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 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 being like a dead white male lab neuroscientist

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, Museum of 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 cap I had

never met my grandfathers they They had died 60 years before or whatever and this

...