The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his second time in the podcast.
He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.
He's one of the most brilliant, productive, and kind people I've had the fortune of talking to.
A lot of my colleagues at MIT and former MIT faculty and students
wrote to me after our first conversation with some version of,
Manolis is awesome, isn't he? I'm glad you guys are now friends.
I am, too, and I'm happy that he makes time in his insanely busy schedule to sit down and
have a chat with me. Quick summary of the sponsors, Public Goods, Magic Spoon, and ExpressVPN.
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As a side note, let me say that I just got back from talking to Joe Rogan on his podcast,
my fifth time on there. I also got a chance to record a separate conversation with Joe on this
podcast. We talked on both quite a bit about his journey and his advice for mine. One of the things
that I think made his show special is that he just had fun and made choices that didn't get in the
way of him having fun and loving life. I'm learning to do just that. It's tough since I'm naturally
full of self-doubt and anxiety, but I'm learning to let go and have fun, even if my monotone robotic
voice sometimes sounds otherwise. For Joe, that involved talking to his friends, comedians,
especially ones that brought out the best in him. Duncan Trussell in the five-hour first
episode on Spotify comes to mind is an example of that. Duncan has been a guest probably close to,
if not more than 50 times on Joe's podcast. My hope with amazing people like Manolis is to find
my Duncan Trussell, my Joey Diaz, and yes, even my Eddie Bravo. Obviously, Joe and I are very
different people, but ultimately both love life when we can interact often with people we love
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And now here's my conversation with Manolis Kallis. What is beautiful about the human epigenome?
Don't get me started. So first of all, as an engineering feat, the human epigenome manages
the most compact, the most incredible compaction you could imagine. So every single one of yourselves
contains two meters worth of DNA. And this is compacted in a radius which is one thousandth
of a millimeter. That's six orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, it's as if a string
as tall as the Burj Al Khalifa, which is about a kilometer tall, was compacted into a tiny little
ball the size of a millimeter. And if you put it all together, if you stretch the trillions of
cells that we have, we have about 30 trillion cells in your body. If you stretch the DNA, the two meters
worth of DNA in every one of your trillion cells, you would basically reach all the way to Jupiter
a hundred times. Yeah, it's all curled up in there. It's 30 trillion cells.
It's 30 trillion cells, human body, every one of them two meters worth of DNA. So all of that is
compacted through the epigenome. The epigenome basically has the ability to compact this massive
amount of DNA from here to Jupiter 10 times into one human body, into just the nuclei of one human
body. And the vast majority of human bodies not even need these nuclei. And that's sort of the
structural part. So that's the boring part. That's the structural part. The functional part is way
more interesting. So functionally, what the human epigenome allows you to do is basically control
the activity patterns of thousands of genes. So 20,000 genes in your human body, every one of
your cells only needs a few thousand of those, but a different few thousand of those. And the way that
your cells remember what their identity is, is basically driven by the epigenome. So the epigenome
is both structural instead of making this dramatic compaction. And it's also functional in being able
to actually control the activity patterns of all your cells. Now, can we draw a definition
distinction between the genome and the epigenome? Again, being Greek, epi means on top of. So the
genome is the DNA. And the epigenome is anything on top of the DNA. And there's, you know, three
types of things on top of the DNA. The first is chemical modifications on the DNA itself.
So we like to think of four bases of the DNA, ACGT. C has a methyl form, which is sometimes
referred to as the fifth base. So methyl C takes a different meaning. So in the same way that
you have annotations in an orchestra score that basically say whether you should play something
softly or loudly or space it out or, you know, interpret basically the score, the human epigenome
allows you to modify that primary score. So a modified C basically says, play this one softly.
It's basically a sign of repression in a gene regulatory region.
I love how you're talking about the function that emerges from the epigenome as a musical score.
It is in many ways. And every single cell plays a different part of that score. It's like having
all of human knowledge in 23 volumes, like 23 giant books, which are your chromosomes. And every
single cell has a different profession, a different role. Some cells play the piano, and they're
looking at chapters seven from chromosome 23 and chapters four from chromosome two and so on and
so forth. And each of those pieces are all encoding in the same DNA. But what the epigenome allows you
to do is effectively conduct the orchestra and sort of coordinate the pieces so that every
instrument plays only the things that it needs to play. One thing that kind of blows my mind,
maybe you can tell me your thoughts about it, is the way evolution works with natural selection
is based on the final sort of the entirety of the orchestra musical performance, right? But
there's these incredibly rich structural things, like each one of them doing their own little job
that somehow work to get like the evolution selects based on the final result. And yet all the
individual pieces are doing like infinitely minuscule specific things. How the heck does that work?
It's a very good insight. And you can even go beyond that and basically say evolution doesn't
select at the level of an organism, it actually selects at the level of whole environments,
whole ecosystems. So let me break this down. So you basically have at the very bottom,
every single nucleotide being selected. But then that nucleotide function is selected at the level
of each gene and not even each gene, each gene regulatory control element. And then those
control elements are basically converging onto the function of the gene. And many genes are
converging onto the function of one cell. And many cells are converging onto the function of one
tissue or organ. And all of these organs are converging onto the level of an organism. But
now that organism is not in isolation. So if you basically think about why is altruism, for example,
a thing? Why are people being nice to each other? It was probably selected. And it was probably
selected because those species that were just nasty to each other didn't survive as a species.
And now if you think about symbiosis of, you know, there's plants, for example, that love CO2.
And there's humans that love O2. And we're sort of, you know, trading different types of gases
to each other. If you look at ecosystems where one organism was just really nasty,
really nasty, that organism actually died because everyone they were being nasty to was killed off.
And then that kind of, you know, universe of life is gone. So basically what emerges is selection
at so many different layers of benefit, including, you know, all of these nucleotides within a body,
interacting for the emergent functions at the body level. Yeah, I wonder if it's possible to
break it down into levels that selection, even beyond humans, like you said, environment, but
there's environments at all different levels too, right? At the minuscule, at the organ level, at
the tissue level, like you said, maybe at the microscopic level. It'd be fascinating if like
there's a kind of selection going on at like both the quantum level and like the galaxy level.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all different forms. Yeah, let's again sort of break down these different
layers. So basically, if you think about the environment in which a gene operates, that gene,
of course, the first definition of environment that we think of is pollution or sunlight or
heat or cold and so on and so forth. That's the external environment. But every gene also operates
at the level of the internal cellular environment that it's in. If I take a gene from, say, an
African individual and I put it in a European context, will it perform the same way? Probably
not, because there's a cellular context of thousands of other genes that that gene has
co-evolved with, you know, in the out-of-Africa event and, you know, all of this sort of human
history of evolution. So basically, if you look at Neanderthal genes, for example, which again
happened long after that out-of-Africa event, there's incompatibilities between Neanderthal
genes and modern human genes that can lead to diseases. So in the context of the Neanderthal
genome, that gene version, that allele was fine. But in the context of the modern human genome,
that Neanderthal gene version is actually detrimental. So it's, you know, that cellular
environment constitutes the genetics of that gene, but also, of course, all of the epigenomics of
that gene. It's fascinating that the gene has a history. I mean, we talked about this a little bit
last time, but just and then some of your research goes into that. But the genes as they are today
have a story from the beginning of time. And then sometimes their story was, like, their path was
useful for survival for the particular organisms and sometimes not. That's fascinating. Let me ask,
as a tangent, we kind of started talking offline about Neanderthals. Do you have
something interesting genetically, biologically, in terms of difference between Neanderthal and,
like, the different branches of human evolution that you find fascinating?
Neanderthals are only one of about five branches that we are pretty confident about.
One branch out of Africa events. So basically, there's Neanderthals. There's Denisovans.
What is the evidence for Denisovans? One tiny little fragment of one pinky from one cave in
Siberia. Relatively recently discovered, right? Less than 10 years ago. And those are like little
folks, right? No, no, no, no. That's yet another one, though. Homo fluorescence. It had the little
folks in sort of Indonesia. But then Denisovans are basically another branch that we only know
about genetically from that one bone. And eventually, we realize that it's one of the three major
branches along with Neanderthal, modern human, and Denisovan. And then that one branch has now
resurfaced in many different areas. And we kind of know about the gene flow that happened in between
them. So when I was reading my Greek mythology, it was talking about the age of the heroes, these
eras of human-like precursors that were wiped out by Zeus or by all kinds of wars and so on and so
forth, like the Titans. And it's ridiculous to sort of read these stories as a kid because you're
like, oh yeah, whatever. And then you're growing up and you're like, whoa, layers and layers of
human-like ancestors. And who knows if those stories were inspired by bones that they found that
kind of looked human-like, but were not quite human-like? Who knows if stories of dragons were
inspired by bones of dinosaurs? Basically, this archaeological evidence has been there and has
probably entered the folk imagination, migrated into those stories. But it's not that far removed
from what actually happened of massive wars of wiping out Neanderthals as modern humans are
populating Europe. Do you think what killed the Neanderthals and all those other branches
is human conflict or is it genetic conflict? So is it us humans being the opposite of altruistic
towards each other? Or is it competition at some other level, like as we're discussing?
Yeah. So if you look at a lot of human traits today, they're probably not that far removed
from the human traits that got us where we are now. So this whole tribalism, you're my sports
team or you're my political party or you're my tiny little village. And therefore, if you're from
that other village, I hate you, but as soon as we're both in the major city, I can't believe
we're from the same region, my friend, come here, my family. And two neighboring countries fighting
and as soon as they're off in another country, you're like, oh, I can't believe that. So it's
kind of funny. This tribalism is nonsensical in many ways. It's like cognitive incongruent
that basically we like kin. And selection for sort of liking kin is hugely advantageous genetically.
Probably across all kinds of organ, across all kinds of life.
Yeah. So basically, if you now transport that to the sort of humans arriving in Europe
and the Undertals are everywhere, what are you going to do? You're going to kill them off.
You know, there's this battle for territory and this battle for they're not like us. We have to
get rid of them. So basically, there's a, you know, very interesting mix there. But and yet,
and yet when you look at the genetics, there's tons of gene flow between them. So basically,
you know, love romance between, you know, we have tribes, but love spans the gap between the
different tribes. It's Romeo and Juliet, the cross patient boundaries. Sneaks away from the village
to hang out with the geniuses. Even before the out of Africa, there's, you know, within Africa
selection, which was probably massive battles of larger and larger tribes, selecting for our social
networking and savviness and, you know, probably all our conspiracy theory genes are, you know,
dating back from then. And, you know, so there's a lot of this mischievousness in the history of
human evolution that unfortunately is still present in, you know, many ugly forms today,
but probably contributed to our success as a species in wiping out other species.
It just sucks that we don't have neighboring species that are, you know, intelligent like us,
that, but yet very different than us. So we have like, you know, dogs or wolves, I guess, co-evolved.
They figured out how to neighbor up with humans in a friendly way and collaborate and it develop
in time. You're describing this as if the wolves made a choice. It's possible that the wolves never
had to say that basically humans were just so overpowering that they had captive wolves and
then at every generation killed off eight of the nine pups and only kept the one that was milder.
Oh, humans. And it only takes a few generations to then sort of have pups that are really mild.
And so the Neanderthals weren't useful in the same way that wolves were.
I don't know if it's a question of useful. They were probably super useful. My thinking is that
they were scary, that basically something that almost resembles you is something that you try to
eliminate first. It's too close. Yeah. And speaking of, you know, species that are intelligent
and sort of what's left of evolution, it is a shame, exactly like you say, that so many different
amazing life forms were extinct and the kind of boring ones remained. So if you look at dinosaurs,
I mean, the diversity that they had, if you look at sub, you know, like there's just so many
different lineages of life that were just abruptly killed. And yet, out of that death, emerged,
you know, many new kinds of really awesome lineages. Do you think there was in the history of life on
earth species that may be still alive today that are more intelligent than humans? And we just
don't know. So there's a case to be made for dolphins. Like if you look at their brains,
if you look at the way that they play, if you look at the way that they learn, you know,
you know, I mean, they don't have a possible thumbs and we do. So, you know, that probably made a big
difference. It's terrifying to think that like, not terrifying, I don't know how to feel about it,
that they're more intelligent than us. It's like the hitchhiker's gut. I know. But how do you define
intelligence? Basically, like I was saying last time, you know, stupid is a stupid does and smart
is a smart does. So if the dolphins are basically super smart, figure out the meaning of life and
just go around playing with water all day, which is probably the meaning of life, then we wouldn't
know because all they're doing is kicking water just like sharks are. And sharks are probably
pretty stupid. So basically, it's very difficult to sort of judge a species intelligence unless
they kind of go out of the way to demonstrate it. Yeah. And that's instructive for our understanding
of any kind of life form. You know, I recently talked to Sarah Seeger looking for life out there on
other planets. It'd be fascinating to think if we discover a habitable planet outside of Earth
in one day, maybe many centuries away, or be able to travel with like a robot there, how would we
actually know that this species would probably be able to detect that it's a living being? But how
would we know if it's an intelligent being? I mean, it's both exciting and terrifying to sort of
come face to face with a life form that's of another world. Like something that clearly is
moving in a, how would you say, like a deliberate way? And to then like ask, well, how do I ask
that thing? Whether it's intelligent? No, but the question that you're asking is applicable
to every species on the Earth now. Yeah. So basically, dolphins are a great example. We know
that they're clearly capable hardware wise and behavior wise of intelligence. How do we
communicate? So basically, if your question is about crossing species boundaries of communication,
the way that I want to put it is that humans have achieved a level of sophistication
in our behaviors, in our communication, in our language, in our ways of expressing ourselves,
that I have no doubt that if we encounter the human like form of intelligence,
we'd figure out their language in a few weeks. Like it'd be just fine. As long as, you know,
of course, they're both trusting each other and not annihilating each other and not sort of
fearing each other and attacking each other. What about, let me ask, just out of curiosity
into science fiction land a little bit. So clearly, you're one of the top scientists in the world. So
if we were to discover an alien life form, you would be brought in to study his genetics.
Do you think the epigenome that we talked about, the genome, the code, the digital code that
underlies that alien life form would be similar to ours? Like in fundamental ways, maybe not
exactly, but in fundamental ways of how it's structured? Yeah. So you're getting to the
very definition of life. You're getting to the very definition of what makes life life and
how do we decode that life? And it's so easy to think that every life form would basically have to,
you know, like oxygen, have to like heat from the sun and rely on sort of being the habitable zone
of, you know, its solar system and so on and so forth. But I think we have to sort of go beyond
this sort of, oh, life on another planet must be exactly like life is on Earth. Because of course,
life on Earth happens to rely on the proximity to the sun and benefit from that amount of energy.
But we're talking at timescales of human life, where we kind of live, I don't know, between,
and I'm going to be super white here, we're going to live between six Earth months and,
you know, 200 Earth months or 200 Earth years. So basically, if you look at the timescale
that we inhabit on Earth, it is very much dictated by the amount of energy that we receive from the
sun. If you look at, I don't know, Europa, you know, the smallest, the fourth smallest moon of
Jupiter, the smallest of the Galilean moons and also the smallest in its distance from Jupiter.
It has an iron core. It has a rock exterior. It has ice all around it. And it has probably
massive liquid oceans underneath. And the gravitational pull of Jupiter is probably
creating all kinds of movement under that ice. How did life evolve on Earth? Yes, sure, life now,
most of life that we above the surface look at, has to do with exploiting the solar energy
for, you know, our daily behavior. But that's not the case everywhere on the planet.
If you look at the bottom of the ocean, there are hydrothermal vents. There's both black smokers
and white smokers. And they are near these volcanic, you know, ducts that basically
emanate a massive amount of energy from the core of our planet. What does life need? It needs energy.
Does it need energy from the sun? It couldn't care less. Does it need energy from, you know,
the Earth itself? Well, yeah, possibly. It could use that. And if you look at how did life evolve
on, you know, on Earth, there are many theories. I mean, a kind of silly theory is that it came
from outer space, that basically there's a meteorite out there that sort of landed on Earth and it
brought with it DNA material. I think it's a little silly because it kind of pushes the buck down the
road. Basically, the next question is how did it evolve over there? Whereas our planet has basically
all of the right ingredients, why wouldn't it evolve here? So basically, let's kind of ignore
that one. And now that the two other competing hypotheses are from the outside in or from the
inside out. What's that mean? From the outside in means from the surface to the bottom of the ocean.
From the inside out means from the bottom of the ocean to the surface.
So life on the surface is pretty brutal. Life obviously evolved in the water. And then there
was an out of water event. But basically, before it exited, it was clearly in the water, which is
a much nicer and shielded environment. So just to be clear, on the surface, are you referring to the
surface of the sea or the bottom of the sea? Versus the bottom of the sea. And you're saying
life on the surface is harsh chemically. Life outside the water is horrible. It takes huge
amounts of evolutionary innovations to sustain living outside the water.
That's so interesting. Why is that? So it's easier to, life is easier in the water. Maybe,
see, I'm telling you, dolphins are under something. We are 70% water. No, dolphins went back into the
water. Really? Because dolphins are mammoths. Of course. Interesting. Well, again, they might be
smarter. They went back. They're like, screw this. So if you basically think about the fact that we
are 70% water, we're basically transporting the sea with us outside the sea. If we don't have water
for about 24 hours, we're dry. And if you look at life under the sea, I mean, I don't know if you're
a diver, but when you go diving, your brain explodes. Again, when I say the boring life forms is what
we see all the time, like tetrapods. I mean, what a stupid, boring body plan. Seriously.
Just go diving and you'll see that a tiny little minority of the stuff under the sea,
under the surface of the sea, is actually tetrapods. It's like snails with all kinds of crazy appendages
and colors and round things and five-way symmetric things and eight-way symmetric things. All kinds
of crazy body plans. And only the tetrapod fish managed to get out. And then they gave rise to
all the boring plans we see today of basically humans with four limbs, birds with four limbs,
lizards with four limbs, and you know, right? It's kind of boring. If you look at, by comparison,
life under water is teeming with diversity. So now let's roll back the clock and basically say
where did life in the ocean come from? From the surface or from the bottom? Exactly. Those two
options that you were mentioning. Exactly. So basically, life on the surface is one option.
And then the idea there is that there's tides with the moon and the sun sort of causing all these
movement. And this movement is basically causing nutrients to sort of, you know, coalesce and,
you know, bounce around, etc. That's one option. The second option, massive amount of energy under,
you know, from our, the core of our planet, basically exploited, leading to these basic
ingredients of life forms. And what are these basic ingredients? Metabolism. Being able to take
energy from the environment and put it as part of yourself. Metabolism, it basically means
transformation, again, in the Greek. It basically means taking stuff from, you know, like nutrients
or energy source or anything and then making it your own. The second one is compartmentalization.
If there's no notion of self, there can't be evolution. You have to know where your own
boundaries end and where the non-self boundaries begin. And that's basically the lipid bilayer
nowadays, which is extremely simple to form. It's basically just a bunch of lipids and then they
eventually just self-organize into a membrane. So that's a very natural way of forming a self.
And then the third component is replication. Replication doesn't need to be self-replication.
It could be A helps make more of B, B helps make more of C, and C helps make more of A.
Any kind of self-reinforcement is what you need to ignite the process of evolution.
After you've ignited that process, you know, I don't want to say all hell breaks loose,
but all paradise breaks loose. So basically, you then boom, you know, have life going.
And the moment you have A, B, C, some kind of thing looping back onto A, you can make modifications
and you can improve. And then you let natural selection work.
Is there some element of that that's like some state representation that stores information?
Like maybe I should say information. Is that a fun about the part of life?
We like to think of life as the information propagation, which is DNA, the messenger,
which is RNA, and then the action, which is protein.
So basically DNA, we think is an essential part of life. That's where the storage is.
And therefore that early life forms must have had some kind of storage medium DNA.
If you look at how life actually evolved, DNA was invented much later.
Proteins were invented later. And RNA was fined by itself. Thank you very much in an RNA world.
So the early version of life as we know it today was in fact RNA molecules performing all of the
functions. The RNA molecule itself was the protein actuator by creating three-dimensional folds
through self hybridization. Self what? Self hybridization. So basically the same way that
DNA molecules can hybridize with themselves and basically form these double helix.
The single stranded RNA molecule can form partial double helices in various places,
creating structure as if you had a long string with complementary parts and you could then
sort of design kind of like origami like structures that will fold onto themselves.
And then you can make any shape from that. That early RNA world eventually got to replication
where enzymes encoded in RNA would replicate RNA itself. And then that process basically
kicked off evolution. And that process of evolution then led to major innovations.
The first innovation was translation. So you start with an RNA molecule and you translate it into
another kind of form. And that's the first kind of encoding. You're like, well, do you need some
kind of code? Yeah, but the code was in fact one thing. It was conflated with the actuators.
The actuators were separated from the code only later on. So you first had the self
replicating code, which was also the actuator. And then you kind of have a functionalization,
partitioning of the functionalization, a sub functionalization of the proteins that are
now going to be the workhorse of life, but they're not self replicating. The code remains the RNA.
So the most beautiful and most complex RNA machine known to man is the ribosome.
The ribosome is this massive factory that is able to translate RNA into protein.
The ribosome, I mean, if you want, I don't know, divine intervention in the history of life,
the ribosome is it. That's one of the great invention in the history of life.
Yeah, but again, you can't think of great inventions as one time steps. They're basically,
you know, the culmination of probably many competing software infrastructures for life
preservation that won out. And then when the ribosome was so efficient at making proteins,
all the other ones basically died out. And then the life forms that we're using the modern ribosome
were basically the more successful ones because they could make proteins. And now those proteins
are much more versatile because RNA only has four bases. Proteins eventually have 20 amino acids,
not initially, but eventually. And then they can form in much more complex shapes and they can
create all kinds of additional machines, one of which is reverse transcriptase. So you basically
now have RNA. Again, we like to think of transcription as the normal reverse transcription
as the oddball. Well, RNA preceded DNA. So reverse transcription actually was the first
invention before transcription itself. So basically, RNA invents proteins, RNA and proteins together
invent DNA. So you now have a more stable medium and more stable backbone with two
helices instead of one, two strands instead of one, the double helix. And RNA basically says,
listen, I'm tired. I'm going to delegate all information storage to DNA. And I'm going to
delegate most actuation to proteins. Proteins. But that's to you is not like a,
that's just an efficiency thing. It's not a fundamentally new innovation. That's why when
you're asking is a separate information storage medium, a definition of life might know any kind
of self preservation, self reinforcement. And it didn't need to be RNA based initially. It didn't
need to be self replication initially. You just need to have enough RNA molecules randomly arising
that reinforce each other that ultimately lead to the closing of that loop and the ignition
of the evolutionary process. Can we just rewind a little bit? Like if you were to bet all your
money on the two options in terms of where life started? Probably the bottom. At the bottom
of the ocean. I don't know if this is answerable, but how hard is the first step? Or if there's
something interesting you can say about that first leap about from not life to life.
I think it's inevitable. On earth or just in the universe. I think it's inevitable.
If you look at Europa, you know, going back the moon of Jupiter. It's also a really nice song by
Santana. Europa basically has all the ingredients. It has, you know, the core that can emit energy.
It has the shielding through the ice sheet, protecting it just like an atmosphere would.
It even has a layer of oxygen, probably sufficiently dense to sustain life. So my guess
is that there's probably independently arisen lifeform already teaming in Europa because
as soon as it today. Is that exciting or terrifying to you?
It's, I mean, as a scientist, I can't wait to see non-DNA based lifeforms. I can't wait because
we are so born, you know, sort of born as I would say in French, but basically we're sort of,
you know, we are so narrow-minded in our thinking of what life should look like that I can't wait
for all that to just be blown away by the discovery of life elsewhere.
Let me bring you into another science fiction scenario. So on that point, if we discover life
on Europa and you were brought in, you seem very excited, but how would you start looking at that
life in a way that's useful to you as a scientist, but also not going to kill all of us? So like to
me, it's a little bit scary because not because it's a malevolent life, like it's a dictator petting
like a cat, it's evil, but just the way life is, it seems to be very good at conquering other life.
So there's a lot of science fiction movies based on that principle and that's sort of
what causes the public to be so scared. But if you think about sort of would
Europa life be scared of humans coming over and taking over? Chances are no, not even like Earth
bacteria because Earth bacteria would be wiped out in an instant in this foreign world because
they don't know how to metabolize energy that doesn't come from the types of energy sources
that are here. The levels of acidity may just kill us all off and at the same way, in the
converse way, if you bring life from Europa on Earth, it'll die instantly because it's too hot
because it doesn't need to know how to cope with the sun's radiation so close to this
completely inhabitable zone by their standards. So what we call the habitable zone might actually
be the inhabitable zone for them. Inhabitable for them. So the difference, if the environments
are sufficiently different, you think we'll just not be able to even attack each other and the basic
It'll take massive amounts of engineering to create machines that will go there and sample
the oceans, basically drill through the layers of ice to basically sample and see
what life is like there and detecting it will probably be trivial. It definitely won't be DNA
based. It's not like we're going to send a sequencer, but it'll be some other kind of
combination of chemicals that will look non-random. So if you had to bet, if I took that life form
we find in Europa and put it on a sandwich that you're eating and eat that sandwich,
it'll taste just fine. Will it taste fine? That's interesting. So the other question is,
do we have taste receptors for this? So where does our taste come from? It's basically adaptations
to chemical molecules that we are used to seeing. We don't have taste buds for things we don't even
know about. So we won't be able to know that this chemical tastes funny. But you think it won't be,
it's likely not to be dangerous. It won't know how to even interact. Do you think our immune system
will even detect that something weird is going on? Probably. And it'll be very easy to detect,
because it'll be very different from us. Very weird. But it won't be able to attack. The scene
from Independence Day where they're communicating with the alien computer and they're like,
ooh, I'm in. I mean, it's hilarious. Max and PCs have trouble communicating, let alone in alien
technology or even alien DNA. Okay. Now I was talking about you being a scientist on Earth,
but say you were a scientist that were shipped over to Europa to investigate if there's life,
what would you look for in terms of signs of life?
Life is unmistakable, I would say. The way that life transforms a planet surrounding it
is not the kind of thing that you would expect from the physical laws alone.
So it's, I would say that as soon as life arises, it creates this compartmentalization.
It starts pushing things away. It starts sort of keeping things inside that are self.
And there's a whole signature that you can see from that. So when I was organizing my
meaning of life symposium, my friend who's an astrophysicist, basically we were deciding on what
would be the themes for the symposium. And then I said, well, we're going to have biology,
we're going to have physics. And she's like, come on, biology is just a small part of physics.
Everything's a small part of physics. And I mean, in many ways it is, but
my immediate answer was no, no, no, no, wait, life challenges physics. It supersedes physics.
It sort of fights against physics. And that's what I would look for in Europa. I would basically
look for this fight against physics for anything that sort of signatures of not just entropy at
work, not just things diffusing away, not just gravitational pools, but clear signatures of,
remember when I was talking earlier about this whole selection for environments,
selection for biospheres, for ecosystems, for these multi-organism form of life.
And I think that's sort of the first thing that you can look for, you know, chemical signatures
that are not simply predicted from the reactions you would get randomly.
Such a beautiful way to look at life. So you're basically leveraging some energy source
to enable you to resist the physics of the universe.
Fighting against physics. But that's the first transformation. If you look at humans,
we're way past that.
What do you mean by transformation?
So basically there's layers. I sort of see life, you know,
when we talk about the meaning of life, life can be construed at many levels. We talked about
life in the simplest form of sort of the ignition of evolution.
And that's sort of the basic definition that you can check off. Yes, it's alive.
But when Alexander the Great was asked,
to whom do you owe your life to your teachers or to your parents?
And Alexander the Great answered, I owe to my parents the zine, the life itself.
And I owe to my teachers the F zine, like euphony. F means good, the opposite of cacophony,
which means, you know, bad. So F zine, in his words, was basically living a human life,
a proper life. So basically we can go from the zine to the F zine.
And that transformation has taken several additional leaps. So basically, you know,
life on Europa, I'm pretty sure has gotten to the stage of A makes B makes C makes A again.
But getting to the F zine is a whole other level. And that level requires cooperation.
That level requires altruism. That level requires specialization.
Remember how we're talking about the RNA specializing into DNA for storage,
proteins, and then compartmentalizations. And if you look at prokaryotic life,
there's no nucleus. It's all one soup of things intermingling. If you look at eukaryotic life,
again, you for true good, you know, so a eukaryote basically has a nucleus. And that's where you
compartmentalize further the organization of the information storage from all of the daily
activities. If you look at a, you know, human body plan or any animal, you have a compartmentalization
of the germline. You basically have one lineage that will basically be saved for the future generations.
And everything outside that lineage is almost superfluous. If you think about it, the rest of
your body, all it does is ensure that that lineage will make it to the next generation,
that these germlines will make it to the next generation. The rest is packaging.
I'm sorry to be so blunt. And if you look at nutrition, you know, we're deuterostomes. What
does deuterostome mean? Deuterome means second, where this is the second mouth. The first mouth
is actually down here, it's the esophagus. So deuterostomes have evolved a second layer of
eating, kind of like alien with the two mouths. So you can think of us as alien where the first
mouth is up here, and then the second mouth is down there. And of course, is the first mouth
just the physical manipulation of the food to make it more consumable? Correct. And basically,
again, if you look at a worm, it's an extremely simple life form. It basically has a mouth,
it has an anus, and it has just some organs in between that consume the food and just spit
out poo. Humans are basically a fancy form of that. So you basically have the mouth,
you have the digestive tract, and then you have limbs to get better at getting food.
Then you have eyesight, hearing, et cetera, to get better at getting food. And then you have,
of course, the germline. And all of this food part, it's just auxiliary to the germline.
So you basically have layers of addition of compartmentalization of specialization
on top of this zine to get all the way to the earth's zine.
Yeah. So like the worm is like Windows 95, very few features, very basic. And then us humans are
like Windows Vista, Windows 10, whatever it is. Well, a few innovations beyond that.
But yeah, I'm not right. We're Windows 3000, at least that way.
So okay, that's such a fascinating way to look at life as a set of transformations.
Exactly. So like, is there some interesting transformations through our history here on
earth that like appeal to you? Of course. And what are the most brilliant innovations and
transformations? Yeah. I mean, this is such a fascinating question. Of course, we're talking
about basic, basic life forms and we're talking about eukaryotic life forms. And then the next
big transformation is multicellular life forms, where the specialization separates the germline
from everything else that accompanies it and sort of carries it. And then that specialization then
sort of has this massive new innovation like above the second mouth, which is this massive brain.
And this massive brain is basically something that arises much, much later on, basically,
you know, not chords, like having the first spinal cord, this whole concept that along with
the these very simple layers, you basically now have a coordinating agent. And this coordinated
agent is starting to make decisions. And remember when we were talking about free will? I mean,
you know, as a worm is hunting for food, oh, it has plenty of free will, it can choose to,
you know, follow chemo taxes to the left or chemo taxes to the right. And maybe that's free will
because it's unpredictable beyond a certain level. So you basically now have more and more
decision making and coordination of all of these different body parts and organs by a
central operating system, a central machine that basically will control the rest of the body.
And the other thing that I love talking about is the different timescales at which things happen.
You know, we're talking about the human epigenome before. The human epigenome is basically able to
find what genes should be expressed in response to environmental stimuli in the order of minutes,
and basically receive a stimulus, transfer all that data through this humongously long string
of searching, and then sort of find what genes to turn on, and then create all that all of that
is happening in the timescale of minutes, basically, you know, three minutes to an hour to half an hour.
That's the expression response. But our daily life doesn't happen on the order of three minutes to
half an hour. It happens on the order of milliseconds. Like I throw a ball at you,
you catch it right away. No gene expression changes there. You just don't have time to do that.
So you basically have a layer of control built on a hardware that supports it, but that hardware
itself lives in a different timescale than the controlling machine on top of that.
Is that an accident, by the way? Is that like a feature? Was it possible for life to have evolved
where the daily life of the organism as it interacts with its environment was on a timescale
similar to the way our internals work? If you look at trees, they look kind of boring and
stupid. You're looking at a tree like stupid. If you speed up the movie of a tree from spring
until October, you'll be like, oh my god, it's intelligent. And the reason for that is that
at that timescale, the tree is basically saying, oh, I'm looking for a thing to catch onto. Oh,
I just caught onto that. I'm going to grow more here. I'm going to spoil out there, etc.
Like I can see the trees in my garden just growing and sort of looping around.
And it's all a matter of timescale. And if you look at the human timescale,
remember we were talking about neoteny the last time around, the whole fact that our young are
pretty useless until maybe a few months of age, if not a few years of age, if not,
I don't know, getting out of college. And then we basically hold them, enabling their brain
to continue being malleable and infusing it with knowledge and thoughts as that period of neoteny
increases and expands. If you fast forward, I don't know, another million years. So humans
have only been around different from apes for about that long. Jumped another unit of that,
another human chim divergence. What could happen? From an evolutionary timescale a lot. One of
the things that's happening already is expansion of human lifespan. We have longer and longer
periods before we mature, and we have longer and longer periods before we have babies.
So intergenerational distance is grown from 16 years to 40 years.
You're saying that's in the genetics? No, not necessarily. But it's sort of an
environmental tendency that's happening. But as we medically expand human lifespan,
the generations might actually be pushed instead of 40 years to 60 years to 100 years.
Like if we look at the long arc of the evolutionary history. Exactly. So as we start thinking about
intergalactic travel now. Sorry, that's a heck of a transition. Yeah, so let's talk about intergalactic.
As we, as a species, start thinking about, I'm talking about these transitions that are happening.
Continuing along these transitions, what does the future hold in the next million years?
So the concept of us going to another planet and that taking three human lifetimes might be a joke
if the human lifetime starts being 400 years or 800 years. So imagine... It's all timescale.
It's all timescale, just different timescales. You ask me offline whether I would like to live
forever. I mean, my answer is absolutely, and there's many different types of forever's.
One forever is, do I want to live today forever? Kind of like Groundhog Day. And the answer is
absolutely. The stuff that I want to learn today will probably take a lifetime just to learn,
you know, basically to clear my to-do list for the day. You mean like relive the day? Relive
the day. And then pick up different things from the richness of the experiences that are all in
today. Exactly. There's just so much happening in the world every single day. So much knowledge
that's has happened already. That just to catch up on that will probably take me around forever.
On that point, I would just love to see you in the Groundhog movie just because you're so
naturally as a scientist, but just the way your mind works beautifully. Just all the
richness of the experiences that you will pick up from that. That's a beautiful visual.
But you try to live each day as if it was Groundhog Day. And basically every single day,
waking up and saying, all right, how would Bill Murray get out of that one?
Well, you know what? On a funny tangent, I got a chance to go to a Neuralink demonstration event.
I'm not usually familiar with Neuralink. And I talked to Elon for a while. And one of the funny
things he said on this Groundhog Day thing is, you know, it's a beautiful dream to eventually
be able to replay our memories. So we're kind of these recording machines, our brain is kind of maybe
a noisy recording machine of memories. And it'll be beautiful if we can someday in the future,
maybe far into the future, be able to like in the Groundhog Day situation, replay that.
And the funny comment that stuck with me is he said that maybe this our conversation now
is a replay of a memory of a previous memory. And that's stuck with me because
it would probably be my replay, you know, who the hell am I? I'm just an idiot guy.
But like Elon Musk is, you know, probably because of SpaceX and so on is probably going to be
remembered as a special person, one of our special apes in history. So if I wanted to
replay a memory, probably be that one, you know, talking to Elon for a while. And that's an interesting
possibility from, if we think about time scales, if we think about the richness of the experience
through time that we humans take, and be able to replay some aspects of that, of that biology,
that's super interesting. But anyway, sorry for the tangent. Let's, you were talking about time
scales and the expansion of the human lifetime and the idea of intercoactive travel.
Yeah. But you're laughing about it. You're talking about this. You're talking about
exploring alien worlds and going to other planets. I mean, you know, when Sarah was here,
she was talking about sort of going to other planets when we find this life. I mean, I'm just
very naturally, given the topics that we've approached, talking about the time scale at
which this will happen. So you think eventually we will human or life, life will expand out into the
universe. The point that I'm trying to make is that in intergalactic species, we'll probably find
ways to engineer its biology in order to expand the way that we experience time, expand the time
scales that we experience. And going back to this whole concept of, you know, would I like to live
forever? Yes, I'd like to live forever. Even if it was stuck on the same day, I'd love to live forever
because I would finally have time to do all these things that I want to do. But if living forever
actually comes with a perk of watching the whole world evolve forever, I mean, that's a huge perk.
And I would, you know, just, it'll never get boring. Just a never changing world. And then the mind,
you know, sort of experiment that I want you to do is to also ask, what if I wanted to live forever
one day at a time every year, or one day at a time every decade, would you choose that?
Or you would wake up and the world would be 10 years later every single day you wake up.
It's the opposite of Groundhog Day, where basically you always wake up and it's always 10 years later.
So you're saying that's such a powerful, interesting concept that life is more interesting
if you're, of all the life forms on earth, that you're the slowest one. Exactly. Exactly.
Like trees have it right. Like trees have it right. All the trees, like, you know, they've been there
since the Minoan civilization. Yeah. And, you know, that takes us back to the question that you
asked about sort of the transformations that have happened in humanity. The Minoan civilization is
one of them. You know, there's this paper that was published just a couple of years ago by one of
my friends that basically looked at the genetic makeup of the Minoans and the Missenians in
ancient Greek, in ancient Greece, and how they relate to modern Greeks. And they found that,
indeed, there was very little gene flow from, you know, the outside. And, you know, it's fantastic
to sort of think about these amazing civilizations that transform the way that human thought happens,
that basically looked for rules in nature, that looked for principles, that looked for
the standard of beauty, not human beauty, but beauty in the natural world. This whole concept
that the world must be elegant and there must be deeper ways of understanding that world.
To me, that's a massive transformation of our species, similar to, you know, the earlier
transformation that we were talking about, of even involving a brain, of, you know, learning how to
communicate language or the evolution of eyesight. If you look at sort of, you know, we're talking
about these worms crawling around and then sensing which direction are the chemicals more abundant,
you know, chemotaxis. So eventually they grow a nose, eventually they grow a, I mean, when I say
nose, I mean, ways of sensing chemicals. That's probably one of the earliest senses. You know,
we always talk about how deep rooted it is in our brain. That's one of the earliest senses.
If you look at hearing, that's a much later sense. If you look at eyesight, that's an
intermediate sense where you're basically sensing where the light direction comes from.
That's probably something that life didn't need until it got, you know, into the surface
and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of, you know, milestones. And I was talking about the
latest milestone, which is LIGO, last time, of being able to detect gravitational waves
and sort of being able to sort of have a sense that humans haven't had before.
So you see that as a yet another transformation gives us an extra little sense.
Of course. And now if you go back to this history of ancient Greece, I mean, this,
this transformation that happened, I mean, of course, the Egyptians had this incredible,
you know, civilization for thousands of years. But what happened in Greece was this whole concept
of let's break things down and understand the natural world. Let's break things down and
understand physics. Let's basically build rules around architecture, about around elegance,
around, you know, statues and tragedy. I mean, another question that you asked me in passing
was this whole concept of embracing the good and the bad, embracing the full range of human
emotions. And if you look at Greek tragedy, it's the definition of that. It's, I mean, drama.
I mean, again, it's a Greek word. But the whole concept of some problems that are just so vast
and large that dying is the easy way out. That death, oh, that's the easy solution.
You know, so I want to touch a little bit on that point and sort of talk about this
concept that life supersedes physics and that the brain supersedes life. That basically we
have a brain that can decide to not follow evolution's path. We can decide to not have children.
We can decide to not eat. We can decide to suicide. We can decide to sort of
abolish communication with the outside world. I mean, all the things that make us human,
we can basically decide not to do that. And that is basically when the brain itself is
basically superseding what evolution problem is for. My mind was already blown at the
beautiful formulation of the idea that life is a system that resists physics. And our brain,
or perhaps the content of it, or however it may be functionally, our brain is a thing that resists
life. Yes. Yes. You're so brilliant. But I want you to see all of that as continuum.
Basically, you're sort of talking about the sort of individual transformations, but it's a path
that humanity has been taking. It's a transformation. It's a path of transformation.
And then I want us to think about what it truly means to become human, like the f-zine. And you
asked me about what motivated my meaning of life's imposing. What motivated it, in part,
I mean, of course, it was an inside joke of turning 42. But what motivated it in part was
actually a midlife crisis. So the joke that I always like to say is Hlissos Papadimitriou,
a famous Greek professor who was previously at MIT at Harvard, at Stanford, at Berkeley, everywhere.
A brilliant, brilliant person. That's actually Costis's advisor. So Hlissos Papadimitriou likes
to say that when you're an undergrad, you work like a rat to get into grad school. And when
you're a grad student, you work like a rat to get your PhD. And when you're a postdoc, you work like
a rat to get your assistant professor, she said. And when you're an assistant professor, you work
like a rat to become a full professor. And then when you're a full professor, well, by then you're
basically a rat. So basically what happened to me is that I arrived at the end of the rat race.
You know, life is a rat race. You constantly have hurdles to jump over. You constantly have tunnels
and secret pathways. And I figured it all out. And eventually, as I was turning 42, I looked back
and I was like, wow, that was an awesome rat race. But I'm not a rat. I basically got out of the
labyrinth and I was like, I'm not, I'm not a rat turns out. Is that the first moment we saw
that it's that you were in a rat race? No, no, no, I've known that I'm in a rat race for a long
time. It's so easy to be in a rat race. It's so easy to be an undergrad, but you have problem sets.
And you know, we're all smart people, you know, problem set, it has a solution. Somebody made
it for you. You can just solve it. Everything was made as a test. And you keep passing those
tests and tests and tests and tests. And you have tasks that are well defined. The PhD is a little
different because it's more open ended. But yet you have an advisor who's guiding you. And then
you become a professor. And tenure is a well set defined set of tasks. And you do all that.
And at 42, I basically had bought a house, three kids, beautiful wife, tenure, awesome students,
tons of grants. Life was basically laid out for me. And that's when I had my main life crisis.
That's when people usually buy a Harley Davidson. And they basically say, oh, I need something new
and it's something different and to be young myself, etc. But basically, that was my realization
that it's not a rat race, that there's no rat race, it's over, that I have to basically think,
how do I fully instantiate myself? How do I complete my transformation into an actual human
being? Because it's very easy to sort of forget all the intangibles of life. It's very hard to
just sort of think about the next test and the next test, and it's all metrics. And what is the
number of viewers I have? What is the number of publications I have? What is the number of citations,
the number of talks, the number of grants? It's very easy to quantify everything. And then at
some point, you're like, this is real life. It's not a test anymore. And that's something that I
told my wife early on. I was like, no, no, no, our life is not going to be let's put the kids through
college. And that, you know, maybe that's when I escaped the rat race, maybe it continued being
a rat race, maybe the next step would have been, all right, how do I make sure that my kids are
first in class? How do I make sure that they're, you know, into the greatest, greatest college?
And then, you know, they're into college. And then you're like 60.
So how do you escape? Is there light at the end of the tunnel of a midlife crisis?
So you should watch that symposium, because the videos were transformative to me
and to many others. So basically, the advice that I received from all of my friends was so
meaningful. There's some advice that basically says you have to constantly maintain unachievable
goals, goals that you can make progress towards, but you can never be fully done with. And I think
that's almost playing into the sort of rat race thing, like basically make sure that there's more
obstacles for your little rat persona to jump through. So that's one possibility.
So first of all, watch, is it available somewhere? It's on YouTube. Just Google, Google, meaning
of life symposium. I should have known this. I mean, you should have told me this. This is awesome.
Okay. This is great. But and also like, you know, saying rat race is, you know, if we look at
Ratatouille, isn't that, I mean, that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful thing of challenges and
overcoming challenges. That could be fundamentally the meaning of life is to see life as a set of
challenges and to fully engage in the overcoming of those challenges. I would say that that's
embracing the rat race view of life. So a joke that we like to have with my wife all the time is
we basically say, we pretend that we're in this old inclusive resort,
that we've basically hired all these people to go on the Esplanade and play games because we
enjoy watching people playing on the Esplanade and we enjoy sort of laying and looking at life
and all the people biking and rollerblading and all of that. And then we've paid all these people
in this all inclusive resort that we live in. And then what are we going to do today? I'm like,
oh, I've signed up for professor activities. It's going to be awesome. They lined up a bunch of super
smart MIT students for me to meet with. I'm going to have a grant writing meeting afterwards. It's
going to be awesome. And then she signed up for a bunch of consulting activities. It's going to be
great. And then in the evening, we just get back together and say, hey, how was your consulting
today? So in a way, that's another view of life of basically, wait a minute, if I was a gazillionaire,
what would I choose to do? I would probably pay an awesome university to give me an office there
and just pay a bunch of super smart people to work with me, even though they don't really want to.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I would have exactly the life that I have now
working my butt off every single day, because it's so freaking fulfilling.
So let's clarify. This is a beautiful way. It's almost like a video game view of life that
is a set of, I mean, again, game is not perhaps a positive term, but it is a beautiful term. So
you do you or do you not like the rat race view of life? No, because it is fulfilling in some
rat races about the goal. My view of life is about the path. So again, according to Greece.
Those folks have come up with some good stuff. So this, obviously, as elites basically wrote
this beautiful poem about sort of going through life saying, as you go through your journey,
impersonating Ulysses of his voyage, he says, wish that the path is long and arduous.
Because when you get to Ithaca, you might realize that it was all about the path, not the destination.
And so the rat race view of life makes it all about the destination. It's like, how do I get
through the maze to get there? But the all inclusive resort view of life is about the path.
It's about, wow, today, I couldn't wish for a better set of activities all programmed for me
to enjoy having my brain, having my body, having my senses, and the life that I have.
So it's a very different kind of view. It's focused on the journey, not on the destination.
So you mentioned kind of the ups and downs of life and the midlife crisis. And right now,
you said focusing kind of on the journey. But what the journey involves is ups and downs.
Is there advice or any kind of thoughts that you can elucidate about the downs in your life,
the hard parts of your life and how you got out or maybe not? Or is there,
yeah, how do you see the dark parts of life? So I am so glad you're asking this question,
because it's something that our society does a terrible job at preparing us for.
Every Hollywood movie has to have a happy ending. It is ridiculous. You can count on
your 10 fingers the number of bad ending movies that you've ever watched. And you probably wouldn't
needle 10 fingers. We strive to tell everyone, yes, you can succeed. Yes, you're a millionaire,
just temporarily disabled. And yes, you know, the prince will eventually figure out his princess
and they will happily ever after ending. And yes, the hero will be beaten and beaten and beaten,
but you know that at the end of the movie, the good guys will win. We need more movies where
the bad guys win. We need more movies where just everybody dies. We're just, you know,
MacGyver doesn't figure out how to disable the bomb and just explode. You just need more movies
that are more realistic about the fact that life kind of sucks sometimes and it's okay.
So again, growing up in Greece, I have been exposed to songs that are not just sad,
but they're miserable, miserable. So one of them comes to mind. And it's basically talking about
this woman who's lamenting in the early morning about losing the joyful kid, the joyful young man,
who basically died in the civil war in the arms of our own fellow citizens. And she's like,
if only he had died fighting the foreign forces, if only he had died at the sides of the general,
if only he had died with honor, I would be proud to have lost the joyful kid. I mean,
it's devastating, right? It's like he didn't just die. He died without honor. And my friend who
was with me was listening to the song and she's like, this is depressing. I'm like, whoa, whoa,
you have to listen to another one. It's not a sad. And she's like, what, this one died with honor?
So that's one example. It's a kind of celebration of misery.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So let me give you a couple more examples and then I'll
answer that question. So another example is I picked up this book that I had for my childhood
and I started reading stories to my kids. And the first story is about these two children.
One is really poor living on the street and the other one is really rich, living in the house
on the bright light above. And the poor one is wishing, looking at that window and wishing
that he could have that house. And the other one is at the window wishing that he was free,
that he wasn't sick all the time, that he could escape outside. It's only four pages long. And at
the end, both children die. One of them dies from cold, the other one dies from illness.
And you're like, how is that even a children's story? The next story, I'm like, okay, that's
fine. Let's keep this one. You know, so I read this to my kids and then I read the next one.
And the next one is about this, this woman whose brother is at war against the Turks.
And he is going to die. And she prays to the Virgin, please don't let him die. And the
Virgin appears and she's like, no problem. Tell me who to kill instead. And she's like,
anyone, anyone. No, no, no, no, choose one. How about this Turk? This one has two kids,
a beautiful family waiting for him at home. She's like, no, no, this one, choose another one.
And then she goes through all the life stories of the other. And she's like, no, no, just don't
take anyone. She's like, I can't do that. I can, you can choose to bring your brother back.
And he will be depressed for the rest of his life because he didn't fight at war,
because he didn't go to that battle. And he will live without arms. She's like,
and in the end, the woman decides to have her brother killed instead, because he dies with her.
I mean, this is insane. So, so why am I giving you these examples? It's not a glorification of
misery. It's, it's expanding your emotional range. It's teaching you that, and when I read these
stories, I'm not, I'm not a jerk. I'm crying out loud. I have tears. And I like my face becomes
red from the pain that I'm experiencing through these stories. It's just so deeply touching
to embrace the suffering, not because of an accident, but because of a choice,
the sacrifice to embrace the fact that not everything is cute and rosy and always ending
well. And I think that we don't do a good enough job of teaching our kids that just life sucks
and life is unfair sometimes. And that's, and that's okay. And sometimes I read a story to my kids.
I read the story every night. And sometimes the story is horrible. And sometimes the story is good
and sort of friendly and happy. And my kids always ask, what's the moral of the story?
And sometimes there's a moral and it's like, oh, you should be good or you should be nice.
You should be helping each other, etc. And sometimes there's just no moral. And I tell my kids,
you know what, sometimes just life doesn't make sense and it's okay. And you can't comprehend
everything. And I think this concept of how do you deal with the bad days comes from the fact
that we're taught, we're brainwashed into thinking that every day should be a happy day.
And we're not ready to cope with misery. And the other thing that crying through these stories
teaches you is that you don't have it nearly half as bad as you think. Do you see what I mean?
Basically, it tells you that, I mean, my mom would always tell me about how she was transformed
as a teenager when she volunteered in the hospital. And she saw all these people at the brink of death
claiming for life and helping them out to best she could and crying her heart out when they were
dying. And just sort of how that taught her the appreciation for what we have every day.
Waking up every morning and saying, my life doesn't suck. My life is not nearly half as bad
as it could be. And sort of embracing the joy that we have of living where we live in the moment
we live. And I'm going to go further. If you look at the arc of human life, human existence
through the centuries, there's no better way to be alive than now. I mean, we're complaining about
every single little thing. But life expectancy is at an all time high. Sickness, all time low.
Poorness, misery, all time low. There's no better time to be alive globally across all of human
existence. Number one, number two, here in Boston, there's no better place to be alive.
If you think about the amalgamation of science, engineering, technology, the ridiculously
awesome people you're bringing every week to your podcast, I mean, this is the ancient Greece of
modern society. But the weather still sucks. No, let me put it this way. The weather gives us a
range of emotions, the full range of human weather patterns. That's such a fascinating thing about
human psychology. I often reread this book. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. It's Man's
Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. He talks about his living through the Holocaust and the
concentration camps. Even there where there's human misery is at its highest. Even there,
he discovers these moments by observing the suffering, by accepting the suffering. He
observes moments of true joy of how great his life is relative to others at the camp who have it
worse. Yeah. So it's a dangerous slippery slope to think that way because it's basically being
better than Jones's. And if the house next door has a giant car, then you want to get a bigger
car or something like that. It's not comparative misery. I think the way that I see it is slightly
different. And it's not even thinking about all the worst possible outcomes that could have happened
but didn't. The example, as you were talking about the concentration camps, one of the most
horrible moments of human existence, I was thinking about pictures that I was seeing of kids in Syria,
in war-torn zones. And you're looking at these kids and again, I cried out loud, imagining my own
son in the van after a bomb explosion, watching his father die or his siblings die or losing his
friends. It's something that we are not capable of fathoming. But if you actually put a seven-year-old
in that situation, the look that I saw in these kids' eyes basically said, it is what it is.
It was, and I've experienced that with my own kid. When he gets, like, my three-year-old last,
like two years ago, who's not my five-year-old, she was burned really badly with like hot chocolate
and coffee that just peeled off her skin. So you could actually see just her fragile skin had just
peeled off. And she was the happiest little kid. She was just going along with the punches.
It is what it is. She accepted it. So it's quite dramatic to sort of realize that
children don't say, oh, I could have it better. They sort of embrace the moment, not embrace,
but sort of accept the moment. And then they can have moments of pure joy in a horrendous war-torn
country. And like so many people from these war-torn countries basically say, oh, you think
you Americans are going to just come and just send us a bunch of aid and food, et cetera?
Yeah, sure. That's helpful. But what do we dream of? What do we struggle for? We struggle for love.
We struggle for meaning. We struggle for, you know, emotions and friendships. We struggle for
the same things you guys struggle for. We're not just like every day waking up and saying, oh,
I wish I had more food. No, that's just a given. I just don't have enough food. But what we struggle
with are basically everything else. And that sort of gives you some perspective on life.
It basically says, you know, and another story that my mom told me when I was a kid is this story
about sort of this man who's basically, you know, he sees the Christ appear in front of him. And he
says, oh, Christ, I'm carrying all these problems. I'm carrying this big bag. Can you please take
it from me? And he's like, sure, let me just give you any other bag. And basically, and of course,
the person in the end accepts his own bag. So acceptance ultimately the path you recommend
is acceptance. Every single other bag is probably worse. It's the evil you don't know versus the
evil you know, like we all struggle with our own problems. But if you look at the bigger picture,
it's just your path through life. And if you embrace it, the good and the bad, every single day,
it's just joy, elation, sadness, misery. If you don't have both, you're not a complete human being.
You know, you can't, I mean, the last example I'm going to give is the movie
Inside Out by Pixar. Beautiful movie. Which one is that? The one with the little characters
controlling all the emotions. So you basically have joy and sadness and fear and disgust, etc.
And the moral of the story, if you remember the movie, the moral of the story is that in the end,
joy is basically trying to fix everything to make everything happy. And she's failing
miserably. And everything else is like crumbling and falling apart. And the little girl basically
becomes emotionless because all she knows how to do is fake happiness. And I think it's a very good
analogy for our everyday society, where we're always saying, are you happy? Are you happy?
My mom calls me and she's like, Manolis, are you happy? I'm like, mom, stop asking this stupid
question. No, I'm not happy. What you should be asking is if I'm fulfilled. And that's a very
different thing. I don't go around being happy. I would love it. If your mom called and said,
Manolis, are you suffering beautifully? It's exactly right. That's what she should be asking.
Are you struggling to achieve something great? That's the question that mom should be asking.
Here that mom called me about the suffering, not about how good are you doing?
So what I tell her is that life is not about maximizing happiness. Life is about accomplishing
something meaningful. And accomplishing that meaningful thing cannot come from a series
of joyful moments. It comes from a series of struggles of successes and failures of people
being nasty to you and people being nice to you and embracing the full thing. And if you supersede
that constant need for gratification, if you supersede that constant need for kindness,
you suddenly know who you are. And what I like to say to my kid and my son the other day was
telling me, oh, so-and-so called me such and such. And I'm like, are you such and such?
He's like, no. I'm like, ha, ha, see, they were wrong. And what I tell him is if you know who
you are, what other people say about you only teaches you about them. So it has no influence
on your self-esteem. If you know where you stand, you embrace the good, but you also embrace the
bad. I have plenty of bad and I'm embracing it. I'm a procrastinator. How do I deal with that?
I trick myself into procrastinating about mindless, stupid little day-to-day things.
And in that procrastination time, doing important things for the future.
So accepting who you are. Accepting your flaws. Accepting the whole of it. Accepting the struggle.
Accepting the sleeplessness. Accepting the fact that the journey is what matters.
Hoping that your path to Ithaca is full of troubles because those troubles are the life you
will lead. Accepting that life will not start after the next milestone that life has already
started a long time ago. And what you're experiencing now is the life. This is it.
It's not some kind of future thing that you work yourself hard to get to. And then after that,
you live happily ever after. To me, the happily ever after, that's the end of the story. Nothing
happens after that. The struggle and the struggle and the struggle is much more interesting story
than they lived happily ever after. So I think we have to embrace that as a society,
that it's not just about the happy ending, that our kids are brainwashed into expecting
that things will be happy and rosy and it's okay if they're not. And they should keep
struggling because the struggle is the journey and the journey is the meaning of life.
It's not the end. It's the journey. What about accepting one of the harder things? We talked
a little bit about immortality. What about accepting that life ends? So do you, Manolis,
think about your own mortality? How we talked about accepting that there's ups and downs to
life. What about the ultimate down, which is the finality of it? Do you think about that? Do you
fear it? You also ask me if I'm afraid of getting older. Yes. And that's on the path to mortality.
So let me talk about that first step and then the last step. The last step. So getting older,
what does that mean? When I was 18, when I was 20, my brain, I felt was at my maximum. I was like,
nothing is impossible. I can't solve anything. I could take any math puzzle, any logic puzzle,
any programming puzzle and just solve it in milliseconds. I just saw the answer through
problems. I was like feeling invincible. I would show up at lecture with my newspaper, lift up my
head every now and then, point to errors, just brat, complete brat. I would raise my hand and
correct my professor from the whole classroom. Total brat. I have some of those in my class now
and it's awesome. It's like very huge. I used to be you. It teaches you humility. So I felt
invincible and I was like, this is it. This is awesome. I'm living the life. 10 years later,
my brain didn't work the same way. I wasn't as good at the tiny little puzzles,
but it worked in different ways. And right now, 20 years later, it works in yet different ways.
And oh gosh, I love the journey. Can you maybe give some hints of the interesting different ways
that your brain works as it aged? Yeah. I went from the phase of sheer speed and hard core
quantitative thinking to sort of stepping back, being able to sort of make more connections,
being able to sort of say, yeah, but let's use that thing sort of a huge new creativity
being unleashed. Basically, when you're young, you're sort of thinking about that one problem.
You can sort of reconfigure all the variables combinatorially in your head and just wipe it
all out. When you're just a little older, you start getting more creative. You start bringing
in things from different fields and different contexts and sort of stepping outside the box.
Basically, it's like being in the right race and saying, there's a ceiling. Why are we trying to get
through that? So it's sort of thinking outside the box. And then at 40, what I'm going through now
is this whole sort of embracing the path of life. And when I say life has started already,
it's not a test anymore. This is basically embracing the finality,
embracing that the journey is what it's at. So what I like to say is live every day,
as if it's your last one, and make plans as if you'll never die. I always have the long term
that I'm sort of planning out for that will eventually become the short term.
And I always have the sort of short term. And I think this ability to sort of look at life in
the past and look at life in the future jointly and sort of embrace the continuity,
both of life in the universe and on our planet, as well as life as a human being from the beginning
to the end, just as a path as a journey, and just embracing every aspect of that. I mean,
I was talking about parenthood the other day and how amazingly fulfilling it is to sort of relive
childhood through the eyes of my kid, but with the perspective of a parent. So the sheer
arrogance of youth, watching this in my kid, I can see myself when I was 18,
correcting my professor, I felt so proud. Little did I know that my professor was working on so
much more interesting things than the three little things he was putting on the board that day.
And I was like, I'm invincible. But in fact, no, just a little brat. And basically right now,
I sort of can see the sort of journey with a little more humility. I can sort of look at
my own students with their unbelievable abilities, being able to do things that I'm no longer able
to do better than I probably was ever able to do, but yet being able to guide them and shape
their thinking and blow their minds with new ideas and new directions through my perspective.
And I know when something is solvable because I've been there, but I'm not going to even bother.
It's not that I can't do it. I'm sure I could if I tried, but just I'm not interested in that
anymore. So what I'm embracing this journey of aging is how my brain is changing and how I'm
constantly trying to figure out the niches, the evolutionary niches that I'm best adapted for
for the tasks that I'm best at while hiring and recruiting both assistants and research scientists
and students and postdocs and, you know, that will be the best at those tasks.
But someone still has to see the big picture. And I love being in that role.
So you're at the time scale of a human lifespan, you're doing the same thing that the worm
did at the evolutionary time scale of growing arms. That's the specialization, the carp
compartmentalization. I mean, it's fascinating to think of what 80-year-old Manolis would
look back at the man that's sitting here today and laugh at the sillings, at the arrogance.
He finally figured out something. I was like, no little thing. You didn't figure out anything.
I mean, ultimately, it seems that if you're introspective about life, it leads to a kind of
acceptance, a deeper and deeper acceptance of the whole of it.
Again, I want to be cautious about acceptance because it almost says that you can't change it.
Ah, yeah.
It's sort of embracing the struggle and embracing the journey. This is the way that I would put it.
So you ultimately feel the journey isn't just something that happens to you.
Of course. You shape it. You shape it. Remember how I was saying that Boston is the best place
and the best time to live in right now, you know, in the history of humanity? I'm exaggerating a
little bit. But the way that I think about this is that if you look at the whole of cosmos,
where would you rather be if you're just a bunch of molecules, roughly your biomass?
Where would you rather be? Would you rather be a rock on Mars? Probably not.
Would you rather be in a black hole? Probably not. Would you rather be in an exploding supernova?
Maybe. That might be interesting. But being on Earth is an awesome solar system, an awesome
planetary system, an awesome, you know, place to be in across all of space time. It's a pretty good
place to be in as a bunch of molecules. If you are a bunch of molecules on Earth today, being an
animal with, you know, some kind of awareness of the stuff around you is wonderful. Being a human
among all animals is amazing because you have all this introspection and being a human who's young,
fit, athletic, smart, etc. I mean, you know, you have so much to be happy for.
Beyond that, being surrounded by a bunch of awesome people that you interact with all the time.
I mean, I feel blessed to interact with the people I know, with the friends I have, the
dinners that I have, all of this, the students that I interact with. I'm so blessed. And the last
little little blip in this awesomeness of local maximum, the last little blip comes from being kind.
Being grateful and being kind. I don't know if you remember that little prayer that I described last
time of, thank you for all the good you've given me and give me strength to give unto others with
the same love that you've given to me. And the whole point of that is being grateful and being
kind. What does that do? From a purely egoistic perspective, it makes the people around you
happier. And it takes that little maximum a little bit further, because you'll be surrounded by happy
people by being kind. That's the purely egoistic view. And the purely altruistic view, or maybe
it's egoistic as well, is that it just is good to give. It feels good to give. Like basically,
watching somebody who's touched by what you said, watching somebody who's like appreciating a rapid
response or a generous offer or just random acts of kindness is so fulfilling. So evolutionarily,
we were selected for that. They're just such a good feeling that comes from that.
You know, it's fascinating to think you said Boston is the best place and talking about kindness
that the very thought that Boston is the best place in the universe is almost,
it's a kind of a gravitational field. Your thought and your very life in itself is a kind of field
that makes that real. So the self-fulfilling prophecy, by claiming it's the best and thinking
is the best, it becomes the best. And you make others, it's not a force that just applies to
your own cognition. It applies to the others around you. And then suddenly you live in
an even better place. Yeah. And it creates the reality, the actual reality that the social
reality, then it molds the environment. Exactly. By what's one of the coolest things about you,
I think is you represent the best of MIT, like the spirit of MIT. So I'm so glad that
I'm fortunate enough to be able to talk to you because there's a kind of cynicism about academia
in parts that I think is undeserved and that there's this MIT, of course, but academic institutions
is a sacred place where ideas can flourish just in the same very way that you're talking about
about is both kindness and curiosity and that weird thing that happens when a bunch of curious
descendants of apes get together and just get excited in this ripple effect that happens.
I mean, that's the most beautiful aspect of MIT. People might think like competition and grants
and like position, like you said, the rat race, but like underneath it all is these curious
human beings inspiring younger human beings. And there's this ripple effect that happens.
And I'm so glad that, I mean, I'm glad that I get a chance to record this because it inspires so
many other students and so many other people to do the same to embrace the inner curious creature
that's not about the race. So let's talk about the negatives. Let's talk about, no, no, no,
I'm serious. I'm serious. You know, you have to embrace the good and the bad. So let's talk about
the negative. Let's address it. So why do people want positions of power? Why do people want,
you know, more money, more power, more these more that? Remember the part where I was saying,
if you know who you are, what other people think about you makes no difference to you,
it only teaches you about them. Many people feel defined themselves, they feel instantiated through
the eyes of others. So being in a position of power makes them feel better about themselves.
Who knows what other kind of struggles they might have that creates that need to feel better about
themselves. But they have a bunch of struggles and everybody has a bunch of struggles. And
every time I see somebody behaving poorly, I'm basically thinking, well, they're in a tough spot
right now and it's okay. You know, I can kind of see how I would behave badly in other circumstances
as well. So I think if you take away that sort of having to prove yourself in the eyes of others,
life becomes so much easier. So when I first became a professor at MIT, I started wearing adult
clothes. I had my like, you know, I mean, before it became a serious person. I basically had,
you know, I would, I would always like go around in my rollerblades and my shorts and a t-shirt.
And eventually I was a professional like, Oh, I bought all these khaki pants and, you know,
these nice, like, you know, shirts with like, you know, whatever they call it, patterns. And I
was like, you know, dressing with my nice belt every day showing up. And then a few months later,
I was like, I can't stand this. And I just went back to my rollerblades and my t-shirts and my
shorts. And it was this struggle of sort of not feeling that I fit in. I was so intimidated by
all of my colleagues, like just watching their incredible achievements, like persons next to me
and the person, you know, the floor below me, I was like, Oh my God, like, they clearly made a
mistake. What the heck am I doing here? How will I ever live up to these people's standards? And
eventually you grow up to realize that the way that I grew up to realize that the way that other
people perceived my work was very similar to the way that I perceived other people's work as flawless.
I knew all of the flaws in my work. I knew the limitations. I knew what I hadn't managed to achieve.
And what I saw was maybe a third of the way of what I was trying to achieve. And I saw everything
as flawed. What they saw, what I had achieved, they didn't see what I hadn't achieved. They only saw
the one third down, which was pretty good in their eyes. So they all respected me.
And I was feeling miserable about myself. I was like, I'm not worthy. And I think that this is a
cognitive problem that we have. We kind of, it's kind of like when we're talking about artificial
and general intelligence, AGI, of sort of, we kind of have this definition that anything that
machines can do is not intelligent and anything that they can't do is intelligent. Therefore,
we narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow the field of what intelligence truly means. And as soon as
machines, it's not intelligent anymore. I feel like I was doing the same thing with myself.
As soon as I could solve something, it was the kind of thing that a kid like me could solve.
And therefore, it was kind of easy. But to the others, it seemed hard. But to me, it seemed easy.
So it was this kind of thing that everything that my colleagues were doing seemed impossible to me.
But everything that I was doing seemed impossible to them. So it was that realization
that sort of made me mature into sort of a not more confident, but more costable human being.
Can you actually linger on that a little bit? I mean, you mentioned Minsky. I remember he said
something in an interview where he said the secret to his, like the way he approached life was
to never be happy with anything he did. So there's something powerful as a motivator
to, to, uh, doing exactly what you're saying, which is everything you've achieved to see that
as easy and unimpressive. What do you do with that? Because clearly that's a useful thing.
I think I've kind of matured past that. And I think the maturity past that is to sort of accept
what it is and accept that it has helped others build onto it and therefore advance human knowledge.
So it's very easy to sort of fall into the trap of, oh, everything I've done is crap.
What I told you last time is that I always tell my students that our best work is ahead of us.
And I think that's more of my mindset. That's a beautiful way to put it.
Exactly. What we've done is, is great. It's great for the time. And it'll become absolutely in 30
years. Yeah. Not we can. We are doing even better. We're doing exactly. So basically our next work
will just strive and, and, and again, you can't, you can't let the perfect be the end of the good.
At some point you have to wrap. I was having a student, a meeting with my student yesterday
and it was like, listen, we know this is not perfect, but it's way better than anything
that's ever been done before. You know how to improve it. But if you try to, your paper is
never going to get published. So, so it, you know, there's this balance of we're already at the top
of the field, get it out. And then you work on the next improvement. And in my experience,
this has never happened. We've never actually worked on the next improvement. And that's okay.
It didn't make a difference because you're basically putting a new stepping stone that others
will be able to step on and surpass you. My advisor in grad school would basically tell me,
Annalise, let others write the second paper in that field. Just write the first one, move on.
Move on to the next field. You don't want to be writing the second and the third and the fourth
and the fifth paper in the same field. Just, and it's very shocking to a student to hear that
because I was like, I was at the top of my game. I was owning that field and I published the first
paper. I'm like, I'm ready for two and three and four. He's like, move on, just let it be.
And I was like, whoa, and it's so liberating to sort of not have to surpass everyone,
surpass everyone, but just put your little stepping stone out there and others will step on it and
put their own stones further and eventually cross a bigger river than if you try to sort of make a
giant leap all at once. So you need both. Beautifully put. So the funny thing is,
I believe I closed the previous episode with a Darwin quote about the power of poetry and music
in life. I think your quote, and again, I only heard once, was Darwin basically saying, if I were
to live life again next time, I would read more poetry and something about art every week or
something like that. Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting for somebody who studied life at a very cold,
I would say, genetic level to say that, yeah, the highest form of living is the art. But like,
on that, which made me realize that you write poetry and I forced you or maybe convinced you
somehow to maybe share if it's possible, if it's okay, some of the poetry you've written yourself
in your life. So again, being Greek, a lot of my poems have been pretty miserable.
And I always like to say that it's very hard for me to write a poem when I'm happy.
And I just have to be in a state of deep despair in order to write poems. But the first poem I ever
wrote was in English class. I was, I'm Greek, I grew up in Greece, but I was in a French high
school and I was taking English as a foreign language. So the English teacher basically
asked us to write a poem in English. So this is basically what I'm going to embarrass myself and
read from my 16-year-old self many, many years ago. Can you give a little bit more context about
who you were in this moment? So like, just... So here's what's really interesting. In terms of
growing up, how do we grow up? It's very difficult to grow up if you're in the same school going
from one class to the other and all your friends know you inside out. It's very difficult to change.
It's very difficult to grow up because they have a certain set of expectations for who you are
and for how you're going to behave. So in many ways we kind of tend to get set in our ways and not
change very much. I think something that helped me grow up is that when I was 11 years old,
I was a kid in Greece in primary school. When I was 12 years old, I was a kid in Greece in a,
you know, first year of high school. When I was 13, I was in France. So basically moved
countries and schools. The next year I moved schools again because it was a transition
in the French educational system from one school to the next. The next year after that,
my family moved to New York in a French high school there. And the next year after that,
I'm moving to MIT. So basically between 11 and 19, every single year, I actually had the opportunity
to grow. I was not held by people who knew me and I could reinvent myself or reshape myself or
reshape my, you know, sort of personality, my emotions, my, you know, as I was growing up,
especially in such a transformative time of a kid's life from 11 to 17.
Okay, first of all, it's so powerful that you think of it that way. Did you think of it that way
at the moment? Because it's kind of a source that you set an opportunity to grow. It's kind of
suffering. I mean, you're being torn away from the thing you know into a thing you don't know.
And so when we moved from South France to New York, I was pissed. I was pissed. I was taking
these long bike rides in the countryside, jumping in French swimming pools. And I had all these
wonderful friendships going downtown and just staying by the fountains in the dim lit streets
of Exxon Provence in the south of France. It was magical. And suddenly I moved to New York City,
a city of cement of ugliness, like trash in the streets at every corner. It's horrible.
Snow everywhere. Having never seen snow or like real snow in my life. I moved from Athens to
South France to Southern New York. So I was pissed. But whether I saw it as an opportunity
for growth, I don't think so. I don't think that I was that self-reflective. It was just
how it happened. I saw it like that probably pretty early on, but not during those transitions.
So basically during those transitions, I was just a kid, being a kid, you know. And
maybe the time that I started seeing it that way was maybe when I decided to stay at MIT as a
professor after having been there as a student. And I kind of saw the struggle of getting professors
to not see you as a kid when they're your peers. And it was very flattered when one of my friends
basically told me, oh, I remember you in recitation. When you first asked me a question,
I said, wow, this kid, I'll pay attention. One day I'll be a peer. So it's, you know,
certainly my perception was that many of them could not see me as anything but a kid.
But it turns out that some of them saw me as something different than a kid even before.
I was actually their colleague. So it's kind of an interesting place because what I like to say
about MIT is that people treat you as equal no matter what stage. And they respect you for
what you say, not for who you are when you're saying it. And if I'm wrong, my students will tell me
they will have no reservation to just be bluntly, you know, sorry. I don't agree with that.
Yeah, I mean, the beautiful thing about you is sorry to put it this way is,
you know, maybe people who weren't familiar with your work beforehand might think,
like, might not realize that you're a world-class scientist who leads a large group and so on
date because there's a youthful nature to you that it's, I mean, you talk like a first, like an
undergrad, you know, with the excitement and the fresh eyes and the sort of excitement about the
world. And that's, first of all, super contagious and beautiful. You know, it's easy to sort of fall
into behaving seriously because then people kind of start putting you on a pedestal more into a
position of power. You want to sort of act like you're in a position of power as opposed to allowing
yourself to be lost in just the curiosity, the childish view of the world, which is just this
open-eyed love of knowledge. And that was the transition that I was describing when I decided
to go back to my rollerblades and t-shirt and, you know, baseball cap. Basically, you know,
when I met my first postdoc, it was basically, you know, he was interviewing for postdocs at
MIT. He already had several first author papers to his name in top journals. And my friend, Julia,
basically introduced me to Alex Stark, who basically was interviewing at the time with Rick
Young and with Eric Lander, just like these massive names in the field. And I was just the
first year faculty person with, you know, zero credibility. And she basically says, oh, there's
this friend of mine, Alex, who's visiting. He's also German, you know, he wanted to meet you.
I'm like, oh, sounds great. I'd love to talk science. I show up. We sit at the amphitheater
in Stata. You know, I basically arrive in my rollerblades, you know, jump a few steps, sit down,
wearing my blades. We're having this awesome conversation about science and about gene
regulation and how the whole thing works and sort of, you know, my perspective and his perspective
were just bouncing ideas for 30 minutes. And then I just dash off to my next meeting. And he
basically emails me afterwards. And I was giving him advice about how to interview with Eric Lander,
how to interview with Rick Young and how to sort of get a position with them. And then after all,
he emails me saying, I would love to become a postdoc in your group. I'm like, are you kidding?
So he basically didn't care that I wear rollerblades and t-shirt. All he cared about was my ideas and
sort of embracing the me with the childhood excitement about science was basically what attracted
him. It wasn't the, wow, this guy runs a big lab or this and that. It was just like, I like his
ideas. I want to work with him. That, by the way, folks is the best of MIT. That's what MIT stands
for. So that's a beautiful, that's a beautiful story. But take me back to the poem and where did
this poem come from? Where's your mindset? So who is the 17, 16 year old kid, Manolis?
So again, I've just seen snow for the first time and I'm in New York. This is New York. So
I'm, you know, maybe that's where the sadness in the poem comes from. But anyway, we're asked in
class to write an assignment. This is my third language. I'm not very good at it. So pardon me,
but here's what I wrote. Children dance now all in row. Children laughing at the snow.
But in time's endless flow, children sooner or later grow. Men are mortal. We go by. If we know
it, we may cry. But I thought a love so sweet was immortal, was so deep. There I told you,
darling sweet, that forever love would keep. Blossom spring and summer shined. Then blue
autumn winter died. One year passed, but the clouds still remember all our vows.
Never faked and never lied. All we did was stare and smile. All alone, sitting down,
to the snow we made our vow. But you told me you were right. Birds who love are birds who cry.
Now, with laughter, children play, yet the sky is so gray. Even if the snow seems bright,
without you have lost their light. Sun that sang and moon that smiled, all the stars have ceased
to shine. All of nature drew its grace, found its light within your face. Now you're gone
and won't return. Let the snow in my heart burn. There's a Greek. That's beautiful. That's beautiful,
by the way. And the rhyming, the musicality. There's a, there's a, both a simplicity and a
musicality to it. No, no, no. But like, so I really enjoy like Robert Frost poems. I don't mean
simplicity in a bad way and then negative way at all. Again, it's very weird to analyze your own
poem, but I think it captures the simplicity of youth and the way that it kind of starts with
children dance like only though it basically, and it kind of shows that snow can be interpreted
first in the first verse as a happy thing. And then in the end, you know, now with laughter,
children play, I'm like, now I've grown basically. It's, it's this transformation that we're actually
talking about. These whole men are mortal. We go by. I'm sort of, you know, you're saying,
are you comfortable with growing old? I'm like, duh, I was, I was since I was 16.
And what's really interesting is that, you know, again, when I was 12 years old
in our summer house in Greece, I remember sort of telling my sister my outlook that I would have
as a father for how to bring up my own kids. So it was, it's very weird that I've always sort of
seen the full path from, you know, a kid when you were young. Yeah. I don't know if you like this
Johnny Mitchell song. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow
it's no zillusions I recall. It's cloud zillusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all.
So it's really beautiful. So, so I think the Johnny Mitchell song, which again,
I heard for the first time much, much after this, and I wouldn't even compare this to that.
But what Johnny Mitchell is saying, that song is that you can see life from two perspectives.
You can see the good or the bad in both, you know, in everything you see. And I think that's the
allegory of snow right now. You can see snow as this bright, white, wonderful thing, or you can
see snow as this miserable, you know, gray thing. So that's sort of, and what I like about the last
verse now with laughter children play is that it's a recall to the first one where I was the kid
enjoying careless life and eventually was making promises that something would be forever.
And I think part of that is also the loss of my friendships in France, of being in New York now
and sort of everything's gray. And, you know, even though the snow seems bright, without you
have lost their light, sun that sang and moon that smiled. So it's this, this concept that if you lose
this concept that if you lose your love, the same thing can be perceived in a very different way.
Let me ask you this, because somebody wrote me this long email.
And I think you're the perfect person to ask this.
You mentioned love from a genetic perspective. What is it? What do you make of love?
Why, why, why do we humans fall in love in your own life? Why did you fall in love?
You know, the email that was written to me was, you always talk about mortality and fear of mortality,
but you don't ask about love. So I don't know if there's some thoughts you could give about
the role of love in your own life or the role of life, the role of love in human life in general.
I think love in many ways defines my life. It's basically, I like to say that I'm a human first
and a professor second. And I think this passion for life, this passion for, you know,
everything around us, I mean, the only way to describe that is love. It's basically, you know,
embracing your, you know, emotional self, embracing the, you know, the
the non-brainiac in you, embracing the sort of intangible, the not very well defined.
And even in my own research, I'm just very passionate about everything I do. You know,
there's a certain passion that comes through it. And what, I'm sorry, again, being Greek,
the etymology of the word passion, what was passion? Passion is suffering.
The etymology, I mean, when we talk about the passion of the Christ, it's a suffering.
And in the Greek version of that word, pathos, like pathology, pathos is deep suffering.
It's the concept and someone who's sympathetic. Sympathetic means suffering together,
experiencing emotions together. So it's funny that you're asking me about love and I respond with
passion, passion for life, passion for research, passion for my family, for my children, for,
you know, so there's, there's a certain passion that defines me and everything else follows
rather than the other way around. I'm not first thinking with my brain, what is the most impactful
people we could write? And then going after that, I'm thinking with my heart, what am I passionate
about? What just drives me, what's just like, you know, makes me take. And that's a beautiful way
to live. But I love it how the Greek part of you just kind of connects it to the suffering. So
if you could remove the suffering, no, no, no, no, no, no, when I say suffering,
I don't mean suffering as in being miserable. I mean suffering as in being emotionally invested
in something. Remember, I mean, again, if you, if you look at this poem, what is it saying?
It's saying birds who love are birds who cry. Right? It's, that's the very definition of love.
Exposing your fragility. If you're not afraid of suffering, you don't fall in love.
As soon as you hold back, you protect, you shield your heart. No love can enter.
So there's this Simon and Garfunkel song. I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain.
And an island never cries. So again, there's some aspect of that into this poem. The, you know,
the fact that, you know, but you told me, you know, there I told you darling sweet that forever
love would keep is this intermediate thing. And then there's a recall, but you told me you were
right birds who love or birds who cry. So it basically says that love is the fragility
that you're willing to give to another person. It's opening up your vulnerable spots. It's sort
of accepting that there's no safety net. You're just giving yourself fully and you're ready to be hurt.
So you've already been way too kind with your time, but I'm going to force you to stay here
just a few minutes longer. As we're talking about goodbyes, you have a really nice other poem here
about goodbyes. Can I force you to read it as well? Oh, twist my arm, twist my arm.
So the next poem was written specifically for our high school yearbook. So another poem written on
demand. The rest of them are just so miserable written by pure, you know, sadness and melancholy.
But this one was also written on demand. And it was basically saying goodbye, as is appropriate
right now, to my friends and sort of again, reflecting this whole journey and transformation
through life. And also, I think showing a little bit of introspection about how we kind of had it
easy in high school, and we're about to go into rougher waters. So the title is actually the Tide
Waters. And it's an analogy on that. So here it goes. All this was another lake where some rest
we sailor stake, waters calm and full of fish, we'll find there what we wish. Some seek fruit
and others feast. Some of us just look for peace. Some find fresh shipped. Other love. Some seek
both and neither have. We were different when we came, each his own story and fame. Different
people had we been, different cultures had we seen, different nature, different face, each unlike
all in this place. We had faith success, defeat, then in one lake came to meet. There, the orders
that we followed, and the pride that we swallowed, made us one, but not the same. Joined us strangers
who there came. Sooner, later, groups were made. Tribes were differences will fade. Some attached,
more or less, others fought and made a mess. But again, we have to go. What for? Where to?
We don't know. Still, we know it. We will try. There to rush, to flee, to fly. There'll be some
who wish to stay, but they'll carry on away. We'll continue on our journey, as we came here,
strong yet lonely. From the lake a river flows, from the river many goals. On that river,
we will race. It will try to find his pace. In that scene, the sailors face, their first fear,
defeat, disgrace. Here and there comes out a face that the waters soon embrace.
Some get lucky, find their way. Others sink beneath the waves. In this race, we will part.
Some will settle near the start. Some set goals beyond the stars, because the river carries far.
You should know in what we've done, the hard part is still to come. So I'll have to say goodbye.
Don't you worry, I won't cry. Neither will they, those who try, till the end, to keep their pride.
But please know, dearest friends, who are always there to mend. I will always need your hand.
I will miss you till the end. I don't think there's a better way to end it.
Manolis, like I said last time, you're one of the most special people at MIT,
one of the most special people in Boston, and whatever mental force field that you're applying
in saying that Boston is the best city in the world, MIT the best university in the world,
you're actually making it happen. So thank you so much for talking to this huge honor.
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis Kellis, and thank you to our sponsors,
Public Goods, Magic Spoon, and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to
get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, 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, let me leave you with some words
from another well-known Greek, Alexander III of Macedonia, commonly known as Alexander the Great.
There is nothing impossible to him who will try. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you.
Next time.