"the following is a conversation with manolis kellis his fourth time on the podcast he's a professor at mit and head of the mit computational biology group since this is episode number 142 and 42 as we..."

"and life if you do please subscribe on youtube review it with five stars on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversat..."

"etc and then the fast part is in your arms grew up and suffered and you know stood up and you know rose men with clear vision this whole concept of taking on the world with nothing to lose because you..."

"if you look at regions of the brain people have lost their language ability because they have an accident in that region of the brain can actually sing because it's exactly the symmetric region of the..."

"and and even as language has now developed i think the artistic expression is needed like badly needed by our brain so it's not just that oh our brain can kind of you know take a break and go do that ..."

"with my students without you know sort of either using my hands or opening the white board in zoom and just constantly drawing or you know back when we had in-person meetings just the whiteboard in my..."

"and who have stolen so many gardens with my mouth that has drunk that has kissed and that has bitten without ever pleasing its hunger with my skin that has been rubbed in the sun of all the summers an..."

"it basically tells you you don't have to be like the others be yourself show kindness show generosity don't you know don't let that anger get to you you know the song fragile how fragile we are how fr..."

"ever could for all those born beneath an angry star lest we forget how fragile we are damn right i mean that's poetry it was beautiful and he's using the english language in just such a refined way wi..."

"it seems that more meaning comes when there's a rhythm that uh i don't know what what that is that probably connects to exactly what you're saying if you pay close attention you will notice that the m..."

"and the front rows died from another song it's like this whole concept of us versus them and there's that theme of us versus them again where the child is discovering how his father died when he finds..."

"just strikes me is the music and the tonality totally changes and now he describes the attack it was dark all around there was frost in the ground when the tigers broke free and no one survived from t..."

"room with it yeah and there's this this scene in the movie which like where he just breaks out with his guitar and there's this prostitute in the room he starts throwing stuff and then he like you kno..."

"mr khrushchev says we will bury you i don't subscribe to this point of view it'd be such an ignorant thing to do if the russians love their children too what is it doing it's basically saying the russ..."

"your your fellow biology you know there is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fans it's just so beautiful there's no crisper simpler way to say russians love their children to..."

"and the last one i mentioned last time we spoke which is johnny mitchell's both sides now so she she has three rounds one on clouds one on love and one on life and on cloud she says rose and flows of ..."

"remember my poem from when i was 16 years old of this whole you know children dance now all in row and then in the end even though the snow seems bright without you have lost their light sound that sa..."

"then if you want a boxer i will step into the ring for you if you want a driver climb inside or if you want to take me for a ride you know you can so this whole concept of you want to drive i'll follo..."

"area and he he takes me aside and he's like manolis we're gonna crash [Laughter] get her out of my car and then he basically says but but but i'm only reassured because you're here with me and i'm lik..."

"if you just don't worry too much if you don't try to be you know a one hor a one-trick pony if you just embrace the fact that you might suck at a bunch of things but you're just gonna try a lot of thi..."

"to narrow it down to what 15 songs thank you for that wonderful journey that you just took us on the the the the darkest possible places of greek song to uh to ending in this a country song i haven't ..."

"to never do anything right basically you have to embrace the fact that you'll be wrong so many times in so many research meetings i just go off on a tangent and say let's think about this for a second..."

"just something that you know if you are the a doer you'll make mistakes if you're a criticizer yeah sure you can still sit back and criticize everybody else for the mistakes they make or instead you c..."

"is it something that raising the question and trying to answer it is that a ridiculous pursuit or is this some value is it answerable at all so first of all i i feel that we owe it to your listeners t..."

"42. so as i was turning 42 i basically sort of researched uh why 42 is such a cool number and it turns out that and i put together this little passage that was explaining to all those guests to my 42n..."

"maybe the asteroid didn't hit you know sister earth and the dinosaurs are still ruling and you know any any kind of proto-human is squished and eaten for breakfast basically however we're not as uniqu..."

"comes probably from being able to project another person's intentions to understand what they mean when you have these large cognitive groups large social groups so me being able to sort of create a m..."

"that's your intuition so uh if you were to sort of uh estimate and bet some money on it if we re-ran earth a million times would what we got now be the most special thing and how often would it be so ..."

"this is the interesting question so with the fermi paradox the idea that the basic question is like if if the universe has a lot of uh alien life forms in it why haven't we seen them yeah and one thou..."

"means that any of these you know alien civilizations would need to be paying attention to every single insignificant planet out there and you know again i mean the movie contact and the book is just s..."

"i mean it's it's a privilege right but it's kind of like living in boston instead of i don't know some middle uh middle-aged uh place where everybody's like hitting each other with with uh you know so..."

"you know poverty less um you know war i mean yes we have the capability to destroy ourselves but the arc of civilization has led to much much less destruction much much less war and much more peace an..."

"which i would recently learned it's not that easy to uh give you another number detect them yes so 48 what happens in 48 years 2068 apophis there's an asteroid that's coming in 48 years it has very hi..."

"many advances so fast okay so what has led to humanity making so many advances is not just the hardware upgrades it's also the software upgrades so by hardware upgrades i basically mean our neocortex ..."

"if you look at what happened in ancient greece why did everything explode at once my take on this is that it was the shift from the egyptian and hieroglyphic software to the greek language software th..."

"so if you're looking at now where we are today look at coronavirus yes sure it could have killed us a hundred years ago it would have but it didn't why because in january we we published the genome a ..."

"from the private space i mean that now democratization of space exploration is you know gonna reveal it's gonna explode continue in the same way that every technology has exploded this is the shift to..."

"horizontally you i gotta tell you you are the lucky one so you might be on the list i don't know yeah i mean i i kind of feel like i would love to see earth from above just to watch our planet i mean ..."

"how exactly are we special relative to the dinosaurs so i mentioned that there's um you know this dramatic cognitive improvement that we've made but i think it goes much deeper than that so if you loo..."

"you know photoreceptors and the smell receptors the chemical receptors like the lion always attacks against the wind so that it's not smelled like all of these things are one layer at a time and we hu..."

"and in the same way humans who have had accidents are aware that they've had accidents so there's this self-awareness of ai that is you know this beautiful concept about you know sort of the eventual ..."

"just like any gazelle walking through you know the desert and any baby looking around is aware of things without doing the math of how am i processing all of these visual information et cetera you're ..."

"and vice versa and that's in space then there's the time direction as you are watching the kilimanjaro mountain you can kind of look back through time to when that volcano was exploding and you know g..."

"perspective meaning like become aware of yeah you know yeah so it's kind of interesting so to think of the world in this way as layers and us humans are able to convert those layers into ideas that th..."

"and i think we're the only species we're the only thing that we even can think of that has actually done that has sort of permeated space and time scales and layers of abstraction plowing through them..."

"which is another very exciting uh possibility what i love about ai and the way that it operates right now is the fact that it is unpredictable there's emergent behavior in our cognitively capable arti..."

"we put the architecture in place but then they do their thing and in some ways that's creating something that has its own identity that's creating something that's not just oh yeah it's not the early ..."

"forever away but it could just simply be that we just need a ton more hardware and that humans are just not that different from the great apes except for just a ton more of it yeah it's interesting th..."

"potential so far i think that kids being born 100 years from now they'll be looking at us now and saying what primitive educational systems they had i can't believe people were not wired into this you..."

"humans will look very different 100 years from now just because the environment changed even though we're still the same great apes the the descendant of apes at the core of this is kind of a notion o..."

"humans with fellowships and the fact that as people apply to mit from around the world there's a selection that happens not just for their ideas but also for the cognitive hardware that came up with t..."

"but once they get into that place the boiling and interbreeding of these memes becomes so much more frequent that what comes out of it is so far beyond if ideas were evolving in a vacuum of an already..."

"of these ideas so that this beautiful image so these are shipping these actual meat cognitive systems to physical locations they they tend to uh cluster in uh the biology ones cluster in a certain bui..."

"not just physically instantiated it's also sort of rearranged you know in this cognitive uh space as well and uh and sometimes these cognitive systems hold conferences and they all get gather around a..."

"basically you know there's i have the luxury at mit of not just choosing smart people but choosing smart people who i get along with who are generous and friendly and creative and smart and you know e..."

"the stickiness of multiple cognitive systems together includes both the commonality so you meet because you're there's some common thing but you stick together because you're dif different in all the ..."

"use to share those ideas because like one essential element of all of this is not just that we're able to have these ideas but we're also able to share them we tend to maybe you can correct me but we ..."

"surrounding that the first one is we have no idea how to even begin to understand how knowledge is encoded in a person's brain i mean i told you about this paper that we had recently with liquitai and..."

"that's number two and number three who says that the way that you encode dave i'm losing my mind and i encode dave i'm losing my mind is anywhere near each other basically maybe the way that i'm encod..."

"difficult let's talk about two two new neuronal systems talking to each other suppose that gpt4 tells gpd3 hey give me all your knowledge right it's ready that's hilarious i have ten times more hardwa..."

"diversity of perspectives and again going back to this whole concept of this entire network of all of human cognitive systems connected to each other and sort of how ideas and memes permeate through t..."

"town and the family that we live in both academic family and you know biological family um make it a little more awesome by being generous to your friends being generous to the people around you being..."

"there's this intangible you know legacy quote-unquote that every one of us has through the people we touch one of my friends from undergrad basically told me oh my mom remembers you vividly from when ..."

"recently on med archive and one of the most generous and eloquent comments about it was like wow this is a master class in scientific writing in analysis in biological interpretation and so so forth i..."

"a hundred and twenty thousand citations i mean that's not just people who read it these are people who used it to write something based on it yeah i mean that to me is is just so fulfilling to basical..."

"of water and bake for an hour love is no recipe as i understand you can't just cook up a poem on demand and as i was twisting all this in my mind i looked at the page by golly it rhymed three roses wh..."

"shout out i love you or send me to hell i don't think there's a better way to end a discussion of the meaning of life whatever the heck the meaning is uh go all in as that poem says manolas thank you ..."