You have a lot of high IQ people who become marginal members of society,
and so what is the one psychological test that correlates with success in life?
Well, when you look at children and you look at all the different
theories about what makes successful kids, you realize that almost all the theories are wrong
because they haven't been verified, like, for example, high IQ.
You have a lot of high IQ people who become marginal members of society,
and so what is the one psychological test that correlates with success in life?
And I found out that it's the marshmallow test. It’s the test that has survived every challenge,
you track students for 30 years, for 30 years in different countries,
and you find that they are more successful, they have a lower divorce rate,
higher income, higher status in society. So what is this marshmallow test?
You get kids and ask them, do you want a marshmallow now,
or two marshmallows a few hours from now?
And the kids that want the marshmallow now tend to be those that want shortcuts,
those that don't want to do the hard work, they want the quick kill,
they grab that marshmallow, but the other ones say,
“no, wait a minute, if I wait two hours, I can get two marshmallows, I can hold out,
there's a pot of gold waiting for me”, they're not going to take the shortcut.
And so you say to yourself, “well, that's a test for kids”.
But then you track them decade by decade by decade,
and then you find out, “oh, my God, these are the ones who go to college,
the ones who hold out for that advanced degree, that don't want that simple a payoff now
but are going to delay gratification into the future”.
And so I realize that that's the key to success in life, not just science,
but in life, don't take the shortcuts. I realize every time I was struggling
with all these equations, there was that pot of gold
out there, I wanted to understand Einstein, I wanted to understand the quantum theory,
I wanted to be the cutting edge of science, even if it meant that I had to
not go play outside, I had to sit in my chair and simply crank out the math,
you've got to pay your dues. And when I think about Einstein,
he spent the last 30 years of his life chasing after the theory of everything.
He spent ten years of his life chasing after what is what we now call relativity.
When Einstein was 16 years old, 16 years old, he asked himself a simple question,
can you outrace a light beam? It took him ten years to solve that problem.
When he was 26 years old, he figured it all out, and that was relativity
and that changed the entire world. So talking about a marshmallow,
here's a man who said he's going to spend ten years of his life
answering a question, can you outrace a light beam?
And the answer is no. The speed of light is the
ultimate velocity in the universe, Einstein is the cop on the block.
So here's a man who really held out for that marshmallow.
We physicists are now probing the thought processes of the human brain,
we want to know about what is mental illness,
we want to know what is schizophrenia, why does the brain go crazy
and what is the creative process and what is intelligence?
And what we found out is that when we compare ourselves to animals,
we realize that our human brain really is different from the animals.
First of all, we have alligators, alligators understand space,
very good understanding of space, they find prey, they find mates,
they know where they are in terms of space.
Then you have monkeys and then you have mice and then you have dogs,
they're social animals, they have not just spatial hierarchy,
they have social hierarchy, they know who's the top dog,
they know how to defer to other members of the tribe,
that’s social consciousness. Then what do we have?
If animals like alligators have spatial consciousness,
if dogs have social consciousness, what kind of consciousness do we have?
And I did some research on it and I found out that what we have in the brain
that is different from animals is we understand time,
we understand the future, we constantly daydream, we scheme, we plot,
we constantly think about what could be. Now let's do an experiment, go home tonight
and teach your dog the concept of tomorrow.
Try it, teach your dog the concept of tomorrow, the next week, the next year.
And you realize you can't. Animals live in the present
and that's what I think intelligence is. Intelligence is being able to
map the future, simulate the future. So if you get an experiment,
people with low IQ and high IQ, put them in the same room and you
give them the same job. Rob a bank.
You'll find out that the low IQ people will probably do a much better job
of robbing a bank, plotting the bank robbery
than high IQ people who get all messed up with legal implications and stuff like that.
The point is that you can have some very smart robbers
because they see the future. And that's what we humans do, that animals cannot.
We constantly daydream, we constantly create worlds that don't exist.
Animals live in a world that do exist, that is the present,
they don't live in the past, they have almost no memory to speak of,
animals have very little memory, they have some, but very minimal.
We, on the other hand, we obsess with memory and we obsess with the future.
And to me, that's what intelligence is, the ability to see the future,
to simulate the future in complex, realistic ways. Right now there's a national debate about jobs,
national debate, people are hurting right now. And where do jobs come from?
Where does prosperity come from? First of all, if you talk to a lawyer,
a lawyer would say that prosperity and money come from lawsuits,
you sue Peter to pay Paul. I'm a scientist,
we say that wealth, all this wealth we see around us
comes from science and technology. From the steam revolution,
which gave us the industrial revolution and machines
to the electric revolution which gave us dynamos and television radio
to the high tech revolution of today, we've had three waves
of wealth generation from science and physics and technologies.
Now we're entering the fourth wave, artificial intelligence, biotech and nanotech,
these are going to be the drivers of wealth generation.
So I tell young people, if you want a job of the future, go with the wave,
the fourth wave beyond steam power, electricity and computers.
The fourth wave is artificial intelligence, nanotech and biotech,
that's where the jobs are going to be. Well, my fundamental philosophy is,
if it's not fun, don't do it. It's got to be fun
because ultimately that's what keeps you going, this is the problem that I can sink my teeth into.
And I would rather work on one big problem and fail
than work on little problems and succeed.
Some people ask me, well, what is the meaning of life then?
And I say to myself that if somebody gives you from up high
the meaning of life, it is too easy. I mean, is that all?
Somebody gives you the meaning of life from the heavens?
My attitude is that it’s self discovery. We have to reinvent ourselves, that the
meaning of life is rediscovery, that we have to recreate
ourselves rather than having it given to us from the celestial being in outer space.