Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating with James Altucher (#241)

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Have you ever thought about why Galileo Galilei, an Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer was willing to risk his life to speak out about science against the will of the church at that time? How was science back then? How can America maintain its leadership in the sciences? Is it slipping? Dr. Brian Keating, an American physicist, podcaster, and author, talks to James Altucher about his project of making the first-ever audiobook that was written by Galileo Galilei, and we also brainstorm on how we could better fund science. Download the first-ever audiobook by Galileo Galilei for your chance to win space dust here: https://BrianKeating.com/dialogue Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enjoy this special episode of Into the Impossible and the James Altuture show. Into the Impossible host Brian Keating and James discuss Brian's work in cosnology and the inside story of how Brian produced the first audio version of Galileo's masterwork, the Diologo. Brian and James brainstorm a master plan for funding and maintaining America's leadership in science. Please subscribe, rate, review, and comment. Ryan reads everyone. Let's go.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the Bob Bay doors, please help. Dr. Brian Keating, physicist extraordinaire, Professor Keating, famous for almost winning the Nobel, or I should say famous for losing a Nobel Prize. I don't know how close you were to almost winning, but we definitely know you lost. That's true. And I always ask the same question, but I'll ask it again, like, and I'll just remind you. people you built a huge telescope in antarctica millions of dollars worth of telescope to see the

gravitational waves that were before the cosmic background radiation because light can't get through that with the idea that maybe you could peek into the secrets of the universe and see the big bang itself by measuring the gravitational waves from before the cosmic background radiation started And do you think your telescope could have done it if it was like fully working? Well, yeah, I mean, the telescope worked as good as it possibly could work. And it was actually so so optimally designed that it made a measurement that hasn't been superseded upon and proved upon in the foregoing, you know, eight years since we made this announcement in 2014, the subject of losing the Nobel Prize. And so it's only gotten more and more strong. the signal to noise ratio, but the thing that we measured was not what we intended to measure.

And so we wanted to measure these gravitational waves, which is kind of like the shrapnel or the fossil relic of the so-called inflationary epoch, where inflation is the spark that ignited the big bang. Theoretically. We're not sure it happened. It's funny because I just explained all this to Neil deGrasse Tyson. I was, you know, humble brag, just on his StarTalk. podcast after, you know, never really expecting to be on it after he basically, you know, called me

a racist a long time ago. But we, we hugged it out virtually and I love that guy. But I was explaining to him and he's an expert and he's just like, oh, you got to, you got to, like, slow it down. You got to slow it down. So I know the James Altucher, you know, audience is amongst the most brilliant in the universe, at least. Very true. Perhaps right after Into the Impossible audience, but it's still a very difficult concept to grasp. You know, how did the universe come to be the way we observe it to be? So we have only very circumstantial evidence. We don't have any real provatory or dispositive evidence.

Well, you and I even done a bunch of podcasts about all the different theories. I didn't realize how many theories there are as opposed to just the Big Bang. And they're all legit theories as to how the universe started. Completely, yeah. And people think it's just completely cemented at the level of, you know, say, the theory of gravity or something like that, which also has, you know, certain gaps in our understanding of it, but to actually go and get evidence as, you know, my hero, Galileo, Galilei, as you know, which we're going to talk about your hero.

Including a couple of first inspired by you, but we'll get to that in a bit. And Galileo said, a scientist should measure what's measurable and make measurable what is not so. So in other words, if something can be measured, go out and do it. can't measure it, do your damnedest to make sure you try to make that measurement while you can. And that's sort of what we aspire to do. And how do you measure something that doesn't exist, right? The Big Bang doesn't exist now. There is no Big Bang happening right now. So all you could do is hope to capture something, some evidence, however circumstantial it is, of what actually caused

the universe to get into its current state, not necessarily how it began and directly observed. observing such a phenomenon. Right. And when we use a normal telescope or even just our eyes to look out into the universe and we see a star, for instance, we're seeing that star as it appeared maybe millions of years ago because we're seeing the light of that star after it's already traveled a distance to Earth. Right.

And the idea would be, well, why can't we see even further? Why can't we see all the way back to the beginning of the universe? And the problem is, as you and I have discussed before, about 300,000 years after the universe began, presumably, this plasma developed all the way back then that is thicker than light. Light can't get through it. So we actually can't see any light beyond 300,000 years after the universe was created. And your theory was, and not your theory, but it was a practical, an experimental goal based on this theory that, well, gravitational waves can be seen. through the cosmic background radiation as opposed to light waves. So you built a telescope for that.

And were you able to see some gravitational waves beyond the cosmic background radiation? So what we ended up seeing, and everything you said is actually correct, it was not the gravitational wave signal that we had sought to observe. Instead, we saw this kind of imposter signal, which was masquerading as the identical signal that you would see if inflation did take place, but it was caused not by inflation, not by the Big Bang itself, but by particles of cosmic dust in our Milky Way galaxy

that produced a pattern of light that exactly replicated the signals we were looking for. And so it's kind of an example of what's called confirmation bias, which is one of cardinal sins of science. Are you looking for something? Oh, I found it, you know, we must have succeeded. You know, I hate it when people ask me, what do you hope to discover?

You know, because it's very perilous. Like, you wouldn't ask your doctor that, like, what do you hope to discover, you know, in my cat scan of my brain? Nothing. I hope you discover nothing, right? So, but just to go back one second to what you said, an interesting fact, you said absolutely correctly, when the universe was in its most hot, dense, primordial state,

it was what we call a plasma. A plasma, sometimes called a fourth state. of matter in addition to solid liquid and gas, there's this plasma. Plasma are bundles, associations, huge amounts of ions, electrons or protons, or my favorite particle, the crouton,

the particles that existed in, before combining the protons and neutrons and electrons to make hydrogen and helium and the elements on the periodic table of the elements. But before that, the universe is a fusion reactor. And you can't see, inside of a fusion reactor. And the proof of that is if you go outside and, you know, don't

look directly at it, but you know if you look at the sun, you can't see inside the sun to where these reactions are occurring. The sunlight that you see started on its journey not eight minutes ago, which, so the sun is eight light minutes away from the earth, meaning that it takes light, the fastest possible traveling particles of photons. It takes those traveling at 186,000 miles a second, it takes them eight minutes to travel 93 million miles. And you can check my math, James. But they didn't begin eight minutes ago. They were actually created something like 100,000 years ago because the fusion reaction that takes place is in the center of the sun. The sun is about a million miles across, and that's a huge reactor. Imagine the equivalent of millions of fusion bombs

going off every second. The light and the heat that's produced from those fusion reactions couldn't escape from the core of this dense object called the sun. Because of gravity? No, just because of the density of scattering in the plasma. So it's just like how light through water goes slightly slower than light through air. So this is like super thick water. It's more like when you're in Grand Central at rush hour and you're trying to get, you know, to your track to catch a subway and you just can't get out.

Like there's jostling and you're being bounced around. And there's something called a drunkard's walk or a random walk. where you move in this, you know, kind of diminishing returns kind of pattern where it takes you a very long time to travel a very short distance. And that's what happens in the sun, and it happened in the universe as well. And so we're just seeing the after effects of actually the light itself was produced basically in the first three minutes of the universe's history. And that was the byproduct, the leftover heat from the formation of the fusion of elements

that make up the lightest elements on the Piroch table. But Brian, so I'm curious, so you saw this cosmic dust, but couldn't you just say, okay, that's cosmic dust, let's keep looking, and figure out a way to distinguish between the dust and gravitational waves? Like, were you still able to keep looking and find gravitational waves from before this plasma? No, so then we would have won the Nobel Prize, or we would. But see, we are doing that with the new upgraded version of Bicep.

So I created Bicep 1, the experiment that made the, announcement is called Bicep 2. There's since been a Bicep 3, and now there's a Bicep Array, not a Bicep 4. And then we're also building the Simons Array and the Simon's Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile because it won't be believed if the Bicep team, imagine like, you know, they discover, and I'm not part of their team again. I've been, I've left the team on friendly terms with the leadership that, you know, for a while I wasn't so friendly with if you remember my first book, but we've become, you know, kind of hugged it out, as I say.

And since then, we've really gone in different approaches to do the same thing, to measure both dust and the cosmic signals that could harbor the imprimatur of inflation. So you're absolutely right. What we'd measure, see, the light that we get doesn't come with a little label that says, I came from dust or I came from the cosmic microwave background. You just get the combination of the light from the cosmos

plus the light from the dust. And then it's your job to make as many sensitive, careful, precise measurements to disentangle the amount that is attributable to dust. We know there's going to be dust produced light. And we don't know that there's gravitational wave light there because the level of dust is already is quite large. And we have to also contend with the intrinsic noise of the instrument. So we're actually winning this fight and we're getting ever more tightly constrained on how much inflation could have taken place if inflation took place, but it's a very long slog.

And it's going to take the better part of the next five years before we have a definitive answer of either we detect it or we realize we don't have the sensitivity amidst the dust and amidst the intrinsic noise of the instrument itself. Every instrument has noise associated with it. So when's Bicep 2 or Bicep Array?

When's your next telescope going to launch so we could finally see the Big Bang and it's full glory. And you can win a Nobel Prize. Yeah, right. So, you know, I've kind of given up on the Nobel Prize, to be honest with you. I did win a medal from my alma mater

from Brown University called the Horace Man Medal. And I thank that doesn't count. I thank them, but I said, now I can't write that book, you know, losing the Horace Man medal. Yeah. You know, so I've kind of gotten over the Nobel, I've now interviewed 13 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast.

They're regular guys like you and me, James. You know, they put on their pants, two legs at a time jumping through the air like we do. I never changed my pants. Your pajamas. Yeah, you've got the... I figured out a way around that cliche saying. You've got that Netherlands comedy club February 2020 pajama combo on.

Since COVID. Last time you left the indoor environment. So, right. So we have telescopes that are deploying currently. And we're also building up an observatory to measure the dust to unprecedented levels and also measure the signal. So, for example, you're driving at night. You're not driving, thank God.

But say Robin's driving you somewhere, whatever. Jay, well, let me drive. Jay's driving you somewhere. And you know you have dust on your windshield, and you don't know how much there is. So how would you remove it? Well, you'd have to do a, quote, experiment. You'd look at it, and then you'd figure out some way to remove it.

Oh, there's a button that sprays some juice on the windshield, and then the windshield wipers would remove it. There'd still be a little bit of dust left, right? It couldn't remove it perfectly every single grain, but you could remove it below the level of what is causing an impediment to seeing straight ahead. So that's kind of what we're doing. We're building a very exquisite dust detection system and a very exquisite detector of this gravitational wave signal. So what do you think? Do you think that they're going to see the Big Bang?

I mean, it seems like there's going to be another problem because it seems almost too good to be true to actually see the Big Bang. Well, you know, that's never stopped, you know, scientists from going after and looking. Again, what Galilee has said is measure what you can measure. So we're measuring we know what exists. There's dust and there could be this cosmic signal. But you're right. There is no proof of it. Otherwise we wouldn't be searching for it.

Now, some discoveries come serendipitously by accident, by divine providence in a sense. When you look out, when astronomers in New Jersey, where James grew up, looked out, they were looking for the very first telecommunication signals from the very first satellites launched in the early 1960s. They were named Arnold Penzius and Robert Wilson. They looked up. They couldn't see the satellites with the signal to noise ratio that they expected because there was this hiss of microwave energy coming in all directions.

They couldn't get rid of. That, in turn, led to them discovering the cosmic microwave background and winning the Nobel Prize and 13 years later for discovering this signal. That was serendipitous. When the Higgs boson was discovered, people were looking for it. They expected to find it.

They built a 13 billion euro experiment just to look for it, more or less, and that experiment found what they were looking for. So there's two types of scientific discoveries that take place, one where you expect it, one where you don't. And in this case, we have reason to be very cautious that if we do see something, it will really be at first blush,

the golden signal that we are looking for. I would say it's safe to say that. But you also have to look to rule it out and be as equally dispassionate about disconfirming and not proving the theory that, you know, many people have staked such high importance upon. 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. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20.

to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Well, okay, it's good to get a summary. Maybe you will win the Nobel Prize. I'm rooting for you, Brian, to win the Nobel Prize after all of this. I don't know.

You know, when you think about, like, what is the Nobel Prize? So, like, I've talked to so many people who have won it, and, of course, it, like, changes your life and does all sorts of things. But all the people that didn't win it and all the people that do win it that do nothing afterwards or it's like any prize it's it's it is what you make of it right like told our mutual friend ryan holiday you know i found out about this this award that i won and and i've won a couple of nice awards lately um one i you know only one i can talk about i've been notified i've won this really prestigious thing that's going to be announced in november carth a genius award uh no no

not that one uh this is something really uh obscure but but it's important to me uh but it's not public i'll you'll be the second person to know i won't even tell my wife, I'll just tell Jane. So, and I wrote to Ryan Holiday because, you know, he and I have been, you know, kind of email buddies. I've had him on my show a few times. And I think you might have introduced us or you. Maybe. Seruptitiously, serendipitously.

But anyway, I told him when I won it that he should be proud because he's kind of like my stoic rabbi. And I said, you know, when I won one of these awards, I was just like, that's great. But if I didn't win it, I wouldn't have been like, oh, crap, I didn't win the freaking award. The way I might have been earlier in my life. And I think it's part of just getting mature that you just, you know, it doesn't mean you shouldn't be guided by wanting to win these prizes and awards. And I freely admit I was early in my career. I wanted to outdo my father, who was an incredible scientist,

but he never won the Nobel Prize. I wanted to, you know, it's like rivalry with him. And it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like just having like a grandmaster rating. Like, you almost don't have to play people. Like, you're not going to play like my kids who were playing this morning in anticipation of me, you know, coming to you. And I've now helped them, like, you know, check-meaning each other twice in the same game. It's really kind of fun.

But, you know, when you get to that level, you almost don't have to, like, think about it anymore if you're not professional. Well, also, different things become important to you at different times. It could be the case that now, look, you were single-minded pursuing this goal, not necessarily the Nobel Prize, but this scientific research. And now you're pursuing scientific research. You're a podcaster. You're a writer. We're going to talk about your audio book. you just did about Galileo.

Like you have many interests and many passions that you pursue. And it could be the case that anyone, like you've diversified your outcomes. And so any one outcome, although it's still important to you, becomes less important. It doesn't mean you're not going to pursue them, but it means you're not going to be as emotionally tied because you're succeeding on these other things. Right. Yeah, it's, yeah, diversifying your interests and family and everything else. But I guess, you know, mostly it's realizing that.

you really don't take anything with you. It's kind of like this notion. David Brooks wrote about this in a book called The Road to Character. We talks about the two different interpretations in the Torah and the Old Testament and the Bible, whatever you want to call it. There's like the Torah, the Bible discusses Adam, the first man. And it discusses him and it does everything twice. And like the first time it's like, you know, he worked the land and he tilled the fields and he

and he had, you know, horses and, or, you know, livestock. And then the other type of description for Adam, he's described again, almost identically, except that now he doesn't do those things. Instead, he commune with God, and he was a spiritual being. And a rabbi, Salavichik, I believe it is, David Brooks quotes from, and he talks about these two atoms. He calls one of them the kind of resume Adam and the other one, the epitaph or, you know, eulogy, Adam. In other words, some things you put on your record,

resume, like, I'm good at working the land and doing those crops. And the other one, I'm really good at those elevation offerings that bring the spices of aroma to the temple. It's like two different total different character aspects. And one of which, you know, like you went to Carnegie Mellon, like, is that going to be on your tombstone, like at your eulogy or is it going to be like father, husband, friend, you know, podcaster. You know, even you won't even put it like, I got this medal from Brown and it's hugely prestigious. The guy. who won it last year did win the Nobel Prize this year in economics, Guido Inbens. And he's, you know, so it's for alumni of the graduate school where I got my PhD.

And, you know, and yet I do think the Nobel Prize is unique because people do put that on their on their gravestones and it does get mentioned in their eulogies. And sometimes it gets mentioned in your eulogy if you didn't win a Nobel Prize. Like in the New York Times, like he was snubbed for a Nobel Prize, you know, or she was snubbed. Yeah. So it's unique in that sense. So I think it's, you know, Suey Generis is, it's some. something in a different category. But yeah, I mean, more and more, it's about doing the work and enjoying the process and being mindful of, you know, who comes next in the line of scientists that I get to mentor.

And, you know, nowadays I get like a lot of thrill when one of my former graduate students becomes a professor. And then they get a graduate student. And then they graduate that graduate. I mean, a lot of, one way you measure the success of a good professor or a good scientist is how many of their students become great scientists and professors. Yeah. So that's an exciting thing.

Yeah, you don't get to get buried with your collection of papers and your citation count or what have you. But you do kind of make this impact on the network of people that you love and you take care of and you support. And so, yeah, that's become more of the motivation. And the science is a vehicle to do that that is fun. And I get in the flow state from doing it because it's just so delightful. the problem that I'm having now, Tunes, like, I'm on, like, the other, Mondays and Tuesdays, I'm on six different Zoom calls.

Why is that? Yeah. I mean, well, it's like, there's one about the site in Chile. There's one about the operations of the whole project. There's another debrue for the managers of that project. Then there's, you know, a meeting. I have a meeting with my students and my postdocs and my college. You know, so it's like just nonstop either. Now we're back to in person. But this, this past quarter, I was teaching cosmology. wearing a mask of all things. Do you still enjoy teaching as much? I actually enjoy teaching more after COVID. Undergrads or grad students? I do both. So one-on-one, it's graduate students.

And then in a class, I have, you know, 45, 50 students. And, you know, COVID I taught last year. It was only on Zoom. This year it was in person after. And I didn't teach like three years ago because I think I was on paternity leave or something like I forget. And because of that, you know,

it was really my first time teaching. in person in three years. And so I realized how much I missed it and I realized I'm going to try to win the hearts and minds of the students by doing something they'd never seen before, which is to do experiments, cosmology experiments, in the classroom.

So no one had ever done this as long as far as I know. And I wasn't like building new universes, but like right behind me, you can't see it if you're listening, obviously. But, you know, I have a cloud chamber which detects subatomic particles traveling near the speed of light. I had Geiger counter

to talk about the formation of the lightest elements. I have like heavy water, which is produced very rarely in reactions other than in the Big Bang. We talked about that, and then it's proper spectroscopy telescopes, looking at Redshift with the Doppler shift. I brought in all these props.

And it was so much fun and bunts and burners like blowing up balloons and thermodynamics. And I was just like, I'm just going to do everything that I love to do my secret weapon, my unfair advantage, is that I'm experimental cosmologists.

So I'm not a theorist. I'm not good enough, smart enough, whatever you want to say to do all the equations. I understand the equations, but I don't create them. But what I do create are new experiments and new interpretations and new analyses. When you were a kid, did you like to tinker

and take things apart and buildings? And one of my kids is like, you know, your mom or dad ever tell you, like, I hope you have a kid like you someday. I have a couple of kids like me. And it's great, but it's like, I realize how it could be frustrating to non-scientist, like my mother was not a scientist.

But to see them, like, they get like this chalk, like they call it railroad chalk. It's like this huge cylinder of chalk. And then he like grinds it up into like the finest possible talcum powder. And then he mixes it in water. It becomes like like mortar,

except it's like bright orange and he's like mixing it. I'm like, what are you doing? I'm doing experiments. I'm doing experiments. And I love it. He's four. And I love it. And my other sons are looking at like, well,

how could we make, you know, a portable nuclear device that could fly on a drone? And I'm just like, stop right there, you know, let's write it down. So actually, with one of my kids, I go on a walk with him, and we talk about, you know, his ideas. And I just have him record it, you know, now everything is audio. And we just record it. And I'm like, someday it'll be, you know, you'll have your own podcast into The Impossible 2. And you'll take over the family business such as it is. And, you know, people say that a lot.

They say, you know, scientists are like children. You know, they're inquisitive. they're curious, they're imaginative, they're playful. And I always say, yeah, and they're also jealous, they're petty. They don't share their toys with their siblings. And so everything is a double-edged sword. I do agree with you that scientists are very playful. Like, I've had a lot of scientists on the podcast, as you know, you most of all,

but also many of your colleagues, Carla Rovelli, who we'll talk about in a second, Alan Lightman, Bobby Loeb, Bobby Loeb, you know, Alan Lightman, Neil deGras Tyson, Uh, uh, uh, what's the guy, uh, oh now I'm forgetting the guy, Michio Kaku. Yeah, yeah. And they're all very like childlike and very, and they, science is a very poetic, beautiful thing for, for all the people. Every single one of those people that you pointed out is a theoretical, a physicist or a cosmologist. So amongst those. I think it's more fun to be theoretical because then you could say, well, how, what if I could teleport? Well, then this must be happening. Like you're allowed, you're allowed to think like, like, you're allowed to think like, science fiction thoughts.

But a lot of it is total nonsense and can never be verified. And so someone like me who likes working on things that you get an outcome for, I always tell my students, and that's what I try to do on my YouTube channel,

what I pivoted from, I used to do only interviews with scientists, Nobel Prize winners. We've had on 13 Nobel Prize winners. I just interviewed in preparation, this will come out after Father's Day. But for Father's Day,

I interviewed Richard Powers, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Overstory, this very thick, famous book. Just a wonderful guy. his newest book is about astrobiology and it's about fathers and sons. I really want to introduce you to him because he'd be,

you'd love this guy. I mean, he's a brilliant writer, and he's just like this avuncular figure. And I've had on all these great, and I still do those interviews. You can still find them on my YouTube channel and I'm on podcast. But I also started doing like 10 minute long science explanation videos,

but only talking about like cool new experiments that disproved, like outrageous theoretical claims. Like we're being visited by aliens or we're, you know, we've discovered a fifth force, So it's like my job, I feel like now is to be not in a curmudgeonly way, but just show people how much hype there is in scientific claims and highlight the fact that 90% of what you hear are at first. We've seen aliens. We've, you know, cold fusion, we've done this and that. They turn out to be wrong.

But the challenge is the announcement of, you know, Chinese scientists find evidence for alien. That occurs on page one of CNN. and then the retraction, if it ever comes, comes out, you know, on the Sunday, Saturday edition that nobody reads in page B24 or something. No, no, I agree. And this is the problem with quote unquote science is that anything, anything that any scientist mentions is considered by 97 or 98% of the population as fact. Once a scientist says it is fact, but throughout history, and we're going to talk about

Galileo, who was confronted with this most of all, throughout history, A scientist actually usually says the things that aren't considered fact and only later are considered fact, usually because that scientist, you know, did the work and the research to start to, you know, in another area, it's not just in physics. You have to always consider what's the agenda of the scientist. And now people are going to think I'm about to start talking about big farm or whatever, but I'm talking about artificial intelligence. The phrase artificial intelligence is bullshit. It's complete BS. There is no such thing as artificial intelligence.

But in the 1950s, when the phrase originated, it was a great phrase to use if you wanted to raise money from the Department of Defense, which is where all these computer scientists raise their money. And now you have this Google guy who, I don't know if he's a computer scientist or not. He doesn't seem to me to be like one. But he has this Google guy who says, oh, this AI created by Google is alive. When clearly, just looking at the quotes, it clearly is not. And it shows basic non-underst- like AI is like another way to put AI. like if you want to call it something, is advanced statistics.

And that's all it really is. Neural networks are an advanced kind of statistics. It's a very almost, you know, statistics. Machine learning. It's like statistics 401, not even graduate level, but like senior level.

And that's all AI is right now. So. And by the way, there's only been maybe one innovation in AI in the past 30 or 40 years. And that's the innovations that created. Grindr. Well, maybe it's using that.

Like deep mind had some innovations with, you know, kind of these special types of, you know, adverse neural networks that would fight each other. Yeah. And, but even the word neural network, it doesn't, it doesn't work like a brain. It's just they call it neural networks because they think of the original guys, Marvin Minsky, there was an analogy to a brain, but that's the best case. Right. Yeah. Let's, you've done an audio book on Galileo. Yeah.

And I want to talk about that. Like this has been as long as I've known you, which is years. now. As long as I've known you, you've been obsessed with Galileo. And by the way, not just you, other lesser-known scientists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein also considered Galileo the father of modern science. But you took the extra step that Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking were not qualified to do, which is you basically made an audiobook of his writings. You've done this phenomenal job at it. And I want to talk about why and what you learned from the father of modern science, what you learned, not just what you expected, but what you learned. Not just what you expected,

you learned. Yeah. So, and this is where, you know, we, we have to, we would be remiss if I didn't credit you with two different things. One is giving me permission, legal authority vested in you as my podcast mentor. I am a certified lawyer on Twitter. That's right. You are. And you're an expert in international diplomacy, vaccines, and virology. Yes. You had told me, because what I did is I had done an interview with this channel that, you know, probably half of your listeners will now turn off the podcast called Prager University and they have this thing called

book club and it's a very controversial guy named Michael Knowles who's that By the way I don't know this is Prager University some kind of like conservative? Oh it's definitely highly conservative yeah and I've done multiple videos for them

but I'm never political it's always talking about what science can and can't do I've never heard you do anything political on any of these things yeah it doesn't interest me I mean you know there's an old joke Einstein dies

and he's dead and then goes to heaven and every guy he meets... That's really funny. Or girl he meets, yeah, it's a rip-roar and fun time. He meets, he asks, what's your IQ? So he meets the first woman comes up, what's your IQ? She says 150.

Great, we can talk about math, theoretical physics, and all sorts of other things. Next person he meets, you know, what's your IQ? 120. Oh, great, we can talk about law. We can talk about, you know, the constant, you know, whatever. Then the next person he meets, what's your IQ? That's 100. Oh, we can talk about the stock market.

We can talk about, you know, all sorts of things like that. Then he said, what's your IQ? In 91. Oh, we can talk about politics. So it's really, it's not interesting to a scientist because it's so local. I mean, I talked to this guy, Justin Amash, who's a libertarian on Twitter. He has a podcast that's really fun. And we, you know, we did compare notes about how politics and science are related and interdependent on each other.

He's a good guy to have on your show as well, by the way. But anyway, you had told me a long time ago when I was getting prepared for this interview. And they asked me to speak about a science book. So they never had a science book, which is why I love talking to, these conservative Christians mainly. You know, I get to talk to 3 million, you know, people that will never think about the scientific method or think about Galileo. They said, which book do you want to talk about? It could be any science book. Einstein.

And I was like, no, it's too impenetrable. Isaac Newton, completely opaque. But Galileo, I said, is one of the best writers who ever lived, not only science writers, but just like overall as a writer, just poetic, beautiful. but, you know, nowadays, thanks to, you know, being influenced by you so much, I only want to consume things using, you know, Audibles 3X, you know, feature. So I was like, well, how can I possibly do this? And, you know, I want to go and listen to the audio book because it's 450 page long book. And I never read the whole book.

So I said, look, I'm going to go and download from Audible the audiobook. It doesn't exist. In fact, none of his books exist in audio format, which is weird. None of Einstein's books exist in audio format. None of any of these guys, Darwin's books, exist in audio format. You should just make all of them into audiobooks. Well, you gave me the original idea, and now the student, you know, has, as Leonardo Da Vinci once said, he said, sad is the disciple who doesn't outdo the master.

I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with that, too. That's why Jay is to be watched and feared. But I thought about, you know, well, should I just do it? And you were like, don't think about it. Just do it. And I was like, how do I do it? You're like, he's not going to sue you.

He's dead for 400 years. He has no estate and blah, blah, and you started putting me down this pathway to do it. And then all these dominoes started falling into place. And it turned out that one of my friends knew somebody who worked for the people that held the right. Now, Galileo is dead, and I can translate from Italian using Google Translate.

But the definitive translation was translated by this man, Stillman Drake. And he has an estate, and he sold the rights to, happens to be the University of California Press. And so serendipitously, I came in contact and I was able to get the rights to that book. And then through your friends and producers, Nathan Roxburgh and Tim Bader and Friends of Jay,

they set me up on this pathway that I started a production company. So I actually have a production company. I recorded the first ever audiobook, along with our friend, Carlo Rovelli, who's written, some of the most popular, books in history as an Italian. This book called The Dialogue, it's actually a trialogue. It's a conversation between three friends over four days debating whether or not the earth is the center of

the universe. So these were huge stakes back in the 1600s. And the ultimate outcome of the story is even the meta story is almost even more interesting because this is the book that got Galileo imprisoned for the remainder of his life, threatened with torture and death for recounting heresy. So let me ask the first question there. Yeah. Like if you're going to to write like okay i would admit if i'm going to write something where i don't even know if this is true but if i'm going to write something where at least i'm going to be threatened with death by the only government that existed at that time which is essentially the church if i'm going to write something that's can cause me to potentially be killed i probably wouldn't do it like why did galileo and he even makes

fun of the pope in his writings the name of the guy who espouses the pope's logic is named simplicio the simpleton. He gives them the name the simpleton. So that to me speaks in another meta level. It speaks to the fact that we all know geniuses who are brilliant idiots. And they're just so smart and they're in domain experts, but they know nothing about life. And that to me, Galileo actually did know a lot about life. He was a very complicated, very interesting figure, as was Einstein. both men, you know, had difficulties with women and illegitimate children and challenges, and Galileo certainly was not a stranger to it. But he knew the controversy that he was stepping into,

but he thought his brilliance could kind of act as an escape clause, that he had actually mentored the Pope, Pope Urban, as a young boy, and had taught him many things about science. And the Pope was actually quite open to it. And he said, look, you can study this earth-centered, sun-centered cosmology. but you can't teach it. And studying meant doing it in the vernacular of science of that time, which was Latin. So his first most famous, rather, book in the early times was called the Cedarius Nuncius,

the Starry Messenger. And that's the book that really was the first demonstration of the scientific method, using a telescope to collect evidence about a hypothesis and then refine the hypothesis and test it. And that proved there were craters on the moon and that Jupiter had moons and Saturn had ring. It was incredible. It's like having your own personal large Hadron Collider and nobody else could access it. And he never shared how he built the telescope

and so forth. So the Pope was cool with that, but he said, make sure you don't teach it. And teaching means doing it in Italian. And this book is called the Dialago, which is not Latin. It's Italian. And so he taught it.

And of course he did call the Pope, the simpleton. And he did call himself the salvation, Salviati. And so Carlo plays Salviati. in this book. My close friend of 30 years now, Lucio Picharillo, who's an Italian Brit, who's living in Manchester, he did Simplicio, the simpleton. And then I did this guy who's kind of like an intelligent layperson interlocutor, and his name is Segredo. And my job is kind of just to

like interspersed between them. I didn't try to put on an Italian accent or anything. But we we had this wonderful, you know, kind of conversation over audio. It's 21 hours long. And it, you know, luckily it takes less than four days to record it. But when you read this, James, you ask me, like, what did I learn? I still just feel like chills because it's like I told my wife, I was like, it's like I'm having a conversation with him with Galileo. Like I'm talking to him or he's talking to me.

Here's a passage, James. So he was this incredible. And Einstein calls this book, you know, the most important book, not just the most important science book, essentially. In his forward, which I had Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize, he narrated Einstein's forward to this book. So you hear this Nobel Prize winner,

you hear Fabiola Giannati, who runs the Large Hadron Collider collaboration. She narrates the Galileo's preface dedication to the Duke of Tuscany. It's just a magical experience. But here's Galileo, and he's talking as Salviati, and he's kind of hedging his bets, but he does it with some level of humility.

It's the very last kind of paragraphs of the book, so you have to download the whole book. You can't just get it in the first chapter. I need this. My kids need to go to Disneyland this summer. Okay, so here it goes. He says, I do not presume to be able to adduce all the proper and sufficient causes

of those effects which are new to me and which consequently I have had no chance to think about. He's talking about discovering in his mind the proof that the sun, is the center of the universe. He said, what I'm about to say, I propose merely as a key to open portals to a road never before trodden by anyone in a firm hope that mine's more acute than mine will broaden this road and penetrate further along it than I have done in my first revealing of it. So a question, is he saying it in such a way so he can later deny that he's actually saying

the earth rotates around the sun. Yes. So at the end he goes, well, at what point are you the one who's accusing me of heresy? You're actually limiting God's power because God could make the universe appear any way he wants to. And so by you saying, no, it has to be this way.

And ultimately it's very interesting because the Hebrew Bible, which they're basing this on, the Catholic Church was basing the earth-centered cosmology on a passage from like Joshua and a couple of other places where the sun stands still and it seems like the sun is going.

And it does seem like the sun orbits around the earth, right? I mean, if I asked you, you know, prove to me that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, or you'll be convicted of heresy. I mean, you couldn't do it. I know that you couldn't do it because even my graduate students can't do it half the time. I mean, I can't prove that and I can't prove that the world is not flat. Yeah. And these are things we take for granted are actually harder than people think.

Yeah. So what Galileo was doing is he was staking his claim to be the first discoverer of this phenomenon, first one to prove it using scientific methods, and also to have some, as you mentioned, plausible deniability that could save his arse if things came down to it, also hoping his favor that he had curried with the Pope would save him. But ultimately, James was so fascinating about this book, which I've fallen in love with and will always have this special place in my heart, and also has unlocked other things. Like we'll talk about another idea you gave me, which is to create NFTs.

And I want to talk to you about that in our time. So what Galileo did was he, you know, in creating this proof, which he thought was a proof that the earth went around the sun, he actually came up with a confirmation bias failure and blunder on his own, which is to say that he believed

that the fact that the earth had tides, that every day there's two high tides and two low tides, on the ocean, that that was proof that the Earth was not only revolving around its axis once per day, like this bottle of water that I'm holding, but also orbiting around the sun, which is what he was trying to prove. So he assumed that that could only happen if the Earth was in rotation and revolutionary orbits around the sun and about its axis. That's totally wrong. We've known for even Galileo suspected that he knew that was wrong. So he almost like he published something because he was so convinced, that his other arguments about what we now call relativity and motion,

that those were right, that he was willing to kind of risk it all on this much, much weaker and in fact, incorrect evidence because it has nothing, the tides have nothing to do with the rotation of the earth or motion of the earth. They have to do everything with the moon's influence on the earth's oceans, something that he could have realized. There's no way, there's no way, like for instance, I would be able to figure out or anybody, even though we all know that again as somewhat common knowledge, I only like vaguely know that.

Yeah, so, you know, in this quest to kind of reveal Galileo's, you know, his impact. So I said, well, you know, how many books does this guy have? And he has like 14 books. Like he published and he perished, but he has many, many books, some of which lend themselves to the audio format more than others. But there's one book. It's actually one of the rarest of all his books. It's called the Military Compass. And it's...

This was like his last book maybe? I forget. No, this is one of his first books. So this is published in 1600, 32 years before the dialogue. And the reason that's so important is not really because it has so much interesting stuff in it. It's more because there's so few copies that remain of it. It's like more rare than the Gutenberg Bible in terms of copies of the first edition of it. So what Galileo did with it is that he, it's basically a compass is actually a slide rule. It's a converter to do like logarithms or to take powers and do stuff like that. So it was actually a tool like a calculator, but obviously hundreds years before we had calculators or even slide rules. And in it, he talks about, because he wants to sell these devices, he wants to sell the books rather than sell the devices

because it's very expensive to make a slide rule compared to printing a book even in 1600. So he wanted to sell as many books as possible. So he was really selling the instruction manual. It's like nowadays our phones don't even come with instruction manuals. But imagine like buying the instruction manual to the iPhone. I mean, David Pogue used to write these books about it, but missing manual and stuff. But anyway, so he wrote this book.

And in it, James, there's a chapter and it's called currency conversion. He talks about, imagine if you're, you know, forced with converting Venetian Dukots to Florentine Scudy or whatever, and you want to do this conversion, here's how you do it. And it's basically just making a ratio between two numbers, right? But imagine like right now I said, you know, Galileo, I can either drop on you like a hundred million lira or Scootie or whatever, or Ducats, or I can drop on you and store a hundred of these copies of this first edition of this book. Which do you think would be more valuable in the year of

2022? Like a piece of Scootie papers, I mean, like some collector, you might get 10 bucks for it or something. these books are like price low, literally, because there's so few of them left. So if he had just provided for his family and the ancestor, that would have been the richest dynasty in the world. And yet the greatest mind of perhaps the entire history of the planet, maybe Einstein accepting, didn't even think about that. And was so concerned with in the moment, let me make a profit. Those are some of the things I learned from him.

And thinking about, but you know, that might be a good, Like, you know, it's one thing to think about posterity, but you're dead then. And let your kids, I'm not saying being cruel to your kids, but let your kids deal with the same worries and issues that we've all had to deal with. Yeah. And learn struggle. And so, and yeah, he needed the money probably. The guy was, you know, defending himself against the Pope who wanted to kill him. And he had illegitimate daughters and son-

for a lot. So along that theme, I started to say, think about like, well, what is a first edition? Like, what does it mean to have a first edition of a book like this? And I started to think about, you know, what could we actually do with it to preserve, but also to protect these artifacts? So what is it like? And you were like, oh, it sounds like an NFT. I was like, oh, that's interesting. So maybe what I could do is, you know, kind of, first of all, develop a legacy or develop a community around his ideas, but also to produce things, a scientific interest. And I've been interested in, like, how can we use

crypto or NFTs or whatever? Not to get rich, because, you know, you know how much Einstein was worth when he died, James? No. 65,000 on. Okay, but, but he was well provided for by the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. Yeah, he wasn't poor. Like he would never, he would never go broke, for instance. Right. William Shockley invented the transistor that we're talking, using right now and listening to on your iPod or iPod that don't exist anymore. On your iPhone or your Google, Android. Those people

died, you know, middle class. In other words, scientists are awful at monetizing. And even, like, you know how many Nobel Prize economists are millionaires? How many? Almost none. I mean, the ones that are like maybe Krugman might be or something, very few. Well, again, like professors

don't make a lot of money. Right. No, that's true. But I'm just saying, so, but A, that's a shame in a certain sense that you develop something like the laser, the transistor, the internet was developed by physicists. And physics as a whole has to grovel for little crumbs of the budget, right? So we just spent twice NASA's budget to the Ukraine.

I'm not going to talk about, like, is that good or bad? And that's like for a month of work, right? Twice NASA's budget. If you ask the ordinary person, how much of your taxes go to NASA, they think like 50%, because it has such a huge impact or SpaceX or whatever.

It has such a huge, huge impact on our daily curiosity and the mystery of life. here's my mission James. I want to fund, you know, cadres of postdocs and graduate students. I want to fund the biggest telescopes on Earth without having to grovel and have an 8% at best acceptance rate for my proposals by the National Science Foundation. This is the key for anything. Like, this is related to the asking for permission.

Because asking for money is a similar way of asking for permission. And yes, there are some projects where, you know, they're big enough. You have to ask for money. You have to do all the things you need to do to fundraise. and grant raise and so on. But the ideal state of things is to figure out some way in which people are asking you. You want people to come to you and say, listen, can you do this? Here's the money.

I mean, like, Elon Musk doesn't have to ask anybody, but like not everyone's Elon Musk, but it would be great. And I always tell people when it comes to, like, for instance, raising money or selling a company, much better than raising money is somebody approaching you and saying, hey, can you take my money? I want to give you money. Right, right. Like, otherwise, you're just, you're selling something and you're not, it doesn't feel as good somehow. Yeah. No, you're 100% right.

So, so first of all, and I don't expect to finish it, maybe we can do a part two at some point. But so then I started talking to people about like these things called DAWS, you know, digital, autonomous or organizations or something like that. I'm sure I'm not getting an honest. Wait, well, what's your goal here? You want a community that revolves around what? Well, so there's multiple aspects. My ultimate goal is for science to be indifference. independent of the whims of a two-year budget cycle in Congress in America.

And I only care about America. I'm sorry, I care about the world, but I care about what I can have an impact on, which is mostly American students that I'm paid to teach and to train, and the American public who pay my salary. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. and host and style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice.

Shop Applant Savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store Online for details. Right, so I'm going to be selfish. Just think about America. I want American science to always be at the top. And it's slipping, James.

We're losing dominance. We no longer have the biggest telescopes on Earth. We no longer have the largest particle accelerators on Earth. We no longer have our space agency fully capable of launching astronauts into space without other countries or entities like SpaceX. So I want, I'm a product of public education. I teach at a public school. So anyway, that's my priority. I want to fund science in perpetuity on some kind of endowment for science.

And maybe that endowment will the Dow part will be this DAO type entity. That's one goal. Endowment. Yeah. So another, yeah, that's trademarked. I trademarked it. The other thing is I also want to protect these books. So I want to have a combined project where, you know, you buy a, you know, Gallo coin or Galileo coin or whatever,

and you get access to this community. You get all my lectures about Galileo. You get all my audiobooks and videos. And you get to meet with me and other luminaries like Mario Livio and Carlo Revelli and Avi Lowe and Eric Weinstein. You know, all these great scientists that I'm so blessed to have had on. my show and Mitch Okaku, Frank Wilczek, put them all together, and have some way of raising funds to buy these books. Because right now, there's very few of them left.

Every day they lose one or something happens to one. And I don't want it to be like the Gutenberg Bible. The last one sold to Sony Corporation errors and is locked in some basement in Tokyo, $50 million worth in 1986. These are to be enjoyed and savored. Okay, so let's start with that for a second, because that actually has value. So these books, like Galileo's books, for instance, what are they worth right now?

All together. So this book, the dialogue, if you buy a first edition, which is all I care about, is about between $150,000 to $200,000. The compass is almost price. You almost can't buy it, but maybe a million dollars.

Same thing is true of, by the way, some of the more recent books, like Darwin's origin of species, the first edition of it, is more rare than Galileo's dialogue, which is 200 years older. So here's how you can do this. So you basically create a cryptocurrency that behaves like a hedge fund.

So if I own, let's say there's a million coins. The coins, you're going to, in the initial coin offering, you're going to raise, let's say, $100 million. You're going to sell each one of these million coins for $100. And now with the $100 million, you're going to immediately buy, you know, all the sign, $100 million in today's prices of all the legendary scientific masterpieces you could think of. And now every coin represents one one millionth of that asset. You're going to tokenize, almost like an IPO, but you're going to tokenize all of these legendary masterpieces.

Yeah, like the guys wanted to do with the Constitution a couple months back, right? Yeah, yeah. So, and then people buy and sell the coins based on how they think the value. of these masterpieces are going up or down. So, like, in a recession, maybe they go up because you want to buy collectibles. And inflation, they go up because you want to buy collectibles in an inflationary period. And, you know, I don't know when they would go down. Maybe if, I don't know, if Galileo was me too.

I mean, they might not go up so fast, but, like, you can't afford these on a, right? Right. And then how will the coins ever, you know, show actual cash value? well if you potentially you know the if you if you if you call this a doubt a decentralized autonomous organization then the owners of the coins can vote and decide we're going to sell darwin's are the first edition darwin's origin of species so we're going to sell one and and distribute the proceeds to the holders of the coin and at some point if there's a big inflationary period and now people think there's going to be a deflationary period maybe the 51% of the doubt will say okay let's sell all of them and and then

just all the cash proceeds get distributed for the Galileo coin. And that's how you can do it. It's a very simple actual. It's almost like a hedge fund structure. I did a simple proof of concept. So I took my friend Jay Passacoff at Williams College as renowned scientists. He actually endorsed my first book. And he actually owns a copy of both all these books by Galileo, which he's donated to

Williams College, their library for protection. He doesn't keep him underneath his bed, right? about a million dollar collection. So when my first book came out, I took images of that, high quality, high-resolution images, and I started to convert them into NFTs. And this is, you encourage me to do that. So I did one. I sold it for half an eath or something on my website.

So if you go to Brian Keating.com slash dialogue, you'll get, you can see, you could buy now. the cover illustration is this classic illustration of Plato and Aristotle and Socrates in conversation about the world and stuff. That one's on sale for five Eth, which as of today has gone, it's worth one third of what it was worth last week when I minted it.

But I'm just playing around with it. I'm trying to have fun with it. That is not part of the endowment. That's just like seeing if there's an interest in this proof of concept. But if there is, and there's 51 images in this book, you know, if you sold each one for, you know, a couple of ETH and they go up, then, yeah, then you could buy a copy of the dialogue,

which I wouldn't own, that I would put in some structure. And I just, you know, I'm a scientist, right? So I don't have a lot of time to deal with things like that. But I'm interested in getting help from the audience, your audience of mine, to promote this. Eventually, so I think it's easier to scale the custodying of the great books of history that made the biggest impact on science. And there's, you know, I have a lot of expertise learning about these books. but there are people that know much more than me,

and I could involve them. But the ultimate goal, again, so then I want to use those proceeds to kind of crowdsource or outsource science. But we'll have to do this another, you know, a different time, James, but here's the thing for my notepad ideas that I'm looking at.

What would you, like, what could you turn into an NFT that, by the way, wouldn't, like, like the first image from the web space telescope? Like, that's pretty valuable. Now, of course, the U.S. government paid for that. I want to look at NFTs in a different way. You're saying, let's take something and make it special and wrap an NFT around it. And then people can say they own this special thing.

But think of NFTs instead as tickets. As an NFT, when you own an NFT, you have access to something. And no one could forge that access. Only you have that access because the NFT is on the blockchain. It can't be forged. It can't be fraudulent. Only you, if you own that NFT, you have access to the thing that this NFT protects. Now, NFTs kind of started as protecting, you know, digital assets like Jack Dorsey's,

an image of Jack Dorsey's first tweet, for instance. But that might be bullshit. We don't know if that really has value or not. So what can you offer? Maybe it's access to a community of special scientists that are working on some special project or working on other ideas. Or you can provide access to some parts of Galileo's, you know, books that have never been released before or your interpretation of this that's never been released before. But what can you

provide access to that has some value that people would want access to? So for instance, if Warren Buffett sold as an NFT, you could have lunch with me. That's a valuable NFT. People would want to buy that NFT. And people have auctioned, people have put a place of value on lunch with him. It's like a million dollars or something. Right. So, so, yeah, so what can you provide? What can you think of that? You can, you can deliver access to and wrap that into an NFT. I think it's, you know, it's kind of like masterclasses. It's, you know, personal kind of events with great scientists, great authors, great luminaries, thinkers. You know, I don't think, like, if you were looking at the data coming out of bicep, you'd be like,

all right, yeah. So, like, the raw data, stuff like that's not particularly interesting. I would do things like meteorites and telescopes. I mean, there could be really big, you know, we have, like, very expensive. but very good, you know, very high quality samples. I'm shaking my meteorites now. So by the way, if you listeners of the James Altwitcher podcast,

a special offer right now, the first hundred people of the podcast that go to Briankeating.com slash list, I'm going to send a piece of space dust. So you have to live in America, and it's first hundred people, you know, first come first, sir, but I'm saying,

serving. Right, cams slash space dust. Space, no, slash list. Just list for mailing list. Or Briancadden.com will get you there too. You have to live in the U.S., because I'm mailing it just U.S. Post Service. I'm a humble servant of the public.

But I'm sending some residue, some powder of this meteorite that landed four billion years ago, was created four billion years ago, and the solar system was created. So that's the ultimate NFT. Every meteorite's unique, and I'm going to send a little tiny fragment of an... Basically, it looks like iron dust powder.

But I'm going to send information about it. Where was it? How old was it? What's it made of? And I'm going to send that to all 100 of your listeners who get to the mailing list first. So, by the way, why don't you say, okay, you're going to make, you're going to call it the Galileo Club. And when you buy an NFT, you get, you're allowed to go into the Galileo Club, which, you know, maybe they get to talk with you. They get to talk with Eric Weinstein. They get to talk with Nealzogastis, whoever.

And they also get access to not only this community, but they get access to one of these pieces of space dust. Yeah. And telescopes, because a lot of times people come up to me, I want to get a telescope. and I've told you it's a crime against humanity for any parent not to get their kid a $50 telescope from Amazon even. But that made me think, what would James say? What would you tell me, James?

If I said there's some crappy telescope on Amazon, they should just get it. Because you can see everything Galileo saw. You can see the moons. You can see galaxies. You can see nebula. What would you tell me? What's James' advice to Brian in that situation?

There's no good telescope, quality telescope that's affordable for parents to get their kids. What would you say? Well, I mean, I don't really know. I would say just get any telescope. No, you would tell me to make one myself. I don't know. It depends if you have that skill set.

Do I not have a skill set to make a gal? Because the other type of advice is, like, people, this is very important, actually, people in nickel and dime their own lives. It's one thing to be conscious of cost. Like, don't spend $20 for something that should cost you $10 in the next aisle over. But I'm not going to, if I'm interested in what I can see in a telehealth, but I don't know how to make a telescope. I'm just going to buy a shitty telescope and look at it.

And I'm not going to say, oh, it's $60. I should save that money. No, I could, if $60 causes me to, like, just ruin my life and become homeless, then I'm in trouble. So, so like, like books, I never, I make it a rule. If I think even for a second that I want some book, I just buy the book. So I don't. Yeah, no, I agree. But here's, so I'm saying it's part of the benefit of being in the Galileo Club,

you would get one of these telescopes, either one that I would make, but really I have very advanced telescopes made by colleagues of mine that have a GPS and can do everything. So you're to point and shoot telescopes automatic, and they could stream to Instagram, they can do all this cool stuff, but they're several thousand dollars. And so, yeah, you'd have to buy several pages of the, you know, sponsor several pages of the purchase.

The last thing I want to leave you with is, you know, one is none, as they say in the military, right, your friend Jock, who's never come on my podcast, even though I've talked to him, and his people have asked me to host his buddies on my podcast. Jocko, if you're listening, I love you. I'm like 10 miles away from you. We've hung out in person. I didn't give you the black eye that we had.

Just show up in his house. Just show up. No, he got to freaking roll me. I don't want to do that. No, no extreme ownership. He will appreciate that. I don't, you don't know where his house is. That would be impressive if you could figure out where his house is.

That's true. I think I would, you know, it's like I said to one of my friends, you know, I was going to, Nancy Pelosi spoke at Brown when I was speaking there. she spoke to the undergrad and I spoke to the grader and I was like, I wonder how many like secret service people know exactly what I had for breakfast like three days ago

like back in San Diego. But anyway, let me just finish up. So the military, they say this one is none two is one, you know, three is two or something. Meaning like if you just have one bullet or one gun, like you're basically screwed. If that thing fails, it's done, you're over. If you have two, you have a backup and then you can lose one or one can break or mean.

So my idea was... By the way, I just want to say there's an interesting analogy in venture capital or in business in general. And if you tell me that you're going to, you have a million dollars left and your burn rate is $100,000 a month, so you'll run out of money in 10 months, then what that, and this is similar to the one is none.

You're already bankrupt. Yes, exactly. Like you're not going to, your business is over. 100%. Like you're not going to survive. So in there's, or if you say,

I need to raise money within six months, then I would say you've already not raised money. Like it's done. So one of the ideas I have is not by one dialogue, you buy two. So you can buy two or compass or whatever or origin of species. You buy two. And like you said, you then, the Dow votes on when to sell, if to sell the one copy that will end up paying if there's some appreciation for some ROI for them.

In other words, it guarantees, as long as you believe in the theory that this is going to go up, it's a very, very restricted asset and there's scarcity and so forth, all the properties of money apply to these books. And far greater value, as I showed, a scooty is worth nothing today. You could drop me a pound of Scudy and it won't be worth nothing. A pound of Galileo books is worth an infinite amount of money potentially. So anyway, my idea is the Dow buys two copies of every single book or maybe even more. But now we're talking about millions of dollars, as you said.

But the ultimate thing, James, and I have to run to meet with a funding agent right now. So that's the ultimate thing, right? I want to someday be my own funding agent. with his Dow or whatever. But I want you to think about, and maybe we can talk about next. You know, I don't want it to be like, oh, well, here's the first time

we split the atom and here's an image, or here's an image of the James Webb telescope and sell that. Like, I want to do something. How would we fund science using some kind of Dow or NFT concept? You know, this book idea makes sense, and I think that I could put that together

with somebody's help. But, you know, actually like, I look down to microscope and I saw this image of a bacteria and now I'm selling it. I don't think that's good for science. No, but if this is funding science, how about all the papers,

the academic papers that come out about it, all the names of the people who, you know, are in the end Dow, D-A-O, Mint, appear on the academic papers of these great discoveries. Yeah, well. As co-authors.

Yeah, that's interesting. Or in the acknowledgments, it couldn't be co-authors, but they could be in the acknowledgments. Why can't they be co-authors? What's the role? Authorship has to do with vetting and contribution to a paper. It means the contribution

of the actual scientist to add someone as an author. In fact, this happened once where there's a guy named Alfer and Gamov, where these two physicists, Ralph Alfer was this graduate student of Hans, of George Gamov. And they discovered

how the lightest elements in the Peerac table are formed. And Gamov had this funny sense of humor. He said, there's this guy, Hans Beta, and I want to involve him. So the paper will be called the alpha beta gamma of paper which sounds like ABC in Greek and this poor guy Alford had to go along with it because his thesis advisor forced him to and the guy beta did nothing and it's now called this paper and beta won the Nobel Prize but neither the other two did so oh my gosh anyway we don't want

that to happen but anyway James I'd love talking to you but think about how you could do it an equitable way so that scientists feel they get like imagine you know my friend eric Weinstein your our mutual friend he's like well we should have taxed, you know, emails or tax, you know, but anything you tax gets, you know, lower. Yeah, I was surprised Eric would say that. That doesn't sound very Eric. He was like, physicists return, like, we need to demand money. And I say, the time to demand it is before you invent it. Like, in other words, let's establish what this thing is going to be capable of doing. You buy in now so that I have an upside guarantee. Like, I'm going to invent

the laser. You can't go back and say, well, physicists invented the laser, the transistor, the internet, now pay us back. That's never going to work. But if you say ahead of time, without holding it hostage. Anyway, these are all totally speculative and probably unorthodox and unethical for me to even talk about as a scientist. But I do feel and fear

that U.S. scientific dominance is slipping for a variety of reasons that I don't want to get into, but we are losing our dominance to other nations. And we don't have to. But it's all for a lack of agility and funding.

No, but this is an interesting idea. And this is part of the reason why crypto is very interesting is because what's happening right now is that we're experiencing this monetary inflation. And that's because an enormous amount of dollar bills were printed. What you're saying is, hey, there are specific use cases for currencies. And so let's make a use, let's make a specific currency where the use case is scientific development. So you'll increase

the money supply, but there won't be monetary inflation because there's going to be scientific innovation that comes out of it that will itself grow the economy. If the economy grows in rate with the money supply, you don't get inflation. So what you're saying is, but, but, but, This is one way to look at cryptocurrencies is that it solves the issue of increasing the money supply without having inflation, but spurring on innovation instead. And that's what you're proposing. And look, the U.S., the government should consider or companies should consider raising money in this way. And it's very important.

I think it's going to take a long time if we wait for countries or companies to do it. I think individuals should do it. You see how much money they're raised for the – and by the way, this is what's so frustrating. So they raised all this money for the Constitution Dow. And then what – was it – Steve Schwartzman. He comes in swoops in Rubenstein, just buys it up. And then he's going to keep it in some museum or whatever.

Same with Bill Gates. He's been on the podcast. No, I know. Yeah. Whatever. I'm not going to say anything. Hey, I mean, he can do whatever he wants. But it didn't, it had this huge groundswell.

And I don't know how they're giving back the money because the gas fees are higher than, you know, returning it. But I don't want that to happen. But I would love it if we had a way of doing it that is open, transparent, and countable. Do it the exact same. they did it. Find like 10 books, your 10 absolute favorite scientific masterpieces from history. Do you know the guys that did that? Because I don't know them. I know of them. I know, but it's not a hard thing to do. Okay. It takes literally like a few days to set up the entire structure for this. So, so, but first thing is find the books you want to buy. I already know them.

Every book by Darwin, every first edition by Galileo, every first edition by Newton, and every first edition by Einstein. That's my starting, you know, four or five by two copies of each one. and sell one and keep one. But then I have to think about, where am I going to keep? I don't want to keep them in my office here. I want to put them in a vault. No, no, you put them in a museum.

Yeah, so then we have to donate to museum and then how do we get that? No, no, no, no, you don't have to donate. You lend. All right, well, let's talk about it next time. I have to meet with a funding agent right now. And this is awesome. And he's, you know, he's a good friend as well.

So, James, thank you so much. And let me know when we can talk again. And can people buy the Galileo? Yeah, it's on the same website that you can get the N&A. that's on Brian Keating.com slash dialogue. But the meteorite you can get by going to enter the chance to win it, the fragment of a meteorite, by going to Brian Keating.com slash list. And now I'll put all the information in my mailing list.

So that's where people get it. You can get it on Audible. You can get it on iBooks. It's everywhere along with my other two books, losing the Nobel Prize and Think Like a Nobel Prize winner with Ford by Nobel Prize winner Barry Barish and a man by the name of James. I'll take to put that in my collection of books where I've written the boards too.

If we ever together, man, it's been like eight years since we were in the same room together. Ted X. Come visit Atlanta. I will. Come visit you all sleep on. Let's do a TEDx Atlanta.

I'll sleep on his couch. Yeah, let's hook it up. No, I got a room just for you. It's called the Brian Keating Room. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguble from magic. All. Pay off your home, travel for life. Drive a Ferrari.

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