How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner with Prof. Brian Keating

24:05Anyway, getting back to, no, he said to the person who asked him, Newton said, I sat in a room without ceasing. So, and it's basically like the, there's another quote by, I think it's Voltaire or maybe it's Pascal, I forget who. And it's, you know, all of man's unhappiness comes from the inability to sit in a room by himself. So what does that tell you? I mean, in a lot of ways, you're right. To be a really important and impressive person at a cocktail party, maybe an advisor or consultant, it is important to have widely discursive and broad curiosity. I'm not saying don't be curious, but in terms of where you dedicate your only non-renewable resource, which is your attention and your time, I think it's really imperative early on to get on course, like going to the moon.

24:50You know, the moon's only half the width of your fingernail. If the Apollo 11 capsule was off, by half the width of your fingernail held at arm's length, they would have still been floating out in space. People say, shoot for the moon. Even if you don't make it, you'll reach the stars. That's terrible advice. I mean, you'll be floating in your solar space for the rest of your life, for all eternity. It's horrible. Concentrate, land on the target, and then you'll be happy. And then you can decide once you've reached the top 1 % that I want to also be a podcaster and write books. I agree with what you're saying.

25:20I think, but I agree and disagree, which sounds like a cop out, but I've seen in my own life, like I've done many disparate things. But to be fair, sometimes I really regret it. Sometimes I really regret not having stuck to one thing since a younger age. Sometimes, though, I'm very grateful for the fact that I've immersed myself in so many different subcultures from one to the other to the other that it was a kind of weird diversification of life for me, which diversification also has its benefits. And sometimes, again, because I've diversified, these many intersections have served me well. But I do regret that I could have maybe taken one approach, done nothing but that for 40 years, whatever, however many years, and achieve maybe a greater success in whatever area that I pursued.

26:13But then again, I don't know if my brain would have let me because I have this maybe horrible tendency to only do what I love doing. And if I don't do what I love doing, I really can't do it at all. And sometimes I fall out of love. I don't think it's terrible or bad at all. But again, yeah, if you look at all the things you did, some things maybe, you know, it served you at that time. You know, I met you, stand-up comedy and podcasting were the top two things in your life. Now, it might be podcasting and, you know, tensor, you know, cryptocurrency or back to your love of chess, right? But yeah, I mean, maybe, I mean, sometimes you might think about, well, what if I just did chess or stuck with computer science or, you know, got a PhD?

26:55Yeah, okay, so we can do all those things. But at the time, it was what served you, right? But you're glad, right? You're glad that you didn't stay in New York City trying to make a comedy club work through the last five years. Maybe now it would have come to, so in hindsight, yes, of course everything is 2020. When you look through the magnifying glass the other way, it also magnifies things, right? So it's not like a telescope. You look through a telescope the other way, nothing happens. Like you see this completely distorted thing, but a magnifying glass, it works in both directions. You can see forward and you can see backwards, and it's just up to your interpretation and which domain you choose to focus on.

27:27I think also it's how you define a lane. And, you know, some lanes can be wider than others. I made this argument for myself when I started day trading and getting interested in finance back in 2000, 2001, which is to say, okay, I'm widening my lane. I love games. And now trading is another example of me trying to master and conquer a game where I can use skills from other games, let's say chess and poker, that I felt I had conquered at that time to this new game of trading. And trading is very much a game. And so I sort of widened my lane there. But again, I sacrificed other things and pursued new things.

28:07But you enjoyed that. I'm sure you enjoyed that because you have this incredibly fertile mind that seems to get better with age. But I think you entered... Or worse. You talk about crystallized versus fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence, no matter how you fight it, it goes down when you age. Oh, certainly does. Yeah, no, it certainly does. But, you know, then again, the summation of crystallized plus fluid, we can talk about that, is very hard to replicate at a young age. And I made the case to Arthur C. Brooks, who was on my show a couple of weeks ago, that actually crystal intelligence is going to be less important in the age of AI because we're going to have instantaneous access to 800 IQ in every single domain of human knowledge.

28:46whereas, you know, the wisdom, these AIs have zero wisdom. They have absolutely zero wisdom. They hallucinate. They average over intellects and so forth. So I think it's going to be, we're going to start to see a resurgence of the importance of the wisdom component of the human intellect. But before I get there, I just want to highlight that you said you were doing this and you kind of enjoyed it. That seems to me like you entered what's called a state of flow, correct? Yeah, in many cases, yes. And I advocate for that as well in that you should basically, I'm doing what I loved as a 12-year-old, which I didn't get paid for, you know, astronomy.

29:20Like, who the hell is going to pay me? Like I said, look through a telescope. It's like, oh, can I get a job, you know, testing a roller coaster at SeaWorld? No. I mean, there is some guy who does that, by the way. But the point is, I would do things like this because it would pass the time, and I wouldn't notice that time had gone by. And that's kind of the definition of flow. And today, I found out that my book is number two behind, how do you say his name, James? Who? Mikko Chikselamachay. I don't know how to say his name. Yeah, yeah. The offer of the book Flow. The offer of the book Flow and the popularity.

29:51So I'm number two in the category of genius, and he's number one. So I need you guys out there to get the Kindle edition. The Kindle edition's on sale for 99 cents. I'm not making any money on it. So I really did this as a labor of love. Again, it's self-published. I'm losing a lot of money, actually, James, thanks to your suggestion to use Lioncrest. But the point is I'm happy to do it because to see somebody avoid going down a lane that's going to ultimately lead to pain, frustration, diminished opportunities for both their personal lives, fewer opportunities to mate and so forth, but also to make money, support themselves.

30:25To avoid that is almost as gratifying as to help someone find the right lane that gets them into a state of flow.

30:33Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means 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.

30:55So things have gotten really busy for me lately and I've asked for it. Like I'm doing all things I love doing and wanting to do, but I'm very busy and I have to be focused on every single thing. and some of these things that I do during the day, like basically I'm helping run three different businesses plus I'm doing three podcasts a week and I have to read and prepare for each podcast. I'm writing a book. Those are just like my professional career things and then I'm doing all sorts of other things and I often have to switch from meeting to meeting to meeting and my brain has to stay focused and I don't want to take any stimulants that's going to get me like overhyped or overstimulated or not.

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34:40Stephen, Brandon, and Bruno, the business owners of SandCloud reinvested their 2 % cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus Terms Apply. There is some very unique advice that I came across in this book that was interesting to me. One is this idea of don't always master the work of those who came before you. And I find this to be extremely valuable advice that is easy to sort of gloss over. So for instance, if I want to build a project on top of the internet, if I want to build a website, I don't need to know how the internet works, as an example.

35:25By the way, even coding now, if I want to code something, because of advances very recently in AI coding, I might not even have to be a coder, which is amazing. But maybe give more specific examples. Like if I want to do quantum mechanics, do I have to know Einstein inside and out? Well, I think that, again, there is a lot of attention paid to novelty, right? Novelty is a very prized quantity of the human experience because it's so rare. There's an obsession in modern culture with novelty, with youth, with fluidity, and all all these other concepts because it is very tied to the release of dopamine in the brain.

36:10We love things like surprises. We love novelty. We're addicted to what this friend of mine, Brett Weinstein, calls hyper novelty. Like everything is in the news. Like do you remember like what the news was three days ago? And nobody knows what it was because it's right now. It's called the never-ending now. It never stops. It's like an ancient history. Yeah, it's exactly right. And it's only getting worse, right? So therefore, what's the contrarian bit of advice? It's to do the opposite. Think of the things that have passed, you know, the Linde test that still are around and have been around for hundreds or if not thousands of years.

36:44You know, scientists have been looking up at the night sky and trying to make sense of it for literally, you know, 50 millennia. And they got a lot of things wrong. But that's part of the project of science is to be wrong, but to at least explore and to dare, you know, greatly and go boldly into this unknown future. So for me, the first thing you want to do is pay homage to what came before you. Think about the different sources of knowledge, like a textbook. You know, a textbook is one of the most perishable forms of knowledge that there is, right? It's something that's crystallized on paper or digital bits, and it represents the field as it was at a frozen moment in time, never gets updated.

37:20And new discoveries come in, and I have to teach them and say, well, the textbook's wrong here. I teach a course in cosmology every spring here at UC San Diego. and every year I'm kind of annoyed because the book that we use is so good and the author Barbara Ryden is a friend of mine and she's at OSU and it's such a well she's like a poet she's so brilliant and I love the book but it's horribly out of date already it's only like nine years out of date a lot of what we teach in there is complete nonsense because we don't know what we didn't know back then we now know and so the point of science is to upgrade yourself but when you find something that's lasted for millennia really literally then you should really pay attention to it.

38:00Some of those ways are, for example, applying mathematics. Like we don't think about it, but math has this unreasonable ability to influence things and predict things about the physical world. Why is that? Like there's no such thing as a triangle. Like if I said, James, give me a triangle, you can't do it. It only exists in the human mind. If I say, give me the number one, like it's a concept, it's not something tangible. And so it's a puzzle. Why therefore should math be so useful in the physical world, which predicts airplanes and rockets and invented the internet and all sorts of things that are tangible, that are non-fungible, that only exist in reality.

38:36It's actually a great mystery. The famous Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner wrote about this. He called it the unreasonable effectiveness of math in physics. And it's kind of related to this difference between things that are discovered versus things that are invented. Like we discovered the concept of a triangle. We didn't invent the triangle because you can't even give it to somebody, right? So in my mind, the... I'm sorry to interrupt. You say you can't give it to somebody because, and this reminds me of our very first podcast that we ever did, perfection and the concept of infinity doesn't exist in the real world.

39:08And so something like a triangle ultimately has to have infinitely precise, you know, whatever, 90 to 45 degree angle, whatever the angles are, 60 degree angles. And you can't have that kind of perfection in the real universe. But theoretically, obviously you can. That's right. And more even than that, there are things in mathematics that can be proven. You can actually prove one plus one equals two. I have this running debate with this guy, Terrence Howard, the actor from Iron Man and Empire and Boardwalk Empire, whatever. He and I disagree because he thinks one times one equals two. So we go back and forth.

39:41And he talked about me with Joe Rogan on Joe Rogan with Eric Weinstein. But besides that, mathematicians have proven that the square root of two is irrational. They've proven that one plus one equals two. But it takes literally like hundreds of pages in some cases of rigorous mathematical reasoning. But I cannot prove to you, James, it's anything about the physical world. In other words, proofs exist in the abstract world of ideas and mathematics, but they do not exist in the tangible physical world of reality. For example, here's a meteorite, which you can get at my website, briankeating.com, if you're lucky.

40:15Or if you have a.edu email address, I guarantee I send these to my.edu email address holders, James, because I am one of them, but they're my target demographic in a lot of sense for this newest book. I really want them to benefit from this book while they're young, get on the right course, focus and concentrate so that they can blow up their careers. Here's a meteorite. There's no telling that this meteorite will fall exactly at 9.8 meters per second squared or that it might not fall up instead of down, right? There's no actual way to prove that because things in the physical world can only be disproven or falsified.

40:49So math is this ideal abstract thing, but it's so powerful and it's so important to learn what are the limits of our capabilities. Where does the lens end, so to speak? Where does it run out of focus? You have to learn those things and you learn that not from knowledge, perishable knowledge in a textbook. You learn that from the wisdom of people that came before sort of what you're trying to emulate. That's really interesting. I mean, the idea that math, you would think you can prove that, right? Because of all the work on the physical laws of science. It's almost like you can prove it, but physical scientists take poetic license.

41:26They leap over the fact that, okay, math doesn't really exist in the real world. We're going to just assume it does. We're going to take poetic license and assume it does. And then we can prove all of these things. That's right. So, exactly. I do feel that it's often underappreciated because we give so much attention, so much credit to physicists. They're kind of like these magicians. As Arthur C. Clarke also said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. To me, it's almost a problem that science sometimes produces technology because then people come to expect technology to come from it, right?

42:02So you kind of don't expect from math there's going to be like a lot of technology, even though we kind of sort of know these AI and LLMs and stuff are based on math, but nobody really knows how. Even their inventors don't know how they work. I talked with this. The actual, he's really regarded as the smartest human being on earth. His name is Terence Tao. He's a famous mathematician in UCLA, and I interviewed him last week. And we started talking about, you know, how are you teaching things different? Like, how are you different than, here's my friend Galileo. You know, Galileo taught 400 years ago in the University of Padua in Italy.

42:37And he was just like, he would go to a classroom with a rock, you know, with a piece of chalk and scrape on a blackboard. So it's like he's using a piece of rock on another piece of rock. And that hasn't changed. You know, I still use chalk. I still use chalkboards. I still use, you know, maybe I use a whiteboard or, ooh, PowerPoint. You know, such a huge, you know, level up from transparencies. But really, like, how is he using AI? or how is he using quantum computing? We don't teach our students any of these things, James. It's really insane. So you've heard of quantum computing probably, right?

43:09Yes, yes. So quantum computing, just maybe for the audience that might not be familiar, is an extension or an improvement or is thought to be an improvement upon classical computers that use transistors like your iPhone, which right now we're talking iPhone 17 just popped out of Tim Cook somewhere here in California. So they're basically built upon semiconductors. These are transistors that transition between a zero and a one and on or an off zero volts or five volts and digital logic. And it was known from 150 years ago that you could compute any sort of algorithm you like just having binary code, just zeros and ones or, you know, zero volts and five volts.

43:47So that's what these transistors do. However, however, Feynman, Richard Feynman, famous Nobel laureate, and many others in the 1950s and 60s realized that you could make a qubit, a quantum bit, which would not be a transistor, can't be a transistor. They don't work for this application. Something called a superconductor, not a semiconductor, a superconductor, something that operates with zero resistance under the right circumstances. And such a qubit could theoretically do an almost unlimited number of calculations at a single time, not just a zero and a one, a one bit at a time or a terabyte at a time.

44:21It can actually do an unlimited number of calculations at a given time. Now, this has incredible applications, but they're very limited in that they seem to be very good at doing things that require a massive amount of what's called parallelization. So, for example, one thing that comes from pure math that's used right now by James and his friends at BitTensor. Is it BitTensor? Yeah. Okay, so it's cryptography. So cryptography is the encoding or hashing of cryptographic information, and then the decoding of it is sometimes used with an algorithm that requires, say, 256 bits of classical bits of computation.

44:59Well, one qubit could actually crack that in a nanosecond if it were optimized perfectly. It's impossible to do so. But in theory, at least, these could... And every couple of months, you hear that, oh, there's a quantum computer which now is threatening the security of not just BitTensor or Bitcoin or Ethereum, but all banking is done. All the internet is encrypted via these techniques. So theoretically, people could read your emails and see your Grindr profile and do whatever you see what you're up to on there, right? So it's very dangerous. It has a lot of impact. And if we don't invent it, I'm sure people in China or Russia or wherever, they're going to invent it before the...

45:35So it's a hot topic. Guess what, James? I don't teach it to any of my students, not yet. I'm actually going to teach the first class, whether they like it or not, in a couple of weeks on quantum computing. And actually, you know, I'm going to make this book, you know, or this course, How to Build a Quantum Computer. What could be more important for a physicist? You know, yes, I think it's important to study cosmology, but leading one of the biggest projects ever made, the Simons Observatory right now with my fellow co-leaders, that's going to be great, but it's going to take a few years before we get the final data results from it and have the earth-shaking information that might win somebody a Nobel Prize.

46:07I don't know if it'll be me anymore, but one of my teammates might win it, right? So that's a few years down the road. That's my number one daily practice. But I'm not teaching my students anything about these revolutions in AI, LLMs, or quantum computing. So I think that's a shame, and we need to do something about it. So I've resolved to teach about how to make your own quantum computer. Now, they won't be able to actually do it. But if I, you know, you might argue now, well, now, Keating, you're not focusing on cosmology, right? But you knew long ago that I stopped focusing on, you know, just one thing at a time.

46:37and the way my mind works, like yours, I like to do multiple things at a time. But I do have to teach as part of my job here and I'm assigned to teach quantum physics this year and advanced quantum physics to undergraduate seniors and juniors and physics majors. And that's what I'm going to do, but I'm going to give them some life skills, James, that they can actually use to maybe get a job and do something that's not going to be replaceable by AI. AI is not going to be able to build a quantum computer. Well, okay, that question aside, first off, great title of a book. You should make a book out of this course.

47:07how to build a quantum computer. True, it'll be out of date the second after you publish it, but it's still a great title for a book and it will sell many copies. Second, tell me, make the leap from teaching that course to teaching them life skills. In terms of like practical applications of say a computing science degree or a physics degree or something like that right now, there's very few jobs that you can do right out of undergraduate with a bachelor's degree in physics because most of the people that go on to do stuff with a bachelor who majored in physics, want to be a professor, a postdoc, you know, go to NASA or do something like that.

47:42And usually that requires a PhD. So there's very few skill jobs that you can do immediately. Now, you can do a lot. And actually physicists, as I believe, have the most wide spectrum of skills. They know everything from how to build a circuit. If you want to understand how an electrical circuit works, an electrical engineer might be able to know a little bit better than you, but they can't build it. They can't solder it. You know, they almost do none of that. We build data acquisition systems. We make measurements of systems near absolute zero or, you know, billions of degrees Kelvin in some cases.

48:11And so you do all these, you know, incredibly diverse skills, but you don't learn them very deeply. You know, you have 10 weeks to learn these in a class. And when you graduate, you know, you've also had to take a whole bunch of other classes. You know, women's studies to be well-rounded is important, but not necessarily, you know, going to help you design, you know, for example, a quantum computer to have taken poetry of the Renaissance. Yes, that might be important, but that's one of those things you can do on your own. Like, I'm totally comfortable learning from YouTube and not having to take a little, you know, also, I mean, why do we force an undergraduate who will have to be paying back$70 ,000 a year in college loans?

48:48Why do we force them to take something that has absolutely no chance of benefiting their career, of advancing them? Like, you know, I'm not advocating against it. I have taught classes in the literature department here as well. But my point is, if you were concerned with the outrageous prices of college tuition, with the incredible rates of the loans that these kids have that can never be discharged, even in bankruptcy court, you would want to also make sure they have a lot of marketable skills so they can at least support themselves in that incredible high cost of living, inflation, and so forth.

49:18My point is that if you learn quantum, to build a quantum computer and use it, not just like, oh, here's some abstract thing with a zero and a one, and it could be also a square root of two if you wanted it to be. No, no, no. You're actually learning everything from the foundations of quantum mechanics, like the Schrodinger equation, how does the uncertainty principle work? How do you understand, you know, the properties of what's called spin of electrons, of photons, and other particles? How do you understand interactions with an electron? How do you know what happens when you take an electron and put it in a magnet?

49:51Like, what happens? I mean, those kinds of things actually could be used to build different products and services, etc. but eventually you have to get to like putting this thing in a system which requires cooling down to very low temperature so you learn about vacuum systems cryogenic systems even if you're going to be a theorist then you learn about what's called perturbation theory the mathematics of it are very advanced elegant and beautiful partial differential equations and solving those numerically they can't be solved analytically so you learn very advanced mathematics you learn very advanced interactions between particles forces and fields and then finally you have to learn how to program these things.

50:26When you start to program a quantum computer, you get something that never happens with a classical computer because it's so cheap to make billions of transistors that you have to get into what's called error correction. So these are algorithms that overcome the noise that's injected by the physical world onto an idealized system in the quantum realm. So you learn about how you overcome these things. How do you do encryption? How do you do decryption? How do you program a quantum computer? So my hope is that it will tie in all these different fields from physics, low temperature, cryogenics, chemistry, computer science, the theory of how you program these things, everything from how to build a vacuum chamber all the way up to how do you crack bit tensor tomorrow so James goes broke.

51:07No, you're not going to do that, James.

51:22What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? A lot, especially when it comes to protecting what matters. At Pacific Life, we've helped people and businesses confidently embrace the future with life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits. with strategies built on strength and trust and a promise to be here for you today and tomorrow. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. I like the idea of, it's sort of like a sexy sounding class, how to build a quantum computer.

52:01And, but to do that, to teach that, you have to teach at a very deep level all these different concepts along the way. And this applies to another thing that's mentioned in the book, which is it's not enough to just solve these earth-shaking and earth-changing problems. You have to be able to communicate them. And communication is, I would say, almost as important as the skill of discovery is the skill of communicating that discovery. In order to, for instance, win a Nobel Prize, no one's giving you a Nobel Prize if you discovered the secrets of the universe, if you can't communicate them. And so I think that is like a key common factor in all these people you interview.

52:39And they express this in your book and you express this in the book. How would you say the average person, and based on what you've seen from these Nobel Prize winners, how can someone improve their communication skills? To do what you just did with coming up with this idea of a sexy sounding class, how to build a quantum computer. Anybody off the street would want to take that class. and you're really just, it's the bridge of all these ideas you have to kind of teach all these disciplines. How do you build that scale? Yeah, so there's a saying that the way to become successful is to do things that don't scale.

53:13Like to grow an email list or to grow a Twitter following, that scales very rapidly. It costs nothing or Instagram influencers, you can pay people to be your followers or whatever. So those scale very easily. Sending out meteorites to people is very hard to do. And that's why I only do it to my beloved people in the academic setting, either professors, postdocs, students, or whatever, or randomly. Sometimes I send them to non-academics. But I noticed when I sent out a notice yesterday, James, that my book is out today, and I said, here, buy the Amazon Kindle copy. It's 99 cents this week only.

53:46And please leave a review. I have an email list. And there's about a couple thousand people from academia on it. And then there's 16 ,000 people that are not in academia on it, okay? So I send them to both. So it's a perfect A-B test. I sent it to the EDU people who have received meteorites. They opened it. 70 % of them opened this email, and 60 % of them clicked on the link to buy the book. Okay? It's unheard of, right? So hopefully I've got, you know, 1 ,400 orders, you know, in my Amazon profile right now, which will be like the logarithm of how many books you've sold. But for me, it's a big deal, right?

54:18Again, I'm not doing it to make money. I wouldn't have priced it at 99 cents. I'm losing a lot of money on this book, but I really want it out there. And then on the non-EDU email list, the open rate is like 33 % and the click rate is like 4%. So it's just this incredible thing. Why? Because I've earned something with the people and I could like sent them something of great value. It costs, you know,$10 to send everybody a meteorite like this. It's very, but I love to do it because they are very curious. I teach them about meteorites, where to find them, how to see meteor showers, where do they come from?

54:49How do you know this is older than our sun? You know, this meteorite that you'll get. So I teach them about it because they're incredibly curious. Now, your original question, how do you teach or what's the lesson that these Nobel Prize winners had in common? It's that. They did things that don't scale. They built relationships. You think of a scientist, you know, the old joke is, you know, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? Because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. But these people are not like that. They're incredibly gregarious. They keep networks. They send messages. They reply.

55:16This woman, Donna Strickland, she doesn't have to reply. She's like the provost. She's this huge level scientist, Nobel Prize winner. She took the time to, you know, respond to me. She meant 30 minutes, you know, talk for 35, 40 minutes. And I don't even know if she even remembered me. But the point is, you know, she was so good with people that she realized that the most important word, as we know, from the seven habits of highly successful people is someone else's name and showing an interest in somebody. Those are going to be the skills that will pay off in the age of AI. AI scales instantaneously and almost infinitely.

55:48It can replicate a thousand graduate students worth of knowledge. It can represent exactly 0 % of the wisdom, of the accumulated wisdom that I've gleaned from meeting these, you know, now it's 22 Nobel Prize winners over the past five years since I started the podcast, you know, thanks in large part to your inspiration. So, okay, learning these skills of communication side by side with doing something intensely that you love, that seems like I'm obviously oversimplifying. But those two things seem like the overall magic formula in addition to all the advice that each one individually gives. But I want to make it clear, I don't expect them to start off at that level, right?

56:31So I give an example. Have you ever gone to a lecture or seen a talk by someone who's just so brilliant and you're just fascinated and you just want to express, you know, that there were really made an impression upon you, right? Like, forget about the podcast. Like, think about when you were in school or, you know, you might have heard a lecture or gone to a talk at the 92nd Street Y or whatever you did, you know, and are do nowadays. Most students don't know that their professors are aching to hear from them. In other words, I do office hours once a week in my office at UCSD. Ironic, you know, for the name office hours.

57:04I get, on average, one or maybe mostly zero people come to my office hours. Now, I'm not bragging about this. Again, I don't do what I do to make money. I wouldn't work for the state of California if that were the case. Right, James? but I can get between one and$10 ,000 an hour consulting or speaking. So that means that every student who's already paid that money in their tuition, they're paying for an office hour with me that they don't come to. And the ones that do, they always come back. Every single one that I have an office hour with, they always come back week after week after week. And I love it.

57:37Professors love that. So if you're a student listening to us talk, I want you to go to all of your professors' office hours. First of all, you're paying for it. Second of all, they're going to love it. Third of all, it may develop into a relationship. Fourth of all, it may develop into a job. Fifth of all, it might develop into a letter of recommendation. And then I extend that information. There are things called seminars and colloquia at every single university on earth, right? Where some speaker comes in from anywhere. It doesn't matter your field or not. You don't have to stay in your lane.

58:05I go to hear talks by people that study abstract properties of theoretical insulators that only work in two dimensions that, you know, we don't even know if that exists. I'll go to that lecture and I'll go up to the person afterwards. If I'm a student, I'll say, this is really fascinating. I'd love to learn more about it. Can you recommend a paper? They'll send you their email. You might want to go to them as a graduate student. You might not, but you might learn so much and it feels so good to have someone express an interest in your research. I mean, most of my papers, James, have like 10 citations, I think, on average.

58:34You know, I've written 400 papers probably in my life. Most of them have about 10. That means 10 people read it enough to like be conversant. Some of them have 2 ,000, but most of them have the square root of the number of books I hope to sell today from being on the show. And so that means that when someone expresses an interest in one of my papers or my books, it really makes me have a deep connection, one that no AI can replicate. By the way, I agree with that. And I hate to kind of say this was a technique. I was legitimately driven by curiosity, but I found when I initially was, let's say, networking in my career, if someone had a PhD, I always thought it very useful to look up and read that person's PhD thesis because I guaranteed Indeed, zero other people trying to network with that person has done that same thing.

59:15And I would legitimately be curious, but I also knew it was a technique to kind of stand out. You know, it's okay to be technique driven if you're sincere in your intentions. And I find like, like, you're right, that doesn't scale. Like you could only, it's, you know, A, only so many people are going to do that. And it's hard work. You have to put in actual footwork to, you know, hustle to do that. Like you have to look up the themes. You have to read it. You have to research it. You have to understand it. Sure, now you can get AI to explain it. So it might be a little bit easier, but not that much easier.

59:47And it's an interesting thing. And look, I actually want to dive into the topics a little bit from our very initial podcast, but I do want to say I found, I'm still reading this book, but what I've read, I'm really enjoying Into the Impossible Volume 2 even more than I enjoyed Into the Impossible Volume 1, which I wrote the forward to. And I think it's because I think you've, you know, by the way, that's a valuable book too, but I really enjoy this, the way you're interweaving kind of the life lessons with a very high level and beautiful understanding of what these people did to get the Nobel prize.

1:00:25And I mean, some of these people did very complicated things like, like, you know, ranging from, like you mentioned, the LASIK surgery to the guy who discovered black holes to very complicated stuff like isolating an atom with lasers and so on, or particles. And so I really enjoyed the discussions of the science as well as, let's call it, I don't like to use the word self-help, but let's say the life lessons you've learned from these people, because I know you're sincerely looking for these questions yourself. When you're not trying to write a self-help book, it comes across, you're genuinely curious, like what do these people do that was different than what other people do?

1:01:01But I do want to ask you, when are we going to find out the age of the universe thanks to your technology? That you're basically instrumental in developing and you almost won the Nobel Prize for. Where are we in that? Is it 13.6 billion years old? I just read the other day, but it might be 28 billion years old. Yeah, no, this is still incredible to think that cosmologists have really extreme battles over the ideology and the basic facts and properties of the universe. So I always like to say, you know, if you went to a doctor, they would take your vital signs, your blood pressure, your weight.

1:01:36If they want to see how long are you going to live for, you know, hopefully to 120. But let's just say they want to predict based on basic data about James Altucher, how long is he going to live? And they'd go through and they'd measure your height, your weight. Another question they'd ask is what's your current age, right? I mean, just completely starting from scratch, right? Your cholesterol, your prostate score, whatever. They do all these tests on you, right? So cosmologists are the same way. We want to understand how long is the universe going to last for? Should we keep paying those taxes that we mentioned at the very beginning?

1:02:05Or what's the point if it's going to come to an end very soon? And to do that, we make measurements of the universe's vital statistics, including what it's made of. How many black holes does it have? How much dark matter does it have? How much dark energy? And these things are because it's like we're establishing the facts that will go into tomorrow's textbooks, which will become obsolete nine years later in the future textbooks. Those things are changing. It doesn't mean that we don't know what we're talking about. We're measuring things with ever greater precision from ever greater numbers of disparate fields, from looking at stars close to the sun all the way back to galaxies at the beginning of time and seeing do they agree on the basic facts of the universe.

1:02:46When your daughters were young, you took them to the doctor at age two and your doctor or pediatrician measured their height. And then they said, basically, they're going to be twice that height. That's what I found out from having kids. They basically double the height at age two. And that predicts how tall they're going to be when they're adults. Well, the universe, we can do that same thing too. We can ask how old is the universe? You know, basically how big is the universe is related to how fast it's expanding and how old it is. We can say, well, how old is the universe according to measurements done close to the Big Bang, close to age two of the universe?

1:03:17You know, when it was a few billion years old. We can also do it nowadays, locally, when it's closer to 13 billion years old. And we can see, do those two things agree? And they don't agree. but they're not like one says the universe is zero and the other one says it's like 10 trillion years old they disagree at about 10 but the interesting thing in other words it's like saying you're either 56 or you're 60 or something like that like there's there's it's a smaller fair you know 60 whatever it works out to be 61 there's a disagreement but they're saying each one of us is saying we know how how you know how old you are to a couple of days precision they disagree with each other wildly, but they don't disagree in an absolute sense astronomically.

1:04:00So it's a controversy and we're trying to answer that question. How old is the universe is related intimately to how it was formed? You know, was there a singularity at the beginning of time? Or it can also be related to how long will the universe last for? And these things are, we're getting new and new, more and new data every day. And as John Maynard Keynes, you know, is reputed to say, you know, when the facts change, I change my mind. We're not changing our mind. There was no Big Bang. There is a Big Bang. We're saying, how much more precision can we know what the future may hold for our cosmos?

1:04:29And we're learning more every day. But I guess what I'm asking is, so your concept, and these are concepts that you, again, you stood on the shoulders of giants as well. A, one can measure gravitational waves the same way a telescope could measure light waves. So you built like a special kind of telescope to measure gravitational waves. And the idea is that the background radiation, the plasma created from the Big Bang, is too thick for light to get through, but not too thick for gravitational waves to get through. So a telescope that could detect gravitational waves could potentially look beyond, for the first time, that background cosmic radiation that formed about 300 ,000 years after the universe was born.

1:05:08So the question is, are we getting closer to seeing beyond, to seeing the gravitational waves beyond that background radiation to see maybe or understand what happened in those first 300 ,000 years? Yeah, we're getting a lot closer to it. There's two main challenges, though, in that the first one is just having the technology to go beyond the current limits that we have set with the BICEP series of experiments. So I created the first BICEP, BICEP 1. It was superseded by a future generation called BICEP 2. That made an announcement that we saw these gravitational waves in 2014 and that we later retracted because that would have meant the universe began with this inflation, this ultra-rapid, faster-than-the-speed-of-light expansion of space and time.

1:05:54And so it was rightfully put on the front page of the New York Times, and that's why we were considered for a Nobel Prize. But spoiler alert, you know, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize because none of us want it because it turned out that we didn't see the Big Bang's imprimatur, the inflationary spark that ignited the Big Bang. We saw microscopic grains of these meteorites, like you'll get on my website, briankidding.com, these meteorites that pollute the cosmos, but also are responsible for the iron in the hemoglobin molecule inside of our blood and at the Earth's core. And so without the iron, without the supernova, without this dust signal that we saw, we wouldn't be here having this conversation, number one.

1:06:30but moreover it pointed us in the direction of how interesting and how curious people are about this fact and that yes if we could do away with that signal that in you know kind of intruded and was an imposter we can then perhaps see back to the very beginning of time so there's man-made obstacles you know in terms of getting funding and building the instrument and so forth and then there's nature made or god made obstacles like dust in our cosmos we have to overcome both of those so we have built the world's most sensitive it may be the last observatory of its kind but by the way, because of the cutbacks to the U.S.

1:07:02government and governments around the world. The Simons Observatory, funded by my patron saint and my godfather, Jim Simons, we are building the Simons Observatory in Chile at 18 ,000 feet nearly above sea level. We have four massive telescopes that are scanning the sky at the waves from the singularity that may have ignited the Big Bang called inflation, but also for the dust that masquerades as the imposter signal that cost us, you know, on bicep at least, the Nobel Prize perhaps in 2014. To do science is very hard because you have to dedicate almost an equal and opposite amount of money, time, resources, and attention to something you don't really care.

1:07:43I don't really care about how many meteorites there are in the solar system or the galaxy. It's interesting to some people. I'm interested in it to. But the point is, it's not the main goal of seeing back to the beginning of time. And it gets in the way. It's like dust on your windshield. Imagine you're like on a stakeout and you're trying to see, like, what is Robin doing right now? Like, you're looking through the windshield and you've got the binos working for you. And you're trying to focus like a Nobel Prize winner. And there's all this dust on the windshield. Like, you would have to do an experiment.

1:08:10Oh, I see that there's something in the way. Then you'd have to remove it somehow, spray that windshield wiper, you know, whatever onto the windshield and wipe it off. And then you'd have to do a test. Is it better before or after? And that's exactly what we're doing with the Simons Observatory that we didn't have the power with on BICEP2. And so we were kind of blind to it. And now we're not blind. Now we can see. And now we're looking back. And we should have data. The problem with these instruments is that the light takes 14 billion years nearly to get here. And then it takes nearly five years to take the data and analyze the data, stress test the data, make sure we didn't fool ourselves and have a press conference and go to the New York Times before it's published and then put it out.

1:08:47I guess, you know, the upside was I got my first book out of it. On the other hand, it was a big, you know, disappointment, depression set upon us for many years. But now we're at that precipice, but it will take more time. And in the meantime, I'm working on my next book because you taught me, you know, the way to sell your current book is to have a future book, right? So my next book, and probably it might be my last book, James, is going to be about Jim Simons, but not as our mutual friend, Greg Zuckerman wrote about his influence on the markets in his book, The Man Who Solved the Markets. But it's going to be about his scientific legacy and the billionaire's quest to uncover the beginning of time.

1:09:22He was one of the richest men in the world. He died a year ago, nearly exactly. And I made him a promise before he died that we'd help to shed light on what happened at the beginning of time. He had his opinions. I think, you know, when I got up to heaven, hopefully at age, you know, older than he He was 86 when he died. Not bad after smoking six packs a day for 59 years, but he made it up there. And hopefully I'll be able to share this information with him that what we did was help to reveal one of the most interesting and impactful results in all of scientific history. But it's going to take time.

1:09:53So in the meantime, I'm writing my next book about him. Well, that's going to be a great book. I can't wait to read it. It's not going to be your last book, by the way. Everyone always says their next book is going to be their last book, but writers are addicts by nature. So I'll have the next book after that as well. I need your help on that. I need your help on that. So that'll be another podcast though. We got to land the spaceship now for my next interlude. I got to go out and promote this book, James. Yeah, well, you always do a good job of it. So Into the Impossible, volume two, I highly recommend it.

1:10:23Whether you want to read about the lives and habits of these Nobel Prize winners, or you simply want to read from a great scientist's point of view, in layman's terms, the incredible achievements and scientific accomplishments of these people. This is a great book and I'm loving it. There were so many things. I could do a podcast with you about each chapter in that book because I have so many scientists. Yeah. I mean, there's real, as I was reading, I kept writing more and more things down. I'm like, you know what? I'm not going to ask him about isolating particles and lasers and whatever. But yeah, stories are so important.

1:10:57I have to say it's not easy to write a book. I'm going to lose a lot of money on this book unless I get the Altucher bump again and again. but how many times can he go back to the Altucher? Well, but the point is like the characters in this book, the people, their characters. And most people think of scientists as caricatures, you know, these just like stoic, boring, you know, the first guy in the book is this German guy, you know, he's got that like stereotypical German voice and he talks about hunting and smelling the prey as you go. And he's so, but he's like, he's the sweetheart, Reinhard Genzel.

1:11:29He, you know, he's like, he got emotional. he almost broke into tears talking about his father and how his father had this huge influence on him to, you know, to be relentless. And he almost became an Olympic javelin, you know, thrower for the German Olympic team. You know, like he had just these incredible skills. And then he used like these advanced lasers and what's called artificial stars. And he discovered this black hole at the center of the Milky Way that's 7 million times more massive than our sun. And this guy is just hilarious and he's deep. And I'm just so excited to share it with them.

1:12:00You know, it's a very small audience. People say you should write for a big audience. But these nine people, they're just like every single one. And one of them is just more and more fascinating than any other human beings that I've ever talked to, besides my wife, I'd say, and you. But the point is like, you get to, I get, you know, I don't get paid a lot to do it. I lose money on it, but not sharing it. That's my rule about writing books, James. And I think you echoed this many times. Like, don't write a book unless you're the only person who could write this book. Like, I've interviewed 22 Nobel Prize winners more than any person I think that's ever lived, in addition to my other two books that I've written or produced, I really feel like I'm getting to something, like this sort of franchise where I can really bring out these people that are truly worthy of it.

1:12:43Like we see celebrities and movie stars and singers and people look at them and they're like, oh, they're taking a position on Gaza or they're not taking a position on, you know, it's like, who gives a crap? They're so, they're famous, but they're not significant. These people are significant, but they're not famous. And I'd like to try to make them more famous to inspire a young Brian or James or, you know, Brianna, Jamie. I want to really inspire that they can do it, but they have to really think about, are they the only person that can do it? Are they willing to put in what it takes? Because as I said, the most gratifying thing is when you hear somebody say like, you inspired me to become X, Y, or Z.

1:13:19But the second most inspiring thing is when you hear them say, you inspired me not to become X, Y, or Z. Like you showed me the truth that my professors and my teachers, my friends, my parents, never told me about like the ugly side of it and how these people got over. I'll say one last thing. Katalin Kariko is an amazing Hungarian. Again, her daughter is actually in the Olympics for rowing. She lives here in San Diego. But her mother emigrated from Hungary and she became a Nobel Prize winner for discovering, inventing really the COVID-19 technology, the mRNA technology. So she invented basically the COVID vaccine with her colleagues.

1:13:55She won the Nobel Prize in 2021. she wrote a book and she describes in the book how she was almost fired. She was actually fired twice from places like the University of Pennsylvania and other places. And one time her postdoc advisor threatened to have her deported if she took a job with his competitor. So it's just insane. Imagine working in an environment, like we think, oh, scientists, they love each other. No, scientists are just like children. You know, they're, they're creative, imaginative, curious, petty, jealous, backbite, you know, it's like all the emotions. And I want to make that clear so that kids, you know, in graduate school or postdocs, they really have their mindset, you know, on the journey and that they're in it for the right reason and that they keep in mind their health, their mental health.

1:14:40I talk about mental health, sleep, caffeine, smoking. I talk about all those things in the book and really distill the wisdom of these incredible geniuses. And I hope to write, yes, I'll probably write one more book. If I do nine more interviews, I'm up to 22. I need five more to get to the 27 number, which would trigger another into the impossible volume. But for now, my main focus is Simon's observatory and seeing if I can see this signal that Jim Simon so kindly provided funding for us to do before his death and kind of as an homage legacy to him as my scientific godfather. Well, look, Brian, you're always welcome back on the podcast anytime you want.

1:15:13But definitely, if you figure out what happened at the beginning of time, then I expect a call the very next day, come on the podcast and tell us what happened at the beginning of time. Nothing so hard, just a simple question. And then maybe the journey to the Nobel Prize will start here. So thank you once again, Brian Keating, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, Into the Impossible, Volume 1, which I wrote the foreword to. And finally, as of today, on his birthday, Volume 2, perhaps the best edition of all these books. Thanks once again for coming on the podcast. I love you, James. Love you. And Jay, and thanks so much for your support and encouragement.

1:15:54And yes, I absolutely will come back and you'll be the second to know. I'll even tell you before I tell my wife.

1:16:24Favorite blockbuster films like Gladiator. I will have my vengeance. Good Burger. This is what I call fast food. Beverly Hills Cop, The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Julie and Julia. Bon Appetit. All for free on your favorite devices. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.