Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness | Lex Fridman Podcast #123
the following is a conversation with manolis kellis his second time on 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 minos is awesome isn't he i'm glad you guys are not 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 please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast 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 and 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 manolas 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 and who inspire us make us smile make us think and make us have fun when we get behind the mic of a podcast whether anyone is listening or not if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter alex friedman i also this time put a link in the description to a survey for this podcast on how i can improve and also an option if you like i don't know why you would like to but if you like to join an inner circle of people that help guide the direction of this podcast via email or occasional video chats if you have a few minutes please fill it out as usual i'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle i try to make these interesting but i give you time stamps so you can skip but still please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description it's the best way honestly to support this podcast this show is sponsored by public goods an online store for basic health and household stuff their products have a minimalist black and white design that i find to be just clean elegant and beautiful it goes nicely at least i think so with the design of crew dragon and the recent spacex nasa mission that sent two humans into space to me very few things are as inspiring as us humans reaching out into the unknown the harsh challenges of space colonizing mars may not have obvious near-term benefits but i believe it will challenge our scientists and our engineers to create technologies whose impact will be immeasurable for us humans here on earth or those of us who choose to stay here on earth personally i'm kind of a long time big fan of this planet anyway visit publicgoods.com lex and use codelex at checkout to get 15 bucks off your first order this episode is also supported by magic spoon low carb keto friendly cereal you might have heard on other videos that i eat keto mostly these days so magic spoon is a delicious healthy treat on a hard workout day that fits into that crazy diet also they're a sponsor of episode 100 with my dad and got my dad to buy this cereal and he now loves it honestly just loves it it's kind of funny actually the deep heartfelt nature of that conversation and the silliness of the cereal captures my dad perfectly much of the hardship in his life he dealt with using wit and humor his favorite flavor happens to be coco mine is too he hasn't bought the a sleep mattress yet though my mom wants to but he's all about this magic spoon cereal i think it's his actually favorite sponsor of this podcast probably because they chose to sponsor the episode he's on anyway click the magicspoon.com lex link in the description and use code lex at checkout for free shipping to let them know i sent you and also indirectly to make my dad happy this show is also sponsored by expressvpn get it at expressvpn.com lexpod they gave me a suggested opening line of using the internet without expressvpn is like going to the bathroom and not closing the door this is like gpt-3 suggesting to me how to be more human-like and i'll honestly take all the help i can get by way of life advice let me tell you that you need a vpn to protect you from russians like me in fact this podcast is a kind of hack of your biological network where i use my monotone low energy voice to convince you to buy a kind of expensive cereal as a way to influence the stability of the us economy i use expressvpn on both windows and linux to protect myself if i ever do shady things on the internet which of course i never do and never will so secure your online activity by going to expressvpn.com slackspod to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast and now here's my conversation with manolas kalas 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 your cells 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 2 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 30 trillion 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 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 epidural is both structural in sort 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 methylc takes a different meaning so in the same way that you have annotations in a 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 uh 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 chapter seven from chromosome 23 and chapter four from chromosome two and so forth and each of those uh 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 the way evolution works with natural selection is uh based on the final sort of the entirety of the orchestra musical performance right and then but there's these incredibly rich structural things like each one of them doing their own little job that somehow work together 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 right 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 nucleotides function is selected at the level of you know each gene and every not even its 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 into 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 um 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 which is 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 i wonder if it's possible to break it down into levels that's 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 the tissue level like you said maybe at the microscopic level it would be fascinating if like there's a kind of selection going on at like both the quantum level and like the the galaxy level yeah yeah right yeah so so all the 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 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 neandertal genes for example which again happened long after that uh 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 neonatal 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 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 the gene has a history i mean we talked about this a little bit last time but just and and then some of your research goes into that but the genes as they are today have have a story from the beginning of time and then some 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 uh do you have something interesting genetically biologically in terms of difference between uh 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 branches of of 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 recent relatively recently discovered right less than 10 years ago yeah and those are like little folks right no no no no no that's yet another one though homo florences it had the little folks in sort of indonesia but then uh 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 you know precursors that were wiped out by zeus or by all kinds of wars and so forth like the titans and the you know it's 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 you know removed from what actually happened of massive wars of wiping out neanderthals as humans are modern humans are populating um you know europe do you think do you think what killed the neanderthals and all those other branches is human conflict or is it genetic conflict so is it uh us humans being the opposite of altruistic towards each other or is it uh some other uh 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 you know this whole tribalism you know your my sports team or your my you know political party or you're my you know tiny little village and therefore you know 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 and like two neighboring countries fighting and as soon as they're off in another country they're like oh i can't believe that right so it's it's kind of funny like this tribalism is nonsensical in many ways it's like cognitive incongruent that basically we like kin and selection for for sort of liking kin is hugely advantageous genetically probably across all kinds of organs all across all kinds of life yeah so so basically if you now transport that to the sort of humans arriving in europe and neanderthals are everywhere what are you going to do you're going to kill them off you know there's this battle for territory and these 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 tribes but love uh uh spans uh the gap between the different tribes it's wrong julia it's across species boundaries sneaks away from the village even before the out of africa there's you know within africa's election which was probably massive battles of larger and larger tribes selecting for our social networking and savviness and uh you know probably all our conspiracy theory genes or you know dating back from then and you know it's so there's a lot of this mischievousness in the history of human evolution that unfortunately 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 uh 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 uh co-evolved they they figured out how to uh neighbor up with humans in a friendly way and collaborate and it develop into 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 ah humans 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 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 yeah is something that you try to eliminate first it's too close yeah and uh speaking of um 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 it's also 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 uh you know i mean they don't have 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 a hitchhiker's guide 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 yeah 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 so basically it's very difficult to sort of judge a species intelligence unless you they kind of go out of their way to demonstrate it yeah and that's instructive for our understanding of any kind of life form uh 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 that's you know 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 uh 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 um how would you say like a deliberate way and to then like ask well how do i ask that thing with it whether it's intelligent no but the the question that you're asking is um applicable to every species on on the earth on earth now yeah so basically you know dolphins are a great example we know that they're you know clearly capable hardware wise and behavior-wise of intelligence you know 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 not annihilating each other and not sort of fearing each other and attacking each other what about the message just out of curiosity into science fiction land a little bit if so uh clearly you're one of the top scientists in the world so if we were to discover an alien life form uh 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 the in um in fundamental ways maybe not exactly but in fundamental ways of how it's structured yeah so so you're getting to the very definition of life you're getting to the very definition of what 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 has to have to like heat from the sun and rely on sort of being in the habitable zone of you know its solar system 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 time scales of human life where we kind of live i don't know between and i'm going to be super wide here we're going we're going to live between six earth months and you know 200 a month earth months or 200 earth years so basically if you look at the time scale 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 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 uh 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 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 yeah whereas our planet has basically all of the right ingredients why wouldn't 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 from the outside in means from the surface to the bottom of the ocean ah 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 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 uh it's harsh like inside the life outside the water is horrible it takes huge amounts of evolutionary innovations to sustain living outside the water well that's so interesting why why is that so it's easier to life is easier in the water maybe see i'm telling you don't water yeah dolphins went back into the water really because dolphins are mammals of course yeah interesting well again they might be smarter they went back so so if you if you basically think about the fact that we are 70 water we're basically transporting the sea with us outside the sea you know if we if we don't have water for about a year 24 hours we're dry yeah 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 light the boring life forms is what we see all the time like tetrapods i mean what a stupid boring body plan seriously like 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 you know snails with all kinds of crazy appendages and colors and you know round things and five-way symmetric things and you know 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 plants we kind of see today of basically you know uh 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 underwater 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 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 this movement and this movement is basically causing nutrients to sort of you know coalesce and you know bounce around et cetera that's one option the second option massive amount of energy under you know from from from our the core of our planet basically uh 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 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 abc 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 co like uh like some state representation that stores information like maybe i should say information absolutely is that talking about the part 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 find 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 itself what self-hybridization so basically the same way that dna molecules can hybridize with themselves and basically form this double helix the single-stranded rna molecule can form partial double helixes 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 fall down to 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 if you 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 it's it's yeah but again you can't think of great inventions as one 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 were using the modern ribosome were basically the more successful ones because it 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 a 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 gonna delegate all information stories 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 fundamental new correlation that's why when you're asking is a separate information storage medium a definition of life like no any kind of self preservation self reinforcement and it didn't need to be rna 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 you know 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 though 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 yeah yeah yeah about from not from not life to life yeah 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 to the the moon of jupiter it's also a really nice song by santana 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 uh independently a reason life form already teeming 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 life forms i can't wait because we are so born uh in in you know sort of uh borne as i would say in french but basically we're sort of you know we we 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 uh it's a 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 not because it's a malevolent life like it's a 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 yeah 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 this in in the converse way if you bring life from europa on earth it'll die instantly because it's too hot or because it doesn't need to know how to cope with i don't know the sun's radiation so close to this completely inhabitable zone by their standards so so what we call the habitable zone might actually be the inhabitants 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 a basic uh it'll take massive amounts of engineering to create machines that will go there and sample the you know 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 you know 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 on europa and like put it on a sandwich that you're eating and like eat that sandwich it'll taste just fine and you'll be well i don't know about that i don't know anyone well it tastes fine that's interesting so the other question is do we have taste receptors for this adaptations to chemical molecules that we are used to seeing so you think we don't have case bugs for things we don't even know about wow so we won't yeah we want to be able to know that this chemical tastes funny but you think it won't be it's likely not to be dangerous like it won't know how to even interrupt do you think our immune system will will even detect that something weird is probably and it'll be very easy to detect because it'll be very different from very weird but it won't be able to sort of attack i mean the scene from i don't know independence day where like they're communicating with the other computer and they're like ooh i'm in i mean it's hilarious because like macs and pcs have trouble communicating i mean let alone an alien technology or even alien dna so okay uh now i was talking about you being a scientist on earth but say you were a scientist uh they 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 herself and there's a whole signature that you can see from that so when i was organizing my meaning of life symposium my my my friend was an astrophysicist um basically uh we were deciding on what would be the themes for the for the symposium and then uh 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 [Laughter] everything is a small part of physics and uh i mean in in many ways it is but my immediate answer was 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 pulls but clear signatures of you remember when i was talking earlier about this whole selection for environment selection for biospheres for ecosystems for this multi-organism form of life and i think that's sort of the 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 that's the first transformation if you look at humans we're way past that what do you mean by transformation so so basically there's 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 uh 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 uh 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 comparablization 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 germ lines will make to the next generation the rest is packaging i'm sorry to be so blunt yeah and if you look at nutrition you know where deterostomes what does the stone mean dertero means second where this is the second mouth the first mouth is actually down here is the esophagus so dirt or stones have evolved a second layer of eating kind of like alien with the two mouths yeah so you can think of us as alien where the first mouth is up here and then the second mouth is down there is of course is the first mouth just the the the physical manipulation of the food to make it more correct correct and basically again you know if you look at 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 you know just some organs in between that consume the food and just spit 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 you have eyesight hearing etc to get better getting food yeah and then you have of course the germline and all of this food part it's just auxiliary to their germline so you basically have layers of addition of comparablization of specialization on top of this zine to get all the way to the earth scene yeah so like the warm is like windows 95 very few features very basic and then us humans are like windows vista or windows 10 whatever it is well a few innovations beyond that but yeah and then all right where i don't know where windows 3000 at least is such a fascinating way to look at life as a set of transformations exactly so like is there some interesting transformations to our history here on earth that like appeal to you of course so and what are the most brilliant innovations and transformations yeah yeah yeah i mean this is such a fascinating question of course like you know we're talking about basic basic life forms and we'll talk about eukaryotic life forms and then the next big transformation is multicellular life forms where the specialization separates the germ line 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 notochords like having the first spinal cord this whole concept that along with the this very simple layers you basically now have a coordinating agent and this coordinating agent is starting to make decisions and remember when we're talking about uh 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 chemotaxis to the left for chemotaxis 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 time scales at which things happen you know we're talking about the human epi genome 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 time scale of minutes basically you know three minutes to a 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 time scale than the controlling machine on top of that is that an accident by the way is that like a feature is it was it possible for life to have evolved where the our the daily life of the organism as it interacts with its environment was on time scale similar to uh the the way our internals work if you look at trees they look kind of boring and stupid you're like 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 time scale the tree is basically saying oh i'm looking for a you know a thing to catch on to oh i just caught on to that i'm going to grow more here i'm going to spawn there etc like i can see the trees in my garden just growing and sort of you know looping around and um it's all a matter of time scale and if you look at the human time scale remember we were talking about neoteny the last time around the whole fact that our young are pretty useless until you know maybe you know 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 we basically hold them enabling their brain to continue being malleable and infusing it with knowledge and you know thoughts as you know that period of neotimi increases and expands if you fast forward i don't know another million years so humans have only been around you know different from apes for about that long jump another unit of that another human gym divergence what could happen from an evolutionary time scale 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 because before we have babies so intergenerational distance is you know grown from i don't know 16 years to 40 years you're saying that's in the genetics like no no not necessarily but but it's 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 if we look at the long arc of the evolutionary history exactly so as we start thinking about intergalactic travel now i'm sorry that's that's a heck of a transition uh yeah so let's talk about it no no no no no as as we as a species start thinking about i mean i'm talking about these transitions that are happening right now and that's that's so awesome 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 this time scale it's all time scale just different time skills yeah you asked me offline whether i would like to live forever i mean my answer is absolutely and there's many different types of forevers 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 of the day and then and then pick up different things from the richness of the experiences there's just so much happening in the world every single day so much knowledge that has happened already that just to catch up on that will probably take me around forever and that on that point i just 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 would pick up from that uh that's a beautiful visual but you just try to live each day as if it was groundhog i'm basically every single day waking up and saying all right how would bill murray get out of that one well you know what on uh on a funny tangent like i got a chance to uh go to a neural link demonstration event i'm not usually familiar with neurolink and uh i talked to elon for a while uh 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 uh maybe a noisy recording machine of memories and it would 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 member of a previous memory and that stuck with me because it would probably be my replay you know who the hell am i i'm just some 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 memory probably be that one you know talking to elon for a while yeah that's an interesting uh possibility from uh 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 replace some aspects of that of that biology that's super interesting but anyway sorry sorry for the tangent let's yeah you were talking about time scales and the expansion of the human lifetime and uh the intergalactic travel yeah no but but you're laughing about this yeah for sure that is you're talking about this you're talking about exploring alien worlds yeah 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 these life i mean i'm just very naturally given the topics that we've approached talking about the the time scale at which this will happen so i think eventually we will human or life life will expand out into the universe the 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 the time skills that we experienced 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 even if i 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 an ever-changing world and then the mind uh you know sort of experiment that i want you to 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 where 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 like you know they've been there since the minoan civilization yeah and you know that takes us back to the the question 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 uh genetic makeup of the minoans and the messinians 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 it's fantastic to sort of think about these amazing civilizations that transformed the way that human thought happens that basically looked for rules in nature that looked for principles that looked for the standards 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 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 uh 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 is in your 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 mean 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 it gives us an extra little sound 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 your 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 but the whole concept of some problems that are just so vast and large that dying is the easy way out the death oh that's the easy solution you know so so i want to touch a little bit on that point and and um 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 that is basically when the brain itself is basically superseding what evolution program is for so okay so one of the it's okay my mind was already blown at the beautiful formulation of the idea that life is uh is a system that resists physics yeah and our brain or perhaps the content of it or however maybe functionally our brain is a thing that resists life yes yes you're so you're so brilliant but but but but i want you to see all of that as a continuum basically you're sort of talking about the sort of individual transformations but it's a path yeah that that humanity has 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 symposium what motivated it in part i mean of course it was an inside joke of turning 42 but what motivated him in part was actually a mid-life crisis so the joke that i always like to say is chris papadimitriou a famous greek professor who was previously at mit at harvard at stanford berkeley everywhere uh brilliant brilliant person that's actually costis advisor yeah uh so so christopher means really likes to say that when you're an undergrad you work like a rat to get into grad school and where you grasp you work like a rat to get your phd and where you're post doc you work like a rat to get your assistant professors in jail and where is this profession 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 that's brilliant so basically what happened to me is that i arrived at the end of the rat race yeah 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 where you saw that it's that you were in a rat race it 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 undergraduate because 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 yeah 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 [Applause] and they basically say oh i need something new i need 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 task and the next ask and it's all metrics and you know what's the number of viewers i have what is the number of you know publications i have what's 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 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 kid is first in class how do i make sure that they're you know into the great greatest callers and then you know they're into college and then you're like 60. so how do you how do you escape but what is uh uh is is there a light at the end of the tunnel of a midlife crisis so 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 this you know there's some 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 rant persona to jump through so that's one possibility so first of all watch is it available it's on youtube just google it google really meaning of licensing i've known this and you should have told me this like this is awesome okay yeah this is great but and also like you know saying rat race is uh you know if you look at ratatouille it's not i mean that's a beautiful that's a beautiful thing of challenges and overcoming child that could be fundamentally the meaning of life is uh 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 so a joke that we like to have with my wife all the time is we basically say we we pretend that we're in this all-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 that and then we've paid all these people in this all-inclusive resort that we live in and then uh 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 they lined up a bunch of super smart mit students for me to meet with i'm gonna have a grant writing meeting afterwards it's gonna be awesome and then she signed up for a bunch of consulting activities it's gonna 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 etc etc 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 well that's so let's clarify this is a beautiful way it's almost like a video game view of life that it's a set of i mean again game is not perhaps a positive term but it's a it's a it is a beautiful time so you you do do you or do you not like the rat race view of life no because it is fulfilling in some the right race is about the goal my view of life is about the path so again quote in greece those folks have come up with some good stuff so this um basically wrote this uh 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 rate 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 you know 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 we 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 uh advice or any kind of thoughts that you can elucidate about the downs in your life yeah 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 i'm 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 ten fingers the number of bad ending movies that you've ever watched and you probably wouldn't need all 10 fingers we strive to tell everyone yes you can succeed yes you're a millionaire just temporarily disabled and yes you know uh the prince will eventually figure out his princess and they will have a 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 googly eyes will win we need more movies where the bad guys win we need more movies where just everybody dies we're just you know a macgyver doesn't figure out how to disable the bomb and it just explodes you just 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 i have been exposed to songs that are not just sad but they're miserable miserable so so one of them one of them comes to mind and and it's 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 you know sides of the you know 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 yeah and and i my friend who was with me was listening to the song and she's like this is depressing i'm like you have to listen to another one it's not as sad and she's like what this one died with honor so so that's one example it's a kind of a celebration of uh misery no no no no no no so let me give you a couple more examples and and then i'll answer that question so another example is i i picked up this book that i had from 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 and the bright light above and the poor one is wishing looking at that window and wishing that you 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 you 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 skip this one let's 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 gonna 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 choose one how about this turk this one has two kids a beautiful family waiting for him at home she's like no not this one choose another one and then she goes through all the life stories of the other and since he's like no no just don't take anyone he'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 her 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 a it's expand your emotional range it's teaching you that and 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 the 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 a story every night and sometimes the story is horrible and sometimes the story is good and and sort of friendly and happy and my kids always ask what's the moral of the story and sometimes those are moral and it's like oh you should be good or you should be nice you should be helping each other et cetera and sometimes it'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 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 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 clinging for life and helping them out to be as she could and crying her her heart out when they were dying and 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 and sort of embracing the joy that we have of living where we live in the moment we live and i'm gonna go further if you look at the arc of human um life the you know 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 because no let me put it this way the weather gives us a range of emotion the full range the full scenic pattern that's such a fascinating thing about human psychology i've i often reread this book i'm not sure if you're familiar with this man's search for meaning by viktor frankl and uh he talks about you know his uh living through the holocaust and in the concentration camps and even there where there's like human misery is at its uh highest even there he discovers these moments by observing the suffering by accepting the suffering he uh he observes moments of true joy of how great his life is relative to others at the camp uh who have it worse yeah so so it's it's a dangerous liberty slope to think that way because it's basically being better than jones's and if you know if the 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 it's and it's not even thinking about all the worst possible outcomes that could have happened but didn't the the example as you were talking about the concentration camps the most horrible i mean 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 you know 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 it was and and i've experienced that with my own kid when he gets like my my my three-year-old last like two years ago who's not my five-year-old uh 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 it is she accepted it so so to sort of realize that children don't say oh i could have it better they 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 you know like so many people from you know 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 etc 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 see he sees the christ up here 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 you know the person in the end except his own bag so acceptance ultimately recommended 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 um 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 manolas are you happy i'm like mom stop asking this stupid question no i'm not happy yeah what you should be asking is if i'm fulfilled yeah and that's a very different thing i don't go around being happy i wouldn't love it if your mom called and said manolas are you suffering beautifully that's exactly right that's what she should be asking are you are you struggling to achieve something great yeah that's the question that your mom should be asking not only did that mom call me about the suffering not about how good uh 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 you 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 yeah 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'll live hyperello happily ever after to me the happily ever after that's the end of the story nothing happens after that they struggled 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 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 monoliths 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 literally 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 solve anything i could take any math puzzle any logic puzzle any programming puzzle and to 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 professors from the whole classroom total brand i have some of those in my class now and it's awesome it's like very huge i used to be you teaching you humility yeah so um so so 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 hardcore 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 you know 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 rat race and saying there's a ceiling why are we trying to get through that so it's sort of look you know 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 you know 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 back 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 the the sheer you know um arrogance of youth yeah watching this in my kid i can see myself when i was 18 correcting my professor i felt so proud yeah 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 i sort of can see the the 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 i 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 so but someone still has to see the big picture and i love being in that role so you're at the at the time scale of a human lifespan you're doing the same thing that the worm did at the evolutionary time scale of uh growing arms of the specialization the car compartmentalization right he talks about i mean it's fascinating to think of what uh 80 year old menolas would look back at the at the man that's sitting here today and and and laugh at the ceiling at the arrogance 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 all it leads to a kind of acceptance a deeper and deeper acceptance of the whole of it there again i want to be cautious about acceptance because it almost says that you can't change it ah yeah it's it's sort of embracing the struggle and embracing the journey is the way that i would put it so you ultimately feel the journey isn't just something that happens to you your horse 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 hub in the whole of cosmos where would you rather be if you're just a bunch of molecules roughly your you know 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 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 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 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 it's 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 place best place in the universe is almost it's a kind of a gravitational field uh like your thought and your very life in itself is a kind of field that makes that real yeah so the self-fulfilling prophecy yeah and by by claiming it's the best and thinking is the best it becomes the best and you make others it's it's a for it's not a force that just applies to your own cognition exactly it applies to the others around you and then suddenly you live in an even better place yeah and because you it creates the reality the actual reality that the the social reality exactly it molds the environment exactly what's one of the coolest things about you i think is uh you represent uh the best of mit like the spirit of mit there's um so i'm i'm so glad that i'm fortunate enough to be able to talk to you because um you know there's a kind of uh cynicism about academia in parts that i think is undeserved and that that there's a you know mit of course but academic institutions is a sacred place where ideas can flourish and just in the same very way that you're talking about is both kindness and uh curiosity and that like that weird thing that happens when a bunch of curious descendants of apes get together and just like get excited and this this uh uh ripple effect that happens i mean that's the most beautiful aspect of mit people might think like competition and grants and like uh position like you said the rat race but like underneath it all is is these curious human beings inspiring younger human beings and there's this uh ripple effect that happens and i'm so glad that i mean i'm glad that you that i get a chance to record this because it inspires so many other students and so many other people uh to do the same to embrace the 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 wait you know you have to embrace the good and the bad so let's talk about the negative as degree comes up let's address it um so why do people want positions of power why do people want you know more money more power more this more that remember the part where i was saying if you know who you are what other people think about you it makes no difference to you it only teaches you about them many people feel um define 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 and it's okay you know i can 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 i became a serious person i 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 this nice like you know shirts with like you know whatever they call it the 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 it and i just went back to my rollerblades and my t-shirts and my shirts 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 um eventually you grow up to realize that the way that i 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 was 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 um it's kind of like when we're talking about artificial general intelligence agi of sort of we kind of have this definition that anything that machines can do is not intelligent right and anything that they can't do is intelligent therefore we narrow in our narrow narrow the field of what intelligence truly means and as soon as machine learning 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 yeah 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 comfortable human being can you actually linger on that a little bit i mean you mentioned minsky remember he said something in an interview where he said the secret to his um like the way he approached life was to never be happy with anything he did so there's a 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 i think 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 it's great it's great for the time and it'll become obsolete in 30 years yeah not we can we are doing even better we're doing it exactly so basically our next work will just strive and and again you can't you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good at some point you have to rap i was having 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 manolis 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 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 but just 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 uh i've uh i believe i closed the previous episode with a darwin quote about uh the power of poetry and music and 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 uh life at a very cold i would say genetic level to say that yeah the the highest form of living is is the art but like on that which made me realize that you write poetry and i uh um forced you or maybe convinced you somehow to uh to maybe share if it's possible if it's okay some of uh the poetry you've written yourself in your life so um again being greek a lot of my poems have been pretty miserable and uh i always like to say that it's very hard for me to write a poem without 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 uh english class i was i'm in greek i grew up in kris 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 uh 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 so here's what's really interesting in terms of growing up how do we grow up um 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 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 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 then the next day after that i'm moving to mit uh 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 you said 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 so when we moved from south france to new york i was pissed i was pissed i i was taking these long bike rides in the countryside jumping in friends 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 and every corner is 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 only now you see it this way i i saw it like that probably pretty early on but not during those transitions so basically during this transition i was just a kid being a kid you know and um 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 i was very flattered when one of my uh 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 it'll be a pier so so it's 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 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 the beautiful thing uh about you sorry to to put it this way is uh you know maybe people who weren't familiar with your work beforehand might think uh like you might not realize that you're a world-class scientist leads a large group and so on they because there's a youthful nature to you that it's i mean you talk like a 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 uh behaving seriously because then people kind of um start putting you on a pedestal more into a position of power you you want to sort of act like you're in a position of power as opposed to allowing yourself to be lost in the just the curiosity the 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 baseball cap basically um you know when i when i met my first postdoc uh 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 to 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 a 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 uh 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 or 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 uh after a while he emails me saying i would love to become a postdoc in your group i'm like what are you kidding me like wow so so uh he basically didn't care that i would wear roller blades 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 he 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 beaut that's a beautiful story but take me back to the poem and where did this poem come from what now where's your mind's set so who's the 17 16 year old kid manolas so uh again i've i've just seen snow for the first time and i'm is this 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 times 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 blossomed 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 grey 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 and my heart burn there's a greek that's beautiful that's beautiful by the way and and the rhyming the musicality there's a there's a both of simplicity i'm language no no no but like i so i really enjoy like robert frost poems i don't mean simplicity so what a bad way and then a negative way 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 line 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 this 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. yeah 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'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 you like this johnny mitchell song i've looked at clouds from both sides now from up and down and still somehow it's those illusions i recall it yeah it's clouds illusions i recall i really don't know clouds at all so it's it's really beautiful so so i think the johnny mitchell song which again i heard for the first time much much after this um and i wouldn't even compare this to that but what johnny mitch 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 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 is gray and you know even though the snow seems bright without you have lost their light some that sang and moon that's mild so it's this um 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 um you mentioned love from a genetic perspective what what's what is it what what do you make of love why why are we 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 some 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 uh 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 [Music] the the non brainiac in you embracing the sort of intangible the not very well defined and even in my on my own research i'm just very passionate about everything i do and you know there's a certain passion that comes through and what i'm sorry again being greek the etymology of the word passion what was passion passion is suffering the etymology when we talk about the passion of the christ it's the suffering yeah 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 ask 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 um there's there's a certain passion that uh 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 drives me which just like you know makes me take and that's a beautiful way to live but i 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 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 uh simon 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 um 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 could love or burst 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 uh 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 gonna force you to stay here just a few minutes longer as we're talking about uh 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 um and the next poem was written uh specifically for our high school yearbook so uh 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 um saying goodbye as it's 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 tidewaters and it's an analogy on that so here it goes all this was another lake where some rest we sailer stake water's 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 other love some seek both and neither have we were different when we came it's his own story and fame different people had we been different cultures had we seen different nature different faiths each unlike all in this place we had faced success defeat that 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 where 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 will carry on away we will 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 each 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 manolas 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 and saying that boston is the best city in the world might be the best university in the world you're actually making it happen so thank you so much for talking to his huge honor thank you so much it's been a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with manolas 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 5 stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from 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