Dr. Bernardo Huberman: How to Use Curiosity & Focus to Create a Joyful & Meaningful Life

0:00:04 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools
0:00:06 for everyday life.
0:00:13 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
0:00:15 School of Medicine.
0:00:17 My guest today is Dr. Bernardo Huberman.
0:00:22 Dr. Bernardo Huberman is the vice president of NextGen Systems at Cable Labs.
0:00:26 Prior to that, he was the director of the social computing laboratory at Hewlett-Packard,
0:00:29 and he is, as his name suggests, my father.
0:00:34 Today, we discuss various topics in science, including relativity theory, chaos theory,
0:00:35 and quantum computing.
0:00:40 But I’d like to assure you that even if you have zero background in physics, computer
0:00:44 science, or mathematics, that entire discussion will be clear to you as to what those things
0:00:48 are and even some of how they work.
0:00:50 During today’s discussion, we also talk about a life of science.
0:00:55 That is, what it is to spend one’s life in curiosity, in trying to understand the universe
0:00:58 around us, and how to understand ourselves.
0:01:03 Indeed, today we also talk about neuroscience, how the brain works, and the different sorts
0:01:08 of questions that I do believe everybody asks, whether you’re a scientist or not.
0:01:10 Questions like, where do we come from?
0:01:11 Is there a God?
0:01:14 What is our use or purpose in the universe?
0:01:19 And how is it that we can ponder these super high-level, abstract questions about how we
0:01:24 got here and what our purpose is and how things work at the quantum level, tiny, tiny bits
0:01:26 of things that we can’t even see?
0:01:31 And at the same time, to lead an everyday life that is meaningful and joyful.
0:01:38 We talk about this in the context of understanding oneself in relation to others, family, community,
0:01:41 including scientific community and what it is like to come from a different country.
0:01:43 My father immigrated from South America.
0:01:48 What it was like to do science in the United States then and now, cultural differences.
0:01:51 And of course, we touch on some of our relationship as well.
0:01:52 How could we not?
0:01:56 I must say, for me, it was an immense pleasure and privilege to have this conversation, not
0:02:00 just because Dr. Hooperman is my father, but because I believe the knowledge and indeed
0:02:04 some of the wisdom that he shares will be useful to everybody about what it is to carve
0:02:07 one’s own unique trajectory in terms of career and life.
0:02:13 And at the same time, how to savor the simple, everyday things that make life so worth living.
0:02:16 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching
0:02:18 and research roles at Stanford.
0:02:22 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information
0:02:26 about science and science related tools to the general public.
0:02:30 In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast.
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0:05:08 And now for my discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman.
0:05:11 Dr. Bernardo Huberman, welcome.
0:05:12 Thank you, Andrew.
0:05:14 And also great to see you, Dad.
0:05:15 Same here.
0:05:18 I guess no premonition would have foreseen this one.
0:05:21 No, absolutely not.
0:05:24 And people might notice today, I’m drinking out of a mate gourd.
0:05:30 In part in honor of my father’s father who drank out of his loose leaf mate every morning,
0:05:37 my first sip of mate was sitting in his lap when I was maybe four years old in my Spider
0:05:39 Man pajamas.
0:05:43 In any event, let’s talk about science.
0:05:45 You’re born in Argentina.
0:05:51 As I recall, because once we had a conversation about it, you had a teacher, maybe it was
0:05:56 in high school, who turned you on to physics, which became your field of choice.
0:06:01 But prior to that, were you interested in different subjects?
0:06:05 I don’t recall if you had an avid interest in academics or you just did it because you
0:06:06 were supposed to.
0:06:08 Prior to that teacher, then we’ll talk about him.
0:06:09 Yes, yes.
0:06:12 I was always very interested in ideas and so on.
0:06:17 Science at that time was a bit vague, but I read a lot of philosophy.
0:06:20 I didn’t understand much of what I read, but nevertheless, I kept reading it.
0:06:23 I was interested in psychology.
0:06:25 I was an avid reader.
0:06:29 As a matter of fact, I embarrassed my father or actually made him disappointed when for
0:06:34 a birthday, I think I was 14 years old, I asked him to buy me the 12 volumes of Freud’s
0:06:35 writings.
0:06:36 Really?
0:06:38 Yes, and he said, “What for?”
0:06:39 But I was very impressed with it.
0:06:44 Of course, I couldn’t even understand half of what these books had in them.
0:06:47 I was very interested in many things.
0:06:52 I must say to you that my interest in science, in particular physics, doesn’t come from the
0:06:55 standard thing that you see here in the United States mostly.
0:06:58 Namely, I was not always kidding math.
0:07:02 I was not one of these people that can really do things very, very quickly and so on.
0:07:09 But I was interested because I thought that physics was going to complement my attempt
0:07:13 at understanding how the whole universe is put together.
0:07:15 The philosophers were saying all sorts of things.
0:07:20 I went to a very special school that I learned six years of Latin and so on, and I had to
0:07:26 read things like Kant and Cosmogonis and so on that really didn’t mean much to me.
0:07:29 But suddenly, I started discovering that physics might be interesting.
0:07:33 And I had a cousin, Hector, who was a physicist, a particle physicist already.
0:07:38 I mean, he was living at that time in France, and so there was a little bit of that influence.
0:07:43 But my interest was in things that had to do with fairly abstract ideas.
0:07:49 I cannot believe that at one point or the other, I was very good in geometry class, being
0:07:50 able to prove theorems.
0:07:53 I mean, the teacher would just say, “Let’s prove this.”
0:07:59 And I was somehow able to reason through and come to some proofs.
0:08:04 So I think that I was very interested in ideas and not necessarily in the very concrete aspects
0:08:06 of science at that time.
0:08:08 Can I ask you a question about early schooling?
0:08:13 So if I remember correctly, you were born naturally left-handed.
0:08:17 They forced you to learn to write with your right hand.
0:08:22 You went to very strict schools, like military levels of strictness.
0:08:23 Almost.
0:08:24 Yes.
0:08:25 Yes.
0:08:26 This is a very interesting type of education.
0:08:27 They have it in France.
0:08:30 It’s called the Lycée in France, and this is a very special school in Argentina.
0:08:37 I was actually founded in the 1500s by the Jesuits, and my father went to that school.
0:08:40 And so he wanted me to go there, and my brother went there, too.
0:08:45 And in six years of a very strict education, mostly humanistic, I learned Greek and learned
0:08:46 Latin.
0:08:49 I learned immense amounts of history, which I loved.
0:08:52 And there were other courses in French and so on.
0:08:56 In French, we had to memorize incredibly long poems that we had to recite.
0:08:57 Do you still remember some of them?
0:08:59 Because sometimes early memories are embedded so deeply.
0:09:00 Yes.
0:09:01 Yes.
0:09:04 And my brother and I sometimes tell each other some of the pieces of these poems.
0:09:05 Yes.
0:09:09 I’ll just say something right now to foreshadow what will likely happen several times throughout
0:09:14 today’s discussion, which is anytime that my father is in the presence of his brother,
0:09:20 my uncle Carlos, they start laughing about jokes that they’ve been telling over and
0:09:23 over back and forth with one another since they were a young kid.
0:09:28 So just the mere mention of his brother will bring a bit of a smile and a chuckle to both
0:09:29 of our faces.
0:09:30 Yes.
0:09:31 Yes.
0:09:35 So I’d learned a lot of French, and also my parents decided, my mother mostly, that
0:09:40 I had to learn French and English, and I went to Alianz Francaise, where for five years
0:09:41 I went there.
0:09:45 I was essentially the only boy in the class, which was very nice in a way, and in order
0:09:49 to graduate, essentially to be fluent in French.
0:09:54 But in the special school I went to, the discipline was very strict, very strict.
0:09:56 We were supposed to do things you don’t do in the United States.
0:10:01 The moment the teacher walks in, everybody stands up, and if you’re late and standing
0:10:04 up, you’re just kicked out of the classroom and things of that sort.
0:10:09 But it was a lovely experience in many ways when I reflect on it, because it gave me a
0:10:14 humanistic education that has been incredibly useful in my career.
0:10:15 Most people don’t realize that.
0:10:19 I mean, I tend to think of things in a very broad context, and it’s because of the education
0:10:20 I have.
0:10:21 Okay.
0:10:27 So, and I loved history of Rome, and I’d learned to recite things in Latin.
0:10:30 And so it was very, very — I enjoyed that very, very much.
0:10:31 My brother didn’t, actually.
0:10:32 And so —
0:10:33 Well, you two are very different.
0:10:34 Yeah.
0:10:37 Great adoration for Carlos, but you two are very different.
0:10:44 Along those lines, I was just about to ask or mention, and some of our Argentine and
0:10:50 South American listeners generally, and perhaps even European listeners, might be shocked and
0:10:55 perhaps disappointed to learn that you’re one of the few Argentines that I know who
0:10:58 doesn’t care much for the game of football, soccer.
0:11:00 It doesn’t seem to concern you much at all.
0:11:01 No.
0:11:02 No.
0:11:03 The reasons for that are sort of interesting.
0:11:08 I think I’ve reflected on that because my own wife likes to watch soccer, I mean, she’s
0:11:11 Danish, she likes European tournaments.
0:11:14 I never liked mob behavior.
0:11:18 I never liked this whole passionate involvement in these things.
0:11:19 I don’t know why.
0:11:24 I was never, you know, able to understand it, to the point that I never went to a soccer
0:11:28 game till the week before I left for the United States.
0:11:31 My brother insisted that I had to go to a soccer game.
0:11:37 And this is sort of embarrassing, but at one point or the other, it was a good goal and
0:11:38 so on.
0:11:39 I stood up and said, “This is great.”
0:11:43 And I turned out I was on the wrong side of the audience.
0:11:46 People got very almost violent with me, you know?
0:11:50 So soccer, to me, is something that I watch, but I’m not passionate about.
0:11:51 Right.
0:11:52 Yeah.
0:11:56 I never really felt that it was that interesting, although I was in a rowing team.
0:11:57 I learned boxing.
0:12:03 I did a lot of sports, but I don’t like that much of spectator sports, like tennis.
0:12:05 I played tennis since I was a teenager.
0:12:07 I’m not a spectator sport fan either.
0:12:09 The other day, someone asked me what my favorite sports team is.
0:12:10 You’ll like this.
0:12:14 And I said the Harlem Globetrotters, because they’re undefeated.
0:12:15 They have the best record.
0:12:16 Yeah, right.
0:12:19 And that was actually the one professional sports team game you took me to when I was
0:12:20 a kid.
0:12:21 We’d always go see the Globetrotters.
0:12:22 Yes.
0:12:23 They’re undefeated.
0:12:24 Yes, unbelievable.
0:12:26 My father took me to see them, too.
0:12:27 They’re fantastic.
0:12:28 Yeah, yeah.
0:12:29 I love it.
0:12:30 So your father was not a scientist.
0:12:31 No.
0:12:33 Your brother is not a scientist.
0:12:37 And you were fated, according to them, to join the family business, but then you had
0:12:41 a teacher who exposed you to physics.
0:12:45 To physics and to the notion of being authentic in what you want.
0:12:46 There were two parts to it.
0:12:51 He was a very interesting and tormented man, I felt, but it was very interesting.
0:12:54 He would come into the class, most of the students really didn’t care about what he
0:12:55 was saying.
0:13:00 And so I was fascinated not only by what he was saying, but his whole personality.
0:13:03 But I need to say something here that is important.
0:13:05 I also was rather irresponsible.
0:13:10 You see, I grew up in a family, a well-to-do family, that I never thought how I was going
0:13:12 to make a living.
0:13:18 So it was easy to be interested in science or anything, because it’s what you do.
0:13:22 You’re interested in culture, you read books, you do things.
0:13:25 But my father used to say, “What are you going to do once you graduate?
0:13:28 You don’t want to start teaching in elementary schools or something of that sort.”
0:13:32 My brother used to say, “If he does physics, I’ll have to support him,” because he still
0:13:33 says that.
0:13:35 So scientists were considered poor?
0:13:36 Poor, yeah.
0:13:37 Yeah, they couldn’t get a job.
0:13:39 I mean, science in Argentina.
0:13:41 Argentina has a big tradition in medical sciences.
0:13:44 I think two or three Nobel prizes and so on.
0:13:46 But in physics, they produce some very good physicists.
0:13:48 One of them lives in the United States.
0:13:52 I mean, it’s very, very famous, Maldesena, and I haven’t met him, but I know he’s one
0:13:54 of the top people in the field.
0:14:01 But I just got into this because I was interested, sounded fascinating and abstract, and the
0:14:03 ideas were so powerful.
0:14:08 And I think, and I reflected a lot on this, when you’re psychologically, in other lessons,
0:14:11 because my parents made me jump two grades.
0:14:15 So I was much younger than my classmates, and that created a lot of problems for me.
0:14:20 At the time when you were developing and so on, all the boys were talking about girls
0:14:21 and so on.
0:14:25 I still was really into understanding why the excitement and so on was very young.
0:14:29 But it gave me a sense of order.
0:14:34 Reading a book about physics and understanding that there are laws that tell you how things
0:14:37 work, gave me a tremendous sense of order and power.
0:14:42 So everything else was a little bit in flow, and the family and my own relationships with
0:14:45 friends and girlfriends or whatever.
0:14:49 And going back to science, it was just a sense of, and I still remember those days.
0:14:52 It was very, very soothing in a way.
0:14:54 So it’s like a touchstone.
0:14:55 Yes.
0:15:00 And what grade were you, this teacher, was this like middle school, high school?
0:15:01 Yeah, high school, yeah.
0:15:03 I was 13 or 14 years old.
0:15:08 When I finally, I started listening to this, and I said, “Wow, this is impressive.
0:15:10 It’s powerful.
0:15:13 There are ways to know what’s true and what’s not true.
0:15:16 You just don’t speculate on things.”
0:15:20 But most of the stuff, I didn’t really understand.
0:15:23 Then I had this cousin of mine, Hector, who was already gone.
0:15:27 But I would go to his parents’ house, and there were his books, all these incredible
0:15:31 books on quantum mechanics, relativity, and I would just take them home.
0:15:37 And I didn’t really comprehend a lot of the math, but somehow it seemed impressive.
0:15:41 It was like looking into a mechanism or something.
0:15:42 And I used to take them to school.
0:15:46 And one of my teachers once said, “You seem to be interested in this, but you don’t understand
0:15:49 it, so you need to learn it.”
0:15:53 And he was the one who started pushing me into this.
0:15:58 On the other hand, my family was saying, “You should become a lawyer, just my brother
0:15:59 and father.”
0:16:00 And that never interested you?
0:16:01 No.
0:16:06 It’s interesting because now, I’m very interested in aspects of constitutional law and so on,
0:16:09 and I hear about arguments against the Supreme Court and so on.
0:16:14 I became very interested in law and economics later on, just to read about it.
0:16:18 But when my father was talking about it at the dining room table, it was all about strategies
0:16:23 of getting something done half an hour before the opposition, so you win a case.
0:16:25 I was totally interested in that.
0:16:31 I’m sensing a bit of a theme, which is that social dynamics and what other people do regardless
0:16:39 of whether or not they like it or it earns them a particular living, didn’t capture you.
0:16:46 The idea that people and their groups and their ways of thinking and behaving, while
0:16:49 they may not bother you, it didn’t captivate you.
0:16:54 The way that it sounds like physics made you think that there’s something bigger, that
0:16:58 there’s something more universal, which indeed physics is, right?
0:16:59 It is.
0:17:01 It explains most everything.
0:17:02 Most everything.
0:17:03 Yes.
0:17:05 I also think that I was a bit of a loner.
0:17:10 It was very hard to find people that, I mean, children or young people that thought like
0:17:11 me.
0:17:13 Eventually, I became part of a group.
0:17:18 We were four or five guys that used to get together on Saturdays and go to the movies
0:17:22 and so on, and then afterwards discuss whatever we were interested in and so on.
0:17:26 I was only 16 years old deciding what to do with my life.
0:17:29 Of all four of us, we committed.
0:17:32 Some of them came from incredibly wealthy families, two of them.
0:17:36 We committed to really be true to ourselves and pursue what we liked.
0:17:38 But I was the only one.
0:17:42 The other two ended up running the business of their parents, and one of them essentially,
0:17:43 I don’t know what he did.
0:17:45 I saw him years later.
0:17:49 Money becomes a pretty bright beacon for a lot of people.
0:17:50 Yes.
0:17:51 Yes.
0:17:52 Yes.
0:17:56 You never pushed me to go in any particular direction.
0:18:02 You pushed me to not go in particular directions, but never with respect to academic choices.
0:18:07 In fact, I don’t recall you telling me or Laura, by the way, folks, that’s my sister’s
0:18:16 name, that we had to do anything except attend our classes and do our best, but I never felt
0:18:17 pushed to go into science.
0:18:18 No.
0:18:19 No.
0:18:22 Although you had a little bit of a curiosity about it.
0:18:23 Animals.
0:18:24 Animals.
0:18:27 And I remember, I was going through a period in which I started getting convinced that
0:18:30 there was very little to do in physics, and I wanted to change.
0:18:34 And one day, on a bike ride, I think I was carrying on the back of my bike, and basically
0:18:38 you were young, you asked me, “What is the unsolved problem?”
0:18:41 And I said, “I don’t think it’s in physics, but it’s the brain.”
0:18:43 And you said, “Okay, I’ll go into that.”
0:18:44 You said, “I’ll never forget that.”
0:18:46 Well, it’s interesting.
0:18:48 I’m fascinated by human memory.
0:18:49 As you know, I know you are as well.
0:18:51 And I recall that story as well.
0:18:54 I recall it slightly differently, but we’re really closely aligned, which is I remember
0:18:59 you used to walk me to school in the morning, and you would drop me off at the cut-through
0:19:03 to the path behind Gun High School.
0:19:07 Because I would pick up Kristen Harnett across the street, and you told me it would be better
0:19:11 if I picked you up by myself and walked her to the end of the street, which is where class
0:19:12 was.
0:19:15 You were teaching me chivalry.
0:19:18 And I remember asking you what you do.
0:19:21 I was probably five or six years, let’s see, first grade.
0:19:23 So it would probably be somewhere around six or seven years old.
0:19:26 I asked you what you do, and you said, “Physics.”
0:19:28 And I said, “Well, what is that?”
0:19:34 And you said, “Well, let me tell you the feeling it gives me instead.”
0:19:37 You said, “You know the night before your birthday?”
0:19:38 And I said, “Yeah.”
0:19:40 And he said, “You know that feeling?”
0:19:41 And I said, “Yeah.”
0:19:45 And you said, “Well, that’s how I feel every day when I go to work.”
0:19:47 And I remember, “I’ll never forget that.”
0:19:48 And I said, “What do you do?”
0:19:50 And you said, “I’m a physicist.”
0:19:52 And I said, “Well, then I’ll be a physicist.”
0:19:58 And then I recall, so maybe we had the conversation twice, you saying, “Well, most of the big problems
0:20:04 in physics are solved, so you should pick something, perhaps a little less untread.”
0:20:05 And I said, “Like what?”
0:20:07 And you said, “Well, the brain is pretty interesting.”
0:20:09 And then I said, “Okay, I’ll work on that.”
0:20:10 No, that’s true.
0:20:14 This issue of feeling like before your birthday is something I remember saying to you.
0:20:17 I don’t recall feeling that way every day.
0:20:21 I do recall feeling like this when I had an idea and finally worked out and we wrote a
0:20:22 paper and so on.
0:20:25 You know, it was an incredibly exciting time.
0:20:26 Well, you know about it.
0:20:29 You’ve done it yourself now.
0:20:31 And so I wanted to convey that to you.
0:20:35 It was very, very interesting and important to me that you understood that.
0:20:39 On the other hand, it made me feel very isolated as well, not only with you, with everybody.
0:20:42 I mean, it’s a very esoteric field.
0:20:45 You used to walk into the study, look at me writing equations and so on.
0:20:47 And would you say, “What’s that?”
0:20:53 I was thinking about your study, which was just a door down from my childhood bedroom.
0:20:56 I still remember the way that your study smelled.
0:20:57 I can still smell it.
0:21:00 I have an incredible sense of memory for certain things.
0:21:01 I can still remember.
0:21:04 But I remember how your books were aligned, where your stereo was placed, your photos,
0:21:08 your photo of Einstein, your photos of me and Laura and Mom.
0:21:11 I remember all of it.
0:21:16 And the sofa that was just off behind it, because you’re an app taker, which I inherited
0:21:19 from you.
0:21:24 But I remember that, yeah, you would spend a lot of time in that office and listening
0:21:25 to classical music.
0:21:28 Do you listen to music while you work or did you listen?
0:21:29 All the time.
0:21:30 All the time.
0:21:31 Yeah.
0:21:34 Classical music, for me, is something I discovered very young, very young.
0:21:36 My parents also loved classical music.
0:21:41 My brother, too, and it’s something that, to me, has a tremendous emotional resonance
0:21:43 with the way I feel.
0:21:45 Sometimes it’s background music.
0:21:47 Sometimes I really listen very carefully.
0:21:51 It’s something that I, yes, I’ve always had in my life and still have it.
0:21:53 I mean, it’s very, very important to me.
0:21:55 But not many musicians in our family.
0:21:58 No, unfortunately, yeah.
0:21:59 Although there is a very famous one.
0:22:00 We’ve all tried.
0:22:01 We’ve all tried.
0:22:02 Yeah, yeah.
0:22:03 You in particular, yeah, yeah.
0:22:04 And we all failed.
0:22:05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:22:09 And there’s a famous Huberman, a great violinist, Bronislav Huberman.
0:22:13 I mean, there’s a picture, I think I sent it to you here in Einstein.
0:22:18 He was one of the greatest violinists in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, an incredibly interesting
0:22:19 man.
0:22:21 He’s the founder of the Israel Philharmonic.
0:22:26 And that’s one of the reasons that the name Huberman is in some street in Israel because
0:22:27 of him.
0:22:28 Are we related to him?
0:22:30 Unfortunately not.
0:22:34 Which explains the lack of musical prowess in our family.
0:22:40 We all love music, but none of us are good musicians, except my cousin Diego.
0:22:45 Diego has a perfect ear, so he can really do interesting things.
0:22:52 So going back to your childhood, this teacher, what was it?
0:23:00 You already had a sort of seeded and interest in finding order in things that made the world
0:23:02 make sense.
0:23:06 What was the political situation in Argentina at that time?
0:23:07 Quite horrible parts of it.
0:23:12 I mean, there was a dictatorship that lasted for a long time, this Peron thing and so on.
0:23:16 He was really a follower of Mussolini and people of that sort even in World War II.
0:23:18 So what did that mean out in the streets?
0:23:22 You grew up in the heart of Buenos Aires, but what did that mean in terms of, I mean,
0:23:25 was there poverty everywhere where people, I mean, was there violence?
0:23:26 No, no, no.
0:23:27 What does it spell out to you?
0:23:29 Well, it was a very oppressive regime.
0:23:36 You had to be careful what you talked about in my family, like most of the social class.
0:23:40 We had maids and a cook, and so you had to be very careful what you said.
0:23:42 Because they would run that information back?
0:23:46 Absolutely, and your grandfather, my father at one point there, was prevented from coming
0:23:50 to visit me in the United States because he was classified as a communist because he did
0:23:52 not join the Peronist party.
0:23:55 Okay, for the record, we are not communists.
0:24:01 We are both big believers in capitalism and he’s sitting here at this table.
0:24:03 So no, and so it was terrible.
0:24:04 It was a terrible time.
0:24:05 It was a very oppressive time.
0:24:06 But he wasn’t a communist.
0:24:07 No, of course not.
0:24:08 Of course, no, no.
0:24:09 He was on the other side.
0:24:15 But the idea at that time, it was to be classified as such, eventually that information leaked
0:24:20 to the, obviously, to the American authorities, so when he asked for a visa, they denied him.
0:24:21 It was a very complicated story.
0:24:25 I don’t think we should waste time to know how he got eventually resolved through a friend
0:24:28 of mine who was a priest and just with here in the United States.
0:24:34 But the point being that during that time, you had to be very careful the way you spoke,
0:24:35 the way you said things.
0:24:41 There was a dictatorship that was very much like the fascist in Italy, you know, and actually
0:24:45 that dictatorship lasted until a few years ago because as you know, as you heard, the
0:24:50 new president we have is one that actually ran against this whole ideology, Peronism
0:24:51 and so on.
0:24:52 Millet.
0:24:53 Millet, yes.
0:24:57 I was never, I was not political at all, but you had to be careful.
0:25:03 But it was a funny time and when he was overthrown through a military revolution, you know, my
0:25:08 parents were delighted and we, I remember the celebrations and so on.
0:25:11 But that was considered the minority that was against him.
0:25:13 You know, it was a social class movement.
0:25:18 The working class was behind Peron and what he promised and what he gave them.
0:25:21 So that eventually died.
0:25:28 So the real problem was that there was no real commitment to science as an investment
0:25:29 that the country should make.
0:25:34 Yes, it was nice to have Nobel prizes and it’s culturally good, but they didn’t have
0:25:38 the pragmatic notions that we have here in the United States of doing science means solving
0:25:39 concrete problems.
0:25:42 And this was in the 1950s.
0:25:43 The ’60s, too.
0:25:44 Right.
0:25:51 It was like one of the biggest and fastest progressions of physics and its implementation
0:25:52 in the U.S.
0:25:53 Yes, right.
0:25:54 So were you hearing about that?
0:25:55 Of course.
0:25:59 I was following it all and I wanted to, you know, I wanted to buy books about it and so
0:26:00 on.
0:26:03 I had some conflicts with my father about spending money on books that he thought they
0:26:05 were not going to take me anywhere and so on.
0:26:07 I mean, he was a very pragmatic lawyer.
0:26:10 He didn’t understand why I was doing these things.
0:26:16 So yes, I was aware of everything and actually the university was very good.
0:26:20 I entered the university, you had to choose what you wanted to do and after a tremendous
0:26:26 crisis, personal crisis, I decided not to go into law or engineering, which was the
0:26:30 alternative my father offered and decided to study physics.
0:26:33 And I didn’t regret it at all.
0:26:35 It was a very impressive time.
0:26:38 I got a good education in physics, a little bit too abstract.
0:26:41 So this was experimental physics or theoretical physics?
0:26:42 Both.
0:26:43 Both.
0:26:44 In the lab, I was okay.
0:26:50 I mean, I was better in classes in advanced, I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics
0:26:55 and calculus and beyond that and, you know, complex analysis and so on.
0:26:58 So it turns out you were good at math after all?
0:26:59 Good, yes.
0:27:00 I understand math.
0:27:01 I’m not a whiz.
0:27:03 I mean, like many of my students have been.
0:27:08 I had guys that can do incredible things, you know, that I can do them, but slowly.
0:27:09 I understand.
0:27:10 Yes.
0:27:11 Yes.
0:27:16 So, but yeah, physics is something that I knew how to be intuitive about it.
0:27:21 I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn’t plan out, but yeah.
0:27:27 So the teacher in high school, were they the one that told you that there was like a career
0:27:28 in this thing?
0:27:32 Yes, he said, you know, you should devote yourself to this if you really care about it.
0:27:37 He was a man that obviously he was sort of tormented at many levels and so on.
0:27:39 And you said that because of the way he carried himself physically?
0:27:40 Yes.
0:27:41 Yes.
0:27:42 Yeah.
0:27:43 Yeah.
0:27:44 He was troubled and but it was interesting.
0:27:45 Intense man.
0:27:47 I still remember his name was in.
0:27:48 He was a philosopher.
0:27:52 His name is Eggersland, which is a German name.
0:27:57 And he started talking about, you know, discovering, you know, Christianity and what he meant
0:28:00 to him and what it is to be authentic and so on.
0:28:05 So and then I had a very large exposure to the great thinkers of the antiquity, you know,
0:28:06 Roman and Greek.
0:28:12 So it was all to me fascinating, interesting, you know, and it was good to have friends
0:28:13 that I could discuss these things with.
0:28:18 Do you think it’s a disservice that nowadays in the United States, and even when I was
0:28:24 growing up, but especially now that we don’t force kids to be exposed to all these topics,
0:28:27 like we try and track people into something early on.
0:28:32 Actually, a recent guest told me that many schools are now just giving knowledge but
0:28:38 not expecting kids to do problem sets, you know, teaching them about physical activity
0:28:41 but not expecting them to do physical activity.
0:28:42 Seriously.
0:28:43 Well, that sounds a little bit funny.
0:28:44 Yeah.
0:28:47 Well, no, but that’s, I mean, that is the direction that education in this country is gone.
0:28:53 I was a visiting professor in France, actually, you live there because of that in Paris.
0:28:58 And I discovered, you know, the French intellectual tradition is also very, very abstract compared
0:28:59 to the American.
0:29:03 I mean, the English and the Americans are the ones that took physics and the Russians
0:29:08 do into a very, very practical realm and make progress that are very, very concrete, almost
0:29:09 engineering-like.
0:29:13 I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.
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0:30:44 When I came to the United States, I must tell you, I went to, I came as a graduate student
0:30:45 at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:30:46 Yeah, let’s talk about that.
0:30:50 So how did you end up getting into the United States as a graduate student?
0:30:51 You applied.
0:30:57 Yeah, I was graduating, and the future looked rather gloomy.
0:31:01 I had a girlfriend whose father was very wealthy, and then she said, “No problem.
0:31:04 You’re going to work for my dad, and he got a factory or whatever.”
0:31:07 Why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you’ll go for?
0:31:08 No, no, not at all.
0:31:09 Not at all.
0:31:11 I’ve never known you to work for anyone, except you.
0:31:12 Yeah, in a way.
0:31:13 You’re right.
0:31:14 A little bit the same.
0:31:15 Yeah, yeah.
0:31:16 So, yes, yes.
0:31:19 Just the idea of running a business was not.
0:31:23 I was truly idealistic and irresponsible too.
0:31:27 But I had a cousin who was already, you know, got his PhD in theoretical physics at Columbia
0:31:28 University.
0:31:32 He was a professor in France, then Sweden, and so on.
0:31:35 So I felt that perhaps I should go to the United States.
0:31:36 And so I started applying to this.
0:31:40 My father was saying, you know, “I won’t even help you with this.”
0:31:41 He didn’t like it.
0:31:42 My parents didn’t like it.
0:31:45 You know, I was very close to my family in many ways.
0:31:48 And so I applied to many places.
0:31:52 I remember being accepted at, I think, was Cornell.
0:31:53 And I said, “Oh, New York.
0:31:54 That’s great.”
0:31:57 ‘Til someone said to me, “You have to take a plane to go to real New York.”
0:31:58 Yeah.
0:31:59 You love the New York City.
0:32:00 You love the New York City.
0:32:05 In any event, I got it this very, very nice fellowship to go to University of Pennsylvania,
0:32:06 which is…
0:32:07 Who is the fellowship from?
0:32:08 The Navy.
0:32:09 The United States Navy.
0:32:10 Yeah.
0:32:11 I’m very grateful for that.
0:32:14 And I actually wrote that in my PhD thesis, you know.
0:32:15 I was very grateful.
0:32:18 I think it was incredible that they were supporting that kind of research.
0:32:21 They wanted to bring you to the U.S. to build weapons?
0:32:22 No, no, no.
0:32:23 Not at all.
0:32:24 Not at all.
0:32:28 I came to the United States working for Professor Burstein, who just died at the age of 101.
0:32:31 And no, but I was supported by the United States Navy.
0:32:33 It was a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:32:40 But I remember, in my first interview with some of the teachers, professors, that I am
0:32:42 talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics.
0:32:45 And the guy says to me, “Let me give you an interesting problem.
0:32:49 You have a ping-pong ball, but instead of being a classical ping-pong ball, it’s a quantum
0:32:50 one.
0:32:51 Could you tell me what heights will it bounce?”
0:32:53 I had no idea what to do.
0:32:58 I had no sense that you could turn all this knowledge into something implementable, practical,
0:32:59 and so on.
0:33:01 So it was quite a struggle the first year.
0:33:03 So you had theoretical understanding.
0:33:04 Yes.
0:33:05 Not experimental understanding.
0:33:06 Right.
0:33:07 Right.
0:33:08 Yes.
0:33:09 Or empirical and so on.
0:33:10 I didn’t know how to calculate things very well.
0:33:11 Yeah.
0:33:12 I was good.
0:33:13 Yeah.
0:33:14 Math understanding and math.
0:33:18 It’s a difference between understanding and math implemented and creating things.
0:33:19 Well, you learned that.
0:33:24 I had four years of graduate school and got my PhD in physics.
0:33:26 So obviously, I learned how to do it.
0:33:31 But what I’m saying is that I had this very, very vague theoretical understanding of what
0:33:34 the world worked, but not really practical.
0:33:36 I didn’t have it at my fingertips.
0:33:39 That’s what you learn when you go to graduate school, as you know yourself.
0:33:40 Okay.
0:33:41 Yeah.
0:33:43 It’s one thing to learn about the brain as an undergraduate, but in graduate school
0:33:47 is where I learned how to slice brain, stain brains, trace connections, record from neurons,
0:33:51 and it’s a whole other business to get your hands dirty in the thing.
0:33:52 Absolutely.
0:33:53 Absolutely.
0:33:54 Yeah.
0:33:55 The same thing for me.
0:33:56 Yeah.
0:33:57 I’m taking courses and discovering what you like and dislike.
0:34:00 I was a little bit bound to my professor because he was the one who gave me the fellowship,
0:34:03 but I didn’t like what he did, which was always very problematic.
0:34:05 Did you have a good relationship?
0:34:06 It was funny.
0:34:11 He sort of became and tried to become my surrogate father, but on the other hand intellectually,
0:34:14 I always felt that the guy was not quite there.
0:34:16 I mean, he was very famous at some point.
0:34:17 Sure.
0:34:18 He’s a member of the National Academy.
0:34:22 He was not, but he was very famous, very famous.
0:34:25 But I always felt that there was a lack of depth into what we were doing.
0:34:26 It was not just him.
0:34:28 It was just the Soli-State physics.
0:34:35 There was a very famous, you know, Mary Gelman who had total contempt for Soli-State physics.
0:34:36 She used to call it squalists state physics.
0:34:42 For those that don’t know, Mary Gelman, we’ll get to Mary later because I had the interesting
0:34:46 experience of meeting him as a child, but he discovered the quark.
0:34:54 He won the Nobel Prize in many ways, is considered at least as superb a physicist as Feynman,
0:34:55 maybe better.
0:34:56 Yeah.
0:34:57 Yeah.
0:35:01 Less or known, but among physicists, you know, would evoke great fear in everybody.
0:35:02 We’ll get to Mary in a little bit.
0:35:04 So did you enjoy graduate school?
0:35:08 Yes, but it was incredibly hard, very hard, the first year in Tobacco.
0:35:14 And also, personally, I was very lonely, you know, I was transplanted into a whole different
0:35:15 world.
0:35:18 Philadelphia is not a city I would recommend to many people to live in.
0:35:22 I escaped every weekend to New York, and my professor was always upset about that.
0:35:26 And you went from being pretty well off financially to basically having no money?
0:35:27 I had no money.
0:35:31 I lived on very little money, as a matter of fact, yes.
0:35:34 My parents, my father felt that, “Okay, this is what you’re going to do.
0:35:35 You’re going to survive on this.”
0:35:41 They paid for a ticket once a year to go back to visit, and it was incredibly nice and soothing
0:35:46 to be back and to be taken care of and everything else, you know, the life in the family.
0:35:50 And then going back again to Philadelphia and the reality of just being a student.
0:35:57 Unlike many people and foreign students that were with me and other places, I did not enjoy,
0:36:02 I mean, it was quite a cultural adventure for me, to meet people from all over the world,
0:36:07 to learn what they, I became very close to a Japanese post-doc, a very interesting man.
0:36:10 But I was quite miserable.
0:36:12 So this was in the mid-60s?
0:36:15 Yes, yes, late 60s, yes.
0:36:20 I did not like my life there at all, I mean, I lived for four years, I didn’t have a single
0:36:26 girlfriend or anything, you know, I dated and so on, but I just felt that I was transplanted
0:36:28 into an environment that I didn’t like.
0:36:29 Okay.
0:36:37 And on top of that, my conflict with my advisor was not serious because they were not overt,
0:36:38 but they were there all the time.
0:36:39 That can be tough.
0:36:45 For those listening, the relationship to your graduate advisor is a potentially wonderful,
0:36:49 a potentially hazardous one, because they exert enormous control over your future, not
0:36:54 just through letters of recommendation, but opportunities, and I got lucky in that sense.
0:36:57 You were very lucky, yes.
0:36:59 My advisor was the kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him, he ordered
0:37:00 for you.
0:37:01 Are you kidding?
0:37:03 I’m not kidding.
0:37:04 He was that kind of guy.
0:37:07 He would take the whole group to a Chinese restaurant, and before you said, “I don’t
0:37:09 like this,” he just ordered.
0:37:13 Once he took me for a whole weekend to his summer house to finish a paper, the guy couldn’t
0:37:18 finish a paper, and I was a mess, and he, and his daughter was there.
0:37:22 She was 16 or 17, and she said, “Are you two gonna talk physics?”
0:37:26 I was gonna say, “No, let’s go for a walk,” he said, “That’s all we’re gonna do.”
0:37:31 But if physics consisted in him regurgitating whatever we were doing, I mean, I remember
0:37:35 I was so miserable looking at my watch, seeing how the heck do I get out of here?
0:37:41 I didn’t have a car, so I was sort of his prisoner from Friday to Sunday night.
0:37:43 So it was hard for me.
0:37:46 I never really felt that happy.
0:37:52 On the other hand, I had no other options at that time, but then as soon as I graduated,
0:37:54 I got out.
0:37:59 I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was from mine.
0:38:01 I delighted it in my advisers, you know.
0:38:02 She was amazing.
0:38:03 You had fantastic people.
0:38:04 Yeah, I got lucky.
0:38:09 And I got a lot of that from you, which was to, for those who don’t know, I left a program
0:38:13 at Berkeley, which everyone thought I was insane, insane to leave Berkeley to go to
0:38:14 Davis.
0:38:16 That was by choice.
0:38:17 But I remember what you said.
0:38:20 You said, how big is your incoming class at Davis, right?
0:38:25 Because by all standard criteria, Berkeley is the better institution.
0:38:29 Davis is great, but Berkeley is considered exceptionally strong.
0:38:30 And I said, there are three of us.
0:38:34 And you said, well, either you’re making the best decision of your life or the worst
0:38:36 mistake of your life.
0:38:38 And then I think you asked me what was driving the decision.
0:38:40 I said, well, there’s this person there.
0:38:44 Her name is Barbara Chapman, and she just seems to be working on things that if I don’t
0:38:48 work on these problems, I’m going to regret it.
0:38:49 And I can’t imagine working on anything else.
0:38:52 And you said, I’m going to go for it, which I really appreciate.
0:38:57 Because any parent, if I were a parent and my kid said, I’m going to leave Berkeley and
0:39:03 go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again, I think I probably would have balked.
0:39:09 So well, Barbara has also played a very, very nice supportive, emotional role in your life.
0:39:12 I mean, it was obvious that she had tremendous preference for you.
0:39:14 She would like her son in many ways.
0:39:20 And I smile well up a little bit only because, well, she passed away young, but she’s just
0:39:21 an amazing person.
0:39:23 So I feel very blessed for that.
0:39:26 That wasn’t your experience with your advisor.
0:39:29 So during that time, I did want to ask about this.
0:39:35 I asked about it being the mid to late 60s because it was the counterculture movement.
0:39:40 And one thing that people should know about you, I’ll just offer this up, is that in the
0:39:47 entire time I’ve known you, which is a while now, you’ve been very clear.
0:39:51 You never had any interest in recreational drugs.
0:39:53 Never did them, even though that was super common then.
0:39:57 I’ve never seen you have more than a glass of wine.
0:40:00 You’ve never been drunk in your life.
0:40:05 And you don’t like football, despite being from Argentina.
0:40:10 It occurred to me on the drive over, like peer pressure is just not something that impacts
0:40:11 you.
0:40:13 You’re not going to do something because people around you were doing it.
0:40:14 Well, no, you’re absolutely right.
0:40:19 I always felt this sense of uniqueness or whatever.
0:40:20 But I became very humbled because of it.
0:40:21 I’m not arrogant.
0:40:24 It’s not that I feel that others are worse and so on.
0:40:29 But yes, when I came to the United States, there was a decision I had to make, which
0:40:31 is I remember explicitly thinking about it.
0:40:36 It was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the social
0:40:37 environment in which I was in Argentina.
0:40:39 So you could do whatever you wanted.
0:40:41 And I was not the only one who came.
0:40:45 There were three or four brilliant mathematicians and physicists that came with me.
0:40:50 And I saw them within a year, just losing it all.
0:40:51 One of them never graduated.
0:40:52 They got into drugs.
0:40:56 They moved to the village in New York and they decided that that was the life they wanted
0:40:57 to have.
0:41:00 The problem is that 10 years on, what are you doing?
0:41:06 I mean, getting it to be an old hippie is not that interesting.
0:41:11 So I really had that notion at that time that I needed to be very disciplined.
0:41:15 And I had to internalize a set of values and to ask myself what I want and what I don’t
0:41:16 want.
0:41:18 And so yes, indeed, I used to go to parties.
0:41:24 To me, it was quite a surprise in New York, Philadelphia, people smoking pot and all sorts
0:41:28 of other incredible things, getting drunk and so on.
0:41:30 It was something that I would say, “No, thank you.”
0:41:31 And that was it.
0:41:35 And I felt quite okay with it.
0:41:40 And I never felt the need to satisfy a group of people that were like this in order to
0:41:41 be included.
0:41:45 You know, there’s only one person that I’ve ever met in my entire life, now that I’m 49,
0:41:51 I can say things like, “Now that I’m 49,” who has never been drunk, never done drugs,
0:41:54 basically has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once.
0:41:56 And that’s Rick Rubin, my good friend who’s-
0:41:57 I like the meaning.
0:42:04 Yeah, by all standards is probably the greatest music producer of all time across a dozen
0:42:05 different genres, right?
0:42:08 Not just rock and roll, but classical, country, all this.
0:42:15 And I once asked Rick, “You worked in music where drugs and alcohol are everywhere or
0:42:16 at least used to be.”
0:42:19 And he just said, “Yeah, it never really interested me.
0:42:22 I could be around it but not participate.”
0:42:26 And so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship
0:42:32 to what’s going on around you where you don’t feel pulled into it.
0:42:37 And also didn’t understand- I mean, for instance, the role of drugs and alcohol in young people-
0:42:43 I was a graduate student- to a large extent plays a role of relaxation and getting rid
0:42:46 of stress and anxiety and so on.
0:42:49 To me it was very interesting that people would actually come sometimes to my place
0:42:52 and ask, “You know, do you have something to smoke or- why?
0:42:53 Because I’m nervous.”
0:42:57 Well, you know, deal with your state of anxiety but you don’t have to drink in order to do
0:42:58 that.
0:43:01 And I was always a little bit also concerned about my brain.
0:43:07 I mean, I was afraid that these things would just take me over the edge of the rails.
0:43:11 So I just- but I think I was also- I need to say this.
0:43:15 I was also rather judgmental of people who did it at that time.
0:43:19 And it was a way by being judgmental, by saying, “This is wrong.”
0:43:23 Then I was able to stay on my track, okay?
0:43:24 Say a much more understanding.
0:43:27 I mean, I hear people and that’s what, you know, it works for them, it’s fine, although
0:43:29 I still don’t like it.
0:43:34 And it was even worse when we came to California because here everything was going on, not
0:43:36 just drugs and everything else.
0:43:37 So-
0:43:38 Well, let’s talk about that.
0:43:40 But not that specifically right off the bat.
0:43:42 So you finished your PhD.
0:43:45 You could have become- done a post-doc, become a professor.
0:43:46 I was playing with that.
0:43:47 I was playing with that.
0:43:53 I wanted to go to- my dream was to go to Cambridge University in England.
0:43:57 Not only because the Cabinich Laboratory was fantastic, there was the whole thing on
0:43:58 DNA.
0:44:00 I mean, Crick was there and so on.
0:44:04 So I thought that perhaps I would just start, you know, inhaling some of those vapors.
0:44:05 You wanted to get into biology.
0:44:06 Well, I was interested.
0:44:11 I mean, because I’d read the famous book by Watson, you know, the double helix and I
0:44:12 couldn’t sleep.
0:44:14 I mean, I read it one night and I said, “It’s incredible what this guy did.”
0:44:15 Amazing book.
0:44:16 Amazing book, yes.
0:44:18 And the whole thing is becoming like physics.
0:44:20 It’s no longer all these complicated names and so on.
0:44:24 Well, it was crystallography, which is, you know, I mean, physics and chemistry are so
0:44:25 into digitary.
0:44:27 Crystallography is boring because you have- it’s like botany.
0:44:29 You have to learn all these crystals.
0:44:35 I’m just joking because the spaghetti model folks are, as we call them, the crystallographers
0:44:39 are probably covering their eyes right now, but that’s all right.
0:44:41 They love what they do and thank goodness for them.
0:44:42 No, no, of course.
0:44:44 Because they designed novel drug pockets and receptors.
0:44:45 I mean, they’re doing some cool stuff.
0:44:47 Well, I thought that being in Cambridge was okay.
0:44:51 I mean, you would suffer from, you know, not even heating in the rooms and so on.
0:44:57 But then what happens was, I mean, you know, I met your mother and then, you know, she
0:45:02 brought a little bit of reality into my life and said, “Well, she said, you know, it’s
0:45:03 time for you to graduate.”
0:45:06 Time, because I was just staying there as a PhD student.
0:45:12 You know, I was fine, you know, okay, the money was a problem, but I got to live like
0:45:13 this.
0:45:14 You were a mom in New York.
0:45:15 I met your mother in New York.
0:45:18 And she was, she had her, you know, feet on the ground and said, you know, it’s time
0:45:20 for you to graduate and so on.
0:45:22 And she actually was right.
0:45:28 And so I decided to look for a job and my professor wasn’t necessarily letting me go.
0:45:30 He wanted me to stay as a postdoc with him, which, you know.
0:45:36 This is something people don’t often understand is that if a student or postdoc is very good,
0:45:41 the advisors are de-incentivized to move them along to their job.
0:45:42 Right.
0:45:46 It’s a tricky game because you want the support of your advisor, but oftentimes your advisor,
0:45:48 if you’re very good, they want to keep you.
0:45:49 Yes.
0:45:51 So there was also another aspect at that time.
0:45:55 By then, I started thinking that I wanted to live a much more comfortable life.
0:45:59 I mean, I come from a family that lived a very comfortable life and I wanted that very
0:46:00 badly.
0:46:03 And so I started, you know, looking for jobs and so on.
0:46:08 My advisor was not too keen to, you know, tell me what to do.
0:46:12 So instead of going, I could have gone for a postdoc to a couple of places, but I wanted
0:46:14 to be a little more independent.
0:46:18 And I discovered that there were research institutions like IBM and Xerox in the West
0:46:19 Coast and so on.
0:46:24 There were, you know, people could do science, you know, good science, and, you know, Bell
0:46:26 Labs was the most famous one of all.
0:46:27 That was on the East Coast.
0:46:28 In the East Coast.
0:46:32 I went to Bell Labs for an interview and I felt that they were running that like a Russian
0:46:33 internment camp.
0:46:35 I mean, it was unbelievable.
0:46:39 They were, we were 10 of us and, you know, they took us around and people were taking
0:46:43 notes of what you were saying and asking and so on, telling us that was an elite place.
0:46:44 It was an elite place.
0:46:45 So East Coast.
0:46:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:46:49 The East Coast institutions, I mean, it makes sense to me now why, having been raised in
0:46:55 the Bay Area, that East Coast institutions and I are just never going to mix because
0:46:58 there’s, they love tradition.
0:47:04 They love hierarchy and they love history, whereas the West Coast, well, it’s all about
0:47:09 the startup, the IPO, what has happened in the last three years and what’s going to happen
0:47:10 in the next 10 years.
0:47:11 Right.
0:47:14 Well, on the other hand, there is something nice to be said about the European model of
0:47:19 universities in the sense that the biggest contrast you say this, I remember, I, you
0:47:23 know, when you gave, when professors came with colloquium and so on, they were wearing
0:47:26 suit and tie at the University of Pennsylvania and Ivy League school and so on.
0:47:27 I came to Stanford.
0:47:31 I went to the first colloquium and the students were coming in shorts with their dogs into
0:47:32 the auditorium.
0:47:33 I couldn’t believe it.
0:47:38 I mean, it was such an incredible, you know, change, cultural change.
0:47:39 Yeah.
0:47:40 But smart.
0:47:41 Not smart.
0:47:42 I mean, yeah.
0:47:43 Incredibly smart.
0:47:44 Incredibly smart.
0:47:45 They know that about that.
0:47:48 So, in an event, I discovered something which historically became incredibly important,
0:47:54 although I was marginally involved in it, which was Xerox Corporation had invented a copier,
0:47:58 decided that they were going to get into the information age and they decided to establish a new research
0:48:03 center in Palo Alto next to Stanford, where they would recruit people that would work on
0:48:07 this whole thing, computers and information and physics as well.
0:48:11 And I came in and the guys, you know, whoever interviewed me, they said, “Oh, this is exactly
0:48:12 the place for you.”
0:48:14 So that’s what I did.
0:48:19 And the interesting thing was that while I was there doing what I thought was interesting
0:48:24 things, there was a whole group of people, very small, that invented the personal computer.
0:48:26 Steve Jobs saw it and built the first Mac out of it.
0:48:30 This was, I had a classmate in high school, Becca Canara.
0:48:31 Yes.
0:48:33 I remember because she wrote a Vespa at a school.
0:48:34 Yeah.
0:48:35 Her mother was involved in that stuff.
0:48:38 And her mom was involved in creating the, it was Adele.
0:48:39 Adele, yes.
0:48:40 Yeah.
0:48:41 Adele Goldberg, yes.
0:48:46 Adele Goldberg, in developing the ability to move what appeared to be pages on the screen.
0:48:47 Objectary interlanguages.
0:48:49 I had no idea that was going on.
0:48:50 I’ll be honest with you.
0:48:52 I mean, it was going on the second floor.
0:48:53 They were all hippy-like.
0:48:56 I mean, it was a scandal of the life that they had there.
0:49:00 It was the ’70s and still the Bay Area was not what it’s now.
0:49:06 I mean, everybody went to risottis, you know, take long lunches and there was a lot of stuff
0:49:07 on drugs and so on.
0:49:08 Yeah.
0:49:09 Can I ask a question about that?
0:49:11 So Xerox Park was this incredible place.
0:49:13 I remember going there when I was a kid to your lab.
0:49:14 Yeah.
0:49:15 Yeah.
0:49:21 Actually, one of my earliest recollections was you took me into your and Jim Boyce’s
0:49:22 experimental lab.
0:49:23 Yeah.
0:49:25 You told me to pick a piece of fruit.
0:49:26 There was a bowl of fruit.
0:49:27 I picked the banana.
0:49:28 You took out the banana.
0:49:31 You peeled it and you dipped it into liquid nitrogen.
0:49:34 And then you told me to throw it on the ground and we shattered the banana.
0:49:36 And I thought, “That was like the coolest thing ever.”
0:49:37 I remember that.
0:49:38 So that was happening.
0:49:45 But you mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and that
0:49:51 indeed jobs borrowed or stole mostly because Park didn’t protect the intellectual property
0:49:52 well.
0:49:53 I mean, he didn’t do it illegally.
0:49:54 I mean, he saw it.
0:49:55 They basically gave it away.
0:49:56 Right, right.
0:49:57 They basically gave it away, right?
0:49:59 So that, you know, copious for the future.
0:50:00 And that’s it.
0:50:03 But I also recall, because I overheard the conversations between you and Mom when I was
0:50:08 a kid, perhaps, that there were, it was pretty wild at Park.
0:50:11 Like there was this whole, like the room with the beanbags.
0:50:14 People were taking LSD and other drugs.
0:50:15 That wasn’t your scene, though.
0:50:16 No, no, no.
0:50:17 Not at all.
0:50:18 Okay.
0:50:20 I was in the physics lab and we can talk later a little bit about it with Jim Boyce was
0:50:22 a very, very interesting collaborator of mine and so on.
0:50:24 We had a lot of fun, but not on that level.
0:50:28 As a matter of fact, we were considered very square people, you know, doing what we were
0:50:29 doing.
0:50:33 I mean, this is a group of people that were truly, I mean, books have been written on
0:50:40 this whole class of people that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became.
0:50:44 There were brilliant people trying to do new things, Adele, Alain Kay, there were many
0:50:45 of them.
0:50:46 Did you ever want to get involved in that stuff?
0:50:50 I used to see them as so, I’ll tell you how I got involved.
0:50:54 The head of the group, Bob Taylor, a very charismatic man who was responsible for the
0:50:56 development of the personal computing.
0:50:58 He was the head of the computer science lab.
0:51:02 He once heard that I played ping-pong, so he started challenging me to ping-pong.
0:51:07 So we used to play ping-pong, you know, and the conversations were so odd because I would
0:51:08 say, “Oh, you do computer science.
0:51:10 I have some mathematical problems.
0:51:13 I would like some guys in your lab to help me.”
0:51:15 He said, “We are not.
0:51:19 We are not the kind of computer scientists you imagine like at IBM with a white coat fixing
0:51:21 machines and solving math.
0:51:22 We want to revolutionize the world.
0:51:24 We want to change the way you think.”
0:51:25 He used to say that to me.
0:51:30 I sort of understood a little bit of it, but quite frankly, he seemed totally out of whatever
0:51:31 I was doing.
0:51:37 This is when Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, et cetera, A16Z, now, when he was sitting
0:51:42 in the very seat you’re sitting in, here he described this notion of wild ducks, that
0:51:47 at companies you have these people that are small groups of people that are really kind
0:51:51 of wild and outrageous and really testing the outer limits of what’s possible.
0:51:52 Yeah.
0:51:53 Do you think they serve an important role?
0:51:54 Tremendous.
0:51:55 Tremendous.
0:51:57 And I was a little bit of that in my field at that time.
0:52:03 I was the first one to realize that once I saw these machines I could use them for doing
0:52:06 things even in physics that no one could do.
0:52:11 And the kinds of fields that I chose to work on were totally out of what people were doing
0:52:13 at Xerox or IBM and so on.
0:52:15 I think that these people are essential.
0:52:20 Now, the question is what does the company or the university, what do they do with those
0:52:22 ideas and so on?
0:52:24 Because Xerox lost it completely.
0:52:27 They show them the stuff and there’s a whole books that have been written about it.
0:52:33 Well, one thing that I think I’m realizing now I inherited from you consciously or unconsciously
0:52:41 is that I’ve been more of a risk taker with various aspects of my life than I probably
0:52:48 should have been, but that I’ve always enjoyed being near people who are really pushing the
0:52:49 boundary on something.
0:52:54 My love of skateboarding, but not just skateboarding, but our friend, Danny Wei, jumping the great
0:52:56 wall of China, building mega ramps in his yard.
0:53:01 I knew I wasn’t going to do that, but there’s something about being adjacent to people like
0:53:02 that.
0:53:03 Yes.
0:53:10 That changes the way that I’ve approached things that were more pedestrian, to make them
0:53:12 less pedestrian.
0:53:17 And maybe we’ll return to this because I think that being around people who are real
0:53:22 mavericks and real iconoclasts can be very beneficial, but it doesn’t mean that you have
0:53:24 to jump in and do what they’re doing.
0:53:25 Right.
0:53:29 Well, I decided, I want to take huge risks and as a matter of fact, my first piece of
0:53:34 work after I got my job at Xerox Park, which was supposed to work on some solid state physics
0:53:39 or whatever, was I had this notion, this fantasy of Einstein in the patent office.
0:53:44 So I would start working on things that were crazy.
0:53:48 There was this whole notion in physics, which is called tachyons, particles that are faster
0:53:49 than the speed of light.
0:53:50 How do you say it?
0:53:51 Tachyons.
0:53:55 They said from the word tachyons, which means fast, swift, means particles that are faster
0:53:57 than the speed of light, which is impossible.
0:54:01 But some physicists were playing with that idea, and I became very interested in that.
0:54:08 As a matter of fact, my first paper out of graduate school was on tachyons, and I had
0:54:12 the pride of getting the paper accepted in the top physics journal.
0:54:14 Is physics review letters?
0:54:16 Physics letters, yes.
0:54:21 And I remember my cousin Hector sending me a note of something saying, “Well, now I
0:54:25 see the road to perdition,” he said.
0:54:26 But I was so proud of it.
0:54:29 I really thought that I was doing something incredible, and it had nothing to do with
0:54:31 the work I was doing on a daily basis.
0:54:35 And I published several papers on things that were very important to me.
0:54:37 You have a lot of single author papers.
0:54:38 Yes, yes.
0:54:46 Something that is especially rare in biology, but you have a lot of single author papers.
0:54:49 I was very proud of that, yes, yes.
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0:57:35 Can I ask you a question?
0:57:39 It’s a slight departure, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.
0:57:45 Feel free to say no if it’s not something that could be done in a couple of minutes.
0:57:51 So many people here on Stein’s name, they think of the hair, they think of relativity.
0:57:58 Is it possible to explain relativity in a way that the everyday person can get it a
0:58:01 little bit better than they perhaps understand it now?
0:58:02 Yes.
0:58:07 As a matter of fact, I learned not long ago that Einstein himself wrote a popular book
0:58:10 on relativity that seems to be very, very accessible.
0:58:12 Now, there are two aspects to relativity.
0:58:19 I mean, there are two things that our brains were not made by evolution to understand intuitively.
0:58:23 One is relativity and the other one is quantum physics.
0:58:29 We know we have intuitions like an animal, for instance, if you see a lion running after
0:58:34 a zebra and so on, the lion can actually calculate intuitively the speed at which he can move
0:58:35 and so on.
0:58:37 We can do the same.
0:58:40 But if you start thinking about what happens when you get to near the speed of light, we
0:58:42 have no intuition whatsoever.
0:58:47 Time almost stops, there are all sorts of complicated things, length contract, I mean, it’s a very
0:58:51 complicated set of things and that’s why it’s very hard to understand, although the math
0:58:52 works.
0:58:55 Then there is general relativity, that is even worse because there is some kind of a
0:58:59 warping of space-time that is responsible for gravitation.
0:59:01 But I’ll go into that in a second.
0:59:03 The other one is quantum physics.
0:59:09 Our brains are not, not only are they not wired to understand the near the speed of
0:59:11 light because no one moves near the speed of light.
0:59:17 I mean, we move at speeds that are fairly small compared to the speed of light.
0:59:21 Then quantum mechanics is at such a microscopic level that is below basically the level of
0:59:24 the molecules, molecules atoms and inside the atom.
0:59:29 So it’s very, very hard to visualize or even understand some of the very counterintuitive
0:59:35 ideas like entanglement and also, you know, so the relativity can be understood in the
0:59:38 sense that you can explain certain things, but people say, well, how can it work like
0:59:39 that?
0:59:41 And then you have to get into the math.
0:59:47 But I think that, I took a course a few years ago on generativity and I, I, I just-
0:59:48 Profound?
0:59:49 Yeah.
0:59:50 Yeah.
0:59:51 I wanted to learn it finally.
0:59:52 It’s profound.
0:59:53 Deep.
0:59:59 And it makes you feel that this, this man Einstein, he had helped from a lot of people, but still,
1:00:00 it’s an incredible thing.
1:00:07 I mean, you know, it’s, it’s on a level of Beethoven’s symphonies and Mozart’s piano
1:00:08 concertos.
1:00:12 It’s something that comes into your head and you’re able to do, you know, through a lot
1:00:13 of struggle.
1:00:15 I mean, it took me a year, took him years to do that.
1:00:16 Okay.
1:00:18 So, but it is profound.
1:00:22 Now the, when you say, can you explain, I mean, the point is Einstein one day discovered
1:00:25 that if the speed of light is a speed of light, no matter how fast you move with respect to
1:00:28 a beam of light, it’s still moving at the speed of light.
1:00:33 That means that the notion of simultaneity between two events is relative now.
1:00:37 So you and I might say, yes, now is one 10.
1:00:41 But if you are moving very fast with respect to me, instead of one 10, you’ll say something
1:00:42 else.
1:00:43 Okay.
1:00:46 Just because time for you and I are not synchronized.
1:00:50 And that leads to also so very interesting effects and practical effects too, because
1:00:55 from there comes the idea that mass and energy are the same from their nuclear weapons came
1:00:56 out of that.
1:01:01 Also so very interesting things, you know, and today, you know, we can even detect gravitational
1:01:04 waves that are coming from the almost the beginning of the universe.
1:01:07 We can detect that because of those theories.
1:01:08 They can calculate.
1:01:10 So it’s profound.
1:01:11 Yes.
1:01:15 I mean, Einstein, I think stands on, I mean, Newton too, by the way, I mean, you know, Newton
1:01:20 and Einstein, I think they’re top people, you know, but they talk to God in a way as
1:01:22 they say.
1:01:26 We’ll get back to God a little bit later.
1:01:35 And yeah, it seems to me that even though it’s very hard to grasp, it’s worth asking
1:01:40 for those of us that don’t have an intuitive sense of relativity theory that is starting
1:01:44 to, you know, peer into these things a little bit, trying to understand them.
1:01:50 Do you think that it gives one’s mind and ability to, you know, to tap into like forms
1:01:55 of cognition that we don’t normally think about when we’re looking at macro mechanics
1:01:59 of the world around us, that objects fall down, not up, and, you know, a helium balloon
1:02:01 goes up, okay, and you can learn something about helium.
1:02:06 But it’s all pretty straightforward with just a few simple bullet points.
1:02:11 Whereas when you get into quantum mechanics, yeah, it challenges the mind in a way that
1:02:16 it really feels like for most people there’s a cliff, and we just kind of go, okay, you
1:02:22 know, and obviously there’s trust there, but for people that are curious about understanding
1:02:27 how the really tiny bits of the physical universe link up with the really big bits of the physical
1:02:30 universe, where’s the best place to start?
1:02:35 Well, okay, you’re asking a very, very interesting question, which is for most of us who are
1:02:40 training physics, we learn how to calculate, we learn how to operate with these things.
1:02:44 I, you know, I just got a patent on using quantum mechanics for communication and so
1:02:45 on.
1:02:49 But it is still the puzzle is why does it work the way it works.
1:02:54 So what I’m saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things operationally.
1:02:59 I don’t know what happens in your brain because I have ideas that come out of intuitions, not
1:03:01 just formulas and equations.
1:03:06 And yet I don’t necessarily think I understand deeply why these things are the way they are.
1:03:08 They are where they are.
1:03:10 And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be like that.
1:03:15 Our brains, as I said before, you know, they are essentially conformed to understanding
1:03:17 macroscopic world, not high speeds and so on.
1:03:22 So physicists to work in general activity, I don’t, can do incredible calculations.
1:03:27 Can you tell you what the black hole collapsing to another hole, black hole would do.
1:03:31 And you know, they’re using general activity things and so they can do it.
1:03:36 Now what it does to your brain that allows you to operationally work with these equations
1:03:40 and solve it and have no ideas, it’s something I don’t understand.
1:03:44 Namely, I, for instance, the example that I give about quantum mechanics, that’s a very
1:03:50 simple one because I talk to a lot of people nowadays, I work on this, is I can give you
1:03:53 two dice, okay, you know, just dice.
1:03:55 You can go to Mars and I stay here.
1:03:58 The dice are, let’s assume they are quantum mechanically entangled.
1:04:01 I throw my dice, I see three, you got three.
1:04:02 And we don’t communicate.
1:04:03 They’re entangled.
1:04:06 They go, this is faster than the speed of light.
1:04:09 I throw again five, you get five, I do one, you get one.
1:04:10 I mean, it’s an amazing thing.
1:04:12 What is the origin of the entanglement?
1:04:17 It’s a property of quantum systems that they can get entangled, that’s the word.
1:04:22 And somehow what happens to your system affects mine, but doesn’t affect it in the sense
1:04:23 of signal.
1:04:24 No signal.
1:04:25 They are entangled.
1:04:29 Now let me, let me, now this becomes rather, they’re not entangled through other bits of
1:04:30 the universe.
1:04:31 No, no.
1:04:32 They’re totally independent.
1:04:33 Totally independent.
1:04:34 Yes.
1:04:35 They are entangled in the sense that quantum mechanically they started like this.
1:04:40 Now, there are ways, I mean, there are trivial things, there’s a famous example of the socks.
1:04:41 Okay.
1:04:45 So you take a trip and you, you, you took a pair of socks, let’s assume there are blue
1:04:46 socks and so on.
1:04:50 And then you open your bag and you, oh, I forgot one sock.
1:04:51 So this is my blue sock.
1:04:53 So you know that there is a blue sock at home.
1:04:56 So knowing that is a correlation, but that’s trivial, right?
1:04:58 I mean, we can do that with anything.
1:05:02 In quantum mechanics, imagine that you look at the sock, but the sock is changing colors
1:05:03 all the time.
1:05:05 So now you observe it is red.
1:05:06 The other one is red.
1:05:07 I observe it is green.
1:05:08 The other one is green.
1:05:09 Okay.
1:05:10 Randomly.
1:05:11 So little bits of the universe are entangled.
1:05:16 Well, some people, and a friend of mine who’s a Buddhist claims that there is a whole religious
1:05:19 or Buddhist voice saying that everything was entangled.
1:05:20 Yes.
1:05:24 Originally, all atoms, all electrons, all the elementary particles were entangled.
1:05:25 Yes.
1:05:27 Because the universe started very, very tiny and everything was entangled.
1:05:28 Okay.
1:05:31 So you can imagine that the universe is entangled.
1:05:33 So what happens here affects the other.
1:05:38 But the entanglement gets lost when perturbations and noise appears and so on.
1:05:42 So we are not today entangled with, I don’t know, I mean, we don’t think that we are
1:05:43 entangled.
1:05:44 Some people think that.
1:05:45 Yes.
1:05:46 Yes.
1:05:47 People are entangled.
1:05:48 Yes.
1:05:49 Yes.
1:05:50 Yes.
1:05:51 Well, that gets to it.
1:05:52 But that’s a whole, yeah.
1:05:53 That’s a whole thing.
1:05:54 That’s poetry.
1:05:55 That’s poetry, exactly.
1:05:57 There’s another example that brings us to a very salient aspect of my childhood, which
1:05:59 is chaos theory.
1:06:00 Okay.
1:06:03 So I’ll say it so you don’t have to.
1:06:08 You’re one of the founders of chaos or certain aspects of chaos theory.
1:06:09 We’ll talk about that.
1:06:16 But for those of us that grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, I was born in ’75.
1:06:19 Who saw the movie Jurassic Park?
1:06:26 There’s a moment in that movie where I think Jeff Goldblum is explaining what is it, chaos
1:06:30 theory and maybe it was the butterfly flapping its wings in one location and impacting something
1:06:31 someplace else.
1:06:40 For the poets in the world, that was a very captivating example because I think the human
1:06:44 brain can naturally understand that things around us, we can have an impact on them and
1:06:46 they can have an impact on us.
1:06:54 But the notion that a small insect thousands of kilometers away can impact something that’s
1:06:57 going on more adjacent to us.
1:07:05 It seems outrageous, sci-fi, but the notion that one thing impacts another impacts another.
1:07:06 That’s pretty straightforward.
1:07:11 There’s just a dominoing of the physical world.
1:07:12 Chaos theory is different.
1:07:13 Yes.
1:07:14 Okay.
1:07:15 Could you explain chaos?
1:07:16 Yes.
1:07:21 And I’ll just add one more thing just for context for you to sort of the paints and the palette.
1:07:27 Around the same time, I remember the chaos coming out and where there was a lot of excitement
1:07:34 around chaos and this was coming up, there was also a lot of discussion about fractals.
1:07:37 The idea that when you zoom into things at a very, very small level, you start seeing
1:07:38 some regularities.
1:07:40 Now, we know this about crystal structures, right?
1:07:44 Like a good drop of water under a high-powered microscope, you see structure there.
1:07:45 It’s not random.
1:07:49 The angles are very consistent at least around certain nodes, et cetera.
1:07:56 So I think people love this idea that we have repeating patterns and numbers in nature,
1:07:59 but things at a distance can impact us more closely.
1:08:06 This is the kind of stuff that the non-physics brain can understand and it does enchant.
1:08:07 We sort of poked at poetry.
1:08:11 I love poetry, you love poetry.
1:08:21 But I think it enchants because I think humans are naturally interested in how the randomness
1:08:23 of life might not be as random as it appears.
1:08:26 So what is chaos?
1:08:27 Okay.
1:08:33 Where does it exist in our lives, not emotional chaos, and what is the relationship between
1:08:34 fractals and chaos, if any?
1:08:35 Okay.
1:08:38 Let me say first of all about why chaos is what it is.
1:08:39 I mean, it’s not quantum.
1:08:44 There is quantum stories and there is a quantum chaotic thing feel, but I won’t go into that.
1:08:51 Chaos is a very interesting idea, which is it flies against our intuitions.
1:08:56 Because the times of Newton, we know that if you give me the position and the velocity
1:09:00 of the initial particle, I can use Newton’s equations of motion to tell you where that
1:09:03 particle is going to be anywhere, with an incredible precision.
1:09:08 When we launch a rocket, we want to go to the moon, we can calculate and predict exactly
1:09:12 where the rocket is going to be after so many hours, after so many days, and so on.
1:09:16 Actually, we use the equations of motion to predict that trajectory and it’s a precise
1:09:17 trajectory.
1:09:20 That’s how Elon was able to capture the rocket with the chopsticks recently.
1:09:23 Something like that, sorry.
1:09:24 Okay.
1:09:28 Now, the idea of chaos is, so that’s okay, it works.
1:09:32 There are some cases where, let’s assume, now I’m going to give you a simple example.
1:09:39 So I take a ball, I put it on a billiard ball on a billiard table, I send it out, and at
1:09:43 the moment I can calculate and know exactly the position of velocity, I can tell you exactly
1:09:44 where it’s going to go.
1:09:51 Elon says that a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny difference in the initial position of velocity of that
1:09:56 ball will take it very, very far from the other one, which is ridiculous.
1:10:02 I mean, if I tell you that two cars start at exactly the same speed in the same position
1:10:05 and one of them has a little more, they’ll stay parallel to each other.
1:10:11 In some systems, and I’ll tell you in a second, those two trajectories diverge completely.
1:10:15 So it’s what we call sensitivity to initial conditions.
1:10:16 Okay.
1:10:19 That’s what chaos is all about in classical mechanics.
1:10:25 What is really weird about it is that it happens in systems that are also undergo friction,
1:10:30 because let me give you an example that I used to teach chaos at that same for many years.
1:10:36 So imagine I give you a beaker full of molasses, and you take a very big ball, stainless steel
1:10:38 ball, and you just throw it into the thing.
1:10:42 Well, after a while, it will just drift with the thing that’s called Stowe’s Law, because
1:10:45 it, you know, friction slows it down, and it just goes.
1:10:49 And now you’ll throw another one from another altitude, and all of them are going to do
1:10:51 exactly the same.
1:10:53 Some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite.
1:10:56 Even though there is friction, everything tends to just slow it down, they just keep
1:10:59 going far apart from each other.
1:11:00 Amazing.
1:11:01 Amazing thing.
1:11:02 So that’s chaos.
1:11:03 Okay.
1:11:06 And I can tell you a little bit why I got so involved in this and the work we did.
1:11:08 Does chaos exist in every physical system?
1:11:09 Mostly.
1:11:10 Yes.
1:11:11 Yes.
1:11:12 Maybe even in neurons or the brain.
1:11:13 Oh, yes.
1:11:14 Absolutely.
1:11:18 I mean, this is why I don’t want to get into controversy here about issues of whether we live a deterministic
1:11:19 life or not.
1:11:23 But, you know, if things that are a little bit random and so on, or even just a tiny difference
1:11:26 in initial conditions can take you to very different outcomes.
1:11:29 But this, we’re not talking about many particles, we’re talking two.
1:11:30 Okay.
1:11:31 So that’s one.
1:11:34 Now, fractals is a different story that comes out of a guy who I knew very well, Ben
1:11:41 Juan Mandelbrot, a very, very funny character, brilliant too, but very strange, who discovered
1:11:45 that certain things are self-similar, that if you look at the coast of Britain, he used
1:11:48 to say that, you look at the coast of Britain and you say, “Okay, tell me, how long is the
1:11:49 coast of Britain?”
1:11:51 You go with a meter and you measure it.
1:11:55 Now, suppose that the meter that you’re using now can measure up to an inch, well, you’re
1:11:58 going to get a different distance, even though you’re adding the same, because there are
1:12:03 all these little things in the coast of Britain that are essentially self-similar that add
1:12:05 a tremendous amount of length.
1:12:07 That’s what a fractal is all about.
1:12:11 These are structures that are not just a simple line, but they have all these other things.
1:12:12 Okay.
1:12:15 He thought that it was a whole new geometry.
1:12:19 As a matter of fact, and I tell you this because I knew Ben very well, I met him through
1:12:20 a talk that I gave on chaos.
1:12:22 He used to hang out with chaos physicists.
1:12:25 He was a mathematician, brilliant man in many ways.
1:12:28 I was having dinner with him in Copenhagen and the rest of them.
1:12:35 The very pretty waitress came to us and served us, and we were talking to his Frenchman.
1:12:37 He spoke with a very heavy French accent.
1:12:39 She says something, “What are you doing here?”
1:12:42 He says, “We’re at a conference, but I’m not just as a conference.
1:12:45 I’m a very special man,” he said to her.
1:12:46 She said, “How come?”
1:12:49 He says, “Do you know who Euclid was?”
1:12:50 She says, “Sort of.”
1:12:53 She said, “Well, he was a Greek man who invented geometry.”
1:12:56 I said, “Oh, well, guess what?
1:12:57 I am better than Euclid.
1:12:59 I invented a different geometry.”
1:13:00 He said that.
1:13:01 Yeah, he said that.
1:13:04 Points to the waitress in Denmark that knew about Euclid.
1:13:05 The Danes are smart.
1:13:06 Yeah, okay.
1:13:09 That was very funny that he would talk about it.
1:13:13 So he would give a talk, and he would say, “My equations can generate anything indeed.
1:13:16 He could generate any patterns.”
1:13:17 So he would say, “You want a mountain?
1:13:22 Here goes a mountain, but you see a mountain, beautiful rafts,” and so on.
1:13:27 Your similarity is a very powerful idea in physics, because it allows you that if you
1:13:30 know something at a certain scale, you can predict what’s going to be at a different
1:13:33 other scales, and I use that.
1:13:39 But chaos and fractals are not always the same, as he used to say, because he didn’t
1:13:43 like physicists, because we never liked his talks, we always said, “Okay, so you’re telling
1:13:46 us that things are,” he used to say, “I’m not interested in pulleys.
1:13:50 I’m not interested in things that move things up and down,” he used to say.
1:13:51 You’re thinking about elementary physics class.
1:13:53 It’s something of that sort, yeah.
1:13:58 But fractals are very interesting, because these are self-similar structures.
1:13:59 At all levels, they look the same.
1:14:05 You look at them big, you look at them small, they have the same type of geometric behavior.
1:14:11 Chaos is all about dynamics, how things evolve in time, okay, and the chaotic systems, they
1:14:14 tend to diverge from each other for a long, long time.
1:14:18 The man who invented the idea of the butterfly effect was a man called Ed Lorenz, who was
1:14:24 a very famous meteorologist at MIT, and he was solving the equations of the atmosphere
1:14:30 trying to predict the behavior of the weather, and he noticed in these very old computers
1:14:34 and so on that sometimes he would get different behaviors, he thought there was something wrong
1:14:38 about the computer, and he discovered that the only thing that was wrong was that the
1:14:42 initial conditions that he was giving them was very, very tiny little different, and
1:14:43 he would get different things.
1:14:48 From there, he went into that, and there are ideas that are very beautiful, like strange
1:14:53 attractors and so on, and we don’t have to go into that, but so chaos is really a field
1:15:00 that essentially explains why things that seem to be simply explained by classical physics
1:15:04 tend to diverge from each other, and they give rise to random outcomes.
1:15:05 That’s the important thing.
1:15:09 You can use chaos in order to generate random numbers.
1:15:12 You can use chaos to generate random patterns.
1:15:13 I’ve done that.
1:15:17 And chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level?
1:15:20 Okay, so I was working at some day, and I don’t think it’s interesting how I got into
1:15:24 this because I was doing something else, and suddenly I decided I was going to do this,
1:15:29 and I really started going very fast at this, but then I had a very bright student.
1:15:35 You met Ted Hogg, and we decided, let’s see if we can see chaos in quantum mechanics,
1:15:38 and we started doing it, and there were a couple of papers by the Russians actually showing
1:15:42 that this was the case, and we discovered that it was not the case.
1:15:46 We actually proved that quantum systems are not chaotic.
1:15:49 There is some kind of interference between them and so on that makes them recur back
1:15:50 and forth periodically.
1:15:54 I know I find that reassuring that if you get down to a small enough level that you
1:15:59 can really predict what’s going to happen as opposed to small perturbations leading
1:16:01 to big differences in the outcome.
1:16:02 That was the whole point.
1:16:07 We discovered that quantum mechanics, there are waves and interferences and so on that
1:16:09 make the system recur.
1:16:13 As a matter of fact, I had quite an exchange with Dick Feynman about it.
1:16:18 When I met him, I went to give a talk at Taltech, and I was in his office and he said, “So
1:16:21 what are you going to talk about because I don’t want to waste my time?”
1:16:22 And I said, “About chaos.”
1:16:24 He said, “Okay.”
1:16:28 I said, “Some things are very, particularly in quantum mechanics.”
1:16:34 So I’m not smiling because he was so sharp and so on, so he said, “Okay, give me the
1:16:35 problem.”
1:16:41 He said, “Well, okay, I give you an electron, and you have any potential, and I give you
1:16:42 a laser.”
1:16:46 And he said, “Inside or outside the apparatus, just like that.”
1:16:47 So I said, “Outside.”
1:16:51 So you turn on the laser and I said, “So what happens to the electron?”
1:16:54 And I knew he was going to give me the answer that was already in the literature, but he
1:16:59 appeared to me thinking that he stood up and walked around and was making lots of noises.
1:17:02 And then he said, “The energy grows linearly in time.”
1:17:04 I said, “No, it doesn’t.
1:17:05 How do you know?”
1:17:06 I said, “We measure it.
1:17:07 I can show you.”
1:17:08 And so on.
1:17:12 And he was very impressed because it means that there is no chaos, actually.
1:17:14 And he said, “Oh, you know why I got it wrong.”
1:17:19 I said, “No, because I wasn’t thinking in colors, only black and white.”
1:17:20 Was he trying to be funny?
1:17:21 Of course.
1:17:22 It was always funny.
1:17:29 Let’s talk about Feynman and Gilman and Mendelbrot and all the rest as a collection for a moment.
1:17:38 One of the great gifts of my life has been that you would talk about scientists.
1:17:39 It really enchants me.
1:17:41 I’m so delighted when I hear it.
1:17:50 I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists and not athletes, which is great.
1:17:51 But scientists.
1:17:57 And it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist, you both revere the
1:17:59 work they did.
1:18:01 You see something unique about them.
1:18:07 And something I learned very early on, and I’ve certainly internalized is, forgive me
1:18:16 because I’m assuming here, is that there’s a certain aspect of their quirkiness or something
1:18:20 about them, to take them seriously, but not too seriously.
1:18:26 I never learned to assume that because somebody was a Nobel Prize winner that they were perfect,
1:18:27 for instance.
1:18:32 You would tell me Einstein had, he was amazing, he was relatively the patent office, all this
1:18:35 stuff, and he had all these problems with women.
1:18:41 And I read the books, or this person, I won’t name names because these people are still alive,
1:18:42 Silicon Valley.
1:18:46 Actually, when you and I used to take walks when I was a post-doc, we used to see jobs
1:18:50 walking around, no feet, no shoes, he had feet, no shoes.
1:18:53 And you would say, he’s amazing, this guy’s brilliant.
1:18:57 But then we would chuckle about some of the job isms.
1:19:03 And so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people, that these founders, they’re
1:19:04 creators, they’re just people.
1:19:09 And they often have very challenging areas of their life as well.
1:19:12 They’re not perfect, they’re not gods.
1:19:18 Some of them have almost godlike access to the universe and understanding it.
1:19:25 But it seems to me that you hold people up for their contributions, but you never actually,
1:19:31 thank goodness, put people on a pedestal to the point where this person is spectacular
1:19:32 in every way.
1:19:35 And I’m not saying you cut them down to size, but I learned very, and this has served me
1:19:40 well in my life in now public facing, or on Twitter, like if I make a mistake and someone
1:19:42 comes at me, it’s somebody that I respect, I go, “Ugh.”
1:19:47 But then I remember, this person has a lot of issues in certain domains of their life.
1:19:55 So to realize that we’re all human, this notion of none of us are gods.
1:20:01 And yet there are people like Feynman, like Gelman, like Einstein, who have almost supernatural
1:20:03 levels of ability.
1:20:04 So what’s that about?
1:20:15 How do you hold knowledge, insight, and stature in your mind alongside the humanness, the
1:20:18 inherent flawed nature of all of us?
1:20:21 Well, okay, it’s complicated.
1:20:23 There are many ways to think about it.
1:20:30 In some of these names, for instance, these people are built into giants by the media
1:20:31 too.
1:20:36 I mean, Feynman, if you go to Quora and so on, everybody’s asking, “What did Feynman
1:20:37 do?
1:20:38 What was he wearing?”
1:20:39 And so on.
1:20:40 As if he was a god.
1:20:45 I mean, obviously, what he did in physics, I interrupt myself here because he really
1:20:50 worked very hard, very hard, according to Gelman in particular, to creating a myth about
1:20:51 himself.
1:20:52 He worked very hard.
1:20:55 When I met him, I can even tell you the anecdotes.
1:20:59 I only met him for an hour, but he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression
1:21:00 with you.
1:21:02 The next rated anecdote.
1:21:03 Exactly.
1:21:07 But I remember the good one was that I was going to give a colloquium, and he said, “Should
1:21:08 I come?”
1:21:09 I said, “I think you should come.”
1:21:11 And then he said, “Well, then I’m going to give you a piece of advice.
1:21:12 Do not look at me.
1:21:16 Because if you look at me during your talk, you’re going to get confused,” and so on.
1:21:18 And actually, that’s exactly what happened.
1:21:23 I started the colloquium at Caltech, the marine wood camp of science, and then I am starting
1:21:24 to talk.
1:21:29 And suddenly, instead of saying the next hour, I said something like in the next week or
1:21:30 something or so.
1:21:31 Because there he was.
1:21:35 And then he started saying, “Look elsewhere, that kind of guy.”
1:21:38 For anyone who hasn’t lectured, there’s a tendency sometimes when one is going fast
1:21:41 to fill in without thinking is just something that one learns.
1:21:45 I mean, I’ve had to learn it the hard way when we missed in the recording and this kind
1:21:46 of thing.
1:21:47 It’s a humbling moment.
1:21:52 But yeah, I think that, well, Feynman would have been canceled by the standards of the
1:21:53 last two years.
1:21:54 Oh, he was.
1:21:55 I took even my father once to lecture.
1:21:57 He was in San Francisco.
1:22:01 And he was giving a beautiful lecture to, I don’t know, get some award for teaching
1:22:02 and so on.
1:22:07 And suddenly, a bunch of women walked into the front of the big room.
1:22:10 And they started, because it turns out that in one of his lectures, he said something
1:22:14 like, “If you do it this way, you’re as bad as a woman’s driver.”
1:22:16 Feynman said that.
1:22:17 Feynman said that.
1:22:18 And then all these women were saying things.
1:22:20 And then he said, “I love women.
1:22:21 They’re all smart.”
1:22:22 He was very clever.
1:22:24 So he would have lost his job by the standards of recent years.
1:22:25 Yeah, okay.
1:22:28 But regardless of that, because I really want to go back to this issue.
1:22:33 People like Merrigal Mann, I mean, it was, to me, he was the most intimidating person
1:22:34 I’ve ever met.
1:22:38 I mean, now, eventually I got to know him because he liked what I was doing.
1:22:42 And as a matter of fact, he and I organized a workshop, an incredibly luxurious place
1:22:47 in France, at the estate of Madame Schlumberger, one of the oil and people.
1:22:51 Actually, it was an incredible meeting that he and I organized.
1:22:52 So I got to know him a little bit personally.
1:22:55 And all he was complaining at that time is he couldn’t get a date.
1:23:01 He was a widow and he wanted to, you know, women were intimidated by him, too.
1:23:04 As I recall, because I remember meeting him when I was a kid and we both shared a love
1:23:07 of birds, but he was perhaps one of the world’s most obnoxious people.
1:23:08 Right.
1:23:09 But you impressed him.
1:23:13 As a matter of fact, I still, you know, I don’t know if you want me to remind you of
1:23:16 this, because we had two stories there.
1:23:20 Your mother and I were taking a hiking aspen and we saw a bird that looked incredibly complicated
1:23:21 and so on.
1:23:22 So we looked over.
1:23:27 The other day we went to him because he loved birds, as you know, and I said, I saw most
1:23:28 unusual bird.
1:23:29 He said, describe it.
1:23:32 So I grew up and he gave me the name in Latin of the bird.
1:23:36 And then he said, that’s the most common bird in the Bay Area of California.
1:23:39 As a matter of fact, you should see it when you pick up the newspaper next time you’re
1:23:40 there.
1:23:44 And indeed, two weeks later, I went to pick up the New York Times and there was the bird.
1:23:49 But at the same time, I said, Andrew likes birds and he asked you, what is your favorite
1:23:50 bird?
1:23:52 And you said the rainbow lower key.
1:23:53 Still is.
1:23:55 And he said, this kid knows.
1:23:56 This kid knows.
1:23:58 He said, I know my birds.
1:23:59 I know my birds.
1:24:00 It’s amazing.
1:24:04 I never, you know, because if you could have said a parrot, he would have not been very
1:24:05 interested.
1:24:06 Okay.
1:24:11 So, but he was intimidating, very intimidating, and he was nasty too when he wanted to be.
1:24:14 So he enjoyed the power he had.
1:24:18 I was on the, I was a member of the board of the directors of the Aspen Center.
1:24:23 So we had to decide what programs we had every summer and he would come to me and say, whom
1:24:25 do you want me to insult today?
1:24:29 He had all sorts of very funny names for all sorts of physicists and so on.
1:24:33 The downside of people like that in science, because I’ve known some too, there’s a very
1:24:41 famous neuroscientist now in his seventies who has a Nobel Prize, who also is known for
1:24:43 generating anecdotes about himself.
1:24:49 And in recent years, because of political correctness, woke-ism, and so forth, it tends to do that
1:24:52 less, because it was sort of a trucker’s mouth.
1:24:58 Brilliant guy, but it’s kind of known for being outrageous and trying to create tales
1:24:59 about themselves.
1:25:03 This is something that scientists do, right, in order to maintain their legacy.
1:25:05 Yeah, also to feel good about themselves.
1:25:09 I mean, by the way, I mean, Gelman, I mean, I work with him.
1:25:10 It was incredible.
1:25:14 I mean, you know, and the way he would interrupt people and so on.
1:25:16 And there are two things I can tell you that are interesting.
1:25:22 Once he was announcing some new results, he was working on this whole thing on quarks
1:25:25 and other things, and actually it was a string theory.
1:25:29 And he announced the seminar, and everybody goes into the garden, you know, the seminars
1:25:30 are nice.
1:25:36 I need to remind the audience, perhaps here, that the Aspen Center for Music was right next
1:25:37 to the tent.
1:25:38 They were rehearsing.
1:25:41 The seminar was supposed to start at three, and there’s Gelman comes with all his notes
1:25:42 under his arms.
1:25:45 He always had notes, walking, pacing, and nothing happened.
1:25:51 And suddenly, they were rehearsing the Beethoven’s 15th one, it was just a “ta-ta-ta-ta” and
1:25:54 then you heard the sound, and then he started.
1:25:58 I will now tell you about a new theory of how the universe works, that’s the way he spoke.
1:26:02 So what strikes me is that these people take themselves very seriously.
1:26:03 Absolutely.
1:26:04 Absolutely.
1:26:06 Do you think that’s important in life?
1:26:07 I don’t.
1:26:13 I mean, as you know, I like to have a good sense of myself and be self-deprecating.
1:26:15 I think some people, you know, have issues and they do that.
1:26:20 I mean, it all depends on how do you, you know, see things.
1:26:23 I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Matina.
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1:27:50 Let me ask you about this.
1:27:55 Further down my list of things I want to talk to you about is that you’ve always loved,
1:28:00 it’s clear from a young age, high-level concepts, deep concepts, order in the universe, working
1:28:01 on hard problems.
1:28:03 You just filed another patent.
1:28:09 As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been pursuing some new area of knowledge or implementation
1:28:17 of knowledge, and yet you, like your father, I know you delight in everyday things.
1:28:21 Since I was a kid, you’ve taken a walk after dinner.
1:28:25 A bike to work if you can that day because of the weather.
1:28:30 You love a really good espresso, a really good meal.
1:28:34 The high and the low are checked off boxes for you.
1:28:38 That’s different, I think, than the way most people think about scientists, especially
1:28:43 theoreticians, theorists.
1:28:44 Which one is it?
1:28:45 Theoreticians or theorists?
1:28:46 Theorists, they say.
1:28:47 Yeah.
1:28:48 Theorists.
1:28:53 They say that we assume like the academics that are always somewhere else, like they’re
1:28:57 up here, they’re not grounded, they’re not feet on the ground, but you like everyday
1:28:58 things.
1:28:59 Oh, absolutely.
1:29:03 Like where we’re going to eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this conversation
1:29:04 about relativity.
1:29:05 Absolutely.
1:29:09 I think that there is a myth that it can sometimes get perpetrated at universities.
1:29:13 My first meeting with my advisor when I got to University of Pennsylvania, he said, “I
1:29:17 want you to know one thing, you’re going to live like a monk.”
1:29:18 I said, “What does that mean?
1:29:19 No fun.
1:29:20 Nothing.
1:29:21 You’re going to work.
1:29:22 I want you to work.
1:29:23 You’re getting paid to do something.”
1:29:27 I was so scared, and then I told him that on weekends I had to escape to New York City
1:29:30 to take a walk on Central Park and look at nice things.
1:29:35 I always enjoyed the good things of life, and at that time I couldn’t afford them, but that
1:29:38 doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy them.
1:29:41 I do believe that I inherited this from my father.
1:29:49 With tremendous enjoyment of life in general, and yes, I am very physical and tactile about
1:29:50 things.
1:29:52 I like to surround myself with things that are beautiful.
1:29:57 I enjoy, as you said, good meals and the daily things about life.
1:30:04 I am not just living in some stratosphere and not being able to enjoy a meal I’m having
1:30:05 and so on.
1:30:06 No, the opposite.
1:30:13 Yes, in that sense, I am very much like that, and Mary’s the same way, and so that’s why
1:30:14 I enjoyed that.
1:30:15 Your wife.
1:30:16 Yeah, my wife, sorry.
1:30:22 Yes, we really enjoy, she in particular being Danish, they have this idea of slow eating
1:30:24 and enjoying the good things of life.
1:30:27 I am very much like that, yes, very much.
1:30:30 I don’t feel guilty about it.
1:30:31 If I can afford something.
1:30:32 Nor should you.
1:30:37 Well, there is a certain aesthetic component to science and the idea that they sell you
1:30:40 that Einstein didn’t care about anything.
1:30:43 Actually, if you look at the negotiations that Einstein had with the Institute for Advanced
1:30:47 Studies for Salaries, you’ll see that he really cared a lot about these things too.
1:30:51 Our notion of him is just kind of like, it was just science and he had no interest in
1:30:52 material things.
1:30:53 Right, right.
1:30:56 Yes, I had an uncle actually, Hector’s father, there was a branch of the family that was very
1:30:57 much into culture.
1:31:00 They had beautiful collections of paintings and so on.
1:31:06 I was, what, 14 or so, and I remember at a party, we had big social parties in my parents’
1:31:12 house, and he was lecturing me that I should never care about anything but truth and concepts
1:31:13 and so on.
1:31:15 I was a little bit scared.
1:31:18 I wanted to enjoy life as well.
1:31:20 Okay, so it was a little bit complicated.
1:31:23 No, no, I enjoy everything, of course.
1:31:26 I think I got out of my father mostly, yes.
1:31:33 My mother was a little more ascetic in a way, but yes, the tiny little things of life are
1:31:35 what makes one’s life.
1:31:36 I’m slowly starting to get that.
1:31:37 Yes, yes.
1:31:43 I think I’ve been a little like rabid about my interests almost to an obsessive level
1:31:49 to the point where I’ve sometimes overlooked like how many opportunities for just like
1:31:51 lovely daily interactions I have.
1:31:57 I try, but I feel like I’ve just been chasing the carrot of knowledge.
1:31:58 I love doing what I do.
1:31:59 I’ve always done that, you know.
1:32:02 Well, but you have to be careful indeed.
1:32:04 As you know, I meditate and for many years and so on.
1:32:10 I’m being in the present and being able to just be there and nothing else is the tremendous
1:32:15 source of satisfaction and comes me down and so on.
1:32:16 When did you start that?
1:32:23 Well, I started actually out of the discovery, I mean a trivial thing that many people have.
1:32:27 I discovered that every time my blood pressure was taken by the doctor, it was just going
1:32:28 through the roof.
1:32:31 You know, it’s called the white coat phenomenon or something of that sort.
1:32:36 I got very, very upset about it because I tried to control it and it got worse and worse
1:32:38 and worse and they told me to do one.
1:32:44 So, at one point or the other, I have a friend, a colleague more than a friend who’s a Buddhist
1:32:49 who started telling me about, you know, have you tried the, first of all, biofeedback?
1:32:50 That’s a good one.
1:32:55 I tried for a year, I did biofeedback and then he started telling me about meditation.
1:32:58 So one day, actually, he’s a physicist as well.
1:33:01 He was visiting me in my lab and I said, he said, “Let me, let’s do it.”
1:33:03 I did a session with him in meditation.
1:33:04 I couldn’t believe it.
1:33:08 My hands suddenly were warm and, you know, felt incredibly nice.
1:33:13 So I decided that I really wanted to learn how to do it and I started doing it at a time
1:33:19 when I truly needed it because I realized that without being aware, I was anxious, like,
1:33:25 for instance, I would see myself walking down the street holding my fists this way.
1:33:27 That’s not a very relaxed way of living, okay?
1:33:32 So I really started doing this meditation on a fairly continuous basis and I really
1:33:40 enjoyed it and it’s very important as a father, I say this to anyone too, that you have to
1:33:41 enjoy life.
1:33:49 I mean, pursuing these things, eventually, the value is in the pursuit, not in achieving
1:33:50 them anyhow.
1:33:52 So you might as well pursue many things at the same time.
1:33:56 I mean, a good meal, eaten properly, can be very, very nice too.
1:33:59 I love that about you.
1:34:01 Something I’m working on.
1:34:05 I remember when I, along those lines, I remember when I was in graduate school, we published
1:34:08 a paper and then we published a second paper in Science.
1:34:12 And I remember thinking, this is like such a proud moment, a first author paper in the
1:34:13 Journal of Science.
1:34:22 And I told you and you said, enjoy it and just be aware that by tomorrow you’ll be worried
1:34:24 that you’ll never do it again.
1:34:25 Exactly.
1:34:26 Yeah.
1:34:29 And fortunately, we publish in Nature and a few other journals a bunch of times after
1:34:30 that.
1:34:36 But you also warned me about the postpartum of post-excitement.
1:34:37 Something great happens.
1:34:42 You know, at that time, we as a field of neuroscience didn’t really understand dopamine dynamics,
1:34:43 but now we do.
1:34:47 What you were describing is this trough and dopamine that we get a day or two after some
1:34:48 big event.
1:34:49 Yes.
1:34:52 Typically postpartum associated with the birth of a child, but it could be, you know, getting
1:34:57 a degree or a great party or a paper in Science or Nature, a first author paper.
1:35:00 And you said, a couple days from now, you’re going to feel low.
1:35:03 And you just have to wait and I’ll never forget what you said.
1:35:09 You said, just go back to what inspired the first project, pick a different problem.
1:35:10 It’ll happen again.
1:35:11 Yes.
1:35:12 And the second time it happened, I was like, he was right.
1:35:13 It happened again.
1:35:14 Yes.
1:35:16 And again, and again, I haven’t had an infinite number of those papers in those journals,
1:35:21 but I learned about the dopamine dynamics associated with pursuing a goal and then you
1:35:26 get the thing and you’re very excited and then you feel the drop.
1:35:27 Yes.
1:35:28 Yes.
1:35:32 And that I think that is something that even ancient philosophers knew about it.
1:35:37 The Buddha, many, you know, the Greeks and so on, this idea that they said the things
1:35:41 we pursue, they are ephemeral in a way, in a way, the feelings that would be eliciting
1:35:43 us, you know.
1:35:44 And I think that you’re right.
1:35:49 And there is also another tendency one has to try to avoid, which is you’re successful
1:35:53 in something and you continue doing exactly the same thing because, you know, by now,
1:35:55 you know how to do it with your hands.
1:35:56 Correct.
1:36:00 And I always felt that I want to go with a swear and, you know, I have sort of a reputation
1:36:06 for changing fields and, you know, I don’t do that in order for others to be puzzled
1:36:07 by it.
1:36:12 It’s just that I’m curious and I want to have a feeling again that like falling in love,
1:36:14 you know, the new thing, you know, is nice at the beginning.
1:36:18 But eventually, whatever you’re doing, it becomes, you know, trite and so on.
1:36:19 Yeah.
1:36:23 Let’s talk about that because after chaos, which brought a lot of, you know, I remember
1:36:29 we had reporters in our house and there was like a TV and the book by Jim Glick and then
1:36:31 you switched to something completely different.
1:36:32 Yes.
1:36:33 Yeah.
1:36:34 And you got into computer science.
1:36:35 Yeah.
1:36:36 Well, computer science is a computer.
1:36:37 Computers.
1:36:41 What happened was that a lot of the success that we had was because I was at park.
1:36:45 We had phenomenal computer facilities there, things that we could visualize at a time very
1:36:47 few people could do.
1:36:51 And so, and one of them actually someone suggested I get a patent that is a pattern for the chaos
1:36:55 that sometimes people have in t-shirts that actually we discovered for the first time with
1:37:00 guys from UC Santa Cruz, with Jim Crutchfield and so on.
1:37:04 You know, he was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so on.
1:37:08 But when I, what happened was, okay, so we did this, we did quantum.
1:37:10 And then one day I said, okay, so what do I do now?
1:37:11 Okay.
1:37:13 Well, you can go and publish one paper after that in chaos.
1:37:16 I mean, you can produce 10 PhDs with this.
1:37:18 But then I said, why don’t I do the opposite?
1:37:20 Are you using computers to help me with physics?
1:37:22 Why don’t I use the physics to study computers?
1:37:23 Well, that’s an interesting idea.
1:37:27 But you know, I mean, this is, so what do you do that?
1:37:32 So what happened to me, I was at a meeting on chaos in Copenhagen and I couldn’t sleep
1:37:36 one night and I had a book called “The Computer that Brain” by John von Neumann.
1:37:40 Perhaps someone that was a true genius, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.
1:37:42 He invented computers.
1:37:47 He was a phenomenon at all levels and he was part of the Manhattan Project.
1:37:50 He was perhaps one of the most brilliant people that ever existed, at least that we
1:37:51 are aware of.
1:37:54 He was at the Institute for Advanced Studies, von Neumann.
1:37:56 There are all sorts of anecdotes about him.
1:37:57 He had a photographic memory.
1:37:59 You could give him a page of a phone book.
1:38:04 He would look at it closely and then he would recite the phone numbers from bottom to top.
1:38:05 Totally useless skill.
1:38:06 Yeah.
1:38:08 But he was a genius, a genius, true genius.
1:38:09 He invented computers.
1:38:12 He invented game theory in economics.
1:38:14 I mean, it was a useful skill.
1:38:15 Yeah, exactly.
1:38:16 Okay.
1:38:19 In any event, so he wrote a very little book called “The Computer and the Brain”.
1:38:20 No equations, nothing.
1:38:23 And one night, four o’clock in the morning, I cannot sleep.
1:38:27 I get down, you know, it was summer, so the sun was still still there in Copenhagen.
1:38:30 And I went there to read it and I said, “This is what I’m going to do.”
1:38:33 I don’t know anything about brains, but I can imagine, you know, if the brain is like
1:38:35 a computer, I could do something like that.
1:38:38 But I also want to apply some of what I know to these things.
1:38:43 And the first thing that occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we
1:38:44 had at PARC.
1:38:48 These computers were communicating with each other as we nowadays, we know it as the internet
1:38:49 and so on.
1:38:52 So there were many, many aspects of this.
1:38:57 And I decided that because I was very influenced by one or two students that were very much
1:39:00 into economics and libertarian ideas and so on.
1:39:04 And one of them had taken two courses in econ at Caltech.
1:39:08 So we decided to start looking at this as a market where computers essentially buy and
1:39:11 sell programs to execute in their machines and so on.
1:39:15 So we started really doing what we call the ecology of computation.
1:39:21 It was a big effort, which married economics with artificial intelligence and computer.
1:39:22 But it became a big thing.
1:39:25 And so I became, again, it’s like falling in love again.
1:39:26 It’s a new field.
1:39:27 I thought it was great.
1:39:30 Yeah, the discovery process of falling in love is half the fun.
1:39:31 Absolutely, yeah.
1:39:36 And I also was able to understand, I mean, there is a lot of formalism in economics and some
1:39:39 of it is really, I mean, sort of academic.
1:39:41 But there are some ideas that are very profound.
1:39:45 To the extent that some people consider me an economist sometimes because I think in
1:39:48 terms of utility rewards and risk and all this stuff.
1:39:52 And as a matter of fact, a lot of the work I’m doing now on resource allocation in networks
1:39:54 comes from ideas from economics.
1:40:02 When you go into a new field, do you, in order to learn about the field, is that mainly through
1:40:05 talking to people in the field, reading books?
1:40:06 Both, both.
1:40:11 And it doesn’t strike me that you have ever tried to ingratiate yourself into any field.
1:40:13 It’s not like you’re trying to be a member of the field.
1:40:19 Like you go in as an observer and a learner.
1:40:21 Yes, I need to say this.
1:40:26 I don’t think that many people have said if I stayed in one field, I would have done
1:40:28 much better in terms of reputation and so on.
1:40:30 As a matter of fact, I can tell you an anecdote that is-
1:40:32 You mean like awards and stuff?
1:40:33 Yeah.
1:40:34 Like for instance, not long ago.
1:40:36 I was already doing computers after chaos and so on.
1:40:41 I won’t name the person, but a very good physicist professor at Berkeley came into my
1:40:42 offices for now.
1:40:43 We have an issue here.
1:40:47 I said, “What is it that your name for a membership in the National Academy of Science
1:40:48 is coming up?”
1:40:49 And I said, “Oh, that’s nice.”
1:40:51 He said, “Well, it’s a problem.
1:40:53 You’re not writing papers in physics.
1:40:54 You’re writing papers in computer science.”
1:40:58 And you know, we need a physicist because otherwise the chemists will get that job.
1:40:59 The physicists don’t-
1:41:00 Welcome to academia.
1:41:01 Yeah.
1:41:02 So I said, “Well, you want me to do?”
1:41:06 And he said, “Well, can you perhaps write one or two more papers on this?
1:41:07 So we can show.”
1:41:08 I said, “No, I cannot do that.
1:41:09 I can’t.”
1:41:13 Well, isn’t there a famous story about Feynman and being elected to the National Academy?
1:41:14 He refused to.
1:41:15 Yes.
1:41:16 Right.
1:41:17 I think they told him he was in the National Academy.
1:41:18 Yeah.
1:41:19 And then he said, “Well, what do I do?”
1:41:22 And they said, “Well, you elect in other members.”
1:41:23 And he said, “I quit.”
1:41:24 Yeah, right.
1:41:25 Well, yeah.
1:41:28 So in any event, I never became a member of the National Academy, but you never sought
1:41:29 prizes.
1:41:30 No.
1:41:31 I mean, I would have liked to get them.
1:41:32 Why not?
1:41:35 Because it’s not that I said they are meaningless.
1:41:37 But there was nothing that I could do about it.
1:41:42 And I, since I was not, as you said, I was always a little bit of a, always moving on
1:41:47 to the next thing, never staying long enough going to these meetings where by now you heard
1:41:50 it all over and over and over again.
1:41:51 So yeah.
1:41:52 Yeah.
1:41:55 I mean, I have to say that, you know, like, I mean, as you know, I still have my position
1:41:59 at Stanford and TEACH involved in a little bit of research.
1:42:06 But, you know, one of the great advantages I had is that all my advisors died or killed
1:42:07 themselves.
1:42:09 So I was orphaned in science.
1:42:13 And so there was never an expectation from my advisors that I do the next thing because
1:42:16 they were dead.
1:42:18 So I thought about that.
1:42:22 But I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcasts, I remember you
1:42:25 being a little bit concerned, you’re like, “What are your colleagues going to think?”
1:42:32 And I think at that point, the way that science was going and the structure of academia relative
1:42:37 to what my needs in life were and just a passion to wanting to do something new, I put a lot
1:42:40 of thought to the fact that you’ve changed fields many times.
1:42:46 And I just felt absolutely compelled to get into science communication and there was no
1:42:47 stopping that.
1:42:52 But I have to thank you a lot of the reason I was able to take the step to do the podcast
1:42:58 in addition to being supported by Lex Friedman’s suggestions and a lot of help from others,
1:43:03 Joe Rogan and others, but is that, I was like, “Well, that’s what you’re supposed
1:43:04 to do.”
1:43:09 When you hit a point where what you’re doing isn’t as compelling, you wait for the thing
1:43:12 that draws you forward, seems like you were always drawn forward.
1:43:13 I was thinking of carrot and stick.
1:43:17 It’s not like you disliked where you were, it’s that there was some carrot that you identified
1:43:18 and you go towards the carrots.
1:43:23 And also something very, the other day, my wife was actually mentioning, “I’ve been,
1:43:24 in a sense, an orphan.
1:43:25 I never had mentors.
1:43:30 It’s very interesting,” after this frankly not terrific graduate advisor.
1:43:31 He was not my mentor, really.
1:43:35 I mean, he didn’t even want me to do the things that I wanted to do.
1:43:39 So I never had someone who was whispering, “Bernardo is the guy, too.
1:43:41 You should be considering for this or that.”
1:43:46 I mean, I had the fortune to really get to the top of many of these fields and I interacting
1:43:47 with the top people.
1:43:49 I mean, we talk about Feynman-Gelman.
1:43:55 There are many very famous people that I respect immensely that I met when I was in France.
1:43:58 As I was teaching there, I met people that are brilliant and so on.
1:44:01 I felt treated with tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on.
1:44:03 But I never had mentors in that sense.
1:44:09 And also, as I said, I am a little bit restless, I am very curious about everything.
1:44:13 And so sometimes I see something and I say, “Oh, there’s an opportunity to do something
1:44:14 interesting.”
1:44:17 And I think that the issue of being curious is extremely important.
1:44:20 And it’s interesting because I reflect a lot on my father.
1:44:24 My father was an immensely curious person, but all about details.
1:44:27 He never liked abstractions of any kind.
1:44:32 He was very proud that he went to the same school I went and the only course he flagged
1:44:36 was philosophy, because he said it doesn’t make any sense.
1:44:38 Now, perhaps he was right about that.
1:44:40 Sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about.
1:44:47 A couple of months ago in Denmark, we were invited, my wife and I, to a dinner with philosophers
1:44:49 talking about artificial intelligence.
1:44:53 I thought these people didn’t really know what was going on.
1:44:58 But nevertheless, yes, I am curious and sometimes I move on to things.
1:45:03 And I feel that the internal reward you get from doing something new and interesting and
1:45:09 exciting is much better than a recognition that someone will come and say, “Whatever.”
1:45:14 I mean, it don’t mean to understand me, I will not say no to a recognition.
1:45:17 But it’s not really that I do this in order to get that.
1:45:19 That’s not me at all.
1:45:20 Yeah.
1:45:26 I mean, the whole thing sort of brings my thinking back to the early discussions about, you know,
1:45:29 other students are not interested in physics, you’re interested in physics.
1:45:34 Other people are like smoking a lot of weed and partying like, “No, like you said, you’ve
1:45:36 not had mentors.”
1:45:39 That’s one area in which you and I have been very different.
1:45:40 Yes.
1:45:42 I’ve always attached myself to mentors, many of them.
1:45:43 Many of them.
1:45:44 Yeah.
1:45:49 Well, there might be a psychological reason, too, yeah, that you need this or need it at
1:45:52 one point that these parental-type figures, yeah, that might be.
1:45:53 I wish I had them.
1:45:54 Don’t misunderstand me.
1:45:59 As a matter of fact, I mean, my influence on my students, I produce more than 15 PhDs.
1:46:02 It’s also strange because none of them stayed in physics.
1:46:05 Now, the department has stand for too happy with that.
1:46:10 It’s not that I told them not to, but they all smelled that, you know, I was doing something
1:46:11 else.
1:46:15 I mean, you know, from computers, I became very aware of what was going on very early
1:46:16 on with the internet.
1:46:19 As you know, I started doing all this stuff on social long before anyone was doing any
1:46:22 economics of attention and all that stuff.
1:46:26 And many of these students, the other day, I found one of them, I met one, Lada Damage,
1:46:28 who, you know, I think he uses early at Google.
1:46:31 No, she went to Facebook.
1:46:32 And the other day, she wrote me notes.
1:46:34 I was so lucky that I met her.
1:46:37 She was going to do a thesis and I don’t know what, collecting solar.
1:46:39 Yeah, you’ve collected some pretty interesting students.
1:46:44 They’re like a pretty, we won’t name names other than laws, but some of them are very
1:46:46 well-known people in the tech industry now.
1:46:47 Oh, yeah.
1:46:48 Yeah.
1:46:51 And I think that, yeah, it seemed like the people that would gravitate towards you.
1:46:52 It’s interesting.
1:46:53 Your laboratory is off campus.
1:46:57 So anyone that decides to be off campus is already making a choice toward like they don’t
1:46:58 want to be part of the standard culture.
1:46:59 But they thought it was interesting.
1:47:00 Yeah, yeah.
1:47:01 Yeah.
1:47:06 So I want to get back to this issue of like internet and Silicon Valley.
1:47:11 I recall it was the early 90s, so it would be like ’89, ’90, ’91.
1:47:16 Remember, I had this girlfriend Gretchen, remember, and her dad was the editor of Guitar
1:47:18 Player Magazine.
1:47:24 And I’ll never forget, he told me, he said, you know, it’s going to be all about multimedia.
1:47:25 Remember that?
1:47:26 No one talks about multimedia.
1:47:34 Your television is going to be, your computer is going to be your stereo is going, I mean,
1:47:35 he was right.
1:47:38 He was basically, everything was going to be synthesized into common devices.
1:47:41 And we now know that we’re not to be true.
1:47:47 But at what point did you decide that things like computers were mainly going to be a route
1:47:50 to industry and not to academia?
1:47:54 This is really important, I think, for people to understand because right now it’s kind
1:47:56 of happening in biomedical sciences.
1:48:00 But you see this at Stanford, people get degrees in computer science, but not to become computer
1:48:04 science professors sometimes, but really so that they can go into industry.
1:48:10 So how do you see nowadays, like for people that are interested in science or technology,
1:48:12 do they need to go to graduate school?
1:48:13 Like is a PhD useful anymore?
1:48:16 Well, Peter Thiele says that you shouldn’t even get a bachelor’s, I think that’s what
1:48:17 he, you know.
1:48:21 I mean, I have great respect for Peter, great respect for Peter.
1:48:24 There are a lot of things that are easier to say when you’re already a billionaire.
1:48:25 No, no, no.
1:48:26 I know.
1:48:28 Like Steve Jobs saying, you know, passion is everything.
1:48:29 Right.
1:48:31 I mean, it’s necessary, but not sufficient.
1:48:32 Right, right.
1:48:33 Necessary, but not sufficient.
1:48:36 So I think that what’s happening today, I mean, technology, we are going through a technological
1:48:37 revolution.
1:48:39 There’s no doubt about it.
1:48:42 We used to learn about the printing press and now it’s the same thing with computers.
1:48:48 I still remember and I, you know, we, this is amazing because, you know, today’s so obvious.
1:48:50 I mean, people didn’t know much what was going on.
1:48:52 I parked everything.
1:48:53 One night we were having for dinner.
1:48:56 I remember, you know, Emmanuel Mignot, who was, you know.
1:48:59 They discovered the O’Rex and hypercretin relationship.
1:49:00 That’s the cause of narcolepsy.
1:49:01 It’s a mutation.
1:49:02 Yeah.
1:49:03 It was a friend of ours and his wife.
1:49:07 They were at home with our dinner and I was telling them, I was telling them that you
1:49:12 could go to a computer and go through the Louvre Museum in Paris and they say, what are
1:49:13 you talking about?
1:49:19 And so we finished dinner and we all drove to park at night and I turned on my computer
1:49:20 and there was a man.
1:49:21 I still remember his name.
1:49:23 Something was the last name.
1:49:28 He had gone taking pictures of every painting at the Louvre and put them online so you could
1:49:31 just navigate through the Louvre.
1:49:32 Today’s obvious.
1:49:33 Trivial.
1:49:34 At that time they couldn’t believe it.
1:49:35 Yeah.
1:49:39 There you are in Palo Alto on an evening going through all the rooms of the Louvre.
1:49:40 They just couldn’t understand what was going on.
1:49:41 What year was this?
1:49:42 I don’t remember.
1:49:43 It must have been like ’94.
1:49:47 But it was just when the web started coming, you know, that was, you know, right before.
1:49:51 We all had to get email in college in the final year of ’97 so it must have been somewhere
1:49:53 around like ’94, ’95.
1:49:54 Something of that sort.
1:49:59 Right before, right at the time and recent, it made the web available to everybody basically,
1:50:01 you know, Netscape, you know.
1:50:02 So in any event.
1:50:04 So it was an amazing thing.
1:50:05 It was amazing.
1:50:10 Now, all these developments were really done in companies, not necessarily in academia.
1:50:11 Okay.
1:50:15 That is an interesting point and I think that today an immense amount of the advances that
1:50:23 we see in biotechnology, in computers, in everything are essentially done, I would say,
1:50:24 for profit by companies.
1:50:25 Okay.
1:50:29 I think social networks, they started, we started doing social networks at a time when
1:50:30 no one even thought of doing it.
1:50:35 I used to say I do social science with a capitalist because sociologists used to study the behavior
1:50:39 of five widows in some Norwegian village and write a paper.
1:50:41 We could look at 150,000 people.
1:50:45 How did they visit this site or that site and predict how, you know, we were able to
1:50:48 predict behaviors, behaviors, you know.
1:50:52 So I think that today everybody knows that that’s the case and it’s, you know, the same
1:50:54 thing with artificial intelligence.
1:50:58 But for a kid in high school or kids in college or kids, I mean, is it worth getting a graduate
1:50:59 education?
1:51:00 Well, it all depends on what you want to do.
1:51:04 I mean, I mean, law, medicine, you need a professional, I mean, those that you need
1:51:07 the professional degree, I mean, these are ultimately professional degrees.
1:51:08 So you need the training.
1:51:11 I don’t want a surgeon that didn’t go to medical school.
1:51:12 Okay.
1:51:17 The danger is, and I remember a very, very bright guy I had in my team, you don’t want
1:51:18 to become a blue color worker.
1:51:21 See, what I’m saying is the following.
1:51:27 Being a hacker or being able to deal with software was an incredibly profitable profession.
1:51:31 Now you have these large language models that can actually program for you.
1:51:32 You need to write a program.
1:51:35 You go to Judge ETP and he’ll write it for you.
1:51:42 So suddenly, you know, if you don’t have a set of talents, a way of imagining things
1:51:47 or doing something, you become basically just someone that just hacks for, you know, for
1:51:48 so many dollars an hour.
1:51:52 Now it’s true that they can give you options if the company does well, you get rich and
1:51:53 so on.
1:51:58 But I still believe that you need some contextual cultural part to this.
1:51:59 Okay.
1:52:05 Now, I personally believe that humanities and all sorts of other things are very important
1:52:09 and to understand where is your cultural environment, where are you coming from and where is the
1:52:11 society going is important.
1:52:15 But on the other hand, as you said, you can just finish high school and start hacking
1:52:19 and become very good at it and doesn’t require much more than that.
1:52:28 Do you think the examples of like Zuck, Elon, you know, and others, you know, going from,
1:52:31 you know, essentially departing standard education to start companies, do you think
1:52:36 they’ve served, I mean, certainly not talking about the companies, but do you think those
1:52:42 examples are good examples for people to internalize or they just, are they unicorns?
1:52:45 Well, I think that they are unicorns and you have to be very careful.
1:52:48 We only talk about the success stories.
1:52:55 We don’t go and interview the guy that is loading a landscaping truck because his startup
1:52:56 didn’t go anywhere.
1:53:02 Okay, so it is a very, our tendency to see these people as heroes and to try to imitate
1:53:04 them is a very dangerous one, I think.
1:53:09 Now, that doesn’t mean that you should not be working on the things you care and gamble.
1:53:12 But these are the guys who played a lottery and won.
1:53:17 You remember, there were many other social websites before, you know, Facebook and they
1:53:18 all died.
1:53:20 And Facebook could have died too.
1:53:23 I mean, Zuckerberg might disagree with me, but, you know, it could have died.
1:53:27 Okay, and, you know, all these things are like that.
1:53:31 Apple, when almost under it, they brought Steve Jobs again and the guy put them into,
1:53:33 you know, into the stratosphere.
1:53:38 And the same thing with Elon Musk, he’s a high-take risk taker.
1:53:41 And so far, every time he flips the coin, he comes the right way.
1:53:47 But to say I want to be like him, you have to be very careful and to calculate the odds.
1:53:51 Okay, so when you say this, how many of these kids really make it?
1:53:53 I mean, it’s a very complicated thing.
1:53:57 So I think that to have a strong background in something will help you when suddenly
1:54:03 they feel switches from being a programmer and making a lot of money to suddenly program
1:54:06 and say, you know, a dime a dozen or becoming a technician, basically.
1:54:07 Okay.
1:54:12 I mean, I had a perfectly thriving career as a lab scientist with grants and private funding
1:54:15 and a bunch of other things publishing regularly.
1:54:19 And when I decided to switch to this, were you worried?
1:54:25 No, because I saw it as a very slow departure from what you were doing.
1:54:27 And I saw the success very early on.
1:54:32 I mean, I realized that you were essentially satisfying two things that are very important
1:54:33 to you.
1:54:34 You like to explain things.
1:54:37 You’re incredibly good at explaining things since you were a little kid.
1:54:38 Okay.
1:54:41 You were always explaining everything to people and you have a talent.
1:54:42 Let’s face it.
1:54:44 I mean, you know, I’m not saying this because I want to flatter you.
1:54:45 I really believe that.
1:54:46 Everybody says that.
1:54:51 Instead of your podcast, this is a success at explaining things in ways that people
1:54:52 understand.
1:54:55 They don’t have to go and buy a book on neuroanatomy to understand what you’re saying.
1:54:56 So I knew that this was a path.
1:55:01 Now, I didn’t realize how incredible the path was and there was a lot of randomness in it.
1:55:05 For instance, you started podcasting at a time when very few people were podcasting.
1:55:08 If you start today, the story would be a very different one.
1:55:10 The timing was the pandemic.
1:55:11 People were home.
1:55:12 They were listening to podcasts.
1:55:13 Right.
1:55:16 And this brings to something to me that many times people have asked me about.
1:55:18 What makes me do what I do?
1:55:24 I believe in the idea of walking on beaches with very few footprints.
1:55:26 When you go into a crowded field, it’s a mess.
1:55:30 So many of the times that I move and do something else is when I realize that it’s a mob scene
1:55:35 of scientists working at this and the chances of doing something interesting are very, very
1:55:36 small.
1:55:37 Okay.
1:55:39 The internet has allowed the information to go everywhere.
1:55:44 A guy in Zambia can actually read the same things that I read here.
1:55:48 So it’s very hard to compete against such crowd and many people are brilliant and many
1:55:50 of them are smart.
1:55:54 So you started something very early on and you were lucky that you chose a field that
1:55:56 resonates with the needs of people.
1:55:57 Okay.
1:56:00 There are also other people who do podcasting and go to nowhere.
1:56:02 So I think that I never worried.
1:56:09 I actually was, you know, elated to see the trajectory of your podcast.
1:56:17 The only thing is you have a tenure position and that is a nice safety cushion if everything
1:56:18 else were.
1:56:20 Today you’re beyond the reach of justice, as I say.
1:56:21 So no problem.
1:56:23 You know, you don’t need it in a sense unless you need it.
1:56:25 No one’s beyond the reach of justice.
1:56:27 But yeah, I still maintain my tenure position.
1:56:31 I spoke to my chairman in ophthalmology this morning and I’ll teach this spring or in the
1:56:32 fall.
1:56:35 And it’s good for you too to really interact with young people and to hear what they did
1:56:36 care and so on.
1:56:41 But I never worried in the sense that I thought that you have enough talent to do well and
1:56:43 you chose to do it.
1:56:47 I mean, I remember during COVID at the beginning, we were at your sister’s house and you were
1:56:49 drawing all these little diagrams.
1:56:50 I used to put my drawings.
1:56:51 Yeah, yeah.
1:56:54 And then I think you put them on Twitter or something of that sort and it was the beginning
1:56:56 of something much more interesting and important.
1:56:58 And so I never worried about it.
1:57:04 I think that all of us, the whole family and those who know you are sort of impressed at
1:57:08 the explosive success of the story here, you know, your podcast.
1:57:09 It’s amazing.
1:57:10 I mean, I don’t have to tell you.
1:57:15 That’s what reflects a kind of early compulsion more than anything of learn and teach, learn
1:57:16 and share.
1:57:18 Yeah, but there’s also, I need to say something.
1:57:23 The other day, actually, we were watching your interview with Esther Perrell.
1:57:28 And regardless of the fact that I think it’s a great interview, both my wife and I were
1:57:32 reflecting on the fact that it’s also an incredible tribute to the way you conduct an interview.
1:57:33 Okay.
1:57:34 And it’s valid there.
1:57:39 I mean, not many people can take someone and talk for it and make it interesting.
1:57:40 Let’s put it that way.
1:57:41 So you have that.
1:57:42 I inherited your curiosity.
1:57:44 No, but it’s more than that.
1:57:49 It’s also a way of drawing people out and so on, which is also part of your practice.
1:57:51 So I never had any doubts at the opposite.
1:57:57 I mean, the issue is, you know, obviously you’re taking it to many, many places, long
1:58:01 beyond what you started, which was essentially explained to people how neuroscience works,
1:58:02 right?
1:58:04 And you’re going into a lot of health domains and other things.
1:58:05 Yes.
1:58:08 And I’ve also been blessed with an amazing team.
1:58:15 This is something that I think while we share a lot of things in common, if I may, I mean,
1:58:17 I’ve always been kind of a pack animal.
1:58:20 You know, if it was skateboarding, like draw friends together.
1:58:23 If it’s birds, I have my bird club with Eddie Chang, who now, as you know, is the chair
1:58:24 of neurosurgery at UCSF.
1:58:27 It’s kind of wild to think about.
1:58:30 But yeah, I’ve rarely gone alone.
1:58:31 Yeah.
1:58:32 Like, I’m just struck.
1:58:35 I mean, we’ve had many conversations over the years, but I’m just struck at how you’ve
1:58:40 been able to be, you’ve been a bit of a lone wolf with these different camps.
1:58:41 You make friends.
1:58:42 You have colleagues.
1:58:43 You maintain long-term relationships.
1:58:44 I have groups of people who collaborate with me.
1:58:45 I don’t do this alone.
1:58:46 Right.
1:58:47 The opposite.
1:58:48 Right.
1:58:52 But there’s, I haven’t changed crowds very often, you know, and it seems like you’ve
1:58:56 had to go into, you know, economics and theoretical physics and all these things.
1:59:00 And yeah, that’s an interesting difference.
1:59:03 And daunting and thrilling at the same time.
1:59:07 Sometimes when you start giving talks in a field that you’ve never done much of before
1:59:11 and you see this audience, you know, can be intimidating too.
1:59:14 You know, even when I started doing chaos, I thought I was doing very well till I gave
1:59:17 a talk at Berkeley and there was a mathematician.
1:59:21 I regard mathematicians as the top, top people in the world.
1:59:24 And I was saying something and the guy, he’s a very famous mathematician.
1:59:26 He said, “That’s a lie.”
1:59:28 I said, “What do you mean?”
1:59:29 He said, “Can you prove it?”
1:59:30 I said, “No.”
1:59:31 Because, you know, physicists don’t prove theorems.
1:59:33 He said, “Well, then it’s a lie.
1:59:34 You cannot prove it.
1:59:35 It’s a lie.”
1:59:36 It was quite a, you know, a cold shower.
1:59:39 Yeah, that happens to me on Twitter every now and again, well, they’ll find something
1:59:42 where I misspoke and they do it and it’s super embarrassing.
1:59:43 You correct yourself, you move on.
1:59:44 No, no.
1:59:45 And then you learn things too.
1:59:46 You have a conversation with someone.
1:59:47 And you never forget those things.
1:59:48 This is what I learned.
1:59:52 Like, you never forget the errors you made, like on a qualifying exam.
1:59:55 Most people will never take a qualifying exam, but they basically ask you questions until
1:59:56 you get something wrong.
1:59:57 Yeah.
2:00:01 And if you don’t know or you get something wrong, that’s an important moment because
2:00:03 it’s also the thing that you go look up and you never forget.
2:00:04 Yeah, right.
2:00:07 And also, the tiny humiliations can be very good too for you.
2:00:08 I mean, this is very important, you know.
2:00:09 Not like 20 of those.
2:00:10 Not like 20 of those.
2:00:11 I do too.
2:00:14 I mean, I think it’s a very, very important part of, you know, growing up and discovering
2:00:16 that you don’t understand something.
2:00:17 But I always, I need to say this.
2:00:21 I mean, in spite of the fact that, you know, you paint me as a lone wolf, I’m not.
2:00:24 I’m very social and I interact, I love interacting with people.
2:00:30 And I’ve always been very lucky that I surround myself with groups of people, including today,
2:00:34 that are brilliant and resonate with the kinds of things I want to do.
2:00:36 And so, it’s very stimulating.
2:00:40 I’m not the kind of person that sits in a corner and does theories and publish papers.
2:00:42 I published papers on my own.
2:00:47 That was my romantic period where I needed to be Einstein in the Patent Office.
2:00:50 Not that I thought I was Einstein, but it was very important.
2:00:51 I was the only author.
2:00:52 Okay.
2:00:55 So, today, I don’t mind putting my name whatever and I don’t need it.
2:00:59 I mean, I have hundreds of papers and lots, you know, more than enough patents and so
2:01:00 on.
2:01:02 So, I like interacting with people.
2:01:04 It’s very, very important to me.
2:01:07 When I have an idea, I need to tell people about an idea.
2:01:09 So I can relate.
2:01:10 Yes.
2:01:11 Yes.
2:01:12 Yes.
2:01:13 So, that’s very good.
2:01:15 And I still see some of my old students and collaborators like, you know, Tad and so
2:01:16 on.
2:01:17 And we take walks.
2:01:19 Everyone said, “Well,” and discuss things, you know.
2:01:21 And so, I learned a lot from him too.
2:01:25 Right now, you’re working, as I understand, on quantum internet.
2:01:26 Yes.
2:01:28 This is a mysterious term to most everybody.
2:01:29 Yes.
2:01:30 Yes.
2:01:32 You alluded to it earlier about quantum entanglement.
2:01:33 Yes.
2:01:34 Or about entanglement.
2:01:35 Yes.
2:01:43 But my understanding is that foreign governments, countries, and our government and country are
2:01:49 very interested in quantum internet, that it might actually be at least as important
2:01:54 as AI, maybe more important for security reasons, et cetera.
2:01:57 Can you explain quantum internet in a way that I can understand in the list?
2:01:58 Yes.
2:01:59 Yes.
2:02:00 I can explain.
2:02:01 I mean, I’ll tell you the original thing.
2:02:05 Quantum mechanics was essentially finished in 1925, so we are not reinventing new physics
2:02:06 here.
2:02:07 Okay.
2:02:10 There’s the physics of the gravitation and quantum, but that’s not really what we’re
2:02:11 talking about.
2:02:12 What happens is the following.
2:02:18 The basis of all secure interactions in the internet on computers are based on the idea
2:02:24 that there are certain mathematical equations or functions that are very hard to resolve.
2:02:29 So when I send you something encoded, if someone is listening to that conversation that is
2:02:34 encoded and tries to read it, it’s very, very hard to do because in order to decode that
2:02:40 code is some kind of symbols and so on, you need to, I don’t know, months or years of
2:02:41 a computer to do it.
2:02:42 Okay.
2:02:45 But it can be done.
2:02:50 Computers get broken, computer codes get broken all the time because the basis of these codes
2:02:52 are mathematical functions.
2:02:56 You have a mathematical function, you can create a computer program that will try to
2:02:58 unravel it and it can be unraveled.
2:02:59 Okay.
2:03:00 So that’s one thing.
2:03:02 Now here comes quantum mechanics.
2:03:07 Quantum mechanics provides security that is not given by mathematics, but by the laws
2:03:09 of physics.
2:03:16 So if you have a way of sending messages from one computer to the other, encrypted using
2:03:20 quantum mechanisms, they cannot be broken.
2:03:24 Can you give me an example of a quantum mechanism for encoding information?
2:03:27 Imagine that I’m sending you messages.
2:03:29 Every message is encoded in binary, ones and zeros.
2:03:30 Okay.
2:03:33 So I’m sending a message, which is a string of ones and zeros.
2:03:37 That string of ones and zeros could be hello Andrew or it could also be something that
2:03:40 is secretly encoded into something.
2:03:45 If it’s classical encryption, which is what we use today, a computer in principle can
2:03:47 look at those symbols and unravel them.
2:03:51 Now let me show you how it works in quantum.
2:03:59 When I send you a quantum message, the act of touching it, trying to look at it destroys
2:04:00 it.
2:04:02 That’s what happens in quantum, not in classical things.
2:04:06 I can look at strings of ones and zeros and I look at them and I can make a copy of it
2:04:10 and then I read them, I take them to my lab and I decrypt them.
2:04:15 If I look at a string of qubits, quantum bits moving, there are not ones and zeros.
2:04:16 They are different things.
2:04:17 These are moving parts.
2:04:18 They are moving parts.
2:04:19 They are usually photons.
2:04:21 You can use fiber optics.
2:04:22 You can use…
2:04:23 So these are photons.
2:04:24 I know what photons are.
2:04:25 Yeah, photons.
2:04:26 So they’re a little bouncing energy of light.
2:04:31 Yeah, little bunches of light, because photons, if they’re going around, they’re also…
2:04:35 The photon could be polarized up or down or whatever, but if it’s in a quantum state, which
2:04:36 is in the intermediate between…
2:04:41 The moment I look at it, the moment I capture it, I collapse it into one or the other and
2:04:42 I destroy it.
2:04:43 The interaction with it changes it.
2:04:45 The measurement destroys it.
2:04:50 This is the mystery of quantum mechanics, that the measurement collapses.
2:04:53 We call it the word collapses into one state or the other.
2:04:54 Before that, it was anything.
2:04:56 We could be anything.
2:05:02 So when I use quantum signals, I’m sending qubits, quantum bits that are called qubits.
2:05:07 The act of observing the qubit renders into a classical one or zero.
2:05:10 So then there’s no way you cannot break it.
2:05:19 So does that mean that the practical implementation of this equates to unbreakable code?
2:05:20 Exactly.
2:05:23 Which is why, of course, other governments…
2:05:27 What I’ve been told is that in China, they’re working very hard on this.
2:05:28 Oh, absolutely.
2:05:29 And that here, we’re working very hard on this.
2:05:30 We are working too.
2:05:31 Yeah.
2:05:32 And you’re working very hard on this.
2:05:33 But who’s there?
2:05:35 Has anyone gotten there yet?
2:05:36 Okay.
2:05:37 The problem is the following.
2:05:43 In order to decrypt this, remember that I told you that you can use mathematics, okay?
2:05:44 Some of these functions are incredibly complex.
2:05:48 It might take the age of the universe, perhaps, to decode them mathematically.
2:05:50 Let’s not talk about quantum.
2:05:54 But if you have a quantum computer, now we’re talking about a quantum computer, it can do
2:05:56 it in a couple of hours.
2:06:01 A quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the ones that are used in encryption
2:06:02 in hours.
2:06:06 Whereas, it would take the age of the universe for a monster computer, a standard computer
2:06:08 you can buy to do it.
2:06:13 So in theory, whoever gets this ability first can read, essentially, all the information
2:06:14 that’s being sent around the world.
2:06:16 Not only that.
2:06:19 And many people are doing the Chinese, the Koreans, and we’re doing…
2:06:21 They are grabbing everything now that is encrypted.
2:06:22 They cannot decrypt it.
2:06:23 And they store it.
2:06:26 Because someday, they’ll be able to decrypt it.
2:06:28 But who knows if it will still be relevant?
2:06:30 Oh, but it may be.
2:06:31 And we don’t know what they have.
2:06:32 Imagine.
2:06:34 Imagine if you can get…
2:06:40 Remember when North Korea hacked, what was it, Disney, one of the…
2:06:44 And then they discovered all these emails where people like George Clooney, who was complaining
2:06:45 about this or that.
2:06:46 So imagine…
2:06:47 And worse.
2:06:48 And worse.
2:06:49 We just didn’t hear about that.
2:06:50 Yeah.
2:06:51 Yeah.
2:06:52 Okay.
2:06:53 So if you grab all this information, we cannot decrypt it today.
2:06:57 But if quantum computers become available and there are people working on quantum computing,
2:06:59 they’ll be able to decrypt it.
2:07:03 In the meantime, people are working on deploying these quantum networks.
2:07:05 We’re working on that too.
2:07:08 Not to deploy them, but just to see whether or not it’s feasible to do that.
2:07:09 Okay?
2:07:11 The Chinese are ahead of almost everybody.
2:07:14 They have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these qubits.
2:07:17 So these are impossible to decrypt.
2:07:18 Okay?
2:07:19 Wait.
2:07:20 So they’re sending the qubits.
2:07:21 So you can already communicate in quantum.
2:07:22 Oh, yeah.
2:07:23 Yeah.
2:07:24 We communicate all the time.
2:07:25 Yeah.
2:07:26 Yeah.
2:07:27 I have a lab in Colorado that does that.
2:07:28 Yeah.
2:07:29 Absolutely.
2:07:30 No.
2:07:31 No.
2:07:32 No.
2:07:33 No.
2:07:34 No.
2:07:35 No.
2:07:36 No.
2:07:37 No.
2:07:38 No.
2:07:39 No.
2:07:40 No.
2:07:41 No.
2:07:42 No.
2:07:43 No.
2:07:44 No.
2:07:45 No.
2:07:46 No.
2:07:47 No.
2:07:48 But eventually, we will have a quantum internet based on all this.
2:07:49 Because in order to talk to these quantum computers, you have to send qubits, not just
2:07:50 normal bits.
2:07:51 So this is a race?
2:07:52 Yeah.
2:07:53 A race.
2:07:54 We are not really, I mean, since we are not, yeah.
2:07:55 Yeah.
2:07:56 And there are a lot of people.
2:07:57 I need to tell you that a lot of people, including this government, that claim that this is not
2:07:58 really that relevant or important.
2:08:01 And this is a sociological phenomenon here.
2:08:06 Cryptography has always been the promise of the mathematicians, because there are mathematical
2:08:09 functions, you know, like discrete logarithms and so on.
2:08:12 They believe, the moment they heard about quantum computers, they said, “Oh, we can solve the
2:08:13 problem.
2:08:18 We can create algorithms, mathematical algorithms that are going to be even harder to break.”
2:08:20 They call that post-quantum.
2:08:23 But they don’t know it’s true.
2:08:27 The United States government is following this post-quantum because they think it’s easier
2:08:28 than anyone.
2:08:32 Already, they published two of these, very, very fancy, two students with a laptop were
2:08:34 able to decrypt it within a week.
2:08:38 So obviously, you cannot prove that no one will ever decrypt these things, okay?
2:08:43 So there is the cryptographers, they don’t like physics, they don’t work as physicists.
2:08:49 So they say, “Quantum key distribution,” that’s the name of this thing, “esoteric”
2:08:52 is not important and so on, and also it won’t work.
2:08:56 Well, they say it’s going to work for short distances, about 10 to 20 kilometers.
2:09:00 They just published a paper that got tremendous publicity and an award and so on, that’s best
2:09:04 paper, that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers, okay?
2:09:09 So I mean, and the Chinese are sending that from satellites, okay?
2:09:11 So impossible to decrypt.
2:09:14 Military communications based on this kind of things are impossible to decrypt.
2:09:16 So they are very important.
2:09:21 But there is a whole group of people that are saying, “No, post-quantum is what we want.”
2:09:26 So NIST, the National Institute of I think Science and Technology, they are really pushing
2:09:28 the post-quantum thing.
2:09:32 In Europe, it’s the opposite, they’re really embracing quantum.
2:09:36 I mean, Denmark, for instance, is very far ahead into these things, NATO just gave them
2:09:39 a pile of money to work on quantum and so on.
2:09:45 So it all depends, you know, it’s a complicated thing because the crypto people are all mathematical
2:09:48 people, so they don’t care about quantum.
2:09:54 Is any of this going to be useful for trying to understand, I don’t know, how the brain
2:09:59 works or is it, I mean, you know, there’s still debate as to whether or not the way
2:10:02 that we’re thinking about brain function is even like the right way.
2:10:08 We think about neurons, action potentials and chemicals, but the physicists, whenever
2:10:13 they poke their noses into this stuff, they tend to think about it a little bit differently
2:10:17 or they start to think about, well, you know, state dependence, like the brain that you
2:10:21 have at 8 a.m. is very different than the brain you have at 2 a.m. or 4 in the afternoon,
2:10:24 like maybe everything is happening differently and maybe some of this actually gets down
2:10:26 to the quantum level.
2:10:30 Like we can’t say this neuron talks to this neuron and when they talk in the following
2:10:33 way, you get a certain output.
2:10:34 Like is there relevance here?
2:10:35 Okay.
2:10:36 There are two things I want to say.
2:10:40 Beware of physicists getting into brains, in brain work, I mean, they’re always in that.
2:10:44 It’s like the new thing now, neuroscience, you know, swung the doors open.
2:10:45 Well, I was into neuroscience for a while, isn’t it?
2:10:49 I mean, I think recently neuroscience has made a good move of including people from
2:10:55 psychology, computation, even philosophy, economics, and biology, basically all levels
2:10:56 of analysis.
2:10:57 Yeah, yeah.
2:11:02 But the other thing you asked about quantum and the brain, there is Roger Penrose, who
2:11:04 just got the Nobel Prize in physics.
2:11:09 He’s one of the few people who have very esoteric ideas about the brain being totally quantum.
2:11:11 He’s an incredibly brilliant man.
2:11:12 He was the advisor of Hawking.
2:11:14 I heard him on Lex’s podcast.
2:11:15 Yes.
2:11:21 And, yeah, he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating maybe
2:11:25 as bound networks as opposed to independent entities.
2:11:28 No one really follows it and I don’t, I’m not an expert in that.
2:11:31 So, Roger Penrose is the one who’s pushing this.
2:11:37 Many of the physicists go into brain science are not very clever at doing brain science
2:11:42 because, you know, I heard a story, I think was Francis Crick or someone who told, I was
2:11:47 at a conference and he was saying this, that a physicist came to him and said, “I decided
2:11:50 to go into brain science,” and so he said, “Okay, what have you done?”
2:11:53 And the guy says, “I measure the specific heat of the brain.
2:11:54 What do I do with it?”
2:11:55 Basically.
2:11:58 Well, I think it’s good that computationally minded people have joined neuroscience because
2:12:01 it was getting too modal, too descriptive.
2:12:08 That said, I do think that, you know, math is so important, but it’s often used to intimidate
2:12:13 biologists into thinking that their ideas either might not be true or that there’s better
2:12:14 ideas out there.
2:12:19 I will say that when computational neuroscience first started, it seemed like the attempts
2:12:22 to model the brain were pretty feeble and actually, I’ll just say it, they were pretty
2:12:31 lame, but now I think with AI and LLMs, like the biologists have had to step back and say,
2:12:39 “Hey, you know, these math physics engineering AI types, they have the potential to really
2:12:40 evolve the field.”
2:12:41 No, no, right, right.
2:12:42 At least that’s my stance.
2:12:43 Yeah.
2:12:46 I was at conferences where people say things like, “The brain is a massively parallel machine,”
2:12:49 and I say, “Wait, wait, are you sure of that?”
2:12:50 That’s a meaningless accent.
2:12:51 Yeah.
2:12:54 So I said, “If I show you a row of trees,” and I said, “Tell me how many are they.
2:12:55 Do you really take the whole thing?”
2:12:58 And he said, “75,” or you have to go sequentially.
2:13:00 It’s not parallel, it’s sequential, you know?
2:13:01 But LLMs are pretty interesting, right?
2:13:07 I mean, you can take four or five large language models, essentially pseudo brains, and have
2:13:09 them work on the same problem.
2:13:12 It’s hard to work with five people in parallel in a way that’s coherent, right?
2:13:15 You can only talk so much over one another.
2:13:16 It’s very interesting.
2:13:18 That’s exactly what we’re doing now.
2:13:23 Years ago with Jeff Drager, we wrote a paper on the idea of showing how programs collaborating
2:13:28 with each other could solve problems very, very fast that human others cannot do.
2:13:31 And it’s a basis of a lot of the work we want to do now, yes.
2:13:35 And there are people who are already thinking of putting many, many of these LLMs together
2:13:39 and then see whether or not they do better than a single one or better than a human.
2:13:44 So you think AII is going to improve life for the typical citizen?
2:13:50 Yes, because you can use these things in order to do things that were very hard to do before.
2:13:52 I mean, I use them, and it’s amazing.
2:13:56 I mean, we just published the paper on hallucinations in LLMs and so, because they hallucinate
2:13:57 every once in a while.
2:13:58 They say anything.
2:14:01 But yes, yeah, they are very useful, very useful.
2:14:05 And I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that
2:14:07 produce them like OpenAI and so on.
2:14:08 Yes, yeah.
2:14:10 It’s a very, very important field.
2:14:14 But 10, 15 years ago, whenever I’d bring up AI, you would chuckle and say, “This stuff
2:14:15 is life.”
2:14:20 Well, the funny thing is that the other day, well, I don’t want to name him one of the managers
2:14:21 at Xerox Park.
2:14:24 When I was at park, I started playing with the idea of using machine learning to see
2:14:25 what they can do.
2:14:28 The AI people at that time said, “That’s nonsense.
2:14:30 We need to think about logic.
2:14:32 How does the brain think?
2:14:34 How do we do cognitive psychology and so on?”
2:14:36 We were just doing neural nets.
2:14:37 That’s exactly it.
2:14:40 And the other day, I was meeting with some of these people, and they were saying to me,
2:14:45 “We used to laugh at you doing this stuff because we could do only very little, and today
2:14:46 is the rage.”
2:14:50 Now, the difference between what I was doing, what is being done today, is a scale.
2:14:54 I mean, I don’t know if you know that they are now using nuclear power reactors in order
2:14:59 to power the data centers, but it’s an immense cost of computing.
2:15:04 You have no idea the amount of work that it takes to one trillion tokens in order to get
2:15:06 one of these things to work.
2:15:14 It strikes me you’ve always been very open-minded and very willing to adopt new technologies,
2:15:18 but it hasn’t changed your daily life very much.
2:15:19 Not much at all.
2:15:23 I remember early on, you showed me the internet, and you said, “Be very careful.”
2:15:24 And I said, “Why?”
2:15:26 You said, “It’s like mental chewing gum.”
2:15:27 You chew and chew.
2:15:28 Those were your words.
2:15:31 You said, “You chew and chew, and at first it tastes good, then it doesn’t taste very
2:15:37 good at all, then you don’t taste it at all, and then you realize there’s no nutrition.”
2:15:44 And I always think about that in terms of phone usage or webforaging behavior.
2:15:52 You still like to work, you take a walk in the afternoon, or after eating, you’ve always
2:15:57 been incredibly regular with your routine despite the evolution of all these technologies.
2:16:01 You’re not the guy in Silicon Valley who’s tricked out with all the gear.
2:16:02 No, no.
2:16:03 Well, there is another aspect.
2:16:05 Actually, I’ve never seen you at a cafe with a laptop.
2:16:08 Well, sometimes, but there’s another aspect to this.
2:16:13 As you know in the last up to five years ago, I spent four years working on the economics
2:16:16 of attention and why is it that people attend to things.
2:16:20 And I really believe, and I’m not an expert, that there is a tremendous resonance between
2:16:24 these machines and our human brains, and they are addictive.
2:16:29 The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, where I was in direct in the labs, Meg Whitman used
2:16:34 to say, “I wake up in the middle of the night to look at my phone, and I know people who
2:16:37 do that, and there are members of my family who do that more often that I would like to
2:16:38 see them do that.”
2:16:39 You don’t do that.
2:16:40 No.
2:16:44 I mean, I do it, but I don’t have this compulsion to see what’s going on.
2:16:48 I had a student that he said, “I love spam because at least something is happening.”
2:16:49 Oh, my goodness.
2:16:50 He said that.
2:16:51 Spam?
2:16:52 Spam.
2:16:56 He said, “I get spam, and I look at it because something is happening,” he used to say.
2:16:59 He’s now a very successful financial guy.
2:17:00 Stop doing something.
2:17:01 Brilliant fellow.
2:17:02 Brilliant fellow.
2:17:06 But that’s because maybe your internal world is rich enough that you don’t…
2:17:07 But I look at news.
2:17:08 I like to look at things.
2:17:09 I like to look at videos.
2:17:10 Don’t misunderstand me.
2:17:11 It’s not that I ignore it.
2:17:17 But yeah, I’m not, I mean, I like the latest things and so on, especially if you are beautiful
2:17:18 and so on.
2:17:21 But yeah, I’m not into whatever the latest is and so on.
2:17:26 I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free from Pace and gave them to you
2:17:29 and I never used them once or twice.
2:17:34 I mean, I’ve used VR in my lab, but I don’t want to spend time in VR.
2:17:40 And also, as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed before this podcast,
2:17:44 I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world.
2:17:45 Okay.
2:17:51 And yeah, digital is interesting and fascinating in some ways, but I like things like mechanical
2:17:56 watches, cameras that click when they oppress them and so on, but not artificially.
2:17:58 So I really like that.
2:18:02 I like things that are very classical and so on in many ways and I enjoy that.
2:18:03 I like technology.
2:18:04 Don’t misunderstand me.
2:18:06 And I use it a lot.
2:18:10 And I use it and I do new things with them and I get patents and so on.
2:18:14 But yeah, I’m not a techie guy in the same thing.
2:18:19 I enjoy, I like to have an analog life, not a digital life.
2:18:25 Writing a bicycle is analog, walking is analog, sitting and meditating is analog.
2:18:30 Of course, you can also listen through the internet to a good thing that helps you meditate
2:18:35 or go to sleep, don’t misunderstand me, but I don’t have this fascination with things
2:18:36 and so on.
2:18:38 I mean, some people do.
2:18:41 It seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future.
2:18:43 You seem very grounded in the present.
2:18:46 I’ve never read a single book of science fiction.
2:18:50 Most of the people I work with, and I admire them, they all come with ideas from books
2:18:52 in science fiction and they always say, “Did you read this or that?”
2:18:55 And I say, “I have no idea.”
2:18:56 I never liked it.
2:19:00 I like to read about real people with real blood and real feelings.
2:19:03 Science fiction, to me, is the void of that.
2:19:05 It’s imagining droids doing this or that.
2:19:07 I couldn’t care less.
2:19:11 As I always think that physicists must love science fiction because–
2:19:15 I never, never, never read a single book or looked at it in a movie or science fiction.
2:19:17 I couldn’t care less.
2:19:18 I don’t relate to that.
2:19:21 I don’t think that these people display human-like behavior anyhow.
2:19:24 So, I mean, I’m not saying that it’s not interesting to others.
2:19:25 I mean, I–
2:19:26 You’re not a futurist.
2:19:27 No.
2:19:28 No.
2:19:30 Even though they call me futurist because I always anticipate things.
2:19:35 Right, but you’re not somebody who thinks about what life is going to be like a hundred
2:19:36 years from now.
2:19:37 No.
2:19:38 No.
2:19:39 I like to know life is now.
2:19:40 Yes.
2:19:44 Yes, and I also, as Niels Bohr once said, “It is hard to predict anything, especially
2:19:45 the future.”
2:19:46 Okay.
2:19:47 We’ll predict the past very well.
2:19:49 I don’t know what’s going to go.
2:19:53 I mean, you know, we’ve seen things happening, unbelievable things.
2:19:58 I mean, the technology that allows you to become such a worldwide known phenomenon is
2:20:00 because of the technology.
2:20:05 Imagine if you were just declaiming the Roman Senate centuries ago.
2:20:09 I’ve been doing exactly what I’m doing now, but with no microphones or cameras.
2:20:10 Okay.
2:20:11 Yeah.
2:20:12 I’m not a futurist, and that’s it.
2:20:18 The people tell me I am because I anticipate things, but not because I imagine a world
2:20:23 in which, you know, I couldn’t care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though Elon
2:20:25 Mars thinks this is very important.
2:20:27 Do you think it’s a cool project?
2:20:30 I don’t know.
2:20:31 I want to ask him why.
2:20:36 And then he tells me things, or he says things like, “Well, you know, civilization is going
2:20:37 to die here.
2:20:38 We are going to spexiate.”
2:20:39 And so I don’t know.
2:20:40 I mean, let it happen.
2:20:41 I don’t know.
2:20:43 Just enjoy now, you know.
2:20:45 You’re not worried about the future.
2:20:47 In that sense, oh, I’m an optimist.
2:20:51 I believe that technology will solve the global warming problem, it’s obvious how to solve
2:20:52 it.
2:20:53 There’s nothing very mysterious.
2:20:57 You know, nuclear power is going to do it, you know, absolutely.
2:21:00 Once we get out over our preconceived notions of nuclear power.
2:21:01 Right.
2:21:03 I mean, very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident.
2:21:04 Let’s face it.
2:21:05 Yeah.
2:21:06 They need to name it something else.
2:21:07 Maybe.
2:21:08 Yeah.
2:21:15 Things that at once were thought to be dangerous when renamed, you know, turn out to not be
2:21:19 so dangerous when renamed, people are willing to adopt.
2:21:20 Yeah.
2:21:21 Yeah.
2:21:22 Right.
2:21:23 Yeah.
2:21:24 So, yeah, I don’t really, you know, I don’t worry too much about the future.
2:21:29 I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to stay away from the brain, hopefully.
2:21:31 You don’t seem to worry too much, generally.
2:21:32 You’re not a big worrier.
2:21:33 Mm-hmm.
2:21:34 Yeah.
2:21:35 Yeah.
2:21:36 You and I are different that way.
2:21:37 You and I are different that way.
2:21:38 Yeah.
2:21:39 Yeah.
2:21:40 That’s what I love.
2:21:41 Yes.
2:21:42 Not if I keep busy.
2:21:43 Oh, okay.
2:21:44 Yeah.
2:21:45 These days a lot less.
2:21:51 I think that, I think at the transition points between different circumstances and at the
2:21:54 transition points between different career things, I think it makes sense to worry.
2:22:00 It sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that, you know, you, you know, reach for
2:22:03 the next rung and grab it, right.
2:22:04 And not, you know, not miss.
2:22:09 I mean, there’s been, I mean, I think there’s been elements of uncertainty in my life where
2:22:14 I felt like, okay, I’m going to ground the things I can control, but no, I don’t stay
2:22:15 up at night worrying about things.
2:22:16 Yeah.
2:22:20 Also, I think meditation is profoundly effective at this.
2:22:22 Suddenly, you’re here and that stays.
2:22:23 The past is the past.
2:22:25 You cannot do anything and the future hasn’t arrived.
2:22:30 So what the heck, you know, I really believe that and it has helped me immensely.
2:22:33 I’m very, at a few things, I’m very proud.
2:22:38 I went for my medical checkup a year ago and the doctor says, I’d love to hear you breathe.
2:22:40 I said, what’s so wrong with my breathe?
2:22:42 He says, so slow and calm.
2:22:44 So you got over the white coat syndrome?
2:22:45 Yes.
2:22:46 Yeah.
2:22:47 Because of meditation.
2:22:48 Yeah.
2:22:49 You sent me your lab results this morning.
2:22:50 So everything, everything looks great.
2:22:51 Yeah.
2:22:52 Yeah.
2:22:53 Yeah.
2:22:54 Yeah.
2:22:55 Yeah.
2:22:56 Yeah.
2:22:57 You’ve always been busy, you know, regular about exercise, not excessive.
2:22:58 No.
2:22:59 You’re never one of the like the marathoners or the, you know, five a.m. in the pool people,
2:23:00 but no.
2:23:02 I tried runs to run a marathon actually.
2:23:03 So.
2:23:04 Yeah.
2:23:08 I mean, it’s very common in the area where, you know, in around Stanford to be pretty extreme
2:23:09 about athletics.
2:23:10 That was never your thing.
2:23:11 No.
2:23:12 No.
2:23:13 Steady, long distance runner.
2:23:14 Yeah.
2:23:15 I told you that once.
2:23:16 I’m not a sprinter.
2:23:17 Yeah.
2:23:18 Some people are.
2:23:19 And by the way, I admire them immensely.
2:23:20 You mean in life.
2:23:21 They were speaking metaphorically.
2:23:22 Yeah.
2:23:23 In general, yeah.
2:23:24 There are some people who really can do things incredibly fast and they move from one thing
2:23:25 to the other and so on.
2:23:26 Yeah.
2:23:29 I like people who reflect some wisdom.
2:23:35 For instance, I have a, it’s very strange for someone like me, but I see a Buddhist monk
2:23:40 and I just suddenly, I feel calmer by just seeing that person, you know.
2:23:41 I don’t know.
2:23:42 I think there’s something.
2:23:47 It’s not just the spirituality, the power they have to be here totally and absolutely.
2:23:48 It’s impressive to me.
2:23:52 I mean, some of the people say, okay, that’s funny robes or something, you know, I like
2:23:53 that a lot.
2:23:55 Not, it’s not necessarily a way.
2:24:03 I mean, my therapist used to say to me and that to use meditation to move away from trouble
2:24:06 and trouble, troubling thoughts is not a good idea.
2:24:08 So you have to embrace the world too.
2:24:09 But I use it.
2:24:13 So it’s just to stay calm and to enjoy and to see things for what they are.
2:24:14 And I think it’s, yeah.
2:24:15 Yeah.
2:24:16 The future is the future.
2:24:17 I don’t know.
2:24:18 Well.
2:24:19 You only control what you can control.
2:24:20 Right.
2:24:22 That’s, but you know, there’s some people who are worried all the time about the future,
2:24:23 you know.
2:24:32 And your understanding of quantum mechanics, relativity and the real world.
2:24:37 And perhaps just generally knowing what you know and experiencing what you’ve experienced.
2:24:44 Do you believe in some sort of higher power organizing force or let’s just be blunt.
2:24:45 Do you believe in God?
2:24:46 Well, okay.
2:24:49 The word God has a lot of implications, right?
2:24:53 I mean, I don’t necessarily, I don’t believe in a God that keeps track of what you and
2:24:54 I are doing at this point.
2:24:58 There are too many people and so on.
2:25:03 So I don’t believe in this notion of, you know, of an agent there that is somehow knowing
2:25:07 what everybody on this planet is doing or, you know, and so on.
2:25:13 I do feel sometimes, and especially because of the studies I have, I, and actually from
2:25:17 reading people who have been very, very deep, you know, in particular the thoughts of people
2:25:22 like Einstein, Heisenberg and so on, that there seems to be at times a sense of an organizing
2:25:25 principle in the universe and to learn those rules.
2:25:30 So there is this notion, I mean, philosophically it’s called pantheism that God is in nature
2:25:31 already.
2:25:36 Spinoza and all these people started this, that is very appealing to me.
2:25:41 The notion that there is something, that this thing is, if it’s evolving, it’s like an entity,
2:25:47 but not an entity that says, oh, tomorrow, you know, you’ll die or so on.
2:25:48 I mean, you’ll die.
2:25:53 There are lots of events that lead to death or to happiness and so on, but not because
2:25:54 someone is out there checking.
2:26:00 I mean, I don’t believe that is enough memory to store all this, although today I saw you
2:26:03 can buy some disk memories that are by study this big.
2:26:08 So I don’t, I don’t believe in that, but it’s a matter of belief, not anything else.
2:26:12 Unfortunately, these beliefs are, you know, translate sometimes in complicated action.
2:26:15 I do believe that there is a sense of mystery.
2:26:22 I sometimes, I once heard, I don’t know who said it, but it’s a very good sentence that
2:26:27 if you listen to Beethoven say, I mean, the man struggled, but it’s amazing, he was able
2:26:29 to create that music.
2:26:33 On the other hand, Mozart seems to have been getting the messages from Heavens, you know,
2:26:35 on a daily basis, just floated down.
2:26:40 So some people are given this connection to something much bigger, and you have access
2:26:44 to that through listening to that music, the experiences we have.
2:26:48 There is this idea out there that consciousness doesn’t just exist within our brains, but
2:26:53 that’s sort of like a collective network, and things come through us, not just as individuals,
2:26:54 but as humans.
2:26:56 Jungian thing is a lot of that.
2:27:01 I was, I am very interested in the word spiritual and what it means, you know, to see that things
2:27:05 transcend our particular needs at any point.
2:27:10 But the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny, you know, if you look
2:27:16 at any movie, you know, Braveheart or whatever, you see the one warrior, one group of warriors
2:27:19 has a priest saying, God is with us, and the other one is about to engage, it says the
2:27:21 same thing to the other group.
2:27:22 That’s a little bit funny, right?
2:27:29 I mean, humans and human brains in particular are amazing, amazing what human brains can
2:27:32 do, this computer in our heads is spectacular.
2:27:39 And yet it also has limitations, and I think, well, put differently, does it make you nervous
2:27:45 or worry you that I seem to have an increasing interest in God and religion?
2:27:49 No, I think that is a beautiful journey in which you’re in, and there are two pieces
2:27:56 to this, provided you don’t, you don’t start using this to somehow spout, you know, arguments
2:27:58 why people shouldn’t do this or that.
2:28:00 No, no, it’s only my own exploration of my own life.
2:28:01 I respect that.
2:28:04 I think it’s a very important thing.
2:28:09 You know, there is an issue here that I read reading Wilson, actually, you know, Wilson,
2:28:13 which, you know, he wrote this beautiful book on human nature, and he claims that the religious
2:28:19 instinct comes from a submissive component in us, that animals have, dogs are submissive,
2:28:23 and we believe that we need to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king,
2:28:25 you know, some deity or something else.
2:28:26 That’s his theory.
2:28:29 Well, I certainly don’t feel any compulsion to be submissive to other humans.
2:28:32 I mean, I think in knowing the limitations of the human brain and cognition, I don’t
2:28:38 care how smart, I don’t care how successful an individual or a group is, it’s very clear
2:28:42 that the human brain is limited and parsing the universe that we’re in.
2:28:45 Otherwise, we wouldn’t continue to have the same issues over and over.
2:28:48 Although I do like to think that we’re falling forward, we’re evolving forward as opposed
2:28:53 to devolving as a species, but we tend to repeat a lot of the same mistakes over and
2:28:54 over again.
2:28:56 There is also a technical thing here.
2:29:01 We sometimes confuse randomness with premonition or God doing something.
2:29:07 I mean, dodging a bullet by turning your head as our next president did is an incredible
2:29:08 thing.
2:29:10 The probability is so, so, so small.
2:29:15 But that doesn’t mean that there was someone who said, “Turn your head, do it,” and so
2:29:16 the bullet will pass.
2:29:20 I mean, we ascribe causality to something that was truly random.
2:29:23 It could have also, in another scenario, the same turn of the head would have been to the
2:29:26 other side and this person would be dead.
2:29:32 But sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences that we cannot explain
2:29:37 and we say, “Oh, it must be God that made sure that you and I met,” or that we thought
2:29:38 the same thoughts and so on.
2:29:45 Although, as a biologist who started off as a neurodevelopmental biologist, I think
2:29:49 I just had to see … There are two things that changed my understanding of what might
2:29:50 be possible.
2:29:54 One was Barbara Chapman, my advisor, once treated me to an experiment.
2:29:57 It was kind of a funny thing, typical Barbara, you know how nerdy she was.
2:30:01 She said, “Are you willing to stay up all night?”
2:30:06 And I was like, “Okay, yeah,” and she took zebrafish eggs and fertilized them.
2:30:08 And I sat for 11 hours with food.
2:30:17 I got up to use the restroom and I watched a zebrafish egg duplicate and become a fish,
2:30:19 like in real time with my eyes.
2:30:23 Not some movie on YouTube, although that’s impressive too, people can look these up,
2:30:27 but to just actually see life emerge from a set of cells through its own organizing principles,
2:30:33 all of which can be explained by genes, transcription factors, the physics of the mitotic spindle.
2:30:38 Well, I mean, math and biology and chemistry can explain all of it, but there was something
2:30:42 truly spectacular about it that seems so non-random because it’s not random.
2:30:48 And then the other one is that, I mean, I guess I’ve had enough experiences with prayer
2:30:53 and the consequences of prayer in my real life that I just … I sort of can’t get my
2:30:58 head around the idea that there’s not a God or some sort of organizing force.
2:31:02 I can’t accept it because there’s, yes, there’s causality, reverse causality, correlation
2:31:08 and mistaken correlation and causality, but somehow … I mean, I like to think I’m grounded
2:31:13 in science and reality, but I don’t think science can explain it all.
2:31:14 Oh, no.
2:31:20 And I think that this experience of this spirituality, for instance, I remember it still happens
2:31:23 spending a night outdoors and looking at the sky.
2:31:28 I mean, it’s an incredible thing, the stars, and you feel so small, and yet there is order
2:31:29 to all that.
2:31:30 It’s not just random stuff.
2:31:35 I mean, they move according to laws that, fortunately, we humans were able to discover,
2:31:37 which is an amazing thing when you think about it.
2:31:38 Dogs did not discover gravity.
2:31:39 No.
2:31:40 They experienced it.
2:31:41 Sir, leave it to Costello.
2:31:42 Okay.
2:31:43 Costello was gravity.
2:31:44 Yeah.
2:31:48 So, I really think that there is something to be said about these spiritual experiences,
2:31:52 and I really believe that, very importantly, and I listened to people talk.
2:31:56 I recently have been looking at some stuff that C.S. Lewis.
2:32:02 He was a man who was studying the sagas and the mythology of the Vikings and so on, and
2:32:06 eventually became a devout Christian, thinking that this was the only answer to the … because
2:32:09 all religions have the same element.
2:32:11 So I understand that.
2:32:12 I respect it.
2:32:18 I experienced that at times in my life, but when I think seriously about it, I think that
2:32:25 at the moment, we have this computer and we can get glimpses of all this, but I don’t
2:32:30 believe that it’s this notion, and no one can prove to me that there is someone there
2:32:34 organizing my life minute by minute or second by second.
2:32:35 I don’t believe that.
2:32:42 I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and randomness, beautiful ones, and
2:32:47 having you and Lara as children is a fantastic randomness in my life.
2:32:48 Hopefully it wasn’t too random.
2:32:49 No, no.
2:32:55 In the sense that children … you know children that come unhealthy, whatever, it’s a very
2:32:56 impressive thing.
2:32:57 Yeah.
2:33:02 The number of things that have to organize to create a healthy child is truly a miracle.
2:33:03 Yeah.
2:33:04 True.
2:33:05 True.
2:33:06 Yeah.
2:33:07 And I think … but a lot of it is random too.
2:33:11 I mean, the same set of parents can produce two different set of children too.
2:33:12 Okay.
2:33:13 I mean, that’s very, very important.
2:33:15 Well, Lara and I are pretty different.
2:33:16 Absolutely.
2:33:17 I mean, in very beautiful ways too.
2:33:24 So I mean, neither of you does behave or conducts a life that I would be unhappy with,
2:33:26 your mother would be unhappy with.
2:33:29 But going back to this, I believe that indeed, spirituality is important.
2:33:32 I have a lot of access to that through classical music.
2:33:37 There are times that I really believe that I can get very, very emotional listening to
2:33:41 music, very emotional.
2:33:45 My wife always notices that when I do that, and I think that then you’re having access
2:33:47 to something very different.
2:33:51 Of course, it can be explained physiologically by all sorts of resonances and so on, but
2:33:53 who cares?
2:34:01 You mentioned that you can peer into the future with ideas that you’re working on, and yet
2:34:02 you don’t get too far ahead.
2:34:05 Like you’re not thinking like a hundred years from now, what’s it going to look like?
2:34:08 Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past?
2:34:09 Sometimes.
2:34:10 Sometimes.
2:34:17 I’ve always, because I left my family when I was still very young, I always had a certain
2:34:21 nostalgia for things, okay?
2:34:26 I became friend with a very impressive guy in France, Clos Jopard.
2:34:30 I think he was the director of the Geophysics Institute, and both of us had very similar
2:34:36 parents in different, you know, French and Argentina, but still similar educations.
2:34:42 We had, I have sometimes a certain nostalgia that is almost melancholy about the way we
2:34:43 grew up and so on.
2:34:44 Melancholy.
2:34:45 A little bit about it.
2:34:50 I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina, like you would have 10, 15 cousins
2:34:51 over for lunch every Sunday.
2:34:52 Yeah, yeah.
2:34:53 That doesn’t sound melancholy.
2:34:54 No, no.
2:35:00 But there were moments, moments of loneliness, moments of times where I felt very misunderstood.
2:35:07 I had, unfortunately, a very punishing mother, but I still remember her, and I think about
2:35:10 her in ways that are not necessarily always very happy.
2:35:14 I was looking at photos a while ago, and there are pictures of her, she’s smiling, coming
2:35:18 out of the Pacific Ocean in Carmel, she took a walk and so on.
2:35:24 But I reflect back in the past, in that sense, and sometimes, you know, I’m asked, how did
2:35:26 you grow up?
2:35:32 My wife, being Danish, she grew up in a very different way from upper middle class Argentines.
2:35:37 So we reflect on that, the kinds of childhoods we had and so on.
2:35:42 But not in the sense that, “Oh, I wish I had that now.”
2:35:43 No regrets.
2:35:46 Well, not many, not many.
2:35:47 That’s good.
2:35:53 I mean, there is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else, which is, if I look at
2:35:58 my family, my brother stayed, produced family, children, grandchildren, and so on.
2:36:02 I came here and I produced children, grandchildren, and they are going to be two diverging branches
2:36:03 of the family.
2:36:07 Which we still got together, we got together last year for your birthday.
2:36:08 Yeah, no, I know.
2:36:10 That’s what is so important to me, yes.
2:36:15 But I think about it sometimes, and when I go back and I see the lives very similar to
2:36:20 what I had, different perhaps, there is a certain sense of thinking about the past.
2:36:26 But I also realize that if I didn’t take the steps I took, I would be as miserable as some
2:36:31 of my old friends that are really struggling even to find meaning in what they do or even
2:36:32 surviving economically.
2:36:34 So I was really lucky.
2:36:35 So what was that?
2:36:37 Because I wouldn’t have existed because you wouldn’t have met them all.
2:36:38 That’s true too.
2:36:39 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
2:36:40 I mean, maybe you would have.
2:36:41 No, no, no, no.
2:36:42 I’m grateful I didn’t grow up in Buenos Aires.
2:36:43 I love the city.
2:36:44 I love the country.
2:36:45 I don’t feel that.
2:36:49 I couldn’t have done any of the things I’ve done in South America, given maybe, but the
2:36:51 landscape was just completely different.
2:36:53 Oh, I go there and after a week I want to come back.
2:36:54 Yeah, yeah, definitely.
2:36:55 So you love this country?
2:36:56 I love this country.
2:36:58 I feel very much part of this country.
2:37:02 I’m very grateful to what this country has done for me, for my family, and that includes
2:37:04 you and your sister, okay, and my wife.
2:37:05 When did you become a citizen?
2:37:06 Oh, many, many years ago.
2:37:12 I really did it consciously, not because, I mean, there were practical things, but no,
2:37:13 I really believe in it.
2:37:18 I really believe it’s an incredible country and it gives incredible opportunities to people.
2:37:22 As Elon says, Elon Musk, I’m also an immigrant and very happy to be one.
2:37:24 Yeah, you’ve always been a patriot.
2:37:25 Absolutely.
2:37:27 And on the other hand, as I said, Argentina is complicated.
2:37:34 I go there and a lot of smells and things that bring memories that I’m amazing.
2:37:35 The food’s not bad.
2:37:40 Yeah, yeah, but it’s also the whole atmosphere and the first two, three days are an incredible
2:37:44 experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on.
2:37:47 But after a while, I also see a darker side to it.
2:37:52 I must tell you that on the other hand, my country law, Denmark, is also a country that
2:37:54 I like immensely.
2:37:59 There’s nice people and pleasant and soft, very soft, especially in summer.
2:38:03 But the Danes are also strong people.
2:38:06 The average Dane is so smart.
2:38:09 I think the high school education there must be among the best in the world.
2:38:12 Yeah, there is a notion of proficiency.
2:38:14 I mean, people are proficient at what they do.
2:38:20 Yeah, you go to a store, you have a problem, the airline or whatever, you’ll get someone
2:38:21 who really knows how to solve it.
2:38:27 But it’s also a very, it’s a small society, very homogeneous, tremendous sense of humor,
2:38:29 which I enjoy.
2:38:31 And it’s very soft.
2:38:32 People enjoy life.
2:38:35 They have notions like slow food movements and things of that sort.
2:38:36 So I like it.
2:38:41 I could not live there because it’s a very homogeneous way of behaving.
2:38:43 The Lutheran ethic is there.
2:38:46 They’re not religious, but they’re Lutheran.
2:38:49 So I feel very comfortable in Europe and so on.
2:38:51 But I like being here, yes.
2:38:57 Yeah, I feel like our family now includes so many different nationalities and religions
2:39:01 and backgrounds and philosophies and political stances.
2:39:02 Well, it’s good too.
2:39:03 Yeah, it’s great.
2:39:04 It’s starting to look like the UN with some extra.
2:39:07 Well, I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity.
2:39:08 It was incredible.
2:39:09 Incredible.
2:39:10 That’s good.
2:39:14 That was also good to be, as a child, to hear these arguments about politics and so on.
2:39:18 Yeah, I hear a few of those now, arguments about politics.
2:39:19 We won’t get into politics.
2:39:24 One thing that I did want to say, however, is that I remember a long time ago, and I’m
2:39:28 certain, because I wrote it in my journal, you said, “Politically incorrect views are
2:39:30 often right.”
2:39:31 Is that true still?
2:39:32 Yes.
2:39:33 Yes.
2:39:34 Still true for you?
2:39:35 I should say.
2:39:36 Yes, absolutely.
2:39:37 Absolutely.
2:39:40 I think we judge in time.
2:39:45 I think that the issue of politically incorrectness is some kind of a mob behavior that says you
2:39:48 should think like us.
2:39:53 We should be able to express our views with respecting others and so on, and we should
2:39:54 be respected for that.
2:39:59 I think that this whole notion that others are telling you what to think or not to think
2:40:00 is a little bit complicated.
2:40:05 I must say something, which I hope it doesn’t get in trouble with my Danish side of the family
2:40:12 or friends, societies like the Scandinavian societies that are extremely uniform in thinking.
2:40:16 The word “should” is used all the time.
2:40:17 You should do this.
2:40:18 You shouldn’t do that.
2:40:24 Good that you did it, the enforced behavior in a very, very particular way.
2:40:29 It’s not a hurting instinct, but there is a very, very strict Lutheran tradition of
2:40:32 telling you what you should and you shouldn’t do.
2:40:37 I know very few people, and I’ve been going to them for many, many years, that really
2:40:45 have iconoclastic ideas that are away from the mean, and they’re considered odd.
2:40:49 Very few, including the physicists, and they have fantastic school of physics there, and
2:40:51 the board was there.
2:40:55 It’s a society that conformity is the issue there.
2:41:01 On the other hand, I think that it’s good to think differently, and there’s a man perhaps
2:41:03 you heard of him.
2:41:04 I admire him.
2:41:05 He died, Freeman Dyson.
2:41:08 He was on a level with Feynman and Gellman, by the way.
2:41:10 He used to have very strange ideas, too.
2:41:12 He used to say, “Global warning.
2:41:13 What’s wrong with it?
2:41:14 This Sahara is going to be a garden.”
2:41:15 Yeah.
2:41:19 The Sahara Desert will become a garden.
2:41:20 People will be able to eat all that food.
2:41:24 Well, I think people hear that, but then they counter it against these very heart-wrenching
2:41:28 pictures of polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking, this kind of thing.
2:41:32 They are more polar bears today than when Mr. Al Gore said that we’re going to die.
2:41:36 Listen, I’m not going to argue climate change with you, because I have no knowledge there.
2:41:37 No, no, no.
2:41:38 Stop giving him paper.
2:41:39 No, no, no.
2:41:40 I’m not countering.
2:41:45 I’m just saying, this is getting very intense on the internet now, because the arguments
2:41:49 on both sides seem pretty strong, at least as they’re presented.
2:41:50 So who’s right?
2:41:52 No, the question is, what can we do about it?
2:41:53 That’s the issue.
2:41:56 I think that technology and wisdom are going to solve it.
2:41:57 I think so.
2:41:58 I really believe that.
2:41:59 Very strongly.
2:42:00 I’m an optimist when it comes to that.
2:42:04 But what I’m talking about being politically incorrect is this idea of saying things that
2:42:08 a group of people say you shouldn’t be saying or thinking those thoughts.
2:42:12 And the question is, can we debate those things rationally or nicely, respecting people’s
2:42:13 beliefs?
2:42:14 Okay?
2:42:16 And yeah, I believe in that very strongly.
2:42:23 And I think being politically incorrect is a way of saying you’re smiling at them.
2:42:25 But it’s okay.
2:42:26 Why not?
2:42:29 I said, who said that we shouldn’t be like that?
2:42:33 I remember encountering the first libertarians when I was already working as a physicist
2:42:39 and they were saying to me, why are we afraid of the Russians?
2:42:43 I said, well, you think they’re going to invade the United States?
2:42:44 Can you imagine Russia invading?
2:42:46 I mean, if they invade, how are they going to control us?
2:42:47 They had these arguments.
2:42:49 They were very funny arguments.
2:42:50 Why do we need an army?
2:42:52 Why do we need taxes?
2:42:56 And I really thought that was so provocative, was so interesting.
2:42:58 Do you consider yourself a libertarian?
2:43:00 In many ways, I like the idea of liberty.
2:43:02 I believe very strongly in it.
2:43:04 I mean, this country was founded on that.
2:43:08 I think that our founding fathers really believed in it and I admire them for that.
2:43:13 You know, reading Jefferson and so on is really inspiring to me.
2:43:17 I think that some of the political movement is a little bit odd.
2:43:21 They always end up with political candidates that go nowhere and so on.
2:43:22 What do you think that is?
2:43:23 Uh-huh.
2:43:24 Why do you think that is?
2:43:25 I think that they’re so rational.
2:43:26 They’re often among the smartest people in the room.
2:43:29 But they are not strategically smart.
2:43:35 I met, at times, libertarians of incredible thoughts and they’re living in Silicon Valley
2:43:36 and they’re poor.
2:43:38 I mean, even though they are the ones who are supposed to–
2:43:39 Some are poor.
2:43:40 Some are not.
2:43:42 But I’m saying it’s very interesting.
2:43:45 They choose presidential candidates no one ever heard of.
2:43:52 I think many of them are, you know, they are on the spectrum in a way that doesn’t
2:43:57 allow them to get into the minds of other people in a way that would allow them to convince
2:43:59 other people about their arguments.
2:44:01 I mean, a lot of politics, as we know, is show business.
2:44:04 I mean, in this recent election, it was all posturing.
2:44:05 It was all about grabbing emotion.
2:44:08 It was not about logic, it was about emotion.
2:44:13 Yeah, I have several of my people that, you know, they put all their money to freeze themselves.
2:44:14 You gonna cry over yourself?
2:44:15 No.
2:44:18 My dad and I have had this running joke for a lot of years because someone we know very
2:44:22 well and several people we know well have set aside significant amounts of money to
2:44:26 have their heads or entire bodies frozen on the idea that they’re gonna be brought back
2:44:29 later on solo style.
2:44:30 You’ve always laughed at this idea.
2:44:35 No, but not only that, there’s a colleague of mine, a Stanford, who accuses me of being
2:44:37 friends with a guy that is like that.
2:44:41 I told this guy, I said, “You know, he thinks that you’re a bad influence on me.”
2:44:44 And the guy said, “Well, tell him that we are the ones who are gonna come back and do
2:44:45 what we believe.
2:44:46 Yeah.
2:44:47 He’s gonna be gone.”
2:44:50 You’re not interested in living to be 200?
2:44:51 It’s not an issue.
2:44:54 These people are interested in living for another thousand years, so when they wake up, they
2:44:57 see how the world looks, they read science fiction.
2:45:01 So they’re very interested to know what the world looks like once they wake up.
2:45:05 So there are people in the health space that are trying to not die, you know, Brian Johnson
2:45:06 and others.
2:45:07 That’s a different story.
2:45:08 Yeah.
2:45:11 I mean, what’s your thought on trying to live to be 150 or something like that?
2:45:12 Well, if you can live.
2:45:13 The issue is not the age.
2:45:17 It’s the conditions of your body and mind, okay?
2:45:18 That’s the issue.
2:45:23 I had the misfortune and unfortunate of having two parents that lived very long lives.
2:45:28 One was incredibly, my father was incredibly lucid until the end.
2:45:34 My mother had everything, you know, all, every dementia and complications that came from,
2:45:36 you know, being in anorexia called her life and so on.
2:45:41 So my father enjoyed being lucid until the end.
2:45:44 And so he, you know, he didn’t take care of himself physically so well.
2:45:48 So the idea is if you live up to 100 or 150 or 200 and you can still do the things you
2:45:51 enjoy in life is one thing.
2:45:55 To be like my mother, who couldn’t even comprehend what was in front of her when you put a cup
2:46:00 of tea, you know, then is very sad, but it can happen at the age of 35, you know.
2:46:05 So yeah, I’m not into a race to live forever.
2:46:06 I want to live healthily.
2:46:07 I want to enjoy life.
2:46:09 Enjoyment is the most important piece.
2:46:15 That’s the point of being, you know, tethered to tubes and all over the place, you know,
2:46:18 flat on a bed and you say, “Oh, I made another year of my life.”
2:46:22 I mean, that’s not really a life, at least for me.
2:46:27 Do you worry about or end or wish for anything for me, for Laura?
2:46:30 Yes, to be super happy people.
2:46:32 No, I don’t want to use the word happy.
2:46:37 I want to see you joyful, joy, joy is more important than happiness.
2:46:39 Joy is a state of mind.
2:46:40 This is okay.
2:46:45 Yeah, I said a list of things I want to have and I have them and I smile a lot.
2:46:48 Joyfulness is the sense of being in yourself and I would like that.
2:46:50 I mean, you two are very different.
2:46:55 Laura, there’s much more in the moment that you do for reasons, okay, it’s her view of
2:46:56 the world.
2:46:57 It’s her demeanor.
2:46:58 Huh?
2:46:59 It’s her demeanor.
2:47:00 It’s very good.
2:47:01 I’m focused on what she’s going to do this weekend.
2:47:02 Yes.
2:47:04 I’m focused on what I’m going to do this weekend, next week, the next month and for the next
2:47:05 week.
2:47:10 I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend and that’s it and everything
2:47:11 else is going to come to you.
2:47:16 I believe and now I’m speaking in a way that is more paternal than anything else.
2:47:22 You had a charmed life and everything came to you since you were very little and you
2:47:29 exhibited behaviors and so on that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from
2:47:30 the very beginning.
2:47:33 I mean, it’s not that you were a genius at chess or a Rubik’s Cube or anything.
2:47:38 I know some kids that are like that, but there was something, something in there and so I
2:47:44 think that learning to just relax and rest, but it’s part of your behavior since you were
2:47:46 very little, you had these problems.
2:47:51 I used to put you on my lap and say, it’s going to be fine and say, what if I cannot
2:47:52 do my homework?
2:47:53 Okay.
2:47:54 But you could.
2:47:55 Or even my stuffed animals.
2:47:56 Yeah.
2:47:57 Yeah.
2:47:58 They say that.
2:47:59 They need it to be organized.
2:48:00 Yeah.
2:48:01 I probably have, remember the grunting tick?
2:48:02 Yes.
2:48:03 Yeah.
2:48:04 They drove us nuts.
2:48:05 Yeah.
2:48:08 Well, I probably have a little bit of an OCD type thing.
2:48:14 I mean, not diagnostically, you know, significant, but when I bite down into something that
2:48:18 I’m pursuing, it’s very hard for me to think about anything else.
2:48:19 Well, we talked about it.
2:48:22 When you were at Berkeley, once you told me that you were starting to run, but you wanted
2:48:24 to run like everybody else was running, I mean, miles.
2:48:25 Yeah.
2:48:28 I heard there was a guy who had been in the department, Randy Nelson.
2:48:30 He’s now a professor in Ohio.
2:48:34 Everybody just like, you know, just in passing said, “Oh yeah, you know, Randy worked, you
2:48:39 know, in like 80 hours a week or 90 hours a week,” and I was like, “95 hours.”
2:48:40 Yeah.
2:48:41 I remember that.
2:48:43 You know, but what’s interesting is I’m not a naturally competitive person.
2:48:44 It was just this idea.
2:48:49 Like I’ve tended to want to know, and I’ve since stopped this, but there was a long time
2:48:53 where I wanted to figure out what my body and mind were capable of.
2:48:56 I just wanted to see like, how high is that ceiling?
2:49:02 And it was only when I almost suffocated on a scuba dive or when I was working to the
2:49:07 point of exhaustion or, you know, where, and then I also realized that, you know, I published
2:49:11 a number of papers to get tenure, like I didn’t need that many, but I enjoyed every one.
2:49:12 It’s not like I’m not having fun.
2:49:13 Right.
2:49:14 I’m having fun.
2:49:15 Yeah.
2:49:16 This idea of pushing oneself to limits.
2:49:17 The question is why?
2:49:22 I mean, I think there is so much to enjoy on a regular life and the things that we have
2:49:23 already.
2:49:26 We have to work to get them the way we want.
2:49:29 I don’t think that worrying for the sake of worrying or, you know, just worrying.
2:49:30 I mean.
2:49:31 Yeah.
2:49:32 I don’t tend to worry.
2:49:33 Well, you know what changed that for me in a major way?
2:49:34 I mean, I’ve had moments.
2:49:35 I’ve had moments.
2:49:40 I think I can recall, like I have a favorite best day of my life moment.
2:49:41 I won’t share it here.
2:49:46 So it’s not, it’s not relevant right now, but Costello helped bring me into the moment.
2:49:50 Like he would do these things that like I would delight in that were just so simple,
2:49:54 like the way he would like, like fall over or something or, you know, that I think that
2:49:59 like having another creature there that, that is very much in the moment brings you into
2:50:00 the moment.
2:50:01 Right.
2:50:02 And we’re very connected to it too.
2:50:05 I mean, I think that if you were connected to someone that has that property of bringing
2:50:08 you down and so on, you would start enjoying it.
2:50:09 Yeah.
2:50:13 The people I’ve had amazing partners, as you know, some less than amazing, but many amazing
2:50:19 partners in the, and they tended to be also kind of into the future, like focus on what’s
2:50:21 not quite there yet.
2:50:25 Like I must say, I think women in general do it better than men that they’re better,
2:50:26 like grounding to the present.
2:50:27 Well, it depends.
2:50:31 I think that my wife tends to be more anxious than I am about the future.
2:50:32 So maybe it’s not generally.
2:50:36 Well, I tend, well, in, in trying to sort of, you know, tell her that she shouldn’t worry
2:50:37 so much.
2:50:41 I think that I also suddenly reflected what am I doing here?
2:50:43 And I tried to also slow down myself.
2:50:47 I think that, you know, yeah, I think you’re someone who’s running from one thing to the
2:50:48 other.
2:50:53 I mean, to say it colloquially, but it would be nice if you said, okay, I’m fine.
2:50:55 You know, you have a podcast that is doing well.
2:50:58 You don’t have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years.
2:51:00 No, I don’t think out that far.
2:51:02 I don’t think about the career piece.
2:51:06 I think that I, I mean, I often don’t have a plan.
2:51:07 I know what we’re going to do this year.
2:51:09 I don’t know what we’re going to do after that.
2:51:13 But professionally, I think, look, I think part of it was science.
2:51:18 I mean, we’re talking about a lot of things, but for many years, right, from the time I
2:51:21 like squared my life away and when I turned 19, it was like, okay, I’m going to get things
2:51:22 right now.
2:51:24 There’s always been these milestones.
2:51:26 You’re going to finish your undergraduate degree.
2:51:27 I did a master’s.
2:51:29 I did the PhD, then the postdoc, then you’re going to need to get tenure.
2:51:38 You know, I think the academic system was a system of two to five year bursts like, like
2:51:42 sprinting marathons in many ways to try and, you know, grab the next thing to get to the
2:51:43 next level.
2:51:45 And there was a lot of uncertainty for a long time.
2:51:50 You know, I think I’m finally now coming into a place of certainty, like feelings of like,
2:51:53 oh, like things are, things are good and they’ve gone great.
2:51:55 But yeah, but it’s, it’s hard.
2:51:58 Oh, of course it’s hard, especially if you have that kind of temperament.
2:51:59 Yes.
2:52:05 And I think you need to train yourself almost to, I just had it, it’s a set of words that
2:52:10 are, it’s a matter of bringing elegance into your life almost to live it in a way that
2:52:11 is elegant.
2:52:16 It’s nice in itself, you know, that, that is important.
2:52:20 One of the things I learned, I mean, you know, living with the Danes, Danes don’t like you
2:52:22 to eat standing.
2:52:27 They sit, they set a table and they light a candle and, you know, it’s very nice.
2:52:31 It creates a pace that the ritual, the rituals, rituals are very important.
2:52:34 And also the other thing that is very important, and I discovered is to have something to look
2:52:35 forward to.
2:52:38 You cannot just wake up one day and say, and now what?
2:52:39 There has to be something.
2:52:40 Okay.
2:52:41 That’s important.
2:52:43 I mean, you know, we all, we all have that.
2:52:46 So Rogan talks about this thing about, you know, because he has a, you know, podcast,
2:52:51 he does four, four episodes a week, plus he’s an announcer of the UFC, he has his comedy
2:52:55 career, he has three kids, he’s in a happy marriage and, you know, he’s really into working
2:52:56 out and all this.
2:53:01 And he, I heard something recently, it was actually the forward to Cameron Haynes’ book.
2:53:03 I was listening to it and he, it was amazing.
2:53:09 And he said, you know, you have to approach your life, no matter how busy or how simple
2:53:14 as a kind of work of art, like you can’t just think of it as daily life.
2:53:19 You have to have some macroscopic view of this so that you know where to put things.
2:53:21 And it’s a lot of what you’re saying as well.
2:53:22 Elegance.
2:53:23 Yeah.
2:53:24 Life has to have elegance.
2:53:28 Otherwise it’s just disjoint moments and so sometimes it would be like that and it can
2:53:30 be very creative too.
2:53:36 But most of the idea is to really get into something, I mean, I personally think that
2:53:41 when you describe me as being very steady or whatever, sounds very boring too for that
2:53:42 matter, right?
2:53:43 I mean, yeah.
2:53:44 I don’t know.
2:53:49 I mean, there’s a beauty in steadiness because from places of steadiness, you can take good
2:53:50 risks.
2:53:51 Well, right.
2:53:55 I mean, and I think that my mind is not, you know, in a steady, you know, state.
2:53:58 But I don’t have this notion, I have to see things.
2:53:59 Everybody’s talking about something.
2:54:00 I have to see it.
2:54:01 I never felt like that.
2:54:02 No.
2:54:03 I mean, I’d like to see things.
2:54:05 Don’t misunderstand me.
2:54:08 But it’s very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I’d like them
2:54:09 to do.
2:54:10 Yeah.
2:54:14 You don’t seem to need to go on like jungle adventures or like where I skate across Antarctica.
2:54:15 No.
2:54:18 Like you’ve never been one for like the kind of wild outing.
2:54:19 No.
2:54:20 No.
2:54:22 The wild outing is here.
2:54:23 That’s my wild outing.
2:54:24 Yeah.
2:54:28 I can have very wild thoughts about things that I would like, you know, sometimes they’re
2:54:29 totally wrong and so on.
2:54:35 But yeah, in a funny way, I am a little bit of what the French call an armchair, a philosopher
2:54:36 or whatever.
2:54:40 There are these people who write articles about France, if Africa would have never
2:54:43 having left France or something that sort.
2:54:44 So I’m not like that.
2:54:51 But I don’t necessarily crave this physical adventure for the sake of adventure.
2:54:52 I like beautiful things.
2:54:57 And I don’t mind repeating the same beautiful thing every year if necessary, going vacation
2:54:59 to the same places and so on.
2:55:00 Yeah.
2:55:01 You like to go back to the same place.
2:55:04 Well, there is a difference between tourism where you see new things and so on.
2:55:05 I like that.
2:55:11 There’s also the idea of vacation where you just sit and enjoy what you have, you know?
2:55:15 I confess I’ve not ever done it.
2:55:16 Well.
2:55:17 And you know this about me.
2:55:18 I’ve never taken a vacation.
2:55:23 You know, to the summer house in Denmark, you can spend a week there just enjoying it.
2:55:24 That’s it.
2:55:28 I know if I show you pictures, you know, from the window, they see the deer in the garden.
2:55:31 You know, they just sit there, you know, it’s nice.
2:55:33 So there’s nothing, you know, it’s nice.
2:55:35 It can be, you cannot spend a life doing that.
2:55:37 You know, I’m not a monk, okay?
2:55:40 I’m not a meditator that will spend hours on this.
2:55:41 But you know, it’s nice to rest.
2:55:43 You know, it’s very important, I think.
2:55:45 And the rituals are important to you.
2:55:46 Very important.
2:55:47 Yes.
2:55:51 The rituals have also a very reassuring because then you know it’s predictable, right?
2:55:54 You don’t want a totally unpredictable life all the time.
2:55:57 That’s what people create rituals, you know?
2:56:03 You early on taught me about etiquette.
2:56:08 You know, it’s something that years later, I think it was probably in the mid-90s.
2:56:12 For some reason, we were at the movies together and we saw some people at the movies and they
2:56:16 were wearing their bathroom slippers.
2:56:19 And more or less their pajamas to the movies.
2:56:23 And I’ll never forget, you grabbed my arm like you didn’t grab it forcefully.
2:56:24 We grab, you say, “You see that?”
2:56:25 I say, “Yeah.”
2:56:28 And you said, “People are coming to the movies in their pajamas.”
2:56:29 I say, “Yeah.”
2:56:32 And you said, “That’s the beginning of the end to any society.”
2:56:34 And I thought you were joking.
2:56:37 But you know, it’s something I thought about a lot.
2:56:43 You also said, and I’ll never forget, you know, you’re always better off being overdressed
2:56:49 because then at least your class that you’re speaking to or your hosts, etc., they know
2:56:52 that you took them seriously.
2:56:56 And I don’t think we really appreciate etiquette.
2:57:02 We sort of like, as Americans especially, we somehow confused freedom of choice with
2:57:04 discarding etiquette.
2:57:09 Yeah, it’s not something that you hear discussed very much, but what about etiquette?
2:57:11 Well, there are many components.
2:57:14 I think the most important one is a societal one.
2:57:18 I mean, one of the things that I like, for instance, if you go to England, how polite
2:57:19 people are.
2:57:21 Politeness is a virtue.
2:57:28 And politeness, the higher the social class, the higher the demand to be polite.
2:57:32 Its behavior is being nice to people, its understanding what they are.
2:57:35 And associated with that, there are codes.
2:57:38 Some of them are behavioral, some of them are dress codes.
2:57:43 I had a brilliant economist, the Italian economist working with me and now he’s in the East Coast,
2:57:48 who told me he went to a wedding in Italy after living in the United States and he went
2:57:52 to his cousin’s wedding and his uncle said, “You show no respect, you’re not wearing
2:57:53 cufflinks.”
2:57:57 He said, “Well, but my shirt is old, but no, no, no, go home and get cufflinks because
2:58:02 you’re showing lack of respect for not dressing the proper way to this wedding.”
2:58:06 So I think that there are expectations that people have about certain types of behavior.
2:58:10 I mean, if you look at the pictures of what’s going on now in Washington, Swan, you notice
2:58:14 that Mr. Elon Musk, who’s always in a t-shirt that says, “Let’s go to Mars,” suddenly he’s
2:58:20 wearing a tuxedo because now he’s part of a group of people that are behaving like government
2:58:21 officials should behave.
2:58:24 You know, you don’t go in sandals and shorts.
2:58:26 But Silicon Valley is famous for the flip-flops and the hoodie.
2:58:33 Right, because the problem is that people confuse the style with the message.
2:58:37 They think that because you wear a hoodie, because Mark Zuckerberg was wearing hoodies,
2:58:39 makes you brilliant.
2:58:43 And I think that the issue of dress codes elicit a certain sense of behavior in people,
2:58:44 as you said.
2:58:50 I mean, how would you feel if you went on a first date with someone that comes in here,
2:58:54 you know, slippers and a bathrobe and say, “Let’s go to the movies.”
2:58:55 It’s not happened yet.
2:58:56 Well, okay.
2:59:00 So what I’m saying is, you don’t have to overdo it.
2:59:01 That’s another issue.
2:59:03 And you have to also conform to the roles of the society.
2:59:07 I noticed, for instance, that in the East Coast, people dress much more properly than
2:59:09 in the West Coast.
2:59:13 You go to New York and you see men wearing suits and ties.
2:59:17 You don’t see that here, perhaps in LA, not in the Bay Area, ever.
2:59:18 Yeah.
2:59:24 One thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina, men keep their jackets
2:59:26 and ties over the whole night.
2:59:28 I’ve always kept my jacket and tie on the entire night.
2:59:33 In the United States, it’s almost like moments after people arrive at any party in a suit,
2:59:34 they start undressing.
2:59:35 Yeah.
2:59:36 Right.
2:59:37 Why did they dress up then?
2:59:38 Yeah.
2:59:39 Okay.
2:59:40 So that’s my view.
2:59:43 So I am not necessarily someone that advocates wearing a tie when I go to work and so on,
2:59:47 but I really believe that there are codes of conduct that sort of reflect many things.
2:59:50 And you’re also, you’re projecting a message, right?
2:59:55 I mean, the idea of a hoodie, I want one or the other, first of all, was hurting behavior.
2:59:58 You had to wear one because then you’re cool or whatever.
2:59:59 Okay.
3:00:01 In other lessons, I understand it.
3:00:03 I mean, that’s what you do as an other lesson.
3:00:04 You do what others do.
3:00:10 But as you grow up, you can also signal whom you are by the way you dress and you behave.
3:00:16 What do you think about the discourse on platforms like X where you can see a mix, including
3:00:20 a lot of academics and high-level thinkers acting kind of like teenagers?
3:00:21 Well, okay.
3:00:22 They want to be popular.
3:00:23 That’s all.
3:00:24 They want to draw attention.
3:00:25 Yeah.
3:00:26 This is kind of a new thing.
3:00:31 I mean, I won’t name names, but some people who are considered some of the smartest people
3:00:38 in the world, like what they, their discourse on social media is like, I mean, they wouldn’t
3:00:42 last two seconds on the schoolyard is how they get hit in the face.
3:00:46 You know, they suck weird, like grown men acting kind of like teenagers.
3:00:47 Okay.
3:00:50 Well, that’s, they have a problem because they want to be thought of as young.
3:00:51 That’s a whole different story.
3:00:52 Okay.
3:00:53 That’s a different story.
3:00:57 I mean, instead of what I said, I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether
3:01:01 or not the rules, the rules that, you know, that rule, you know, the rules that say how
3:01:06 you should dress to do one thing or the other or not, do not operate for you.
3:01:08 And then you decide to be very different.
3:01:11 You know, there are many people who are like that and like to be iconoplastic.
3:01:15 I heard many stories about, we were talking about Richard Feynman who actually made a
3:01:16 case.
3:01:20 I mean, Mary Gilman used to say that about him to be so different that people will talk
3:01:23 about it because he was very interested in people telling stories about pongo, German
3:01:26 naked on the roof, not brushing his teeth.
3:01:27 Exactly.
3:01:28 All that.
3:01:29 Okay.
3:01:30 So that he, he, he was very good at drawing attention.
3:01:31 Okay.
3:01:32 That’s fine.
3:01:33 You can also draw attention by dressing very nicely.
3:01:38 You know, it’s all, it’s all a matter of, I mean, I was reflecting, you know, we go
3:01:43 to the symphony in San Francisco regularly and we are donors and so on.
3:01:44 Sometimes you go to a concert.
3:01:46 It’s an amazing thing what you see there.
3:01:50 Some people nicely dressed, some people dressed us, they just woke up, they didn’t have time
3:01:53 to get dressed and, you know, got there, you know, in their, whatever.
3:01:58 But do you think that going back to the, the initial, you know, ping of the question, do
3:02:04 you think that, that we have societally gone, that we’re sort of drifting towards, like,
3:02:08 for lack of a better word, chaos, sort of social interaction chaos?
3:02:11 Well, you know, I think the pendulum will swing again.
3:02:16 The other day I was talking to some reading, actually, that suddenly, not only in New
3:02:21 York, but in the Midwest, men are starting to wear jacket and ties, not just for work.
3:02:22 Okay.
3:02:23 They go on dates like that.
3:02:24 So, you know, it’s a pendulum.
3:02:26 It goes back and forth, back and forth.
3:02:30 I don’t think we’re going to end up at a time when, you know, you have to wear tails to,
3:02:31 to have breakfast or something.
3:02:34 I think only the aristocrats used to do that.
3:02:39 But I think that, you know, it’s an issue of how, also, how we perceive the world through
3:02:41 the eyes of television and movies.
3:02:42 Okay.
3:02:45 If movies start showing that everybody’s dressed whatever, you know, people are gonna do the
3:02:46 same thing.
3:02:49 If movies start showing, you know, the trends that we see in movies are the trends that
3:02:51 essentially society follows.
3:02:52 Okay.
3:02:57 So, I think that we, this is, I don’t think we’re going to chaos, it’s gonna revert.
3:03:02 California is a particular place because it has always been a place where people, in
3:03:06 order to feel free, they had to dress differently and who cares and all that stuff.
3:03:08 But it’s not everywhere.
3:03:09 Yeah.
3:03:11 It’s kind of interesting that now counterculture is conservatism.
3:03:12 Right.
3:03:13 Right.
3:03:15 We’re back, we’re back to that.
3:03:17 The anti-war group is the more conservative anyway.
3:03:22 I mean, also, people like, you know, it’s interesting how Americans are fascinated with English
3:03:24 aristocracy and traditions.
3:03:29 I’ve been to High Table Dinner at King’s College in Cambridge twice.
3:03:31 You know, everybody dresses properly.
3:03:35 They wear gowns and the fellows are sitting at a table and everybody else and people love
3:03:36 it.
3:03:38 They like to see that in the movies.
3:03:39 Well, it’s theater.
3:03:40 Yeah.
3:03:42 I mean, it’s academic theater, a little bit of pomp and circumstance, but it’s theater.
3:03:43 And it’s nice.
3:03:46 Well, we have the same thing on commencement, you know, traditions and so on.
3:03:47 Yeah.
3:03:50 No parent wants to go to a graduation that’s, you know, kind of a free-for-all.
3:03:52 They want to see some order.
3:03:53 Absolutely.
3:03:54 Absolutely.
3:03:56 And I think that, you know, there is a place for that and some people will, I mean, there
3:04:00 are designers and so on of clothing and so on that exploit this nostalgia for that kind
3:04:04 of elegant world, you know, Ralph Lauren and so on.
3:04:10 So it’s always in your 1960s, fancy, you know, club type clothing and so on.
3:04:11 Yeah.
3:04:15 Do you plan to ever retire?
3:04:17 I don’t know what it means.
3:04:22 I mean, if you retire, no, no, because I’m not a postal worker.
3:04:27 I’m not a cook at a restaurant that eventually says, “Okay, I cooked it long enough that
3:04:29 I collect my retirement and go home.”
3:04:35 I have a mind that it works and I need an environment where that mind can thrive and
3:04:39 I need an environment where, you know, for one year when I left Hewlett Packard, I was
3:04:44 basically, I took a course in generativity and so on, but I was really a bit idle.
3:04:48 So suddenly, I mean, in a context where people have problems and so on that I’d really like
3:04:52 to listen to, there’s a social component to work, as you know.
3:04:58 So retirement is, retirement means what, you know, you’re a postal worker and one day you
3:05:04 stop delivering mail and you stay home watching the paint dry and that’s not me, okay?
3:05:09 So to me, I’m working and I enjoy it and, you know, the day that will come that I cannot
3:05:10 enjoy it, I’ll stop.
3:05:14 And I think that, again, goes with this issue of getting bored with things that you don’t
3:05:18 like to do, you know, because you’ve done it for a long time.
3:05:26 Now, I enjoy my life, but I don’t think in terms of, I’ll say something, the CEO of my
3:05:30 company said, “Great guy, Phil McKinney,” said, “Bernardo, I don’t work for the money
3:05:31 here.”
3:05:32 I said, “I don’t either.
3:05:36 I mean, I like to get paid, but if I don’t like it, I’ll walk and I can do that.”
3:05:38 So it’s not that I’m doing this for the income.
3:05:39 That’s what I’m trying to say.
3:05:42 It seems like you’ve never pursued money for its own sake.
3:05:43 No.
3:05:44 But…
3:05:45 Nor did you ever encourage me to pursue money for its own sake.
3:05:46 No.
3:05:49 But as my cousin, the physicist used to say, money doesn’t bring happiness, but it points
3:05:51 in the right direction.
3:05:54 I would say money doesn’t bring happiness, but it can buffer stress.
3:05:55 Right.
3:05:58 It allows you to have the things you want to have and you don’t have to…
3:05:59 Absolutely.
3:06:00 Absolutely.
3:06:01 Right.
3:06:02 Yeah.
3:06:04 I think money is an important aspect of our lives, having it and so on.
3:06:08 I live for many years as a graduate student with no money and it was very painful, I’ll
3:06:09 tell you.
3:06:13 Sometimes I didn’t eat dinner because I didn’t have any money.
3:06:19 So I like having money to do the things that I like, but I don’t work for money.
3:06:23 Many people say, “Well, I invented so many things, I could have started in some companies
3:06:28 and make a lot of money, I don’t regret that at all.”
3:06:32 The ultra-rich people that I know who are happy are still working every day.
3:06:33 Right.
3:06:37 Because beyond a certain amount of money, you still have to brush your teeth like everybody
3:06:38 else.
3:06:39 Okay.
3:06:41 You can dream of having 150 toothbrushes, but so what?
3:06:42 Right.
3:06:43 And you can only eat so many steaks.
3:06:44 Yeah.
3:06:45 Yeah.
3:06:46 I mean, that we all cover.
3:06:48 The question is, what do you do with your life?
3:06:50 Now, you want to travel, well, you can travel.
3:06:56 It’s nice if you can travel in better ways than being an undergrad with the backpack,
3:06:57 although it can be adventurous.
3:07:02 I had fun backpacking on a limited budget where part of the joy of traveling that way
3:07:08 is you’re thrown into kind of street-level interactions and use hostels and things like
3:07:09 that.
3:07:10 Yeah, I went through Europe like that.
3:07:11 I mean, I wouldn’t change that for anything.
3:07:12 No, I went through Europe as a graduate student.
3:07:13 I quit everything.
3:07:16 I went to Europe in winter and it was quite an adventure.
3:07:17 In the winter?
3:07:18 In the winter, it was horrendous.
3:07:19 I had very little money.
3:07:25 I stayed in places where in Paris where the lady in the little hotel would turn off the
3:07:27 light if I turned it on in the middle of the night.
3:07:28 It was awful.
3:07:29 And yet?
3:07:30 To save energy.
3:07:31 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:07:32 And it was very funny.
3:07:37 But I met people that were interesting and I engaged, you know, it was, I still, I still,
3:07:42 every once in a while I hear from one or two of those people I met years ago in trains.
3:07:44 I went by train everywhere.
3:07:46 I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter, you know.
3:07:48 Everything seems to lead back to Denmark.
3:07:49 Yeah.
3:07:50 It’s a nice country.
3:07:51 Well, now you have a Danish wife.
3:07:52 Yeah, so.
3:07:53 And have for a long time.
3:07:54 And have for a long time.
3:07:55 Yeah, many times.
3:07:56 Yeah, yeah.
3:07:57 No, I, yeah, I like it.
3:08:01 It’s a very different contrast to Europe, the Central Europe and so on, you know, then
3:08:06 Northern Europe, Denmark, Sweden, Norway is a very special kind of, you know, country
3:08:07 and people.
3:08:08 Yeah, I like them a lot.
3:08:09 Life is very easy there.
3:08:11 I like Scandinavia.
3:08:12 Yeah.
3:08:13 Yeah, it’s very nice.
3:08:14 Yes.
3:08:15 Good, good, good natured people.
3:08:16 Yes.
3:08:17 Good saunas.
3:08:18 Yeah.
3:08:19 Yeah.
3:08:20 And sunshine at least in the summer.
3:08:22 In the summer only, yeah.
3:08:27 Any plans for the next couple of years, anything that we should put on the calendar to make
3:08:29 sure that we get in?
3:08:32 No, because I cannot plan that well.
3:08:33 I don’t plan.
3:08:34 I just.
3:08:35 Neither.
3:08:36 Maybe I inherited it from you.
3:08:37 Well, I just move.
3:08:38 I just move and intuitive.
3:08:40 I’m very intuitive about these things.
3:08:42 I suddenly see something, you know, this quantum stuff.
3:08:43 I don’t know.
3:08:44 I started hearing about it.
3:08:48 I talked to a brilliant guy who was in my lab and said, hey, Jing, what do you think
3:08:49 about this?
3:08:50 It sounds interesting.
3:08:51 Let’s do it.
3:08:52 And we’re doing it.
3:08:57 I am lucky that I get paid to do that, but no, I don’t have plans like that.
3:09:03 I would like to, we would like, I mean, we would like to organize our life a little
3:09:07 bit differently now that, you know, that we have a summer house in Denmark and so on.
3:09:08 I still plan to travel there.
3:09:11 I like Europe a lot, but I don’t know if I can live there.
3:09:13 I like Switzerland a lot.
3:09:18 I want to go to Argentina every year and I feel very close to my family.
3:09:19 That’s very important.
3:09:21 We are all going for an event there.
3:09:24 I hope that you can join us if you can.
3:09:28 So those things are very important to me, but I, no, I don’t have plans for anything.
3:09:31 I don’t know.
3:09:33 I’d like to be surprised.
3:09:45 Well, dad, I want to extend a real sense of gratitude from me, from everyone listening
3:09:50 and watching, although you may argue that they’re not going to be interested.
3:09:54 This has been our back and forth over the last months as I’ve tried to convince you
3:09:56 to do this podcast.
3:10:00 I can assure you that they were, they are very interested.
3:10:05 Your story is a really unique one and I can say that both as your son, but also as somebody
3:10:10 who’s sat across from scientists from all different, you know, domains and backgrounds,
3:10:17 not just neuroscientists, I also really appreciate your ability to explain complicated things
3:10:25 in ways that at least we can start to get an understanding because these are hard concepts.
3:10:31 And you know, I think what comes through so clearly is that somehow you’ve been able to
3:10:37 grab these high level really abstract concepts and work with them and try to understand them,
3:10:40 but you’ve also been able to lead a life where you’re really grounded in the day to
3:10:42 day and in reality.
3:10:46 And I have to say your wish for me and for Laura and I assume for everyone else to be
3:10:47 joyful.
3:10:50 I’ll work on that.
3:10:56 And also, I must say, it just hit me like square in the face during this discussion
3:11:03 that I get such peace and I can really focus on being joyful knowing that you’re joyful.
3:11:07 Like it’s so clear like you have a joyful life at so many levels and that you’ve pursued
3:11:12 what you wanted to do over and over.
3:11:15 And you know, some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were going to
3:11:17 get into our issues and things like that.
3:11:21 I’ll just briefly say that yeah, we’ve had our ups, we’ve had our downs and we’ve certainly
3:11:28 landed up and much, much higher than we ever would had we not had all of that.
3:11:34 And as I told you last year around this time on your birthday when we all got together
3:11:38 to celebrate like we’re not just good, we’re beyond good.
3:11:44 So anything that comes up around that I want to just go on record saying that like that’s
3:11:47 water under the bridge and I don’t ever think about it.
3:11:52 All I think about are the incredible gifts that you’ve given me about curiosity and pursuing
3:11:59 my curiosity about putting new footprints on untread beaches, the early discussions around
3:12:01 the excitement that science can bring.
3:12:03 I mean, I remember all of it.
3:12:08 I really remember all of it and in immense detail and I love your stories about scientists
3:12:13 both how they soar and also how human they are and how they’re fallible like the rest
3:12:14 of us.
3:12:19 So, you know, there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t thank God because I do believe
3:12:26 in God, that you’re my father, that you and mom created me and Laura and that I’ve had
3:12:29 the life that I have and that I continue to have the life that I have.
3:12:35 So I just want to thank you for the example and the nurturing and for coming here.
3:12:36 There aren’t words.
3:12:37 Well, thank you.
3:12:39 You know how much I love you.
3:12:45 I think that these words are the biggest gift that I get and I think any father listening
3:12:50 to that, to his son or daughter saying that would also feel the same way or no matter
3:12:51 for no matter.
3:12:56 It is a very fulfilling feeling, you know, to have that notion that you feel that you
3:13:02 owe so much to what you got and also the fact that you’ve done incredibly well and the kind
3:13:03 of person you are.
3:13:04 Yeah.
3:13:10 So, I wish you all the wisdom that you need in order to just go through life the way,
3:13:15 you know, you’re going but I think that it’s nice to also that we are sort of on the same
3:13:17 wavelength and many things.
3:13:21 In you, I see more of a reflection of what I always wanted to be as well.
3:13:23 So that’s easier in a way.
3:13:25 Perhaps it’s because fathers and sons have that.
3:13:27 So we certainly relate.
3:13:28 Yes.
3:13:29 Well, thank you.
3:13:30 Thank you.
3:13:31 I love you.
3:13:32 I love you too.
3:13:33 You know that.
3:13:36 Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman.
3:13:40 To learn more about his work, please see the links in the show note captions.
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3:14:13 For those of you that haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out.
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3:15:29 Those one-to-three-page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate
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3:15:31 We have a foundational fitness protocol.
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3:15:59 [MUSIC]