 Boom, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are still in Boston, Massachusetts. We are very excited to be talking about a bunch of different things related to neurobiology, related to all different types of interesting subjects. I'm super excited to be sitting down with Surinouche Babakanova. Hello. Thank you so much for having me today. Thank you for coming onto the show. I appreciate it. Very excited, very excited. And we've been having some great conversations and I'm looking forward to learning more about your story, sharing your story with other people, sharing your interests and what you want to build into this world. Really, really excited. Let's do this. So tell us about yourself. Well, my name is Surinouche. It's a very hard name for some people to say, but I don't make friends with people who don't take a little bit of time and take a few neurons in their brains to memorize it. So I think everyone should be proud of their roots. That's what I try to make with this point. And what do you want to hear about myself? I'm just a human, simple like everyone. I don't think that anyone is like different from each other much, but we're different enough to be interested in each other. And I'm very excited about this opportunity because this opportunity is not just like kind of interview with me, but through this, I'm very excited also to learn more things about myself and also about you and about... Because this kind of like makes me think about the audience who we talk to through this interview. So like it's also making me to realize himself about the audience, about myself and about the people that we do our work for because eventually like we're not just in the vacuum doing our own thing. We wouldn't be a human if we did not have other humans with who we grew up. So basically me is not just myself, but also like all these other people and influences and people who gave the memories that I had and people who gave the knowledge that I had and emotions that I had and that what makes me, what makes my neural network to give me experiences that this brain gets from probably the same things that you get, but like I process it the way I do. So that's what makes me, I can tell you more about the people and things that I went through that made me who I am. That's interesting, yes. So I love how you already took us into this realm of thinking. So first of all, yes, Sir Anush, people got to know how to say names that are not Bob and John and Sally and Kim. You got to know how to say different names from around the world. It gives you a better taste of reality at its fullest and diversity. And then you also said that this is interesting that humans are just different enough to be interested in each other, but humans are humans. We're just evolved on this rock together and we're now figuring things out about where we can hopefully prosper with love. And then, yes, so tell us more about you in terms of like you were saying, you have this unique mind as everyone has a unique mind, unique stimuli, have filled their mind, right? So that makes everyone unique in that sense, their mind's unique. But then we have this unique perspective that you and I have been sharing as well that. And it's fantastic that we have the language to exchange those and, you know, it's fantastic to have that opportunity to like, that I say something and you actually understand me even though like how your brain pursues world is just, you know, electrical signals that kind of like makes a hallucination and a very limited thing that it gets through very limited range of, you know, things that every sense gets to the brain. So I don't know. Yeah. That's actually like, let's celebrate it. We have the language and actually it works. It is a very weird phenomenon that we can talk to each other and make sense of what seems to be a reality from one perspective and a different perspective. Thank goodness for how we've evolved here and how we have so many privileges that we get to live with. It's such a blessing. Okay. So, all right. So now we're talking about how you and I and a bunch of people that we typically surround ourselves with have an abstract perspective on reality. And you have sort of built yourself this abstract perspective on reality by getting yourself involved in a lot of different things at young ages, especially like the sciences and competitions. This is very exciting stuff. So teach us about this. Yeah. So I am a proud citizen of Armenia. I also have roots from Georgia, Russia, Iran, probably also Israel, as I know, so much as we can know. And I mean, in one sense it gives something. In other sense, people think that they are very, you know, like citizens of the world. They don't need to be tied to some place, but I think having those experiences of those nations kind of like being with each other, having some relationship, having this opportunity to be a bridge for them because you're not really theirs and you're not really theirs. You kind of have to balance. It gives you enough power and understanding about how the world works to actually be able to contribute it later on. So that's what I grew up with. I had to kind of like balance in between those and also parallel to that balance in between the things that were economically not stable at the times when I was born in those states. Again, post-Soviet countries and all the economical differences in 90s and early 2000s. You were born there right after my family left, a couple years after my family left. And after a little bit more time, most of my family left. So I was just like, yeah, it was very hard. Hard, yeah. But I mean, probably like one of the, something that can probably a little bit personalize my experience for you and our audience would be like, imagine our house didn't have light and we didn't have heat in our house. So that for us gave an opportunity to open our windows and there was no light pollution on the streets. And also it was like kind of the same because it was winter and it was cold in-house and outside the house. So it was, you know, it wouldn't matter to open the windows. And we were studying astronomy and looking at the stars and being like, you know, amazed by them. And those are like my brightest memories. I don't remember the cold and, you know, lack of food and stuff like that. But I remember the inspiration by like beauty and arts and science that was, you know, taught to me in that, you know, situation of like absolute, you know, like no food, no electricity, no anything. That's what kind of like, you know, if you go through that then like, and through a couple of things like that, then it's like a little bit hard to break you afterwards because you really know what is important. If you, yeah. So for me, important things where the arts, the sciences and being able to make those connections and comprehend them at some higher level and just, you know, it was just joy to be with them. All the competitions that you mentioned, like, I mean, again, we can list them, but I don't think it's important to list them because, you know, they were just the consequences of me just trying to, you know, spend my time with those things that I loved. And then that was just kind of like secondary. It came through that. And it came also through, of course, not just like me wanting those things, but also like the collective, you know. Of course, everyone competes for his own medal, for his own gold, but you have so much better results and so much better memories. If you actually kind of like work in team, you push through things together, you share and you go through struggles together. So those are the things that made me who I am, not like the things that are on my resume, like the end points of like I got gold or I got bronze or whatever. So, yeah. That's so important that you bring this up, this point of being driven by insatiable curiosity in certain fields. And that drive, actually you made that point about the drive earlier as well, about how if you set your goal on achieving an objective that is solely, I have to achieve this objective and you become so attached to this one aspect of it, rather than having a strong desire for something like just curiosity in that domain, things kind of fall more into place for you if you just have that curiosity in that domain and want to explore and experience a life. Okay, so as you study, and this is a really interesting perspective that you bring up about astronomy and just about like living somewhere where it's the same temperature outside as it is inside in a cold environment, because I think we talk about this so much, but we're just not fully aware of our privileges because we don't really look back in time of civilization evolving to get here enough. And we don't really understand the hard work that people went through in order to give us electricity and heat and internet and all these tools and texts that we have now. We don't even acknowledge some of the things that already have been done and they actually worked very well at those times. Those papers just have been forgotten. Those things, you know, those nodes when knowledge exists, it's just no one's making edges between them, no one's making edges of them with the current technologies that exist today to make these technologies stronger, you know, like synergize on those things to develop some of the things that would cure cancer like, I don't know, fight with the differences in socioeconomic status of people or establishing democracy not by using iron and using bombs and stuff like that but using actually some like, you know, novel technologies for that purpose. So yeah, there's a lot of work that we could do and everything is like available for us. We're just like not connecting the right edges at the right time. And I think the main problem for that and that's been also like, I went to credit all the people who I'm getting this ideas from. It was in one of the conversations of my PI with me that we are kind of like trying to do our next steps in our lives based on the skills that we already have but we don't need to like think about the skills to think about what's next step to undertake. Like again, that was also a big struggle of me trying to connect astronomy and biology while I was like a high schooler and simultaneously trying to become ballerina and people were like, oh, are you crazy? Like how are you going to like do well in all of them? But I proved that like, you know, everything is the same because the world like seemed the same for me. The arts, the way you meditate and dance or the way you, you know, see math in creation of the biological systems or creation of the physical systems in the stars are like super similar and like by just looking at them from very abstract, a little bit more abstract perspective you can understand and excel them all and they can actually help you to understand the other one much better because you apply the methods from studying the other one to study the next one. Yes, that's that multidisciplinary lens of seeing the world and it's also you brought this up, this really beautiful knowledge accumulation of collective learning that we've had as a society and furthermore is you have an opportunity everyone has an opportunity to be able to figure out what we in the past have learned and then potentially forgotten to apply and I think one of those things is the collective is a feeling of a stronger collective unity amongst each other. Potentially, who knows, who knows and maybe, I think maybe there were times before where we felt a deeper, more divine connection to each other and to something that transcended us and I think a lot of the vanity metrics and narcissism metrics have sort of hurt us in many ways. Interesting. Yeah, so building on the fact that you started doing this multidisciplinary perspective and lens and hustling a lot to your different interests areas you ended up applying to come to the United States and study at schools here in the US. So again, that might be some kind of name dropping you know, I go here, I talk to these people I'm under this professor and for some people maybe this is a goal they try to get in here and for me it was more of like let me try and prove myself that I can either can make it or maybe it waits for me at some other stage of my life let's check whether this is the right time for me to be in this place and of course first one of the things that I would like to mention is that people should not be afraid of going into spaces that they have absolutely no experience in if you really want to be there your passion is enough to study and do well in that I knew no English, I knew no way to write letters about myself I knew no way of writing essays about myself that are you know like qualified for these universities I knew no way to study in medical school and work on three jobs to have the money to apply to these universities I knew no way how to deal with things like you know misdiagnosis of cancer and waiting for your application results I knew no way how to get into MIT with your science recommender not submitting his science recommendation which is like required for you to be at MIT and you know I was just honest with what I'm doing and like what I want to do and that was just enough for people to recognize me and it was right for me and it was logical step for me to be here at that time and you know it was not like fanatic dream for me to get into here or be somewhere and I don't want for anyone to have that fanatic dream because it can be very destroying if you don't get into there if you are really good in like doing something and you are good because you're passionate about it then at some point I don't know you'll come here as an undergrad or you will be with these professors because they are leading people in this field as a grad student or you'll come for some problem or you just send them a letter and they will pay for you and you'll come and do research here or you will become a professor yourself or find a company or you know you just talk about it on a media and you'll come and interview them and just like you know be with them and actually spend time with them more than their students do so like there is absolutely non limitation on you being anywhere you just like identify the problem that you want to solve and try to find the best way that your like the space of your opportunities allows you to get there and then that way eventually would be very close to places like MIT, Harvard or probably some other places where super genius people who are not listed on this top ranked places but are you know like very interesting people and you will talk to them eventually if you you know just follow your passion instead of following some names so that was my lesson from this even though I got into somewhere but you know that was my what I took after that it's such a good story it's such a good story we forget about sometimes the the difficulty that that you know in your specific story the difficulty that sticks out to me is like a misdiagnosis with cancer a being a woman even be yeah there's a lot and this is a big where's a big uprising that's going on in terms of just adoring the feminine energy and being totally yeah I love that it's time it's time here we go I'm serious there's going to be a really beautiful synergy with both of them that's coming up that's a very strong feeling that I have yeah absolutely and that and then you know not having the scientific letter and not being absolutely like fluent in that as your primary language and figuring out how to write that adequately competing in so many different you know three jobs at the same time as trying to get over here you know this is these are the struggles that people from like you and people from around the world in many ways go through in order to like you said you have something in mind a problem that you want to solve where you want to go ish and you just got you go and you and you find different diverse past explore and figure it out and then things you know kind of collapse in on that one path and you go with that one and that's why you find yourself now at MIT in Boston in Cambridge and here and here you are you're okay so you're now in you're you're going in your third I'm in my junior year like in the middle of my junior year sitting physics and electrical engineering computer science yes as academics and I work was at avoiding synthetic neurobiology some cool shit some cool shit so there's no we can we can say whatever we want okay so so so physics now how did you decide that electrical engineering computer science and physics how do you how do you find out that that's you know where you want to steer yourself well that will also come from like my personal like again story my fears and the place where I'm at there are not many women in the sciences and especially in my family where my both parents are mathematicians and at that time it was cybernetics and applied mathematics what we call computer science right now especially my dad who was like super talented in this unfortunately both my parents couldn't continue their academic path because of the economic situation of the country different all the countries but because of you know this authority I was and patriarchal place where I'm coming from even though they are very supportive I always felt like you know I'm a little bit scared of touching math very firmly being very close to it because you know there are always people around me who are so much better than me so like I was just like a little bit kind of like trying to walk around it like I don't know astrophysics biology chemistry things around it not really touching the math and computers and I just was born and like when I was like two years old I was like just surrounded with micro schemes and wires and I was like so horrified of them I didn't know how to connect them what goes where why did things response to me like telling it something and I was just like so scared of that some form of intelligence I don't know something that does something it's kind of intelligent like this toy that I have no idea how can I control it so for the longest time I was actually kind of waiting it even though I was like good at math and when I was pushing computer science I was good at it for me when I came to MIT I knew that there's so much to the beautiful mathematical and physical tools and just like the understanding of the world as is in physics I don't consider myself the genius in physics absolutely not there's so many more people there you know like so much better in me and they have like this background but like I'm just like so passionate about the way how it teaches me to see the world and it's like so beautiful to like see how the math works such that it makes the world as it is right now and how you can use it to control for example biological systems to program them to make them do what you want them to do and biological systems basically you as human it's like you know something conscious or it is some kind of you know system that is made of something else I mean whatever it is quantum computer or some kind of computer that also has some form of intelligence or may have some form of knowledge and you can control it in some ways and it's like just so mesmerizing and I started from physics and I mean my background allowed me to do a little bit of research and like biological stuff but then I also like kind of pushed myself and was like okay I'm gonna like really try to learn computer science so I don't care about I mean it's still like levels and steps of realization because you can get trapped very quickly at MIT that oh you need to do majors or you need to like write senior thesis or you need to apply for a PhD I try to you know ground myself to my actual nature and remember that nothing of this actually matters and what I need to do is actually just take classes and just be with people and cool professors and cool teas and think professors that I just want to like click with and just have like really nice conversations with and if like some kind of majors come out or if I want to like continue doing what I do and if it makes sense for me to you know get a fellowship and get into a PhD or something I'll do that but like it's like so much secondary for then me kind of like you know understanding these things clicking with these people having this connection in the middle of the night with them or I mean in the middle of the setting night when we solve some problems or connect with my peers on those problems or trying to identify the problem or you identified it trying to find the best way for you to like get to solve the right portion of that or the life right level of abstraction to contribute to that and yeah so that's where I am right now I mean it says that I'm studying that but like this is what I'm actually like pushing myself to do it's really hard yeah it's really hard but you nailed it there with surrounding yourself with other really smart people and knowing that as you do that you kind of aim to be a problem-solver amongst your groups and you aim to be an abstract thinker filling yourself in in areas that maybe have a way that you can help contribute and that you can for sure learn and ask questions about and that's a really good way to end up you know finding yourself in a place that can at times be a little bit cutthroat in terms of make sure that you take as much value from people as possible and make sure that you have everything that you have figured out for your next steps your PhD your industry wherever you're going next so it's good to take that you know okay well who are the top five people I want to connect myself with yeah how can I you know slowly start learning from people like that and so taking maybe a different approach to a kind of a standardized system of how you go through academia yeah it's been a blessing to like connect to all those peers that even drop out of the school you know like who drops out of MIT well very nice people do actually do that and they I mean some of them are like some of the most inspirational people for me that like went and did their own thing and I mean my perception of how my contribution may be also changed like back in my previous years I thought that I can contribute only in academia but I mean being an entrepreneur and starting something and helping to organize people to also find those values and all those things that's mentioned for myself in themselves can be also a very right abstraction level to contribute at and well eventually I think I hope that I mean I think just like personality wise I may feed into that as well so like I'm trying myself in that kind of work as well right now yeah yeah it's almost as though you're constantly surrounding yourself with different groups of people that are pushing the boundaries of knowledge what's known and then you kind of you know kind of play and dance with them by hitting these balls of ideas back and forth until you scrape at the boundary of knowledge and you're like whoa that was cool has anyone thought of that before can we potentially send that over to other people and see what they say about it and that type of stuff that's how collective learning happened in many ways how the knowledge boundaries were pushed it wasn't pushed by people that sat around and did nothing with their time it was people that relentlessly wanted to know what the next thing was that humans didn't know over and over again and actually you had you brought up a good point in your story as well about how when there was just for you you were already around a bunch of different you know your parents and your parents were already inspiring you in some ways for you to explore math, computer science and whatnot but again it's just we sometimes we just need and this happens so often in people of all different types of socioeconomic statuses from all around the world just need a little bit of enthusiasm from someone if we see like another woman or another person of a different status than us that are in a position of of being in computer science or in math or whatever and we're like wait a second I can do that too and they're like you can do this too go do that here play with this get used to it it's explore it that's so needed in our world and we're slowly getting there it's exciting okay sometimes you don't even need to like have those people to push the boundaries and create new nodes but as I said some of the nodes or so many nodes already exist it just needs people to make the right connections and so many discoveries are you know just made by chance because those edges were not thought to like okay why is this very similar to that why this can contribute to this and they together can be something I mean VR was then so much earlier than Magiklip existed or I don't know the first touchpad was earlier than the first iPad existed like why why some of the things become viral so much later well maybe today some of the technology allows us to push those things and cure cancer or do something and there is a knowledge from 70s or 60s already exist in there is just like we're not linking that thing with the technology that we have today to just like produce that thing very easily well it doesn't take much it's great how you're you're in the last couple of decades and my mind for a moment went to well what about from 2500 years ago the meditation the ability to to understand that the self is an illusion the ability to become one with everything the ability to really feel that feeling then what then what if we were putting that into all our exponential technologies today into our geopolitical discussions at the United Nations today why has that lineage been so distracted and distraught in so many ways because okay I want to I want to go to this because I want to make sure we're like we're deep in knowledge graph the knowledge I love it because we were talking about that so much and it's such an important subject but I want to see where you take us here because I this actually has a lot to do with the knowledge graph and especially the outer ring neuro biology we don't really get that much about it quite yet we're starting to understand the universe in here and in the inner workings of our biological mechanisms are starting to get it there's a lot of cutting-edge stuff going on in this field a ton and so what are you what are you like what are you exploring in that outer edge right now well you you trapped me or like we having this conversation at the crossroad of my life right now when I need to decide which way which level of extraction or which particular path am I choosing to contribute it I know the problem that I want to solve I want to help people probably like futuristic like be able to augment themselves why one person should be disadvantaged from going to space or living in extreme environment of having AI near him by just you know not being smart enough not being fast enough or not having you know the radiation protection his skin or not having the right liver to process the right things not being able to see infrared for some reason why can't we change ourselves and make the decisions after we're born not by having CRISPR before you know like before where form embryos well one of the ways to do that is to be able to control the biological systems and program them and you know help assemble them in a way we can later transplant or like import somehow or like change the biological system by injecting something in your body so the severe like physical method and the other ways like more computational which is you know being able to teach machines and intelligence machine to be more biological more human like and especially the learning which is more important in machines to be more human like so the link between them because we it is much easier we don't want to fight them in the end we want them and us to be able to synergize with each other have a symbiosis with each other and have our interaction with them at higher bandwidth and have them also more powerful because they may help us solve some of the more like humanitarian questions and more important questions just for the survival of the humankind yeah there's a lot that you started unpacking there first is the augmentation side of things it's great to hear you being really passionate about that because it's a hundred thousand plus people die every single day and there's a lot of creativity that's being lost that we have just a little bit more time for people could give them the potential to contribute more to the knowledge graph of humanity and it could give them those last bits of relationships that they want to develop with their with their loved ones that they weren't able to because they potentially didn't get it done in the time period that they actually were able to preserve yourself and some form even after you die or be able to connect with other people and just merge in other people why do we have to use the language to communicate with each other why can't I just connect to you when you just like have all my emotions and actually leave everything that I went through yeah and that's sort of do we really care about the secrets that we have from each other and I'm really like in the bigger scheme of things yeah that's right in the bigger scheme of things I don't really care open up my everything and then yeah you decentralize everyone's everything then what then it's like oh we have black male what's your black male is useless there's no everyone is loving and caring and progressing so your black male is useless so totally the opening networks of each human being are very very interesting yeah we do love sci-fi a lot well it's sci-fi now and then it becomes reality soon and it's interesting to see that transition so as you talk about augmentations I also found it to be exciting that the way that you the way that you think about this is you think about things in a very like high level picture about how we can move towards making sure that we can have more of the bodily functionalities that we need for longer periods of time I'm curious how do we do that at the micro level do we like what are the best ways to make sure that we can have the proper skin or have the proper organs or have the proper what we need to to move on we are very bad right now and being able to make organs or add functionality to existing organs and I believe that it's really important for people to be able to have choice what to do with themselves after they are born so instead of changing your babies and deciding the color of their eyes I think a more interesting thing would be okay the person is already grown up I decided that I need to go to Mars well I'm not an astronaut I don't have like the health or I need to have I want to go to some kind of like distant stars so I need to like reach slowly for that I need to preserve myself somehow so that would look more like okay let me delete my liver or delete my eyes and then replace them with something else that gives me more information about the things super liver super eyes super liver super eyes super skin and I don't know be able to connect yourself with the spaceship or connect yourself with the computer that you work with at home that you can actually emotionally it's broken or when that data is not processing correctly and you can send signals in higher bandwidth or let me see if I can get this so you're on the degrees of freedom you love being able to give people what they potentially would want really want so if for example if there are people that want to just be their biological selves like totally cool like be just your biological self but for those that do want augmentations you're gonna have a lot of selection we're gonna have a lot of selection available for people to be able to actually potentially want to who wants to go to Mars or who just want to have supervision here on Earth or who want to be able to connect to everything that is all the time all these interesting things it's all about perception like if you want to feel like you're living a longer life like as fly does it feels that the time actually is like slower because just the lifespan is so short can we actually make the people believe that they are living longer but just making them live longer it's a little bit hard with them communicating to other people because other people are super slow for them then but also playing with those why do we have to feel that we see you and but why don't we have to feel some other things in our body why can't we consciously feel that we don't have enough insulin in our blood and then consciously make our progress to produce more insulin so things like that is there any way to connect our brain just better with our body without any augmentation basically like making more edges in the nose that we already have in the graph of our cells yeah that's right that okay so there's so many there's so many cool ways to take this okay you also had some time doing intern work with NASA which is very exciting in exoplanet work and it was analyzing with chemical compositions of atmospheres you know it was a blessing to work on that first of all because it was my first major exposure to computer science because I was actually modeling trying to model in Fortran which is like a language I don't know nowadays most of computer scientists know about that that's what physicists do use and then the other one is that you know there are many ways to do things and then that particular internship taught me that you know there even at the larger scale actually like finding lives in other planets you can build a 30 billion telescope or you can build like 1 million telescope and still be able to reach enough accuracy to detect that so what are the smart ways how can you treat the system of physics and chemistry how can you actually see the model and also connected to the economic you know opportunities of your company for example NASA how to you know make your decision based not just of abstract things of what we can do but actually what is the minimum needed to do to get like very high result so that's what I got from that and of course I love astrobiology and exoplanets because I was always trying to connect the my earlier like astronomy like astrophysics and like biology in some ways that was the first my attempt then space medicine now it's like more in you know just extreme environments and human centered that you bring up this really again a really good point about if you can figure out how to more cost effectively probe the universe or to probe biologists systems or whatever it may be you can gain so many more trials and people yeah testing because a decrease in cost of 30x means 30 times more tests on different ways that you want to probe and explore wow yeah that's so important so to actually have the smart people around you that are thinking outside the box we talked about that a good amount as well and maybe that that's actually quite important to bring up tell us about your experience here because we've we know we've had a couple people now that are at MIT, Harvard Berkeley, Sanford et cetera on the show and we'd like to ask about what their experiences were like at the institutions that they're like what is it like talking to other students here because you know you're you're like you know you're the first person from our media to come and do an undergrad your first person from our media to go and do an internet asa you know these are very cool things you're setting a precedent for other people to say I can do that too I can do that too and go and then when you get here you're like there's so many other smart people everywhere around you from different countries that are all their first people and stuff so what is that transition like when you get here and what has it evolved to in the last couple years? So it might be intimidating again if you think about it in like just you know oh did you get a gold medal or if you didn't get one I don't even talk to you like you know more in like well at MIT especially and like at Harvard MIT where I had a chance to study and anywhere in the world every person is like so unique and I always think about you know like Socrates sitting there and thinking about life and you know a small me here trying to do something with my life and I'm just like I don't know how many years 20 years old like maybe by the end of his life he wouldn't have all the secrets of you know like what life is more than I do even though like he might be like so much better than I am like he's the philosopher and everything so every one of us have the chance and every one of us is like a super cool and amazing person so I mean my conversations with students just kind of like are very like directed because there's no I'm sorry there's no time for bullshits there's no time to you know like hi how are you what's up there's more you know like okay let's set up a time I like you let's come and talk until 6am about the coolest thing and some people like the early stages of my friendship was like my best like the people that I am inspired most and like with who would continue our interactions it was a little bit intimidating for them because I mean I would just go like deep in their souls like psychologically if you like oh I think like who are they what you went through your life they're like how the fuck did you know like I never talked to anyone about this I only talk about this stuff only when I'm like super drunk at a party was you know like the best friend of mine like why you are making eye contact with me why are you trying to like know the stuff like can we just like talk about our classes so for me most important is just kind of like really know the person like try to if there is any way that I like can bring light to his life do that I really think that it's very important to have that because that helps me probably that's a little bit selfish to like continue being in love with the world in this state that continues having giving me opportunity to you know make those connections and those connections are more powerful than anything else because this person might be not you know like something today but he might become something else later or this same honest you know approach helped me to kind of like be very you know good friends with people who are much older than me or much more accomplished and I you know I I would never think that they would shout out to that that's so crucial if you carry that mentality throughout your life of shattering through surface level conversations getting deep to the psyches of people quickly that will take you so far so fast and people that are older than you people that are that are more accomplished in some ways they will want to talk to you because you will be more interested in who they are and what they care about and why they care about those things and they'll tell by the way that you listen by the way that you paraphrase by the way that you ask more questions and get deeper into their souls and I like how you how you brought that up as something that that more and more hopefully young people can start embodying into their culture and into their lives because nobody really cares about the three beers that you drank with someone else talking about the weather no no how about the conversation about what is the core driving principle of your life not weather yeah so sometimes that you know like people try to like have those conversations outside their work work is really like sucking everything every energy you have like it's filling your Google calendar with like a lot of to do things and then you have just a little bit free time so you kind of try to like turn off your brain something that also happens with me like I try to like just fill myself with things because I'm sometimes afraid to just talk to myself because I know the moment I talk to myself I need to make like radical changes and sometimes you know it's scary to make those changes because it's like brings you out of the comfort zone it makes you to say no to some people in your life it makes you to say no to some projects that it's comfortable to continue just because you know if you really like honestly talk to yourself you will like you know that you see the value of those things you see like you know you have the gut feeling the intuition I don't know where it comes from and how scientifically I can explain that but I mean I'm absolutely not perfect in that I'm still learning how to do that how to say no to things and how to how to talk to myself and how to like force myself to find time to talk to myself and then these conversations also are like one of the ways to like force yourself to like answer those questions because you know sitting down for a minute like what am I doing and like why am I with this person why am I like choosing this path why am I thinking about these fellowships or like these companies or whatever why not something else why don't I just stop for a second and just do something that my gut feeling tells me to do man that internal dialogue oh it's so crucial it's so crucial one has got to love oneself and if you truly love yourself you will have those hard dialogues with yourself we so frequently see people saying things like I know I'm unhealthily addicted to this thing and then they're not taking the action that's needed to get themselves away from that distraction and those sort of we like to call them clouds these clouds of addictions that we sort of that we put up prevent this beautiful sunlight from coming and giving us love this collective love that we actually have because we put up the clouds that get in the way and it's so crucial for self development especially in a time of like the early 20s of like discovering oneself the hedonistic feeling of the void of meeting with with drugs alcohol with Netflix with with doing more things that you think I actually help eating recently we had a friend that like went over to the kitchen and then realized that they took something out of the kitchen started and they were like I'm not even hungry I was just looking for something to do like what's going on we have abundance of food to such a degree that we eat food when we're bored oh my gosh well those are long times I mean again like so many things like that come in complexes I was recently in South Africa thanks to that opportunity and I randomly decided to climb the mountain and I'm very afraid of height and I hate like doing something very crazy like that because it's kind of like playing with your life and you've done a lot of crazy things in your life leading to get you here so this isn't too crazy yeah and I've been like climbing that thing and I'm just like so scared and at the time I didn't have any water and I only had like sparkling water and I hate sparkling water and I thought that I'm already on the top and I saw like that I still need so much and that part it's like so much more dangerous and you know those kind of situations just putting yourself up on the mountain and knowing that there is no helicopter that is going to save you that you are the only one or I mean again like the friend or like the partner or whoever in my case that was there to like help me to like go through that but you know it's basically you making the decision that they're going to continue the way or you're going to go down and down it's even more scarier or you're going to like you know do that while you have like this weird mental state with like all this like a lot of sun happening or you're actually going to drink the sparkling water because that's essential for you and you just don't feel that it's sparkling it just tastes like water and I was like damn being in that like situation makes you to kind of like disregard those small things and just you know like believe in yourself and concentrate on like one step at a time and you are able to make it and you know same in our lives you know we just there is there are the paths and then we can just like imagine like which one we can be in which one we can go at and yeah the resources it's just something that keeps our life it's it is something good and you know all this like culture was like food and everything and you can still keep it but it's not worth it to keep it in your life unless you really set for a second and challenge the idea of why do you keep it in your life like all this like traditions and challenge why is it in your life yeah like all the things why do I like wear clothes why do I like want to marry why do I want to have kids why do I want to do this PHD company why do I want to have hair why do I want to wear rings why do I want to talk to people like is it's good stuff you can still continue doing that but like did you think actually why and established it for yourself and I mean I am absolutely not best person to that's right it's a very good that does all of that but like keep pressing oneself with questions yeah yeah refine one's own spirit that they carry themselves with by asking self questions small questions like silly questions and then you're like why are we doing my why are we here even those questions like that can drive a deeper purpose or it's meaning you brought up the mountain analogy the mountain analogy is so good both that you got to keep climbing so that you have a great experience and that you conquer your fear because you're pushing a boundary over and over again and it's teaching you more and more about life but yet also with whatever you set to accomplish when you do look back the point of looking back to see how far you're going and not to go back and say that's more comfortable I should go that way no towards discomfort yeah towards risk towards a good well calculated way of growth is way way more important okay let's let's make sure we touch on this as well what is your what is this like entrepreneurial drive that you have with you what what would be an ideal thing that you build into the world that you could look back at your life on and be like yeah again this thing may be something that I just think of at the stage of my life and can be that very different later but like from the experiences and like thoughts that I had so far like this is something that I think of right now and I mean if I pursue that and that's a mistake I mean that's fine because I had this much knowledge and that was my best decision that I could make so at this point in my life I mean I did baby steps we started the sapiens thing was Logan Ford co-founder for the first human augmentation club at MIT and it's funny that no such club existed before and no one there's so many cool people from all the different disciplines that are so excited about it and know so much about different aspects of it or people who are very who want to devote their lives to it but they didn't actually know that it's actually a thing and you know like so many things are happening in that area right now and they thought it was just like very sci-fi and you know we better go to like some other relevant things based on our skill set so that's been amazing so far and I think being able to work with a group of interdisciplinary people have all those various disciplines that are kind of like surrounding the problem that we want to tackle because those disciplines and nodes in this graph are not connected to each other and be that organizational driving force for them to connect those nodes having a company that would allow people to change their buddies as they will I mean I'm kind of human centered because I just like believe in humans and want them to be you know like probably my most contribution can be for humans not to kind of like either kill each other or be disappointed in themselves but actually allow them to be the better selves they are well that's probably what I would like to do beautiful I like how you brought it to the to sapiens because you do seem like the one that wants to link together the humans that enable the different entrepreneurial technological processes to flourish across different disciplines and whatnot that's very cool none of those companies are human centered and none of those companies are like broad enough that they exist today are broad enough to like encompass all those things or I hope that because of the chance my age allows me to like live up to that point when some of the experiments that I think are going to be crucial to get to the next step by the time when I have enough knowledge to contribute in this way so yeah but maybe something is going to happen and tomorrow there is going to be something else and will convince me that I have to just go to the moon and do some art project well I'm with you socketed the moon yeah that's right no no um anything totes totes totes go to the Himalayas and just sit there and like just meditate for 20 years that's the best thing well I'll do that if I get convinced that's the thing there's a good blend to do between that and between some sort of influencing civilization and a good trajectory okay a couple questions on the way out this wouldn't be simulation if we didn't ask you are we in a simulation um well you're like now pinching the most hurt the most why does it hurt the most because in one way it's like very disappointing but like if it's just a I mean it is a simulation because I mean we are well okay so because you didn't clarify in which like what do you mean by stimulation I will say yes and a simulation in a sense that every time we choose a path in our lives and I believe that there is a portion of you know like our choice nothing is predetermined or we would just kind of like be very depressed so like there are different ways and we already thought out the way that would lead us somewhere and hopefully made the logical decisions so that simulation was already run so we are today living in simulation every second I'm living in a simulation that I run in my brain like kind of like very quickly that okay what's gonna happen next second you know like should I sit on this chair continue sitting on this chair or should I run away because something is gonna happen very bad here well like I live in the simulation that I thought about before so yes we live in simulation in that sense I kind of like avoided that like fair okay last question what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world I love sleeping but what I love in sleeping is that if you think about some things before you sleep if you are very tired then you sleep and then there's like this time when you just like wake up and like go sleep back and like wake up again and go sleep back it's lucid dreaming or something and in my dreams I sleep through like this crazy action movies I go to different planets crazy stuff happens with me I go to different scales I go to like different like kind of like cell scale stuff I like touch like different molecules and things and in there I'm able to you know like we think that we want money and jewels and you know like what girls want or like what people want but well like I'm able to simulate it all in my brain and kind of like you know be with those amorphous things for a little bit and when I wake up it makes me think that well I always can do that in my brain you know what more interesting thing can I do that my brain couldn't simulate yet can I use some other technology to create something new that I cannot just do with my brain because all of those banal things I can just run in my brain when I sleep so I can just like make myself sleep on time and like just live in this other world in this other version of myself that is you know living in the dream so it's very beautiful to have that power to do that so yeah I think we all want a peek into Syranusha's dreams hold on a peek in there seems like it's a constant state of DMT in there that's awesome okay okay and that's this has been great thank you I hope so it's been great thank you no not at all this has been fantastic thank you for joining us on this show thank you so much yes we greatly appreciate having you thank you everyone go check out some of the links below to Syranusha also let us know your thoughts on the episode give us your comments below we'd love to hear from you also go and build the future go and manifest your destiny into the world everyone much love and we'll see you soon peace that's it