#123 – Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness

Lex Fridman Podcast

Lex Fridman

Technology, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Science

4.7 • 13.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2020

⏱️ 131 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Manolis Kellis is a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
06:20 – Epigenome
10:28 – Evolution
15:26 – Neanderthals
27:15 – Origin of life on Earth
43:44 – Life is a fight against physics
49:56 – Life as a set of transformations
51:35 – Time scales
1:00:31 – Transformations of ideas in human civilization
1:05:19 – Life is more than a rat race
1:13:18 – Life sucks sometimes and that’s okay
1:30:16 – Getting older
1:36:21 – The best of MIT
1:49:01 – Poem 1: The Snow
2:01:52 – Love
2:06:16 – Poem 2: The Tide Waters

Transcript

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0:00.0	The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his second time in the podcast.
0:05.1	He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.
0:09.9	He's one of the most brilliant, productive, and kind people I've had the fortune of talking to.
0:15.3	A lot of my colleagues at MIT and former MIT faculty and students
0:19.5	wrote to me after our first conversation with some version of Manolis' Awesome, isn't he?
0:25.7	I'm glad you guys are now friends.
0:27.3	I am too.
0:29.0	And I'm happy that he makes time and is insanely busy scheduled to sit down and have a chat with me.
0:35.1	Quick summary of the sponsors.
0:37.5	Public goods, magic spoon, and express VPN.
0:41.0	Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
0:46.8	As a side note, let me say that I just got back from talking to Joe Rogan on his podcast.
0:52.0	My fifth time on there.
0:54.0	I also got a chance to record a separate conversation with Joe on this podcast.
0:58.9	We talked on both quite a bit about his journey and his advice from mine.
1:04.1	One of the things that I think made his show special is that he just had fun.
1:08.8	I mean, choices that didn't get in the way of him having fun and loving life.
1:13.3	I'm learning to do just that.
1:15.2	It's tough since I'm naturally full of self-doubt and anxiety, but I'm learning to let go and have fun.
1:22.4	Even if my monotone robotic voice sometimes sounds otherwise.
1:28.0	For Joe that involved talking to his friends, comedians, especially ones that brought out the best in him.
1:34.4	Duncan Trussell and the five-hour first episode on Spotify comes to mind as an example of that.
	...

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