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

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Bernardo Huberman, Ph.D., a research physicist, expert on quantum networks, and vice president of CableLabs’ Next-Gen Systems. We discuss his journey into science, beginning in South America, how a curiosity about physics led him to the United States, and how his hunger for studying novel problems guided him into fields like physics, computer science, biology, economics, and, most recently, quantum computing. He explains relativity theory, chaos theory, fractals, and quantum internet in terms anyone can understand. We explore how curiosity has continually guided his decisions about what to study and how to live, and how researching hard, even abstract, problems can serve as a model for staying grounded and enjoying everyday life. We also discuss meditation, spirituality, and why continually asking questions about how the world is organized can bring about an immense and lasting sense of meaning and joy. Read the full show notes at hubermanlab.com. Pre-order Andrew's new book, Protocols at protocolsbook.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/huberman Mateína: https://drinkmateina.com/huberman More Huberman Lab Huberman Lab Premium: https://go.hubermanlab.com/premium Huberman Lab Shop: https://go.hubermanlab.com/merch Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Bernardo Huberman 00:02:13 Sponsors: Helix Sleep & BetterHelp 00:05:08 Early School, Science Interest, Argentina; Soccer 00:12:29 Physics, Childhood Teacher, Family 00:20:48 Music; Dictatorship; Humanistic Education 00:29:09 Sponsor: AG1 00:30:40 US Graduate School 00:39:27 Counterculture, Peer Pressure; Graduation, Job Search 00:49:19 Xerox, Personal Computers; Risk-Takers, Tachyon 00:54:49 Sponsors: LMNT & ExpressVPN 00:57:33 Relativity Theory, Quantum Mechanics 01:05:53 Chaos Theory, Fractals, Butterfly Effect 01:17:21 Scientists, Positive Contributions & Flaws 01:26:19 Sponsor: Mateína 01:27:45 Enjoyment of Life, Meditation; Goal Pursuit 01:35:44 Changing Fields, Computers 01:43:24 Mentors, Students; Restlessness, Curiosity 01:47:41 Industry, Academia, Graduate Degrees 01:54:02 Podcast, Interviewing; Mistakes, Working with Others 02:05:48 Quantum Internet, Unbreakable Code 02:09:48 Physics & Neuroscience; AI 02:15:06 Analog vs. Digital Life, Thinking about Future 02:20:10 Worry, Meditation 02:24:22 Beliefs, God; Spiritual Experiences, Randomness 02:33:53 Thinking about Past; Nostalgia 02:39:19 Politically Incorrect; Libertarians; Cryogenics; Enjoying Life 02:46:30 Joyful; Pushing to Limits; Worry & Enjoyment, Living with Elegance 02:55:57 Etiquette, Clothing 03:04:11 Retirement, Money, Travel 03:12:00 Future Plans; Joyful Life 03:13:33 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Bernardo Huberman. Dr. Bernardo Huberman is the vice president

of NextGen Systems at Cable Labs. Prior to that, he was the director of the Social Computing Laboratory at Hewlett Packard. And he is, as his name suggests, my father. Today, we discuss various topics in science, including relativity theory, chaos theory, and quantum computing. But I'd like to assure you

that even if you have zero background in physics, computer science, or mathematics, that entire discussion will be clear to you as to what those things are and even some of how they work. During today's discussion, we also talk about a life of science, that is what it is to spend one's life in curiosity,

in trying to understand the universe around us and how to understand ourselves. Indeed, today we also talk about neuroscience, how the brain works. And the different sorts of questions that I do believe everybody asks, whether you're a scientist or not, questions like, where do we come from?

Is there a God? What is our use or purpose in the universe? And how is it that we can ponder these super high level abstract questions about how we got here and what our purpose is, and how things work at the quantum level, tiny, tiny bits of things that we can't even see.

And at the same time to lead an everyday life that is meaningful and joyful. We talk about this in the context of understanding oneself in relation to others, family, community, including scientific community and what it is like to come from a different country. My father immigrated from South America, what it was like to do science in the United States then and now, cultural differences. And of course we touch on some of our relationship as well. How could we not? I must say for me, it was an immense pleasure

and privilege to have this conversation. Not just because Dr. Huberman is my father, but because I believe the knowledge and indeed some of the wisdom that he shares will be useful to everybody about what it is to carve one's own unique trajectory in terms of career and life. And at the same time, how to savor the simple everyday things that make life so worth living. Before you begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire

and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference

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Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school, but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health.

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it's very time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. So if you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. Dr. Bernardo Huberman, welcome. Thank you, Andrew.

And also great to see you, dad. Same here. I guess no premonition would have foreseen this one. No, absolutely not. And people might notice today, I'm drinking out of a mate gourd, in part in honor of my father's father who drank out of his loose leaf mate every morning.

My first sip of mate was taken sitting in his lap when I was maybe four years old. Yes, yes. In my Spider-Man pajamas. In any event, let's talk about science. You're born in Argentina. As I recall, because once we had a conversation about it, you had a teacher, maybe it was in high school, who turned you on to physics, which became your field of choice. But prior to that, were you interested in different subjects?

I don't recall if you had an avid interest in academics or you just did it because you were supposed to prior to that teacher. Then we'll talk about him. Yes, yes. I was always very interested in ideas and so on. Science at that time was a bit vague, but I read a lot of philosophy. I didn't understand much of what I read, but nevertheless I kept reading it. I was interested in psychology. I was an avid reader. As a matter of fact, I embarrassed my father or actually made him disappointed when for a birthday, I think I was 14 years old, I asked him to buy me the 12 volumes of Freud's writings. Really? Yeah. And he said, what for? So, but I was very impressed with it. Of course, I couldn't

even understand half of what these books had in them. So, I was very interested in many things. And I must say to you that my interest in science, in particular physics, doesn't come from the standard thing that you see here in the United States mostly, namely, I was not a wits kid in math. You know, I was not one of these people that can really do things very, very quickly and so on. But I was interested because I thought that physics was going to complement my attempt at understanding how the whole universe is put together.

The philosophers were saying all sorts of things. I went to a very special school that I learned six years of Latin and so on, and I had to read things like Kant and Cosmogony and so on that really didn't mean much to me. But suddenly I started discovering that physics might be interesting. And I had a cousin, Hector, who was a physicist, a particle physicist already. He was living at that time in France. And so there was a little bit of other influence.

But my interest was in things that had to do with fairly abstract ideas. I cannot believe that at one point or the other I was very good in geometry class, being able to prove theorems. I mean, the teacher would just say, let's prove this. And I was somehow able to reason through and come to some proofs. So I think that I was very interested in ideas

and not necessarily in the very concrete aspects of science at that time. Can I ask you a question about early schooling? So if I remember correctly, you were born naturally left-handed. Yes. They forced you to learn to write with your right hand. You went to a very strict schools.

Yes. Like military levels of strictness. Almost, yes. This is a very interesting type of education. They have it in France. It's called the Lycée in France. And this is a very special school in Argentina. It was actually founded in the 1500s by the Jesuits.

And my father went to that school. And so he wanted me to go there. And my brother went there, too. And in six years of a very strict education, mostly humanistic, I learned Greek and learned Latin. I learned immense amounts of history, which I loved. And there were other courses, you know, French and so on. In French, we had to memorize incredibly long poems that we had to recite. Do you still remember some of them? Because sometimes early memories are embedded so

deeply that... Yes, yes. And my brother and I sometimes tell each other some of the pieces of these poems. Yes, yes. I'll just say something right now to foreshadow what will likely happen several times throughout today's discussion, which is anytime that my father is in the presence of his brother, my uncle, Carlos,

they start laughing about jokes that they've been telling over and over, back and forth with one another since they were a young kid. So just the mere mention of his brother will bring a bit of a smile and a chuckle to both of our faces. Yes, yes. So I learned a lot of French

and also my parents decided, my mother mostly, that I had to learn French and English. And I went to Alliance Francaise, where for five years I went there. I was essentially the only boy in the class, which was very nice in a way. And in order to graduate, I essentially, you know, to be fluent in French. But in the special school I went to, the discipline was very strict, very strict. You know, we were supposed to do things you don't do in the United States.

The moment the teacher walks in, everybody stands up, and if you're late and standing up, you're just kicked out of the classroom and things of that sort. But it was a lovely experience in many ways when I reflect on it because it gave me a humanistic education that has been incredibly useful in my career. Most people don't realize that. I mean, I tend to think of things in a very broad context, and it's because of the education I had. Okay.

So, and I loved history of Rome, and I'd learned to recite things in Latin. And so it was very, very, I enjoyed that very, very much. My brother didn't actually and so. Well, you two are very different. I have great, great adoration for Carlos, but you two are very different. Along those lines, I was just about to ask or mention, and some of our Argentine and South American listeners generally and perhaps even European listeners might be shocked and perhaps disappointed to learn

that you're one of the few Argentines that I know who doesn't care much for the game of football, soccer. It doesn't seem to concern you much at all. No, no. The reasons for that are sort of interesting. I think I've reflected on that because my own wife likes to watch soccer games. She's Danish. She likes the European tournaments. I never liked mob behavior. I never liked this whole passionate involvement in these

things. I don't know why. I was never able to understand it. To the point that I never went to a soccer game till the week before I left for the United States. My brother insisted that I had to go to a soccer game. And this is sort of embarrassing, but at one point or the other, it was a good goal and so on. I stood up and said, this is great. And I turned out I was on the wrong side of the audience.

People got very almost violent with me. So, yeah, soccer to me is something that I watch, but I'm not passionate about. Right. Yeah, I never really felt that it was that interesting. Although, I was in a rowing team. I learned boxing. I did a lot of sports.

But I don't like that much of spectator sports, like tennis. I played tennis since I was a teenager. I'm not a spectator sport fan either. The other day someone asked me what my favorite sports team is, you'll like this. And I said the Harlem Globetrotters because they're undefeated, they have the best record. And that was actually the one professional sports team game

you took me to when I was a kid. We'd always go see the Globetrotters. Yes, they're undefeated. Yes, unbelievable. Yes, yes. My father took me to see them too. They're undefeated. Yes, unbelievable. Yes, yes. My father took me to see them too. They're fantastic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. So your father was not a scientist. No. Your brother is not a scientist and you were fated according to them to join the family business. But then you had a teacher who exposed you to physics.

To physics and to the notion of being authentic in what you want. There were two parts to physics. To physics and to the notion of being authentic in what you want. There were two parts to it. He was a very interesting and tormented man, I felt. But it was very interesting. He would come into the class, most of the students, you know, really didn't care about what he was saying. And so, I was fascinated not only by what he was saying, but his whole personality.

But I need to say something here that is important. I also was rather irresponsible. You see, I grew up in a family, a well-to-do family, that I never thought I was going to make a living. So, it was easy to be interested in science or anything because, you know, it's what you do. You know, you're interested in culture, you read books, you do things. But my father used to say, what are you going to do once you graduate? You don't want to start teaching in elementary schools or something of that sort.

My brother used to say, if he does physics, I'll have to support him because he still says that. So scientists were considered poor. Poor, yeah. Yeah, they couldn't get a job. I mean, science in Argentina. Argentina has a big tradition in medical sciences, I think two or three Nobel Prizes and so on. But in physics, they produce some very good physicists.

One of them lives in the United States. I mean, he's a very, very famous Maldacena. I haven't met him, but I know he's one of the top people in the field. But I just got into this because I was interested. It sounded, you know, fascinating and abstract, and the ideas were so powerful. And I think, and you know, I reflected a lot on this, when you are psychologically in adolescence, because my parents made me jump two grades. So I was much younger than my classmates. And that created a lot of problems for me.

I mean, you know, at the time when, you know, you're developing and so on, all the boys were talking about girls and so on, I still wasn't really into it, understanding why the excitement and so on, you know, I was very young. But it gave me a sense of order. You know, reading a book about physics and understanding that there are laws that tell you how things work gave me a tremendous sense of order and power. So you know, everything else was a little bit in flow and the family and my own relationships with friends and girlfriends or whatever.

And going back to science, it was just a sense of, and I still remember those days. It was very, very soothing in a way. So it's like a touchstone. Yes, yes, yes. And what grade were you, like this teacher, was this like middle school, high school? Yeah, no, yeah, high school, yeah.

I was 13 or 14 years old, yeah. When I finally, I started listening to this and I said, wow, this is impressive, you know, it's powerful. There are ways to know what's true and what's not true, you know, you just don't speculate on things. But most of this stuff I didn't really understand. Then I had this cousin of mine, Hector, who was already gone, but I would go to his parents' house and there there were his books, all these incredible books on quantum mechanics, relativity, and I would just take them home. I didn't really comprehend a lot of the math, but somehow it seemed impressive. It was like looking into a mechanism or something.

I used to take them to school. One of my teachers once said, you seem to be interested in this, but you don't understand it. So, you need to learn it. And he was the one who started pushing me into this. On the other hand, my family was saying you should become a lawyer. Just my brother and father. And that never interested you?

No. It's interesting because now I'm very interested in aspects of constitutional law and so on when I hear about arguments against the Supreme Court and so on. I became very interested in law and economics later on, just to read about it. But when my father was talking about it at the dining room table, it was all about strategies of getting something done half an hour before the opposition so you win a case. I was totally interested in that. I'm sensing a bit of a theme,

which is that social dynamics and what other people do, regardless of whether or not they like it, or it earns them a particular living, didn't capture you. Like the idea that people and their groups and their ways of thinking and behaving, while they may not bother you, it didn't captivate you. The way that like, it sounds like physics made you think that there's something kind of bigger, that there's something more universal, which indeed physics is, right?

It explains most everything. Most everything. Yes. And I also think that I was a bit of a loner. It was very hard to find people that, you know, children or young people that thought like me. So, eventually, I became part of a group. We were four or five guys that used to get together on Saturdays and, you know, go to

the movies and so on, and then afterwards discuss, you know, whatever we were interested in and so on. I was only 16 years old, you know, and deciding what to do with my life. Of all four of us, we committed, some of them came from incredibly wealthy families, two of them, we committed to really be true to ourselves and pursue what we liked. But I was the only one.

The other two ended up running the business of their parents and one of them essentially, I don't know what he did. I saw him years later. Money becomes a pretty, a bright beacon for a lot of people. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I'm grateful to you that you never pushed me

to go in any particular direction. Right. You pushed me to not go in particular directions, but never with respect to academic choices. In fact, I don't recall you telling me or Laura, by the way, folks, that's my sister's name, that we had to do anything except attend our classes and do our best, but I never felt pushed

to go into science. No. Although you had a little bit of a curiosity about it. Animals. Animals, and I remember I was going through a period in which I started getting convinced that there was very little to do in physics, and I wanted to change.

And one day on a bike ride, I think I was carrying on the back of my bicycle, you were young, you asked me, what is the unsolved problem? And I said, I don't think it's in physics, but it's the brain. And you said, okay, I'll go into that, you said. I'll never forget that.

Well, it's interesting. I'm fascinated by human memory, I'll go into that, you said. I'll never forget that. Well, it's interesting. I'm fascinated by human memory. As you know, I know you are as well. And I recall that story as well. I recall it slightly differently, but we're really closely aligned. Which is, I remember you used to walk me to school in the morning.

And you would drop me off at the cut through to the path behind Gunn High School. Because that's, I would pick up Kristen Harnett across the street and you told me it would be better if I picked her up by myself and walked her to the end of the street, which is where class was. You were teaching me chivalry. And I remember asking you what you do.

I was probably five or six years, let's say first grade. So it would probably be somewhere around six or seven years old. I asked you what you do and you said physics and I said, well, what is that? And you said, well, let me tell you the feeling it gives me instead. You said, you know the night before your birthday?

And I said, yeah. And he said, you know that feeling? And I said, yeah. And you said, well, that's how I feel every day when I go to work. And I remember, I'll never forget that. And I said, what do you do? And you said, yeah. And you said, well, that's how I feel every day when I go to work. And I remember, I'll never forget that. And I said, what do you do? And you said, I'm a physicist.

And I said, well, then I'll be a physicist. And then I recall, so maybe we had the conversation twice, you saying, well, most of the big problems in physics are solved. So you should pick something perhaps a little less untread like, and I said, like what? And you said, well, the brain is pretty interesting. And then I said, okay, I'll work on that.

Yeah, no, that's true. This issue of feeling like before your birthday is something I remember saying to you. I don't recall feeling that way every day. I do recall feeling like this when I had an idea and finally worked out and we wrote a paper and so on. You know, it was an incredibly exciting time. It's, you know, well, you know about it.

You've done it yourself now. And so I wanted to convey that to you. It was very, very interesting and important to me that you understood that. On the other hand, it made me feel very isolated as well. Not only with you, with everybody. I mean, it's a very esoteric field. You know, you used to walk into the study,

look at me, you know, writing equations and so on, and would you say, what's that? I was thinking about your study, which was just a door down from my childhood bedroom. I still remember the way that your study smelled. I can still smell it. I have an incredible sense of memory for certain things. I can still remember, but I remember how your books

were aligned, where your stereo was placed, your photos, your photo of Einstein, your photos of me and Laura and mom. I remember all of it. And the sofa that was just off behind it because you're a nap-taker, which I inherited from you. But I remember that, yeah, you would spend a lot of time in that office and listening to classical music. Do you listen to music while you work or did you listen?

All the time, all the time. Classical music for me is something I discovered very young, very young. My parents also loved classical music, my brother too. I mean, something that to me has a tremendous emotional resonance with the way I feel. Sometimes it's background music, sometimes I really listen very carefully. It's something that I, yes, I've always had in my life and still have it.

I mean, it's very, very important to me. But not many musicians in our family. No, unfortunately, yeah. Although there is a very famous one. We've all tried. We've all tried. Yeah, yeah, you in particular. Yeah, yeah.

We all failed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a very famous Huberman, the great violinist Bronislav Huberman. I mean, there's a picture, I think I sent it to you here on Einstein. He was one of the greatest violinists in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, an incredibly interesting man.

He's the founder of the Israel Philharmonic. And that's one of the reasons that the name Huberman is in some street in Israel that because of him But are we related to him? Unfortunately, not Which explains the lack of musical prowess in our family. We all love music, but none of us are good musicians No, right. Yes, except my cousin Diego Diego was he has a perfect ear so he can really do interesting thing. Yes Yeah, so he can really do interesting things. Yes. So going back to your childhood, this teacher, right?

Yes. So, I mean, what was it? You already had sort of seeded an interest in finding order and things that made the world make sense. What was the political situation in Argentina at that time? Quite horrible parts of it. I mean, there was a dictatorship that lasted for a long time, this Peron thing and so on.

It was, I mean, he was really a follower of Mussolini and people of that sort during World War II. So what did that mean like out in the streets? Like you grew up in the heart of Buenos Aires. But like, what did that mean in terms of, I mean, was there poverty everywhere? Were people, I mean, I mean, was there violence everywhere? Were people, I mean, was there violence? I mean, what does it spell out to you?

Well, it was a very oppressive regime. I mean, you had to be careful what you talked about. You know, in my family, like most of the social class, we had maids and a cook, and so you had to be very careful what you said. Because they would run that information back? Absolutely. And people, and your grandfather, my father, at one point or another, was prevented from coming to visit me in the United States because he was classified as a communist because he

did not join the Peronist party. Okay. For the record, we are not communists. We are both big believers in capitalism sitting here at this table. So no, and so it was terrible. It was a terrible time. It was a very oppressive time. But he wasn't a communist either. No, of course not. Of course not. No, yes. It was terrible. It was a terrible time. It was a very oppressive time. But he wasn't a communist either.

No, of course not. Of course not. He was on the other side. But the idea at that time, it was to be classified as such. Eventually that information leaked to the, obviously to the American authorities. So when he asked for a visa, they denied him. It was a very complicated story. I don't think we should waste time to know how it got eventually resolved through a friend

of mine who was a priest in Jesuit here in the United States. But the point being that during that time, it was a very, you have to be very careful the way you spoke, the way you said things. There was a dictatorship that was very much like the fascist in Italy, you know. And actually, that dictatorship lasted until a few years ago because as you know, as you heard, the new president we have is one that actually ran against this whole ideology, Peronism and so on. Millet.

Millet, yes. So, I was never, I was not political at all, but you have to be careful. But it was a funny, a funny time. And when he was overthrown through a military revolution, you know, my parents were, you know, delighted and I remember the celebrations and so on. But that was considered the minority that was against him. You know, it was a social class movement. The working class was behind Perón and what he promised and what he gave them. But that eventually died. So the real problem was that there was no real commitment to science as an investment

that a country should make. Yes, it was nice to have Nobel Prizes and it's culturally good, but they didn't have the pragmatic notions that we have here in the United States of doing science means solving concrete problems. And this was in the 1950s? The 60s, too. Right. So this was the like one of the biggest and fastest progressions of physics and its implementation in the US.

Yes. So were you hearing about that? Of course. I was following it all and I wanted to, you know, I wanted to buy books about it and so on. I had some conflicts with my father about spending money on books that he thought 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. So yes, I was aware of everything. And actually, the university was very good. I entered the university. You had to choose what you wanted to do. And after a tremendous crisis, personal crisis, I decided not to go into law or engineering, which was the alternative my father offered, and decided to study physics. And I didn't regret it at all.

It was a very impressive time. I got a good education in physics, a little bit too abstract. So this was experimental physics or theoretical physics? Both, both, both. In the lab, I was okay. I mean, I was better in classes. I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics and calculus and beyond that and complex analysis and so on.

So it turns out you were good at math after all. Good, yes. I understand math. I'm not a whiz. I mean, like many of my students have been. I have guys that can do incredible things, that I can do them, but slowly. I understand, yes, yes.

But yeah, physics is something that I knew how to be intuitive about it. I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn't pan out, but yeah. So the teacher in high school, were they the one that told you that there was like 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. You say that because of the way he carried himself physically? Yes, yeah, yeah. He was troubled, but it was interesting. Intense man.

I still remember his name was, he was a philosopher, his name in Egersland, which is a German name, and he started talking about discovering Christianity and what it 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, the Roman

and Greek. So it was all, to me, 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, and 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. Well, no, but that's, I mean, that is the direction that education in this country is gone. I was a visiting professor in France. Actually, you live there because of that, in Paris.

And I discovered 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.

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When I came to the United States, I must tell you, I came as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. 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 he got a factory or whatever. Why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you'll go for? No, no, not at all, not at all. I've never known you to work for anyone except you. Yeah, in a way, you're right. I'm a bit the same.

Yeah, yeah, so yes, yes. 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 it. 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 it was Cornell, and I said, oh, New York, that's great. So, someone said to me, you have to take a plane to go to real New York. I mean, you know, it's not for you.

So, in any event, I got this very, very nice fellowship to go to University of Pennsylvania. Who is 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. 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 Bernstein who just died at the age of 100 or 101. And no, but I was supported by the United States Navy. It was a fellowship by the University of Pennsylvania. But I remember in my first interview with some of the teachers, professors, there I am talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics. And the guy says to me,

let me give you an interesting problem. You have a ping pong ball, but instead of being a classical ping pong ball, it's a quantum one. Could you tell me at what heights will it bounce? I had no idea what to do. I had no sense that you could turn all this knowledge into something implementable, practical, and so on. It was quite a struggle the first year.

You had theoretical understanding, Yes. Not experimental understanding. 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- Despite being good at math. I was good, yeah, math, understanding the math is a different thing between understanding math.

Implemented. Implemented and creating things. Well, you learned that. I had four years of graduate school and got my PhD in physics. So obviously I learned how to do it. But what I'm saying is that I have this very, very vague theoretical understanding of what the world worked, but not really practical.

I didn't have it at my fingertips. That's what you learn when you go to graduate school, as you know yourself. Okay? So that's- Yeah, it's one thing to learn about the brain as an undergraduate, but in graduate school is where I learned how to slice brains, stain brains, trace connections, record from neurons, and it's a whole other business to get your hands dirty in the thing. Absolutely, absolutely.

The same thing for me. Yeah, I've taken 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? It was funny. He sort of became his, tried to become my surrogate father. But on the other hand, intellectually, I always felt that the guy was not quite there. I mean, he was very famous.

Sure. He'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 depth into what we were doing. It was not just him. It was just the solid-state physics. There was a very famous, you know, Mary Gell-Mann who had total contempt for solid-state physics.

She used to call it squalid-state physics. For those that don't know Mary Gell-Mann, we'll get to Murray later because I had the interesting experience of meeting him as a child, but he discovered the quark, he won the Nobel Prize in many ways is considered at least as superb a physicist as Feynman, maybe better. Yeah, lesser known, but among physicists, would evoke great fear in everybody. We'll get to Murray in a little bit.

So did you enjoy graduate school? Yes, but it was incredibly hard, very hard. The first year in everybody. We'll get to Murray in a little bit. So did you enjoy graduate school? Yes, but it was incredibly hard, very hard. The first year in total. And also personally, I was very lonely. I was transplanted into a whole different world. Philadelphia is not a city I would recommend too 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, yes. My parents, my father felt that, okay, this is what you're gonna do, you're gonna survive on this.

They paid for a ticket once a year to go back to visit. And it was incredibly nice and soothing to be back and to be taken care of and everything else, the life in the family. And to be back and to be taken care of and everything else, you know, the life and the family. And then going back again to Philadelphia and the reality of just being a student. Unlike many people and foreign students that were with me in other places, I did not enjoy — I mean, it was quite a cultural adventure for me to meet people from all over the world and to learn what they — I became very close to a Japanese postdoc, a very interesting man.

But I was quite miserable. 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 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.

Okay. And on top of that, my conflict with my advisor were not serious because they were not overt, but they were there all the time. 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, not just through letters of recommendation, but opportunities. And I got lucky in that sense.

You were very lucky, yes. My advisor was the kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him, he ordered for you. Are you kidding? I'm not kidding. He was that kind of guy. He would take the whole group to a Chinese restaurant and before you said, I don't like this, he just ordered.

Once he took me for a whole weekend to his summer house to finish a paper. The guy couldn't finish a paper. And it 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. He said, that's all we're going to do.

But the physics consisted of him regurgitating whatever we were doing. I mean, I remember I was so miserable looking at my watch, seeing how the heck do I get out of here? I didn't have a car. So, I was sort of his prisoner 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.

I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was from mine. I delighted in my advisor, as you know. Yes, you had fantastic people. Yeah, I got lucky. And I got a lot of that from you, which was to, for those who don't know, I left a program at Berkeley, which everyone thought I was insane, insane to leave Berkeley to go to Davis.

That was by choice. But I remember what you said. You said, how big is your incoming class at Davis? Right, because by all standard criteria, Berkeley is the better institution. Davis is great, but Berkeley's considered exceptionally strong. And I said, there are 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. I said, well, there's this person there. Her name is Barbara Chapman. And she just seems to be working on things that if I don't work on these problems, I'm going to regret it. And I can't imagine working on anything else.

And he said, go for it, which I really appreciate, because any parent, if I were a parent and my kid said, I'm going to leave Berkeley and go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again, I think I probably would have balked. Well, Barbara has also played a very, very nice, supportive, emotional role in your life. I mean, it was obvious that she had tremendous preference for you. She 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 those are the counterculture movements. 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. No. Even though that was super common then. I've never seen you have more than a glass of wine. Yes.

You've never been drunk in your life. Never. 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,

but I became very humble because of it. I'm not arrogant. It's not that I feel others are worse and so on. But yes, when I came to the United States, there was something, there was a decision I had to make, which is I remember explicitly thinking about. It was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the social environment in which I was in Argentina. So, you could do whatever you wanted. 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. One of them never

graduated. They got into drugs. They moved to the village in New York and they decided that that was the life they wanted to have. Problem is that, you know, 10 years on, you know, what are you doing, right? I mean, you know, being a, getting to be an old hip is not that interesting. So, I really had that notion at that time that I needed to be very disciplined. And I had to internalize a set of values and to ask myself what I want and what I don't want. And so, yes, indeed, I used to go to parties. To me, it was quite a surprise, you know, in New York, Philadelphia, you know, people smoking pot and all sorts of other incredible things,

getting drunk and so on. It was something that I, you know, I would say, no, thank you, and that was it. And I felt quite okay with it. And they, and I never felt the need to satisfy a group of people that were like this in order to be included. You know, there's only one person that I've ever met in my entire life, now that I'm 49.

I can say things like now that I'm 49, who has never been drunk, never done drugs, basically has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once, and that's Rick Rubin, my good friend. I like the meaning. Yeah, by all standards is probably the greatest music producer of all time across a dozen different, a dozen different genres, right? Not just rock and roll, but 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 he just said, yeah, it never really interested me. I could be around it, but not participate. And so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship to what's going on around it, but not participate. And so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship

to what's going on around you, where you don't feel pulled into it. And also didn't understand, I mean, for instance, the role of drugs and alcohol in young people, I 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 or whatever. Well, you know, deal with your state of anxiety, but you don't have to drink in order to do that. And I was always a little bit also concerned about my brain. I mean, I was afraid that these things would just take me over the edge and off 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 if that's what works for them, it's fine, although I still don't like it. And it was even worse when we came to California

because here everything was going on, not just drugs and everything else. Well, let's talk about that, but not that specifically right off the bat. So you finished your PhD. Yeah. You could have done a postdoc, become a 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 Cavendish Laboratory was fantastic. There was the whole thing on DNA. I mean, a crick was there and so on. So I thought that perhaps I would just start inhaling some of those vapors. You wanted to get into biology. Well, I was interested.

I mean, because I read the famous book by Watson, The Double Helix, and I couldn't sleep. I mean, I read it one night and said, it's incredible what this guy did. Amazing book. Amazing book, yes. So I said, oh, the whole thing is becoming like physics. It's no longer all these complicated names and so on. Well, it's crystallography, which is, you know, I mean, physics and chemistry are so interesting. Crystallography is boring because it's like botany. is, you know, I mean, physics and chemistry are so interesting.

Crystallography is boring because you have, it's like botany. You have to learn all these crystals. I'm just juggling because the spaghetti model folks are, 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 them. No, no, of course. Because they design novel drug pockets and receptors. I mean, they're doing some cool stuff.

So I thought that being in Cambridge was okay. I mean, you would suffer from not even heating in 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, you know. How so? Well, she said, you know, it's time for you to graduate. Time. Because I was just staying there as a PhD student.

You know, I was fine. You know, okay, the money was a problem. But I got to live like this. You met Mom in New York. I met your mother in New York, yes. And she had her feet on the ground and said, you know, it's time for you to graduate and so on. And she actually was right. And so I decided to look for a job.

And my professor wasn't necessarily letting me go. He wanted me to stay as a postdoc with him. Which you know. This is something people don't often understand is that if a student or postdoc is very good, the advisors are de-incentivized to move them along to their job. Right.

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, 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. And so I started looking for jobs and so on. My advisor was not too keen to, you know, tell me what to do. So instead of going, I could have gone for a post-doc 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 in 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 on the East Coast. In the East Coast. I went to Bell Labs for an interview and I felt that they were running that like a Russian internment camp almost. I mean, it was unbelievable. You were, we were 10 of us and they took us around

and people were taking notes of what you were saying and asking us, telling us that was an elite place. It was an elite place. So East Coast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The East Coast institutions, I mean, telling us that was an elite place, it was an elite place. So East Coast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The East Coast institutions, I mean, it makes sense to me now why, having 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 on 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 10 years. Right, well, on the other hand,

there is something nice to be said about the European model of universities in the sense, the biggest contrast, you say this, I remember, when you gave, when professors came with colloquium and so on, they were wearing a suit and tie at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school and so on. I came to Stanford. I went to the first colloquium and the students were coming in shorts with their dogs into

the auditorium. I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was such an incredible, you know, change, cultural change. Yeah. But smart. But smart, I mean. Oh, incredibly smart, incredibly smart. No doubt 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 would work 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, you know, this is exactly the place for you. So that's what I did.

And the interesting thing was that while I was there doing what I thought was interesting things, there was a whole group of people, very small, that invented a personal computer. Steve Jobs saw it and built the first Mac out of the outboard. I had a classmate in high school, Becca Canara. Yes. I remember, because she wrote a Vespa to school. Yeah, her mother was involved in that. And her mom was involved in creating the, it was Adele.

Adele, yes. Adele Goldberg. Adele Goldberg, in developing the ability to move what appeared to be pages on the screen. Object-oriented languages. I had no idea that was going on. I'll be honest with you. I mean, it was going on the second floor.

They were all hippie-like. I mean, it was a scandal of the life that they had there. It was the 70s, and still the Bay Area was not what it's now. I mean, everybody went to risottis, you know, take long lunches, and there was a lot of stuff on drugs and so on. Yeah. Can I ask a question about that? So Xerox PARC 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. You told me to pick a piece of fruit. There was a bowl of fruit. I picked the banana. You took out the banana, you peeled it, and you dipped it into liquid nitrogen.

And then you told me to throw it on the ground and we shattered the banana. And I thought that was like the coolest thing ever. I remember that. So that was happening. But you mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and that indeed jobs borrowed or stole,

mostly because Park didn't protect the intellectual property well. I mean, he didn't do it illegally. I mean, he saw it. They basically gave it away. They basically gave it away, right? Xerox was thinking that, you know, copious were their future and that's it.

But I also recall, cause I overheard the conversations between you and mom when I was a kid, perhaps, that there were, it was pretty wild at park. Like there was this whole, like the room with the beanbags, people were taking LSD and other drugs. That wasn't your scene though. No, no, no, not at all. I was in the physics lab and we can talk later a little bit about it. Eugene 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 the, I mean, books have been written on this whole class of people that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became. There were brilliant people trying to do new things, Adele, Alain Kay, 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 computing. 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. I would like some guys in your lab to help me. He said, 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 a little bit of it, but quite frankly, it seemed totally out of whatever I was doing. This is when Mark Andreessen, founder of Netscape, et cetera, A16Z, now when he was sitting in the very seat you're sitting in, here he described this notion of wild ducks. That at companies you have these people that are, small groups of people that are really kind of wild and outrageous and really testing the outer limits of what's possible.

Do you think they serve an important role? Tremendous, tremendous. 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 that no one 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 a company or a university, what do they do with those ideas and so on? Xerox lost it completely. I mean, they show them the stuff and there's a whole books that have been written about it. Well, 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 like skateboarding, but not just skateboarding, but our friend, Danny Wei, jumping the Great Wall of China, building mega ramps in his yard. I knew I wasn't gonna do that, but there's something about being adjacent

to people like that. That changes the way that you, that I've approached things that were more pedestrian to make them less pedestrian. And maybe we'll return to this because I think that being around people who are real mavericks and real iconoclasts can be very beneficial, but it doesn't mean that you have to jump in

and do what they're doing. Well, I decided at one point there to take huge risks. And as a matter of fact, my first piece of work after I got my job at Zellhoffs Park, which was supposed to work on some solid-state physics or whatever, was I had this notion, this fantasy of Einstein in the Patent Office. So I would start working on things that were crazy. There was this whole notion in physics, which called tachyons, particles that are faster than the speed of light.

How do you say it? Tachyons. Tachyons. They say from the word tachyons, 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 of fact, my first paper out of graduate school was on Tacquios, and I had

the pride of getting the paper accepted in the top physics journal. It's physics review letters? Physics letters, yes. Yeah. And I remember my cousin Hector sending me a note or something saying, well, now I see the road to perdition, he said. But I was so proud of it. I really thought that I was doing something incredible. And it had nothing to do with the work

I was doing on a daily basis. And I published several papers on things that were very important to me. You have a lot of single author papers. Yes, yes. This is something that is especially rare in biology, but you have a lot of single authored papers. Yeah, I was very proud of that.

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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 hear Einstein'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? Yes.

I think as a matter of fact, I learned not long ago that Einstein himself wrote 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 like an animal, for instance, if you see a lion running after a zebra and so on, the lion can actually calculate intuitively the speed at which he can move and so on.

We can do the same. But if you start thinking about what happens when you get to near the speed of light, we have no intuition whatsoever. Time almost stops. There are all sorts of complicated things. Length contract. I mean, it's a very complicated set of things. And that's why it's very hard to understand, although the math works.

Then there is general relativity. That is even worse because there is some kind of a warping of space-time that is responsible for gravitation. But I'll go into that in a second. The other one is quantum physics. Our brains are not, not only are they not wired to understand the nearer speed of light, because no one moves nearer the speed of light. I mean, we move at 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, molecules, atoms, and inside the atom. So it's very, very hard to visualize or even understand some of the very counterintuitive ideas like entanglement and also, you know. So relativity can be understood in the sense that you can explain certain things, but people say, well, how can it work like that? And then you have to get into the math. But I think that I took a course a few years ago on generativity.

Just profound? Yeah, yeah. I wanted to learn it finally. It's profound, deep. And it makes you feel that this man, Einstein, he had help from a lot of people, but still, it's an incredible thing. I mean, it's on a level of Beethoven's symphonies and Mozart's piano concertos. I mean, you know, it's on a level of Beethoven's symphonies and Mozart's piano concertos. I mean, it's something that comes into your head and you're able to do, you know, through a lot of struggle. I mean, it took him years to do that. Okay. So, but it's profound. And now, when you say, can you explain, I mean, the point is Einstein one day discovered that if the speed of light is the speed of

light, no matter how fast you move with respect to a beam of light, it's still moving at the speed of light. That means that the notion of simultaneity between two events is relative now. So you and I might say, yes, now is 1.10, but if you are moving very fast with respect to me, instead of 1.10, you'll say something else, okay, just because time for you and I are not synchronized. And that leads to all sorts of very interesting effects and practical effects too, because from there comes the idea that mass and energy are the same.

From there, nuclear weapons came out of that. All sorts of very interesting things, you know, and today, you know, we can even detect gravitational waves that are coming from almost the beginning of the universe. We can detect that because of the universe, we can detect that because of those theories they can calculate. So it's profound, yes. I mean, Einstein, I think, stands on—I mean, Newton too, by the way. I mean, Newton and Einstein, I think they're top people, you know.

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 an ability to tap into forms of cognition that we don't normally think about when we're looking at macro mechanics

of the world around us, that objects fall down, not up, and a helium balloon goes up, okay, 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, yeah, 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. 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 tiny bits of the physical universe link 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.

I just got a patent on using quantum mechanics for communication and so on. But it's still the puzzle is why does it work the way it works. So what I'm saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things operationally. I don't know what 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 conformed to understand the macroscopic world, not high speeds and so on. So physicists who work in generativity, I don't, can do incredible calculations. Can you tell you what a black hole collapsing to another hole black hole would do? And 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 solve it and have new ideas, it's something I don't understand. Namely, for instance, the example that I gave about quantum mechanics, that's a very simple one because I talk to a lot of people nowadays that work on this, is I can give you two dice, okay, you know, just dice. You can go to Mars and I stay here. The dice are,

let's assume they are quantum mechanically entangled. I throw my dice, I see three, you got three. And we don't communicate. They're entangled. They go, this is faster than the speed of light. I throw again five, you get five. I do one, you get one. I 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 the sense of signal. No signal, they're entangled. Now, let me, now 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. You know, there are ways, I mean, they are trivial things. There's a famous example of the socks. Okay, so you take a trip and you took a pair of socks, let's assume they're blue socks and so on, and then you open a trip and you took a pair of socks, let's assume they are blue socks and so on, and then 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? I mean, you can do that with anything. In quantum mechanics, imagine that you look at a sock, but the sock is changing colors all the time. So now you observe it is red, the other one is red now I observe it is red, the other one is red. I observe it is green, the other one is green. Okay, randomly.

So little bits of the universe are entangled. Well, some people, and a friend of mine who's a Buddhist claims that there is a whole religious or Buddhist who is saying that everything was entangled. Yes, originally all atoms, all electrons, all elementary particles were entangled. Yes, because the universe started very,, all elementary particles were entangled, yes, because the universe started very, very tiny and everything was entangled. Okay, so you could imagine that the universe is entangled. So what happens here affects the other.

But it gets, 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're entangled. Some people think that people are entangled. Yes, yes. Well, that gets to a, maybe. But that Yes, yes, yes. People are entangled. Yes, yes, yes. Well, that gets to a, maybe- But that's a whole, yeah. That's a whole thing. Yeah, 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. Okay. Right, 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. We'll talk about that.

But for those of us that grew up in the 80s and 90s, I was born in 75, who saw the movie Jurassic Park? 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, you know, things around us, we can have an impact on them and they can have an impact on us. But that the notion that a small insect, thousands of kilometers away can impact something that's

going on more adjacent to us, it seems outrageous sci-fi. But the notion that one thing impacts another impacts another, that's pretty straightforward, right? There's just 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 sort of the paints and the palette. Around the same time, I remember the book, Chaos Coming Out, 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. Now we know this about crystal structures, right? Like you put a drop of water under a high powered microscope, you see structure there, It's not random. The angles are very consistent, at least around certain nodes, et cetera. 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. And it does enchant, right? We sort of poked at poetry. I love poetry, you love poetry. But I think it enchants because I think humans are naturally interested in how 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 what it is, and it's not quantum. And there is quantum stories on, 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 the initial particle, I can use Newton's equations of motion to tell you where that particle is going to be anywhere with an incredible precision. When we launch a rocket, we want to go to the moon. We can calculate and predict exactly where that rocket is going to be after so many hours, after so many days, and so on.

Actually, we use the equations of motion to predict that trajectory, and it's a precise trajectory. This is how Elon was able to capture the rocket with the chopsticks recently. I was talking about that. Yeah. Okay. Now, the idea of chaos is, so that's, okay, it works. There are some cases where, let's assume, I'm going to give you a simple example. So I take a ball, I put it on a billiard, a billiard ball on a billiard table.

I send it out, and at the moment I can calculate, I know exactly the position of velocity, I can tell you exactly where it's going to go. Kale 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 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 also undergo friction. Because let me give you an example that I used to teach in chaos at Stanford for many years. So imagine I give you a beaker full of molasses and you take a very big ball, stainless steel ball, and you just throw it into the thing. Well, after a while it will just drift with the thing, it's called StowSlaw, because friction slows it down and it just goes. And now you throw another one from another altitude and all of them are going to do exactly

the same. Some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite. Even though there is friction, everything tends to just slow it down. They just keep going far apart from each other. Amazing. Amazing thing. So that's chaos. Okay.

And I can tell you a little bit why I got so involved in this and the work we did. Does chaos exist in every physical system? Mostly, yes. Yes. Maybe even in neurons or the brain. Oh, yes. Absolutely. I mean, this is why I don't want to get into a controversy here about issues of whether we live a deterministic life or not. But, you know, if things that are a little bit random and so on, or even just a tiny difference in initial conditions can take you to very different outcomes. But this we're not talking about many particles, we're talking two.

So that's one. Now fractals is a different story that comes out of a guy who I knew very well, Benoit Mandelbrot, a very, very funny character, brilliant too, but very strange, who discovered that certain things are so similar that if you look at the coast of Britain, he used to. That if you look at the coast of Britain, he used to say that, you look at the coast of Britain and you say, okay, tell me, how long is the coast of Britain? You go with a meter and you measure it. Now suppose that the meter that you're using now

can measure up to an inch. Well, you're gonna get a different distance, even though you are adding the same, because there are all these little things in the coast of Britain that are essentially self-similar that add a tremendous amount of length. That's what a fractal is all about.

These are structures that are not just a simple line, but they have all these other things. He thought that it was a whole new geometry. As a matter of fact, and I tell you this because I knew Benoit very well, I met him through a talk I gave on chaos. He 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 a restaurant. One day, the very pretty waitress came to us and so on

and served us and we were talking, he's a French man, he spoke with a very heavy French accent. So she says something, what are you doing here? He says, we are at a conference. But I'm not just at a conference. I'm a very special man," he said to her. And she said, how come? And he says, do you know who Euclid was?

And she says, sort of. She said, well, he was a Greek man who invented geometry. And she said, oh, well, guess what? I am better than 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- The Danes are smart. Yeah, okay. That was very funny that he would talk about it. So he would give a talk and he would say, my equations can generate anything. Indeed, he could generate any patterns. So he would say, you want a mountain? Here goes a mountain. You see a mountain.

Beautiful graphs and so on. So self-similarity is a very powerful idea in physics because it allows you that if you know something at a certain scale, you can predict what's gonna be on a different other scales. And 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, we always said, okay, so you're telling us that, you know, things are... He used to say, I'm not interested in pulleys. I'm not interested in things that move things up and down, he used to say. He's thinking about elementary physics class. Something of that sort, yeah. But fractals are very interesting because these are self-similar structures.

At all levels, they look the same. You look at them big, you look at them small, they have the same type of, you know, geometric behavior. Chaos is all about dynamics, how things evolve in time. Okay? And the chaotic systems, they tend to diverge from each other for a long, long time. The man who invented the idea of the butterfly effect was a man called Ed 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 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.

I mean, we don't have to go into that. So chaos is really a field that essentially explains why things that seem to be simply explained by classical physics tend to diverge from each other. And they give rise to random outcomes. That's the important thing. You can use 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. It's very simple. And chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level? Okay. So I was working at some day, and I don't think it's interesting, but I got into this because I was doing something else and suddenly I decided I was going to do this and I really started going very fast at this. But then I had a very bright student, you met that, Hogg, 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 this was the case and we discovered that it was not the case. We actually proved that quantum systems are not chaotic. There's some kind of interference between them and so on that makes them recur back and forth periodically. Why do I find that reassuring? That if you get down to a small enough level that you can really predict what's going to happen as opposed to small perturbations leading

to big differences in outcome? Yes. That was the whole point. We discovered that quantum mechanics, there are waves and interferences and so on that make the system recur, you know. As a matter of fact, I had quite an exchange with Dick Feynman about it, you know. When I met him, which I was very, I went to give a talk at Caltech, and I was in his office and he said, so what are you going to talk about? Because I don't want to waste my time. And I said, about chaos.

He said, okay. I said, you know, some things are very important, particularly in quantum mechanics. So I'm smiling because he was so sharp and so on. So he said, okay, give me the problem. And he said, what is it? I said, well, okay, I give you an electron and you have any potential and I give you a laser. And he says, 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 electrode? And I knew he was going to give me the answer that was already in the literature, but he appeared to be thinking, he stood up and walked around and was making all sorts of noises. And then suddenly he says, the energy grows linearly in time. I said, no, it doesn't. How do you know? I said, we, it doesn't. How do you know? I said, we measure it, I can show you and so on.

And he was very impressed because that means that there is no chaos actually. Then he said, oh, you know why I got it wrong. I said, no, because I wasn't thinking in colors, only black and white. Was he trying to be funny? Of course, it was always funny. Let's talk about Feynman and Gell-Mann and Mandelbrot

and all the rest 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 like, I'm so delighted when I hear it. Like I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists and not athletes, right? Which is great. I get so delighted when I hear it. Like I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists. Right. And not athletes, right?

Which is great, like, but scientists. And it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist, you both revere the work they did. You see something unique about them. 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 like their quirkiness or something about them, like 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 there's relativity, the Patent Office, all this stuff. And he like had all these problems with women. Oh, yeah. Or, you know, and I read the books, right?

Or, you know, or this person, I won't name names because these people are still alive, Silicon Valley, you know, like actually when you and I used to take walks when I was a postdoc, we used to see jobs walking around, right? Yeah, yeah. No feet, no shoes, he had feet, no shoes. And you would say, you know, I mean, like, he's amazing. Like this guy's brilliant.

But then we would chuckle about some of the jobisms, you know? Yes. And so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people, that these founders, that are 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. But it seems to me that like you hold people up for their contributions, but you never actually, thank goodness, put people on a pedestal to the point where you're like, this person is spectacular in every way. And I'm not saying you cut them down to size, but I learned very, and this has served me well

in my life in now public facing or on Twitter. Like if I make a mistake and someone comes at me, it's somebody that I respect, I go, ah. But then I remember like, this person has a lot of issues in certain domains of their life. So, you know, to realize that, you know, like we're all human, like this notion of like, like none of us, none of us are gods.

Right. And yet there are people like Feynman, like Gell-Mann, like Einstein, who have almost supernatural levels of ability. Yes. Yeah. So what's that about? Like, how do you hold knowledge, insight, and staff, have almost supernatural levels of ability. Right, yes. Yeah. So what's that about? How do you hold knowledge, insight, and stature in your mind alongside the humanness, the

inherent flawed nature of all of us? Well, okay, it's complicated. There are many ways to think about it. In some of these names, for instance, these people are built into giants by the media too. I mean, Feynman, I mean, if you go to Quora and so on, everybody's asking, what did Feynman do? What was he wearing and so on? As if 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 what he did in physics, he, and I interrupt myself here because he really worked very hard, very hard according to Elman in particular, to creating a myth about himself. He worked very hard. When I met him, I can't even tell you the anecdotes, I only met him for an hour, but he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression with you.

R-rated and X-rated anecdotes. Exactly. But I remember the good one was that I was going to give a 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. Do 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 started the colloquium at Caltech, the Marine Boot Camp of Science, and then I am starting to talk. And suddenly I said, instead of saying the next hour, I said something like in the next week or something. So because there he was, I mean, he started saying,

look elsewhere, that kind of guy. For anyone who hasn't lectured, there's a tendency sometimes when one is going fast to fill in without thinking, it's just something that one learns. I mean, I've had to learn it the hard way when we missed 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 the last few years. Oh, he was. I took even my father once to a lecture he was giving in San Francisco. And he was giving a beautiful lecture to, I don't know, 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. Finements. Finements. And then all these women were saying things.

And then he said, I love women. They're all smart. He was very clever. So he would have lost his job by the standards of recent years. Okay. But regardless of that, because I really want to go back to this issue, people like Mary Gell-Mann, I mean, to me, he was the most intimidating person I've ever met. I mean, now eventually I got to know him because he liked what I was doing.

And as a matter of fact, he and I organized a workshop, an incredibly luxurious place in France, in the estate of Madame Schlumberger, one of the oil and people. Actually 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 a widow and he wanted to, you know, women were intimidated by him too. 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 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 in Aspen and we saw a bird that looked incredibly complicated and so on. So we looked over.

The next day we went to him because he loved birds, as you know. I said I saw most unusual bird. He said describe it. So I looked it up and he gave me the name in Latin of the bird and then he said that's the most common bird in the Bay Area of California. As a matter of fact, you should see it when you pick up the newspaper next time you're there. And indeed, two weeks later, I went to pick up the New York Times and there was the bird. But at the same time, I said, Andrew likes birds and he asked you, what is your favorite bird? And you said the rainbow lower keet. Still is.

And he said, this kid knows, this kid knows, he said. I'll never forget that. I know my birds. I know my birds. No, no, but it's amazing. I never heard, you know, because if you could have said a parrot, he would have not been very interested, okay? 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 a member of the board of the directors of the Aspen Center, so we had to decide what programs we had every summer. And he would come to me and say, whom do you want me to insult today? He had all sorts of very funny names for all sorts of physicists and so on. The downside of people like that in science,

cause 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, woke-ism and so forth, it tends to do that less, because they have sort of a trucker's mouth.

Brilliant guy, but it's kind of known for being outrageous and trying to create tales about themselves. This is something that scientists do. Yeah, right, right. Right, in order to maintain their legacy. Yeah, also to feel good about themselves. I mean, by the way, I mean, Guilman, 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 it was a string theory. And he announced the seminar, and everybody goes into the garden, and the seminars are nice. I need to remind the audience perhaps here that the Aspen Center for Music was right next to it, and they were rehearsing.

So the seminar was supposed to start at three, and there's Gilman comes with all his notes under his arm. He always had notes, walking, pacing, and then nothing happened. And suddenly, they were rehearsing the Beethoven's 1520, which just says, ta-ta-ta-ta-da. And then you heard the sound, and then he started. I will now tell you about a new theory of how the universe works. That's the way he spoke. So what strikes me is that these people take themselves very seriously.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you think that's important in life? I don't, I like to, I mean, as you know, I like to have a good sense of human about myself and be self-deprecating. I think some people have issues and they do that. I mean, it's all depends on how do you see things.

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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 wanna talk to you about is that, you've always loved, it's clear from a young age, like high level concepts, deep concepts, order in the universe, working on hard problems.

You just filed another patent. Like, I mean, 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, you know,

that day because of the weather. You love like a really good espresso, a really good meal. Like the high and the low are checked off boxes for you. Yes. Right. That's different, I think, than the way most people think about scientists, especially theoreticians, theorists, excuse me. Which one is it?

Theoreticians or theorists? Theorists, they say, yeah. Theorists, excuse me. Which one is it? Theoreticians or theorists? Theorists, they say, yeah. Theorists. That, you know, 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. Like you very much like, like where we're gonna eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this conversation about relativity. Absolutely. I think that there is a myth that sometimes gets perpetuated 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?

No fun, nothing, you're going to work. I want you to work. You're getting paid to do something. I was so scared. 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 inherit this from my father, a 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. I enjoy, as you said, good meals and the daily things about life. I'm not just living in some stratosphere and not being able to, you know, enjoy a meal I'm having and so on. No, the opposite.

And yes, in that sense, I am very much like that. And Mary's the same way, and so that's why we enjoy that. Your wife. Yeah, my wife, sorry. Yes, we really enjoy, she in particular being Danish, they have this idea of slow eating and enjoying the good things of life. And I'm very much like that, yes, very much. I don't feel guilty about it. You know, if I can afford certain.

Nor should you. Nor should you. Well, 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 cared 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 false? Right, right. Yes. I had an uncle, actually, Hector's father. You know, there was a branch of the family that was very much into culture. They had beautiful collections of paintings and so on. And once I was, what, 14 or so.

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 bit complicated. No, no. I enjoy everything, of course.

I think I got out of my father mostly, yes. My mother was a little more ascetic in a way, but yes, the tiny little things of life are what makes one's life, you know. I'm slowly starting to get that. Yes, yes. I think I've been a little like rabid 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. I 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 and 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 calms me down and so on. And I love it. Why 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. You know, it's called the white coat phenomenon or something of that sort. And I got very, very upset about it because I tried to control it. And it got worse and worse and worse. And they told me, you know, to do one. So I went one or the other. I have a friend, a colleague more than a friend, who's a Buddhist, who started telling me about,

you know, have you tried, first of all, biofeedback? 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 on meditation. I couldn't believe it. My hands suddenly were warm and, you know, let's do it. I did a session with him in meditation. I couldn't believe it. My hands suddenly were warm and it 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. So, you might as well pursue many things at the same time. I mean, a good meal eaten properly can be very, very nice, too. I love that about you. It's something I'm working on. I remember when I, along those lines, I remember when I was in graduate school, we published a paper 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. But you also warned me about the postpartum of post excitement. Like something great happens. 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 in 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 getting a degree or a great party or a paper in science or nature for a softer paper. And you said, a couple of days from now, you're going to feel low. And you just have to wait.

And I'll never forget what you said. You said, just go back to what inspired the first project, pick a different problem, it'll happen again. And the second time it happened, I was like, he was right, it happened again. And again and again, I haven't had an infinite number of those papers in those journals, but I learned about the dopamine dynamics

associated with pursuing a goal. And then you get the thing and you're very excited and then you feel the drop. Yes, yes. And that I think that is something that even ancient philosophers knew about it. The Buddha, many, you know, the Greeks and so on, this idea that the things we pursue, they are ephemeral in a way,

in the way the feelings that they elicit in us, you know. And I think that you're right. And there is also another tendency one has to try to avoid, which is you're successful in something and you continue doing exactly the same thing because by now you know how to deal with your hands tied. You're turning over a crank. And I always felt that I want to go with the swear.

And I have sort of a reputation for changing feels. 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 like falling in love, the new thing, it's nice at the beginning. But eventually, whatever you're doing, it becomes trite and so on. Yeah, let's talk about that because after chaos,

which brought a lot of, I remember we had reporters in our house and there was like TV and the book by Jim Glick and then you switched to something completely different. Yes. And you got into computer science. Yeah. Well, computer science is computers. Computers.

What happened was that a lot of the success that we had was because I was at PARC, we had phenomenal computer facilities there, things that we could visualize at a time very few people could do. And one of them actually, someone suggested I get a patent. There is a 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 with Jim Crutchfield and so on. He was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so on. But 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 that in chaos. I mean, you can produce 10 PhDs with this. But then I said, why don't I do the opposite? Are using computers to help me with physics? Why don't I use the physics to study computers? Well, that's an interesting idea, but, know, I mean, so why do you do that? So what happened to me, I was at a meeting on chaos in Copenhagen,

and I couldn't sleep one night, and I had a book called The Computer of the Brain by John von Neumann, perhaps someone that was a true genius. I don't know if you heard of him. He invented computers. He was a phenomenon at all levels, and he was part of the Manhattan Project.

He was perhaps one of the most brilliant people ever existed, at least that we are aware of. He was a Dean for Advanced Studies for Neumann. There are all sorts of anecdotes about him. He had a photographic memory. You could give him a page of a phone book. He would look at it closer, and then he would recite the phone numbers

from bottom to top. Totally useless skill. Yeah, but he was a the phone numbers from bottom to top. Totally useless skill. Yeah, but he was a genius, a genius, true genius. He invented computers, he invented game theory in economics. Useful skill. Yeah, exactly. Okay. In any event, so he wrote a very little book called The Computer and the Brain.

No equations, nothing. And one night, four o'clock in the morning, I cannot sleep, I get down, you know, it was summer, so the sun was still setting 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, you know, if the brain is like a computer, I could do something like that. But I also want to apply some of what I know to these things. And the first thing that occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we

had at PARC. These computers were communicating with each other, as we nowadays, we know it as the 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. But 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. The discovery process of falling in love is half the fun.

Absolutely, yeah. And I also was able to understand, I mean there is a lot of formalism in economics and some of it is really, I mean, sort of academic. 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. As a matter of fact, a lot of the work I'm doing now in resource allocation in networks

comes from ideas from economics. Peter Van Doren When you go into a new field, in order to learn about the field, is that mainly through talking to people in the field, reading books? Both, 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 an observer and a learner. Yes, I need to say this.

I don't think that many people have said 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, I was already doing computers after chaos and so on. I won't name the person, but a very good physicist professor at Berkeley came into my office as Bernardo.

We have an issue here. I said, what is it that your name for a membership in the National Academy of Sciences is coming up. I said, oh, that's nice. He said, well, there's a problem. You're not writing papers in physics. You're writing papers in computer science. And we need a physicist because otherwise,

the chemists will get that job. The physics is done like the chemists. Welcome to academia. Yeah. So I said, well, you want me to do? He said, well, can you perhaps write one or two more papers on this so we can show? I said, no, I cannot do that, I can't.

Well, isn't there a famous story about Feynman and being elected to the National Academy? He refused to, yes. Right, I think they told him he was in the National Academy and then he said, well, what do I do? And they said, well, you elect in other members and he said, I quit. Well, yeah, so in any event, I never became a member

of the National Academy. But you never sought prizes. No, I mean, I would have liked to get them, why not? I mean, you know, I'm not, it's not that I said they are meaningless, but there was nothing that I could do about it. And I, since I was not, as you said, I was always a little bit of a,

always moving on to the next thing, never staying long enough going to these meetings where by now you heard it all over and over and over again. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have to say that, as you know, I still have my position at Stanford and teach. I'm involved in a little bit of research, but 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. But I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcasts, I remember you being a little bit concerned. You're like, you know, what are your colleagues gonna 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, Joe Rogan and others, but is that, I was like, well, that's what you're supposed to do. When you hit a point where what you're doing

isn't as compelling, you wait for the thing that draws you forward. Seems like you were always drawn forward. I was thinking of carrot and stick. It's not like you disliked where you were. It's that there was some carrot that you identified and you go towards the carrots. And also something very, the other day,

my wife was actually mentioning, I've been in a sense, I never had mentors. It's very interesting. Except for this frankly not terrific graduate advisor. He was not my mentor really. I mean, you know, he didn't even want me to do the things that I wanted to do. So I never had someone who was whispering, Bernard is the guy to you should be considering for this or that.

I mean, I had the fortune to really get to the top of many of these fields and 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 are brilliant and so on. I felt treated with tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on. But I never had mentors in that sense. And also, as I said, I am a little bit restless. I am very curious about everything. And so, you know, sometimes I see something and I say,

oh, there's an opportunity to do something interesting. I think that the issue of being curious is extremely important. And it's interesting because I reflect a lot on, say, my father. My father was an immensely curious person, but all about details. He never liked abstractions of any kind. He was very proud that he went to the same school I went, and the only course he flanked was philosophy, because he said it doesn't make any sense. Now perhaps he was right about that.

Sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about. Couple of months ago in Denmark, we were invited, my wife and I, to a dinner with philosophers talking about artificial intelligence. I thought those people were, they didn't really know what was going on. But nevertheless, yes, I am curious and sometimes I move onto 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 to misunderstand me.

I will 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 sort of brings my thinking back to like the early discussions about, other students are not interested in physics, you're interested in physics. Other people are like smoking a lot of weed and partying.

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, yeah, that you need this, you know, or needed that one point of that, these parental type figures, yeah, sorry, yeah,

there 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 I was doing something else. I mean, 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 in economics of attention and all that stuff. And many of the students the other day, I found one of them, I met one, Lada Damage, who, you know, I think you- She was early at Google. No, she went to Facebook. And the other day she wrote me a note. I was so lucky that I met her.

She was gonna do a thesis and I don't know what, solar collecting, solar. Yeah, you've collected some pretty interesting students. They're like a pretty, we won't name names other than Laz, but like some of them are very well-known people in the tech industry now. Oh yeah. Yeah. And I think that, yeah, it seemed like the people

that would gravitate towards you. It's interesting, your laboratory is off campus. So anyone that decides to be off campus is already making a choice toward like, they don't want to be part of the standard culture. But they 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'd 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, it's going to be all about multimedia. Remember that?

No one talks about multimedia. He said, your television it's going to be all about multimedia. Remember that? No one talks about multimedia. He said, your television is going to be, your computer is going to be, your stereo is going. I mean, he was right, right? He was basically, everything was going to be synthesized into the common devices. And we now know that were not 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? 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. So how do you see nowadays, like for people that are interested in science or technology, do they need to go to graduate school?

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

I know. Like Steve Jobs saying, passion is everything. Right. I mean, necessary but not sufficient. Right, right. Necessary but not sufficient. I think that what's happening today, I mean, technology, we are going through a technological revolution.

There's no doubt about it. We used to learn about the printing press, and now it's the same thing with computers. I still remember, and this is amazing the same thing with computers. I still remember and I, you know, we, this is amazing because, you know, today it's 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 Mignot who was, you know. He discovered the orexin-hyprocretin relationship.

That's the cause of narcolepsy is a mutation. Yeah, 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. And they say, what are you talking about? So we finished dinner and we all drove to park at night.

And I turn on my computer and there was a man, I still remember his name, something Pioche 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 it's obvious, trivial. At that time they couldn't believe it. There you are in Palo Alto on an evening going through all the rooms of the Louvre. They just couldn't understand what was going on.

What year was this? I don't remember. Must have been like 94. When the web started coming, you know, that was, you know, right before- So we all had to get email in college in the final year, 97. So it must have been somewhere around like 94, 95. Something of that sort, right before,

right at the time Andreessen 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, an immense amount of the advances that we see in biotechnology, in computers, in everything, are essentially done, I would say, for profit by companies. Okay, I 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 Norwegian village and write a paper. We could look at 150,000 people, how did they visit this side or that side and predict how, you know, we were they visit this side or that side and predict how we were able to predict behaviors, you know? So I think that today everybody knows that that's the case and it's the same thing with artificial intelligence.

But for a kid in high school or kids in college or kids in, I mean, is it worth getting a graduate education? Well, it all depends on what you want to do. I mean, law, medicine, you need the professional degree. I mean, these are ultimately professional degrees. So you need the training. I don't want a surgeon that didn't go to medical school. Okay, but the danger is,

and I remember a very, very bright guy I had in my team, you don't want to become a blue-collar worker. See, what I'm saying is the following. Being a hacker or being able to 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. You go to ChatGTP and he'll 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. Now I personally believe that humanities and all sorts of 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. But on the other hand, as you said, you can just finish high school and start hacking

and become very good at it and doesn't require much more than that. Do you think the examples of like Zuck, Elon, and others 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 they're unicorns and you have to be very careful. We only talk about the success stories. We don't go and interview the guy

that is loading a landscaping truck because his startup didn't go anywhere. Okay, so it is a very, our tendency to see these people as heroes and to try to imitate them is a very dangerous one, I think. Now, that doesn't mean that you should not be working on the things you care and gamble, but these are the guys who played a lottery and won.

Do you remember, there were many other social websites before Facebook, and they all died. And Facebook could have died too. I mean, Zuckerberg might disagree with me, but he could have died, okay? And all these things are like that. I mean, Zuckerberg might disagree with me, but he could have died. All these things are like that. Apple, when almost under, they brought Steve Jobs again, and the guy put them onto the

stratosphere. And the same thing with Elon Musk. He's a high-risk taker, and so far, every time he flips a coin, he comes the right way. But to say, I want to be like him, you have to be very careful and to calculate the odds. Okay, so when you say this, how many of these kids really make it? I mean, it's a very complicated thing. So I think that to have a strong background in something

will help you when suddenly the field switches from being a programmer and making a lot of money to suddenly programming a dime a dozen or becoming a technician basically. I had a perfectly thriving career as a lab scientist with grants and private funding and a bunch of other things publishing regularly. When I decided to switch to this, were you worried? No, because I saw it as a very slow departure from what you were doing.

And I saw the 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 is a success at explaining things in ways that people understand. They don't have to go and buy a book on neuroanatomy 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 listening to podcasts. And this 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. When 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 there's a mob scene of scientists 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. Okay, there are also other people who do a podcasting and goes nowhere. So I think that I never worried.

I actually was, you know, elated to see the trajectory of your podcast. The only thing is you have a tenure position, and that is a nice safety cushion if everything else were. Today, you're beyond the reach of justice, as I say. So no problem. You don't need it, in a sense. No one's beyond the reach of justice. But yeah, I still maintain so no problem. You don't need it in a sense unless you need it. No one's beyond the reach of justice. But yeah, I still maintain my tenured position.

I spoke to my chairman in ophthalmology this morning and I'll teach this spring or in the fall. And it's good for you too, to really interact with young people and to hear what they care and so on. But I never worried in the sense that I thought that you have enough talent to do well and you chose to do it.

I mean, I remember during COVID at the beginning, you were, we were at your sister's house and you were drawing all these little diagrams. I used to put my drawings. Yeah, yeah. And then so I think you put them on Twitter or something of that sort. And it was the beginning of something

much more interesting and important. And so I never worried about it. I think that the, all of us, the whole family and those who know you are sort of impressed at the explosive success of this story here, you know, your podcast. It's amazing. I mean, I don't have to tell you.

That's what reflects a kind of an early compulsion more than anything of learn and teach, learn and share. Yeah, but there's also, I need to say something. The other day, actually, we were watching your interview with Esther Perel. And regardless of the fact that I think it's a great interview, 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. So I never had any doubts. They are the opposite.

I mean, the issue is, you know, obviously you're taking it to many, many places long beyond what you started, which was essentially explained to people how neuroscience works, right? Yeah, we've gone into a lot of health domains and other things. And I've also been blessed with an amazing team.

This is something that I think, while we share a lot of things in common, if I may, I mean, I've always been kind of a pack animal. You know, if it was skateboarding, like draw friends together, if it's birds, I have my bird club with Eddie Chang, who now, as you know, is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. It'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 have groups of people who collaborate with me.

I don't do this alone. Right. The opposite. Right. But I haven't changed crowds very often. And it seems like you've had to go into economics and theoretical physics and all these things. And yeah, that's an interesting difference. And it's daunting and 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, you know, can be intimidating too. You know, even when I started doing chaos, I thought I was doing very well till I gave a talk at Berkeley, and there was a mathematician.

I regard mathematicians as the top, top people in the world. And I was saying something, and the guy, he's a very famous mathematician, he said, that's a very famous mathematician, he said, that's a lie. I said, what do you mean? He said, can you prove it? No, because you know, physicists don't prove theorems.

He said, well then it's a lie. You cannot prove it's a lie. It was quite a cold shower. That happens to me on Twitter every now and again, well, they'll find something where I misspoke and they do it and it's super embarrassing. You correct yourself, you move on. No, no, and then you learn things too.

You have a conversation with someone. And you never forget those things. This is what I learned. Like you never forget the errors you made. Like that on a qualifying exam. Most people will never take a qualifying exam, but they basically ask you questions until you get something wrong.

The moment you say, I don't know, or you get something wrong, that's an important moment because it's also the thing that you go look up and you never forget. Yeah, right. And also the tiny humiliations can be very good too for you.

I mean, this is very important. I've had plenty of those. I've had plenty 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, in spite of the fact that you paint me as a lone wolf, I'm not, I'm very social and I love interacting with people. And I always been very lucky that I surround myself with groups of people, including today, that are brilliant and resonant with the kinds of things I wanna do. And so it's very stimulating.

I'm not the kind of person that sits in a corner and does theories and publish. I published my papers on my own. That was my romantic period where I needed to be Einstein in the patent office. And not that I thought I was Einstein, but it was very important that I was the only author. Okay.

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. Yes, yes, yes.

So that's very good. And I still see some of my old students and collaborators like, you know, Ted and so on. And we take walks every once in a while and discuss 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, or 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. Can you explain quantum internet in a way that I can understand and the listeners can understand? Yes, 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 is some kind of symbols and so on, you need to, I don't know, months or years of a computer to do it. Okay. But it can be done. Computer codes get broken all the time because the basis of these codes are mathematical functions. You have a mathematical function, you can create a computer program that will try to

unravel it, and it can be unraveled. 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 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?

Yes. Imagine that I'm sending you messages. Every message is encoded in binary, ones and zeros. Okay, so I'm sending a message which is a string of ones and zeros. That string of ones and zeros could be hello Andrew or it could also be something 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 thing. I can look at the strings of ones and zeros, I look at them and I can make a copy of it and then I read them, I take them to my lab and I decrypt them, okay? If I look at a string of qubits, quantum bits moving, there are not ones and zeros, there are different things.

These are moving parts? They are moving parts, they are usually photons, they go on, you can use fiber optics, you can use- So these are photons, like, I know what photons are, so they're a little bouncing energy of light. Yeah, little bunches of light because photon. If they're going around, they're 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 or the other and I destroy it. The interaction with it changes it. The measurement destroys it. This is the other and I destroy it. The interaction with it changes it. The measurement destroys it. This is the mystery of quantum mechanics. That the measurement collapses,

we call it the word collapses, into one state or the other. Before that, it was anything. We could be anything. So when I use quantum signals, I'm sending qubits, quantum bits, they're 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? Exactly. Now- Which is why, of course, other governments- Everybody wants- I mean, what I've been told is that in China, they're working very hard on this. Oh, absolutely.

And that here we're working very hard on this. We are working, I'm working too, yes. Yeah, and you're working very hard on this. Yeah, yeah, now, but wait, wait. But who's there? Has anyone gotten there yet? Okay, the problem is the following. In order to decrypt this,

remember that I told you that you can use mathematics, okay? Some of these functions are incredibly complex. It might take the age of the universe perhaps to decode them mathematically. Let's not talk about quantum. But if you have a quantum computer, now we're talking about a quantum computer, it can do it in a couple of hours.

A quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the ones that use an encryption in hours. Whereas it would take the age of the universe for a monster computer, not standard computer you can buy to do it. So in theory, whoever gets this ability first can read essentially 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 who knows if it will still be relevant? Oh, but it may be. And we don't know what they have. Imagine, imagine. Yeah, sure, sure. If you can get... Remember when North Korea hacked, what was it, Disney, one of the... And then they discovered all these emails where people like George Clooney, I don't know who

was complaining about this or that. So imagine- And worse, and worse. We just didn't hear about that. Yeah, yeah, okay. So if you grab all this information, we cannot decrypt it today, but if quantum computers become available

and there are people working on quantum computing, they'll be able to decrypt it. In the meantime, people are working on deploying these quantum networks. We're working on that too. Not to deploy them, but just to see whether or not it's feasible to do that, okay? The Chinese are ahead of almost everybody.

They have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these qubits. So these are impossible to decrypt, okay? Wait, so they're sending the qubit. So you can already communicate in quantum. Oh yeah, yeah, we communicate all the time. Yeah, yeah, I have a lab in Colorado that does that. Yeah, absolutely, over 100 kilometers, yeah. We communicate all the time. Yeah, yeah. I have a lab in Colorado that does that.

Yeah, absolutely. Over 100 kilometers. Yeah. But that's not what standard internet is. 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... 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, but in Europe, for instance, that 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 logarithms and so on. They believe, the moment they heard about quantum computers, they said, oh, we can solve the problem. We can create algorithms, mathematical algorithms, that are going to be even harder to break.

They call that post-quantum. But 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. Already they published two of these, very, very fancy, two students with a laptop were able to decrypt it within a week. So obviously you cannot prove that no one will ever decrypt these things. Okay? So there is the cryptographers, 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 esoteric, it's not important and so on. And also it won't work. Well, they say it's gonna work for short distances, about 10 to 20 kilometers. We just published a paper that got tremendous publicity and an award and so on, that's best paper,

that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers. Okay, so I mean, and's best paper, that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers. 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 are very important. But there is a whole group of people that are saying, no, post-quantum is what we want. So NIST, the National Institute of, I think science and technology, they are really pushing the post quantum thing.

In Europe is the opposite. They're really embracing quantum. I mean, Denmark for instance, is very far ahead into these things. NATO just gave them a pile of money to work on quantum and so on. So it all depends, it's a complicated thing because the crypto people are all mathematical people.

So 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? I mean, there's still debate as 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 kind of like poke their noses into this stuff, they tend to think about it a little bit differently or they start to think about, well, you know, state dependence, like the brain that you have at 8 a.m. is very different than the brain you have at 2 a.m. or four 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 wanna say. Beware of physicists getting into brains

in brain work. I mean, they always end up. It's like the new thing now. I know, I know. Neuroscience, you know, swung the doors open. I was into neuroscience for a while. Yeah, I mean, I think recently neuroscience has made a good move of including people

from psychology, computation, even philosophy, economics, and biology, basically 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 Hawking. Yeah, I heard him on Lex's podcast. Yes, yeah. And yeah, he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating maybe as bound networks as opposed to independent entities. No one really follows it and I'm not an expert in that. So, Roger Prentos is the one who's pushing this.

Many of the physicists going to brain science are not very clever at doing brain science because I heard a story, I think it was Francis Crick or someone who told, I was at a conference and he was saying this, that a physicist came to him and said, I decided to go into brain science. And so he said, okay, what have you done? And the guy says, I measured the specific heat of the brain. What do I do with it? Basically.

Well, 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, you know, math is so important, but it's often used to intimidate biologists into thinking that their ideas either might not be true or that there's better ideas out there.

I will say that when computational neuroscience first started, it seemed like the attempts to model the brain were pretty feeble. And actually, I'll just say they were pretty lame. But now I think with AI and LLMs. Oh, that's a whole different story. 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, no, right, right. At least that's my stance. Yeah, I was at conferences where people say things like, the brain is a massively parallel machine. And I say, wait, wait, are you sure of that? That's a meaningless access. Yeah.

So I said, if I show you a row of trees, and I said, tell me how many are they, do you really take the whole thing and you say 75, or you have to go sequentially? It's not parallel, it's sequential. But LLMs are pretty interesting, right? I'm working on them. You can take four or five large language models, essentially 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 Drager, we wrote a paper on the idea of showing how programs collaborating with each other could solve problems very, very fast that a human or others cannot do. And it's a basis of a lot of the work we want to do now, yes. And there are people who are already thinking of putting many, many of these LLMs together and then see whether or not they do better than a single one or better than a human.

So you think AI is going to improve life for the typical citizen? Yes, because you can use these things in order to do things that were very hard to do before. I 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 mean, we just published a paper on hallucinations in LLMs and so on, because they hallucinate everyone. So they say anything, but yes, yeah,

they are very useful, very useful. And I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that produce them like OpenAI and so on. Yes. Yeah. It's a very, very important field. But 10, 15 years ago, whenever I'd bring up AI, you would chuckle and say this stuff

is like... Well, the funny thing is that the other day, well, I don't want to name him one of the managers at Xerox PARC. When I was at PARC, I started playing with the idea of using machine learning to see what they can do. And the AI people at that time said, that's nonsense. We need to think about logic. How does the brain think?

How do we do cognitive psychology and so on? We 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 doing this stuff because we could do only very little. Today is the rage. Now, the difference between what I was doing, what is being done today is a scale.

I don't know if you know that they are now using nuclear power reactors in order to power the data centers. I didn't know that. But it's an immense cost of computing. You have no idea the amount of work it takes to one trillion tokens in order to get one of these things to work. It strikes me you've always been very open-minded and very willing to adopt new technologies.

But it hasn't changed your daily life very much. Like not much at all. I remember early on you showed me the internet and you said, be very careful. And I said, why? You said, it's like mental chewing gum. Absolutely. 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. Yes. 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, there is another- Actually, I've never seen you at a cafe with a laptop.

Well, sometimes, but there's another aspect to this. As you know, in the last, up to five years ago, I spent four years working on the economics of attention and why is it that people attend to things. And I really believe, and I'm not an expert, that there is a tremendous resonance between these machines and our human brains, and they are addictive. The former CEO of Hewlett Packard, where I was directing the labs, Meg Wickman, she used to say,

I wake up in the middle of the night to look at my phone, and I know people who do that, and there are members of my family who do that more often than I would like to see them do that. You don't do that. No, I mean, I do it, but 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. Spam? Spam, he said, I get spam and I look at it because something's happening, he used to say. He's now a very successful financial guy. Stop doing that, brilliant fellow, brilliant fellow.

But that's because maybe your internal world is rich enough that you don't, I mean. But I look at news, I like to look at things, I like to look at videos, don't misunderstand me, it's not that I ignore it, but yeah, I'm not, I mean, I like the latest things and so on, especially if they are beautiful and so on, but yeah, I'm not into whatever the latest is and so on,

and I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free from Facebook. VR. And I gave them to you Oculus things that I got for free from Pace and 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. And also as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed before this podcast, I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world. Okay. I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world. Okay, so yeah, digital is interesting and it's fascinating in some ways,

but I like things like mechanical watches, cameras that click when you press them, but not artificially. Okay, so I really like that. I like things that are very classical and so on in many ways, and I enjoy that. I like technology. Don't misunderstand me. And I use it a lot. 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 sense. I like to have an analog life, not a digital life. Riding 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 you understand me? But I don't have this fascination with things and so on.

I mean, some people do, but. It seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future. You seem very grounded in the present. I've never read a single book of science fiction. Most of the people I work with, and I admire them, they all come with ideas from books and science fiction. They always say, did you read this or that? And I said, I have no idea.

I never liked it. I like to read about real people with real blood and real feelings. Science fiction to me is devoid of that. It's imagining, you know, droids doing this or that. I couldn't care less. You know. Because I always think that physicists must love

science fiction because they... Never, never, never read a single book or looked at it in a movie or science fiction. I couldn't care less. I don't relate to that. I don't think that these people display human-like behavior anyhow. So, I mean, I'm not saying that it's not interesting

to others. I mean, I'm not saying. Yeah, you're not a futurist. No, 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 gonna be like a hundred years from now. No, no, I like to know life is now.

Yes, yes. And I also, as Niels Bohr once said, it is hard to predict anything, especially the future. Okay, we all predict the past very well. I don't know what's going to go. I mean, you know, we've seen things happening, unbelievable things. I mean, the technology that allows you to become such a worldwide known phenomenon is because of the technology.

Imagine if you were just declaiming the Roman Senate centuries ago. I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now but with no microphones or cameras. Right, okay. So yeah, I'm not a futurist in that sense. People tell me I am because I anticipate things, but not because I imagine a world in which I couldn't care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though Elon Musk thinks it's very important. Do you think it's a cool project? I don't care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though Elon Musk thinks it's very important. Do you think it's a cool project?

I don't know. I want to ask him why. And then he tells me things like, he says things like, well, civilization is going to die here. We are going to asphyxiate. And so I don't know. I mean, let it happen. I don't know.

Just enjoy now. You're not worried about the future. In that sense, no, I'm an optimist. I believe that technology will solve the global warming problem. It's obvious how to solve it. There's nothing very mysterious. Nuclear power is going to do it, you know? Absolutely.

Once we get over our preconceived notions of nuclear power. Right. I mean, very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident. Let's face it. Yeah, they need to name it something else. Right, I mean, very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident, let's face it. Yeah, they need to name it something else. Maybe, yeah. Like many things that once were thought to be dangerous

when renamed, turn out to not be so dangerous when renamed, people are willing to adopt. Yeah, right, yeah. So yeah, I don't really, you know, I don't worry too much about the future. I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to steer away from their brain, hopefully. You don't seem to worry too much generally.

You're not a big worrier. Yeah. Yeah. You and I are different that way. You and I are different that way. Yeah, you worry a lot. Not if I keep busy. Oh, okay.

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. It sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that you reach for the next rung and grab it, right?

And not miss. I mean, there's been, I think there's been elements of uncertainty in my life where I felt like, okay, I'm gonna ground to 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 stays.

The past is the past, you cannot do anything and the future hasn't arrived, so what the heck? I really believe that and it has helped me immensely. A few things I'm very proud of. I went for my medical checkup a year ago and the doctor says, I'd love to hear you breathe. I said, what's wrong with my breathe? He says, so slow and calm.

So you got over the white coat syndrome? Yes, because of meditation. You sent me your lab results this morning, It's so slow and calm. So you got over the white coat syndrome. Yes. Yeah. Because of meditation. Yeah, you sent me your lab results this morning. So everything looks great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People always been regular about exercise, not excessive. No.

You're never one of the marathoners or the 5 a.m. in the pool people, but no. I tried runs to run a marathon actually. So it was- Yeah, I mean, it's very common in the area where, in and around Stanford to be pretty extreme about athletics. That was never your thing. No, no.

Steady, long distance runner. Yeah, I told you that once. I'm not a sprinter. Yeah, some people are, and by the way, I admire them immensely. You mean in life, like we were speaking metaphorically. 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. Yeah, I like people people who really can do things incredibly fast and they move from one thing to the other and and so on I yeah, I I like people who reflect some wisdom for instance I have a it's very strange for someone like me But I see a Buddhist monk and I just suddenly I feel calmer by just seeing that person, you know I don't know. I think there's something it's not the spirituality, the power they have to be here totally and absolutely. It's impressive to me. I mean, some other people say,

okay, he has funny robes or something, you know. I like that a lot. It's not necessarily a way, I mean, my therapies used to say to me, and to use meditation to move away from trouble and troubling thoughts is not a good idea. So you have to embrace the world too. But I use it so as just to stay calm and to enjoy and to see things for what they are.

And I think it's, yeah. Yeah, the future is the future. I don't know. Well, you only control what you can control. Right. But there are 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, do 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 an agent there that is somehow knowing what everybody on this planet is doing, 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, in particular the thoughts of people like Einstein, Heisenberg, and so on, that there seems to be at times a sense of an organizing principle in the universe, and to learn those rules. So there is this notion, I mean philosophically it's called pantheism, that God is in nature already. Spinoza and all these people started this. It's very appealing to me, the notion that there is something, that this thing, if it's

evolving, it's like an entity, but not an entity that says, oh, tomorrow, you know, you'll die or so on. I mean, you'll die, you'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 it's enough memory to store all this, although today I saw you can buy SanDisk memory,

they don't buy study this big. So I don't believe in that. But it's a matter of belief, not anything else. Unfortunately, these beliefs are, you know, translated sometimes in complicated actions. 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 struggled, but it's a very good sentence that if you listen to Beethoven say, I mean, the man struggled, 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 on a daily basis, just wrote 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. There is this idea out there that consciousness doesn't just exist within our brains, but that's sort of like a collective network and things come through us, not just as individuals, but as people. Jungian thing is a lot of that.

I'm very interested in the word spiritual and what it means to see that things transcend our particular needs at any point. But the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny. you know, to see that things transcend our particular needs at any point. But the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny. You know, if you look at any movie, you know, Braveheart or whatever, you see that one warrior, one group of warriors has a priest saying, God is with us, and the other one is about to engage and says the same thing to the other group.

That's a little bit funny, right? I mean, you know. Well, I think humans and human brains in particular are amazing, amazing what human brains can do. This computer in our heads is spectacular. And yet it also has limitations. And I think, 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.

There are two pieces to this, provided 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 of my own life. I respect that. I think it's a very important thing. There is an issue here that I read reading Wilson, actually, E.O. 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 are submissive. And we believe that we need to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king, you know, some deity or something. That's his theory. I certainly don't feel any compulsion to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king, some deity or something else. That's his theory. I certainly don't feel any compulsion to be submissive to other humans.

I mean, I think in knowing the limitations of the human brain and cognition, I don't care how smart, I don't care how successful an individual or a group is, it's very clear that the human brain is limited in 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 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 again. 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. I mean, we ascribe causality to something that was truly random. It could have also, in another scenario,

the same turn of the head would have been to the other side and this person would be dead. But sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences that we cannot explain and we say, oh, it must be God that made sure that you and I met or that we thought the same thoughts and so on. 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. One was Barbara Chapman, my advisor, once treated me to an experiment. It was kind of a funny thing. Typical Barbara, you know how nerdy 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, not some movie on YouTube, although that's impressive too. People can look these up, but to just actually see life emerge from a set of cells through its own organizing principles, all of which can be explained by genes, transcription factors, the physics of the mitotic spindle, all, I mean, math and biology and chemistry

can explain all of it, but there was something truly spectacular about it that seems so non-random because it's not random. And then the other one is that, I mean, I guess I've had enough experiences with prayer and the consequences of prayer 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. Oh, 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. There is not just random stuff. I mean, they move according to laws that fortunately we humans were able to discover, which is an amazing thing when you think about it. Dogs did not discover gravity.

No. It's a little bit Costello. Okay. Costello was gravity. Yeah. 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. I recently have been looking at some stuff that C.S. Lewis, he was a man who was studying the sagas and the mythology of the Vikings and so on and eventually became a devout Christian, 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 this notion, no one can prove to me that there is someone there organizing my life minute by minute or second by second. I don't believe that. I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and randomness, beautiful ones. Having you and Lara as children is a fantastic randomness in my life.

Hopefully it wasn't too random. No, no, in the sense that you know children, you know children that come unhealthy, whatever. I mean, it's a very impressive thing. Yeah, the number of things that have to organize to create a healthy child is, it's truly a miracle. Yeah, true, true. Yeah, and I think, but a lot of it is random too.

I mean, the same set of parents can produce two different set of children too. Okay, I mean, that's a very, very important. Laura and 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 I would be unhappy, your mother would be unhappy with. But going back you know, I would be unhappy, your mother would be unhappy

with. So, but going back to this, I believe that indeed spirituality is important. I have a lot of access to that through classical music. There are times that I really believe that I can get very, very emotional listening to music, very emotional. You know, my wife always notices that when I do that. And I think that then you're having access to something very different.

Of course it can be explained physiologically by all sorts of resonances and so on, but who cares? You 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 gonna look like? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past?

Sometimes, sometimes. And there is a, I've always, because I left my family very, when I was still very young, I always had a certain nostalgia for things, okay? I met a, I became friend with a very impressive guy in France, Claude Jopard. I think he was the director of the Geophysics Institute and both of us had very similar parents

in different, you know, French and Argentina, but still, and similar educations. And I have sometimes a certain nostalgia that is almost melancholy about the way we grew up and so on. Melancholy. A little bit of that. I mean, I-

I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina, like you would have 10, 15 cousins over for lunch every Sunday. Yeah, yeah, I was very- 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, but I still remember her, and I think about her in a way that I'm not necessarily always very happy. I was looking at photos a while ago and there are pictures of her that is, you know, she's smiling coming out of the Pacific Ocean in Carmel. She took a walk and so on. But I reflect back in the past in that sense. I mean, and sometimes, you know, I'm sometimes I'm asked, how did you grow up?

My wife being Danish, she grew up in a very different way from upper middle class Argentines. So we reflect on that, the kinds of childhoods we had and so on, but not in the sense that, oh, I wish I had that now. No regrets. Well, not many, not many. That's good.

I mean, there is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else, which is if I look at my family, my brother state produced family, children, grandchildren, and so on. I came here and I produced children, grandchildren, and they are gonna be two diverging branches of the family. We should still get together. We got together last year for your birthday. Yeah, no, I know. That's two diverging branches of the family. That doesn't mean... What if we still get together? We got together last year for your birthday.

Yeah, no, I know. That's what is so important to me, yes. But I think about it sometimes. And when I go back and I see the lives, very similar to what I had, different perhaps, there is a certain sense of thinking about the past. But I also realize that if I didn't take the steps I took, I would be as miserable as some of my old friends that are really struggling even to find meaning

in what they do or even surviving economically. So I was really lucky. Well, so was that, because I wouldn't have existed because you wouldn't have met mom. That's true too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, maybe you would have, but-

No, no, no, no, 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 wanna come back.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So you love this country. I love this country. I feel very much part of this country. I'm very grateful to what this country has done for me, for my family, and that includes you and your sister, okay, and my wife. When did you become a citizen?

Oh, many, many years ago. And I really did it consciously, not because, I mean, they were practical things, but no, I really believe in it. I really believe it's an incredible country, and it gives incredible opportunities to people. As Elon says, Elon Musk, I'm also an immigrant, and very happy to be one.

Yeah, you've always been a patriot. Absolutely. And on the other hand, as I said, Argentina's complicated. I go there and a lot of smells and things that bring memories that are amazing. Food's not bad either. I mean, huh?

The food's not bad. Yeah, yeah, but it's also the whole atmosphere. And the first two, three days are an incredible experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on. But after a while, I also see a darker side to it. I must tell you that on the other hand, my country in law, Denmark, is also a country that I like immensely.

These nice people and pleasant and soft, very soft, especially in summer. But the Danes are also strong people. Like they're, the average Dane is so smart. I think the high school education there must be among the best in the world. Yeah. There is a notion of proficiency. People are proficient at what they do.

You go to a store, you have a problem, an airline or whatever, you'll get someone who really knows how to solve it. But it'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. 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. Well, it's good too. Yeah, it's great, it's starting to look like the UN with some extra, you know. Well, I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity. It was incredible, incredible.

Yeah, it's good. Yeah, so that was also good to be, as a child, to hear these arguments about politics and so on. Yeah, I hear a few of those now, arguments about politics. We won't get into politics. One thing that I did wanna 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. Still true for you, I should say? 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, 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 in trouble with my Danish side of the family or friends. Societies like the Scandinavian societies that are extremely

uniform in thinking, the word should is used all the time. Yeah, you should do this, you shouldn't do that. Good that you did it, you know, it's a very, they enforce behavior in a very, very particular way. It's not a hurting instinct, but there is a very, very strict Lutheran tradition of telling you what you should and you shouldn't do. So I know very few people, and I've been going to Denmark for many, many years, that really have iconoclastic ideas that are away from the mean, and they're considered odd. Okay?

Very few, including the physicists. And they have fantastic school of physics there. Niels Bohr was there. So it is a society that conformity is the issue there, right? So on the other 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 was on a level with Feynman and Gell-Mann, by the way. He used to have very strange ideas too. He used to say, global warming, what's wrong with it? The Sahara is going to be a garden. Yeah, the Sahara desert will become a garden. People will be able to eat all that food. Well, I think people hear that, but then they counter it against these very heart wrenching

pictures of like polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking, this kind of thing. There are more polar bears today than when Mr. Al Gore said that we're going to die. Listen, I'm not going to argue climate change with you because I have no knowledge there. 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, how are they going to solve it? I think so.

I really believe that very strongly. I'm an optimist when it comes to that. But when I'm talking about being politically incorrect, it's 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 smiling at them. But it's okay. Why not?

You know, who said that we shouldn't be like that? I remember encountering the first libertarians when I was already working as a physicist and they were saying to me, why should we, why are we afraid of the Russians? I said, well, you know, what do you think they're gonna invade the United States? Can you imagine Russia invading?

I mean, if they invade, how are they going to control us? You know, they had these arguments. They were very funny arguments, you know. Why do we need an army? Why do we need taxes? And I really thought that was so provocative, so interesting. Do you consider yourself a libertarian? In many ways, I like the idea of liberty.

I believe very strongly in it. I mean, this country was founded on that. I think that our founding fathers really believed in it, and I admire them for that. I, you know, 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. Why do you think that is? Uh-huh.

Why do you think that is? I think that they're... that they are so rational, they're often among the smartest people in the room. But they are not strategically smart. I've met at times libertarians that think incredible thoughts and they're living in Silicon Valley and they're poor. I mean, even though they are the ones who are supposed to. Some are poor, some are.

Some are not, but I'm saying it's very interesting. They choose presidential candidates, no one ever 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 about their arguments.

I mean, a lot of politics, as we know, is show business. I mean, in this recent election, it was all posturing. It was all about grabbing emotion. Yeah. It was not about logic, it was about emotion. Yeah, I have several of my people that, you know, they put all their money to freeze themselves. You gonna cryo yourself?

No. My dad and I have had this running joke for a lot of years because someone we know very well and several people we know well have set aside significant amounts of money to have their heads or entire bodies frozen on the idea that they're going to be brought back later Han Solo style. You've always laughed at this idea. No, but not only that, there's a colleague of mine at Stanford who accuses me of being

friends with a guy that is like that. I told this guy, I said, you know, he thinks that you're a bad influence on me. And the guy said, well, tell him that we are the ones who are going to come back and do what we believe. He's going to be gone. You're not interested in on me. And the guy said, well, tell him that we are the ones who are gonna come back and do what we believe. He's gonna be gone. You're not interested in living to be 200? It's not an issue. These people are interested in living

for another thousand years, so when they wake up, they see how the world looks. They read science fiction. So they are very interested to know what the world looks like once they wake up. Well, there are people in the health space that are trying to not die, you know, Brian Johnson and others.

That's a different story. Yeah. I mean, what's your thought on trying to live to be 150 or something like that? Well, if you can live, the issue is not the age, it's the conditions of your body and mind, okay? That's the issue. I had the misfortune, unfortunate, of 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, every dementia and complications that came from, you know, being an anorexic all her life and so on. So my father enjoyed being lucid until the end. And so he, you know, he didn't take care of himself physically so well. So the idea is if you live up to 100 or 150 or 200

and you can still do the things you 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, then it's very sad. But it can happen at the age of 35. So yeah, I'm not into a race to live forever. I want to live healthily.

I want to enjoy life. Enjoyment is the most important piece. What's the point of being tethered to cubes all over the place, you know, flat on a bed, and you say, oh, I made it another year of my life. I mean, that's not really a life, at least for me. Do you worry about or, and or wish for anything for me, for Laura?

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 a list of things I wanna have and I have them and I smile a lot. Joyfulness is this sense of being in yourself

and I would like that. I mean, you two are very different. Lara lives much more in the moment that you do for reasons, okay, it's her view of the world. It's her demeanor. Huh? It's her demeanor. It's very good.

Lara's focused on what she's gonna do this weekend. Yes. I'm focused on what I'm gonna do this weekend, next week, the next month, and for the next month. I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend? Yes. I'm focused on what I'm going to do this weekend, next week, the next month, and for the next month. 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 think you had a charmed life. And everything came to you since you were very little. And you exhibited behaviors and so on that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from the very beginning. I mean, it's not that you were a genius at chess or Rubik's Cube or anything. I know some kids that are like that. But there was something, something in there.

And so I think that, you know, learning to just relax and rest, but it's part of your behavior since you were little, you had these problems. Okay, I used to take, put you on my lap and say, it's going to be fine and say, what if I cannot do my homework? Okay. But you could. Or even my stuffed animals. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're saying that gave you tremendous- Needed to be organized and it could do- Yeah, it gives you tremendous- Well, I probably have, remember I had the grunting tick? Yes, yeah. Oh, yeah, that was- Yeah, I probably- It drove us nuts, yeah.

Well, I probably have Throw us nuts, yeah. Well, I probably have a little bit of an OCD type thing. I mean, not diagnostically 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 at Berkeley, once you told me that you were starting to run, but you wanted to run like everybody else

was running by how many miles. And he said- Yeah, 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. Yeah, I remember that. You know, but what's interesting is I'm not a naturally competitive person. It was just this idea. Like I've tended to want to know, 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, I published a number of papers to get tenure, like I didn't need that many, but I enjoyed every one. It's not like I'm not having fun.

I'm having fun. Yeah, this idea of pushing oneself to limits, the question is why? I mean, I think there is so much to enjoy on a regular life and the things that we have already. We have to work to get them the way we want. But I don't think that worrying for the sake of worrying or just worrying.

I mean- Yeah, I don't tend to worry. Well, you know what changed that for me in a major way? I mean, I've had moments. I've had moments. I think I can recall like I have a favorite, best day of my life moment. I won't share it here.

So it's not relevant right now, but Costello helped bring me into the moment. Like he would do these things that like I would delight in that were just so simple, like the way he would like fall over or 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 you were very connected to it too. I mean, I think that if you were connected to someone that has that property of bringing you down and so on, you 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 tended to be also kind of into the future, like focus on what's not quite there yet.

But I must say, I think women in general do it better than men, that they're better at like grounding to the present. Well, it depends. I think that my wife tends to be more anxious than I am about the future. So maybe it's not generally related. 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 have a podcast that is doing well. You don't have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years. Five years will arrive. 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. We're talking about a lot of things. But for many years, from the time I squared my life away and when I turned 19, it was like, okay, I'm going to get things right now. There's always been these milestones. You're going to finish your undergraduate degree. I did a master, then you did the PSU, then the postdoc, I'm going to get things right now. There's always been these milestones. You're going to finish your undergraduate degree. I did a master, then the PhD, then the postdoc, then you need to get tenure.

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. Oh, of course it's hard,

especially if you have that kind of temperament. Yes, and I think you need to train yourself almost to, I just had a set of words that are, it's a matter of bringing elegance into your life almost, to live it in a way that is elegant, is nice in itself, you know. That is important. One of the things I learned, I mean, you know, living with the Danes, Danes don't like you to eat standing. They sit, they set a table and they light a candle and it's very nice. It creates a pace.

Yeah, the ritual. The rituals, rituals are very important. And also the other thing that is very important and I discovered is to have something to look forward to. You cannot just wake up one day and say, 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, because he has a podcast, he does four episodes a week, plus he's an announcer of the UFC, he has a comedy career, he has three kids, he's in a happy marriage, and he's really into working out and all this. And I heard something recently, it was actually the forward to Cameron Haynes' book.

I was listening to it and he, it was amazing. He said, 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. What I say, elegance, yeah.

Life has to have elegance. Otherwise it's just disjoint moments. Sometimes it would be like that and it can be very creative too. But 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, yeah. I don't know. I mean, there's a beauty in steadiness because from places of steadiness, you can take good risks. Well, right. I mean, and I think that my mind is not in a steady state, but I don't have this notion. 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. That means to understand me. But it's very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I like that, no. I mean, I like to see things, don't misunderstand me, but it's very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I like them to do. Yeah, you don't seem to need to go on like jungle adventures

or like ice skate across Antarctica. No, no. Like you've never been one for like the kind of wild outing. No, 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, philosopher or whatever. There are these people who write articles about France, or Africa, without ever having left France or something of that sort. So I'm not like that, but I don't necessarily crave this physical adventure for the sake of adventure. I like beautiful things.

And I don't mind repeating the same beautiful thing every year if necessary, going vacation to the same places and so on. Yeah, you like to go back to the same places. Well, there is a difference between tourism where you 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.

I confess I've not ever done it. Well, and you know this about me. I've never taken a vacation. You know, to the summer house in Denmark, you can spend a week there just enjoying it. That's it. I know if I show you pictures, you know, from the window, they see the deer in the garden. You know, they just sit there, enjoying it. That's it. I don't know if I show you pictures from the window, they see the deer in the garden.

They just sit there, it's nice. So there's nothing, it's nice. It can be, you cannot spend a life doing that. I'm not a monk, okay? I'm not a meditator that will 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, yeah.

The rituals also are very reassuring because then you know it's predictable, right? You don't want a totally unpredictable life all the time. That's what people create rituals. You early on taught me about etiquette. It's something that years later, I think it was probably in the mid 90s, for some reason we were at the movies together

and we saw some people at the movies and they were wearing their bathroom slippers and more or less their pajamas to the movies. And I'll never forget, you grabbed my arm. Like you didn't grab it forcefully, we grabbed you said, you see that? I said, yeah. And you said, people are coming to the movies

in their pajamas. I said, yeah. And you said, that's the beginning of the end to any society. And I thought you were joking, 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, et cetera, they know that you took them seriously. And I don't think we really appreciate etiquette. As Americans, especially, we've somehow confused freedom of choice with discarding etiquette. It's not something that 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 hire the social class, they hire 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. I had a brilliant economist, the Italian economist working with me, and now he's in the East Coast, who told me he went to a wedding in Italy after living in the United States, and he went to his cousin's wedding and his uncle said, you show no respect, you're not wearing cufflinks.

He said, well, but my shirt is all, but no, no, no, go home and get cufflinks because you're showing lack of respect for not dressing the proper way to this wedding. So I think that there are expectations that people have about certain kinds of behavior. I mean, if you look at say the pictures of what's going on now in Washington Swan, you notice that Mr. Elon 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 Silicon Valley 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 wear a hoodie, because Mark Zuckerberg was wearing hoodies, makes you brilliant. And I think that the issue of dress codes elicit a certain sense of behavior in people,

as you said. I mean, how would you feel if you went on a first date with someone that comes in, you know, slippers and a bathrobe and say, let's go to the movies? It's not happened yet. Well, okay. So, what I'm saying is you don't have to overdo it. You know, that's another issue. And you have to also conform to the roles of the society.

I noticed, for instance, that in the East Coast, people dress much more properly than in the West Coast. You go to New York and you see men wearing suits and ties. You don't see that here, perhaps in LA, not in the Bay area, ever. Yeah, one thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina, men keep their jackets and ties on the whole night.

I'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? Okay, so that's my view. So I am not necessarily someone that advocates

wearing a tie when I go to work and so on, but I really believe that there are codes of conduct that sort of reflect many things. And you're also, you're projecting a message, right? You're giving, I mean, the idea of a hoodie at one point or the other, first of all, was hurting behavior. Everybody had to wear one because, you know, then you're cool or, you know, whatever. Okay. In adolescence, I understand it.

I mean, that's what you do as an adolescent. You do what others do. But as you grow up, you can also signal whom you are by the way you dress and you behave. Well, 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 wanna be popular. That's all. They wanna draw attention. Yeah, this is 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, like what their discourse on social media is like.

I mean, they wouldn't last two seconds on the schoolyard. They'd get hit in the face. You know, they said 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, okay? That's a different story.

Now, having said what I said, I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether or not the rules that say how you should dress to do one thing or the other 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 iconoclastic. I heard many stories about, we were talking about Richard Feynman who actually made a

case, I mean Mary Gell-Mann used to say that about him, to be so different that people will talk about it because he was very interested in people telling stories about it. Bongo drumming naked on the roof. Yeah, exactly. Not brushing his teeth. Exactly, all that. Okay, so he was very good at drawing attention. Okay, that's fine. You can also draw attention by dressing very nicely.

You know, it's all a matter of, I mean, I was reflecting, you know, we go to the symphony in San Francisco regularly and we are donors and so on. Sometimes you go to a concert, it's an amazing thing what you see there. Some people nicely dressed, some people dressed as if they just woke up, didn't have time to get dressed and got there and 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 we're sort of drifting towards, for lack of a better word, chaos, so social interaction chaos. Well, you know, I think the pendulum will swing again. The other day I was talking to someone, reading actually, that suddenly not only in New York, but in the Midwest,

men are starting to wear jacket and ties, not just for work, okay? They go on dates like that. So, you know, it's a pendulum. It goes back and forth, back and forth. I don't think we're gonna on dates like that. So, you know, it's a pendulum, it goes back and forth, back and forth. I don't think we're gonna end up in a time when, you know, you have to wear tails to have a breakfast or something.

I think only the aristocrats used to do that. But I think that, you know, it's an issue of how, also, how we perceive the world through the eyes of television and movies, okay? If movies start showing that everybody's dressed whatever, you know, people are gonna do the same thing. If movies start showing that everybody's dressed whatever, you know, people are going to do the same thing. If movies start showing, you know, the trends that we see in movies are the trends that

essentially society follows, okay? So I think that we, this is, I don't think we're going through chaos. It's going to 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 conservatism.

Right, right. 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. I've been to high table dinner at King's College in Cambridge twice. Everybody dresses properly, they wear gowns and the fellows are sitting at a top table

and everybody else and people love it. And we like to see that in the movies. Well, it's theater. Yeah. I mean, it's academic theater, a little bit of pomp and circumstance, but it's theater. And it's nice. 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 kind of a free for all. They want to see some order. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that there is a place for that. And some people will, I mean, there are designers and so on of clothing and so on that exploit this nostalgia for that kind of elegant world, you know, Ralph Lauren and so on, it's always, you know, 1960s fancy, you know,

club-type 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 Hewlett Packard, I was basically, I took a course in general activity and so on, but I was really a bit idle. So suddenly, I mean, in a context where people have problems and so on. But I was really a bit idle. So suddenly, I'm in a context where people have problems

and so on that I'd really like to listen to. There's a social component to work, as you know. So retirement means what, you know, you're a postal worker and one day you stop delivering mail and you stay home watching the paint dry, and that's not me, okay. So to me, I'm working and I enjoy it and you know, the day that will come

that I cannot enjoy it, I'll stop. And I think that again goes with this issue of getting bored with things that you don't like to do, because you've done it for a long time. No, I enjoy my life, but I don't think in terms of, I'll say something, my the CEO of my company said great guy Phil McKinney said we're not I don't work for the money here I said I don't either I mean I like to get paid but I don't like a

lot of work 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 it allows you to have the things you want to have and you don't have to, no, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I think money is an important aspect of our lives, you know, having it and so on. I lived for many years as a graduate student with no money and it was very painful, I'll tell you. Sometimes I didn't eat dinner because I didn't have any money. So, 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 some companies and make a lot of money. I don't really, I could have started in some company of these companies and make a lot of money. I don't regret that at all. The ultra-rich people that I know who are happy are still working every day. Right, because beyond a certain amount of money, you still have to brush your teeth like everybody else. Okay, you can dream of having 150 toothbrushes, but so what? Right, and you can only eat so many steaks.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that we all cover. The question is what do you do with your life? Now, you wanna travel? Well, you can travel. It's nice if you can travel in better ways than being an undergrad with a backpack, although it can be adventurous.

I had fun backpacking in Europe. On a limited budget where part of the joy of traveling that way is you're thrown into kind of street level interactions. I did too. And youth hostels and things like that. is you're thrown into street level interactions. And youth hostels and things like that. I went through Europe like this. I mean, I wouldn't change that for anything. No, I went through Europe as a graduate student.

I quit everything. I went to Europe in winter. And it was quite an adventure. In the winter? In the winter, it was horrendous. I had very little money. I stayed in places in Paris where the 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, yeah. And it was very funny. But I met people that were interesting and I engaged, you know, I still, every once in a while I hear from one or two of those people I met years ago in trains.

I went by train everywhere. I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter. Everything seems to lead back to Denmark. Yeah, it's a nice country. Well, now you have a Danish wife, so you have for a long time. And have for a long time. Yeah, many times.

Yeah, yeah. No, I like, it's a very different contrast to Europe, this central Europe and so on. Denmark, Northern Europe, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, it's a very special kind of country and people. Yeah, I like them a lot. Life is very easy there.

I like Scandinavia. Yeah, yeah, it's very nice, yes. Good natured people. Yes. Good saunas. Yeah, everything, yes. And sunshine, at least in the summer. In the summer only, yeah.

Any plans for the next couple of years? Anything that we should put on the calendar and make sure that we get in? No, because I cannot plan that well. I don't plan. I just either, maybe I inherited it from you. Well, I just move. I just move and 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, Gene, what do you think about this? He said, oh, sounds interesting, let's do it. And we're doing it. I am lucky that I get paid to do that.

But no, I don't have plans like that. I would like to, we would like, I mean, we would like to organize our life a little bit differently now that, you know, that we have a summer house in Denmark and so on. I still plan to travel there. I like Europe a lot, but I don't know if I can live there. I like Switzerland a lot. I want to go to Argentina every year, and I feel very close to my family. That's very important. 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, no, I don't have plans for anything. I don't know. I 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. And I think what comes through so clearly and we can start to get an understanding because these are hard concepts. And 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 also been able to lead a life where you're really grounded in the day to day and in reality. And I have to say your wish for me and for Laura, and I assume for everyone else to be joyful. I'll work on that. And also I must say it just hit me like square in the face during this discussion that I get such peace and I can really focus

on being joyful knowing that you're joyful. Like it's so clear like you have a joyful life at so many levels and that you've pursued what you wanted to do over and over. And some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were going to get into our issues and things like that. I'll just briefly say that, yeah, we've had our ups, we've had our downs, and we've certainly landed up and much, much higher than we ever would had we not had all of that.

And as I told you last year around this time on your birthday, when we all got together to celebrate, we're not just good, we're beyond good. So anything that comes up around that, I want to just go on record saying that 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 in immense detail. And I love your stories about scientists, both how they soar and also how human they are and how they're fallible like the rest of us. 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 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 that matter. It is a very fulfilling feeling, you know, 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'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're

going. But I think that it's nice too also that we are sort of on the same wavelength on many things. In you, I see more of a reflection of what I always wanted to be as well. So that's easier in a way. Perhaps it's because fathers and sons have that. We certainly relate. Yes.

Well, thank you. Thank you. I love you. I love you too, you know that. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. To learn more about his work, please see the links in the show note captions.

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