Rebuilding Higher Education for the 21st Century | Brian Keating

25:05No, not wheels, but skis. And then you let, so this, you know, one way is probably$50 ,000. So this is the most expensive water in the universe. And it's all because I went down there to study the origin of the universe, which then produces the type of heavy water that we can then use as a fossil to unravel what were the physical conditions like in the early universe. So the reason I went to the South Pole was to make a cosmic microwave background experiment called BICEP, which we've talked about. And that was the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, available everywhere books are sold.

25:36Does not come with a forward. I always recommend it, by the way. Thank you. Does not come with a forward written by a Nobel prize winner and also, uh, James Altucher, like my second book, think like a Nobel prize winner inspired by James. Perfect example of imposter syndrome. When I, when I write the forward to a book about the Nobel prize alongside another Nobel prize winner, Barry Barish. Uh, I've got an interview with him coming up as well in person. We did an in-person interview. So anyway, um, I don't know how we got on this tangent, but the point is I'm doing these experiments in my class, which is a, which is a theoretical class, but I'm doing lab experiments, not just boring.

26:11And I can't get more than 50 % of class to participate, but wait, it gets worse. It gets worse, James. These are some of the most brilliant kids in the world, but they're not very good financially, okay, for a bunch of reasons. One, if they're out of state and they pay all the full freight, in-state's a little bit less. It's a lot less, maybe$10 ,000. But if you're out of state, you're coming from Florida or Georgia or wherever, you pay $72 ,000 full freight, tuition, fees, room and board, you know, books and everything. It's$72 ,000. Princeton is$75 ,000 a year. And I think we give just the same quality education.

26:49So, you know. By the way, I just want to mention something about these tuitions. Tuition prices have risen faster than inflation every single year since student loans have been available, like since the mid-60s, whatever the Student Loan Act was. It's not like tuitions, oh, it's normal. Tuitions rise to 60 ,000 to 75 ,000. No, they've been rising much faster inflation every single year, not on average, every single year, which shows, again, what a scam the colleges and why it is worth rethinking what are you teaching here? Are you the product or are you the service provider, the educator. Exactly.

27:28A hundred percent right. And for me, uh, the, the challenge has always been that I am teaching and I'm a member of this very exclusive guild called university professors. And at the same time, I have a, uh, I am a member of this, you know, cartel that is price fixing. I mean, I just told you that Princeton and which is Ivy league school, you know, sometimes considered the best school, uh, in the world. It's the second best Ivy league school after, after Brown University, of course. And all these reasons, you know, basically - Did you go to Brown? I forget. Yeah, I went to Brown for graduate school.

28:02I lived, I grew up in Princeton. Oh, oh, you did? That's right. Yeah, you were right outside. So anyway, we're basically price fixing. We raise our prices. And guess what, James? San Diego State, you know, our arch-rival, crosstown rivals, which is part of the California state system, not the University of California state system, they also charge about these same kinds of - in other words, once the cartel fixes its price. It's like OPEC. And it never goes down. There's never been a reduction. During COVID, when I was teaching on Zoom, you know, for three months, wearing a mask, I don't know why I was wearing a mask.

28:36But that time, we were still charging the exact same amount. We just didn't get room and board. But, you know, whatever. So the university seems to have survived. We've got huge buildings going up. Princeton is now what Malcolm Gladwell calls a perpetual motion machine in that it never has to raise a dime again. Its endowment is growing. The president just bragged about how fast their endowment's growing. In the last year, it grew 12%, which is six times what the target rate of inflation is. And maybe it's 50 % higher than the actual inflation rate. Anyway, they're bragging about that and how important it is to have college in some article op-ed that they wrote.

29:14So they're fixing their prices. We're fixing our prices. We're matching these prices. Has the education gotten better? Have we used new and innovative tools? But I'm really not bringing this up to rag on the universities. We can do that some other time. I'm always happy to talk like that about how we do have a monopoly. And our main job is to squelch competitors and make exclusivity and scarcity have a higher price tag. And that's what we do in the university system. In addition to being conscious, caring, attendant professors. But now I'm actually criticizing my students. and, you know, I know they all listen to your show, but they are throwing away, you know, probably$500 a class that they don't attend.

29:58And if they do that for, you know, there's only 20 classes, each one's a two hour, you know, 90 minutes long. They're throwing away thousands and thousands of dollars, but wait, it gets worse because we also have office hours and office hours where I will literally sit in my office, which is right next to class, right before class. And I will sit there and I will talk about anything they want. We can talk about the homework, We can talk about what it's like to go to graduate school. Is the lifestyle of a professor really worth the sacrifice, the hunger games that you and I talked about the very first podcast we ever did?

30:29And we'll talk for, I could talk to them for a full hour. I get two. So I get a click-through rate, you know, of about 4%. And again, I can get paid. What do you mean? Oh, you mean out of all your students, two of them. Two out of 50. Come to your office hours. You actually take advantage. And of the people who come to your office hours, how many are just trying to kiss ass to get better grades? And how many have legit questions? I mean, it's always the same two girls, women, that come to the class. And they're really smart and they're fun to talk to. And we'll talk mainly about big picture topics.

31:04I don't think they're there to kind of be obsequious or what have you. They are interested. But they talk about the homework, and that's fine. I'm really happy. When they come, James, by the way, I give them a signed copy of the book that bears your name on the cover. So I want that book to be spread and read wide. And so every student that comes to my office, I give them a signed copy of Think Like a Nobel Prize winner forward by Dr. James Altucher. And that doesn't even entice them. That costs me$16 a pop every time I give it away. I'm paying for it. University doesn't buy them for me. But I wrote the book.

31:41I want the message to spread and I want to influence students to do good things and to, and be aware of the, the unwritten rules of science that we go through, including the imposter syndrome. Anyway, this is all to say that 90, you know, plus percent, 96 % of the students are throwing away tremendous amount of value, not just the book. Okay. The book is condensation of 30 years of my wisdom and knowledge and 30 years of nine Nobel prize winners, James Altucher and others included. So, but last but not least, you know, James, I've been paid ridiculous amounts of money to go and give a speech in places.

32:14I've been paid, you know, all expenses paid, first class airfare for me, my family, my nanny, you know, we have to take a nanny somewhere. Internationally, I've gotten more than I, you know, more than my first five cars put together, you know, for a single speech that lasted 45 minutes. Where? This was in Atlantis. This was in the Bahamas earlier this year. At a conference? Or like, why did they pay you? No, it was a combined thing with like a charity foundation and a hedge fund. And I'm not supposed to talk about the details, but you can probably figure out eventually. What did you talk about?

32:50I talked about that. I'm sorry for this interruption. I'm just curious, like, what do hedge funds like this pay? Why are they paying like a physicist? Well, this particular hedge fund would have a deep interest in what I'm doing because they run a charity as well. but you know other other funds have done this too so they had me come in and speak about the biggest picture philosophical questions of all that that you could possibly ask and in terms of why are we here how do we get here is there life elsewhere in the universe uh this is kind of a team building thing it wasn't like how to maximize alpha and minimize beta i mean i wasn't talking about that uh and so it was like an inspirational speech about the the you know where these young philanthropists, many of them are young philanthropists, things that they can get interested in that are outside the box that advance the, you know, human knowledge without necessarily advancing technology.

33:41Although many of my students go on to jobs at these very same hedge funds. I've had students, you know, that go on to interview with places and because the training as a physicist is the most broad and far reaching of all educations, I claim. Even in terms of like writing and reading, if you do it right, if you read Richard Feynman and you read Galileo and you read Marie Curie, you will have as well-rounded appreciation of the English language literature as, you know, reading, you know, just purely reading Shakespeare or Baldwin or whoever, because to communicate well, as those authors do, and other science authors too, modern or ancient, you will get a tremendous firsthand account of what was going through a scientist mind as he or she was making a discovery, which would then change the course of nature and the course of history and the course of technology.

34:35So in other words, you learn cosmology, but then you learn literature. That's pretty cool. I don't think the converse is true. If you learn literature, you don't learn cosmology.

34:59I want to roll it back, though, to you have this identity crisis that you're talking about. And I wonder, you know, I've had on, for instance, a guy, you know, Alan Lightman, who kind of switched from being like a great physicist to being a really amazing writer about physics. Like he's written beautiful books for the past almost 30 years about physics. It's Einstein's Dreams, I think, was his first book that I read. And it's back in the early 90s. So are you saying this type of philosophical thinking is now more on top of mind? Or what's going on with you? For me, what's been happening is the intersection of science and culture has become very, very important to me.

35:42Because I'm worried that the prestige of science has been potentially irreparably damaged. due to the pandemic and the response and the lockdowns and everything else. Okay, so, but science as a word, I don't think physics reputation has been ruined. I think maybe the word science, people now, when you say question the science, it sort of determines whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, the tone you use to say it, which is ridiculous. And so I agree with you, but physics itself, I don't feel the reputation of physics has changed. If anything, physics has recovered since its fascination with string theory.

36:18Well, yeah, but this fascination only intensifies when you have people like Michio Kaku and Brian Green and others that go on and extol the virtues of these 11-dimensional vibrating beads of energy that, if written down, would allow us to know the mind of God and as Stephen Hawking said about strength theory. No, I disagree respectfully because physics is at the core of all this stuff. So here's one example. Climate change. Climate change is the description of atmospheric phenomena on a rotating planet that orbits around a medium, you know, G2-type sub-dwarf star. And there's a whole host of astrophysical and physical impact in these things.

37:01And the question of the vicinity of life on the Earth and the future of life on Earth. Then we have things that invoke computation, quantum computation, artificial intelligence, the web, networks, simulation hypothesis, things like that we've talked about. Then you have the intersection of these with life outside of the Earth's surface. Okay, but tell me again, like where, and I don't mean to interrupt this stuff. You're right about all these things. I just want to know where you personally are feeling pain right now. So for me, the pain point is coming from a little bit of disillusionment with the kind of hunger or passion that young people have towards physics and science in general.

37:48That they are given the keys to this Ferrari and they don't really understand why that's valuable rather than, you know, they just say, oh, there's like 4 ,200 pounds of aluminum and rubber and some glass. Instead of saying, no, no, no, that's true. that's what makes it up, but it's so much more powerful than, than just that, uh, because it can do so much more and it can benefit society so much more. And by seeing the students who, you know, are kind of not taking advantage. And I'm not saying, I don't think I'm the greatest professor. I think I'm probably like the 17th best professor out of the top 10 professors that I know.

38:24Um, and, and, you know, for that reason, I'm trying to learn from them. I'm asking them advice. I'm being, trying to be humble. I've been doing this for 19 years. Plus as a graduate student teaching assistant. It's about 25 years of my life devoted to teaching, studying the great teachers, both and interviewing them for my podcast and my books. And so I don't think I'm that great, but I don't think I'm that bad. And I'm trying innovative new approaches, including like doing experiments in a purely theoretical. It's outrageous to do that. And people are like, why are you doing that? Like, you know, someday, one day I came in, it was actually April 20th.

38:57I came in with what's called a hoot tube, which shows how sonic vibrations occur in a standing wave in a pipe as you heat it up. This thing's a large cardboard tube with various metal gratings inside of it. And you can set up a standing wave that sounds like a didgeridoo or whatever. And you have to light it with a blowtorch. And then that sets up oscillations depending on how hot you heat up the blowtorch. So it teaches thermal connection to sound. This is very cool. and as I'm doing it and you have to hold this thing and then I lit it and I'm like, well, sorry, you know, I didn't realize this, but it's 420 and this thing looks like an enormous bong, but there's no relationship between this and the kids are all laughing and it was all in good fun.

39:41But, you know, here I am, I'm trying to come up with innovative things. There's one other piece of depressing data that happened to me. So last week, we had a survey that went out to all my students and they were able to fill out the survey and it's their only opportunity to provide a short answer. And I said to them, guys, look, I've won many, many awards in my life. I'm not saying this to brag. I'm not telling you this, James. You know I've lost more awards than I've won. But I've never won the award of best teacher at UCSD. And that is my goal before I retire. I want to win that award. I want to do what it takes.

40:15I don't mean I'm going to give everybody an A plus. No, I said, I want your honest feedback. I was very vulnerable with them. I said, I know I can do better. I know I'm doing okay, but I want it not only for the rest of this quarter, which is another five or six weeks to go, but also for future generations of students that will take the same class with me. How can I do better? What kind of lacunae, flaws, gaps do I have? What things do you like? Do you like the experiments? And it's their only time, they get asked to evaluate me twice. Once at the end of the year, which is like a Scantron form, just like, do you agree that this is a good professor?

40:50yes or no. Like it's just binary questions the whole way down. So I get no real signal to noise there. Instead you get, you know, I get information, but it's not granular at the level that I'd be happy with this and contradistinction last week, they were able to write little, you know, sentences about why is Brian a good or bad teacher? What do I want to see more of? Um, how can we improve things? What do you think about the book? What are the short, anyway, long story short out of 45 students, only two people filled out the survey. It's probably the same two people that filled out the, that come to my office hours.

41:23And because the number is so low, UCSD will not release the survey results to me of the two people that submitted the survey results. Because you don't want them to. Yeah, they could be targeted. Because they think you're going to figure it out or whatever. Right, exactly. And this is down from like 10 or 15, you know, last year, same size class, roughly, same caliber of students. And I'm just like, I'm working harder than ever to engage students, to teach them things about, you know, why what they're doing is so interesting and so important that with the students that do come to class are mesmerized and they seem very interested, although who the hell knows, uh, the same students keep coming and the same students don't keep coming.

42:02I want to do better. I asked, I was vulnerable. Give me feedback. Now, James, I can release a video and tomorrow it'll have a hundred thousand views. And I'm not bragging about that. And many of them watch my channel and they, they're just like, they love seeing me on, on your show. They've, they've actually said that they've seen me on Lex Friedman and Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and all these podcasts. And they're like, oh, it's just like, you're so good at doing that. I'm like, then why don't you come to office? Like, I'll sit there and I'll talk to you about anything you want, anything in life.

42:30And some of my colleagues are like, well, maybe they're intimidated by you because you're this YouTuber and whatever. And I'm like, I don't know if that's really true. Like I was intimidated to talk to you, James, you know, And the first time we ever met was, well, we met because we gave a TEDx talk together in San Diego in 2014, which I can't believe how long ago that was. We met there. We lost touch. You had a couple of marriages. And then I went on Jordan Harbinger's show, not Jordan Peterson, Jordan Harbinger's show. And that took a long time to organize back in 2018. And I said, I just have one request.

43:04I'll never ask you for another introduction again. I really want to reconnect with James Altucher because he's done so much for me psychologically. He's stimulated so many ideas. He's, he, he prompted me to become a standup comedian. Uh, then he prompted me to, to really go deep into the podcast. So, so here I am. And, uh, and, and Jordan says, hi, by the way, he's, he's super busy, but he loves you. And, uh, we always, he's coming on soon again. Oh, great. Yeah. He's the best. Yeah. So, uh, so, and I'm like when I had the opportunity to meet James, I didn't like, I wasn't like, oh, I'm not going to meet Jane.

43:37Like, thanks for the introduction. Not going to do it. Like I was intimidated by you. Uh, you have this huge audience and, and now the student has become the team. No, no. But now James, I feel like, you know, we become friends. And so we lost out on that. And, uh, by not, if I would have not taken advantage of these opportunities, all this is to say that, that there's a couple of different dimensions that are causing disillusionment. One is that the students are not getting what they're paying for at a university and they're paying dearly. They're paying tremendous amount of money. And I don't just mean for cosmology and physics, as I obviously think, it's the best education you could possibly get in STEM, but that doesn't mean other forms of it.

44:14But I assume this is happening to other professors, like in literature and sociology. Yeah. And again, sorry to interrupt. No, it's fine. It's your show. I've given quite a few lectures at colleges, whether it's about entrepreneurship or investing or writing or the economy or whatever. And one thing I've noticed is that, and usually I'm speaking to like a big class, like a class with more than 200 students in it. So I don't know if that's like the average size of classes now or whatever. Depends on the university, obviously. It depends on the class, yeah. Yeah. So one thing I've noticed over the past decade or so is that before people would sit there and they're looking at you.

44:56Now everybody's got their laptop open and they're kind of I guess you would say multitasking, but I don't believe multitasking is a thing that exists. I think that's like a made up word. And, and look, I have to work really hard to get their attention. Like they don't know who I am. They know roughly the topic and roughly who I am because their professor introduces me. And I have to use all my skills. Like it's the hardest public speaking I've ever done is speaking to a room full of students. And I, I'm, I'm, you know, I think I do a pretty good job. I have to use the comedian skills. I have to use the public speaking skills.

45:31I have to use everything to get them to look up from their laptops and engage. And you could feel their engagement when they're engaged. So it's very hard for professors right now, I think, and schools because you're right. Not only are the students overpaying, but they're not really learning. They're just there to be there because they think they have to be there. It seems in most cases, not in every case. No, that's right. But you would think that an elective class in a subspecialization. By the way, this is spring quarter. A lot of them are seniors and they're graduating and they're going on to graduate school.

46:04So they don't have to take this. They already got into graduate school or they have a job offer. Very high levels of employment and employment satisfaction when you get a graduate degree in physics, an undergraduate degree in physics. So for all these reasons, you think, well, like, why did they sign up for the class? It's like, I really want to get in better shape. I'm going to pay for a bunch of personal training classes and I'm just not going to show up to any of them, but I'll pay for them. And worse than that, I'm going to go into debt. I'm going to go into tremendous debt that maybe will be paid off by Joe Biden or some taxpayers, you know, down the road, but probably not, you know, that might not happen.

46:39So I'm going to go into tremendous debt for my personal training classes. And I'm not even going to show up. That's brain training, but I'm not going to show up. I'm not going to show up to that one-on-one consultation that Professor Keating could get$1 ,000 an hour in consulting fees if I wanted to. And so, you know, for these reasons, it's disillusioning to me. And it's caused me to start to think about the model of education. Because, listen, the first major university in the Western Hemisphere was in Bologna, Italy, in the year 1080, the University of Bologna. Go Bologna sandwiches. That was their mascot.

47:13Nobody knows that, but it's true. And it's been a thousand years, basically, since that first university. And you know what? And you know, the big reason why they started universities is who commits the most crimes? Yes. Men aged 18 to 22. Yes. And so the guards at this university were facing inwards, not outwards. That's right. They weren't protecting the students. They were protecting the rest of the population from the quote unquote students getting out. That's right. So previously they had sent them on to the Crusades, but now it's like, oh, we can't keep killing people in the Middle East.

47:46Let's just. That's right. That's why I was against the border wall of Mexico, which is nearby from here, because, you know, someday like the first income tax was, you know, 1 percent. Right now it's like up to 30 plus percent plus California. Plus, you know, this is pretty expensive. So camel's nose under the tent in certain speak. So I'm worried the border wall, you know, eventually to keep Americans in like forget about keeping. I mean, you know, half of my people that I interact with on a daily basis are from Mexico or from Latin America. I love them and it's great. But like, what if someday it's like, oh, the guards are keeping in just like they used to do with students.

48:20But you ever remember from Saturday Night Live, James, when it was funny, there was a segment called Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy? Yeah, yeah. So I remember one of those deep thoughts and it reminds me of the university situation. And Jack said, in the early days, in ancient times, fly swatters were nothing more than a long stick with a flat piece of wood at the end to smack a fly. My, how things have changed. It's like, it's basically the exact same thing, right? Yeah, it's a long piece of stick. Maybe there's a piece of plastic on the end of it. And so I started to think, well, let's look at what were universities like a thousand years ago?

48:58Well, there was an older guy, usually it was a guy, sometimes a girl, I guess. There was an older guy and he would take a piece of chalk, you know, and they had like a big stone wall and that person would like scratch off the chalk onto the wall. And I'm like, wow, you know, things have really changed. you know, in a thousand years. Can you think of anything from medicine to, to like any form of technology, anything that has changed so little compared to education? I really can't. I mean, yeah, you can have PowerPoint, you can have a smart boards and. I'm going to say the answer is yes, because when you're using the word education, you're referring to what we always thought was education.

49:37You go to first through 12th grade, then college, then some graduate school and so on. But now education could mean a how-to YouTube video. Education could mean I went to Coursera or Udemy or anything. Education could mean a how-to podcast, like kind of like how this one is. So I do think education because of the internet is amazing now. I meant college education. I meant college. Yeah. No, college education has not changed, but that led to the rise because college education is, I don't want to say so bad because I don't want to make too many judgments on it, but because there's something lacking and people like you are having these identity crises, you know, things like Khan Academy and Coursera, they're really excellent.

50:21Like I learned so much from YouTube. I watch YouTube every night. You know, I don't, I don't do anything else, you know, besides a cavort with the misses. I'm not going to get into that. That's a different type of video education, James. But speaking, I'm just, I can only speak about what I know for sure. And then I can start to think about using innovations to improve that. But I would argue that it's actually gotten much, much worse. There's nothing like it. In other words, medicine, I had a guest on and he's one of the, you know, nine people that we interviewed, I interviewed in my book that you co-authored the forward to.

50:56His name is Carl Wyman. He won the Nobel Prize for discovering exotic forms of matter. And he's really trying to reestablish and reinvent the way education takes place for physicists. And it will be hopefully applicable elsewhere. And he told me that in his opinion, education today is at the same level of like bloodletting with leeches and so forth as in like middle-aged medicine. But I actually made the point to him, no, it's worse because whatever you want to say, the cost of medical procedures in many realms has come way down. In some ways, of course, it's gone way up, but like take like cosmetic surgery.

51:32You know, you and I both had our Brazilian butt lifts a few years ago and that price - That was a great vacation together. That was fun. That was a good times, James. We got to go back for the other cheek. We got to turn the other cheek next time. So when we did that, it was, of course, the price has calmed down like Moore's law as has dropped precipitously. But in contradistinction, education has skyrocketed, As you said, the price has gone up 300 % in just the past 25 years since I've been in higher education. And is the value any better? I'd argue it's worse. I'd argue at least maybe to some extent there are many better professors than me.

52:11But this was true when I was a teaching assistant at Brown or at Stanford or Caltech. The best students are always going to thrive. They're always great. But the average student also needs to thrive in order for society as a whole to thrive. And that's, so I've become, you're saying that physics is being, it still has the, is the rose of the sciences as it was called. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not, but, but science as a whole, I'm worried about it because, because we do hear things like look at Scientific American. It used to be my favorite journal of all time. And in the back, there'd be a section called, you know, the, called the amateur scientist, which taught me how to make rockets and a synchrotron accelerator and a bubble chamber.

52:55And then I'll do all sorts of other things in chemistry. Then there was Martin Gardner who had the section on puzzles and games and every now and then he'd talk about chess. That magazine is a shrill political, you know, rag now where they talk about, you know, their presidential endorsements and they talk about gender identity and all this culture war bull crap. And it's, I can't even look at it. I block all their authors who are some of them used to be my, I've been on their podcast. I've been on Steve Mirsky, you know, science talk. I block it now. I don't want anything to do with it. It's so obviously politically motivated.

53:33And I don't see the benefit at all to science. So many people say, oh, look, but you look at any of the other magazines, it's also becoming true. And so science as a whole, I think, is suffering. and I worry most of all that my colleagues, let's take a colleague who's a much better professor than I am, she's much more giving, but she still will only teach, let's say she has 100 % click-through rate. Everybody answers a survey. Everybody comes to office hours. Everybody comes to class and they're getting every penny out of their tuition. That's still only 45 kids times, say 30 hours of class time.

54:13But let me ask you a question. Why can't just everybody learn from... I could take a physics class on Coursera, pay$10 instead of$12 ,000 for that class. Why can't education just change to something that we already have? I'm saying there are now fine places to get an education, and they're online. They're more legit in many ways than college. Why can't that be the solution you're looking for? I think it can. The problem is the model of accreditation. So a lot of things could be much better than they are, but for lawyers. And I know you have a lot of lawyers listening. And my brother's a lawyer and he listens.

54:58So let me make a point. When you look at, say, there's a device in my room right now. Actually, it's an Alexa. So I can say Alexa and it won't go off because I changed it to be not using that word. So now I have it the following very, very winsome name. Computer, who is James Altucher? James Altucher is an American hedge fund manager, author, podcaster, and entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded over 20 years. Yeah, it reads the Wikipedia page, basically. Computer, stop. So now imagine you're in your doctor's office. And I had Eric Topol on a couple of years ago during the pandemic's early stages talking about, and he's written books about, you know, the doc, the patient will see you now.

55:38It's all about revolutions in medicine. And I said, how come there's not like an Alexa device sitting in the back as you're talking to the patient? You know, I had a consultation, just like an annual consultation with my doctor over the phone this morning. I'm driving, you know, he's got his iPhone and I'm like, it was like 14 minutes. It was, sorry, it was four minutes long and I got a$250 bill for it. And I don't know if he's gonna follow up. I didn't know like when he said, well, you gotta come in and have that cyst on your butt lift because of the butt lift, James, The complication rate is very high.

56:10And so you got to have that looked at. I don't know if I'm going to get a call from a nurse and they're going to tell me I have to make an appointment. But if I had a very intelligent, you know, chat bot sitting right there with him and with me, then they could fight it out and say, well, like, you know, he mentioned getting, you know, getting 70-hour x-ray on your butt. So make sure he follows up and gets that ordered or you could get, you know, the cyst could pop. I don't know. I don't want to get too disgusting. thing. But the point being, they don't have that because of like HIPAA regulations.

56:37And it's not, you can't secure privacy. That comes out. Or here's another example, pilots. When you're flying across the country, every time you stop at an airport, you have to dial in their local weather for that airport and any particular obstructions on the runway. There's a deer on the runway. There's a plane that popped the tire. You won't know that. Like when you took off, if you call them, you know, it could be right have happened, the plane that's landing before you in my little Cessna. So I'm coming in for a landing and there's, holy crap, there's a plane. I have to be familiar with it.

57:07So to do that, 10 or 15 minutes before I'm landing, I have to dial in by hand on a radio, an analog radio from the 1960s, take my eyes off of the outside world, take my hands off of the control wheel and dial in this number. Then I have to listen for two minutes. Each broadcast, the minute the weather takes two minutes. There's a special code they tell you. Then they tell you about any notices you have to be aware of, any obstructions, if the airport's open. And while I'm doing that, I can't talk to anybody else. I'm 100 % focused on that. Now, the plane knows where I'm going. I've got a GPS inside the plane, so it knows where it's going.

57:44Why can't it call up and have just computers talk back and forth and just put visually up? We can read 60 times faster than we can listen. So I could read these signals, and it would just pop up. It's safe to land. Just give me a flag. again, the FAA is rotten with lawyers. And because of that, it's very vulnerable to shutdowns as happened a couple months ago when the system went down and planes were grounded across the country, cost billions of dollars because this totally antiquated system that requires analog radios to be tuned by hand and listened to for two minutes and taking attention off of the cockpit and onto something esoteric while you write something down by hand on a piece of paper.

58:21It's crazy. Yeah, so - So education now. So let's get to education. So that's made me think about, well, what can we do with education? First of all, you encouraged me to make the first ever audiobook by Galileo. And I did that with friend of the show, Carlo Rovelli, who's been on your show many times, and Frank Wilczek, who won the Nobel Prize, and Fabiola Giannati, and James Gates, and my friend Lucio. We recorded it. Nathan, who's listening and editing right now, who's instrumental in editing the audiobook, 22 hours long. You can get a free copy if you're one of my Twitter subscribers, and I will send you a free copy of 22 hours of blood, sweat, and tears.

58:59But you hear Galileo's, mellifluous, well, my voice, and Carlo's voice, but you hear the ideas that span four generations that determined that the Earth is not the center of the cosmos that ushered in the Copernican Revolution that then made our way into understanding as we venture out into the universe. So you can hear that. Now I start to think because I got the data, the raw data, in other words, the text of Galileo in a Word document that's 800 pages long and it's broken out by character and stuff like that, I could dump that into a large language model. And then better than that, you must have had this question posed by you and to you a thousand times.

59:37James, who would you like to invite for dinner? Who would you like to have dinner with? What? Any celebrity, any historical figure? Have you ever been asked that? You don't have to tell me who it is, but. Yeah. Okay. So you've been asked that. Now I ask you, James, what if you could actually have that person with you? Would that be cool to have dinner prepared by a chef in your home with your friends? For me, it would be Galileo. And a 3D rendering of Galileo that you could interact with. You could say, well, like, how did it feel when your daughter died in 1632 when, you know, before you died?

1:00:09And like out of that, what was the impact of losing every parent's nightmare? And like, and talk to him as a person because I have a million of his words. So we have a million impressions of digital imprints, of thumbprints, of his mind. And with Einstein, we could do that. With Archimedes, we could do that. We could go back to tribal leaders in sub-Saharan Africa. We could do anything, right? So why aren't we using that? As I said, I'm a middling teacher at best. But Galileo is a great teacher. Why am I teaching about balls rolling down inclined planes when he could do it better than anybody?

1:00:42because he was the first person to ever think of doing that, of stopping time or slowing time down so that it could be measured by crude measuring instruments that were available at the time. Wouldn't that be a better person to teach than Brian Keating? So we're sclerotically confined in the educational system that is charging, you know, Hermes-like prices, you know, for something that is becoming more and more, as you say, commoditized. Why can't we make that model flip? And I think it's because of this accreditation process. And I'll explain what's happening with that. So I've been in conversation with two new forms of education.

1:01:18One is called Peterson Academy, and it's run by Jordan Peterson, who I've gotten to know very well over the last few months. And the other one is called University of Austin, Texas. And neither one is like super firmed up in terms of like exactly how I might assist them in their mission. But both are doing very innovative approaches to the learning experience. but the biggest impediment is again legal they cannot get accredited until they've graduated a graduate class why do you need accreditation um i claim well for graduate school you need accreditation like to get into physics graduate school you need an undergraduate degree this seems to me like kind of a scam like like who gives accreditation the schools themselves they form a cartel and they west and they they they they partner like a legal it's not like the law does it.

1:02:07It's just the schools say, hey, we're going to find one other thing we're going to charge people for. Yeah, Freeman Dyson was my first podcast guest ever, progenitor of the Dyson sphere, the explicator of quantum mechanics, the true Nobel loser, unlike me, who wasn't quite as close as he was. And Freeman, my first guest, sadly departed three years ago, but he didn't have a PhD. And he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, rubbing shoulders with Einstein and the folks over there for a decade, Wheeler and everybody. So no, you don't need one to do research, but I can't tell you a single scientific paper that I've read that's, let alone not had a bachelor's degree, but didn't have a PhD.

1:02:49There are obstacles to that that seem to be insurmountable. And whether it's a way of sorting and credentialing and whether that's because of this cartel that sets its own prices, that fixes across state lines and does all sorts of things that would be illegal if the mafia did it. Somehow these universities are getting away with it. And I'm part of the problem. I'm not like going to my chancellor and saying, up yours, I'm not gonna take a dime until you lower the prices. But these new institutions are. Jordan Peterson and Peterson Academy, which is gonna be completely non-political. It's gonna have classes about philosophy, psychology, physics.

1:03:26Is it gonna require a PhD to teach? No, no, it doesn't even require that you're a professor anywhere. Same with University of Austin. Texas. Peter Boghossian, who you've had on the show, I think I introduced you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very smart guy. Where did he end up? Because last time I spoke to him, he had just quit Oregon State University because of an issue there, a political issue there. Yeah, exactly. So the diversity and equity inclusion squad came after him, and he quit Portland State. And he hasn't set foot until just last week when he went to ask kids what they think about rights for transgender kids.

1:04:00I mean, he's a very, very controversial guy and and and i i love his mind and everything he does but but uh but the bottom line is he's one of the founding faculty at the university of austin texas barry weiss you know is one of the backers behind it i believe for a while stephen pink the university of austin texas isn't that a real i guess there's ut there's university of texas at austin you're saying this is different yeah that's this one is called you austin texas the other one's you texas austin so it would be like the university of san diego which is who started that it's very interesting.

1:04:30So it's a privately funded college. I think there's people from maybe like the PayPal mafia days and that kind of orbit, perhaps. It's definitely not a left-wing institution. In fact, they were talking to me yesterday about, you know, like you can count the number of folks that are on their bureaucratic staff that do what's called diversity, equity, and inclusion on zero fingers because they just refuse to have anything like that. And so here at UCSD, we have at least eight people whose title has the word diversity, equity, and inclusion in it. And each one of them has a staff. And each one of them is charged with maintaining this balance in the university.

1:05:09And that's been in place since the year 2012. And I've been here since 2004. And the number of black faculty members in my, or true ethnic minority members is basically unchanged. We don't have a single African-American. We have very few female professors. And this has been the job of this institution, of this institutional superstructure architecture. Now, how does that get paid for? It gets paid for from the tuition and fees of the students and from state funds. So this university is not going to have that, which allows them to offer free tuition, at least for the first graduating class. But the problem is the first graduating class won't get a degree from an accredited school.

1:05:49They'll get a degree from the University of Austin, Texas, but it won't be accredited by the state of Texas, even in Texas, which is a very conservative state, obviously. So you still have these same kind of cartel rules and the higher education that are outside the bounds of perhaps what is necessary. And Peterson Academy is even more far removed because that's not even in person. That's going to be an online educational facility that will have a total cost 96 % lower than the average cost of college tuition. It'll be accredited eventually, but it'll be online instead of being in person. So it'll have even lower cost.

1:06:27So, you know, for me, it's like doing experiments, like you always talk about and skip the line, your most recently published book, that you want to do as many experiments as fast as you can because you want to get the results of those experiments, have them be low cost, but potentially high ROI. And I'm reading from your book, you know, as I say this. And for me, how else are we going to potentially improve education if we're so sclerotically stuck in this mold that goes back to the year 1080? Yeah, I agree. But again, I wonder why can't we just say, hey, Coursera is good enough. And even Google says that.

1:07:06You could get a Google certificate in essentially software and programming at quote-unquote institutions like Coursera. And thousands of companies have said, yeah, we'll hire people with that kind of quote-unquote degree. So I feel like this is a problem that is organically being solved, even though it doesn't have the current status of higher education. But that's the same thing like with publishing. So publishing was an antique for 100 years. You had to go through one of the five to 10 publishers to get your book published or else it was like vanity publishing. But now you can use Amazon self-publishing and millions of books that are highly ranked, highly reviewed, sell great, are self-published.

1:07:48I agree. But I mean, so look at places where there has been credentialing. Any place that has an entrance exam from the SATs and ACTs, which are no longer required at the University of California, by the way, to the GMAT, to the LSAT, to the MCAT, to the GRE, all those different three and four letter tests. Those are all gatekeepers to a next level of credentialism. So for a lawyer, I think you can become a lawyer without even going to law school. I mean, you can represent yourself. It's very hard. So I would ask the same question of you. Why is that so hard? I mean, is it really so important that you go and listen to Larry Tribe at Harvard, you know, wax about, you know, whatever he's going to talk about for three years and pay another$179 ,000 a year.

1:08:37I don't know. No, I agree with you. I've tried to become a lawyer without getting a law degree, which is why I know it's very hard. So, and similarly, the physician, you know, now they're in some schools, they don't require the MCATs. But, you know, the question is, is there a limited, what's the fundamental constrained resource. Is it the teachers that are teaching? No, because as you said, it's cost zero to duplicate an educational experience online. But here's my concern. I thought that, and your past guest, professor, quote unquote, Professor Galloway, Scott Galloway, who you were very, very kind, James, to introduce me to digitally.

1:09:14I asked you for an introduction to Scott and I I wrote him and invited him on the podcast. I've listened to his podcast with Kara Swisher and with him. I have all his books. And, you know, I'm still waiting to hear from him almost a year later. So, you know, thank you, Scott, for, you know, causing me to wait in vain. Well, that's a shame. I feel bad about that. Yeah, it's not your fault. I mean, I told him, I wrote him, eventually I wrote him an email and I was just like, look, I've written you five times. You've gone on podcasts with like literally an audience of 300 people. I have as many YouTube subscribers and podcast subscribers probably as you do.

1:09:51I know I have as many on YouTube because it just shows my channel's subscribers compared to his. And yet I've interviewed 14 Nobel laureates, not one of them of the other two or three that I've tried to invite that didn't come on. None of them at least didn't have the courtesy to say no thanks. and I just find it like totally outrageous that somebody who comes from the University of California system, went to UCLA, you went to UC Berkeley and just like, won't even say, sorry about that. I really, you know, I've got too much going on. Not interested. You're not that interesting to me, Brian. I don't wanna, just say something.

1:10:27Don't make me write like five emails to you asking like, when can we set this up? And, you know, thanking Jane. Anyway, that's my rant for the day. But as I think, you know, he teaches this brand strategy and all sorts of things. He does those online. He's got his own online educational facility. I think you're going to see more of that, but I don't know if you necessarily need to have more, you know, I don't know, if these kind of Courseras could form a cartel, you know, and have some kind of negotiating power. It's not up to me to figure out how can we establish a whole new educational system, but certainly if reducing the barriers and reducing the cost, those have to be the paramount issues of concern.

1:11:07And I see there's no attention. Like at UCSD, we've got brand new buildings going up. My chancellor just got the highest raise in UC California chancellor history. You know, got a$500 ,000 raise. You know, some of the highest paid state employees in any state are college, you know, employees, usually on football team coaches. They're paid by the taxpayer. You know, it's a tremendous amount of money that flows through these universities. And yet, you know, we're actually not innovating in what we do. And we're not even aware of the threat, as I thought, during COVID, that it would lay bare, you know, and this is something Galloway said a lot in his books about corona panic and so forth, that we would have the end of the educational system.

1:11:53And I don't see any difference. In fact, I see we're raising prices, we're trying to increase perks. But we haven't fundamentally changed anything about what we do educationally. So I'm trying to do, you know, like one of the ideas I have, if I do collaborate with University of Austin, Texas, you know, or, you know, and it wouldn't be like, I'm going to quit my tenure job here and go work in Austin. No, I'm not going to do that. But I might do a seminar where an intercession between my classes and their classes, you know, between Thanksgiving and Hanukkah that we, we do this project, like what I've described to you.

1:12:29take my large language, you know, make a large language chatbot of Galileo who can answer physics questions and then teach him all the physics that's come up since he was alive and then ask him about quantum mechanics and ask him about, you know, interpretation of wormholes and the philosophy of the Big Bang. I mean, this would be amazing. And it would be a synergy between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, between the literature and English and communication and and, and writing and the hard sciences that Galileo is known for. And so those are one of the things I'm interested in. We got that.

1:13:05It only took, it's only took an hour to figure out your existential crisis. And so let me just ask you some questions. One is why can't you right now do that? So create, you know, you know, take Galileo's writings, everything he's written, feed it into a large language model. I could help you do this. If you go, if I did this for myself, I put all my blog posts into notepad.com and there's AI James now, which is like a weird, more generic version of me. We could do it. I could do it for you. And then we could take Isaac Newman. Heck, we could take Isaac Asimov. We could do whoever you want. And we'll make like a little virtual AI college and we can test it out.

1:13:49I'm totally, there's nothing. Answer, nothing. The other thing is like you did a good job. you wrote a great you know audiobook or you didn't write but i mean you made a great audiobook with galileo's teachings why don't you try setting that up as a course and coursera experience the process of doing that um so that you know you don't have the university system behind you to help you but it's it's not that hard it would take some just a little bit of effort and since you want kind of an alternative form of teaching where people are like signing up because they not because it's a requirement or because getting a degree is important, but because they want to learn about Galileo.

1:14:27Why don't you try that experience to see how you feel about it? Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I will. But, uh, the, the main point is I don't want to do it. Not because I'm lazy, although I am, uh, and not because I don't have the time, although I don't, but because it's part of the, I would want this to be done every quarter. You know, in other words, I'd want the students to develop it because for them to wrangle with all these things, as you always say, like podcasting is not a skill. Being a comedian is not a skill. It's a million micro skills amalgamized together into one, you know, mellifluous format, right?

1:14:59So what I would like to do is have that be the course. Have it be the course. Make AI Feynman, make AIAE, Albert Einstein. That's the course. I can help you put together a course like that. I mean, a lot of people can help you, but I think that would be a valuable thing. And then for profit, for profit. So, okay, So there's one thing. And again, I'm paid. I'm a state employee. OK? I'm never complained about my salary, even though I could make more. And if I am a teacher at Princeton University, we keep talking about, the second best Ivy League school, and my children go to college, as they probably will, Princeton will pay their tuition at Princeton.

1:15:36But they'll also pay their tuition at UC San Diego up to the amount that Princeton would charge. We don't get that at UC California and any of the UCs. In fact, the only benefit we get is a benefit my neighbor gets as well, which is that they pay in-state tuition. My kids will only pay in-state tuition. But let's get back to that. I don't think money is, I'm not doing any of this for money, although I think that people think take things more seriously when they have to pay for them. Anytime I've given out a book, just given it away like to these students, I'm not sure they're ever going to read it.

1:16:05I said, part of your accepting this book, by signing this book, I'm encumbering upon you, you have to leave a review, good or bad, and you can use a pseudonym. That's the whole thing. People think like I'm going to track them down. I love bad reviews because at least they're engaging with it. But let's take that aside. Anytime you've given away something, people treat things with the value that they pay for. So I don't, I think it's important to charge. And therefore, I would like to do the dinner party, you know, chat dinner party or whatever. But I'd like it to be like catered in any city, you know, Atlanta, San Diego.

1:16:39You say like 10 people get together. We're going to come in. there's going to be a catering van that shows up and there's going to be an NVIDIA, you know, super cluster, you know, whatever. There's going to be a computer with, with, uh, you know, screen, or you're going to get Oculi, Oculi. I think that's a word. And you're going to have dinner. You and your friends are going to have dinner with a historical figure. And that could be a for-profit, you know, kind of model. I'd like the educational thing to be, you know, for education and yes, maybe they pay for it on Coursera. I would love to know how to do that.

1:17:08I'd love it even more if the students would do it. But I think that's a very interesting exercise. So the exercise for the student is pick a historical figure you want to learn from, accumulate as much material as you can get your hands on, go through this process of creating the AI version of that human being and make it good enough so that you could then ask it questions and learn from it. And at the end of the semester, you have to kind of do a thesis, what you learned that you didn't know before from this, you know, persona. Right, in other words, like some of my students now, although it's less in cosmology and the physical sciences, they're obviously using, you know, chat GPT or BARD.

1:17:51I like BARD better for a reason I can explain. I've never used BARD. It's great because you can, so what's the problem for me as an academic? I want to make a plot of like, and I did this, plot the cost of attending UCSD since 1990. And that's how I came up with some of the data that we're talking about. But chat or BARD, they won't let you do that. But what BARD will do that chat GPT won't do, and I shouldn't do this because now more people are gonna sign up for BARD and it's gonna tax the resources that I depend on. But anyway, you can say BARD, write a Python script that plots the cost of tuition versus time in-state and out of state for UC San Diego or any UCLA or whatever, and then make a Python script and then it will do it.

1:18:30And then it will say, would you like to run this in Google Colab, which is their built-in Python, you know, Jupiter and so forth evaluation platform. So I have an account, it just clicks run and it plots up the data. It's pretty cool. So I like BARD for that reason versus chat, but I'm sure chat can do something similar. But anyway, so my students are using it, it's obviously they're using, but here I'd like them to use it. In other words, like I'm learning so much, I don't need to like, I'm a full professor. I don't need to like worry about stuff in terms of like, well, some guy's gonna come take my job, like literally can't take my job until I become an emeritus professor or die.

1:19:07And even then, when they take my job, it's not like they're going to plug into the Simons Observatory and become the leader, you know, with my colleagues. And then they're going to, you know, teach. No, it's not the way it works. They hire a junior professor who makes, you know, half of what a full professor makes or two thirds of what a full. And so that's how they save money and pay for, you know, the retirement stuff. Anyway, the point is I'm learning about this stuff because I find it really interesting. And what's so much fun about it is that you get to play with it. You're interacting with it.

1:19:34And you're interacting with the AI, you know, with the chat itself, the bot itself. But it'd be so much more fun if you're interacting with, you know, we make a Joe Rogan bot or we make a, you know, we make a Galileo bot or whoever. And by doing that, then they're not only learning, but the entity in which they're interacting has a persona that's physically and mentally, intellectually interesting to them. I have this ability on, we built this ability on notepad really oh awesome yeah can you make a bribot i could totally make a brian keating bot like which could take think like a nobel prize winner it could take uh your losing the nobel prize losing the nobel prize it could take your galileo audiobook it could take all of your podcasts the transcripts of all your podcasts and make an ai brian like we could do that and we should do that james this is something that has to be done uh the other thing is to do That's why I think a lot of these issues with education, I mean, education right now is going through an amazing revolution because of online.

1:20:31Look, I'll tell you an experiment that I have not yet launched yet, but I'm about to launch. Jay and I, a few weekends ago, we spent about – I sketched it all out. Jay did all the video. We did about 20 hours of video of me teaching a course, how to write and publish a quality book in the next 30 days. Oh, I saw that. and and yeah so so i i've probably mentioned it here and there but i've taught writing informally to so many people you know people i know who are working on books or articles or whatever uh and so i it gave me the idea oh i really enjoy this i went through my own existential thing and i really wanted to to this was is my contribution to to teaching yeah i'm excited to do this so this is an experiment for me and I'm excited, but I do think teaching is going to change because of all this.

1:21:23Like I think I will teach a better course than most courses about, right. We're all courses about writing in college right now. Absolutely. Cause you're actually, I mean, I have a ton of experience. I've written 20 books. I've written many bestsellers and you can't really find that teaching in college. Absolutely. I mean, the students are hungry for authenticity. They want to see something that's real. And if you look at like, who are their heroes? A lot of them are like influencers and people with big channels and Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan. They want to be like that. Well, they could actually do stuff that they have not done.

1:21:56Joe Rogan hasn't written a book and Lex Friedman hasn't written a book. And maybe because they don't have kind of the, I don't know, the wherewithal or the time or the thought process to do it, but the barriers to entry could be lowered. And then I see this as like a tool. Like you can't take certain classes without, um, without a computer. Like we have classes on, you know, data analysis and Python for physicists, you know, um, you, you need a computer. Every single one of them has an iPhone or Android. So, you know, so they have these platforms, the huge amounts of computing power, by the way, I love to like troll Elon, you know, when, like whenever the Falcon launches or the, you know, star show, I'm like, I can't believe he did it with even less computing power than we have in our pockets right now.

1:22:41He liked one of my tweets about a month ago. It was about a dad joke that I made. So I think it's important, yeah, to kind of like, what can we do that's innovative, that's fun? It has to be in this Venn diagram. It has to be, you know, fun, useful. It has to be something that there are some barriers to entry to because otherwise, you know, it might already be done. Like, we're not going to make a new chatbot, we're going to make a specific application of a chatbot. You know, we're not going to make our own LLM. I mean, I would like an LLM chatbot to help me parse through all the different things that I'm told and barraged about every single day that AI can do for me from making slide.

1:23:18Oh, that's another thing. The last rant going back an hour ago. So a lot of the students come in and they're just not as good in calculus as they need to be to take to do well in the class or they don't remember special relativity because they took it three years ago or two years, you you know, not everyone's up to speed. I had lacunae in my knowledge, right? So I started using this slide, you know, generator in AI, not for the main course material. I think that would be hard. But like, tell me everything you need to know as a freshman in physics about special relativity in 10 slides or less, including examples and images.

1:23:54And this, you know, came up for me. And then I just upload it to them. I say, you don't have to read it, but if you're feeling like you need some supplemental material, I've reviewed it. I've checked it for accuracy. You know, these chat things have a lot of flaws in them. And guess what? You know, it's good. It's here for you. I haven't heard one thing if they like it or they don't, if they even listen to it. And it's frustrating because again, the incentives of feedback are very different in a college thing. I love these online learning sites. I think they're better than college. I, you know, yeah, here's what you get in college.

1:24:27I'm willing to concede. I wasn't willing. I mean, I wrote a book, 40 alternatives or 80 alternatives to college. It was the number one book in the college section for a while on Amazon. So, I mean, I've really looked into this. And look, I do think I've changed my mind a little bit. I do think you get, if you use this aspect of college, you could get a social, you know, career networking connections. Like you certainly know all the great physicists in the world because of your networking. Not because of college though. I mean, I - Well, it's because of grad school and then going to conferences and the research you did and the people you worked with.

1:24:59Like, you know, I just read some book by Sean Carroll. You've worked with him and, you know, all these great physicists. You know, so I do think that college is good for it. But I think now is the time. Like, I would take your class if you were to make, and we even talked about doing this once. If you were to make the 10 different ways the universe might have began according to experimental physics. Yeah. And if you had made that online course, I would pay 50 bucks, 200 bucks, whatever. and I take it and listen to it with my family. And yeah, I mean, you have all these things like masterclass and so forth.

1:25:32And like, oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson teaches astronomy. It's not so that you can go to graduate school. There is a huge thirst for those kinds of things. But, you know, I also feel like I'm doing a lot of that on YouTube and people can find stuff and also interviewing people besides me. And so I think, yeah, I mean, I guess for me, I'm less interested in the financial thing other than as an incentive for people to value what they pay for, unlike, but again, I'm like, so torn because here are these students paying, let's say they take four classes and they're paying$9 ,000 a quarter or whatever. That's ridiculous.

1:26:04And then they're four, you know, so that's 2 ,500 or whatever,$2 ,300. And they're not coming to the classes and they're not coming to my office hours. Come on guys. I mean, so I do think that there's a value in the physical world versus the metaverse, which is what we're talking about with these avatars. I think both have a place in education because how do you make something educationally viable? You have to make it visceral. Like you basically take, you take Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you start taking them away. Like, in other words, you make the student feel unsafe. Like they're going to get a bad grade if they don't learn this, you know, you teach them something very quickly and then you teach them something very primally.

1:26:39And then, so in other words, if you can establish the, the, the, the synergy between the best of what high online or virtual world or metaverse type stuff could do. And I think Mark Zuckerberg is like a total fool about the metaverse and it's going to go. I lost billions of dollars on it. But education is the one place where it really is a killer app. And it's education, all forms, like from teaching people how to fly, making surgeons and stuff. And all I see is like, oh, play like, you know, Crossy Road with your friends on the metaverse. Like it's totally useless. And so there I agree with Scott Galloway.

1:27:15So but I have to go to a class now, James, in the physical world, although I'll be on Zoom for the first part of it, but please do for the good of humanity, James, make a bribot. If you can do that. I could do that. And, and Brian, what I wanted to ask you, I won't do it maybe another time, or I'll, I'll call you up. I've never called you up and talked to you on the phone. Yeah, let's just do this talk. Yeah. You, you, you did such a good job taking your podcast and making a good YouTube channel out of it. Thank you. And I never am able to do that. Maybe it's just the way I look. Nobody wants to, to look at an hour video of me, but it's like my YouTube, I have 40 ,000 subs on YouTube, but my YouTube audience per video is like one, one millionth per podcast.

1:27:58Yeah. So yeah, that's true. I got to figure it out. Yeah. No, I'd love to do, uh, to do a deep dive into what I did. And, uh, we have different kinds of niches, although we have a lot of guests that do overlap. Um, yeah, I would love that. And, and, you know, all the more so for kind of doing things to repay you with the gratitude that I always have for you, giving me my start in podcasting and being an inspiration and a co-author and a forward. And yeah, Jordan and I, Harbinger talked on the phone for like two hours a couple of days ago. So yeah, let's just schedule a Zoom or a FaceTime call sometime soon, James.

1:28:33Yeah, that'd be great. All right, well, good luck in your class, Brian, and I will talk to you soon. Thank you, James.

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