Stephen Hsu — Education of a Theoretical Physicist

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the Information Theory Podcast. This is my episode with Stephen Hsu.

**Stephen Hsu** (0:05)
You're breaking news here, because I don't think I've ever said this publicly. So in 2016, when Peter Thiel was playing a big role in the transition, I almost joined the Trump administration. I was at a very senior level that would have required Senate confirmation.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
My guest today is Stephen Hsu. Steve is a theoretical physicist, a technology entrepreneur, and a prolific blogger and podcaster.
His main research work has been in quantum field theory, but he's also done pioneering research in computational genomics and co-founded multiple startups. I first heard of him through his blog Information Processing, which he started writing all the way back in October of 2004 So first topic, Steve, I want to start with the education of a theoretical physicist. There's a photograph of you at your Caltech graduation. You're only 19 and you're standing next to Richard Feynman. So there's something almost surreal about that image today because we think of him as a legendary figure. So my first question is, how did you end up at Caltech at such a young age?

**Stephen Hsu** (1:07)
Well, Feynman definitely was a legendary figure. It's a little mind blowing for me to actually think that, yeah, I actually interacted with this guy over several years. So I was always very precocious as a kid, so I was always highly accelerated. That was unusual back in my day.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:23)
So you grew up in the Midwest, right? But it was a university town.

**Stephen Hsu** (1:27)
Yeah, I grew up in Ames, Iowa, which is a college town. The local university there is a, it's actually Iowa State University of Science and Technology. So it's pretty engineering science kind of focused. It has a pretty solid physics department. My dad was a professor. So I benefited from pretty strong, talented, gifted programs growing up, but there was resistance in the school system to letting you accelerate. And so I was literally the first kid at my high school who was allowed to take courses at the university during high school. And by the time my senior year rolled around, I was spending half the day at the university. And so I took a lot of, I guess even today, it sounds pretty unusual. I took quantum mechanics while still in high school. I took courses in ordinary and partial differential equations, linear algebra I just taught myself. I took complex analysis, which is actually kind of an advanced class. I think a lot of kids don't take it anymore these days. It was pretty unusual. I think I wasn't that far from the core requirements for the applied math degree at Iowa State by the time I finished high school.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:32)
You actually finished high school like a few years ahead of time, right, I assume?

**Stephen Hsu** (2:35)
Yeah, so I was 16 when I graduated. Yeah, so I was young. I'd skipped some grades, and my older brother was very tolerant of me being in the same grade as him. And we kind of hung out. We had all the same friends. You know, despite all this crazy stuff that I'm telling you, I had a very all-American childhood because, you know, I was co-captain of the swim team and, you know, pretty good athlete, given that I was younger than all my competitors, and just had an all-American childhood in addition to, you know, studying all these advanced topics. I would actually characterize, I don't know if kids these days anymore, they watch these crazy movies about high school. There's a lot of big, whole 80s genre of high school movies, like Risky Business and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and stuff like that. And we actually lived that. So we actually did all kinds of crazy stuff in high school, drinking, racing our cars, you know, amazing pranks that we pulled off in high school. So anyway, I had a great childhood.
I couldn't possibly complain about my childhood. And when it came time to go to college, it was a much more naive time than today. So most of the smartest kids from Iowa would just stay in Iowa and go to Iowa State or University of Iowa. There would be a few odd kids, especially like kids of professors, Jewish kids that I grew up with. They were more ambitious. They somehow knew they were supposed to apply to like Ivy League schools or Stanford or things like this. But, you know, I had a close friend who got into Cornell but decided to stay at Iowa State, for example. I think there was another guy who got into Chicago and decided to stay at Iowa State. So that was much more typical of the times.