Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Ambition, Accolades, Life Advice, and the Paradox of Striking Graduate Students: Brian Keating and James Altucher in Conversation (#282)

Episode Date: December 24, 2022

An open and revealing conversation with host Brian Keating Ph.D. and James Altucher. Imposter syndrome, winning and losing prestigious awards, and whether it's more charitable to donate anonymously or influence others to do so publicly. https://jamesaltucher.com/ https://twitter.com/jaltucher https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-james-altucher-show/id794030859 Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm getting to the point where I'm trying to get more comfort, more satisfaction from helping other people rather than like trying to climb some ladder of success. But I'm worried, James, because there is sort of that Elon Vital, as they call it, you know, that life energy, that vitality that you have when you're questing after something, bestseller, you know, to win an Oscar, a Nobel Prize. Like, if I don't have that anymore, I think I'm healthier. I think it's better, you know, for society where the person doesn't care so much about him or herself, but more about their family, their community, their society.

Happy holidays and welcome to a special co-lab edition of Into the Impossible, featuring a revealing conversation between James Altutcher and your host, Brian Keating. Their wide-ranging dialogue covers the paradoxes of the recent University of California grad student strike, Talmudic lessons in tithing, and how to do you. enjoy accolades and the joy and peril of ambition. You'll get a glimpse into Professor Keating's seldom told personal story. All we want for Christmas and Conica is for you, dear listener, to leave us a review and the gift of an asterism of stars to boost our ratings even more as we move into the new year. So, for your holiday cheer, sit back and enjoy James Altutcher in conversation

with The End of the Impossible host, Brian Keating. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot-bay doors, please, hell. That's because they think I'm what? That's because your students think you're part Republican. Part Republican. Yeah, I think I am part Republican. Part Republican.

I'm part independent. Part Democrat, probably. Students don't like anything other than progressive. You know, it's so funny is that we just are in the middle of a strike. the graduate students you remember being a graduate student wasn't really like a lucrative career and it's true still today as when you were studying you know category theory way back in the day but this this time the united auto workers have formed a union for graduate students at the university of california and they've been on strike for a month and they're not getting paid

and they're not teaching classes and they're not taking classes. But you know how recently the New York Times employees went on strike? Did you hear that? Yeah. Yeah. So Elon Musk tweeted out,

woke versus woke, you know, that the woke writers of the New York Times are striking against a woke employer at the New York Times. And it's very similar with, you know, graduate students are striking against professors who used to be graduate students, all of whom were in the same persuasion,

politically, you know, 99%. It's like, you know, Twitter politics. And so we have this, you know, kind of battle, you know, Kramer versus Kramer, woke versus woke, where the students are claiming that, you know, the professors are evil capitalist pigs and exploiting labor and the graduate students, which is true. I mean, the graduate students living in La Jolla, California is not very cheap, nor is it to live in Berkeley or Westwood or Brentwood, California. But first off, living in La Jollaia is great. If you could afford to live there. It is great.

Like the most beautiful town in the ice. Yeah, it might be. Santa Barbara, very similar as well. You know, any place where the tagline is that it's a place for the newlywed and the nearly dead, I mean, you know you're going into a place that's going to bankrupt you if that's where you're going to live. But of course, the cities grow up around the universities, right? It's a great place to have a family, to have culture, to have education, obviously, to have, I mean, we built a train track that goes from campus now to downtown San Diego.

It's billions of dollars. I was actually featured as a picture on the side of the train recently. But the point about the strike is, you know, the graduate students in physics are very different from a graduate student in anthropology or something like that. And yet they're all on strike. And the thing that concerns me is that if I ask my graduate students, I think I treat well, if I said, you know, well, why don't you ask your med school friends, you know,

how much they get paid to go to graduate school and get professional training, they'll say negative $40,000 a year because they have to pay to go to medical school or law school or whatever. That's true. But Brian, I could argue both sides. I could say on the one hand, the grad students, they're going to get the benefit of a PhD, and then they could go off and make whatever.

But at the same time, you guys get huge multi-million dollar grants and then grad students really are cheap labor to work on those grants. Oh, it's worse than that. I agree. And it's worse than that because we've actually outsourced a lot of labor to China and other parts of the world because we couldn't, quote unquote, couldn't find the labor pool that we needed for graduate students in the U.S. But that just made the problem worse because the Asian students that come, you know, literally from, I mean, I have a thousand applicants a year for, you know, three spots or something, you know, from Asia. And they're, you know, perfect test scores and great training. So it's almost impossible to keep up with it. But that was a very deliberate policy of the National Science Foundation in the 60s and 70s and 80s, you know, to kind of reduce the cost of capital and labor for research to be conducted.

So let me ask you question. Yeah. By step two, which was your almost Nobel Prize winning project, how much in grants did you get to support that project, like the dollar amount? I mean, probably over, over its lifetime, 20 million plus, most of which was federal. How much equipment and costs that were, you know, fixed like that? It was probably about half, maybe 50, 50.

Okay, so you get $10 million for labor. And how much did you pay the grads? You didn't pay the grad students anything to work on that. How much you have to pay the school? Take that $3.50 an hour, James. Come on. Don't be ridiculous. No.

Okay, so there's a couple of misconceptions. One is that the professor controls their salaries, which we don't. We get a grant and it specifies. Yeah, but the listeners might not understand it. Right. But the other thing is, you know, when you do this kind of research, it's also professional preparation. And the graduate students do get a huge benefit of this work.

And the, you know, furthermore, the thing that I don't like about it is that it's, you know, my PhD advisor, Peter Timby, he's not only been on my podcast, you know, he came to my wedding, you know, he'll probably come to my second wedding. No, no, I'm just kidding. He, you know, he's been intimately involved. I've stated it as, you know, I love the guy. Like, like, and to go on strike, it's not like Starbucks employees, okay? So Starbucks employees, I don't know if this would ever happen, James.

Imagine if you are working at Starbucks and then there's a kid. You're right there. That would never happen. Not because I'm elitist and above Starbucks. It's because they would not hire me. I would be, I can't, I tried to figure out how to use, like, the basic soda machine and stuff at the comedy club that I own. I couldn't even figure that out.

So forget Starbucks. Well, I think, well, I'd say they hire you because they want to figure out how to make it, you know, more optimal as a third space for chess players. And they want to understand the permutations of lattes and soy and oat milk. So they're hiring you for your brains, not just for your looks. And when they do that, but you are so desperate to get this position that you write to one of the baristas and you say, please write me a letter of recommendation.

I am desperate to join, you know, your profession. And immediately, as soon as I get there, I'm going to go on strike because I hate this profession. In other words, right now I'm in the midst of hell. Professor hell. You know, I always say being a professor is the hardest three hour or a week job in the world. but every December it becomes a six hour a week job because we have to write letters of recommendation. And I don't know if you've ever done a show on like how to write a letter of recommendation.

What do you want to do? What do you want to provide? How do you want to tailor it? And I've written, I think I looked at my folder. I think I've written like 600 letters in the last 22 years of being a scientist, you know, postdoc professor. It's a lot. And each one is tailored, you know, to the – and then each individual university that, that say one of my undergraduates is applying to.

So let's say she's applying to 12 institutions. Each institution, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, Stanford, they all have a different portal. They all have these different permutations of like rate their intellectual capacity and tell me the cohort that you're, it takes like 10 minutes per person per school, plus the writing of the actual letter and making a PDF. And then sometimes they won't accept PDF. They want Word.

and then I use Mac and it's a big thing. Anyway, you know, world's tiniest violin, okay? But the bigger point is that they are desperate to get this and I'm happy to provide them these letters of recommendation. But you wouldn't have that situation where people are desperately trying to become coal miners, right? Or are desperately wanting to work in the Triangle Shirt Waste Factory in 1906, right, where they're just like, it's awful.

They're basically slave labor conditions, child labor. In other words, this is a very precise. prestigious thing. We also have a surplus of incredible, I mean, we turn away six or seven incoming graduate school classes. So my bigger point is that people want to work in this field and yet they're also going on strike and they're striking against the very people who share their ideology. It's a very unusual situation to be in because we share their ideology politically. I ultimately agree with you. I just think all these situations you're describing, like I don't think grad school is necessary at all, period.

And I don't think... Well, how do you say that? Now we're fighting. Now, those are fighting words. Okay, let's take that apart. I don't think the New York Times is necessary. Like, when was the... I mean, no, I don't get my news from New York Times, and I'm pretty up on all of the news, on both the left side and the right side and the middle, all the many things in the

middle. I've seen personally the effect of the useless op-ed page in the New York Times. And so just, and that's the most prestigious newspaper in the world. And I've seen so many articles where I knew people who were covered in the articles who documented for me all of the actual lies. And the reporters even knew the lies were there. Like the New York Times, any, I'm not saying every established media is useless, but probably it's the case that 90% of established media,

particularly the most prestigious ones are useless. Not prestigious. I'm willing to bet they're more interested in reporting the news. But the New York Times is so desperate. They just, they just want clicks. Have you been red pill, James? Have you been red pilled by Elon? What's going on?

No, but look, the New York Times has covered me on several occasions. And I can agree. And featured an op-ed by your enemy. Right? An op-ed about LinkedIn guy. It was like a useless piece of crap. So sorry for the language. Yeah.

But it's okay. It's your podcast. I got today. I got today an email about. about that op-ed. It's two and a half years later. Could people just lose my number on this already? Like, it's ridiculous.

So. So you don't believe that, you know, all. Okay, so the publishing, you know, the media is sort of doomed in one sense, but on another sense, they're essential. You know, I still look at it. You still look at it. You just admitted that you look at the New York Times. No, I don't actually never once look at the New York Times.

Oh, you don't. When Jerry Writers an opad about me, I look at the New York Times, but that's it. I had an article written recently about me, and I'm not doing this to sound elitist, but I'm just like, I don't have the time to, like, read about myself. And it's not like I'm so, you know, like I said, I'm not saying this from, you know, elitist point of view. There's an old joke, like the professor gets mad

because he's only been featured twice this month on the school's website. You know, it's, but the point is, is like, I'm actually here, I want to discuss this with you. I've had the best year of my life in a lot of ways. and it's partially why I want to come on the show because this whole year, you and I didn't speak to each other until right now in December.

We haven't spoken, you know, basically this whole year. We haven't done a podcast this last year? I think so. We might have done one when my Galileo book, audio book came out, but I don't remember 100%. And that's why it's been the greatest year of my... No, so I missed you,

but I wanted to share some things and I want to discuss, you know, some other things just on how to hand. handle success, you know, because I think you've been incredibly successful. You've been incredibly influential, not just on me, but on millions of people. And yet, I think I've come to a point, and I shared this with Ryan Holiday, you know, the humble dropping of a name. You know, who I have issues with in some ways, as you know, from the pandemic and his kind of, you know, overarching concern about it to, you know, to like not asking about, you know, how is James feeling?

You know, it's just like, did you get your eighth shot? Or not say Ryan's a great writer. and I love his books on Stoicism, and he's always really interesting things, and he's a good guy. And I call him my Stoic Rabbi. So I won this award, speaking of graduate students, I was the recipient of the 22 Horace Mann Medal from Brown University, where I got my PhD. And I gave a speech in commencement alongside Nancy Pelosi, outgoing speaker of the house. And she was speaking to the undergrads. I spoke to the graduate students. And it was very, you know, it was very moving.

My kids came. my wife came uh all expenses paid trip i got this huge medal like flavor flave and um and it was lovely it was an incredible thing but i wrote to ryan like when i won it um i wrote to him and i said i just wanted to let you know you've had a big effect i mean because i won it and i was like let's say i didn't win it would i be depressed like would i be bummed out to know i hadn't won the horace man medal from brown university one of the most prestigious universities in the world And I said, no, like, you know, it wouldn't hurt me. Like, I lost a Nobel Prize.

You know, like, there's only, you know, very few places you can go down. And actually, in my speech, I said, now, thank, you know, I have to express my hostility because now I can no longer write the book losing Biharis Man Medal. But besides all that, I felt indifferent, James. It was like, it was a very strange thing because as a professor, you're always trying to get accumulate accolades and get, you know, raises and teaching promotions and this and that and sabbaticals. I mean, it's funny because graduate students want to become postdocs. Postdocs want to become professors.

And then professors want to not teach and get sabbaticals and go back to basically doing research like a graduate student. So it's kind of weird that we're in this weird habit trail of life as an academic. This is all an important thing. Like you say if you hadn't gotten it, first off, when you did get it and when you were told that you got it, what was your reaction? It was, I want to say, I don't want to say embarrassment, But I felt like, you know, all these prizes and awards,

I actually felt proud of myself for being indifferent because I always had this question, James, you know, if I did win the Nobel Prize, would my life have been different, you know, if we hadn't made the mistakes that we made and the errors and so forth, not blunders, not stupid, you know, I mean, Bicep is still going on, as I just said. You know, I never knew, like, what would happen? Like, would I turn it down? Would I, you know, use it as a platform to rail against it?

Or did I still kind of worship it the way I did as a 20, year old, 30-year-old scientist. And it's not the same thing. Obviously, winning an award from an Ivy League institution is great, but it's not the same as the Nobel Prize. It is really. Getting acknowledged for anything that you've done by a group of your peers is a very exciting thing. And look, and look, I want to address this directly. Like, you said you felt indifferent, but often when bad things happen to us, like let's say you hadn't gotten tenure, let's say, you know, for as you didn't get the Nobel Prize, you wrote an entire book about your frustration of not getting the Nobel Prize. It's very important that you're in a

field, physics. It's very important that a lot of things are going to happen that disappoint you and you're going to also have a lot of successes, particularly if you're ambitious and you love physics and you want to succeed, good things will happen, but also bad things will happen. Like you won't win certain prizes and everything. It's very important that you are more happy on the good things than you are sad on the bad things. You have, let's say a certain amount of well-being in the bank and you withdraw well-being when you're upset about the bad things, but you need to replenish and celebrate the good things or the result is burnout.

Like the result is you run out of emotional fulfillment in what you love doing. And when that happens, you're burnt out, like literally. You've taken too much out of. of too much oxygen out of your passion and there's nothing left, so it's burnt. And I think this is very important that you should be happy getting this Horace Mann award. You should celebrate.

You should go out with the wife. You should tell all your friends. You should write a blog post. You should give a great talk and all that. I mean, I actually turned it back, you know, because if I've learned nothing, it's to, you know, from you, it's to shamelessly self-promote myself at every opportunity.

So I did, my talk was called Think Like Galileo. I gave the commencement. speech for the graduate school. And of course, I had the product tie-in to my book, audio book. But in reality, I did kind of use it to present these correlations with these things like accolades. Like when there was no Nobel Prize with Galileo, right, that didn't exist until 1901.

But Galileo instead did win this prize at the time. It was called the Academy of the Links. The Links is like a little giant, you know, kitty cat. That's wildcat in Italy, I guess, has big, eyes and a big ear, so it has a lot of sense organs. So scientists would associate like someone who's very smart, like a wise old owl. To them, it was the Lynx. And so they had this academy of the links called the Lincean society. It still exists. And Galileo won it. And he said many, many amazing things when he won it. But ever since then, ever, like he won it in 19, sorry, in 1613 or

something after his first major book, the Sidereus Nuncius, the story messenger. And he, he, which revealed that Jupiter was like a mini solar system with moons going around it, not the Earth, and that upheld the Copernican worldview. Now, once he received this accolade, he then, on every single one of his books thereafter, and he wrote like 10 more books, he wrote, member of the Academy of the Links

underneath his name. And so that accolade meant a tremendous amount to him. Of course, it meant a tremendous amount to him. And you make a point where he used it not only for not only was he proud of it and probably celebrated it, but he used it to acquire future career success because, you know, it's an authority figure or an authority body said, you're a great scientist. And people, it's just natural human instinct. People want authority to get affirmation that they're associating with the right people and the right ideas and so on.

So it's, again, extremely important to celebrate these things and not downplay them and to mention them. Not of course to the point where, like you were saying, you know, it gets too self-promotional, but you should just be proud of what you do. And these things are important in society, and society recognizes them. I guess, you know, the next level, you know, in Judaism that we share and we've talked about many times, you know, there's different levels of charity. You know, Jews have as many words for different, you know, kind of societal things as Eskimos allegedly have for snow, right? So, like, Jews have like 20 different names for love and like 10 different names,

different names for charity and kindness and everything. But one of the concepts within the concept of philanthropy is the notion of the different levels of giving charity. So the first level is give nothing, right? The second level is you give the minimum, you know, which is 10%, the, and this is all in the Talmud, which is the second holiest book in Judaism. But there's a limit. There's a maximum. You're not allowed to give more than 20%. Have you ever heard that, James? You have to give 10%, which is like a tie, the 10th, you know, but there's a maximum of 20%. And why do you think there would be a maximum?

Because perhaps it's ego. So your ego doesn't get too big, like, oh, I'm the benefactor of this. If you love this hospital. Right, because who's the ultimate benefactor, according to the Talmudic rabbis? Who's the ultimate benefactor in space? God.

God, right. So like, oh, you're better than God. Like without James Altitcher's, you know, $10,000 check, you know, it's just 20% of his network, you know, whatever. Oh, this guy, like, the whole world would be poor, you know, give me a break. So it's to keep your ego in check. I think that's very interesting because like you might say, well, give all your money away and, you know, just be poor and that's the highest. No.

But then, and then even then, you shouldn't just, like, the highest thing is not just giving a guy a check. You know, as Jesus, a great Jew said, you know, teach a man to fish and it'll have fish for his whole life. Give him a man a fish, he'll eat for one day. So the highest level is actually to give anonymously, like, so that nobody knows, you know, put your name in a building. And then the ultimate highest level is to anonymously give somebody a job, which is kind of weird when you think about, like, how can you anonymously give someone a job? Because then they're self-sufficient, then they don't need you. And then your ego's not bound up with it because it's anonymous. So you'll never be. So I kind of feel like, you know, in some ways that when I, when I think about

these, you know, kind of levels of different accolades, that maybe it should be that indifference is, I hear what you're saying, because, you know, like, I actually like that people put their name on a hospital. Like here in San Diego, there's a hospital named after Irwin Jacobs, the founder of Qualcomm and his wife.

And they've given billions of dollars away, and they always put their name on it. And it inspired me to give a substantial amount of money to the food bank, which has their name on it. But I think it's good because then it motivates. But it should be done. And you see it, like Jeff Bezos just gave, like, $100 million to, you know,

I don't know, the ACLU or some left-wing charity or whatever, or his wife did to plan parenthood and ex-wife, McKenzie. That's fine. You could do whatever you want. But, I mean, the highest thing is to do it without anybody knowing it. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set

For only $499. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. US only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Usually I agree with kind of these, like, it's always very interesting how the, the secondary philosophies of all these things that are in the Jewish religion that you don't normally think about, like, you know, this idea of giving anonymously, for instance, is the highest form of charity.

But I don't agree with this because like you said, I think putting your name on it does inspire people to follow. Like there's science about this. Like if you know others are doing something, you're more likely to do it. So, you know, if people currently in the hotel are recycling their towels, then you're more likely to recycle your towel. By the way, you should never do that. You should never do that. They're doing it to save money, okay? And they're leveraging your social welfare aspects.

But the more people that do that, the less work there is for the housekeepers. And eventually they're going to, they have reduction in the amount of housekeeping staff. And, you know, people don't realize that it's actually, you know, just set up so the hotel can save money on housekeeping staff. And not give as many tips because you're actually less likely to give a tip to your house. Do you give a tip to when you stay at a hotel? I know you never leave your house, but theoretically, do you give a tip? And how much do you give? I always give a tip.

Yeah. And I always give a little bit more than would be considered normal because. because I wanted to remember me. Yes. And, you know, there's a practical benefit. If you leave something behind, which I was just in Chile for like four nights, imagine going to Chile, a 5,000-mile trip for four nights.

I was just there at a nice hotel down there. And, you know, it's like they pay their staff, you know, $5 a day or whatever. But I knew I was going to forget something. And I always tip, like, even when I'm there. Like, I used to do it. By the way, never tip the whole time that you stay. never tipped the last day. Did you know that?

You shouldn't, like some people, I used to do that. Like, oh, when I leave, I'm going to leave, you know, $50, you know, $30, whatever it is, $10 a day. But only, but never do that because they have different staff at different dates. So you might not, you might miss the man or woman who's cleaning the day that you. My issue is I don't, when I say in a hotel, I don't get housekeeping at all until the end. You don't? You just keep, do not disturb on there?

That's, that's smart. I guess that's smart. I like it. You know, they put a chocolate on your pillow and. But they tuck in your sheets. tight i can't stand that they tuck in my sheets but to the point really though of the of the anonymity and charity i used to believe that now i don't because i do see the effects of when you do something and people are inspired by what you did there's likely to be more charity uh later on

and that's and that's what i'm talking into with like accolades so like you know to not accept by the way the Nobel Prize in physics i believe is the only prize in chemistry those are the only prizes that no one's ever rejected. In other words, people have turned down the literature prize, people turn down the peace prize, people have turned down the whatever other prize, but they never turned down the physics or chemistry prize. And that is, as I say in my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, you know, a function of the idolatry that we have towards these prizes. And I guess I felt like, who am I trying to impress? Like either with charity, charity, okay, that makes sense. Maybe with science, like someone will look up to me if I won

a Nobel Prize, but they won. But like, there's so many other metrics. And I guess this year, you know, I've kind of, I've won another award at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. I was inducted into the international. It was called the International Aviation Hall of Fame Award. And it's given out to like, it's been given out to, you know, Amelia Earhart and to Charles Lindberg and to Neil Armstrong and Brian Keating now. And I was one of several winners. And I really felt insecure. I mean, I really of Nazis it was given now to. No, there were some communists.

There were a couple commies in there too. All right. So now when I won that, I really felt like the imposter syndrome. Ironically, after you and I co-wrote, or you wrote the forward, co-wrote the forward with Barry Barish, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize to the wonderful book, Think Like

a Nobel Prize winner, James All Touched Your Forward. Which I did tell the imposter syndrome writing that forward. So I was like, thank you for giving me this gift of now in my acceptance speech by the way they didn't if you're giving an award at least tell the person you're going to have to give an acceptance speech i didn't know i have to give an acceptance so until i saw the other guy ahead of me who had like started the school called top gun that the movies are based on dan peterson who wrote a book about that called top gun so he

won it like a minute before me then he gets up there gives this like tear-jurking speech and i'm like what the hell i didn't even know how to get of a speech um so i get up there and i said i for the first time in my life, I'm wondering if I'm even good enough to have the imposter syndrome. I've been in this crowd of like the guy who runs all army helicopters around the world, this major general and then like an astrophysics professor. But my wife, Sarah, helped me out a lot. She said, look, Brian, you've taught tremendous number of people. You've flown like kids with cancer and burn victims around the world in a tiny little

Cessna, you know, you've done a lot for aviation, but mostly for space. and learning about space and teaching space at the level and the scale that I teach, I shouldn't be embarrassed. And so with her help, she helped me see that. But again, and again, these things now I'm enjoying because my kids are finally old enough to come to these events and I don't have to go alone.

And that used to be kind of a drag, even though it was nice to give a speech or get an award. But now I just, I do feel like, you know, like my mortality. You know, I'm 51 and I'm thinking about life, you know, in just a different, frame of mind where where it's not here here's another example my my rabbi you know who I loved and

married me and did the eulogy for my father at his funeral 16 years ago he moved to Israel and we have a new rabbi in the temple that I go to and I felt like a little bit that I had been abandoned by this you know he's like a father figure to me after my father died and and now he's in Israel and he always wanted to do and then there's a new rabbi who's wonderful and he and he and he and he and he's a new rabbi who's wonderful and he and his wife, you know, are now the rabbi and Rebetson, it's called the woman, the wife of the rabbi, of my, for my children. And I was like, you know, how selfish am I? Because I was like, mourning the fact that I don't have this rabbi in my life at a daily basis anymore. But, but how great I should feel for my kid. Like, I'm getting to the point where I'm trying to get

more comfort, more satisfaction from helping other people rather than like trying to climb some ladder of success. But I'm worried, James, because there is sort of that Elon Vital, as they call it, you know, that life energy, that vitality that you have when you're questing after something, bestseller, you know, the, you know, to win an Oscar, a Nobel Prize. Like, if I don't have that anymore, I think I'm healthier. I think it's better, you know, for society where the person doesn't care so much about him or herself, but more about their family, their community, their society. But I think on a personal level, perhaps that's going to diminish my vitality or my, you know, kind of my emotional attachment to my own victories. So what do you think? Yeah, I think this is a

really fundamental question that is a life question. Like at what point in life do you let kind of elder statesmanship take over after youthful ambition and passion? And, you know, when you're young, and it depends on the profession, but like in physics, math, science, and many other professions, the peak age, for most professions, actually, and for sports, the peak age is in the 20s or 30s. For physics, certainly, it's probably the peak age where people do their peak research is in their 20s and 30s. It doesn't mean that's true for you. It's just an average. And, you know, you can argue Einstein was in his 20s when he wrote his most useful. papers. Not his most cited paper, by the way, which is the one where he says, God doesn't roll dice.

That was much later in his life, which is an ex-cited paper. But his theory of relativity was when he was in his 20s. But at some point, it needs to shift over. The metric by which you're defining your success, I feel, needs to shift over to how much am I influencing and helping the next generation, the people who will inherit my passion for a subject and go even further with it. There's so many conflicts that have happened through history between mentors and mentees. When the mentee starts to rise above the mentor. But the goal of the mentor is to make the mentee, the student, better than the teacher. Right, which is, again, by the way, coming back to where we started with graduate students,

that's my goal. My goal is that my graduate students should exceed me. And in every way, you know, but financially is like the least important part. I know it's important for them and it was important for me, but nobody goes into, you know, being a grad student to make money. So what are you doing it for? You're doing it so you could exceed the person you're apprenticing with. You know, again, graduate school is like an apprenticeship in a lot of ways.

But I do agree with you. But does that diminish your own ability to then continue succeeding? Well, your success will be different. it does diminish the ability to come up with the next theory of relativity, to come up with the next concept that's going to win the Nobel Prize. That does diminish. And your ambitions kind of will naturally change. And for those who don't, like, they become less happy.

Because when you're in your 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, your ability to come up with new concrete research that changes the world, does get less. So you have to, and then your ability to write it up, and then your ability to fight for credit and your ability to publicize it. All of these things get less, but it's not necessarily true that your need

for these things gets less. That you have to sort of train yourself to say, look, now I've done this, now how can I do this to go to this next stage in my life? And whether, I'm not saying 50 is the dividing line, but lots of things in the brain start to change around the age of 50. For instance, your ability to do complex mathematical reasoning in your brain diminishes.

But many other things change. But what does increase is your ability to recognize patterns. You know, when you see a student who's going through something you've seen other students go through or you've been through, your ability to help them actually increases. So this is why what's the average peak age for a historian is 79 years old. So historians, it's very different from mathematics. A good historian depends on learning from the past and then using that to interpret, you know, whatever it is they're analyzing and make then predictions or assumptions about the future.

What's the peak age for a mentor? You know, you see many of these people in Silicon Valley. They've been their CEOs for a while and then they become on boards and our investors and our mentors to the next generation of CEOs. And you don't see them becoming a CEO again, and striving to become a CEO and making the next you see them taking more of this mentorship role. And I think that's probably what you're feeling a little bit. Like I know I in the past few years have felt this extremely like, let's say from the age

of 25 to 45, I was in, or 50 even, I was insanely obsessed with, you know, writing every single day, getting more followers, writing things that were meaningful to people. I wanted to be the best writer in the world. I wanted to be the best entrepreneur. I wanted to give great talks, everybody to know who I am, have a podcast with tens of millions of downloads a day. And in the past few years, I think for a lot of reasons, that's become less for me.

And I don't always know why, but I think it's because I'm much more happy now teaching and helping people. And that really has become a strong part of my life. Like right now, Jay and I are preparing a course. course, which I'm going to put on you to me about writing. And I've never wanted to do something like this before, but now I just love this idea of because I've helped so many people with their own writing, that the idea of taking a course about it, there's nothing else I'm more interested in than that because I can see that

will have an impact on people. I don't need to be famous from it. I have no desire to write, you know, the next bestselling book about writing. I just simply want to teach about it. Yeah. No, I agree. And I think, you know, it's part of becoming like a different mindset, which requires that you accept the changes in your own capabilities,

which has to do with, you know, like when you're young and you are a grad student, you are a postdoc, you are a professor, and you're coming up, you have a flexible mind, you're reading all the papers, you're doing all the tests and stuff like that. And then later in life, you can start to become more consumed with teaching. And you see much of the good teachers, as you said, historians are teachers in a way, right? So for them, you know, to mature and to accept that they're aging and my brain isn't as facile as it was as a, you know, 26-year-old or whatever. And so forth is, you know, when I was in my Einstein prime.

But now I'm a better teacher. I have more tools in my toolkit of wisdom. But still, that's separate. You know, that's kind of as Arthur Brooks talks about like the second brain or whatever. I forget what he calls it specifically. but but you know you mature from this fluid brain to this more kind of uh toolkit you know like oh i remember that exact problem or that chess problem you know arthur brooks call that you're moving from fluid intelligence to crystallized intelligence that's right that's exactly right see i forgot that

i forgot what he called it that's what my fluid intelligence is gone that's what he mentions also and this is also known in neuroscience is that your your memory declines it doesn't mean you're getting dementia it's just memory just naturally declines you don't need it as much exactly I agree. And so, you know, I think in that sense, I've kind of taken a lot more, you know, maybe comfort from or, you know, put a lot more of my own self-worth in teaching. But because, you know, the students are on strike and we can't, you know, get together in person without, you know, violating scab laws or whatever they call it. So it kind of got away from that. But on the other hand, I've started this podcasting, you know, into the impossible podcast.

Thanks enlarge. For you you. Yeah, think about what you've done the past for years. You've started a podcast that's been very successful and influential. You've written these great books. Like this latest one on Galileo was a passion of yours. Like you discovered so much about this saint of physics that you learned so much more by reading his works in the original that it became such a pleasure for you to write this book

and you even give talks about it. Like these are all now ways. you're taking this passion for physics and transforming them into what Brian the Elder is doing as opposed to Brian the Younger. Brian the Younger was trying to figure out how the universe began. Brian the older is now just taking pleasure and all these nuances of demonstrating new, fascinating things about physics and explaining them. You've explained to me 10 different theories of how the universe began.

You could have been working on research instead of that. Instead, you shared all this knowledge with my listeners. Right. I feel like, you know, I get to teach at scale with my YouTube channel and my podcast and my books. And, you know, whereas a scientific paper, my most highly cited paper has maybe 1,500 citations. And that's the Bicep 2, you know, result paper, which is great. But there's people with 10 times higher, you know, citations on certain papers.

But, but, and that's kind of the gamification of academia is like how many citations. And not only that, how many set papers have a certain number of citations. citations, it's called your H index, which is kind of a metric. Like you could have one paper, let's say you write two papers, and one has zero citation, one has 1,000 citations. So your average citations is 500. But really, you just had one paper, or you had 100 papers. One has 1,000 citations, and the rest have zero.

So there's something called the H index, which is the number of papers that have at least H citations. So if you've written 10 papers and they all have 10 citations, your H index would be 10. But if you've only written nine papers and they each have 10 citations, then you'd be nine. Okay, so you keep, so the higher, it gets exponentially higher to increase that number, to go from like 48, which is my age index now, to 49, means I have to have another, you know, I have to have 49 total papers that have 49 total citations rather than just one that has 1,500, like I said.

So it's kind of a quantity times quality metric. And none of these things are perfect. And then you could do all sorts of gamification, you know, modifications where you can, you know, do it by age and cohort and field because some fields have just way more citations. And then like physics has theory and experiment and computation, you know, break down all those different levels. So and in my, and fun fact, that H index is named after my colleague here at UC San Diego named Jorge Hirsch, H stands for Hersh. And that's his most cited paper is his paper about this way to quantify citations of papers. But, you know,

So I started to think, like my YouTube channel, like some of my videos will have 100,000 views, and that's, you know, literally 60 times higher than my highest-sided paper. So, like, where should I over-index? Where should I put more of my, you know, and of course, a lot of them are not physicists that are watching it. And that's great. I try to, you know, as you know, I feel scientists have a moral obligation if we're spending taxpayer money, as we all are, to explain to the taxpaying public what we do. I mean, can you imagine if you were working, like, for HBO again?

And your boss comes in and says, you know, what are you working on, James? And you say, I'm doing something very, very, very specialized. And something that you're not capable of understanding. And even though you pay me, I'm not going to break down in terms that you can under, you know, you'd be fired, you know, in a heartbeat. But we as scientists do that. First of all, we don't do any, like, kind of training in media. We don't do any kind of way to distill and spread our ideas.

We keep it literally locked in this ivory tower, which I think is immoral. because again, your audience and my audience, they were paying my salary. And so how can I not give back for free, putting it on YouTube, putting on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, et cetera? How can I not exchange for them some tangible reward that if they're interested, some people might not be interested.

But if they are, I think it's borderline, unconscionable that we do that as scientists. So I've been on a personal mission to do that. There are other people you've had on, like Andrew Huberman, who's kind of similar, Although that guy won't return my phone calls, James. That guy, he was a professor here in San Diego about eight to ten years ago. And one of the other kind of 2022 highlights is that is related to him in a way

and that his close friend and colleague here at UC San Diego is named Gentry Patrick. And I've had him on my podcast. Gentry happens to be African American. And I've known him for longer than I've known my wife. and this summer, he and my wife's cousin got married. And they asked me to perform the ceremony. And it was done on June 15th, which is known as Loving Day, because that was the day Loving v. Virginia,

which ratified interracial marriage, was passed by the Supreme Court legalizing interracial marriage in the U.S. in 1967. So I was very honored and touched that they asked me to perform. I'd never performed a ceremony. And I had to become a minister. So this year I became, you know, a Jewish minister. And it was a very, you know, it was very arduous, James, to do this because you actually need, you need to have an email address.

And if you don't have an email address, you cannot become a minister in the Universal Life Church. So it was arduous, but I became a minister. I have my certificate. And I performed this wedding. And it was a huge highlight for me because, you know, I put a lot of thought into it. I figured, you know, I usually don't do things that I'm only going to do once. Like, I never, like, rewire the electricity in my house. Like, you know, it's just, it's stupid.

You should just get a professional to do it like you, you know. That would be my goal. But, you know, so like, I usually, but this is so special. I couldn't not do it. So I put a lot of effort into it. And it was a very challenging thing because actually, sad thing, the worst thing that happened to me this year is one of my very close friends passed away, very young. His name is Eden Raphael. And he passed away just literally, he worked at Google

X up in the Bay Area and he just literally collapsed one day at work and was taken to the hospital and he died a few days later. And he was basically taken off of life support as I'm performing his wedding and I'm talking with his parents. It was a very challenging day. But, you know, and I keep a journal because Ryan Holiday told me I should keep a journal. And I never got back to the connection with Ryan. So when I won this Horace Man Medal, I told Ryan, I told him I didn't feel like I was really changed. You know, like I said, it was important,

but it wasn't like transfer. It wasn't like if I hadn't won it, I would have been crushed. Like the way I was about the Nobel Prize, say, at one point. And he was like, that's good. You know, you're like getting there young Paduan or whatever. So it's nice. He's kind of my stoic rabbi. But at the same time, I feel like I wouldn't,

I would have been, you know, knowing, let's say they said at the last minute, you can't perform the wedding or whatever, who knows, then it would have hurt. It would have, you know, because it's almost like those things mean more than winning an academic award or even a Nobel Prize, right? To do those kinds of things, the spiritual things, that nourish the side of your life that only you can do.

Like a lot of people have won the Nobel Prize, but only one person has ever performed this particular wedding. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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I mean, and Ryan has a lot of a way. lot of great examples from stoicism, but let's look at, I'll look at one example from Buddhism and one example from Judaism. And so in Buddhism, Buddha, of course, started as a prince, right? The most, yeah, he wanted to win wars. He wanted to be a king, all this kind of stuff. Then he was ambitious for what he thought was different definitions of enlightenment. He would try every possible way, like whether to be an ascetic or, you know, engage in meditation, or whatever it was, he would try all these different ways to get some magical state he called enlightenment.

And then finally, whatever state he realized, he really became like an elder and taught a bunch of students, monks. And not only that was almost a diplomat. Like he, his grove was in the middle of three warring kingdoms that were always at war with each other. One of those kingdoms was the one he would have been king. of so it was particularly difficult for him to be a diplomat and to keep all of his monks who were

peace-loving to keep them safe there's a lot about buddha that people don't realize he was constantly negotiating to just save the lives of his monks and he played extreme elder statesman role now taking judaism moses at first was the rising young rabble rouser he wanted to bring his people you know freedom and out of slavery he's like splitting the red sea he couldn't split red sea in his 70s could only do it in his 20s otherwise forget it and then after that his whole goal he didn't even need to get to Israel his whole goal was to just get his people to exceed his own ambition his ambition initially was to get to Israel he never himself got to Israel but he brought his land so right you know it this is a almost you know you know

know, it's throughout history, you see the examples of the people we remember and are, you know, not worship, but we think the most highly of are these people who make this transformation from ambition to statesmanship. Yeah. And the, you know, and I appreciate being compared already to Jesus, to Buddha, to, I didn't compare to Jesus because Jesus never made his 50s. That's right. That's right. We've exceeded the Jesus life. If we want to be going to Stoicism, I would have compared to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Yes. Okay, good. That'll be when we write our next, you know, next book together.

But no, I feel like that is a truism, but to get to that point. And also, I see this with fatherhood as well. And I see you're, you know, you and your daughter, you know, going back and forth on Twitter and that's cute. And, you know, I'm looking forward. forward to the day if I ever allow my kids to be on social media, that they'll be able to do such things. It's such a pleasure for me. My daughter's tweets are a bit spicy. Yeah.

And we, I laugh when I read her tweets and I don't respond to them often because I don't want to like, you know, get in the way of her own thing. But when I do, it's funny. And then one of her friends yesterday tweeted, I can't believe you let your father follow your tweets, given what you tweet. And she tweeted back, he's chill. And that was my highest moment of the weekend. In Yiddish, that's called shepping nachis.

Shepping nachas. When you just are filled with a kind of paternal, maternal pride over something that your kids did, not to be confused with schlepping nachos, which my kids never do for me. I love nachos. But, yeah, no, I mean, again, it's like taking pride in your kids' accomplishments,

you know, is at a certain level more satisfying than your own. And so it's like, I feel like at some point, we always have this inner voice, right? And maybe you're trying to live to impress your inner voice or live to impress yourself, I've heard it said. But there's really nobody. Like, I mean, yes, God, you believe in God. You can think about, you know, living in accordance with his rules or what have you.

But in terms of like, am I an impressive person? You know, am I doing something impressive? I think, yeah, the highest form of that, which relates to my ultimate theory. of the meaning of life. You know, I mean, Elon wants to go to Mars and he wants to do this and he wants to live forever and he wants to. And that's great. You know, I'm most supportive of what he's doing in a lot of his endeavors. But we already can live forever. We just can't bring our physical bodies with us. And that is through the values and the and the lessons that we teach to our children, where the children could be biological, but they don't have to be. They could be ideological.

And I think looking at that in kind of an ethical perspective that you can extend maybe not forever, who knows? I mean, there's some saying I heard recently that's depressing. It's like a man dies twice, you know, once when he breathes his last breath and once when his name is spoken for the last time. And, you know, we're talking about Moses and Buddha and Jesus and everything now. There's still being talked about. I think that could be viewed as a positive quote, though.

Like, in the sense that I hope for the day, like I, sometimes I talk to 80 year olds who are very successful. And I say, when does the, the ambition and constant drive, which also means constant deployment, when does it end for you? And sometimes they say it never has. And that depresses me because I want to know that I can transform to not being as ambitious. Like, oh, so-and-so went on this podcast, but I didn't. you know, so I get... Andrew Huberman. Paging Andrew Huberman.

No, but you had this with Stephen Pressfield. You had Stephen Pressfield on earlier this year, or maybe it was a repeat. And he was just like, yeah, I didn't. And I think this is true. Please correct me if wrong, James. But he was like, yeah, every book you write is a kid you didn't have or vice versa or something like that. Or every kid you have is a book you didn't write.

That's what he said. And I found that so depressing because he doesn't have any kids, right? No, no. And we, in fact, that was a podcast we did in, in 2021, where, because the very first podcast I had with him in 2016, he said to me, it was in his house in Malibu, actually, and he said to me that he's given up a lot in his life to be a writer. And I always, but I was leaving.

I was walking out the door. The podcast was over when he said that. And I always, always wondered, what did he mean by that? So I started off as one in 2021, asking him, what do you mean? And he actually said, you know, I surprised myself by saying that to you. and I had to think what it meant that I said it to you. Like, I've thought about it a lot since then. And look, he really gave up a lot to be a writer.

And I feel like, is it worth it? You know, is that worth it? Yes. I mean, let's say that's all you have is that you're remembered for a long time for the books. I mean, Jesus didn't have any kids either, right? And he's still remembered and he's still had an influence. So I'm not equating those things together. And by the way, you know, people always say, well, look, why is, because I'm always talking

about children. but I don't mean to say that if you don't have children, you're like a loser or your failure or you're immoral in any way. But I will say that there are options. You could be a big brother, big sister, you could be an adoptive parent, you could be a foster parent.

I mean, there's so many children. We talk about abortion and what should we be able to do and not be able to do. You know, there's so many kids. And I was adopted, you know, and so I know this. I didn't know that, right? Yeah, my stepfather adopted me. And so my name is not Keating when I was.

was a child. I was adopted, you know, by my stepfather and my mother, but we changed my name. And so he did adopt me as his own kid. And I wasn't in touch with my father, my biological father, my biological father for the next 15 years of my life. But I, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is when I have, well, how come you weren't in touch with your biological father for the next 15 years? So he, you know, kind of after the divorce with my parents, with my mom, he viewed us, my older brother and I, of the same mother and father, as kind of, you know, being completely under the sway of my mother and her, her fiancé, who became my father, adopted father. And, you know, he decided he didn't, you know, have a place in our life and that we'd be better

off without him and that he'd be better off without us. And so he gave us up for adoption instead of paying my mother and stepfather, you know, alimony and whatnot, he gave us up for adoption. And so I wasn't, so he didn't have the right to keep our names as his name. How did you regain contact? So in graduate school when I was at Brown, I had a neighbor in the dorms who had the exact same lifestyle, life history as me. His father had abandoned him.

He was raised by his mother and his stepfather. And he went to, you know, he was a brilliant kid. He came from Turkey. I think his mother was Turkish and his father was an American GI and they met after the Korean War or something. Anyway, so he told me that he had had this reconciliation

with his father, his biological father, and it transformed his life and it transformed for the better, even though he had the same kind of hostility towards his father and how he treated his mother, etc. And he told me, you know, like baggage has a handle for a reason so you can put it down. And by carrying this antipathy towards my father, I realized it was really eating me up inside.

And worse than that, in some ways, was my, you know, his mother also and his sister had disconnected from me and never had contact with me and my older brother. You know, from the time I was seven, my brother was 10. And so I never saw my biological grandmother again because she ended up dying. And so the exact moment I met this friend of mine at Brown, I somehow got in touch with not, so my grandmothers, both my biological grandmothers, lived in the, what I call the Jewish Mother Triangle in Southern Florida. You know, so it goes from like, you know, New York to Florida to, you know, to Boca,

to Miami to Boca, and then it goes back up. And they communicated not to each other because they hated each other, but through mutual friends that I call the Yentanet, all these, you know, Jewish bubbyes and nannas and whatever. And so word got around that I was interested in talking to my father, and it also got around that my father's mother was dying of cancer. and she ended up dying before I ever saw her again. I never talked to her again. But before she died, she put my biological father in touch with me,

and he and I connected when I was a grad student, and I researched all of his work and math and physics, and we had this connection immediately, and we resumed a relationship after many, many, you have 15 years. I'm not seeing each other, not talking to each other, no contact whatsoever. And still getting along now? Well, he passed away in 2006.

So, yeah, we did. did reunite and that was wonderful and it meant that he could be in the life of my my nephews and my brother's life and my sister-in-law. He never met my wife or my kids unfortunately. But I forgot why we brought this up. But the, you know, kind of living, living, you know, with your kids or through adoption or whatever is, it is fulfilling. And there is this tendency. I don't know, how do you react to this with this notion of, you know what antinatalism is? No. There's this push that people shouldn't really have children and that mankind is sort of a virus on the surface of the earth.

It's causing the destruction of planetary resources. It's causing the depletion of our habitability zones, of animal life, of plant life, global warming, nuclear war threats, all sorts of things. And that were effectively like a cancer or toxin on the earth. and that the moral choice, according to many philosophers and thinkers, quote unquote, now is that you shouldn't have children. And, you know, it's curious to me if they think, you know, we should commit suicide. And there is actually a move towards, you know, assisted suicide and encouragement of suicide in many other countries, as you may know.

So there's this thing. Antinatalism means it's the philosophy of not having reproduction. And that is considered by many intellectuals. to be a net good for the planet and for, you know, I mean, it's so alien to my philosophy that I can't even speak about it because, you know, it's cliche children or our future or whatever. But you think that the very cure to, to let global warming will be enhanced with more people on Earth or, you know, or reduced. I mean, it's so obvious that technology depends on the flourishment of the existing human civilization. And also, ever since they, I've had to be,

this conversation with Matt really ever since like the early 1800s every 10 years people were saying overpopulation's going to kill us in the next years and it never happened and life has only quality of life around the world on average has only gotten higher in every decade and so it's just ridiculous right you tell me that that i can understand not having children i did not want to have children most things in my life that i have now i did not want to have so it's a doesn't even matter what you want or don't want. It's going to happen anyway. Yeah. So, like, how can you know, though? There are people that I've interviewed many, many people on the podcast who chose specifically not to have children, whether it's for lifestyle

reasons or look at, look at press field, right? I mean, he's basically acknowledged. Maybe it wasn't intentional. Maybe it was that he didn't have children. I guess I feel like, like, I've actually, you know, this is where I'm kind of nervous to ask your advice in a certain sense, because I feel like that ambition. Like I never wrote a book. And then I wrote a book. And then it was with a major publisher with Norton. And then I did a self-published book that you know, that you wrote the forward to, think like a Nobel Prize winner. And that was great. And it's made even more money than the first one. You know, I didn't get into it for the money. I mean, I probably got paid less than my graduate students, you know, $3 an hour up from the Norton advance. And then I did an audio book because

I thought, oh, that's really cool. It'll be great to have my voice connect. I did it with with Carlo Reve. and Frank Wilczek and, you know, these Nobel Prize winners and brilliant thinkers. And that was kind of a one. But now I'm like, I don't know if I have that ambition. Like I've ticked those boxes and I'm like, where's the next box? And I realize that's in total, you know, contrast and completely antithetical to what I'm saying before, which is like you should live to impress yourself.

You shouldn't care about these awards and accolades and metric. But like, I don't, like those itches have been scratched and so to speak. Like, I don't feel the need. Maybe that's a good thing. Like, I think people write books and there's way too many books, right? I think there's just people write a book because, you know, whether it's a cookbook because someone told them they're a good cook or a memoir because someone said, oh, you had a funny story.

There's way too many books. And maybe they could say that about my books. I don't know. I'd like to think that they help. But it's partially narcissism, right? We write books. We like attention. We like book sales.

we have publicity. We do these things. I mean, you did it more in the past. You do it less than a, but is that a warning sign? Like, how do you know when you're over the hill or when you, how do you know when your lack of ambition as a 50-something could be detrimental to some long-term flourishment? I think it's a great question because I don't think there's a real answer because, first

off, a lot of times ambition decreases because of depression. A lot of times ambition decreases because of less testosterone. So particularly for men over the age of a certain age. But, you know, and should you be doing things like, like I wonder for myself, should I be focusing so much, for instance, on this podcast as opposed to like starting another business or, you know, writing a bestselling book or whatever? Or like, for instance, I take a lot of my spare time now and I study. chess because I'm trying to get better at something that I loved so much as a child.

And am I wasting my time? Am I ruining my talents? But one thing you can remember though is that basically three years after everyone's death, nobody remembers you. And that's true for just about everybody. Like when was the last breath? Yeah, it's the last time you take a breath and the last time that's your name is mentioned, right?

I don't know about three years. I mean, you really think it's three years? I mean, we go to my synagogue, and my synagogue temple has a board with people's names that died in the, in the, in the, you know, 1900, late 1900. You think about them when you see that board. So there's like 50 people. I'm thinking of the one when you see that board. That's right. But like, it doesn't matter how many books you wrote.

Like, who won the Nobel Prize in 1953? Like, we know in 19th, Rueh, I think, was Ernest Hemingway. But in 1953, I have no idea who won the Nobel Prize in literature. Probably never read any of her books. Probably this year, nobody has read that person's books. Right. And let's just see, 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature. But, you know, again, most, you know, President Gerald Ford died, you know, in the past decade or so. Just president of the United States between Nixon and Carter, like a pivotal president

that took us from Vietnam to hopefully a more normal period. It took us from the Nixon, you know, fraud and potential impeachment to, you know, the nice Jimmy Carter. And, Nobody talks about him ever. Nobody says, well, this guy is up there on the list of greatest president of the world. And nobody thinks about him ever. And that was a president. Yep. We hope you enjoyed this special co-lab episode with Brian Keating and James Altutcher.

Please leave us some holiday cheer and subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen. Get more of James on his ever-popular James Altutcher. Your Show podcast. For a chance to win some actual 4 billion-year-old star dust, subscribe to Brian's mailing list at briankeeting.com. Happy holidays from Into the Impossible. Stay curious. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.