Sara Seager on the Search for Life on Venus, Widowhood, and Autism

[upbeat electronic music] My guest today is Sara Seager. She has spent her career asking one of the most important questions, are we alone in the universe? But Sara isn't asking that question in the abstract. She's asking it through rocket launches, space telescopes, exoplanets, and now she's got a privately funded mission to Venus. She's a professor at MIT, a MacArthur Genius, and one of the pioneers of the search for life beyond Earth.

But what makes Sara so compelling is that her story is much bigger than science. She's a widow who rebuilt her life, a mother, and the author of a beautiful memoir, The Smallest Lights in the Universe. She's now leaving MIT and returning home to Toronto after 30 years. I already had one conversation with Sara that made me wanna cancel [laughs] the rest of my day. I think you'll understand why. Sara Seager, welcome to The Puck.

Thank you. So we've had a chance to talk in the past, and one of the things that struck me was that not only do you love your work, but you're at a point in your life where you feel like you have it all. What does that look like for you? Well, it looks like good health,

a great job,

and freedom and autonomy, and let me add, a great view from my office.

So what does that look like?

That's a great view of Boston, the city of Boston across the Charles River from Cambridge. Ah. What's the weather like? Is it beautiful? Oh, beautiful. Today's an absolutely gorgeous day. It's about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, sunny, just a few clouds in the sky, people sailing out on the river. Great day. Well, it sounds like you love nature, and if I remember correctly, you went on a camping trip when you were, like, 10 years old, and from what I remember, you looked up at the sky and something happened.

Yes. Well, I grew up in the inner city, and I always loved the stars. When you look up in the city, you know, you can see a handful of stars. You can see the constellation Orion. But I literally had no idea what was waiting for me. But I did get to go on my first camping trip ever, and my dad, he was... He's not alive now, but he was from London, the city of London, and he was the type of person more comfortable wearing a tie on weekends, and he certainly wasn't going to go camping, but he did.

He did. We had a babysitter who told us we all needed to go camping, and the babysitter borrowed his family's camping gear, and we went camping. And I was just wandering out of the tent in the middle of the night because couldn't sleep, and I remember looking up

and wow.

I just had never imagined anything so magnificent.

I was literally starstruck. Like, have you ever had a moment like that, like, for anything? I mean, a few times. I mean, the birth of my kids was kind of, like, one of those aha moments, but also looking up at the stars and just realizing how expansive it is and how small we are in comparison to that is a pretty awe-inspiring but also humbling experience.

Incredibly humbling. I do think about that a lot. I definitely think about our planet and all the craziness on our planet and how, yeah, to the rest of the universe, you know, we're just a little point of light. Well, and when you're looking at us as a little point of light, you seem to have expanded that- Yeah, little point of light ... and you believe that there's the ingredients for life everywhere, and what does that mean for our listeners?

Well, we can break it down to the simplest building blocks. Let's talk about amino acids. I think most people know what that is. All of us into fitness, you know, we need to take protein. Yeah, protein powder [laughs] and, you know, amino acids, right, our essential amino acids. We literally see ingredients like that, like, in the space between stars.

We have seen on meteorites, NASA brought back part of an asteroid and analyzed it and just found a lot of, like, very basic molecules. Like, they didn't find DNA or, like, life or anything, but, like, the pieces that make up DNA, they found some of those. So by building blocks, I do mean the very most simplistic things, but it's incredible how much chemistry

we can find on other planets and moons in our solar system and just floating around in outer space. And why Venus, the clouds of Venus, and how does that tie into, for instance, your ability to defend your search on Venus with people that are skeptics? Well, the one thing is that I'm just enamored with the idea that if the ingredients are, of life are everywhere and they came together in the right way here on Earth, surely they must have come together again somewhere else.

And myself and others, we're just trying to, like, look wherever we possibly can, you know? Like,

we are trying to look at every planet, every moon, everything possible. It just so happens that our planet next door, Venus... You know, sometimes Venus has been called our twin. It's about the same size as Earth. It's about the same mass as Earth. But I bet you know a lot of fraternal twins out there who are just nothing alike at all. Okay. Well, 'cause Venus is sometimes called our evil twin sister

because Venus isn't like Earth. It doesn't have what I described, like water and forests and just the beautiful weather. Venus at the surface is so hot. You know, due to a massive carbon dioxide greenhouse atmosphere, Venus, the surface of Venus is so hot it's hundreds and hundreds of degrees, like, and it is hot enough to melt lead, and we humans couldn't survive for a second on Venus. But just like on Earth,

if you've ever hiked up a mountain, even a little bit, right, it gets colder and colder really fast. Or you go in an airplane and you look at the map and it gives you the outside temperature, like, minus 40, minus 60. It gets cold, like, above the surface. So on Venus, way above the surface, 50 kilometers above, it's the right temperature for life.

So it's no longer super hot, but literally it's the right temperature. So people have speculated for decades that maybe there's life not on the surface, but like little microbes floating around in the clouds. And so that kind of... You know, I'm trying to sell, right? So I'm selling it to you, and you look happy about it. But in fact, the problem is the clouds of Venus, they're not made of water like our clouds are,

even though we do have bacteria temporarily in our clouds. But these clouds are made of concentrated sulfuric acid,

a substance so nasty that, like, most people haven't heard of it because no one will let you near any of that stuff. You can't, like, buy it at the hardware store. You just, you can't even get your hands on it. It's so dangerous. It kills all of our life. It'll burn a hole in your clothes and your skin. But it is a liquid, and we know that liquid needs the right temperature, and it... Life we mean. Life, I mean, we know that life needs the right temperature, it needs some energy, and it also needs a liquid where chemical reactions can happen.

And then- So it sounds like it's got a, a lot of the ingredients, but then a- are you nervous that, for instance, some of the ingredients like, you know, the proper distance from the sun or just putting it all together, it's a miracle when you actually find life that's more complex. I mean, are you optimistic that you're gonna be able to find a more meaningful, you know, source of li- life out there? Well, you know, it was more like, let's talk about Venus for a moment.

I mean, it's more that why not look? Like, we have all the ingredients for life there. We started laboratory work to convince ourselves that it might be... Well, we started laboratory work to explore the idea of whether it's worth it or not. We can't put life in sulfuric acid,

and it's kind of not for human pub- it's not for public consumption. But my son when he was a teenager working on the project, he literally put an ant in sulfuric acid, and it did not go well. The ant had a seizure and turned to goo before you could say, "Please don't do that." Right. But you know what? We put some of those building blocks, the ones found in outer space, into sulfuric acid. And just like here on Earth, we get the meteor showers.

You hear sometimes about a meteorite landing or you can see s- if you're lucky, catch a shooting star that's actually a piece of rock hitting our atmosphere. Those are delivering these molecules, you know? And so amino acids, parts of the DNA, they're being delivered to Earth, they're being delivered to Venus, and we've shown in the lab that some of those building blocks are indeed very stable in concentrated sulfuric acid.

But it's more like this. Like, let's say you had... You're convinced you have an absolutely brilliant idea for a business. Like, it's such a great idea, and no one has really got onto that idea yet, even though people might have heard about it. And it's such a good idea, like, you're not sure you're gonna create a business, but you know that 100% it is worth exploring. It's worth taking it to the next step. Mm-hmm. So with Venus, that's kind of where we are.

We're just, wow, this is just so amazing. Every step takes us to the next step and so on and so on. So if you

go all the way through this where the puck is going, when you look at things like the distance to s- other stars and things at the speed of light, do you think we will be able to practically find

more complex life as time goes by? Yeah, it's a really good question, and I do want to unpack that for a moment, 'cause on the solar sys- in our solar system, all the planets, all the moons, all the asteroids, we know there's no intelligent life here. So we have that at least. We're pretty confident that there isn't. So yes, to think about really intelligent life, we have to think beyond the solar system.

And your question is, do I think we'll meet it someday or hear from it or? I spoke to someone a while ago, and they were saying one of the challenges is that because of the great, great distances from the stars to our galaxy, for instance, that there could be cultures out there since there's so many billions of stars and planets, but that because of the constraints of things like the speed of light, that it would not necessarily mean we'd ever speak to each other.

I mean, it kind of depends how optimistic you are, right? And again, back to the business analogy, I bet you that most business owners at the startup phase, you have to be optimistic. Right. You have to be, like, overly optimistic, right? Or it's just not gonna happen. And so we're very, we have to be very optimistic, and we're just, even though we're just laying the most basic groundwork, astronomers have found

evidence for a planet around the very nearest star. I mean, even though the distances are so huge, it's like me telling you, I found your neighbor in Australia. You know, our nearest star is still very far away, Proxima Centauri. It is still four light years away. But there is a planet there, and if we would have to be just incredibly lucky to have intelligent life, like, on the very nearest star, you know, that at least we would have some hope.

Takes you four years to send the message, four years to get the message back. So Sara, one of the things we were just talking about is optimism, but you also, I understand, talked about post-traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress. Wh- when did you first realize that that was happening to you? Well, interestingly, I did have it all

back, like, halfway through my life. I had just started my job at MIT, where I'm a professor.

I had two, like, beautiful toddlers. What mom doesn't think their toddlers are beautiful?

I had, like, this gorgeous dream house, an old Victorian in a really nice town called Concord, Massachusetts, a husband. I literally had it all.

And then I just had something bad happen. My husband had a stomach ache that wouldn't go away,

and all I know is my dad had that, and then he died. So I was just like, wow, what's happening? And I think everyone, you've gotta, you already know, you have to be, like, a major advocate for yourself. If something's not right, don't listen to the doctors. They blow you off.

And it ended up that he had a problem. He had a major intestinal blockage that turned out to be cancer, and it spread throughout his whole body.

And in 18 months from diagnosis, he died, and it was an incredible, traumatic, definitely stressful-

But while I was going through all this, a colleague sent me an article about a widower whose life took a major turn after his wife died. Like, it was definitely bad. No one wants anyone to die, but

he had to start cooking, and he had to start, you know, doing more around the house and, like, paying attention to his kids. And really, when I thought about it, you know, there's two options. One is you kind of crawl under the rock and stay there the rest of your life, which happens. Happens, right, when people have a tragedy. Or the other one is you can,

like, step up.

And so just some really interesting things started happening. I had to, like, really leave my comfort zone. I had to pay more attention around the house and, in a great way, spend more time with my kids and just, like, be more aware of things. And also, when someone dies, it's so sad, and you just get into a groove where I was like, "You know what? I did so many ne- I paid my d- negative dues."

And so if you were to ask me to do something, like maybe even you were to say, "Hey, let's go out, let's..." I'd be like, "You know what?

Not gonna work for me, no."

And all of a sudden, you have a clarity of focus,

because when something so drastic happens, you're forced into... You don't have a lot of emotional bandwidth. You- it's like having n- no money. You can only spend on what you require, so you can only spend time and energy and attention on what really matters.

And so, wow,

I started to feel incredible after time went by, because all of a sudden, I can do this.

And some of the things seem trivial. Like, [chuckles] okay, it does seem trivial. Like, my kids would play Star Wars. You know anyone who has kids, boys, you know, they can get kind of, not violent, but you know, aggressive. And there was this swinging light, and so I had to remove it. But honestly, I'd never done electrical.

And I did, um, meet some other widows in town, and they were really helpful, and they were giving me instructions, and yeah, I removed it. It wasn't maybe the prettiest tying off of those live wires, but I, I got it done.

And, you know, I took my kids traveling, and I just, wow, I mean, I felt like, you know when the dinosaurs got completely destroyed

by a giant asteroid that hit Earth, like, new stuff could flourish.

And that's what I mean by post-traumatic growth. Like, new stuff has to flourish. First of all, I'm sorry. What an, what a, I mean, a tragic thing that you turned into a positive thing. I mean, is it still... I mean, I, I assume something like that never completely goes away. Well, I definitely reflect on that a lot, and I try to be inspirational or helpful to other widows

and widowers. And

it's kind of interesting, 'cause I'm coming up to my 15th anniversary. I mean, that's how long it's been. It sounds pretty far away.

I think the best word to say how I feel now is wistful.

And it's a good wistful. You know? It's a good wistful. It's not a like,

it's not a super sad wistful, I just wanna say, in a positive, respectful way. It stays there- Yeah ... but it's manageable. Well, it's, it's beyond... I mean, it's not even a, I don't even have to manage it now. Like, you can talk to a lot of widows. I don't think many of them get to where I am, I just wanna say. I don't think many people get there. But I can tell you something [chuckles] that's, I don't know if this is good or bad, and I know everyone would have an opinion about it, but one time, my friend Melissa, my best friend, who's been a widow for probably over 20 years now, she told me that once she had a dream about her late husband, and in the dream she bumped into him.

And it was like, you're not gonna expect this, but she bumped into him, and it was, you know when you see someone, and you bump into them, and you don't know what to say, and it's very awkward, and you kinda just shuffle around and then you leave? Sure. Yeah, it was like that, and I was thinking to myself, like, is this good or bad? Like,

you know, do you want that to be your memory, that you're so far over it that they're just kinda like an acquaintance in your mind?

You know, or do you need it to be like you meet them in your dream, and you're hysterical, and then the next month is ruined because you realize what the loss is? Like, where's a good place for you to be? Is it somewhere in between or where? Not like you can choose where you're gonna be, but maybe you can. Maybe you have more agency, and you can work on yourself to get where you need to go.

With me, I will say that, you know, once in a while, but it's probably on the order of once a year or less,

something will happen,

and I'll be, like, bowled over. I'll just be almost, like, knocked over by the tremendous loss it is. One time, I was in New Hampshire with my kids in the winter, and we were just there for a weekend. One of them was already in college, and one was in high school, but he already could drive and spend time with his own friends. And we decided to do something for a day. He wanted to hike up a big mountain. I'm like, "I'm not hiking up that mountain in winter." So we went cross-country skiing on, like, a hiking trail where we had to cross rivers, little rivers, little streams, and kinda go uphill, and it was so fun, and we had such a great time.

And my one son was like, "There's gonna be carnage. That means you're gonna fall. You're gonna, like..." And they have videos of us, like, just laughing 'cause we kept falling, and it was so fun. We had a great time.

And then we got to the hut. There was a hut where you can sleep over, but we just, you know, took a little break there.

And it was the, I had the biggest compliment, one of the biggest compliments of my life, 'cause we bumped into some people we were chatting with who were also doing this kind of backcountry skiing. And they didn't realize we were a family. They just thought we were some random friends together. And after a while, they started realizing, 'cause I'm like, "Yeah, it's only, like, their fourth time on cross-country skis." And then they started realizing the way I was talking that they're actually my grown-up sons.

And this lady was like, "Wait, what? They wanna spend a weekend with you?" You know, on, when they're in high school and when they're in co- I'm like, "Oh, wow." And then when we were skiing, I was like, after that, I just thought, you know, that's what I used to do with my first husband, my late husband. We would go skiing, and we would go off trail, and we would go in the forest a lot. That was one of our main hobbies.

And just, like, after that day, I had to call one of my widow friends and just, like, you know, just say, like, "What happened?" Like, I just feel, wow, like, what a loss that we're not doing this together. Like, the thing I love. Like, I didn't do it with the kids ever, and they just loved it the first day they did it. And like, wow, what, what does this mean? So like that, like once in a while just something happens and you're like, "What a loss." But honestly, most of the time I don't, I don't mind.

I can say I don't mind. It's like, it's like a book. You know, you have your book, and you have all the chapters of your life, and this was a chapter of my life, and this was a chapter that was, like, at the beginning of the book.

And I don't believe in life after death, but

I, I hate to say it in public just to hedge my bets, I hope he's happy. You know, he'd be happy with me doing that, and I, I really do.

I do believe that he wanted me to have that life where I move on and where I remember him fondly, but that my life's not ruined. You know, when you say this, it, it, it's ties into, like, to me, the mystery of life, and I, I wonder if part of what you were feeling is 'cause you were so happy and your kids were happy and you were... You had built this life and you had come through it, and is there, is there... It's almost like there's a guilt that he's missing out on it.

Maybe, but I think in that case it was more of a sense that

in a way it's their loss.

Right. I got to do that cross-country skiing with him all those years. Got it. And in some ways, like, they don't know what they're missing, right? They don't know that they're missing-

The him ... that kind of thing where we would all do it. But I don't... It's really hard to go back. Like, one thing my first husband would never do, and I try to honor that, he would never go back and do the what ifs. Like, what if this, what if that, you know? One thing is, because he died, my kids and I got super tight. You know how f- all those families out there, they're... it's always us against them, us kids against them parents, us parents aga- you know, there's always, like, the different groups.

But we didn't have that. We're just one group, and it's a known thing. I've seen studies on this about how close widows are with their children for that reason. So we maybe should honor him and not be like, "What if this? What if..." Like, it's impossible because my life turned out so different after he died

that maybe we wouldn't be here. You said that, you know, and I know you've said this before, you know, you know, you're an atheist or, you know, that you don't believe in life after death, but then there's a part of you that kind of hopes that he's happy, so to speak. So in a sense, is that almost like you're more of an agnostic, meaning you're open to the possibility that there is, in the same way that there's potentially life out there, that there is some kind of m- you know, different dimension or, or our consciousness somehow does continue after, after we're gone?

Well, I'm definitely an atheist, and unfortunately I don't believe that anything continues after we've died.

But I do think that there's a lot more to consciousness than we know, and I'm not saying that as a scientist. I'm just saying that as, like, a human,

a human who just experiences life like everyone else does. When you say just from experiencing it like, you know, other humans, I mean, there are people that have had mystical experiences. I mean, I've had some myself, mostly, you know, without drug induced, but I know, like, we're living in a time now where people are experimenting with LSD and iboga and psilocybin and there's all sorts of different ways people are kind of exploring consciousness.

I mean, from your perspective, when you say from your own life experience you've experienced these, these glimpses, what does that look like? Well, I don't have those glimpses you've had, and I haven't tried any of those, but I've read about people doing it. I just mean, like, do you remember in the old days before we had cell phones- Yeah ... and you have the dial-up phone? Yeah, the rotary phone. Yeah. Or we had the punch buttons, right?

Sure. Or that. Both. I'm old enough that I remember both. Yeah. [laughs] But yes. Okay. Well, there would be the times, oftentimes, like, I'd pick up the phone to call my dad, and guess what? He had just called me at that moment. I mean, there's a lot of things like that going on where you're just thinking about someone, but they're thinking of you at that exact same moment.

There's the power of positive thinking, you know, where you do have more agency than you think, where you can open your mind to things, like the athletes that, you know, spend a lot of time purposely, right, envisioning their strategy. So there's so much going on beneath

that I wish I knew more about or could speak more authoritatively about.

But one just has to feel like there's more going on. In the scientific world, in the world of the rationalist, and we've had Neil deGrasse Tyson on and we talked about this, you know, things have a beginning and they have an end and they're measurable. But I think, you know, Einstein said what? That time was relative and that it needed matter. And so the... Is there, is there a dimension that's outside of timelessness that, that maybe we experience, like when you make a phone call and your dad was making a phone call at the same time?

I mean, is there a weird dimension that is not bound by the physical universe? Not that I'm aware of. Well, for me at least, it's fun to contemplate. So d- and when I experience synchronicity or in Buddhism, there's this concept of simultaneously cause and effect, that things kind of, if when something is ready to shift, it just shifts. Have you, have you ever experienced that where, you know, you were trying to solve a problem, you're working at it, you're working at it, and then you let go, and then all of a sudden it miraculously appears?

Well, that happens a lot in science,

and maybe it's something more about our brain and how we don't understand how it works. But typically, yes, like, I'll solve a really big problem on a Monday, Monday morning,

you know, because you're thinking about that problem, working really hard, but you're kinda stuck and you can't solve it,

then you have the weekend and it just kinda lets go. But your mind is still working on it. It's still happening beneath the hood, really constantly being worked on, and then, yeah, you have a break, and then you come to it fresh and it's solved. It, it's funny because you come at it from that rationalist perspective, which is that, you know, even though it comes from this kind of

nothingness, so to speak, when you let go, that that could just be a dimension of the brain that we don't understand yet.

Could be. How do you think when you process life, I know you've publicly talked about being on the spectrum and being diagnosed as an adult. How did that change your understanding of your own life, and how does it affect you? I mean, I, we definitely have a long way to go in understanding the brain,

but I'm in good company here at MIT. A lot of people appear like they're on the spectrum.

And the funny thing is, it's, it's really nice being here because,

yeah, just because of that. But one thing was that when I grew up, I was always weird and different, and I never had friends. Like, people just stayed away from me. You know, as kids, like, somehow in humans we just wanna be with people that are like us. I was kind of shunned from a lot of kids, and I don't know if it was...

Yeah, I just don't really know why. And I also had these weird moments as a child. Like, one time, I was literally, like, five years old, and you're gonna remember this too. I hate to, like, admit how old we are, right? But there was the day we didn't have seat belts, we didn't have car seats. Remember when they stuck you, like, in the back of the station wagon with a bunch of other kids, like, just in the back, back?

Yeah, so funny. Yeah, I mean, at the end, I was just talking- Yeah ... I mean, literally in the back of a Ford Squire, you know, station wagon, and people are f- you know, you're bouncing around and, you know- Yeah. [laughs] ... yeah, facing the seats- Yeah ... facing y- you, no seat belts- I mean, it's so dangerous, huh? Yeah, yeah. No seats at all. No seats. You're just sitting- Right ... like as if you're on the rug.

Right, right, right. Yeah. Right, right. And I remember being there carpooling home from my school, and I just remember seeing the other girls, and I was like, "Huh, that's so weird. They're, like, connected." You know, they're, like, somehow friends together and I'm just, like, this sort of external

element to this. And it was like, "Huh, okay." And I just had that a bunch of times throughout my life. So the people not liking me, me being really laser focused and, like, really a smart kid, it just was different.

And so I did used to... Yeah, so I used to have a phrase too, and I would say, "The real world doesn't work for me." That just means, like, I'd go to CVS and buy something, and people would start getting mad at me, like the person selling stuff and ringing up the cashier, because they'd be like, "Have a nice day," and I would just, like, have a blank, robotic face 'cause that's autism, you know? [laughs] Right. You don't really interact with people well.

And just people would get mad at me for no reason. Or, like, sometimes I'd get pulled aside in the airport line, you know, 'cause they're, they're just screening, like, your body language, so they literally identify that something about me is off. That doesn't happen too often, but just, like... So I was just kind of going through life, and

someone wrote an article about me in The New York Times Magazine, and it said that I'm wired differently. Like, it just was trying to be polite about it. And the writer told me later he saw that I had autism immediately. His kids, one of his kids having it, he realized that, yeah, I had it. But he told me that you can't ask someone. It's like asking a woman her age, or, like, are you pregnant? Like, never ask a woman if she's pregnant, right?

Because she might just be fat. Like, that would just be... You can't ask someone, "Are you autistic?" Like, you just cannot. So he didn't ask me, but he wrote it wi- kind of code for it in this article. So one of my good friends and mentors called me, and he's like, "Sarah, I read this article and it makes perfect sense. You have autism." And I just, like, broke out laughing. I'm like, "That's so ridiculous. I would know myself.

I definitely don't have that." I've just never heard of anything so ridiculous, ever. And my mentor's wife had been an autism doctor. Like, she was one of the original autism doctors, so, you know, he, he just said, "Look,

I've never seen anyone who can focus the way you can, like laser focus on something when the world goes away and it's just you and your work." And he started listing all the other reasons, and I just thought it was just nuts. But, you know, eventually we went back and forth,

and I started to think, "Okay, that could be it." And meanwhile, I have a wonderful husband now, Charles. We met, we had, like, love at first sight moment, and we've been married for 10 years. It's wonderful. But I was starting to have a little difficulty with him because he thought I was too abrupt and rude.

Like, I'd be on the phone, "Hi, how are you doing? Okay, bye." And I hang up and just suddenly, like, done. And all these things, and we just had a bit of friction because I thought he had, like, a sixth sense, speaking of sensitivity. He's just very sensitive, but it's sort of the opposite of autism. And so I did tell him about this, I'm like, "These people think I have autism. What do you think?" And I sent him an article.

He reads the article and he said, "I read the article.

The only thing missing from this article is your picture."

Meaning the article about autism just described me perfectly. And eventually I went to get a diagnosis because I ended up writing a memoir, and

the

publishing agency wanted to promote the book and talk about me being autistic, and I was like, "Well, if we're gonna do that, I better make sure I am and not just have it as, like, an anecdote."

So I went to... You have to go to a doctor who gives you permission to get diagnosed, 'cause if it's gonna be covered by insurance. So I go there, and I'll tell you what was really bad [laughs] about that, that evaluation. This doctor had pity for me. Like, it was very obvious I had autism by the end of this evaluation session. And I don't want your pity. I do not want your pity. Please do not give me pity. I can have sympathy, it's okay, but I don't want you feeling sorry for me.

And at the end she's like, "Look, why do you need this diagnosis? 'Cause if you need the actual diagnosis, sh- you know, insurance might not cover it. It's gonna cost a lot of money. It takes two full days. You're not like a kid who needs the school to, like, have a written blurb about you." She's like, "Why do you wanna do it?"

And in the end I didn't do it 'cause she said you don't need it. But I said, "Well, it's because I wrote this book and they wanna promote it and say I'm autistic, and I don't wanna lie." And she just started laughing in a good w- natured way. And she said, "You know what? Autism, honesty to a fault.

Just, like, another trait."

So I found out I was autistic in my 40s, and it was amazing. I'm like, "I love this," because I love being autistic. I just love being good at my job. I love being able to focus. And because I'm grown up now, I learned to love myself,

and I can not worry what people think. I don't need external validation,

and I can embrace my superpower, which is my ability to focus and to get stuff done and be analytical. And so it helped explain, like, my whole past, you know? Like, it's sometimes nice to have a, like, why? Why did you behave this way? Why did you do that? Why did you do that? It's like, it's just 'cause I am. That's who I am. It sounds like, I mean, again, it's been a superpower for you, and as you were saying, your work, your life is, you know, relatively speaking, perfect right now.

You've got a working relationship. You've got a successful family and a successful career. And you also used the term love, which is an emotion, and then empathy's also an emotion. Do you feel, like, how do you think-

I mean, like to the extent, not that feeling sorry for yourself, but how do you think it's handicapped you at all? Like, or if you have this superpower, what do you think is the weakness that, for instance, let's say your husband compliments you on that you don't have? No, it's definitely a handicap, I would say it's for sure. It's a massive handicap. Because imagine this, let's pick a country. You go to France.

You go to Paris. You don't speak Eng- you don't speak any French. You go out of the big city, people aren't speaking it. Like, how do you navig- how do you navigate a world where people don't speak your language?

And so the problem is you can't interact with people in a way that they find acceptable.

So you offend people, people don't like you. They won't... Like, if you're in business, they won't make a deal with you if, you know. [laughs] And so that's why people come to MIT and they feel so great, because now I'm not gonna say you're in the majority, but maybe you are. Now all of a sudden people speak your language, and there's more people like you, and now there's less friction.

So it definitely has caused me a lot of problems, personal, professional, all through my life. When I think of other groups of people that, you know, have had people judge them, like for instance people that are gay have had people look at them because they're different or otherwise. I mean, from your perspective, does it give you a greater understanding of diversity and kind of how as a species we could do better at, at accepting the fact that we're all different?

Like, yes and no. Like, I do think we can try harder,

but sometimes

I just think, you know what? It's really, really hard to fight millions of years of evolution.

Like, there's a reason why we just stick to our tribe, we stick to the safe things of the people around us.

You know, I have trouble even... Like, I'll give you a recent example of it. It seems trivial, but it really isn't. Like, I came back on a, from a trip on a small plane, and usually I bring a small bag so I can fit it in the overhead, but otherwise they gate check it. But in this case they... You get off the plane, but it... I, so I said like, "Where's my bag?" [laughs] But I say it in that voice, "Where's my bag?" Like I'm getting worried.

[laughs] I'm like, "Where's my bag?" [laughs] And they're like, "It's up the stairs." I'm like, "Okay." So I rush up the stairs. I'm like, "Where's my bag?"

[laughs] I'm super, like, worried.

And,

"It's not here." Okay, I don't know where my bag is, and I call out to the gate agent, "Where's my bag?" And then some lady comes up to me and is like, "Where's your boarding pass?" I'm like, "What do you mean, where's my boarding pass? I just got off the plane. I'm not boarding it." She's like, "You tried to get back on the plane." I'm like, "I didn't try to get back on the plane." It's like, "You said my bag was up the stairs.

Where's my bag?" And they're like, "Your bag is at the carousel." It's like, well, why didn't they say that, you know? But you take everything so literally, like when they said up the stairs.

I don't know, up the stairs means up... I had to walk when you go through the, you know, the, I forget what it's called when it attaches to the airplane, but for some reason there were some stairs after, so we had to- Right ... I thought they meant it's right up those stairs. Well, hey, I got news for you. Oh. The carousel's downstairs. So I take everything literally. And I wasn't, it wasn't that I w- I was a bit agitated, but it was just that I wasn't doing my, "Hi, how are you, Jim?

Hey, you know, it's kind of interesting, but usually my bag's here. Do you have any... You know, like, where would my bag be?" It, I was like just abrupt and to the point, and like the very kind of autism robotic, and it, it, it annoyed them, and then they thought I was being disruptive. I wasn't. I was just being myself. So if you're yourself and you're considered disruptive and now they start escalating it because they need to see your boarding pass, like what does that mean?

So finally just said, "I'm not [laughs] showing you my boarding pass. You just said my bag's at the carousel. I'll see you later." And I just walked off. But I'm just saying like if that's, you ha- I have to behave differently and expend all that energy translating what I'm thinking into behaving like all the other people, it just takes too much effort, and you get into trouble, and like, I don't know, it could've gotten worse.

When I use the word agnostic, which is kind of a more nebulous, right, not black-and-white place, you were very quick to say, "No, no, no, I'm an atheist." Are you more comfortable being in that place where there's, you know, clear borders, so to speak? Definitely, yeah. I like clear borders. Interesting. And yet when we're dealing with extraterrestrial life, and it, it's completely open-ended, right? I mean, because there's, there's no certainty.

No. But that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make a certain situation out of no certainty. Like, we could speculate about intelligent life and aliens, or we could say, "Look, okay, Jim, here's what I have for you. We know there's stars out there, lots of stars. We know that the stars have planets, just like our sun is a star and has planets. Check, we found planets. Now we're gonna look for rocky planets. Check, we found those.

Now we're gonna look for planets that have liquid on them. We're getting there, I mean, outside our solar system.

Now we're gonna look for signs of life." So we're still just taking it one step at a time. But, you know, I guess you like to win an argument, and I can't disagree with you [laughs] because we definitely have belief in science. You're right about that. Like, we're not repeating every last experiment. We have to just believe things. You definitely called me out on it, and what can I say? And I'm gonna get defensive and say it's not that I wanna win the argument.

It's exploring consciousness, and I recently realized that when people talk and, or when they write something down, it becomes concretized. And one of the things I've found is that when I use a particular word, atheist, agnostic, God, um,

more abstract principles, love, people hear something and process it based on their own

experiences. And unless you explore what we really mean by the word, we have a disconnect where there, there may not be a disconnect just because- Yes, yeah ... we're using finite words to describe things that are much more abstract.

That's right. I mean, I certainly do not believe in any higher being, but I believe that we're all connected in a way that we don't understand yet. Yeah, and that's, that's what's given me the room to try to have these conversations in a more, I, I would say, kind of

non-judgmental but n- in a nonlinear way. And I even have a friend who's, you know, an extreme atheist, and I recently, you know, said, "Look, uh, you and I don't necessarily disagree about this. The issue is we- Life itself is a miracle, right? We don't know where we came from, we don't know where we're going, and yet there does seem to be some oneness where we all kind of are connected on some level, and also that the universe follows certain principles.

And the fact that the universe follows these principles, it, to me it's, it's a search for was there a guiding principle that set all those principles up in the first place? That's the thing is we have these discussions and somebody says, "I have faith. I believe this," or whatever. But when you really push, none of us know. There has to be a humility, going back to your thing, looking at the stars. I mean, really? I mean, do we really have the hubris to think we can understand this majesty?

Yeah. It's amazing.

So you left Canada, like, when you were in your 20s, I think, and now you're returning home. What's that all about? How does that feel? I'm really excited. I, I do think, um, I had a wonderful time in the United States of America. I love America. I love the innovative spirit. I love the can-do attitude.

And as an aside, you're seeing this reflected on all the visitors from all over the world, right? For the World Cup. Like, you're seeing them on social media loving America and loving the big thinking here. And I, I do really like that. MIT, great place. But I think we all agree, if you've been somewhere for 20 years, it's time for a change, right? That's like a more- Well- ... minor version of Postma's law of growth- Although, although- ...

is definitely happening ... although you said that's where you're comfortable, I mean, is it scary to be going... I mean, you're joining a new institution. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of different things going on. One of them is, like, the big cuts to science and the chaos in science funding in the US. What that has done actually, it's enabled other countries like Canada and like other places to try to heavily recruit. You know, they're trying to take advantage of the situation.

And me being from Canada originally,

I did get a call from the University of Toronto, which is my alma mater,

and they asked me if I was interested in returning, and enabled them to make an offer, like, a salary and, like, resources to do my job at, like, an unprecedented level for them. And I just thought about it and, you know, my kids are grown up now. I'm ready for a change, and I'm really, really excited to be going back to Canada to help give back to the country where I grew up.

And we do have a thing in Canada called, it's been called brain drain, where all the smartest people who are the most ambitious leave Canada, and now they're trying to reverse that and call it brain gain. And it's a chance to go back and help build on Canada's growing momentum to innovate and to invent and to create new things. And so I'm extremely happy and extremely excited to return and to do all those things. And is it going to accelerate your search for life beyond Earth?

I mean, is the program that you're gonna be part of now gonna give you more... Does it give you more optimism that you're gonna actually accomplish your dream? I would say yes and no. As pertains to the solar system where things are,

like, lower cost and doable, definitely a yes.

In terms of finding, like, a true Earth twin and finding a sign of life on an exoplanet, that is just a maybe. That might not get accelerated by my move, because it's kind of a global effort, and that depends on people all around the world, like, coughing up the money and the resources and the brains to make the right choice out of all the options.

So I would say yes, it enables me to do some things,

but as for the true Earth twin, that's still gonna take the whole world. What, for us mere, you know, mortals that don't really understand the scientific breakthroughs that are taking place, what's happening in science right now that accelerates your ability to

search for life? When it comes to exoplanets, it, telescopes. We have the James Webb Space Telescope that is like the next Hubble. Like the Hubble Space Telescope, everyone knows Hubble. The James Webb Space Telescope, it's like the next one that is incredibly powerful. It orbits very far from Earth where it's dark. It works in the infrared. So there it's always the new paradigm of telescopes, the next generation.

In terms of finding signs of life in our solar system,

it's all the same things that help you really. It's your phone. It's miniaturized electronics. It's tiny detectors. And it's also the lowering costs of going to space, like the new commercial rocket companies, SpaceX, Rocket Lab, other companies that are lowering the cost by having reusable la- rockets and finding cheaper ways to go there. So it's really all of the above. It is new telescopes. It is smaller, better technology.

It's AI helping us sort through data and algorithms. Is AI... I mean, you s- you touched on AI. Everybody's obsessed with AI these days. In, in a practical way, is it, is AI... Like, how do you use AI in your life? Well, I can tell you how I use it and how I aspire to use it, 'cause those are two different things right now. Sure. Sure. So one thing is we just use it for shortcuts. Like, you know, it helps you write. It helps you be more polite in your email.

It really helps code. AI is amazing at coding. It can write code, and we can make a lot more progress and test our code and debug our code and just have a way bigger scope of getting things done in the programming side.

But there's a harder way that I'm still aspiring to do, and that is to have AI be like,

like we do experiments in the laboratory

where we're trying to understand the range of chemicals that are stable in sulfuric acid for Venus, or people work in origin of life. How did life originate from these simple building blocks on Earth?

We have experiments and they're very slow and it takes us a lot of time. We'd like AI to help,

but sometimes we need to, like, get the right data and use AI in the right way. And I'll say we, you know, to guide the experiments, right? 'Cause it's like what are you gonna do next in the lab

when there's so many possibilities? We want AI to help narrow that down so we can be more successful more rapidly, and that's what I'm aspiring to do, but I'm not there yet. Well, and when you say you're not there yet, what's challenging about it? I love that question Like the reason why AI can do all the things that we're all using it for every day is there's lots of data out there. You know, like millions of people have written millions of emails, so fine, it can read emails and understand how to write and respond to your email.

But when it comes to the lab and experiments, we don't have millions of experiments we've done.

So it, we're limited because we don't have the data to train it on. And so instead of just taking random, like millions of data sets, we have to be clever in what we're taking, 'cause we don't have, you know, all that...

We can't take enough data that we need, so we have to be more clever with AI to take the data we need to train AI. And sometimes it's a different kind of data. It's not the data we're taking in the lab, but it's something peripheral that we have to think through that as well. One of the things that's different about AI is it's gonna continue to grow exponentially. And when you look at gathering data and doing what you're doing, as you get more and more data, will this continue to accelerate more and more?

I think so. I mean, in the same way when we look at the sky and we have no idea where it ends or it's a miraculous kind of horizon, it sounds like when we look at AI and kind of this new tool that we have, we just really don't know where the end is with it. No. We have no idea where the end is. So Sarah, this was wonderful. Your frankness is inspiring. The fact that you've had these challenges in your life that you've overcome is amazing.

But I also think, you know, we all, so many of us feel judged, right? I mean, you walk into a room and whether or not you have autism, whether or not you're short, you're too tall, you're, y- you know, you look different, and I think it's inspiring for you to, the way you present it, which is that it's given you a handicap, but it's also given you this superpower, and you choose to focus on the positive. Sarah- Enjoy.

I really enjoyed talking to you, Jim. I really hope we can meet sometime.

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