Manolis Kellis is a computational biologist at MIT. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Manolis Website: http://web.mit.edu/manoli/
Manolis Twitter: https://twitter.com/manoliskellis
Manolis YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkKlJ5LHrE3C7fgbnPA5DGA

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Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:18 - Music and life
41:51 - The number 42
47:52 - The question about the meaning of life
50:32 - Are humans unique in the universe?
56:16 - Human civilization
1:08:22 - Mars
1:10:15 - Human mind and the abstraction layers of reality
1:21:08 - Neural networks and intelligence
1:28:25 - Ideas as organisms
1:37:49 - Language
1:49:04 - Legacy
2:03:55 - Poems

SONGS MENTIONED:
[1] Dwros Gewrgiadis - An imoun plousios - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7akZoEQv6jI
[2] Grigoris Bithikotsis - Ftoxologia - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyGR24O0KQ8
[3] Sto perigiali to kryfo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-GBPx_GXQw
[4] Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqe5NP86OCc
[5] George Michael - Careless Whisper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izGwDsrQ1eQ
[6] Gainsbourg with Isabelle Adjani - Pull Marine - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7MwHGHWgLk 
[7] Georges Moustaki - Le meteque - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV8fGf-N06A 
[8] Jacques Brel - Ne me quitte pas - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bq5mStroM
[9] Sting - Englishman In New York - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d27gTrPPAyk
[10] Sting - Fragile - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB6a-iD6ZOY
[11] Pink Floyd - The Wall (When the Tigers Broke Free) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_5DRKZI1Ow
[12] Pink Floyd - The Wall (One Of My Turns) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOay-7aqLks
[13] Sting - Russians - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHylQRVN2Qs
[14] Joni Mitchell - Both sides now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCnf46boC3I
[15] Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOnXe8ttmjY
[16] Alison Krauss & Union Station - The Lucky One - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcRZ_J_VgNc

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The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his fourth time on the podcast.

He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.

Since this is episode number 142, and 42, as we all know, is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we decided to talk about this unanswerable question of the meaning of life in whatever way we 2 descendants of apes could muster, from biology to psychology to metaphysics and to music.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

Thanks to Grammarly, which is a service for checking, spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability, Athletic Greens, the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends.

Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that the opening 40 minutes of the conversation are all about the many songs that formed the soundtrack to the journey of Manolis' life.

It was a happy accident for me to discover yet another dimension of depth to the fascinating mind of Manolis.

I include links to YouTube versions of many of the songs we mention in the description and overlay lyrics on occasion.

But if you're just listening to this without listening to the songs or watching the video, I hope you still might enjoy, as I did, the passion that Manolis has for music, his singing of the little excerpts from the songs, and in general, the meaning we discuss that we pull from the different songs.

If music is not your thing, I do give timestamps to the less musical and more philosophical parts of the conversation.

I hope you enjoy this little experiment in conversation about music and life.

If you do, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Manolis Callas.

You mentioned Leonard Cohen and the song Hallelujah as a beautiful song.

So what are the 3 songs you draw the most meaning from about life?

So there's really countless songs that have marked me, that have sort of shaped me in periods of joy and in periods of sadness.

My son likes to joke that I have a song for every sentence he will say, because very often I will break into a song with a sentence you'll say.

My wife calls me the radio because I can sort of recite hundreds of songs that have really shaped me.

So it's very, it's going to be very hard to just pick a few.

So I'm just going to tell you a little bit about my song transition as I've grown up.

In Greece, it was very much about, as I told you before, the misery, the poverty, but also overcoming adversity.

So some of the songs that have really shaped me are Charis Alexiou, for example, is 1 of my favorite singers in Greece.

And then there's also really just old traditional songs that my parents used to listen to.

Like 1 of them is, Ani mon plousios, which is basically, oh if I was rich.

And the song is painting this beautiful picture about all the noises that you hear in the neighborhood, his poor neighborhood, the train going by, the priest walking to the church, and the kids crying next door and all of that.

And he says, with all of that, I'm having trouble falling asleep and dreaming if I was rich.

And then he was like, you know, breaking into that, so it's this juxtaposition between the spirit and the sublime, and then the physical and the harsh reality.

It's just not having troubles, not being miserable.

So basically rich to him just means out of my misery, basically.

And then also being able to travel, being able to sort of be the captain of a ship and see the world and stuff like that.

the Greek songs, just like the poetry we talked about, they acknowledge the cruelty, the difficulty of life, but are longing for a better life.

And this is 1 of those songs that has like a fast and joyful half, and a slow and sad half.

And it's like, ♪ Ftoholo yia yiafse na kathe mon tragoudi ♪ So poor, you know, basically, it's the state of being poor.

I don't even know if there's a word for that in English, and then fast part is ta heria sou megalosan ke ponesan ke matesan.

So then it's like, oh, you know, basically, like the state of being poor and misery, for you, I write all my songs, et cetera.

And then the fast part is in your arms, grew up and suffered and stood up and rose, men with clear vision.

This whole concept of taking on the world with nothing to lose because you've seen the worst of it.

This imagery of psilaki parisopula, charastakorisopula, so it's describing the young men as cypress trees.

And that's probably 1 of my earliest exposure to a metaphor, to sort of, you know, this very rich imagery.

And I love about the fact that I was reading a story to my kids the other day and it was dark.

And my daughter, who's 6, is like, oh, can I please see the pictures?

And Jonathan who's 8, so my daughter Cleo, is like, oh, let's look at the pictures.

And my son Jonathan, he's like, but Cleo, if you look at the pictures, it's just an image.

If you just close your eyes and listen, it's a video.

And he's basically showing just how much more the human imagination has besides just a few images that, you know, the book will give you.

And then another 1, 0 gosh, this 1 is really like miserable.

And it's basically describing how vigorously we took on our life and we pushed hard towards a direction that we then realized was the wrong 1.

And it, again, these songs give you so much perspective.

They were basically, you know, sort of just smacking the face about sort of the passion and the force and the drive.

And then it turns out, we just followed the wrong life.

So, you know, growing up in sort of this horrendously miserable, you know, sort of view of romanticism of, you know, suffering.

So then my preteen years is like, you know, learning English through songs.

So basically, you know, listening to all the American pop songs and then memorizing them vocally before I even knew what they meant.

So, you know, Madonna and Michael Jackson and all of these sort of really popular songs and, you know, George Michael and just songs that I would just listen to the radio and repeat vocally.

And eventually, as I started learning English, I was like, oh wow, this thing I've been repeating, I now understand what it means without re-listening it, but just with re-repeating it, I was like, oh.

Again, Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror is teaching you that it's your responsibility to just improve yourself.

You know, if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change.

This whole concept of, again, I mean, all of these songs, you can listen to them shallowly, or you can just listen to them and say, oh, there's deeper meaning here.

And I think there's a certain philosophy of song as a way of touching the psyche.

So if you look at regions of the brain, people have lost their language ability because they have an accident in that region of the brain, can actually sing because it's exactly the symmetric region of the brain.

And that again, teaches you so much about language evolution and sort of the duality of musicality and rhythmic patterns and eventually language.

Do you have a sense of why songs developed?

So you're kind of suggesting that it's possible that there is something important about our connection with song and with music on the level of the importance of language.

It's not just possible, in my view, language comes after music, language comes after song.

No, seriously, like basically, my view of human cognitive evolution is rituals.

If you look at many early cultures, there's rituals around every stage of life.

There's organized dance performances around mating.

And if you look at mate selection, I mean, that's an evolutionary drive right there.

So basically, if you're not able to string together a complex dance as a bird, you don't get a mate.

And that actually forms this development for many song learning birds.

Not every bird knows how to sing and not every bird knows how to learn a complicated song.

So basically there's birds that simply have the same few tunes that they know how to play, and a lot of that is inherent and genetically encoded.

And others are birds that learn how to sing.

And If you look at a lot of these exotic birds of paradise and stuff like that, the mating rituals that they have are enormously amazing.

And I think human mating rituals of ancient tribes are not very far off from that.

And in my view, the sequential formation of these movements is a prelude to the cognitive capabilities that ultimately enable language.

It's fascinating to think that that's not just an accidental precursor to intelligence.

Well, it's sexually selected and it's a prerequisite.

It's like, it's required for intelligence.

And even as language has now developed, I think the artistic expression is needed, like badly needed by our brain.

So it's not just that, oh, our brain can kind of, you know, take a break and go do that stuff.

No, I mean, you know, I don't know if you remember that scene from, oh gosh, what's that Jack Nicholson movie in New Hampshire, all work and no play, make Jack a doll boy.

So there's this amazing scene where he's constantly trying to concentrate and what's coming out of the typewriter is just gibberish.

And I have that image as well when I'm working.

And I'm like, no, basically all of these crazy, you know, huge number of hobbies that I have, they're not just tolerated by my work, they're required by my work.

This ability of sort of stretching your brain in all these different directions is connecting your emotional self and your cognitive self.

And that's a prerequisite to being able to be cognitively capable, at least in my view.

Yeah, I wonder if the world without art and music, you're just making me realize that perhaps that world would be not just devoid of fun things to look at or listen to, but devoid of all the other stuff, all the bridges and rockets and science.

And my kids, I mean, I could be doing the full math treatment to them.

No, they play the piano and they play the violin and they play sports.

I mean, this whole sort of movement and going through mazes and playing tennis and playing soccer and avoiding obstacles and all of that, that forms your three-dimensional view of the world.

Being able to actually move and run and play in 3 dimensions is extremely important for math, for stringing together complicated concepts.

It's the same underlying cognitive machinery that is used for navigating mazes and for navigating theorems and sort of solving equations.

So I can't, you know, I can't have a conversation with my students without sort of either using my hands or opening the whiteboard in Zoom and just constantly drawing.

Or back when we had in-person meetings, just the whiteboard on my own.

The whiteboard, Yeah, that's fascinating to think about.

Mirror, Careless Whisper, George Michael, which is a song I like.

I had recorded a small part of it as it played at the tail end of the radio.

And I had a tape where I only had part of that song.

And I just played it over and over and over again.

so sorry to offend you so deeply not knowing this.

Anyway, so we're moving to France when I'm 12 years old and now I'm getting into the songs of Gainsbourg.

So Gainsbourg is this incredible French composer.

He is always seen on stage, like not even pretending to try to please, just like with his cigarette, just like rrrr, mumbling his songs.

Like basically entire sentences will rhyme.

He will say the same thing twice, and you're like, whoa.

And in fact, another, speaking of Greek, a French Greek, Georges Moustaki, This song is just magnificent.

Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de patre grec.

So with my face of, métèque is actually a Greek word.

It's, you know, it's a French word for a Greek word, but met comes from meta, and then ek from Ikea, from ecology, which means home.

So metek is someone who has changed homes, who are migrant.

So with my face of a migrant, and you'll love this 1, the juif erant, the patre grec, of meandering Jew, of Greek pastor.

So again, you know, the Russian Greek, you know, Jew orthodox connection.

So, Et mes cheveux aux quatre vents, with my hair in the 4 wings.

Avec mes yeux tous délavés qui me donnent l'air de rêver.

With my eyes that are all washed out, who give me the pretense of dreaming, but who don't dream that much anymore.

With my hands of thief, of musician, and who have stolen so many gardens, with my mouth that has drunk, that has kissed, and that has bitten without ever pleasing its hunger, With my skin that has been rubbed in the sun of all the summers and anything that was wearing a skirt, with my heart, and you have to listen to this verse.

Avec mon coeur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert.

With my heart that knew how to make suffer as much as it suffered, but was able to, that knew how to make, in French it's actually, su faire, that knew how to make, qu'il a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert.

Do you know, on a small tangent, do you know Jacques Brel?

And then, Namakita Pa, you know those songs?

So there's a cover of that song by 1 of my favorite female artists.

And she has a version of Numequita Pa, where she's actually added some English lyrics.

But again, Ne me quitte pas is just so, I mean, it's, you know, the promises, the volcanoes that, you know, will restart.

And- I love, there's not many songs that so, show such depth of desperation for another human being.

Je t'offrirai des perles de pluie venant de pays

And then high school, now I'm starting to learn English.

And again, there's, ♪ If manners mageth manners someone said ♪ ♪ Then he's the hero of the day

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, be yourself no matter what they say.

And then, takes more than combat gear to make a man, takes more than a license for a gun.

Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can.

Again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live.

Basically says, it's not the combat gear that makes a man.

Where's the part where he says, there you go.

Gentleness so brighty, a rare in this society, at night a candle's brighter than the sun.

So beautiful, he basically says, well, you just might be the only 1.

Modesty propriety can lead to notoriety, You could end up as the only 1.

It's, it basically tells you, you don't have to be like the others.

Be yourself, show kindness, show generosity.

Don't, You know, don't let that anger get to you.

So again, in Greece, I didn't even know what that meant, how fragile we are, but the song was so beautiful.

And then eventually I learned English and I actually understand the lyrics.

And the song is actually written after the Contras murdered Ben Linder in 1987.

And the US eventually turned against supporting these guerrillas.

And it was just a political song, but such a realization that you can't win with violence, basically.

And that song starts with the most beautiful poetry.

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are 1, Drying in the color of the evening sun Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away But something in our minds will always stay Perhaps this final act was meant To clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes through violence and nothing ever could for all those born beneath an angry star lest we forget how fragile we are.

It was beautiful And he's using the English language in just such a refined way with deep meanings, but also words that rhyme just so beautifully and evocations of when flesh and steel are 1.

And then of course the refrain that everybody remembers is on and on the rain will fall, et cetera.

And again, tears from a star, how fragile we are.

I mean, just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally.

Something, it seems that more meaning comes when there's a rhythm that, I don't know what that is.

That probably connects to exactly what you were saying.

you pay close attention, you will notice that the more obvious words sometimes are the second verse.

And the less obvious are often the first verse because it makes the second verse flow much more naturally because otherwise it feels contrived.

Oh, you went and found this like unusual word.

In dark moments, the whole album of Pink Floyd and the movie just marked me enormously as a teenager, just the wall.

And there's 1 song that never actually made it into the album that's only there in the movie about when the Tigers broke free and the Tigers are the tanks of the Germans and it just describes again this vivid imagery It was just before dawn, 1 miserable morning in Black 44 when the forward commander was told to sit tight when he asked that his men be withdrawn and the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while and the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives.

So that's a theme that keeps coming back in Pink Floyd with Us vs.

Us and them, God only knows, that's not what we would choose to do.

Forward he cried from the rear, and the front rows died.

From another song, it's like this whole concept of us versus them.

And there's that theme of us versus them again where the child is discovering how his father died when he finds an old and a founded 1 day in a drawer of old photographs hidden away and my eyes still grow damp to remember his majesty's sign with his own rubber stamp.

So it's so ironic because it seems the way that he's writing it, that he's not crying because his father was lost.

He's crying because kind old King George took the time to actually write mother a note about the fact that his father died.

It's so ironic, because it basically says, we are just ordinary men, and of course we're disposable.

So I don't know if you know the root of the word pioneers, But you had a chessboard here earlier, a pawn.

They are the ones that you send to the front to get murdered, slaughtered.

This whole concept of pioneers, having taken this whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that we're now treating as heroes.

So anyway, there's this juxtaposition of that and then the part that always just strikes me is the music and the tonality totally changes and now he describes the attack.

It was dark all around, there was frost in the ground when the tigers broke free And no 1 survived from the royal fusiliers company They were all left behind, most of them dead, The rest of them dying And that's how the high command Took my daddy from me And that song, even though it's not in the album, explains the whole movie.

It's this movie of someone being stuck in their head and not being able to get out of it.

There's no other movie that I think has captured so well this prison that is someone's own mind and this wall that you're stuck inside and this feeling of loneliness and sort of, is there anybody out there?

Just 1 little day, and you're down and in again.

Yeah, it's in the darker moments, the mind does feel like you're trapped and alone in a room with it.

Yeah, And there's this scene in the movie, which like, where he just breaks out with his guitar and there's this prostitute in the room.

He starts throwing stuff and then he like, you know, breaks the window, he throws the chair outside and then you see him laying in the pool with his own blood, like, you know, everywhere.

And then there's these endless hours spent fixing every little thing and lining it up.

And it's this whole sort of mania versus, you know, you can spend hours building up something and just destroy it in a few seconds.

And it's like, I feel cold as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum.

And then the music builds up saying, run to the bedroom, there's a suitcase on the left, you'll find my favourite axe, don't look so frightened, this is just a passing phase, 1 of my bad days.

It's like so many, it's just such harsh imagery.

And then, you know, anyway, So there's the dark moment.

And then again, going back to Sting, now it's the political songs, Russians.

And I think that song should be a new national anthem for the US, not for Russians, but for Red vs.

It'd be such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too.

It's basically saying the Russians are just as humans as we are.

There's no way that they're going to let their children die.

How can I save my innocent boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?

There is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence.

We share the same biology regardless of ideology.

Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Russians love their children too.

There's no crisper, simpler way to say Russians love their children too, that the common humanity.

Yeah, and remember what I was telling you, I think in 1 of our first podcast, about the daughter who's crying for her brother to come back for more, and then the Virgin Mary appears and says, who should I take instead?

This Turk, here's his family, here's his children.

This other 1, he just got married, et cetera.

And that basically says, no, I mean, if you look at the Lord of the Rings, the enemies are these monsters, they're not human.

We always say, they, you know, they're not like us, they're different, they're not humans, et cetera.

So there's this dehumanization that has to happen for people to go to war.

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Manolis Kellis: Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything | Lex Fridman Podcast #142