I’ve got a real soft spot for outsiders—the poorly socialized nerds, hackers, lateral thinkers and other weirdos who refuse to accept the map they were handed. Spiros Michalakis has spent years at Caltech trying to figure out how to give more people access to the ideas and institutions normally reserved for the best and brightest.

Spiros is a quantum physicist, researcher and outreach leader who can make an argument about assholes, Marie Antoinette, the Fellowship of the Ring and quantum gravity all land in the same place. In part one, we pick apart why shifting your point of view might be the highest form of intelligence.

Transcript

Spiros: But what stories do we need to tell each other to get to a place where we're no longer just hanging out with the same people over and over again? We've got the same cocktail parties and it's the same people. And then maybe we end up becoming Marion to Annette's. We think that that's what the world wants because it's caviar and uni, which is good, but still maybe there's other things—circles that we usually don't have access to or don't spend much time in and also feel uncomfortable. You're like, no, am I wasting my time here? What am I doing? Feels uncomfortable. It's not my thing. That's why also we're not friends with everybody, no matter how smart or successful for some people are. You're like, thanks but no, you're just an acquaintance kind of thing.

Pablos: That's a good menu there. I think there's a couple things that come to mind. On one side of it, we have been leveling everybody up. It's not politically correct to celebrate that, but in some sense we have actually there for a huge amount of the world and for of society—they're doing a lot better than they were a hundred years ago.

Spiros: Of course.

Pablos: And that's not to say that we should back off and that the job is done. But I don't think it's cool to constantly make everyone feel like it's all going so terribly when it's actually going a little better all the time. And so I think that's one thing that I take heart in.

And part of what I love about traveling is you kind of get to see that all over the world in its way. Everywhere I go I don't find places that I want to live, but because they're doing something completely foreign to me, and you realize that they're doing the thing they want to do that's comfortable to them—they like it that way. I don't have to like it. But I love that it helps you realize that nobody's got it all figured out.

The way society lives and works in Asia or India or anywhere in South America is just radically different. And even Europe is totally different than what we do in LA, which is actually different than what we do in New York. And I can sort of span those societies and still feel pretty comfortable, but if I get out of the country it starts to get a little weird for me—but not because it's worse, because it's different. So I think there's a kind of thing going on when you start looking at what is working.

We don't ever—no one ever says this, but computers are the most democratized technology ever. Those kids in Peru have the same computer I have. They have the same operating system, the same database, same programming languages, same everything. I have probably a lot more experience and I'm surrounded by people who know more about it. And the day that something new is possible on a computer, I might get it on it as in the beta or something, but basically the whole world's gonna get it, maybe in weeks or months, not years. They get access to that, and so I think in that sense there's things like that that are going pretty well that we should celebrate and build on.

Spiros: No, in fact, for me, the question even popped up. I think because people like you ended up taking care of the lower runs or Maslow's hierarchy of needs are helping to do some of this around the world. And there's still a lot of work to be done, because it's still very concentrated in many ways. But even so, even once you do have a democratizing force like computer or the internet or social media or crypto for that matter, to allow people to do transactions without centralized monetary monitoring, I still wonder that kid is gonna get it maybe a week later or even a day later—the update or the upgrade or whatever it is—and even if they don't have quite the same, sure, for computer that's not the issue.

The issue is that they do not have either the capital or the social capital to make anything more interesting with it. All the people I know that are like the billionaires or the multi-millionaires—every single person I know is not smarter than the other people I know. I have none of that. And sometimes it's just who they knew, who they grew up next to, who gave them their first—

Pablos: Totally.

Spiros: Right. All that stuff. And even individuals who came from nothing. I came from a very poor family in Greece. But I've achieved certain things. It would not have been possible without the scholarships, the ones I got at MIT once I got in, that use Davis for my PhD, Los Alamos, Caltech, all these. There was an infrastructure, God exactly right, allowed me. And it wasn't just hard work; it was smart work, and again the mentorship, all these things.

And so for me I guess it comes down to how do we open up that vision we have of the world of wanting to level up. But usually we look at the best and brightest. And now the new thing is that it doesn't matter where you come from as long as you can prove to us that you're one of the best and brightest, we will level you up so far. And then hopefully it'll trickle down to others as well.

But what I've seen is that the rarefied circles within which we spend time, we must admit we see the same people over and over again. It's not like, oh wow, hi, that was special. And even who knows whom, and the fact that somebody who's already in the club to get you in and all that stuff. That's how the world works, but I think it's such an interesting problem. It's trying to figure out how.

Pablos: There's so many things about it because on one side you could say that it's unfair we end up in these ivory towers or these social cliques or whatever that are elite. And I try never to join anything. I like to go visit; I get to go be it with your group for a day and then I'm gonna go to a different one. And I get invited to join a lot of things; I never join any of them because I'm not trying to focus on one cross section of society or something. I'm trying to be able to move to different places and I don't want to be just in the place with the rich people or just the place with the

The elite scientists or something. I like to be able to go, and I feel like it's great that I get to do that, but I want to be that interstitial connection that can also go to a junior high or hang out with the skateboarders or whatever it is.

Not to say I'm a role model of any kind in this way. I just thought that's what I want to be able to do. And for what I'm doing a lot of times, which is I'm trying to help a lot of times help inventors of some description get their idea to come to light.

And these, by definition, tend to be people who are very under networked. And maybe inadvertently, I sort of ended up being like extremely networked. So I could help them a lot of times by getting them—sometimes it's a customer, sometimes it's an investor, sometimes it's a team member or something—but I can often, or even just somebody who can validate that their thing is real or even add credibility to it.

Those are things that I think can accelerate some of these folks—that would be, it took me a lifetime to build that. I got Nobel prize winners on speed dial. Sometimes I can be helpful, which is not true for a lot of these other folks. And if I can be that bridge that I think can accelerate things, maybe I feel that sometimes that people did that for me at times, but mostly it's not even that I care so much about the people. I like to believe I do, but I mostly care about those technologies that they've invented and the potential for them. And so I'm just trying to help shepherd those things along.

But I don't know. I think you could easily go too far the other way is my instinct, which is that these social structures exist for a reason. And I find I'm kind of one of those.

I advance a lot of trust. Maybe you're kind of like that too. Like I take people, bring them in, cool, let's go, and then whereas like a lot of people I know are the other way around—they're like, do a background check, suss them out, see how they go, give, test them, get they're very suspicious or that way. And I—I'm the other way. And so to be able to be trusting, I also have to be able to recognize when somebody doesn't live up to it, and you have to either deal with that or cut them off or something.

And in a lot of these communities, because I go to so many different places, you'll see how is this community formed? Is somebody in a curatorial role? Is anybody welcome? Is there a process for getting rid of the people who turn out to be untrustworthy or assholes in some other way? And it makes a big difference; it totally shapes what these different communities are good for. And I don't even know that there's one right answer—that you probably do need a community for that's welcoming to assholes. They got to go somewhere. And maybe there's like a certain asshole ratio that's necessary, like everybody needs one. There's something like that—zero would be really bad. So something like that is a—those things come to mind for me. It's like I don't know exactly how where the target should be.

Spiros: For me it's, I don't know, I keep going back to the Fellowship of the Ring as almost like an ideal, where you have all these different races, all these different abilities, and in fact the ones that are entrusted with the ring are the last ones you would ever imagine. There's strong people, they're wizards, they're powerful kings, but not to them. But actually they have to work together, and there is again the Boromir, who's kind of like the asshole in the end, chip on their shoulder and all that stuff, but it's needed and has something very powerful to offer in just the right time, besides the betrayal and all that stuff.

Pablos: I have kind of an appreciation for assholes in a way because I'm a computer hacker and all my friends are sort of poorly socialized nerds who relate to people by arguing. And I'm sort of okay with that in a way that most people don't feel comfortable. And I sometimes find it refreshing after dealing with people who are well socialized because they're too polite.

And so they don't tell you what you want to hear versus what you need to hear here and small talk, whereas hackers are great because a lot of inventors in particular I feel like are beholden to what's technically accurate. So we have a north star we're trying to get to the truth of.

What's technically true, so I don't need to be nice about it. If you say something is not technically true, I'm going to tear it to shreds. And if you can defend it, that's great, but I'm never going to lose an argument over because I didn't finesse my argument properly—we're going to end up at whatever physics gave us. So I think there's a kind of discourse there that a lot of people don't get to experience.

Spiros: This is interesting to me again, being a mathematician, mathematical physicist. I'm surrounded by the worst of this. Basically at Caltech I'm pretty lucky to have pretty nice colleagues, and I have seen that honestly the smarter you are the more empathy you have, at least in my opinion, because I see empathy as the highest form of intelligence.

What you just said is almost true. What I have seen is the issue with this mentality of we have a north star is that it is actually completely false. And what happens in the end—and again as a mathematician I speak about this, on top of which everything else is based: computer science to its foundations to quantum physics, all these foundations, all that stuff—and when you go pretty deep you realize that the whole thing is actually kind of faith. Even the axioms, the fundamental aspect, they are useful illusions that we use.

The problem is this: that when you go very deep, because you can be very analytical and you use logic, and you can go very deep and create incredible structures on top of these axioms that are very useful obviously, you will never be able to see what is just to the left of today. Why? Because sometimes the most interesting problems and their solutions lie outside of the convex hull of all the possibilities that we have actually discovered, all the nodes that we said we just need to explore this, but this is the whole universe.

And we know this is true. I don't care if you're Newton—many think of him as the smartest person ever to exist and all that stuff—well he didn't think of one of the simplest ideas: general relativity. And I say it's simple because we could spend some time. I could tell you how we could have figured this out 3,000 years ago.

We could have figured this stuff out 3,000 years ago without any of the intervening mathematics or physics. We could have done that. And when you realize that and you're like, what are we missing?

If we are so smart, so powerful as calculational machines, almost like AI, certain individuals throughout human history, how come we miss some things that are just obvious? I think the answer is because we never think to ask questions that break the status quo, the intuition we have on the moment, because the smartest people told us these are the actions, these are the foundations. Just build on top of it. All of you have to work really hard like nerds until we get to the other side. It has gotten us very far as a human race. It's pretty amazing.

But I feel every time we hit a snug with something that is a millennium level challenge, the answer is not compute harder, set up and calculate more. The answer often is to go back to the foundations: what did I miss? I made an assumption at what point? It could be in the mathematics. It could be the physical intuition that everybody accepted. I accepted. We drank it up. I cannot see outside of it. I'm like fish in the water. I don't even know it's happening to me.

The idea, for example, even for Einstein, we're pooping on Newton, that you couldn't understand that it was actually time. We're falling in time, but it looks like it is falling in space that is pushing us under gravity. But it's actually moving in time. Time is folding into a partial dimension of space, a hybrid space-time dimension, and it carries you through because in time you cannot stop and you cannot go back, which is exactly the same feeling when you're falling. You can't just fall up. You cannot just go Wily Coyote and stop for a few seconds before falling.

Simple ideas we could have figured out thousands of years ago, and then the mathematics of differential geometry or whatever else was needed would have been on top of it. But it would have been the engineering task. The conceptual framework we would have figured out and would have had 2000 years to go way beyond where we are. Same thing with quantum physics, but we cannot imagine quantum physics being the epistemology running the source code of unreality, of the omniverse. Why? Because we never even thought until recently that maybe there is more than just one possible space-time.

And not just that, but maybe space-time itself is an illusion. Maybe there is underlying structures, relationships, which you see in mathematics, in what we call homotopy type theory or category theory. All you need to know in order to understand something is not the thing in itself, but its relationship to everything else, which defines its point of view.

Pablos: So if you were going to try and describe that, if you think about an analogy for that that is not math or physics, sometimes a good example is driving or sports or music or something. If I'm in an orchestra, I'm sitting here playing a violin. The percussion's back here. I have a different point of view. I'm experiencing something different. Everybody in the room is experiencing something different. We think of it as a shared experience. We think we're all hearing the same thing, but we all have this different point of view. From where I'm sitting, maybe the drums are a little too much. Whereas for the audience, it may be perfect.

There's a version of that when you're talking about it. I don't think we acknowledge it, but I sort of think one of the things you're getting at is if you say, all right, we have our north star of math and physics and what's understood. But the only thing that's happening in a place like Caltech is people are trying to explore the bounds of that. They're not trying to argue about the stuff that we already know. We learned all that. We accept all that. That's our foundation. We're arguing about the edges, and the stuff the edges is the stuff that we haven't proven. We don't have tests for.

So they're just ideas, and they're ideas based on, okay, we share a belief in gravity and in this entanglement thing and these other things we've sort of observed and discovered. But now we're at the edges out here trying to piece together the frontier. There is a lot to argue about there.

Spiros: If I may take you on that analogy, because I think this is really great, the idea that the way we try to learn what is going on, even within the hallowed halls of Caltechs and the MITs and the Stanford's of the world — anywhere but Harvard, I'm sorry.

What you're trying to do is the pursuit of truth. That's the big mistake, actually, coming from a scientist and a mathematical physicist. Why is this a mistake? If you were pursuing the pursuit of truth and trying to do it the way you were describing earlier, where we have accepted what we already know, this is good. So now we try to expand the balloon of knowledge, to go through the negative space and start seeing what else there is. But we have our center. We have our axiomatic framework, the core. We know how to expand away from that.

We would never have figured out that gravity comes from the curvature of space-time. Why? Because the moment somebody even said, I think that light should be able to gravitate, field force the same way that everything else that has mass, anyone from Newton's time or even the hundreds of years would have been like, heretic, get out of here. Why? Because the force of gravity is Newton's constant times the first mass times the second mass of the object divided by the distance squared. Zero times anything is zero. Photons have no mass.

It would not have been acceptable within that framework to be able to figure out what is really going on. Ironically, we would not know the truth behind what the essence of gravity if we were trying to pursue it with that north star. It is lateral thinking, almost adversarial thinking, starts from diverse minds that say, something doesn't feel right. It is so important, and I agree with you, the assholes in quotation marks are as important as everybody else.

In some ways we are people. We're like, we know what's true, got the shit right. This is not about feelings. This is how it works. That's very important, because once you grab onto the thread, then the kind of people that can pull this thread and pull humanity closer to that truth are exactly these people who are like, we're just going down this path right now. But we also need people who can zoom out and realize, holy shit, there is a multiverse of possibilities here, of paths that can end up at the same destination.

The question may still be the simplest question: why do things fall? Which is the quantum gravity, the theory of everything we're trying to figure out, is trying to answer the simple, stupid sounding question. And if we kept going at it only from one set of paths, whether you call it string theory or you call it Newtonian physics or Einstein's relativity or quantum field theory for that matter, and honestly, even just quantum physics. Quantum physics is not the ultimate theory of physics because it's just another epistemology. It's just a much more powerful one, much more general, just like general relativity is such a thing.

Based on a different foundation of topological spaces versus measure spaces for quantum physics. But that's the thing, that once you start seeing from the zoomed out perspective that many people often feel like, ah, this is for philosophers, or this is annoying.

To start out and calculate, go back and have an application: the world needs to be saved. And I come from a different perspective where it's good to do that work. I think it's important, but I think the world needs understanding more than saving. We need to be doing both, but if we don't understand—you were saying something I really liked earlier, that we shouldn't pretend to know what other people want in order to be happy. This is great, but often we may create barriers around different cultures, different ideas to flourish.

And for me that's the thing that I love the most: just having a conversation is a free power up.

Pablos: I like the way you describe it because one of the things I've run into, and I'm sure you have in physics: it's easy to find people who—the biggest heretics who've come up with their own unified theory of whatever, but haven't. It's very interesting because the people who assimilate to the community of physicists learn all the fundamentals. They learn the vernacular. They learn how to communicate in the language that's used in find upstanding physics.

And then you get these heretics who have a completely wild idea and they're not taken seriously at all because they haven't done the work to learn. It's very difficult to find somebody who's both. And I think that assimilation process is, I'm sure it's weeding a lot of people out by educating them. It's like, okay, we already know that doesn't work and here's what I could do, but it's probably also just conditioning them in a way that keeps them from actually being creative.

And I don't know if part of it could be that, and part of it can just be the social hierarchy. There's a lot of professional liability by the time you have a PhD in physics. If you say something that sounds crazy, you have a lot to lose. You're bought into that culture, that community.

Spiros: And I've even seen it, by the way, with individuals who have Nobel prizes in physics. Gerard de Hooft I think is one of the most brilliant physicists of all time. And I will hear even colleagues of mine, very high level people at Caltech, will be like, oh yeah, and he's a bit of his rocker now, he started saying some weird stuff and all that stuff. And I'm like, I don't think so. But even if he is right, shame on us when we miss out on listening to some insane wisdom. When you do not engage with another point of view, you lose.

You may say, I'm sorry, I really don't have time right now, I have my own thing to pursue and I want to see how far I can take it. That's fine. But to be disrespectful towards other points of view is basically, ironically if you're a quantum physicist or physicist, is the undoing of the endeavor, the journey, the adventure you're on, because quantum physics is a theory of knowledge that tells you.

It forces you to look at the same exact freaking thing from seemingly stupid point of view that you're like, why would I ever look at it from this complementary point of view? I already know the answer. And then you look at it at the same state, the same quantum state gives you a different answer. And you're like, wait, the light bulb is on, but for the people outside it's off at the same time, and we're both correct. That's what we call contextuality. But this is the most important realization.

Pablos: We're expected to believe that that's okay, but it's not okay to consider these other views, and it's crazy to think you're describing the scenario where someone has spent their whole career playing the game so much so that they even earn a Nobel prize and finally feel like, okay, now I'm finally free to be creative, and then they get canceled for that.

And it makes you realize there's so much going. I try to really be compassionate and listen to these folks. I've had experiences like that, but I also feel like I can't help you, because you sound crazy.

And doesn't matter who I can bring Stephen Hawking and he's still gonna tell you you sound crazy, because you need to do the work to learn the language of the

Spiros: Empathy goes both ways. There we go, it goes both ways. In order to gain the respect, you have to pay your own pay respects as well, because the issue sometimes with what we call the crackpots is that the first thing that comes out of their mouth often is, oh, Einstein was wrong, or this is stupid, or quantum physics is right, and it's that you're not gonna make any friends.

But most importantly, you thought you were a pioneer and somebody who is a lateral thinker and is thinking more broadly. But if you cannot see value in everything, including the very nature of the thing you're about to disprove, then you're probably not it. You have to spend enough time to pay tribute to the past and all the great ideas that come with it, all the great value that is there. It's real. In order for you to be able to go beyond, to provide the evolution, the next step.

Pablos: It's hard to think that through. On one hand, I sort of feel, at least in these cases, if something is true we'll eventually figure it out.

And it may a lot of times it takes us more than a lifetime to course correct. So burn that guy at the stake. A couple hundred years we'll figure out, oh yeah, he was totally right. Sorry buddy. That's kind of the game, and maybe that cycle is shortened to the point where you could live long enough to see the world figure out that you were right.

To do it quickly, I don't know.

Spiros: Just this conditioning: we do not need to do it quickly. We need to take our freaking time, enjoy the journey. This is the most fun thing. Probably the best experiences we've ever had, either of us, are there once we was the struggle was real, but you had a good team around you. There was ups and downs and were moments you're like I am the dumbest person on earth. Because you're fighting something that is not even a human being. Maybe a concept, an idea, you're thinking it's not even possible. Maybe it'll take another hundred years. Maybe we'll never be able to crack this code.

But just by having, for me, it was a panini lady at Los Alamos. They had no idea what problem I was trying to solve, something about the quantum Hall effect. Very difficult problem at the time. And I was just alone. I was left alone. I had one of the most brilliant minds of all time as my mentor, but he left. He went to Microsoft to help with the quantum computing efforts over there. And he left me with this insane, one of his 13 grand challenges in mathematical physics. And I was like, what the hell am I going to do with that now?

It wasn't people. I didn't finish this. No one's ever been able to do it. You take it on.

Pablos: Right. Exactly.

And by the way, I got to go.

Spiros: I mean, my goodness. And so the people that were left there, or even him, I could not get any help. Why? He had learned, because sometimes where you're that smart you have no ability of any empathy towards someone who's just starting, who hasn't even heard of this problem before, all the maybe decades of work that noble prizes behind it, all that stuff, and you're like jump in, and then good luck. And then even when I would ask him questions, he would maybe repeat the same thing, and it was as if I was talking to an alien. No idea. There was also nobody.

I mean she had that's what I'm talking about. Intelligence for me, the highest form is the ability to shift your point of view and look at what you already think you understand better than anyone else in the world and explain it, because that's when you truly understand it, when you can explain it to somebody. This is my task in life. If I can do that, that'd be amazing. Level up humanity to be able to do that, to explain some of the most cutting edge concepts, ideas from science, from anything, to somebody who is not just 12 years old but 12 years old from 3 000 years ago. How can it be, if it was that simple with a figure?

Pablos: That's a high bar, but you could start with you can start with me.

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Recorded on May 4, 2025