Lex Fridman Podcast
#486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life
30 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
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 lexfriedman.com slash 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, on to 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.
Chapter 2: How do biological systems help us understand intelligence?
To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com slash contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. With an 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.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of biological intelligence?
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 slash Lex. That's all lowercase.
Chapter 4: How do we define the origin of life in this context?
Go to Shopify.com slash 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 CodeRabbit, a platform that provides AI-powered code reviews directly within your terminal. The thing I can definitively recommend especially is the CLI version of CodeRabbit. It's the most installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab.
2 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 CodeRabbitCLI does is... 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 CodeRabbit CLI. at coderabbit.ai slash lex. That's coderabbit.ai slash 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. It 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 overdrink 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 drinkelement.com. 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. We're doing soldering, all this kind of stuff. Anyway, all these Uplift Desks, all of it makes me happy. You can customize them. the crap out of whatever you want. It's over 200,000 possible desk combinations.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of consciousness as an interface?
And so that's right. You know, mathematicians can perhaps interact with these with these patterns directly in that space. But for the rest of us, we have to make interfaces. And when we make interfaces, which might be cells or robots or embryos or whatever. What we are pulling down are minds that are fundamentally not produced by physics. So I don't believe that.
I don't know if we're going to get into the whole consciousness thing. But I don't believe that we create consciousness, whether we make babies or whether we make robots. Nobody's creating consciousness. What you create is an interface, a physical interface, through which specific...
Chapter 6: How do mathematical truths influence the physical world?
patterns, which we call kinds of minds, are going to ingress, right? And consciousness is what it looks like from that direction looking out into the world. It's what we call the view from the perspective of the Platonic patterns.
Just to clarify, what you're saying is a pretty radical idea here. So if there's a mapping from mathematics to physics, okay, that's understandable, intuitive, as you described. But what you're suggesting is there's a mapping from some kind of abstract mind object to an embodied brain that we think of as a mind. Yeah. As us fellow humans. What is that? What exactly?
Chapter 7: What unexpected competencies emerge from sorting algorithms?
Because you said interface. You've also said pointer. So the brain, and I think you said somewhere a thin interface.
A thin client. Yeah, the brain is a thin client, yeah.
Thin client, okay. So you're, a brain is a thin client to this other world. Yeah. Can you just lay out very clearly how radical the idea is? Sure.
Chapter 8: How can intrinsic motivations shape AI systems?
Because you're kind of dancing around. I think you could also point to Donald Hoffman and kind of who speaks of an interface, right? to a world. So we've only interact with the quote unquote real world through an interface. What is the connection here?
Yeah. Okay. A couple of things. First of all, when you said it makes sense for physics, I want to show that it's not as simple as it sounds because what it means is that even in Newton's boring sort of classical universe, long before quantum anything. Newton's world, physicalism was already dead in Newton's world. I mean, think about what that means. This is nuts.
Because already he knew perfectly well, I mean, Pythagoras and Plato knew that even in a totally classical deterministic world, Already you have the ingression of information that determines what happens and what's possible and what's not possible in that world from a space that is itself not physical. In other words, it's something like the natural logarithm E, right?
Nothing in Newton's world is set to the value of E. There is nothing you could do to set the value of E in that world. And yet that fact that it was that and not something else governed all sorts of properties of things that happened. his, that classical world was already haunted by patterns from outside that world. That's this, this should be like, this is, this is, this is wild.
This is, this is not saying that, okay, everything was, was cool. Physicalism was great up until, you know, maybe we got quantum interfaces or we got, you know, consciousness or whatever, but, but originally it was fine. No, this is saying that it was that, that worldview was already, uh,
impossible really for since from from a very long time ago we already knew that there are non-physical properties that matter in the physical world this is a chicken or the egg question you're saying newton's laws are creating the physical world That is a very deep follow-on question that we'll come back to in a minute. All I was saying about Newton is that you don't need quantum anything.
You don't need to think about consciousness. You already, long before you got to any of that, as Pythagoras, I think, knew... Already, we have the idea that this physical world is being strongly impacted by truths that do not live in the physical world.
Which truths are we referring to? Are we talking about Newton's law, like mathematical equations?
Mathematical facts. So, for example, the actual value of E.
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