Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Andy Viterbi: Wireless Pioneer, Co-Founder of Qualcomm - A Historic Perspective (#118)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing from magic. Finally, I'm turning the tables and using technology against one of the pioneers of all the technology that we know and love. And it's none of the other than Dr. Andrew Andy Viturvy, who is a hero of mine. And it's such a great treat to be with you today. Andy, thanks for spending some time with us on this podcast from my house at the air, from my office at UCSD to wherever you may be. Thank you for joining us. Hope I don't disappoint you. No, we did.

Starting point is 00:00:39 I haven't given your proper introduction yet. I'll do it now. You were born Andrea Giacomo Viterbi. I think I'm saying that. Yeah, it's become famous now. In Bergamo. For all the wrong reasons. That's right.

Starting point is 00:00:54 And you are an American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm and invented the Viterbi algorithm. He has been the presidential chair professor of electrical engineering at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering. And we're talking today about your career and especially about this book. This book, I'm holding up, yes, I'm holding up the front cover. Normally, Andy, I say I judge books by their covers, but I'm not going to judge this book by its cover. How did this book come about? The book is called Reflections of an Educator, Researcher, an Entrepreneur.

Starting point is 00:01:28 And you and I spoke about this at a synagogue in San Diego about three or four years ago. and it was a packed house, and people are just so curious about your life and the wisdom that you can provide. But how did you come to write this particular book? It's not like your textbook, is it? No, not at all. Although I have a little bit of watered-down explanation of the algorithm, which probably more confuses than it explains. But I did it in a moment of some sadness, but something I wanted to leave to my grandchildren. And my children, although I point out that my children had lived through, lived and suffered through a certain part of a fair part of the narrative.

Starting point is 00:02:22 So that was the original, and I actually bound or had bound some, I don't know, 20, 30 copies gave to all my children, my grandchildren, that's about half of them, and the other half to friends and close acquaintances. For some years now, I've been involved with a society in New York City, which runs on a shoestring for a very small audience in the United States, maybe a slightly larger one in Italy, are regarding Italian Jews. and they have in association with NYU, Columbia, and CUNY. They put on a number of lectures by American and Italian scholars and historians and other specialties. Now, recently they've been doing Zoom webinars, go much further afield in New York City. And I recently did one on the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, which was a very interesting subject.

Starting point is 00:04:08 That's based on one family whose archives had been held a very large, broad Sephardic family of many, many branches from about the beginning of the 19th century through the Holocaust and thereafter. In any case, that's just one example of what the... the kinds of studies they put on. And they also have a book series. And so the editor, who's also the assistant director of the Primo Levy Center, this organization that I referred to earlier,

Starting point is 00:05:05 asked me if he could publish this handbook, which I'd given, or memoir, which I'd given him. and I said, sure, why not? And he did a very good job on it and made me improve a couple of sections. So we were last together last year. It was 2019. It was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Primo Levy.

Starting point is 00:05:28 And we did a symposium here with some renowned chemists and other people. I also pointed out it was the 150th anniversary last year of the periodic table, which is behind my back over here, which is the title of one of Primo's famous, most famous essays. And you're related to Primo. Can you explain the relationship? And what was Primo like as a person and as a scientist? Well, I'm a first cousin-in-law.

Starting point is 00:05:55 That is his wife or his late wife. They're unfortunately that generation, my generation, although I'm the youngest member thereof. But most of my cousins, my first cousins have passed on. have no siblings. So, uh, uh, uh, uh,

Starting point is 00:06:18 oh yeah. So, uh, his, uh, his wife is my first cousin. Um, the daughter of a

Starting point is 00:06:29 distinguished, uh, family in education and literature. Her father was a, uh, a published author of, uh,

Starting point is 00:06:40 uh, he was a what we call high school they call lyceum he was a lyceum professor and fairly renowned but but the levy family i would say the first really famous member was primo he in his uh um periodic table periodic uh In English, it's periodic table in Italian, it's different. He describes his ancestors in the Piedmont region of Italy, and he's not very nice to them. He also uncovers the dialect,

Starting point is 00:07:35 the, let's say, the Yiddish of Piedmont, which was never spoken by more than maybe 2,000 people, but ranks up there with Ladino and Yiddish. I wasn't aware that there was another dialect. I guess we don't lack for dialects in our particular culture. When we look at this biography, again, it's called reflections of an educator, researcher and entrepreneur from the CPL editions, memoirs, and biography series. You have many chapters here. Let us start with the fact that you came here as a refugee and you went on to achieve

Starting point is 00:08:20 these incredible heights of success academically as a business person, entrepreneurially, and then later philanthropically. What do you, if some alien, you know, gets a broadcast, you know, and can decode CDMA in the Viterbi algorithm. And they say, Andy, who are you? What is the core essence of who you are? How would you answer it? What sums up how you think about who Andrew Viterbi is? Well, I was a very fortunate man.

Starting point is 00:08:51 I was a very fortunate child and grew into a man who seemed to be in the right place or in the right, field at the right time. As a child, if I were to compare myself to other children of that era, they were born in Bergamo, I was very lucky in that my parents, first of all, found a way to enter America. where if they had stayed, we would have met the fate of one of my father's closest friends,

Starting point is 00:09:46 the psychiatrist, Joseph Bimouja, who was originally from Venice. And when the racial laws that took away all civil rights from Jews, enforced in 1938 he decided just to move back to Venice because that was

Starting point is 00:10:11 his home his origin he knew everybody there and there were all his friends and in 1943 he his wife

Starting point is 00:10:20 and his daughter wound up in a cattle car on his way to Auschwitz so my father had the foresight to find

Starting point is 00:10:33 to seek an exit. And he had, it wasn't easy. We did it through Switzerland, through a close colleague and friend in Switzerland who was able to pull strings with the U.S. consul in Zurich, whereas the U.S. consul in Naples where the embassy was in, well, the embassy was in Rome,

Starting point is 00:10:59 but the main consulate was in Naples, rejected his request for an exit visa, well, for an American visa. And so we made it three days before the war broke out in Poland, August 27th of 1939. In that period, public education for children was in New York and Boston were excellent. And I had a good introduction to English after my poor exasperated teacher who couldn't communicate with me kept putting me in the corner. Then we moved to Boston because, again, to my good fortune, my father passed the medical licensing exam in Massachusetts. And I was able to be educated in the Boston public schools at that time, which were very good. And some of them are still good.

Starting point is 00:12:15 My high school alma mater, Boston Latin, is considered the best in the state, possibly of public schools, because there's a lot of preparatory schools. It was actually a public preparatory school six years. and ranked us well or higher than the private schools in the area. So anyway, I came out of there and was easily admitted to MIT, went into the right field, electronics, electrical engineering at the time when the time was ripe. MIT was on the leading edge, partly because of the radiation lab

Starting point is 00:13:04 that had been located there during World War II, mostly developing radar, but also communications. And learned what was the advanced electronics, advanced electrical and electronics theory of the 50s. which is laughable by today's standards. But kept with it, computer science, computer wasn't even, science wasn't even considered a department, took a couple of rudimentary courses in computers,

Starting point is 00:13:42 and also did a co-op program, which had been active at MIT for most of the 20th century. You talk a lot about luck. in your autobiography. Luck to escape, as you just said, the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust, being able to come to America and go to the schools that you were educated at.

Starting point is 00:14:10 And then later, yes, to go to the JPL and the time when the U.S. space program was really ramping up for the first time and really Southern California, what was it like? I've always been curious, what was the spirit, what was kind of the zeitgeist like,

Starting point is 00:14:25 back then, in terms of entrepreneurship, creativity. Is this something that was in the air? And do you feel like it's something that can have a renaissance, maybe even nowadays? Well, in the 50s, Cold War competition with the Soviets. And of course, Sputnik was a wake-up call, both for our government and also for science, because they started to pour money in. That was the only way that science could really be pushed forward because entrepreneurship was not in the zeitgeist.

Starting point is 00:15:11 There were excellent organizations that were not military primarily. Bell Labs is particularly the one that's recognized, but so was IBM, so was General Electric at that time. Throughout the Cold War, that continued. And entrepreneurship really started in my recollection, probably in the 70s and then got a very big boost throughout the rest of the century. And the companies that I was with or helped found

Starting point is 00:15:53 initially were very dependent on government funding. Luckily, it was a funding non-lethal for non-lethal devices, namely communication security devices, that is anti-jam and anti-jam, and anti-detection. And so that the very same technology, which generally is called spread spectrum, the person most accredited for its initialization

Starting point is 00:16:39 was Hetty Lamar. Most of that story is true. It's a little bit embellished. But in any case, by the 50s, it was well ingrained into the military communications world. And it was talking about entrepreneurial activities in the commercial world. we were probably the first to use it successfully, initially for transportation, for satellite communication to trucks, and then later to what is called CDMA,

Starting point is 00:17:28 Co-Division Multiple Access, which is one of the spread spectrum technologies that are now used throughout 2G, 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. 4G was a real breakthrough because that's how the cell phone was connected to the Internet. How did you realize or how did you move from something that was academic, scientific, or engineering and signals and systems? How did you realize that that could have actual commercial value or did you even?

Starting point is 00:18:07 Because this was decades before it was really fully. put into use, if I'm not mistaken. Now, we transitioned seamlessly. Three professors, two at UCLA at the time, and one at UCSD, Erwin Jacobs, got together after a NASA conference in the Bay Area in 1967. It took us a while to figure out how to found a company. It took about a year for us to convince ourselves that it could be done. done it was worth doing. And then we got some small contracts initially from what was then called

Starting point is 00:18:47 the Naval Electronics Lab. It's now gone through several names, Spile Wars and other things like that. It's still in San Diego. They gave us our first little contract for probably $20,000, $30,000. and we were able to hire another engineer. So now we were four. One of the three founders got very involved in ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, and effectively dropped out. We left them some of the worthless stock at the time.

Starting point is 00:19:24 A dozen years later was worth something. And then Irwin came on full time because we were just working one day and week except for the engineer Jerry Heller, who was the first guy to show that the Viterbi algorithm was feasible and was easier to implement than most people believed. In any case, we used that as a vehicle and did work for, as I said, the Navy and then also for JPL, as they were implemented. implementing their space missions to the moon and, well, that was a little later, but all their planetary missions, unmaned planetary missions. We were never really at a loss because we were doing government contracts, which were at progress payments. but by 1980 we were already what we thought was a big company we went from three people to about several maybe 300 and we had turned down a couple of offers from aerospace corporations companies like Lockheed and then along came a small conglomerate based in Boston

Starting point is 00:20:55 that was picking up all these little startups, most of which ultimately collapsed. But we were successful for them. And one of the more important products was to do a digital television system for HBO, box office, which was a little concerned that their signal was being stolen. And so we built them a secure digital system.

Starting point is 00:21:34 And that really boosted the company, actually to some extent, boosted the parent company. And but eventually the parent company had a palace revolution. ousted the CEO, chairman who had acquired our company, and the company started to rapidly descend to a shadow of what it had been. And management was not very successful. And they remanaged this out of, well, without going in any detail.

Starting point is 00:22:24 It was no longer fun. And so Irwin and I quit. And three months later started Qualcomm. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice.

Starting point is 00:22:42 Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is ours. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, Free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-EX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials.

Starting point is 00:22:58 No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Qualcomm, well, we started it with a number of our original leading engineers. And so to some extent, we had a running start, although we didn't have very much money. Well, we were able to sell finance for a while. Then we got some study contracts from defense contractors initially. In fact, the low earth orbiting satellites were initiated based on one of our study contracts, which then led to Global Star, which was a great technical achievement, but a commercial failure,

Starting point is 00:23:55 along with all the others, by the way. I want to talk about non-commercial failures in terms of the marketplace, but maybe a financial mistake that you might have made, which was not to patent the Viterbi algorithm. Was that a mistake in retrospect? You talked about it in a 1999 interview as not really regretting it, but. But I wonder, you know, looking back in hindsight, this is now being used by people, you know, for their own commercial purposes. Why shouldn't, you know, Andy have gotten more of a taste of the intellectual fruits that you had picked? Well, to begin with, if it had been patented, it would have been patented in 1968 when we first presented it to a patent attorney.

Starting point is 00:24:43 Till this will never be used by anybody but governments. It's much too expensive and too complicated. And he was right. It took about a decade before it and probably closer to two decades before it became commercially valuable. Meanwhile, you know, the industry proceeded. We were able to finally, in the late 70s, put it on a single chip. and to some extent it probably gained attention and it was unpatented and therefore it got into several generations.

Starting point is 00:25:33 As far as I know, it's still in the current generation. I've been away from it for a couple of decades, so I don't follow 5G other than what I, the advertisements I see on television, which is all hype anyway. Yeah, which you can't avoid. And that's another question I have. You know, I've heard about 4G and 3G and LTE and all these things that are going to revolutionize. And I had on Peter Diamandes, who, like you, as an MIT alum, he writes all these books about, you know, the future is going to be bold and abundant because of things like 5G.

Starting point is 00:26:09 But I seem to remember him saying the same thing, maybe about 4G and 3G. And so my question is, is it really worth the hype? These, you know, can something like 5G really revolutionize the world as you see it? Good question. Every G corresponds to one decade. And why one decade? Because more players come into it and they want their own thing. But there certainly have been great progress.

Starting point is 00:26:42 I had the good fortune of helping to develop 2G CDMA. It was a struggle to get CDMA into 2G because the world had already decided on a different technology, a much more conventional technology. And the Europeans had run with it. It's called GSM. The name actually started from the French, the French title of the working group, they put it together.

Starting point is 00:27:14 Group Special Mobile. We were struggling to be accepted in that 2G. And we were boosted by other early cellular companies into Air Touch, and now it's called Verizon. But Verizon is half the user. in the country. And they were the one, all of these variously named evolutions used our technology, CDMA. And what really boosted it was the Korean market.

Starting point is 00:27:55 The Koreans adopted it as their sole digital technology, rejecting both GSM and the Japanese version. And in my opinion, that's what. had really boosted Samsung and other companies in Korea from secondary to primary status in the industry. 3G was our great success because that's where the whole world accepted it. After suing us left and right, we were attacked by Erickson and Nokia, who were the European leaders, by Motorola. We settled with everybody favorably. At the end of the 90s, I turned 65 and I retired.

Starting point is 00:28:47 I'd have my fun. However, a very small company that was an offshoot from Bell Labs came and asked me to join their board and be on their advisory committee. And they were the ones who really boosted the next technology 4G. and had the foresight to design it in a way that it was particularly adapted for the Internet by minimizing the lag times, which are so disturbing. So I had the very good fortune to be part of that. It wasn't nearly the financial success that Qualcomm had been, but it was a very satisfying role to be kind of a godfather to that one.

Starting point is 00:29:48 It's called Flareon, by the way. It was bought by Qualcomm, to which I give my former colleagues credit. Then 5G started in the 2010s. As I said, it had to, all these things are always under development starting at least five years prior to the decade. But the first tentative implementations are put out in the zero year, 2020, 2010, 2020. I won't go into the details of 2020 because it's only one. what I read in the papers. But it exploits a very high frequency band.

Starting point is 00:30:40 And it therefore uses a small antenna, but it has fairly low range, so you have to have very many, which applies very well for cities, but not so well for rural areas. So that's all we know. So I had the good lack of spending. spending most of my career in an industry that was growing faster than anything else in any previous industry.

Starting point is 00:31:09 Another example of luck triumphing. I want to ask you a little bit more about commercialization, but maybe not in the way that we were just talking about it. And that's to say the value of basic research in science and engineering, theoretical research, and even basic research like I do in cosmopol. which, as you know, the cosmic microwave background radiation that I study was really discovered at Bell Laboratories, which, you know, exists. And you can go and visit the, you know, the 7 meter horn antenna there in Holmdell. And I know you had a lot of interaction with Bell Laboratories.

Starting point is 00:31:48 And we'll talk about that maybe later. But what I want. And then subsequently Bell Labs went on, I believe, to invent one of the first cell phones and, and many other patents and so forth. but really wasn't able to survive as a non-commercial, pure research-based facility, and now is owned by Nokia. And they still call it Bell Labs, but that's just for historical attribution, I suppose. But, you know, I've often heard things decrying how poor the funding is in basic mathematics, in basic science, that is science without a profit or engineering motive. And yet we always want our kids and our grandkids, et cetera, to go into STEM.

Starting point is 00:32:29 fields. And so I'm wondering, is there a way, have you thought of a way that we could use the, you know, kind of inventions that come out of basic research like Viterbi algorithm enabling CDMA and enabling very high performance mobile communications? Can we use that to generate, not, I don't say wealth or income, but to generate resources, financial resources for theoretical physicists and cosmologists and mathematicians. to benefit from so that this virtuous cycle can continue. I mean, coming out of industry rather than from government. Maybe both.

Starting point is 00:33:08 I mean, the government, you know, is not the only, you know, kind of supplier of research funding, but they sure do benefit tremendously. They benefited from CDMA. They benefited from the Berturbi algorithm, and you didn't patent it so they could do whatever they want. But they don't seem to feed that back into basic. That is, you know, what Nobel laureate should. Sheldon Glashow called on my program,

Starting point is 00:33:31 useless research. You know, the fundamental particles of nature aren't going to speed up our internet, but I think it's part of what drives us as human beings. So is there a way we can commercialize, you know, utilize the commercial benefits of email, you know, a tax on every email. You guys used to own Eudora. That was one of your products, I remember correctly, which I used for a long time. What about taxing each email and then funneling some of that money back into mathematics?

Starting point is 00:33:57 Crazy idea. But what do you think about ways to, to utilize the intellectual property to benefit basic research? Well, it's a good idea. It probably can't be done. Let me just pick up on some of the things you said. Yes, Bell Labs, Bell Labs today is not what it was.

Starting point is 00:34:22 When Judge Green broke up AT&T, he significantly, degraded the value of the jewel of the AT&T system. And then AT&T ultimately was grabbed by the most aggressive of the baby bells. But they had quite a run. All of, well, many fields, including the ones I've been most interested in. really got their start at Bell Labs. You were talking about radio astronomy,

Starting point is 00:35:08 and you will know that Arnold Penzius, he was very lucky where you were not. And he got the Nobel Prize. Interestingly, a Bell Lab scientist, who I knew well has passed on fairly young, actually, told me that he didn't understand the first thing about information theory. He had been, since Arna was the vice president of research, I think, my friend

Starting point is 00:35:37 had briefed him a number of times on what was called the math lab or the mathematical applications lab and didn't get his message through very well. But Bell Labs was a unique organization. The problem is for the corporations, even the largest ones, I would give Microsoft a little more credit than the others. I've heard Bill Gates talk about how there are research labs and the people he has in them.

Starting point is 00:36:26 Google has some very smart guys. guys and gals, but I'm not sure that they have the same interest in science. They may. They certainly started out with some good applied mathematicians launching it, Page and Bryn. But certainly the smaller companies, and among them I would include Qualcomm have the disadvantage of having shareholders. And they won't look beyond the next fiscal year. And so that's the problem with industry.

Starting point is 00:37:15 The problem with government is greed and ignorance. And Congress and the president. Now, we may improve on that. I made some comments towards the end of the memoir about capitalism and socialism. I know it's a dirty word, it isn't to me, but people seem to get scared by it. But as long as it remains a democracy and is reasonably well governed, as is the case in much of Western Europe. the UK still, Germany, France.

Starting point is 00:38:00 It works. They all have better, more efficient health systems than we do, even though, in fact, well, we, but our scientists are still, still the best in the world for a simple reason. They attract people. They attract the best of the cream of the crop from all over, from Asia, from Europe. from Africa.

Starting point is 00:38:27 But hopefully we can get back to that way of doing things. We've certainly lost our lot of respect in the last four years. You think that actually literally applying attacks or, you know, the physicists played a huge role in the invention and DARPA, etc., in the invention of, of email and HTP protocols and also, obviously, the World Wide Web at CERN was invented at CERN to large extent. But would it not impede progress to say have some kind of attacks? I mean, do you think there would be less creativity had or less development?

Starting point is 00:39:15 Let's say you did patent it and you made, you know, they did pay for it. The government would have paid for it. It was a small amount of money to them. With that impeded, like, will we only be on 2G now? In other words, does monetizing via taxation, does that ultimately impede progress? Well, in my opinion, and it's strictly my opinion, if debatable, I believe that as long as we were in a existential struggle with Eastern Europe with Russia, with the Soviet Union. We poured a lot of money into research.

Starting point is 00:40:10 A lot of it wasted, but we did great things in space and aeronautics, and even more important in communication tying together. for better and sometimes for worse, our nation and the world. With the end of the Cold War, we much curtailed that. Industry, or private enterprise, more likely, more properly, was, is a great, creator because it incentivizes people. Incentivizes mostly for wealth, but also in the technological fields, and that includes,

Starting point is 00:41:16 of course, all the biological fields, it also incentivizes people to do things that have never been done before. independent whether they're profitable or not. And you get better people doing that. Not that in the Cold War we didn't have very good people, but as that whole project wound down, the people that are attracted to government work are not quite the same level. the ones who are more are either in it for science and culture and stay at universities

Starting point is 00:42:05 or else they go to industry and try to make the best of products. So it's a balancing act. Are we, and it's a pendulum that swings between creativity and inaction. Absolutely. Okay. Well, we've got a few more. minutes left and I have a few more questions so it should work out pretty well. I want to ask you, you may have heard recently of the possible detection of a techno signature, which is to say a carrier wave

Starting point is 00:42:42 signal coming from a star system known as Proxima Centuri B. And Proxima Centurie, Proxima means, as you know, from your Latin upbringing with romance language, it means nearest. So proximate centuries are nearest celestial neighbor. And it seems as if there's a roughly one gigahertz tone coming from that particular direction, that particular star system, only about four light years away. And that has been declaimed by a team called the Breakthrough, Listen, Listen, Meaning like ear, listen, a program up at UC Berkeley. I've got many friends that work up there.

Starting point is 00:43:24 And loosely affiliated with the Allen Telescope Array, which is funded in part by Franklin Antonio, who is one of your friends and co-collaborators and Linkabit and Qualcomm, et cetera. But we've detected, apparently, some signal. I talked to a scientist about this recently, Jill Tarter, who is the inspiration for the character and Carl Sagan's contact movie, Ellie Arrowway.

Starting point is 00:43:52 But anyway, what do you make about this? Do you think that extraterrestrials exist, first of all, Andy, and second of all, how would you communicate? How would you tell the proxamins, you know, what would you tell them about us, and how would you do so? Well, there's been a program to try to find extraterrestrials for at least 60 years. It was called a sea tie.

Starting point is 00:44:19 I don't call it now what the acronym stood for, but I was started at Stanford in their antenna farm. In fact, I was invited to that to participate, but I had just gotten to UCLA and just. Was that with Bracewell? Was that with Bracewell? Was that with Professor Bracewell at Stanford? I think that's right, yes.

Starting point is 00:44:47 And in fact, my younger colleague, Jim Moora, worked there for quite a number of years while still being at UCLA. So, yes, it's worth doing. Franklin is a very intelligent and very interesting fellow. whether it should I put odds on it? 10 to the minus 6 and that's being generous

Starting point is 00:45:24 yeah I tend to there is also what was it called the the survey that looked for planets that had similar characteristics to the yeah there's a bunch of surveys one is called

Starting point is 00:45:41 Kepler. One is called Tess. These are surveys in space that are looking for either the dimming of a planet by a star, dimming of a star by a planet, transit or perturbations to its orbit. And we've detected thousands of planets, some even earth-like, very earth-like planets around very sun-like stars. And yet, I'm curious, why do you think the probability for the existence of, not just like a slime mold, but intelligent, so SETI stands, or CITI, as you say, stands for either communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. But why do you think the odds are so low? Actually, if it's one in a million and there's 10 to the 20 of stars, that means that there's,

Starting point is 00:46:28 it could be a lot, but I assume you mean the overall odds of any technological life is extremely low. Why do you feel that way? I mean, the percentage is one in a million? Yeah, if you say one on a million stars, you're talking about, literally, you know, a billion stars in our own galaxy potentially. Yeah, and it may be approaching infinity, although mathematicians are. Right.

Starting point is 00:46:51 So I really add a loss to comment on that. It's certainly, well, with the kinds of programs like the, finding the black holes and won another Nobel Prize, more for, I guess, administration than precise. But that was so remarkable that you cannot exclude anything from happening. But, you know, given our very limited imagination, talking about myself, but human beings, beings always cook up something that makes sense to them and makes no sense otherwise.

Starting point is 00:47:48 Who knows what that other life, if there is other life, who knows what it's like? It's not little green men. They don't look like us. Intelligence, if you can, if you believe in artificial intelligence, not that I believe that we're going to be taken over by cyclops. But then anything is possible. Yeah, I do

Starting point is 00:48:19 always note that I'm still looking for signs of terrestrial intelligence. That occupies a lot of my time. Well, Andy, we're coming to the end. I would do want to ask you the questions that I ask all of my honored and treasured guests who do come on the Into the Impossible podcast, which is named after one of Sir

Starting point is 00:48:39 Arthur C. Clark's famous three laws. We'll get to that in the second. Did you ever know, Sir Arthur, or meet Arthur C. Clark? Not in person, but I think I was on a call with him through the Marconi Society some years, some decades ago. Very nice. So I usually ask my guest, harkening back to the conversation we had at the synagogue not too long ago, what they would put in an ethical will. not a material will, but in Judaism we have this concept called the Zava-a, which means ethical will, and it sort of harkens back to what Moses does in the book of Deuteronomy, where he kind of gives all these imprecations and threats, very few blessings seem to come out of it, but there's sort of a lot of warnings. And I wonder, what would you put in your ethical will, not your material will, but something to leave to your children, of which you have many and grandchildren,

Starting point is 00:49:43 but actually to your ideological children like me, people that look to you as a role model, what would you put out there as inspiration, as wisdom in an ethical will? Well, I actually touch on that briefly, I think in my preface. And what I say there is that if you find something that you enjoy, if you're so lucky as to actually be turned on by your, the career of choice and the kinds of things and projects and books you write or plays you create, or scientific activities, then that's one of the real joys of life.

Starting point is 00:50:42 Effectively, you're not working a day of your life. You're spending it all, having fun. Of course, there's also a family which brings a higher level of satisfaction. If you're successful, and if you're lucky, It's always, I always come back to that. I married a woman who was extraordinary, and much of what my grandchildren, my kids and my grandchildren are doing,

Starting point is 00:51:15 and the way they're living their lives is a lot of it due to her. And I finished that memoir just before she passed. I had no idea that I wouldn't be able to share it with her. Yeah, yeah, she was a real treasure, not just for San Diego. I had the honor and blessing to meet her several occasions ever since I came here in 2004, and she was gracious and a delightful, a human being. We miss her terribly too, and we're so glad that you have shared your wisdom with us. I want to continue with that and also connect to Sir Arthur C. Clark by evoking the memory of a

Starting point is 00:52:00 called 2001, a space odyssey. Did you ever see that, Andy? Some parts of it, I also fall asleep. I do that a lot. Yeah, the opening scene has these ape-like creatures in Africa, and they encounter this monolith, this huge black obelisk, or whatever it is. We don't know what it is, really, but it's really sort of a time capsule placed by an ancient alien civilization to kind of... I was still awake to see that. Yeah, well, that's the opening credit. So I don't give you much credit for staying awake for that.

Starting point is 00:52:34 But I don't fault you for falling asleep. I think I closed my eyes the first time I saw it because I was scared. But anyway, thinking about that, a time capsule, the notion of a time capsule has always been appealing to people throughout history. And actually, I talked to Carl Sagan's widow. Her name is Anne Druian. And I asked her, what would you put on a billion year-long time capsule that would last for a billion years?

Starting point is 00:52:58 And she said, I did that. When the Voyager satellite was launched in the 70s or 80s, early 70s, she had her brainwaves recorded by Carl Sagan, who made this golden disc. And it had music and had all sorts of other things. And that went into the outer reaches of our solar system and is now an interstellar space. I want to ask you, and I think I might know what you might put on it, but what aspect, as Richard Feynman, the famous Nobel laureate said, if in some cataclysm, All scientific knowledge was destroyed, and only one sentence could be passed on to the next generation of creatures. What statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? And he said, I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms.

Starting point is 00:53:44 I want to ask you, Andy, what one thing would you most want to put on a monolith to last for a billion years that would encapsulate you or what you've learned or the grandeur of humankind? Well, quantum mechanics that works, but nobody really understands why. Some say that about the Viterbi algorithm. That's trivial. Very good. Okay, the last question I ask goes the opposite direction. We've gone into the future with a time capsule and with your ethical will. Now I want to ask you backwards.

Starting point is 00:54:26 I want to ask you, in terms of advice to your former self, what would you say one seems impossible to a young 20, 30-year-old Andy Viterbi, but now seems eminently feasible because you had the courage to go into the impossible. I guess I would say communicating in real-time worldwide. Sounds like you just got a message from some distant planet on your device over there. So that seemed impossible. Well, that makes a lot of sense. It certainly seems magical to me. that, well, you and I are in the same town, but I talked to people, I talked to a woman from Egypt not too long ago, and it was just incredible that we could be talking about my book. She's a devout Muslim.

Starting point is 00:55:14 I'm a devout Jew, and we could have a conversation instantaneously at the speed of light, and a large part of it is thanks to you. Oh, I can't resist, Andy. I'm sorry, if you have one more minute. You've won a tremendous number of accolades and awards, but I don't want to just focus on that. I want to ask you a question. Let me just get these back. So we've won the following awards.

Starting point is 00:55:35 And I don't want to talk about the awards, as you know, my feelings about awards, et cetera. But you've won the Alexander Graham Bell Prize, the Marconi Medal, the Claude Shannon Award, the James Clerk Maxwell Medal, and the John Fritz Medal, which I don't know much about. But of all those people, of all those people, Maxwell, Shannon, Marconi, Graham Bell, who would you most like to me to explain the Viterbi algorithm too? Well, first of all, it wouldn't be Shannon. Because he would look at it and say, that's trivial. It was clearly in one of my papers.

Starting point is 00:56:12 He was a very, very shy individual. But he's, no, I would be, I have met Shannon, and I'd be embarrassed. I would love to meet James Clark Maxwell He pushed Well, he's a mathematician basically More of a theorist than a practical Hertz Heinrich Hertz had done the experiment

Starting point is 00:56:46 But he didn't understand A, why And B, that it would ever be practical He said that specifically I know James Clark Maxwell really, and it wasn't just electromagnetics. He did a lot of other things. And I think he was the greatest scientist of the 19th century. 20th century, you've got a lot of candidates. Einstein, of course, but Feynman and many others and Shannon.

Starting point is 00:57:19 Did you overlap with Feynman when you were in Calta or JPL? He was, oh, he was at Caltech. I was just working at the laboratory. And, but one of my closest friends, Saul Gallum, was very close to him. So it's a one number, what do you call it? One step away. Like the erudish, one degree of separation, right? Well, Andy, I want to thank you so much.

Starting point is 00:57:49 You're really a legend and you're one of my heroes. I love talking to you because you're not only a phenomenal scientist, you're a philanthropist, and you're an incredible father, grandfather, maybe great-grandfather, I don't know. Thank you. Too many compliments, but thank you very much. I will say that you handle it very well because I was a little bit, I won't say I was worried, but I was a little uncertain of doing this because I have trouble with words, as you probably have noticed. remember words and even terms that I used to know very well.

Starting point is 00:58:26 And that's something that's happening in my brain, but I'm carrying on nevertheless. I'm not as creative, but I still enjoy mathematics. And you handle it well. Well, I just love talking to you. I love doing events with you. We've done this is our third event together. Maybe we'll go on the road in 2021 and do some stadium tours, maybe the old Qualcomm Stadium.

Starting point is 00:58:54 Andy, have a blessed 2021. We ascend my best to your children and your grandchildren, and I hope that we can meet again, maybe in person, in 2021. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Starting point is 00:59:15 If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com.

Starting point is 00:59:45 Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to Imagination U-CSD.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Volko.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Andy Viterbi: Wireless Pioneer, Co-Founder of Qualcomm - A Historic Perspective (#118)

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