"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..."

"connect with me on twitter alex friedman i also this time put a link in the description to a survey for this podcast on how i can improve and also an option if you like i don't know why you would like..."

"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 co..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 confli..."

"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 ga..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 th..."

"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..."

"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 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 t..."

"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-reinfo..."

"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 innova..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 ab..."

"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 ..."

"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 t..."

"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 ye..."

"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 ge..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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..."

"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 h..."

"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 th..."

"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 gre..."

"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 t..."

"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..."

"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 m..."

"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 ..."

"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 teach..."

"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 ..."

"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 wee..."

"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 y..."

"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 me..."

"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 s..."

"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 di..."

"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 y..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 final..."

"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 m..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 li..."

"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 ..."

"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 y..."

"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 y..."

"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 k..."

"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 b..."

"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 a..."

"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 su..."

"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 wha..."

"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 ..."

"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 intere..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 t..."