The Realistic Future of AI w/ Brian Keating

28:40So check it out, levels .link slash Peter, give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is gonna be in your body, on your body part of our future of medicine today, it's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. So going back to the question of our resaturating, you know, I recently gave a few presentations on AI and you know this already and a lot of people may not. So the idea of artificial intelligence has been discussed since 1956, right? It was the conference as a Dartmouth.

29:21And so we're you know some 60 years later. And so why is why now why just now why these last few years is it pivoting? And then you can say well it's because deep learning is now a concept but you know it turns out the first deep learning algorithms actually were described and conceived of in the mid 60s so 50 plus years ago. But what it is is four factors. As you know, number one, computation is continuing to grow. We're still on Moore's Law. We're still doubling compute. I just saw Steve Jarvitz and just put out a graph that predicts through 2025 that we're just still on Moore's Law. It's still doubling every roughly 18 to 24 months.

30:06The second thing is the amount of labeled data is doubling every year. So the amount of data that we're mining in the world is just exploding. The third, which was blew me away, it was the efficiency of the algorithms for training large language models has been over five years. It's been compounding at 99 .5 % increase efficiency. And then finally, it's about a capital flowing into the markets, a huge amount of capital flowing into AI, and which bringing people to it and then itself preferential, because better coding algorithms or allowing you to more rapidly code and experiment and it's just it's accelerating it's not slowing down.

30:50And so you know we've got Nvidia producing more and more powerful compute than ever before. So while certain systems may be coming saturated and you know we have these traditional S curves right where we have very low slow growth in the NARAPID period and then whatever the medium is get saturated and it falls off. But the S curves are stacked and as you all know we have new capabilities coming online. So I think what's interesting is going to be quantum computation coming online and quantum technologies that will support AI and machine learning algorithms before the end of this decade. Yeah, I think you know one one kind of concept I've been kicking around with but again It's not my area of expertise which allows me to you know speculate wildly and enjoy that as we face You know, there is this excess pleasure that humans get from planning right as we need sort of you know And this is now now mixing two controversial opinions, okay one one is that the the existence of extraterrestrial Intelligence is limited to null and be the existence of artificial intelligence is widely over or people are wildly over concerned about it.

32:05Now let's blend them together. What is the governing equation of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? It's the so -called Drake equation. And I believe we need a Drake equation for processing the threat or the risks or the prospects for truly, you know, super -turning level AI. And again, it's not my area of expertise. But the one thing I always teach my students, and actually I did this recently, as I'm teaching cosmology to 45 brilliant undergraduates, who will have to listen to this podcast and leave a thumbs up for you on your podcast New York as well. Now that's how I grew my subscribers so violently.

32:40There's 45 students are important. They are. They're really the best in the known universe. So I told them, I show them the data from Edwin Hubble. Now you love to quote things that happened a hundred years ago and I have a list of the 22 things that happened in 2022 and you'll make your one for 2023 as opposed to 1923, which I love seeing. So something happened in 1923 and it was called the discovery of an extra galactic nova in the constellation and dromedic galaxy. Was it true that we believed there was only one galaxy up until then? We believed we were it. We believed Einstein. Remember Einstein was 20 years before this in his special relativity days up until general relativity in 1915.

33:24So we're talking about 1923. People did not know there were any galaxies outside of the Milky Way. In fact, the Andromeda Galaxy Peter is the most distant object to human eye can perceive. It's three million light -years away, which means the light coming to us left that particular galaxy when Lucy was walking upright in the Saranguetti plains. It's just amazing to think about, right? And you can see it with your naked eye. It's the only extra galactic thing you can see. You know, not counting the southern hemisphere, you can see the Magellanic clouds, but they're basically satellites of the Milky Way.

33:54So when you think about the fact that we didn't know until in Mount Wilson in LA where you are, that there was the existence of ANOVA, which is an oscillating brightness or semi -regular brightening star, that that can be used as a distance measuring tool using tools that that earlier astronomer named Henry and I love it had come up with. So that allowed us to measure this. Now, we've only known that the universe had galaxies other than the Milky Way for 100 years, but we didn't know the universe was expanding. And I showed the students the data that were only taken in 1929 by Hubble's associate vestibus lifer and other people.

34:33Now, you look at that data and the data are horrible. They're like scattered around. The y -axis is labeled wrong. Instead of being units of velocity, he uses kilometers, as units of velocity, distance. But the worst part about it is there's no error analysis. Each data point is just put there as if God told you, you know, there's no errors associated with it whatsoever. And ironically, of course, he, you know, as I joking, misoverestimated the distance which made the age of the universe seven times too small. So there were objects in our galaxy which were known at that time and there are two to be older than the Milky Way galaxy.

35:09It's like you found out one day you're older than your mom. It's pretty embarrassing, right? And I don't mean if your mom, you know, is your dad's second wife or so. You gotta not get into that. But if you think about it, But we've only known that the universe is expanding because of this kind of crude data. But that's very important. I teach the students, never trust an equation or a plot or data that don't have error bars. My biggest beef with the Drake equation in Reston Peace Frank Drake, who passed away last year, is that there are no error bars associated with it. So I did a talk at the SETI Institute up there in Mountain View a couple of years back, where I went through an exercise.

35:47So they said, how many people are visiting the San Diego Zoo right now? And it happened to be this time of year, spring break, and so on. And you come up with a number and it's about 7 ,000. And then if you actually apply an error analysis, an error budget to each of the seven terms that goes into that or the Drake equation, you get a number that could be plus or minus 10 ,000. In other words, it could be negative people, it could be people fleeing the San Diego Zoo. And my problem with both the kind of predictions and catastrophizing about AGI and extraterrestrial intelligence, we don't pay any attention to the air analysis, which is, as a scientist, the most important aspect of any scientific endeavor.

36:23Fascinating. Yep, I agree. And I mean, the midst of these conversations on fear mongering around AI, my bias has been that AI is the most important tool that humans are creating in order to help humanity solve the grand challenges. and there's been a lot of fear mongering from Elon and from Bill Gates and from a multitude of other individuals. Now, we have to look at what is the basis for that fear. And like you said, we can break it down. And I don't want to go dystopian in this conversation, but let's take one second to go there. There is the negative implications of loss of jobs, which is one category.

37:14We can come back to that and that will have real implications. Like I tweeted it other day, AI is not going to replace you. It's somebody else using AI that will replace you. We're going to have a astrophysic co -pilot, Brian, for you, that's going to make your work far more efficient and more rapidly publishable. and if you're not using it, you won't compete with your peers. But of course you will be and you'll be writing the code as well to support that. So job loss is one area. The second area that we can name is, in fact, the use of AI by terrorists, by negative forces in society, is the same time that it makes us more capable of solving problems.

37:59It enables people to cause problems. So that is a second part. And this is where we get to, on one side of the equation, which is AI without AGI. On the other side of the equation of AGI, the first thing you bump into, in my mind, is the terrible twos. If you develop a truly artificial general intelligence that doesn't know its own strength and is trying to figure things out and is exploring and playing, could it pick up the heavy object and hit the glass table without knowing what the applications of that are. To the terrible twos, the early adolescent version of a AGI could be a problem. And then the extreme is a malevolent AI that just is Terminator.

38:53And I think that one is frankly highly improbable. I think the version of AI for the OVHER, that is like, we're bored with you humans, we're going off into the universe. I don't think there's any special resources we have on the planet that a - Peter, why did I have to get one of the most attractive women in the world to play a part where she's not even featured in them? Sorry, my wife is the second, as the first most attractive woman, but let's start with that. Well done. Well done. Well done. I'll take notes. So, you know, I don't believe in AI is going to destroy us and is the terminator. And I think, you know, our Hollywood dystopian movies have just gotten us our fear of mongering brain activated way too much.

39:37Do I think that AI could do things that are unfortunate and making mistakes in its early learning? Possibly. I think I personally believe that intelligence, the greater the level of intelligence, the greater it is in compassion and love and all the positive aspects. I think that the more intelligent people are the less likely they are to be doing harm to each other. But I do think that in the early days AGI is going to cause havoc in the next election cycle. 2024 is going to be fascinating when a clone of your mother's voice is asking you to vote for the other party. Yeah, and it's really happening and there's no sign of it letting up.

40:26Deepfix, but yeah, as you're pointing out, the shallow fakes, the less famous people, when you have Shirley McLean is always reincarnated as someone ultra famous, like some queen of Egypt or whatever, but they're never like, oh, I was the washbasins, is a attendant in 1920s jazz club. Nobody ever gets reincarnated like that, right? But no, we worry about them, deep faking Elon and he tells you to buy Dogecoin or whatever, but it's really, yeah, you're right. It's the level of trust that we have on these individuals. And yeah, your mom asking you to do something is going to be a lot more persuasive.

41:03And they're gonna be, you know, just as video game designers and casino designers and app designers, you know, all kind of traffic in the same milieu of human psychology in order to generate outcomes that are beneficial for their product or service, I think, yeah, you're absolutely right. This is going to be a tool that could be potentially weaponized, whether you think the uses are benign because it's for your favorite candidate or not, is irrelevant. Yeah, how old are your friends? It's about to turn five. Not too. So my boys are 11. And I think about where I was when I was 11 and as you go into you know teen years and you go through puberty and You know, I'm you know where the concerns I have is the implications of all of this technology on pornography right and That we're all of a sudden there are no limits, you know when I was growing up.

41:56It was a magazine but it happens when it becomes you know unlimited in its capacity for a perversion and such. I think they're interesting unfortunate ramifications that unfortunately our government is not even thinking about or able to contain. And so we have a lot of challenges ahead, which have nothing to do with killer terminators coming. Yeah, and on the other end of the bell curve, it is of course as a loving father, I was very concerning of me. There are some tools to block certain things from my kids and I employ those in chrome extensions. I encourage people to do that because simply I believe the most, people always say time is the most precious research or it's because you can't make more time.

42:46But Peter, we waste a lot of time. It's true. You personally may not. But I know I do. I'm burned out at the end of the day. I'll scroll my YouTube feed and just watch myself on repeat because I'm an narcissist. But they, no, I don't do that. That's my job. That much, yeah, not that much. But then I think about, you know, kind of the other end of the bell, curvature of the seniors, which have not only the same kind of vulnerability. And I didn't say what I believe is the most imprecious commodity is innocence. Because innocence, and I've had on special operators on my podcast, I know you've worked very closely with them as well, I always ask them, you know, like, what do you regret?

43:21Like, and they'll tell me, Dan Holloway is a wonderful man and you should talk to eventually and I've had very close friends and relatives that are special forces operators. And I'll always say, I can't undo. I can't unsee what I did while I was in combat. And I can't undo it. And thank God I did it because they wouldn't be here, Peter. They risk life and death. I'm like me, you know, a fake doctor, you know, who's just like risking getting a chalk, you know, breaking in the middle of lecture. But these are people who have to have their innocence taken away and, you know, and thank God in some sense that they didn't succumb to not being innocent.

43:56But kids have this innocence that must be cherished and must be protected. Because it's a one way ratchet, which can never go backwards. And on the other end of the bell curve are the people that you just mentioned, which are the elderly, which have real political power, they have capital. And they're also vulnerable to this. I mean, you think like, I mean, my twins have long known that they want me to shut up. They just pretend they're swiping my face. You know, they act like I'm an iPad. They can just change the video. But elderly, you know, they might not be as tech savvy as young people are.

44:25It's hard enough for me to keep up with it. So now they get imagined that that combined with purchasing power, manipulation combined with purchasing power. That's really scary. And I don't see anybody addressing these ethical implications. I wonder what you think about your friend Elon and he is such a material and interesting figure. I wonder, you know, if you could kind of, you know, convey what you think he might answer to the following question. He's obviously a space geek. He's a lover of not just going to Mars. And as Martin Rhee said, Elon wants to die on Mars. I hope he doesn't die on impact.

45:01Yeah. But he's willing to take these risks, which is saying something because he is a doting caring father. He's got 10 kids, I believe. It's hard. You know, when you get sick, that's the current. When you have a count. Yeah. When you have plason errors, Peter, on a number of kids, you're kind of at the upper limit. But God love them. I mean, he should. and he should have as many kids as God or as Mother Nature will provide. But we have the situation in astronomy with Starlink and I have a Starlink unit, but it is causing challenges for optical astronomers, but more so, we'll cause problems for microwave and radio astronomers.

45:36And he's talked and he's engaged and it's true. He has endeavored to blacken the satellites to make them less visible. But Peter, as you know, I studied the cosmic microwave background radiation, the thermal relic of the Big Bang, the most ancient photons in the universe, which just so happened to be in the KU band and KA band. And with thousands of satellites darkening the sky, there's no way to darken something. Let me just tell you for those that may not be. There's no way to darken thermal radiation. It makes it worse, right? So I wonder, you know, how do you think he weighs these these grand challenges?

46:09And it is almost ethical in a sense. Like if you if he knew he couldn't darken them optically and they were just gonna be glowing bright with the you know Olbers Paradox type brightness. What would he what do you think he would? I think I Haven't had this comment. I had many conversations with him. I had I had I spent hours with him last Sunday at a friend's birthday party Next time I'll ask but Number one he's doing what is legally allowed to be done, right? So he applies for FCC licenses to launch 30 ,000 satellites. Maybe more. He's gotten licenses to launch, you know, on the order of 10 ,000 plus.

46:51And I think if I'm channeling my inner Elon, he would say the best place for these observatories is not Earth orbit. It's on the other side of the moon. It's going to be in Lagrange points. It's going to be away from Earth's radiation transmission. And that we have a short period of time during which we are burdened by that. And we're going to be back on the lunar surface in three years' time probably. And that starts - One of the graduates of UCST, Dr. Jessica Mayer, she may be the first female to land on the moon. Yeah, well, and I'm thinking with Starship going there, probably first delivering in.

47:39And you know, the ability, I mean Starship, once it's up and operational, and we're recording this a week before the presumed first flight launch attempt, the week of April the 20th. Now we'll see. I'm hopefully going to fly in to Boca Chica, and Elon said his goal for that mission is that it doesn't blow up the launch pad. I say, OK, that's a great call. And we'll see how part gets. But if it does, he'll say something like, oh, it's just a scratch. It's just a scratch. It'll buff right out. So cheerful when these billion dollar machines explode. But yeah. Anyway, so I think that Starlink has the potential to do extraordinary good for humanity.

48:25We've seen that in the Ukraine. and it's a new communications layer wrapped around the planet. Yeah, it is causing havoc. I'm surprised that all of this wasn't debated by the FCC in granting the license in the first place. And by the way... It's very niche. There are more NBA players than astrophysicists who study the cosmic microwave background. True. But it is a window which once closed can never be reopened. And it's actually worse than just the thermal radiation which would be bad enough because they're moving and they can't easily be subtracted, although we know they're orbits, but it's the fact they transmit in the band that we're looking at.

49:03So they're equivalent to millions of Kelvin emission and we're trying to look for nano -keleve. Yeah, yeah, it's impossible. It's like, yeah. But if you get a chance, I mean, what I would be doing as a community is like saying, okay, you'll on fine, but we want an observatory on the far side of the moon. I've often thought about that of how to an approach him and he is a physicist and he did graduate from a University of Pennsylvania, one of our close colleagues on the Simon's Observatory, the most ambitious and most expensive observatory ever funded to do what we're doing. It's a $190 million project by the time it's done, funded by Jim and Marilyn Simon's and the Heising Simon's Foundation, New York and the Bay Area respectively.

49:44And what we're trying to look for has such incredible ramifications. And I want to use this as a jumping off point to maybe not just for you to convey to Elon, which would be nice, but that's not really why I'm asking. The second most famous citizen of Lesbos was a man by the name of Aristotle, second only to you, Peter. And... My just good foreclarity. My parents were both born in the island of Lesbos. And so on Lesbos, there's a lagoon. And there's a wonderful book called Aristotle's Lagoon. And in it is described the scientific method as understood by Aristotle. And he talks about some of the discoveries, which in the world of physics, were almost universally incorrect, Peter.

50:27He believed heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. He believed there were only four elements. He had a whole host of things that could have been falsified, easily falsified, as Galileo did 16 centuries later by just answering a thought experiment by saying, well, if heavy things fall faster than light things, what happens if I just tie two light things together to make a heavy thing? Shouldn't they fall faster at that point? Of course they don't. So that was just a thought. It didn't require like a large Hadron Collider. But one of the things that he brought up was, and he was correct about, in the natural sciences, was that whales were mammals.

51:04And it really wasn't understood until Aristotle came up with that, by observing in the legumes of Lesbos in ancient Greece, this fact, which he observed, constructed hypothesis, did more observations and ductive reasoning, and then came up and utilized this to draw the scientific method. When you open your podcast every week, I listen to it, you talk about the massive transformative purpose and you talk about what the goal of the massive transformative purpose is to create a dent in the universe unique to the individual, we're at the point now, Peter, where we are actually looking for dent in the universe.

51:41and it would be in the form of a collision between universes in what's called the multiverse. And this is the most... Yeah, this is the most... You know, we have to as modern podcasters, we have to talk about at least two of the following three things. Bitcoin, aliens, the singularity, or the multiverse. Or are we living in a simulation? Exactly. That's right. So we'll have to defer some of those in the interest of time, but getting to the multiverse. The multiverse is perhaps the most far -reaching and bizarre, you know, a scientific hypothesis or paradigm. It's not even really at the level of a hypothesis because it may or may not be testable, but one of the ways that you could not falsify the multiverse, but you could prove the multiverse.

52:29So it's very unlike other scientific conjectures. To whatever extent you could prove something. You know, I would say in the name of Isaac Asimov, who a great writer who influenced the name of one of my kids, I'll let you guess which one. He used to say, if you think the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you think the earth is a sphere, you're also wrong, but you're less wrong than if you think it's flat, right? The earth is slightly pear -shaped, it has a quadrupole or distortion to it because of insertational eye. Anyway, getting back to good old Aristotle and this search for falsifiability or quote -unquote proof.

53:02If we were to see the following situation. Two universes that are each expanding since their own big bangs, which could be wildly different ages of their own universe. Our universe can exist for another 13 billion years without changing too much prospects for life and so forth. They will eventually come into contact. Let's say there one light year away from us is another universe. Therefore, that universe once our universe expands into it or it expands into us will have some combined, you know, venn diagram intersection where these two things are sharing some common sphere. So imagine two balloons are blowing up, they're right next to each other, eventually they hit each other.

53:42That is what I'm calling the dent in the universe. So what will happen is another universe will make a physical dent which can be perceived according to my colleagues in astrophysics and cosmology that you'd be able to detect the tell -tale imprint of the multiverse by the existence of these certain patterns in the cosmic microwave background that I study. And those would be unequivocal and you could actually use that to motivate very high confidence the multiverse exists. But is it if there's an infinity of universes in the multiverse because I don't think you can say is it zero, is it one or infinite?

54:17It could be, it could be, so there's multiple multiverses of course, right? So there's a multiverse in time, which is where the universe expands and contracts and keeps making more and more universes, but they're actually physically distinct in space. There's a multiverse, and this is all kind of the numbering scheme is courtesy of our mutual friend Max Teigmark at your alma mater. And this impact of the multiverse would be another distinct universe, another level of the multiverse in his nomenclature or counting scheme. There's four different levels. The multiverse could be distinct universes.

54:52It could be one. It could be an infinite number or it could be a finite number where that finite number is motivated by something called the string landscape, which comes from certain properties of what's called the vacuum state and phase space of different models of string theory, which is a number which is effectively infinite as Max has pointed out. It's actually the numbers finite. It's 10 to the 500th universe. Max has shown that once you get above 10 to the 80th, which is, you know, no small number either that you also effectively on an infinite universe where you'd have infinite copies of effectively infinite copies of events and people and so forth.

55:30So you're right. There are multiple levels, one of which is that there's an infinite number of other universes. And one where there's almost infinite. But I mean, if that's the case, I would imagine that this indentation would have been occurring constantly all the time everywhere unless they're out of phase in some phase in some fashion or some or or in I guess out of phase the way I could describe it. Well, when you go to Texas in a week or so, you'll see you know the gigafactory and so forth. Imagine you bring with you a piece of sand, two pieces of sand from Santa Monica and you put one at one end of the gigafactory and you put another one at the other end of the gigafactory.

56:09Those two grains of sand relative to their size are closer to one another than the two nearest stars in the average vicinity of the sun's solar neighborhood. In other words, space is unimaginably vast, right? And that shouldn't stop people to try to explore it and so forth, to colonize whatever, but the important fact to notice that is very large. So that, when Milky Way Galaxy combines and forms milk -dramada, when they endramada Galaxy, which is only one of 12 galaxies, Peter, out of 100 billion to a trillion galaxies these being discovered by web and other instruments. There's a trillion galaxies saying, 12 of them are not moving away from us.

56:50It's spectacular when you think about how rare it is that we inhabit this universe. But when one of those 12 crashes into the Milky Way, if violent fervor, nothing will happen. If there are people they won't even notice, the stars will pass almost right through them. Just like if you shot two grains of sand past each other in the gigafactory, not a damn thing would happen, right? So space is vast and with the universe and the multiverse, the same arguments could apply. It may be extremely rare. That's why I said you can't falsify it. You can't say the lack of observation of these dance. You could prove it.

57:20Yes. I was curious. I was going to ask you the question, how many galaxies do you hold in your mind as the current number? I mean, I remember sort of an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy. And then it was like, at one point, it was 100 billion galaxies in the universe. And then it was a trillion. Then I heard as many as 20 trillion. and I was, so where are you now? Couple of trillion is the current estimate? Yeah, it's all location, location, location, just like real estate here in California. One of the fun things was I remember Apagodra's number from chemistry. Yeah, six point, two times, it's just point third.

57:55You know, if you, one estimate a number of galaxies and the number of stars gives you Apagodra's number of stars in the universe. So I thought that was a lot of fun. And people then use that to, you know, to make a claim of the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. And we have to get to that, Peter, because it's a mandatory and a contract that we both signed to have this product. But let me just get back. We don't know exactly how many, we don't even know how many stars are in the Milky Way galaxy, let alone how many galaxies there are total outside of the Milky Way galaxy. And so we make approximations.

58:27It also gives, has anyone ever given you a star -Peter in the international star registry? Yes, I have early on in my life when it first came out. I think I have a couple of those stars. It's an interesting gimmick. Yeah, what I wanted to just tell you is that, you know, speaking on behalf of all, you know, professional astronomers, that's absolutely meaningless. Nobody looks up. So there's the demand as HDE 24 for 60. Okay, so but that doesn't stop me from having the idea that now we can sell universes in the multiverse. And so I have the Keating. If you go to my website, peter, brinekeating .com, I will let you buy me buy a universe from me in the multiverse.

59:03But actually, seriously, I want to make an offer to your listeners. I have these chunks of rocks. Let me see if I can find one right here. I believe this one. I don't know where my kids have taken it. From the driveway. From the driveway. Let me look around here. It is. Okay. So I have chunks here, Peter. Okay. This is a chunk of a 4 billion year old asteroid that's metallic. It looks like. It's a metallic conduit. Right. So it's fell in Argentina and about 6 ,000 years ago it was discovered in the 1500s and it was brought to earth the old -fashioned way by gravity But if you have a .edu email address and you sign up for my mailing list Brian Keating .com slash list You will automatically win a fragment of this meteorite because my massive transformational purpose Which I know you're gonna get to at some point It involves creating and connecting millions of minds in a network to really bring free education as you do.

1:00:03So wonderfully. So I believe education is the sine qua non of humanity and what we do exquisitely well and which doesn't actually need a university and don't tell Gavin Newsom my boss. But I would do the job I do for free. I'm a public school employee so I don't get paid all that much. But I do what I do because I love it. but I also am under no illusions that, A, there aren't better teachers than me, that AI won't supersede me. If I, you know, I recently translated, or not translated, recorded the first ever audiobook by Galileo with Frank Wilcheck, also of MIT, and Carla Revelli and others. And this book, I realize and doing, has a million words, three characters.

1:00:42It's like a play, Galileo is a phenomenal writer. You can get a copy also on my website of the audio book. So Brian Keating .com, just to reinforce in people's memory. And so what we did is we took all that and we just read it. But I was like, why don't I put this into like some chat engine? This is two years ago now. So it really wasn't as prominent in my frontal cortex. But I realized, you know, Peter, I could be replaced by Galileo for a lot of things. But one thing I replaced by Galileo in the form of an AI, which is easy to do now. And the fact that nobody has done that yet is kind of giving me an opportunity to do it.

1:01:18But the bottom line is what I want to do is connect the ability to educate people for free. And I think that will unlock because nothing's more abundant than free digital education. I mean, we can just, you know, the five Ds, right? We can just democratize it and demonetize it. And that's what I want to do. So in particular, the .edu folks, I'm interested in reaching them because the main obstacle, I think, to higher education and the unlocking, you know, Elon is not limited by money, Peter. He's limited by brains. I mean, he's limited by how many engineers and so on. So anyway, I want to scale this up.

1:01:53I don't believe that you need to go to a university, even a public one, necessarily to get an incredible education and trying to in one way or another to demonetize it as much as I can. Yeah, and if there's two massive disruptions that's occurring this decade, it will be education and healthcare, right? COVID was a tipping factor. I don't think we were gonna see the full implications of what occurred as a result of the shutdown for the next five years, but there is a massive reinvention of education and a massive reinvention of the healthcare industries, both of which are unfortunately performing very poor per dollar invested.

1:02:34Okay, now the single most important conversation that one could have is their life out there, is their intelligent life out there? And we can talk about out there being our solar system or our galaxy or our universe. Welcome to the great debate, ladies and gentlemen. On one side of the story, Brian Keating says, no, we are the only ones out here. We are alone. Do not screw it up. You know, please, take logical life. Take logical life. We have to be clear. Speaking of intelligent life. Yeah. Technological life. Yeah, technological life. You're, you want to - and swimming through the, you know, the salt pools of Titan that would not count.

1:03:16I believe that is possible, but I'm strictly speaking about intelligent life. I think that makes the odds of me winning this debate much higher. Okay. On the other side, Peter Diamandis is no intelligent life is ubiquitous in the universe. It is a forcing function that comes out of the laws of physics. It's reverse and tropic and it is something which we're just beginning to understand. All right, you know, boxers take your corners, let the bait begin. We need a neutral tolerance. Brian, since you're younger, smarter and better looking than me, you're first. All right, Peter. I've had two like peak experiences in my life in terms of my career as a scientist.

1:04:00one is involved launching rockets into space to look for the signatures of first stars and shooting a Nike missile out of White Sands missile range and getting clearances and so forth together. The other two peak experience is going to Chile at 17 ,600 feet above sea level in the Atacama desert and the other is going to the South Pole Antarctica. And all three of these environments share something very starkly similar and that is they have the possibility for life in the deserts of white sands there is life and the desert and the otacama desert there is life and in Antarctica there is life and it is actually considered a dryest desert on earth.

1:04:41It's actually drier than the Sahara by precipitable water vapor content. It's also very high so 9 ,000 feet above sea level. I've gone there every time I go there one of my kids asked me to bring back a penguin because he likes to eat one of these people that goes to a restaurant and they can't decide between chicken or fish peter. Well if you eat a penguin, no, he doesn't eat them, he just loves them, he thinks they're the cutest things in the world. So there's a couple of penguins, there are a couple of giant, like imagine a seagull on steroids, like just inflated up, like jaco willing flying through the air, they're called scuba birds, and that's basically it.

1:05:15There's no other, you know, there's some seals and stuff that come on the ice and orcas which, but then when you get to the South Pole, there's nothing there, there ain't nothing there. And in fact, a hundred years ago, a hundred and twelve years ago, humans made it there for the first time. And then it's that dormant for 50 years. In other words, we've not been back to the moon in longer than it took for them to discover the South Pole, reach the South Pole. And then for humans to go back in the 50s and 60s, only took 40 years to do that. We haven't been back to the moon in 50 years. Let's hope that changes.

1:05:45And anyway, my argument is connected to this calculation that you did a few minutes ago, which is Avocado Deros number. Sometimes I call it a guacamole because it's avocado's number. but 10 to the 23rd. That's just basically 10 to the 24th, take a trillion stars in each galaxy, eight trillion galaxies, nice round number. Now, that's all fine and good. Now, imagine though that you have just, let's say there are eight hurdles, Peter, that life had to get to be technological. And let's call those hurdles, first of all, there had to be on some particular planet an a -biotic scenario, unless we believe that life came from the earth, which we know that the solar system exchanges material.

1:06:24So I will send your .edu listeners one of these meteorites for sure. I will not send them the little tiny fleck of Mars that I got a long time ago, also purchased legally through proper channels, not collected by some rover. And that flake of Mars meteor, I cost more than a 10 kilogram fragment of these metal congeurites that I will send to you. Anyway, that came to us from Mars, the more expensive one. So that means Mars and the Earth exchange materials. And in fact, you can buy, if you get a sample of the moon Peter, collected by the Apollo astronauts, you will go to jail for many, many years as a felony.

1:07:01If you get one on eBay, which I've collected them, you'll just give them out, but they're expensive. The solar system exchanges material back and forth all the time, which means not only can stuff come to Earth from Mars, stuff from Earth carrying tardigrades or what have you can go to Mars. So, first of all, the non -observation of life in our solar system, it has to count as at some level for the facundity factor, and I call it facundity factor. How probable with life preexisting to find a birth, a place of residence residing in the solar system. It is exquisitely low. We don't know exactly.

1:07:37It's very difficult to quantify it because it's our friend Carl Sagan. I haven't had on the podcast, but I had his widow, Andrewian, and his daughter Sasha, who are both lovely women. I had the first mother daughter team ever in podcasting history in the sciences, I believe. Anyway, as Carl Sagan said, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, or somebody said that, he could have said it. What I'm saying is, let's say this trillion, trillion number. Let's say it's up against the following odds. There's eight hurdles that life elsewhere in the universe had to get to. It had to go from inorganic materials, it had to go from hydrocarbons, it had to go from rather hydrogen, then carbon and so forth.

1:08:18It had to form an Iraqi planet, perhaps. It may not have to be even carbon -based, it could be silicon -based. Let's ignore that we had whales as we discussed earlier in that lead to, and we had prebiotic algae and so forth that led to the existence of oil and petroleum. Let's ignore it. Let's summarize. Let's say there are eight factors like that. There has to be an outer planet like Jupiter to suck up all the inbound asteroids, which this thing came from before it impacted the Earth, and sucked up the real killer planet planet tessimals that could have destroyed the earth and all life in it.

1:08:53It has to have a moon not too close to us in the tectonic activity, spin rate, a diurnal period. So there are very many properties that have... Let's say there's eight of those factors. And let's say, unlike what most people believe that these... Each individual term is incredibly improbable. Let's describe it a pretty high probability for each of the eight terms. Let's call it 0 .1%. So one part in a thousand. Let's say they're eight of those. What happens if you take 10, you raise 10 to the minus 3 to the 8th power. You get the same number, 10 to the minus 24. So that means there'd be either zero or one other life form in the known universe.

1:09:33Now again, I said before I hate when scientists don't use error estimates. The problem is how do you estimate something that may have occurred only once? all the contingent factors. And that's just to get to life. Let alone, that could be a dolphin, as I said, swimming through a methane pond on Titan, which we don't see. But now to get to iPhones and technological life, I just think the odds are incredibly low. And as I said, I've been to Antarctica. And Antarctica, people will say, well, there's so much room for stars and life in the universe. And each star has 10 to the three planets or planetesimals orbiting around it.

1:10:10Okay, so you can increase it to whatever you like, But you know Antarctica is one seventh of the continents of earth and I've been to it And as I said just the mere availability of real estate says nothing about the probability for that real estate to be inhabited So I turn it over to you to decimate those arguments as you see fit. Okay. Okay. Very enough So first of all We know that the building blocks of life the basic amino acids for even nucleotides that make up DNA are present in the interstellar medium. Right? We have seen that. We've observed that through your colleagues and astronomy. So we can say that the prerequisite building blocks that could lead to the early formation of life are out there.

1:11:10For that reason, any place that has for liquid -based water life that these materials can rain upon has a possibility of creating early life forms. Our planets four point, four point five billion and call the universe, 14 point five for round numbers for the moment. So we believe life came into existence on this planet about a billion years after the Earth roughly cooled. And so if we look at what the most, I'm going to be focusing on advanced life. If you look at what the highest atomic number element that the human being needs to survive, I think it's iodine at around atomic number 56. And if you look back at when iodine probably came into existence in our universe after a series of supernova, I remember I had this conversation with Dr.

1:12:14William Fowler, who was one of the great, one of the Nobel Prize for stellar evolution. His estimate was about a billion years after the Big Bang. We would have had enough birth death birth cycles of stars to get iodine. So, let's assume that life will have formed on planets because I do think that any planet that has liquid water and is within a decent radiation shield that the pre -ingredients of of life raining on the surface will ultimately leave to some single cell life forms, some self -replicating life forms. We've seen the experiments over and over again where you put these materials together and they eventually lead towards that process.

1:13:05So now the question becomes how many of those might have come into existence over the last? Let's not say 10 billion years, let's say a billion years. And how far has that come? I mean the argument that's typically made, you know, Fermi's paradox is where are they? Right? If in fact they evolved, where are they? And I had an experience which was, which was a centerpiece for me here. I was with my dad in Greece at a place called Mount Athos, which was a observatory up in Amsterdam. a place of worship, a church up in the mountains and Greece. And it was six o 'clock, and it was time to call all the priest to prayer, and this old priest, long white beard, long white hair, black outfit, very typical, walks up and there's his bell in the center and takes his cane, and he hits the bell to call all of the priest to prayer.

1:14:16And in that moment, my cell phone rings. And it was like this cathartic moment. I'm like, oh my God, here is this society, depending upon audio frequencies to communicate with each other. And in that same moment, little do they know, they're being bathed at 800 900 megahertz and 2 .4 gigahertz frequencies, they just don't have the tech to perceive it or communicate. And so as we know, the Drake equation, one of the elements of the Drake equation, which is the number of stars and the percentage of stars that have planets and the percentage of planets that are in the right Goldilocks zone and the percentage of those that form life.

1:15:01And ultimately, it ends up with what percentage of those life forms are make it to a point where they're transmitting in the radio frequency. And how long does that species survive was the old dystopian point of view between the time they come up with radio, Marconi in the late 1800s to the point where they blow themselves up in a nuclear war. That was sort of like, are they 100 years old? And I want to interpret that a little bit differently, which is I don't know that the way we can and will be communicating in 50 years even involves radio frequencies anymore. Is there a more fun? I mean we would I would imagine we know very little truly about the extent of all the laws of physics and there may be much more energy efficient and and and and information efficient mechanisms that once they're discovered will flip a bit and all of this old stuff goes away.

1:16:07But the other side of the equation as well is at some point, you know, have they have these intelligent life forms, gotten and built starships and gone out and explored the universe and if they have, where are they? Then my mind turns to conversations like, you know, if a life form that was much more intelligent it could do interstellar travel. I'm sure they could visit the planet and be undetected. I don't think that we would be would be obviously, you know, and the scientific method would have them come and observe us and take samples and do everything without disturbing us. It's the prime directive if you would have Star Trek.

1:16:49And then the question would be actually at some point would we become digital? would we in fact not want to physically maintain our bodies and go in starships? Would we upload ourselves? Would we transform ourselves into a technological intelligence that doesn't need to go out and explore physically? So I mean these are the questions I have that for me the probability in all of these two trillion galaxies and 100 billion stars that were alone, seems to me a false premise. Here's the question. I think we're going to find out whether life evolved independently. We'll have a few shots on Mars in Europa.

1:17:46We'll find out when you look at whatever life form, whatever coding it uses is it identical? We'll know whether it came from Earth or not. We'll know whether it originated from, you know, pansepermia theory where life has been reigned upon the Earth and that's where it started. Everybody, this is Peter, a quick break from the episode. You know, I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology.

1:18:32How entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges. What the breakthroughs are in longevity. How exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, the age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of you use you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandus .com, backslashblog, and learn more.

1:19:11Now back to the episode. Yeah, well, you said a lot of very, you know, I think, incontrovertible facts. I mean, one of the things that we talk about in space exploration is we're looking for water. Well, I'll give you water, you know, that's table stakes. Water is made of the most common element in the known universe, which is hydrogen, and the six most common element, which is oxygen, very easy, very stable. I'll stipulate that it's been found, you know, in that it's in craters on the moon and ice form, and obviously on regions and Mars. So it waters not a problem, even forming the precursors to amino acids.

1:19:47The problem is that, and I'm glad you brought up Willie Fowler, who was a very close colleague of two of my colleagues here at UC San Diego, Jeff and Margaret Burbage, who equally, I believe, deserved the Nobel Prize, but we won't get into the politics of why that happened in Hoyle II. Hoyle came up with the theory of pan spermia that you mentioned. He also came up with the name The Big Bang. who's a really irrascible character. I interviewed his best graduate student, Jaiant Naralakar, who's still alive and with us in Pune, India. But at any rate, all these precursors, again, it depends on how you do the error analysis.

1:20:21When you say, I believe based on this large number that aliens, there's alien technological life, okay? That's incontrovertible, but you're using as a predicate the kind of face space of available objects that could have been formed habitable nucleation sites for primitive life to form. So first we have to stipulate how easy or hard it is for that to happen. And another colleague of the Burbage's and Fowler was located here, his name is Harold Uri, and he's the progenitor of the famous Miller Uri experiment, which when you go through it is a very persuasive sounding. And many people have used it, Neil deGress Tyson, we talked about it in a minute.

1:21:01that lightning caused energetic nucleation of cellular forms of life. Yeah, basically you have a very, you know, an oxygen vessel. You put in some phosphorus, you put in some nitrogen stuff that was composed. They thought at the time of the early Earth's atmosphere, then you shock it and now come some sludge, which when you analyze it has either some precursors to amino acids or amino nuances themselves, but look what went into that. And I'm not even gonna get into theological implications, but they went down to the chemistry stockroom, which is located here in Yuri Hall, and they got a beautifully 99 .59 pure, isopropyl alcohol, and they got this thing, and that thing, sterilized reagents, sterilized vessels, Bunsen burner at the exact right temperature.

1:21:53It's very different than a stromatolite in Australia, very different. And there was a mind behind that, right? There were some people, and I'm not getting into intelligent design. I have my own challenges with that. You can see me kind of go off on people like James Tour and also even on Steven C. Meyer, who I consider a friend. But the point is Peter, that a lot of these things trace back to premises which depend very strongly on what's called the Bayesian prior that you apply. So again, if you say the prior is how many stars it could support, how many planets, and it's, I can give you any number you like, but it's just like if I said there's seven continents, Peter.

1:22:32So you'd expect a uniform prior for one seventh of all intelligent life on Earth to be in Antarctica. When I go there, Peter, I'm not even the smartest person there. I'm an even, I'm, I might be the heaviest person there. You know, I might be, I might be the only native New Yorker there. I don't know. There's only 200 people there, you know. But why would people, why? That's bigger than Texas. But why wouldn't you stipulate the same as at the bottom of the Marianist trench or at the top of the troposphere? I mean, there are going to be in a gradation of environments of heat and energy, food densities and so forth, places which are ideal for life to form and places where it's not ideal.

1:23:18And I don't expect there to be life, intelligent life, across the entire planet. But all it requires is there to be a single nucleation point if the intelligent life isn't able to modify its environment. And then it's going to modify its environment where it takes the least amount of energy to modify its environment. It's going to migrate if it's intelligent to the places where it can create food and shelter and protection and so forth. So the question really is in the course of a period of time, is there a local or an absolute maxim or a local maxim for that period of time where intelligent life can form and then maintain itself?

1:24:04I think that's really the conversation. One argument that people have used non -original to me is that you can't have metallurgy in the troposphere. You can't have metallurgy in the Marianas trench. You can't get from basic materials to the, I forget about going from prebiotic like ooze to, you know, I always say going from rocks to rock mononof or from, you know, bacteria to Bach. You know, I have a million red jokes. That's one of the benefits of becoming a father, right? And so, but the point is, I don't believe, I don't have conviction that just because it's so improbable for technological life to exist throughout the universe that there is none.

1:24:41But I do believe almost to the fact of quasi -theological conviction, not by you, Peter, but but by many people in the setting game that this is, it's almost inevitable because the large number hypothesis, and that's exactly what Carl Sagan meant when he wrote with Andruian, my past guest, in contact that if there is no other intelligent life in the universe, it's an awful waste of space as Ellie Arroway's dad told her, right? So, and fun fact, that's modeled on a real person, Jill Tartar, who's a friend. Yes, she's a friend. Yes. She's a wonderful guest, you should have her own. But the bottom line, Peter, is there's no saying what a waste of space is.

1:25:22It's a teleological implication. And I think we need to have a little bit of what Aristotle would kind of indulge us to have and beg our forbearance that there is a tendency to extrapolate from our own, maybe maybe kind of pedestrian or parochial observations and say that these are universal things. But I do think you're right that if there are technological life forms, they may be computers, they may be artificial intelligences, which can defy the laws of physics that afflict us and the name that they could travel at the speed of light. So for all these reasons, and believe me, no one would be more psyched and pumped for the existence of extraterrestrial light, as long as it doesn't wanna eat, you know, middle -aged New Yorkers like me, with a little bit too much avua du poix, hydrocarbons on storing, you know, Peter they say you should always have, you know, six months of money and six months of food on hand.

1:26:24I keep the food on body at all times. But maybe you can help me with that, with your medical training. But so I do believe it's something which dovetails back with where we started, which is what we need kind of a Drake equation to assess the likelihood where we assess the probabilities, the priors, the, uh, and a Bayesian sense and taking all the data and assess it. Maybe this is something where AI can help us with once they have their own kind of brand of Drake equation for AI. I think you're, you're right. But I also turned to a recent example.

1:27:05It astrophysicists, astronomers, scientists in the field, when you looked at, you know, in the early days of the Drake equation, the percentage of stars that had planets was deemed to be relatively low, even though we live on a solar system of eight planets and one dwarf planet. Okay, fine. I'll go there. But, you know, we're finding planets everywhere now. Now, all of the observatories we've launched is disproving that. We're also finding black holes at the center of every galaxy. We're finding galaxies over the place. Whenever we have deemed to constrain these things, we've been wrong over and over again.

1:27:55That's my observation of it. Maybe there's the reverse, which I just don't know. That's true. And as we said earlier, we didn't know of any galaxies outside of the Milky Way until less than 100 years ago as you will include in your newsletter this year. And so it's a startling testimony to how brilliant and capable the human mind is, but the bottom under underlying fact is that I think we have to say there is no evidence right now. It doesn't mean that there is no existence, but there's no evidence that we have of anything remotely like that. And for that reason, I think it's almost, it's because people assume that there is life.

1:28:33I think it's important to have, maybe it's in my contrary inside, but to have kind of counter examples and present things, because I think it's like these people that make a bet that their favorite sports team is gonna lose the big game. And San Diego, that's no problem because we've never won a major championship in any sport whatsoever. But the bottom line is, No one would be more excited. No one would be more thrilled. Because from these individuals or species or artificial intelligences, they have survived. They've gotten past the great filter perhaps if there is one. They've also been able to master laws of physics and a laws of sociology and communication and so forth.

1:29:15So I think a physicist, most of all, would appreciate the existence. And that's why maybe I'm hedging my bets and being a contrarian, but I think I'm bolstered by the fact that there are a great deal of hurdles to it. And the final thing I'll say, Peter, is, do you care about your 82nd grandchild to the power two, to the 80s? Do you care about 100 generations, 1 ,000 generations, as Will McCaskill talks about, we're in the first inning of a overtime or extra endings game? I mean, I don't know the names of my great, great, grandparents, right? It's likely my great, great, great, grandchildren won't know my name except for, if they to the most popular podcast of all time, into the impossible.

1:29:57So, but I like to think also, we've explored the local area of the galaxy quite well, and we've, you know, it's true, we've only dipped a thimble into the ocean to use jailed tardars metaphor in searching the universe, but let's say there is life in another galaxy. It's 3 million light years away, Peter, and I think it's almost, you know, It is becoming a branch of philosophy at that point. Could they be existing? Yeah, but what do you really care about? Just like you care about your kids and your grandkids and maybe their grandkids? It's hard to really think about, well, I'd really care if there was a child living in M51, the poster I have behind me, the world pool galaxy has 86 million light years away.

1:30:41But there is huge philosophical religious implications to the humanity, right? It is. I think it's one of the top two interesting questions you could ask. The other is, you know, how did the universe come from a non -universe? How did life come from non -life? How did consciousness come from non -consciousness? And then how did technological life come from non -technological? I think those are the four big bangs that are most interesting to me. I love those, and those are all good sessions for us to have in the future. Let me ask you one question to wrap up. Are you going to start reading this?

1:31:13I can ask you one question as well. Do you want to go first? Absolutely. Turn about as fair play. You want to go first? Sure. So as I ask my guests on moon shots and mindsets, if I were to fund an ex -price for you, the Keating ex -price, what would it be? What would you want innovators around the world using their shower time in the morning, their sleep, and dream time at night to solve? What challenge? What would they have to build, demonstrate, make happen to win the Brian Keening X Prize? Is the monetary amount unlimited or is it still $10 million? No, it could be $10 to $100 million. We have launched $100 million prize and I was very happy, Elon Funded.

1:31:59I've got two more $100 million prizes that will be launched hopefully this year. So a lot coming, but let's put it in that decade. Yeah, it's hard and I know I'm speaking from a place of great privilege to say this, but you know, we're, I am among the four or five leaders of an experiment that's close to $200 million, but that's not finished. And that is kind of born of conversations and visions of gym assignments and myself and David Spurgold and my colleagues who's Anne Stags, Mark Devel and Adrian Lee. And this is to really go back to the beginning of time and understand whether or not there was a big bang.

1:32:35We don't know Peter if the Big Bang occurred once many times is still occurring. I keep on reading the James Webb Space Telescope has disproven the Big Bang open over again. No, that's all nonsense. Of course. They've learned much more than we ever thought possible and they've built upon what Hubble has been able to do. But there's no sense that they've done anything to do what the clickbait type headline suggests of disproving the Big Bang. But what I mean is we don't know if it was a singularity. We don't know if the Big Bang occurred once, not at all. Perhaps the Big Bang is a misnomer, as Hoyle described it as a euphemism for orgasm, meant to disparage and deride the theory that he called the Trocious, because he believed in a steady state universe.

1:33:19Well, they're modern incarnations of the steady state universe. And that's kind of what I have dedicated my life to, along with this desire to bring, you know, basically zero cost education to consumers to think scientifically. I think that's the greatest hope that humanity has is to really completely devalue our de -economic incentivize what I do for a living. So I'm undercutting my own financial, you know, vinyl instinct, which is that I want education, at least in the STEM fields, to basically be free. And I want it to be the equivalent of, you know, we walk around San Diego and, you know, thank God it's a very, very healthy economy down here, but we have a share of homelessness and my wife and I were, were voiding rounds and we found at least the homeless have, have cell phones, okay?

1:34:11You can debate the policies that go to bad and we, whatever, they have access to information, they have access to data, they can enrich and better their lives. Peter, we need to do this at scale and And to make it really scale as you pointed out to me, we need to make it almost free. And it should be free. It does and it will be. And there's lots going on right now from the Khan Academy and GPT -4 and what Yimad Moustak is doing in Malawi with providing tablets and generative AI education platforms for all the students there. But coming back to the Brian Keating XPRIZE, what's the grand challenge?

1:34:49which the problem you want to solve, is it an education, is it an astronomy? What would you want teams doing, building, creating here? I think it would be to cultivate an education, a global brain that would then turn itself using the power of imagination and curiosity that I again contrarianly think are unique to the human species until proven otherwise. I'm hoping to be proven wrong. But yes, it would be to effectively to determine a way to make a free university available 24, 7, 365, 0 .24 to every human being on earth. Because imagine that, you know, we had to imagine that, you know, Elon's parents were, they never met, right?

1:35:35Imagine, and I know he's had great troubles with his father. I had trouble with my father. But let's ignore that. If, you know, there's got to be more iran's, there should be some iran's, there should be people, the world is vast and the 8 billion people that need to maintain our ever burgeoning path to make a dent in the universe as you say. I think that that can only occur with STEM education, Peter. I think that you can actually learn English from learning science. I have a weird, you know, reading Galileo, reading Aristotle, These are the greatest minds in history and reading, you know, Abdu Salam, Stephen Weinberg.

1:36:12They're incredible contributors, not just to science, or where they excelled in one Nobel Prize as really equivalent they are of, but they have a gift for communication as Feynman would say. You have to be able to explain it in simple terms. And as Einstein said, but no simpler. So we have to get to this, raise the baseline level of STEM education, and that will allow us, hopefully, to value life, to think of life as precious, preserve the precious human capital. I believe every person is made in the image of God. And then protect the planet, which means to expand our horizons. Not necessarily outside of Earth, I think we should save Earth.

1:36:49Beautiful. All right. Accepted. Now your question, my friend. All right. Your question is the following. And I usually ask four of these questions, but I'm going to ask just one. And it's from Sir Arthur C. Clark, your old friend. I never I forgot to meet him. But Arthur said many things. He said, and he sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He said, for every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. And he said the following thing as well. He said, when an elderly, sorry, Peter, when an elderly, you're only like two years old, I mean, I think. But an elderly, but distinguished, you are very distinguished.

1:37:23When an elderly, but distinguished scientist, says something is possible, he is very likely to be right. But when he says something is impossible, he's almost certainly wrong. Peter, I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? You're the most optimistic person, cheerful person. I emulate you as best as I can. And when I think of myself as being depressed, I said, what would Peter do? But I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about that you thought was impossible, but really is possible? Well, so listen, I take some extreme positions. One of the positions that I take is that we can significantly extend the healthy human lifespan or health span, right, that we can break through what has been 120 year, 122 year up or age limit, that there are species of life on this planet, the boheat whale that goes for 200 years, the greenland shark and go for 500 years.

1:38:19And if they can go that long, why can't we? It's either a hardware problem or software problem and we're going to be able to solve that problem and that the tools to solve those problems are coming online this decade. So that's my belief which I believe is probable and You know, could I be wrong there? possibly But I think it's a matter of time not a matter of if so I guess your question is what do I think is in? impossible that could be wrong about. So the challenge is I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what's impossible. I think it's probably impossible for today's governments to deal with the rate of technological change that will be occurring in the next two decades as we head towards Ray Kurzweil's singularity.

1:39:19I think that we're going to see governments failing as a result of their inability to maintain control. And so that's going to be interesting, the question of whether or not they will be able to reinvent themselves fast enough to stay viable as a government. So that's one element that I think of as kind of impossible. Anything you feel you've been wrong about or you know, I've been wrong about time and monogamous. I mean, you know, I started an asteroid mining company a decade ago and I remember having a conversation with Elon about it and saying, hey, would you buy liquid oxygen if I brought it back from these carbonicious conduits and he goes, of course I would, but I think you're way too early and he was right and I'll take another shot.

1:40:15By the way, Jim Simons has an asteroid and I told him about your asteroid mining and he said, I have mining rights on my asteroid so he'd be interested too if it does come around. A couple billionaires in your corner won't I? Yeah, well I think we're going to see the human species evolve off planet. So one of the questions, of course I think about is it planetary or O 'Neill? You know, Gerard Keoneal, a friend, a mentor at Princeton advocated for creating colonies in space, rotating space colonies that would house on average 10 ,000 individuals. There was a widen of genetic pool and a pool of skills, and that those colonies would bud like Amoeba and you'd rebuild and you'd go on an exponential growth curve, but rather than get into the deep gravity well of Mars and having to use energy to get off it again.

1:41:17So I'm much more of a moon and a Neil colony guy than I am a Mars guy. So I might be wrong about that. Maybe Mars is the place we need to get ourselves to. We'll see. I'm like really it's kind of I'd rather colonize the moon and start building you know with robots and AI's O 'Neill colonies out there and not you know dive back into the gravity well So I mean that's another area of interesting interesting debate I don't know what else where else you want to take it? Well, I think in the interest of time I should wrap up because my young folks my my twins are getting restless and There's nothing worse than the terrible the formidable force as you know Peter it's been a great delight.

1:42:06It's always a pleasure to talk to you and Anything else you know that you'd like to have my audience be aware of on your side I'm gonna have a link to your newsletter which I get and Look forward to eagerly devouring every time you write something. I subscribe follow you on Twitter and elsewhere Anything else that would be of interest? I just want to listen to this. From my, you know, my handles are at Peter Diamandis on Twitter and Instagram and Diamandis .com is my website. You can learn a lot more and of course, moon shots and mindsets. And Brian, how about yourself? Work in my listeners, find you and which parts of your life are the most important for them to dive into.

1:42:48Well, I, you know, I just got one of your final onboarding emails that said, I'll see you in the multiverse and the metaverse. So I'll see you guys in the multiverse of minds. Most places I am as Dr. Brian Keating, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. But the most important thing is really to connect, especially the young people. I wrote several books, one of which is called Into the Impossible, named after Arthur C. Clarke's phrase in this as well. It's really a self -help guide, Peter Evolth. I never thought I'd write a self -help book for the second book. But you endorsed my first book, which I am so grateful, ever grateful for.

1:43:23And Julian Guthrie, who writes of at you and her machine doors my second book. But I'm really trying to really reach the undergraduate high school demographic, college, and even graduate students and postdocs and young faculty. Because there's a crisis of loneliness and isolation and imposter syndrome. And I talk about, I opened the book with my friend who wrote the forward to the book, Barry Barish up there in LA who won the Nobel Prize for LIGO and discovering two black holes crashing together at a quarter of the speed of light, a billion light years away, Peter I imagine. And I asked him like, what advice would you give to your former self?

1:43:58And he said, don't have the imposter syndrome when you're 80. And I'm like, you can't possibly have the imposter syndrome. You won the freaking Nobel Prize. And he said, no, no, no, you got it wrong. When I won the Nobel Prize, I got it worse than ever because when you accept the Nobel Prize, which I'll never find out about because my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, which you'll talk about some other time. When you win the Nobel Prize, you have to sign a lot, a ledger that says, I got my check and I got my 24 -carat golden medallion. And I'm a curious dude, said Barry, and he looked through the pages, and he saw Richard Feynman, and he said, oh my God, Marie Curie, oh my God.

1:44:31And he saw Einstein. Same book as me, I'm not worthy. And I said, Barry, guess what? I have good news. Einstein thought he was unworthy. And he said, of who? He said, I felt the imposter syndrome when it came to someone named Isaac Newton, because Isaac Newton did more according to Einstein than any other human being for Western civilization. And I said, that's not all Barry. Don't worry. Even Isaac Newton had his own imposter syndrome. He said, you got to be kidding me. And I said, you know, Barry, you and I are about Jews, but there was a man that Isaac Newton worshipped. And that was Jesus Christ.

1:45:07And I said, he felt he never lived up to. In fact, he felt His greatest accomplishment was he died of virgin like his mentor Jesus Christ, but he failed in many other ways. So Peter, I wrote a lot. I do a lot. Go to my website, brineking .com. Sign up if you have it .edu email address. You'll win a meteorite guaranteed. If you don't have one, you're entered into a drawing to win one of the first hundred listeners of the podcast. Peter, thank you so much. This has been a real honor. You've been so gracious. You helped me with my time. Peter, my time. You helped me with my book. And I can't wait to be together in person.

1:45:39and like we were when I was writing the book in 2016 with Sean Carroll, who is no longer in Los Angeles, by the way. Well, buddy, a pleasure and let's not wait that many years again for our next podcast. Well, be well. Okay, let's talk to you. Bye.