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

24:17Someone he asked for a visa, they denied it. It was a very complicated story. I don't think we should waste time to know how he got eventually resolved. The referendum mic was a priest in just here in the United States. But the point being that during that time, it was a very, you had 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. 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.

24:50Mille. Mille, yes. So, I was never, I was not political at all, but you have to be careful. But it was a funny time. And when he was overthrown through a military revolution, you know, my parents were, or you know, delighted and we remember the celebrations and so on. But that was considered the minority that was against you. You know, it was a social class movement. The working class was behind Beron and what he promised and what he gave them. So that eventually died. So the real problem was that there was no real commitment to science as an investment that the country should make. Yes, it was nice to have Nobel Prizes and it's culturally good.

25:33But they didn't have the pragmatic notions that we have seen in the United States of Green Science means solving concrete problems. And this was in the 1950s? 60s, too. 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 buy books about it and so on. 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.

26:10So yes, I was aware of everything. And actually, the university was very good. I entered the university and you had to choose what you wanted to do. And after tremendous personal crisis, I decided not to go into law or engineering, which was the alternative my father offered and decided to study physics. And I didn't regret it at all. It was a very impressive time. I got a good education in physics, a little bit to abstract. So this was experimental physics or theoretical physics? Both, both. In the lab I was okay. I mean I was better in classes and advanced, I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics and calculus and beyond that and you know complex analysis and so on.

26:55It was so turns out you were good at math after all. Good. Yes. I understand math. I'm not I'm not a whiz. I mean like many of my students happy. I had guys that can do incredible things you know that I can do them but slowly. You know, I understand yes. Yes. So but yeah physics. Yeah, it's something that I I knew how to beam Twitter about it. I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn't plan out but yeah. So the teacher in high school, were they the one that told you that there was a career in this thing? Yes, he said, you should devote yourself to this if you really care about it. He was a man that obviously he was sort of tormented on many levels and so on.

27:37He said that because of the way he carried himself. Yes, he was troubled and was interesting. He intends, man. And I still remember his name was in, he was a philosopher, he's named in Egesland, which is a German name. And he started talking about discovering 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, then Roman and Greek. So it was all fascinating, interesting. 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?

28:17And even when I was growing up, but especially now that we don't force kids to be exposed to all these topics, like we try and track people into something early on. Actually, a recent guest told me that many schools are now just giving knowledge, but not expecting kids to do problem sets. You know, teaching them about physical activity, but not expecting them to do physical activity seriously. Well, 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 visiting professor in France, actually, you live there because of that in Paris.

28:53And 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 the Russians too, into a very, very practical realm and make progress that are very, very concrete, almost engineering -like. 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. I've been drinking AG1 since 2012 and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited.

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30:39When I came to the United States, I must tell you, I came to the United States to University of Brazil. Let's talk about that. So how did you end up getting into the United States as a graduate student? You applied. Yeah, I was graduating. And the future looked rather gloomy. I had a girlfriend whose father was very wealthy and she said no problem, you're gonna work for my dad and you know, you got a factory or whatever. Why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you'll go for? No, no, no, no. I've never known you to work for anyone except you. Yeah, in a way, you're a bit the same.

31:13Yeah, yeah, so, yes, yes. I just the idea of running a business was not. 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. He was a professor in France, then Sweden, and so on. So I felt that perhaps I should go to the United States. And so I started applying to this. My father was saying, you know, I won't even help you with this. He didn't like, my parents didn't like it. You know, I was very close to my family in many ways. And so I applied to many places. I remember being accepted at, I think, was Cornell.

31:51and I said, oh, New York, that's great. Till someone said to me, you have to take a plane to go to real New York. I mean, you know, it was not for you. So you know, I got it, I got it, this very, very nice fellowship to go to University of Pennsylvania, which is. Who's the fellowship from? The Navy, the United States Navy. Yeah, I'm very grateful for that. And I actually wrote that in my PhD thesis. You know, I was very grateful. 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 the United States working for a professor bursting who just died at the age of 101.

32:28And no, but I was supported by the United States. Maybe it was a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. But I remember in my first interview with some of the teachers, professors, that I am talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics and the guys, as to me, let me give you 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 what heights will it bounce? I had no idea what to do. I had no sense that you could turn all these knowledge into something implementable, practical, and so on. So it was quite a struggle the first year.

33:01So you had theoretical understanding? Yes, not experimental. Right, right. Yes, or empirical and so on. I didn't know how to calculate things very well. Yeah, I didn't think it was a good at math. It was good, yeah, math and understanding in math is a different thing between understanding and understanding. Implemented and creating things. Well, you learn that. I had four years of graduate school. I got my PhD in physics, so obviously I learned how to do it. But what I'm saying is that I have this very, very vague theoretical understanding of what the world worked, but not really a practical. I didn't have it in my fingertips.

33:36That's what you learn when you go to graduate school, as you know yourself. Okay. So that's one thing to learn about the brain as an undergraduate, but in graduate school is where I learned how to slice brain, stain brain, trace connections, record from neurons and it's a whole other business to get your hands dirty and the thing. Absolutely. Yeah, the same thing for me. Yeah, I take courses and discovering what you like and dislike. 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?

34:05It was funny. He sort of became a try to become my surrogate father, but on the other hand, intellectually, I always felt that he was not quite there. I mean, he was very famous at some point. But it's a member of the National Academy. He was not, but he was very famous, very famous. But I always felt that there was a lack of death into what we were doing. He was not just him, he was just a solid state physics. There was a very famous Mary -Gelman who had told contempt for solid state physics. He used to call it squally state physics. For those that don't know, Mary -Gelman, we'll get to Mary later, because I had the interesting experience of meeting him as a child, but he discovered the quark, he won the Nobel Prize, in many ways, is considered at least as superb of physicists as fine men, maybe better.

34:55Yeah, lesser known, but among physicists, you know, would have owed great fear in everybody. We'll get to marry in a little bit. So, did you enjoy graduate school? Yes, but it was incredibly hard, very hard. The first year and so forth. And also, personally, I was very lonely. You know, I was transplanted into a whole different world. Philadelphia is not a city. I would recommend to many people to live in. 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 lived on very little money, as a matter of fact.

35:30Yes. My parents, 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 he 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, with me and other places, I did not enjoy, I mean, it was quite a cultural adventure for me, to meet people from all over the world, to learn what they, I became very close to a Japanese postdoc, a very interesting man.

36:07But I was quite miserable. And so this was in the mid -60s? Yes, yes, late 60s, yes. I did not like my life there at all. I mean, I lived for four years. I didn't have a single girlfriend or anything. I dated and so on. But I just felt that I was transplanted into an environment that I didn't like. And on top of that, my conflict with my advisor that were not serious because they were not overt, but they were there all the time. That can be tough for those listening. The relationship to your graduate advisor is a potentially wonderful, potentially hazardous one because they exert enormous control over your future.

36:49Not just through letters of recommendation, but opportunities and I got lucky in that sense. You were very lucky. My advice was that kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him, he ordered for you. Are you kidding me? 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. I couldn't finish a paper. And I was a mess. And his daughter was there. She was 16 or 17. And she said, are you two going to talk physics? I was going to say, no, let's go for a walk.

37:24He said, that's all we're going to do. But the physics consistent in him regultitating, 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 from Friday to Sunday night. So it was hard for me. I never really felt that happy. On the other hand, I had no other options at that time. But then as soon as I graduated, I got out. So I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was. From my, I delighted in my advisor, as you know. Yes, it was amazing. Fantastic people.

38:03Yeah, I got lucky. And I got a lot of that from you, which was to, for those that don't know, I left a program at Berkeley, whichever one thought I was insane. Insane to leave Berkeley to go to Davis. That was by choice. But I remember what you said. You said, how big is your incoming class at Davis, right? Because by all standard criteria, Berkeley is the better institution. Davis is great, but Berkeley is considered exceptionally strong. And I said, they're three of us. And he said, well, either you're making the best decision of your life or the worst mistake of your life. And then I think you asked me what was driving the decision.

38:38I 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 going to go for it. Which I really appreciate because any parent, if I were a parent and my kids said, that I'm gonna leave Berkeley and go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again, I think I probably would have balked. So well, Barbara also played a very, very nice supportive emotional role in your life. I mean, it was obvious that she had tremendous preference for you.

39:11You would like her son in many ways. I smile and well up a little bit only because well, she passed away young, but she's just an amazing person. So I feel very blessed for that. That wasn't your experience. with your advisor. So during that time, I did want to ask about this. I asked about it being the mid to late 60s because it was the counter culture movement. Yes, yes. And 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, you've been very clear. Like you never had any interest in recreational drugs. No, never did them.

39:51Even though that was super common. and then I've never seen you have more than a glass of wine. Yes. You've never been drunk in your life. Never. And you don't like football, despite being from Argentina. It occurred to me on the drive over, like peer pressure is just not something that impacts you. You're not gonna do something because people around you are doing it. Well, no, you're absolutely right. I always felt this sense of uniqueness or whatever. And but I became very humble because of it. I'm not arrogant. It's not that I feel like others, other than a worse and so on. But yes, when I came to the United States, there was a decision I had to make, which is I remember explicitly thinking about.

40:31It was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the social environment 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 mathematicians and physicists 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 the move to the village in New York, and they decided that that was the life they wanted to have. Problem is that, you know, ten years on, you know, what are you doing, right? I mean, you know, being a, you know, getting into being an ol' hippie is not that interesting.

41:06So 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, it was quite a surprise. In New York Philadelphia, people were smoking pot and also some of these incredible things, getting drunk and so on. It was something that I would say, no, thank you. And that was it. And I felt quite OK with it. 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.

41:45I can say things like now that I'm 49 who has never been drunk, never done drugs. Basically has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once and that's Rick Rubin, my good friend who's Yeah, by all standards is you know, probably the greatest music producer of all time across you know Doesn't a dozen different genres right not just rock and roll classical country all this and I once asked Rick You know, you worked in music where, you know, drugs and alcohol are everywhere, or at least used to be. And you just said, yeah, it never really interested me. I could be around it, but not participating.

42:21And so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship to what's going on around you, where you don't feel pulled into it. And also didn't understand, I mean, for instance, the roll of drugs and alcohol in young people who was a graduate student, to a large extent plays a role of relaxation and 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. So whatever, deal with your state of anxiety, but you don't have to drink in order to do that.

42:58And 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 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 track. Okay. Today I'm much more understanding. I mean, I hear people and that's what, you know, it works for them. He's fine, I'll go, I still don't like it. And it was even worse when we came to California because that here everything was going on, not just drugs and everything else.

43:36So, well let's talk about that. I've been at that specifically right off the bat. So you finished your PhD. Yeah. You could have done a postdoc become my professor. I was playing with that. I was playing with that. I wanted to go to, my dream was to go to Cambridge, University in England, not only because the cabinish laboratory was fantastic. There was a whole thing on DNA, I mean, a crick was there and so on. So I thought that perhaps I would just start, you know, inhaling some of those papers. 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 couldn't sleep.

44:11I mean, I read it one night and say, it's incredible what this guy's in book. Amazing book, yes. So I said, oh, the whole thing is becoming, but like physics is no longer all these complicated names and so on. Well, it's crystallography, which is, you know, but I mean, physics and chemistry are so interesting. So instead of his boring, because you have, it's like botany, you have to learn all these crystals from him. I'm just juggling because the spaghetti model folks, as we call them, the crystallographers are probably covering their eyes right now. But that's all right. They love what they do and thank goodness for it.

44:41No, of course. Because they design novel drug pockets and receptors, I mean, they're doing some cool stuff. So I thought that being a Cambridge was okay. I mean, you would suffer from not even heating and the rooms and so on. But then what happens was, I mean, I met your mother and then she brought a little bit of reality into my life and said, well, she said, it's time for you to graduate. Because I was just staying there as a PhD student. I was fine. The money was a problem, but I got to live like this. You were a mom in New York. I met your mother in New York, yes. And she had her feet on the ground and said, it's time for you to graduate and so on.

45:20and then she actually was right. And so I decided to look for a job. And my professor wasn't necessarily letting me go. He wanted me to stay as a postdoc with him. This is something people don't often understand is that if a student or postdoc is very good, the advisors are de -incentivized to move them along to their job. But it's a tricky game because you want the support of your advisor, but oftentimes your advisor, if you're very good, they want to keep you. Yes. 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, I come from a family that lived a very comfortable life, and I wanted that very badly.

46:00And so I started looking for jobs and so on. My advisor was not too keen to tell me what to do. So instead of going, I could have gone for a postdoc to a couple of places, but I wanted to be a little more independent. And I discovered that there were research institutions like IBM and Xerox and the West Coast and so on. There were, you know, people could do science, you know, good science and you know, Bell Labs was the most famous one of all. That was in the East Coast. In the East Coast, I went to Bell Labs for an interview and I feel that they were running that like a Russian in term in Campyolamose.

46:33I mean, it was unbelievable. You were, we were 10 of us and, you know, they took us around and people were taking notes of what you were saying and asking and so on, telling us that was in a lead place. It was in a lead place. So East Coast. Yeah, yeah, the East Coast institutions. I mean, it makes sense to me now why haven't been raised in the Bay Area that East Coast institutions and I are just never gonna mix because there's They love tradition. They love hierarchy and they love history whereas the West Coast Well, it's all about the startup the IPO What's about what happened in the last three years and what's gonna happen in the next ten years?

47:10Right. Well, on the other hand, there is something nice to be said about the European model of universities in the sense that the biggest contrast you say this I remember. I, you know, when you gave when professors came with colloquium and so on, they were wearing suit and tie and the University of Pennsylvania and Ivy League, school and so on. I came to Stanford. I went to the first colloquium and the students were coming in shows 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. It was smart. It was smart, I mean.

47:40It was incredibly smart. It was incredibly smart. They know that about that. So, in any event, I discovered something which historically became incredibly important, although I was marginally involved in it, which was Xerox Corporation had invented a copier, decided that they were going to get into the information age, and they decided to establish a new research center in Palo Alto next to Stanford, where they would recruit people that were working on this whole thing, computers and information and physics and so on. And I came in and the guys, you know, whoever interviewed me, they said, well, this is exactly the place for you.

48:12So that's what I did. And the interesting thing was that when 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 it. So I was at a classmate in high school back at Canara. Yes. I remember because she wrote a vast book at a school. Yeah. Her mother was involved in that. in creating the, it was a Dell. A Dell, yes. A Dell Goldberg. Yes. The ability to move, what, here to be pages on the screen. Object or interlanguage, I had no idea that was going on, I'll be honest with you.

48:50I mean, it was going on the second floor. They were all hippie -like. I mean, it was a scandal of the life that they had there. It was a 70s, and still the Bay Area, it was not what it's now. I mean, everybody went to Risades, you know, those 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 was this incredible place. I remember going there when I was a kid to your lab. Actually one of my earliest recollections was you took me into your and Jim Boyce's experimental lab. Yeah. You told me to pick a piece of fruit. There was a bowl of fruit.

49:26I picked a banana. You took it at 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 you mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and that indeed jobs borrowed or stole. Mostly because Parkton protect the intellectual property well. I mean, he didn't do it illegally. I mean, he saw it. They basically gave it away. Right. Right. It basically gave it away, right? Xerox was thinking that, you know, copious, what are their future?

49:59That's it. But I also recall, because I overheard the conversations between you and mom when I was a kid perhaps, that there was, 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, no. I was in the physics lab, and we can talk later a little bit about it. Jim Boyce was a very, very interesting collaborator of mine and so on. We had a lot of fun, but not on that level. As a matter of fact, we were considered very square people, you know, doing what we were doing. I mean, this is a group of people that were truly, I mean, books have been written on this called Glass of People that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became.

50:39There were brilliant people trying to do new things at the LDL, the LNK. There were many of them. Did you ever want to get involved in that stuff? I used to see them as so, I'll tell you how I got involved. The head of the group, Bob Taylor, a very charismatic man who was responsible for the development of the personal computer. He was the head of the computer science lab. He once heard that I played ping pong. So he started challenging me to ping pong. So we used to play ping pong, you know. And the conversations were so odd because I would say, oh, you do computer science. I have some mathematical problems.

51:10I would like some guys in your lab to help me. He said, we are not, we are not the kind of computer scientists you imagine, like at IBM with a white coat fixing machines and solving math. We want to revolutionize the world. We want to change the way you think. He used to say that to me. And I sort of understood it a little bit of it, But quite frankly, he seemed totally out of whatever I was doing. This is where when Mark and Dreson found our net scape, etc. A16Z, now when he was sitting in the very seat, you're sitting in here. He described as this notion of wild ducks that at companies, you have these people that are small groups of people that are really kind of wild and outrageous and really testing the outer limits of what's possible.

51:51Do you think they serve an important role? and I was a little bit of that in my field at that time. I was the first one to realize that once I saw these machines, I could use them for doing things even in physics and I could do. And the kinds of fields that I chose to work on were totally out of what people were doing at Xerox or IBM and so on. I think that these people are essential. Now the question is what does the company or a university what do they do with those ideas and so on? Zeros lost it completely. I mean, they showed them this stuff and the whole books that have been written about it.

52:27Well, one thing that I think I'm realizing now, I inherited from you consciously or unconsciously, is that, well, I've been more of a risk -taker with various aspects of my life than I probably should have been, but that I've always enjoyed being near people who are really pushing the boundary on something. Like my love of skateboarding, but not just skateboarding, but our friend anyway, jumping the Great Wall of China, building mega -ramps in his yard. I knew I wasn't going to do that, but there's something about being adjacent to people like that. That changes the way that I've approached things that were more pedestrian, to make them less pedestrian.

53:11And maybe we'll return to this because I think that being around people who are real mavericks and real iconoclas can be very beneficial, but it doesn't mean that you have to jump in and do what they're doing. Well, I decided, I want for my idea to take huge risks, and as a matter of fact, my first piece of work after I got my job at the Ox Park, which was supposed to work on some solid state physics or whatever, was I had this notion, this fantasy of Einstein in the Patinophys. So I would start working on things that were crazy. There was a whole notion in physics, which is called tachions particles that are faster than the speed of light.

53:49How do you say? Tachions. Tachions. They say from the word tachios, which means fast, swift, means particles that are faster than the speed of light, which is impossible. But some physicists were playing with that idea. And I became very interested in that. As a matter In fact, my first paper out of Grudge School was on Tacuans, and I had the pride of getting the paper accepting in the top physics journal. And I said, review letters? Physics letters, yes, yeah. And I remember my cousin Hector sending me a notice, and he was saying, well, now I see the road to perdition, he said. But I was so proud of it.

54:26I 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 probably several papers on things that were very important to me. You have a lot of single -author papers. Yes, this is something that is especially rare in biology but you have a lot of single -author papers. 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.

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57:16If you'd like to start protecting your internet activity using ExpressVPN, you can go to expressvpn .com slash huberman and you can get an extra three months free. Again, that's EXPRES of VPN .com slash huberman to get an extra three months free. Can I ask you a question? As a slight departure, but it's something I've always wanted to ask you. And feel free to say no if it's not like something that could be done in a couple of minutes. So many people here on Stein's name, they think of the hair, they think of relativity. Is it possible to explain relativity in a way that the everyday person can get it a little bit better than they perhaps understand it now?

58:01Yes, I think as a matter of fact, I learned a lot, not long ago that Einstein himself wrote for a popular book on relativity that seems to be very, very accessible. Okay, now there are two aspects to relativity. I mean, there are 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, an animal, for instance, if you see a lion running after a zebra and so on, the lion can actually calculate intuitively, you know, the speed and 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 also some complicated things length contract.

58:46I 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 relativity that is even worse because there is some kind of a warping of space time that is responsible for gravitation But I'll go into the next 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 move the speeds that are 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 molecule.

59:22It's molecules, atoms, and inside the atom. So it's very, very hard to visualize. So even understand some of the very counterintuitive ideas like entanglement and also, you know. So the relativity can be understood in the sense that you can explain certain things, but people say, well, how can accounting work like that? And then you have to get into the math. Okay. But I think that I took a course a few years ago in general relativity. And I just... Just for fun? Yeah, yeah. I wanted to learn it finally. It's profound, deep. And it makes you feel that this man, Einstein, he had helped from a lot of people, but still it's an incredible thing.

1:00:00I mean, you know, it's it's on a level of Beethoven's symphonies and Mozart's piano concertos. I mean, there's something that comes into your head and you're able to do You know through a lot of struggle. I mean, it took me here to keep me here to do that Okay, so but it is profound and now the quote when you say can you explain? I mean the point is Einstein one day discovered that if the speed or light is speed or light no matter how fast you move respect to a beam of light, it's still moving at the speed of light, that means that the notion of simultaneously between two events is relative now.

1:00:33So, you and I might say yes, now is 110, but if you're moving very fast to 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 some very interesting effects and practical effects, too, because from there comes the idea that mass and energy are the same, from their nuclear weapons came out of that also some very interesting things. And today, we can even detect gravitational waves that are coming from the almost the beginning of the universe. We can detect that because of those theories. They can calculate.

1:01:08So it's profound, yes. I mean, Einstein, I think, stands on, I mean, Newton, too, by the way. I mean, Newton and Einstein, I think they're top people. But they talk to God in a way, as they say. We'll get back to God a little bit later. Yeah, it seems to me that even though it's very hard to grasp, it's worth asking for those of us that don't have an intuitive sense of relativity theory that is starting to peer into these things a little bit trying to understand them. Do you think that it gives one's mind and ability to, you know, that we don't normally think about when we're looking at macro mechanics of the world around us, that objects fall down, not up.

1:01:58And, you know, a helium balloon goes up, okay, and you can learn something about helium. But it's all pretty straightforward with just a few simple bullet points. Whereas when you get into quantum mechanics, it challenges the mind in a way that it really feels like, for most people, there's a cliff. And we just kind of go, okay, you know, and obviously, There's trust there, but for people that are curious about understanding how the really tiny bits of the physical universe linked up with the really big bits of the physical universe, 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.

1:02:40I just got a patent on using quantum mechanics for communication and so on. But it is still the puzzle is why does it work the way it works. So what I'm saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things operationally. I don't know what happens 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 conform to understanding macroscopic, well, not high speeds and so on.

1:03:17So, this is just working in general activity. I don't can do incredible calculations, can you tell you what a black hole collapsing to another hole, black hole would do, and you know, they're using general activity things, and so they can do it. Now, what it does to your brain that allows you to operationally work with these equations and solving and have no ideas, it's something I don't understand. Namely, for instance, an example that I give about quantum mechanics. That's a very simple one because I talk to a lot of people nowadays. I work on this. I can give you two dice. You know, you just dice.

1:03:53You 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. Because this is faster than the speed of light. I throw a game five, you get five, one, you get one. I mean, it's an amazing thing. What is the origin of the entanglement? It's a property of quantum systems that they can get entangled, that's the word. And somehow what happens to your system affects mine but doesn't affect it in a sense, a signal. No signal, they're entangled. Now, let me leave it here.

1:04:26Now, this becomes rather... They're not entangled through other bits of the universe. No, no. 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 things. There's a famous example of this socks. Okay, so you take a trip and you took a pill of socks. Let's assume there are blue socks and so on, and you open your bag and you, oh, 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?

1:04:56I mean, you can do that with anything. In quantum mechanics, imagine that you look at this sock, but the sock is changing colors all the time. So now you 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 said Buddhist claims that there is a whole religious or Buddhist who are saying that everything was entangled. Yes, originally all atoms, all electrons, all elementary particles were entangled. Yes, because the universe started very, very tiny and everything was entangled.

1:05:28Okay, so you can imagine that the universe is entangled. So what happens here, I think so. But 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 don't think that. Yes, yes. People are intangible. Yes, yes. Well, let's get to it. Maybe that's a whole thing. That's a whole thing. That's poetry. That's poetry, exactly. There's another example that brings us to a very salient aspect of my childhood, which is chaos theory. OK. So, I'll say it so you don't have to. You're one of the founders of chaos or certain aspects of chaos theory.

1:06:08We'll talk about that. But you know, for those of us that grew up in the 80s and 90s, I was born in 75. Who saw the movie Jurassic Park? You know, there's a moment in that movie where I think Jeff Goldblum is explaining, you know, what is it? Chaos theory. and maybe it was the butterfly flapping its wings in one location and impacting something, someplace else. For the poets in the world, right? That was a very captivating example, because I think the human brain can naturally understand that things around us, we can have an impact on them and they can have an impact on us. But the notion that a small insect, you know, thousands of kilometers away can impact something that's going on more adjacent to us.

1:06:57It seems outrageous sci -fi, but you know, the notion that one thing impacts another, impacts another, that's pretty straightforward, right? There's just a domino, a dominoing 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, these are the paints and the palette. Around the same time, I remember the book, Chaos coming out and where there was a lot of excitement around Chaos and this was coming up. 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.

1:07:38Now we know this about crystal structures, right? Like, you put a drop of water under a high powered microscope and you see structure there. It's not random. The angles are very consistent at least around certain nodes, etc. So I think people love this idea that we have repeating patterns and numbers in nature that things at a distance can impact us more closely. This is the kind of stuff that the non -physics brain can understand. It does enchant. We sort of poked it poetry. I love poetry. You love poetry.

1:08:12But 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 what is chaos? Where does it exist in our lives? Not emotional chaos, but, and what is the relationship between fractals and chaos if any? Okay, let me say first of all about why chaos is when it is and it's not quantum and there is quantum stories and there is a quantum chaotic thing field 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 whether particle is gonna be anywhere with an incredible precision.

1:09:03When 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 equation 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 saw something, that's all. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Okay, now, the idea of chaos is, so that's, okay, it works. there are some cases where let's assume that I'm going to give you a simple example. So I take a ball, I put it on a billier ball on a billier table, I send it out and at the moment I can't know exactly the position of velocity, I can tell you exactly what it's going to go.

1:09:44KELSE 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, in the same position, and one of them has a little more, 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 it's 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 are also undergo friction, Because let me give you an example that I used to teach Kels at Stanford for many years.

1:10:30So imagine I give you a beaker full of molasses and you take a very big ball, stainless steel ball, and you just throw it into the thing. Well, after a while, it will just drift with it and it's called slow -slower because friction slows it down. And it just goes. And I have thrown another one from another architecture and all of them are going to do exactly the same. Some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite. Even though the risk friction, everything tends to just slow it down, they just keep going far apart from each other. Amazing. Amazing thing. So that's chaos. And I can take you a little bit why I got it.

1:11:04So involving this and they work with it. Does chaos exist in every physical system? Mostly, yes. Maybe even in neurons or the brain. Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, this is why I don't want to go into controversy here about issues of where we live, the deterministic lives are not. but if things are a little bit random and so on, or even just a tiny difference in initial conditions, can take you to very different outcomes. But this we're not talking about many particles. We're talking too. So that's one. Now, fractals is a different story that comes out of a guy. I knew very well. Ben Wemondelbrot, a very, very funny character, brilliant too, but very strange, who discovered that certain things are so similar, that if you look at a coast of Britain, he used to say that.

1:11:46You look at the coast of Britain and say, OK, Tony, how long is the cost of it? You go with a meter and you measure it. Now to both, that meter that you're using now can measure up to an inch. Well, you're going to get a different distance, even though you are adding the same, because there are all these little things in the cost of Britain that are essentially so 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. OK. He thought that it was a whole new geometry. As a matter of fact, and I tell you this, because I knew Ben Ma very well.

1:12:18I met him through a talk that I gave on chaos, used to hang out with chaos physicists. He was a mathematician, brilliant man, in many ways. I was having dinner with him in Copenhagen in the restaurant. And then the very pretty waitress came to us and so on and served us and we were talking his French man. He spoke with a very heavy French accent. So she said something, what are you doing here? He says, we are at a conference. But I'm not just a conference. I'm a very special man, he said to her. And she said, how come? And she says, do you know who Euclid was? And she says, sort of. She said, well, he was a Greek man who invented geometry.

1:12:54And she said, oh, well, guess what? I am better than Euclid. I invented a different geometry. He said that. Yeah, he said that. Points to the waitress in Denmark that knew about Euclid. That was very good. The Danes are smart. Yeah, yeah. OK, that was very funny. But he would talk about it. So he would give it talk. And he would say, my equations can generate anything Indeed, he could generate any patterns. So he would say, you want a mountain? Here it goes a mountain. But you see a mountain, beautiful, graphs and so on. So self -similarity is a very powerful idea in physics, because it allows you, if you know something at a certain scale, you can predict what's going to be at a different scale.

1:13:32And I use that. But chaos and fractals are not always the same, as he used to say, because he didn't like physicists, because we never liked his talks. Will, I said, okay, so you're telling us that things are, he used to say, I'm not interested in pulleys, I'm not interested in things and move things up and down, he used to say. He's thinking about elementary physics class. It's something of that, so yeah, yeah. So, but fractals are very interesting because these are so similar structures, at all levels they look the same. You look at it big, you look as small, they have the same type of geometric behave.

1:14:04Chaos is all about dynamics, how things evolve in time, okay? and 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 Lorenz 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 little different and he would get different things from there he went into that and there's a very beautiful I mean there are ideas that are very beautiful like strange attractors and so on.

1:14:49I 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 He simply 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 chaos to generate random patterns. I've done that. And chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level. OK, so I was working at some there. And I don't think it's interesting where I got into this because I was doing something else and suddenly I decided I was going to do this.

1:15:24and I really started going very fast at this. But then I had a very bright student, you met that hug, 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 is some kind of interference between them and so on that makes them recur back and forth periodically. I found that reassuring, that if you get down to a small enough level, that you can really predict what's gonna happen as opposed to small perturbations leading to big differences.

1:16:00Yeah, that was the whole point. We discovered that quantum mechanics, they get waves and interferences and so on that make the system recur. As a matter of fact, I had quite an exchange with Dick Feynman about it. When I met him, which I was very, I went to give a talk at Taltek, and I was in his office and he said, so what are you gonna talk about? Because I don't wanna waste my time. And I said about chaos. He said, okay, I said, you know, some things are very in particular in quantum mechanics. So I'm smiling because he was so sharp and so on. So he said, okay, give me the problem. I said, well, okay, I give you an electron and you have any potential in I give you a laser.

1:16:41And he said, the laser inside or outside the apparatus just like that. So I said outside. So you turn on the laser and I said, so what happens to the electron? And I knew he was going to keep the answer that was already in the literature, but he appeared to thinking that he stood up and walked around and was making hot sauce on noises. And then suddenly he says, the energy grows linearly in time. I said, no, he doesn't. How do you know? I said, we measure it. I can show you and so on. And he was very impressed because it means that there is no chaos actually. Then he said, oh, you know why? I got it wrong.

1:17:14I said, no, because I wasn't thinking in color, it's only black and white. What was he trying to be funny? Of course, it was always funny. Let's talk about fine men and girl man and Mandal brought all the rest in as a collection for a moment. One of the great gifts of my life has been that you would talk about scientists. It really enchants me. I'm so delighted when I hear it. Like, I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists. Right. And not athletes, right? Which is great. But scientists. And it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist, you both revere the work they did.

1:17:58You see something unique about them. And something I learned very early on, and I've certainly internalized is, forgive me, because I'm assuming here, is that, There's a certain aspect of their quirkiness or something about them to take them seriously, but not too seriously. Like I never learned to assume that because somebody was a Nobel Prize winner that they were perfect, for instance. Like you would tell me, you know, like Einstein had, you know, he was amazing, like the Rizferel, it would be the patent office, all this stuff, and he had all these problems with women. Oh yeah. Or, you know, and I read the books, right?

1:18:37Or, you know, or this person, I won't name names because these people are still alive, they're still convales. Actually, when you and I used to take walks when I was a post -doc, we used to see jobs walking around. No shoes, he had feet, no shoes. And you would say, he's amazing, like this guy is brilliant. But then we would chuckle about some of the jobisms. And so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people, that these founders, their creators, they're just people. And they often have very challenging areas of their life as well. Like, they're not perfect, they're not gods. Some of them have almost godlike access to the universe and understanding it.

1:19:18But it seems to me that you hold people up for their contributions, but you never actually thank goodness put people on a pedestal. To the point where you're like, this person is spectacular in every way. And I'm not saying you cut them down to size, but I learn very, and this has served me well in my life in 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, uh, 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 none of us, none of us are gods.

1:19:54Right. And yet there are people like Feynman, like Galman, like Einstein, who have almost supernatural levels of ability. Yes. Yeah, so what's that about like how do you hold knowledge and stature in your mind alongside like the the humanist the like the inherent flawed nature of all of us, you know well Okay, it's it's complicated There are many ways to think about it in some of these names You know for instance These people are built into giants by the media too. I mean, you know fine I mean, if you go to Khor and so on, everybody's asking, you know, what did Feynman do? What was he wearing and so on?

1:20:38I say, 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 the Manning Particle, to creating a myth about himself. He worked very hard. When I met him, I can even tell you the anecdote. I only met him for an hour, but he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression with you. You are rated and ex -rated anecdotes. Exactly. But the good one was that I was going to give the colloquium and he said, should I come? I said, I think you should come. And then he said, well, then I'm going to give you a piece of advice.

1:21:11Do not look at me. Because if you look at me during your talk, you're going to get confused and so on. And actually, that's exactly what happened. I even started the colloquium at Caltech, the Marine Boot Camp of Science. And there I am starting to talk. And suddenly I said, instead of saying the next hour, I said something like the next week something or something or something, because there he was. I think he started saying, you know, like, look elsewhere, 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.

1:21:41One learned, I mean, I've had to learn it the hard way when we missed it in the recording and this kind of thing. It's a humbling moment. But yeah, I think that, well, Feynman would have been canceled by the standards of law. He was. I took even my father once to lecture. He was giving in San Francisco. And 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 big room, you know, and they started coming. Because it turns out that in one of his lectures, he says something like, you know, if you do it this way, you're as bad as a woman's driver.

1:22:15As a, you know, finance it. Finance it. And then all these women were saying things. And then he said, I love women, they're all smart. He was very clever. He would've lost his job by the standards of every year. 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 an intimidating person I've ever met. I mean, now, eventually I got to know him because he'd like what I was doing, and that's the matter of fact, he and I organized a workshop, an incredibly luxurious place in France at the state of Madame Schlange -Bergé, one of the oiled people.

1:22:47Actually, it 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 he couldn't get a date. He was widow and he wanted to, you know, women were intimidated by him too. So as I recall, because I remember meeting him when I was a kid and we both shared a love of birds, but he was perhaps one of the world's most obnoxious people. Right. But you're impressed him. As a matter of fact, I still, you know, I don't know if you want me to remind you of this, because we had two stories there. Your mother and I were taking a hike and ask Ben and we saw a bird that looked incredibly complicated and so on.

1:23:21So we looked over. The next day we went to him because he loved birds as you know and I said I saw in the most unusual bird. He said, describe it. So I grew up and he gave me the name of enlatting 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 key. Still is.

1:23:53And he said, this kid knows, this kid knows, he said. I know my birds. I know my birds. It's amazing. You know, 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 on 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, who do you want me to insult today? He had also some very funny names for all sorts of physicists and so on.

1:24:29The downside of people like that in science, because I've known some too, there's a very famous neuroscientist now in his 70s who has a Nobel Prize, who also is known for generating anecdotes about himself. Like, and in recent years because of political correctness, wokeism and so forth tends to do that less because they've sort of a trucker's mouth. Brilliant guy, but it's got known for being outrageous and trying to create tales about themselves. This is something that scientists do, right, to in order to maintain their legacy. Yeah, I'll tell you something. To figure it out about themselves.

1:25:05I mean, by the way, I mean, 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 this whole thing, on Quarks and other things. And actually, he was a string theory. And he announced the seminar and everybody was into the garden. And all of a sudden, you know, the seminars are nice. I need to remind the audience, perhaps here, that the Aspen Center for Music was right next to the 10. They were rehearsing. So they, I mean, I was supposed to start at three and there's Gilman comes with all his notes on the his own.

1:25:42He always had notes walking past me and nothing happened. And suddenly, they were rehearsing the Beethoven's 15th when he was just ta -ta -ta -ta -an 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's spoken. So what strikes me is that these people take themselves very seriously. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you think that's important in life. I don't, I like to, I mean, as you know, I like to be, to have a good sense of you and myself and be self -deprecating. I think some people, you know, have issues and they do that.

1:26:15I 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 yerbomate. Now, I've often discussed yerbomate's benefits, such as regulating blood sugar, its high antioxidant content, the ways it can improve digestion and it's possible neuroprotective effects. It's for all those reasons that your bammate is my preferred source of caffeine. I also drink your bammate because I simply love the taste. And while there are a lot of different choices out there of your bammate drinks, my personal favorite, far and away, is mattina.

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1:27:19I find it gives me terrific energy all day long and I'm able to fall asleep perfectly well at night. No problems. If you'd like to try Matina, you can go to drinkmatina .com slash huberman. Right now, Matina is offering a free one pound bag of loose leaf yerba mate tea and free shipping with the purchase of two cases of their Colbrue yerba mate. Again, that's drinkmatina .com slash huberman to get a free bag of yerba mate loose leaf tea and free shipping. Let me ask you about this. So further down my list of things I wanted to talk to you about is that you've always loved It's clear from a young age like high level concepts, deemed concepts, order in the universe, working on hard problems.

1:28:01You just filed another patent. As long as I've known you, you've been pursuing some new area of knowledge or implementation of knowledge. And yet you like your father, I know you delight in everyday things. I mean, since I was a kid, you've taken a walk after dinner. You bike to work if you can that day because of the weather, you love a really good espresso, a really good meal. The high and the low are checked off boxes for you. That's different, I think, than the way most people think about scientists, especially theoreticians. Thearists, excuse me. Which one is it? Theariticians are theorists.

1:28:45Thearists, they say. Thearists. That we assume like the academics that are always somewhere else, like they're up here, they're not grounded, they're not feet on the ground. But you like everyday things. Oh, absolutely. You're very much like where we're going to eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this. Absolutely. A conversation about relativity. Absolutely. I think that he's a myth that he sometimes gets perpetrated at universities. My first meeting with my advisor when I got to University of Pennsylvania, he said, I want you to know one thing. You're going to live like a monk. I said, what does that mean?

1:29:18No fun? Nothing? You're going to work. I want you to work. You're beginning to pay to do something. I was so scared. And then I told him that on weekends I had to escape to New York City to take a walk on Central Park and look at nice things. And, you know, I always enjoyed the good things of life. And, you know, at that time I couldn't afford them. But that doesn't mean that I didn't, you know, I enjoyed them. And I do believe that I inherited this from my father. It's tremendous enjoyment of life in general. And, yes, I am very physical and tactile about things. I like to surround myself with things that are beautiful.

1:29:52I enjoy it, as you say, good meals and the daily things about life. I'm not just living in some stratosphere and not being able to enjoy a meal I'm having, I'm not so on, no, the opposite. And yes, in that sense, I am very much like that. And you know, Mary is the same way, and so that's why I enjoyed that. Your wife? Yeah, my wife, sorry. Yes, we really enjoy, you know, Jean, particularly, Danish, you know, they have this idea of slow eating and enjoying the good things of life. And I am very much like that. Yes, very much. I don't feel guilty about it. You know, if I can afford to. No, I should do.

1:30:32Well, there is a certain aesthetic component 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 really cares a lot about these things too. So our notion of him is just kind of like it was just science and he had no interest in material things as balls. Right, right. Yes, I had an uncle actually, he had his 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 one.

1:31:00I was, what, 15 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 a little bit scared. I wanted to enjoy life as well. Okay, so it was a little complicated. No, no, I enjoy everything. Of course, I think I got out of my father mostly. My mother was a little more ascetic in a way. But yes, the tiny little things of life I would make one's life, you know. I'm slowly starting to get that. Yes, I think I've been a little, like, rabbit about my interests almost to an obsessive level, to the point where I've sometimes overlooked, like, how many opportunities for just, like, lovely daily interactions I have.

1:31:51I try, but I feel like I've just been chasing the carrot 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, you know, as you know, I meditate. I'm for many years and so on. I'm being in the present and being able to just, you know, be there and nothing else is the tremendous source of satisfaction and comes, comes me down and so on. And I like it. When did you start that? Well, I started actually out of the discovery, I mean, a trivial thing that many people have, I discovered that every time my blood pressure was taken by the doctor, it was just going through the roof.

1:32:28You know, it's the 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 he got worse and worse and worse and they told me to do one. So I went from the other. I have a friend, a colleague more than a friend who's a Buddhist, who started telling me about, have you tried the first of all, biofeedback? That's when I tried for a year, I did biofeedback. And then he started telling me about meditation. So one day, actually, he's a physicist as well. He was visiting me in my lab and I said, he said, let me, let's do it. I did a session with him in meditation.

1:33:03I couldn't believe it. My hands suddenly were warm and 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. Like for instance, I would see myself walking down the street holding my fists this way. That's not a very relaxed way of living. So I really started doing this meditation on a fairly continuous basis. and I really enjoy it. And it's very important, as a father, I say this to anyone too, that you have to enjoy life. I mean, pursuing these things, eventually, the value is in the pursuit, not in achieving them anyhow.

1:33:50So you might as well pursue many things at the same time. I mean, a good meal, even properly, can be very, very nice too. I love that about you. So something I'm working on. I remember when I, along those lines, I remember when I was in graduate school, we published a paper and then we published a second paper in science. And I remember thinking, like this is like such a proud moment, a first author paper in the journal science. And I told you and you said, 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 published in Nature and a few other journals a bunch of times after that.

1:34:29But 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 or a paper in science or nature for softer paper. And you said a couple days from now you're going to feel low. And you just have to wait and you never forget what you said.

1:35:03You said just go back to what inspired the first project, pick a different problem. It'll happen again. And the second time it happened, I was like he was right, it happened again. And again and again, I know 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 know about it. The Buddha, many, you know, the Greeks and so on, this idea that the things we pursue, they are a femoral in a way.

1:35:39And the way the feelings are with the illicit in us, you know. And I think that you're right. And there is also an other tendency one has to try to avoid, which is you're successful in something and you continue doing exactly the same thing, because by now, you know, how to deal with your hands and I always feel that I want to go elsewhere. And I have sort of a reputation for changing fields. And I don't do that in order for others to be puzzled by it. It's just that I'm curious and I want to have a feeling again that falling in love, the new thing, it's nice at the beginning. But eventually, whatever you're doing, it becomes, you know, trite and so on.

1:36:18Yeah, let's talk about that because after chaos, which brought a lot of, you know, I remember we had reporters in our house and there was like a TV and the book by Jim Glick and then, and then you switched to something completely different. Yes. And you got into computer science. Yeah. Well, computer science is a computer. 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 patent, but he said, patent for the chaos that sometimes people have in t -shirts that actually we discovered for the first time with guys from UC Santa Cruz, which in Crutchfield and so on.

1:36:59You know, he was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so on. But that is, 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 they're in chaos. I mean, you can produce 10 PhDs, with this. But then I said, why don't I do the opposite? I use in computers to help me with physics. Why don't I use the physics to study computers? Well, that's an interesting idea, but you know, I mean, this is it. So what do you do that? So what happened to me? I was at a meeting on Chaos in Copenhagen, and I couldn't sleep one night, and I had a book called The Computer of the Brain by John von Neumann, where I have someone that was a true genius.

1:37:38I don't know if you heard of him. He invented computers. He was a phenomenon at all levels and he was part of the Manhattan Project. He was perhaps one of the most brilliant people who ever existed, at least that we were aware of. He was the Institute for Advanced Studies for Neumann. There are also some anecdotes about him. He had a photographic memory. You could give him a page of a phone book. He would look at it closely and then he would recite the phone numbers from bottom to top. Totally useless skill. Yeah, but he was a genius, a genius, through genius. He invented computers, he invented game theory in economics.

1:38:12I mean, it was a useful skill. Yeah, exactly. OK. In any event, so he wrote a very little book called the computer and the brain. No equations, nothing. And one night, four o 'clock in the morning, I cannot sleep. I get down in the summer, so the sun was still still still there in Copenhagen. 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 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 it occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we had in park.

1:38:44These computers were communicated with each other. As we know it, as an internet and so on. So there were many, many aspects of this. And I decided that because I was very influenced by one or two students who were very much into economics and libertarian ideas and so on, and one of them had taken two courses in Econ at Caltech. So we decided to start looking at this as a market where computers essentially buy and sell programs to execute in their machines and so on. 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.

1:39:20But it became a big thing. And so I became again, it's like falling in love again. It's a new field. I thought it was great discovery process of falling in love as half the fun. Absolutely. Yeah. And I also was able to And there is a lot of formalism in economics, and some of it is really, I mean, sort of academic. 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.

1:39:54When you go into a new field, do you, in order to learn about the field, Is that mainly through talking to people in the field reading books? Both. 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 as a observer and a learner. Yes, I need to say this. I don't think that many people have said that if I stayed in one field, I would have done much better in terms of reputation and so on. I can tell you an anecdote that is, you mean like awards and stuff? Yeah, like for instance, not long ago.

1:40:34I was already doing computers after chaos and so on. A very, I won't name the person, but a very good physicist professor at Berkeley came into my office, but now that we have an issue here, I say, what is it that your name for membership in the National Academy of Sciences coming up? And I say, oh, that's nice. He said, well, this is a problem. You're not writing papers in physics. You're writing papers in computer science. And you know, we need a physicist, is because otherwise the chemists will get that job. The physicists have done like a welcome decade. Yeah. So I said, well, you want me to do.

1:41:02He said, well, can you graph one or two more papers on this topic and show I said, no, I can't do that. I can't. Well, there's a, isn't there a famous story about Feynman and being elected to the National Academy? He refused to. Yes. I think they told him he was in the National Academy. And he said, well, what do I do? And they said, were you electing other members? And he said, I quit. Well, yeah. So in an 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, it's not that I said, they're meaningless.

1:41:35But 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, but 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, as you know, I still have my position at Stanford and teach involved in a little bit of research, but You know, one of the great advantages I had is that all my advisors died or killed themselves So I was orphaned in science and so there was never an expectation from my advisors that I do the next thing because they were dead So I thought about that.

1:42:18But I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcast, I remember you being a little bit concerned. You're like, you know, what are your colleagues going to think? And I think at that point, 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 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 have to thank you a lot of the reason I was able to take the step to do the podcast in addition to being supported by Lex Friedman's suggestions and a lot of help from others.

1:42:58Joe Rogan and others, but is that, I was like, well, that's what you're supposed to do. When you hit up, when you hit up point where what you're doing is compelling, you wait for the thing that draws you forward. Seems like you were always drawn forward. I was thinking of carrot and stick. It's not like you disliked where you were. It's that there were some carrot that you identified and you go towards the carrots. And also something very, my wife was actually mentioning. I've been in a sense in an elephant. I never had mentors. It's very interesting. Except though this, frankly, not terrific graduate advisor.

1:43:30He was not my mentor, really. I mean, he didn't even want me to do the things that I wanted to do. So I mean, I never had someone who was whispering, Bernardo 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 I'm interacting with the top people. I mean, we talk about Feynman -Gelman. There are many very famous people that I respect immensely that I met when I was in France, you know, I was teaching there. I met people that had been brilliant and so on. And I felt treated with tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on.

1:44:01but I never had mentors in that sense. And also, as I said, I am a little bit restless. I am very curious about everything. And so sometimes I see something, and I say, oh, there's an opportunity to do something interesting. I think that the issue of being curious is extremely important. And it's interesting because I reflect a lot on my father. My father was an immensely curious person. But all about details. He never liked abstraction, so 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.

1:44:36Now perhaps he was right about that. You know, sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about. A couple of months ago, in Denmark, we were invited, my wife and I, dinner with philosophers talking about artificial intelligence. I thought that people were, they didn't really know what was going on. But nevertheless, yes, I am curious and sometimes I move on to things. And I feel that the reward, the internal reward you get from doing something new and interesting and exciting is much better than a recognition that someone will come and say, you know, whatever. I mean, don't mean it's an understanding.

1:45:11I would not say no to a recognition. But it's not really that I do this in order to get that. That's not me at all. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing, it sort of brings my thinking back to like 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 partying like, no, like you said, 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. Well, there might be a psychological reason too. Yeah, that you need this, you know, all needed that one point of that is parental type figures.

1:45:51Yeah, so yeah, that might be, I wish I had them, don't misunderstand me. I actually, matter of fact, I mean, my influence on my students, I produce more than 15 PhDs. It's also strange because none of them stay in physics. Now, the department at Stanford was not too happy with that. It's not that I told them not to, but they all smelled that, you know, I was doing something else. I mean, 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.

1:46:22And many of these students, the other day, I found one of them. I met one, a lot of that amici, who, you know, I think you, you just early at Google. No, she went to Facebook. And the other day, she wrote me, you know, I was so lucky that I met you. She was gonna do a thesis and I don't know what, solar collecting, solar it. Yeah, you've collected some pretty interesting students. They're like a pretty, we won't name names, other than laws, but like some of them are very well -known people in the tech industry now. Oh, yeah. And I think that, yeah, it seemed like the people that would gravitate towards you.

1:46:51It's interesting your laboratory is off campus. 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. But you thought it was interesting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so let me, I want to get back to this issue of like internet and Silicon Valley. I recall it was the early 90s. So it would be like 89, 90, 91. Remember I had this girlfriend, Gretchen? Remember and her dad was the editor of Guitar Player Magazine. And I'll never forget, he told me, He said, yo, it's gonna be all about multimedia. Remember that? No one talks about multimedia.

1:47:25He said your television is gonna be your computer is gonna be your stereo is going, I mean, he was right, right? He was basically, everything was gonna be synthesized into common devices. And we now know that we're now to be true. But at what point did you decide that things like computers were mainly going to be a route to industry and not to academia? Yeah, this is really important, I think, for people to understand, because 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.

1:48:04So 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 the Theta says, you shouldn't even get a bunch of those, I think that's what it's, you know. I mean, I have great respect for Peter, great respect for Peter. There are a lot of things that are easier to say when you're already a billionaire. No, no, no. Like Steve Joe saying, you know, passion is everything. Right. I mean, it's necessary, but not sufficient. Right, right. So I think that what's happening today, I mean, technology, we are going through a technological revolution.

1:48:37There'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, this is amazing because, you know, today. So, so obvious. I mean, people didn't know much what was going on. I parked everything. One night we were having for dinner. I remember, you know, Emmanuel Minio, who was, you know, they discovered the O 'Rex and hypercretin relationship. That's the cause of narcolepsy. He was a friend of ours and his wife. They were at home with our dinner. And I was telling them, I was telling them that you could go to a computer and go through the Louvre Museum in Paris.

1:49:12And they say, what are you talking about? And so we finished dinner, and we all drove to park at night. And I turned on my computer. And there was a man, I still remember his name, something Pioch was the last name. He had gone taking pictures of every painting at the Louvre and put them online. So you could just navigate through the Louvre. Today is obvious, trivial. At that time, they couldn't believe it. There you are, in Palo Alto, and in evening, going through all their rooms of the Louvre. They just couldn't understand what was going on. What year was this? I don't remember, but it was just that the, when the web started coming, you know, that was, you know, right, right before that.

1:49:47All the email and college in the last, no year, 97. So it must have been somewhere around like 94, 90, something of that sort, right before, right at the time and reason, made the web available to everybody, basically, you know, Netscape, you know. So, in any event, so it was an amazing thing. It was amazing. Now, all these developments were really done in companies, not necessarily in academia. That is an interesting point. And I think that today, in immense amount of the advances that we see in biotechnology, in computers, in everything, are essentially done, I would say, for profit by companies.

1:50:24I think social networks, they started, we started doing social networks at a time when no one even thought of doing it. I used to say I do social science with a capitalist because sociologists used to study the behavior of five widows in some Norway, Norwegian village and write a paper. We could look at a hundred and fifty thousand people. How did they visit this side or not 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 is you know the same thing with artificial intelligence But for a kid in high school or kids in college or kids I mean is it worth getting a graduate education?

1:50:59Well, it all depends on what you want to do. I mean law medicine You need a 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 to surgeon that didn't go to medical school. OK, but the danger is, I remember a very, very bright guy I had in my team. You don't want to become a blue -color worker. See, what I'm saying is a following. Being a hacker or being a deal with software was an incredibly profitable profession. Now you have these large language models that can actually program for you. You need to write a program.

1:51:32You go to chat GTP and you write it for you. So suddenly, 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 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 contextual cultural part to this. Okay, now I personally believe that humanities and also some other things are very important and to understand where is your cultural environment, where are you coming from and where is the society going is important.

1:52:11But on the other hand, as you said, you can just finish high school and start hacking and become very good at it and that doesn't require much more than that. Do you think the examples of like the Suck, Elon, you know, and others, you know, going from 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 are good examples for people to internalize or are they unicorns? Well, I think that the unicorns and you have to be very careful. We only talk about the success stories. We don't go on interview the guy that is loading a landscaping truck because he startup didn't go anywhere.

1:52:55Okay, 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 then gamble But these are the guys who played a lottery and won do you remember there were many other websites social websites before You know Facebook and they all died and Facebook could have died too. I mean Zachary might disagree with me but you know, it could have died. Okay? And you know, all these things are like that. Apple, when almost under, they brought Steve Jobs again, and the guy put them on to, you know, into the stratosphere.

1:53:33And the same thing with Elon Musk, he's a high -tech risk taker. And so far, every time he flips the coin, he comes the right way. 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 is strong background in something will help you when suddenly they feel stitches from being a programmer and making a lot of money to suddenly programmers that you know, dime it 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 when I decided to switch to this, were you worried?

1:54:19No, because I saw it as a very slowly departure from what you were doing. And I saw this success very early on. I mean, I realized that you were essentially satisfying two things that are very important to you. You like to explain things. You're incredibly good at explaining things since you were a little kid. Okay, you were always explaining everything to people and you have a talent. Let's face it. I mean, you know, I'm not saying this because I want to flatter you. I really believe that. Everybody says that. the success of your podcast, this is success at explaining things in ways that people understand.

1:54:51They don't have to go and buy a book on Nurena to me 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 one. The timing was the pandemic. People were home. They were the same podcast. And this It brings to something to me that many times people have asked me about me. What makes me do what I do? I believe in the idea of walking on beaches with very few footprints.

1:55:24When you go into a crowded field, it's a mess. So many of the times that I move into something else is when I realize that it's a mob scene, a scientist working at this, and the chances of doing something interesting are very, very small. Okay? The internet has allowed the information to go everywhere. a guy in Zambia can actually read the same things that I read here. So it's very hard to compete against such crowd, and many people are brilliant and many of them are smart. So you started something very early on, and you were lucky that you chose a field that resonates with the needs of people.

1:55:57There are also other people who do a podcasting and go nowhere. So I think that I never worried. I actually was elated to see the trajectory of your podcast. The only thing is you have a tenured position and that is a nice safety cushion if everything else were. Today, beyond the reach of justice, as I say, so no problem. You don't need it in a sense unless you know what's beyond the reach of justice. But yeah, I still maintain my tenured position. I spoke to my chairman in optimology this morning and I'll teach the spring or in a few And it's good for you to interact with young people and to hear what they did care and And so, but I never worry in the sense that I thought that you have enough talent to do well and you chose to do it.

1:56:43I mean, I remember during COVID at the beginning, we were at your sister's house and you were drawing all these little diagrams. I used to do my drawings. Yeah, yeah. And I think you put them on Twitter or something of that. So, and it was the beginning of something much more interesting and important. And so, I never worried about it. I think that all of us, the whole family and those who know you are sort of impressed at the explosive success of this story here, you know, your podcast is amazing. I mean, I don't have to tell you. But it reflects a kind of early compulsion more than anything of learn and teach, learn and share.

1:57:16Yeah, but there is also, I need to say something, the other day actually we were watching your interview with Esther Perrell in regard to the fact that I think it's a great interview. 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 also a way of drawing people out and so on, which is also part of your practice.

1:57:49So I never had any doubts. I mean, the issue is, you know, obviously you're taking it to many, many places, is long beyond what you started, which was essentially explained to people at Unruro Science Works. We've gone into a lot of health domains and other things. And I'm also been blessed with an amazing team. This is something that I think while we share a lot of things in common, if I may, I mean, I've always been kind of a pack animal. If it was skateboarding like draw friends together, if it's birds, I have my bird club with Eddie Chang, who now, as you know, is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF.

1:58:25It's kind of wild to think about. But yeah, I've rarely gone alone. Like I'm just struck. 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 relationships. I'm a group of people who collaborate with me. I don't do these alone. Right, you're up is it? Right, but there's, I haven't changed crowds very often. And it seems like you've had to go into economics and theoretical physics and all the things. Yeah, that's an interesting difference.

1:59:00And look, don't think I'm thrilling at the same time. Sometimes when you start giving talks in a field that you've never done much before, and you see this audience come intimidating too. Even when I started doing chaos, I thought I was doing very well until I gave a talk at Berkeley. And there was a mathematician's, I regard mathematicians as the top people in the world. And I was saying something, and a guy, I, he's very famous in my teaching. He said, that's a lie. I said, what do you mean? He said, can you prove it? No, because you know, physicists don't prove theorems. He said, well, then he's a lie.

1:59:33So you can't 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, we'll find something where I misspoke and they do it. And it's super embarrassing. You correct yourself, you move on. No, I didn't learn things too. You have a conversation with someone. And you never forget those things. This is what I learned. You never forget the errors you made. Like I don't know qualifying exam. Most people will never take a qualifying exam, but they basically ask you questions until you get it something wrong. The moment you say, I don't know, or you get something wrong, that's an important moment because it's also the thing that you go look up and you never forget.

2:00:03Yeah, right. And it's also the tiny humiliations can be very good too for you. I mean, this is very important. No, no. 20 of those. I do too. I mean, I think it's a very, very important part of growing up and discovering that you don't understand something. But I always, I need to say this. I mean, it's part of the fact that you know, you paint me as a long wolf. I'm not. I'm very social and I interact, I love interacting with people and I've always been very lucky that I surround myself with groups of people including today that are brilliant and resonate with the kinds of things I want to do.

2:00:34And so it's very stimulating. I'm not a kind of person, the system, a corner and thus the theories and publish it by... I published papers on my own. That was my romantic period where I needed to be Einstein in the patent office. not that I thought I was Einstein, but it was very important. I was the only author. Today I don't mind putting my name whatever, and I don't need it. I mean, I have hundreds of papers and lots, you know, more than enough patents and so on. So 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.

2:01:09Yes, yes, yes. So that's very good. And I still see some of my old students and collaborators, it was like, you know, tad and so on. And we take walks every once in a while and these guys things, you know, and so I learned 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. You alluded to it earlier about quantum entanglement. Yes. What about entanglement? Yes. But my understanding is that foreign governments, countries and our government and country are very interested in quantum internet. Yes. That it might actually be at least as important as AI, maybe more important for security reasons, et cetera.

2:01:53Can you explain quantum internet in a way that I can understand in the list of your I can explain. I mean, I'll tell you, the original thing, quantum mechanics was essentially finished in 1925. So we are not reinventing new physics here. 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, or 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.

2:02:41Okay, but it can be done. Computers get broke, a 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 unravel. Okay, so that's one thing. Now here comes quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics provides security that is not given by mathematics, but by the laws of physics. So if you have a way of interacting, sending messages from one computer to the other, encrypted using quantum mechanisms, they cannot be broken. Can you give me an example of a quantum mechanism for encoding information?

2:03:24Imagine that I'm sending you messages. Every message is encoded in binary, 1s and 0s. Okay, so I'm sending a message, which is a string of 1s and 0s. That's the thing of one's and Zilos could be hello Andrew or could also be something that is secretly encoded into something. If it's classical encryption, which is what we use today, a computer in principle can look at those symbols and unravel them. Now let me show you how it works 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 things.

2:04:02I can look at the 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 into my lab and I decrypt them Okay, if I look at a string of qubit quantum bits moving there are not ones and zeros. They are different things These are moving parts. Yeah moving parts. You usually photons they go on you can use fiber optics You can use these are like I know photons are so they're low. Yeah, yeah Bouncing energy wise. Yeah, yeah, little bunches of them because photon if they are 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.

2:04:42The interaction with it changes. The measurement destroys it. This is the mystery of quantum mechanics. That the inter, the measurement collapses, we call it the word collapses into one state of the other. Before that, it was anything. We could be anything. So when I use quantum signals, I'm sending qubits, quantum bits that are called qubits. The act of observing the qubit renders into a classical one or zero. So then there's no way you cannot break it. So does that mean that the practical implementation of this equates to unbreakable code? No, which is why, of course, other governments. I mean, what I've been told is that in China, they're working very hard on this.

2:05:26Oh, absolutely. And that here we're working very hard. We are working too. But who's there? Has anyone gotten there yet? Okay. The problem is the following. In order to decrypt this class, do you 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 decode them mathematically. Let's not talk about qual. But if you have a quantum computer, now we're talking about a quantum computer. by quantum computer, it can do it in a couple of hours. A quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the one's use in encryption in hours, whereas it would take the age of the universe for a monster computer, standard computer you can buy to do it.

2:06:08So in theory, whoever gets this ability first can read essentially everything, 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 will who knows if it will still be relevant. Oh, but maybe we don't know magic Imagine imagine if you can if you can get remember when the Korean North Korea Hacked what was it Disney? The one of the and then they discovered all these emails where people in a large clinic and who was complaining about this other so So in that case, we just hear about that.

2:06:48Yeah, yeah. 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 it's feasible to do that. The Chinese are ahead of almost everybody. They have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these qubits. So these are impossible to be crypt. Okay. Wait, so they're sending the qubit? So you can already communicate in quantum.

2:07:21Oh, yeah, yeah, we communicate all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a lab in Colorado, does that? Yeah, absolutely. Over a kind of kilometers. Yeah. That's not what standard internet is. No, no, no, no. But eventually we will have a quantum internet based on all this. Because in order to talk to these quantum computers, you have to send qubits, not just normal bits. So this is a race. Yeah, a race. We are not really, I mean, since we are not a, yeah. Yeah, and there are a lot of people, I need to tell you that a lot of people including this government that claim that this is not really that relevant or important.

2:07:50But in Europe, for instance, they're really putting a lot of money into that. Why would our government not think it's important? Because there is a sociological phenomenon here. Cryptography has always been the promise of the mathematicians. Because there are mathematical functions, like discrete logger, 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 it is, they don't know it's true. The United States government is following this post -quantum because they think it's easier and so on.

2:08:27Already they published two of these very, very fancy algorithms. Two students with a laptop were able to decryptor within a week. So obviously you cannot prove that no one will ever decrypt these things. So there is the cryptographers, they don't like physics, they don't work as physicists. So they say quantum key distribution, that's the name of this thing. It's a theory, it's not important and so on, and also it won't work. Well they say it's going to work for short distances of about 10 to 20 kilometers. We just published the paper that got tremendous publicity and award and so on as best paper that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers.

2:09:04So, I mean, and the Chinese are sending that from satellites. 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 what we want. And so, next, the National Institute of Science and Technology they are really pushing the post -quantum thing. In Europe, is the opposite. They're really embracing quantum. I mean, I was Denmark for instance, very far ahead into these things. NATO just gave them an island money to work on quantum and so on. So it all depends, you know, it's a complicated thing because the crypto people are all mathematical people.

2:09:46So they don't care about quantum. Is any of this going to be useful for trying to understand, I don't know, how the brain works? Well, 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, but the physicists, whenever they poke their noses into this stuff, they tend to think about it a little bit differently, or they start to think about, well, state dependence, like the brain that you have at 8 a .m. is very different than the brain you have at 2 a .m.

2:10:20or 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 You get a certain output. Like is there relevance here? Okay. There are two things I want to say beware of physicists getting into brains In brain work coming in they always invent the new thing now I know science, you know swung it open. I was into neuroscience for a while I think recently neuroscience has done made a good move of including people from psychology computation even philosophy economics and biology.

2:10:54These are all levels of analysis. But the other thing you asked about quantum and the brain, there is Roger Penrose, who just got the Nobel Prize in physics. He's one of the few people who have very esoteric ideas about the brain being totally quantum. And he's an incredibly brilliant man. He was the advisor of Cawkin. I heard him on Lexus podcast. And yeah, he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating maybe as a bound network as opposed to independent anti -execence. No one really follows it and I don't, I'm not an expert in that. But so, Roger Prennrose is the one that's pushing this.

2:11:31Many of the physicists go into brain science, are not very clever, are doing brain science, because you know, I heard a story, I think was Francis Crick or someone who told, I was at a conference and he was saying this, that the physicists came to him and said, I decided to go into brain science. And so he said, okay, what have you done? And the guy says, I initially specifically killed the brain. What do I do with it? Basically. I think it's good that computationally -minded people have joined neuroscience because it was getting too modal, too descriptive. That said, I do think that math is so important, but it's often used to intimidate biologists into thinking that their ideas either might not be true, that there's better ideas out there.

2:12:14I 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 they were pretty lame but now I think with AI and LLMs, like the biologists have had to step back and say hey you know these math physics engineering AI types they have the potential to really evolve the field. No not 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 action. Yeah, so I say, if I show you a row of threes, and I say, tell me how many are they, do you really take the whole thing?

2:12:55And you say 75, or you have to go sequentially. It's not parallel, it's sequentially. But LLMs are pretty interesting, right? I mean, I'm working on them. You can take four or five large language models, especially 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 only talk so much over one another. It's very interesting. That's exactly what we're doing now. Years ago with Jeff Threger, we wrote a paper on the idea of showing how programs collaborating with each other could solve problems very, very fast that human, other's cannot do.

2:13:28And it's a basis of a lot of the work we want to do now. Yes. And there are people who are really 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 and it's amazing. I just, we just published the paper on hallucinations in LLM's and so on, because they hallucinate everyone and say, oh, there's anything. But yes, yeah, they are very useful, very useful.

2:14:01And I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that produce them like OpenAI and so on. Yes, yeah, it's a very, very important field. But 10, 15 years ago, whenever I'd bring up AI, you would chuckle and say this stuff is life. Well, the funny thing is, the other day, well, I don't wanna 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 see what they can do. And the AI people at that time say, that's nonsense, we need to think about logic. How does a brain think? How do we do call me to psychology inside?

2:14:34We were just doing neural nets, that's exactly it. And the other day, I was meeting with some of these people, And they were saying to me, we used to laugh at you, you know, doing this stuff because we could do only very little. 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, I don't know if you know that, they are now using nuclear power reactors in order to power the data centers. 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 get one of these things to work.

2:15:06It 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 not much at all. I remember early on you said, you showed me the internet and you said, be very careful. And I said, why? 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. And I always think about that in terms of phone usage or web foraging behavior.

2:15:42Like, and you still bike to work, you take a walk in the afternoon or after eating, 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, they just said, how did it actually have never seen you at a cafe with a laptop? Well sometimes, but there's another aspect to this. As you know in the last 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 tremendous resonance between these machines and our human brains and they are addictive.

2:16:23The former CEO of Hewlett Packard, where I was a director in the labs, Make Wigman choose to say, you know, I wake up in the middle of the night to look at my phone. And I know people who do that, and I get a memory of my family who do that more often that I would like to see them do that. You don't do that. No. I mean, I do it, but 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 said that. He spam, spam. He said, I get spam, and I look at it because something's happening. He was to say.

2:16:56He's now a very successful financial guy. Stop doing some brilliant fellow. Brilliant fellow. But that's because maybe your internal world is rich enough that you know, I mean, I look at news. I like to look at things. I like to look at videos on this. It's not that I ignore it. But yeah, I'm not, I mean, I like the latest things and so on, especially if you are beautiful and so on. But yeah, I'm not into whatever the latest is and so on. And I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free from. I gave them to you and I never used them once or twice. I mean, I've used VR in my lab, but I don't want to spend time in VR.

2:17:34And also, as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed before this podcast, I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world. Okay, so digital is interesting and fascinating in some ways, but I like things like mechanical watches, cameras that click when they oppress them and so on. but not artificially. So I really like that. I like things that are very classical and swan in many ways. And I enjoy that. I like technology. Don't misunderstand me. And I use it a lot. And I use it. And I do new things with them. And I get patents and so on. But yeah, I'm not a techie guy in the same way.

2:18:15I like to have an analog life, not a digital life. Writing a bicycle is analog. Walking is analog. sitting and meditating is analog. Of course, you can also listen through the internet to a good thing that helps you meditate or go to sleep, don't misunderstand me. But I don't have this fascination with things and so on. I mean, some people do, but it seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future. You see 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.

2:18:51And they always say, did you read this or that? And I never had 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 droids doing this or that. I couldn't care less. As I always think that physicists must love science fiction, because never, never, never read a single book or look that in a movie or science fiction. I couldn't care less. I don't relate to that. I don't think that these people display human -like behavior anyhow. So, I mean, I'm not saying there is not interesting to others. I mean, you're not a futurist.

2:19:27No, no, even though they call me a futurist because I always anticipate things. Right, but you're not somebody who, like, thinks about what life is going to be like a hundred years from now. No, no, I like to know life is now. Yes, yes. And also, as Niels War one said, it is hard to predict anything, especially the future. We all predict the past very well. I don't know what's going on. I mean, you know, we've seen things happening, I mean, unbelievable things. I mean, the technology that allows YouTube to become such a worldwide known phenomenon is because of the technology. Imagine if you were just claiming the Roman Senate centuries ago.

2:20:05Very few people would say, I'm doing it now, but with no microphones or cameras. So, yeah, I'm not a futurist. And I said, people tell me I am because I anticipate things, but not because I imagine, you know, I world in which, you know, I couldn't care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though Elon Musk thinks this is very important. Do you think it's a cool project? I don't know. I wanna ask him why. And then he tells me things like he says things like, well, you know, civilization is gonna die here, we are gonna stick to it. And so I don't know. I mean, let it happen, I don't know.

2:20:41Just enjoy now, you know. You're not worried about the future. And that's just, oh, I'm an optimist. I believe that technology will solve the global warming problem. Everything is obvious how to solve it. There's nothing very mysterious in a nuclear power. It's going to do it, you know? Absolutely. And once we get our over our preconceived notions of nuclear power. I mean, very few people have ever died of a nuclear action. Let's face it. They need to name it something else. Maybe, yeah. 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.

2:21:18Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, so yeah, I don't really, you know, I don't worry too much about the future. I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to stare away from their brain, hopefully. You don't seem to worry too much generally. You're not a big warrior. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah. You and I are different that way. Uh -huh. You and I are different that way. Yeah. You worry a lot. Not if I keep busy. These days a lot less. I think that 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.

2:21:54It sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that you reach for the next wrong and grab it, right? And not miss. Yes, I mean, there's been, 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 don't stay up at night worrying about things. Yeah. Also, I think meditation is profoundly effective at this. Suddenly, you're here and that's this. The past is the past. You cannot do anything and the future hasn't arrived. So what the heck, you know, I really believe that. And it has helped me immensely. I'm very, the few things I'm very proud, I went for my medical checkup a year ago and the doctor says, I'd love to hear you breathe.

2:22:38I said, what's wrong with my breathe? He says, so slow and calm. So you got over the white coat syndrome. Yes. Yeah, because I'm meditation. You send me your lab results this morning, so everything, everything looks great. People always been, you know, regular about exercise. Not excessive. No. You're never one of the like the marathoners or the, you know, 5 a .m. in the pool people, But I tried to run into running marathon actually. 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. Steadied long distance runner.

2:23:13Yeah, I told you that once. Yeah. I'm not a sprinter. Yeah. Some people are, and by the way, I admire them immensely. You mean in life, they were speaking mad words. Yeah, in general, yeah. There are some people who really can do things incredibly fast and they move from one thing to the other and so on. And I like people who reflect some wisdom. For instance, I have a very strange for someone like me, but I see a Buddhist monk, and I just feel calmer by just seeing that person. I don't know. There is something, it's not just this spirituality, the power they have to be here totally and absolutely.

2:23:47It's impressive to me. I mean, some people say, okay, it's got funny robes or something. I like that a lot. It's not necessarily a way, I mean, my therapist used to stale me and to use meditation to move away from trouble and traveling thoughts is not a good idea. So you have to embrace the world too. But 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, the future is the future. I don't know. Well, you can control what you can control. But there's some people who are worried all the time about the future. Given your understanding of quantum mechanics, relativity, and the real world, 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?

2:24:44Do you believe in God? Well, okay, the word God has a lot of implications, right? I mean, I don't necessarily, I don't believe in a God that keeps track of what you and I are doing at this point. There are too many people. And so on. So I don't believe in this notion of, 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 do feel sometimes and especially because of the studies I have, And actually, from reading people who have been very, very deep, you know, and got particular the thoughts of people like Einstein, Heisenberg, and so on, that there seems to be at times a sense of an organizing principle in the universe and to learn those rules.

2:25:25So there is this notion, I mean, philosophically it's called pantheism, that God is in nature already. It's been awesome, all these people started this. That is very appealing to me. The notion that there is something that this thing is, if it's evolving, it's like an entity. But not an entity that says, oh, tomorrow, you'll die or so on. I mean, you'll die. You'll 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 there's enough memory to store all this. Although, today I saw you can buy San Disc Remorace, terabytes that you speak.

2:26:03So I don't believe in that. But it's a matter of belief, not anything else. Unfortunately, these milleys are, you know, translated sometimes in a complicated reaction. I do believe that there is a sense of mystery. I, sometimes I once heard, I don't know who said it, but it's a very good sentence that if you listen to Beethoven say, I mean, the man's struggle, but it's amazing he was able to create that music. On the other hand, Mozart seems to have been getting the messages from heavens, you know, on a daily basis. Just slow it down. So some people are given this connection to something much bigger and you have access to that through listening to that music the experiences we have.

2:26:44There is this idea out there that consciousness doesn't just exist within our brains but it's sort of a collective network and things come through us. Not just as individuals but as Jungian thing is a lot of that. I was very interested in the word spiritual and what it means to see that things transcend our particular means 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, Brave Heart or whatever, you see the one warrior, one group of warriors has a pre -saying goddess with us. And the other one is about to engage.

2:27:19It says the same thing to the other group. That's a little bit funny, right? I mean, 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, well, put differently, does it 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 there are two pieces to this. Provide Iran, you don't start using this to somehow spout arguments why people shouldn't do this or that. No, no, it's only my own exploration.

2:28:00I respect that. I think it's a very important thing. There is an issue here that I read, reading Wilson, actually, here, Wilson, which he wrote this beautiful book on human nature. And he claims that the religious instinct comes from a submissive component in us that animals have dogs as submissive. And we believe that we need to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king, some deity or something else. That's history. 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.

2:28:37It'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. So there's also a technical thing here. We sometimes confuse randomness with premonition 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, turn your head, do it, and so the bullet will pass.

2:29:16I mean, we ask right 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 will be dead. So I, but sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences that we cannot explain and we say, oh, it must be God, that makes sure that you and I met or that we thought the same thoughts and so on. Although as a biologist who started off as a neurodevelopmental biologist, I think I just had to see, there are two things that changed my understanding of what might be possible. Well, one was Barbara Chapman, my advisor, once treated me to an experiment.

2:29:54It was kind of a funny thing. Typical Barbara, you know, under her knees, she was, she said, are you willing to stay up all night? And I was like, okay, yeah. And she took zebrafish eggs and fertilize them. And I sat for 11 hours with food. I got up to use the restroom. And I watched a zebrafish egg duplicate and become a fish. Like in real time with my eyes, It's 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.

2:30:33All, 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 and the consequences of prayer in my real life, that I just, I sort of can't get my head around the idea that there's not a God or some sort of organizing force. I just, 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 like to think I'm grounded in science and reality, but I don't think science can explain it all.

2:31:13Oh, no, I think that this experience of this spirituality, For instance, I remember it still happens, spending a night outdoors and looking at the sky. I mean, it's an incredible thing. The stars, and you feel so small, and yet there is order to all that. It's not just random stuff. I mean, they move according to laws. Unfortunately, we humans were able to discover, which is an amazing thing. When you think about it, dogs did not discover gravity. No. They experienced Castello. Castello was gravity. So I really think that there is something to be said about these spiritual experiences. And I really believe that, very importantly, and I listen to people talk.

2:31:52I recently have been looking at some stuff that C .S. Lewis, you know, he was a man who was studying the sagas and the mythology of the Vikings and so on and eventually became in the vowed Christian, you know, thinking that this was the only answer to the, because all religions have the same element. So I understand that. I respect it. I experienced that at times in my life. But when I think seriously about it, I think that the moment we have this computer and we can get glimpses of all this. But I don't believe that it's this notion. And no one can prove to me that there is someone there organizing my life, minute by minute or second by second.

2:32:34I don't believe that. I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and randomness, beautiful ones. Okay? And, you know, having you and Lara as a children is fantastic randomness in my life. Hopefully it wasn't too random. No, no. In this sense that, you know, children, you know, children that come unhealthy, whatever. I mean, you know, it's a very impressive thing. Yeah, the number of things that have to organize to create exactly a healthy child is it's truly America. Yeah, it's 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.

2:33:11Okay? I mean, that's a very, very important, I are pretty different. Oh, absolutely. But in very beautiful ways too. So, I mean, neither of you does behave or conducts a life that, you know, I would be unhappy, your mother would be happy with. So, but going back to this, I believe that indeed, It's pretty truly important. 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. My wife always notices that when I do that. And I think that then you're having access to something very different.

2:33:47Of course, you can be explained physiologically by also some resonances and so on. But who cares? You mentioned that you can peer into the future with ideas that you're working on and yet you don't get too far ahead. Like you're not thinking like a hundred years from now, what's it going to look like? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past? Sometimes, sometimes. And then he said, I've always, because I left my family very, when I was still very young, I always had a certain nostalgia for things. Okay. I became a friend with a very impressive guy in France, 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 in similar education.

2:34:35And we had, I have sometimes a certain nostalgia that is almost melancholy about the way we grew up and so on. Melancholy. A little bit about it. I mean, I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina, like you would have 10, 15 cousins over for lunch every Sunday. Yeah, yeah, it was very tough. That doesn't sound melancholy. No, no, but there were moments, moments of loneliness, moments of times where I felt very misunderstood. I had unfortunately a very punishing mother. So that, but I still remember her. And I think about her in a way that are not necessarily always very happy. I was looking at photos a while ago.

2:35:12And there are pictures of her that she smiling coming out of the Pacific Ocean in Carmel, she took a walk, and so on. But 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? My wife, being Danish, she grew up in a very different way from, you know, upper middle class Argentines. So, you know, we reflect on that, you know, the kinds of childhoods we had and so on. But not in the sense that, you know, I wish I had that now. No regrets. Well, not many, not many. I mean, I mean, there is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else, which is if I look at my family, my brother's state, produce family, children, grandchildren and so on, I came here and I produced children and grandchildren and they are gonna be two diverging branches of the family.

2:36:04That's what we still get together. We got together last year for the 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, they're similar to what I had or different perhaps. There is a certain sense of thinking about it, But I also realized 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, someone was that because I wouldn't have existed because you wouldn't have met me.

2:36:37That's true too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe you would have, but no, no, no, no, no. I'm grateful I didn't grow up in Buenos Aires. I love the city. I love the country. I don't feel that I couldn't have done any of the things I've done in South America, given maybe, but the landscape was just completely different. Oh, I go there and after a week I want to come back. Yeah, yeah, definitely. As you love this country. I love this country. I feel very much part of this country and very grateful to what this country has done for me for my family and that includes you and your sister, okay, and my wife.

2:37:04When did you become a citizen? Oh, many, many years ago. I really did it consciously, not because, I mean, they were practical things, but no, I really believe in it. I really believe it is an incredible country. I mean, it gives incredible opportunities to people. As Elon says Elon Musk, I'm also an immigrant and very happy to be one. So 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, you know, bring memories that are not bad. I'm not bad. The food's not bad. Yeah, yeah, but it's also the whole atmosphere.

2:37:38And the first two or three days are an incredible experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on. But after a while, I also see a darker side to it. I must tell you that on the other hand, my country law, Denmark is also a country that I like immensely. There's nice people and pleasant and soft, very soft, especially in summer. But the Danes are also strong people. Like the average Danes is so smart. I think the high school education there must be on the best in the world. Yeah, there is a notion of proficiency. I mean, people are proficient at what they do. Yeah, you go to a store, you go to, you have a problem, the airline or whatever, you'll get someone who really knows how to solve it.

2:38:21But there's also a very, it's a small society, very homogeneous, tremendous sense of humor, which I enjoy. And it's very soft, people enjoy life. They have notions like slow food, movements, and things of that sort. So I like it. I could not live there because it's a very homogeneous way of behaving, you know, the Lutheran ethic is there. They're not religious, but they're Lutheran. So I feel very comfortable in Europe and so on. But I like being here, yes. Yeah, I feel like our family now includes so many different nationalities and religions and backgrounds and philosophies and political stances.

2:39:01Well, it's great. It's starting to look like the UN with some extra. Well, I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity, was incredible, incredible. That's good. Yeah, so 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 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. Political true for you.

2:39:34I should yes. Absolutely. Absolutely because this has only to be judged in time Okay? I think that the issue of politically incorrectness 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 a little bit complicated and I must say something which I hope it doesn't get me in trouble with my Danny Sado, if I'm your friends. Society's like this Scandinavian societies that are extremely uniform in thinking.

2:40:11The word should is used all the time. Yeah, you should do this. You shouldn't do that. Good that you did it. It's a very, the enforced 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 the government for many, many years, that I really have, I cannot, classic ideas that are away from the mean and they're considered odd. Very few, including the physicists and they have fantastic school of physics there. He was born there. So it's a society that conformity is the issue there, right?

2:40:55So on the only hand, I think that it's good to think differently. And you know, there's a man, perhaps you heard of him. I know, I mean, I admire him. He died. Freeman Dyson. He wasn't a level with Feynman and Gellman, by the way. He used to have very strange ideas too. He used to say, global warning, what's wrong with it? This ahaha is gonna be a garden. And it will be, yeah, this ahaha desert will be coming garden. People will be able to eat all that food. Well, I think people hear that, but then they counter it against these, you know, very heart -wrenching pictures of like polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking.

2:41:28This kind of thing. They are more polar bears today than when Mr. Al Gore said that we're gonna die. Listen, I'm not gonna argue climate change with you because I have no knowledge there. No, no, no, no, I'm not countering. I'm just saying, you know, like, I mean, 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? No, the question is, what can we do about it? That's the issue. And I think that technology and wisdom are going to solve it. I think so. I really believe that, very strongly. I mean, optimism is when it comes to that.

2:42:00But when I'm talking about being politically incorrect, 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 believe in that very strongly. And I think being politically incorrect is a way of saying you're sort of, you're smiling at them. But it's okay, why not? You know, I said, you know, who said that? We shouldn't be like that. I remember encountering in the first libertarians when I was already working as a physician. They were saying to me, why should we...

2:42:37Why are we afraid of the Russians? I say, well, you know, but I think they're going to invade the United States. Can you imagine Russia invading? I mean, if they invade, how they're 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, was so interesting. Do you consider yourself a libertarian? In many ways, I like the idea of liberty. I believe very strongly, and I mean, this country was founded on that. I think that our founding fathers really believed in it, and I admire them for that.

2:43:08You know, 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 candidates that go nowhere and so on. What do you think that is? What do you think that is? I think that they're so rational. They're often among the smartest people. But they are not the most, they are not strategically smart. I've met, I met at times libertarians, I think, you know, incredible thoughts and you know, they're working, they're living in Silicon Valley and they're poor. I mean, even though they're the ones who are supposed to know.

2:43:39Some are poor, some are not. But I'm saying it's very interesting. They choose presidential candidates, not whenever I heard of. I think many of them are, 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 is show business. I mean in this recent election it was it was all posturing. It was all about grabbing emotion. Yeah, it was not about logic. It was not about emotion. Yeah, I have several of my people that you know they put all their money to freeze themselves.

2:44:12You gonna cry over 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 gonna be brought back later on solo style You've always laughed at this idea. No, but not only that I there's a colleague of mine a stand for who accuses me of being friends with a guy that is like that and I told this guy I said, you know, few things that I you're about influence on me and they guys say what tell him that we are the ones We're gonna come back and do what we believe yeah, he's gonna be gone.

2:44:47You don't you're not interested. No nothing 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 they were looked. They rescience fiction. So they're very interested to know what they were looks like once they wake up. So there are people in the health space that are trying to not die, you know, Brian Johnson and others. I mean, what's the different story? Yeah, I mean, what's your thought on trying to live to be a hundred and fifty or something like that? Well, if you can live, the issue is not the age. Is the conditions of your body and mind.

2:45:16Okay. That's the issue. I I had the misfortune and unfortunate having two parents that lived very long lives. One was incredibly my father, was incredibly lucid until the end. My mother had everything, you know, all every dementia and complications that came from, you know, being in anorexical her life and so on. So my father enjoyed being lucid until the end. And so he, you know, he didn't take care of himself physically so well. So the idea is if you live up to a hundred or a hundred and fifty or two hundred and you can still do the things you enjoy 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's very sad, but it can happen at the age of 35 for you know, so Yeah, I am not in and to erase to live forever I want to live healthily.

2:46:06I want to enjoy life. Enjoy. Many is the most important piece What's the point of being you know tether to choose a lower place? You know, flat on a bed and you say, oh, I made another year of my life. I mean, that's not really a life, at least for me. Do you worry about or end or wish for anything for me, for Lara? Yes, to be super happy people. No, I don't wanna use the word happy. I wanna see you joyful. Joy, joy is more important than happiness. Joy is a state of mind. Happiness is, okay, yeah, I said at least the things I want to have them and I smile a lot. Joyful is this sense of being in yourself and I would like that.

2:46:48I mean, you two are very different. Lara, there's much more in the moment that you do for reasons. Okay, it's her view of the world. It's her demeanor. It's her way. And it's very good. I'm a large focus 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 next week. And I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend and that's it. And everything else is going to come to you. I believe, and now I'm speaking in a way that is more paternal than anything else, I've been, you had, have a charmed life, and everything came to you since you were very little, and you exhibited, you know, behaviors and so on, that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from the very beginning.

2:47:30I mean, it's not that you were a genius at chess or a 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 we're little, you have these problems. Okay, I used to take for it, put you in my lap and say, it's gonna be fine and say, what if I cannot do my homework? Okay, okay. But you could, or even my stuffed animals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They say, they can be organized in the future. I probably have, remember I did the grunting tick? Yes, yeah.

2:48:01Oh, yeah, that was. Yeah, I probably, I told us not to. Well, I probably have a little bit of an OCD type thing. I mean, not diagnostically, you know, significant, but when I bite down into something that I'm pursuing, it's very hard for me to think about anything else. Well, we talked about it. When you were a Berkeley, once you told me that you were starting to run, but you wanted to run like everybody else was running by, I don't know, how many miles. And you said, no, I heard there was a guy 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.

2:48:39Yeah, 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 or and then I also realized that you know Published a number of papers to get ten you're like I didn't need that many but I enjoyed everyone It's not like I'm not having fun.

2:49:12I'm having fun. Yeah, the idea of pushing oneself to limousine the question is why I mean yet I think there is so much to enjoy on a on a regular life and there were the things that we have already we have to work to get them the way we want. But I don't think that worrying for the sake of worrying or just worrying, I mean. 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 relevant right now. But Costello helped bring me into the moment.

2:49:46Like, he would do these things that, like, I would delight in that were just so simple, like, the way he would, like, like fall over something or you know that I think that like having another creature there that is very much in the moment brings you into the moment. Right. And we're 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 will start enjoying it. Yeah, the people I've had amazing partners as you know, some less than amazing, but many amazing partners and they and they tended to be also kind of into the future, like focus on what's not quite there yet.

2:50:20But I must say, I think women in general do it better than men that they're better grounding to the present. Well, depends. I think that my wife tends to move more anxious than I am about a few years ago. So maybe it's not general. Well, I tend, well, in trying to sort of tell her that she shouldn't worry so much, I think that I also suddenly reflect what am I doing here? And I try to also slow down myself. I think that, you know, yeah, I think you're someone who's running from one thing to the other, I mean to say colloquially, but it would be nice if you said, okay, I'm fine. You know, you have a podcast that is doing well.

2:50:55You don't have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years. No, I don't think out that far. I don't think about the career piece. I think that I, I mean, I often don't have a plan. I know what we're going to do this year. I don't know what we're going to do after that. But professionally, I think, 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 gonna get things right now. There's always been these milestones You're gonna finish your undergraduate degree.

2:51:26I get a master. They do the PhD then the postdoc then you need to get tenure You know, I think the academic system was a system of two to five year bursts, like sprinting marathons in many ways, to try and grab the next thing to get to the next level. And there was a lot of uncertainty for a long time. I think I'm finally now coming into a place of certainty, like feelings of like, oh, things are good and they've gone great. But yeah, but it's hard. Of course it's hard, especially if you have that kind of temperament. Yes. And I think you'll need to train yourself almost to, I just had it, it's a set of the words It's a matter of bringing elegance into your life, almost, to live it in a way that is elegant, it's nice in itself.

2:52:13That is important. One of the things I learned, living with a dainst, don't like you to eat standing. They sit at the table and they light a candle. It's very nice. They create a pace. They are the rituals. They are rituals and 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 on days and now what? There has to be something. Okay, that's important. I mean, we all have that. So Rogan talks about this thing about, you know, because he has a podcast, he does four episodes a week, plus he's an answer to the UFC.

2:52:50He has his comedy career, 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' book. I was listening to it and he was amazing. He said, you know, you have to approach your life 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 it's a lot of what you're saying as well. It's a legacy. Yeah. Life has to have elegance. Otherwise, it's just these joint moments and sometimes they would be like that and it can be very creative too.

2:53:30But most of the idea is to really get into something. I mean, I personally think that when 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 and steadiness because from places of steadiness, you can take good risks. Well, right. I mean, and I think that my mind is not, you know, in a steady, you know, state, but I don't have this knowledge. I have to see things. Everybody's talking about something. I have to see it. I never felt like that. No. I mean, I'd like to see things. Dom is understanding me. But I, it's very important for me to be at the moment and do things the way I like them to do.

2:54:09Yeah, you don't seem to need to go on like jungle adventures or like, or ice skate across Antarctica. like you've never been one for like the kind of wild outing. No, the wild outing is here. That's my wild outing. Yeah, I can have very wild thoughts about things that I would like, you know, sometimes they're totally wrong and so on. But yeah, in a funny way, I am a little bit of what the French call an armchair, philosophers, whatever. There are these people who write articles about France, if Africa would have never having left France or something that sort. So I'm not like that, but I don't necessarily crave this physical adventure for the sake of adventure.

2:54:51I like beautiful things. And I don't mind repeating the same beautiful thing every year if necessary, going vacation to the same place and so on. Yeah, you like to go back to the same places. Well, there is a difference between tourism where you see new things and so on. I like that. There's also the idea of vacation, where you just sit and enjoy what you have. You know, I confess I've not ever done it. And you know this about me. I've never taken a vacation. You know, do the summer house in Denmark. You can spend a week there just enjoying it. That's it. I know if I show you pictures from the window, they see the deer in the garden.

2:55:28You know, they just sit there. You know, it's nice. So there's nothing, you know, it's nice. It can be, you cannot spend a life doing that. You know, I'm not a monk. I'm not a meditator that would spend hours on this, but it's nice to rest. It's very important, I think. And the rituals are important to you. Very important, yes. The rituals have a 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 early on taught me about etiquette. You know, it's something that years later, I think it was probably in the mid 90s.

2:56:08For some reason we were at the movies together and we saw some people at the movies and they were wearing their bathroom slippers. And more or less they're pajamas to the movies and I'll never forget you grabbed my arm. Like you didn't grab it forcefully, we grabbed you so you see that? And I said, yeah, and you said people are coming to the movies and they're pajamas. I said, yeah, and you said, that's the beginning of the end to any society. And I thought you were joking. But it's something I thought about a lot. You also said, and I'll never forget, you're always better off being overdressed because then at least your class that you're speaking to or your hosts, etc., they know that you took them seriously.

2:56:53And I don't think we really appreciate etiquette. As Americans, especially, we've somehow confused freedom of choice with discarding etiquette. Yes. Yeah, it's not something you hear discussed very much, but what about etiquette? Well, there are many components. I think the most important one is a societal one. I mean, one of the things that I like, for instance, if you go to England, how polite people are. Politeness is a virtue. And politeness, the higher the social class, the higher the demand to be polite. It's behavior. It's 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.

2:57:38I had a brilliant economist, a Italian economist working with me, and now he's in these codes, who told me he went to a wedding in Italy after living in the United States, and And he went to his cousin's wedding, and his uncle said, you show no respect. You're not wearing cufflinks. He said, well, but my shirt is all but no, go home and get cufflinks because you're showing lack of respect for not dressing the proper way to this wedding. So I think that there are expectations that people have of a certain times of behavior. I mean, if you look at the pictures of what's going on now in Washington's Swan, you notice that Mr.

2:58:11Elon Musk who's always in a t -shirt that says, let's go to Mars, suddenly he's wearing a tuxedo because now, at least now, he's part of a group of people that are behaving like government officials should behave. You don't go in sandals and shorts, but still the convales is famous for the flip flops and the hoodie. Right, because the problem is that people confuse the style with the message. They think that because you were a hoodie because Maris Zuckerberg was wearing hoodie makes you brilliant. Okay. And I think that the issue of dress codes elicit a certain sense of behaving living people, as you said.

2:58:45I mean, how would you feel if you went on a first date with someone that comes in and cares, slippers and a bath row, let's go to the movies. It's not happened yet. Well, okay, yeah. Okay, so what I'm saying is you don't have to overdo it. That's another issue. And you have to also confront 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've got a New York and you see men wearing suits and ties. You don't see that here. Perhaps in the lay, not in the Bay Area ever. One thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina, men keep their jackets and ties on the whole night.

2:59:26I've always kept my jacket and tie on the entire night. In the United States, it's almost like moments 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 I have a case wearing a tie when I go to work on 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 projecting a message, right? The idea of a hoodie, at one point or the other, first of all, was hurting behavior. Everybody had to wear one because then you're cool or whatever.

2:59:59In other lessons, I understand it. I mean, that's what you do as another lesson. You do what others do. But as you grow up, you can also signal whom you are by the way you dress and 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, they want to be popular. They want to throw attention. It's kind of a new thing. I mean, I won't name names, but some people who are considered some of the smartest people in the world, what they're discourse on social media is like, I mean, they wouldn't last two seconds on the school yard, so they get hit in the face.

3:00:42They suck weird, like grown men acting kind of like teenagers. Okay, well, they have a problem because they want to be thought of as young. That's a whole different story. That's a different story. Now, having said what I said, I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether or not the rules that rule, that rules that say how you should dress to do one thing or the other are not do not operate for you. And then you decide to be very different. There are many people who are like that and like to be iconoplastic. I heard many stories about, we were talking about Richard Feynman, 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 Bunger German naked on the roof, not rushing his teeth.

3:01:27Okay, so he was very good at drawing attention. Okay, that's fine. You can also draw attention by dressing very nicely. It's all a matter of, I mean, I was reflecting, we go to the symphony in San Francisco regularly, and we are donors and so on. Sometimes you go to a concert, it's an amazing thing. What you see, there's some people nicely dressed. Some people dressed, they just woke up, didn't have time to get dressed and got there, and they're whatever, and they do. But do you think that going back to the initial, ping of the question, do you think that we have societally gone that were sort of drifting towards like for lack of a better word chaos.

3:02:06So social interaction, chaos. Well, you know, I think the pendulum will swing again. The other day I was talking to some reading actually. That's suddenly 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 days like that. So, you know, it's a pendulum. It goes back and forth, back and forth. I don't think we're going to end up and the time when you have to wear tails to have a breakfast or something, I think only the aristocrats used to do that. But I think that it's an issue of how we perceive the world through the eyes of television and movies.

3:02:42If movies start showing that everybody's stressed whatever, people are going to do the same thing. If movies start showing, the trends that we see in movies are the trends that essentially society follows. Okay, so I think that we did this is I don't think we're going to chaos. It's gonna revert 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. We're back. We're back to that the anti -war group is the more conservative anyway I mean, also people like, you know, it's interesting how Americans are fascinated with English aristocracy and traditions.

3:03:24I've been to high -table dinner at King's College in Cambridge twice. You know, everybody dressed as property. They wear gowns and they fell as sitting on a top table and everybody else and people live in. And we'd like to see that in the movies. Well, it's theater. Yeah. It's academic theater, a little bit of pomp and circumstance, but it's theater. How do you say, well, we have the same thing on commencement, you know, traditions and so on. 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.

3:03:55And some people will, I mean, there are designers and so on of clothing and so on. That exploit, there's nostalgia for that kind of elegant world, you know, Ralph Lorraine. And so I was always in your 1960s, fancy, you know, club, like, clothing and so on. So do you plan to ever retire? I don't know what it means. I mean, if retire, no, no, because I'm not a postal worker. I'm not a cook at a restaurant that eventually says, okay, I cooked it long enough that I collect my retirement and go home. I have a mind that it works, and I need an environment where that mind can thrive, and I need an environment where, you know, for one year, when I left Hule Packer, I was basically, I took a course in general activity and so on, But I was really a bit idle.

3:04:44So suddenly, I mean, in a context where people have problems and so on, that I'd really like to listen to this social component to work, as you know. So retirement means what you're opposed to working. When they stop delivering mail and you stay home, watching the paint dry, and that's not me. So to me, I'm working and I enjoy it. And the day that will come that I cannot enjoy it, I'll stop. And I think that again goes to this issue of getting bored with things that you don't like to do very, you know, because you've done it for a long time. Now, I enjoy my life, but I don't think in terms of age, I'll say something, the CEO of my company said, great guy, I feel my Kenny said, But I don't work for the money here.

3:05:30I said, I don't either. I mean, I like to get paid, but I don't like it. I'll 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. But nor did you ever encourage me to pursue money for its own sake. But as my cousin, the physicist, 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 that allows you to have the things you want to have, and you don't have to, no, absolutely, absolutely.

3:05:59Yeah, 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 need dinner because I didn't have any money. So, I like having money to do the things that I like but I don't work for money. Many people say, well, you know, I invented so many things I could have started in some companies 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.

3:06:38Okay, you can dream of having 152 brushes, but so what? And you can only eat so many steaks. Yeah, yeah. I mean, no. That we all cover. The question is, what do you do with your life? Now, you want to travel? Well, you can travel. It's nice if you can travel, you know, in better ways than being a graduate. you know, in undergrad with the back back although it can be adventurous. I had fun backpacking there. Yeah, okay. On a limited budget where, you know, part of the joy of traveling that way is you're thrown into kind of street level interactions. I think you've hostels and things like that. I went through Europe like that.

3:07:09I 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. Not winter. In the winter was horrendous. I have very little money. I stayed in places where they, in Paris, where they're lady, in the little hotel would turn off the light if I turned it on in the middle of the night. It was awful. And yet, to save energy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was very funny. But I met people that were interesting and I engaged, you know, I still, I still, every once in a while, I hear from one or two of those people.

3:07:40I met years ago in trains. I went by train everywhere. I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter, you know. Everything seems to lead back to Denmark. Yeah, it's a nice country. Well, now you have a Danish wife. So that's for a long time. And half for a long time. Yeah, yeah. No, I like it. It's a very different contrast to Europe, this central Europe, and so on. You know, Northern Europe, then Mark Sweden or way. It's a very special kind of country and people. 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.

3:08:15Good saunas. Yeah. Everything. Yes. And sunshine at least in the summer and the summer only. Yeah. Any plans for the next couple of years, anything that 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 neither. Maybe I inherited it. Well, I just move. I just move on intuitive. I'm very intuitive about these things. I suddenly see something in all 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, Jean, what do you think about this? He said, oh, sounds interesting.

3:08:49Let's do it. And we're doing it. I am lucky that I get paid to do that. But no, I don't have plans like that. I would like to, I mean, we would like to organize our life a little bit differently now, 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. We are all going for an event there. I hope that you can join us if you can. So those things are very important to me. But I don't have plans for anything.

3:09:29I don't know. I'd like to be surprised. Well, Dad, I want to extend a real sense of gratitude. from me, from everyone listening and watching, although you may argue that they're not gonna be interested. This has been our back and forth over the last months as I've tried to convince you to do this podcast. I can assure you that they were, they are, 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 domains and backgrounds, not just neuroscientists. I also really appreciate your ability to explain complicated things in ways that at least we can start to get an understanding because these are hard concepts.

3:10:25And you know I think what comes through so clearly is that somehow you've been able to grab these high -level really abstract concepts and work with them and try and understand them but you've I've also been able to lead a life where you're really grounded in the day to day and in reality. I have to say, you're wish for me and for Laura and I assume for everyone else to be joyful. 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 pursued what you wanted to do over and over and and you know I some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were gonna 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 certainly landed up and much much higher than we ever would had we not had all of that.

3:11:28And as I told you last year, around this time on your birthday, when we all got together to celebrate, like, we're not just good, we're beyond good. So, anything that comes up around that, I want to just go on a record saying that, like, that's water under the bridge, and I don't ever think about it. All I think about are the incredible gifts that you've given me about curiosity and pursuing my curiosity about putting new footprints on untread beaches. The early discussions around the excitement that science can bring. I mean, I remember all of it. I really remember all of it and in immense detail.

3:12:06And I love your stories about scientists, both how they soar and also how human they are and how they're fallible like the rest of us. So, you know, there's not a day that goes by where I don't thank God because I do believe in God, that you're my father, that you and mom created me 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. There aren't words. Well, thank you. You know how much I love you. I think that these words are the biggest gift that 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 them are.

3:12:51It is a very fulfilling feeling to have that notion that you feel that you owe so much to what you got. And also the fact that you've done incredibly well and the kind of person you are. Yeah, so I wish you all 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 and many things in you I see more of a reflection of what I always wanted to be as well So that's easier in a way perhaps it's because fathers and sons have that so we certainly relate. Yes Well, thank you. Thank you. I love you.

3:13:31I 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 Endor and enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero -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.

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