#486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Michael Levin, his second time on the podcast. He is one of the most fascinating and brilliant biologists and scientists I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with. He and his labs at Tufts University study and build biological systems that help us understand the nature of intelligence, agency, memory, consciousness, and life in all of its forms here on earth and beyond. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We've got Shopify for selling stuff online, Code Rabbit for AI powered code review, Element for electrolytes, Uplift Desk for my favorite office desks that I'm sitting behind right now, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, and Masterclass for learning stuff from incredible people. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you must skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, the great looking online store with the engineering stack that utilizes the beauty and the elegance of Ruby on Rails that DHH so beautifully articulated in my conversations with him. I continue to tune in to DHH's tweets and posts on X. Just a beautiful human being. And it's just nice to know that he's a big supporter of Shopify. Him and Toby have been close for years. And it's just nice to know that great human beings and great engineers can create great products that also make a lot of money and also bring a lot of usefulness to the world. So I will forever be celebrating Shopify, not just for the services that they create, but for the people behind the scenes that are building it. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lower case. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. Speaking of beautiful code and incredible people, this episode is also brought to you by Code Rabbit, a platform that provides AI powered code reviews directly within your terminal. The thing I can definitively recommend especially is the CLI version of Code Rabbit. It's the most installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab. Two million repositories in review, 13 million pull requests reviewed. Basically, a lot of you listening to this know how to generate a bunch of code. Some of it is AI slop, some of it is on the borderline. But what Code Rabbit CLI does is, as they put it, vibe check your code. So they do the review process to make sure you go from that AI-generated code to something that's actually production-ready by helping you catch errors. And it supports all programming languages. You absolutely must go now, install Code Rabbit CLI at coderabbit.ai.lex. That's coderabbit.ai.lex. Please go support them. Try it out, you will not regret it if you're at all a programmer or exploring programming. Friends, don't let friends vibe code without vibe checking the code, all right? Anyway, this episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that in all of my crazy travel I always bring with me. That's going to be tested when I go into the middle of nowhere for multiple weeks at a time with just a backpack. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. But it's so easy to bring with you. It's light, doesn't take much space. You just put it in some water. First of all, it makes the water taste really good. Second of all, it just balances the nutritional value of the water. So you don't want to over drink water without any electrolytes. It just makes me feel so good to get the right balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. When I am doing fasting for one day or two day at a time or I'm doing crazy long-distance runs, one of the things I learned actually is you need to listen to your body. You need to understand your body. You need to understand what it needs, what makes you feel good mentally, physically. And sometimes outside advice is good to incorporate, but really what you need to develop is the ability to sense deeply the state of your body, what makes it feel good, what makes it feel bad, have a really nice internal feedback controller that's able to establish a happy, stress-free existence. Anyway, get a free 8-count sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinklmnt.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Uplift Desk, my go-to for all office and podcast studio furniture. I don't know if I want to say that all other desks suck, because that wouldn't be very nice, but I really want to say that. Because I've tried other desks, and Uplift Desk is what made me truly happy. I now have six Uplift Desks for the podcast, for my Windows machine for the video editing. I have a bunch of Linux boxes, I have the robotics desk for doing soldering, all this kind of stuff. Anyway, all these Uplift Desks, all of it makes me happy. You can customize the crap out of whatever you want. It's over 200,000 possible desk combinations. I'm pretty sure all of them are super sexy, super nice in both sitting and standing positions. Plus the people that come to install are just really kind human beings. I just had wonderful experiences all throughout this everything. Everything involved with Uplift Desks has been really great. So please go support them, they're great. And the fact that they are supporting this podcast is like, what? I've been a fan of theirs for many years before they were supporting this podcast. The fact they're doing that now is just please go buy all their stuff so they keep supporting this podcast. Anyway, go to upliftdesk.com/lex and use code Lex to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, a 15 year warranty, and an extra discount off your entire order. That's upliftdesk.com/lex.