Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Hakeem Oluseyi: Quantum Leaps! ​(#216)

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Hakeem Oluseyi is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, inventor, educator, science communicator, author, actor, veteran, and humanitarian. Oluseyi was named a Visiting Robinson Professor at George Mason University in 2021, a distinction by which the university recognizes outstanding faculty. In 2021, he published an autobiography titled: A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars co-authored with Joshua Horwitz. His best known scientific contributions are research on the transfer of mass and energy through the Sun's atmosphere; the development of space-borne observatories for studying astrophysical plasmas and dark energy; and the development of transformative technologies in ultraviolet optics, detectors, computer chips, and ion propulsion. Hakeem Is the president elect of the National Society of Black Physicists: https://nsbp.org/page/officers Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. All 33 Chairs. My All33 Chair is the ideal chair for all of us ‘knowledge workers’ suffering through unending Zoom calls. Sitting still is bad for you. All33 chairs are my choice because they allow your pelvis to move the way it does while you walk — so all 33 vertebrae align into perfect posture. The result? Better breathing, better blood flow, and relief from pain. It’s crazy what you can do when you set your body to it. To get $100 off your order, visit https://all33.com/impossible Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:58 Judging the Book By Its' Cover 00:08:47 Why study the sun? It's so close! What makes observing it so diificult? 00:12:04 Hakeem's first space shot 00:17:26 Competition in Science - Hakeem V SOHO 00:20:41 The world of cutthroat competition in science! 00:30:12 The moral obligation for public science communication. 00:36:07 Art Walker and the importance of mentorship. Pioneering Black scientists. 00:49:47 About drugs and Hakeem's upbringing. 01:01:38 Would you change anything in your past if you could? 01:03:46 What would you put in a time capsule that would last a billion years? 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Neil deGrasse Tyson https://youtu.be/1kxgK6J4S5Y Michio Kaku: https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Michael Saylor: https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating Edited by Stuart Volkow Music:  Yeti Tears Miguel Tully - www.facebook.com/yetitears/ Theo Ryan - http://the-omusic.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Looking back at my boyhood in the 1970s, I see a frightened child who lived like a feral animal, surviving day by day on hustle and hope. I had a different nickname in those days. They called me the professor, because by the time I was 10 years old, I was reading every book I could get my hands on. If anyone had told me that I'd grow up to be an actual professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town, I wouldn't have believed them.

In my hood, that kind of daydreaming was more likely to get you jacked than help you find your next meal or a safe place to sleep indoors. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please help. And we are here today with a true inspiration. A man, I have wanted on this podcast for years and doubled down on last year during the pandemic. My audience was so intent and intense about getting on today's guest, who is Hakeem Olochayi, who is, let me read this quick biography. This could take up most of the hour.

He's an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, inventor, educator, science communicator, author, actor, veteran, humanitarian. He's named a visiting Robinson professor at George Mason University, which recognized outstanding faculty in 2021. He published an autobiography that we're going to be talking about, a quantum life. My unlikely journey from the street to the stars. His best known scientific contributions are on the transfer of mass and energy in the sun's atmosphere.

The development of spaceborne observatories playing a role in WST. We're going to talk about that. Transforming technologies. He's got at least three patents that I read, and we're going to go over those. Iron propulsion. Computer chips. Optics. Okay, Hakeem, my first question, why are you doing this interview?

Do you have any time left in your freaking calendar to do an interview with someone so pointless as me? Oh, man. are you kidding me? Pointless, not at all. I absolutely have a lot of time for this. Dude, listen, I hacked the system, sir. That's why I have time. You don't do what everybody tells you. So when I was at Berkeley as a postdoc, there was a famous story about the Berkeley postdocs. And what happened allegedly was that there was this European postdoc and this American postdoc. They're walking down the street and some guy comes up and pulls a gun. He says, give me your wallet. And the American guy hands over his wallet immediately.

And the European guy goes, no, you can't have my wallet. And the guy was like, what? And you're going to give me your wallet? He's like, no, you better run. And the guy runs. And so the European guy turns to the America guy and says, look, man, you can't give your wallet to every guy who shows up with a gun. You'll be broke.

I got that impression once from Jim Simons, who's the patron of our Simon's Observatory, Simon's Array, mathematician, codebreaker, philanthropist. And once I was hosting a charity fundraiser for his philanthropy called Math for America. It's a great charity. And then there was this famous scientist who happens to be here in San Diego. And he was hitting him up for money for his own charity. So this guy's hitting up Jim Simons for a charity of his own at Jim Simon's own charity fundraiser that I was headlining. And then afterwards, Jim looks at me and he goes, if I gave away a dollars, every person who told me they were a genius, I'd be broke.

The guy's worth like $10 billion. So, yeah, you can't, yeah, you got to be vigilant. You got to be vigilant. All right, Hakeem, I told you before we started that we were going to begin with the question that you're never supposed to answer. You're never supposed to ask, which is, which are the thing you're never supposed to do, which is to sit in judgment of a book by its cover. I love to ask.

You got behind you. I listened to it on audio, on audio book here. I got the opening. Here we go. I loved it. It was narrated by today's guest, Hakeem. And Hakeem, where did you get the title? A Quantum Life, My Journey from the Streets to the Stars. What does that mean? And what is that? Who is that young man on the front? Is that you? It's meant to represent me because I meant to represent, you know, a cross-section of humanity, right? A story, right? My story is a story of humans that occurs.

A quantum life. So, man, I went through so many titles. the quantum here has to do with a couple of ideas, right? One of them is the idea of initial conditions determining the full trajectory in classical physics, but only determining the probabilities of outcomes in quantum physics. So when we're all born, we have, you know, certain probabilities of where we're going to end up. And you know what? You know, I think of it almost like an eigenvalue problem, right?

like the time-independent trod-injury equation, each human can be represented as a vector in this multi-dimensional space, right? That has to do with identity. So, you know, are you rich or poor? Are you, you know, within there, you know, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, you know, all these things, right? And then the situation that we put you in in quantum mechanics,

we call that the Hamiltonian, right? So you're left, you know, that matrix is life, a society, right, that you're placed in. So, you know, you can calculate the probabilities of certain outcomes, right? We don't actually do that, but, you know, if you look at certain life outcomes, they quite often will be a strong function of zip code. Right? Yeah. And initial conditions, right?

So, you know, so that's what I was representing there. And so my case is so extreme that I compare it to quantum tunneling as well. right you know breaking through this barrier that just shouldn't be that shouldn't be broken to super and so my unlikely journey from the street to the stars is basically about my journey from living my you know my first four years were like you know good for two parent household you know older sister community that generations of my family had grown up in in east new orleans great then my parents divorced and the next decade for me was pretty bad to say the least, but at the same time, you know, certain passions were engendered in me.

And so what makes my story so unlikely is what I was drawn to and what I was drawn into. But, you know, despite that, I was able to still achieve what I've achieved. And so the thing about it for me is, you know, I'm not the only person who's done the things that I've done. And how that impacts a person's life and a person's psyche, again, will depend on their zip code. So where I'm from, people will say, oh, you know, that thing isn't for me. Oh, now I'm disqualified because I've done these things. Right. But, you know, I've gotten to know you guys.

All you, I got to know the CEOs, the heads of state, you know, all over the world, the government engineers. And I can't tell you how many times I tell a little bit about my story. and then one of you squeaky, kick, he looked at cats, pulled me to the sign and go, let me tell you about me. I've never told anyone this. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's pretty provocative because, you know, when I think about that, I naturally, because I'm a physicist, I have that bias, I thought of like a path integral. I thought of a Feynman path integral or, you know, like the path was unlikely, right?

And path has a, has a connotation to us, right? I like that. you seek out, you know, kind of the, the path that maximizes or minimizes the action. And there's a lot of action in this book. We're going to talk about the book. The book has tons of action, both in the physics sense, et cetera. But I want to take a big step back. And I want to, I want to my audience to learn about your fascination with the sun and starting off with the sun, the sun as a star. And then we'll get into new stars, old stars, rather, when it comes to JDBST. But I want to talk about, first of all, most of my audience is familiar with theorists,

because I have a lot of theorists, a lot of Nobel Prize winners come on. They're theorists. Not so many experimentalists, hardware builders, rocket scientists, literally like yourself. So tell me, first of all, what is there to know about the sun? The sun is the closest star. You know, when my kids say, what's the closest star of the earth? I say, Proximus Centurrie. No, no, dad, it's the sun, you more.

Right. Don't we know everything about the sun, Hakeem? What's left to learn about the sun? No, we don't know everything about the sun. Well, because there are several reasons. You know, you can't literally stick probes inside of it. You know what I mean? You have to observe the surface.

And because humans are so dope, they figure out all these amazing ways to do things like heliocysmology, where you can figure out what's happening inside the core and even on the opposite side of the sun. But the sun is not like looking at other objects. Because it's so close, we get so much deep. that we can't see in other stars. Right. So when you see something from a distance, you can think you understand it. But then when you look at it up close, you're like, whoa, there's a lot going on here that I don't quite understand.

And so the sun also has utility as a tool. And that is, is that it is our plasma physics laboratory that has magnetic field, strengths, and sizes and, you know, energy content that's hard to reproduce here on Earth, right? if possible at all. And so we learn the plasma physics. And, you know, if you think about how much of, what percentage of the barionic matter in the universe is in the form of plasmas? Most of it, to the short answer, right? So the idea here is that, you know, quite often we'll learn these plasma physics processes on the sun and then apply them elsewhere. And that's sort of what I've done in my career, you know.

So when I often call my research hacking the stars. because, you know, stars, you know, the sun is the only star that I've studied to understand the actual object and how it works. But I've used the sun and my knowledge from studying the sun to develop new technologies or to help them to understand the universe. Like, for example, you know, supernova cosmology or, you know, galactic archaeology. You know, I'm not studying these pulsating stars to understand the stars. I'm using them for another purpose, right? Yeah. So when you looked at the sun using the Mista, I think that's how you did it.

So that was your thesis project at Stanford University, where we overlap briefly. I was there as a postdoc in 99. You were here as a student. Well, I actually finished in 99. But I remain strategically registered for a year while I worked in Silicon Valley. I asked my PhD about, will you pay me my tuition for another year? because I can't afford to move off campus. I know.

And at that time, people forget, that was the first.com boom. I live, like, literally on the train tracks pretty much on Alma Street. Yeah, I almost got nailed by the train a couple times. But tell me about that rocket. Tell me about the thrill of going to White Sands with this object that you spent so much of your blood, sweat, and tears on, along with your dear beloved mentor, art. Walker would talk about art because he was a towering figure. I remember his presence around there.

But tell me about what it's like to put your baby on a rocket and launch your dreams to the stars with about, I think it's like about a 5 to 10% chance that they'll either be catastrophically destroyed or will produce no data. I think it had to be at least 50-50, man. But before we go further, I want to establish some sort of framing. Because when people ask me questions about, like, tell me what fascinates you about the sun. it sets a framing and it has assumptions in it that are not true. And those assumptions are, is that young Hakeem thought, oh, what would I like to be? What would I like to study? And then I pursued that.

That's not how it worked for me, right? For me, it was, oh, man, high school is coming to an end. How do I live indoors and eat after this? Oh, I joined the military. I'm out of the military. Oh, no, what do I do? Oh, I got to find a job. Can't find a job.

Go to college. All right. I'm at college. learn about this thing, oh, what do I do after college? Here come to these graduate students saying, yo, we got this conference you can come to and we'll tell you about this thing called graduate school. Then I get to Stanford, and I'm like,

I don't trust none of y'all, but I trust him, Art Walker. So I didn't choose the son. I chose Art Walker. And that's so critical, Hakeem, permit my interruption, but I always tell my students it's not important what you go, because they're all like, should I put on that I want to be an experimentalist because that gives me a higher chance of getting into grad school or things.

I'm like, I don't care what you put on. The most important relationship you're going to have is with your advisor. That man or woman may come to your wedding. You may go to their funeral, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to have a bond with that person, maybe even closer than you have with your siblings or your uncle, certainly than you're like an uncle or something like that. So I want to double tap what you just said

because I think it is incredibly important that the relationship matters more than what you are relating with, say, the science or the thesis or the experiment. So yeah, please go. 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 speed. That's why I chose Google Fi 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 Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google FiWireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah, so anyway, as far as like the work of it, man, you know, for me, every time I'm engaged in something, you know, on one hand, I just try to do the best that I can and just be as careful as I can. And if I, you know, and then there's a certain point where it's just not under your control, right? And you have to, you know, the face, it's in the hands of the fates. Have I been naughty or have I been nice?

And when it works, you're like, yes. Right? And so, you know, it doesn't turn out 100% necessarily, but at least if you can get some scientists, you know, it's so hard to be an experimentalist man. And, you know, but it's not as frustrating for me as coding, especially when I'm working with other people's code. But, you know, and there is such a sense of accomplishment that you get. But at a certain point, you know, you start feeling like, hey, I'm the redhead stepchild of astronomy. I've built the Hubble Space Telescope, but the people that get all the credit are the ones that are using it, you know, to make, are using it. And they get, you know, they're the genius, but I made it.

So, I mean, audience, I did not make the Hubble Space Telescope had nothing to do with it. I'm just, that was an example. Putting their life on hands that it's inherently fickle. We, a scientist, we're at least to, like, control, we think we have power. We think we have decisive intent on what the future is going to bring. You put this thing on the rocket. It can grow up, as you say. one every two times.

You wouldn't get on a plane, put it this way. You would not get on a commercial airliner if it had this lower rate of success, right? That's right. Absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. That is, you know, it is not to, you know, no part of it is easy. But, you know, nothing in life is easy, right?

You know, being broke ain't easy. Yeah. And I say that to say, you know, we talk about the difficulty of it. We talk about the challenge, you know, the challenges of it. then, you know, there's a lot of advantages to what I do. You know, the change in my life that occurred because I got a PhD because I became educated. And, you know, for me, you know, I like to look at history a lot. And when you look at all these people in history that were like, oh, you're keeping me from an education.

And, you know, they're so value and they're so trying to get it. And now we're in a world where people like, school, school ain't cool, you know, educate what? Nerd, you know, that kind of thought process. I don't want to run anybody away by like it's so hard, right? But, you know, because reality is everything is hard. No matter what you do, it's hard. And, you know, is it fulfilling is another question, right? Can you, you know, and then of course, for some reason there's your value to society

and dignity is sometimes associated with your career. I don't like, I don't think of it that way, but I just realize that, you know, a lot of society does. So, yeah, it's hard, but it's very worthwhile. Yeah. Now talk about, you know, some of these things that are you. universal. We like to think of scientists, the public thing, science is we're all getting along. We're all trying to do the same thing. We're all in the name of science and we're just pursuing truth. Talk about what science is really like. You have a gripping passage and series in the book with your competition against Soho and how Misto is in competition and how people don't think about science is like competitive. And yet they think of scientists like children. I'm like, do you know a kid who's not like competitive, possessive, jealous, you know, anxious or whatever? So talk about. like what is it like to compete against something when the competition's like what they call an infinite game we're just you're never going to win science right like you might win a Nobel Prize but you don't win science so talk about competition what was that feeling like against so first of all what was soho why was the competition soho why was the competition it must be because the stakes were really high right yeah the stakes are really high you know when you make a new observation you have a edge up on the competition if you have a new instrument right the latest greatest data is always going to give you new stuff right that's why j WST is going to, you know, who knows what we're going to see.

And so there's a little sort of competition that happens between rockets and satellites. So a rocket, a suborbital sounding rocket goes up and comes back down quickly. It's much less of a lead-up time and the cost is much less than a satellite. And what you can do with that is you can prove technologies. You can advance them in their technical readiness levels, right? So they can go on satellites, which can then take much more pristine data for much longer periods of times. So now imagine you have a rocket flight and you have a bunch of data. And now here comes a satellite that's coming online.

And, you know, their data's coming and you haven't published your data yet. And so here's what I used to say as a graduate student, when I felt like I observed. I thought that there were two types of experiments. There were experiments that are nearly impossible to build, right? These are like my condensed matter friends. But once you build them and get them working, the data is pretty straightforward, right? You can analyze the data, you're good to go. You spend all your time making a dang experiment.

Then note there are those experiments that, you know, it's kind of straightforward to make them, but the data is darn near impossible to analyze. That was us, okay, because our detector was photographic film, which is not a linear detector like our electronic detectors. And so extracting, calibrating, you know, we wanted to make, absolute flux measurements, and measure how many photons, you know, at what wavelength?

And so, you know, we spent a lot of time doing calibration exercises. And so we were doing so much time in the experimental component. We just, and then the analysis component was so tough that, you know, it looked like we might not be able to get stuff published before someone else did,

which means that we wouldn't be able to publish at all. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. And you have to like keep your eye on it and you also have to navigate these waters of competition for funding. It's like, you know, scarce resources at every leg of the journey. Go ahead. I'll tell you a funny story. So my PhD advisor, our mission was the first to get these full-disc images of the sun that you see all the time with the plasma loops, right? He was in competition with another astronomer at an East Coast University. I'm not going to say, right? So I become a young for. you know, 15 years later or something. And, you know, after starting grad school. And I go to this conference and this, you know, more mature colleagues said, hey, Akeem, are you interested in, you know, doing this particular experiment together? It was a rocket flight experiment.

I'm like, yeah, sure. I was actually thinking about doing that. He's like, great. I work with, and he names, you know, number one competitor. And I'm like, wow. What are the chances? Those guys hate each other. Now I'm going to be working with.

him, right? So we submit our proposal. It gets very good ratings, but it's not funded. So I called people, you know, the rocket community isn't that big, right? So I called people who I thought would know what the deal was. And so this guy was very straightforward with me. He was like, hey, look, man, you know, we really don't know you like that. You know, you're just coming here from Silicon Valley. And, you know, we know what you've done technologically. We don't want to give you the whole rocket. If you decide to build just the instrument, we probably would have funded you. But so next time around, here's what I suggest, either partnering or, you know, that sort of thing, right? So the next year comes around and me and the same collaboration, we're about to strike up again.

And the guy who approached me originally, like, oh, yeah, remember your, your, that other guy who was your, you know, he's no longer with us. He's doing a different rocket with these other people. I'm like, oh, okay, what are they going to fly? Guess what it was? My rocket. You're a rocket, yeah. Yeah, and it's gone, and it went on to get, I don't know if it was science or nature or something like that. Yeah, I called it Quiet, Q Street, Quiet Sun Transreciated Explorer Telescope.

So, dude, that threw me for such a loop. I was like, I hate y'all. I'm going to another field. And I started, I started working with the people that do. Galactic archaeology, Jelko Ivesic, Andy Becker at Washington, Josh Bloom, and Peter Nugent at Berkeley. Because I was just like, you know, I don't want to forget y'all.

You know, this is, you know, I ain't got time for this. I'm trying to, you know, understand the universe here. I don't have, you know, I got to curate my scientists. Right. You got to think no, you know, which is a skill, I think it's hard to learn. Because in the beginning of your career, you got to say yes a lot because you don't have as many opportunities. And in order to say yes to the things that matter,

sometimes you're going to say no to other things. You also worked on a very competitive field. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Becky. You know, there was that whole thing of like, I complained that I had no shoes until I saw a man with no feet, right? So I told my colleagues what happened a couple of friends, and a couple of them were like, well, let me tell you what happened to me.

And those was way worse. Like, in both cases, they actually got the one, the grant for the actual instrument, but somehow their colleagues had convinced them that it was better to take the grant, even though it was their idea they'd through their institution and they took it. Yeah, kicked them off the project. Yeah, twice, two different people, two different countries, right? So, you know, the competition is fierce. And I'm going to tell you one other thing, Brian.

So I, this is, you know, I like to use humor a lot. Yeah. And when I hear the public discussion about science and scientists and how opposite it is of how we actually are. Yeah. And let me tell you what I mean. So you look at things that are controversial because it runs a butt. You know, when you start talking about origins, our faith traditions talk about the origin of humans, the origin. You know, all this kind of.

Right. So there's sort of like a budding heads. You know, certain things are the topics that I feel like the public thinks that the world scientists get together in a room every 30, 40, 50 years. And the topic is the same every time. what's the big lie we're all going to agree on? Global warming, evolution, the big, you know, when the reality is we ain't agreeing on nothing, right? There's no agreement. And it's not that we hate each other is that we're all Sheldon Cooper.

Right. And that's our job is to be skeptical, right? I mean, findman said science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the wisdom, not the knowledge. Because if he had just thought, oh, well, you know, Schrodinger got it all right. And Schrodinger thought, oh, Newton got it all right. We'd never have Schrodinger, Einstein, et cetera. Exactly, man. So I agree completely.

And I just want to like kind of maybe brainstorm a little bit. I had on one of your competitors last month, a man by the name of Brian Schmidt, one of the few Bryans that I know who have won the Nobel Prize. Yeah. And he was a competitor of yours when you were on the Supernova Cosmology Project. That's right. described with with great disdain the competition the toxicity of the competition between those two groups and it's like no matter where you go yeah what was that like to be a part of that and and like

was that part of like when did you go to silicon valley was that after as that was uh you were in applied materials and then you went to and then you went to um supernova cosmology project right you made your millions of dollars from your patents you made that idea millions millions and then you're like i'll retire i'll be a a gentleman of leisure Let me tell you what I did, man. I had played my cards right all the way up until I didn't. So, you know, these historic trends in the market. So, man, you know, I negotiated my way and the stock options and I was just in there kicking butt.

You know, seven patents in a year and a half. And so I, you know, I discovered I don't like the culture. Okay. So I'm like, you know, nobody's interested in the universe. Everybody's talking about stocks and chips. I want to, you know, let's think big. And they're like, I mean, I can't tell you how many times. You know, I'm engineering something.

I was like, oh, yeah, I think I understand the physics. And if we say it, and my manager goal, nobody cares. Right? Nobody cares. Just get the thing done and out, right? So anyway, what are we talking about again? It's just like that Silicon Valley kind of competition and transferring the supernova cosmology project.

It's kind of going back into the fire. Yeah, the supernova cosmology project. So yeah, that was such a toxic community. And I'll tell you one thing that happened. So when I became a young professor, you know, I didn't take it for granted that I could get funding in anything that I had done. So my first year, I submitted 10 proposals. And it was everything that I had done, right? I'm submitting some solar stuff.

I'm submitting some detector stuff. And, you know, I was getting these weird reviews, right? Excellent, excellent, fair. Like, what? And so, you know, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm getting insight, right? Because one thing that happened is one of my arts buddies at NASA invited me to be on a proposal evaluation committee very early, you know, after I became a professor. And I'll tell you what was shocking to me. You know, I'm a fan boy.

So when I was a graduate student in the 90s and, you know, everything wasn't digital yet, you might, I don't know if you did this. But I would go get the journals, photocopy the papers, and I just had all these stacks of papers, right? Yeah, yeah. And so what I would do is if I saw the same person's name coming up, and, you know, in a field, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go and get every paper that person wrote and read them. And I literally did that, right? Yeah. Anyway, I decide, you know, I attend this Christmas party, and there's a younger astronomer at this party.

And I'm telling him like, oh, yeah, man, here's how it goes. Here's what you want to know. And when I told him about this experience with one proposal, that was excellent and excellent, excellent fair. He goes, oh, I remember that. The person who reviewed it and I are close. He told me about that. Yeah, and guess who it was? The competition of the previous group I was in.

Yeah. Right. Yeah, right. Not that would that be one. Yeah. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot.

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That's something I don't think most people appreciate. You know, you get reviewed by your competitors. It's not even like to get reviewed by other people. And it goes for peer review. It goes for journal articles. It goes for brands. you know, it leads to some kind of ethical, you know, quandaries. And by the way, we never get, like, our colleagues in medicine and law,

they take classes on ethics. We never get scientific ethics class. At least I never did. I don't remember any. Yeah. Or at least, like, talks to the, you know, to the TAs on ethics and stuff like that. Sure. Yeah.

I mean, you know, like, an hour, you know, every year and, like, an online, you know, course that, you know, is mind-numbingly boring. But what if we thought? See if you're moving your mouse and all this stuff. Right. But what if we approach. science the way we have approached this pandemic. Everyone who needs a vaccine will get a vaccine.

Yeah. Right? Everyone who has a sound meritorious scientific idea will get that idea funded. Yeah. That's not what we're doing. We are saying to ourselves, we are only going to fund this tiny percentage of the feasible and meritorious ideas. Right.

What kind of approach? How are we going to compete with the Klingons? Right. And a barangie like that, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's like, what are the solutions?

You know, some of my friends are like, oh, we should tax emails, you know, because we invented emails or semiconductors where you used to work, right? I mean, physicists invented the semiconductor, invented the laser, invented the transistor, and, you know, everything. Do we tax it? Do we have, you know, I think then refaful innovation. But I think it is an important thing to think about how scientists are just like other people, you know, quote unquote, normal people.

Absolutely. But I, and I wonder in your, in your role as, you know, part of your, you know, one of your 17 different jobs and hats that you wear is communicator public, you know, communicator and public face of science. I always feel like when I talk to my colleagues, I say you guys have a moral obligation, in my opinion, to do communication to the public because the public pays your salary. And better yet, it's for your own good because the day that they give up on you and say that you do not need, are no longer necessary because we don't have any wars anymore or pandemic or whatever. It's the end of the road for you. And by the way, most of our colleagues, true or false,

Hakeem would do what we do for free, right? We're having fun. We're playing games. So it's an existential risk for us. And yet my colleagues say, oh, I'm not good at that. I'm not good at speaking. And you had a, you know, your journey, you know, from the streets of the stars, it wasn't that you weren't taught this growing up in the sound, you know, like how did you approach it?

Do you approach it as part of professional development as an obligation, as I call it a moral obligation or what do you think? Well, I do feel obligated, to be honest with you. But, you know, that comes from even when I was a child, you know, my family was very engaged in the community. And, you know, we're a rural community. So, you know, you have your summer, you know, we sold beer and other products. We, you know, you have your summer softball and baseball games, you know, and so like my brother-in-law was the manager.

And so we would always, you know, host the fish fries and, you know, all this kind of thing. But we were always community and church involved, right, as a, you know, as a young guy. So I brought that in. And then when I went to Tuguloo College, you know, historically black colleges, they all they also, and all, Also, I went to the military first, right? So also you have that sense of service. And then, you know, when I went there to historically black colleges and I joined Cap Alpha Psiah fraternity, you know, our fraternities aren't about, you know, these

historically black fraternities. They're not about, let's party, right? They're about achieve, right? You know, community service. That's what they're about. So this whole, like, built in. So when I show up in graduate school, if you're American African American graduate student, you know, there is a huge percentage

of the population, you know, you're, you've now in physics or chemistry, something, mathematics, you know, you're, you're, you're, rare, right? In this country, okay? So, you are requested by people that are serving communities that are similar to what you're doing because, you know, they want to see their students, their kids,

advance to where you have advanced. So then you start going out, right? Now, for me, you read you saw my book you know I gave at least one sermon you know but you know for me I was a kid in the country and you know you had like one channel that worked reliably you know it was a turn when it got to the point when you go outside and turn the antenna then we were big time you know before you had the aluminum foil on the thing so what do you do you sit around telling stories all the time so one thing that I had in my book that I cut out And I fear that Eddie Murphy had scooped me is, you know, I memorized Rudy Ray Moore's albums. So there was Shine and Dolomite completely memorized at like 10 years old, right? And then later, when I'm 13, I memorized a signifying monkey. So Google these things and look them up. But all of this ability to tell a story.

And then, you know, I had to go to church every Sunday. You know, your parent, get in there, right? And so what do they do? You got to give a speech when you're a kid. Easter, give a speech, right? So you go in there and you get accustomed to just stand in front of others, making people laugh, you know, that sort of thing, right? And so it came very natural. It was a discovery.

It wasn't a desire. It was a discovery. The first thing that happened is when I became the president of my fraternity at Tugalu, you know, you got to do the service stuff. So one of the people that I teamed up with was National Junior Achievement. And so we went into classrooms and taught these kids economics. And so, you know, they give you a curriculum. them, but they don't really give you, here's how you interact. And dude, I'm a total ham.

Give me a room full of kids. Oh, we're about to have a ball, right? So, you know, the teachers are like, oh, my God, you're amazing. And the reason why is just like us, right? So, Brian, I'm going to give you a little bit of insight. All right. I had a little bit of acting training. Yeah.

I see some of our colleagues, they get a shot to go on a TV show, and you can see clearly that they're talking to our colleagues. They're not talking to the audience of regular folks. They're like, my colleagues are looking over my shoulder. I better be incredibly, you know. And so, you know, and here's the other thing I want to say. I don't think it's, I think your colleague is right. I don't think it is for everybody.

Yeah. Right. And here's what I, you know, we, you know, everybody is, everything isn't for me. You know what I mean? Like, sure, I might be the greatest basketball player who's ever lived, the prettiest guy in the history of humanity. The smartest, the highest jumping, fastest running, quick. Anyway, yeah, I might be great a lot of things, but I'm a lot of. complete idiot at a lot of things, right?

Recognizing, you know, where you have a gap, where you have a lack, and, you know, that's part of being a good scientist. I think, you know, and we're doing. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. We probably everything. My thesis advisors say, that's why they call it research, not reading.

You know, it's like if you knew all the answers, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be. Yeah. So let's talk about research. Let's talk about your mentor, our Walker, who was the mentor and the, is, this advisor of Sally Ride, who is my colleague here at. you see San Diego, first American woman in space, inspiration to women and men around the world. What was he like as a person?

You described very candidly, you know, he was kind of like a father figure. You have two fathers in your story, and we'll talk about both of them. Although I had three, really. Three. Oh, yeah, okay. The other was my brother-in-law, but you know how it is when you write a book.

I submitted to 150,000 words. They're like, 50,000 words, got to go. You know what easy way to do that, Hakeem? Get rid of characters. like no it's called control x yeah exactly so talk about art what was he like as as a person the man overcame many barriers he broke through a lot of ceilings but he was also you know a taught one of the best scientists you know of that generation and sadly he's no longer with us but but talk about what what he meant to you and the importance of mentorship and almost as academia has to have a father

has to be platonic but but we are kind of like advisors we are sort of like paternal or maternal, right? I'll turn, I will say something to you that, you know, when I was at NASA headquarters, I went and had a conversation with Dr. Freeman Robowski, who's the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Okay. And there's certain things that are outstanding about this guy. One is you remember when Martin Luther King was leading a group of people over the bridge in Selma, Alabama?

I don't remember personally, but yes. Not right, exactly. Well, Freeman Robowski was a kid on that bridge. He was beaten. There's footage of it, right? So the other thing that's notable about him is that if you look at the top producers of African Americans and, you know, technical fields,

it's always dominated by the historically black colleges and universities in like the top 15. With the exception of one university, and that is his university, right? So I asked him, you know, about what he finds effective. And so for me, a lot of the things that I do that are effective, I do them because, you know, It's not like I read anything, right?

It's just kind of luck. Like, you know, it's hard because I have a, I go to an interview or something that someone is like job interview. Yeah, so tell us how you blah, blah, blah. I'm like, look, I can't tell you how I don't know. It just does. You know, when I leave people,

they just are highly motivated and they get their stuff done. They succeed. I have no idea what I'm doing as different than anyone else, right? I'm just taking care of every day as it happens, right? Being me. So art was one of the three, the first three research African Americans in astronomy and astrophysics. Now, that's different from the first person to obtain a PhD in astronomy.

The first person to obtain a PhD in astronomy was Harvey Banks in the 60s. And he became a professor at Howard and didn't really have much of a research career, but it was an educator. But before him, in 1956, Carl Rouse got a PhD at Caltech. Now, his PhD work was not in astronomy and astrophysics. He was doing, I think, something to have to do with particle physics, you know, in that era, right? So Carl Rouse uses a supercomputer to solve the Sahai equation for the core of the sun, right? So you calculate the state of ionization inside the core of the sun. And, you know, he got nature papers out of this, okay?

So in a way, he was the first astrophysicist that had a research career in astrophysicist. physics. Then in 62, I think, George Carruthers and Art Walker got their PhDs. So George Carruthers goes on to be the first person to put an observatory on another body. That's not the earth. He put a

ultraviolet instrument on the moon that looked back at the earth and discovered the daytime UV glow and a few other things. I don't recall off the top of my head. And then you had art. Right? So they go way back. Okay. Now,

Art as a person, you know, he was a short of stature, but he was very dignified and formal in his bearing. You know, I often compare him to someone like Colin Powell, for example. But the thing about him, because of his bearing and the force of his personality, even though he was short of stature, you know, you felt like he was seven foot six. You know, you felt like you were standing in front of Shaquille O'Neal. And it was the same way. And the thing about him is how patient and calm he was. And I picked that up from him. Because you see my natural being is buck wild, right?

So, you know, art, people would ask art questions that were utterly ridiculous. And art would treat each person with dignity and patience and answer their question. So I'm like, ah, I see that, right? I see that. But art was also really tough. Okay. And so when I started, it was at a tough time. for him because him and his father

had a schism at a certain point. I don't remember the details of what it was about, but his father got nearer to the end of his life and Art brought his father into his home. And because, you know, I have, I don't know what it is about me, but, you know, people open up to me personally. You know, I used to say I got

this Oprah thing or something. I don't know what it is, you know, but, you know, I'm a good person to tell your secrets, too, because I forget him immediately. But anyway, he would talk to me about his family, right? And he talked to me about getting close to his father after having a schism. He talked to me about my relationship with my parents, right, and how important it is.

And then when his father really started to decline, with at the same time where we were behind on launching this rocket. So he was under major stress. And then stupid things started happening in the lab. I'm not going to go into the details. It wasn't me. But there was, say, destruction of. incredibly expensive, and Hart would say, you know,

you could pay for a year of your PhD for breaking that, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, but he was serious. Pay off the bills, yeah. Yeah, but the other thing about him was he was so about rigor, man. He just hammered it, hammered it. And so one of the things that I became to advocate for is he never framed it in this way. here's what he would say to me.

He was saying, Akeen, did you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'd say, yeah, it happened. And he was like, really? Do you know that it happened? And I'm like, yeah, I told such and such. And, you know, they did it. It's like, okay, do you know that it happened?

I'm like, yeah, I saw him walk out the room right after I told him. Like, do you know that it happened? And I'm like, I'll be right back. Right. And I learned what I felt was perhaps one of the most important things I ever learned. the difference between knowing and not knowing. What does it mean to actually know something? Right?

And so you've verified it. You've confirmed it. It's not belief. I've accepted it as true and I'm not verified to be true, right? When I know it versus believing it. And then sometimes, you know, there is, you know, processes that you can trust to some degree sometimes like the scientific process. So, you know, I don't have to go and redo. You know, I'm going to build my own CERN.

And, you know, you know, you know what I'm saying? So art was really about making sure, like I'll give you an example, Mista. Let's take Mista for example. So when Art flew the very first rocket that got the full disc images of the sun like we get every day now, because colleagues said two things. Number one, there's an optical problem with your telescope. Because you see how there's that emission that cover, you see how the plasma loops that you see on a limb of the sun.

Sun, they have constant cross-section, but we know that magnetic fields diverge with altitude. It's sort of like Albert Einstein with the cosmological constant, right? Like, I know what I don't actually know. Right. So I'm going to do this, right? And the other thing they say it is, you see how there's emission all over the disk? That means that your telescope pass bands, right? You only let through this narrow wave and light, are not properly tuned.

Something's wrong there. So here's what Art decided to do. That first flight had three telescopes. After that, the flights had 16 to 22 telescopes. So I'm going to use multiple telescopes that do the exact same thing, tuned to the exact same wavelength, but they're different optical configurations. Single reflection Herschelians,

double reflection Richie Cretions, double reflection cassergrines. So if it's identical, you know, the loops have constant cross-air, it's not my telescopes is what nature is doing. Ah, okay. So it's building in the fail-paves on that. Systematic error checks, yep.

Exactly, right? So, you know, you have all this redundancy in, but it wasn't because that was the best way to do the experiment. That's the way to convince the colleagues that we're doing it the right way. And then there's the whole issue of, you know, sort of spectroscopy, you know, is what you're doing with these mirrors. And so now, if you're able to make spectroscopic observations, you're able to make physical measurements from the light, right? That's what I always, you know, that was my other big, you know, I, you know, reveal in, in, in, grad school was, where does light come from? You know, it's like, what is matter made of? Adams? Everybody tells you that, right? But then you say, where does light come from? And the answer is, and I tell this to my students, if you're nowhere near a neutron star or black hole, matter makes it. That's right. And the identity of what the matter is is encoded in the light. And what the matter is doing is encoded in a light. So interpreting this light is how we do this science, but it has to be

done in a rigorous way and you've got to prove it to your colleagues. So we then had to develop that science, but Art had already done that for x-rays. Because remember that whole battle between the rocket and the satellite? In his early work, he had the first x-ray satellite to study the sun. Spectroscopic one, right?

And he got the grant first, but a rocket beat him. So he likes to say I didn't get the first x-ray spectra of the sun. I got the, you know, fifth through 3,000. The best, yeah. Yeah, the best, right?

Yeah, and they laid the foundation for, you know, how X-ray analysis of astrophysical plasmas would unfold in the future, right? And that's the sort of thing that I employed. So art was, but art was also supergiving. You know, he always was a member of community groups and he was supergiving to me, right? He would take me. Like, you know, when I first joined, one of our, you know, one of the grad student I was perhaps closest with kind of took me under his wing in a real big brother kind of way. you know how a big brother will help you, but they also punch you in the face.

Craig, he wouldn't punch me. He kicked me one time, kicked me in the button. I looked at all like, Craig, if you ever. So one thing about science communication, you ask, observing art teaching his astronomy class because he made the graduate students run the slide projector. taught me how to communicate science. So if you look at, like especially if you look at my first TED talk,

I basically embodied art whenever I gave my talks, right? But Craig DeForest was another guy. who was a great science communicator. So he became, after he left Stanford, the science communicator for the solar physics division of the WAS, until very recently, right? He was it for like 25 years or something like that. So I had these two great science communicators to give me,

you know, as an example of being a science communicator, right? Yes. Yeah. And that's part of, you know, the public persona of science and the appreciation of science. I mean, my only quip is, you know, when people say, oh, no, it's too hard for me. Like, and I always say, oh, yeah, I know.

Yeah, quantum field theory is so easy. You learn that, you know, coming out of the womb and no, no, no, I had to study that. Oh, oh, so you study things that you perceive have value. But so it must be that if you don't study and work on your communication skills, maybe you don't perceive it as having value and maybe it's denigrated a little bit. Anyway, I do feel like we, you know, every, every scientist should at least pay attention to it. it's the soft skills that really lead to our career. I mean, you could be, you know, the greatest, you know, brain, have the greatest memory, the greatest processing power. I don't care. Wikipedia is

going to beat you. You know, Wikipedia is a lot smarter than you and it knows more facts than you, but it doesn't have wisdom and it can't relate to people. And, you know, for those reasons, I do feel like it's a neglected skill. I do try to accentuate that with my students and really inculcated in them a desire to do that. And there's the old Jerry Seinfeld joke that, you know, people are more scared of public speaking than they are of dying. So you'd rather be, at the inside the casket than giving the eulogy at the funeral. You know, the other thing, man, is what I see. It seems like every young person is a science communicator now, right?

Every graduate student has their Twitter, I mean, they're slick with it. Because I think also is that people see it in various ways, right? It's not just as like, okay, this is a public good. You know, it also can be a way to make money or, you know, it's a way for me to get my creative person out, right? Or, you know, as many, or I like to teach, I like to engage with, you know, people in prisons or people in the

community or kids, you know, and so there's so many different avenues and so many different styles. And, you know, I think that, you know, study after study has shown that reaching people is very granular. You know, the more like you are a person that's trying to accomplish something

and you're their guide to it, the more receptive they are to it, you know. And so the one study I saw recently was a study on who gets patents. And basically they found that, oh, the kids who go on and get patents are the kids or the people who were exposed to patent getters. Right? But then they looked at it more, you know, finer. And they saw that, oh, if it was a young lady and she was exposed to a woman who had patents, that was even way more effective. You know, and it's quantitative. It's not, you know, it's like a social study done with, you know,

data that scientists would say, okay, this is real, you know, because you know how we are. I want to ask you a difficult question because I do see you as, you know, in some ways, like a parent's dream, you know, with the stuff that you, curiosity that you had. No, seriously, the inquisitiveness, the forthrightness, the boldness. Look, you change your name. You have courage, man. And you did it. You did it.

You're self-made in a way and you're also father raised and father not raised. But I want to ask you, you know, like one of the greatest things, I'm teaching my kids right now that drugs are basically the one thing I won't forgive. Because when you, as I understand it, it doesn't depend the different drugs of different effects, right? But I do see gateway drugs. I see other things. And I've never done a drug in my life. Maybe I should have. Nerd.

I'm a nerd too. I don't have as many brain cells as you to rub around. I can't afford to lose the three I have left. man me and Stephen Hawking we were like this is the only Rubik's cube I can solve

you know I'm not that smart man my 16 year old son came back from Christmas holiday oh I know I'd saw Rubik's Cube now messing up

I'm like oh dude he's always you know I'm always my mom when he was like I think he's smarter than you I'm like what

so you know I've been fighting this so I want to think I want to ask you if it's fair if it's not you don't have to answer it but like

I look I look at your upbringing. I'll look at what, and just for people, you know, you talk about this kennily in the book. You had experience with drugs. You actually, you know, dealing drugs at Stanford, of all place. You're cooking crack. You talk about that. How can, how can, first of all, let's talk about that.

You know, the trope. Black man, raised, single parent, you know, mostly his father left him. Although I'm a white man. My father left me, but that's for another story. It wasn't like that. There's nobody left. You know, they broke up. Yeah, there's no monopoly, right?

but you know there's this trope right in the cycle of poverty the cycle of of leakin talk about that was that something like that people get wrong about you or that it's just a trope oh he came from the ghetto he came from or wherever he came in the deep south no no his dad was a drug deal is that a trope or is there something to learn from it are you sick and talk about it you said this place was steps from the water we just haven't found the steps yet how much did we save enough enough enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your 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.

You know, it's really interesting that you bring that up because I just was listening to something or watching something about exactly that and how it came about from this document, this analysis that was. done. And, you know, if you look at these, you know, the statistics and they looked at it as like, you know, crisis in the black family, well, guess what? It's no longer just a black family. So the statistic that everybody likes to, you know, point out is like 70% of black kids are born

to black mothers who are unmarried. But guess what? White women who, you know, without much education, 68% of their kids are born out of wetlock, right? And the other thing is, there was a study done of parental involvement. So even though you're not married, your parents are still involved in your life. And so it turned out that African American men had the highest parental involvement of all races.

So even though my parents were married when I was born and divorced, my father, you know, now it wasn't like, you know, so the guy I wrote my book with, another Jewish guy whose father was a neuroscientist, you know, there were these times

where he was like, well, you know, when they gave you an IQ test and they discovered it, didn't your parents, you know how, like, they'll send you to be in a gymnastics camp, but I'm like, no, dude,

ain't nobody going to do that where I'm from? You know, nobody gives a care. But my story is extreme, right? Most kids weren't me. I was, you know, every guy in the eighth grade wasn't selling joints.

It was just me. Right. Every guy in ninth grade wasn't selling joints. It was just me. And they didn't go to Stanford. Didn't get a PhD from Stanford either. Well, yeah,

but no, a lot of the people at Stanford was selling joints. That's the difference is that, you know, like I told you before, I'll tell my story and some high-ranking person in the world who's now in black, oh, let me tell you my story. And the difference is, is that it becomes a part of your identity if you're part of that lower economic identity group, right? But if you're in a higher, oh, it doesn't really matter, right?

Like, you know, at least one president, I'm not going to name because I told you, you know, the hater listener is going to be like, yeah, this book, I snorted a few lines. I spoke, right? Man, I tell you this, you know, just like I say science ain't science, drugs ain't drugs. And what I mean by that is, you know, precision and prediction and physics is very different than in, say, medicine. Right. So you can't say science, right? And it's the same thing with drugs.

You know, having a beer, smoking a cigarette, drinking some coffee, cocaine, heroin, you know, this array of things. There are some of them, of course, don't ever go anywhere near that. But the biggest problem that parents have is when you take that extreme position and they leave home and they see their colleagues, you know, I'm not touching that drug while y'all are drinking and doing lines and smoking, I'm going to be there. And then they go on and have the exact same life. You're like, huh, what the hell was dad talking about? They didn't die instantly, right? Most people don't become alcoholics who drink alcohol. Most people don't become drug addicts, right?

They become successful professionals, you know? And so having these tropes, it lives in everybody's mind. So not only will people look at you in a certain way, people look at themselves and I guess now I'm disqualified. I can't do it. So one of the questions I've gotten over and over is like, man, how could you have been doing that while being at Stanford? I'm like, clearly, statistically, I wasn't the only one. Yeah. Right?

Several people are doing it. Chances are your parent was doing, you know, and parents and teachers are big hypocrites. right? You know, I was talking to a good example of that is there was this one guy I knew. And, you know, this guy, he was married, but he loved to talk about his exploits of the past, right? Even though he was a devoted husband, you know, hardcore Christian guy, you know, love, yeah, man, you know, to impress, right? He thought it was impressive. But they had a daughter who was coming of age, and their daughter had promised that she would not, you know, have relations with a boy until after graduating high school. And after this couple graduated high school, that same day, they had relations, right? And so he was telling me about this and how he went through, right?

And I'm like, dude, you're talking to the wrong guy. You did it. I did it. Your wife did it. Your mama did it. You know what I'm saying? And the world didn't fall apart. Right.

Right. So stop being, you know, it's not a tragedy. You know, there's responsibility that has to be taking. There's care. You want to get, you know, want to do things right way and things like that. Right, right. Yeah, but don't treat things in a way that's going to make you lose your credibility with your child, right? For being, you know, a hypocrite or, you know, so I try to tell my kids the truth.

Like, for example, what I've come to understand about our educational system, right? Yeah. You're not learning mastery there most of the time, especially when it comes something like mathematics. I now firmly feel like I have enough evidence to say that if you learn mathematics, well, right? Before you graduate high school, it happens for one of two reasons. It's in your house slash community

or you're lucky. Yep. Right? I was neither one. Right? I had to learn it later. You know, and so now I have a son and my son completes algebra one at seven, algebra two and trig at nine, starts calculus at 10. So I was teaching.

Okay? Teach them how to master. And then I see what schools are, I'm like, look, dude, let's be, let's be frank about this. School ain't where you get mastery from. In fact, what they're doing is BS, bogus solution, right? It's not, you know, I got that from my math teacher in the Navy, Mr. Galoole. He'd say,

he was so good at knowing how you're going to think incorrectly and lead you right down this incorrect path. He's like, dude, that's right, yeah, shake his head, yeah? And then after that he writes BS on the board, right? Now, we were in the military, you know, we got to be proper. He writes BS, we're like, oh, shock. And he goes,

bogus solution. Fogus solution. But yeah, man, it really is doing an education now. I think that there needs to be a major revision in how we do things. And clearly, to educate the kids, you've got to educate the parents.

You know, my goal is turn every parent into me. And so, you know, my mom claimed that, oh, maybe he's smarter than you. I said, no, the hell he ain't. His daddy got a PhD in physics. Both my parents are. Right. They need to graduate high school.

It matters. there's a reason why people want to send their kids to the best school and it actually does matter it's not the kid it's the training of the brain and the mind so let me give me an example so he's doing api physics now and in high school he showed me his book right and it's a real college you know like you know what are you what is riznick and whatever you know i don't remember the university physics that type of book right yeah and i'm like man this is great but you guys should have done this by like week two or three And he's like, no, dad, you don't understand, man.

It's really hard for everybody. And I don't understand why. You know, I try to teach my friends sometimes. They just don't get it. I know it's because you taught me how to think a certain way, but I don't understand how they miss it. You know, and that's a key thing, knowing how to think, being trained to think for yourself, right, to be logical and critical thinking, we don't teach that. Right. And so when I became a part of the federal education ecosystem, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to push to get critical thinking taught.

And guess what? Surprise, surprise. I wasn't the first person in history to think of this. But it got killed. Why? Because it undermined parents and faith. So if you teach your kid, so that same guy, for example, I told you about who was hypocritical with his daughter. I remember one time, you know, so you ask a friend, dad, why is the sky blue?

right you got an actual answer right so i taught this you know and i didn't teach him enough tact so maybe we're like five or six and him and his little cousins run up to that guy and asked him some question like that why is sky blue and he gives an answer whatever it is what is lightning you know something like that and he gives the answer and another kid's like okay and my son goes that's not an answer to that question i'm like dude have respect but but you know right your mind yeah yeah i have some respect that's his job man people think of uh You know, it's hard to get a PhD. It's hard.

It's hard to be a professor, get out, you know, through all the academic country games. It's hard to be a taxi driver. It's hard to be a bus driver. It's hard to work at a – I've done them all. That's right. Yeah. So, and then kind of wrap up that I want to convey, you know, just – I think of you as this, you know, kind of, you know, my notes as I'm jotting down as I'm listening to your voice and the melyfluous tones that you elicit. I know where you're going.

I know where you're going. World's greatest basketball player in history. And and speaker and singer of baritone lyrics. I sing in one note that's out of tune. I say I play one instrument. It's Spotify. I play Spotify. I want to ask you, you know, like I've often heard it said, you know, like, oh, I wouldn't

change anything about my past because, you know, it's my past worldwide, the paths, the quantum paths, you know, in the path integral. That's what got me to where I am. And I'm happy with where I am. You know, I always tell people like, what, if you're, you know, if you you search on Google, you search this term, I came you search, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

You say, what was the sentence the person said right before that? I got fired, she broke up with me. It's always something bad. It's never something good. So I want to ask you in that same vein. Like in your,

and I usually ask this in the context of my final questions, but we covered so much, I feel like I would be redundant to go over it again. But in your path, would you change anything? Is there stuff that you would change? You know, how would you, because you talk a lot about the heartbreak

of dealing with your father and then losing art, as you say, very touching and dealing with, I mean, straight up racism and it's true. And you don't use that as a, you know, you're not like harping on that as, because you admit candidly, your foibles and so forth. Is there an element, a path integral, is there a part, you know, one of the vertices of the Feynman diagram that made Hakeem who he is, would you change it? Would you do anything different? Would you go back in your 20-year-old self?

Would you tell him? I'm too scared to do something like that, man. Because I'm like, you know, it's the butterfly effect, right? You know, things have turned out, I've survived and, you know, people around me. Like, man, especially 2020, you know, losing close friends. Like just a month ago, one of my closest friends that's in the book, you know, I talk about my, you know, not as much as I did when it was 150,000 words. My band crew, my drumline story, man, there's three of us left.

Wow. Yeah. And, you know, early last year, about a year ago, our heart and soul, Andrew McGee, the guy who went to the state science fair with me. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he had a heart attack and passed away. And then the guy who, you know, told me all about dating, like, boy, I say it like you mean it.

You know, Jackie Pugh. And Jackie Pugh would say this too. I'm going to curse. But, you know, I go home, you know, I come back from Tugalu and I've like studied or whatever. And I've discovered that, oh, those bright ones are the planets. That's Jupiter, right? And so, you know, we're staying outside in the middle of the night in Mississippi.

It's all blue and we're doing whatever we're doing. But you're always talking. And I would always start like, oh, by the way, did you guys know? And my man, Jackie Pugh, who just passed, he would always go, and he'd go with that shit again. Love him, man. I love him. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Yeah, man. Yeah, so that's amazing. Actually, I want to ask you, one of my final questions is always involves a movie 2001, a space odyssey. When these primates in Africa, they come upon this monolith, you know, this solid black thing. And then we don't know what it is. It could be a time capsule. It could be a warning or whatever.

But I want to ask you, if, you know, if you're not. you had a monolith, you know, that was guaranteed at time caps to last a billion years, what would you put on it? What would you put in it? Me? That's an easy one. It's leaving now. So that means you're ready to go, right? Let me tell you something, Brian. So I was talking to Rocky Cobb. You know, Rocky Cobb? Yeah, of course. Chicago. Yeah. And so this is when I first met him back in 2003.

And he told me two things that stuck with me. He was like, you know, you're only 30, you're only the third astro person I know from New Orleans. He's anna with there's me, there's some other giant of astronomy, and there's you. I'm like, well, thanks, Rocky. You know, I just graduated P&M. I'm like, oh, no. Right? And then he says, he gives that apocryphal quote from Mark Twain, and he applies to physics.

And, you know, he talks about Albert Einstein. People's like, it's not what we don't know is what we know that ain't so. That's right. Right. And so I started thinking about that in terms of the universe and our reality. And so, you know, one of the things like, you know, space and time, like just right, right, where I started, right? And I figured, I had this thought. I'm like, okay, you know, me and Brian are experienced in this moment, and we call it now. And we believe, don't know it, we believe

that there was this thing called the past and the universities evolve up to this point. And now is the actual real now. And beyond now, there's that thing called the future. That's right. And then I was like, but every person who's ever lived would have that exact same thought, every conscious entity that's aware of time. So what makes my now the actual now and not there now? So it seems like the existence of consciousness makes all world lines co-equal in a way. So as far as I know, it's 100 million years from now, and I'm already dead. That's right.

So if you want to understand why Hakeem is so unfiltered, you know, after you die, they tell all your secrets. Right, yeah. And so I've just already died myself, right? I'm like, you know, let me just, you know, let me unleash and just. just be who I am because I feel like, you know, I'm, you know, disappointing myself is the biggest disappointment, you know, and I know what my life's missions are, and I'm living those missions, and I have disappointed myself a lot in life.

Yeah. So there's not, there's very little someone could tell me to make me feel like, you know, I'm not doing it right or, but anyway, the point is that I'm not convinced that, you know, a billion years, you know, I might be there a billion years from now. I don't know. How can you tell that? That's right. We're actually going through time in these bodies versus, you know, you're a consciousness and these frames already exist and you go through them over and over and over again.

You know, next time I'm going to be Brian. You know, I mean, you know, you can't do an experiment. That job is taken, man. You know, they say like. You might want to be me next time, man. Exactly. You get those drugs in. But, listen, I haven't told you everything I'm going to hit 65.

When I'm retired from the university, I will explore an experiment. I'm a rapper. So look, Hakeem, it would actually be derelict in my duty if I didn't ask you, a solar physicist. Yes. I'm a physicist. I'm not a solar physicist. Well, I know, but a solar, you know, man who knows so much about the sun. I did supernova cosmology.

I did galactic archaeology. I didn't send me to me to conduct. How often do I get to talk to a genius about the sun? Let me ask you this one question. This will be a separate clip. It's going to be, you know, world's expert or famous astronomer gives advice. There are these people called preppers. You ever heard about preppers?

No. Okay, these are guys that are planning and gals planning for the end of the world, end of civilization. Dune day preppers, yeah. Dune day preppers, right? So one of the things they're worried about in addition to a global pandemic, that would never happen, though. But something that could happen is a solar storm, a Carrington event, a solar mass ejection. First of all, what are those things? Should we worry about them? Is it overblown? How would you personally prepare? Is this something that you're really worried about? We'll make this into a little clip. All right. So what's a Carrington event? What's a solar mass ejection? what the hell's going on with the sun? I thought we had a deal, man.

We got a deal. We got a deal. So the sun is explosive in its surface activities. At the micro scale and it's large scale, and the largest scale's explosions are known as flares. If it's contained, because there's a sufficiently strong magnetic field overlying the magnetic fields that break apart

and give their energy to the matter that would otherwise go. And a lot of that energy does excetations, ionizations which results in, well, you assume it's fully ionized, but excetations which result in light being admitted. But then, if there isn't a sufficiently strong, overlying magnetic field, it just bursts out.

And if it's pointed at the earth, it's coming at us. And, you know, it carries magnetic fields. And so if the magnetic field of the material coming from the sun in that coronal mass ejection is opposite in direction to a magnetic field

of Earth, then you have your worst case scenario, Karen, and event type event. And so what happens is the Earth magnetic field just gets collapsed down, right? And so it gets penetrated. And the Earth's magnetic field, some of those field lines reconnect themselves, just like what happened on the sun to trigger that flare. And that sends charged particles streaming down and hitting our atmosphere, which ionizes creates the northern lights.

But when you have changing magnetic fields, right? So I always ask my students in, you know, how do you create, what creates electric fields? Electric charges? Changing magnetic fields. What creates magnetic fields? Moving electric charges, changing electric fields. So that changing magnetic field in our magnetosphere creates electric fields which move currents through our power lines and could destroy satellites, our power grid. You know, it could be really bad.

But I think what we should be more concerned with is what's happening with the Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field serves as our shield. And our magnetic field from time to time flips. And at the midpoint of that flip, the Earth is not as protected from the solar wind particles radiation as otherwise would be. Now, this is not something that happens in a day, right? Or a year, right? But right now the sun is weak. If you look at the peaks in the maxima as it has more and more flares and this sort of thing, each peak isn't equal.

There's a cycle. They get stronger and weaker. So they've been getting weaker. So our sun today, in terms of its surface activity, it's weaker than average. So it's when you have a solar maximum when the maxima are near the big maxima that you can get events like this. And we don't have to worry about that. Now edit that down to four seconds. That's impossible.

That is truly into the impossible, but that is the name of my podcast. And the reason I call it so is because we are fascinated by people who, as Arthur C. Clark said, the only way to understand the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And Akeem, we've done so much for so many. May you continue to inspire, to create, to innovate, and to spread these wonderful ideas and knowledge that you have so infectious. The best kind of virus is the mind virus of Gamel Shea.

And I hope we get to meet again. It was so much fun to meet you in Washington, D.C. Yeah, go ahead. I got to say one more thing, Brian. You know, just looking at you, man. I was like, wow, that guy is a super nerd. I am a nerd. Surely he's a hater.

But then I do first guy, we have all the same friends. And then I get to meet you now. I'm like, this dude is a cool nerd. He's not a hater. That's right, yeah. If you want to rebuttal, I'll let you. introduce to you to my mother-in-law. She will rebut that and all, no, I think that. I really appreciate it. Thanks for spending your time. Thank you, sir.

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