YouSaid · the spoken record

Manolis Kellis

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152
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2020-09-12
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2020-09-12
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  1. “It's exactly right. That's what she should be asking Are you struggling to achieve something great? That's the question that mom should be asking.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And the moral of the story, if you remember the movie, the moral of the story is that in the end, joy is basically trying to fix everything to make everything happy. And she's failing miserably and everything else is crumbling and falling apart. And the little girl basically becomes emotionless because all she knows how to do is fake happiness. And I think the very good analogy for our everyday society, where we're always saying, are you happy? Are you happy? My mom calls me and she's like, Man always, are you happy? I'm like, mom, stop asking this stupid question. No, I'm not happy You should be asking is if I'm fulfilled. And that's a very different thing. I don't go around being happy.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The path you recommend is Every single other bag is probably worse. It's the evil you don't know versus the evil you know. Like we all struggle with our own problems, but if you look at the bigger picture, It's just your path through life. And if you embrace it, the good and the bad, every single day, It's just joy. Sadness, misery if you don't have both you're not the complete human being. The last example I'm going to give is the movie Inside Out by Pixar. beautiful movie The one with a little character controlling. So you basically have joy and sadness and fear and disgust, etc.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You know, he sees the Christ appear in front of him. He says, Oh, Christ, I'm carrying all these problems. I'm carrying this big bag. Can you please take it from me? And he's like, sure. Let me just give you any other bag. And basically The person in Vienna accepts his own bag.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Children don't say, oh, I could have it better. They sort of Embrace the moment, not embrace, but sort of accept the moment And then they can have moments of pure joy in a horrendous war-torn country. And like so many people from these war-torn countries basically say, oh, you think you Americans are going to just come and just send us a bunch of aid and food, et cetera? Yeah, sure. That's helpful. But what do we dream of? What do we struggle for? We struggle for love. We struggle for meaning. We struggle for, you know, emotions and friendships. We struggle for the same things you guys struggle for. We're not just like every day waking up and saying, oh, I wish I had more food. No, that's just the given. I just don't have enough food. But what we struggle with are basically everything else. And that sort of gives you some perspective on life. It basically says, you know, and another story that my mom told me when I was a kid is this story about sort of this man who's basically”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Capable of fathoming? But if you actually put a seven-year-old in that situation, the look that I saw in these kids' eyes basically said, it is what it is. And I've experienced that with my own kid when he gets like my three-year-old two years ago, who's now my five-year-old, she was burned really badly with hot chocolate and coffee that just peeled off her skin. So you could actually see just her fragile skin had just peeled off. She was the happiest little kid. She was just going along with the punches.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So it's a dangerous slippery slope to think that way because it's basically being better than Jones's. And if the house next door has a giant car, then you want to get a bigger car. The way that I see it is slightly different And it's not even thinking about all the worst possible outcomes that could have happened but didn't. The example as you were talking about the concentration camps, the most horrible, I mean, one of the most horrible moments of human existence, I was thinking about pictures that I was seeing of kids in Syria, in war-torn zones. And you're looking at these kids. And again, I cried out loud, imagining my own son in the van. After a bomb explosion, watching his father die or his siblings die or losing his friends, it's something that we are not”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Life, you know, human existence through the centuries. There's no better way to be alive than now. I mean, we're complaining about every single little thing, but life expectancy, is that an all-time high? Sickness, all-time low, poorness, misery, all-time low. There's no better time to be alive globally across all of human existence. Number one. Number two, here in Boston, there's no better place to be alive. If you think about the amalgamation of science, engineering technology, the ridiculously awesome people you're bringing every week to your podcast, I mean, this is the ancient Greece of modern society.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And we're not ready to cope with misery. And the other thing that crying through these stories teaches you. Is that you don't have it nearly half as bad as you think? Do you see what I mean? Basically, it tells you that my mom would always tell me about how she was transformed as a teenager when she volunteered in the hospital She saw all these people at the brink of death clinging for life and helping them out to best she could and crying her heart out when they were dying and just sort of how that taught her the appreciation for what we have every day Waking up every morning and saying Life doesn't suck. My life is not nearly half as bad as it could be. And sort of embracing the joy that we have of living where we live in the moment we live. And I'm going to go further. If you look at the arc of human”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Not because of an accident, but because of a choice. The sacrifice to embrace the fact that not everything is cute and rosy and always ending well. And I think that we don't do a good enough job of teaching our kids that just life sucks and life is unfair sometimes. And that's okay. And sometimes I read a story to my kids. I read a story every night. And sometimes a story is horrible. And sometimes the story is good and sort of friendly and happy. And my kids always ask, what's the moral of the story? And sometimes there's a moral. And it's like, oh, you should be good or you should be nice. You should be helping each other, etc. And sometimes there's just no moral. And I tell my kids, you know what? Sometimes just life doesn't make sense and it's okay. And you can't comprehend everything. And I think this concept of how do you deal with bad days comes from the fact that we're taught, we're brainwashed into thinking that every day should be happy day.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And then she goes through all the life stores of the other, and she's like, No, no, just don't take anyone. She's like, I can't do that. I can, you can choose to bring your brother back. And he will be depressed for the rest of his life because he didn't fight at war, because he didn't go to that battle. And he will live without arms. And in the end, the woman decides to have her brother killed instead because he dies with her. I mean, this is... Insane. So, why am I giving you these examples? It's not a glorification of misery. It's expanding your emotional range It's teaching you that, and when I read these stories, I'm not a jerk. I'm crying out loud. I have tears. And my face becomes red from the pain that I'm experiencing through these stories. It's just so deeply touching to embrace the suffering.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “One of them dies from cold, the other one dies from illness. And you're like, how is that even a children's story? The next story, I'm like, okay, that's fine. Let's skip this one. So I read this to my kids and then I read the next one. And the next one is about this woman whose brother is at war against the Turks. And he is going to die. And she prays to the virgin, please don't let him die. And the virgin appears and she's like, no problem. Tell me who to kill instead. And she's like, anyone, anyone. No, no, no, no. Choose one. How about this Turk? This one has two kids, a beautiful family waiting for him at home. She's like, no, not this one. Choose another one.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So let me give you a couple more examples and then I'll answer that question. So another example is I picked up this book that I had from my childhood and I started reading stories to my kids. And the first story is about these two children. One is really poor living on the street and the other one is really rich, living in the house in the bright light above. And the poor one is wishing, looking at that window and wishing that you could have that house. And the other one is at the window wishing that he was free, that he wasn't sick all the time, that you could escape outside. It's only four pages long. And at the end, both children die.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “He died without honor. And my friend who was with me was listening to the song, and she's like, this is depressing. I'm like, you have to listen to another one. It's not Assad. And she's like, what? This one died with honor? So that's one example”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Where just, you know, MacGyver doesn't figure out how to disable the bomb and just explode. You just need more movies that are more realistic about the fact that life kind of sucks sometimes and it's okay. So again, growing up in Greece, I have been exposed to songs that are not just sad, but they're miserable. So one of them comes to mind. And it's basically talking about this woman who's lamenting in the early morning about losing the joyful kid, the joyful young man, who basically died in the civil war, in the arms of our own fellow citizens. And she's like, if only he had died fighting the foreign forces, if only he had died at the sides of the general, If only he had died with honor, I would be proud to have lost the joyful kid. I mean, it's devastating, right? It's like he didn't just die.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So, I'm so glad you're asking this question because it's something that our society does a terrible job at preparing us for. Every Hollywood movie has to have a happy ending. It is ridiculous. You can count on your ten fingers the number of bad ending movies that you've ever watched. And you probably wouldn't need all 10 fingers. We strive to tell everyone, yes, you can succeed. Yes, you're a millionaire just temporarily disabled. And yes, you know, the prince will eventually figure out his princess and they will have happily ever after ending. And yes, the hero will be beaten and beaten and beaten, but you know that at the end of the movie, the good guys will win. We need more movies where the bad guys win. We need more movies where just everybody dies”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “This Ovice Elitis basically wrote this beautiful poem about sort of going through life saying as you go through your journey impersonating Ulysses of his voyage, he says wish that the path is long and arduous. Because when you get to Ithaca You might realize that it was all about the path, not the destination. So, the rat review of life makes it all about the destination. It's like, how do I get through the maze to get there But the all-inclusive resort view of life is about the path. It's about wow, today I couldn't wish for a better set of activities all programmed for me to enjoy having my brain, having my body, having my senses, and the life that I have. So it's a very different kind of view. It's focused on the journey, not on the destination.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Choose to do I would probably pay an awesome university to give me an office there and just pay a bunch of super smart people to work with me even though they don't really want to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I would have exactly the life that I have now working my butt off every single day. Because it's so freaking fulfilling.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I would say that that's embracing the rat race view of life. So, a joke that we like to have with my wife all the time is we basically say we pretend that we're in this all-inclusive resort, that we've basically hired all these people to go on the Esplanade and play games because we enjoy watching people playing on the Esplanade and we enjoy sort of laying and looking at life and all the people biking and rollerblading and all of that. And then we've paid all these people in this all-inclusive resort that we live in. And then what are we going to do today? I'm like, oh, I've signed up for professor activities. It's going to be awesome. They lined up a bunch of super smart MIT students for me to meet with. I'm going to have a grant writing meeting afterwards. It's going to be awesome. And then she signed up for a bunch of consulting activities. It's going to be great. And then in the evening, we just get back together and say, hey, how was your consulting today? So in a way, that's another view of life of basically, wait a minute, if I was a gazillionaire, what would happen?”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So you should watch that symposium because the videos were transformative to me and to many others. So basically the advice that I received from all of my friends was so meaningful. Some advice that basically says Have to constantly maintain Unachievable goals. Goals that you can make progress towards, but you can never be fully done with. And I think that's almost playing into the sort of rat race thing, like basically make sure that there's more obstacles for your little rat persona to jump through. So that's one possibility.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Very hard to just sort of think about the next ask and the next ask, and it's all metrics, and you know, what's the number of viewers I have? What is the number of publications I have? What is the number of citations? The number of talks, the number of grants. It's very easy to quantify everything. And then at some point, you're like, this is real life. It's not a test anymore. And that's something that I told my wife early on, I was like, no, no, no. Our life is not going to be, let's put the kids through college. And maybe that's when I escaped the rat race. Maybe it continued being a rat race. Maybe the next step would have been, all right, how do I make sure that my kid is first in class? How do I make sure that they're, you know, into the greatest colors? And then, you know, they're into college. And then you're like 60.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And that's when I had my midlife crisis. That's when people usually buy a Harley Davidson. And they basically say, oh, I need something new, I need something different. And to be young myself, et cetera. But basically, that was my realization that it's not a rat race. That there's no rat race. It's over. I have to basically think how do I fully instantiate myself? How do I complete my transformation into an actual human being? It's very easy to sort of forget all the intangibles of life.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “No, no, no. I've known that I'm in a rat race for a long time. It's so easy to be in a rat race. It's so easy to be an undergrad because you have problem sets. We're all smart people. Problem said, it has a solution. Somebody made it for you. You can just solve it. Everything was made as a test, and you keep passing those tests and tests and tests and tests, and you have tasks that are well defined. The PhD is a little different because it's more open-ended, but yet you have an advisor who's guiding you. And then you become a professor. And tenure is a well-set defined set of tasks, and you do all that. And at 42, I basically had bought a house, three kids, beautiful wife, tenure. Awesome students, tons of grants. Life was basically laid out for me.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So basically, what happened to me is that I arrived at the end of the rat race. You know, life is a rat race. You constantly have hurdles to jump over. You constantly have tunnels and secret pathways. And I figure it all out. And eventually, as I was turning 42, I looked back and I was like, wow, that was an awesome rat race. But I'm not a rat. I basically got out of the labyrinth and I was like, I'm not a rat, turns out.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And we're in this profession. You work like a rat to become a full professor. And then when you're a full professor, well, by then you're basically a rat”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “That humanity has been taking. A path of transformation. And then I want us to think about what it truly means to become human, like the FZEN. And you asked me about what motivated my meaning of life symposium. What motivated it in part? I mean, of course, it was an inside joke of turning 42. But what motivated in part was actually a midlife crisis. So, the joke that I always like to say is Christos Papatimitriou, a famous Greek professor who was previously at MIT at Harvard at Stanford at Berkeley everywhere, brilliant, brilliant person, actually Costis's advisor. So Chris Papa Mitri likes to say that when you're an undergrad, you work like a rat to get into grad school. And where you graduate and you work like a rat to get your PhD. And where you're a postdoc, you work like a rat to get your assistant professor to jail.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “But I want you to see all of that as a continuum. Basically, you're sort of talking about the sort of individual transformations, but it's a path.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “That death. Oh, that's the easy solution, you know. So I want to touch a little bit on that point and sort of talk about this concept that life supersedes physics. And that the brain supersedes life. Basically, we have a brain that can decide to not follow evolution's path. We can decide to not have children. We can decide to not eat. We can decide to suicide. We can decide to sort of abolish communication with the outside world. I mean, all the things that make us human, we can basically decide not to do that. And that is basically when the brain itself...”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Gives us an extra little sense, of course. And now, if you go back to this history of ancient Greece, I mean, this transformation that happened, I mean, of course, the Egyptians had this incredible civilization for thousands of years. But what happened in Greece was this whole concept of let's break things down and understand the natural world. Let's break things down and understand physics. Let's basically build rules around architecture, about around elegance, around statues and tragedy. I mean, another question that you asked me in passing was this whole concept of embracing the good and the bad, embracing the full range of human emotions. And if you look at Greek tragedy, it's the definition of that. Drama, I mean, again, it's a Greek word, but the whole concept of some problems that are just so vast and large.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Know milestones, and I was talking about the latest milestone, which is LIGO last time of being able to detect gravitational waves and sort of being able to have a sense that humans haven't had before.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “If you look at sort of, you know, we're talking about these worms crawling around and then sensing which direction are the chemicals more abundant, chemotaxis. So eventually they grow a nose. Eventually they grow, I mean, when I say nose, I mean ways of sensing chemicals. That's probably one of the earliest senses. You know, we always talk about how deep-rooted it is in our brain. That's one of the earliest senses. If you look at hearing, that's a much later sense. If you look at eyesight, that's an intermediate sense where you're basically sensing where the light direction comes from. That's probably something that life didn't need until it got into the surface. And so on and so forth. So there's a lot of...”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “World must be elegant and there must be deeper ways of understanding that world. To me, that's a massive transformation of our species. Similar to the earlier transformation that we were talking about of even involving a brain, of learning how to communicate language or the evolution of eyesight.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Like trees have it right have it right. Olive trees civilization. And that takes us back to the question that you asked about sort of the transformations that have happened in humanity. The Minoant civilization is one of them. You know, there's this paper that was published just a couple of years ago by one of my friends that basically looked at the genetic makeup of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans in ancient Greek and how they relate to modern Greeks. And they found that indeed there was very little gene flow from the outside. And it's fantastic to sort of think about these amazing civilizations that transformed the way that human thought happens, that basically looked for rules in nature, that looked for principles, that looked for the standards of beauty, not human beauty, but beauty in the natural world. This whole concept that”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Every decade, would you choose that, or you would wake up and the world would be 10 years later every single day you wake up? It's the opposite of Groundhog Day, where basically you always wake up and it's always 10 years later.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “The point that I'm trying to make is that in intergalactic species, we'll probably find ways to engineer its biology in order to expand the way that we experience time, expand the time scales that we experience. And going back to this whole concept of, you know, would I like to live forever? Yes, I'd like to live forever, even if it was stuck on the same day. I'd love to live forever because I would finally have time to do all these things that I want to do. If living forever actually comes with a perk of watching the whole world evolve forever, I mean, that's a huge perk and it'll never get boring, just a never-changing world. And then the mind, you know, sort of experiment that I want you to do is to also ask, what if I wanted to live forever one day at a time every year or one day at a time?”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I mean, I'm just very naturally given the topics that we've approached, talking about the timescale at which this will happen.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah. But you're laughing about this. No, for sure. That is the future. You're talking about this. You're talking about exploring alien worlds and going to other planets. I mean, you know, when Sarah was here, she was talking about sort of going to other planets when we find this life.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Try to live each day as if it was Groundhog. I'm basically every single day waking up and saying, all right, how would Bill Merrig get out of that one? Well, you know what?”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “They're all in today. There's just so much happening in the world every single day, so much knowledge that has happened already that just to catch up on that will probably take me around forever.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “All time scale, just different time scales. You ask me offline whether I would like to live forever. I mean, my answer is absolutely. And there's many different types of forevers. One forever is, do I want to live today forever? Kind of like Groundhog Day. And the answer is absolutely. The stuff that I want to learn today will probably take a lifetime just to learn, you know, basically to clear my to-do list for the day.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “So continue along these transitions. What does the future hold in the next million years? So, the concept of us going to another planet and that taking three human lifetimes might be a joke if the human lifetime starts being 400 years or 800 years. So imagine”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “No, no, no, no, no. As we as a species start thinking about, I'm talking about these transitions that are happening, right?”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “No, no, not necessarily. But it's sort of an environmental tendency that's happening. But as we medically expand human lifespan The generations might actually be pushed instead of 40 years to 60 years, to 100 years.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “An evolutionary time scale, a lot. One of the things that's happening already is expansion of human lifespan. We have longer and longer periods before we mature, and we have longer and longer periods before we have babies. So intergenerational distance is grown from, I don't know, 16 years to 40 years.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “It's all a matter of timescale. And if you look at the human timescale, remember we're talking about Neotony the last time around, the whole fact that our young are pretty useless until maybe, you know, a few months of age, if not a few years of age, if not, I don't know, getting out of college. And then we basically hold them, enabling their brain to continue being malleable and infusing it with knowledge and thoughts as that period of neotany increases and expands. You fast forward, I don't know, another million years. So humans have only been around different from apes for about that long. Jumped another unit of that, another human gym divergence. What could happen?”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “If you look at trees, they look kind of boring and stupid. You're like looking at a tree like stupid. If you speed up the movie of a tree from spring until October, you'll be like, oh my God, it's intelligent. And the reason for that is that at that time scale, the tree is basically saying, oh, I'm looking for a thing to catch on to. Oh, I just caught onto that. I'm going to grow more here. I'm going to spaw out there, etc. Like I can see the trees in my garden just growing and sort of, you know, looping around.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “What genes should be expressed in response to environmental stimuli? In the order of minutes, and basically receive a stimulus, transfer all that data through this humongously long string of searching, and then sort of find what genes to turn on, and then create all that. All of that is happening in the timescale of minutes, basically, you know, three minutes to half an hour. That's the expression response. But our daily life doesn't happen on the order of three minutes to half an hour. It happens on the order of milliseconds. Like I throw a ball at you, you catch it right away. No gene expression changes there. You just don't have time to do that. So you basically have a layer of control built on a hardware that supports it, but that hardware itself lives in a different timescale than the controlling machine on top of that.”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I mean, you know, as a worm, he's hunting for food. Oh, it has plenty of free will. It can choose to, you know, follow chemotaxis to the left or chemotaxis to the right And maybe that's free will because it's unpredictable beyond a certain level. So you basically now have more and more decision making and coordination of all of these different body parts and organs by a central operating system, a central machine that basically will control the rest of the body. And the other thing that I love talking about is the different timescales at which things happen. You know, we're talking about the human epigenome before. The human epigenome is basically able to find”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I mean, this is such a fascinating question. Of course, we're talking about basic basic life forms and we're talking about eukaryotic life forms. And then the next big transformation is multicellular lifeforms where the specialization separates the germline from everything else that accompanies it and sort of carries it. And then that specialization then sort of has this massive new innovation like above the second mouth, which is this massive brain. In this massive brain is basically something that arises much, much later on, basically, you know, notochords, like having the first spinal cord, this whole concept that along with these very simple layers, you basically now have a coordinating agent. And this coordinating agent is starting to make decisions. And remember when we were talking about free will,”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It's an extremely simple life form. It basically has a mouth, it has an anus, and it has just some organs in between that consume the food and just spit out poof. Humans are basically a fancy form of that. So you basically have the mouth, you have the digestive tract, and then you have limbs to get better at getting food. You have eyesight, hearing, etc. to get better at getting food. And then you have, of course, the germline, and all of this food part, it's just auxiliary to the germline. So you basically have layers of addition of compartmentalization of specialization on top of this zine to get all the way to the earth zine”

    2020-09-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source