Kind: captions
Language: en
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
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one of the things that i think made his
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he just had fun and made choices that
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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
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
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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