My friend Richard Feynman | Leonard Susskind | TEDxCaltech

I can't see the audience and I hate that.

How many great grandparents are there
in the audience?

I can't see anything.

Okay,
you probably wonder why I am sitting,

the answer is,

because I'm a great grandfather,

not a good grandfather,
a great grandfather.

And everybody knows great grandparents
get to do any damn thing they please,

including
following my own grandfather's advice,

which was whenever you give a talk

to thousands of people
about Richard Feynman,

sustain yourself. (laughter, applauds)

This is an extremely slack operation,
and I'm a slack man,

so I don't use these things.

I decided when I said yes
to do this thing

that I really want to talk about is
my friend Richard Feynman.

I was one of the fortunate few
that really get to know him,

enjoy his presence.

And I'm going to tell you
Richard Feynman I knew.

I'm sure there are other people here
who can tell you Richard Feynman they knew,

and it would probably be
a different Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman is a very complex man.

He was a man of many, many parts:

he was of course, foremost,
a very great scientist;

he was an actor,
you saw him act --

I also had the good fortune
to be in those lectures--

back in the balcony,
they were fantastic;

he was a philosopher,
he was a drum player,

he was a teacher pAr excellence.

Richard Feynman was also a showman,

a normal showman,
who was brash, irreverant,

he was full of macho,
a kind of macho one optimum shape.

He loved intellectual battle.
He had a big ego.

But the man had somehow a lot of room
in the bottom,

what I mean by that,
is a lot of room in my case,

can't speak for anybody else,

but in my case a lot of room
for another big ego.

While not as big as his, but,
fairly big.

I always felt good to be with Feynman.

It was always fun to be with him.

He always made me feel smart.

How can somebody like that
make you feel smart?

Somehow we did. He made me feel smart,
he made me feel he is smart.

He made me feel we were both smart,
and two of us could solve any problem whatever.

And in fact, sometimes
we did do physics together.

We never published papers together.
But we did have a lot of fun.

He love to win.

With these macho games sometimes
he not only plays with me,

he also plays with people,
he almost always win.

But if he didn't win, when he lost,
he would laugh,

and seems to had just much fun as he won.

I remember once he told me about a joke
a student play on him.

They took him,
I think it's for his birthday,

they took him for lunch in a sandwich
place in Pasidina, which may still exist.

Celebrity sandwich was their thing,

you can get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich,
or get a Boga sandwich.

The student went there in advance,

and they arranged that
they all order Feynman sandwiches.

One after another,
they came to order Feynman sandwiches.

Feynman loved this story,

he told me this story he was really happy
laughing.

When he finished the story,
I said to him,

"Dick, I wonder what is the difference between
a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich?"

Without speaking for a whilel, he said,
"Well, a Susskind sandwich will be all the same.

The only difference would be that

a Suskind sandwich would have a big ham,
a ham as in bad actor."

Well, I happened to be very quick that day,
so I said,

"Yeah, but a lot less Brownie."

The truth of matter, is that
Feynman sandwich had a load of ham,

but absolutely no Brownie.

What Feynman hated most than anything else
was intellectual pretense,

phoniness, full of sophistication, jargon.

I remember sometimes doing the wordidiots.

Dick and I meet a couple of times
in San Francisco in some very rich guy's house for dinner.

Last time, a rich guy invites us,
he also invites a couple of philosophers.

These guys were philosophers of mind,

their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness.

And they are full of all kinds of jargon,
I can remember the words,

monism, doism, categorism,
I don't know what the words mean

neither did Dick, and neither did Sydney
for that matter.

Sydney was better educated than most of us.

What do you talk about when you talk about
minds?

One obvious thing to talk about is,

can a machine becomes a mind?

Can you build a machine that
thinks like a human being that conscious?

We sat around and we talked about it,
this is never resolved.

But the trouble with the philosophers,
is they philosophing when they should be sciencifying.

It is a scientific question after all.

And this is a very very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman.

Feynman let them have it , both barrels,
like between the eyes.

It was brutal, it was funny.
He really popped that balloon.

But the amazing thing is,

Feynman had to leave early,
he wasn't feeling too well.

Sydney and I was left with two philosophers.

And the amazing thing is, these guys were
flying, they were so happy.

They had met the great man, they had been
instructed by the great man.

They had enormous fun
when their faces shoveled in the mud.

And there was something special,

I realize there was something extraordinary
about Feynman,

even when he did what he did.

So yes, he didn't like intellectual pretense.

Dick and I some little repool