Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Can Science and Religion Coexist? w/ Danny Miranda (2021)

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Can science and religion coexist? Is it true that scientists cannot be religious? And what’s really behind supposed coincidences?  I had the privilege to discuss all this and more with Danny Miranda on his podcast. Danny is a writer turned leading podcaster. He is a communicator who strives to empower people to become the highest version of themselves and to raise the consciousness of humanity - one conversation at a time.  We talked about some of my early influences, coincidences that are too good to be true, my journey with Judaism, science, and more!  Enjoy.  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:30 My roommate Thomas 00:04:48 On coincidences  00:07:16 Getting fired 00:17:30 My healing journey  00:22:23 What values lead my life  00:30:03 Religion as a source of sanity  00:34:25 Holding together science and religion  00:50:34 The most powerful tool  00:55:13 The most unique thing about being a human  00:57:15 Into the Impossible  01:06:52 Imposter syndrome among women and minorities  01:10:40 What I’ve learned from a student 01:15:41 Where’s education going?  01:24:18 Final piece of advice  01:28:30 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Danny Miranda: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/heydannymiranda ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Brian, thank you for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm extremely excited for this. And I think we're going to have an incredible conversation. Thank you for being here. Undoubtedly so.

And in fact, Danny, I am so pleased to be here. Because I thought originally your podcast was about nutrition for your Brian. And I thought that was pretty cool. But then I realized, actually, it's better that you have to witness this experiment. I'm an experimental physicist. You mostly see people like Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's a theoretical physicist. Let's get into the distinction between those two.

But I do experiments, Danny. And today I decided I would do an experiment. And you can only see this if you subscribe to Danny's YouTube channel. I'm going to show you how to get nutrition for your brain. You ready for this, brother? So you got some Quest nutrition. And what's that? There's my brain.

So it's going into that's where I hold. Anyway, most experiments fail. But here's a brain. And I just, I just filled it with some good old Tom Billia special that you had on Quest Nutrition. This man has caused me to only gain five pounds during COVID. Thanks to Tom. And thanks to your wonderful interview with him.

That was really archival. That was one for the ages. I love what you do, my friend. And I'm just pleased as punch to be here. Wow. You really come prepared. And for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, you got to check out the YouTube. But Brian, we got to talk about you and we got to talk about

your start. And let's talk about graduate school. And particularly I want to know about your roommate Tomas or maybe it's Thomas. You tell me. How did he play a critical role in your life? So I went to grad school at Brown University, which I could never have gotten into as an undergraduate, but somehow they let their standards slip for allowing me to come to graduate school there. And I was living in the dorms in Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island. And I was just assigned some random roommates. And one of them happened to be a young man from the Middle East slash Europe. And he actually had been struggling his life to deal with an open wound in his soul,

which was the lack of reconciliation with his strength. father. And he had finally come to grips with the fact that his father, you know, kind of abandoned him, but he put down that, uh, that hostility towards his father and, uh, had a reproach Mont. And that spoke to me because I too at that very moment had been dealing with, uh, an estrangement for my biological father for more than 15 years. And I was kind of thriving on that, you know, like, I don't need this guy. I came this farm. Now I'm on an Ivy league school and I'm, you know, thriving in this thing. I don't need, you know, this guy in my life, but, but he pointed out that there are, you know, there are things you'll never know, unless you

kind of confront those demons. And for me, it was, it was kind of getting over this man who had really kind of abandoned me as a kid and my older brother. When I was only seven years old, my brother was 10 and started a new life and became, you know, a completely different person, totally without me. And by the time I came to graduate school, I unwittingly was following in his footsteps as a scientist. I had become interested in physics, fundamental questions of reality, of meaning, of existence, of energy, of time and space. And I had gone to the, this is before Google, right? So this is 1993, 1994. I got into the library, the science library, and looked up his old research papers. He was an academician at Cornell, youngest, 10th professor, full professor,

mathematics. And I looked up and it turned out he had been doing the exact same stuff that I was doing. Physics at the fundamental level. What is reality? What is nature comprised of? What governs the physical forces of nature? And can we do things like stop time, reverse time? Could I go back in time and re-engage with him? I didn't know. And it just was really interesting me at that synergistic moment that come into contact with this friend of mine in the dorms completely serendipitously and randomly. And he convinced me, that I need to put down this baggage. As he said, baggage has handles for a reason so you can put it down, not only carry it.

So I did that. And we had a reproachment with my father and my older brother as well. And he was in my life for many years. And I got to benefit from that all because of this random assignment, you know, of roommates in graduate school. It was quite, quite striking to think about. I mean, how crazy is that that your roommate also has a very similar situation to you? like coincidences like that. What do you think that is?

Well, you know, in physics, we hate to try to as supernatural explanation when there can be a perfectly naturalistic or materialistic explanation for something. That said, I do believe in the famous quote by philosopher, writer, Soron Kirkagard, that life must be lived going forwards. But you can only understand your life when you look backwards. And I think that's a perfect metaphor for what I do as an astronomer. We look out at telescopes.

And even though you know that you're there on Long Island, my ancestral homeland, I'm here in San Diego, my transplanted homeland now. And I'm looking and we're talking over these electronic communications media. And there's a delay because we're 3,000 miles apart. And light travels 186,000 miles per second. But, you know, 3,000 is not a small fraction of 186,000. So it might be delayed a fraction of 8,000. of a second. But if you extend that further out in space, you're going back further in time. And the

time machine is in the form of a telescope. It's really quite uncanny. So I do think that through the aid of time, you get distance. And because of that and because, you know, you can say it was Kismet or karma or whatever you want to call it. The shirt, as we say in Hebrew, it wasn't exactly clear to me at the time. But looking back on it, that was a very pivotal moment that led to me, essentially being here, along with almost every other moment in my podcasting career, which is probably shorter than yours, although you're probably more, you've put out more episodes than I can even contemplate. But then, you know, when I hear somebody describing challenges, I looked up how often, what's the words that most often precede the following sentence?

It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I looked up on Google search. You can just search on Google Ngram search. It was, I got fired. I failed. I lost. Or I was abandoned. Or I was traumatized. And yet, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

And it made me set off on a path that directly leads to where we are right now. So yeah, in a sense, you could think of it as karma or what have you. I don't have a problem with that. I, you know, there are worse things that you can assume about the laws of physics. When you think of the best thing that ever happened to me for you, What is the thing that comes before it? Oh, it has to be getting fired. It has to be the only time in my life I was ever fired.

You know, I was kind of like a, I wouldn't say it was a parent's dream. I mean, you can consult with my mom on that. But nevertheless, I got good grades. I was always self-motivated. I didn't do drugs. I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. Even to this day, I've never done a drug.

Some people say I'd be better off if I did try some drugs. And maybe we can get into my philosophy about that later. But the point is for me, I was pretty much set up on a dream trajectory that, you know, I got into a good college and I got into graduate school, full ride, everything. And then it came to be what is known as a postdoc. Now postdoc in academia means post your doctoral degree. So what happens to you after you get your PhD before you become a professor? And it's kind of like a major league baseball has a farm team.

I forget what it is out of Long Island. Here, it's the, you know, we have the El Paso Chihuahuas. And we have the Lake Elsinore Storm for the San Diego Padres, Go Padres. I've since become a fan and abandoned the New York Yankees. But when you think about the farm system for academia, it's called a postdoc. I'd become a postdoc, Danny, and one of the best places in the universe of astrophysics, which is Stanford University. This is a Titan.

This is Nobel laureates around the corner. The founders of the field of cosmology in its modern form are at Stanford. I was so thrilled. I was so proud. It was even a place that my father hadn't gotten into and I was competitive with him. And so I was I was quite taken with myself. And yet living in the Bay Area in 1999 on a salary of $32,000 a year, which is less than I make as a state university employee professor. Nevertheless, it was almost impossible. I had a girlfriend that I was basically breaking up with on the East Coast from Rhode Island. And it just wasn't, I wasn't happy. my boss, who was a young professor herself at the time, she could tell I was kind of dead weight and I was spending more time thinking about my own projects, my own experiments, kind of selfishly thinking about my own prospects

as a minor league baseball player to get into the majors, not thinking about my team. And she fired me. She can me right on the spot one day. And this is so embarrassing, Danny. You can't even imagine. I tell my friends. They're so proud.

I'm moving to California. It was magical time. Silicon Valley in 1999. super exciting, humiliated. And yet, and yet, that very moment at which I got fired, which I thought was the end of my career as an astronomer, as a cosmologist, as a scientist, determinist point, it's like getting fired from AAA baseball.

You're never going to make it. She did me a kindness. She actually connected me to her former advisor, who was a wonderful man by the name of Andrew Lang, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, which is not like a tech school. It's a formidable institution of technology, one of the best in the world.

And in fact, where she had got her training and it was good enough to get her a job at Stanford, and he was one of the most charismatic, Steve Jobs-like figures. And he took an interview with me. Based solely on her word, after her having fired me,

and he gave me a chance. And I got a $500 a year raise. and I moved from Northern California, Southern California. And that path then took me to create an experiment with my colleagues called Bicep that we'll talk about, I'm sure. We put that at the bottom of the world, the very bottom of the planet known as the South Pole Antarctica. And that made amazing images and discoveries about our universe. And that led to me becoming a professor here in San Diego, meeting my wife, getting married. None of this would have happened.

Having children, getting tenure, making names. accomplishments and then developing a new project called the Simon's Observatory, which we can talk about, and traveling all over the world and educating people and interacting and learning from people, none of this would have happened, Andy, if I didn't get fired. That day, I got fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. When we look back at Andrew Lang, why do you think that he gave you a shot, even though the person recommending you to him previously fired you? It's interesting because when you think about someone who has a job title like mine, astronomer, cosmologist, you probably picture somebody who's like, you know, waxing philosophical at every moment,

thinking about the origin, you know, like a Neil deGrasse Tyson, but always like that every day, all day long. And Neil's been on my podcast and I love talking to him, but like an hour with him is like five hours with a normal person. I mean, a normal person not as bright as he is. When I came to realize that most of my colleagues aren't like that. And actually, I had a special gift, which some would say, you know, might come with, with all gifts come with downsides, as you know. But one of my gifts is that I am extremely curious. In fact, the motto of my channel is always be curious, ABC.

And there's nothing, absolutely nothing that doesn't interest me. I can talk about, but I can't talk with any authority, but I can talk about somebody Bulgarian Renaissance poetry. And like, I won't fall asleep, but it's not like my top thing. I'd rather talk about the Padres. But anyway, having a conversation with him, he was a kindred spirit, for he only was interested in solving the most magnificent mysteries in the universe. And I felt like in contradistinction to many of his other, very talented, much brighter than I, employees, that these people weren't as curious. And he could tell within me lay an insipient desire to answer certain questions before I die.

And that's really the mystery that I'm most interested in. how do you combine the most happiness experience flourishing for you and for others, including intellectual nutrition for your brain, as you say, in the shortest amount of time because that's the only time scale that is relevant to a human being is how long we're going to live. And as Mark Twain said, you know, there are two moments that are utmost importance, the day you're born and the day you find out why you were born. And I think at that moment he saw in me this potential. And he took me under his wing as a father figure.

And he would tragically later abandoned me in a different way and many other people much more significant than me. That's deep. Do you want to break that down how that happened? That's such a cliffhanger. Yeah. So what Andrew meant to me was he was literally playing a role as almost a father figure as estranged from my father. As I said before, I'd never had somebody in science truly take me under their wings, male or female advisor or whatever. and also be a boss, but also give me life advice.

Part of being a professor, it's not all about standing up in front of class and teaching about, you know, pendulums and springs and electromagnetism. Sometimes as a PhD advisor, I have to tell my student, you know, whether she should, you know, get married or, you know, what, in my opinion, I'm never going to tell them what to do, but they'll have, you know, should I get married before I take a job? You know, should I move out? Oh, like, how do I feel about like changing careers doing something completely different

than physics, making money, and then coming back to physics. Those are the kinds of applications of wisdom in contradistinction to knowledge that a professor should have some conversational ability about. So the word science in Latin means knowledge. It doesn't mean wisdom. So many people have far more knowledge than I do, but I try to ascribe to sapien, to be a sapien, a wise person. And to me, that was what Andrew Lang embodied.

he would give advice and he would give scientific knowledge, but most of it was always coupled with some kind of a moral or ethical lesson. And this happened for many years. And he was the only one that really believed in me at this time and stood by me through ups and downs. And yet, he was dealing with things that no person really could understand. And this man who is like literally on the short track to win a Nobel Prize, young, handsome, Steve Jobs-like motivation, but not the a-holeness that Steve Jobs reportedly could demonstrate. This man was a leader and a thinker and a divinely, you know, kind of inspired soul, if that's your thing. And yet he had demons. And no one knows why, but in January of 2020, just weeks after deploying this instrument to the South Pole, this phenomenal

instrument that would take a team that I had been a part of to the precipice of perhaps winning a Nobel Prize, he took his own life. And he died, as they say, by suicide in a hotel room, not far, the very hotel room, where he had had me come in, not the hotel room, but the very hotel that I had stayed in when I interviewed with him coming from Stanford down to Caltech, just a mile or so away from Caltech. And of course, it devastated me, but kind of that. was minimal compared to, and the impact on science is minimal compared to the children that he left behind the friends, the family that he left behind. And it just, it always just tore at me that, you know, this man that I loved that, you know, profess that he was, wanted to be a father

figure to me and a mentor to me, that he would not reach out to me, that he has, he was maybe too proud of it or so, and so forth. And, you know, I just wish that he had had the courage. And I always try to communicate to people that there are resources, there are. are people that you can talk to. When you feel like all hope is lost, that's like the definition of extreme depression. And so we don't know why, but that's what happened. And here I was again, you know, now age 30 something, but still needing him very much, just like a father. And, you know, not a day goes by when I don't think about calling him or talking to him or talking to my own father as well. I'm sorry for your loss. How do you,

begin to start the process of healing yourself after learning that someone that's played such a critical role in your life has passed? Well, what was different from me when I lost him or when the world lost him and when I and my brother lost our father, which had happened four years earlier, is that by the time my advisor died, I was married. And I had, uh, I had. had the greatest, you know, friend and support of my life to rely on, to, to cry on, to to talk to. And I had, you know, also lots of other friends to, to, to, to deal with it. Whereas with my father, it was a very much more private. I wasn't married. I had my brother, my mother, but we didn't, you know, that was basically it. And so it was very different in that

sense to move on in some sense, less closure because, you know, it's ultimately final. And, And as close as I was to my PhD, my post-doctoral advisor, Andrew Lang, you know, he wasn't my family. He wasn't directly the grandparent of my children. So it was different in that sense. But, you know, intellectually and kind of ideologically, he had a huge impact on me. And I like to say that, you know, everybody should be a parent. Like even you right now, Danny, are a parent. It's just that you're not a parent, maybe not.

I don't know. biologically. Like every man, every woman should strive to be a parent. And by that I mean to influence the future generation of people that come after you. So you're younger than me. You actually do influence me as an older, you know, because I learned from your style and how you interact. And I actually played in the interview you did with Tom Bill, you with my 10 year old.

And I was saying, like, listen to who's talking, listen to what Danny's doing. And it was like a master class because you were doing things and you do things so frequently. And if I told my son who's 10 years old, I said, Dan, how old are you, Danny? 24. 25. If I said, Danny's 24. And he's talking to Tom Billia, who's multi-billionaire, one of the most successful. Someone I look up to as well with, and he'd love to sit down with over a beer, but he probably wouldn't drink.

He's too healthy. Not alcoholic or whatever. But if I told you, and he's 40 something, I think, I said, my son Isaac, I said, Isaac, you know, I said to him, there are two men. who's going to say the F bomb? Who's going to do it? Like the kid who's like good looking blue-eyed kid, you know, skater dude or whatever. I don't know what you do, Danny,

but the point is the probability overwhelmingly and statistical odds would be that you would do it. And you just let him go off and you let him be him and you don't talk. And so you give you are the long way of saying it, you are mentoring people whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not. But so much more so, as we say in Hebrew, Colva Homer,

should you strive to mentor people, A, that are in your life physically, like you're present with, not just remotely over a podcast connection, but in your life. And even so much is to mentor people in the future, because we physicists are consumed with the notion of time travel. We would love to go and bend time and space and warp and travel throughout the galaxy and visit other planets and visit galaxies and explore the early universe, the late universe. But there's only one way that we know how to travel in time.

And unfortunately, we can't do it physically. but we know we can travel, we can have our values travel and transport through time. And it's called children. It doesn't mean biological only. It can be. Hopefully is, if you have biological children, at least, you inculcate them with values. And that was something, you know, with your interview with Tom, that would be very interesting for me to discuss with him someday. But the point being, you are influencing people.

He's influencing people. And you guys don't have kids, physical kids, biological kids. But you're transmitting values into the future. And so that for me is the most vivid essence of what a scientist should want to do, what a person should want to do, and why I enjoy having conversations like this, to be honest. Hello, Students of the Impossible. It's Professor Brian Keating here with just a tiny little homework assignment to interrupt your podcast. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast or following us on your podcast app of choice. did some research and actually only about 50% of you are actually following or subscribing to The Into the Impossible podcast.

And really mean a lot if you could subscribe and keep up to date with me and with all the greatest content. I'm putting out tremendous amounts. Podcast has grown in popularity, but it can be better and bigger with your help. Do that. Please do it now. Don't wait. You'll forget.

If you're looking to really boost your position on the grade curve for some extra credit, make sure to leave a rating or review of the podcast. It really helps. Thanks a lot. Now back to the... It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless.

My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. I appreciate the kind words tremendously. And the fact that you showed the podcast to your son is mind-blowing to me because you don't know what happens when you put content and stuff out into the

world that anything could happen. And that's an incredible thing. So I'm really grateful for that. But you ended that with values and the importance of values. I'm curious as a scientist and as a father, what values lead your life? So I am very much, although I came to a via a twisted route of first being born to two Jewish parents, which makes me biologically, ethnically, ethnically, culturally Jewish. I used to joke, we'd go to temple, you know, maybe two days a year on Christmas and Easter. My parents weren't committed to Judaism at all. They were just culturally. And so when my parents divorced, which is why I was separated from my father, you know, at least at some level, not all fathers estranged themselves from their

kids after they divorced, but nevertheless, my father did. My parents were divorced, age seven. And then my mother remarried a gentleman of my name Ray Keating is still with us. And he was a devout Roman Irish Catholic, nine brothers and sisters, huge family, great grandmother. Yeah, it was this amazing family, super warm, loving, inviting. And I fell in love with that tradition, with the Roman Catholic tradition. So much so that I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church. And it was only later when I, at the same time that Jewish boys typically study for their bar mitzvah, age 12 and 13, I obtained my first telescope. So for those of you again, please go to the YouTube channel, subscribe to Danny Miranda.

His channel is really, it has the logarithm of the number of subscribers that it will do someday. So say you got in then, I got the small telescope just like this, Danny. And I became infatuated with the discoveries of a famous Roman Catholic by the name of Galileo, Galilei. Another reason to subscribe to the YouTube is you will see a finger puppet of Galileo, the first human being to ever turn a telescope to the night sky as far as we know and make discoveries. And I learned what the Catholic Church did to him after his claims of the son's lack of being moved away from the center. He claimed the earth was not the center of the universe and the Catholic Church and the Pope, etc. claimed he was deadly mistaken.

and they sentenced him to house imprisonment for the remainder of his life. I felt I didn't want to be part of a religion that would do such a thing. It turns out I had a 12-year-old's understanding of the whole affair. I understand it much better. And in fact, in 2015, I had the honor, Danny, to host a conference for 30 of the world's most eminent cosmologists in the prison, i.e. in the final villa where Galileo spent the remaining nine years of his life on and off. it's one of the most sumptuous places to, you know, let's just say, you know, if Bernie Madoff could have chosen to go there, he would have done it in a heartbeat because it is one of the most resplendent. The Italian villas doesn't even do it justice.

So I didn't know that much as a 12 year old, but I assumed the Catholic Church bad. I don't want to have anything to do with anyone who would torture my hero. Again, they didn't torture him, but nevertheless. So I sullied on the idea of Catholicism and I became an atheist and didn't practice religion at all. until about September 11, 2001 came along. And at that time, I realized, you know, I knew so much about Christianity from being an altar boy for years in the Catholic church.

And I loved it. Had no, nothing but good experiences. Except, you know, I thought, well, how do I go with the distance? You know, I like to do everything to the utmost degree. So, you know, I want to win a Nobel Prize in physics. I want to, you know, do something. I want to get into the best college. How do you go to the distance in Catholic?

as a boy, you become a priest. And at that time, you know, I was kind of a little uncertain about being a celibate, shall we say, for the rest of my life. But we'll keep it clean because I know my son is going to listen to this. So anyway, we, so I ended up basically knowing nothing about the religion of my birth. And I thought that was odd. And so after September 11th, I started learning about Judaism. And I found it incredibly rich and rewarding. I couldn't get past certain aspects of it. But, you know, the phrase I like to say is, I don't care so much if you believe in God, but do you live in a way that God believes in you if he exists?

And I started to wonder, like, how do you know your values, as you asked originally, are commensurate with goodness. Where do you get them from? So most people, I get them from myself,

or I get them from, you know, I don't hurt other people. And I say, well, to them, like, I have this microphone.

You have a good microphone. Do you have a sure SM7B? I do it's like it's like derogor right did you did you read the manual for it do you know what the switches on the bottom of this thing do Danny no I don't so there's a manual and you should read it there's some switches at the bottom so James Altoucher's podcast producer shout out to Jay Yao um he's a good friend of mine now so he taught me how to set up the switches anyway he read the manual the point is um when my kid was born my first kid was born one night I'm basically drunk from lack of sleep and and he's crying and my wife's angry and you're at each other's throats.

I'm just like, get the instruction manual, that there is no instruction manual. So how do you live life? You know, the most complicated thing. If a microphone, you know, I have, I have a, you know, a cigar lighter. It has an instruction manual. Like, what the hell? You don't mean an instruction. Yeah.

Put butane in here and spark here and it blows up, right? No, it has an instruction. So the most complicated entity in the known universe, a child. child doesn't have an instruction manual? Well, let's stipulate that maybe the Torah, as we call it in Judaism and the Old Testament, as Christians call it. Let's stipulate maybe it's not perfect, but it provides what's known as a calibration. It allows you, as a scientist, we talk about how do you know when you go down to Starbucks and you buy a pound of coffee? How do you know you're getting a pound of coffee? You don't have a scale right there. And even if you did, how do you know

that scale is right? Maybe the scale is off too. You have to calib. values, metric values, things you measure, why don't you have a calibration standard for how you live your life? And so I started to dive into it. And so for me, the Torah, the Old Testament is as full of not only 10 commandments, but 613 commandments. And I don't know if God exists. I can't say that. I always say I never engage in discussions about proving God's existence or, you know, but what you can do is speculate if God exists and you live by a certain code. I don't care what that code is, except that you can't generate it yourself. Nobody can say that they're capable for the first time in 7 billion people that are alive right now and the

100 billion that came before us. You know, 100 billion people have lived on Earth before you and me, Danny, that you're the first person who ever came up with the code of, no, it's just selfishness. It's narcissism. But you can approach an existing text, the Koran, the New Testament, the old whatever you want or the Bhagavad Gita. I don't care. But as long as you say, I'm comparing and assaying, testing, calibrating, I think that you're on a right path. So for me, it happens to be the Torah, but for other people, it could be anything else. And I think that the point is to not be without these questions of where do you get your values, the very question you asked me.

So let me get this right. 9-11 happens. And in the aftermath, was it like the next day you pulled up the Torah? it a process? What was that like of going through the tragedy and then finding religion as a source for your own sanity or help? What would you say? Yeah. So it was it was of course known to me that that, you know, I was a Jew and and and and that I had biological connections, some cultural connections. You know, one of the, uh, AJ Jacobs, he's a famous writer. He writes, you know, like my family was Jewish in the same way that the Olive Garden is Italian,

you know, like we were culturally Jewish, whatever. But by the same token, I knew that I didn't know that much about it. And after 9-11, I realized that I only knew what Jews know about. Most Jews only, even those that had bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvids. They only, they really only think about Judaism in two contexts. One is the Israel-Palestine conflict. And the other is the Holocaust. I'm like, who the hell is going to join this religion?

And we're also forbidden to proselytize. In fact, if you tell me tomorrow, you want to, you know, have, you want to, you want to become a Jew. I don't believe you are Jewish, right? So you want to become a Jew. And I say, okay, Danny, you know, there's a little surgery. We have to do it. We'll get past that. We'll talk about that later.

You get some Anashevitz. You'll be okay. Actually, I'm supposed to tell you no. Sorry, can't join. Not because we're better than you or superior, just because the mission of the Jews has sometimes been a suicide. mission, that the Jews have had a mission from God, Eli Wiesel called often a suicide mission. And we've been, you know, discriminated again. I'm not saying this for like pity or anything like.

It's just a truth. In human history, there's no hatred more enduring than anti-Semitism. There's no hatred older than anti-Semitism and so forth. And, you know, and also, you know, the notion that for some reason that someone's just going to join for the benefits means that we, there are no benefits. So we forbid proselytizing. So I'll never proselytize about my religion, which I like about it. I like religions that don't proselytize because who wants to change your religion?

But anyway, but I realize I only know about these negative things. Why don't I know about any of the positive things? There's a whole universe of positive things about Judaism that people, even Jews get turned off to because of the Holocaust, because of Palestine, because they learn that you're supposed to stone your kids or like adulterers or. or do all the, and it's just out of ignorance. I literally talked to the most prominent Jewish atheist in the world this week was a cosmologist. His name is Lawrence Krauss.

He's not Jewish. I mean, he's biologically Jewish. And he brought up, oh, I don't, you know, how can you think of a book that talks about stoning your kids? And I'm like, Lawrence, this is like something that you learned at age 12, cause you to hate the Bible and hate the Torah. And now you just use that for the remaining 50 years of your life as a reason not to go to synagogue or not to keep a commandment. or do whatever. And that's fine. I'm not going to proselytize to a Jew either. But the reason is it's very subtle. Most people would not accept. You know, if you get advice on podcasting Danny, you know, from Tim Ferriss, you're going to listen to it. If you get it from my 10 year old,

you might not listen so carefully because he just doesn't know that much. He thinks like, you put it out there and you get a million likes and follows and reviews on iTunes, which everybody should do right now on Danny's podcasts. But you wouldn't take the advice of a 12-year-old when it comes to podcasting. So why do you take the advice from a 12-year-old, i.e., your former self, when it comes to religion? And so I started to think about this just much more deeply in the same way that I tried to approach my science. And I found that they could be reconciled and that there was this huge tradition that I had basically just thrown away this beautiful gift. And again, I call myself a practicing agnostic. I don't claim to believe with full faith as some of my

friends, my rabbi, et cetera, do. But it's a path. But it's a path. and it should always be progressing. And I think if you can get 1% better a day and losing weight and reading books and stuff like we all talk about, you know, the five people that surround you, you know, maybe one of those could be your spiritual dimension. And that's what I try and do. You've raised a couple of interesting things about your fellow scientists in the community. One, you said earlier that Andrew Lang saw in you a curiosity that maybe other scientists.

didn't have. And that struck me because that was really confusing. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that. And then the other thing is scientists not being religious. And there's a juxtaposition of that. But you are able to hold both together, science and religion as both useful. So take that wherever you would like to take that. Yeah. Let's start with the first one. So when you think about a scientist, you should think about essentially like a child. Like, children have this curiosity. Typically, they're inquisitive. They, you know, they're kind of temperamental.

And, you know, they have these wonderful, delightful, mysterious, and they're just like, they smile more often. They laugh more often than adults. They've got all these wonderful traits. But like scientists, children also get jealous. They're petty. They squabble. They don't share their toys.

They, you know, they're indifferent to criticism. And most of us, I will say, we don't do a very good job at explaining what we do to the general public, which I think of as a moral. I joke about it, but I'm half joking, half serious. I feel like you, well, you live in New York, but, you know, and I grew up there as a product of the state university educational system all the way up to high school. You know, I benefited from taxpayer money. Taxpayers paid me to study what I would do for free. Don't tell my boss Gavin Newsom that right now, please, anybody who's listening. But therefore, I have a moral obligation to give back.

And how do I give back? Do I take them, you know, and put them into a rocket and send them into space or put them in a particle accelerator and Brookhaven National Lab? No, I can't do that. But I can share in words they can understand in demonstrations that they can appreciate some of the cutting-edge research that my colleagues and I are doing. But most scientists don't feel that obligation. They feel, A, it's too hard.

It's not part of their ability. The old joke about, you know, they're just not outgoing. Like, the old joke is, you know, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? He looks at your shoes when he talks to, you know, instead of his own. You know, it is true. And I say, well, that's hard, right? It's hard to learn how to speak, you know. But I guess you were born learning, you know, knowing quantum electrodynamics and general relativistic perturbation theory, right?

No, no, no, I had to learn that. I'm like, was that easy? No, it was very hard. Okay. So then why don't you spend like an hour a week developing the soft skills of persuasion, of motivation, of salesmanship, salespersonship, whatever you want to say? Typically, they won't do that. They find that diminished in their esteem that a good scientist shouldn't really do that.

Another finger puppet I have here for the YouTube subscribers, Danny Miranda on YouTube is Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a renowned scientist. Brilliant had many, many contributions, worked at NASA. He was not admitted into the National Academy of Sciences, which is the most prestigious organization of scientists on Earth, in my opinion, second only maybe to the cohort of Nobel Prize winners, perhaps. But almost everyone who is a Nobel Prize winner was already a member of the National Academy of Sciences. They denied him entry because, oh, well, he's doing outreach or he's doing, they, A, ignored his contributions to actual scientific discovery. and B, they trivialized and minimized his contributions. Now, that same academy, the National Academy of Sciences, over 90% of its members do not actively believe in God.

So that is in complete contradiction to the way things were in Galileo's time, in Newton's time. Everybody believed in God. Everyone acted, practiced as a religious person. but for me, the question of what does it mean to believe is actually, you know, kind of not appropriate in science. In science, we don't talk about things that we believe in. I have a video on my YouTube channel where I say, I don't believe in gravity. I don't believe in evolution. I don't believe the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. No, I have evidence for those. All those. And extreme forms of evidence come most beautifully from most.

multiple perspectives. That's the true diversity of science. When you get a climatologist and a paleontologist and a geologist and a physicist, and we all agree on what's happening with a global temperature. Let's just use that as an example. You'll have, or, you know, nuclear physics. We have evidence from the Big Bang to a particle accelerator, not far from where you're located. That's amazing. You get completely different aspects and perspectives. Now, in religion, by contrast, you are expected to accept things on faith, although some people do try to prove God's existence or prove God doesn't exist. Those are really fools errands, because you cannot really essentially rule out the existence of God, nor can you prove him. And I think it's simpler

to prove that you can't prove God exist than to prove that you can't prove that God doesn't exist by saying that, you know, essentially the, you know, one of the, one of the proofs, if you will, is that, you know, God could make you think that you don't believe in him. You know, that's one way to refute it. So it's not a question of belief. It's a question of evidence. Now, that being said, I think it's perfectly acceptable to try to look for evidence of a scriptural or faith-based claim.

In other words, if there's something that can, con, con, contradicts physical evidence, you know, evidence in the physical world, in the archaeological record, you know, those things are completely fair game for scientists to investigate. And I enjoy that. And I actually find that to be something I think if God exists, which I always have to say, I don't think he would be displeased with that. In fact, I always point out, and I did to Lawrence Krause, again, he's one of the most prominent atheists in the world, happens to be born Jewish. And he wrote this book

that I'm holding up here called The Universe from Nothing. The afterward is written by someone I'm sure you've heard of called Richard Dawkins. He's a great get. If you can ever get him on your podcast, let me know. Maybe he'll come on mine.

But Richard Dawkins is most prominent. He created the word meme, the concept of the meme. Okay. So a prominent guy, right? Lawrence Krauss, who's second only to Richard Dawkins, he didn't know the etymology of the word Israel, which is like,

kind of an important word in Judaism. And yet he criticizes Jews and Israel all the time. And he's a friend of mine. But I said it means struggles against God. In other words, the word Israel means fights with God. In contrast to Islam, which, you know, means submits to God. And there's virtues of different ones. But Israel, to me, as a scientist, means I'm always wrestling with the notion.

Does God exist? And if he does again, does he believe in me? Not do I believe in him. I think that's kind of more of a childish question. Does he believe in me? Break that down for me. What does that mean? So I think that there are universal values spring from the notion that if God exists.

Again, I'll always say that. He has common sense. In other words, if you like have to eat a piece of pork in my religion, someone puts a gun to your head and says, if you don't eat this shrimp cocktail, you know, I'm going to blow your brains out. then I think it's okay to eat that piece of shrimp cocktail, even though I don't eat any fish of any kind. I love fish, so I don't eat them, but I hate cows. So I said, God has common sense.

So if you live in accordance, let's say you live, but that's why that's the whole point of having a calibration standard. You ever see these old-fashioned balance beam, you know, scales that you weigh stuff on that's like a pivot and two pans on the side and one goes up and one goes down, depending on which one is that. So that's called a scale or balance. To balance it, you have to have something that you know the weight of, i.e. a calibration. So you take a pound of something that you know, and it doesn't matter if it's a pound of feathers or a pound of gold. And you compare that to the pound of something else that's claimed to be that. Again, for me, the Torah is that calibration source, that known weight that the guy takes out when he go to the butcher shop or whatever and puts on the pan to counterbalance what you're measuring.

And from the departure of the scale up or down, you derive. which one and by how much those two standards are differing from one another. From my perspective, I use the Torah, which is the Old Testament, the name that Jews call the Old Testament. I use those commandments supplemented by another, the second holiest book is called the Talmud. And it's no puzzle to me why most people can't read the Bible. You can't really understand that the Old Testament, at least the Old Testament, without this commentary. And the commentary comes in the form of this Talmud. It's kind of like, The hyperlinks, you know, you're reading something and you click on this link in Wikipedia.

Like, you can't really understand the subject of Wikipedia article, just reading the Wikipedia. You have to go on the references. That's what the tomid is. It supplements that for me, those in combination provide the richness that at least I can assay, I can assay, which means to compare. So an assay is an old-fashioned guy who would take, so you'd come into his, to a jewelry shop, Danny. You say, oh, here's a piece of gold. Give me a thousand shekels.

or a thousand lira, whatever. And the guy says, okay, fine. And he takes a piece of stone that's completely worthless. It's just like some rock slate. And he takes the gold that you claim is gold and rubs it. He rubs something purportedly very valuable on something that's value less, except for the fact that it reveals hidden value latent in what is being claimed. So for me, that assay stone is the Torah.

And I can compare how I live. And people can use the Koran or the New Testament. I don't care. As long as you're not so haughty, arrogant, et cetera, narcissistic, I can come up with that on my own. I'm better than everyone that came before me and I am self-generating my rules. And I'm even getting them from Darwinism.

You know, because it's survival of the fit. No, and you're not. You're just making it up because it's easy because you don't want the obligation of answering to something or someone. Who I agree may not exist. But the important thing is to strive as if they might exist. And in so doing, you'll live in accordance that God would believe in you if he exists. Do you think prior to 2001, you were living with your own set of standards and values?

Definitely. Yeah. I was doing things. And again, I wasn't like doing, I've never done a drug. I've never, you know, gotten like hammered except for my 21st birthday. Again, my son's going to listen to this. You know, I wasn't promiscuous or did anything like that. But I would do things that I wouldn't do now. Let me give you an example, Danny. I don't know where you bought the microphone. You probably brought it on some online outlet, maybe. There's a law. Amazon. Amazon. Okay, fine. So that's perfect. Imagine if before you bought it, you want to try it out. So you go down to B&H or whatever they have out there. What are the crazy Eddie? They don't have that anymore. Anyway, what are the stores they have out there? Fries. Best Buy. So Best Buy is a microphone. But Danny, you're going to spend, was it $299, $2.89, something like that. Almost $300, $300.

with tax for an SM7B short. I don't want to spend that much money. I don't make that much from podcasting. Let me go down to Best Buy. Let me try it out and see how it sounds. Those awesome headphones that you're wearing. Let me try them out because I'm going to buy it. That's illegal in the according to the Torah, according to the Talmud.

Because you're going to go there and you know for certain if you're going to buy, you might not buy it. But if you buy it, you're not going to buy it there because they charge a lot more than Amazon. almost everybody knows that. You'll get a day later or whatever. Because what you're doing is you're committing, you're violating the Seventh Commandment. You're actually stealing.

You don't realize it. We don't think about it as stealing. But you are taking the stores time, their electricity, their inventory. Even if you don't talk to any, I don't want to talk to you, going and try, oh, I'm by myself. You still are using them.

You're a user. I'm not saying you're doing this, by the way, I believe that you are of a, upstanding moral character. But what I'm saying is, that's just an example. Now, imagine if you are sensitive to that as you are, I have daughters too. So now, like, I'm a normal guy. You know, sometimes I look at other women and whatever, but that is, in fact, in a sense, you're kind of like stealing from that woman. Like you're utilizing her beauty or whatever. Like, whatever, it's normal. I'm not, I'm not criticizing it. I don't want to sound like totally crazy because I'm not

perfect at doing this either. The point is not to not do it, but to at least think about it. Think about the consequences of your actions. Another great line is is about a commandment against gossip, not gossip in the sense of telling lies. That's forbidden. You shall not bear false witness. So it's already assumed you're not going to tell a lie about, you know, Danny's actually stole that microphone. But, but saying like, Danny got that microphone. That's really, that's an expensive microphone. You know, wow, he must be doing really well. And, oh, yeah, Tom Billion. And he had on and he had on the comment. and Samir and oh man this guy's like he's he's getting kind of too big for anyway the point is

because they say it's as hard to to retract evil speech lachan hurrah in Hebrew as gossip it's as hard to do that that there's a parable about a man and he goes to his rabbi about whom he said some gossip says rabbi I feel guilty I want you to to forgive me for telling gossip about you the rabbi says sure get me a pillow with feathers in it guys what the heck fine i'll get you pillows here's a feather pillow go to take a nap i guess you now you're going to rest easy right was no no no last thing i want you to do is cut the pillow open all right fine god cuts the pillow open wind blows well it goes now pick up all the feathers and you'll be forgiven in other words your words the word for word in hebrew danny is the same as the word for thing words are things

and we as human beings you as a podcaster your words are causing actions to take place in the universe. They sometimes are positive. They are sometimes neutral. I don't think you do anything negative. But to think of a word as a thing that enact, what else do human beings have? Animals, yeah, dogs can bark and do stuff. No, no, no. Homosapient means man that knows. It means a human that knows that he knows. He has the power that his words can control literally life and death. The future can affect the way we look at the past. Judaism made me think about that. So no, I, liken myself to somebody who was like kind of, you know, going through a museum with, you know, thick sunglasses and oven mitts on. Not that I was bad. Like that's not bad. I just wasn't

appreciating the moral dimension that life could offer me. And it's actually given me even greater appreciation as as a scientist, which sounds incongruous, doesn't it? Because scientists aren't supposed to be really no, because it makes me appreciate the miraculous nature for lack of a better world, word of our existence. And to do something and to assume that there's no ultimate purpose or meaning or guiding, you know, force of the universe, you know, is maybe true, but it doesn't mean that I can't kind of rail against it and try to understand as close as I can to whatever we mean by understanding the so-called mind of God. When you said words are things, it really hit me. And it's really true because if you have words that convince you to take a certain action,

it could also convince someone else to take a certain action. And the power of our words is so often downplayed. And I'm curious when you realize that, did it influence you to start a podcast or start talking to people? How do you get that idea to put yourself out there as a scientist? And did it have anything to do with words or things and influence it? people on that level. Yeah, definitely. That's very perceptive. So I started to think about what kind of conversations you have to have and what kind of conversations you want to have.

And in my job, again, my, so the reason that I don't want to denigrate my other scientists who might not have this like addiction to curiosity, because it is an addiction. I actually talk with Dr. Judd Brewer, who is a famous addiction psychologist at Brown University, where I went, but he wasn't there when he's younger than me, I think. And he talks about to overcome, you know, weight loss and smoking and drug, cocaine, that actually one of the most powerful tools is a meditative approach that's based on curiosity and analytic approach to like, why am I hungry?

Did something trigger it? A lot of the meditative stuff that people of your audience are certainly familiar with. So curiosity is actually addictive. And so I don't really view that as like, oh, I'm so great. I'm addicted. I'm addicted to curiosity. It could be addicted to worst things.

But in this sense, so my colleagues, they might be better at doing the things they have to do than I am. In other words, sometimes I need to talk to a contractor about getting diesel fuel up to 17,500 feet above sea level on a mountaintop in the Andes Mountains in Chile. Or I have to talk about getting a graduate student, a flight home from that same place in Chile because there's a global pandemic and like her father's calling me and is, you know, and it's almost never.

I almost never am like thinking about like Newton's laws of motion and like quantum mechanics. It's almost a minuscule part of my job. It's how do I get funding? How do I get a graduate student? How do I get a postdoc to apply? How do I get this paper accepted for publication in this journal where the editor hates my guy? That's what a scientist does. And that's very mundane.

And it has a lot of things that I just don't care for. So I started to realize, well, instead of those conversations that I have to have, I want to have. And with people like you and people like the guests I've had on nine Nobel Prize winners, three billionaires, four astronauts, including one while she was floating around on the space station. I don't think I could have done that, you know, just even as the, you know, Professor Chancellor's Professor of Physics that I am. I think I needed to have some kind of a vehicle for it.

And it was funny because, you know, my wife is very, she doesn't understand exactly like what the, you know, kind of attraction of podcasting is, although she listens to some of my podcast, but other ones too. And, you know, like, do you ever like have conversations with James Altoucher? Do you ever have conversations that you guys don't record? I don't care. Like, I don't, I don't care what he's like off the, like, this is who he is. It's part of who we are as communicators. And that's part of who you are, right?

There is a sort of addictive quality to talking to people that are spending this time with you. I'm not on my phone. I'm not like calling up and getting concrete or, you know, whatever. I'm just focusing on this connection so that it can be a force multiplier and have leverage out into the grander universe. So, yes, I think that words are the most powerful. tools. And I think that that can even be, you know, thought of as as the unique attribute of man.

You know that humans share 99.9% of our chromosomes with chimpanzees. We share like 54% with fruit flies. I mean, there's nothing unique about our DNA. We have the same, you know, four-letter sequence that any creature on earth has. And yet it's kind of miraculous that the same ingredients, Danny, that go into a chimpanzee, you're like, is that? 0.1% that's one out of a thousand parts of the human being. That's the only difference in our chromosome. Like somehow that makes a difference. No, there's something unique about us. And it's to be treasured. And I think the guilt that science has sometimes is trivializing it and saying, we're just pure matter. And that's all that matters. And so, yeah, I do think that words are the

most powerful tools. And as an experimental scientist, that's what we do. We make and build better tools to do what Galileo said, to measure what is measurable and to make measurable what is not. I think that's a beautiful way to think about being a scientist. What's the most unique thing about being a human being from your perspective as a scientist? Well, I think that the most vivid illustration of what a scientist is, to me, comes from the Russian language. In Russian, the word scientist means, translates to someone who has, was taught. In other words, intrinsic to the name is this person was taught. So that to me demonstrates the two obligations of a scientist to be a good student, to be coachable, to be teachable.

And if you can master that skill of being coached and teach, then there's no limit to what you can achieve. And then two, that you must pay it forward by being a teacher. And you could be a teacher scientifically. You can be a teacher ideologically. You can be a teacher biologically. I don't care. The point is that that is the essence of the human being. And so for me, and this guided me on this quest that I started to write my second book, which is coming out in September called Think like a Nobel Prize winner, not to say that we should only emulate Nobel Prize winners, but more to deconstruct the fact that these people that have achieved the highest heights, there's nothing else like the Nobel Prize. It's Sui Generis that they have achieved the highest

tight-standing, and they have the exact same biases, fears, prejudices, flaws as you, who's a podcaster, works in our, you know, what you're doing out there. And what I'm doing here as a professor, but that might make more sense because they're all physics professors, but that they have as much to say to the car salesman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or wherever, as they do to me. And so I distilled, not their knowledge. You can get their knowledge anywhere you look it up on Wikipedia, but you can't get their wisdom and their flaws and their fears. And that's what I want to point out. And the fact that they were authentic and genuine and shared their vulnerabilities with me, that I think made that project almost equal to my first book, losing the Nobel Prize. And I promise I'm going to write

books that don't have the word Nobel Prize. Wait, so tell me about the second book. I'm so curious about it. Because what made you want to write it? And what did you learn from putting your thoughts to words on paper. So I never thought, you know, I always asked my guests on my podcast because of the podcast called Into the Impossible. And it comes from a quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark who said that the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. And that's the name of my podcast.

And I wanted to kind of convey that I never thought I could write a book, let alone two books. And now I've got three or four in the works. because Carl Sagan, again, finger puppet for those watching on YouTube, he said a book is proof that humans can work magic. Because you will have a book from a long dead author. Look, I read Moses every day and I read Seneca and I read Tim Ferriss and I read Jesus. I read that every morning. So like people are like, oh, you're some, you know, techno wizard scientist. And yeah, I can, I can all my own. I can, I can certainly hack code and then I can build. really super cold stuff, almost the edge of comprehension, how cold it is. But I also have much to learn from 3,000 year old, 2,000 year old, thousand year old documents. And so that process for me is

truth that, as Carl Sagan said, books are proof that humans can work magic because you have the voice of this author who may have died millennia ago and he's in your head or she's in your head and you are being influenced and guided to a better version of, as you say, your higher self. I've updated that catchphrase of Carl Sagan. I had his widow and his daughter on the podcast as well. That was a huge honor and treat for me. But I said to them, I said, my update is that a podcast is proof that humans can work magic.

Because now we have not only my voice and my words, but my image, my whatever, and it's recorded it for all time. So, you know, people ask me, why don't you record your own audiobooks? Because like the audiobook for losing the Nobel Prize and the audiobook for Think like a Nobel Prize, you know, they hired somebody. to do it. I could have done it. I would have made an extra $800 or whatever. But it's not, you know, it's not for me. Like I don't need to. There's so much of my voice on the internet. It's going to be there. My kids know plenty of what I have to say. And they don't have to

pay to hear me speak and they still don't listen half the time. So what do you learn from the new project? Well, I learned something that really kind of kicked me off on this on this quest to write this new book. And that was that, actually, some of the fears and flaws and biases that I have, they were worse in people that won the Nobel Prize, which is kind of weird. Like, imagine you win, what do they call it, Audi Award, like Jordan Harbinger is one of the best of Apple podcast. Imagine if like, and you're in the top 1%, at this rate, you're going to be top 0.1%, Jordan's in the top 0.01%. You're going to be there, right?

So you're moving on trajectory. You're cool. But imagine you win that. You're like, I made it. And I asked Jordan this when he came on my show. I said, how did you feel you won the 2018 best podcast? How'd you feel 2019? Because he didn't win it.

And it made me think, like once you get to the promised land, how many baseball, how many times of the Islanders won the Stanley Cup in a row? Like, never? Like they won at once? Right? They never, like almost no team. except for, you know, sometimes, I guess, you know, whatever, whatever team Tom Brady's playing on will win a lot of game. But, but, but no, you don't win every year. The same person doesn't win the Nobel Prize every year.

So once you get to your promised land, where do you go from there? And my last, my first book, losing Nobel Prize kind of brought that out and displayed that the Nobel Prize can be as much of a religion as any practiced in a temple, in a, in a, in a, in a church, mosque, or otherwise. be just as religious as those ceremonies and those endeavors. But I didn't really have any practical takeaway at the end of it. It was kind of like my exploration and my encounter with it, but it's really mostly about cosmology. That book is three chapters about the Nobel Prize and its flaws and how to rectify it. And then nine chapters are about the origin of the universe, the origin of time, my grapplings and wanderings with religion, and then becoming a father and understanding what it feels like to grasp at the golden ring is more important than actually holding it. But then I was like, well, where do we go from there? What advice do you have for the car salesman in Tulsa,

Oklahoma? Well, the point that is coming through this new book, think like a Nobel Prize winner, is that once you get there, you never stop. You'll never be comfortable with where you are. You never get and just achieve pure contentment. You may strive to be content. And you may strive to be content. you're struggling and lifting weights. You never get to when you're like, I'm done. You know, now I'm going to go back to pizza and beer. Like, no, you're always working out. You're always doing something, meditating.

You're like, ah, Nirvana, here we go. Like, you reach it. You might reach it for a millisecond. So here, it's how do you get comfortable in it? So the book was launched by 2017 Nobel Prize winner, Barry Barish. And I said to him, just as a throwaway line. I said, Barry, did you ever when you were younger? Because he was kind of shy when he was younger.

He's in his late 70s now. did you ever suffer when you were a kid from the imposter syndrome, this feeling of inadequacy and fraudulent nature that many scientists have, especially women and minorities, by the way. I found that in my conversations. It's very much endemic in that and we have to do something about that. He said, what do you mean? Did I ever?

He's like, I feel it now worse than ever after I won the Nobel Prize. And Danny, my jaw hit the floor. What are you talking about? You got this golden Nobel Prize. I'm holding up in the camera. You got the highest high. It's the biggest achievement for detecting two black holes, Danny, crashing together, each with the mass 30 times the sun, which weighs a million times or something more than the Earth,

two of these things crashing together at nearly the speed of light, one billion plus light years away. You detected their distortions of spacetime continuum at a level 1,000th or less, one millionth of the diameter of a proton. You're telling me you have imposter syndrome. You did that. You earned it. He said no. Because when you win the Nobel Prize,

you go and pick up your medallion, you go and pick up your share of the $1 million purse, and they say, would you mind signing this logbook that proves and attests that you won your Nobel Prize? And you received your check for a million dollars or some fraction thereof. So you go through it.

and like a good scientist, he's incredibly curious. He took a look through this book. Who's in this book? Oh, I see. Marie Curie, Discoverer of radioactivity is in there. Richard Feynman. He's in there. Oh, wow.

You know, this really, oh, my God. Look at this. Albert Einstein. He's in there. His signature is there. There's almost no documents that have his actual signature, except for this Nobel Prize log. he said I got chills.

I'm getting chills now telling you, Danny, about this story. I said to him, Barry, how can you feel like? He's like, I'm no Einstein. You want to know what? I said, Barry, did you know that Einstein looked up? This is my last finger puppet, I promise. Actually, I got one more, but I'm not going to show that one. This is Isaac Newton.

You know that Einstein worshipped and felt he was an imposter compared to Isaac Newton, invented calculus, invented universal gravitation, invented almost all the ways that we look at optics. And you know what, Barry? I said to him, Isaac Newton had the imposter syndrome too. We know for a fact that he felt tremendously, pathetically inadequate before the almighty Jesus Christ. Because he wrote about it, how disgusting he was compared to Jesus. This is a man whose highest achievement, he said, I'll tell my son Isaac to turn off. He said, my highest achievement was not calculus, not universal gravitation, not the laws of optics. It was dying a virgin like his holiness, Jesus Christ.

So the short story is, if a Nobel Prize winner can feel these emotions and their heroes can feel these emotions, what do we surmise, Danny, that we are normal? That's normal to have this. It's normal to feel like, well, like, you know, I'm going to strive for something. But even if I get there, I'm still going to feel like I don't deserve it. But that's normal. And so it's kind of like, now it's a self-help book for like the Nobel Prize winners. Because almost all of them with one exception, which is interesting to talk about some other time. But there's like one guy who said, I don't feel the imposter syndrome.

Are you kidding me? But the rest of them, they do. And I think it's amazing. And so I think that'll be a service to people. And dealing with things like the spotlight effect or the, you know, impression of privilege and so forth, those will be valuable services. not only to the physicist, you know, graduate student, but to the car salesman who has to learn, how do I collaborate with difficult, highly effective, intelligent people, but maybe not

emotionally intelligent, maybe not as gifted in the soft skills that I prize and value so much. 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 own.

ocean front 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. When you say that we need to do something about women and minorities who are feeling the imposter syndrome specifically, what do you think is the solution there?

So yeah, I was talking with a renowned professor at Princeton University this morning, Joe Dunkley, who she won the Rosalind Franklin Medal and she's won the breakthrough prize. She's an amazingly accomplished professor there. And I was talking to her about what to do because you might think that you're helping this underrepresented community like African American scientist or women's scientist, by saying like help us think of new programs and so forth. And she basically described it as a tax. Like she has to pay a tax that I don't have to pay as a white man or my friend who's the chairman of the president of the National Society of Black Physicist. He has to, you know, pay a tax. He has to Stefan Alexander.

He's coming out with the book. He'd be a great guest for you someday too. He, you know, he's had to achieve incredible out. Now you're asking him, well, like, think of a new program and come up with a metric and a rubric and it's just like, wow, you're giving them all these homework assignments. But in reality, we don't have to do that. So as a white man, I don't have to really deal with that. So what I try to do is say, look, I'm not going to change society, Dan.

I'm not going to make society of 1980, which set the kind of track that we're on now where we had some level of discrimination. I don't like to say that systemic racism. I don't actually believe in that because I don't know that anybody would call themselves racist. And yet they call, if somebody calls somebody else racist, like I'll say to you, I don't know if I'm a great Jew, but if I say like all Jews are bad, like all, no, I don't think that's legitimate. And so, and I think it's unfalsifiable. We can't really, I can't demonstrate that I'm not a racist by only doing and reading books

about anti-racism. So what I do is I look for ways to promote underheard voices, in particular African-Americans, in particular African-American women and, and, and, and physicists of all different genders and orientations. So I like to promote them on the podcast, have them on the books, contribute financially, because it's great to contribute your support, but you know, as well as I do, nothing speaks like, you know, just supporting financially. These are tremendous organizations. They do great work. And then being a mentor and a teacher as part of being a scientist, so volunteering. And so we established programs like that for the Simon's Observatory, where last year during

COVID, all these young kids from historically black colleges and universities, they lost their internship. You know, they just, oh, I'm not the particle accelerators closed. Now you're not, so we, we, we had a bunch of them paid internships, $4,000 for the whole summer. They worked, they got mentorship. Now they're going to go to graduate school. And, and I've had some of them on my podcast. So it's, it's really a thrilling thing to, to be able to participate in that, in that great tradition of, of teaching and also learning from them, too. not only speaking, but listening as well. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the Impossible Tiz Eye, your fearful host.

Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it, depending on your podcast, catcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that only about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that. and for some extra credit. If you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it.

Do it now. Before you forget, let's go back to the episode. You know, that's such a common phrase, like how teachers learn from their students. What have you learned from a student that sticks out in your mind? It's like, whoa, I would never have learned that had it not been for teaching someone else. Yeah, so there's two different ways that a professor at a research university like UC San Diego teaches. One is in front of a classroom with undergraduates. And there, you know, you'll read a book.

You'll be preparing lecture notes and you'll always dig into something much more deeply than you did when you were exposed to it the first time as an undergraduate. And I think that's one type of teaching. And then there's one-on-one mentorship of graduate students who are getting their PhD or master's degree. They're very different. one is much more individual, tailored, one-on-one, much deeper. Like I call my PhD advisor, I did an episode with him that I put out on Father's Day, because he's like my academic father. And I can actually trace my academic heritage, my genealogy,

17 generations back, whereas my biological genetics, I can only trace back like four generations. But anyway, it's just interesting what Wikipedia allows you to do. But then in the classroom, you definitely, learn a lot about how to teach because most people don't know how to teach. And in fact, as a professor, I mean, how much training do you think I get, Danny, to be like to teach in the undergrad, not the graduates? How much education do you think I get in that? In terms of hours or or just like courses or something like so. I would probably take a course every year is what I would

expect. Yeah. So then I've been here 17 years. So I've missed 17 of them because we don't get anything. They put you literally, they say, here's your class, here's your assignment, show up at this time. There's your grade sheet. Here's your TA. Goodbye. How are you supposed to know what to do? You don't. Everyone learns on their own.

So that's one of the chapters in this book. Think like a Nobel Prize winner is with Carl Wyman who won the 2001 Nobel Prize. And then instead of just doing more and more research, he started to think about physics pedagogy. How do you teach physics? Because we just teach it. Usually we teach it by just the same way that we learned it, which is just some guy. scraping a piece of rock and another piece of rock,

you know, or a girl, whatever. And it's just like reading for some book. And that's like totally the same model as 1,000 years ago in northern Italy where we started the conversation. That's what they were doing. There's just some guy. And the only difference was the students didn't like the professor

that could go on strike and the professor wouldn't get paid. Thank God that barbaric process has been eliminated. But no, we never learned. So it's only up to the kind of benevolence of the professor. he or she takes time to learn how to teach. Most of my younger colleagues are much better at it than I am, but I start to look into it when I became a student of flight instruction.

So someday I want to instruct my kids in a little Cessna, a little prop plane. And you have to learn how to be a teacher. And you have to learn what people need to learn something. And you have to learn the flaws and biases that people have. For example, in flying, when we teach flying, the first lesson you get is if the plane starts to stall, which doesn't mean the engine stops, it means that the wings stop developing lift

and the plane is falling out of the sky. Your natural tendency is to pull back on the yoke or on the stick. And that makes the stall worse because you're making the angle of attack much higher and the plane goes worse. And that's how a lot of pilots die. The first lesson you get is push forward and totally counterintuitive.

Go towards the ground when I'm like running out of energy and altitude. So it's overcoming that. So you teach you. it first because one of the ways that you learn is the thing you learn first, you learn best. The thing you learn most recently, you take most recently with you. Things you cannot learn when you're scared. You cannot learn when you're terrified. If I'm yelling at the integral of E to the I pie and negative, like you're just going,

what the hell? I can't learn. Even if you kick my hat, you know, but so you have to know what kind of modalities do students learn best in. And so I've had to study that offline courtesy only of the federal aviation. administration. So hopefully things like this perspective in this chapter that I wrote with my conversation with Carl Wyman will, you know, kind of illuminate that there are new tools, new technologies. And I actually think artificial intelligence is going to really revolutionize what we do as professors, at least in STEM,

science, technology, engineering, and math. And I'm excited about it, but I think it's an existential risk for this thousand-year-old model. And there are very few things in society that last for a thousand years without some almost evolutionary precedent under underlying them, like religion or, you know, culture or law or whatever. Those things only last for thousand years because they have something intrinsically associated with the natural tendency of evolution. So I think there's going to be a lot of disruption, as they say, in education. And I think it's going to come faster than almost anybody thinks. Where's education going? I think, you know, a lot of stuff that you talked about with Tom and that you talked about with Colin and Samir,

you know, this kind of thinking about like what can artificial intelligence, machine learning, and even things like blockchain, what can they do? And you be surprised, like, okay, so we have one of the highest ranked computer science departments in the world here at UC San Diego, affiliated in part with Qualcomm, because the founders of Qualcomm that make all the cell phone chips for almost every mobile device on Earth. The founder of it was a professor here as a friend, Erwin Jacobs. And because of that, we have this great.

So now, wouldn't you think that like a lot of my fellow professors and maybe in computer science, that they'd be investing in Bitcoin or NFTs or anything like that? But you know what? You know how many do? No. I don't know a single person. No, I bought like some, someone made one of my podcasts into an NFT. I was, you know, trying to dabble in buying a half of an ether.

you know, whatever. But why do I do that to get education? Because when you lose that half and even, you know, when it goes down 50% as I did, I bought it the high, kept it at the low. I'm not going to sell this half ether. But the point is, and I had on Michael Saylor, who's like the biggest proponent of Bitcoin, I wanted to bring that to academia. A, because it may be a disruptive technology that we can use to have funding for students, for experiments, for new laboratories and for teaching modality and scholarships. We're not even thinking about it, Danny. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's really paradoxical.

And typically what happens is physics invents the thing and the physicists die poor. So physicists invented the lines of communication that you and I are talking on, fiber optics, telecommunications. They invented the internet. We invented the transistor. That's the screen powered, your computers powered by it. These are all devices in physics,

the laser. Einstein, he died pretty much broke. These Nobel Prize winners, they get a million or a half a million or a third of a minute. They almost always, they're not rich. And so my point is like, why don't we get a little taste? Can I wet my beak, my bK? You know, why can't my colleagues benefit from this technology that they're doing so that it

can be self-sustaining? And my friend and frequent guests, Eric Weinstein has been on the show nine times, ten times. And he's like, you should charge money, a physicist for every email that gets things. All came out of physics. And it could support, you know, a half a cent, according to him per email could support all of physical progress for the next hundred years, plus cut down on spam, because who's going to send out like a billion emails about purple pills, as I seem to get? But nevertheless, it's an idea. I don't know if I'm such a big fan of it. But it's a thought. The point is, we are really poor at doing this, and it's going to sneak up on us. Just as we've missed the wave of all these things before, we're going to miss the wave when you can sit down and talk to

Brian Keating on your podcast or you can sit down and talk to Galileo. You know, I think I'm, I got a healthy ego. I'm no Galileo. Or you can talk to Jesus Christ. Like you can have a podcast with Jesus Christ. I mean, I don't care who you are. That would be interesting conversation. You know, one of the topics people cliche to ask is,

who would you like to interview for your podcast, right? Who's your next dream guest after you got Brian Keating, Danny? I don't know. Well, whoever could be someone who's alive, Barack Obama. Like, chances of him coming on my podcast are pretty small. But with technology that's available right now, I could interview him. I could interview an avatar of him. And so much more so for Galileo, whose words I'm putting into an audiobook, the first in

human history, with a couple of physicists friends next year. So it's going to sneak up. And until scientists realize that most of what academia is, or rather academicians, academicians, realize that a lot of what we're doing is just applying a pedigree, saying, Danny went here, Brian going here. It's a sorting mechanism. It's lazy. We're just like making it easy for Procter and Gamble to, oh, I should hire, you know, Brian

because he went to Brown, you know, rather than someone else who went to Colgate. I don't know. The point being, if we've benefited too long and the tuitions and the student loan, it's gotten so out of control. People graduate $200,000 in debt for like a film degree or, you know, whatever. I like film. But the point is we have to. start thinking these terms. And people like Michael Saylor, by the way, he's establishing a free

university, only teaching STEM courses called Sailor Academy. And it's going to completely destroy, it's going to have the same course content. Like, you can learn Maxwell's equations from Brian Keating, or you can learn from someone else teaching from India. And they speak English. So you're going to learn from them. And they'll get paid some amount and probably pay them in Bitcoin. So it's going to be a win-win on that. And it's just going to eat traditional academia alive. Yeah. You raised such an interesting point about podcasting with your heroes because GPT3 has arrived where you can basically have a conversation with Obama and Galileo talking to each other and what they would say to each other and how crazy is that? So when that actually becomes a podcast of something that

could happen, I mean, it's not that far away and it's not that ridiculous and it's very exciting. Yeah, one of my friends who has a podcast, I'm not going to say who it is because it might embarrass him, but he took TPT3 and then he put in all of his guests and he put in all of his transcripts. And he said, like, make a list of all these people and just different words and a word cloud and who I should invite next. And it was coming up with like really big names, okay, but people that were accessible. It wasn't like Barack Obama. It was like this five star admiral, whatever. I don't even know what I'm saying.

And then he was like, well, let me push it a little bit further. Let me say like, let me just let me see like what kind of questions. what I asked, Mark Cuban, well, let's just say, because I don't think he's going to come on this guy's show. And then he's like,

well, what if I go, like, what if I go, what do I just have it do the interview? Like, write my questions, and then his answer,

it's just like, yeah, it could be totally nuts. And then you combine that with like, really good augmented reality, like just glasses, like cool glasses,

not like this Oculus that I have, but like, you know, shades. And like, Galeo's in the room with you and you're doing like, the most boring,

inclined plane expanse, but you're with Galileo, or you're with, you know, I don't care. You're learning singing lessons from lupa deo lupa, whatever. I don't know. Arianna, I'm going to say that. Yeah. Beyonce, right? You're doing dance lessons and your sync. But like, you're learning about, like, some of these rhythms were influenced by, you know,

African Bambata. And she's just like, whatever. You go into, like, it's just, it's so much more richness now. And it's all because of this network effect. And people don't appreciate the, as you brought up, Obama talking to, Galileo is even more interesting than me talking to Obama or me talking to Galilee. And that's called the network effect. So, Danny, if you know five people, like, there's actually more like, there's like 12 different

pairs of combinations between those five people. Because, like, you know one, two, three, four, and five. And then they know one, two, three, four, and five. But you're one, so you can't count. Anyway, you go through the math. And it grows as a square of the number of people in your set. That's basically the way Facebook works. So you can be connected to somebody who's connected to a connection of a connection

of the connect. And it grows like a billion square. It is an enormous number. Compounding. It can compound exactly. And it grows faster than linear. And anything goes faster than linear, the human mind gets deceived by. We can't Peter Diamandis talked about this. You know, it's the deception of the exponential growth. So I think it's going to be, you know, I don't think it's right around the corner like we're riding and flying cars and but we're already starting to see some of it. As I said, I think there are things with like the NFT could be very interesting in the context of prizes and awards or in science, it's very important to get there first to make the first discovery of some effect. But then it's not peer reviewed. But then you're

waiting for it to get peer reviewed. Somebody steals the idea and this happened or publicizes it to the press and leaks it. And then the journal won't publish it. This happens. It's all the kind of BS that happens in academia. But if you made some kind of a token that can't be fungible, there are a lot of possibility and nobody's thinking about it. So there's a ton of opportunity for young energetic people to think creatively to use these tools that are older, stodgy or professors like me are just like not inclined or too sclerotic to deal with. It's going to be an exciting, exciting world.

And you're definitely not a stodgy professor because you're right on the cutting edge of everything that's going on, which is certainly very exciting. But we're getting near in our time. and I'd love to just get a final piece of party wisdom from you to someone pursuing the highest version of themselves, whether that's academically, mentally, spiritually, physically, whatever it may be. What lesson or what words of wisdom do you have for someone pursuing the highest version of themselves?

Yeah, that's a great question. So in my next book, Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, I talk a lot about really these two different sides of things where people will say, follow your passion. You know, you've probably heard that before. I think that's kind of crappy advice. It's just a platitude. It's just gets them out of, gets them out of the obligation of giving some piece of wisdom. You know, what if you're passionate about, like, you know, frying ants with a, with a magnifying guy, I don't want you to follow your passion. Passion is something that's kind of externally imposed upon you. And in academia, I see that a lot. academics is where you first have to get in,

get good grades in high school. So you can get to a good college and you get a good college. Then you want to get into a good graduate school. The same process, you got to take SATs, GREs, L, Sats, M-Cats, all these different tests. You're being graded, externally validated. Then you get to be a postdoc and you want to get a faculty position.

You get faculty. You want to get tenure. You want to get a tenure. You want to get a chair perfectly. You want to be a Nobel Prize winner. And then there's nowhere to go. Right. So how do you deal with that?

Well, I think the way to deal with that is the following. your passion is kind of letting other people external to you define your goals and your settings. It's saying like in you, I value your passion. But that's not extrinsic. It's not intrinsic. For me, what I always say I want to do is there are things in life, Danny, that are puzzles, like a Rubik's Cube, a crossword puzzle, a homework problem. Those are things that might have solutions, but you might not be smart enough, capable enough, athletic enough, whatever. You might not be able to do it or solve it or win it, but somebody can. Then there are things that are mysteries that nobody really knows if there's even an answer. That's a lot about what graduate school is

like. Like undergraduate, there's homework problems. You expect to be solved. And there might not even be a solution. Those are mysteries. I think in life, what I want to do is convert as many mysteries into puzzles in the limited amount of capital, of curiosity, of the rocket fuel, of self-motivation that I think comes from that internal compass, not being defined externally. So I hope I can continue to do that. And as I say, as my tagline is ABC, always be curious because that's the type of rocket fuel that can ignite the incipant potential that may have been started with a spark of passion, but it's the rocket fuel that actually get you to the stars. Always be curious. What a beautiful tagline. What a beautiful way to wrap this conversation.

out, where can people find more from you? I'm pretty active on Twitter at DR. Brian Keating, B-R-I-N-K-A-N-K-A-T-I-N-G. I have a website, Brian Keating.com. If you sign up, you get life lessons from the world's smartest billionaire, Jim Simons, the proprietor of an extremely large hedge fund, not far from you on Long Island. And I send out weekly emails that I call Magic Mondays, where you get a memory and appearance, like I'll put this appearance in there, a genius invention or product or something I'm curious about, something, an image, a picture from around the universe, and then a conversation,

one of my podcasts. That's my Monday Magic inspired by Arthur C. Clark, who said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So yeah, website. And then books are available online on Amazon. And podcast is Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. into the impossible, an audio only. You are everywhere, my friend, and we'll put that all below.

Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for the conversation. I really appreciate it. And I just want to recommend that people do sign up and go to Brian Keating.com and put Miranda as your last name. I don't care what you can use your real first name, but put Miranda, unless your first name is Danny Miranda, so then use some other name.

I will send a meteorite to the first 10 people that sign up for the mailing list. This is an actual 4.3 billion-year-old piece of space rock from the origin of our solar system. And it's actually the villain of my book, losing the Nobel Prize. So you can see that here. I will send to the first 10 people who sign up. But that is your last name at Brian Keating.com. You have to live in the U.S. because my shipper does not supply these. It's funny, they came from outer space, but you think that they can only send it to U.S.

post offices or APO boxes. So please do that, and I can stay in touch with this beautiful universe that you've created, Danny. Congratulations on all your wonderful success. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com.

only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. U-N. Must be 21 to enter.