Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How to Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner | The James Altucher Show

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

James sits down once again with cosmologist Brian Keating—longtime friend of the show and author of Into the Impossible: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. In this candid conversation, they challenge each other’s views on focus, curiosity, and the trade-offs of staying in your lane. Brian shares behind-the-scenes lessons from interviewing Nobel Prize winners, the thinking behind his new “Keating Test” for AI, and why communication matters as much as discovery in science. This episode isn’t about self-help clichés. It’s about real-world insights you won’t hear anywhere else—whether it’s why guarding your time is the most important skill, how to use flow states to sharpen your career, or why great breakthroughs depend on questioning the work of those who came before. What You’ll Learn Why Brian created the “Keating Test” as a new measure for true artificial intelligence How Nobel Prize winners balance intense focus with curiosity across disciplines Why communication skills matter as much as scientific discovery for lasting impact How to guard your time from “time bandits” and apply the power of saying “no” Practical ways to find your lane—or combine lanes—while still pursuing flow and mastery Timestamped Chapters [02:00] The Keating Test: AI, free will, and the act of survival [06:00] Humor, history, and reclaiming the “worst joke ever told” [08:00] Friendship, TEDx, and 11 years of conversations [09:00] Lessons from Nobel Prize winners: beyond self-help habits [10:00] Publishing with Scribe/Lioncrest and connections to James and David Goggins [12:00] Into the Impossible, Volume One: why distilling Nobel wisdom matters [13:00] Imposter syndrome, Alfred Nobel, and Volume Two’s focus [15:00] Donna Strickland, LASIK, and the power of saying no [18:00] Stay in your lane—or widen it? A debate on mastery and curiosity [23:00] Newton, Pascal, and the discipline of sitting in a room [26:00] Regrets, diversification, and finding flow [28:00] Crystallized vs. fluid intelligence in the age of AI [31:00] The importance of novelty—and the Lindy test [35:00] Math, reality, and the unreasonable effectiveness of ideas [38:00] Teaching quantum computing: bridging theory and life skills [43:00] From cryogenics to code: skills that outlast AI [47:00] Why communication defines success in science [50:00] Doing things that don’t scale: relationships, meteorites, and networks [52:00] The missed opportunities of office hours—and how to build relationships [54:00] Reading theses, genuine curiosity, and non-scalable networking [55:00] Into the Impossible, Volume Two: life lessons and scientific breakthroughs [57:00] How old is the universe? The cosmic controversy [59:00] Gravitational waves, BICEP2, and losing the Nobel Prize [61:00] Dust, data, and the Simons Observatory’s quest for origins [63:00] What comes next: Jim Simons’ legacy and Brian’s future book Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply.

See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Today on the James Altiger show. All a man's unhappiness comes from the inability to sit in a room by himself. The moon's only half the width of your fingernail. If the Apollo 11 capsule is off, by half the width of your fingernail held at arm's length, they would have still been floating out in space. No one's giving you an OL prize if you discovered the secrets of the universe if you can't communicate them. How do you teach her what's the lesson that these Nobel Prize winners had in common?

It's that. They did things that don't scale. They built relationships. I want you to go to all of your professor's office hours. First of all, you're paying for it. Second of all, they're going to love it. Third of all, it may develop into a relationship. Fourth of all, it may develop into a job. Fifth of all, it might develop into a letter of recommendation.

You know, when the facts change, I change my mind. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altager show. So there's this one. This was the first one in the series, and now there's today's book, which came out today. birthday. And they're different, and you've got to look closely at them to see why they're different. But you don't have the hard copy yet. Nobody has it until probably tomorrow or later on if they bought it. Well, before we move on to the topic of today's podcast, I do want to tell you that I once

tried to kill the world's most handsome man. Did I ever tell you this? No. But then I realized suicide is a crime. So, James, today we're talking. Oh my God. That is the worst joke ever told. on this podcast. You just went into the impossible. Dr. Bride. I don't know if there's award higher than the Nobel Prize, but you deserve it right there. Wow. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to do that. You know, we met, well, we met in 2014. We've known each other 11 years this November at TEDx, San Diego. We go way back with each other. But I think this is like only the 17th time I've been on your podcast. So I'm glad that it only took 17 times to reclaim that title. Well, look, I, you know, obviously not only did I read into The Impossible, but wrote the forward for it.

And this is the second book. I've just got it yesterday. Thank you very much, Brian, for keeping me in the loop with it. And I've been reading, you know, night and day and catching up. And it's fascinating. And, you know, I feel comfortable enough with you. I can say, I'm not sure I agree with some of your conclusions in the book. The premise is, of course, you interview these Nobel Prize winners and you find things in common

and what habits, ideas, career methods, what creativity methods they have that are all in common. And you talk about their careers and lives. And also, what's fascinating is it's not just like self-help, like, do these five habits, sleep well because all these Nobel Prize winners do. What they did to get the Nobel Prize is so fascinating and what they've accomplished is so instrumental to how we live in the world today that it's great to see a book interweaving the commonalities as well as their very individual accomplishments. So great stuff. Fortunately, it's page turning reads. I was able to read very fast, but let's dive in. Yeah. So, well, first of all, I want to thank you for a couple of things. One, you connected me

with the publisher four or five years ago. This is published by Scribe, which is part of their brand. This is called Lioncrest, which is publisher of a book by one of your slightly more popular guest than me, David Guggins. So they published his Can't Hurt Me book many years ago. It's one of the bestselling. It's a self-published book. So, I mean, technically it's not a traditionally published book. But a lot of this conversation is inspired by the fact that over the spring, last spring,

in this spring, 2025, you put out kind of a list of books basically where people choose themselves. And you included me in this incredible list of authors, not for my second book, which will we'll talk about in just a second, or this third book, or fourth book, my dialogue of Galileo, but about my first book, losing the Nobel Prize. And you've compared it to, like, Victor Frankl's books and, you know, books like, you know, Star Wars, you know, or whatever, like epics like that. It was just a real treat. And I want to say thank you for doing that because, you know, you're kind of the avatar for the podcast, you know, empire that I'm trying to build. If you remember, back in my, the first time, we met each other, as I said, in 2014 at TEDx. You don't

even remember that. I barely can remember that. But then I went on our mutual friend, Jordan Harbinger's podcast. In 2019, maybe, he took him like two years to get me on after my first book because he wasn't really interested. Then he got really interested. And then I said, after the podcast interview with Jordan came out, I said, I only have one request. I'm not one of these guys going to bug you. Introduce me to Elon Musk and Kobe Bryant and all these people that he knew. I said, I just want to be introduced to James, just to you. And so you were my one wish, and we got connected in 2020, in 2019, maybe. We've been podcasting ever since.

So, first of all, I want to thank you for that. Second of all, I want to thank you for being so gracious and writing the forward, one of two forwards, to my second book, which was called Into the Impossible, Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, which is, of course, inspired by Think Like a Billionaire, which is your epic nonfiction book. Also, kind of a self-help book, as are these books.

Well, I want you to notice something. On this book, my second book, Into the Impossible, After I interviewed nine Nobel Prize winners on my podcast, I decided I'd make a book because who's going to go back and listen to 18 hours of podcast to find that one nugget of wisdom? So I work with Scribe, and we had a very tight distillation, maybe 150 pages, of the best information, input, et cetera, and basically strategies to level up your intellectual side. You know, everyone talks about sports or diet or whatever, but how do you exercise your brain? How do you make your brain, you know, which is not a muscle for my birthday, one of my kids,

maybe this is my external brain. So I've got an external 3D printed brain here. So but how do you know how to level up your brain? So I want to take the Olympic athletes of neural activity, which are Nobel Prize winners, right? So I was nervous. I asked you, and I asked my friend Barry Barish to write the forward and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize in 2017

for co-discovering black holes colliding together a billion light years away in some galaxy we don't even know exist anymore. and he won it for the LIGO detection. And he wrote the kind of scientific introduction forward. And you wrote the kind of general layperson introduction. So it says on the top, it says Brian Keating, forward by Barry Barish, Nobel laureate, and James Altucher.

Imposter. What's that? Imposter. Well, this book was really about the imposter syndrome. We'll talk about that later. But notice my second book in this series. So this is called Into the Impossible, Volume 2, focus like a Nobel Prize winner. That's Alfred Nobel on the cover,

and he's kind of ruminating about how he can become even more impressive than he already was. And it says, lessons from laureates to concentrate your creativity and ignite your career. And then it says, Brian Keating, but look, underneath there,

there's no James Altiture, there's no Barry Barish. Why is that? I was really at first sad about that, but I know you have your reasons. I always, I have faith in your reasons. So the reasons where this book is really focused, no pun intended, but it really does concentrate on the notion of how do you know how to be a scientist? Like how do you start your scientific career as you're an undergraduate student?

I didn't think I could be a professor like I am now. I thought that would be like being an ice cream taster. Who's going to pay me to do what I would do for free, right? It's so cool you say that though because I see this book as the advice they give about, becoming a, you know, a world-renowned Nobel-level scientist is perfect advice for career advice in general. It is. It is. I thank you for that. The first book, my avatar when I wrote it, was a car salesman in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Like, it didn't matter if you were a scientist or not. You could use these tools in the first book. The second book, though, I did try to focus on the things

you never learn, like what my teachers never told me. And that goes from, you know, really strutting out in school. And it's not like an optimistic, everything's going to be great, you know, follow your dreams. I think that's BS. But before I get into like what the main thrust of the book is, the reason that you're not on the cover and nobody is on the cover is because of the tools of this book. I asked Donna Strickland, you don't know her work because you don't have LASIC, right? You have these beautiful glasses that have become your trademark. In fact, she would have ruined your career, right? As if, you know, the wall barber shop would have also ruined your. career. I mean, the wall, you know, the company that makes all these shavers, right? You're not going to use their

products. But she invented LASIC, basically. She invented the laser tool that is used to blast away part of your cornea to shape your cornea in the shape of a lens, so you never need glasses again. And many of you listening out there have had this procedure. I've had it done as well. Now, I asked her, because not only is she a brilliant, genius, you know, level scientist, she's also one of the only three or four women that are alive today that have won the Nobel Prize in physics. I think there's only, yeah, there's only four total, and she's, so she's one quarter of all women of all time that have won it, and she's just got the greatest attitude where it has nothing to do with her being a woman or anything like that. She just, you know, was incredibly passionate,

and she always felt that her work should be play. It should be fun to be a scientist, and if you're not having fun, get out. And that's sort of the message of the book. But the reason I'm winding up to this, finally, James, is I ask. her to write the forward to this book. Okay? So I asked her to write the forward to volume two, focus like a Nobel Prize winner. And guess what? She said no. Why did she say no? She said no, because she's too busy, she's overcommitted. She has to focus, literally, she has to focus on laser-like, she has to concentrate on these other projects that are much more pressing than Brian Keating's second volume of this series of Nobel Prize win. Now, she did do an interview with me.

I had a wonderful interview with her, and it's in the book, a wonderful chapter. She's brilliant, inspirational, and everything else. Her husband was in the room when I was interviewing her. It was kind of awkward, but we made it work. But she basically showed how you apply these lessons. It was like a real life lesson for me, the author of this book, and one of the main themes of the book is you have to guard your time like a hawk. You cannot let people come into your life, steal your time, and call them time bandits,

and you have to do what you've always advocated people do, which is to say use and apply the power of no. So she did that, and it's a work example. And I didn't feel like having no Nobel Prize winners and then kind of a Nobel Prize winning, you know, man like yourself, the quality level. But I didn't want to have, you know, chess master. So I just said, let me just do it without the forwards this time

and get right to the book. And you know what? I actually think most books should not have forwards, to be honest. Like when I started this book, I'm reading and I'm thinking of myself, hmm, I disagree with this. And then I realize, oh, I'm reading the very first chapter. Is this a forward or did Brian write this? Right. And then I realized, Brian write it.

And I'm like, okay, I can bring this up with Brian because I disagree with the exact first sentences he's saying in this book. But that's good. You know, book shouldn't be like the Bible. It's not like I'm going to download this book and change my life. You have to, as you say in the book, which I agree with you have to question things. Yeah. Questions are more important than answers, which is why I always, I'm always. I'm always very comfortable asking you questions.

But you say in the very introduction to this book, the first chapter, that in grad school you made the mistake of trying to be the master of everything, you know, not just a jack of all trades, but a master of them all. And you sort of like say it's better to focus, not try to master all of these things, better to focus, you even say later in the book,

stay in your lane. You kind of prize this, but I feel like what, and this is the question I have for you, what is a lane? I feel like a lane, when people say, stay in your lane. Society is defining what a lane is. What if my lane is I love, you know, sports and I love business. So now I was in two lanes, but maybe later on I can combine them and be

the best in the combination of those lanes, right about the business of sports, as we've had on this podcast, Joe Pompliano, who has a great newsletter about the business of sports. Huddle up. And so I feel like I like the approach, Donna's approach, and pursue. sue what you love, but that might be a combination of things. It might not be one standard lane. Well, I mean, where does that phrase come from? Let's analyze that phrase, we stay in your lane. So it's come from swimming, right? It comes from, or driving, whatever. I mean, would you prefer that people on the side of the road, you know, they're just choosing their own lane? They're not staying in their own lane, of course not. Or swimmers, how do they get to the finish line and win the

Olympic gold? They stay in their lane. They don't do golf and they don't also do tennis. I'm sure all these guys, like the guy who won the U.S. Open this past Sunday, this guy from Spain, Alcaraz, Alcatraz, what did he do? At the end, when he won the championship of tennis, he got up on the podium and he took a golf swing. Now, he loves golf, but he obviously didn't spend as much time playing golf. He kind of noodles around with his friends. I'm not saying, don't do that. God forbid that, I'm not saying don't have hobbies. In fact, I say have hobbies, have interest, you know, but explore and then you can exploit. If you just think as a beginning student, or even as a postdoc or something like that, that you don't even have time to master your own lane. The funny thing is, like, when you tell people

to stay in their own lane, they don't even have the capability to do other lanes. In other words, like, are they going to become an actor? Are they going to also be jockey and horse racing? No, their best ticket, remember, this is to make success and to concentrate, like focus, as they say, is to concentrate. And that will then, like a magnifying glass, if you kept the magnifying glass and you, you know, pointed it all around, you couldn't fry the ants the way that we used to do as a kid, right? You have to concentrate it. And only by doing that can you really unleash what's there. And then once you get to that level, then you can try golf and you can try other things. But if your goal is to be a ninja, a SEAL Team 6 member of the intellectual elite, like these Nobel Prize winners,

oftentimes it comes at the expense of being a dilettante and trying to do too much. And I happen to think I did too much of the dilettante as a graduate student, et cetera. I'm interested in so many different things. Maybe that's yes. Maybe that makes me unique or whatever. But there's no doubt I could have had more success in my actual career as a physicist if that's all I did. If I didn't write books, if I didn't do podcast. Look, what you had on Stephen Pressfield many years ago, and he said to you, James, he said, every book is a kid you didn't have or every kid is a book you didn't write. I don't know, which is worse.

You know, I've got a bunch of kids. You have a bunch of kids. You know, it is true, right? I mean, he could write so many amazing books because he didn't have kids. Now, would you like to not have the kids that you have? I mean, sometimes we all do as parents, right? But the point is, no, he concentrated, and that led to great success for him. Now, maybe that's not worth the tradeoff.

It surely wasn't for me. I'd love to have more kids than I already do, in fact. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium. And a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m. Sash.C. Yeah, I'm not saying sacrifice success. I'm saying if, let's say you get in the top 10% of one area of life. And then, like, let's say biology. You become the top 10% of all biologists. And then you say, you know what, I'm also fascinated by computer science.

So you get in the top 10% of computer scientists. Now, in the 90s, about the whole area of like, you know, biocomputation. And so now you're in, because you were a little bit of a delta, not a total delta, you also didn't become a horse racing jockey, but you add two areas you got in the top 10% of. Now you're in the top, you combine them, you're in the top 1%, or even better of biocoputation, which became a huge area of science. So I do think one way to success is by pursuing things you love, and letting that love dictate the direction that you go that day, month, or year.

And then at some point, when you feel the love for the intersection, suddenly you're going to realize you're the best in the world of that intersection. And a business example might be Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Okay. I don't know if he loved retail, but Amazon was a retailer. And then it became more of like a computer, you know, BMF, you know, going into cloud services and all sorts of other things. Yeah.

Look, I agree with you. Joe Rogan is almost as good a podcaster as you, not only because he does UFC commentary, and he did stand-up comedy. But that's very different than Magnus Carlson or Gary Kasparov or somebody like that who would focus on basically one thing and one thing only. In fact, Isaac Newton, I quote in the book,

he was asked, how did you come up with optics, calculus, calculus, universal gravitation, you know, how did you come up with all these different things, alchemy, and still die a virgin, as I talk about? in a different book. That's his highest accomplishment. Did you know, Newton thought that was the highest accomplishment he could do because that was the only way he could emulate Jesus Christ, his hero. Anyway, getting back to, no, he said to the person who asked him, Newton said, I sat in a room without ceasing. So, and it's basically like the, there's another quote by, I think it's Voltaire,

or maybe it's Pascal, I forget who, and it's, you know, all of man's unhappiness comes from the inability to sit in a room by himself. So what does that tell? you. I mean, in a lot of ways, you're right. To be a really important and impressive person at a cocktail party, maybe an advisor or a consultant, it is important to have widely discursive and broad curiosity. I'm not saying don't be curious. But in terms of where you dedicate your only non-renewable resource, which is your attention and your time, I think it's really imperative early on to get on course, like going to the moon. You know, the moon's only half the width of your fingernail. If the Apollo 11 capsule is off, by half the width of your fingernail,

at arm's length, they would have still been floating out in space. People say, shoot for the moon. Even if you don't make it, you'll reach the stars. That's terrible advice. I mean, you'll be floating in your solar space for the rest of your life for all eternity. It's horrible. Concentrate, land on the target, and then you'll be happy. And then you can decide once you've reached the top 1% that I want to also be a podcaster and write books. I agree with what you're saying. I think, but I agree and disagree, which sounds like a cop-out, but I've seen in my own life, like I've done many disparate things. But to be fair, sometimes I really regret it.

Sometimes I really regret not having stuck to one thing since a younger age. Sometimes though I'm very grateful for the fact that I've immersed myself in so many different subcultures from one to the other to the other that it was a kind of weird diversification of life for me, which diversification also has its benefits. And sometimes, again, because I've diversified, this. intersection has these many intersections have served me well but i do regret that i could have maybe taken one approach done nothing but that for 40 years whatever however many years and and and achieve maybe a greater success in whatever area that i pursued but then again i don't know if my brain

would have let me because i have this maybe horrible tendency to only do what i love doing and if i don't do what I love doing, I really can't do it at all. And sometimes I fall out of love. I don't think it's terrible or bad at all. But again, yeah, if you look at all the things you did, some things maybe, you know, it served you at that time. You know, I met you, stand-up comedy and podcasting were the top two things in your life. Now it might be podcasting and, you know, tensor, you know, cryptocurrency or got our back to your love of chess, right? But yeah, I mean, maybe, I mean, sometimes you might think about, well, what if I just did chess or stuck with computer science or, you know, got a PhD. Yeah, okay, so we can do all those things. But at the time,

it was what served you, right? But you're glad, right? You're glad that you didn't stay in New York City trying to make a comedy club work through the last five years. Maybe now it would have come to for it. So in hindsight, yes, of course everything is 2020. When you look through the magnifying glass the other way, it also magnifies things, right? So it's not like a telescope. You look through a telescope the other way, nothing happened. Like you see this completely distorted thing. But a magnifying glass, it works in both directions. You can see forward and it can see backwards. And it's It's just up to your interpretation and which domain you choose to focus on. I think also is how you define a lane.

And some lanes can be wider than others. I made this argument for myself when I started day trading and getting interested in finance back in 2000, 2001, which is to say, okay, I'm widening my lane. I love games. And now trading is another example of me trying to master and conquer a game where I can use skills from other games, let's say chess and points. poker that I have felt I had conquered at that time to this new game of trading. And trading is very much a game. And so I sort of widened my lane there rather the, but, you know, again, I sacrificed

other things and pursued new things. But you enjoyed that. I'm sure you enjoyed that because you have this incredibly fertile mind that seems to get better with age. But I think you entered. Or worse. Like you talk about crystallized versus fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence, no matter how you fight it, it goes down when you age. Oh, certainly does. Yeah. No, it certainly does, but, you know, then again, the summation of crystallized plus fluid, we can talk about that, is very hard to replicate at a young age. And I made the case to Arthur C. Brooks, who was on my show a couple of weeks ago, that actually crystal intelligence is going to be less important in the age of AI because we're going to have instantaneous access to 800 IQ in

every single domain of human knowledge, whereas, you know, the wisdom, these AIs have zero wisdom. They have absolutely zero wisdom. They hallucinate. They e. They e. average over intellects and so forth. So I think it's going to be, we're going to start to see a resurgence of the importance of the wisdom component of the human intellect. But before I get there, I just want to highlight that you said you were doing this

and you kind of enjoyed it. That seems to me like you entered what's called a state of flow, correct? Yeah, in many cases, yes. And I advocate for that as well in that you should basic, I'm doing what I loved as a 12-year-old, which I didn't get paid for, you know, astronomy.

Like, who the hell is going to pay me? Like I said, look through a telescope. It's like, oh, can I get a job testing the roller coaster at SeaWorld? No, I mean, there is some guy who does that, by the way. But the point is, I would do things like this because it would pass the time, and I wouldn't notice that time had gone by. And that's kind of the definition of flow. And today I found out that my book is number two behind, how do you say his name, James?

Who? Miko Chicksa le Mahai. Oh, yeah. I don't know how to say his name. Yeah, yeah. There's a finish. Flow. Offer the book Flow and the popular is it.

So I'm number two in the category. of genius and he's number one. So I need you guys out there to get the Kindle edition. The Kindle edition's on sale for 99 cents. I'm not making any money on it. So I really did this as a labor of love. Again, self-published. I'm losing a lot of money, actually, James, thanks to your suggestion to use Lioncrest. But the point is I'm happy to do it because to see somebody avoid going down a lane, you know, that's going to ultimately lead to pain, frustration, diminished opportunities for both their personal lives, fewer opportunities to made and so forth, but also to make money and support themselves. To avoid that is almost as gratifying as to help

someone find the right lane that gets them into a state of flow. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much for me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcatra.g. com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks. So things have gotten really busy for me lately. And I've asked for it. I'm doing all things I love doing and wanting to do. But I'm very busy and I have to be focused on every single thing.

And some of these things that I do during the day, like basically, I'm helping run three different businesses. Plus, I'm doing three podcasts a week and I have to read and prepare for each podcast. I'm writing a book. Those are just like my professional career things, and then I'm doing all sorts of other things. And I often have to switch from meeting to meeting to meeting, and my brain has to stay focused.

And I don't want to take any stimulants that's going to get me overhyped or overstimulated and not. I really want to function optimally. I don't think this is going to last forever. Well, I hope it doesn't last more than a month like this. But basically, I had to figure out what to do. And I really can't highly recommend enough, H-U-E-L and their black addition powder.

It's like a complete meal so you feel full, focused, and I feel more ready for the day, like it actually works. So at less than $3 per meal, it's packed with 40 grams of plant-based protein and 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no added sugar, gluten-free, taste great with flavors like salted caramel and chocolate. plus it keeps me full for hours. That's key. I don't want to be like hungry

during all these meetings. And it's perfect for breakfast, lunch, or post workout. And just when you thought Huell had everything covered, they just dropped a first of its kind super greens drink in a can. And it's called the Hule Daily Greens Ready to Drink. So you forget powders,

forget those pills. This is your daily greens. No mixing, no mess, quick and convenient without compromising nutrients. Don't go for those compromising nutrients. It's sparkling and comes in flavors like blueberry, apple, peach, 42 vitamins, minerals, and superfoods, only 25 calories, 4 grams of fiber, one gram of sugar made by dieticians. So try Hewell with 15% off for new customers today using my code Altiture at Heel.com slash Altiture. Fuel your best performance with Heel today.

There is some very unique advice that I came across in this book that was interesting to me. One is this idea of don't always master the work of those who came before you. And I find this to be extremely valuable advice that is easy to sort of gloss over. So for instance, if I want to build a project on top of the internet, if I want to build a website, I don't need to know how the internet works as an example. By the way, even coding now. If I want to code something because of advances very recently in AI coding, I might not even have to be a coder, which is amazing.

But maybe give more specific examples. Like if I want to do quantum mechanics, do I have to know Einstein inside and out? Well, I think that, again, there is a lot of attention paid to novelty. Right? Novelty is a very prized quantity of the human experience because it's so rare. There's an obsession in modern culture with novelty, with youth, with fluidity, you know, and all these other concepts. Because it is very tied to the release of dopamine in the brain. We love things like surprises. We love novelty. We're addicted to what, you know, what this friend of mine, Brett Weinstein calls hyper-novelty. Like everything is, is a in the news. Like, do you remember, like, what the news was three days ago? And nobody knows what it was,

because it's right now. It's called the never-ending now. It never stops. Like an ancient history. Yeah, it's exactly right. And it's only getting worse, right? So, therefore, what's the contrarian bit of advice? It's to do the opposite. Think of the things that have passed, you know, the Lindy test that still are around and have been around for hundreds or if not thousands of years, you know, scientists have been looking up at the night sky and trying to make sense of it for literally, you know, 50 millennium. And they got a lot of things wrong. But that's part of the project of science, is to be wrong, but to at least explore and to dare greatly and go boldly into this unknown future. So for me, the first thing you want to do is pay homage to what came before you. Think about the

different sources of knowledge, like a textbook. A textbook is one of the most perishable forms of knowledge that there is, right? It's something that's crystallized on paper or digital bits, and it represents the field as it was at a frozen moment. time, never gets updated, and new discoveries come in, and I have to teach them and say, well, the textbook's wrong here. I teach a course in cosmology every spring here at UC San Diego. And every year, I'm kind of annoyed because the book that we use is so good. And the author, Barbara Ryden, is a friend of mine, and she's at OSU. And it's such a well, she's like a poet.

She's so brilliant. And I love the book, but it's horribly out of date already. It's only like nine years out of date. A lot of what we teach in there is complete nonsense because we don't know. what we didn't know back then. We now know. And so the point of science is to upgrade yourself. But when you find something that's lasted for millennia, really, literally, then you should

really pay attention to it. Some of those ways are, for example, applying mathematics. Like, we don't think about it. But math has this unreasonable ability to influence things and predict things about the physical world. Why is that? Like, there's no such thing as a triangle. Like, if I said, James, give me a triangle.

You can't do it. It only exists in the human mind. If I say, give me the number one. Like, it's a concept. It's not something tangible. And so it's a puzzle. Why, therefore, should math be so useful in the physical world, which predicts airplanes and rockets and invented the internet and all sorts of things that are tangible, that are

non-fundable, that only exist in reality? It's actually a great mystery. The famous Nobel Prize winner, Eugene Vigner, wrote about this. He called it the unreasonable effectiveness of math in physics. And it's kind of related to this difference between things that are discovered versus things that are invented. Like, we discovered the concept of a triangle. We didn't invent a triangle because you can't even give it to somebody, right? So in my mind, the- And you say you can't, I'm sorry to interrupt, you say you can't give it to somebody because,

and this reminds me of our very first podcast that we ever did, perfection and the concept of infinity doesn't exist in the real world. And so something like a triangle ultimately has to have infinitely precise, you know, whatever, 90 to 45-degree angles, whatever the angles are, 60-degree angles. And you can't have that kind of perfection in the real universe. But theoretically, obviously, you can. That's right. And more even than that, there are things in mathematics that can be proven. You can actually prove one plus one equals two.

I have this running debate with this guy, Terrence Howard, the actor from Ironman and Empire and Empire and whatever. He and I disagree because he thinks one times one equals two. So we go back and forth and he talked about me with Joe Rogan on Joe Rogan with Eric Weinstein. But besides that, mathematicians have proven that. that the square root of two is irrational. They've proven that one plus one equals two. But it takes literally like hundreds of pages in some cases

of rigorous mathematical reasoning. But I cannot prove to you, James, it's anything about the physical world. In other words, proofs exist in the abstract world of ideas and mathematics, but they do not exist in the tangible physical world of reality. For example, here's a meteorite, which you can get at my website,

briancaiding.com, if you're lucky, or if you have a .edu email address, I guarantee, I send these to my.edu email address holders, James, because I am one of them, but they're my target demographic in a lot of sense for this newest book. I really want them to benefit from this book while they're young, get on the right course, focus and concentrate so that they can blow up their careers. Here's a meteorite. There's no telling that this meteorite will fall exactly at 9.8 meters per second squared

or that it might not fall up instead of down, right? There's no actual way to prove that because things in the physical world can only be disproven or falsified. So math is this ideal abstract thing, but it's so powerful and it's so important to learn what are the limits of our capabilities. Where does the lens end, so to speak? Where does it run out of focus? You have to learn those things, and you learn that not from knowledge, perishable knowledge in a textbook. You learn that from the wisdom of people that came before sort of what you're trying to emulate. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage.

That's really interesting. I mean, the idea that math, you would think you can prove, that right because of all the work on the physical laws of science it's almost like you can prove it but but physical scientists take poetic license they leap over the fact that okay math doesn't really exist in the real world we're going to just assume it does we're going to take poetic license and assume it does and then we can prove all these things that's right so exactly i do feel that it's often underappreciated because we give so much attention so much credit to physicists they're kind of like these magicians, as Arthur C. Clark also said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable

for magic. To me, it's almost a problem that science sometimes produces technology because then people come to expect technology to come from it, right? So you kind of don't expect from math, there's going to be like a lot of technology, even though we kind of sort of know these AI and LLMs and stuff are based on math, but nobody really knows how. Even their inventors don't know how they work. I talk with this. The actual, he's really regarded as the smartest human being on earth. His name is Terrence Tao. He's a famous mathematician in UCLA, and I interviewed him last week. And we started talking about, you know, how are you teaching things different? Like, how are you different than, here's my friend Galileo? You know, Galileo taught 400 years ago in the University of Padua in Italy,

and he was just like, he would go to a classroom with a rock, you know, with a piece of chalk and scrape on a blackboard. So it's like he's using a piece of rock on another piece of rock. And that hasn't changed. I still use chalk. I still use chalk boards. I still use, you know, maybe I use a whiteboard or, ooh, PowerPoint, you know, such a huge, you know, level up from transparencies. But really, like, how is he using AI or how is he using, you know, quantum computing? We don't teach our students to any of these things, James. It's really insane. So you've heard of quantum computing probably, right? Yes, yes. So quantum computing just maybe. for the audience that might not be familiar is an extension or an improvement

or is thought to be an improvement upon classical computers that use transistors like your iPhone, which, you know, right now we're talking iPhone 17, just popped out of, you know, Tim Cook somewhere here in California. So they're basically built upon semiconductors. These are transistors that transition between a zero and a one and on or an off, zero volts or five volts and digital logic. And it was known from 150 years ago that you could compute any sort of algorithm you like, just having binary code, just zeros and ones or, you know, zero volts and five volts. So that's what these transistors do.

However, however, Feynman, Richard Feynman, famous Nobel laureate, and many others in the 1950s and 60s, realized that you could make a qubit, a quantum bit, which would not be a transistor, it can't be a transistor. They don't work for this application. Something called a superconductor, not a semiconductor, a superconductor, something that operates with zero resistance under the right circumstances.

And such a qubit could theoretically do an almost unlimited number of calculations at a single time, not just a zero and a one, a one bit at a time or a terabyte at a time. It could actually do an unlimited number of calculations at a given time. Now, this has incredible applications, but they're very limited in that.

They seem to be very good at doing things that require a massive amount of what's called parallelization. So, for example, one thing that comes from pure math, that's used right now by James and his friends at bit tensor. Is it bit tensor? Yeah. Okay. So is cryptography. So cryptography is the encoding or hashing

of cryptographic information, and then the decoding of it is sometimes used with an algorithm that requires, say, 256 bits of classical bits of computation. Well, one qubit could actually crack that in a nanosecond if it were optimized perfectly. It's impossible to do so. But in theory, at least, these could,

And every couple of months you hear that, oh, there's a quantum computer which now is threatening the security of not just, you know, BitTens or Bitcoin or Ethereum, but all banking is done. All the internet is encrypted via these techniques. So theoretically, people could read your emails and see your grinder profile and do whatever you see what you're up to on there, right? So it's very dangerous. It has a lot of impact. And if we don't invent it, you know, I'm sure people in China or Russia or, you know,

wherever, they're going to invent it before the – so it's a hot topic. Guess what, James? I don't teach it to any of my students. Not yet. I'm actually going to teach the first class, whether they like it or not, in a couple weeks, on quantum computing. And actually, you know, I'm going to make this book, you know, how to build a quantum computer. What could be more important for a physicist? You know, yes, I think it's important to study cosmology, but leading one of the biggest projects ever made, the Simon's Observatory right now with my fellow co-leaders, that's going to be great, but it's going to take a few years before we get the final data results from it and have the earth-shaking information that might win somebody a Nobel Prize. I don't know if it'll be me anymore. but one of my teammates might win it, right? So that's a few years down the road. That's my number one daily practice, but I'm not teaching my students anything about these revolutions in AI, LLMs, or quantum computing.

So I think that's a shame, and we need to do something about it. So I've resolved to teach about how to make your own quantum computer. Now, they won't be able to actually do it. But if I, you know, you might argue now, well, now, Keating, you're not focusing on cosmology, right? But you knew long ago that I stopped focusing on, you know, just one thing at a time. and the way my mind works like yours, I like to do multiple things at a time. But I do have to teach as part of my job here,

and I am teaching. I'm assigned to teach quantum physics this year and advanced quantum physics to undergraduate seniors and juniors and physics majors. And that's what I'm going to do, but I'm going to give them some life skills, James, that they can actually use to maybe get a job and do something that's not going to be replaceable by AI.

AI is not going to be able to build a quantum computer. Well, okay, that question aside. First off, great title of a book. You should make a book out of this course. how to build a quantum computer. True, it'll be out of date the second after you published it, but it's still a great title for a book and it will sell many copies.

Second, tell me to make the leap from teaching that course to teaching them life skills. In terms of practical applications of, say, a computing science degree or a physics degree or something like that right now, there's very few jobs that you can do right out of undergraduate with a bachelor's degree in physics, because most of the people that go on to do stuff

with a bachelor, who majored in physics, want to be a professor, a postdoc, you know, go go to NASA or do something like that. And usually that requires a PhD. So there's very few skills jobs that you can do immediately. Now, you can do a lot. And actually, physicists, as I believe, have the most wide spectrum of skills. They know everything from how to build a circuit. If you want to understand how an electrical circuit works, an electrical engineer might be able to know a little bit better than you, but they can't build it. They can't solder it. They almost do none of that. We build data acquisition systems. We take, you make measurements of systems near absolute zero or, you know, billions of degrees Kelvin in some cases. And so you do all these, you know, incredibly diverse skills, but you don't learn them very deeply.

You know, you have 10 weeks to learn these in a class. And when you graduate, you know, you've also had to take a whole bunch of other classes, you know, women's studies to be well-rounded as important, but not necessarily, you know, going to help you design, you know, for example, a quantum computer to have taken poetry of the Renaissance. Yes, that might be important. But that's one of those things you can do on your own. Like, I'm totally comfortable learning from YouTube and not having to take a little, you know, also, I mean, why do we force an undergraduate who will have to be paying back $70,000 a year in college loans? Why do we force them to take something that has absolutely no chance of benefiting their career of advancing them? Like, you know, I'm not advocating against it. I have taught classes in the literature department here as well. But my point is, if you were concerned with the outrageous prices of college tuition, with the incredible rates of the loans that these kids have that can never be discharged, even in bankruptcy court, you would want to also make sure they have a lot of marketable skills so they can at least support themselves in the incredible high cost of living, inflation, and so forth.

My point is that if you learn quantum to build a quantum computer and use it, not just like, oh, here's some abstract thing with a zero and a one, and it could be also a square root of two if you wanted it to be. No, no, no. You're actually learning everything from the foundations of quantum mechanics, like the Schrodinger equation, how does the uncertainty principle work, how do you understand, you know,

the properties, what's called spin of electrons, of photons, and other particles. How do you understand interactions with an electron? How do you know what happens when you take an electron and put it in a magnet? Like, what happens? I mean, those kinds of things actually could be used to build different products

and services, etc. But eventually you have to get to, like, putting this thing in a system, which requires cooling down to very low temperature, So you learn about vacuum systems, cryogenic systems, even if you're going to be a theorist. Then you learn about what's called perturbation theory. The mathematics of it are very advanced, elegant, and beautiful partial differential equations and solving those numerically.

They can't be solved analytically. So you learn very advanced mathematics. You learn very advanced interactions between particles, forces, and fields. And then finally, you have to learn how to program these things. When you start to program a quantum computer, you get something that never happens with a classical computer because it's so cheap to make billions of transistors that you have to get into what's called error correction. So these are algorithms that overcome the noise

that's injected by the physical world onto an idealized system in the quantum realm. So you learn about how you overcome these things. How do you do encryption? How do you do decryption? How do you program a quantum computer? So my hope is that it will tie in all these different fields from physics, low temperature,

cryogenics, chemistry, computer science, the theory of how you program these. things, everything from how to build a vacuum chamber all the way up to how do you crack, you know, bit tensor tomorrow. So James goes broke. Now, you're not going to do that, James. I like the idea of it's sort of like a sexy sounding class, how to build a quantum computer. And but to do that, to teach that, you have to teach at a very deep level all of these different concepts along the way. And this applies to another thing that's mentioned in the book, which is it's not enough to just solve these earth-shaking and

earth-changing problems. You have to be able to communicate them. And communication is, I would say, almost as important as the skill of discovery is the skill of communicating that discovery. In order to, for instance, win a Nobel Prize, no one's giving you a Nobel Prize if you discovered the secrets of the universe if you can't communicate them. And so I think that is like a key common factor in all these people you interview. And they express this in your book and you express this in the book. How would you say the average person, and based on what you've seen from these dollar prize winners, how can someone improve their communication skills to do what you just did with coming up with this idea of a sexy sounding class, how to build a quantum computer, anybody off the street

would want to take that class? And you're really just, it's the bridge of all these ideas you have to kind of teach all these disciplines. How do you build that skill? Yeah. So there's a saying that the way to become successful is to do things that don't scale. Like to grow an email list or to grow a Twitter following, that scales very rapidly. It costs nothing or, you know, Instagram influencers. You can pay people to be, you know, your followers or whatever. So those scale very easily. Sending out meteorites, you know, to people is very hard to do. And that's why I only do it to my beloved people in the academic setting, either professors, post-ex students or whatever, or randomly. Sometimes I send them to non-academics. But I noticed, when I sent out a notice yesterday, James, that my book is out

today. And I said, here, buy the Amazon, Kindle copy. It's 99 cents this week only. And please leave a review. I have an email list. And there's about a couple thousand people from academia on it. And then there's 16,000 people that are not in academia on it. Okay. So I sent it to both. So it's a perfect AB test. I sent it to the EDU people who have received meteorites. They opened it. 70% of them opened this email. And 60% of them clicked on the link to buy the book. Okay? It's unheard of. Right. So hopefully I've got it. got, you know, 1,400 orders, you know, in my Amazon profile right now, which will be like the logarithm of how many books you've sold. But for me, it's a big deal, right? Again, I'm not doing

it to make money. I wouldn't have priced it at 99 cents. I'm losing a lot of money on this book, but I really want it out there. And then on the non-EDU email list, the open rate is like 33%, and the click rate is like 4%. So it's just this incredible thing. Why? Because I've earned something with the people and I can, like, sent them something of great value. It costs, you know, $10 to send everybody a meteorite like this. It's very, but I love to do it because they are very curious. I teach them about meteorites where to find them, how to see meteor showers, where do they come from? How do you know this is older than our sun, you know, this meteorite that you'll get? So I teach them about it because you're incredibly curious. Now, your original question, how do you teach her, what's the

lesson that these Nobel Prize winners had in common? It's that they did things that don't scale. They built relationships. You think of a scientist, you know, the old joke is, you know, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? Because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. But These people are not like that. They're incredibly gregarious. They keep networks. They send messages. They reply.

This woman Donna Strickland, she doesn't have to reply. She's like the provost. She's this huge level scientist, Nobel Prize. She took the time to, you know, respond to me. Like she met 30 minutes, you know, talk for 35, 40 minutes. And I don't even know if she even remembered me. But the point is, you know, she was so good with people that she realized that the most important word, as we know, from the seven habits of highly successful people, is someone else's name

and showing an interest in somebody. Those are going to be the skills that will pay off in the age of AI. AI scales instantaneously and almost infinitely. It can replicate 1,000 graduate students' worth of knowledge. It can represent exactly 0% of the wisdom, of the accumulated wisdom that I've gleaned from meeting these, you know, now it's 22 Nobel Prize winners, over the past five years since I started the podcast, you know, thanks in large part to your inspiration. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. So, okay, learning these skills of communication side by side with doing something intensely that you love, that seems like I'm obviously oversimplifying, but those two things seem like the overall magic formula. in addition to, you know, all the advice that each one individually gives. That's right. But I want to make it clear. I don't expect them to start off at that level, right? So I give an example.

Have you ever gone to a lecture or seen a talk by someone who's just so brilliant and you're just fascinated and you just want to express, you know, that there really made an impression upon you, right? Like, forget about the podcast. Like, think about when you were in school or, you know, you might have heard a lecture or gone to a talk at the 90 Second Street, Why, or whatever you did. you know, and are due nowadays. Most students don't know that their professors are aching to hear from them.

In other words, I do office hours once a week in my office at UCSD, ironic, you know, for the name office hours. I get, on average, one or maybe mostly zero people come to my office hours. Now, I'm not bragging about this again. I'm not, I don't do what I do to make money. I wouldn't work for the state of California if that were the case, right, James? But I can get between $1,000 and $10,000 an hour. or consulting or speaking.

So that means that every student who's already paid that money in their tuition, they're paying for an office hour with me that they don't come to. And the ones that do, they always come back. Every single one that I have an office hour with, they always come back week after week after week. And I love it. Professors love that. So if you're a student listening to us talk,

I want you to go to all of your professor's office hours. First of all, you're paying for it. Second of all, they're going to love it. Third of all, it may develop into a relationship. fourth of all, it may develop into a job. Fifth of all, it might develop into a letter of recommendation. And then I extend that information. There are things called seminars and colloquia

at every single university on earth, right, where some speaker comes in from anywhere. It doesn't matter your field or not. You don't have to stay in your lane. I go to hear talks by people that study abstract properties of theoretical insulators that only work in two dimensions. We don't even know if that exists.

I'll go to that lecture and I'll go up to the person afterwards. If I'm a student, I'll say, this is really fascinating. I'd love to learn more about it. Can you recommend a paper? They'll send you their email. You might want to go to them as a graduate student. You might not, but you might learn so much and it feels so good to have someone express an interest in your research. I mean, most of my papers, James, have like 10 citations, I think, on average. You know, I've written 400 papers probably in my life. Most of them have 10, that means 10 people read it enough to, like, be conversed and they could cite. Some of them have 2,000, but most of them have the square root of the number of books I hope to sell today from being on this show. And so, That means that when someone expresses an interest in one of my papers or my books, it really makes me have a deep connection, one that no AI can replicate. By the way, I agree with that. And I hate to kind of say this was a technique. I was legitimately driven by curiosity.

But I found when I initially was, let's say, networking in my career, if someone had a PhD, I always found it very useful to look up and read that person's PhD pieces because I guaranteed zero other people trying to network with that person has done that same thing. And I would legitimately be curious, but I also knew it was a technique to kind of stand out. You know, it was okay to be technique driven if you're sincere in your intentions. And I find like, like you're right, that doesn't scale. Like you could only, it's, you know, A, only so many people are going to do that.

And it's hard work. You have to put in actual footwork to, you know, hustle to do that. Like you have to look up the themes. You have to read it. You have to research it. You have to understand it. Sure. Now you can get AI to explain it.

So it might be a little bit easy. but not that much easier. And it's an interesting thing. And look, I actually want to dive into the topics a little bit from our very initial podcast, but I do want to say, I found, I'm still reading this book, but what I've read, I'm really enjoying Into the Impossible Volume 2, even more than I enjoyed Into the Impossible Volume 1, which I wrote the forward to. And I think it's because, I think you've, you know, by the way, that's a valuable book, too,

but I really enjoy this, the way you're interweaving kind of the life lessons with a very high level and beautiful understanding of what these people did to get the Nobel Prize. And some of these people did very complicated things, like, you know, ranging from, like you mentioned, the Lasic surgery, to the guy who discovered black holes to very complicated stuff, like isolating an atom with lasers and so on, so or particles. And so I really enjoyed the discussions of the science. as well as, let's call, I don't like to use the word self-help, but let's say the life lessons you've learned from these people,

because I know you're sincerely looking for these questions yourself. When you're not like trying to write a self-help book, it comes across. You're genuinely curious. Like, what do these people do that was different than what other people do? But I do want to ask you, where are we going to find out the age of the universe thanks to your technology?

You're basically instrumental in developing, and you almost won the Nobel Prize for. Yeah. Are we in that? Is it 13.6 billion years old? I just read the other day, but it might be 28 billion years old. Yeah, no, this is still, you know, incredible to think the cosmologists have, like, really extreme battles over, you know, the ideology and the basic facts and properties of the universe. So I always like to say, you know, if you went to a doctor, they would take your vital sense, your blood pressure, your weight. If they want to see, how long are you going to live for, you know, hopefully to 120. But let's just say they want to predict based on basic data about James.

alter, how long is it going to live? And they'd go through and they measure your height, your weight. Another question they'd ask is, what's your current age, right? I mean, just completely starting from scratch, right? Your cholesterol, your prostate score, whatever. They do all these tests on you, right? So cosmologists are the same way. We want to understand how long is the universe going last for? Should we keep paying those taxes that we mentioned at the very beginning? Or what's the point if it's going to come to an end very soon? And to do that, we make measurements of the universe's vital statistics, including what it's made of. How many black holes does it have? How much dark matter does it have? How much dark energy? And these things are, because it's like we're establishing the

facts that we'll go into tomorrow's textbooks, which will become obsolete nine years later in the future textbooks, those things are changing. It doesn't mean that we don't know what we're talking about. We're measuring things with ever greater precision from ever greater numbers of disparate fields, from looking at stars close to the sun all the way back to galaxies at the beginning of time and seeing do they agree on the basic facts of the universe when your daughters were young, you took them to the doctor at age two

and your doctor, pediatrician, measured their height and then they said, basically they're going to be twice that height. That's what I found out from having kids. They basically double the height at age two. And that predicts how tall they're going to be when they're adults. Well, the universe, we can do that same thing too. We can ask how old is the universe, you know, basically how big is the universe

is related to how fast is expanding and how old it is? We can say, well, how old is the universe according to measurements done close to the Big Bang, close to age two of the universe, you know, it was a few billion years old. We can also do it nowadays,

locally, when it's closer to 13 billion years old, and we can see do those two things agree and they don't agree? But they're not like, one says the universe is zero and the other one says it's like 10 trillion years old. They disagree at about 10%. But the interesting thing,

In other words, it's like saying you're either 56 or you're 60 or something like that. Like there's, it's a smaller, you know, 60, whatever, it works on to be 61. There's a disagreement, but they're saying, each one of us is saying, we know how, you know, how old you are to a couple of days, precision. They disagree with each other wildly, but they don't disagree on an absolute sense, astronomically. So it's a controversy, and we're trying to answer that question. How old is the university is related intimately to how?

how it was formed, you know, was there a singularity at the beginning of time? Or it can also be related to how long will the universe last for? And these things are, we're getting new and more new data every day. And as John Maynard Keynes is reputed to say, you know, when the facts change, I change my mind. We're not changing our mind. There was no Big Bang. There is a big. We're saying how much more precision can we know what the future may hold for our cosmos?

And we're learning more every day. But I guess what I'm asking is, so your concept, and these are concepts that you again, you stood on the shoulders of giants as well. A, one can measure gravitational waves, the same way a telescope could measure light waves. So you built like a special kind of telescope to measure gravitational waves. And the idea is that the background radiation,

the plasma created from the Big Bang, is too thick for light to get through, but not too thick for gravitational waves to get through. So a telescope that could detect gravitational waves could potentially look beyond for the first time that background cosmic radiation that formed about 300,000 years after the universe was born. So the question is, are we getting closer to seeing beyond,

to seeing the gravitational waves beyond that background radiation to see maybe or understand what happened in those first 300,000 years? Yeah, we're getting a lot closer to it. There's two main challenges, though, in that the first one is just having the technology to go beyond the current limits that we have set with the Bicep series of experiments. So I created the first bicep, Bicep 1, it was superseded by a future generation called Bicep 2.

That made an announcement that we saw these gravitational waves in 2014 and that we later retracted, because that would have meant the universe began with this inflation, this ultra-rapid, faster than the speed of light, expansion of space and time. And so it was rightfully put on the front page of the New York Times, and that's why we were considered for a Nobel Prize. But spoiler alert, you know, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize because none of us won it

because it turned out that we didn't see the Big Bang's imprimatur, the inflationary spark that ignited the Big Bang. We saw microscopic grains of these meteorites, like you'll get on my website, Brian kidding.com, these meteorites that pollute the cosmos, but also are responsible for the iron in the hemoglobin molecule inside of our blood and at the Earth's core. And so without the iron, without the supernova,

without this dust signal that we saw, we wouldn't be here having this conversation, number one. But moreover, it pointed us in a direction of how interesting and how curious people are about this fact, and that, yes, if we could do away with that signal that in, you know, kind of intruded and was an imposter, we can then perhaps see back to the very beginning of time. So there's man-made obstacles, you know,

in terms of getting funding and building the instrument and so forth. And then there's nature-made or God-made obstacles like dust in our cosmos. We have to overcome both of those. So we have built the world's most sensitive. It may be the last observatory of its kind, by the way, because of the cutbacks to the U.S. government and governments around the world, the Simons Observatory, funded by my patron, you know, Saint and my godfather, Jim Simons, we are building the Simons Observatory in Chile at 18,000 feet nearly above sea level.

We have four massive telescopes that are scanning the sky at the thermal waves from the singularity that may have ignited the big bang called inflation, but also for the dust that masquerades as the imposter signal that cost us, you know, on Bicep at least, the Nobel Prize perhaps in 2014. To do science is very hard because you have to dedicate almost an equal and opposite amount of money, time, resources, and attention to something you don't really care. I don't really care about how many meteorites there are in the solar system or the galaxy.

It's interesting to some people. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. I'm interested in the two,

but the point is it's not the main goal of seeing back to the beginning of time. And it gets in the way. It's like dust on your windshield. Imagine you're like on a stakeout and you're trying to see like what is Robin doing right now? Like you're looking through the windshield

and you've got the binos working for you and you're trying to focus like a Nobel Prize winner and there's all this dust on the windshield. Like you would have to do an experiment oh I see that there's something in the way then you'd have to remove it somehow spray that windshield wiper jizz, you know whatever onto the windshield

and wipe it off and then you'd have to do a test is it better before or after and that's exactly what we're doing with the Simon's Observatory that we didn't have the power with on Bicep 2 And so we were kind of blind to it. And now we're not blind.

Now we can see. And now we're looking back. And we should have data. The problem with these instruments is that the light takes 14 billion years nearly to get here. And then it takes nearly five years to take the data and analyze the data, stress test the data, make sure we didn't fool ourselves and have a press conference and go to the New York Times before it's published and then put it out. I guess, you know, the upside was I got my first book out of it. On the other hand, it was a big, you know, disappointment, depression set upon us for many years. But now we're at that precipice, but it will take more time.

And in the meantime, I'm working on my next book because you taught me, you know, the way to sell your current book is to have a future book, right? So my next book, and probably might be my last book, James, is going to be about Jim Simons, but not as our mutual friend Greg Zuckerman wrote about his influence in the markets in his book, The Man Who Solved the Markets. But it's going to be about his scientific legacy and the billionaire's quest to uncover the beginning of time. He was one of the richest men in the world. He died a year ago, nearly exactly, and I made him a promise before he died that we'd help to shed light on what happened at the beginning of time.

He had his opinions. I think, you know, when I got up to heaven, hopefully at age, you know, older than he was, he was 86 when he died. Not bad after smoking six packs a day for 59 years, but he made it up there. And hopefully I'll be able to share this information with him that we, you know, what we did was help to reveal one of the most interesting and impactful results in all of scientific history. but it's going to take time. So in the meantime, I'm writing my next book about him. Well, that's going to be a great book. I can't wait to read it.

It's not going to be your last book, by the way. Everyone always says their next book is going to be their last book. But writers are addicts by nature. So you'll have the next book after that as well. I need your help on that. I need your help on that. So that'll be another podcast, though. We've got to land the spaceship now for my next interlude.

I've got to go out and promote this book, James. Yeah, well, you always do a good job of it. So Into the Impossible, Volume 2, I highly recommend it whether you want to read about the lives and habits of these Nobel Prize winners or you simply want to read from a great scientist's point of view in layman's terms the incredible achievements and scientific accomplishments of these people. This is a great book and I'm loving it. There were so many things.

I could do a podcast with you about each chapter in that book because I have so much. I was like, yeah, I mean, there's real, as I was reading, I kept writing more and more things down. And I'm like, you know what, I'm not going to ask him about isolating carticles and lasers and whatever. But yeah. Stories are so important. I have to say, it's not easy to write a book. I'm going to lose a lot of money on this book unless I get the Altutcher bump again and again. But how many times he'd go back to the Altoucher well?

But the point is, like, the characters in this book, the people, they're characters. And most people think of scientists as caricatures, you know, these just, like, stoic, boring, you know, people. The first guy in the book is this German guy, you know, he's got that, like, stereotypical German voice. And he talks about hunting. and smelling the prey as you go. And he's so, but he's like, he's the sweetheart, Reinhard Gensel,

he, you know, he's just like, he got emotional, he almost broke into tears talking about his father and how his father had this huge influence on him to, you know, to be relentless. And he almost became an Olympic javelin, you know, thrower in, for the German Olympic team. Like, he had just these incredible skills.

And then he used like these advanced lasers and art, what's called artificial stars. And he just, this black hole at the center of the Milky Way that's 7 million times more massive than our son. And this guy is just hilarious and he's deep. And I'm just so excited to share it with them. You know, it's a very small audience.

People say you should write for a big audience. But these nine people are just like every single one. And one of them is just more and more fascinating than any other human beings that I've ever talked to besides my wife and say. And you. But the point is like you get to, I get, you know, I don't get paid a lot to do it. I lose money on it.

But not sharing it. That's my rule about writing books, James. And I think you echoed this many times. Like, don't write a book unless you're the only person who could write this book. Like, I've interviewed 22 Nobel Prize winners more than any person I think that's ever lived. In addition to my other two books that I've written are produced, I really feel like I'm getting to something, like this sort of franchise where I can really bring out these people that are truly worthy of it.

And we see celebrities and movie stars and singers. And people look at them and they're like, oh, they're taking a position on Gaza or they're not, taking a position on, you know, it's like, who gives a crap? They're so, they're famous, but they're not significant. These people are significant, but they're not famous. And I'd like to try to make them more famous to inspire a young Brian or James or, you know, Brianna, Jamie. I want to really inspire that they can do it, but they have to really think about, are they the only person that can do it? Are they willing to put in what it takes? Because as I said, the most gratifying thing is when you hear somebody say, like, you inspired me to become X, Y, or Z. But the

second most inspiring thing is when you hear them say, you inspired me not to become X, Y, or Z. Like, you showed me the truth that my professors and my teachers, my friends, my parents never told me about, like, the ugly side of it and how these people got over. I'll say one last thing. Catalyn Carico is an amazing Hungarian. Again, her daughter is actually in the Olympics for a rowing as she lives here in San Diego. But her mother emigrated from Hungary, and she became a Nobel Prize winner for discovering inventing, really, the COVID-19 technology, the MRI technology.

So she invented basically the COVID vaccine with her colleagues. She won the Nobel Prize in 2021. She wrote a book, and she describes in the book how she was almost fired. She was actually fired twice from places like the University of Pennsylvania and other places. And one time, her postdoc advisor threatened to have her deported if she took a job with his competitor. So it's just insane. Imagine working in an advisor. We think, oh, scientists, they love each other. No, scientists are just like children.

You know, they're creative, imaginative, curious, petty, jealous, back, by, you know, it's like all the emotions. And I want to make that clear so that kids, you know, in graduate school or postdocs, they really have their mindset, you know, on the journey and that they're in it for the right reason and that they keep in mind their health, their mental health. I talk about mental health, sleep, caffeine, smoking. I talk about all those things in the book. And really distill the wisdom of these incredible geniuses.

and I hope to write, yes, I'll probably write one more book if I do nine more interviews. I'm up to 22. I need five more to get to the 27 number, which would trigger another into the impossible volume. But for now, my main focus is Simon's observatory and seeing if I can see this signal that Jim Simon so kindly provided funding for us to do before his death and kind of as an homage legacy to him as my scientific godfather. Well, look, Brian, you're always welcome back on the podcast anytime you want, but definitely if you figure out what happened at the beginning of time, then I expect a call the very next day, come on the podcast, and tell us what happened at the beginning of time.

Nothing so hard, just a simple question. And then maybe the journey to the Nobel Prize will start here. So thank you once again, you know, Brian Keating, author of losing the Nobel Prize into the Impossible, Volume 1, which I wrote the Forward 2. And finally, as of today, on his birthday, volume 2, perhaps the best edition of all these books. Thanks once again for coming on the podcast. I love you, James. Love you and Jay. And thanks so much for your support and encouragement. And yes, I absolutely will come back and you'll be the second to know. I'll even tell you before I tell my wife.

Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19. Tickets on sale now at yamava theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter.