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

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Bernardo huberman Dr Bernardo huberman is the vice president of NextGen systems at cable Labs prior to that he was the director of the social Computing laboratory at hulet Packard and he is as his name suggests my father today we discuss various topics in science including relativity Theory chaos theory and Quantum Computing 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 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 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 questions like where do we come from is there a god what is our use or purpose in the universe 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 and at the same time to lead an everyday life that is meaning ful and joyful 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 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 how could we not I must say for me it was an immense pleasure and privileged to have this conversation not just because Dr huberman is my father but because I believe the knowledge and 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 before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford 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 in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Helix sleep Helix sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs now I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance now the mattress you sleep on makes a huge 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that's customized for your unique sleep needs right now Helix is giving up to 25% off all mattress orders again that's helixsleep.com huberman to get up to 25% off today's episode is also brought To Us by betterhelp betterhelp offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online now I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years initially I didn't have a choice it was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health in fact I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise now there are essentially three things that great therapy provides first it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and talk to about any and all issues that concern you second of all great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support but also directed Guidance the dos and the not Tod do and third expert therapy can help 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who drank out of his loose leaf mate every morning 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 you're born in Argentina mhm 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 but prior to that were you interested in different subjects I 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 yes yes I I was always very interested in ideas and so on I science at that time was a bit vague but I I read a lot of philosophy I was I didn't understand much of what I read but nevertheless I kept reading it I was interested in Psychology um I was an Avid Reader 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 and yeah and he said what four so but I was very impressed with it of course I couldn't even understand half of what these books had in it uh in them so I was very interested in in many things and I must say to you that uh 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 a wiiz kid in math um 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 was going to complement my uh attempt at understanding how the whole universe is put together the philosophers were saying all sorts of things I went to a very special School uh that I learned six years of Latin and so on and I had to read things like C and cosmogas and cosmogonies and so on that really didn't mean much to me but suddenly I started discovering that physics might be interesting and I 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 a influence but my my interest was in in things that had to do with fairly abstract ideas uh I cannot believe that at one point or the other I was very good in um in geometry class being able to prove theorems I mean the the teacher was just said let's prove this and I was somehow able to reason through and come to you know some proofs um so I I think that I I was very interested in ideas and 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 correct to write with your right hand you went to a very strict schools like like military levels of strictness almost yes yes uh this it's a very interesting type of education they have it in France it's called the Lis in France and this is a very special school in Argentina was actually founded in the 1500s by the Jesuits and uh my father went to that school uh 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 learn Latin I learn immense amounts of History which I loved um and there were other courses in French and so on in French we had to memorize incredibly long poems that we had to recite do you still remember some of them because sometimes early memories are embedded so yes yes and my brother and I sometimes tell each other some of the pieces of these poems yes I'll just say something right now uh to foreshadow what will likely happen several times throughout today's discussion which is anytime that my father um is in the presence of his brother my uncle Carlos um they start laughing about jokes that they've been telling over and over back and forth with one another uh since they were a young kids so just the mere mention of his brother will bring a a bit of a smile and a chuckle to to both of our our phes yes yes so 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 aliance Franz where for five years I went there I was essentially the only boy in the class which was very nice way and uh in order to graduate essentially you not to be fluent in French but in the special school I went to the discipline was very straight very straight um you know we were supposed to do things you don't do in the United States the moment the the teacher walks in everybody stands up and if you was late and standing up you just kicked out of the classroom and things of that sort uh but it was a lovely uh 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 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 uh and so it was very very I enjoyed that very very much my brother didn't actually and so well you two are very different I great great adoration for for Carlos but you two are very different along those lines I was just about to ask um or mention and some of uh our Argentine and uh 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 it doesn't seem to concern you much at all no no the the reasons for that are 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 stain she likes European uh tournaments I didn't I never lik mob Behavior I never liked uh this whole uh passionate involvement in these things I know I don't know why I I was never you know able to understand that to the point that I never went to a soccer game till the week before I left for the United States my brother insisted that I had to go to a soccer game and uh this is sort of embarrassing but I at one point or the other someone you know there was a good goal and so I stood up and said this is great and I turn out I was on the wrong side of the audience and people got very almost violent with me you know so I yeah soccer to me is something that I watch but I I'm not passionate about right yeah I I never really felt that I was that interesting although I you know I was in a rowing team I uh I learned boxing I did a lot of sports but I know I don't like that much of spectator sports like tennis I played tennis since I was a teenager 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 um I said the Harlem Globe Trotters because they have they're undefeated 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 Globe Trotters they're undefeated yes unbelievable yes yes my father took me to see them too they're fantastic yeah yeah yeah I love it so your father was not a scientist your brother is not a scientist um and you were faded according to them to join the family business but then you had a teacher who exposed you to physics 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 uh but it was very interesting he would come into the class most of the students you know really didn't care what he was saying and so I was fascinated not only by what he was saying but his whole personality but I need to say something here that is important uh I also was rather irresponsible you see I I grew up in a in a family a well-to-do family that I never thought how I was going to make a living so it was easy to be interested in science or anything because you know it's it's what you do it's you're you're you know 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 you don't want to start teaching in elementary schools or something that sort my brother used used to say if he does physics I'll have to support him because yeah he still says that so scientists were considered poor 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 but in physics they produ some very good physicist one of them lives in the United States I mean he's very very famous malda Sena I haven't met him but I know he's one of the top people in the in the field but I I just got into this because I was interested it sound sounded you know fascinating and abstract and the ideas were so powerful and I think and uh you know I reflected a lot on this when you're are psychologically in adolescent because my parents made me jump two grades so I was much younger than my classmates and that created a lot of problems for me I mean know at the time when you know you were developing and so all the boys were talking about girls and so on I still was really interest understanding why the excitement and so on you know I was very young but um it gave me a sense of order you know reading a book about physics and understanding that there are laws that tell you how things work gave me a tremendous sense of order and power so you know everything else was a little bit in flow and the family and my own relationships with friends and girlfriends or whatever and going back to science it was just a sense of and I still remember those days it was very very um soothing in a way so it's like a touchstone yes yes yes and I and what grade were you exp this teacher was was a like middle school high school yeah no yeah High School yeah I was uh 13 or 14 years old yeah yeah when I finally I started listening to this and I said wow this is impressive um you know it's powerful uh there is there are ways to know what's true and what's not true you know there you know you just don't speculate on things um so but most of this stuff I didn't really understand uh 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 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 uh so and I used to take them to school and one of my teachers once said you know you seem to interested in this but you don't understand this so you need to you need to learn it and he was the one who started pushing into this um on the other hand my family was saying you should become a lawyer just you know my brother and father and that interested you no I it's interesting because now I'm very interested in aspects of constitutional law and so on when I hear about arguments against you know the Supreme Court and so on I became very interested in law and economics later on I mean just to read about it but when my father was talking about at the dining room table was all about strategies of you know getting uh something done half an hour before the opposition so you win a case I mean I was totally interested in that I'm sensing a bit of a theme which is that um social Dynamics and what other people do regardless of whether or not they like it or it earns them a particular living um didn't capture you like that the idea that people and their uh groups and their their ways of thinking and behaving while that they may not bother you it doesn't it didn't Captivate you the way that like it sounds like physics you know made you think that there's something kind of bigger that there's something um more Universal which indeed physics is right it's not it is a it explains most everything yes and I most everything yes and I also think that I was a bit of a loner um it was very hard to find people that you know children I mean children or young people that thought Like Me So eventually I became part of a group 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 I was I was only 16 years old you know and deciding what to do with my life of all four of us we committed they were 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 the other two ended up running the business of their parents and one of them essentially I don't know what he did I I saw him years later money becomes a a pretty a bright Beacon for a lot of people yes yes yes yeah I'm grateful to you that you never pushed me to go in any particular direction right you pushed me to not go in particular direction but never with respect to academic choices in fact I don't recall you telling me or laara that by the way folks that's my sister's name um that we had to do anything except attend our classes and do our best but I never felt pushed to go into science no no although you you had a little bit of a curiosity about it animals 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 and one day on a bike ride I think I was carrying in the back of my bicycle you were young you asked me what what is the unsolved problem and I said I don't think it's in physics but it's the brain and you said okay I'll go into that you said I'll never forget that well it's interesting um 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 which is I remember you used to walk me to school in the morning um and you would drop me off at the cut through to the path behind uh gun High School uh 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 uh where class was you were teaching me chivalry um and I remember asking you what you do I was probably five or six years well let's see first grade so it' 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 um 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 um you saying well most of the big problem s in physics are solved so you should pick something perhaps a little less uh unread like uh and I said like what and you said well the brain is pretty interesting and then I said okay I'll work on that yeah no that's true uh this issue of feeling like before your birthday is something I remember saying to you I don't recall feeling that way every day 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 is you know well you know about it you've done it yourself now and uh and so I I wanted to convey that to you it was very very interesting and important to me that you understood that um on the other hand it made me feel very isolated as well not only with you with everybody I mean it's a it's a very esoteric field you know you you used to walk into the study look at me you know writing equations and so and would you say what's that you know 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 I have an incredible sense of memory for certain things I can still remember but I remember how your books were aligned where your stereo was placed your photos your photo of Einstein uh your photos of me and Lura and Mom I remember I remember all of it um and the sofa that was just off uh behind it because you're a napt taker like uh which I inherited from you um but I remember that yeah you would spend a lot of time in that office and listening to classical music do do you listen to music while you work or did you list all the time all the time yeah I classical music for me is a is something I discovered very young very young uh my parents also loved classical music my brother too and is something that I I to me has a tremendous emotional resonance with the way I I feel sometimes it's background music sometimes i' really listen very carefully um 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 but not many musicians in our family no unfortunately yeah although there is a famous one we've all tried we've all tried yeah yeah you in particular yeah yeah we all failed 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 hean Einstein he um he was one of the greatest violinist in the 1920s 30s and 40s an incredibly interesting man he's the founder of the Israel philarmonic and that's one of the reasons that the name huberman is in some Street in in Israel that because of him but are we related to him unfortunately not which explains the lack of musical prowess in our in our family we all love music but none of us are are good musicians right yes except uh my cousin Diego Diego was he has a perfect ear so he can really do interesting things yes yeah so so going back to your uh childhood this teacher yes right so I mean what was it you already had sort of seeded an interest in in finding order um mean things that made the world make sense um what was the political situation in Argentina at that time quite horrible parts of it I mean there was a dictatorship that lasted for a long time this Pon thing and so on it was a he was really a a follower of musolini and people of that sort in World War I so what did that mean like out in the streets like you grew up in the heart of buen aidus but like what did that mean in terms of I mean was there poverty everywhere were people I mean I mean was there violence I mean what does it spell out to well it was a very it was a oppressive regime I mean you had to be careful what you talked about you know in my my family like most of the that in that social class we had maids and a cook and so you have to be very careful what you said uh because they would run that information back absolutely and people and and your grandfather my father at one there was prevented from coming to visit me in the United States because he was classified as a communist because he did not join the ponist party okay for the record we are not Communists we are both big big Believers in capitalist sitting here at this table so no and so it was terrible it was a terrible time was a very oppressive time but he wasn't a communist 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 eventually that information leaked to the obviously to the American authorities so when he asked for a Visa they they Den denied him it was a very complicated story I don't think we should waste time to know how it got eventually resolved through a friend of mine who was a priest and a Jesuit here in the United States but the 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 there was a dictatorship that was very much like the fascist in Italy you know and actually that dictatorship lasted until a few years ago because as you know as you heard the new president we have is one that actually ran against this whole ideology peronism and so on mele Mele yes so I was never I was not political at all but you have to be careful uh but it was a funny a funny time and when he was overthrown through a military Revolution you know my parents were you know delighted and we I remember the celebrations and so on but that was considered the minority that was against him you know it was it was a social class movement the working class was behind Bon and what he promised and what he gave them uh so that but that that eventually died so the the real problem was that there was no real commitment to science as a as an investment that the country should make yes it was nice to have Nobel prizes and it's 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 and uh this was in the 1950s and 60s too right so this was the like one of the biggest and fastest progressions of physics and its implementation in the US yes so were you hearing about that of course I was following it all and I wanted to uh you know I wanted to buy books about it and so on I uh I had some conflicts with my father about spending money on books that he thought that were not going to take me anywhere and so on I mean he was a very pragmatic lawyer he didn't understand why I was doing these things uh so yes I was aware of everything and uh and actually the University was very good I entered the university you had to choose what you wanted to do 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 um I didn't regret it at all uh it was very it was a very impressive time you know I got a good education in physics little bit too abstract so this was experimental physics or theoretical physics both both both I I in the lab I was okay I mean I I I was better in in in classes on Advanced I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics and calculus and beyond that and you know complex analysis and so on it was it was so it turns out you were good at math after all good but yes I understand math I'm not I'm not a whiz I mean like many of my students have been I have guys that can do incredible things you know that I I can do them but slowly okay I understand yes yes so but yeah physics yeah is something that I I I I knew how to be intuitive about it I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn't plan out but yeah so the teacher in high school yeah were they the one that told you that there was a like a career in this yes he said you know you should devote yourself to this if you really care about it he was a man that obviously he he was sort of tormented on many levels and so on you say that because of the way he carried himself physically yes yes yeah yeah he walked he was troubled and but was interesting intense man I still he remember his name was in he was a philosopher his name in easland which is a German name and he started talking about you know discovering you know Christianity and what he meant to him and what it is to be authentic and so on so and then I had a very large exposure to the great thinkers of the Antiquity you know Roman and and Greek so it was all to me fascinating interesting um you know and it was good to have friends that I could discuss these things with do you think it's a disservice that nowadays in the United States um and even when I was growing up but especially now um that we don't force kids to be exposed to all these topics like we try and um track people into something early on actually uh recent guest told me that um many uh schools are now just giving knowledge but not expecting um kids to do problem sets um you know teaching them about physical activity but not expecting them to do physical activity seriously well that that sounds a little bit funny yeah well no but that's I mean that is the direction that education in this country is gone I was a visiting professor in France actually you you live there because of that uh in Paris and I discovered you know the French intellectual tradition is also very very abstract compared to the American I mean the English and the Americans are the ones that took physics and and the Russians too into a very very practical realm and made progress that are very very concrete almost engineer in light I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens ag1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs and it tastes great now I've been drinking ag1 since 2012 and I started doing that at time when my 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again later in the afternoon or evening that I have more mental Clarity and more mental energy if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com uberman to claim a special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer when I came to the United States I must tell you uh I went to uh I came as a graduate student the university of's let's talk about that so how did you end up getting into the United States as a graduate student you applied yeah I I was graduating and you know the the future looked rather gloomy I I had a girlf friend whose father was very wealthy and she said no problem you're going to work for my dad and you know he got a factory or whatever why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you'll go for no no not at all not at all I've never known you to work for anyone except you yeah in a way you're right I'm a bit the same yeah yeah so yes yes I I I just the idea of you know running a business was not I was 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 then Sweden and so on so I 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 my parents didn't like it uh you know I was very close to my family in many ways and um so I I applied to many places I remember being accepted at at um I think it was Cornel 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 and New York city yor so in anyway I got it I got it this very very nice Fellowship to go to University of Pennsylvania which is who the fellowship from uh the Navy the United States Navy yeah this I'm very grateful for that um and I actually wrote that in my the PHD thesis you know I was very grateful and I think it was incredible that they were supporting that kind of research they wanted to bring you to the US to build weapons no no no not at all not at all I came to United States working for a professor burin who just died at the age of 100 101 and uh no but I was supported by the United States Navy it was a fellowship by the University of Pennsylvania um but I remember uh then my first interview with some of the teachers P professors there I am talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics and the guy says to me let me give an interesting problem 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 I had no sense that you could turn all this knowledge into something implement mble practical and so on so it was quite a struggle the first year so you had theoretical understandings not experimental understanding right yes or empirical and so on I didn't know how to calculate things very well yeah I didn't think being good at math I was good yeah math understanding the math there's a difference thing between understanding implemented and you know creating well you learned that I I had four years of graduate school and got my PhD in physics so obviously I learned how to do it but what I'm saying is that I had this very very vague theoretical understanding what the world worked but not really a practical you know I didn't have it at my fingertips that's what you learn when you go to graduate school as you know yourself okay so 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 to get your hands dirty in the thing absolutely absolutely the same thing for me yeah I taking courses and discovering what you like and dislike um 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 did you have a good relationship it was funny he 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 uh I mean he was he was very famous song but he's a member of the National Academy he was not but he was very famous very famous uh but I always felt that there was a lack of dep into what we were doing it was not just him it was just a solate physics um there was a very famous uh you know Merill man who had tall contempt for Sol State physics he used to call it squal State physics for those who don't know Mary Gil man we'll get to uh Murray later uh because I had the interesting experience of meeting him as a child but he um he discovered the cork he won the Nobel Prize in many ways is considered at least at least as um uh superb pH physicist as Fineman maybe better yeah yeah lesser known but among physicist you know would evoke great fear in everybody we'll get to Murray in a little bit so did you enjoy graduate school yes but it was incredibly hard very hard the first year in to and and also personally I was very lonely um you know I say I was transplanted into a whole different world Philadelphia is not a city I would recommend to many people to live in uh I escaped every weekend to New York and my professor was always upset about that and you went from being pretty well off financially to basically having no money I had no money I I lived on very little money as a matter of fact yes uh my parents uh my father felt that okay this is what you're going to do you're going to survive on this 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 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 in with me and other places I did not enjoy I mean it was 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 post talk a very interesting man but I was I was quite miserable and so this was in the mid-60s yes yes late 60s yes yeah I did not like my life there at all I mean it's a I I lived for 4 years I didn't have a single girlfriend or anything I you know I dated and so on but I I I just felt that I was transplanted into an environment that I didn't like okay okay and that that's and on top of that my my conflict with my advisor were not serious because they were not overt but they were there all the time that can be tough for those listening you the relationship to your graduate advisor is um a potentially wonderful and potentially hazardous one because they they exert enormous control over your future not just through letters of recommendation but opportunities and um I got lucky in that sense you were very lucky yes my my advice was the kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him he ordered for you told you 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 once he took me for a whole weekend to his summer house to finish a paper the I couldn't finish a paper and it was was a mess and he and his daughter was there uh she was uh 16 or 17 and she said are you too going to talk physics I was going to say no let's go for a work he said that's all we're going to do but the physics consisted in him regurgitating whatever we were doing 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 for from Friday to Sunday night um so it was it was it was hard for me uh I never really felt that happy on the other hand I had no other options at that time okay so uh but then as soon as I graduated I I got out so I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was from mine I uh you know I delighted in my adviser as you know she fantastic people yeah I got lucky and I I got a lot of that from you which was to um for those who don't know I 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 uh how big is your incoming class in Davis right because by all standard criteria Berkeley is the better institution Davis is great but Berkeley's considered exceptionally strong and I said there three of us and you said well either you're making the best decision of your life or the worst mistake of your life and then I I think you asked me what was driving the decision 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 and I can't imagine working on anything else and he said I'm go for it which I really appreciate because um any any parent if I were a parent and my kid said I'm going to leave Berkeley go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again I think uh I probably would have bulked so well Barbara also played a very very nice supportive emotional uh role in your life I mean it was obvious that she had tremendous preference for you yeah she would like her son in many ways I smile and uh well up a little bit only because well she passed away young but um she's just an amazing person so I feel very blessed for that um that wasn't your experience um with your advisor so during that time uh I did want to ask about this I asked about it being the the mid to late 60s because um it was the counterculture movement yes right 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 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 never been drunk in your life never and you don't like football despite being from Argentina it's I it occurred to me on the drive over like like peer pressure is just not something that impacts you you're not going to do something because people around you are doing it well no you're absolutely right I I always felt this sense of uh uniqueness or whatever and but I became very humble because of it I'm not arrogant it's not that I feel that others other us are worse and so on but yes when I came to the United States there was something think there was a decision I had to make which is I remember explicitly thinking about was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the so social environment in which I was in Argentina so you could do whatever you wanted and I was not the only one who came there were three or four brilliant uh mathematicians and physicist that came with me and I saw them within a year just losing it all they never one of them never graduated they got into drugs they got they moved to the Village in New York and they they decided that that was the life they wanted to have problem is that you know 10 years on you know what are you doing right I mean you know being a getting to be an old hip is not that interesting um so I 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 and so yes indeed I used to go to parties to me was quite a surprise uh uh you know in New York Philadelphia you know people smoking pot and all sorts of other this incredible things getting drunk and so on uh it was something that I you know I would say no thank you and that was it and I felt quite okay with it uh and they and I never felt the need to satisfy a group of people that were like this in order to be included 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 um basically has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once and that's Rick rubben my good friend who's like me Yeah by all standards is you know probably the greatest music producer of all time across you know dozen a dozen different genres right not just rock and roll but classical country all this and I once asked Rick um you know you you worked in music where you know drugs and alcohol are are everywhere or at least used to be and he just said yeah it it never really interested me I could be around it but not participate yeah and and so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that um kind of relationship to what's going on around you where you don't feel pulled into it I also didn't understand I mean for instance the the the the role of drugs and alcohol in young people I was a graduate student to a large extent plays a role of relaxation and and you know 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 you know do you have something to smoke or why because I'm nervous or whatever well you know deal with your state of anxiety but don't you don't have to drink in order to do that and I was always a little bit also concerned about my brain I mean I was afraid that these things would just take me over the edge and of the Rails so I just 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 on my on my track okay today I'm much more understanding I mean I hear people and if that's what you know works for them is fine although I still don't like it um and it was even worse when we came to California because that here everything was going on not just drugs and everything else so uh 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 postto become a professor I was playing with that I was playing with that I I wanted to go to um my my dream was to go to Cambridge uh university in England not only because the the the cabinh 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 uh you know inhaling some of those Vapors you wanted to get into biology well I was interested I mean because I read the famous book by Watson you know the double helix and I I couldn't sleep I mean I read it one night and say it's incredible what this guy amazing book amazing book yes so I said oh the whole thing is becoming like physics it's no longer all these complicated names and so on oh it's crystallography which is you know I mean physics and chemistry are so soy is boring because you have it's like both you have to learn all these crystals I'm just chuckling because the the uh the spaghetti model folks or as we call them the crystallographers are probably covering their eyes right now but um that's all right they they they love what they do and thank goodness for them of course because they design novel drug pockets and receptors I mean they're doing some cool stuff so I thought that being in Cambridge was okay I mean you would suffer from you know not even Heating in the rooms and so on but then what happens was I mean you know I I Met Your Mother uh and then you know she she brought a little bit of reality into my life and said you know 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 it was 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 then she actually was right and so I decided to look for a job and my my professor wasn't necessarily letting me go he wanted me to stay as a postto with him which you know this is something people don't often understand is that if a student or postto is very good the advisers are deinen diviz to move them along to their job right but it's a tricky game because you want the support of your adviser but often times your adviser if you're very good they want to keep you yes so so there was also another aspect at that time by then I started thinking that I wanted to live a much more comfortable life I mean you 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 my adviser was not too Keen to um you know tell me what to do so instead of going I I could have gone for a postto to a couple of places but I wanted to be a little more independent and I discovered that there were research institutions like IBM and and Xerox in the west coast and so on there were you know people could do science you know good science and you know B Labs was the most famous one of all that was in the east Coast in the east coast I went to baps for an interview and I felt that they were running that like a Russian interment Camp I mean it was unbelievable you were they were we were 10 of us and you know they 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 so East Coast yeah yeah the East Coast institutions I mean it makes sense to me now why having been raised in the Bay Area um that East Coast institutions and I are just never going to mix because there's the they love tradition they love hierarchy and they love history whereas the West Coast well it's all about the startup the IPO what is 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 the biggest contrast you say this I remember uh I you know when you gave when professors came collum and so on they were wearing sud and thae at the University of Pennsylvan and IV League school and so on I came to Stanford I went to the first colloquium and the students were coming in shortes with their dogs into the auditorium I couldn't believe it I mean it was it was such an incredible you know change cultural change you smart smart I mean oh incredibly smart incredibly smart they know that about that so in any event I I discovered something which historically became incredibly important although I 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 paloalto next to Stanford where they would recruit people that would work on this whole thing computers and information and physics and so on and I came in and the guys you know whoever interview me they said well this is exactly the place for you so that's what I did 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 a personal computer Steve Jobs saw it and built the first Mac out of was I had a classmate in high school Becca canara yes um I remember cuz she wrote a Vasa a school yeah her mother was involved in and her mom was involved in in creating the uh it was Adele Adele yes Adel Goldberg goldber in developing the um the ability to move um what appear to be pages on the screen objectoriented 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 it was it was a scandal of the life that they had there it the' 70s and still the Bay Area is not was not what it's now I mean everybody went to radis uh you know those take long lunches and there was a lot of stuff on drugs and so on yeah can I ask a question about that so Xerox Park is was this incredible place I remember going there when I was a kid to to your lab actually one of my earliest Recollections was you took me into your and Jim Boyce's um uh experimental lab yeah you um you told me to pick a piece of fruit there was a bowl of fruit I picked a banana you took out the banana you peeled it and you dipped it into liquid nitrogen 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 the um you mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and um that Indeed jobs borrowed or stole um mostly because Park didn't protect the intellectual property well I mean he didn't do it illegally I mean he saw it they basically gave it away they basically gave it away right was thinking that you know cop were the future and that's it but I also recall cuz I overheard the conversations between you and Mom when I was a kid perhaps um 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 no no no not at all I was in the physics lab and we can talk later a little bit about it J Boyce was a very very interesting collaborator of mine and so on we had a lot of fun but not not on that level as a matter of fact we were considered very Square people uh you know doing what we were doing I mean this is a group of people that were truly the I mean books have been written on on this whole class of people that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became uh there were brilliant people trying to do new things Adel Alan K there were many of them did you ever want to get involved in that stuff I used to see them as as so yeah 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 computing he was the head of the computer science lab he once heard that I played pingpong so he started challenging me to ping pong so we used to play ping pong you know 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 we are not the kind of computer scientist you imagine like at IBM with a white coat fixing machines and solving M we want to revolutionize the world we want to change the way you think 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 this is what when Mark Andre um founder Netscape Etc um a16z now when he was sitting in the very seat you're sitting in um here he described as this notion of wild ducks yeah that at companies you have these people that are you know 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 an important tremendous tremendous and I was a little bit of that in my field at that time 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 I no one could do uh and the kinds of fields that I chose to work on were totally out of what people were doing at at Xerox or IBM and so on I think that these people are essential uh now the question is what does a company or a university what do they do with those ideas and so on zero lost it completely I mean they showed them the stuff and there a whole books I've been written about it well one thing that I think I'm realizing now I inherited from you um consciously or unconsciously is that uh well I'm I've been more of a risk taker with uh various aspects of my life than I probably should have been but um that I've always enjoyed being near um people who are really pushing the boundary on something like my love of like skateboarding but not just skateboarding but our friend Danny Way jumping the Great Wall of China building mega ramps in his I knew I wasn't going to do that but there's something about being adjacent to people like that yes that changes the way that you that I've approached things that um were more um pedestrian to make them less pedestrian yes you know and and maybe we'll return to this because uh um you know I think that being around people who are real Mavericks and real iconic class can be very beneficial but it doesn't mean that you have to jump in and do what they're doing right well I I I decided I one take huge risks and as a matter of fact my first piece of work after I got my job at at zero Park which was supposed to work on some solid state physics or whatever was I had this notion this fantasy of Einstein in the patent office so I would start working on things that uh you know were crazy uh there was a there's a whole notion in physics which is you know called tachon particles that are fast in the speed of light how do you say it tachon takos they said from the word takos which means fast Swift means particles that are faster than the speed of light which is imposs but some physic were playing with that idea okay and I became very interested in that as a matter of fact my first paper out of uh graduate school was on taion and I had the pride of getting the paper accepted in the top physics journal his physics review letters physics letters yes yeah and I remember my cousin Hector sending me a note or something saying well now you I now I see the road to predition he said but I was so proud of it I 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 and I published several papers on things that I were very important to me you have a lot of single author papers yes this is something that um like is is especially rare in biology but you have a lot of single author papers yeah yeah I I I was very proud of that yes yes I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium magnesium and potassium in the correct ratios but no sugar we should all know that proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function in fact even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance to a considerable degree it's also important that you're not just hydrated but that you get adequate amounts of electrolytes in the right ratios drinking a packet of element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate amounts of hydration and electrolytes to make sure that I'm getting 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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 one is relativity and the other one is quantum physics we know we have intuitions like you know and animal for instance if you see a a lion running after a zebra and so on the lion can actually calculate intuitively you know the speed and at which he can move and so on we can do the same but if you start thinking about what happens when you get to near the speed of light we have no intuition whatsoever time almost stops there are all sorts of complicated things length contract I mean it's a very complicated set of things and that's why it's very hard to understand although the math works then there is General reactivity that is even worse because there is some kind of a war ing of SpaceTime that is responsible for gravitation but I'll go into that in a second the other one is quantum physics our brains are not not only are they not wired to understand that near the speed of light because no one moves near the speed of light I mean we we move as speeds that are fairly fairly small compared to the speed of light and quantum mechanics is at such a microscopic level that is below basically the level of a molecues molecules atoms and inside the atom so it's very very hard to visualize or even understand some of the very counterintuitive ideas like entanglement and also you know so relativity can be understood in the sense that you can explain certain things but people say well how can how can it work like that and then you have to get into the math okay but I think that I I took a course a few years ago on generativity and I I I just for fun yeah yeah I I wanted to learn it finally it's profound deep and it it makes you feel that this this man uh Einstein he had help from a lot of people but still it's an incredible thing I mean you know it it's it's on a level of Boven Symphonies and and mo piano conceras I mean there something that comes into your head and you're able to do you know through a lot of struggle I mean it took me year took him years to do that okay so but it it's profound and now the qu when you say can you explain I mean the the point is Einstein one day discovered that if the speed of light is speed of light no matter how fast you move respect to beam of light is still moving at the speed of light that means that the notion of simultaneity between two events is relative now 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 and that leads to also 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 all sort of very interesting things you know and uh today you know we can even detect uh gravitational waves that are coming from the almost the beginning of the universe we can detect that because of those theories they can calculate so it it's profound yes I mean Einstein I think stands on on I mean Newton too by the way I mean you know Newton Einstein I think they're top people you know but they they talk to God in a way as they say we'll get back to God uh a little bit later um yeah it seems to me that um even though it's very hard to grasp it's worth asking uh for those of us that that don't have an intuitive sense of of Relativity theory that is starting to you know peer into these things a little bit trying to understand them do you think that it gives um one's mind an ability to um you know to tap into like forms of of cognition that we don't normally think about when when we're looking at macromechanics of of the world around us that objects fall down not up and you know a helium balloon goes up okay and you can learn something about helium but but it it's all um it's all pretty straightforward with with just a few simple bullet points uh whereas when you get into quantum mechanics it it um yeah it challenges the mind in a way that really feels like for most people there's a cliff and we just kind of go okay you know and obviously um there's trust there but um for people that are curious about understanding how the the really tiny bits of the physical Universe link up with their really big bits of the physical Universe um where's the best place to start well okay you're asking a very very interesting question which is for most of us who are training physics we learn how to calculate we learn how to operate with these things I you know I just got a patent on using Quantum Mechanics for communication and so on but it it's still the puzzle is why does it work the way it works so what I'm saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things operationally I don't know what happened in your brain because I have ideas that come out of intuitions not just formulas and equations and yet I don't necessarily think I understand deeply why these things are the way they are they are where they are and there's no reason why they shouldn't be like that our brains as I said before you know they are essentially um conformed to understand the macroscopic world not high speeds and so on so physicist to work in generativity I don't can do incredible calculations can you tell you what black hole collapsing into another hole black hole would do and you know they're using gener activity things and so they 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 it's something I don't understand namely I I 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 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 and we don't communicate they're entangled they go this is faster than the speed of light I throw again five you get five I do one you get one I it's an amazing thing what is the origin of the entanglement is is a property of quantum systems that they can get entangled that's the word and somehow what happens to your system affects mind but doesn't affect it in the sense a signal no signal they're entangled now let me living now this becomes rather they're not entangled through other bits of the universe they're totally independent 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 thing there's a famous example of the socks okay so you take a trip and you you you you took a pair of socks let's assume that blue socks and so on and then you open your bag and you oh I 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 in quantum mechanics imagine that you look at a sock but the sock is changing colors all the time so now I observe it is red the other one is red I observe it is green the other one is green okay randomly so little bits of the universe are entangled well some people and I a friend of mine who's a Buddhist claims that there is a whole religious or Buddhist voice saying that everything was entangled yes originally all atoms all electrons all elementary particles were entangled yes because the universe start very very tiny and everything was entangled okay so you could imagine that the universe is entangled so what happens here affects out but it gets the 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 some people think that people are entangled yes yes well it gets to it but that's a whole yeah that's a whole thing that's a that's poetry that's poetry exactly um there's another example that brings us to a a a very Salient aspect of my childhood which is uh Chaos Theory okay right so um I'll say it so you don't have to you're one of the the uh founders of chaos or certain aspects of Chaos Theory we'll talk about that but you know um for those of us that grew up in the 80s and 90s I was born in 75 um you know who saw the movie Jurassic Park you know there there's a a moment in that movie where I think Jeff Goldblum is explaining you know uh what is it chaos theory and maybe it was the butterfly flapping its wings in one location and impacting something someplace else for the The Poets in the world right um that was a very um captivating example because I think the human brain can naturally understand that you know things around us we can have an impact on them and they can have an impact on us but that um the the notion that a a small insect you know thousands of kilometers away can impact something that's going on um more adjacent to us it it seems outrageous sci-fi but you know the the notion that one thing impacts another impacts another that's pretty straightforward right there's just a domino a dominoe of the physical world chaos theory is different yes okay could you explain chaos yes and I'll just add one more thing just for context for you to you know the sort of the paints in the pallet um around the same time I remember the book chaos coming out and and um where there was a lot of excitement around chaos and this was coming up um uh 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 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 the angles are are very consistent at least around certain nodes Etc so I think people love this idea that we have repeating um you know repeating patterns and numbers nature that things at a distance can impact us more closely like this is the kind of stuff that not the non-physics brain can understand and it does enchant right we sort of poked at poetry I love poetry you love poetry um but I think it enchants because I think humans are naturally interested in how you know the randomness of life might not be as random as it appears so um what is chaos okay where does it exist in our lives um not emotional chaos but um and what is the relationship between fractal in chaos if any 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 is a Quantum chaotic Thing feel but I won't go into that chaos is a very interesting idea which is it flies against our intuitions since the times of Newton we know that if you give me the position and the velocity of initial particle I can use Newton's equations of motion to tell you where that particle is going to be anywhere M with an incredible Precision when we launch a rocket we want to go to the Moon we can calculate and predict exactly where the rocket is going to be after so many hours after so many days and so on actually we use the equations of motion to predict that trajectory and it's a precise trajectory this is how Elon was able to capture the rocket with the Chopsticks recently I something of that sort yeah that's that's yeah okay now the a of chaos is so that that's okay it works there are some cases where let's assume I'm going to give you a simple example so I I take a bow I put it on a on a billar a bilar bow on a on a billar table I send it out and at the moment I can C know exactly the position of velocity I can tell you exactly where it's going to go k 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 I mean if I tell you that you know two cars start at exactly the same speed you the same position and one of them has a little more you know I you know they'll stay parallel to each other in some systems and I'll tell you in a second that actually those two trajectories diverge completely so is what we call sensitivity to initial conditions 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 because let let me give you an example that I used to you know I used to teach k at Stanford for many years so imagine I give you a a a be full of a molasses and you take a very big ball stainless steel ball and you you just throw it into the thing well after a while it will just drift with a thing is called Stow slow because it you know friction slows it down and it just goes and now you throw another one from another altitude and they all of them are going to do exactly the same some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite even though there is friction everything tends just slow it down they just keep going far apart from each other amazing amazing thing so that's chaos okay and I can tell you a little bit why I got so involved in this and they work with did does chaos exist in every physical system mostly yes yes maybe even in neurons or the brain oh yes absolutely I mean this is why I don't want to get into a controversy here about issues of uh when not we live a deterministic lives or not but you know if things are a little bit random and so or even just a tiny difference in initial conditions can take you to very different comes in but this we're not talking about many particles we're talking two okay so that's one now fractals is a different story that comes out of a guy who I knew very well Beno Mandel bro a very very very funny character brilliant too but very strange um who discovered that certain things are so similar that if you look at the coast of Britain he used to say that you look at the coast of Britain and you said okay tell me how long is the coast of Britain you go with a meter and you measure it now to 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 adding the same because there are all these little things in the coast of Britain that are essentially s similar that add a tremendous amount of length that's what a fractal is all about 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 as a matter of fact and I tell you this because I knew benma very well I met him through a talk that I gave on chaos he used to hang out with chaos physicist he was a mathematician brilliant man in many ways I was having dinner with him in Copenhagen in a restaurant when then the the very pretty waitress came to us and so on and served us and you know we were talking he French man he spoke with a very heavy French acccident so she she says something what are you doing here he says we at the conference but I'm not just as a conference I'm a very special man he said to her and she said how come and he says do you know who uid was 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 ukl I invented a different geometry he said that yeah he said that points to the waitress in Denmark that knew about uclid that was very the Danes are smart yeah yeah okay that was very funny that he was he would talk about it so he would give a talk and he would say my equations can generate anything indeed he could generate any any any patterns so he would say you want a mountain here it goes a mountain you see a mountain beautiful grafts and so on so self-similarity is a very powerful idea uh in 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 and and and U and fractals are not always the same as he used to say because he didn't like physicist because we never liked his talks we said okay so you're telling us that you know things are he used to say I'm not interested in Pulley I'm not interested in things that move things up and down he used to say you're thinking about elementary physics class something of that sort yeah yeah so but uh fra are very interesting because these are self-similar structures at all levels they look the same you look at big you look at small they have the same type of you know geometric behave chaos is all about Dynamics how things evolve in time okay and the chaotic systems they tend to diverge from each other for a long long time the man who invented the idea of the butterfly effect was a man called Ed lawen who was a very famous meteorologist at MIT 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 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 tiny different and he would get different things from there he went into that and there's a very Bea I mean there are ideas that are very beautiful like strange attractors and so on I mean we don't have to go into that but so chaos is really a field that essentially explains why things that seem to be simply you know explained by classical physics tend to diverge from each other and they give rise to random outcomes that's the important thing you can use chaos in order to Generate random numbers you can use gen chaos to Generate random patterns I've done that it's very chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level okay so I was working at some and I don't think it's interesting how I got into this because it was I was doing something else and suddenly I decided I was going to do this and I really started going very fast at this but then I had a very bright student you you met T hog and we decided let's see if we can see chaos in quantum mechanics and we started doing it and there were a couple of papers by the Russians actually showing that in this was a case and we discovered that it was not the case 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 why do I find that reassuring 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 outcome yeah that that was the whole point we we discover that quantum mechanics there are waves and interferences and so on that make the system recur you know as a matter of fact I had quite an exchange with big fan about it you know when I met him which I was I went to give a talk at Caltech and I was in his office and he said so what are you work 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 something things that are very in particular in quantum mechanics so um uh I'm smiling because he was so so sharp and so on uh so he said okay give me the problem I he said what is it I said well okay I give you an electron and you have any potential and I give you a laser he says the laser inside or outside the apparatus just like that 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 me was thinking he stood up and walked around and was making lot s of noises and then sudden he says the energy grows linearly in time I said no it doesn't 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 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 was he trying to be funny of course he was always funny let's talk about Fineman and Gilman and Mand brought and all the rest in um as a collection for a moment um you know one of the great um uh Gifts of my of my life has been that you you would talk about scientists it really enchants me I'm I'm like I'm get so delighted when I hear it like I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists right and um not athletes right um which is great like uh but scientists and it it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist you you both um rever the the work they did you see something unique about them and something I learned very early on and I've certainly internalized is and forgive me because I'm I'm assuming here is that there's a certain aspect of like their quirkiness or something about them like to take them seriously but not too seriously like I never learned um to assume that because somebody was uh Nobel Prize winner that they were perfect for instance like you would tell me you know like uh Einstein had you know he was amazing like the his relativity the patent office all this stuff and he had he like had all these problems with women oh yes or you know and I read the books right um 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 post do we used to see jobs walking around right 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 the job isms you know and so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people that these uh these Founders they're creators they're just people and they often have um very challenging areas of their life as well like like they're not perfect they're not Gods yes some of them have almost um Godlike access to the universe and understanding it but it seems to me that like you hold people up for their contributions but you never actually are thank goodness are put people on a pedestal to the point where you're like this person is spectacular in every way and I'm not saying you cut them down to size but I learned very and this has served me well in my life and now public facing or on Twitter like if I make a mistake and someone comes at me it's somebody that I respect I go H but then I remember like this person has a lot of issues in certain domains of their life 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 right and yet there are people like feineman like Gilman like Einstein who have almost Supernatural levels of of ability yes yeah so what's that about like how how do you hold um knowledge insight and stature in your mind alongside like the the humanness the like the the inherent flawed nature of all of us you know well um okay it's it's it's complicated uh there there are many ways to think about it um in some of these names um you know for instance these people are built into Giants by the the media too I mean you know fan I mean if you go to coure and so on everybody's asking you know what did fan do what how what was he wearing and so on as if you know he was a God I mean obviously what he did in physics he and I interrupt myself here because he really worked very hard very hard according to El man in particular to creating a myth about himself he worked very hard when I met him I I I can even tell you the anecdotes I only met him for an hour but he was he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression with you R-rated and x-rated anecdotes exactly and and you know but I remember the good one was that you know I was going to give the collum and he said uh should I come I said I think you should come and 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 your talk you're going to get confused and so on you know and actually that's exactly what happened I I started you know the collum at Caltech you know the the Marine Board Camp of Science and there I am starting to talk and sudden I said and in instead of saying the next hour I said something like in the next week or something as so because I there he was and then he started saying you know like look elsewhere else you know that kind of guy you know 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 I mean I've had to learn it the hard way when it we we missed in the recording and this kind of thing it's a it's a humbling moment but yeah I think that um well Fineman would have been cancelled by by the standards of the last few years I took even my wants to lecture he was given in in San Francisco uh and uh he was giving a beautiful lecture to I don't know get some award for teaching and so on and suddenly a bunch of women walked into the front of the the the big room you know and they started com 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 as a you know said finean 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 so he would have lost his job by the standards of yeah yeah okay 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 in most intimidating person I've ever met 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 an incredibly luxurious place in France uh the estate of Madame schamber one of the oil people actually was an incredible meeting that he and I organized so I got to know him a little bit personally and all he was complaining at that time is couldn't get a date he was a widow and he wanted to uh you know women were intimidated by him too well he as I recall cuz I remember meeting him when I was a kid and we both shared the love of birds but he was perhaps one of the world's most obnoxious people I mean he but you impressed him as a matter of fact I I still you know I I don't know if you want me to remind you of this uh because we had two stories there uh 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 and I I said I saw a most unusual bird he said describe it so I and he gave me the name in Latin of the bird 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 and indeed two weeks later I went to pick up the New York Times and there was the bird but at the same time I said Andrew likes birds and he asked you what is your favorite bird and you said the rainbow lower keit still is and he said this kid knows this kid knows he said I'll never know my birds I know my bird that it's amazing I never heard you know I 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 so he enjoyed the power he had I was on the 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 wow he had all sorts of very funny names for all sorts of physicist and so on the the downside of people like that in science cuz I've known some too there there's a very famous neuroscientist um now in his 70s who has a Nobel Prize who also is um known for generating anecdotes about himself like um and in recent years because of political correctness wokeism and so forth is tends to do that less because it sort of a trucker's mouth um brilliant guy um but is kind of known for being outrageous and trying to create tales about themselves this is something that scientists do yeah right right right to in order to maintain their legacy yeah also to feel good about themselves I mean by the way I mean Gman I mean I work with him he was incredible I mean you know and the way he would interrupt people and so on and there are two things I can tell you that are interesting once he was announcing some new results he was working on on on this whole thing on uh on on quarks and other things and uh and actually was extrem Theory and he announced the seminar and everybody goes into the garden you know you know the seminars are nice I need to remind the the audience perhaps here that the Aspen Center for music was right next to in the tent they were rehearsing so the seminar was supposed to start at 3 and there Gil man comes with all his notes under his house he always had notes walking pacing and nothing happened and suddenly they were rehearsing the uh bto's 1520 which just T 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 so what strikes me is that these people take themselves very seriously absolutely absolutely do you think that's important in life I I I don't I like to I mean as you know I like to be to have a good sense of hum about myself and be self-deprecating I think some people you know have issues and they they do that I mean it's all depends on how how do you you know see things I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors matina matina makes loose leaf and ready to drink yerbamate now I've often discussed yeram mate's benefits such as regulating blood sugar its high antioxidant content 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and I'm able to fall asleep perfectly well at night no problems if you'd like to try matina you can go to drink maa.com huberman right now matina is offering a free one pound bag of loose leaf yerbamate tea and free shipping with the purchase of two cases of their cold brew yerbamate again that's drink maa.com huberman to get a free bag of yate loose leaf tea and free shipping let me ask you about the um about this so you know further down my list of things I wanted to talk to you about is that you know you you've always loved it 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 like you've I mean as long as I've known you you've you've been pursuing some new area of knowledge or implementation of knowledge and and yet you like your father you um I know you Delight in everyday things 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 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 which one is it theoreticians or theorists theorist they say yeah theorists um that you know we assume like the the academics that are always somewhere else like they're up here they're grounded they're not feet on the ground but you like everyday things you're very much like like where we're going to eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this AB 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 gonna work I want you to work you're getting paid to do something I was sort of 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 enjoy them and I do believe that I I inherit this from my father a tremendous enjoyment on of life in general and um uh yes I am very physical and tactile about things I I like to surround myself with things that are beautiful I I I enjoyed as you said good meals and the daily things of our life I I'm not just living in some Stratosphere and not being able to you know um enjoy a meal I'm having and so on no the opposite and uh yes in that sense I am very much like that and uh you know uh Mar's the same way and so that's why we enjoy that I your wife yeah my wife sorry uh yes uh we 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 I'm very much like that yes very much I I don't feel guilty about it uh I you know if I can afford should you should well there there is a certain aesthetic component to to science and the idea that they sell you that you know Einstein didn't care about anything actually if you look at the negotiations that Einstein had with the institute for advanced studies for salaries you'll see that he he really car a lot about these things too Al so our notion of him is just kind of like it was just science and he had no interest in material things is false right yes I I had an uncle actually Hector's father he you know 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 14 or so and he 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 I was I was a little bit scared I I I wanted to enjoy life as well okay so it was a little bit complicated no no I enjoy everything of course I I I think I got out of my father mostly yes uh my mother was a little more aesthetic in a way um but yes I I did the tiny little things of Life are what makes one's life you know I'm slowly starting to get that yes yes I think I've been a little uh over like rabid about my interests almost to an obsessive level to the point where I've sometimes um overlooked like how many uh opportunities for just like lovely daily interactions I have I try but I feel like I've just been chasing in the carrot of of of knowledge like I love doing what I do I've always done that you know but well but you have to be careful indeed I I you know as you know I meditate and for many years and so on I'm being in the present and being able to just you know be there and uh nothing else is is the tremendous source of uh satisfaction and calms calms me down and so on and I when did you start that well I started actually out of out of um the discovery I mean a trivial thing that many people have um I discover that every time my blood pressure was taken by the doctor it was just going through the roof U you know it's to called the 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 and they told me you know what to do and so I want one or the other I have a friend a a colleague more than a friend who's a who's a Buddhist who started telling me about you know have you tried first of all U bio feedback that's going I tried for a year I did BYO feedback and then he started telling me about about meditation so one day actually I he's a physicist as well he was visiting me in my lab and I said he said let me let's do it I did a session with him in meditation I I I couldn't believe it my hands suddenly were warm and you know felt incredibly nice 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 uh like for instance I would see myself walking down the street holding my you know fists this way that that's not a very relaxed way of living okay so I I really started doing this meditation on a fairly continuous basis and I really enjoy it uh and it's very important as you know as as as a father I I say this to anyone too that you have to enjoy life I mean the pursuing these things you know eventually what what you know the 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 properly can be very very nice too you know I love that about you um 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 first author paper in the journal science and I I told you and you said um you said um well enjoy it and just be aware that by tomorrow you'll be worried that you'll never do it again exactly yeah and fortunately we publish in nature and a few other journals a bunch of times after that but you also warned me about the postpartum 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 what you were describing is this trough and dopamine that we get a day or two after some big event yes typically postpartum associated with the birth of a child but it could be you know getting a degree or a great party paper in science or nature for sth or paper and 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 you said just go back to what inspired the first project pick a different problem it'll happen again yes and the second time it happened I was like he was right it happened again and again and again and 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 very excited and then you feel the drop yes yes and that I think that is something that even ancient philosophers knew about it the Buddha many you know the Greeks and so on this idea that the the things we pursue they are Emeral in a way in the way the the feelings are they elicit in us you know and I I think that you're right and there is also another tendency one has to uh try to avoid which is you're are successful in something and you continue doing exactly the same thing because you know by now you know how to do it with your hands tight yes and I always felt that I want to go elsewhere and uh you know I I have sort of a reputation for changing Fields uh and you know I don't do that in order to for others to to be puzzled by it it's just that I'm curious and I want to have a feeling again that that like falling in love you know the new thing you know is nice at the beginning but eventually whatever you're doing it becomes you know TR and so on yeah let's talk about that because um after chaos which brought a lot of you know I remember we had reporters in our house and there was like a like TV and the book by Jim Glick and then and then you switched to something completely different yes and you got into computer science yeah well computer science is computers computers what happened was that a lot of the success that we had was because I was at Park 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 pattern 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 C crvi and so on um you know he he was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so that 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 there in chaos I mean you can produce 10 phds with this but then I said why don't I do the opposite are using computers to help me the physics why don't I use the physics to study computers well that's an interesting idea but you know I mean this so how you do that so what happened to me I was at a meeting on chaos in Copenhagen and I couldn't sleep one night and I had a book called the computer of brain by John F noyman perhaps someone that was a true genius I don't know if you heard of him he invented computers he was a a phenomenon at all levels and he was part of the the Manhattan Project he was perhaps one of the most brilliant people ever existed at least that we aware of I mean he was at the institute for advanced studies for no there are all sorts of anecdotes about him uh he had a photographic memory you could give him a page of a phone book he would look at it close it and then he would recite the phone numbers from bottom to top totally useless skill yeah but he was a genius a genius true genius he invented computers he invented game theory in economics I mean it useful skill yeah exactly okay in any EV so he wrote a very little book called the computer and the Brain no equations nothing and one night 4:00 in the morning I cannot sleep I get down you know it was summer so the sun was still s day in copen and I went there to read it and I said this is what I'm going to do 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 and the first thing that occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we had at Park these computers were communicating with each other as we nowadays we know it that's the internet and so on so uh there were many many aspects of this and I decided that because I was very influenced by uh 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 in econ at Caltech so we decided to start looking at this as a market where computers essentially buy and sell programs to execute and their machines and so on 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 and so I I became again it's like falling in love again it's a new field I I I thought it was great the discovery process of falling in love is half the fun absolutely yeah and I also was able to I mean there is a lot of formalism in economics and some of it is really I mean sort of academic and 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 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 when you go into a new field do you um you in order to um learn about the field is that mainly through talking to people in the field reading books both both and 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 a as a um as an observer and a learner yes I am I I I need to say this I don't think that many people have said if I stayed in one field M I would have done much better in terms of reputation and so on as a matter of fact I can tell you an anecdote that is uh you mean like Awards and stuff yeah like for instance not long ago I was already doing computers after chaos and so on a very I won't name the person but a very good physicist Professor Berkeley came into my office Bernard 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 a problem you're not writing papers in physics the writing papers in computer science and you know we need a physicist because otherwise the chemist will get that job you know they physics don't like welcome to Academia yeah so I said what you want me to do he said well can you perhaps write one or two more papers on this so we can show I said no I cannot do that I can't well there's a isn't there a famous story about um Fineman and being elected to the National Academy yeah he refused to yes right he he 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 electing other members and he said I quit yeah right well yeah so in any event I never became a member of the National Academy but you never sought prizes no I mean I would have liked to get them why not I mean you know I'm not uh it's not that I said they they're meaningless but there was nothing that I could do about it 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 so yeah yeah I mean I have to say that you know like I mean I as you know I still have my position at Stanford and teach involved in a little bit of research but um you know one of the great advantages I had is that all my advisers died or killed themselves so I was orphaned in science and so there was never an expectation from my advisers that I do the next thing because they were dead um so I thought about that and um but I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcast I remember you being a little bit concerned learned you're like you know what are your colleagues going to think and I think at that point the um the 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 I put a lot of thought to the fact that you've changed Fields many times and I just felt absolutely compelled to get into science communication and there was no stopping that but I 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 freedman's suggestions and a lot of help from others um Joe Rogan and others but is that I was like well that's what you're supposed to do when you hit when you hit a 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 it's not like you disliked where you were it's that there was some carrot that you identifi and you go towards the carrots and also something very um there they my wife was actually mentioning I've been in a sense an orphan I never had mentors it's very interesting except though the this uh frankly not terrific graduate adviser 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 uh so I I never had someone who was whispering Bernard is the guy to you should be considering for this or that I mean I had the fortune to really get to the top of many of these fields and interacting with the top people I mean we talk about F and Gilman there are many very famous people that I respect immensely that I met uh when I was in France you know as you know I was teaching there I met people that are brilliant and so on and I felt treated with tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on but I never had mentors in that sense and also as I said I I am a little bit Restless uh 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 I think that the the issue of being curious is extremely important and it's interesting because I reflect a lot on say my father my father was an immensely curious person but all about details he never liked abstractions of any kind he was very proud that he went to the same school I went and the only course he flanked was philosophy because he said it doesn't make any sense now perhaps he was right about that you know sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about uh a couple of months ago uh in Denmark we were invited uh my wife and I to a dinner of Phil with philosophers talking about artificial intelligence I thought that these people were they didn't really know what was going on but nevertheless um yes I am curious and sometimes I move on to things and I 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 I mean don't mean it's understand me I will not say no to a recognition and I but it's not really that I'm I I do this in order to get that and that's not me at all yeah I mean the the the whole thing is sort of 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 I mean well there might be a psychological reason too yeah yeah that you need this you know or need it that one put these parental type figures you know yeah it might be I wish I had them don't misunderstand me as a matter of fact I mean my influence on my students I produce more than 15 phds is also strange because none of them stays in stayed in physics now the department of stord was not too happy with that it's not that I told him not to but they all smelled that you know I I I was doing something else I mean uh you know from computers I became very aware of what was going on very early on with the internet as you know I started doing all this stuff on social long before anyone was doing an economics of attention and all that stuff and many of the students the other day I found one of them I met one L damage who you know I think you was early at Google no she went to Facebook and the other day she wrote me a note I was so lucky that I met you she was going to do a thesis and I don't know what solar collecting solar yeah you've collected some pretty interesting students they're like a pretty we won't name names uh other uh than than L but like some of them are are very well-known people in the tech industry now yeah and and I think that um yeah it seemed like the people that would gravitate towards you it's interesting your laboratory is off Camp M so anyone that decides to be off campus is already making a choice to like they don't want to be part of the standard culture they thought was interesting yeah yeah yeah so let me I want to get back to this issue of of like internet and Silicon Valley I recall it was the early 90s so it would be like 89 9091 remember I had this this girlfriend Gretchen remember and her dad was the editor of Guitar Player magazine and I'll I'll never forget he told me he said you know it's it's going to be all about multimedia remember that no one talks about multimedia he said your your television is going to be your computer is going to be your um stereo is going I mean he he was he was right right he was basically everything was going to be synthesized into common devices and we now know that that that or not to be true but at what point did you decide that things like computers were mainly going to be a a route to Industry and not to Academia this is this is really important I think for people to understand because um right now it's kind of happening in biomedical Sciences but you see this at Stanford people get degrees in computer science but not to become computer science professors sometimes but really so that they can go into industry so how do you see nowadays like for people that are interested in science or technology do they need to go to graduate school like is a PhD useful anymore Peter field says that you shouldn't even get a bachelor I think that's what you know I mean I I have great respect for Peter great respect for Peter there are a lot of things that are easier to when you're already a billionaire no no no I know like like Steve Joe saying you know passion is everything right I mean necessary but not sufficient 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 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 uh this is amazing because you know today is so so obvious I mean people didn't know much what was going on I park everything one night we were having for dinner I remember you know Emanuel moo who was uh you know they discovered the orexin hypocretin relationship that's a cause of narpy isation he was a friend of ours and his wife they were home with at our dinner and I was telling them I was telling them that you could go to a computer and go through the Lou Museum in Paris and they say what are you talking about and so we finished dinner and we all drove to park at night and I turn on my computer and there was a man I still remember his name something P was it last name he had gone taking pictures of every painting at the L and put them on on online so you could just navigate through the L today is obvious trivial at that time they couldn't believe it yeah there you are in Palo Alto on an evening going through all the rooms of the L they just couldn't understand what was going on what year was this I don't remember but it was when the web started coming you know that was you we get email in college in the final year of 97 so it must have been somewhere around like 9495 something of that sort right before right at the time and Reon made the web available to everybody basically you know Netscape you know so in any EV so it was an amazing thing it was amazing now all these developments were really done in companies not necessarily in Academia okay that that is an interesting point and I think that today an immense amount of the advances that we see in biotechnology in computers in in everything are essentially done I would say for profit by companies okay I I think social networks they started we started doing social networks at a time but no one even thought of doing it I used to say I do social science with the capital S because sociologist used to study the behavior of five widows in some Norway Norwegian Village and write a paper we could look at 150,000 people how did they visit this side on that side and predict how you know we were able to predict behaviors behaviors you know so I think that today everybody knows that that's the case and this you know the same thing with artificial intelligence but for a kid in high school or kids in college or kids in I mean is it worth getting a graduate education well it all depends on what you want to do forget I mean I mean law medicine you need a Prof I mean those are you need the 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 okay but the the danger is you and I remember a very very bright uh guy I had in my in my team you don't want to become a bluec color worker see what I'm saying is The Following being a hacker or being to deal with software is it was an incredibly profitable profession now you have these large language models that can actually program for you you you need to write a program you go to J GTP and he'll write it for you 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 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 some contextual cultural part to this okay now I personally believe that Humanities and all sorts of other things are very important and to understand where where is your cultural environment where are you coming from and where is this Society going is important but on the other hand as you said you can just finish high school and start hacking and you know become very good at it and doesn't require much more than that do you think the examples of like Zak um Elon um you know and others you know going from you know essentially departing standard education to start companies do you think they've served I mean certainly not talking about the companies but do you think those examples um are good examples for people to internalize or they just are they unicorns well I think that they're unicorns and you have to be very careful we only talk about the success stories we don't go and interview the guy that is uh loading a l escaping truck because his startup didn't go anywhere 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 now that doesn't mean that you should not be working on the things you care and and gamble but these are the guys who played the lottery and won do you remember there were many other we social websites before you know Facebook MH and they all died and Facebook could have died too I mean zachar might disagree with me but you know could have died okay and you know all these things are like that um Apple went almost under they brought Steve Jobs again and the guy put them on you know into the stratosphere and the same thing with Elon Musk he's a highte risk taker and so far every time he flips the coin he comes the right way but to say I want to be like him you have to be very careful and to calculate the odds okay so when you say this how many of these kids really make it I mean it's a very complicated thing so I think that to have a strong background in something will help you when suddenly the field switches from being a program it and making a lot of money to suddenly programing you know Diamond doesn't or becoming a technician basically okay 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 uh when I decid to switch to this were you worried no because I saw okay I saw it as a as a very slow departure from what you were doing and I saw the success very early on I mean I 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 okay you were always explaining everything to people and you you have a talent let's face it I mean you know I'm not saying this because I want to flatter you I I really believe that everybody says so the success of your podcast is a success at explaining things in in ways that people understand they don't have to go and buy a book on neur Anatomy to understand 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 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 the timing was um the pandemic people were home they were listening a podcast so and this it brings to something to me that many times people have asked me about me what what what makes me do what I do I believe in the idea of walking on beaches without f with very few Footprints when you go into a crowded field is a mess so many of the times that I move into something else is when I realize that there's a mobs in of scientists working at this and the chances of doing something interesting are very very small okay the internet has a lot 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 crowd and many people are brilliant and many of them are smart so you started something very early and you were lucky that you chose a field that resonates with the needs of people okay there are also other people who do podcasting and go nowhere so I I think that I never worried I actually was you know elated to see the the the trajectory of your podcast and the only thing is you have a tenar 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 know you don't needed in a sense unless you no one's beyond the reach of justice but yeah I still maintain my tenure position I spoke to my chairman in Opthalmology this morning and I'll teach this spring or or and it's good for you too to to Really interact with young people and to hear what they they care and so but I never worried in the sense that I I thought that you you have enough talent to do well and you chose to do it I mean I remember during covid at the beginning you were we were at your sister's house and you were drawing all these little diagrams and put my drawing yeah yeah and that's so 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 I never worried about it I I think that the all of us the the whole family and those who know you are sort of impressed at the explosive success of the story here you know your podcast uh is amazing I mean I don't have to tell you well it reflects a kind of an early compulsion more than anything of learn and teach learn and share yeah but I there's also I need to say something uh the other day actually we were watching your your interview with Esther per and regardless of the fact that I think it's it's a great interview um both my wife and I were reflecting on the fact that it's 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 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 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 are the opposite I mean the issue is you know obviously you're taking it to many many places long be beyond what you started which was essentially explain to people how Neuroscience works right yeah we've gone into a lot of Health domains and other things and I'm also been blessed with um an amazing team this is something that I think uh while we share a lot of things in in common if I may I mean I've I've um I've always been kind of a pack animal you know if it was skateboarding like draw friends together if it's Birds I have my bird club with Eddie Chang who know as you know is chair of neurosurgery at UCSF it's kind of wild to think about but um yeah I've I've I've rarely gone alone like I'm just struck 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 you make friends you have colleagues you maintain long-term relationship have groups of people who collaborate with me I don't do this alone the opposite right but but there's um I haven't changed crowds very often I you know and it seems like you've had to go into you know economics and theoretical physics and all these things and um yeah that's that's a an interesting um difference and look and it's daunting and thrilling at the same time I sometimes when you start giving talks in a field that you 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 guy and 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 theor he said well then it's a lie if you cannot prove it's a lie it was quite a you know a cold shower and 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 it's super embarrassing you correct yourself you move on no no and then you learn things too you have a conversation with some you never forget those things this is what I learned like you never forget the the the errors you made like on a qualifying exam um 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 that's a that's an important moment because it's also the thing that you go look up and you never forget yeah right and also the tiny humiliations can be very good too for you I mean this is very important I've had plenty of those I've had plent of those I do too 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 I mean in spite of the fact that you know you paint me as a as a lone wolf I'm not um I'm very social and I interact I love interacting with people and I 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 it's it's very stimulating I'm not the kind of person that ass in a corner and does theories and publish by I published papers on my own that was my uh Romantic Period where I needed to be Einstein in the patent office and not that I thought I was Einstein but it was very important I was the only author okay I 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 patterns and so on so um I like 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 I can relate yes yes yes so that that's very good and I still see some of my old students and collaborators like you know Tad and so on and we take walks every once in a while and discuss things you know and so I learn a lot from him too right now you're working as I understand on Quantum Internet yes this is a mysterious term to most everybody yes yes um you alluded to it earlier about quantum entanglement or about entanglement yes but my understanding is that foreign governments countries and um and our 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 Etc can you explain Quantum Internet in a way that I can understand and the listeners can understand I can explain I mean I'll tell you the the original thing quantum mechanics was essentially finished in 1925 so we are not Reinventing new physics here 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 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 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 I don't know months or years of a computer to do it okay but it can be done computers get broke 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 and it can be unraveled okay so that's one thing now here comes quantum mechanics quantum mechanics provide security that is not given by mathematics but by the laws of physics so if you have a way of interact sending messages from one computer to the other encrypted using Quantum mechanisms they cannot be broken can you give me an example of a Quant mechanism for encoding imagine imagine that I'm sending you messages every every message is encoded in binary ones and zeros okay so I'm sending a message which is a string of ones and zeros that string of ones and zeros could be hello Andrew or it could also be something you know that is secretly encoded into something if if it's classical encryption which is what we use today a a computer in principle can look at those symbols and unravel them now let me show you how how it works in computer in in Quantum in Quantum when I send you a Quantum message the act of touching it trying to look at it destroys it that's what happens in Quantum Not In classical thing 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 if I look at a string of Cubit Quantum bits moving there are not ones and zeros they are different things these are moving Parts they moving Parts they are usually photons they go on on you can use fiber optics you can use like I I know what photons are so they're little little bouncing energy yeah yeah little Bunches of light because Photon if they're going around there are also you know the photon could be polarized up or down or whatever 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 of the other and I destroy it the interaction with it changes the measurement destroys it this is the mystery of quantum mechanics that the interact the measurement collapses we call the word we call it the word collap es into one State or the other before that it was anything we could be anything so when I use quantum signals I'm sending cubits Quantum bits that are called cubits the the act of observing the Cubit renders into a classical 10 Zer so then there's no way you cannot break it so does that mean that the Practical implementation of this yes equates to Unbreakable unbreakable code exactly now which is why of course everybody other governments I mean what I've been told is that the that in China they're working very hard on this oh absolutely and that here we're working very hard on we are I'm working too and you're working very hard on us so but wait wait but who's there has anyone gotten there yet okay the problem is the following in order to decrypt this remember that I told you that you can use mathematics okay some of these functions are incredibly complex it might take the age of the universe perhaps to to decode them mathematically let's not talking about qu but if you have a quantum computer computer now we're talking about a quantum computer it can do it in a couple of hours a quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the ones used in encryption in hours whereas you would take the age of the universe for a monster computer standard computer you can buy to do it so in theory whoever gets gets this ability first can read essentially all all the information that's being sent around the world 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 and they store it because someday they'll be able to decrypt it but it who knows if it will still be relevant oh buty maybe and we don't know what imagine imagine if you can if you can get remember when the Korean North Korea uh hacked what was it Disney one of the and then they discovered all these emails where people you know like George Clooney I don't know who was complaining about this or that so imagine and we just didn't hear about that yeah yeah okay 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 in the meantime people are working on deploying these Quantum networks we're working on that too not to deploy them but just to see whether or not is feasible to do that okay the Chinese are ahead of almost everybody they have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these cubits so they this are impossible to the Crypt okay wait so they're sending the Cubit so you can already communicate in Quantum oh yeah yeah we communic all the time yeah yeah I have a lab in Colorado that does that yeah absolutely over 100 kilometers yeah but that's not what standard internet is using 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 cubits not not just normal bits so this is a race yeah a race we we are not really I mean since we are not a yeah yeah and there are a lot of people uh I I need to tell you that a lot of people including this government that claim that this is not really that relevant or important but I in your for instance they're really putting a lot of money into that why would our government not think it's important because there is 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 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 they call that post Quantum but there is they don't know if true the the United States government is following this postquantum because they think it's easier and so on already they published two of this very very fancy Al 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 so there is the cryptographers don't they don't like physics they don't you know they don't work as physicist so they say Quantum key distribution that's the name of this thing it's esoteric is 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 we just published the paper that got tremendous publicity and an award and so on as best paper that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers okay so I mean and the the 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're very important but there is a whole group of people that are saying no post Quantum is is what we want and so n the National Institute of uh I think Science and Technology they're really pushing the postquantum thing in Europe is the opposite they're really embracing Quantum I mean I was Denmark for instance is very far ahead into these things NATO just gave them in P of money to to work on Quantum and so on so it it all depends you know it's a complicated thing because the the crypto people are all mathematical people so they they don't care about Quant is any of this um going to be useful for trying to understand I don't know how the brain works um or is it I mean you know there's still debate to whether or not the way that we're thinking about brain function is even like the right way we think about neurons Action potentials and chemicals and but the physicists whenever they kind of like poke their noses into this stuff they tend to think about it a little bit differently or they start to think about well you know um State dependence like the brain that you have at 8:00 a.m. is very different than the brain you have at 2: a.m. or 4 in the afternoon like maybe everything's happening differently and maybe some of this actually gets down to the quantum level like we can't say this neuron talks to this neuron and when they talk in the following way um you get a certain output like is there relevance here okay there are two things I want to say beware of physicist getting into brains uh in brain work I mean they always end up it's like the new thing now Neuroscience you know swung the doors open was I was into Neuroscience for I mean I think recently Neuroscience has done made a good move of including people from psychology computation even philosophy eoms and biology B all levels ofis but the other thing you ask about 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 adviser of Hawking I heard him on Lex's podcast and um and yeah he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating maybe as as bound networks as opposed to Independent en no one no one really follows it and I I don't I'm not an expert in that but so R prros is the one that's pushing this many of the physicist go into brain science are not very uh clever doing brain science because uh you know I heard a story I think was Francis cek or someone who told I was at a conference and he was saying this that if phys came to him and said I I decided to go into brain science and so he said okay what have you done and the guy says I measure the specific heat of the brain what do I do with it basically well I think it's good that computationally minded people have joined Neuroscience because it was getting too modal too descriptive right that said um I do think that you know math 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 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 but now I think with AI and llms oh that's a whole different story like the Nur the biologists have had to step back and say Hey you know the these math physics uh engineering AI types they they have the potential to really evolve the field right right at least that's my stance yeah 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 that's a meaningless access yeah so I said if I if I show you a row 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 it's not parallel it's sequential you know but llms are pretty interesting right I mean you can take four or five um large language models essentially sort of pseudo brains and have them work on the same problem 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 I it's very interesting that's exactly what we're doing now years ago with with Jeff frager we wrote a paper on on the idea of showing how programs collaborating with each other could solve problems very very fast that human or others cannot do and it is a basis of a lot of the work we want to do now yes 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 so you think AI is going to improve life for the typical citizen yes because you can use these things in order to do things that were very hard to do before I mean I use them is amazing I mean I I just we just published the paper on hallucinations in llms and so because they hallucinate every once while they say anything but yes yeah they are very useful very useful and they I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that produce them like openi and so on yes yeah it's very it's a very very important field but 10 15 years ago whenever I'd bring up AI you would chuckle and say this stuff is like well the funny thing is that the other day uh well I don't want to name him one of the managers at zerox Park when I was at Park I started playing with the idea of using machine learning to to see what they can do 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 neutal L that's exactly it and the other day I was meeting with some of these people and they were saying to me we we used to laugh at you you know doing this stuff because we could do only very little and today is the rage now the difference between what I was doing what is being done today is a scale I mean you know they you I don't know if you know that they're now using nuclear power reactors in order to power the the data centers didn't know that but it's an immense cost of computing you have no idea the amount of work that it takes to one trillion tokens in order to to get one of these things to work it strikes me you've always been very open-minded and very willing to adopt new technologies but it hasn't changed your daily life very much like it like not much at all I remember early on you said uh you showed me the intern and you said be very careful and I said why you said it's like mental chewing gum you chew and chew those were your words you said you chew and chew 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 right and I I always think about that in terms of phone usage or web foraging Behavior like um and you still bike to work you take a walk in the afternoon or or uh after eating you um you 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 no no no well there's another actually I've never seen you at a cafe with a laptop well sometimes but well there's another aspect to this as as you know in the last up to five years ago I spent four years working on the economics of attention and why is it that people attend to things 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 uh this the former CEO of uh hulet Packer where I was in direct in the labs um M Wickman used to say you know I I wake up in the middle of night to look at my my phone and I know people who do that and I there are members of my family who do that more often that I would like to see them do that you don't do that no I I mean I do it but not not 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 he said that he spam spam he said I I get spam and I I look at it because some something's happening he used to say he's not a very successful Financial guy stop doing St brilliant fellow brilliant fellow but that's because maybe your internal world is is Rich enough that you don't I mean no but I look at news I like I like to look at things I like look at videos don't misunderstand me it's not that I ignore it but um yeah I'm not I'm not I mean I mean I like the latest things and so on especially if they're beautiful and so on but yeah I'm not into whatever the latest is and so on and I I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free from faceb I gave them to you and I never used them once or twice I'm not I mean I've used VR in my lab but we I I don't want to spend time in VR and also as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed uh before this this podcast I love mechanical things and the details the analog world okay so yeah digital is interesting and you it's fascinating some ways but I like things you know like mechanical watches cameras that click when they press them and so but not artificially okay so I I I really like that I like things that are very classical and so on in many ways and I enjoy that I I like technology don't misunderstand me and I use it a lot um and I am you know I I use it and I I do new things with them and I get pattern and so on but yeah I'm not a techy guy in in the same say I I enjoy I like to have an analog life not a digital life riding a bicycle is analog walk is analog you know sitting and meditating is analogue uh you know I of course you can also listen through the internet to a good thing that helps you meditate or go to sleep don't me understand me but I don't have this fascination with things and so on I mean some people do but it seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future you seem very grounded in the present 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 and science fiction they always say did you read this or that and 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 it's imagining you know droids doing this or that I couldn't care less uh you know as I always think that physicists must love science fiction because never never never read a single book or looked at it in a movie or science fiction I couldn't care less I don't I don't relate to that I 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 I mean I you're not a futurist no no even though they call me futurist because I always anticipate things right but you're not somebody who like thinks about what life is going to be like a 100 years from now no no I I like to know life is now yes yes uh and I also as Neil Bor 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 I mean you know we 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 imagine if you were just declaiming the uh Roman senate uh centuries ago very few people exactly what I'm doing now but with no microphones or cameras okay so yeah I I'm not a futurist and that's it the people tell me I am because I anticipate things but not because I imagine you know a world in which you know I I I couldn't collect about going to Mars for instance even though Elon Mar thinks it's very important do you think it's a cool project I don't know I I what I 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're going to fix it and so I don't know I mean let it let it happen I don't know just enjoy now you know you're not worried about the future in that sense oh I'm an optimist I believe that technology will solve the global warming problem everything it's obvious how to solve it there's nothing very mysterious you know nuclear power is going to do it you know absolutely I once we get out over our preconceived notions of nuclear power right I mean very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident let's face it yeah they need to name it something else mightbe yeah might like many things that at once were thought to be dangerous when renamed we you know turn out to not be so dangerous that when renamed people are willing to adopt yeah yeah right yeah so yeah I I don't really you know I don't worry too much about the future I I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to to stare away from the brink hopefully you don't seem to worry too much generally you're not a big worrier M yeah no yeah you and I are different that way H you and I are different that way yeah you you worry a lot yes um not if I keep busy oh okay um these days a lot less I think that um 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 it sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that you know you you know reach for the next rung and and and grab it right and not you know not miss I mean there's been I I think there's been elements of uncertainty in my life where I felt like okay I'm going to ground the things I can control but no I I don't stay up at night worrying about things yeah also I think meditation is is profoundly effective at this suddenly you're here and that's the is the past is a past you cannot do anything and the future hasn't arrived so what the heck you know I 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 wrong with my breathe say it's so slow and calm so you got over the White Coat Syndrome yes yeah because of meditation yeah you send me your lab results this morning so everything everything looks great people always been you know regular about exercise not excessive you're never one of the like the marathoners or the you know 500 a.m. in the pool people but no I tried run to running marathon actually uh so yeah 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 steady longdistance running yeah I told you that once I'm not a sprinter yeah some people are by the way I admire them immensely you mean in life we speaking met in general yeah some people who really can do things incredibly fast and they move from one thing to the other and and so on I yeah I I I like people who reflect some wisdom for instance I have a it's very strange for someone like me but I see a a Buddhist monk and I just suddenly I feel Cal by just seeing that person you know um I don't know I there's something it's not just the spirituality the power they have to be here totally and absolutely uh it's impressive to me I mean some of people say okay got funny robes or something you know I like that a lot uh not it's not necessarily a way I mean my therapist used to stale me and that to use meditation to move away from uh trouble and and trou troubling thoughts is not a good idea so you have to embrace the world too but I I use it so 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 I don't know well you can only control what you can control right that's but you know there's some people are worry all the time about the future you know given um your understanding of quantum mechanics relativity and the real world um and perhaps just generally knowing what you know and experiencing what you've experienced do you believe in some sort of higher power organizing force or let's just be blunt do you believe in god well okay the word of 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 and so on uh so I don't believe in this notion of U you know of an agent there that is somehow knowing what what everybody on this planet is doing or you know and so on I I do feel sometimes and especially because of the the studies I have I uh and actually from reading people who have been very very deep you know in particular the thoughts of people like Einstein Heisenberg and so on that there seems to be be at times a sense of an organizing principle in the universe and to learn those rules so there is this notion I mean philosophically it's called pantheism that God is in nature already spos and all these people study this that I is very appealing to me the notion that uh there there is something that this thing is 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 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 I mean I don't believe that is's enough memory to store all this although today I saw you you can buy sandis terabytes that this big so I I I don't I don't believe in that but it's a matter of belief not not anything else and unfortunately these beliefs are you know translate sometimes in complicated action I I do believe that there is a sense of mystery I uh uh I I sometimes uh I once heard U I don't know who said it but it's a very good sentence that if you listen to betov and say I mean the man struggled but it's amazing he was able to create that music on the other hand mozar seems to have been getting the messages from Heavens you know on a daily basis just Flo it down so some people are given this connection to something much bigger and you act you have access to that through listening to that music the experiences we have there is this idea out there that Consciousness doesn't just exist within our brains but as sort of a like a Collective Network and things come through us not just as individuals but as thing is a a lot of that I was I I'm very interested in the word spiritual and and what it means you know to see that things transcend our particular needs at any point but the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny you know if you look at any movie you know braveart or whatever you see the one Warrior one group of Warriors has a pre saying God is with us and the other one is about to engage and says the same thing to the other group uh that's a little bit funny right 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 um well but differently do does it um make you nervous or worry you that I seem to have an increasing interest in God and religion no I think that is a beautiful journey in which you're in and and there are two pieces to this uh provided you don't you don't start using this to to somehow spout uh you know arguments why people shouldn't do this or that no no it's only my own exploration of my own I respect that I think it's a very important and thing uh you know there is an issue here that I read reading Wilson actually IO Wilson which you know he wrote this beautiful book on human nature and he claims that the religious Instinct comes out of a submissive component in us that animals have dogs are submissive and we believe that we need to be submissive to a King and to something Beyond a king you know some deity or something El that's his theory I certainly don't feel any compulsion to be submissive to other humans 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 like it's very clear that the human brain is limited and parsing the universe that we're in 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 but we tend to repeat a lot of the same mistakes over and over also there's also a technical thing here we sometimes confuse Randomness with premonition or or God doing something 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 but that doesn't mean that there was someone who said tally head do it and so the bully will pass I mean we ascribe causality to something that was truly random 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 so I but but sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences that we cannot explain and we say oh must be God that made sure that you and I met or that we we thought the same thoughts and so on although as a uh 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 one was Barbara Chapman my adviser once treated me to an experiment it was kind of a funny thing typical Barbara you know how nerdy she was she said um are are you willing to stay up all night and I was like okay yeah and she took zebra fish um eggs and fertilized them and I sat for 11 hours with food I got up to use the restroom and I watched a zebra fish egg duplicate and become a fish like in real time with my eyes not some movie on YouTube although that's impressive too people can look these up 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 all 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 and then the other one is that I mean I guess I've had enough experiences with prayer and the consequences of Prayer my real life that I just I sort can't get my head around the idea that there's not a God or some sort of organizing Force I just I I can't accept it because there's yes there's causality reverse causality correlation and mistaken correlation and causality but somehow like I mean I I like to think I'm grounded in science and reality but I don't think science can explain it all oh no and I think that this experience of the of this spirituality for instance I remember and still happens spending a night outdoors and looking at the sky I mean is an incredible thing the stars and you you feel so small and yet there is order to all that it's not just random stuff 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 you know not Costello okay Costello was gravity yeah so I I really think that there is something to be said about these spiritual experiences and I I really believe that importantly and I listen to people talk I recently I've been looking at some stuff that CS Lewis you know uh he was a man who be was studying the the sagas and the mythology of the Vikings and so on and eventually became a devout Christian uh you know thinking that this was the only answer to the because all religions have the same element um so I I understand that uh I respect it I I experienced that you know at times in my life but when I think seriously about it I think that the moment you know we we have this computer and you know we we can get glimpses of all this but I don't be I don't believe that it's 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 I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and Randomness beautiful ones okay and uh you know having you and and Lara has children is in fantastic Randomness in my life hopefully it wasn't too random no no in the sense that you know children you know you know children that come unhealthy whatever I mean you know it's it's a very impressive thing yeah the number of things that have to organized to create exactly a healthy child is it's truly a miracle yeah true true yeah and I think but a lot of it is random too you know I mean the same the same set of parents can produce two different set of children too okay I mean that that's a very very important and I are pretty different oh absolutely but in in very beautiful ways too so I mean neither of you does behave or or conducts a life that you know I would be unhappy your mother would be unhappier with so but going back to this the I I believe that indeed spirituality is import I have a lot of access to that through classical music there are times that I really believe that is it I mean I can get very very emotional listening to music very emotional uh you know my wife always notices it when I I do that and I I think that then you're having access to something very different of course it can be explained physiologically by all sorts of resonances and so on but who cares you know you mentioned that you can peer into the future with ideas that you're working on um and and yet you don't get too far ahead like you're not thinking like a 100 years from now what's it going to look like do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past sometimes sometimes and there is a I've always because I left my my family very when I was still very young I always had a certain Nostalgia for things okay um I I met a I became friend with a very impressive guy uh in France clart I think he was the director of The geophysics Institute and both of us had very similar parents in different you know French and Argentina but still and similar educations and we we had I have sometimes a certain Nostalgia that is almost Melancholia about the way we grew up and so on melan a little bit about it I mean I I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina like you would have 10 15 cousins over for lunch every Sunday yeah was very that doesn't sound melan no but there were moments moments of loneliness moments of times where I felt very misunderstood uh I I I had unfortunately a very punishing mother uh so that but I still remember her and I think about her in ways that are not necessarily always very happy I was looking at photos a while ago and I there are pictures of her that is you know she's smiling coming out of the Pacific Ocean in in Carmel she took a walk and so on but uh I I 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 uh my wife being Danish she grew up in a very different way from you know upper middle class argentines uh so you know that we we reflect on that you know the kinds of childhoods we had and so on but not not in the sense that you know oh I wish I had that now uh no regrets well not many not many I mean good uh I mean I there is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else which is if I look at my family my brother State produce family children grandchildren and so on I came here and I produce children grandchildren and there are going to be two diersing branches of the family uh not should we still get together we got together last year for your birthday yeah no I know that's what is so important to me yes but I think about it sometimes and when I go back and I see the lives very similar to what I had or you know different perhaps there is a certain you know sense of think about the past but I also realize that if I didn't take the steps I took 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 well so was I cuz I wouldn't have existed because you wouldn't have met Mom that's true too yeah yeah exactly I mean maybe you would have but no no no no but I'm grateful I didn't grow up in buos ciris I love I love the city I love the country I couldn't have done any of the things I've done in South America given Maybe but the landscape was just completely oh I go there and after a week I want to come back yeah yeah definitely you love this country I love this country I feel very much part of this country I'm very grateful to what this country has done for me for my family and that includes you and your sister okay and my wife when did you become a citizen oh many many years ago and I really did it consciously not not because I mean I mean they were practical things but no I I I really believe in it I really believe is an incredible country and gives incredible opportunities to people uh as Elan says El ask I'm also an immigrant I'm very happy to be one yeah you've always been a patriot absolutely and on the other hand as I said Argentina is complicated I go there and a lot of smells and things that you know bring memories that are amazing huh the food's not bad yeah yeah but it's also the whole the whole atmosphere and the first two three days are are an incredible experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on but after a while I also see the a darker side to it I must tell you that on the other hand my country- in-law Denmark is also a country that I like immensely uh there nice people and pleasant and soft very soft especially in summer but the Danes are also strong people like they they're the average Dane is so smart I think the high school education there must be among the best in the world yeah there is a there is a notion of proficiency I mean people are proficient that what they do yeah you you go to a store you go to you have a problem an airline or whatever you get someone who really knows how to solve it but there's also a a very it's a small Society very homogeneous tremendous sense of humor which I enjoy um 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 I I could not live there because it's you know it's a very homogeneous way of Behaving you know the the Lutheran ethic is there they're not religious but they're Lutheran um so I I feel very comfortable in Europe and so on but I like like being here yes yeah I feel like um our family now includes so many different nationalities and religions and backgrounds and philosophies and political stances to yeah it's great it's starting to look like the UN with some extra you I I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity was incredible incredible that's good you know so that that was also good to be as a child to hear these arguments about politics and so on you know 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 um 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 is that true still yes yes still true for you I should say yes absolutely absolutely because this has only to be judged in time okay um I I think that the issue of political incorrectness is is some kind of a mob behavior that says you should think like us okay we should be able to express our views with respecting others and so on and we should be respected for that I think that this whole notion that others are telling you what to think or not to think is is a little bit complicated and I I must say something which I hope it doesn't get me in trouble with my Dany side of the family or friends societies like the Scandinavian societies that are extremely uniform in thinking the word should is used all the time yeah you should do this you shouldn't do that good that you did it it you know it's a very they enforce behavior in a very very particular way it's not a hurting Instinct but there is a very very strict Lutheran tradition of telling you what you should and you shouldn't do so I know very few people and I've been going to D for many many years that really have I canoc clastic ideas that are away from the mean and they're considered odd okay very few including the physicists and they they have fantastic School of physics there Neil Bor was there so it it's a society that Conformity is the issue there right so on the other hand I think that it's good to to think differently and uh you know uh there's a man perhaps you heard of him I know where I mean I admire him he died Freeman Dyson he was on a level with fan and Gelman by the way he used to have very strange ideas too he used to say global warming what's wrong with it the Sahara is going to be a garden and what yeah you know the Sahara Desert will become a garden people will able to eat all that food well I think people hear that but then they countered against these um you know very heart-wrenching pictures of like polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking this kind of thing there are more polar bears today than when Mr Al Gore said that we're going to die listen I'm not going to argue climate change with you because I have no no no no I'm I'm I'm not I'm not countering I'm just saying you know like uh it I mean this 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 now 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 I really believe that very strongly I'm an optimist when it comes to that 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 and the question is can we debate those things rationally or nicely respecting people's beliefs okay and I I yeah I believe in that very strongly and I think being Politically Incorrect is a way of saying you're you're sort of you're smiling at them but it's it's okay why not you know it's a you know 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 why we why are 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 I mean if they invaded how 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 and I really thought that was so provocative so interesting do you consider yourself a Libertarian in many ways I like 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 uh I you know the the 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 Pol itical candidates that go nowhere and so on why do you think that is why do you think that is I think if they're so rational they're often among the smartest people they not the most C they are not strategically smart yeah I've met I met at times Libertarians that think you know incredible thoughts and you know they work they live in Silicon Valley and they're poor I mean even though they are the ones who are supposed to some are poor some are some are not but but I'm saying it's very interesting they choose presidential candidates no one ever heard of I think many of them are uh you know they are 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 how about their arguments I mean a lot of Politics As We Know show business I mean in this recent election it was it was all posturing it was all about grabbing emotion it was not about logic it was about emotion yeah I have several of my people that you know they they they put all their money to freeze themselves you going to cryo yourself no 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 um you've always laughed at this idea no but not only that I I there's a colleague of mine at Stanford who accuses me of being friends with a guy that is like that and I told this guy I said you know he thinks that I 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 he's going to be gone you don't you're not interested in living to be 200 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 look they read science fiction so they're very interested to know what the world looks like once they wake up so well there are people in the health space that are trying to not die you know Brian Johnson and others I mean that's a different story yeah I mean what's your thought on on trying to live to be 150 or something like that well if you can live the issue is not the age is the conditions of your body and mind okay that's the issue I had the fortunate unfortunate of having two parents that live very long lives one was incredibly my father was incredibly Los it until the end my mother had everything you know all 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 he he you know 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 eny joy in life is one thing 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 then he very sad but it can happen at the age of 35 you know so yeah I I I'm not into a race to live forever uh I want to live healthily I want to enjoy life enjoyment is the most important piece what's the point of being you know Tethered to tubes all over the place you know flat flat on a bed and you say oh I made it another year of my life I mean that's not really a life at least for me do you worry about or and or wish for anything for me for Lara yes to be super happy people no I don't want to use the word happy I want to see you joyful joy joy is more important than happiness joy is a state of mind happiness is okay yeah I I I set a list of things I want to have and I have him and I smile a lot joyfulness is this sense of being in yourself and I would like that I mean you two are very different Lara lives much more in the moment that you do uh for reasons yeah okay her her view of it's her demeanor huh it's very good I focused on what she's going to do this weekend yes I'm focused on what I'm going to do this weekend next week the next month and I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend and that's it and everything else going to come to you I believe and you know now I'm speaking in a way that is more paternal than anything else I've been you you had have a Charmed Life and everything came to you since you were very little and you you exhibited um you know behaviors and so on that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from the very beginning 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 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 take put 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 or even my stuffed animals yeah yeah yeah they say they gave you organized and probably have remember I had the the grunting tick yes yeah oh yeah that was yeah I probably drove us nuts well I probably have a little bit of an OCD type thing I mean not diagnostically you know significant but but when I bite down into something that I'm pursuing it's very hard for me to think about anything else 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 how many miles and know I heard there was a guy in who had been in the department Randy Nelson he's now a professor in Ohio 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 and I was like 95 hours yeah I remember that 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 how 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 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 10 you're 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 limit the question is why I mean I 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 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 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 it's not it's not relevant right now but Costello helped bring me into the moment like he would do these things that like I would light in that were just so simple like the way he would like like fall over or something or you know that I think that like having another creature there that that is very much in the moment brings you into the moment 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 I yeah the people I've I've had amazing Partners as you know um some less than amazing but many amazing partners and the and they tended to be also kind of into the future like focus on what's not quite there yet but I must say I think women in general do it better than men that they're better like grounding to the present well depends I I think that my wife tends to be more anxious than I am about the future so maybe it's not gated I tend well in in trying to sort of you know tell her that she shouldn't worry so much uh I think that I also suddenly reflect what am I doing here and I try to also slow down myself I I think that you know yeah I 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 um you know you have a podcast that's doing well you don't have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years I don't think out that far I don't think about the career piece I I think that I um I mean I often don't have a plan I 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 um look I think part of it was science 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 there's always been these Milestones you're going to finish your undergraduate degree I did a master the PHD then the post off then you need to get 10 year you know I think the academic system was a system of two to five year bursts like like sprinting marathons in many ways to try and you know grab the next thing to get to the next level and there was a lot of uncertainty for a long time 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 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 um I I just had it set of the words that are it's a it's a matter of bringing Elegance into your life almost to live it in a way that is elegant is nice in it in itself you know uh that that is important uh uh one of the things I learned I mean you know uh living with a Dane Danes don't like you to eat standing they 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 ritual 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 there has to be something 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 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 Cameron haynes's book I was listening to it and he it was amazing he said you know you have to approach your life no no matter how busy or how simple as a kind of work of art 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 and and it's a lot of what you're saying as well Elegance yeah life has to have Elegance otherwise it's just uh disjoint moments and so sometimes they will be like that and it can be very creative too 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 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 in a steady you know state but I I don't have this notion I have to see things everybody's talking about something I have to see it I I never felt like that no I mean I I'd like to see things don't misunderstand me but I it's very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I like them to do yeah you don't seem to need to go on like jungle Adventures or like or ice skate across Antarctica like like you've never been one for like the the kind of wild OU in no the wild outing is here uh that's my wild outing yeah I I I have I can have very uh wild thoughts about things that I would like you know sometimes they're totally wrong and so on but yeah I'm in a funny way I I am a little bit of what the French call in armchair philosopher or whatever there are these people who write write articles about France and if Africa without ever having left France or something that sort so I'm not like that but I I don't I don't necessarily um crave this physical adventure for the sake of Adventure I like beautiful things and I don't mind repeating the same beautiful thing every every year if necessary going vacation to the same places and so on yeah you like to go back to the same places well there is a difference between tourism where you new see new things and so on I like that it's also the idea of vacation where you just sit and enjoy what you have you know I I I I confess I've I've not ever done it and you know this about me I've never taken a vacation you know to the summer house in Denmark you can spend a week there just enjoying it that's it I don't know if I show you pictures you know from the window they see the deer in the garden you know they just sit there you know it's nice so there's nothing you know it's it's nice it can be you canot spend a life doing that you know I'm not a monk okay I'm not a meditator that will spend hours on this but you know it's it's nice to rest you know is the very important I think and the rituals are important to you very important yes yeah the rituals have a also are very reassuring because then you know it's predictable right you don't want a totally unpredictable life all the time that's what people create rituals you know you early on uh taught me about etiquette mhm um you know it's it's something that uh years later I think it was probably in the mid90s uh for some reason we were at the movies together and and we saw some people at the movies and they were wearing their um their bathroom slippers and um more or less their pajamas to the movies and I'll never forget you grabbed my arm like you didn't grab it forcefully you grab it you said you see that I said yeah and he 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 but you know it's it's something I thought about a lot you also said and and I'll never forget um you know you're always better off being overdressed because then at least your class that you're speaking to or your hosts of um Etc they know that you took them seriously right and um I don't think we really appreciate eate we sort like as Americans especially we've somehow confused Freedom of Choice with um discarding etiquette yes um yeah like it's not something you he discussed very much but what what about etiquette and what well there are many components I I think the most important one is a societal one I mean one of the things that I like for instance if you if you go to England polite people are politeness is a virtue and politeness the higher the the CL the social class the higher the demand to be polite is it's behavior is is is being nice to people it's understanding what they are and associated with that there are codes some of them are behavioral some of them are dress codes um I had a brilliant uh Economist Italian economist working with me and now he's in the east coast who told me he went to a wedding in in Italy after living in the United States and he went to his cousin's wedding and his uncle said you you show no respect you're not wearing cufflinks he said well but my shirt is all but no no no go home and get cinks 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 Swan you notice that Mr Elon Musk who's always in a t-shir that says let's go to Mars suddenly he's wearing a tuxedo because now he's now a he's part of it group of people that are behaving like government officials should behave you know you don't go in sandals and shorts but Silicon Valley is famous for the flip-flops in the hoodie right because the problem is that people confuse the the the style with the me the message with they think that because you wear a hoodie because Mark Zuckerberg was wearing hoodies makes you brilliant okay and I think that the issue of dress codes elist it a certain sense of behavior in people as you said I mean you know how would you feel if you went on a first day with someone that comes in in in in her you know slippers and and path R let's go to the movies it's not happened yet okay but okay so so what I'm saying is you don't have to overdo it I I'm you know that's another issue and and you have to also conform to the roles of the society 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 you don't see that here perhaps in La not in not in in the Bay Area ever yeah one thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina um men keep their jackets and ties on the whole night I I've always kept my jacket and tie on the entire night in the United States it's almost like moments um after people arrive at any party in a suit they start undressing yeah right why did they dress up then yeah 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 but I really believe that there are codes of conduct that sort of reflect many things and you're also you're you're projecting a message right you're giv I mean the idea of a hoodie at one point or the other first of all was hurting Behavior everybody had to wear one because you know then then you're cool or you know whatever okay 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 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 kind of a new thing I mean I mean there 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 um like what they their discourse on social media is like I mean they wouldn't last two seconds on the schoolyard they get hit in the face you know they like weird like like grown men acting kind of like teenagers okay well that's 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 now having said what I said I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether or not the rules the rules that Reg 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 uh you know operate for you and then you decide to be very different um you know there are many people who are like that and like to be iconoclastic I heard many stories about we were talking about Richard fan who actually made a case I mean Mary galman 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 Bongo drumming naked on the roof not rushing his teeth exactly all that okay so but he he he was very good at drawing attention okay that's fine you can also draw attention by dressing very nicely uh you know it's all it's all a matter of uh I mean I was reflecting you know we we go to the symphony in San Francisco uh regularly and we are donors and so on sometimes you go to a concert it's an amazing thing what you see there some people nicely dressed so people dress us they just woke up they didn't have time to get rest and you know got there you know and their whatever and they do you think that going back to the the initial you know ping of the question do you think that um that we have Society gone that we're sort of drifting towards like for lack of a better word chaos so so so social interaction chaos well you know I think the pendulum will swing again the other day I was talking to some reading actually that suddenly uh not only in New York but in the midwest men are starting to wear jacket and ties not just for work okay they go on dates like that so you know it's a pendulum he goes back and forth back and forth I don't think we're going to end up in a time when you know you have to wear tails to to have a breakfast or something I I think only the aristocrats used to do that but I I think that you know it's an issue of how also how we perceive the World Through The Eyes of television and movies okay if movie start showing that everybody's dressed whatever you know people are going to do the same thing if movies start showing you know the trends that we see in movies are the trends that essentially Society follows okay definitely so I think that we we this is I don't think we're going to chaos it's going to revert uh 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 yeah it's kind of interesting that now counterculture is conservativism right right right we're back to we're back to that the anti-war group is the more conservative anyway it's also people like you know it's interesting how Americans are fascinated with um English aristocracy and traditions I've been to high table din at King's College in Cambridge twice um you know everybody dresses properly they wear gowns and the fellows are sitting in a top table and everybody else and and people love it and we like to see that in the movies well it's theater yeah I mean it's academic theater a little bit of Pomp and Circumstance but it's theater nice well we have the same thing on commencement you know traditions and so yeah no parent wants to go to a graduation that's you know kind of a free-for-all they want to see some order absolutely absolutely and I think that you know there is a place for that 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 ra Lauren and so it's always you know 1960s fancy uh you know Club typ clothing and so so do you plan to ever retire I don't know what he means I mean is reti no no because I I'm not a postal worker I I'm not a cook at a restaurant that eventually says Okay I I cooked it long enough that I I collect my retirement and go home I have a mind that it works and I need an environment where that mind can can Thrive and I need an environment where they you know for one year when I when I left H Packard I was basically I took a course in general activity and so on but I was really a bit Idol so suddenly I'm mean in a context where people have problems so on that I really like to listen to there's a social component to work as you know so retirement is retirement means what you know you're a postal working one day you stop delivering mail and you stay home watching the pain dry and that's not me okay so to me I I'm working and I enjoy it and uh you know the day that will come that I cannot enjoy it I'll stop and I think that again goes through this issue of getting bored with things that you you don't like to do very you know because you've done it for a long long time um no I enjoy my life but I don't think in terms of Ed I I'll say something my my the the CEO of my company he a great guy Phil mckenny 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 walk 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 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 but as my cousin the physic used to say money doesn't bring happiness but it points in the right direction I would say money doesn't bring happiness but it can buffer stress 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 I live 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 uh so I like having money to do the things that I like but I don't work for money uh many people say well you know I invented so many things I could have started in some of these companies and and make a lot of money I don't really I don't regret that at all the ultra rich people that I know who are happy are still working every day 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 and you can only eat so many steaks yeah yeah I mean that we all cover the question is what do with your life now you want to travel well you can travel it's nice if you can travel you know in in better ways than being a you know an undergrad with a your backpack although can be Advent have fun backpacking on a limited budget where you know part of part of the joy of traveling that way is you're you're thrown into kind of street level interactions use hosts and things like that I went through Europe like I wouldn't change that for anything no I went through Europe as a graduate student I quit everything I went to Europe in winter and it was quite an adventure and the was hor friend us and I have very little money I stayed in places where the in in Paris where the lady in the in the little hotel would turn off the light if I turn it on in the middle of the night it was awful and yet to save energy yeah yeah yeah yeah and it was very funny but I met people that were interesting and I I engage 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 I went by train everywhere I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter you know everything seems lead back to Denmark yeah it's a nice country well now you have a Danish wife so and have for a long time and have for a long time many times yeah yeah no I yeah I like it's a very different contrast to Europe This Central Europe and so on you know Denmark northern Europe uh 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 I like Scandinavia yeah yeah it's very nice yes good good good natured people yes good saunas yeah everything yes and sunshine at least in the summer in the summer only yeah 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 I don't plan I just me either maybe I inherited it well I I just move I just move and intuitive I'm very intuitive about these things I suddenly see something in know this Quantum stuff I don't know I started hearing about it I talked to a brilliant guy who was in my lab and said hey J do what do you think about this you said oh sounds interesting let's do it and uh we're doing it I am lucky that I get paid to do that but um no I don't have plans like that I I I I would like to um 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 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 um we are all going for an event there I hope that you can join us if you can uh so those things are very important to me but I no I don't have plans for anything I I don't know I i' like to be surprised well Dad I want to extend a a 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 uh very interested your story is a really unique one and I can say that both as your son but also as somebody who's sat across from scientists from all different you know domains and backgrounds not just neuroscientists um I also really appreciate your ability to explain complicated things in ways that at least um we can start to get an understanding because these are are these are hard Concepts and you know I think what comes through so clearly is that somehow you've been able to grab these highlevel really abstract Concepts and work with them and try and understand them 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 mhm um I'll work on that and also I must say it just hit me like Square in the face during this discussion that I get such peace and I can really focus on being joyful knowing that you're joyful 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 and um and you know some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were going to get into our issues and things like that I'll just briefly say that yeah we've had our ups we've had our downs and we've um certainly landed up and um much much higher than we ever would had we not had all of that um and 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 we're Beyond good 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 all I think think about are the incredible gifts that you've given me about curiosity and pursuing my curiosity about putting new footprints on UNT tread beaches um the early discussions around the excitement that science can bring I mean I remember all of it I really remember all of it and and in immense detail and I love your stories about scientists both um how they soar and also how human they are and how they're fallible like like the rest of us so you know I there's not a day that goes by where I don't thank God because I do believe in God um that you're my father that you and Mom created me 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 just want to thank you for the example and the nurturing and for coming here uh there aren't words well thank you you know how much I love you I I think that these words are the biggest gift that I I 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 it's it's a very fulfilling feeling you know to have that notion that you you feel that you owe so much to what you got uh and also the fact that you've done incredibly well and the kind of person you are yeah so I wish you all the the wisdom that you need in order to just go through life the way you know you're going but I think that is a it's nice to also that we are sort of on the same wavelength on 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 perhaps it's because Fathers and Sons have that so we certainly relate yes well thank you thank you I love you I love you too you know that 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 if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube 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 ual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter threads Facebook and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the hubman Lab podcast again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural Network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief 1 to three-page PDFs those one to three page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol we also have protocols for optimizing your sleep dopamine and much more again all available completely zero cost simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu tab scroll down to newsletter and provide your email we do not share your email with anybody 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 [Music]