Part of the premise of this show, and we'll just get started with this, is kind of understanding

a little bit of how you got to where you are today in terms of what was your inner journey

like.

So, if there is any particular insight or moment of kind of clarity or awareness you

had, like some thought that hit you along your path to trying to become, you know, a successful

author and scientist, what was that that sort of hit in and open for you that made you

realize that that was a possible path for you?

Well, this is not going to sound especially Zen or centered or anything, but when I was

a kid, just in terms of background, I've sort of spent my adult life oscillating between

like a dead white male lab, neuroscientists, and doing stuff to neurons, and then spending

33 summers studying wild baboons in the National Park in East Africa, which was really my

first love when I was eight or so, New York City, using the natural history, and I could

just as easily have stumbled in there and imprinted on like geckos or horseshoe crabs or something,

but my mother took me into the primate wing, and there was this stuffed mountain gorilla

in this display, and looking at him, it struck me that I would really love to live inside

that diorama, which is pretty much what I then set out to do, and when I was 20, I was sort

of shipped off to my first field work, and it was sort of a central part of my life for

decades.

That's amazing.

What was it about that exhibit that grabbed you so much?

Well, let's see, I had older immigrant parents, a big intergenerational gap, I had never

met my grandfather's, they had died 60 years before or whatever, and this gorilla struck

...