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

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Speaker 1 I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Speaker 1 My guest today is Dr. Bernardo Huberman.
Dr. Bernardo Huberman is the Vice President of Next Gen Systems at Cable Labs.

Speaker 1 Prior to that, he was the director of the Social Computing Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard, and he is, as his name suggests, my father.

Speaker 1 Today, Today we discuss various topics in science, including relativity theory, chaos theory, and quantum computing.

Speaker 1 But I'd like to assure you that even if you have zero background in physics, computer science, or mathematics, that entire discussion will be clear to you as to what those things are and even some of how they work.

Speaker 1 During today's discussion, we also talk about a life of science, that is, what it is to spend one's life in curiosity, in trying to understand the universe around us and how to understand ourselves.

Speaker 1 Indeed, today we also talk about neuroscience, how the brain works, and the different sorts of questions that I do believe everybody asks, whether you're a scientist or not.

Speaker 1 Questions like, where do we come from? Is there a God? What is our use or purpose in the universe?

Speaker 1 And how is it that we can ponder these super high-level, abstract questions about how we got here and what our purpose is and how things work at the quantum level, tiny, tiny bits of things that we can't even see.

Speaker 1 And at the same time, to lead an everyday life that is meaningful meaningful and joyful.

Speaker 1 We talk about this in the context of understanding oneself in relation to others, family, community, including scientific community, and what it is like to come from a different country.

Speaker 1 My father immigrated from South America, what it was like to do science in the United States then and now, cultural differences. And of course, we touch on some of our relationship as well.

Speaker 1 How could we not? I must say, for me, it was an immense pleasure and privilege to have this conversation, not just because Dr.

Speaker 1 Huberman is my father, but because I believe the knowledge and indeed some of the wisdom that he shares will be useful to everybody about what it is to carve one's own unique trajectory in terms of career and life, and at the same time, how to savor the simple, everyday things that make life so worth living.

Speaker 1 Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

Speaker 1 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

Speaker 1 In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep.

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And now for my discussion with Dr.

Speaker 1 Bernardo Huberman. Dr.
Bernardo Huberman.

Speaker 2 Welcome. Thank you, Andrew.

Speaker 1 And also great to see you, Dad.

Speaker 2 Same here.

Speaker 1 I guess no premonition would have foreseen this one.

Speaker 2 No. No, absolutely not.

Speaker 1 And people might notice today I'm drinking out of a mate gourd, in part in honor of my father's father, who drank out of his loose leaf mate every morning.

Speaker 1 My first sip of mate was taken on sitting in his lap when I was maybe four years old. Yes, yes.
In my Spider-Man pajamas. In any event, let's talk about science.

Speaker 1 You're born in Argentina.

Speaker 1 As I recall, because once we had a conversation about it, you had a teacher, maybe it was in high school. who turned you on to physics, which became your field of choice.

Speaker 2 But prior to that, were you interested in different subjects?

Speaker 1 I don't recall if you had an avid interest in academics or you just did it because you were supposed to. Prior to that, teacher, then we'll talk about him.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. I was always very interested in ideas and so on.
Science at that time was a bit vague, but I read a lot of philosophy.

Speaker 2 I didn't understand much of what I read, but nevertheless, I kept reading it. I was interested in psychology.

Speaker 2 I was an avid reader.

Speaker 2 As a matter of fact, I embarrassed my father or actually made him disappointed when for a birthday, I think I was 14 years old, I asked him to buy me the 12 volumes of Freud's writings.

Speaker 2 And yeah, and he said, what for?

Speaker 2 But I was very impressed with it. Of course, I couldn't even understand half of what these books had

Speaker 2 in them. So I was very interested in many things.

Speaker 2 And I must say to you that my interest in science, in particular physics, doesn't come from the standard thing that you see here in the United States mostly, namely I was not always kid in math.

Speaker 2 You know, I was not one of these people that can really do things very, very quickly and so on. But I was interested because I thought that physics was going to complement

Speaker 2 my

Speaker 2 attempt at understanding how the whole universe is put together. The philosophers were saying all sorts of things.

Speaker 2 I went to a very special school that I learned six years of Latin and so on, and I had to read things like Kant and

Speaker 2 Cosmogonies and so on that really didn't mean much to me. But suddenly I started discovering that physics might be interesting.

Speaker 2 And I had a cousin, Hector, who was a physicist, a particle physicist already. I mean, he was living at that time in France.
And so there was a little bit of that influence.

Speaker 2 But my interest was in things that had to do with fairly abstract ideas.

Speaker 2 I cannot believe that at one point or the other I was very good in geometry class, being able to prove theorems. I mean, the teacher would just say, let's prove this.

Speaker 2 And I was somehow able to reason through and come to some proofs.

Speaker 1 So I think that I was very interested in ideas and not necessarily in the very concrete aspects of science at that time can I ask you a question about early schooling so if I remember correctly you were born naturally left-handed yes they forced you to learn

Speaker 2 to write with your right hand yes you went to a very strict school yes like military levels of strictness almost yes yes this is a very interesting type of education they have it in France it's called the lycée in France and this is a very special school in Argentina.

Speaker 2 It was actually founded in the 1500s by the Jesuits. And my father went to that school.

Speaker 2 And so he wanted me to go there. And my brother went there too.
And in six years of a very strict education, mostly humanistic, I learned Greek and learned Latin.

Speaker 2 I learned immense amounts of history, which I loved.

Speaker 2 And there were other courses in French and so on. In French, we had to memorize incredibly long poems that we had to recite.

Speaker 1 Do you still remember some of them? Because sometimes early memories are embedded so deeply.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. And my brother and I sometimes tell each other some of the pieces of these poems.
Yes.

Speaker 1 I'll just say something right now to foreshadow what will likely happen several times throughout today's discussion, which is anytime that my father is in the presence of his brother, my uncle, Carlos,

Speaker 1 they start laughing about jokes that they've been telling over and over back and forth with one another since they were a young kid.

Speaker 1 So just the mere mention of his brother will bring a bit of a smile and a chuckle to both of our faces.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 So I learned a lot of French and also my parents decided, my mother mostly, that I had to learn French and English and I went to Alliance Française where for five years I went there.

Speaker 2 I was essentially the only boy in the class, which was very nice in a way. And in order to graduate, I essentially have to be fluent in French.

Speaker 2 But the special school I went to, the discipline, was very strict, very strict.

Speaker 2 We were supposed to do things you don't do in the United States. The moment the teacher walks in, everybody stands up.

Speaker 2 And if you're late and standing up, you're just kicked out of the classroom and things of that sort.

Speaker 2 But it was a lovely experience in many ways when I reflect on it because it gave me a humanistic education that has been incredibly useful in my career. Most people don't realize that.

Speaker 2 I mean, I tend to think of things in a very broad context, and it's because of the education I had. Okay, so and I loved history of Rome and I'd learned to recite things in Latin

Speaker 2 and so it was very, very, I enjoyed that very, very much. My brother didn't, actually.
And so.

Speaker 1 Well, you two are very different. I have great, great adoration for Carlos, but you two are very different.

Speaker 1 And along those lines, I was just about to ask or mention, and some of our Argentine and South American listeners generally, and perhaps even European listeners, might be shocked and perhaps disappointed to learn that you're one of the few Argentines that I know who doesn't care much for the game of football, soccer.

Speaker 1 It doesn't seem to concern you much at all.

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 2 The reasons for that are sort of interesting, I think. I've reflected on that because my own wife likes to watch a soccer game.
I mean, she's Danish. She likes European tournaments.

Speaker 2 I never liked mob behavior. I never liked this whole passionate involvement in these things.
I don't know why. I was never

Speaker 2 able to understand it. To the point that I never went to a soccer game.
game till the week before I left for the United States. My brother insisted that I had to go to a soccer game.

Speaker 2 And this is sort of embarrassing, but at one point or the other, someone, you know, there was a good goal. And so I stood up and said, this is great.

Speaker 2 And I turned out I was on the wrong side of the audience.

Speaker 2 People got very almost violent with me, you know. So I, yeah, soccer to me is something that I watch, but I'm not passionate about.
Right. Yeah, I never really felt that I was that interesting.

Speaker 2 Although I, you know, I was in a rowing team. I learned boxing.
I did a lot of sports. But I don't like that much of spectator sports, like tennis.
I played tennis since I was a teenager.

Speaker 1 I'm not a spectator sport fan either. The other day, someone asked me what my favorite sports team is.
You'll like this. And I said the Harlem Globetrotters because they're undefeated.

Speaker 1 They have the best record. And that was actually the one professional sports team game you took me to when I was a kid.
We'd always go see the Globetrotters.

Speaker 2 Yes. They're undefeated.
Yes, unbelievable. Yes, yes.
My father took me to see them too. They're fantastic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it.

Speaker 1 So your father was not a scientist. Your brother's not a scientist.

Speaker 1 And you were fated, according to them, to join the family business. But then you had a teacher who exposed you to physics.

Speaker 2 To physics and to the notion of being authentic in what you want. There were two parts to it.
He was a very interesting and tormented man, I felt. But it was very interesting.

Speaker 2 He would come into the class. Most of the students, you know, really didn't care about what he was saying.
And so I was fascinated, not only by what he was saying, but his whole personality.

Speaker 2 But I need to say something here that is important.

Speaker 2 I also was rather irresponsible. You see, I grew up in a family, a well-to-do family, that I never thought I was going to make a living.

Speaker 2 So it was easy to be interested in science or anything because, you know, it's what you do.

Speaker 2 You're interested in culture, you read books, you do things. But my father used to say, what are you going to do once you graduate?

Speaker 2 You don't want to start teaching in elementary schools or something of that sort. My brother used to say, if he does physics, I'll have to support him because he still says that.

Speaker 1 So scientists were considered poor?

Speaker 2 Poor, yeah, yeah, they couldn't get a job. I mean, science in Argentina.
Argentina has a big tradition in medical sciences, I think, two or three Nobel Prizes and so on.

Speaker 2 But in physics, they produced some very good physicists. One of them lives in the United States.
I mean, he's very, very famous, Malda Sena.

Speaker 2 I haven't met him, but I know he's one of the top people in the field. But I just got into this because I was interested.
It sounded

Speaker 2 fascinating and abstract and the ideas were so powerful.

Speaker 2 And I think, and I reflected a lot on this, when you're psychologically in adolescent, because my parents made me jump two grades, so I was much younger than my classmates.

Speaker 2 And that created a lot of problems for me. I mean, at the time when you were developing and so on, all the boys were talking about girls and so on.

Speaker 2 I still was really into understanding why the excitement and so on. I was very young.
But

Speaker 2 it gave me a sense of order.

Speaker 2 Reading a book book about physics and understanding that there are laws that tell you how things work gave me a tremendous sense of order and power.

Speaker 2 So, you know, everything else was a little bit in flow and the family and my own relationships with friends and girlfriends or whatever.

Speaker 2 And going back to science, it was just a sense of, and I still remember those days. It was very, very

Speaker 2 soothing in a way. So it's like a touchstone.
Yes, yes, yes. And I think that's...

Speaker 1 And what grade were you exposed? This teacher was this like middle school, high school?

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, yeah, high school. Yeah, I was 13 or 14 years old.
Yeah, yeah. When I finally, I started listening to this and I said, wow, this is impressive.

Speaker 2 You know, it's powerful.

Speaker 2 There are ways to know what's true and what's not true. You know,

Speaker 2 you just don't speculate on things.

Speaker 2 So, but most of this stuff I didn't really understand.

Speaker 2 Then I had this cousin of mine, Hector, who was already gone, but I would go to his parents' house and there there were his books, all these incredible books on quantum mechanics, relativity, and I would just take them home.

Speaker 2 And I didn't really comprehend a lot of the math, but somehow it seemed impressive. It was like looking into a mechanism or something.

Speaker 2 So, and I used to take them to school. And one of my teachers once said, you know, you seem to be interested in this, but you don't understand it.
So

Speaker 2 you need to learn it. And he was the one who started pushing me into this.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, my family was saying you should become a lawyer. Just, you know, my brother and father.

Speaker 1 And that never interested you?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 It's interesting because now I'm very interested in aspects of constitutional law and so on.

Speaker 2 When I hear about arguments against the Supreme Court and so on, I became very interested in law and economics later on, just to read about it.

Speaker 2 But what my father was talking about at the dining room table was all about strategies of

Speaker 2 getting

Speaker 2 something done half an hour before the opposition so you win a case. I mean, I was totally interested in that.

Speaker 1 I'm sensing a bit of a theme, which is that social dynamics and what other people do, regardless of whether or not they like it or it earns them a particular living,

Speaker 1 didn't capture you. Like the idea that people and their groups and their ways of thinking and behaving, while

Speaker 1 they may not bother you, it didn't captivate you.

Speaker 1 It sounds like physics made you think that there's something kind of bigger, that there's something more universal, which indeed physics is, right?

Speaker 2 It explains most everything. Yes, and I most everything.
Yes, and I also think that I was a bit of a loner. It was very hard to find people that, you know,

Speaker 2 I mean, children are young people that thought like me. So eventually I became part of a group.

Speaker 2 We were four or five guys that used to get together on Saturdays and, you know, go to the movies and so on. And then afterwards discuss, you know, whatever we were interested in and so on.

Speaker 2 I was only 16 years old, you know, and deciding what to do with my life. Of all four of us, we committed.

Speaker 2 Some of them came from incredibly wealthy families, two of them. We committed to really be true to ourselves and pursue what we liked.
But I was the only one.

Speaker 2 The other two ended up running the business of their parents. And one of them essentially, I don't know what he did.
I saw him years later.

Speaker 1 Money becomes a pretty bright beacon for a lot of people.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm grateful to you that you

Speaker 1 never pushed me to go in any particular direction.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 You pushed me to not go in particular directions, but never with respect to academic choices. In fact, I don't recall you telling me

Speaker 1 or Laura, by the way, folks, that's my sister's name,

Speaker 1 that we had to do anything except attend our classes and do our best. But I never felt pushed to go into science.

Speaker 2 No. No.
Although you had a little bit of a curiosity about it.

Speaker 1 Animals.

Speaker 2 Animals? And I remember I was going through a period in which I started getting convinced that there was very little to do in physics and I wanted to change.

Speaker 2 And one day on a bike ride, I think I was carrying on the back of my bicycle, you were young, you asked me, what is the unsolved problem? And I said, I don't think it's in physics, but it's the brain.

Speaker 2 And you said, okay, I'll go into that. You said, I'll never forget that.

Speaker 1 Well, it's interesting. I'm fascinated by human memory, as you know.
I know you are as well. And I recall that story as well.
I recall it slightly differently, but we're really closely aligned.

Speaker 1 She says, I remember you used to walk me to school in the morning

Speaker 1 and you would drop me off at the cut through to the path behind Gunn High School

Speaker 1 because that's I would pick up Kristen Harnett across the street and you told me it would be better if I picked her up by myself and walked her to the end of the street which is where class was you were teaching me chivalry

Speaker 1 and I remember asking you what you do I was probably five or six years let's say first grade so it would probably be somewhere around six or seven years old I asked you what you do and you said physics and I and I said well what is that and you said well

Speaker 1 let me tell you the feeling it gives me instead you said you know the night before your birthday and I said yeah and he said you know that feeling and I said yeah and you said well that's how I feel every day when I go to work yeah and I remember I'll never forget that and I said what do you do and you said I'm a physicist and I and I said well then I'll be a physicist and then I recall so maybe we had the conversation twice

Speaker 1 you saying

Speaker 1 well most of the big problems in physics are solved so you should pick something perhaps a little less untread, like.

Speaker 1 And I said, like what? And you said, well, the brain is pretty interesting. And then I said, okay, I'll work on that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, that's true. This issue of feeling like before your birthday is something I remember saying to you.
I don't recall feeling that way every day.

Speaker 2 I do recall feeling like this when I had an idea and finally worked out and we wrote a paper and so on. You know, it was an incredibly exciting time.

Speaker 2 Well, you know about it. You've done it yourself now.
And

Speaker 2 so I wanted to convey that to you. It was very, very interesting and important to me that you understood that.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, it made me feel very isolated as well, not only with you, with everybody. I mean, it's a very esoteric field.

Speaker 2 You used to walk into the study, look at me, writing equations and so on. And when you say, what's that?

Speaker 1 I was thinking about your study, which was just a door down from my childhood bedroom. I still remember the way that your study smelled.
I can still smell it.

Speaker 1 I have an incredible sense of memory for certain things.

Speaker 1 I can still remember, but I remember how your books were aligned, where your stereo was placed, your photos, your photo of Einstein, your photos of me and Lara and mom. I remember all of it.

Speaker 1 And the sofa that was just off behind it because you're a nap taker,

Speaker 1 which I inherited from you.

Speaker 1 But I remember that, yeah, you would spend a lot of time in that office and listening to classical music.

Speaker 1 Do you listen to music while you work or did you listen? All the time.

Speaker 2 All the time. Yeah.
classical music for me is something I discovered very young, very young.

Speaker 2 My parents also loved classical music, my brother too, and it's something that to me has a tremendous emotional resonance with the way I feel. Sometimes it's background music.

Speaker 2 Sometimes I really listen very carefully. It's something that I, yes, I've always had in my life and still have it.
I mean, it's very, very important to me.

Speaker 1 But not many musicians in our family.

Speaker 2 No, unfortunately. Yeah.
Although there is a very famous one. We've all tried.

Speaker 2 We've all tried. Yeah, yeah, you in particular.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And we all failed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a very famous Huberman, the great violinist, Bronislav Huberman.
I mean, there's a picture. I think I sent it to you, and Einstein.

Speaker 2 He was one of the greatest violinists in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, an incredibly interesting man. He's the founder of the Israel Philharmonic.

Speaker 2 And that's one of the reasons that the name Huberman is in some street in Israel because of him.

Speaker 1 Are we related to him?

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, not.

Speaker 1 Which explains the lack of musical prowess in our family. We all love music, but none of us are good musicians.

Speaker 2 No, right, yes. Except my cousin Diego.
Diego was he has a perfect ear, so he can really do interesting things. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 So going back to

Speaker 2 your

Speaker 1 childhood, this teacher,

Speaker 2 right?

Speaker 1 So, I mean, what was it? You already had sort of seeded an interest in

Speaker 1 finding order, in things that made the world make sense.

Speaker 1 What was the political situation in Argentina at that time?

Speaker 2 Quite horrible parts of it. I mean, there was a dictatorship that lasted for a long time, this Peron thing and so on.

Speaker 2 He was really a follower of Mussolini and people of that sort during World War II.

Speaker 1 So, what did that mean, like out in the streets? Like, you grew up in the heart of Buenos Aires, but like, what did that mean in terms of, I mean, was there poverty everywhere?

Speaker 1 Were people, I mean, I mean, was there violence?

Speaker 2 I mean, what does it spell out to you? Well, it was a very, it was a very oppressive regime. I mean, you had had to be careful what you talked about.
You know, in my family, like most of

Speaker 2 that social class, we had maids and a cook, and so you had to be very careful what you said.

Speaker 1 Because they would run that information out.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 And your grandfather, my father, at one point, was prevented from coming to visit me in the United States because he was classified as a communist because he did not join the Petonist party.

Speaker 2 Okay, for the record.

Speaker 1 We are not communists. We are both big believers in capitalism

Speaker 2 sitting here at this table.

Speaker 2 So it was terrible. It was a terrible time.
It was a very oppressive time.

Speaker 1 But he wasn't a communist either.

Speaker 2 No, of course not. Of course, no, no.
He was on the other side. But the idea at that time, it was to be classified as such.

Speaker 2 Eventually, that information leaked to the, obviously, to the American authorities. So when he asked for a visa, they denied him.
It was a very complicated story.

Speaker 2 I don't think we should waste time to know how it got eventually resolved to a friend of mine who was a priest and a Jesuit here in the United States.

Speaker 2 But the point being that during that time, it was a very, you have to be very careful the way you spoke, the way you said things.

Speaker 2 And there was a dictatorship that was very much like the fascist in Italy.

Speaker 2 And actually, that dictatorship lasted until a few years ago, because as you know, perhaps you heard, the new president we have is one that actually ran against this whole ideology, Peronism and so on.

Speaker 2 Millet. Millet, yes.
So

Speaker 2 I was never, I was not political at all, but you have to be careful.

Speaker 2 But it was a funny,

Speaker 2 funny time. And when he was overthrown through a military revolution, you know, my parents were, you know, delighted, and I remember the celebrations and so on.

Speaker 2 But that was considered the minority that was against him. You know, it was a social class movement.
The working class was behind Perron and what he promised and what he gave them.

Speaker 2 But that eventually died. So the real problem was that there was no

Speaker 2 real commitment to science as an investment that a country should make.

Speaker 2 Yes, it was nice to have Nobel Prizes that is culturally good, but they didn't have the pragmatic notions that we have see in the United States of doing science means solving concrete problems.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this was in the 1950s.

Speaker 2 The 60s, too.

Speaker 1 Right. So this was the like one of the biggest and fastest progressions of physics and its implementation in the U.S.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 So were you hearing about this?

Speaker 2 Of course. I was following it all and I wanted to,

Speaker 2 you know, I wanted to buy books about it and so on. I had some conflicts with my father about spending money on books that he thought they were not going to take me anywhere and so on.

Speaker 2 I mean, he was a very pragmatic lawyer. He didn't understand why I was doing these things.

Speaker 2 So yes, I was aware of everything. And

Speaker 2 actually, the university was very good. I entered the university that you had to choose what you wanted to do.

Speaker 2 And after a tremendous crisis, personal crisis, I decided not to go into law or engineering, which was the alternative my father offered, and decided to study physics. And I didn't regret it at all.

Speaker 2 It was a very impressive time. You know, I got a good education in physics.
A little bit too abstract.

Speaker 1 So this was experimental physics or theoretical physics?

Speaker 2 Both physics. Both, both.
In the lab, I was okay. I mean, I was better in classes.

Speaker 2 I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics and calculus and beyond that and complex analysis and so on.

Speaker 1 So it turns out you were good at math after all.

Speaker 2 Good, yes, I understand math.

Speaker 2 I'm not a whiz. I mean, like many of my students have been.
I had guys that can do incredible things, you know, that I can do it, but slowly. Okay, I understand.
Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 So, but yeah, physics is something that

Speaker 2 I knew how to be intuitive about it. I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn't pan out, but yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the teacher in high school? Yeah. Were they the one that told you that there was like a career in this thing?

Speaker 2 Yes, he said, you know, you should devote yourself to this if you really care about it. He was a man that obviously he was sort of tormented on many levels and so on.

Speaker 1 You say that because of the way he carried himself physically?

Speaker 2 Yes, yeah, yeah. He walked, he was troubled and but was interesting, intense man.
I still remember his name.

Speaker 2 He was a philosopher, his name in Egersland, which is a German name.

Speaker 2 And he started talking about, you know, discovering, you know, Christianity and what it meant to him and what it is to be authentic and so on.

Speaker 2 So, and then I had a very large exposure to the great thinkers of the antiquity, the Roman and Greek. So it was all, to me, fascinating, interesting.

Speaker 2 And it was good to have friends that I could discuss these things with.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's a disservice that nowadays in the United States, and even when I was growing up, but especially now that we don't force kids to be exposed to all these topics?

Speaker 1 Like, we try and track people into something early on. Actually, a recent guest told me that many schools are now just giving knowledge but not expecting kids to do problem sets.

Speaker 1 You know, teaching them about physical activity but not expecting them to do physical activity.

Speaker 2 Seriously. Well, that sounds a little bit funny.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, no, but that's, I mean, that is the direction that education in this country is gone.

Speaker 2 I was a visiting professor in France, actually.

Speaker 2 You live there because of that, in Paris. And I discovered, you know, the French intellectual tradition is also very, very abstract compared to the American.

Speaker 2 I mean, the English and the Americans are the ones that took physics and the Russians too into a very very practical realm and make progress that are very very concrete almost engineering like

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Speaker 2 When I came to the United States, I must tell you, I went to, I came as a graduate student, University of Belgium. Yeah, let's talk about that.

Speaker 1 So how did you end up getting into the United States as a graduate student? You applied.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was graduating and, you know, the future looked rather gloomy. I had a girlfriend whose father was very wealthy and she said, no problem, you're going to work for my dad.

Speaker 2 And he got a factory or whatever.

Speaker 1 Why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you'll go for? No, no, not at all.

Speaker 1 I've never known you to work for anyone except you. Yeah, in a way, you're a bit the same.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. So, yes, yes.

Speaker 2 Just the idea of running a business was not.

Speaker 2 I was truly idealistic and irresponsible too. But I had a cousin who was already, you know, got his PhD in theoretical physics at Columbia University, was a professor in France, in Sweden, and so on.

Speaker 2 So I felt that perhaps I should go to the United States. And so I started applying to this.
My father was saying, you know, I won't even help you with this. He didn't like it.

Speaker 2 My parents didn't like it.

Speaker 2 You know, I was very close to my family in many ways. And so

Speaker 2 I applied to many places. I remember being accepted at,

Speaker 2 I think it was Cornell. And I said, oh, New York, that's great.
Till someone said to me, you have to take a plane to go to real New York. I mean, you know, if you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 It loves New York City.

Speaker 2 So, in any event, I got this very, very nice fellowship to go to the University of Pennsylvania, which is.

Speaker 1 Who is the fellowship from?

Speaker 2 The Navy, the United States Navy. Yeah, I'm very grateful for that.

Speaker 2 And I actually wrote that in my PhD thesis.

Speaker 2 I was very grateful. I think it was incredible that they were supporting that kind of research.

Speaker 1 They wanted to bring you to the U.S.

Speaker 2 to build weapons? No, no, no, not at all. Not at all.
I came to the United States working for a professor Burstein, who just died at the age of 100 or 101.

Speaker 2 And no, but I was supported by the United States Navy. It was a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 But I remember in my first interview with some of the teachers,

Speaker 2 professors, there I am talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics. And the guy says to me, let me give you an interesting problem.

Speaker 2 You have a ping-pong ball, but instead of being a classical ping-pong ball, it's a quantum one. Could you tell me at what heights will it bounce? I had no idea what to do.

Speaker 2 I had no sense that you could turn all this knowledge into something implementable, practical, and so on. So it it was quite a struggle the first year.

Speaker 1 So, you had theoretical understandings, not experimental understandings.

Speaker 2 Right, yes, or empirical, and so on. I didn't know how to calculate things very well.
Yeah, I didn't think. You were being good at math.
I was good, yeah, math, understanding the math.

Speaker 2 There's a difference thing between understanding,

Speaker 2 implementing, and you know, creating things. Well, you learn that.
I had four years of graduate school

Speaker 2 and got my PhD in physics. So, obviously, I learned how to do it.

Speaker 2 But what I'm saying is that I had this very, very vague theoretical understanding of what the world worked, but not really a practical, you know, I didn't have it at my fingertips.

Speaker 2 That's what you learn when you go to graduate school, as you know yourself. Okay.
So that's.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's one thing to learn about the brain as an undergraduate, but in graduate school is where I learned how to slice brains, stain brains, trace connections, record from neurons, and it's a whole other business

Speaker 1 to get your hands dirty in the family. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Yeah, the same thing for me.
Yeah, I'm taking courses and discovering what you like and dislike.

Speaker 2 I was a little bit bound to my professor because he was the one who gave me the fellowship, but I didn't like what he did, which was always very problematic.

Speaker 1 Did you have a good relationship?

Speaker 2 It was funny. He sort of became his, tried to become my surrogate father.
But on the other hand, intellectually, I always felt that the guy was not quite there. I mean, he was very famous or some.

Speaker 1 He's a member of the National Academy.

Speaker 2 He was not, but he was very famous, very famous.

Speaker 2 But I always felt that there was a lack of depth into what we were doing. It was not just him.
It was just the solid state physics.

Speaker 2 There was a very famous

Speaker 2 Mary Gell-Mann who had tall contempt for solid state physics. He used to call it squalid state physics.

Speaker 1 For those that don't know Mary Gell-Mann, we'll get to Murray later because I had the interesting experience of meeting him as a child, but

Speaker 1 he discovered the quark. He won the Nobel Prize.
In many ways, is considered at least as

Speaker 1 superb a physicist as Feynman, maybe better.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Lesser known, but among physicists, you know, would evoke great fear in everybody.
We'll get to Murray in a little bit. So did you enjoy graduate school?

Speaker 2 Yes, but it was incredibly hard, very hard, the first year in total. And also, personally, I was very lonely.

Speaker 2 You know, I was transplanted into a whole different world. Philadelphia is not a city I would recommend to many people to live in.

Speaker 2 I escaped every weekend to New York, and my professor was always upset about that.

Speaker 1 And you went from being pretty well off financially to basically having no money.

Speaker 2 I had no money. I lived on very little money, as a matter matter of fact.
Yes. My parents, my father felt that, okay, this is what you're going to do.
You're going to survive on this.

Speaker 2 They paid for a ticket once a year to go back to visit. And it was incredibly nice and soothing to be back, to be taken care of, and everything else, you know, the life in the family.

Speaker 2 And then going back again to Philadelphia and the reality of just being a student. Unlike many people.
that and foreign students that were in with me and other places.

Speaker 2 I did not enjoy, I mean, it was quite a cultural adventure for me to meet people from all over the world, to learn what they. I became very close to a Japanese postdoc, a very interesting man.

Speaker 2 But I was quite miserable.

Speaker 1 So this was in the mid-60s?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, late 60s, yes.

Speaker 2 I did not like my life there at all. I mean,

Speaker 2 I lived for four years. I didn't have a single girlfriend or anything.

Speaker 2 I dated and so on. But I just felt that I was transplanted into an environment that I didn't like.

Speaker 2 Okay. And that's it.
And on top of that, my conflict with my advisor were not serious because they were not overt, but they were there all the time.

Speaker 1 That can be tough.

Speaker 1 For those listening, the relationship to your graduate advisor is a potentially wonderful, a potentially hazardous one because they exert enormous control over your future, not just through letters of recommendation, but opportunities.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I got lucky in that sense.

Speaker 2 You were very lucky. Yes.

Speaker 2 My advisor was the kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him, he ordered for you.

Speaker 2 I'm not kidding. He was that kind of guy.
He would take the whole group to a Chinese restaurant, and before you said, I don't like this, he just ordered.

Speaker 2 Once he took me for a whole weekend to his summer house to finish a paper, I couldn't finish a paper. And I was a mess.
And

Speaker 2 his daughter was there. She was 16 or 17.
And she said, Are you two going to talk physics? I was going to say, no, let's go for a walk. He said, that's all we're going to do.

Speaker 2 But the physics consisted in him regurgitating whatever we were doing.

Speaker 2 I mean, I remember I was so miserable looking at my watch, seeing how the heck do I get out of here? I didn't have a car. So I was sort of his prisoner from Friday to Sunday night.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it was hard for me. I never really felt that happy.
On the other hand, I had no other options at that time. Okay.

Speaker 2 So, but then as soon as I graduated, I got out.

Speaker 1 I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was from mine.

Speaker 1 I delighted in my advisor, as you know, she's amazing.

Speaker 2 She's fantastic people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I got lucky. And I got a lot of that from you, which was to,

Speaker 1 for those that don't know, I left a program at Berkeley, which everyone thought I was insane, insane to leave Berkeley to go to Davis. That was by choice.
But I remember what you said. You said,

Speaker 1 how big is your incoming class in Davis, right?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 1 by all standard criteria, Berkeley is the better institution. Davis is great, but Berkeley is considered exceptionally strong.
And I said, there are three of us.

Speaker 1 And you said, well, either you're making the best decision of your life or the worst mistake of your life. And then I think you asked me what was driving the decision.

Speaker 1 I said, well, there's this person there. Her name is Barbara Chapman, and she just seems to be working on things that if I don't work on these problems, I'm going to regret it.

Speaker 1 And I can't imagine working on anything else.

Speaker 2 And he said, I'm going to go for it, which I really appreciate because

Speaker 1 any parent, if I were a parent and my kids said, I'm going to leave Berkeley and go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again, I think I probably would have balked.

Speaker 2 Well, Barbara's also played a very, very nice, supportive, emotional role in your life. I mean, it was obvious that she had tremendous preference for you.
You were like her son in many ways.

Speaker 1 I smile and well up a little bit only because, well, she passed away young, but

Speaker 1 she's just an amazing person.

Speaker 2 So I feel very blessed for that.

Speaker 1 That wasn't your experience with your advisor. So during that time, I did want to ask about this.

Speaker 1 I asked about it being the the mid to late 60s because um it was the counterculture movement yes yes right

Speaker 1 and um one thing that people should know about you i'll just offer this up is that in the entire time i've known you which is a while now um

Speaker 1 you've been very clear like you never had any interest in recreational drugs no never did them no even though that was super common then i've never seen you have more than a glass of wine yes you've never been drunk in your life never

Speaker 1 And you don't like football despite being from Argentina.

Speaker 1 It occurred to me on the drive over, like, peer pressure is just not something that impacts you. You're not going to do something because people around you are doing it.

Speaker 2 Well, no, you're absolutely right. I always felt this sense of uniqueness or whatever.

Speaker 2 But I became very humble because of it. I'm not arrogant.
It's not that I feel that others are worse and so on. But yes, when I came to the United States,

Speaker 2 there was a decision I had to make, which is I remember remember explicitly thinking about it.

Speaker 2 It was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the social environment in which I was in Argentina. So you could do whatever you wanted.

Speaker 2 And I was not the only one who came. There were three or four brilliant mathematicians and physicists that came with me.
And I saw them within a year just losing it all.

Speaker 2 One of them never graduated. They got into drugs.
They moved to the village in New York and they decided that that was the life they wanted to have. Problem is that 10 years on,

Speaker 2 what are you doing, right? I mean, you know, being a, you know, getting to be an old hip is not that interesting.

Speaker 2 So I really had that notion at that time that I needed to be very disciplined. And I had to internalize a set of values and to ask myself what I want and what I don't want.

Speaker 2 And so, yes, indeed, I used to go to parties. To me, it was quite a surprise.

Speaker 2 You know, in New York, Philadelphia, you know, people smoking pot and all sorts of other incredible things, getting drunk and so on.

Speaker 2 It was something that I, you know, I would say, no, thank you. And that was it.
And I felt quite okay with it.

Speaker 2 And they, and I never felt the need to satisfy a group of people that were like this in order to be included.

Speaker 1 You know, there's only one person that I've ever met in my entire life. Now that I'm 49, I can say things like, now that I'm 49, who has never been drunk, never done drugs,

Speaker 1 basically has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once, and that's Rick Rubin, my good friend, who's

Speaker 1 all standards is, you know, probably the the greatest music producer of all time across

Speaker 1 a dozen different genres, right? Not just rock and roll, but classical, country, all this. And I once asked Rick,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 you worked in music at where drugs and alcohol are everywhere, or at least used to be. And he just said, yeah, it never really interested me.
I could be around it, but not participate.

Speaker 1 And so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship to what's going on around you, where you don't feel pulled into it.

Speaker 2 And I also didn't understand. I mean, for instance,

Speaker 2 the role of drugs and alcohol in young people, I was a graduate student, to a large extent plays a role of relaxation and

Speaker 2 getting rid of stress and anxiety and so on. To me, it was very interesting that people would actually come sometimes to my place and ask, Do you have something to smoke? Or

Speaker 2 why? Because I'm nervous or whatever. Well, deal with your state of anxiety, but you don't have to drink to do that.
And I was always a little bit also concerned about my brain.

Speaker 2 I mean, I was afraid that these things would just take me over the edge and off the rails. So I just,

Speaker 2 but I think I was also, I need to say this, I was also rather judgmental of people who did it at that time. And it was a way, by being judgmental, by saying this is wrong, then I was able to stay

Speaker 2 on my track.

Speaker 2 Today I'm much more understanding. I mean, I hear people, and if that's what, you know, it works for them, it's fine, although I still don't like it.

Speaker 2 And it it was even worse when we came to California because that here everything was going on not just drugs and everything else so well let's talk about that but not that specifically right off the bat so you finished your PhD yeah you could have become done a postdoc become a professor I was playing with that I was playing with that I wanted to go to

Speaker 2 my my dream was to go to Cambridge University in England and not only because the the the Cavendish laboratory was fantastic there was the whole thing on DNA I mean Crick was there and so on So I thought that perhaps I would just start, you know, inhaling some of those vapors.

Speaker 1 You wanted to get into biology?

Speaker 2 Well, I was interested. I mean, because I read the famous book by Watts on, you know, the double helix, and I couldn't sleep.

Speaker 2 I mean, I read it one night and said, it's incredible what this kind of thing. Amazing book.
Amazing book, yes. So I said, oh, the whole thing is becoming like physics.

Speaker 2 It's no longer all these complicated names and so on.

Speaker 1 Well, it's crystallography, which is, you know,

Speaker 1 I mean, physics and chemistry are so interesting.

Speaker 2 Crystallography is boring because you have, it's like botany. You have to learn all these crystals.

Speaker 1 I'm just juggling because the spaghetti model folks, as we call them, the crystallographers are probably covering their eyes right now. But

Speaker 1 that's all right.

Speaker 1 They love what they do, and thank goodness for that. No, no, of course.
Because they design novel drug pockets and receptors. I mean, they're doing some cool stuff.

Speaker 2 So I thought that being at Cambridge was okay. I mean, you would suffer from not even heating in the rooms and so on.
But then...

Speaker 2 What happens was, I mean, you know, I met your mother, and then, you know, she brought a little bit of reality into my life and said, you know

Speaker 2 well she said you know it's time for you to graduate time because i was just staying there as a you know phd student you know i was

Speaker 2 fine you know okay the money was a problem but you know i got to live like this you met mom in new york i met your mother in new york yes and she she was she was she had her you know feet on the ground and said you know it's time for you to graduate and so on and she actually was right and so i decided to look for a job and my

Speaker 2 professor that wasn't necessarily letting me go. He wanted me to stay as a postdoc with with him.

Speaker 1 This is something people don't often understand is that if a student or postdoc is very good, the advisors are de-incentivized to move them along to their job. Right.

Speaker 1 But it's a tricky game because you want the support of your advisor, but oftentimes your advisor, if you're very good, they want to keep you. Yes.

Speaker 2 So there was also another aspect at that time. By then, I started thinking that I wanted to live a much more comfortable life.

Speaker 2 I mean, I come from a family that lived a very comfortable life, and I wanted that very badly. And so I started, you know, looking for jobs and so on.

Speaker 2 My advisor was not too keen to, you know, tell me what to do. So instead of going, I could have gone for a postdoc to a couple of places, but I wanted to be a little more independent.

Speaker 2 And I discovered that there were research institutions like IBM and Xerox in the West Coast and so on. There were, you know, people could do science, you know, good science.

Speaker 2 And, you know, Bell Labs was the most famous one of all.

Speaker 1 That was on the East Coast.

Speaker 2 In the East Coast. I went to Bell Labs for an interview, and I felt felt that they were running that like a Russian internment camp almost.
I mean, it was unbelievable.

Speaker 2 We were 10 of us, and

Speaker 2 they took us around, and people were taking notes of what you were saying and asking, and so on, telling us that was an elite place. It was an elite place.

Speaker 1 So East Coast.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 The East Coast institutions, I mean, it makes sense to me now why, having been raised in the Bay Area,

Speaker 1 that East Coast institutions and I are just never going to mix because

Speaker 1 they love tradition, they love hierarchy, and they love history whereas the west coast

Speaker 2 well it's all about the startup the ipo what's it's about what happened in the last three years and what's going to happen in the next 10 years right well on the other hand there is something nice to be said about the european model of universities in the sense that the biggest contrast you say this i remember uh i you know when you gave when professors came with colloquium and so on they were wearing suit and tie at the university of principal venue and ivy league school and so on i came to stanford i went to the first colloquium and the students were coming in shores with their dogs into the auditorium.

Speaker 2 I couldn't believe it. I mean,

Speaker 2 it was such an incredible

Speaker 2 change, cultural change.

Speaker 2 It's not smart.

Speaker 1 Not smart. I mean,

Speaker 2 incredibly smart. Incredibly smart.
There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 2 So in any event, I discovered something which historically became incredibly important, although I was marginally involved in it, which was Xerox Corporation had invented a copier, decided that they were going to get into the information age, and they decided to establish a new research center in Palo Alto, next to Stanford, where they would recruit people that would work on this whole thing, computers and information and physics and so on.

Speaker 2 And I came in and the guys, you know, whoever interviewed me, they said, oh, this is exactly the place for you. So that's what I did.

Speaker 2 And the interesting thing was that while I was there doing what I thought was interesting things, there was a whole group of people, very small, that invented the personal computer.

Speaker 2 Steve Jobs saw it and built the first Mac out of it.

Speaker 1 I had a classmate in high school, Becca Cannara.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 I remember because she wrote a Vespa to school.

Speaker 2 Yeah, her mother was involved in that.

Speaker 1 And her mom was involved in creating the,

Speaker 1 it was Adele.

Speaker 2 Adele, yes. Yeah.
Adele Goldberg.

Speaker 1 Adele Goldberg in developing the

Speaker 1 ability to move what appeared to be pages on the screen.

Speaker 2 Object-oriented languages. I had no idea that was going on.
I'll be honest with you. I mean, it was going on the second floor.
They were all hippie-like. I mean,

Speaker 2 it was a scandal of the life that they had there. It was the 70s, and still the Bay Area was not what it's now.
I mean everybody went to Risadis, you know, those

Speaker 2 long lunches and there was a lot of stuff on drugs and so on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, can I ask a question about that? So Xerox Park was this incredible place. I remember going there when I was a kid to your lab.

Speaker 1 Actually one of my earliest recollections was you took me into your and Jim Boyce's

Speaker 1 experimental lab.

Speaker 1 You told me to pick a piece of fruit. There was a bowl of fruit.
I picked the banana. You took the banana, you peeled it and you dipped it into liquid nitrogen.

Speaker 1 And then you told me to throw it on the ground, and we shattered the banana. And I thought that was like the coolest thing ever.
I remember that. So that was happening.
But

Speaker 1 you mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and

Speaker 1 that indeed Jobs borrowed or stole, mostly because Park didn't. protect the intellectual property well.

Speaker 2 I mean, he didn't do it illegally.

Speaker 1 I mean, he saw it. They basically gave it away.
Right, right. Basically, gave it away, right?

Speaker 2 Xerox was thinking that, you know, copyists were their future. That's it.

Speaker 1 But I also recall, because I overheard the conversations between you and mom when I was a kid, perhaps,

Speaker 1 that there were, it was pretty wild at Park. Like, there was this whole, like, the room with the bean bags, people were taking...
LSD and other drugs. That wasn't your scene, though.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, not at all. I was in the physics lab, and we can talk later a little bit about it.
Gene Boyce was a very, very interesting collaborator of mine, and so on.

Speaker 2 We had a lot of fun, but not on that level. As a matter of fact, we were considered very square people, you know, doing what we were doing.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is a group of people that were truly the, I mean, books have been written on this whole class of people that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became.

Speaker 2 They were brilliant people trying to do new things, Adele, the Alan K. There were many of them.
Did you ever want to get involved in that stuff? I used to see them as so.

Speaker 2 I'll tell you how I got involved. The head of the group, Bob Taylor, a very charismatic man who was responsible for the development of the personal computer.

Speaker 2 He was the head of the computer science lab. He once heard that I played ping-pong.
So he started challenging me to ping pong. So we used to play ping pong, you know.

Speaker 2 And the conversations were so odd because I would say, oh, you do computer science. I have some mathematical problems.
I would like some guys in your lab to help me. He said, we are not.

Speaker 2 We are not the kind of computer scientists you imagine, like at IBM with a white coat fixing machines and solving math. We want to revolutionize the world.
We want to change the way you think.

Speaker 2 He used to say that to me. And I sort of understood a little bit of it, but quite frankly, it seemed totally out of whatever I was doing.

Speaker 1 This is what when Mark Andreessen, founder, Netscape, et cetera, A16Z, now when he was sitting in the very seat you're sitting in, here he described this notion of wild ducks.

Speaker 1 That at companies you have these people that are small groups of people that are really kind of wild and outrageous and really testing the outer limits of what's possible. Do you think they serve an

Speaker 2 important thing? Tremendous, tremendous. And I was a little bit of that in my field at that time.

Speaker 2 I was the first one to realize you know, that once I saw these machines, I could use them for doing things even in physics that no one could do.

Speaker 2 And the kinds of fields that I chose to work on were totally out of what people were doing at Xerox or IBM and so on. I think that these people are essential.

Speaker 2 Now, the question is, what does the company or a university,

Speaker 2 what do they do with those ideas and so on? Xerox lost it completely. I mean, they show them the stuff and there's a whole books that have been written about it.

Speaker 1 Well, one thing that I think I'm realizing now I inherited from you

Speaker 1 consciously or unconsciously is that well,

Speaker 1 I've been more of a risk taker with various aspects of my life than I probably should have been, but

Speaker 1 that I've always enjoyed being near

Speaker 1 people who are really pushing the boundary on something.

Speaker 1 Like my love of like skateboarding, but not just skateboarding, but our friend Danny Wade jumping the great wall of China, building mega ramps in his yard.

Speaker 1 I knew I wasn't going to do that, but there's something about being adjacent to people like that

Speaker 1 that changes the way that you that I've approached things that were more

Speaker 1 pedestrian to make them less pedestrian. Yes.
You know, and maybe we'll return to this because,

Speaker 1 you know, I think that being around people who are real mavericks and real iconoclasts can be very beneficial, but it doesn't mean that you have to jump in and do what they're doing.

Speaker 2 Right. Well,

Speaker 2 I decided at one point to take huge risks.

Speaker 2 And as a matter of fact, my first piece of work after I got my job at Xerox Park, which was to work on some solid-state physics or whatever, was I had this notion, this fantasy of Einstein in the patent office.

Speaker 2 So I would start working on things that were crazy. And there was a whole notion in physics, which is called tachyons, particles that are faster than the speed of light.
How do you say it? Tachyons.

Speaker 2 Tachyons. It's from the word tachyos, which means fast.
Swift, means particles that are faster than the speed of light, which is impossible. But some physicists were playing with that idea, okay?

Speaker 2 And I became very interested in that. As a matter of fact, my first paper out of

Speaker 2 graduate school was on tachyons, and I had the pride of getting the paper accepted in the top physics journal.

Speaker 1 It's physics review letters?

Speaker 2 Physics letters, yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I remember my cousin Hector sending me a note or something saying, well,

Speaker 2 now I see the road to perdition, he said.

Speaker 2 But I was so proud of it. I really thought that I was doing something incredible.
And it had nothing to do with the work I was doing on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 And I published several papers on things that were very important to me.

Speaker 1 You have a lot of single-author papers.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 This is something that

Speaker 1 is especially rare in biology, but you have a lot of single-author papers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was very proud of that. Yes, yes.

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Speaker 1 Can I ask you a question as a slight departure, but as something I've always wanted to ask you,

Speaker 1 and feel free to say no if it's not

Speaker 1 like something that could be done in a couple of minutes.

Speaker 1 So many people hear Einstein's name, they think of the hair, they think of relativity.

Speaker 1 Is it possible to explain relativity in a way that the everyday person can get it a little bit better than they perhaps understand it now.

Speaker 2 Yes, I think as a matter of fact, I learned not not long ago that Einstein himself wrote a popular book on relativity that seems to be very, very accessible.

Speaker 2 Okay, now there are two aspects to relativity. I mean there are there are two two things that our brains were not made by evolution to understand intuitively.

Speaker 2 One is relativity and the other one is quantum physics.

Speaker 2 We know we have intuitions like you know an animal for instance if you see a lion running after a zebra zebra and so on, the lion can actually calculate intuitively, you know, the speed at which it can move and so on.

Speaker 2 We can do the same. But if you start thinking about what happens when you get too near the speed of light, we have no intuition whatsoever.
Time almost stops.

Speaker 2 There are all sorts of complicated things. Lengths contract.
I mean, this is a very complicated set of things. And that's why it's very hard to understand, although the math works.

Speaker 2 Then there is general relativity. that is even worse because there is some kind of a warping of space-time that is responsible for gravitation.
But I'll go into that in a second.

Speaker 2 The other one is quantum physics. Our brains are not,

Speaker 2 not only are they not wired to understand near the speed of light, because no one moves near the speed of light. I mean, we move at speeds that are fairly small compared to the speed of light.

Speaker 2 And quantum mechanics is at such a microscopic level that is below basically the level of a molecule's atoms and inside the atom.

Speaker 2 So it's very, very hard to visualize or even understand some of the very counterintuitive ideas like entanglement and also, you know. So

Speaker 2 relativity can be understood in the sense that you can explain certain things, but people say, well, how can it work like that? And then you have to get into the math. Okay.

Speaker 2 But I think that I took a course a few years ago in general relativity. And

Speaker 2 I just. Just for fun.
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to learn it finally.
It's profound, deep.

Speaker 2 And it makes you feel that this man, Einstein, he had help from a lot of people, but still, it's an incredible thing. I mean, you know, it's on a level of

Speaker 2 Beethoven's symphonies and Mozart's piano concertos. I mean, it's something that comes into your head and you're able to do, you know, through a lot of struggle.

Speaker 2 I mean, it took me years, it took him years to do that. Okay, so, but it's profound.
Now, when you say, can you explain?

Speaker 2 I mean, the point is, Einstein one day discovered that if the speed of light is the speed of light, no matter how fast you move with respect to a beam of light, it's still moving at the speed of light.

Speaker 2 That means that the notion of simultaneity between two events is relative now.

Speaker 2 So you and I might say, yes, now is 110, but if you are moving very fast with respect to me, instead of 110, you'll say something else, okay? Just because time for you and I are not synchronized.

Speaker 2 And that leads to all sorts of very interesting effects and practical effects too, because from there comes the idea that mass and energy are the same. From there, nuclear weapons came out of that.

Speaker 2 All sorts of very interesting things, you know. And today, you know, we can even detect gravitational waves that are coming from almost the beginning of the universe.

Speaker 2 We can detect that because of those theories. They can calculate.
So it's profound, yes. I mean, Einstein, I think, stands on, I mean, Newton too, by the way.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, Newton and Einstein, I think they're top people, you know.

Speaker 2 They talk to God in a way, as they say.

Speaker 1 We'll get back to God a little bit later.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it seems to me that

Speaker 1 even though it's very hard to grasp,

Speaker 1 it's worth asking for those of us that don't have an intuitive sense of relativity theory that is starting to peer into these things a little bit, trying to understand them.

Speaker 1 Do you think that it gives one's mind an ability to

Speaker 1 tap into forms of cognition that we don't normally think about when we're looking at macro mechanics of the world around us? That objects fall down, not up. And a helium balloon goes up.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And you can learn something about helium, but

Speaker 1 it's all pretty straightforward with just a few simple bullet points. Whereas when you get into quantum mechanics,

Speaker 1 it challenges the mind in a way that it really feels like for most people there's a cliff. And we just kind of go, okay.

Speaker 1 And obviously

Speaker 1 there's trust there. But

Speaker 1 for people that are curious about understanding how the really tiny bits of the physical universe link up with the really big bits of the physical universe,

Speaker 1 where's the best place to start?

Speaker 2 Well, okay, you're asking a very, very interesting question, which is for most of us who are trained in physics, we learn how to calculate, we learn how to operate with these things.

Speaker 2 I just got a patent on using quantum mechanics for communication and so on. But it is still the puzzle is why does it work the way it works?

Speaker 2 So what I'm saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things operationally.

Speaker 2 I don't know what happens in your brain because I have ideas that come out of intuitions, not just formulas and equations.

Speaker 2 And yet, I don't necessarily think I understand deeply why these things are the way they are. They are the way they are.
And there's no reason why they shouldn't be like that.

Speaker 2 Our brains, as I said before, they are essentially conformed to understand the macroscopic world, not high speeds and so on.

Speaker 2 Physicists who work in general activity, I don't, can do incredible calculations. Can you tell you what a black hole collapsing into another black hole would do?

Speaker 2 And they're using general activity things. And so so they can do it.
Now, what it does to your brain that allows you to operationally work with these equations and solve it and have new ideas,

Speaker 2 it's something I don't understand. Namely,

Speaker 2 for instance, the example that I give about quantum mechanics, that's a very simple one because I talk to a lot of people nowadays that work on this, is I can give you two dice.

Speaker 2 Okay, you know, just dice. You can go to Mars and I stay here.
The dice are, let's assume they are quantum mechanically entangled. I throw my dice, I see three, you got three.

Speaker 2 And we don't communicate. They're entangled.

Speaker 2 This is faster than the speed of light. I throw again five, you get five.
I do one, you get one. I mean, it's an amazing thing.

Speaker 1 What is the origin of the entanglement?

Speaker 2 It's a property of quantum systems that they can get entangled, that's the word. And somehow, what happens to your system affects mine, but doesn't affect it in the sense, sends a signal.
No signal.

Speaker 2 They're entangled. Now, let me let me now this becomes rather.

Speaker 1 They're not entangled through other bits of the universe.

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 1 They're totally independent?

Speaker 2 Totally independent. Yes.
They are entangled in the sense that quantum mechanically they started like this. Now, there are ways, I mean, there are trivial things.

Speaker 2 There's a famous example of the socks. Okay, so you take a trip and

Speaker 2 you took a pair of socks. Let's assume they're blue socks and so on.
And then you open your bag and you... Oh.

Speaker 2 I forgot one sock. So this is my blue sock.
So you know that there is a blue sock at home. So knowing that is a correlation, but that's trivial, right? I mean, you can do that with anything.

Speaker 2 In quantum mechanics, imagine that you look at the sock, but the sock is changing colors all the time. So now you observe it is red, the other one is red.

Speaker 2 I observe it is green, the other one is green. Okay, randomly.

Speaker 1 So little bits of the universe are entangled.

Speaker 2 Well, some people, and a friend of mine who's a Buddhist, claims that there is a whole religious or Buddhist way saying that everything was entangled.

Speaker 2 Yes, originally, all atoms, all electrons, all the elementary particles were entangled, yes, because the universe started very, very tiny and everything was entangled.

Speaker 2 Okay, so you could imagine that the universe is entangled. So what happens here affects others.
But

Speaker 2 the entanglement gets lost when perturbations and noise appears and so on. So we are not today entangled with, I don't know.
I mean, we don't think that we are entangled. Some people think that

Speaker 2 some people are entangled. Yes, yes.
Well, that gets to a maybe that's a whole, yeah. That's a whole thing.
That's a poetry.

Speaker 1 That's poetry, exactly.

Speaker 1 There's another example that brings us to a very salient aspect of my childhood, which is chaos theory. Okay.
Right. So

Speaker 1 I'll say it so you don't have to. You're one of the

Speaker 1 founders of chaos. There are certain aspects of chaos theory.
We'll talk about that. But you know, for those of us that grew up in the 80s and 90s, I was born in 75,

Speaker 1 you know, who saw the movie Jurassic Park. You know, there's a moment in that movie where I think Jeff Goldblum is explaining, you know,

Speaker 1 what is it? Chaos theory. And maybe it was the butterfly flapping its wings in one location and impacting something someplace else? For the poets in the world, right?

Speaker 1 That was a very captivating example because I think the human brain can naturally understand that things around us, we can have an impact on them and they can have an impact on us. But that

Speaker 1 the notion that a small insect, you know, thousands of kilometers away can impact something that's going on more adjacent to us, it seems outrageous, sci-fi,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 you know, the notion that one thing impacts another and impacts another, that's pretty straightforward, right? There's just a domino, a dominoing of the physical world. Chaos theory is different.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Okay, could you explain chaos? Yes. And I'll just add one more thing just for context for you to, you know, these are the paints and the palette.

Speaker 1 Around the same time, I remember the book Chaos coming out, and

Speaker 1 where there was a lot of excitement around chaos, and this was coming up,

Speaker 1 There was also a lot of discussion about fractals. The idea that when you zoom into things at a very, very small level, you start seeing some regularities.

Speaker 1 Now we know this about crystal structures, right? Like you put a drop of water under a high-powered microscope, you see structure there. It's not random.

Speaker 1 The angles are very consistent, at least around certain nodes, et cetera. So I think people love this idea that we have

Speaker 1 repeating patterns and numbers in nature, that things at a distance can impact us more closely. Like this is the kind of stuff that

Speaker 1 the non-physics brain can understand.

Speaker 1 And it does enchant, right?

Speaker 2 We sort of poked at poetry. I love poetry.

Speaker 1 You love poetry.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 I think it enchants because

Speaker 1 I think humans are naturally interested in how

Speaker 1 the randomness of life might not be as random as it appears. So

Speaker 1 what is chaos?

Speaker 1 Where does it exist in our lives?

Speaker 1 Not emotional chaos,

Speaker 1 and what is the relationship between fractals and chaos, if any?

Speaker 2 Okay, let me say first of all about why chaos is what it is, and it's not quantum. And there is quantum stories on there, it's a quantum chaotic thing, feel, but I won't go into that.
Chaos is a very

Speaker 2 interesting idea, which

Speaker 2 flies against our intuitions.

Speaker 2 Since the times of Newton, we know that if you give me the position and the velocity of the initial particle, I can use Newton's equations of motion to tell you where that that particle is going to be anywhere with an incredible precision.

Speaker 2 When we launch a rocket, we want to go to the moon, we can calculate and predict exactly where that rocket is going to be after so many hours, after so many days, and so on.

Speaker 2 Actually, we use the equations of motion to predict that trajectory, and it's a precise trajectory.

Speaker 1 This is how Elon was able to capture the rocket with the chopsticks recently.

Speaker 2 Something of that sort. Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's, yeah. Okay, now, the idea of chaos is, so that's okay, it works.
There are some cases where, let's assume, I'm going to give you a simple example. So I take a ball, I put it on

Speaker 2 a billiard ball, on a billiard table, I send it out, and at the moment I can know exactly the position and velocity, I can tell you exactly where it's going to go.

Speaker 2 Chaos says that a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny difference in the initial position or velocity of that ball will take it very, very far from the other one, which is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 I mean, if I tell you that, you know, two cars start at exactly the same speed, you know, the same position, and one of them has a little more, you know, they'll stay parallel to each other.

Speaker 2 In some systems, and I'll tell you in a second, that actually those two trajectories diverge completely. So it's what we call sensitivity to initial conditions.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's what chaos is all about in classical mechanics. What is really weird about it is that it happens in systems that also undergo friction.

Speaker 2 Because let me give you an example that I used to, you know, I used to teach chaos at St. Inferred for many years.

Speaker 2 So imagine I give you a beaker full of molasses, and you take a very big ball, stainless steel ball, and you just throw it into the thing.

Speaker 2 Well, after a while, it will just drift with the thing called Stowe's Law, because friction slows it down, and it just goes.

Speaker 2 And now you throw another one from another altitude, and all of them are going to do exactly the same. Some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite.

Speaker 2 Even though there is friction, everything tends to just slow it down, they just keep going far apart from each other. Amazing.

Speaker 2 Amazing thing. So that's chaos.
Okay, and I can tell you a little bit why I got so involved in this and the work we did.

Speaker 1 Does chaos exist in every physical system?

Speaker 2 Mostly, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Maybe even in neurons or the brain.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, this is why I don't want to get into a controversy here about issues of whether we live deterministic lives or not.

Speaker 2 But, you know, if things that are a little bit random and so on, or even just a tiny difference in initial conditions can take you to very different outcomes.

Speaker 2 But this, we're not talking about many particles, we're talking two. Okay, so that's one.

Speaker 2 Now, fractals is a different story that comes out of a guy who I knew very well, Benoit Mandelbrod, a very, very, very funny character, brilliant too, but very strange,

Speaker 2 who discovered that certain things are so similar.

Speaker 2 That if you look at the coast of Britain, he used to say that, you look at the coast of Britain and you say, okay, tell me how long is the coast of Britain? You go with a meter and you measure it.

Speaker 2 Now, suppose that the meter that you're using now can measure up to an inch. Well, you're going to get a different distance, even though you are adding the same.

Speaker 2 Because there are all these little things in the coast of Britain that are essentially self-similar that add a tremendous amount of length. That's what a fractal is all about.

Speaker 2 These are structures that are not just a simple line, but they have all these other things. Okay.
He thought that it was a whole new geometry.

Speaker 2 As a matter of fact, and I tell you this because I knew Ben-Ma very well, I met him through a talk that I gave on chaos. He used to hang out with chaos physicists.

Speaker 2 He was a mathematician, brilliant man, in many ways. I was having dinner with him in Copenhagen in a restaurant.
One day, the very pretty pretty waitress came to us and so on and served us.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we were talking, he's a French man. He spoke with a very heavy French accent.
And so she says something, what are you doing here? He says, we are at a conference.

Speaker 2 But I'm not just at the conference. I'm a very special man, he said to her.

Speaker 2 And she said, how come? And he says, do you know who Euclid was?

Speaker 2 And she says, sort of. She said, well, he was a Greek man who invented geometry.
And she said, oh, well, guess what? I am better than Euclid. I invented a different geometry.
He said that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he said that.

Speaker 1 Points to the waitress in Denmark that knew about Euclid.

Speaker 2 That was very funny.

Speaker 1 The Danes are smart. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 That was very funny that he would talk about it. So he would give a talk, and he would say, My equations can generate anything.
Indeed, he could generate

Speaker 2 any patterns. So he would say, you want a mountain? Here goes a mountain.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You see a mountain.
Beautiful graphs and so on. So self-similarity is a very powerful idea

Speaker 2 in physics because it allows you that if you know something at a certain scale, you can predict what it's going to be at a different other scales. And I use that.
But chaos

Speaker 2 and fractals are not always the same. As he used to say, because he didn't like physicists, because we never liked his talks, we always said, okay, so you're telling us that, you know, things are...

Speaker 2 He used to say, I'm not interested in pulleys. I'm not interested in things that move things up and down, he used to say.

Speaker 1 He's talking about elementary physics class.

Speaker 2 It's something of that sort, yeah, yeah. So, but fractals are very interesting because these are so similar structures.
At all levels, they look the same.

Speaker 2 You look at them big, you look at small, they have the same type of geometric behavior. Chaos is all about dynamics, how things evolve in time.

Speaker 2 And chaotic systems, they tend to diverge from each other for a long, long time.

Speaker 2 The man who invented the idea of the butterfly effect was a man called Ed Lorentz, who was a very famous meteorologist at MIT.

Speaker 2 And he was solving the equations of the atmosphere, trying to predict the behavior of the weather. And he noticed in these very old computers and so on that sometimes he would get different behaviors.

Speaker 2 He thought there was something wrong about the computer. And he discovered that the only thing that was wrong was that the initial conditions that he was giving them was very, very tinily different.

Speaker 2 And he would get different things. From there, he went into that.
And there's a very beautiful, I mean, there are ideas that are very beautiful, like strange attractors and so on.

Speaker 2 I mean, we don't have to go into that.

Speaker 2 But so chaos is really a field that essentially explains why things that seem to be simply explained by classical physics tend to diverge from each other and they give rise to random outcomes.

Speaker 2 That's the important thing. You can use chaos in order to generate random numbers.
You can use chaos to generate random patterns. I've done that, essentially.

Speaker 1 So chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level?

Speaker 2 Okay, so I was working at some data, and I don't think it's interesting how I got into this, because I was doing something else, and suddenly I decided I was going to do this, and I really started going very fast at this.

Speaker 2 But then I had a very bright student,

Speaker 2 you met, Tan Tan Hog, and we decided, let's see if we can see chaos in quantum mechanics.

Speaker 2 And we started doing it, and there were a couple of papers by the Russians actually showing that this was the case. And we discovered that it was not the case.

Speaker 2 We actually proved that quantum systems are not chaotic. There's some kind of interference between them and so on that makes them recur back and forth periodically.

Speaker 1 I know I find that reassuring.

Speaker 1 That if you get down to a small enough level, that you can really predict what's going to happen as opposed to small perturbations leading to big differences in outcomes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was the whole point. We discovered that quantum mechanics, there are waves and interferences and so on that make the system recur.

Speaker 2 As a matter of fact, I had quite an exchange with Dick Feynman about it.

Speaker 2 When I met him,

Speaker 2 I went to give a talk at Caltech, and I was in his office, and he said, so

Speaker 2 what are you going to talk about? Because I don't want to waste my time. And I said, about chaos.
He said, okay. I said, you know, some things are very, in particular in quantum mechanics.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I'm smiling because he was so sharp and so on. So he said, Okay, give me the problem.

Speaker 2 He said, What is it? I said, Well, okay, I give you an electron, and you have it in a potential, and I give you a laser. And he says, The laser inside or outside the apparatus, just like that.

Speaker 2 So I said, Outside. So you turn on the laser.
I said, So, what happens to the electron? And I knew he was going to give me the answer that was already in the literature, but he appeared to think.

Speaker 2 He stood up and walked around and was making lots of noises. And then suddenly he says, The energy grows linearly in time.
I said, No, it doesn't.

Speaker 2 How do you know? I said, We measure it, I can show you, and so on. And, you know, he was very impressed because that means that there is no chaos, actually.

Speaker 2 Then he said, Oh, you know why I got it wrong? I said, No, because I wasn't thinking in colors, only black and white.

Speaker 1 Was he trying to be funny? Of course.

Speaker 2 He was always funny.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about Feynman and Gilman and Mendelbrot and all the rest

Speaker 1 as a collection for a moment.

Speaker 1 You know, one of the great

Speaker 1 gifts of my life has been that you would talk about scientists. It really enchants me.
I'm like, I'm just so delighted when I hear it.

Speaker 1 Like, I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 not athletes, right?

Speaker 1 Which is great.

Speaker 1 but scientists. And it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist, you both revere the work they did, you see something unique about them.

Speaker 1 And something I learned very early on, and I've certainly internalized, is, forgive me because I'm assuming here, is that

Speaker 1 there's a certain aspect of like their quirkiness or something about them, like to take them seriously, but not too seriously.

Speaker 1 Like I never learned to assume that because somebody was a Nobel Prize winner, that they were perfect, for instance.

Speaker 1 Like you would tell me, you know, like Einstein had, you know, he was amazing, like there was relativity, the patent office, all this stuff. And he had, he like had all these problems with women.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Or, you know, and I read the books, right?

Speaker 1 Or, you know, or this person, I won't name names because these people are still alive, Silicon Valley, you know, like actually when you and I used to take walks when I was a postdoc, we used to see jobs walking around, right?

Speaker 1 No feet, no shoes. He had feet, no shoes.
And you would say, you know, I mean, like, he's amazing, like, this guy's brilliant. But then we would chuckle about some of the job-isms, you know.

Speaker 1 And so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people. That these founders, they're creators, they're just people.
And they often have very challenging areas of their life as well.

Speaker 1 Like they're not perfect. They're not gods.

Speaker 1 Some of them have almost godlike access to the universe and understanding it.

Speaker 1 But it seems to me that like you hold people up for their contributions, but you never actually, thank goodness, put people on a pedestal to the point where you're like, this person is spectacular in every way.

Speaker 1 And I'm not saying you cut them down to size, but I learned very, and this has served me well in my life in now public facing or on Twitter.

Speaker 1 Like if I make a mistake and someone comes at me, it's somebody that I respect, I go, oh. But then I remember, like, this person has a lot of issues in certain domains of their life.

Speaker 1 So, you know, to realize that, you know, like we're all human, like this notion of like, like none of us, none of us are gods.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 And yet there are people like Feynman, like Gell-Mann, like Einstein, who have almost supernatural levels of ability.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So what's that about? Like, how do you hold

Speaker 1 knowledge, insight, and stature in your mind alongside like the humanness, like the inherent flawed nature of all of us?

Speaker 2 Well, okay,

Speaker 2 it's complicated.

Speaker 2 There are many ways to think about it.

Speaker 2 In some of these names,

Speaker 2 for instance, these people are built into giants by the media, too. I mean, you know, Feynman, I mean, if you go to court and so on, everybody's asking, you know, what did Feynman do?

Speaker 2 What was he wearing and so on? As if he was a god. I mean, obviously, what he did in physics, he,

Speaker 2 and I interrupt myself here because he really worked very hard, very hard, according to Gelman in particular, to creating a myth about himself. He worked very hard.
When I met him,

Speaker 2 I can't even tell you the anecdotes. I only met him for an hour, but he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression with you.

Speaker 1 R-rated and X-rated anecdotes.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And, you know, but I remember the good one was that, you know, I was going to give a colloquium and he said, should I come? I said, I think you should come.

Speaker 2 And then he said, well, then I'm going to give you a piece of advice. Do not look at me.
Because if you look at me during your talk, you're going to get confused and so on, you know.

Speaker 2 And actually, that's exactly what happened. I started, you know, the colloquium at Caltech, you know, the Marine Board Camp of Science.
And there I am starting to talk. And suddenly I said,

Speaker 2 instead of saying the next hour, I said something like in the next week or something or so, because there he was.

Speaker 2 And then he started saying, you know, like, look elsewhere, elsewhere, you know, that kind of guy, you know.

Speaker 1 For anyone who hasn't lectured, there's a tendency sometimes when one is going fast to fill in without thinking. It's just something that one learns.

Speaker 1 I mean, I've had to learn it the hard way when we missed it in the recording and this kind of thing. It's a humbling moment.
But yeah, I think that,

Speaker 1 well, Feynman would have been canceled by... by the standards of the last few years.

Speaker 2 I took even my father once to a lecture. He was giving in San Francisco, and he was giving a beautiful lecture to, I don't know, got it some award for teaching and so on.

Speaker 2 And suddenly a bunch of women walked into the front of the

Speaker 2 big room, you know, and they started coming. Because it turns out that in one of his lectures, he said something like, you know, if you do it this way, you're as bad as a woman's driver.

Speaker 1 Feynman said that.

Speaker 2 Feynman said that. And then all these women were saying things.
And then he said, I love women. They're all smart.
He was very clever.

Speaker 1 So he would have lost his job by the standards of

Speaker 2 the years. But regardless of that, because I really want to go back to this issue, people like Mary Galman, I mean, it was, to me, he was the most intimidating person I've ever met.

Speaker 2 I mean, I mean, now eventually I got to know him because he liked what I was doing. And as a matter of fact, he and I organized a workshop at an incredibly luxurious place in France,

Speaker 2 the estate of Madame Schlam-Berger, one of the oil people. Actually, it was an incredible meeting that he and I organized.
So I got to know him a little bit personally.

Speaker 2 And all he was complaining at that time is he couldn't get a date. He was a widow, and he wanted to, you know, women were intimidated by him too.

Speaker 1 Well, he's, as I recall, because I remember meeting him when I was a kid and we both shared a love of birds, but he was perhaps one of the world's most obnoxious people.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 But you impressed him. As a matter of fact, I still, you know, I don't know if you want me to remind you of this, because we had two stories there.

Speaker 2 Your mother and I were taking a hike in Aspen and we saw a bird that looked incredibly complicated and so on. So we looked at the bird.
The next day we went to him because he loved birds, as you know.

Speaker 2 And I said, I saw a most unusual bird. He said, describe it.
So I drew it up. And And he gave me the name in Latin of the bird.

Speaker 2 And then he said, that's the most common bird in the Bay Area of California. As a matter of fact, you should see it when you pick up the newspaper next time you're there.

Speaker 2 And indeed, two weeks later, I went to pick up the New York Times and there was the bird. But

Speaker 2 at the same time, I said, Andrew likes birds. And he asked you, what is your favorite bird? And you said, the rainbow lorikeet.
Still is. And he said, this kid knows.
This kid knows.

Speaker 2 He said, I'll know my bird. I know my birds.

Speaker 2 I know my birds. I know my birds.
It's amazing. I never heard, you know,

Speaker 2 because if you could have said a parrot, he would have not been very interested, okay? So, but he was intimidating, very intimidating, and he was nasty too when he wanted to be.

Speaker 2 So he enjoyed the power he had.

Speaker 2 I was the member of the board of the directors of the Aspen Center, so we had to decide what programs we had every summer. And he would come to me and say, whom do you want me to insult today?

Speaker 2 He had all sorts of very funny names for all sorts of physicists and so on.

Speaker 1 The downside of people like that in science, because I've known some too. There's a very famous neuroscientist now in his 70s who has a Nobel Prize, who also is

Speaker 1 known for generating anecdotes about himself.

Speaker 1 And in recent years, because of political correctness, wokeism, and so forth, it tends to do that less because it was sort of a trucker's mouth.

Speaker 1 Brilliant guy,

Speaker 1 but it's kind of known for being outrageous and trying to create tales about themselves. This is something that scientists scientists do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right, right.

Speaker 1 Right? In order to maintain their legacy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or also to feel good about themselves. I mean,

Speaker 2 by the way, I mean, Gelman, I mean, I worked with him. He was incredible.
I mean, you know, and the way he would interrupt people and so on.

Speaker 2 And there are two things I can tell you that are interesting. Once he was announcing some new results, he was working on this whole thing on

Speaker 2 quarks and other things. And actually, it was string theory.
And he announced a seminar. And everybody goes into the garden.

Speaker 2 The seminars are nice. I need to remind the audience perhaps here that the Aspen Center for Music was right next to the tent.
They were rehearsing.

Speaker 2 So the seminar was supposed to start at 3, and there's Gilman comes with all his notes under his arm. He always had notes, walking pacing, and nothing happened.

Speaker 2 And suddenly, they were rehearsing the Beethoven's 15th, which just ta-ta-ta-ta.

Speaker 2 And then you heard the sound, and then he started. I will now tell you about a new theory of how the universe works.
That's the way he spoke to me.

Speaker 1 So what strikes me is that these people take themselves very seriously.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Do you think that's important in life?

Speaker 2 I don't. I like to, I mean, as you know, I like to

Speaker 2 have a good sense of humor about myself and be self-deprecating. I think some people, you know, have issues and they do that.
I mean, it all depends on how you see things.

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Speaker 1 Let me ask you about the, um,

Speaker 1 about this. So, you know, further down my list of things I wanted to talk to you about is that, you know, you...

Speaker 1 You've always loved, it's clear from a young age, like high-level concepts, deep concepts, order in the universe, working on hard problems. You just filed another patent.

Speaker 1 Like you've, I mean, as long as I've known you, you've been pursuing some new area of knowledge or implementation of knowledge.

Speaker 1 And yet you, like your father, you, I know you delight in everyday things.

Speaker 1 I mean, since I was a kid, you've taken a walk after dinner. You've biked to work if you can, you know, that day because of the weather.
You, you love like a really good espresso, a really good meal.

Speaker 1 Like the the high and the low are checked off boxes for you yes right that's different i think than the way most people think about scientists especially theoreticians um theorists excuse me um

Speaker 1 which one is it theoreticians or theorists theorists they say yeah theorists yeah um

Speaker 2 that you know we assume like the the academics that are always somewhere else like they're up here they're not grounded they're not feet on the ground but you like everyday things oh you're very much like like where we're gonna eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this absolutely the conversation about relativity absolutely i think that there is a myth that it sometimes gets perpetuated at universities my first meeting with my advisor when i got to university of pennsylvania he said i want you to want to know one thing you're going to live like a monk i said what does that mean no fun nothing you're going to work i want you to work you're getting paid to do something i was so scared and then i told him that on weekends i had to escape to new york city to take a walk on central park and look at nice things and you know I always enjoyed the good things of life and you know at that time I couldn't afford them but that doesn't mean that I didn't you know I enjoy them and I do believe that I inherit this from my father a tremendous enjoyment on of life in general and

Speaker 2 Yes, I am very physical and tactile about things. I like to surround myself with things that are beautiful.

Speaker 2 I enjoy, as you said, good meals and the daily things about life. I'm not just living in some stratosphere and not being able to, you know, enjoy a meal I'm having and so on.
No, the opposite.

Speaker 2 And yes, in that sense, I am very much like that. And, you know, Mary is the same way.
And so that's why we enjoyed that. Your wife.
Yeah, my wife, sorry. Yes.

Speaker 2 We really enjoy, you know. She in particular, being Danish, you know, they have this idea of slow eating and enjoying the good things of life.
And I am very much like that. Yes, very much.

Speaker 2 I don't feel guilty about it.

Speaker 2 You know, if I can afford it. Nor should you.
Nor should you. Well, there is a certain ascetic component to science and the idea that they sell you that Einstein didn't care about anything.

Speaker 2 Actually, if you look at the negotiations that Einstein had with the Institute for Advanced Studies for salaries, you'll see that he really cared a lot about these things, too.

Speaker 1 Oh, so our notion of him is just kind of like it was just science and he had no interest in material things is false.

Speaker 2 Yes. I had an uncle actually, Hector's father.

Speaker 2 There was a branch of the family that was very much into culture. They had beautiful collections of paintings and so on.
And once I was, what,

Speaker 2 14 or so, and I remember at a party, we had big social parties in my parents' house, and he was lecturing me that I should never care about anything but truth and concepts and so on.

Speaker 2 I was a little bit scared.

Speaker 2 I wanted to enjoy life as well. Okay, so it was a little bit complicated.
No, no, I enjoy everything, of course.

Speaker 2 I think I got out of my father mostly. Yes.
My mother was a little more ascetic in a way.

Speaker 2 But yes,

Speaker 2 the tiny little things of life are what makes one's life.

Speaker 1 I'm slowly starting to get that. Yes.
I think I've been a little

Speaker 1 rabid about my interests almost to an obsessive level to the point where I've sometimes

Speaker 1 overlooked like how many opportunities for just like lovely daily interactions I have. I try, but I feel like I've just been chasing the carrot

Speaker 1 of knowledge. Like I love doing what I do.
I've always done that, you know.

Speaker 2 Well, but you have to be careful indeed.

Speaker 2 As you know, I meditate for many years and so on. And being in the present and being able to just, you know, be there and nothing else is the tremendous source of satisfaction and

Speaker 2 calms me down and so on.

Speaker 2 When did you start that? Well, I started actually out of the discovery, I mean, a trivial thing that many people have.

Speaker 2 I discovered that every time my blood pressure was taken by the doctor, it was just going through the roof.

Speaker 2 You know, it's called the white white coat phenomenon or something of that sort. And I got very, very upset about it because I tried to control it.
And it got worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 2 And they told me, you know, what to do. And so at one point or the other, I have a friend, a colleague more than a friend,

Speaker 2 who's a Buddhist, who started telling me about, you know, have you tried, first of all,

Speaker 2 biofeedback. That's the one I tried for a year, I did biofeedback.
And then he started telling me about meditation. So one day, actually, he's a physicist as well.
He was visiting me in my lab.

Speaker 2 And I said, he said, let's do it. I did a session with him in meditation.
I couldn't believe it. My hands suddenly were warm and felt incredibly nice.

Speaker 2 So I decided that I really wanted to learn how to do it. And I started doing it at a time when I truly needed it because I realized that without being aware, I was anxious.

Speaker 2 Like, for instance, I would see myself walking down the street holding my

Speaker 2 fists this way. That's not a very relaxed way of living.

Speaker 2 So I really started doing this meditation on a fairly continuous basis and I really enjoy it.

Speaker 2 And it's very important as, you know,

Speaker 2 as a father, I say this to anyone too, that you have to enjoy life. I mean, the pursuing these things, you know, eventually, what, you know,

Speaker 2 the... the value is in the pursuit, not in achieving them anyhow.
So you might as well pursue many things at the same time. I mean, a good meal eaten properly can be very, very nice too.

Speaker 2 I love that about you.

Speaker 1 Something I'm working on uh i remember when i along those lines i remember when i was in graduate school we we publish a paper and then we publish a second paper in science and i remember thinking like this is like such a proud moment a first author paper in the journal science and i i told you and you said um you said

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 well enjoy it and just be aware that by tomorrow you'll be worried that you'll never do it again exactly yeah and uh fortunately we publish in nature and a few other journals a bunch of times after that But you also warned me about the postpartum

Speaker 1 of post-excitement. Like something great happens.
You know, at that time, we, as a field of neuroscience, didn't really understand dopamine dynamics, but now we do.

Speaker 1 What you were describing is this trough in dopamine that we get a day or two after some big event.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Typically, postpartum is associated with the birth of a child, but it could be, you know, getting a degree or a great party or a... paper in science or nature for solar paper.

Speaker 1 And you said, a couple days from now, you're going to feel low. Yes.
And you just have to wait. And I'll never forget what you said.

Speaker 1 You said, just go back to what inspired the first project, pick a different problem, it'll happen again.

Speaker 1 And the second time it happened, I was like, he was right. It happened again.
Yes. And again and again.

Speaker 1 I haven't had an infinite number of those papers in those journals, but I learned about the dopamine dynamics associated with pursuing a goal. And then you get the thing and you're...

Speaker 1 very excited and then you feel the drop.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 And that I think that is something that even ancient ancient philosophers knew about it.

Speaker 2 The Buddha, many, you know, the Greeks and so on, this idea that the things we pursue, they are ephemeral in a way, in the way the feelings that they elicit in us.

Speaker 2 And I think that you're right.

Speaker 2 And there is also another tendency one has to try to avoid, which is you're successful in something and you continue doing exactly the same thing because by now you know how to do it with your hands right here.

Speaker 2 And I always felt that I want to go elsewhere. And I have sort of a reputation for changing fields.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I don't do that in order for others to be puzzled by it.

Speaker 2 It's just that I'm curious and I want to have a feeling again that it like falling in love, you know, the new thing, you know, it's nice at the beginning.

Speaker 2 But eventually, whatever you're doing, it becomes trite and so on. Yeah, let's talk about that because

Speaker 1 after chaos, which brought a lot of, you know, I remember we had reporters in our house and there was like a TV and the book by Jim Glick. And then

Speaker 1 you switched to something completely different. Yes.
And you got into computer science. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, computer science is

Speaker 2 computers. What happened was that a lot of the success that we had was because I was at Park.

Speaker 2 We had phenomenal computer facilities there, things that we could visualize at a time very few people could do. And so, and one of them actually, someone suggested I get a patent.

Speaker 2 There is a pattern for the chaos that sometimes people have in t-shirts that actually we discovered for the first time with guys from UC Santa Cruz, with Jim Cratchfield and so on.

Speaker 2 You know, he was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so on.

Speaker 2 But when I, what happened was, okay, so we did this, we did quantum, and then one day I said, okay, so what do I do now? Okay, well, you can go and publish one paper after the other in chaos.

Speaker 2 I mean, you can produce 10 PhDs with this. But then I said, why don't I do the opposite? I'm using computers to help me with the physics.
Why don't I use the physics to study computers?

Speaker 2 Well, that's an interesting idea, but you know, I mean, this is it. So why do you do that? So what happened to me, I was at a meeting on chaos in Copenhagen, and I couldn't sleep one night.

Speaker 2 And I had a book called The Computer-led Brain by John von Neumann, perhaps someone that was a true genius. I don't know if you heard of him.
He invented computers. He was a phenomenon at all levels.

Speaker 2 And he was part of the Manhattan Project. He was perhaps one of the most brilliant people that ever existed, at least that we are aware of.

Speaker 2 I mean, he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies, von Neumann. There are all sorts of anecdotes about him.
He had a photographic memory. You could give him a page of a phone book.

Speaker 2 He would look at at it closely and then he would recite the phone numbers from bottom to top.

Speaker 1 Totally useless skill.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but he was a genius. A genius, true genius.
He invented computers. He invented game theory in economics.

Speaker 2 Useful skill. Yeah, exactly.
Okay. In any event, so he wrote a very little book called The Computer and the Brain.
No equations, nothing. And one night, four o'clock in the morning, I cannot sleep.

Speaker 2 I get down. You know, it was summer, so the sun was still cellular in Copenhagen.
And I went there to read it, and I said, this is what I'm going to do.

Speaker 2 I I don't know anything about brains, but I can imagine, you know, if the brain is like a computer, I could do something like that. But I also want to apply some of what I know to these things.

Speaker 2 And the first thing that occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we had at PARC.

Speaker 2 These computers will communicate with each other, as we nowadays we know it, that's the internet and so on. So there were many, many aspects of this.

Speaker 2 And I decided that because I was very influenced by one or two students that were very much into economics and libertarian ideas and so on. And one of them had taken two courses in Econ at Caltech.

Speaker 2 So we decided to start looking at this as a market where computers essentially buy and sell programs to execute in their machines and so on.

Speaker 2 So we started really doing what we call the ecology of computation. It was a big effort, which married economics with artificial intelligence and computer.
But it became a big thing.

Speaker 2 And so I became again, it's like falling in love again. It's a new field.

Speaker 1 I thought it was a-discovery process of falling in love is half the fun.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Yeah.
And I also was able to understand, I mean, there is a lot of formalism in economics, and some of it is really, I mean, sort of academic.

Speaker 2 But there are some ideas that are very profound, to the extent that some people consider me an economist sometimes, because I think in terms of utility rewards and risk and all this stuff.

Speaker 2 And as a matter of fact, a lot of the work I'm doing now on resource allocation in networks comes from ideas from economics.

Speaker 1 When you go into a new field, do you,

Speaker 1 in order to

Speaker 1 learn about the field, is that mainly through talking to people in the field, reading books?

Speaker 2 Both, both.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't strike me that you have ever tried to ingratiate yourself into any field. It's not like you're trying to be a member of the field.
Like you go in it as

Speaker 1 an observer and a learner.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 I need to say this. I don't think that many people have said that if I stayed in one field, I would have done much better in terms of reputation and so on.

Speaker 2 As a matter of fact, I can tell you an anecdote that is...

Speaker 1 You mean like awards and stuff?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like for instance, not long ago, I was already doing computers after chaos and so on. I won't name the person, but a very good physicist, professor at Berkeley, came into my office.

Speaker 2 He says, Bernardo, we have an issue here. I said, what is it? That your name for a membership in the National Academy of Science is coming up.
I said, oh, that's nice. He said, what is the problem?

Speaker 2 You're not writing papers in physics. You're writing papers in computer science.
And, you know, we need a physicist because otherwise the chemists will get that job. The physics will come like that.

Speaker 2 Welcome to academia. So I said, well, you want me to do? He said, well, can you perhaps write one or two more papers on this that we can show? I said, no, I cannot do that.
I can't.

Speaker 1 Well, there's a, isn't there a famous story about

Speaker 1 Feynman and being elected to the National Academy?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he refused to. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 1 I think they told him he was in the National Academy. And then he said, well, what do I do? And they said, well, you elect in

Speaker 1 other members. And he said, I quit.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah. So in any event, I never became a member of the National Academy.

Speaker 1 But you never sought prizes.

Speaker 2 No. I mean, mean, I would have liked to get them.
Why not? I mean, you know, I'm not, it's not that I say they are meaningless. But there was nothing that I could do about it.

Speaker 2 And I, since I was not, as you said, I was always a little bit of a, always moving on to the next thing, never staying long enough going to these meetings where by now you heard it all, you know, over and over and over again.

Speaker 2 So. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I have to say that, you know, like...
I mean, as you know, I still have my position at Stanford and teach.

Speaker 1 I'm involved in a little bit of research. But,

Speaker 1 you know, one of the great advantages I had is that all my advisors died or killed themselves. So I was orphaned in science.

Speaker 1 And so there was never an expectation from my advisors that I do the next thing because they were dead.

Speaker 1 So I thought about that. And, but I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcasts, I remember you being a little bit concerned.

Speaker 1 You're like, you know, what are your colleagues going to think? And I think at that point, the

Speaker 1 way that science was going and the structure of academia relative to what my needs in life were and just a passion to wanting to do something new, I put a lot of thought to the fact that you've changed fields many times.

Speaker 1 And I just felt absolutely compelled to get into science communication and there was no stopping that.

Speaker 1 But I have to thank you a lot of the reason I was able to take the step to do the podcast, in addition to being supported by Lex Friedman's suggestions and a lot of help from others,

Speaker 1 Joe Rogan and others, but is that I was like, well, that's what you're supposed to do.

Speaker 1 When you hit a point where what you're doing isn't as compelling, you wait for the thing that draws you forward. Seems like you were always drawn forward.
I always think of carrot and stick.

Speaker 1 It's not like you disliked where you were, it's that there was some carrot that you identified and you go towards the carrots.

Speaker 2 And also something very

Speaker 2 the other day, my wife was actually mentioning. I've been, in a sense, an orphan.
I never had mentors. It's very interesting.

Speaker 1 Except this, frankly, not terrific graduate advisor.

Speaker 2 He was not my mentor, really. I mean, you know, he didn't even want me to do the things that I wanted to do.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I never had someone who was whispering, Bernardo is the guy to you should be considering for this or that.

Speaker 2 I mean, I had the fortune to really get to the top of many of these fields and I interacting with the top people. I mean, we talk about Feynman Gelman.

Speaker 2 There are many very famous people that I respect immensely that I met when I was in France. You know, as you know, I was teaching there.
I met people that are brilliant and so on.

Speaker 2 And I felt treated with a tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on. But I never had mentors in that sense.
And also, as I said, I am a little bit restless.

Speaker 2 I am very curious about everything. And so, you know, sometimes I see something and I say, oh, there's an opportunity to do something interesting.

Speaker 2 I think that the issue of being curious is extremely important. And it's interesting because I reflect a lot on my father.
My father was an immensely curious person, but all about details.

Speaker 2 He never liked abstractions of any kind. He was very proud that he went to the same school I I went, and the only course he flanked was philosophy, because he said it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 Now, perhaps he was right about that. You know, sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about.

Speaker 2 A couple of months ago,

Speaker 2 in Denmark, we were invited, my wife and I, to a dinner with philosophers talking about artificial intelligence. I thought that these people were, they didn't really know what was going on.

Speaker 2 But nevertheless,

Speaker 2 yes, I am curious, and sometimes I move on to things.

Speaker 2 And I feel that the reward, the internal reward you get from doing something new and interesting and exciting is much better than a recognition that someone will come and say, you know, whatever.

Speaker 2 I mean, don't misunderstand me. I will not say no to a recognition.

Speaker 2 But it's not really that I do this in order to get that. That's not me at all.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 the whole thing

Speaker 1 sort of...

Speaker 1 brings my thinking back to like the the early discussions about you know other students are not interested in physics you're interested in physics other people are like smoking a lot of weed and and partying like no like like you said you you've not had mentors that's one area in which you and i have been very different i've always attached myself to mentors many of them many of them yeah i mean well there might be a psychological reason too yeah

Speaker 2 yeah that you need this you know or needed at one point there these parental type figures yeah yeah it might be i wish i had them don't misunderstand me i actually matter of fact i mean my influence on my students i produce more than 15 phds it's also also strange because none of them stayed in physics.

Speaker 2 Now, the department at Stanford was not too happy with that. It's not that I told them not to, but they all smelled that, you know, I was doing something else.
I mean,

Speaker 2 you know, from computers, I became very aware of what was going on very early on with the Internet.

Speaker 2 As you know, I started doing all this stuff on social long before anyone was doing an economics of attention and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 And many of the students, the other day I found one of them, I met one, Lada Damic, who, you know, I think you... She was early at Google.
No, she went to Facebook.

Speaker 2 And the other day she wrote me, you know,

Speaker 2 I was so lucky that I met you. She was going to do a thesis and I don't know what solar collecting, solar.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've collected some pretty interesting students. They're like a pretty, we won't name names other than Laz, but like some of them are very well-known people in the tech industry now.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think that, yeah, it seemed like the people that would gravitate towards you.
It's interesting, your laboratory is off campus.

Speaker 1 So anyone that decides to be off campus is already making a choice toward, like, they don't want to be a part of the standard culture.

Speaker 2 Which I thought was interesting. Yeah, yeah.
yeah. Yeah.
So let me,

Speaker 1 I want to get back to this issue of like internet and Silicon Valley. I recall it was the early

Speaker 1 90s. So it would be like 89, 90, 91.
Remember, I had this, this girlfriend, Gretchen, remember? And her dad was the editor of Guitar Player magazine.

Speaker 1 And I'll never forget, he told me, he said, yo, it's... it's going to be all about multimedia.

Speaker 2 Remember that?

Speaker 1 No one talks about multimedia. He said,

Speaker 1 your television is going to be, your computer is going to be your

Speaker 1 stereo is going, I mean, he was right, right? He was basically everything was going to be synthesized into common devices. And we now know that that wore not to be true.

Speaker 1 But at what point did you decide that things like computers were mainly going to be a route to industry and not to academia? This is really important, I think, for people to understand because

Speaker 1 Right now it's kind of happening in biomedical sciences, but you see this at Stanford.

Speaker 1 People get degrees in computer science, but not to become computer science professors, sometimes, but really so that they can go into industry.

Speaker 1 So how do you see nowadays, like for people that are interested in science or technology, do they need to go to graduate school?

Speaker 2 Like is a PhD useful anymore? Peter Thiel says that you shouldn't even get a bachelor's. I think that's what he, you know.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I have great respect for Peter, great respect for Peter. There are a lot of things that are easier to say when you're already a billionaire.
No, no, no.

Speaker 2 I know. Like

Speaker 2 Steve Joe saying, you know, passion is everything. Right.
I mean,

Speaker 1 necessary but not sufficient.

Speaker 2 Right, right. Right.
Necessary but not sufficient. So I think that what's happening today, I mean, technology, we are going through a technological revolution.
There's no doubt about it.

Speaker 2 We used to learn about the printing press, and now it's the same thing with computers. I still remember, and I, you know, we,

Speaker 2 this is amazing because, you know, today is so obvious. I mean, people didn't know much what was going on.
I park everything. One night we were having for dinner.

Speaker 2 I remember, you know, Emmanuel Mignon, who was, you know.

Speaker 1 He discovered the orexin-hypercretin relationship. That's the the cause of narcolepsy.

Speaker 2 Is it table?

Speaker 2 A friend of ours and his wife. They were at home at our dinner.
And I was telling them, I was telling them that you could go to a computer and go through the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Speaker 2 And they say, what are you talking about? So we finished dinner. And we all drove to Park at night.
And I turned on my computer.

Speaker 2 And there was a man, I still remember his name, something Pioch was the last name. He had gone taking pictures of every painting at the Louvre and put them online.

Speaker 2 So you could just navigate through the Louvre. Today it's obvious, trivial.
At that time, they couldn't believe it. There you are in Palo Alto on an evening going through all the rooms of the Louvre.

Speaker 2 They just couldn't understand what was going on.

Speaker 1 What year was this?

Speaker 2 I don't remember, but it was like

Speaker 2 when the web started coming. That was right.

Speaker 1 We all had to get email in college in the final year, 97. So it must have been somewhere around like 94, 97.

Speaker 2 Something of that sort, right before, right at the time, Andreessen made the web available to everybody, basically, Netscape.

Speaker 2 So in any event, so it was an amazing thing. It was amazing.
Now, all these developments were really done in companies, not necessarily in academia. Okay, that is an interesting point.

Speaker 2 And I think that today, an immense amount of the advances that we see in biotechnology, in computers, in everything, are essentially done. I would say for profit by companies.

Speaker 2 I think social networks,

Speaker 2 we started doing social networks at a time when no one even thought of doing it.

Speaker 2 I used to say I do social science with a capitalist because sociologists used to study the behavior of five widows in some Norway, Norwegian village, and write a paper.

Speaker 2 We could look at 150,000 people. How did they visit this side or that side and predict how we were able to predict behaviors? Behaviors, you know.

Speaker 2 So I think that today everybody knows that that's the case and it's, you know, the same thing with artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1 But for a kid in high school or kids in college or kids in, I mean, is it worth getting a graduate education?

Speaker 2 Well, it all depends on what you want to do.

Speaker 1 I mean law medicine you need a professional degree. I mean these are ultimately professional degrees so you need the training.
I don't want a surgeon that didn't go to medical school.

Speaker 2 Okay but the danger is you and I remember a very very bright guy I had in my in my team you don't want to become a blue color worker.

Speaker 2 See what I'm saying is the following being a hacker or being able to deal with software

Speaker 2 was an incredibly profitable profession. Now you have these large language models that can actually program for you.
You need to write a program. You go to ChatGTP and he'll write it for you.

Speaker 2 So suddenly, you know, if you don't have a set of talents, a way of imagining things, of doing something, you become basically just someone that just hacks for, you know, for so many dollars an hour.

Speaker 2 Now, it's true that they can give you options if the company does well, you get rich and so on. But I still believe that you need some contextual, cultural part to this.

Speaker 2 Okay, now I personally believe that humanities and all sorts of other things are very important.

Speaker 2 And to understand where is your cultural environment, where you're coming from, and where is this society going is important.

Speaker 2 But on the other hand, as you said, you can just finish high school and start hacking and become very good at it and doesn't require much more than that.

Speaker 1 Do you think the examples of like Zuck,

Speaker 2 Elon,

Speaker 1 and others

Speaker 1 going from essentially departing standard education to start companies, do you think they've served?

Speaker 1 I mean, certainly not talking about the companies, but do you think those examples are good examples for people to internalize? Or are they just, are they unicorns?

Speaker 2 Well, I think that they are unicorns, and you have to be very careful. We only talk about the success stories.

Speaker 2 We don't go and interview the guy that is loading a landscaping truck because his startup didn't go anywhere.

Speaker 2 Okay, so it is a very, our tendency to see these people as heroes and to try to imitate them is a very dangerous one, I think.

Speaker 2 Now, that doesn't mean that you should not be working on the things you care and gamble. But these are the guys who played a lottery and won.

Speaker 2 Do you remember there were many other social websites before

Speaker 2 Facebook?

Speaker 2 And they all died. And Facebook could have died too.
I mean, Zachary might disagree with me, but it could have died. Okay.
And, you know, all these things are like that.

Speaker 2 Apple went almost under, they brought Steve Jobs Jobs again and the guy put them into

Speaker 2 the stratosphere. And the same thing with Elon Musk.
He's a high-tech risk taker. And so far, every time he flips the coin, he comes the right way.

Speaker 2 But to say, I want to be like him, you have to be very careful and to calculate the odds.

Speaker 2 So when you say this, how many of these kids really make it? I mean, it's a very complicated thing.

Speaker 2 So I think that to have a strong background in something will help you when suddenly the field switches from being a programmer and making a lot of money to suddenly programmers are in a dime a dozen or becoming a technician basically.

Speaker 1 I mean I had a perfectly thriving career as a lab scientist with grants and private funding and a bunch of other things publishing regularly and when I decided to switch to this were you worried?

Speaker 2 No, because I saw Okay, I saw it as a very slow departure from what you were doing. And I saw the success very early on.

Speaker 2 I mean, I realized that you were essentially satisfying two things that are very important to you. You like to explain things.
You're incredibly good at explaining things since you were a little kid.

Speaker 2 Okay, you were always explaining everything to people. And you have a talent, let's face it.
I mean, you know, I'm not saying this because I want to flatter you. I really believe that.

Speaker 2 Everybody says so. The success of your podcast is a success at explaining things in ways that people understand.
They don't have to go and buy a book on neural anatomy to understand.

Speaker 2 what you're saying. So I knew that this was a path.
Now, I didn't realize how incredible the path was. And there was a lot of randomness in it.

Speaker 2 For instance, you started podcasting at a time when very few people were podcasting. If you start today, the story would be a very different one.

Speaker 1 The timing was the pandemic, people were home, they were all the same podcasts.

Speaker 2 And this brings something to me that many times people have asked me about me.

Speaker 2 What makes me do what I do? I believe in the idea of walking on beaches

Speaker 2 with very few footprints. When you go into a crowded field, it's a mess.

Speaker 2 So many of the times that I move into something else is when I realize that there's a mob mob scene of scientists working at this and the chances of doing something interesting are very, very small.

Speaker 2 The internet has allowed the information to go everywhere. A guy in Zambia can actually read the same things that I read here.
So it's very hard to compete against such a crowd.

Speaker 2 And many people are brilliant and many of them are smart. So you started something very early on and you were lucky that you chose a field that resonates with the needs of people.

Speaker 2 There are also other people who do podcasting and goes nowhere. So I think that I never worried.
I actually was

Speaker 2 elated to see the trajectory of your podcast.

Speaker 2 The only thing is

Speaker 2 you have a tenured position. And that is a nice safety cushion if everything else were.
Today you're beyond the reach of justice, as I say. So no problem.
You don't need it in a sense.

Speaker 1 No one's beyond the reach of justice. But yeah, I still maintain my tenured position.
I spoke to my chairman in ophthalmology this morning and I'll teach this spring or in the middle.

Speaker 2 And it's good for you too to really interact with young people and to hear what they decided and so on.

Speaker 2 But I never worried in the sense that I thought that you have enough talent to do well and you chose to do it. I mean, I remember during COVID at the beginning,

Speaker 2 we were at your sister's house and you were drawing all these little diagrams. I showed them,

Speaker 2 I think you put them on Twitter or something of that sort. And it was the beginning of something much more interesting and important.
And so I never worried about it.

Speaker 2 I think that all of us, the whole family and those who know you, are sort of impressed at the explosive success of this story here, you know, your podcast. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't have to tell you.

Speaker 1 That's what it reflects a kind of an early compulsion more than anything of learn and teach, learn and share.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but there is also, I need to say something. The other day, actually, we were watching your interview with Esther Perel.
And regardless of the fact that I think it's a great interview,

Speaker 2 both my wife and I were reflecting on the fact that it's also also an incredible tribute to the way you conduct an interview okay so there is a talent there I mean not many people can take someone and and talk for and make it interesting let's put it that way so you have that I inherited your curiosity no but it's more than that it's it's also a way of drawing people out and so on which is also part of your practice so I never had any doubts the opposite I mean the issue is you know obviously you're taking it to many, many places long beyond what you started, which was essentially explained to people how neuroscience works, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, we've gone into a lot of health domains and other things. And I've also been blessed with an amazing team.
This is something that I think

Speaker 1 while we share a lot of things in common, if I may, I mean,

Speaker 1 I've always been kind of a pack animal. You know, if it was skateboarding, like draw friends together.

Speaker 1 If it's birds, I have my bird club with Eddie Chang, who now, as you know, is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. It's kind of wild to think about.
But yeah,

Speaker 1 I've rarely gone alone. Like, I'm just struck.

Speaker 1 I mean, I mean, we've had many conversations over the years, but I'm just struck at how you've been able to be, you've been a bit of a lone wolf with these different camps.

Speaker 1 You make friends, you have colleagues, you maintain long-term relationships.

Speaker 2 There are groups of people who collaborate with me. I don't do this alone.
Right.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 But, but there's,

Speaker 1 I haven't changed crowds very often. You know, and it seems like you've had to go into, you know, economics and theoretical physics and all these things.
And

Speaker 1 yeah, that's an interesting difference.

Speaker 2 and look and it's daunting and thrilling at the same time i sometimes when you start giving talks in a field that you've never done much before and you see this audience you know uh can be intimidating too uh you know i even when i started doing chaos i i thought i was doing very well till i gave a talk at berkeley and there was a mathematicians i i regard mathematicians as the top top people in the world and i was saying something and a guy i he's a very famous mathematician he said that's a lie i said what do you mean he said can you prove it no because you know physics don't prove theorems.

Speaker 2 He said, well, then it's a lie. You cannot prove it.
It's a lie. It was quite a

Speaker 2 cold shot. What I mean.

Speaker 1 That happens to me on Twitter every now and again. Well, they'll find something where I misspoke and they do it.
And it's super embarrassing. You correct yourself.

Speaker 2 You move it. Well, and then you learn things too.
You have a conversation with somebody.

Speaker 1 And you never forget those things. This is what I learned.
Like, you never forget the errors you made. Like on a qualifying exam.

Speaker 1 Most people will never take a qualifying exam, but they basically ask you questions until you get something wrong. The moment you say, I don't know, or you get something wrong,

Speaker 1 that's an important important moment because it's also the thing that you go look up and you never forget. Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 And also, the tiny humiliations can be very good too for you. I mean, this is very important.
I know. I've had plenty of those.
I've had plenty of those. I do too.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think it's a very, very important part of, you know, growing up and discovering that you don't understand something. But I always, I need to say this.

Speaker 2 I mean, in spite of the fact that you paint me as a lone wolf, I'm not. I'm very social and I interact, I love interacting with people.

Speaker 2 And I've always been very lucky that I surround myself with groups of people, including today, that are brilliant and resonate with the kinds of things I want to do. And so it's very stimulating.

Speaker 2 I'm not the kind of person that sits in a corner and does theories and publishes by. I published papers on my own.
That was my romantic period where I needed to be Einstein in the patent office.

Speaker 2 And not that I thought I was Einstein, but it was very important.

Speaker 2 I was the only author.

Speaker 2 Today, I don't mind putting my name whatever, and I don't need it. I mean, I have hundreds of papers and lots, you know, more than enough patents and so on.
So

Speaker 2 I like interacting with people. It's very, very important to me.
When I have an idea, I need to tell people about an idea. So

Speaker 2 I can relate. Yes, yes, yes.
So that's very good. And I still see some of my old students and collaborators like Ted and so on.
And we take walks every once in a while and discuss things.

Speaker 2 And so I learned a lot from him too.

Speaker 1 Right now, you're working, as I understand, on quantum internet. Yes.
This is a mysterious term to most everybody.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 You alluded to it earlier about quantum entanglement or about entanglement. Yes.

Speaker 1 But my understanding is that foreign governments, countries,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 our government and country are very interested in quantum internet. Yes.
That it might actually be at least as important as AI, maybe more important for security reasons, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Can you explain quantum internet in a way that I can understand and the listeners can understand?

Speaker 2 I can explain. I mean, I'll tell you the original thing.
Quantum mechanics was essentially finished in 1925. So we are not reinventing new physics here.

Speaker 2 Okay, there's the physics of the gravitation and quantum, but that's not really what we're talking about. What happens is the following.

Speaker 2 The basis of all secure interactions in the internet on computers are based on the idea that there are certain mathematical equations or functions that are very hard. to resolve.

Speaker 2 So when I send you something encoded, if someone is listening to that conversation that is encoded and tries to read it, it's very, very hard to do because in order to decode that code, it's some kind of symbols and so on, you need to,

Speaker 2 I don't know, months or years of a computer to do it. Okay.

Speaker 2 But it can be done.

Speaker 2 Computer codes get broken all the time because the basis of these codes are mathematical functions. You have a mathematical function, you can create a computer program that will try to unravel it.

Speaker 2 And it can be unraveled. Okay, so that's one thing.
Now here comes quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics provides security that is not given by mathematics, but by the laws of physics.

Speaker 2 So if you have a way of interacting, sending messages from one computer to the other, encrypted using quantum mechanisms,

Speaker 2 they cannot be broken.

Speaker 1 Can you give me an example of a quantum mechanism for encoding?

Speaker 2 Imagine that I'm sending you messages.

Speaker 2 Every message is encoded in binary ones and zeros. Okay, so I'm sending a message which is a string of ones and zeros.

Speaker 2 That string of ones and zeros could be hello, Andrew, or it could also be something that is secretly encoded into something.

Speaker 2 If it's classical encryption, which is what we use today, a computer in principle can look at those symbols and unravel them. Now let me show you how it works

Speaker 2 in quantum. In quantum, when I send you a quantum message,

Speaker 2 the act of

Speaker 2 touching it, trying to look at it, destroys it. That's what happens in quantum, not in classical things.

Speaker 2 I can look at a strings of ones and zeros, and I look at them, and I can make a copy of it, and then I read them, I take them to my lab, and I decrypt them. Okay?

Speaker 2 If I look at a string of qubits, quantum bits moving, there are not ones and zeros, they are different things.

Speaker 1 These are moving parts?

Speaker 2 They're moving parts. They are usually photons.

Speaker 2 You can use fiber optics. You can use...

Speaker 1 So these are, like, I know what photons are, so they're

Speaker 2 bouncing energy of light. Yeah, little bunches of light.
Because photons, if they're going around, they're also, you know, the photon could be polarized up or down or whatever.

Speaker 2 But if it's in a quantum state, which is in the intermediate between, the moment I look at it, the moment I capture it, I collapse it into one or the other and I destroy it.

Speaker 1 The interaction with it changes.

Speaker 2 The measurement destroys it. This is the mystery of quantum mechanics: that

Speaker 2 the measurement collapses,

Speaker 2 we call it the word collapses into one state or the other. Before that, it was anything.
It could be anything. So when I use quantum signals, I'm sending qubits, quantum bits, they're called qubits.

Speaker 2 The act of observing the qubit renders into a classical 100.

Speaker 2 So then there's no way you cannot break it.

Speaker 1 So does that mean that the practical implementation of this

Speaker 1 equates to

Speaker 2 unbreakable code.

Speaker 2 Exactly. No, which is why, of course,

Speaker 1 other governments. I mean, what I've been told is that

Speaker 1 in China, they're working very hard on this.

Speaker 2 Oh, absolutely. And that here we're working very hard on this.

Speaker 2 I'm working too. And you're working very hard on this.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But wait, wait, but who's there?

Speaker 1 Has anyone gotten there yet?

Speaker 2 Okay, the problem is the following. In order to decrypt this class, remember that I told you that you can use mathematics, okay?

Speaker 2 Some of these functions are incredibly complex. It might take the age of the universe, perhaps, to decode them mathematically.
Let's not talk about quantum.

Speaker 2 But if you have a quantum computer, Now, we're talking about a quantum computer, it can do it in a couple of hours.

Speaker 2 A quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the ones used in encryption in hours.

Speaker 2 Whereas it would take the age of the universe for a monster computer, standard computer you can buy, to do it.

Speaker 1 So in theory, whoever gets this ability first can read essentially

Speaker 1 all the information that's being sent around the world.

Speaker 2 Not only that, and many people are doing the Chinese, the Koreans, and we're doing, they are grabbing everything now that is encrypted. They cannot decrypt it.

Speaker 2 And they store it because someday they'll be able to decrypt it. But

Speaker 1 who knows if it will still be relevant.

Speaker 2 Oh, but it may be. And we we don't know.

Speaker 2 Imagine, imagine if you can, if you can get...

Speaker 2 Remember when the Korean, North Korea

Speaker 2 hacked, what was it, Disney, one of the, and then they discovered all these emails where people, you know, like Josh Klunik, I don't know who was complaining about this or that. So imagine.

Speaker 2 We just didn't hear about that. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 So if you grab all this information, we cannot decrypt it today, but if quantum computers become available and there are people working on quantum computing, they'll be able to decrypt it.

Speaker 2 In the meantime, people are working on deploying these quantum networks. We are working on that too.
Not to deploy them, but just to see whether or not it's feasible to do that.

Speaker 2 The Chinese are ahead of almost everybody. They have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these qubits.
So these are impossible to decrypt.

Speaker 1 Wait, so they're sending the qubits. So you can already communicate in quantum.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, yeah, we communicate all the time. Yeah, yeah.
I have a lab in Colorado that does that. Yeah, absolutely.
Over 100 kilometers.

Speaker 1 But that's not what standard internet is.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no. But eventually we will have a quantum internet based on all this.
Because in order to talk to these quantum computers, you have to send qubits, not just normal bits.

Speaker 1 So this is a race.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a race. We are not really, I mean, since we are not a, yeah, yeah, and there are a lot of people,

Speaker 2 I need to tell you that a lot of people, including this government, that claim that this is not really that relevant or important.

Speaker 2 But in Europe, for instance, they are really putting a lot of money into that name.

Speaker 1 Why would our government not think it's important?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 there is a sociological phenomenon here. Cryptography has always been the promise of the mathematicians because there are mathematical functions, you know, like discrete logarithms and so on.

Speaker 2 They believe the moment they heard about quantum computers, they said, oh, we can solve the problem. We can create algorithms, mathematical algorithms, that are going to be even harder to break.

Speaker 2 They call that post-quantum. But they don't know.
It's true.

Speaker 2 The United States government is following this post-quantum because they think it's easier and so on. Already they published two of these very, very fancy.

Speaker 2 Well, two students with a laptop were able to decrypt it within a week. So obviously you cannot prove that no one will ever decrypt these things.
Okay.

Speaker 2 So there is the cryptographers don't, they don't like physics,

Speaker 2 they don't work as physicists. So they say quantum key distribution, that's the name of this thing.

Speaker 2 It's esoteric, it's not important and so on. And also it won't work.
Well, they say it's going to work for short distances, about 10 to 20 kilometers.

Speaker 2 We just published a paper that got tremendous publicity and an award and and so on as best paper that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers.

Speaker 2 So I mean and the Chinese are sending that from satellites. Okay, so impossible to decrypt.
Military communications based on these kind of things are impossible to decrypt. So they are very important.

Speaker 2 But there is a whole group of people that are saying, no, post-quantum is what we want.

Speaker 2 And so NIST, the National Institute of, I think, science and technology, they are really pushing the post-quantum thing. In Europe, it's the opposite.
They're really embracing quantum.

Speaker 2 I mean, I was in Denmark, for instance, is very far ahead into these things. NATO just gave them a pile of money to work on quantum and so on.
So it all depends.

Speaker 2 You know, it's a complicated thing because the crypto people are all mathematical people. So they don't care about quantum.

Speaker 1 Is any of this going to be useful for trying to understand, I don't know, how the brain works?

Speaker 1 Or is it, I mean, you know, there's still debate as to whether or not the way that we're thinking about brain function is even like the right way.

Speaker 1 We think about neurons, action potentials, and chemicals.

Speaker 1 But the physicists, whenever they kind of like poke their noses into this stuff, they tend to think about it a little bit differently.

Speaker 1 Or they start to think about, well, you know, state dependence, like the brain that you have at 8 a.m. is very different than the brain you have at 2 a.m.
or 4 in the afternoon.

Speaker 1 Like maybe everything's happening differently. And maybe some of this actually gets down to the quantum level.

Speaker 1 Like we can't say this neuron talks to this neuron and when they talk talk in the following way, you get a certain output.

Speaker 1 Is there relevance here?

Speaker 2 Okay, there are two things I want to say. Beware of physicists getting into brains, in brain work.
I mean, they always end up.

Speaker 1 It's like the new thing now.

Speaker 1 Neuroscience swung the doors.

Speaker 2 I was into neuroscience for a while.

Speaker 1 And I think recently neuroscience has made a good move of including people from psychology, computation, even philosophy, economics, and biology, basically all levels of

Speaker 2 biology.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the other thing you asked about quantum quantum and and the brain there is roger penrose who just got the nobel prize in physics he's one of the few people who have very esoteric ideas about the brain being totally quantum and he's an incredibly brilliant man he was the advisor of cawking i heard him on lex's podcast and um

Speaker 1 and yeah he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating maybe as as bound networks as opposed to independent but no one no one really follows it and i i don't really i'm not an expert in that but so reger penrose is the one one that's pushing this.

Speaker 2 Many of the physicists go into brain science are not very clever at doing brain science because, you know, I heard a story, I think it was Francis Crick or someone who told, I was at a conference, and he was saying this, that a physicist came to him and said,

Speaker 2 I decided to go into brain science. And so he said, okay, what have you done? And the guy says, I measured the specific heat of the brain.
What do I do with it?

Speaker 1 Well, I think it's good that computationally minded people have joined neuroscience because it was getting too modal, too descriptive.

Speaker 1 That said,

Speaker 1 I do think that, you know, math

Speaker 1 is so important, but it's often used to intimidate biologists into thinking that their ideas either might not be true or that there's better ideas out there.

Speaker 1 I will say that when computational neuroscience first started, it seemed like the attempts to model the brain were pretty feeble. And actually, I'll just say it, they were pretty lame.

Speaker 2 But now, I think with AI and LLMs,

Speaker 1 like the biologists have had to step back and say, hey, you know, these math, physics,

Speaker 1 engineering AI types,

Speaker 1 they have the potential to really evolve the field. Right, right.
At least that's my stance. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I was at conferences where people say things like, the brain is a massively parallel machine. And I say, wait, wait, are you sure of that?

Speaker 1 That's a meaningless exercise.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So I said, if I show you a row of trees and I said, tell me how many are they, do you really take the whole thing? And you said, 75? Or you have to go sequentially?

Speaker 2 It's not parallel, it's sequential.

Speaker 1 But LLMs are pretty interesting, right? I mean

Speaker 1 you can take four or five large language models, essentially sort of pseudo-brains, and have them work on the same problem.

Speaker 1 It's hard to work with five people in parallel in a way that's coherent, right? You can all talk, you can only talk so much over one another.

Speaker 2 It's very interesting. That's exactly what we're doing now.

Speaker 2 Years ago with Jeff Drager, we wrote a paper on the idea of showing how programs collaborating with each other could solve problems very, very fast that human others cannot do.

Speaker 2 And it is a basis of a lot of of the work we want to do now. Yes.

Speaker 2 And there are people who are already thinking of putting many, many of these LLMs together and then see whether or not they do better than a single one or better than a human.

Speaker 1 So you think AI is going to improve life for the typical citizen?

Speaker 2 Yes, because you can use these things in order to do things that were very hard to do before. I mean, I use them and it's amazing.

Speaker 2 We just published a paper on hallucinations in LLMs and so, because they hallucinate every once in a while, they say anything. But yes, yeah, they are very useful, very useful.

Speaker 2 And I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that produce them, like OpenAI and so on. Yes, yeah.
It's very, it's a very, very important field.

Speaker 1 But 10, 15 years ago, whenever I'd bring up AI, you would chuckle and say, this stuff is like...

Speaker 2 Well, the funny thing is that the other day,

Speaker 2 well, I don't want to name him, one of the managers at Xerox Park. When I was at PARC, I started playing with the idea of using machine learning to see what they can do.

Speaker 2 And the AI people at that time said that's nonsense. We need to think about logic.
How does the brain think? How do we do cognitive psychology? And so we were just doing neural nets.

Speaker 2 That's exactly it. And the other day I was meeting with some of these people and they were saying to me, we used to laugh at you, you know, doing this stuff because we could do only very little.

Speaker 2 And today is the rage.

Speaker 2 Now, the difference between what I was doing and what is being done today is the scale.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, they are you, I don't know if you know that they are now using nuclear power reactors in order to power the data centers. I didn't know that.
But it's an immense cost of computing.

Speaker 2 You have no idea the amount of work that it takes to one trillion tokens in order to get one of these things to work.

Speaker 1 It strikes me you've always been very open-minded and very willing to adopt new technologies.

Speaker 1 But it hasn't changed your daily life very much. No.
Like it, like, not much at all. I remember early on you said, you showed me the internet.
And you said, be very careful. And I said, why?

Speaker 1 You said, it's like mental chewing gum. Absolutely.
You chew and chew. Those were your words.
You said, you chew and chew.

Speaker 1 And at first it tastes good, then it doesn't taste very good at all, then you don't taste it at all, and then you realize there's no nutrition.

Speaker 1 And I always think about that in terms of phone usage or web foraging behavior.

Speaker 1 And you still like to work, you take a walk in the afternoon, or

Speaker 2 after eating, you

Speaker 1 know, you've always been incredibly regular with your routine despite the evolution of all these technologies. Like you're not the guy in Silicon Valley who's like tricked out with all the gear.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. Well, there is another.

Speaker 1 Actually, I've never seen you at a cafe with a laptop.

Speaker 2 Well, sometimes, but well, there's another aspect to this. As you know, in the last,

Speaker 2 up to five years ago, I spent four years working on the economics of attention and why is it that people attend to things.

Speaker 2 And I really believe, and I'm not an expert, that there is a tremendous resonance between these machines and our human brains, and they are addictive.

Speaker 2 The former CEO of Hewlett Packard, where I was directing the labs,

Speaker 2 Meg Wickmans, used to say, you know, I wake up in the middle of the night to look at my phone. And I know people who do that.

Speaker 2 And there are members of my family who do that more often that I would like to see them do that.

Speaker 1 You don't do that.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 I mean, I do it, but

Speaker 2 I don't have this compulsion to see what's going on. I had a student that he said, I love spam because at least something is happening.
Oh, my goodness. He said that.

Speaker 2 Spam? Spam. He said, I get spam and I look at it because something's happening, he used to say.
He's now a very successful financial guy. Stop doing stuff.

Speaker 2 Brilliant fellow. Brilliant fellow.

Speaker 1 But that's because maybe your internal world is rich enough that you don't.

Speaker 2 I mean it's not. But I look at news.
I like to look at things. I like to look at videos.
Don't misunderstand me. It's not that I ignore it.
But yeah,

Speaker 2 I'm not, I mean,

Speaker 2 I like the latest things and so on, especially if they are beautiful and so on. But yeah, I'm not into whatever the latest is and so on.

Speaker 2 And I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free from you and gave them to you and I never use them once or twice.

Speaker 1 I mean, I've used VR in my lab, but

Speaker 1 I don't want to spend time in VR.

Speaker 2 And also, as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed before this podcast, I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world.

Speaker 2 Okay, so yeah, digital is interesting and it's fascinating in some ways, but I like things like mechanical watches, cameras that click when you press them and so on, but not artificially.

Speaker 2 So I really like that. I like things that are very classical and so on in many ways and I enjoy that.
I like technology, don't misunderstand me, and I use it a lot.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I use it and I do new things with them and I get patents and so on. But yeah, I'm not a techie guy in the same sense.

Speaker 2 I like to have an analog life, not a digital life. Riding a bicycle is analog.
Walking is analogue.

Speaker 2 Sitting and meditating is analog.

Speaker 2 Of course, you can also listen through the internet to a good thing that helps you meditate or go to sleep. Don't misunderstand me.
But I don't have this fascination with things and so on.

Speaker 2 I mean, some people do, but.

Speaker 1 It seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future. You seem very grounded in the present.

Speaker 2 I've never read a single book of science fiction. Most of the people I work with, and I admire them, they all come with ideas from books in science fiction.
They always say, did you read this or that?

Speaker 2 And I say, I have no idea. I never liked it.
I like to read about real people with real blood and real feelings. Science fiction to me is devoid of that.

Speaker 2 It's imagining, you know, droids doing this or that. I couldn't care less.

Speaker 1 Because I always think that physicists must love science fiction because...

Speaker 2 Never, never, never read a single book or looked at it in a movie of science fiction. I couldn't care less.

Speaker 2 I don't relate to that. I don't think that these people display human-like behavior anyhow.
So, I mean, I'm not saying that it's not interesting to others.

Speaker 1 But you're not a futurist.

Speaker 2 No, no, even though they call me futurist, because I always anticipate things.

Speaker 1 Right, but you're not somebody who

Speaker 1 thinks about what life is going to be like 100 years from now.

Speaker 2 No, no, I like to know life is now. Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 And I also, as Niels Bohr once said, it is hard to predict anything, especially the future. Okay, we all predict the past very well.
I don't know what's going to go.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, we've seen things happening, indeed, unbelievable things. I mean, the technology that allows you to become such a worldwide known phenomenon is because of the technology.

Speaker 2 Imagine if you were just declaiming in the Roman Senate centuries ago, very few people.

Speaker 1 I'm doing exactly what I'm doing now, but with no microphones or cameras.

Speaker 2 Right, right. Okay, so yeah, I'm not a futurist, and that's it.
People tell me I am because I anticipate things, but not because I imagine a world in which

Speaker 2 I couldn't care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though... Elon Musk thinks it's very important.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's a cool project?

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I want to ask him why. And then he tells me things like, he says things like, well, you know, civilization is going to die here.
We are going to asphyxiate. And so I don't know.
I mean, let it happen.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Just enjoy now, you know.

Speaker 1 You're not worried about the future.

Speaker 2 In that sense, no, I'm an optimist. I believe that technology will solve the global warming problem.

Speaker 2 It's obvious how to solve it. There's nothing very mysterious.

Speaker 2 Nuclear power is going to do it.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Once we get over our preconceived notions of nuclear power.

Speaker 2 Right. I mean, very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident, let's face it.

Speaker 1 They need to name it something else.

Speaker 2 Maybe, yeah, maybe.

Speaker 1 Like many things that

Speaker 1 once were thought to be dangerous, when renamed,

Speaker 1 turn out to not be so dangerous that when renamed, people are willing to adopt it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. So, yeah, I don't really, you know, I don't worry too much about the future.
I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to steer away from the rink, hopefully.

Speaker 1 You don't seem to worry too much generally. You're not a big worrier.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You and I are different that way. You and I are different that way.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You worry a lot.

Speaker 1 Not if I keep busy.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 These days, a lot less. I think that

Speaker 1 I think at the transition points between different circumstances and at the transition points between different career things, I think it makes sense to worry.

Speaker 1 It sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that, you know, you

Speaker 1 reach reach for the next rung and and and grab it right and not yeah you know not miss I mean there's been I mean I think there's been elements of uncertainty in my life where I felt like okay I'm gonna ground the things I can control but no I don't stay up at night worrying about things yeah also I think meditation is profoundly effective at this suddenly you're here and that's the

Speaker 2 past is the past you cannot do anything and the future hasn't arrived so what the heck you know I really believe that and it has helped me immensely uh i i'm very the few things i'm very proud i i i went for my medical checkup a year ago and the doctor says i'd love to hear you breathe i said what's so wrong with my breathing says so slow and calm so you got over the white coat syndrome yes yeah because of meditation yeah you sent me your lab results this morning so everything's everything looks great yeah yeah um you've always been busy you know regular about exercise not excessive no you're never one of the like the marathoners or the you know 5 a.m in the pool people but no i tried tried runs to run a marathon, actually.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's very common in the area where, you know, in around Stanford to be pretty extreme about athletics. That was never your thing.
No.

Speaker 1 Steady. long distance running.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I told you that once. See, I'm not a sprinter.
Yeah. Some people are, and by the way, I admire them immensely.

Speaker 1 You mean in life? We're speaking medical.

Speaker 2 Yeah, in general, yeah, there are some people who really can do things incredibly fast and they move from one thing to the other and and so on. Yeah,

Speaker 2 I like people who reflect some wisdom.

Speaker 2 For instance, I have a, it's very strange for someone like me, but I see a Buddhist monk, and I just suddenly, I feel calmer by just seeing that person, you know.

Speaker 2 I don't know. There is something, it's not just the spirituality, the power they have to be here totally and absolutely.

Speaker 2 It's impressive to me. I mean, some other people say, okay, he has funny robes or something.

Speaker 2 I like that a lot.

Speaker 2 It's not necessarily a way. I mean, my therapist used to say to me that to use meditation to move away from trouble and and

Speaker 2 troubling thoughts is not a good idea so you have to embrace the world too but I use it so it's just to stay calm and to enjoy and to see things for what they are and I think it's yeah yeah the future is the future I don't know well you can only control what you can control right that's but you know there are some people who are worried all the time about the future you know given your understanding of quantum mechanics relativity

Speaker 2 and the real world

Speaker 1 and perhaps just generally, knowing what you know and experiencing what you've experienced. Do you believe in some sort of

Speaker 1 higher power organizing force? Or let's just be blunt. Do you believe in God?

Speaker 2 Well, okay, the word God has a lot of implications, right? I mean, I don't necessarily, I don't believe in a God that keeps track of what you and I are doing at this point. There are too many people

Speaker 2 and so on. So I don't believe in this notion of

Speaker 2 an agent there that is somehow knowing what everybody on this planet is doing or you know and so on.

Speaker 2 I do feel sometimes and especially because of the studies I have,

Speaker 2 and actually from reading people who have been very, very deep, in particular the thoughts of people like Einstein, Heisenberg and so on, that there seems to be at times a sense of an organizing principle in the universe.

Speaker 2 And to learn those rules. So there is this notion, I mean, philosophically it's called pantheism, that God is in nature already, as Pinos and all these people study this.

Speaker 2 That is very appealing to me. The notion that there is something, that this thing is, if it's evolving, it's like an entity, but not an entity that says, oh, tomorrow you know, you'll die or so on.

Speaker 2 I mean, you'll die, you die, there are lots of events that lead to death or to happiness and so on, but not because someone is out there checking.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't believe there is enough memory to store all this, although today I saw you can buy Sandisk memory terabytes that are this big. So

Speaker 2 I don't believe in that. But it's a matter of belief, not anything else.
Unfortunately, these beliefs are translated sometimes in complete reactions. I do believe that there is a sense of mystery.

Speaker 2 Sometimes I once heard, I don't know who said it, but it's a very good sentence that if you listen to Beethoven, say,

Speaker 2 I mean, the man struggled, but it's amazing he was able to create that music.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, Mozart seems to have been getting the messages from heavens, you know, on a daily basis, just wrote it down. So some people are given this connection to something much bigger.

Speaker 2 And you have access to that through listening to that music, the experiences we have.

Speaker 1 There is this idea out there that consciousness doesn't just exist within our brains, but it's sort of like a collective network and things come through us. Not just as individuals, but as people...

Speaker 2 The union thing is

Speaker 2 a lot of that.

Speaker 2 I am very interested in the word spiritual and what it means, you know, to see that things transcend our particular needs at any point.

Speaker 2 But the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny.

Speaker 2 You know, if you look at any movie, you know, Braveheart or whatever, you see the one warrior, one group of warriors has a priest saying God is with us, and the other one is about to engage.

Speaker 2 It says the same thing to the other group. That's a little bit funny, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, I think humans and human brains in particular are amazing, amazing, what human brains can do. This computer in our heads is spectacular.
And yet it also has limitations. And I think,

Speaker 1 well, put differently,

Speaker 1 does it

Speaker 1 make you nervous or worry you that I seem to have an increasing interest in God and religion?

Speaker 2 No, I think that it's a beautiful journey in which you're in. And there are two pieces to this, provided

Speaker 2 you don't start using this to somehow spout

Speaker 2 arguments why people shouldn't do this or that. No, no, it's only my own exploration of of my ideas.
I respect that. I think it's a very important

Speaker 2 thing.

Speaker 2 You know, there is an issue here that I read reading Wilson, actually, Eo Wilson, which

Speaker 2 he wrote this beautiful book on human nature. And he claims that the religious instinct comes from a submissive component in us that animals have.
Dogs are submissive.

Speaker 2 And we believe that we need to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king, some deity or something other. That's his theory.

Speaker 1 I certainly don't feel any compulsion to be submissive to other humans.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think in knowing the limitations of the human brain and cognition, I don't care how smart, I don't care how successful an individual or a group is.

Speaker 1 It's very clear that the human brain is limited in parsing the universe that we're in.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, we wouldn't continue to have the same issues over and over. Although, I do like to think that we're falling forward, we're evolving forward as opposed to devolving as a species.

Speaker 1 But we tend to repeat a lot of the same mistakes

Speaker 2 over and over again.

Speaker 2 There's also a technical thing here. We sometimes confuse randomness with premonition or God doing something.

Speaker 2 I mean, dodging a bullet by turning your head, as our next president did, is an incredible thing. The probability is so, so, so small.

Speaker 2 But that doesn't mean that there was someone who said, turn the head, do it, and so the bullet will pass. I mean, we ascribe causality to something that was truly random.

Speaker 2 It could have also, in another scenario, the same turn of the head would have been to the other side, and this person would be dead.

Speaker 2 So, I but sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences that we cannot explain.

Speaker 2 And we say, oh, it must be God that made sure that you and I met or that we thought the same thoughts and so on.

Speaker 1 Although, as a biologist who started off as a neurodevelopmental biologist, I think I just had to see, there are two things that changed my understanding of what might be possible.

Speaker 1 One was Barbara Chapman, my advisor, once treated me to an experiment. It was kind of a funny thing.
Typical Barbara, you knew how nerdy she was. She said,

Speaker 1 are you willing to stay up all night? And I was like, okay, yeah. And she took zebrafish eggs and fertilized them.
And I sat for 11 hours with food.

Speaker 1 I got up to use the restroom and I watched a zebrafish egg duplicate and become a fish. Like in real time with my eyes, not some movie on YouTube, although that's impressive too.

Speaker 1 People can look these up.

Speaker 1 But to just actually see life emerge from a set of cells through its own organizing principles, all of which can be explained by genes, transcription factors, the physics of the mitotic spindle.

Speaker 1 I mean, math and biology and chemistry can explain all of it. But there was something truly spectacular about it that seems so non-random because it's not random.

Speaker 1 And then the other one is that, I mean, I guess I've had enough experiences with prayer and the consequences of prayer in my real life that I just, I sort of can't get my head around the idea that there's not a God or some sort of organizing force.

Speaker 1 I just, I can't accept it because there's, yes, there's causality, reverse causality, correlation and mistaking correlation and causality, but somehow, like, I mean, I like to think I'm grounded in science and reality, but I don't think science can explain it all.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, and I think that this experience of

Speaker 2 this spirituality, for instance, I remember, and still happens, spending a night outdoors and looking at the sky.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's an incredible thing, the stars and you feel so small, and yet there is order to all that. It's not just random stuff.

Speaker 2 I mean, they move according to laws that fortunately we humans were able to discover, which is an amazing thing when you think about it. Dogs did not discover gravity.

Speaker 1 They're certainly not Costello.

Speaker 2 Costello was gravity.

Speaker 2 So, I really think that there is something to be said about these spiritual experiences, and I really believe that, very importantly, and I listen to people talk.

Speaker 2 I recently have been looking at some stuff that C.S. Lewis, you know, he was a man who was studying the sagas and the mythology of the Vikings and so on and eventually became a devout Christian,

Speaker 2 thinking that this was the only answer to the, because all religions have the same element.

Speaker 2 So I understand that. I respect it.
I experienced that at times in my life. But when I think seriously about it, I think that the moment

Speaker 2 we have this computer and

Speaker 2 we can get glimpses of all this. But

Speaker 2 I don't believe that this notion, no one can prove to me that there is someone there organizing my life minute by minute or second by second. I don't believe that.

Speaker 2 I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and randomness, beautiful ones, okay? And, you know,

Speaker 2 having you and Lara as children is a fantastic randomness in my life.

Speaker 1 Hopefully it wasn't too random.

Speaker 2 No, no, in the sense that, you know, children, you know, you know, children that come unhealthy, whatever. I mean, you know, it's a very impressive thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the number of things that have to organize to create a healthy child is it's truly a miracle.

Speaker 2 Yeah, true, true. Yeah, and I think, but a lot of it is random too, you know.
I mean, the same set of parents can produce two different set of children, too. Okay.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's a very, very important.

Speaker 1 Mar and I are pretty different.

Speaker 2 Oh, absolutely. But in very beautiful ways, too.
So, I mean, neither of you does behave or conducts a life that, you know, I would be unhappy or your mother would be unhappy with.

Speaker 2 So, but going back to this,

Speaker 2 I believe that indeed spirituality is important. I have a lot of access to that through classical music.

Speaker 2 There are times that I really believe that is it, I mean, I can get very, very emotional listening to music, very emotional.

Speaker 2 You know, my wife always notices it when I do that. And I think that then you're having access to something very different.

Speaker 2 Of course, it can be explained physiologically by all sorts of resonances and so on. But who cares?

Speaker 1 You mentioned that you can peer into the future with ideas that you're working on

Speaker 1 and yet you don't get too far ahead. Like you're not thinking like 100 years from now, what's it going to look like? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past?

Speaker 2 Sometimes, sometimes.

Speaker 2 I've always, because I left

Speaker 2 my family when I was still very young, I always had a certain nostalgia for things.

Speaker 2 I became friend with a very impressive guy in France, Claude Jopart. I think he was the director of the Geophysics Institute.

Speaker 2 And both of us had very similar parents in different, you know, French and Argentina, but still and similar educations.

Speaker 2 And we had, I have sometimes a certain nostalgia that is almost melancholy about the way we grew up and so on. Melancholy.
A little bit about it. I mean,

Speaker 1 I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina, like you would have 10, 15 cousins over for lunch every Sunday.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, it was very. That doesn't sound melancholy.
No, no, but there were moments, moments of loneliness, moments of times where I felt very misunderstood.

Speaker 2 I had, unfortunately, a very punishing mother.

Speaker 2 But I still remember her and I think about her in ways that are not necessarily always very happy.

Speaker 2 I was looking at photos a while ago and there are pictures of her that is, you know, she's smiling coming out of the Pacific Ocean in Carmel. She took a walk and so on.
But

Speaker 2 I reflect back in the past in that sense. I mean, and sometimes, you know, I'm asked, you know, how did you grow up?

Speaker 2 My wife being Danish, she grew up in a very different way from, you know, upper-middle-class Argentines.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we reflect on that, the kinds of childhoods we had and so on. But not in the sense that,

Speaker 2 oh, I wish I had that now.

Speaker 2 No regrets.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 not many, not many.

Speaker 2 That's good.

Speaker 2 I mean, there is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else, which is if I look at my family,

Speaker 2 My brother stayed, produced family, children, grandchildren, and so on. I came here and I produced children, children, grandchildren, and they are going to be two diverging branches of the family.

Speaker 1 We still get together. We got together last year for your birthday.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I know. That's what is so important to me.
Yes.

Speaker 2 But I think about it sometimes. And when I go back and I see the lives very similar to what I had, or different perhaps,

Speaker 2 there is a certain sense of thinking about the past. But I also realize that if I didn't take the steps I took,

Speaker 2 I would be as miserable as some of my old friends that are really struggling even to find meaning in what they do or even surviving economically. So I was really lucky.

Speaker 1 Well, so was I, because I wouldn't have existed because you wouldn't have met Mr.

Speaker 2 Speaker, too. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 I mean, maybe you would have, but.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 But I'm grateful I didn't grow up in Buenos Aires. I love the city.
I love the country. I don't feel that.

Speaker 1 I couldn't have done any of the things I've done in South America given maybe, but the landscape was just completely different.

Speaker 2 Oh, I go there and after a week, I want to come back. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 So you love this country.

Speaker 2 I love this country. I feel very much part of this country.
I'm very grateful to what this country has has done for me, for my family, and that includes you and your sister, okay, and my wife.

Speaker 1 When did you become a citizen?

Speaker 2 Oh, many, many years ago. And I really did it consciously, not because, I mean, I mean, they were practical things, but no, I really believe in it.

Speaker 2 I really believe it is an incredible country and gives incredible opportunities to people.

Speaker 2 As Elon says, Elon Musk, I'm also an immigrant. I'm very happy to be one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've always been a patriot.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And on the other hand, as I said, Argentina is complicated.
I go there and a lot of smells and things that bring memories that are amazing.

Speaker 2 The food's not bad. Yeah, yeah.
But it's also

Speaker 2 the whole atmosphere. And the first two, three days are an incredible experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on.
But after a while, I also see a darker side to it.

Speaker 2 I must tell you that on the other hand, my country-in-law, Denmark, is also a country that I like immensely.

Speaker 2 These nice people and pleasant and soft, very soft, especially in summer.

Speaker 1 But the Danes are also strong people.

Speaker 2 Like they're very...

Speaker 1 The average Dane is so smart. I think the high school education there must be among the best in the world.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 there is a notion of proficiency. I mean, people are proficient at what they do.
Yeah, you go to a store, you go to, you have a problem,

Speaker 2 an airline or whatever, you'll get someone who really knows how to solve it. But there's also a very, it's a small society, very homogeneous, tremendous sense of humor, which I enjoy.

Speaker 2 And it's very soft. People, you know, enjoy life.
They have notions like slow food movements and things of that sort. So I like it.

Speaker 2 I could not live there because it's, you know, it's a very homogeneous way of behaving. You know, the Lutheran ethic is there.
They're not religious, but they're Lutheran.

Speaker 2 So I feel very comfortable in Europe and so on. But I like being here.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I feel like.

Speaker 1 Our family now includes so many different nationalities and religions and backgrounds and philosophies and political stances. It's good too, right? Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 1 It's starting to look like the UN with some extra.

Speaker 2 Well, I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity. It was incredible.
Incredible. That's good.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So that was also good to be, as a child, to hear these arguments about politics and so on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I hear a few of those now. Yeah.
Arguments about politics. We won't get into politics.
One thing that I did want to say, however, is that

Speaker 1 I remember a long time ago, and I'm certain because I wrote it in my journal, you said, politically incorrect views are often right.

Speaker 1 Is that true still?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, politically.

Speaker 1 Still true for you, I should say.

Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Because this has only to be judged in time, okay?

Speaker 2 I think that the issue of political incorrectness is some kind of a mob behavior that says you should think like us.

Speaker 2 We should be able to express our views with respecting others and so on, and we should be respected for that.

Speaker 2 I think that this whole notion that others are telling you what to think or not to think is a little bit complicated.

Speaker 2 And I must say something which I hope it doesn't get me in trouble with my Danish side of the family or friends.

Speaker 2 Societies like the Scandinavian societies that are extremely uniform in thinking, the word should is used all the time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you should do this, you shouldn't do that. Good that you did it.
You know, it's a very, they enforce behavior in a very, very particular way.

Speaker 2 It's not a hurting instinct, but there is a very, very strict Lutheran tradition of telling telling you what you should and you shouldn't do.

Speaker 2 So I know very few people, and I've been going to Delman for many, many years, that really have iconoclastic ideas that are away from the mean, and they're considered odd.

Speaker 2 Okay, very few, including the physicists. And they have fantastic school of physics there.
Niels Bohr was there. So it is a society that conformity is the issue there, right?

Speaker 2 So on the other hand, I think that it's good to think differently. And, you know,

Speaker 2 there's a man, perhaps you heard of him. I know, I mean, I admire him.
He died, Freeman Dyson. He was on a level with Feynman and Engel-Mann, by the way.
He used to have very strange ideas, too.

Speaker 2 He used to say, global warming, what's wrong with it? The Sahara is going to be a garden.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, the Sahara Desert will become a garden.
People will be able to eat all that food.

Speaker 1 Well, I think people hear that, but then they counter it against these,

Speaker 1 you know, very heart-wrenching pictures of like polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking, this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 There are more polar bears today than when Mr. Al Gore said that we're going to die.

Speaker 1 Listen, I'm not going to argue climate change with you because I have no idea.

Speaker 2 No, no, I'm talking about giving him a question. Oh, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 I'm not countering. I'm just saying, you know, like,

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 this is getting very intense on the internet now because the arguments on both sides seem pretty strong, at least as they're presented. So who's right?

Speaker 2 No, the question is what can we do about it? That's the issue. And I think that technology and wisdom are going to solve it.
I think so. I really believe that very strongly.

Speaker 2 I'm an optimist when it comes to that.

Speaker 2 But what I'm talking about being politically incorrect is this idea of saying things that a group of people say you shouldn't be saying or thinking those thoughts.

Speaker 2 And the question is, can we debate those things rationally or nicely, respecting people's beliefs? Okay.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I believe in that very strongly. And I think being politically incorrect is a way of saying you're sort of

Speaker 2 smiling at them. But it's okay.
Why not? You know,

Speaker 2 who said that we shouldn't be like that? I remember encountering the first libertarians when I was already, you know, working as a physicist, and they were saying to me, why should we,

Speaker 2 why are we afraid of the Russians? I say, well, you know, well, you think they're going to invade the United States? Can you imagine Russia invading?

Speaker 2 I mean, if they invade it, how are they going to control us? You know, they had these arguments. They were very funny arguments, you know.
Why do we need an army? Why do we need taxes?

Speaker 2 And I really thought that was so provocative, so interesting.

Speaker 1 Do you consider yourself a libertarian?

Speaker 2 In many ways, I like the idea of liberty. I believe very strongly in it.
I mean, this country was founded on that. I think that our founding fathers really believed in it, and I admire them for that.

Speaker 2 Reading Jefferson and so on is really inspiring to me. I think that some of the political movement is a little bit odd.
They always end up with political candidates that go nowhere and so on.

Speaker 2 Why do you think that is?

Speaker 2 Why do you think that is?

Speaker 2 They're so rational. They're often among the smartest.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 they are not strategically smart.

Speaker 2 I've met at times libertarians that think incredible thoughts, and

Speaker 2 they live in Silicon Valley, and they're poor. I mean, even though they are the ones who are supposed to be.

Speaker 1 Some are poor.

Speaker 2 Some are not. But I'm saying it's very interesting.
They choose presidential candidates no one ever heard of.

Speaker 1 I think many of them are

Speaker 1 on the spectrum. in a way that doesn't allow them to get into the minds of other people in a way that would allow them to convince other people about their arguments.

Speaker 1 I mean, a lot of politics, as we know, is show business. I mean, in this recent election, it was all posturing.
It was all about grabbing emotion.

Speaker 2 It was not about logic. It was not about emotion.
Yeah, I have several of my people that, you know, they put all their money to freeze themselves.

Speaker 1 You going to cryo yourself? No.

Speaker 1 My dad and I have had this running joke for a lot of years because someone we know very well and several people we know well have set aside significant amounts of money to have their heads or entire bodies frozen on the idea that they're going to be brought back later Han Solo style.

Speaker 1 You've always laughed at this idea.

Speaker 2 No, but not only that,

Speaker 2 there is a colleague of mine at Stanford who accuses me of being friends with a guy that is like that.

Speaker 2 And I told this guy, I said, you know, if he thinks that you're a bad influence on me, and the guy said, well, tell him that we are the ones who are going to come back and do what we believe.

Speaker 1 He's going to be gone.

Speaker 1 You're not interested in living to be 200?

Speaker 2 It's not an issue. These people are interested in living for another thousand years.
So when they wake up, they see how the world looks. They read science fiction.

Speaker 2 So they are very interested to know what the world looks like once they wake up.

Speaker 1 So there are people in the health space that are trying to not die, you know, Brian Johnson and others. I mean, what's a different story?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, what's your thought on trying to live to be 150 or something like that?

Speaker 2 Well, if you can live, the issue is not the age, it's the conditions of your body and mind, okay?

Speaker 2 That's the issue. I had the misfortune and fortune of having two parents that lived very long lives.
One, was incredibly, my father was incredibly lucid until the end.

Speaker 2 My mother had everything, you know, every dementia and complications that came from, you know, being an anorexic all her life and so on. So my father enjoyed being lucid until the end.
And so

Speaker 2 he didn't take care of himself physically so well. So the idea is if you live up to 100 or 150 or 200 and you can still do the things you enjoy in life is one thing.

Speaker 2 To be like my mother who couldn't even comprehend what was in front of her when you put a cup of tea, you know, then it's very sad. But it can happen at the age of 35.

Speaker 2 So, yeah,

Speaker 2 I'm not into a race to live forever.

Speaker 2 I want to live healthily. I want to enjoy life.
Enjoyment is the most important piece. What's the point of being

Speaker 2 tethered to tubes all over the place,

Speaker 2 flat on a bed, and you say, oh, I made another year of my life. I mean, that's not really a life, at least for me.

Speaker 1 Do you worry about or and or wish for anything for me, for Lara?

Speaker 2 Yes, to be super happy people. No, I don't want to use the word happy.
I want to see you joyful.

Speaker 2 Joy. Joy is more important than happiness.
Joy is a state of mind. Happiness is, okay, yeah,

Speaker 2 I said a list of things I want to have and I have them and I smile a lot. Joyful is this sense of being in yourself.
And I would like that. I mean, you two are very different.

Speaker 2 Lara lives much more in the moment than you do for reasons. Okay, it's her view of it.

Speaker 1 It's her demeanor.

Speaker 2 Her demeanor. It's very good.

Speaker 1 Lara's focused on what she's going going to do this weekend.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 I'm focused on what I'm going to do this weekend, next week, the next month.

Speaker 2 And I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend, and that's it. And everything else is going to come to you.

Speaker 2 I believe, and now I'm speaking in a way that is more paternal than anything else. I've been, you had a charmed life.
And everything came to you since you were very little.

Speaker 2 And you exhibited, you know, behaviors and so on that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from the very beginning.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's not that you were a genius at chess or Rubik's Cube or anything. I know some kids that are like that, but there was something, something in there.

Speaker 2 And so, I think that, you know, learning to just relax and rest, but it's part of your behavior. Since you were little, you had these problems.
Okay, I used to

Speaker 2 put you on my lap and say, it's going to be fine. And say, well, what if I cannot do my homework? Okay.
But you could.

Speaker 1 Or even my stuffed animals.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. They say that gave you organized and

Speaker 2 I probably have, remember, I had the grunting tick? Yes, yeah. Oh, yeah, that was

Speaker 2 drove us nuts. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I probably have a little bit of an OCD type thing.

Speaker 1 I mean, not diagnostically, you know, significant, but when I bite down into something that I'm pursuing, it's very hard for me to think about anything else.

Speaker 2 Well, we talked about it when you were at Berkeley. Once you told me that you were starting to run, but you wanted to run like everybody else was running.
I don't know, how many miles?

Speaker 1 No, I heard there was a guy who had been in the department, Randy Nelson. He's now a professor in Ohio.

Speaker 1 Somebody just like off, you know, just in passing said, oh, yeah, you know, Randy worked, you know, like 80 hours a week or 90 hours a week.

Speaker 2 And I was like, 95 hours. Yeah, I remember that.

Speaker 1 You know, but what's interesting is I'm not a naturally competitive person. It was just this idea.
Like, I've tended to want to know,

Speaker 1 I've, and I've since stopped this, but there was a long time where I wanted to figure out what my body and mind were capable of. I just wanted to see like, how high is that ceiling?

Speaker 2 And it was only when I almost suffocated on a scuba dive or when I was working to the point of exhaustion or you know where and then I also realized that you know I published a number of papers to get tenure like I didn't need that many but I enjoyed every one it's not like I'm not having fun I'm having fun yeah this idea of pushing oneself to limits the question is why I mean I think there is so much to enjoy on a on a regular life and the things that we have already we have to work to get them the way we want but I don't think that worrying for the sake of worrying or you know just worrying I mean Yeah, I don't tend to worry.

Speaker 1 Well, you know what changed that for me in a major way? I mean, I've had moments. I've had moments.
I think I can recall like I have a favorite best day of my life moment. I won't share it here.

Speaker 1 It's not, it's not relevant right now.

Speaker 2 But Costello helped bring me into the moment.

Speaker 1 Like he would do these things that like I would delight in that were just so simple, like the way he would like

Speaker 1 fall over or something.

Speaker 1 You know, I think that like having another creature there that, that is very much in the moment brings you into the the moment.

Speaker 2 Right. And you were very connected to it, too.
I mean, I think that if you were connected to someone that has that property of bringing you down and so on, you would start enjoying it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the people I've I've had amazing partners, as you know, some less than amazing, but many amazing partners. And

Speaker 1 they tended to be also kind of into the future, like focused on what's not quite there yet.

Speaker 1 But I must say, I think women in general do it better than men, that they're better at like grounding to the present.

Speaker 2 Well, it depends. I think that my wife tends to be more anxious than I am about the future.

Speaker 1 So maybe it's not general.

Speaker 2 Well, in trying to sort of tell her that she shouldn't worry so much, I think that I also suddenly reflect, what am I doing here? And I try to also slow down myself.

Speaker 2 I think that, you know, yeah, I think you're someone who's running from one thing to the other. I mean, to say it colloquially, but it would be nice if you said, okay, I'm fine.

Speaker 2 You know, you have a podcast that is doing well. You don't have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years.
No,

Speaker 2 I don't think out that far.

Speaker 1 I don't think about the career piece. I think that I,

Speaker 1 I mean, I often don't have a plan. I know what we're going to do this year.
I don't know what we're going to do after that. But professionally, I think,

Speaker 1 look, I think part of it was science.

Speaker 1 I mean, we're talking about a lot of things, but for many years, right, from the time I like squared my life away and when I turned 19, it was like, okay, I'm going to get things right now.

Speaker 1 There's always been these milestones. You're going to finish your undergraduate degree.
I did a master's. Then you did a PhD.
Then the postdoc. Then you need to get tenure.

Speaker 1 You know, I think the academic system was a system of two to five year

Speaker 1 bursts, like sprinting marathons in many ways to try and grab the next thing to get to the next level. And there was a lot of uncertainty for a long time.

Speaker 1 You know, I think I'm finally now coming into a place of certainty, like feelings of like, oh, like things are, things are good and they've gone great. But yeah, but it's it's hard.

Speaker 2 Oh, of course it's hard, especially if you have that kind of temperament. Yes.
And I think you need to train yourself almost to...

Speaker 2 I just had

Speaker 2 a set of the words that

Speaker 2 it's a matter of bringing elegance into your life almost, to live it in a way that is elegant, is nice in itself, you know.

Speaker 2 That is important.

Speaker 2 One of the things I learned, I mean, you know,

Speaker 2 living with the Danes, Danes don't like you to eat standing.

Speaker 2 They sit, they set a table and they light a candle and, you know, it's very nice. It creates a pace.
Yeah, the ritual. The rituals.

Speaker 2 rituals are very important and also the other thing that is very important and i discovered is to have something to look forward to you cannot just wake up one day say and now what

Speaker 2 there has to be something

Speaker 1 okay that's important i mean you know we all we all have that so rogan talks about this thing about you know because he has a you know podcast he does four four episodes a week plus he's an announcer of the ufc he has his comedy career he raised he has three kids he's in a happy marriage and you know he's really into working out and all this and he i heard something recently it was actually the forward to a cameron Haynes' book.

Speaker 1 I was listening to it and he, it was amazing. He said, you know, you have to approach your life, no matter how busy or how simple,

Speaker 2 as a kind of work of art.

Speaker 1 Like you can't just think of it as daily life. You have to have some macroscopic view of this so that you know where to put things.

Speaker 1 And it's a lot of what you're saying as well.

Speaker 2 Elegance, yeah. Life has to have elegance.
Otherwise, it's just disjoint moments. And so sometimes they will be like that.
And it can be very creative too.

Speaker 2 but most of the the the the idea is to really get into something I mean I I personally think that when you you describe me as being very steady or whatever it sounds very boring too for that matter right I mean I don't know I mean there's a beauty in steadiness because from places of steadiness you can take good risks well right I mean and I think that my mind is not you know in a steady you know state but I don't have this notion I have to see things everybody's talking about something I have to see see it.

Speaker 2 I never felt like that. No, I mean, I'd like to see things, don't misunderstand me.
But it's very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I like them to do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you don't seem to need to go on like jungle adventures or like or ice skate across Antarctica.

Speaker 1 Like you've never been one for like the kind of wild outing.

Speaker 2 No. No, the wild outing is here.

Speaker 2 That's my wild outing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I can have very

Speaker 2 wild thoughts about things that I would like, you know, sometimes they're totally wrong and so on. But yeah,

Speaker 2 in a funny way, I am a little bit of what the French call in armchair, a philosopher or whatever.

Speaker 2 There are these people who write articles about France and Africa without ever having left France or something of that sort. So I'm not like that.
But

Speaker 2 I don't necessarily

Speaker 2 crave this physical adventure for the sake of adventure. I like beautiful things.
And I don't mind repeating the same beautiful thing

Speaker 2 every year if necessary, going vacation to the same places and so on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you like to go back to the same place.

Speaker 2 Well there is a difference between tourism where you see new things and so on. I like that.
There's also the idea of vacation where you just sit and enjoy what you have.

Speaker 1 I confess I've not ever done it.

Speaker 1 And you know this about me. I've never taken a vacation.
I've never seen

Speaker 2 to the summer house in Denmark. You can spend the week there just enjoying it.
That's it. I don't know if I show you pictures from the window.
They see the deer in the garden.

Speaker 2 You know, they just sit there. You know, it's nice.

Speaker 2 So there's nothing, you know, it's nice. It can be, you cannot spend a life doing that.
You know, I'm not a monk. Okay.
I'm not a meditator that will spend hours on this.

Speaker 2 But, you know, it's nice to rest. You know, it's very important, I think.

Speaker 1 And the rituals are important to you.

Speaker 2 Very important. Yes.
Yeah. The rituals have a, it also are very reassuring because then you know it's predictable, right? You don't want a totally unpredictable life all the time.

Speaker 2 That's what people create rituals. You know.

Speaker 1 You early on

Speaker 1 taught me about etiquette.

Speaker 1 You know, it's something that years later, I think it was probably in the mid-90s, for some reason, we were at the movies together and we saw some people at the movies and they were wearing their bathroom slippers

Speaker 1 and more or less their pajamas to the movies. And I'll never forget, you grabbed my arm.
Like you didn't grab it forcefully. We grabbed you.
So you see that? I said, yeah.

Speaker 1 And you said, people are coming to the movies in their pajamas. I said, yeah.
And you said, that's the beginning of the end to any society. And I thought you were joking.

Speaker 1 But, you know, it's something I thought about a lot. You also said,

Speaker 1 and I'll never forget, you know, you're always better off being overdressed because then at least your class that you're speaking to or your hosts,

Speaker 1 et cetera, they know that you took them seriously.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I don't think we really appreciate etiquette. We sort of, like, as Americans, especially, we've somehow confused freedom of choice with discarding etiquette.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like it's not something you hear discussed very much, but what about etiquette?

Speaker 2 Well, there are many components. I think the most important one is a societal one.
I mean, one of the things that I like, for instance, if you go to England, how polite people are.

Speaker 2 Politeness is a virtue. And politeness, the higher

Speaker 2 the social class, the higher the demand to be polite. It's behavior, it's being nice to people, is understanding what they are.
And associated with that, there are codes.

Speaker 2 Some of them are behavioral, some of them are dress codes.

Speaker 2 I had a brilliant economist, Italian economist working with me, and now he's in the East Coast, who told me he went to a wedding in Italy after living in the United States, and he went to his cousin's wedding, and his uncle said, you show no respect, you're not wearing cufflinks.

Speaker 2 He said, well, but my shirt is all, but no, no, no, go home and get cufflinks because you're showing lack of respect for not dressing the proper way to this wedding so I think that there are expectations that people have about certain kinds of behavior I mean if you look at say the pictures of what's going on now in Washington and so on you notice that Mr.

Speaker 2 Elon Musk who's always in a t-shirt that says let's go to Mars suddenly he's wearing a tuxedo because now he's now a he's part of a group of people that are behaving like government officials should behave.

Speaker 2 You know, you don't go in sandals and shorts.

Speaker 1 But Silicon Valley is famous for the flip-flops and the hoodie.

Speaker 2 Right, because the problem is that people confuse

Speaker 2 the style with

Speaker 2 the message.

Speaker 2 They think that because you wear a hoodie, because Mark Zuckerberg was wearing hoodies, makes you brilliant. Okay.

Speaker 2 And I think that the issue of dress codes elicit a certain sense of behavior in people, as you said.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, how would you feel if you went on a first date with someone that comes in in her, you know, slippers and a bathrobe and say, let's go to the movies?

Speaker 1 It's not happened yet.

Speaker 2 Well, okay, but okay. So what I'm saying is you don't have to overdo it.
I mean, you you know, that's another issue. And you have to also conform to the roles of the society.

Speaker 2 I noticed, for instance, that in the East Coast, people dress much more properly than in the West Coast. You go to New York and you see men wearing suits and ties here.

Speaker 2 You don't see that here, perhaps in LA,

Speaker 2 not in the Bay Area, ever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, one thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina,

Speaker 1 men keep their jackets and ties on the whole night. I've always kept my jacket and tie on the entire night.

Speaker 1 In the United States, it's almost like moments after people arrive at any party in a suit, they start undressing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right. Why did they dress up then?

Speaker 2 Okay, so that's my view. So I am not necessarily someone that advocates wearing a tie when I go to work and so on.

Speaker 2 But I really believe that there are codes of conduct that sort of reflect many things. And you're also,

Speaker 2 you're projecting a message, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, the idea of the hoodie at one point or the other, first of all, was hurting behavior. Everybody had to wear one because, you know, then you're cool or, you know, whatever.
Okay.

Speaker 2 In adolescence I understand it I mean that's what you do as an adolescent you do what others do but as you grow up you can also signal whom you are by the way you dress and you you know you behave

Speaker 1 what do you think about the discourse on platforms like X where you can see a mix including a lot of academics and high-level thinkers acting kind of like teenagers well okay that's they want to be popular that's all they want to draw attention this is kind of a new thing i mean i mean they're i mean i won't name names but you know some of some people who are considered some of the smartest people in the world,

Speaker 1 like what their discourse on social media is like, I mean, they wouldn't last two seconds on the schoolyard. They get hit in the face.
It's like weird, like grown men acting kind of like teenagers.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, they have a problem because they want to be thought of as young. That's a whole different story, okay? That's a different story.

Speaker 2 Now, having said what I said, I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether or not the rules, the rules that regulate, you know, that rule, you know, the rules that say how you should dress to do one thing or the other are not, do not, you know, operate for you, and then you decide to be very different.

Speaker 2 You know, there are many people who are like that and like to be iconoclastic.

Speaker 2 I heard many stories about, we were talking about Richard Feynman, who actually made a case, I mean, Mary Galmann used to say that about him, to be so different that people will talk about it because he was very interested in people telling stories about it.

Speaker 1 Bongo drumming naked on the roof,

Speaker 1 not brushing his teeth.

Speaker 2 Exactly, all that. Okay, so that, but he was very good at drawing attention.
Okay, that's fine. You can also draw attention by dressing very nicely.
You know, it's all a matter of,

Speaker 2 I mean, I was reflecting, you know, we go to the symphony in San Francisco regularly, and we are donors and so on. Sometimes you go to a concert, it's an amazing thing what you see there.

Speaker 2 Some people nicely dressed. Some people dressed as if they just woke up, didn't have time to get dressed, and got there, you know, and they're whatever.

Speaker 1 But do you think that, going back to the initial, you know, ping of the question, do you think that

Speaker 1 we have societally gone, that we're sort of drifting towards,

Speaker 1 for lack of a better word, chaos?

Speaker 1 So social interaction chaos?

Speaker 2 Well, you know, I think the pendulum will swing again.

Speaker 2 The other day I was talking to someone, reading actually, that suddenly not only in New York, but in the Midwest, men are starting to wear jacket and ties, not just for work.

Speaker 2 Okay, they go on dates like that. So, you know, it's a pendulum.
It goes back and forth, back and forth.

Speaker 2 I don't think we're going to end up at a time when you have to wear tails to to have breakfast or something. I think only the aristocrats used to do that.
But I think that it's an issue of also

Speaker 2 how we perceive the world through the eyes of television and movies.

Speaker 2 If movies start showing that everybody's dressed, whatever, people are going to do the same thing.

Speaker 2 If movies start showing the trends that we see in movies are the trends that essentially society follows.

Speaker 2 So I think that

Speaker 2 this is, I don't think we're going to chaos. It's going to revert.

Speaker 2 California is a particular place because it has always been a place where people, in order to feel free, they had to dress differently and who cares and all that stuff. But it's not everywhere.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's kind of interesting that now counterculture is conservativism.

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 1 We're back to that. The anti-war group is the more conservative anyway.

Speaker 2 I mean, also, people like, you know, it's interesting how Americans are fascinated with English aristocracy and traditions. I've been to high table dinner at King's College in Cambridge twice.

Speaker 2 You know, everybody dresses properly. They wear gowns and the fellows are sitting at a top table and everybody else, and people love it.
And we'd like to see that in the movies. Well, it's theater.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, it's academic theater, a little bit of pomp and circumstance, but it's theater.

Speaker 2 It's nice. Well, we have the same thing on commencement, you know, traditions and so on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no parent wants to go to a graduation that's kind of a free-for-all. They want to see some order.

Speaker 2 Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that there is a place for that.

Speaker 2 And some people will, I mean, there are designers and so on, of clothing and so on that exploit this nostalgia for that kind of elegant world. You know,

Speaker 2 Ralph Lorraine and so on. It's always, you know, 1960s fancy, you know, club type clothing and so on.
So

Speaker 1 do you plan to ever retire?

Speaker 2 I don't know what it means. I mean, if retiring, no, no, because I'm not a postal worker.

Speaker 2 I'm not a cook at a restaurant that eventually says, okay, I cooked it long enough that I collect my retirement and go home.

Speaker 2 I have a mind that it works, and I need an environment where that mind can thrive.

Speaker 2 And I need an environment where, you know, for one year when I left Hewlett-Packard, I was basically, I took a course in general activity and so on, but I was really a bit idle.

Speaker 2 So, suddenly, I mean, in a context where people have problems and so on, that I really like to listen to, there's a social component to work, as you know. So,

Speaker 2 retirement is, retirement means what, you know, you're a postal working, one day you stop delivering mail and you stay home watching the paint dry, and that's not me. Okay.

Speaker 2 So to me, I'm working and I enjoy it. And, you know, the day that will come that I cannot enjoy it, I'll stop.

Speaker 2 And I think that, again, goes with this issue of getting bored with things that you don't like to do

Speaker 2 because you've done it for a long time.

Speaker 2 No, I enjoy my life.

Speaker 2 But I don't think in terms of

Speaker 2 I'll say something.

Speaker 2 The CEO of my company, he's a great guy, Phil McKinney, said, Bernardo, I don't work for the money here. I said, I don't either.
I mean, I like to get paid, but if I don't like it, I'll walk.

Speaker 2 And I can do that. So it's not that I'm doing this for the income.
That's what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 1 Seems like you've never pursued money for its own sake. No.
Nor did you ever encourage me to pursue money for its own sake.

Speaker 2 But as my cousin, the physicist, used to say, money doesn't bring happiness, but it points in the right direction.

Speaker 1 I would say money doesn't bring happiness, but it can buffer stress.

Speaker 2 Right. And it allows you to have the things you want to have and you don't have to, no.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah. I think money is an important aspect of our lives, you know, having it and so on.

Speaker 2 I lived for many years as a graduate student with no money and it was very painful. I'll tell you.
Sometimes I didn't eat dinner because I didn't have any money. So

Speaker 2 I like having money to do the things that I like, but I don't work for money.

Speaker 2 Many people say, well, you know, I invented so many things, I could have started in some of these companies and make a lot of money.

Speaker 2 I don't really, I don't regret that at all.

Speaker 1 The ultra-rich people that I know know who are happy are still working every day.

Speaker 2 Right, because beyond a certain amount of money, you still have to brush your teeth like everybody else. Okay, you can dream of having 150 toothbrushes, but so what? Right.

Speaker 1 And you can only eat so many steaks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. I mean, that we all covered.
The question is, what do you do with your life? Now, you want to travel? Well, you can travel. It's nice if you can travel, you know, in better ways than being

Speaker 2 an undergrad with the backpack, although it can be adventure. It's a lot of fun backpacking.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay. On a limited budget, where

Speaker 1 part of the joy of traveling that way is you're thrown into kind of street-level interactions. I think youth hostels and things like that.

Speaker 1 I went through Europe like I wouldn't change that for anything.

Speaker 2 No, I went through Europe as a graduate student. I quit everything.
I went to Europe in winter and it was quite an adventure. In the winter? In the winter, it was horrendous.
I had very little money.

Speaker 2 I stayed in places where the, in Paris, where the lady in the little hotel would turn off the light if I turned it around in the middle of the night. It was awful.
And yet... To save energy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was very funny.

Speaker 2 But I met people that were interesting and I engaged, you know, it was, I still, I still, every once in a while, I hear from one or two of those people I met years ago in trains.

Speaker 2 I went by train everywhere. I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter, you know.

Speaker 1 Everything seems to lead back to Denmark. Yeah, it's a nice country.

Speaker 2 Well, now you have a Danish wife, so have for a long time. And have for a long time.
Many times. Yeah, yeah.
No, I, yeah, I liked it.

Speaker 2 It's a very different contrast to Europe, to Central Europe, and so on. You know,

Speaker 2 Northern Europe, Denmark, Sweden, Norway is a very special kind of, you know, country and people. Yeah, I like them a lot.
Life is very easy there.

Speaker 1 I like Scandinavia.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, it's very nice, yes.

Speaker 1 Good-natured people.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Good saunas.

Speaker 2 Yeah, everything, yes.

Speaker 1 And sunshine, at least in the summer.

Speaker 2 In the summer only, yeah.

Speaker 1 Any plans for the next... couple of years anything that um we should put on the calendar make sure that we get in no because I cannot plan that well.

Speaker 2 I don't plan.

Speaker 1 Either. Maybe I inherited it.

Speaker 2 Well, I just move. I just move.
I'm intuitive. I'm very intuitive about these things.
I suddenly see something, you know, this quantum stuff. I don't know.
I started hearing about it.

Speaker 2 I talked to a brilliant guy who's in my lab. I said, hey, Jing, what do you think about this? He said, oh, sounds interesting.
Let's do it. And we're doing it.
I am lucky that I get paid to do that.

Speaker 2 But no, I don't have plans like that.

Speaker 2 I would like to,

Speaker 2 we would like, I mean, we would like to organize our life a little bit differently now, that, you know, that we have a summer house in Denmark and so on. I still plan to travel there.

Speaker 2 I like Europe a lot, but I don't know if I can live there. I like Switzerland a lot.
I want to go to Argentina every year, and I feel very close to my family. That's very important.

Speaker 2 We are all going for an event there. I hope that you can join us if you can.

Speaker 2 So those things are very important to me. But

Speaker 2 I don't have plans for anything.

Speaker 2 I don't know i i like to be surprised

Speaker 1 well

Speaker 1 dad

Speaker 2 i

Speaker 1 want to extend a

Speaker 1 real sense of gratitude from me from everyone listening and watching although you may argue that um they're not going to be interested this has been our back and forth over the last months as i've tried to convince you to do this this podcast i can assure you that um they were they are very interested Your story is a really unique one.

Speaker 1 And I can say that both as your son, but also as somebody who's sat across from scientists from all different

Speaker 1 domains and backgrounds, not just neuroscientists.

Speaker 1 I also really appreciate your ability to explain complicated things in ways that at least

Speaker 1 we can start to get an understanding because

Speaker 1 these are hard concepts.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think what comes through so clearly is that somehow you've been able to grab these high level, really abstract concepts and work with them and try and understand them.

Speaker 1 But you've also been able to lead a life where you're really grounded in the day-to-day and in reality. And I have to say, your wish for me and for Laura, and I assume for everyone else to be joyful,

Speaker 1 I'll work on that. And

Speaker 2 also,

Speaker 1 I must say, it just hit me like. square in the face during this discussion that I get such peace and I I can really focus on being joyful knowing that you're joyful.

Speaker 1 Like it's so clear like you have a joyful life at so many levels and that you've pursued what you wanted to do over and over.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were going to get into our issues and things like that.

Speaker 1 I'll just briefly say that, yeah, we've had our ups, we've had our downs, and we've certainly landed up and much, much higher than we ever would had we not had all of that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 as I told you last year, around this time on your birthday when we all got together to celebrate, like, we're not just good, we're beyond good.

Speaker 1 So anything that comes up around that, I want to just go on record saying that like that's water under the bridge. And I don't ever think about it.

Speaker 1 All I think about are the incredible gifts that you've given me about curiosity and pursuing my curiosity, about putting new footprints on untread beaches, the early discussions around the excitement that science can bring.

Speaker 1 I mean, I remember all of it. I really remember all of it and in immense detail.

Speaker 1 And I love your stories about scientists, both how they soar and also how human they are and how they're fallible like the rest of us.

Speaker 1 So, you know, there's not a day that goes by where I don't thank God, because I do believe in God, that you're my father, that you and mom created me.

Speaker 1 and Laura, and that I've had the life that I have and that I continue to have the life that I have. So I I just want to thank you for the example and the nurturing and for coming here.

Speaker 2 There aren't words. Well, thank you.
You know how much I love you.

Speaker 2 I think that these words are the biggest gift that I

Speaker 2 get. And I think any father listening to that, to his son or daughter saying that would also feel the same way, or a mother, for that matter.

Speaker 2 It is a very fulfilling feeling, you know, to have that notion that you feel that you owe so much to what you got.

Speaker 2 And also the fact that you've done incredibly well and the kind of person you are. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I wish you all the wisdom that you need in order to just go through life the way you're going. But I think that

Speaker 2 it's nice too also that we are sort of on the same wavelength and many things. In you, I see more of a reflection of what I always wanted to be as well.
So that's easier in a way.

Speaker 2 Perhaps it's because fathers and sons have that.

Speaker 1 But we certainly relate.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you. Thank you.
I love you. I love you too.
You know that.

Speaker 1 Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman.
To learn more about his work, please see the links in the show note captions.

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Speaker 1 I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.
It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.

Speaker 1 This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience.

Speaker 1 And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.

Speaker 1 And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com.
There you can find links to various vendors.

Speaker 1 You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.

Speaker 1 If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast.

Speaker 1 Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

Speaker 1 If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, our Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one-to-three page PDFs.

Speaker 1 Those one to three page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol.

Speaker 1 We also have protocols for optimizing your sleep, dopamine, and much more. Again, all available completely zero cost.

Speaker 1 Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter, and provide your email. We do not share your email with anybody.

Speaker 1 Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman.
And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.