Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How Evidence Sometimes Loses Out to Emotion The AlphaMind Podcast with Brian Keating (#321)

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

In this interview on the ALPHA MIND podcast, hosts STEVEN GOLDSTEIN & MARK RANDALL interview Professor Keating about some of the connections which bind trading, investing, and science. Brian talks about how scientists, despite being held on some sort of an intellectual pedestal, are human, and are just as prone to the foibles and behavioral errors which are common to people in all fields, including trading. The theme, which resonates throughout this interview, alludes to the meta game of science and trading, something which was captured in a quote by Dr. Keating, and which featured prominently in Greg Zuckerman’s 2019 book about the trading legend Jim Simons, ‘The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution.’ The quote is: ‘Scientists are human, sometimes all too human. When desire and data are in collision, evidence sometimes loses out to emotion.’ Themes explored in this interview are; confirmation bias, ego, and our ability, or even inability, to separate our outcomes from our ego. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-alphamind-podcast/id1467395734 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Confirmation bias, I think, is the most deadly, dangerous of biases that scientists will often succumb to. And I think, you know, taking it one level deeper, in trading or whatever, there's this huge motivation to exploit minimal types of advantages. I mean, it's rare you're going to have some huge, you know, unless it's insider trading, which you guys would never engage in. But, you know, or any of your listening. But, you know, you're trying to take a tiny little advantage. Perhaps it's purely, you know, stochastic. And you only get hints at it via a, you know, very complex models. But you're trying to, you know, take something very tiny and have a lever,

a leverage up that particular piece of information or model. In science, you know, we're not really, you know, competing for something like a fixed gain. Of course, there is only one true reality of life, of nature, of the universe, and there are many people competing it. But it's not like there's millions of people in a marketplace that kind of is efficient in any sense. Instead, you can have a killer idea. Hello, dear listeners. Welcome to this Wednesday replay edition of Into the Impossible, featuring your host, Brian Keating, being interviewed on the Alpha Mind podcast by Stephen Goldstein and Mark Randall. AlphaMind focuses on the world of finance and fields relating to trading, financial markets, and risk.

So what do traders have to learn from an experimental cosmologist? Did you know that one of the greatest supporters of Professor Keating's work is famed quantitative trader, mathematician, and billionaire Jim Simons? In this interview, you'll learn how both scientists and traders are often driven by similar passions, by a quest to know, excel, and be recognized by peers. And in the process, both traders and scientists can fall into the same cognitive bias traps that can distort reality and lead to disaster. Beyond knowledge, what is the role of wisdom in a purpose-driven life? If you're hungry for more sincere, in-depth, open dialogue into cutting-edge science

and want to know what great minds are thinking, please keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing and following. For some extra credit, head to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Heating, that's DR Brian Heating, and subscribe there too. Remember to click the bell to receive alerts on new episodes as they drop and get in on the live chats. If you feel your personal intellectual universe expanding, please remember to add a five-star astrism to ours and paid forward with a share.

We love hearing from you. Please let us know what you think of the show with a review like this one from Audible. Brian Keating is one of the most genuine and honest scientists and overall thinkers out there. It of the Impossible podcast does a great job at curating some of the most important voices in the world that people should be listening to. And now at the intersection of finance and science, Brian Keating on the Alpha Mind podcast. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please help. Welcome to the AlphaMine podcast.

Today, the podcast deviates slightly from our usual type of guests in order to broaden our search for greater understanding of what contributes to outstanding human performance in financial markets. We're going to the world of science to speak to one of the world's most esteemed scientists specialise in in the field of cosmology, Dr. Brian Keating. Dr. Keating is a distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Keating's research area is the study of the cosmic microwave background and its relationship to the origin and evolution of the universe. This project, Bicep, aim, was to find evidence of what and how the universe looked like a fraction of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang experience.

motion. As well as proposing and setting up the Bicep Cosmic Microwave Project, Dr. Keating has received great honours throughout his career. He won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2010 NASA Group Achievement Award and holds multiple doctorates from several esteemed academic institutions, including Stanford and Caltech. You may be wondering why one of the world's most eminent scientist is a guest on a podcast which focuses on exploring in the psychological behavioral and emotional aspects of trading and investing. So let me explain the link. Last year, Greg Zuckerman, a Wall Street journalist, published a book, The Man Who Solved

the Market, How Jim Simons launched the Quant Revolution. In the book, there is a wonderful quote from Dr. Keating, which simply says, scientists are human, often all too human, when desire and data are in collision. Evidence sometimes loses out to emotion. This is a statement which will resonate with many traders and investors. We tweeted this comment out to Dr. Keating, who connected with us to say thank you for the endorsement. And shortly later, we got a DM from Dr. Keating after he listened to a podcast episode where we discussed the mental challenges of trading and invest in and how this unbalances people

and throws out objective decision-making and good practice. He pointed out that he recognized these same effects in the world of science. that he is part of. Sometimes with deadly consequences which led unfortunately to people take in their own lives. We could go further. Trading and investing, as anyone who has tried it, is activity which gets to the very soul of a person. The highs and lows of trading trigger elevated feelings of self-worth, failure, and the associated feelings of humiliation, loss of respect, letting others down. And although these may not be quantifiable or real in our minds, they can wreak havoc with our self-esteem and can drive our behaviour.

his actions, moves, and states in ways which aren't in our best interests. So there are other themes that we'd like and love to delve into with Dr. Keating. And we very much look forward to dip it into this world and really start to understand how he navigated himself through his career. So thank you, Dr. Keating. I'm sure the audience would like to hear further about you. Yes. Thank you so much, Mark and Stephen, for having me on. I just want to correct one thing in the biography of me that my mother provided to you. I was very love it, loving. I only have one doctorate, and that's from Brown University, my alma mater on the East Coast, but the others are postdoctoral research positions that I held at Caltech and Stanford. And the postdoc is kind of an

interesting, you know, almost like a purgatory for scientists. You know, it's kind of this waiting ground before we get to be faculty. If indeed, we get to be faculty, Now it's become kind of like the hunger games, a difficulty getting to actually become a professor either here in the United States or in Europe. It's incredibly challenging. And the purgatory sort of after graduate school and what do you do? And for me, it was a very telling period of my life, one in which I was kind of on my own for the first time as a scientist after being under the wing of my PhD advisor, Peter Timby and Brown University. And then kind of let to go off on my own, to some extent, to prove myself and to see if I have what it takes. And science is incredibly competitive.

And as I said, it's become incredibly more so competitive. Even before this awful tragic COVID-19 emergency, the stakes and the challenge is for getting a position as a, you know, kind of a faculty or even a scientist at a research institution was incredibly a challenge. to get. And it's become even more so, unfortunately, for my students who are entering into a job market. One of the things I always say is my graduate students have had about 16 of them in my 2017 years of teaching. They've all been, you know, employed and mainly very gainfully so. And I'm fearful for the ones that are graduating into this, into this very awful job market. Yeah. It's, I mean, it brings Australia into the coronavirus. And, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's, you know, It's a fascinating era. I've actually been following a few people kind of from the world of systems thinking and complexity thinking who have been very vocal in talking about the spread of the coronavirus.

And I've actually, I think, been ahead of the curve for a lot of people simply because they understand this whole field of complexity and almost sort of pandemics fits into that, sort of, you know, and how humans behave. So it has brought me to this fascinating area, which I think a lot of people in financial markets could do with understanding a lot more. And I wonder how much that fits into your world and what your understanding of that is. Yeah, I think it's brought up a lot of different elements from the scientific world and, you know, that lay people and possibly even, you know, traders and high achievers in your line of work may not have encountered before. this notion. I mean, just take, for example, who among, you know, the many listeners, besides the technically minded, knew what a logarithmic graph is or what an exponential curve is. And now it's, like, we have these on a daily basis. Scientists are used to thinking in these terms. But, you know, we don't think in these terms because human beings are wired for linear thinking. I had a chat with

Peter Diamandes yesterday, the famous entrepreneur and scientist and XPRIZ, co-founder. And director. And he was saying, you know, his main kind of claim to fame is that exponential functions really dominate the human landscape, but we're just not used to not used to really confronting them. And they go by so slowly at first, you know, the hockey stick curve is flat for a long time. And then, whoop, it goes to the knee. And that could be everything from the, you know, number of microprocessors on a chip to the, you know, the amount of money printing that takes place in certain governments to, you know, you really don't notice these tiny things that sneak up on you. And I think, you know, one of the enduring aspects of this crisis will be that we judge it

in the same way that we judge, say, the financial crisis or the tragic events of 2001, it'll be a seminal event that percolated across every single aspect of life. I don't know a single aspect of life, although I do know one place. I've been to the one place on Earth where there are no cases of coronavirus, and that is the South Pole. Antarctica where my experiment bicep was located. That's the subject of my book, losing the Nobel Prize, this experiment, what it's like to go there, how I was really kind of humbled to be there and really got the perspective of these heroes from the United Kingdom, Robert Falcon Scott and Norway, and how they got to the South Pole 100 years before I did,

and it made me feel incredibly wimpy. But now it's a hot ticket to go to the South Pole. You're not in quarantine, you can do whatever you want down there. There's, I mean, there's 40 people there. It's the middle, almost the middle of winter, but it's a good place to avoid both coronavirus and to avoid, you know, the tax collector. I should assume it's the only place you can really go out and get cold beer right now. A very cold one. Maybe you could tell us why you were down there, because I understand it's part of your project, but maybe you can explain to the audience a little bit about your work and what you were doing down there? Yeah, so I'm a scientist as a mom, I'm a cosmologist, which some people are confused with

cosmetologist, and they do share that same prefix cosmos, and that is because the word cosmos in Greek means face or appearance, and what I study is the appearance of the universe, the face that the universe presents to us, not using visible light, not using optical sensory equipment that my eyes or even a CCD camera might be able to detect, but instead using very faint emanations microwaves that have been permeating the universe since its origin. And the question that I'm trying to answer with my colleagues and friends that work in this field is,

did the universe have a singular origin? Was it really a unique event in the history of all time? If it was, that means that time itself had a beginning. And that's kind of strange when you think about it. When you're familiar, I'm sure, at least with the book by Stephen Hawking called The Brief History of Time. That really, you know, Stephen didn't concern himself with the origin of time. He thought that was sort of a nonsensical question to really anticipate that or to ask what happened before the beginning of time. He thought that was like asking what's north when you get to the North Pole or South when you get to the South Pole.

I always say north of the North Pole. Every kid knows it's Santa Claus. He's up there in the sky above the North Pole. But in the context of time itself, how can time progress when it hasn't even begun? So those are some of the mysteries that my colleagues and I are attempting to answer with technology, with really heavily advanced technology that's on one hand really driven from the byproduct, in some cases of the great war of the previous century. This is technology invented in the UK and in the U.S. called radar.

And that radar technology led to the development of things ranging from the cell phone to the radio telescope. And I obviously use the latter. So we go to these places not because it's fun to get away from it all, but because it's the best place on Earth, the two places that I work at, the high Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and the high planer ice plains of the South Pole, those are places that are free from atmospheric contamination, from man-made contamination, they're very dry, very high altitude.

So we go there to get the most pristine glimpse of the early universe's birth pangs. The project has been a great success. It's still ongoing today. But there was some disappointment that it didn't achieve exactly what it's set. Yeah, yeah. I mean, oftentimes we think of science as,

being right and it makes the front page of the New York Times or the Guardian or whatever, and it will make this big splash or it's wrong. In other words, that it's a blunder or a mistake, you know, kind of as if science is a zero-sum game the way that many other things are. But in fact, you know, science isn't really best depicted in that light. It should be thought of as, you know, kind of a positive sum game, but along with the setbacks, the disappointments that you get, sometimes you do get inklings of pure truth and pure facts. But most of the time, you're trying to prove yourself wrong. You're trying to say, what could have possibly contaminated the data that I've collected

that would have obfuscated what is true and deceived me into thinking what I wanted to believe in some sense, is actually the truth. And I make the point in the book that scientists are human beings. And despite the stereotypes to the contrary, I mean, you look at somebody like Stephen Hawking. It's very hard to relate to somebody like him. He was such a genius, such a brilliant, inventive, creative mind. And plus, with his persona in the public imagination, he achieved a level of fame and kind of super reality that few, if any of us, can ever achieve.

And yet if you ask people, you know, who's name a living scientist, they would say someone like him. But he's really the, you know, the black swan. He's the exception to the rule in that he, you know, he has this incredible personal story and this incredible, you know, level of creativity. And, you know, I can't say that I'm as brilliant as Stephen Hawking. What I can say is that I can be as passionate, as curious about the universe. And what happens too often, I think, is that scientists cultivate that aura of genius that is just, you know, it's earned in many cases. The scientists are, you know, incredibly intelligent. But I always point out the word science means, derives from the Latin word, sciencia, which means knowledge.

It doesn't mean wisdom. And so I think trying to develop wisdom, which is part and parcel of understanding when you're wrong and how, not to be wrong, that is, that's the challenge for scientists. I think we all struggle with that. So what happened with Bicep, the experiment I created, and then Bicep 2, which is a successor to it, we set out to measure these reverberations that would have indicated that essentially the time and space had a singular beginning, that began from essentially as close as we could possibly conceive of as a singularity, as an infinity in space and time, kind of almost unimaginable properties of this epoch, and that's called inflation.

And scientists have been wondering and trying to prove this for decades, ever since the Big Bang itself was coined by Fred Hoyle, a British scientist of the incredible renown, and he coined it in a pejorative sense, because he said it's ludicrous to think about time having a beginning because, you know, it has all sorts of other unintended consequences, such as really kind of harkening to a supernatural creator, a god, if you will, an unipotent, omniscient designer of the universe. And that was completely anathema to him. He was a huge secular humanist, atheist, now we call them secular humanists, more typically today. But he coined that term, Big Bang. You guys are Brits, so you guys can tell me, you know, it was a pejorative

for something that we probably don't want to say in a potentially open mic. But the bottom line is he was very derisive of this model. We're in time had a beginning, space had a beginning. So we were trying to prove that. So the stakes were incredibly high. We wanted to prove it in a sense. I certainly wanted to prove it for two reasons. One, the intellectual pursuit of it.

And two, the desire that I had, quite frankly, to win a Nobel Prize. And that is the coin of the realm. That is the most prestigious accolade in human history, I contend, that dwarfs anything else. And in so doing has become as close to a monopoly as is legally allowed to exist in the free world. There's nothing else like it. No, it's quite incredible. I think the sense of curiosity that one needs in this space of discovery and understanding that discovery, that discovery never ends

and that there's always something beyond the beyond I was lucky enough to be present when Stephen Hawking was on stage that the it was the showing of interstellar at the Royal Aberhold in London

when he spoke through his method but you could have heard a pin drop in this play the respect was ridiculous but you had this sense of the thought process that was behind

it. And of course, in markets, I think to understand that we are not singler, as it were, that we are more than just us and that, you know, that we are part of something much, much bigger is a very, very important lesson. And that certainly within markets and liken it to the way science evolves is that, yeah, don't assume you know everything. Biases that scientists have, you know, are just like any other human being. Why would you expect this to be any different? We have confirmation bias, authority bias, etc. Yes, and that was the quote which I took from Greg Zuckerman's book. And again, if I could just read it out because it literally leapt off the page at me when I saw it.

And I think every trader or investor or anyone who's working on any similar field really, but we'll relate to this. And the quote is, scientists are human, often all too human. when desire and data are in collision, evidence sometimes loses out to emotion. And you kind of refer to that, that desire to prove something right, that desire to win the accolade, which, you know, we all have a purpose and a reason. You know, we all want to be recognized for achieving something. So we're human and I don't apologize to it. I say to people, you know, when I work with, you know, when I work,

with people in the markets, you know, on the one hand, suppression of ego is almost the holy grail of trading to be able to make a decision without letting that come through. But on the other hand, you need an ego to drive you forward to push forward to take risks, otherwise you don't go anywhere. So there's this balance that you have to play. You can't sit there and be egoness. Otherwise, you're just an empty vessel. Yeah, exactly. I feel the same applies. in all cases to scientists. If you don't have competition, if you don't have healthy competition,

and a little bit of an ego, it's true. Of course, maniacal egos are common in science, and that's also another stereotype, not just in science fiction movies. You know, there's always some, you know, super villain scientist whose ego has gone out of control. But in ordinary everyday life, that we have this desire to see patterns,

and it's intimately connected with our sense of identity and I like to kind of make the analogy that, you know, what you do, when we say like, what do you do or, you know, to somebody when we meet them, really the first thing that they say is their job, typically, they'll say what their job is. And, you know, we can debate is that really the essence of a man or a woman. But, you know, that's kind of what they do for their living, but it's not who they are. And yet they do identify it with themselves as their personality, as their definition. As their defined. trait, almost more than anything, like, what do I do? You could say, well, I give charity or I do good deeds or whatever, but in this case, people say that, and I think for scientists, it's even more so because I think scientists really see life through a scientific lens at all times. And that doesn't mean they're always right or we're always right. It just means this is a perspective, a worldview that we look at the world through and sometimes convince ourselves that we aren't driven by emotion. If you ask any scientists, they'll usually say, I don't really, you know,

play heat to emotion. I'm purely rational. You know, many scientists will agree with that statement. But I think it's, I think it cultivates this misapprehension that scientists are these kind of walking wikipedias who just make all these judgments, you know, from, from just logical principles and nothing else. I think it does a disservice too because it means that a child will look up and say, I'm not Einstein. Or, you know, what if I said, I'm not Stephen Hawking, will never be Stephen Hawking, when I read his book in 1989, and I couldn't understand it any way back then. And what if I said, I'll never be a smart time?

And I didn't go into science, and I went into some practice of ill repute like trading. No, I'm just kidding. I love traders. I mean, that actually brings me on a little bit. I mean, I did want to sort of talk about that. idea of ego and confirmation bias. I think they're a little bit implicit in what we've said. That point you made about scientists being all too human.

You know, that's something that we notice in the world of trading as well. You know, traders like to think they're scientific and they're led by the data. And yet, it's our emotion and almost how we select the data we want, which is what stands out. And then there's that collision between, I think, between objectivity and subjectivity. It's impossible to be purely objective. Obviously, the closer you can get to that, the better you're able to make, I would say, a good choice. Yeah. And we know that, you know, in science, as you said, you're always trying to disprove the theory that you're trying to prove.

Yeah, it's the confirmation bias, I think, is the most deadly dangerous. of biases that that scientists will often succumb to. And I think, you know, taking it one level deeper in trading or whatever, there's this huge motivation as I understand it, to, you know, to exploit minimal types of advantages. I mean, it's rare you're going to have some huge, you know, unless it's insider trading, which you guys would never engage in. But, you know, or any of your listeners. But, you know, you're trying to take a tiny little advantage.

Perhaps it's purely, you know, stochastic. and you only get hints at it via very complex models. But you're trying to take something very tiny and have a lever, a leverage up that particular piece of information or model. In science, we're not really competing for something like a fixed gain. Of course, there is only one true reality of life, of nature, of the universe, and there are many people competing it. But it's not like there's millions of people in a marketplace that kind of is efficient

in any sense. Instead, you know, you can have a killer idea. And I think back to the first kind of pioneer who was really a scientist but also a businessman. And I have a great deal of affection for him. And I talk about him a lot in my book, losing the Nobel Prize, is Galileo, the famous Galilei, who didn't invent a telescope, but he did something very interesting. He, he, instead of inventing the product, he invented the instruction manual. He wrote the book about the telescope. knowing that no one else could make a telescope the way that he could in the winter of 1610 in Padua, he knew that he could make this uniquely, this invention that had been invented in Holland maybe a year or so before. And he took that idea and basically plagiarized it in a sense, made it better, improved it,

and then kept it a secret so that he could extract maximum advantage of it from both his patrons, which were the Medici family of Italy, and also to leverage it into scientific fame, notoriety, and influence. And that's what's the currency chief amongst for scientists' reputation and the currency of influence, of their ideas, of their schools of academia, of thinking. And that propagates through, and what is the ultimate conference of prestige and influence?

It's the Nobel Prize. There's nothing else that's remotely close. close to it. So I kind of draw parallels between what he did, Galileo, and what other scientists have done throughout history, in a way to, at the meta level, above just the near pursuit of knowledge, which is important, Galileo had mundane concerns. He had dowries for his sisters that he had to pay. He was the sole breadwinner. He had two illegitimate daughters and the son. And he had to support them and a laboratory and all doing that on a, you know, it's hard enough to do that now as a public university professor, I can tell you. But back then, you know, in the 1600s, I think it was

even more remarkable. So a look at his work. And he had been driven by many times this desire to confirm, there's that word again, the so-called Copernican theory of the universe, which was that the earth was not the center of the universe, then instead the sun was. And, That is, of course, what led to his eventual downfall, and that seemed to conflict with the widely held belief by the powerful Vatican Church that the Earth was the center of the universe. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I have certain theories in the work I do with traders

that actually a lot of the time, although we talk about the money, the money is the prize rather than the goal. Often Earth's career becomes, it starts off as the goal. and then it changes at some point to the prize. And really the goal becomes to almost prove your own ego or prove your own superiority. And that people are brought down by their need to prove their rightness.

They're intellectually superior. I see both Mark's nod and his head there and your nodding your head. You know, the ego becomes all encompassing it. some point. And, you know, they say pride goes before a fall. Yeah, exactly. I feel it's very similar in science in that we, look, in your profession, my profession, it draws a lot of, you know, alpha, you know, type alpha, not just alpha mind, alpha R cubed, but it draws the alpha of personalities, male and female that are interested. They're incredibly passionate. They're incredibly curious. They have imagination. They have creativity. They want to have, and their outlets,

for that is their profession. It's what they do. It's who they are. And I think, you know, once you get beyond, you know, even undergraduate, you know, graduate school certainly, nobody really cares about your grades. You know, you stop caring about your grades. So how do you keep score? As you said, it could be money. It could be, it could be attribution. And that attribution in science is our currency, our citation count. I carry that around with me in my H index. How many of my papers have been cited at least H. Times, you know, is kind of going to go next to me in my promotion file. That then goes to the university. They get to say how prestigious it is to have Professor Brian Keating. I don't say that, but, you know, they could say that. And the point is,

how do they distinguish themselves? Look, I don't teach some new physics that Harvard University hasn't discovered. I mean, we're all teaching the same thing. We're all teaching the same laws of physics. There is only one universe unless we get into the multiverse. That's a topic for another day. But in our local observable universe, there's one set of laws. That means I can only teach that one set of laws. That means UCLA or Stanford, they can only teach the same things as we can. It's like they have special access. So it becomes a game. How do you distinguish yourself between those? So in your field, it's how do I do relative to the S&P? It's a benchmark. It's a standard. And it's become all too common for people to really obsess and invest tremendous amounts of mental, emotional, spiritual energy, as well as financial resources into recruiting these masthead scientists that we're betting on to achieve these great things.

And who better to bet on than someone who's won an Nobel Prize? That's the ultimate past performance as predictor of future returns, literally. I do want to talk about the pressures of the Nobel Prizes in particular and what it's like to be a scientist. I talk about in the book, I don't want to give too much away, but a very close mentor to me, who I considered worthy of a Nobel Prize, whose wife later won a Nobel Prize not too long ago, and how influential he was and how he seemed to have everything. And then just recently in the economic sciences, there's no Nobel Prize for Economics, but there's a Nobel Memorial Prize, which is usually called the Nobel Prize in economics. And there was a colleague in just last year, Professor Weitzman, and he said, according to his friends, this is from the New York Times, that he committed suicide in part because the Nobel Prize in 2018 in economics went to two other scientists,

including Paul Romer and William Nordhaus, and they had done work that had really in his mind, perhaps depended on his work. Again, you'll never know what drives a human being to take his or her own life, and it's an infinite tragedy when this happens. But in this case, it was clear that he had left, an inkling that this had been something

his being overlooked for this accolade had led to, contributed to his depression. and knowing that if your field of study wins a Nobel Prize, there will never be another Nobel Prize given for that exact same discovery. So he's sort of excluded for that. At least that's typically what happens. And so, you know, in that case, and I like to just think, well, in the case, let's say he won the Nobel Prize, how would that have saved him and why would that have saved him?

And if you take a step back, the actual name of the Nobel Prize in Economics is not the Nobel Prize in Economics. It's the Swedish Central Bank Prize in honorary of Alfred Nobel. And the reasons for that is they're basically chastised the Nobel family, felt that they were being too political. Alfred Nobel never endowed that prize. It was added in 1968, 70 years after Alfred Nobel's death. So they felt his family felt Peter Nobel, felt that, felt that, wasn't comporting with what he wanted. It was too political. And so this bank in central Sweden gives out this prize. And then because you didn't win it, it causes you to be depressed. It just seems,

you know, I don't know, if Barclays doesn't give you guys an award, I don't know if that would really hurt your, you know, self-esteem. But obviously it was tragic. This professor took his own life. And part of my hope is that people will see the Nobel Prize for what they are. They're an earthly award given by human beings who are fallible and and they shouldn't be worshipped like an idol the way that people do for things like money fame power and unfortunately the Nobel Prize at least you know as I say in my case I can only speak for myself yes we're all vulnerable and fragile I think is an important thing to remember right if we get hit by different things and uh you know we have to manage ourselves through our journeys so yeah difficult difficult

there is this humanity behind everything that we do, whether it's sciences, you know, whether it's the natural sciences that we can't, we can't divorce ourselves from. You know, we're all too human. Yeah. And that leads people astray. It does. It does. And I think that there is this temptation to sort of, you know, to get this accolade, this recognition, even if it's from people that, It's funny because, you know, one of my colleagues has a poster on his office door. It says, I don't believe in peer review because I have no peers. And, you know, it's a joke about his ego. But in reality, you know, these things are really determined by human beings.

And a lot of people, if they have disdain for, you know, if they really did have disdain for the people that make these decisions, then perhaps they shouldn't take it so seriously. I liken it to, you know, something that's, that's, appealing to scientists. As I said, there are no more grades after undergraduate. There's no more scorekeeping that's in an absolute sense, but people do feel like this is the ultimate A-plus. And in a way, you know, scientists oftentimes, I don't want to say that they're, that they're, you know, maybe being dishonest with themselves, because we'll say, oh, we don't care about money.

But I think we do. And I think part of the prestige conferred by a Nobel Prize certainly leads to higher funding levels, more citations. And these are all documented in my book. and how this monopoly, as I called it before, is really doing things to the practice of science. You almost can't hear somebody give a lecture or talk about something in physics without hearing, well, this led to this discovery, that won a Nobel Prize, this led to that discovery. So we're teaching history through the lens of the Nobel Prizes when in fact, you know, oftentimes it's incredibly distorted picture of reality. So how do you manage that? I mean, you've had situations in your life.

You've had letdowns and disappointments, and you've achieved some great things as well. How do you manage that balance? How do you maintain able to stay on the right path? I realized for myself that I had succumb to, you know, to one of the gravest sins possible, which is, you know, worshipping an idol. And I didn't think it was possible until, you know, I came into contact with an actual Nobel Prize medallion. And I talk about this in the book that literally has a gilded, graven image of Alfred Nobel on it that you bow down to and receive from the holy king of Sweden if you should happen to win a Nobel Prize. And I realized that that wasn't why I wanted to be a scientist in the first place.

It stemmed actually out of a desire to kind of certify to my father, who was a great scientist, but a complicated person, as I described in the book, and really validate my own, you know, pursuit of this as opposed to doing something else. You know, many scientists can do things other than actual science. We can do, you know, a lot of things in the world besides this. But I think we sometimes want to, you know, compensate for doing this. And one way to do that is to rack up these accolades and awards. And that became sort of an obsession. So the cure for that obsession was really realizing that there's nothing wrong with the people that win it because they can't actually choose it.

but during the process of writing the book, I was asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prizes, and, you know, which would kind of be like, you know, you inviting me on your podcast. I invited myself on your podcast, but, but you inviting me on your podcast. And I said, no, I'd rather go on, you know, Adam Grant's podcast, you know, whatever, I don't know, because it's more prestigious.

So it felt, you know, a little bit humbling. But I treated it like a scholar, you know, should, which is to go back and look at primary sources and realize that Alfred Nobel didn't get what he was, do. And I think that that's very painful because once you die, you know, you have no recourse from beyond the grave. So my, my wish for this was to write my own ethical will to my children, to my ideological children, my graduate students, as well as my biological children. And I think, you know, doing that was cathartic and revealing. And I did come to the realization that science

is a great puzzle and it's a great mystery and finding things about it have impact on things, not just in technology and building better cell phones or radar stations, but also considering the grandest questions, the ultimate issues of life, including the meaning of everything there is. It takes me back to a conversation we had with a trader on our podcast last week, who ironically had a PhD in chemical engineering and then left that to become a day trader,

where he talked about the importance of maintaining purpose and values and getting balance. Because he said, you know, doing trading, you're not making any contribution to the world whatsoever in any way, shape, or form. So for him, he has to balance that out in other ways. Mm. Mm. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place.

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Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Yeah, I can see that. You know, I mean, I think meaning in life is hard to, and as up to each individual to define. I do feel like scientists sometimes do confuse this notion, as I said before, of science, which means knowledge. it doesn't mean wisdom. And it seems as if, you know, especially now with COVID and everything else, that, you know, we're looking to the scientists tell us what to do and we kind of want this, and we want these scientists up on this wall to protect us. But in reality, you know, I think the virus has done something else. It's really revealed what matters. And you can ask, well, does it matter to understand if time began 13.7 billion years ago or 13.75 billion years ago? No, that doesn't necessarily matter to any. anybody, but the pursuit of knowledge and understanding how the universe came to be in the first place, if you don't only silo that into adding another decimal place, if you stop and think about, what is your value system, what about the universe have you derived and used to attain wisdom

and confer that on other people? I think that's what scientists do. I have a chart in my book that of all the PhD advisors of my PhD advisor, my PhD advisor, my PhD advisor, it goes back 17 generations, so 15 hundreds. And I now have graduate students that have gotten graduate students. So I've, you know, students of mine that have become professors. And so this is like 19 generations long into the 20th generation. It's an awesome responsibility. And I never lose sight of the fact that the word, you know, scientist in the Russian language means someone who is taught. And that means I have an obligation to be a teacher, to be a mentor, not just with knowledge, because you can get a lot more knowledge from Wikipedia than Brian Keating will ever have, but to have wisdom and to really

confer that what matters most in life are the moments that we spend out of the laboratory, or in your case, out of the trading pits, and how we use us to cultivate our lessons. I think there's a great link here. Maybe I can just ask Mark what you're thinking about that, but there's a great link here between what we're trying to do at Alpha Mind and the way you're talking about science here, because we've always believed that wisdom is possibly more important than knowledge in the markets. How you are is more vital to success than perhaps what you know and even what you do. And I think that's a link.

Maybe Mark, you could just comment on what you're hearing there. I think finding purpose is pretty critical for everyone really as well as whatever they have as a role in the traditional sense of the word. But I think if we're driven by purpose and that can be a discovery and curiosity, not just about the universe, but about ourselves. And I think there are, you know, so I need to understand ourselves in that. and you know curiosity equals discovery equals curiosity it gets carriers on growing

and I think but ultimately it is so important I think particularly now of what's going on for all of us to have a purpose to kind of ground ourselves

and with that you know when people come to you to ask for advice you know they see you as someone that can offer wisdom that's a very nice feeling to have and you're offering you know perhaps years of experience to help guide somebody and I think we all need that we all need that kind of kind of guidance from from those that have wisdom at the

moment yeah I never lose sight of the fact that you know teaching is an act of love you know if you look at this famous maslow's hierarchy of needs and and you look at well how can I teach something to somebody what do they need to learn you know what is a feeling of safety and security and You can't like, I'm going to teach you a lesson, you know, I mean, as much as we might try with our kids or something to, you know, raise our voices. That's ultimately, you know, counterproductive. It doesn't, people don't learn unless they feel loved and appreciated. And I think that feeling of safety, that communication will be the most successful way to cultivate your values and extend those into the future and take it from me as a cosmologist. You know, the one, only method that we have of time travel is to go in the future.

And how do you want to program your future? I want to program it by propagating the good values that I think I've cultivated, and I want those to be spread throughout the known universe as much as I can. On that front, you do some work with the Carl Sagan Institute? It's actually the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Sir Arthur C. We're going to have on Carl Sagan's daughter is coming on the show in a couple of weeks. Yeah, so we run a center, which really focuses on how science, science fiction,

culture, futurism, and even free speech, academic freedom, and things like that, combine to stimulate, cultivate the imagination and create a safe space

for developments in imagining and envisioning what the future will be like. So my role is really, you know, fairly narrow, but I do enjoy it.

And that's, I host the podcast. I started the podcast called the Into the Impossible podcast. And that's named, after Sir Arthur C. Clark had three famous laws. And the first one is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law number two was the only way to find out what is possible is to go a little bit beyond into the impossible.

And so that's where the podcast name takes its moniker from. And we have on luminaries, even a couple of Nobel Prize winners, as well as science fiction writers and thinkers. ponderers, curious puzzle solvers that are achieving at the highest level. So I would love it if your listeners tuned in. I have a YouTube channel where we post the episodes, and that's my YouTube channel is Dr. Brian Keating, D.R. Brian Keating, B-R-I-A-N, K-E-A-T-I-N-G, and I have a Twitter handle, Instagram, same things. And I love interacting with people, and I love guest recommendations.

I just had on my podcast, Greg Zuckerman. We talked about Jim Simons in his book, The Man Who Solved the Markets. And before that, we had on folks like Michael Shermer, is a famous skeptic, a skeptical inquirer type guy. And as I said, we're going to have Peter Diamandas on next week, as well as hopefully Carl Sagan's daughter, Sasha. So it's going to be an exciting project for me. It's wonderful to sit down with brilliant people and get a little bit of a taste of what you guys, must be experiencing right now. No, I'm just kidding. I really enjoyed talking. We're talking to somebody who's almost from the Nobel Prize.

I'm a bit of a space nut, Brian, so I've been biting my tongue on the Apollo program, on the cool spot, in the microwave radiation, you know, and cricky, yeah, that's for another conversation, I think. You'll enjoy it. Yeah, I talk about that in the book, losing a Nobel Prize, how the quest. to win Nobel prizes and the quest to go to places like the South Pole were identical to the quest to get to the moon first in the 1960s in terms of national prestige. But if you look at the plaque, there's a plaque in gold engraved in gold on the side of the lunar lander with that godlike feature, a creature named Richard Nixon's signature on it. And it said that, you know, we came in peace

for all mankind, you know, like beneficently for the benefit of all mankind. And that's the exact same thing that the Nobel Prize is say on them, you know, for the benefit of mankind. And so I think it's just interesting that these competitions, you know, people don't think, oh, science is competitive. Believe me, it's every bit as competitive as trading. And I think there's so many commonalities between the two different subjects. It's a delight to talk with you guys. But I hope we can do it again sometime. I got one question. One question to ask you. Yeah. Do you watch the Big Bang Theory? Ah, you know what? I don't watch the Big Bang Theory. And I talk. to, I talked to Greg Zuckerman when he was on my podcast, and I asked him if he watched the show

billions, and he said, no, it's too close to what I do. And I said, yeah, that's the same reason I don't watch, I don't watch the Big Bang Theory. I will, someday I'll probably get into it. Well, look, this has been great. We always leave Mark to take us out, because Mark's, mark's a great closer. So, Mark, do you want to just sort of wrap this up? Well, you know, be curious, discover, keep trying to prove yourself wrong. I think is a a big message and it's applicable to trading as it is to science and gaining a sense of purpose and sticking with it. But the degree of self-management and bringing critical people with you to achieve things

that seem impossible, I think is fantastic. And the fact, we've mentioned Coponica's Galileo, you know, Stephen Hawkin and of course Dr. Brian Keating within this podcast. Excellent guys. Thank you guys so much. I'm going to relish this conversation. as I'm teaching my little ones. Any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch and inspired by signing up from Professor Keating's Monday Magic email at Briankeeting.com slash list. And if you have a dot edu domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth

forged in the fire of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Thanks to all our viewers and listeners for helping us blow past 100,000 subscriber mark on YouTube. Please keep it growing by following, subscribing, and sharing. And remember, always be curious.