AI That Helps, Schools That Don’t, and How Not to Go Crazy with Prof. Brian Keating

26:06Like, what does it mean? How did they pass AP calculus or, you know, advanced calculus? That's the thing. I think that there was probably massive grade inflation, massive just, you know, corruption. And don't forget, like, who is admitting, who do you think, like, does admissions at Princeton or UCSD? Have you ever thought about that? No, I mean, I assume the admissions, team. Yeah, but who makes up the admissions? Is it like a panel of professors? Is it like an external committee of faculty and consultants? I guess I don't know. I assume people are hired just for admissions. Yeah, there's an administrative component of UCSD or any university that just does admission.

26:49Now, do you think they're professors? Do you think they have PhDs, any of them? Do you think they have any expertise in education. I mean, many of them don't have the qualifications of a guidance counselor. And yet they're responsible for the most, you know, determinative decision in a 17, 18 year old's life, you know, up to that point. And so many of them don't, you know, I wouldn't say many of them, you know, they're not all astrophysicists and, you know, mathematicians, right? So there's a spectrum of what their accomplishments are, but they're working in like academia at some lower level than academia, like they're working with high school kids.

27:22So maybe they only need to have high school degrees. I don't know. But they're in charge of this most monumental decision process. And I don't know what expertise they have. I know for a fact I've never been asked anything about undergraduate admissions as opposed to graduate admissions where it's only determined by faculty. So I think my graduate student performance is uniformly, it's as good as anywhere else in the world. but the undergraduate is out of my control as a professor, which is completely insane. Again, again though. I'm not asking to get to be on the admissions committee, but I'm asking like, I should get like teaching relief.

28:00I should be not forced to, that's the most important thing to a professor is like, you can't teach, like teaching takes up, you know, half my life, you know, teaching, grading, planning, getting guest lecturers, getting demonstrations, experiments, lab stuff. So that takes up half my life. So if you want me to do another thing, like review a proposal, and I just remembered I'm in charge of this committee. I haven't even started it yet. You want me to do that? You have to either give me more money, which is impossible because the university is a public university and they have no money and whatever.

28:32Or you have to say, look, we're going to get somebody else to take some of the teaching burden off of you so that you can do this other thing that we're telling you is so important. And I just find it crazy that we have so much to do, almost no time to do it. And we're expected to do more and more. And we have no, like, imagine you're hiring for a company, James, which is the model I'm making up in academia. You're hiring for a company, which are my students, but I have no say in who I hire. Whatsoever. I can't say this student is great. I get what you're saying, but it doesn't even explain it to me.

29:05Again, if they passed calculus, that means they passed algebra. It means they've passed geometry, maybe trigonometry. They've had to get through so many math classes. All the way to the bottom. First off, this is basic algebra. This is like algebra zero. So it does not make sense to me. Maybe corruption, but I don't even understand the point of that kind of corruption. Nobody's getting paid off. No one's making extra money. I would agree that it's suspicious or something weird, but it happens at all these schools, like all the UC schools. even at MIT, there's a remedial math class. You're like, how could you possibly get into MIT and have remedial math?

29:46Okay, but even remedial math, though, in a college level doesn't explain this problem. Well, what is remedial math at MIT? What do you think it involves? Well, I think it's for people who... I always say there's a backdoor into MIT, which is if you're an 18 years old and you really want to get into MIT, apply to the theater department. and you'll get in because no one else is applying for that at MIT. And so maybe then you need remedial math to keep up with MIT students. But then that means you know, though, still algebra, you got A's in. You had to still get all A's, which because of great inflation, most of these have.

30:23Yeah, I'd like to see what they actually teach and the remedial level at these other institutions. But look, this could all be done away with with some standardized testing, right? I mean, you can't imagine that you could do, get above a 200 on the SATs and the math, a 300 or whatever, if you don't know that simple algebra problem. So that would have eliminated it, but that was considered to be racist. And it was more important that they learn about social justice in 2020, 2021, and then they show their commitment to it. And that's why people like my nephew said, I believe all people are equal.

30:55That's considered a microaggression here. And so it was probably disqualifying. So instead of pandering to that level, we should have some standard. Now, the standardized test, should the standardized test companies, ETS or whatever it is, have the power that they have? It should be part of a portfolio of evaluation. But these sophisticated people in the admissions department and all these universities, they should be able to weight things. It's not that complicated. And say, well, the SAT is important. But they also did this, provided 1 ,000 mosquito nets to every person in a town in Rwanda or whatever.

31:31That's great. So maybe they did a little bit, but if they can't do basic math, then they have no business being in a top university like UCSD. Again, it doesn't explain it to me because that is so out of context, like not being able to answer that question. And yet you're a student at UCSD, even in Ruedel math. And I saw people say, oh, well, UCSD, part of their admissions because it's a public school, they have to accept, you know, there's some, there is a little bit more, it's not, some of their admissions are not as strict as other of their admissions. I don't know the reasoning behind that, but so it could be the potential, the cases they have very low ranking students, but I still don't understand if there are people who have taken any math classes at all, not answering that question.

32:17And they're saying 25 % of Ramiro math was, you know, was not able to answer that question. It just sounds ludicrous to me. I don't understand. And I'm not saying it's a shame that so many students don't know the answer to that question. I'm saying something seems wrong with the research they did. I don't believe the research they did. I was even going to post this exact thing on Twitter just to ask someone to explain to me, like, have you ever met anyone in your life who can't do that question? Well, yeah, but not. But yes, there are probably some people that can't do that question. But are they in college or are they first graders or whatever, right?

32:55Have you ever met anybody at UCSD who you think can't answer that question? No, but I've met students that are incapable of doing basic calculus. Yeah, well, I probably can't do basic calculus. I took calculus four years. But you're not a physics major in upper division class. They shouldn't be here either. So it's true at all levels. I would say UCSD probably has as many smart people as Harvard does, but our incoming class is eight times bigger than Harvard's. But the best of my students can compete with any student anywhere. There's just not as many proportionally as there might be at MIT. Harvard, I'm not so sure about anymore.

33:40Harvard has really gone to a dark place in many capacities. And I think everything from Lawrence Summers, kind of Epstein, the Epstein connection. My friend Eric Weinstein's detailed all these weird things where he knew about quantum mechanical theories of everything in the 1980s and 90s. He was supposed to be some hedge fund manager, but no one could point to a single hedge fund that he ran. He was advising Lawrence Summers on dating strategies in 2018, allegedly. It's a crazy place. It could be viewed as a think tank plus a lobbying firm plus a secret government program. I mean, from the way that Eric describes things, and I've heard other people describe as well.

34:29And being there, Harvard's like the gold standard, right? You say, oh, it's a Harvard professor, Harvard student. A lot of people are seeing emperors naked, basically.

34:45Really, really appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

35:04So I have started many companies. Some did well, some did not do as well. I've also run many companies. I've advised many companies and I've been involved in all aspects of the hiring process, whether sometimes I would have to hire a CEO, but sometimes software developers, sometimes designers, sometimes head of sales or business development. I've been involved in basically every aspect of running a business and hiring is maybe the most important thing you could do when you start a business. So I'm going to give you one piece of advice and it's related to what I'm talking about here. I used to think I was frugal because I would try to find employees as cheaply as possible.

35:43Someone young, just starting out, whatever. But what I've learned is you do so much better as a business finding the best person in your field. If you want a head of sales, find the best head of sales. If you want a software developer, hire the best software developer. It ultimately will save you money, but it'll also save you so much time, so much aggravation, so much anxiety. These are all things you need to preserve. It's really important to hire correctly. When you're running a business, your mind is on your business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's the problem with being an entrepreneur is you never leave the work at the office.

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40:15my stance in general is kids shouldn't go to college i'm as i get older i'm a little i understand why parents want to send why many parents want to send their children to college i get it i'm not really arguing this even though i strongly feel this look i even sent my kids to college you can't you can't say no to your daughters so you know i'm i believe this but I'm a hypocrite. So it's hard to be to fully argue. But look, yeah, people shouldn't send their kids to Harvard. And by the way, Harvard might be the one school where you can really make the argument, oh, the connections I make are going to be worth it alone.

40:52That is the case. Now, okay, if I send my kids to UCSD for physics, they get to have Brian Keating as their professor. That's probably worth it too. And that's if they're really into education and changing the field of physics and so on. So there's reasons to go to college for specific professions and purposes. And there's reasons to go to Harvard just for the connections. But I agree, Harvard lately is just a very, very disturbing place. All the schools, all these high school schools. I actually don't know. A lot of my friends went to Harvard, Cornell. I went to Brown graduate school. But I also met really high-quality people in high school.

41:30If you ever meet somebody in your life when you're younger and you're like, I wish I could buy an option on this person, not just financially because they're going to be rich or whatever, but just like, they're going to be successful. Like, there was no doubt in high school, some of my friends would be super successful. And then in college, I went to Case Western. It wasn't like, you know, an Ivy League school. But, you know, some of the people there that I met, I'm still friends with to this day and are super successful, you know, like just top of their game. And the people I know from Harvard and Cornell, like, they would have been successful anywhere.

42:02They would have made networks anywhere. But I don't even know. The type of person that networks, physics, I don't have some network because I went to an Ivy League grad school. No, but for physics, then it's, for some professions, it's the quality of training and education. If your goal is to go to school to get rich, which you don't have to go to school for that, but if you do go for that purpose, then a place like Harvard, and if you really are good at networking, that's going to help you. the effort you put into that into networking at a place like Harvard I'm sure if you're in investment banking and you go to any of these places it'll certainly be beneficial to you but the allure has been gone at least in my mind from academia I started keeping this thing in 2020 during BLM and just all the performative prostrations and land acknowledgements and crazy just like posturing in every virtuous signaling lexicon imaginable.

43:07And I started this like Apple Notes, you know, just like university rot. And it's like 10 megabytes now. And it's all text, you know, maybe a picture here or there. But everything from like Ivy League, Professor Cornell, you know, feeling exhilarated when October 7th happened. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I remember reading that too. about i look i went to cornell so i know that yeah yeah reading that as well about about that professor and yeah it's really disturbing and upsetting and look we've we've focused a lot on october 7th but how anybody there's no other event in history i think where women girls were raped grandparents were shot and the videos put on babies were strangled yeah yeah yeah and and the videos were then put on people's facebook pages so everyone can see what you see it now like Like Charlie Kirk.

43:59Where was Charlie Kirk killed? Utah, some university there. I forget. Yeah, Utah Valley University. So he's killed in a college camp. We had things on our college. We have this free speech zone where anybody can go. And a couple days after Charlie Kirk was killed, there was a sign. It's like a free speech zone where anyone can go and put graffiti there. As long as it's not about like LGBTQ or African-American, like you can put anything about Israel as a genocidal state. You can put in, and then there was a sign. and said, kill all Nazis. And I was just like, well, you know, do you think I'm a Nazi?

44:34Like, do you think Charlie Kirk was a Nazi? I'm sure a lot of people think he was a fascist, not the, you know, ironically, the people they don't hate are the Nazis themselves. And so, you know, they fancy themselves this, you know, kind of cohort, you know, defending freedom and whatnot. But all these things happen at universities. Why is that? Why is that? You know, a lot of it, you know, all politicians went to universities. All journalists went to universities. Business people went to universities. Very few people didn't go to universities. So the university has this outsized impact. And I felt like during, you remember when we first started talking on podcasts in 2020, I was like, I don't know if the university is going to survive past COVID.

45:13And AI was just kind of coming into consciousness at that point in the consumer realm. And I remember thinking, what's the future? I think I had, what's Alt at your university? If you have a university, what's going to be in it, James? What do you mandate to teach? Chess? I mean, be thoughtful about it. What would you teach at a university you have complete control as the president of? Yeah, so I think A, 90 % would be motivated purely by what you're interested in and using AI to guide you and focus your curiosity and the professors seeing where your plateaus are, what your questions are, what you're interested in.

45:55and the professor could guide and direct you according to your curiosity. But I also think the most important things that helped me in my career, that literally has made every success for me, is communication abilities. So ability to write well, speak well, think logically, steel man your arguments, the ability to negotiate, the ability, you know, all of these communication skills are 100 % the secret to success, as well as the psychology of entrepreneurship, money, These things that are never taught in college that are so important for success. But if I'm not curious about biology, but I take a biology class, I'm going to remember zero afterwards.

46:34So there's no point. So you have to, it really has to be motivated by what you're interested in, what you're curious about. The great thing is someone could be listening to this and say, oh, I don't know who Mom Donnie is. And then you use ChatGPT and like, oh, well, did he really say, why would he say he's African-American on his college application? Did he really say globalize the infantata, and where did he say it? What's the context? What does that statement mean? Is it really true what James is saying about it's in the Hamas founding charter? So now you can have your curiosity guide you. And the AI is much better than just Google for answering these questions.

47:10How are you using AI? Because I heard your conversation with Ryan Holiday and you guys focused on what AI is not good for and why humans are safe for now, which I agree with. I fully agree that even in science, AI is completely underwhelming. I think we're on the verge of a huge bubble popping. Does Robin use AI every day? Yeah, I use AI 20 times a day. Me too. But does Robin... Yes, 100%. So for instance, right now there's a bunch of battleships and aircraft carriers and 15 ,000 troops surrounding Venezuela. So I don't really know anything about the Venezuelan political situation. So I asked, what spurred the reign of Chavez?

47:54When did, you know, I didn't know anything. When did it start? How did he get, so how did he become leader? And then Madero, what was his background? What does he really believe in? What has he done, you know, to the Venezuelan people? And then what companies, as an investor, what companies in the US or how might the US benefit if there's a regime change in Venezuela? So AI is really great for this, as opposed to taking my chances. Google gives me, here's 10 sites. A lot of those sites are just bullshit sites and I have to figure it out. AI is really good at giving me really great answers. And then if I'm curious, well, I don't understand.

48:30Did Madera really do social? What's the difference between socialism and fascism? Was Madera a socialist or a fascist? And AI is really good at taking hundreds of sources and compiling it together into something. And then I can ask dumb questions because I don't know. A lot of people know this stuff like it's secondhand to them. I don't know anything. so I can ask dumb questions and not being afraid to ask. I'm just following my curiosity. I don't know. I use it hundreds of times a day, probably. Everything from contracts, or I'm thinking of switching to a podcast network. Is that going to save time so I can develop models?

49:10I'm looking at my AI history. So I'm seeing, okay, US-China tariffs. What have been the history of US-China tariffs? Now, I've written a lot about this. I've done a lot of research, but okay, just give me a timeline. Okay. Oh, and then I'll ask, oh, in 2017, we put steel tariffs on. What was the result in jobs increase or decrease in the US? What was the result of inflation? What was the result on the market? Okay. So that was one question. I have here, tell me about, this is related to you. Tell me about the relationship between photonic computing and quantum computing. So that I asked AI rather than read myself a bunch of research papers I can't understand.

49:50I asked about, oh, New York City voter turnout in yesterday's election. That's how I learned that 30 % of the Jews who voted voted for Mamdani. I asked about, I didn't know, everyone's talking about vote for Prop 50 in California. I didn't know what Prop 50 was. So explain to me, California Proposition 50. Oh, don't they realize this is against blah, blah, blah. Oh, but here's this Texas thing that they're comparing themselves to. So everything I'm interested in, I'm asked. And then I know it. Now I know it. Now I'm able to say, because I checked the sources too, because the AI links to the sources, I'm able to say, oh, 30 % of these people voted for Momdani.

50:33And now I know Proposition 50 and they've suspended their California constitution for two years just because they want to get back at Texas for doing something similar to Prop 50. It's so evil that they have to do it and do it hard. Even if Texas doesn't do it, they took out that provision. There's all this bullshit stuff, but then you find out. If I had just read about it, I could have... Do you even read the news? I mean, I don't read the news. I knew all this stuff. I knew all this stuff about New York City. I don't live in New York City. I knew about it. You know about this stuff in California.

51:02You don't live in California. But it's interesting because the Venezuela thing, I did look on the news and I couldn't find anything. And yet, we have 15 ,000 troops who have moved to be surrounding Venezuela. So for whatever reason, the news is not reporting on this. And yet it's probably the most important geopolitical thing happening for America, at least right now, because as, and I know this from AI, Mario Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize a few months ago, has literally said to Trump, we've got$1.7 trillion in assets here. Come and get it. And so all this stuff I'm learning from AI. And I'm not ashamed to say it.

51:40I wouldn't have known it. I wouldn't have known where to look and so on. The thing is, first of all, I asked my students on the first day of class, I said, you're allowed to use any resource you like, a human or silicon, for anything, including the homework solutions. I don't care how many, because it's like telling your daughter, it's okay if you drink while you're in college, if you're 21. She's going to do it no matter what you say, but at least now if she overdrinks, she's going to come and tell you. So I said, but you won't be allowed to use anything on the exam. So there's three major exams that count for 50 % of your grade as well as the homework counts 50%.

52:15So yes, you could rely on it. And I said, just out of curiosity, how many of your professors allow you to use AI? And none of them raised their hand. I'm like, this is like child abuse, student abuse. We're not only crippling their ability to do research, we're preventing them from competing in the real world once they graduate against people who are. But it wasn't just UCSD. I don't want you to think I'm dumping on UCSD. I love it. I couldn't be anywhere. I got an offer to go to an Ivy League school a couple of years back. I didn't even bring it to my chair. We have this stupid policy here that the only time they would give you a raise, if I wanted a raise, I basically have to tell them, not only do I have a job offer from Cornell or Dartmouth or whatever, but here it is in writing.

53:02In other words, I have to go so far down the rabbit, which takes a long time in academia to get a job offer. First of all, they have the position, the money, the startup. It's millions of dollars of commitment. It's a lifetime appointment for somebody like me. And so this takes six to eight months of another university doing. And by that time, there's so much sunk cost into it that you're going to leave. A lot of my friends who did leave UCSD, they went to Stanford and other places. They went through the process because they didn't nip it in the bud at UCSD. They could have kept the person if they didn't have this stupid policy.

53:34So we have a lot of stupid policies. One of my other favorite things is I cannot have an office as a professor that's bigger than the office of a state assembly member. That's actually part of the constitution of the UC. It's so petty and that actually dates back to probably Ronald Reagan or something like that. But it's still enforced and they still do enforce it. So I went to Princeton and I asked my good friends and colleagues there. They're like, no, we don't let them use AI. It's like cheating. They won't learn it the real way. I'm like, how do you know what the real way is? Their minds are so adaptable and malleable.

54:07And you didn't know about AI when you were eight years ago. And now you're telling them that they can't use it in their career, which can last the next 60 years. That's really a lot of chutzpah. Right now, I think there's an amazing career arbitrage that can happen, which is the people who are using AI. And by the way, you don't need any expertise to use AI. You just need to open up ChatGPT or Grok or whatever you want and ask questions. The only skill you need is the ability to ask questions. And people who are using AI and not afraid to use it have a significant advantage over the people who don't use AI.

54:46Absolutely. You know, like I was in a debate a few weeks ago. It was a Bitcoin versus gold. I was on the Bitcoin side, obviously arguing for Bitcoin. And my opponent in this debate was arguing for gold. and it was on a stage in front of a thousand people. And I heard in just conversation that this guy I was going to debate said Tether, the biggest stable coin has never been audited. Okay, I didn't know that. And I didn't really know who to ask to confirm this. So I asked AI and it gave me real details about the difference between audit and what Tether does, which is basically the same thing. And I was able to understand the subtleties of what was going on.

55:29So I was able to address this if it had come up in the debate, which it didn't. And it took me two seconds. My knowledge of crypto, I'm a crypto expert in general, but I didn't know this one question. I knew that their assets had been confirmed, but I didn't know officially what was the official mechanism that they confirmed them. So that's why I asked the question. And so now I know the official mechanism. Now I can answer this question. And it wasn't much different than what I thought, but now I know specifically. Now you have to be careful. Yeah. I do research the source and see that it's accurate because I don't want to be fooled by any AI hallucinations that's part of the thing James you're doing the right thing but that's part of the vitality and the urgency that we have to teach students how to use it right now so for example I go to chat GPT I say what books has Brian Keating written comes back losing the Nobel Prize into the impossible Galileo's dialogue and a brief history of time and I'm like oh that's really nice I hope I, do I get like 1 % of the revenue of the book sales, you know, residual?

56:30No, I didn't write that. Stephen Hawking. So not only does it flatter you, it hallucinates, it's sycophantic. So I get an email a day now with a theory of everything. And the reason that I get so many, it's exploded since ChatGPT. And what happens is these people have these ideas. They're earnest. They're well-meaning. And they send me an email and they say, you know, Professor Keating, you know, I value you so much. You do such good work. here's my theory of everything. I think it changes everything. I'm willing to have you as a collaborator. I won't share the Nobel Prize with you. And here's the deal.

57:04Just to prove to you that I'm right, ChatGPT's output and evaluation and 600 different parameters, I literally had a guy I talked to. So what I started to do, James, is I have an auto-reply on my phone. And when you write me with your theories of everything, that's great. I say, thank you for your email due to extreme overload at work. I can only engage with you for$1 ,000 an hour for private consulting, or you can join my group chat once a month on YouTube. I host for$20 an hour, for$20 a month, which is a good deal compared to $1 ,000 an hour. And the$1 ,000 an hour goes to charity, a 501c3, either the UCSD has a food pantry for students that can't afford food.

57:46Can you imagine like go to college, but you can't afford food? So there's a food pantry on campus. And then there's a Jewish organization called Chabad on campus. And I've had half a dozen people. I made thousands of dollars for charity. I don't take it for myself. And that gets rid of about 90 % of it. But I still have a lot of people, James, that are coming through. And it's all because ChatGPT is telling them that they've solved everything from entropy, the hour of time, dark matter, dark energy, and they have to get this to the world. And they're very earnest about it. But before ChatGPT, if I had said something like that, no one would have put their money, because they wouldn't have had any confidence in it.

58:25Now it's giving them this false bravado that they're the next Einstein. And the probability of that is, I always say to each one, because at the end of each hour, they always say, I want to talk to you longer. Let's keep going. And I'm like, well, I learned from my friend who's a psychotherapist, you always end at 50 minutes, not an hour, so that you can start wrapping up. And then you say, my time is like this. And now I just send them, they say, nobody else is as smart as me. I say, oh yeah, well, here's 10 other people that wrote me this week. I took out their names, but here's what their theories of everything are.

58:55Here's the chat GPT validation. And how would you respond if you're me? Oh, I'm right. So I'm like, the next hour goes up to 2 ,000. And then it's just going to keep doubling and doubling. And if they want to pay$64 ,000 per hour to donate to the food pantry, I'm here for it. that that's funny so some people have have paid and yeah has anybody's has anybody i mean obviously nobody's theory probably holds up to the math but has anybody's theory even conceptually made sense It's hard to say. I mean, they're often extremely convoluted, and they all have a common theme, which is that they try to solve everything from, like I said, from dark matter, dark energy, entropy, the hour of time, the ontology of quantum mechanics, everything.

59:45And there's, like, imagine Einstein. In 1905, Einstein published four separate papers, and I'm convinced, you know, Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, the theory of relativity, and one other that I'm blanking on, but it's embarrassing. But anyway, I'm convinced if he published all four at once, you wouldn't know his name. Because it's just too much. Like proving the existence of molecules, describing a photon, talking about things moving relativistically, electrodynamics of, you know, all these things that he did, nobody would believe, you know, you just couldn't take it seriously. And he was very smart.

1:00:20He didn't have chat GPT. And he just broke it into that easily, digestible kind of corpuscles. And that was then magnified the response. And still he didn't win the Nobel Prize for 17 years because people that invented the gas regulator for the lighthouse and buoys, that was just a much more important invention than the theory of relativity, as you know. It's so fascinating, though. You're right. So AI is a tool, right? And you need some basic skills. So maybe I'm wrong when I say, oh, you just need to ask questions because you're right, AI does want to please. AI wants to please the user. So sometimes it says what you want to hear.

1:01:00That's why you do have to look at the sources. But AI will give you the sources, so it's easy to do. But you have to check it. That's part of the process of using AI kind of responsibly. And that's what I teach my students, even my kids. My kids love it. They'll never know a world that AI didn't exist in. Now, do I think it's going to contribute? I read somewhere that the imputed value of AI in the world economy is at least$5 trillion. I mean, NVIDIA is worth$5 trillion. So it has to be more than that. Let's say you put a multiple on that of 10x. It has to be at least, Apple contributes more than$2 trillion to the world economy over its lifetime.

1:01:40It's probably close to$10 or$20 trillion because of all the things it enables and apps. But in other words, how much does AI contribute to GDP in billions or trillions of dollars right now? Right now, I think it's hard to say, but let's say over the next five years, it'll probably be$30 to$50 trillion. So I wonder how you get that valuation because... You just look at everybody. Apple's committed to spending$600 billion. NVIDIA's committed to spending$600 billion. All this is on data centers and AI compute and inference. TSM is building factories here. by the way then you have every company let's say in the Fortune 500 is going to be 10 % profitable.

1:02:20I think that's more than the internet. I think that's more than the internet has contributed. Yeah, AI is definitely going to be bigger for society. But how is that? Do you feel like you have a bias because you have a survivorship bias. You know how it works. You use it effectively. You know its limitations. You know its fallacies. That might be, but like 10 minutes before this podcast. Even my student doesn't know. Like even a top student, like they don't know how to use it. Like a junior at a top university in the world, they have no idea how to use it or what it's for. There's so many different kinds of it.

1:02:53And well, I didn't tell you the answer. So this comes from Aswath Damodaran, who's a famous professor at NYU. Although like Scott Galloway, your friend Scott Galloway, who ghosted me many years ago. I have his book right in front of me. Did not come on the show. Is he coming on your show? Well, he's come on like seven times before. Jay, has Scott Galloway responded to you? I think he's too big for his attention. On notes on being a man. Somehow these guys are teachers, but they don't live in the city where they teach. Anyway, so he says something like the amount of current actual revenue is under$50 billion.

1:03:32In other words, it's like 100x. But okay, but that's like, he's just looking. I don't really think of AI as just ChatGPT and Grok and all that. He took everything. He took DeepSeek. No, no, but did he take Tyson Foods tractors? Because some percentage of that now, they use AI to more efficiently spray pesticides and they have self-driving tractors. Sure, but that's going to reduce the tractor inspector. It's going to take some GDP away as well, right? Because the tractor inspector, or like look at lawyers. Let's say every lawyer is replaced by Chatt-GBT. Is that net positive for GDP or is that negative?

1:04:10It's going to be a net positive because - But by 100X? I don't know. No, no, but it might be, it's a net positive. Take the farmer who used to ride the tractor and buy more pesticide. Now he's got more money and more time. And what will he do with that money and time? Well, he's an entrepreneurial person. He's got his farm that he harvests and sells the products and so on. So he's going to use his time and money more efficiently and he's going to be probably a better allocator of that money in time than he would have been otherwise. So he'll start other businesses or buy other things that allow other people to start other businesses.

1:04:45Ultimately, we don't know the net result of this sort of economic velocity, but it will be a net positive, I'm sure of it. I look at kiosks at McDonald's or something like that. Not that I go there, but it's taken away. Actually, don't go to McDonald's. But it's taken away. I go to a healthy place like Dunkin' Donuts, as you see my coffee cup over here. So, but it's taken away a lot of entry-level jobs and stuff like that, right? So in that sense, like, you know, it wasn't net accretive or not. It saved money for McDonald's, but like, so anyway, there's two different things. It can either save money, reduce, you know, kind of expenditures, costs, and payroll and stuff like that, which is, I agree, that benefits.

1:05:29But you can't cut your way to profit. Like, if you don't have a profit, you can't have a bigger profit if you just keep reducing your expenses. to zero. So then it has to leverage things. I just think, you know, I tend to be biased by something when I like a product or whatever. It's very different than, you know, it's like, an add-on. And it's not like we haven't had it. We've had chatbots, we've had, you know, AI assistants. Remember the Microsoft paperclip? You know, we've had things that help us, you know, for a long time. And these are markedly better, but like, are you deploying agents to do coding, project?

1:06:04How many coding projects do you have? I have one or two. Again, we are unusual because I can analyze data, but my neighbor who does insurance adjustments and stuff like that, again, he might be able to model something that he couldn't do before, but is that 100x what the CapEx is currently? Anyway, I know it's not what you want to say. No, no, we don't know, but look, this is an area that I am very familiar with. And so I need an AI assistant to keep reminding me of all the conversations around me. I have this pendant that records everything that I say. I forgot to put it on today. That's the other problem.

1:06:41You know, but I just had a podcast right before this one where I was talking to these two guys who created a company to do special effects using AI, do special effects on Hollywood movies. And that, you know, each scene now costs one-tenth the price. So you're talking about instead of having a$100 million budget for visual effects, you could have a$10 million budget now to make the same movie. So across all the movies, okay, it doesn't add up to trillions of dollars, but every industry now is using AI to improve profits. So you can, like a movie that would have been unprofitable can now be profitable because they reduce expenses using AI.

1:07:18And that does become a net positive because it does mean the studio can make more movies, hire more actors, hire more crew. And again, I'm not saying trillions. You have to kind of add up lots of small things to get to the trillions. But I think that is happening across every industry where money's being saved and that means it's being more efficiently allocated towards new projects, hiring new employees. So 70 % of the companies in the Fortune 500 have filled out a survey and said, yes, we're using AI. But only 4 % of those companies have said, oh, this has led to firing employees. So we haven't really seen the mass layoffs yet.

1:07:53We see the headlines of mass layoffs. We haven't seen countrywide mass layoffs. How do you justify NVIDIA being worth more than all the European stock markets put together?

1:08:06Let's say you took out one of their customers, like ChatGPT. That could be the pinprick that pops everything. Again, it's not like a consumer thing. We don't buy the hopper chips. We pay for tokens. And then what if that goes to zero? The Chinese flooded the market with solar panels. I remember solar panels was a hot new thing in 2005, 2006. America was going to dominate and be great. And now there's not a single company in America that makes them. China barely makes a profit, but they make quality products. But now that market's totally gone. With DeepSeek, DeepSeek costs 10 times less to train and to run per million tokens than Claude does at ChatGPT.

1:08:47A hundred percent I agree with you about DeepSeek. I think decentralized open source, general purpose inference, like a chat GPT, is much better done in the long run by a decentralized open source platform like DeepSeek. So I think that any one industry, yes, I agree with you. Open AI is probably overvalued. Who knows? I don't know. But it's certainly up against some strong competitors that are one one hundredth the price, like DeepSeek or Mistral. there's plenty of open source, decentralized AI competitors to open AI. So we don't know the answer there. And on NVIDIA, I agree with you. That might be overvalued only because, not because they're going to run out of the need for GPUs, some other company might come up with something better than GPUs.

1:09:34And that's the risk you take when you're an investor in NVIDIA, because the demand is still there.

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1:13:14You mentioned about AI coding. Well, Google and Microsoft have laid off thousands of programmers because they're using AI coding. And Cursor, which is the leader in the space right now, they are the fastest company in history to get to a billion dollars in revenues. And they're AI coding. And their code is not perfect. You need programmers to go over it, but it reduces the time. For a good Google programmer, it reduces their time and the amount of manpower and man hours needed to make a program by 90%. So it is valuable. And again, that's built on top of the Anthropic platform and Claude, Cursor is.

1:13:49So there's going to be other, these niche companies that get to a billion dollars in revenue super fast. That means, you know, if they get to a billion dollars in revenues, it's super fast like that. They're probably worth, you know, I think actually Cursor's valuation in the last fundraising was about 30 billion, which actually makes some sense because they're still growing at that rate. And, you know, that's where you start to build all this value is that the time to build things and the efficiency using AI is really great. No, yeah, believe me, I know. But I just feel like the user base, how many millions of people are going to use it.

1:14:20Yes, cursor and those things are very good, but it's also like quantum computing, which eventually we'll talk about, maybe not even today because I have to teach quantum mechanics soon. But quantum mechanical computers are extremely useful at discovering and optimizing the properties of quantum computers. There's no AI, quantum computing, a secret killer app yet. Now, there are certain things that they're very good at, and then the most famous one is encryption, decryption, and so forth. But that might have a really negative externality in that it could compromise encryption schemes, including those used in Tensor and Bitcoin and other things.

1:15:04We get into that at some point. Why is that the case? How does that work? I agree. It feels almost like a similar bubble when you look at stock market valuations or private company valuations. Here's the one big difference. Quantum computers have zero legitimate users. Now, there are research users and there are users who are trying to build better quantum computers, but there are zero users at the current moment other than research and academic. It wasn't the case. AI has 2 billion users just using like ChatGPT and competitors to ChatGPT, not counting the tractors spraying pesticides and all that kind of stuff using AI.

1:15:45So just 2 billion users on these general inference platforms, that's a real difference. I got to see your tractor. I mean, you keep talking about your tractor. You're a chicken farmer down there. What are you doing down there? I need like AI to make the pickleball lines on my tennis court. Yeah, that's a number one use case. I think that's how NVIDIA is going to stay in business. Now I'm not worried about my position, my one share of NVIDIA. I have this friend who, he's like this complete genius programmer and he's got this whole idea for new types of AI that's different from diffusion. It's like diffusion plus branch and network theory, like graph theory, like Stephen Wolfram works on.

1:16:30and stuff like that. It's this revolutionary thing. He told me to buy NVIDIA in like 2019 and he's like almost broke. I'm just like, this guy, I mean, literally if he bought like 100 shares, you know, when it was like$1 ,000, you know, that would have been$1 ,000. Like he could have been, I don't know how I'm just going to, but we could ask AI. But like he'd be like well off. And now he's totally, you know, like I feel bad for the guy. And I'm like, I didn't really take your advice. But that's sometimes the problem with it. Yeah, I mean, And these things have such abilities, we impute to them these almost mythical, magical powers, including the power of the economy and over science and physics.

1:17:08And that's why people have this misplaced trust, in my opinion, that their theories of everything are correct because they're vetted by Gemini or whatever. But Gemini in the hands of a professional physicist is an extremely unusual, powerful tool. Yeah, because I would say that, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'll ask you the question. Like I would say the difference between the guy pitching you the theory of everything and someone like you using chat GPT is you won't ask leading questions. So if I asked to chat GPT, hey, if I, you know, assume gravitons are influenced by gravity, does that make a theory of everything?

1:17:49And if chat GPT is going to say, yes, that's very astute. So Chachapiti is going to try to agree with me. Whereas you'll ask meaningful questions to give you more information so you can come to a conclusion. You won't ask leading questions. You'll ask information-oriented questions. And I think that's a big difference in terms of how to use Chachapiti correctly. Yeah. No, and it is. And that is a huge form of leverage, which is, again, why I don't think that it should be really reconsidered by my colleagues. And even my fellow parents. One of my daughters is interested in making a song using Sona or whatever.

1:18:28Yeah, Sona. Yeah. So she's doing it and she's like, oh, make a song with Taylor Swift singing about my friend Brittany and my friend Kaylee and Layla and whatever. And then they're going to try to get me at recess and hit me with a dodgeball or whatever. And it comes back, I'm sorry, Orly. I can't get back to you on this. And we can't, sweetie, we can't deal with this because it violates copyright. Not only is her name trademark, but even her style, like Taylor Swift's style is trademarked. And that was kind of a revelation. But then she said, oh, okay, well, how do I get around it? So she asked ChatGPT, what are basically synonyms to describe Taylor Swift's voice perfectly to an LLM that isn't allowed to use.

1:19:16I helped her a little bit. Yeah. But it's not like to, and it came back and it was perfect. So what did she learn? She learned how to prompt. She learned that prompt engineering, you know, so to speak, which is an important skill. And she learned that, you know, as a kid. And now, you know, that's a lesson that she's not going to forget. And now she knows she can't do certain things. There's guardrails on it. She learned a tremendous amount. And I feel like - By the way, then she also learned Taylor Swift's style and maybe some music theory around Taylor Swift's, you know, what makes a pop song.

1:19:44Right. And that's incredibly valuable. Taylor Swift is one of the best-selling artists of all time. So it's kind of incredibly valuable that you wouldn't have learned. I wrote just in my Monday Magic mailing list where you can get it, briankeating.com slash mail or list. And I wrote about this new site that I found called book.sv. And all it does is give recommendations. I said, do you ever read a book, James, that you kind of wish you didn't read it because then you'd be able to read it for the first time. I know you were like that with losing the Nobel Prize. It gives you recommendations of similar books.

1:20:23It's pure AI. Oh, I love that. Recently, I typed in, and you can put that in the show notes, James. First, put in my mailing list, Jay, and then put in book.sv. It's a great little thing. So I put in, of course, my books. But then I put in Choose Yourself. Be happy, make millions, live the dream. So what do you think are some comparable books, similar books to Choose Yourself? Besides the Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth. Okay, maybe Seth Godin's books it would recommend. Maybe something like The Four Hour Workweek it would recommend. Yeah, it's got that. But here are some other ones that I, like I didn't think about at first, but then I read it and I was like, yeah, you're absolutely right.

1:21:07Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield. Oh yeah, absolutely. Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. yeah yeah but these are books like if like and then gary vaynercheck jab jab jab right hook um so that's like first i thought well it's just it's just looking at the title like but then it has um josh waitskin the art of learning um no and these are all books that i've read pretty heavily you know either before or after i've interviewed yourself yeah i've interviewed yeah and uh yeah mastery with by uh um robert green so yeah all of these things were actually one of seth's books is most similar to your book, according to book.sv?

1:21:45I mean, I think he actually had a book called Pick Yourself. Really? Yeah. Or there was a book that felt like that. But maybe Purple Cow, I would have to think about. The Icarus Deception. Yes. How high will you fly? Yes, that one was, yeah, that came out a little bit before Choose Yourself. And I felt it was like a similar theme. Isn't that cool? So that is a great application of, and so just that feeling. There must be some Japanese word for that feeling of regret after you finish something you like. It's almost like you finished eating at this three-star Michelin restaurant and now you can't eat anymore.

1:22:20You're like stuffed. You know, I just put in my favorite collection of short stories and I asked for recommendations. Every single recommendation I've read and loved. That's amazing. Okay, Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth. So this is a little bit more popular. Now there's Reinvent Yourself, Choose Yourself, the rich employee. Let's see. Yeah, no whole series. Yeah, let's see what's one that's not. Actually, this one should have been Kamal Ravikant's book. I think that should have been more similar to Choose Yourself. Only because I wrote, I think I wrote, did I write the foreword to that? I forget.

1:22:58I don't think I did. No, I just recommended it. Yeah, some of these are not, I haven't read that book, your book, The Wealth Guide, but I've read the other one. It's the same as Choose Yourself. Just don't read that one. Okay, yeah, yeah. So save, save money. And then the other one is Reinvent Yourself. Let me just see that one. Oh, skip the line. Skip the line. Skip the line. Yeah, I read that. Obviously, I hosted you. But I'm just trying to see any ones that are really, like, that resonate in that sense. Like, the sense I had when I was done, yeah, Tribe of Mentors, Tim Ferriss, yeah. So it's an interesting site.

1:23:35So those are great things that, like, I kind of distill the DNA of something. But I'm worried about writing. I'm glad that ChatGPT really came out after my first books, after I had done a lot of it. Because it's very tempting to use it. I use it for writing. I write letters of recommendation. I basically just brainstorm in this AI voice mode. And then I have a boilerplate thing and clawed as a project. I just say, make sure you interview the candidate that you're writing for. You meet with him or her. And I say, if you were writing a recommendation, what would you want me to? Because they've been working for me for six years.

1:24:16I don't remember everything they did in 2019. So tell me everything you're proud of. Your mother is writing this thing for you. And then I'm going to make it professional. I'm going to add it. But I use AI to distill what they say because they're not maybe as good a writer as I am. Or they just put it like a CV, like bullet points. Like that's not as, I'm not going to cut and paste that. but then I can convert it and add in my special sauce and spices. I actually trained, have you done any like James bots? I mean, you must have. Yes, yes. And how did you do that? Because I saw this really good guy, Matt Wolfe.

1:24:47He lives in San Diego, actually. And he has this great tutorial on how to take every single interview you've ever done on YouTube, at least. I don't know how you do it for the audio only ones, but all your YouTube ones. I've done all my articles and a bunch of my books. And what about your podcast? No, I haven't done that. I haven't done that. So what did you put in it? Like, what tools did you use? Let's make this actionable for the audience. I actually don't know because someone else did it for me. So, but one thing I will say is that if I say, okay, now right in the style of James Altucher, I can see what it's doing.

1:25:21Like, I do think I have, for better or for worse, a particular style. And I could see what it's doing and how it's trying to do it, but it's not working. It's failing. And I don't think AI could replace us as writers. And of course, I could be biased because I'm a writer. But the problem is over 50 % of content now being written on the internet is written by AI. It's about 52 % last month. So now an AI always only learns from the latest things going on the internet. So it's only learning about writing now from its own writing. So it's kind of hitting a plateau. Yeah, I call it mad bot disease.

1:25:59Remember mad cow disease? like where cows would eat other cows and then they'd go, they get this brain disease. So I call it mad bot disease. Yeah, it's exactly right. And that's why there's no chance as LLM, maybe AI will, but there's no chance an LLM plus GPU-based architecture will create a theory of everything. I'm going on record right now. You heard on the journey. It's not going to come up. It can't do it because we haven't done it before. And the only new things that are contained to it are going to be either new physical laws, new physics discoveries from humans, or it's going to be like, oh, here's a transcript from the Fast and the Furious 11.

1:26:33Is that what's missing from our current understanding of physics? Is that the corpus of knowledge and tokens doesn't include the Fast and the Furious 11? No, it has nothing to do with that, right? No, you're absolutely right. For writing, for instance, okay, there's only so many good writers. There's only so many Hemingways in the world. So even statistically, you can't analyze. There isn't enough data to give you examples of good writing. Plus, it's even hard subjectively, let alone objectively to determine good writing. So it's never really gonna learn to be a good writer. But video is a different story.

1:27:06So there's a million hours a minute being uploaded to YouTube for videos. So there's so much more data on what makes a video look like a real video. Every minute, there's another million hours worth of real videos being uploaded. So the data is there. The data for good writing is not there. The data for a theory of everything is not there. So you have to understand how AI works. it's dependent on good and marked data. And sometimes it's able to mark the data. Yeah, yeah. Well, this kind of connects back to what I said in the beginning. Like my rubric for picking a good politician is like the most liberal person in a red state or something like that, right?

1:27:45But what's like the dumbest take of a smart person? Like I think Elon Musk, very bright, very high agency, very competent. But I think, you know, he or Sam Altman, like they really believe that AGI is going to be here and that it's going to fundamentally do things like create a theory of everything. I mean, they've said such. It's just like a matter of time. And I understand they have quite an investment with both a chemical rocket company plus an AI company plus a social media platform. So I understand it's incentives, but what do you attribute that to? I mean, it's such a simple proposition.

1:28:24Nobody who knows anything about math. I interviewed Terrence Tao. IQ is like 260 or something, reportedly. Smartest man. He won the Fields Medal. He is just this wunderkind. He's brilliant. He actually graduated from college, I think, in 19. And then he went to Princeton at 21. He got his PhD. But he's like, man, no, they don't even have things that can... Literally, James, you can't even check Andrew Weil's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. He doesn't know how to do that. You have to basically... And these are very optimized. Only do things like prove math expressions are true or false. And it can't reproduce something that was done 30 years ago by a human.

1:29:06So I think that gives you a lot of, now I believe that it can beat us in chess. I always say like, they'll never beat us in tic-tac-toe, James. They will never take our tic-tac-toe crown away from human beings. I think it's impossible. Like, I'm joking. I mean, tic-tac-toe. Well, you know, I was, I of course worked on everything, you know, chess software and game software. And I remember going to, when I was in grad school, I went to Kai-Fu Lee, who later on basically invented speech recognition at Apple, then became one of the biggest investors in China. But Kai-Fu Lee was a professor at the time of computer speech recognition in 1989 at the grad school I went to.

1:29:43And I said, let's work on Go, because I knew he was interested in Go. And he had created the best Othello program using AI. And he said, no, no, no, Go is too hard. They're never going to solve it. And yet now Go is solved. It seemed like an impossible problem and it's solved because there was data. Yeah, exactly. Right. So those are algorithmic things, but where there's no algorithm, like would you ever say like the you know, the AI sculpture like this robotic sculpture and it's going to do something that is as evocative as like Michelangelo or the Mona Lisa or whatever. Like, yes, it can make incredible art and even music.

1:30:17And I read somewhere that the top 10 on Billboard is like half AI in certain categories, which is pretty crazy. But then people in there asked about it, do you want an AI thing? You remember this thing, you must remember, because I think you talked about it first, as far as I don't know, like the uncanny valley. You remember that? Yeah, yeah. Nobody talks about that anymore. We just went like, wait, nobody says like, oh, these AI girlfriends, they don't really look identical to Scarlett Johansson or Robin or my wife. No, they look perfect. They're exactly, you know, you can replicate people's exact images, but people, you know, do they prefer it?

1:30:56And so I'm worried about writing. I mean, I've seen like a massive decrease, even on like YouTube. Like you take some of the most popular YouTubers and except for the very top, like Joe Rogan or Stephen Bartlett or whoever, like they're getting way fewer views. And why is that? Like what happened in the last year? I mean, the only explanation is that there's just so much explosion of other content. And some of it's AI, but, you know, in terms of writing, like, are people sitting down, like, I haven't read a physical book, like, in a long time. And I read a lot. Like, I listen to audiobooks, you know, 2x speed for my podcast.

1:31:31I read a lot of nonfiction. You know, so I read more than 99 % of the population. I think I'm unusual when I have a podcast and I do research. So, I mean, I'm worried about, like, I'm thinking about writing a traditionally published book, about Jim Simons, but from his scientific accomplishments. I would totally read that. Yeah, and there's so many more insights. You asked Jim, who is he? Would he say, I'm a hedge fund manager? No, he was a scientist. His whole life was based on his scientific curiosity. So I think the financial thing, of course, gets the headlines because it's titillating, but no, that wasn't his core identity.

1:32:12And so I knew him as well as anyone outside of his family, I would say. And I think that's the story that needs to be told. But who's going to read that? You would read it because you're my friend. No, no, I would read it. I read it also because I'm fascinated by Jim Simon. So yes, I would read it because of you and I would read it because of... So you're going to get niche audiences. Like AI and the internet in general has encouraged niche subcultures and that's what you're going to appeal to. You might appeal to a general audience. They hear niche and they're like, screw that. I'm not getting into a niche.

1:32:43They can do niche all by themselves. But that's why I would not do a traditionally published book. Are you ever going to do another one? I don't know. The last traditionally published book I did was Skip the Line. And I got a great advance. And it was nice to have a really great editor. But overall, I enjoy my experience of self-publishing more. I have total control. I make 100 % of the profit on the book. I could design a book cover just as well as any editor because I could hire a book designer. And I could get better marketing because I can also control the price depending on the marketing campaign.

1:33:22So I don't really see the benefit other than advance and prestige. I'm not thinking a book about five-dimensional topology is going to be a huge runaway Wall Street bestseller. but in terms of, and maybe it will because Jim Simons is involved but what do you see as the trade-offs? If I just said, I don't care about the money the advance or whatever, but I want the full firepower of a publisher what does that involve? What is the full firepower? That's what I'm asking you. The only firepower with just basic self-publishing compared to traditional publishing the only firepower traditional publishing has is they can get it into Barnes & Noble that is the only firepower they have I say Barnes & Noble in quotes, they can get into other bookstores.

1:34:08But they're not gonna get it into Walmart books. They're not gonna get it into Target books because you have to write like a romance novel or a thriller or whatever. So Jim Simon's book is not gonna get into Walmart. It'll get into Barnes & Noble in the major cities. And then if it does well in the major city Barnes & Nobles, then it could get into the other cities. But there's no, I would say self-publishing has more firepower. And by the way, the evidence, the statistical evidence is there. So on average, a self-published book has a higher star rating on Amazon, meaning readers like it better than on average, than an average traditionally published book.

1:34:44And it has on average higher rank on Amazon than traditionally published books, meaning they sell more copies if you're self-published. I don't know why that is. It could be because the gatekeepers are just not that good at the traditional publishers. So there's no real firepower that traditional publishing gets you other than the fact that, oh yes, my agent got me Simon & Schuster and the advance was published in Publishers Weekly and now I'm, oh, you can't get me on the New York Times bestseller list if you were self-published. So why does Steven Pinker not publish self-publish? I think my guess is he, if I were to estimate, he probably gets about a million dollar advance per book and he's writing a book a year.

1:35:27So that's a decent addition to his Harvard academic salary. I'm just guessing at this. And, and then he doesn't have to hire a book. He would make it up in the book sales, right? Yeah. But he's not, he's probably not going to sell that many books. Like he, he is kind of like a marquee name for them. And, uh, you know, they don't really make the money on those authors. They make the publishers make the money on their backlist, but they stay relevant by having, you know, Steven Pinker is our latest author. And we got, we got them on the today show, which by the way, doesn't really sell any books, but you know, they can kind of then, And then when they're pitching like Stephen King's next book, they're like, oh yeah, we just had Stephen Pinker, and we'd love to have you.

1:36:12But I think it's a dying business model. And for Stephen Pinker, he doesn't want to hire a book designer. And I'm a little more entrepreneurial, not that he isn't, but I'm a little more entrepreneurial. And I will get a great book designer. I'll figure out how to play with the pricing. And I know email lists and podcasts. and so on. I don't need a PR firm. His book publisher will hire a PR firm for him and so on. But did Choose Yourself sell more copies than whatever his latest book is? Probably. And that was self-published. And Skip the Line, which was traditionally published, and I got a good advance, did not make back the advance.

1:36:52I do worry about the self-published. For one thing, having an editor, if you have a good editor, I think that's extremely powerful. I'm very close to my copy editor, Allegra Houston. She's amazing and she does a lot. And I was very close to my original acquiring editor and then he quit Norton and went off on his own because it was a horrible job, I'm sure, at that pay rate. His office was like a janitor's closet somewhere. But having someone to bounce ideas off of that has kind of a financial stake in things. If you hire somebody, you could say, well, first of all, it's pretty hard to find a group of people that are as good at copy editing.

1:37:39Now, maybe I could hire them again. But bouncing ideas off of, that was very valuable. It's like AI. I could have AI be my editor, but I think it'll be horrible. So I think you're right. I've had great editors and traditional publishers. But, okay, choose yourself. I will tell you the team of people I had helping me with edit and, and marketing and design. First, I had this guy, Niels Parker. You might not know him, but he was Tucker Max's editor on all of Tucker Max's books, which were all Tucker Max and Malcolm Gladwell are like the two people who've had, you know, three books at the same time on the New York times bestseller list.

1:38:13So yeah, I know you introduced me to Tucker. So yeah, Niels Parker is, is a great editor and writer. Then I had two other people helping me with marketing design, the thinking of it, the editing of it. I had the young Ryan Holiday pre all his stoicism books. And he was a marketer then. I hired him. And Tucker Max. So that was my group of people to bounce ideas off of. So I had a real professional team that I made up of. Between Tucker and Ryan now, there's like 20 million copies of their books. So this was like a really super professional team. And I was very fortunate in that. I'm just thinking like someone like Basic Books, who does a lot of science stuff, having that as an independent person who's going to read the book and not kiss my butt.

1:39:04In the scientific realm, what I've heard from my agent is people don't really care about whether or not a theory is true. They just want to hear it. They hear, oh, black holes destroy information. or quantum computers are going to revolutionize, you know, our world. Or, you know, we go to Mars and it's going to change everything for preservation of human life. Or there are aliens, you know, throughout the galaxy and the universe. Like, none of those are provable statements. In fact, some of them are demonstrably false. And the biggest one is like quantum gravity and the theory of everything, you know, will change, you know, completely change the roadmap for civilization, like the invention of fire and all these other.

1:39:48And so they like things like string theory because it's unfalsifiable. In other words, these authors are like, Stephen Hawking was famous for this. He wrote total nonsense, BS. I know I wrote his book, A Brief History of Time, but nevertheless, there's so much nonsense in that book. He talks about string theory, and it's like less reputable cousin called M-theory, which, you know, nice thing. Oh, I'd never heard of that. Yeah, no, so it's all in. But 90 % of the people didn't read it. I once was at a talk that, when he could still talk or respond in near real time. And someone said, why'd you write a brief history of time?

1:40:23It's rumored that nobody who buys it reads it. And he replied, well, it's only important that they buy it. You know, it's like, my daughter needed to pay for, I needed to pay for private school for my daughter. He literally told me that, told us that. So, but people like that. It's almost like this hero where like, you just want to know that there's something like SEAL Team 6 of intellectual, you know, physicists out there. but you don't need to know how they do the wet work that they do, you know, in Venezuela or wherever they're going to be. Uh, you just need to know that they're there. Like a member, like a few good men, Jack Nichols, you know, you want them on that wall.

1:40:59You need them on that wall. Like we need these Nobel prize winners, even though we have no freaking clue what they do, most people, um, because it's sort of like a CV enhancer for the human race. And I just feel like, I know how to write a book like Brian Green and the fabric of reality or just the breathless tones about string theory. I know how to do that, but I don't want to do that. I'd rather do something that's true to experimental. The ironic thing is that Jim Simons worked on a scientific theory, which not only could be a theory of everything, but it also is verifiable and in some cases verified.

1:41:43In other words, there have been Nobel Prizes given for predictions that stem from his mathematics. He didn't predict the physical application. And some of them relate to quantum computers, which we have to talk about, but not today because I got to go teach like right now. But let's catch up again soon and I'll try to get on talking about the moon landing denial. Yeah, the entire purpose of this podcast, schedule this podcast, was to talk about Candace Owens and denying the moon landing. and we will just have to reschedule that for the next few days or weeks or whatever. It's always going to be a hot topic, so we'll be able to talk about it soon.

1:42:19It's the computing of the future. It always will be. And the moon landing is always going to be denied. The Epstein files, people are like, oh, the Epstein files are going to come out and it's going to change everything. I'm like, do you think they're going to reveal everything, James? Not even like, just is it possible? How many gigabytes of data is that? And even LLMs, a lot of limitations of the LLMs, they can't go through a context more than 100 emails or something before they just forget what they're doing. Let me ask a slightly different question, which maybe answers this question, which is, have they ever released anything about anything?

1:42:56So where's the JFK stuff? Where's the UFO stuff? Where's the MLK stuff? Oh, that's coming this week, the UFO stuff. Well, I just had someone talk about UFOs, and it's like, oh, no, they're threatened with death. But, you know, and he didn't quite say that. I'm not making fun of that guy. A lot of them do claim that, James. They claim they're going to be, you know, detained and that they're whistleblowers. Why do you need a whistleblower? Like I talked to this astronaut, Chris Hadfield. He's like, well, if you're telling the truth, why do you need a whistleblower? Love Chris. Yeah, he was great.

1:43:27You know, he gave me like such a good interview about his new book. But let me just say, as long as there's some capacity for doubt, the human mind will never be satisfied, right? We'll never know exactly, like to the molecule, what happened in Dallas in 1963. We'll never know exactly why the Twin Towers, the Building 7, fell down. Yes, there are theories in there, but there are always going to be gaps. There's always going to be some plausible kind of outlet. And as long as that happens, you can never resolve something. Look, we can't even resolve that the moon landing happened. There's a substantial number of people who are alcoholics or felons or truly mentally ill people.

1:44:06I'm not saying that people that don't believe we landed on the moon are mentally ill, but I'm just saying 10 % of the population are murderers and alcoholics. And so you're never going to convince everybody that any event happened, the Epstein files or not. Even if Trump's all over it, he was really down there, he's doing everything bad, and it's reprehensible what Epstein did. Nobody denies that. But that this is going to somehow change everything. Or like Scott Galloway keeps saying, oh, the reason that Trump is going to declare war on Venezuela and signed these peace accords is because he wanted to keep Epstein out of the news.

1:44:46It's so much like wish casting. And you can wish anything onto it, such that if you hate America or you love America, you could have plausible case for your argument. But none of that has to do with the moon landing or quantum computing. So we have to schedule that. Jay set it up. You got my email. I'll talk to you guys soon. What are you doing for Thanksgiving? Playing chess, playing in the U.S. Masters in Charlotte, North Carolina. Awesome. That's close to you. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll, yeah, I have some relatives there that would like to meet you, including one that might want to work on quantum computing.

1:45:22We'll talk about that. All right, excellent. Well, look, Brian, good luck on your teaching today. And we're going to talk soon about all these other things. figure out what, you know, six plus three equals X plus seven, right? Yeah. You can get me that information. I will, I'll be eternally grateful. I, we, we got to get to the bottom of this.

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