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I can't see the audience and I hate that.
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How many great grandparents are there
in the audience?
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I can't see anything.
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Okay,
you probably wonder why I am sitting,
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the answer is,
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because I'm a great grandfather,
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not a good grandfather,
a great grandfather.
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And everybody knows great grandparents
get to do any damn thing they please,
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including
following my own grandfather's advice,
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which was whenever you give a talk
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to thousands of people
about Richard Feynman,
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sustain yourself. (laughter, applauds)
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This is an extremely slack operation,
and I'm a slack man,
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so I don't use these things.
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I decided when I said yes
to do this thing
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that I really want to talk about is
my friend Richard Feynman.
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I was one of the fortunate few
that really get to know him,
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enjoy his presence.
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And I'm going to tell you
Richard Feynman I knew.
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I'm sure there are other people here
who can tell you Richard Feynman they knew,
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and it would probably be
a different Richard Feynman.
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Richard Feynman is a very complex man.
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He was a man of many, many parts:
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he was of course, foremost,
a very great scientist;
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he was an actor,
you saw him act --
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I also had the good fortune
to be in those lectures--
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back in the balcony,
they were fantastic;
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he was a philosopher,
he was a drum player,
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he was a teacher pAr excellence.
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Richard Feynman was also a showman,
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a normal showman,
who was brash, irreverant,
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he was full of macho,
a kind of macho one optimum shape.
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He loved intellectual battle.
He had a big ego.
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But the man had somehow a lot of room
in the bottom,
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what I mean by that,
is a lot of room in my case,
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can't speak for anybody else,
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but in my case a lot of room
for another big ego.
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While not as big as his, but,
fairly big.
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I always felt good to be with Feynman.
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It was always fun to be with him.
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He always made me feel smart.
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How can somebody like that
make you feel smart?
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Somehow we did. He made me feel smart,
he made me feel he is smart.
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He made me feel we were both smart,
and two of us could solve any problem whatever.
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And in fact, sometimes
we did do physics together.
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We never published papers together.
But we did have a lot of fun.
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He love to win.
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With these macho games sometimes
he not only plays with me,
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he also plays with people,
he almost always win.
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But if he didn't win, when he lost,
he would laugh,
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and seems to had just much fun as he won.
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I remember once he told me about a joke
a student play on him.
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They took him,
I think it's for his birthday,
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they took him for lunch in a sandwich
place in Pasidina, which may still exist.
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Celebrity sandwich was their thing,
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you can get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich,
or get a Boga sandwich.
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The student went there in advance,
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and they arranged that
they all order Feynman sandwiches.
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One after another,
they came to order Feynman sandwiches.
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Feynman loved this story,
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he told me this story he was really happy
laughing.
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When he finished the story,
I said to him,
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"Dick, I wonder what is the difference between
a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich?"
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Without speaking for a whilel, he said,
"Well, a Susskind sandwich will be all the same.
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The only difference would be that
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a Suskind sandwich would have a big ham,
a ham as in bad actor."
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Well, I happened to be very quick that day,
so I said,
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"Yeah, but a lot less Brownie."
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The truth of matter, is that
Feynman sandwich had a load of ham,
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but absolutely no Brownie.
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What Feynman hated most than anything else
was intellectual pretense,
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phoniness, full of sophistication, jargon.
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I remember sometimes doing the wordidiots.
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Dick and I meet a couple of times
in San Francisco in some very rich guy's house for dinner.
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Last time, a rich guy invites us,
he also invites a couple of philosophers.
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These guys were philosophers of mind,
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their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness.
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And they are full of all kinds of jargon,
I can remember the words,
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monism, doism, categorism,
I don't know what the words mean
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neither did Dick, and neither did Sydney
for that matter.
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Sydney was better educated than most of us.
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What do you talk about when you talk about
minds?
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One obvious thing to talk about is,
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can a machine becomes a mind?
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Can you build a machine that
thinks like a human being that conscious?
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We sat around and we talked about it,
this is never resolved.
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But the trouble with the philosophers,
is they philosophing when they should be sciencifying.
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It is a scientific question after all.
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And this is a very very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman.
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Feynman let them have it , both barrels,
like between the eyes.
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It was brutal, it was funny.
He really popped that balloon.
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But the amazing thing is,
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Feynman had to leave early,
he wasn't feeling too well.
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Sydney and I was left with two philosophers.
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And the amazing thing is, these guys were
flying, they were so happy.
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They had met the great man, they had been
instructed by the great man.
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They had enormous fun
when their faces shoveled in the mud.
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And there was something special,
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I realize there was something extraordinary
about Feynman,
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even when he did what he did.
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So yes, he didn't like intellectual pretense.
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Dick and I some little repool