Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - I Write Therefore I Am: David Perell— Building A Second Brain + Write of Passage (#139)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It's really a treat to talk to David Perel. It's a kind of a change-up from the podcast you've heard lately with Neil deGrasse Tyson and with Michi Okaku and other luminaries of the astronomical variety. But today having David Perel, who is an up-and-coming star building on our intrinsic capabilities, and hopefully upgrading them, giving us a Life 2.0 as PastGest Max Tegmark classifies life. Life 3.0, David, is artificial intelligence. And as Einstein said, I don't know what weapons will be used to fight World War III,

Starting point is 00:00:47 but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. So I don't know what Life 4.0 will be like, but you guys building a second brain, you and your partner, Tiago Forte, I wanted to have you on, and I'm a big fan of your work and his work. and I just wanted to showcase what you guys are doing for my audience. So welcome to the End of the Impossible Podcast. Thank you so much. It's a real honor to be here.

Starting point is 00:01:09 It's kind of crazy how many guests you've had that I, of people I just really admire and look up to. Yeah, of course, I became aware of your work. I don't really remember exactly how I found you, but those are serendipitous things that add delight and intrigue to life. But my main motivation is sort of a purpose. personal one, which is to enhance not only my brain, but in so doing, enhance my Brian. And so I'm interested in building a second Brian.

Starting point is 00:01:39 But before we get there, I think of what you do is providing the most critical skill that is also the least taught. And I'm saying that as a scientist, as someone who works with engineers, we have almost no training in how to write for our audience, but certainly for a non-technical audience. And lately, my big crusade, if you will, is that scientists have a moral obligation to explain what we do to the general public because you guys out there paying my salary via your taxes. Assuming you pay your taxes. I know you do, David. I know you move to Texas, but nevertheless, you pay your taxes. So tell me, why is it the most important skill, and yet we teach it to almost nobody in this field or almost any other field? I agree. When I read scientific writing, the lack of writing education shows. It shows it's not hard to see that writing isn't taught very well. I mean, just think about it, right? Like, to the extent that scientists believe that they're doing important work, I believe that there's an actual moral obligation to learn how to write and to communicate things in ways that are easy to understand and clear. And there's always some kind of trade-off between technical precision and the ability for people to understand

Starting point is 00:03:01 what is being said. But, you know, one of the things that I think a lot about is, you know, it's a lot of people get upset with this. And I understand why. But I think that these people provide a great service to the world. And those are the people who, like Bill Bryson, right, he goes out and takes a lot of biological research or anthropological research. and it just writes this book on the body.

Starting point is 00:03:27 And it's just magnificently written. It has stories. The writing is personal. It's observational. It's playful. It pops. And it then addresses the total addressable market for these important ideas. And I really wish that more scientists were able to write well and communicate their ideas.

Starting point is 00:03:49 And I think that those who do, such as David Deutsch, comes to mind, are, able to have a tremendous influence. You know, it's amazing. You mentioned Einstein earlier. His writing is quite clear. And something weird happened with 20th century literature, with 20th century philosophy, and with a lot of 20th century scientific writing. I mean, I go and I read Descartes' Meditations last week, and it wasn't easy to read, but it's definitely easier to read than modern scientific thinking, and that was written 400 years ago. Yeah, I point out that Galileo, Galilei, who is the first really popular science writer of any renown, he wrote in classic style, but also with modern twist to it. And so much so was he a wonderful kind of lyricist with his writing that he was able, through his writing, to discover new modalities of the human condition.

Starting point is 00:04:46 I'll bring one to your attention right now, which I find so beautiful. and it's an example of something that you've spoken about at different times, but it's called the Dunning Kruger effect, which is basically the steepness of the learning curve is lulls one into a false sense of undeserved arrogance. And what Galileo said 400 years ago in his dialogue on two universal systems, he said, this vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything

Starting point is 00:05:17 for anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished would recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing. And I think it's so beautiful to look at this man who was an incredible scientist. He had incredible foibles as well. He had, as we all do, certain habits, certain misdeeds and tendencies that led to his undoing. And maybe some of that could have been avoided if he weren't such a good writer. Obviously, the dialogue got him into the ultimate home imprisonment, which he ended his final days. But if knowledge, this paradox of knowledge, again, the topic you've addressed in your

Starting point is 00:06:04 wonderful YouTube channel and porell.com and your writings is something that you do every day. You write every day, and that's a habit of the greatest scientist in history, too. maybe not writing, but doing some kind of experiment. And so I'd love to talk about your kind of approach to creativity and whether or not we can teach creativity and or imagination, as that's a big focus of my group and the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Can that be taught? Can you teach someone to be a good writer or can you merely imitate previous writers?

Starting point is 00:06:38 And what is the best way to teach someone to develop their own voice? Yeah, so creativity is something that can only be cultivated, but you can't just like snap your finger, just come up with something creative. But you can cultivate a life that does make you more creative. And I use that terminology very deliberately, a life that makes you more creative. Creativity isn't something that you just do and you sit down and it just emerges. Like creativity is a way of being. And the reason why I write every day is because of this sort of paradox that I sense inside of the creative process, which is, on one hand, it is true that history's great creatives have been very spiky in terms of their ability to have a piece of great output. You know, one of the things that I find to be very surprising is how many of the great novels.

Starting point is 00:07:41 How many of the great essays, even my own essays that I'm pretty proud of, were written in an extremely short amount of time. And so people learn that, they see that, and they say, oh, great. That means I only have to do creative work when I'm inspired. That means I don't need to show up most of the days. And I say, you know what, that's actually not true. Because what you realize is that if you show up every single day, most days are actually just going to be quite frustrating, but those days where you don't get much done are like the price of admission

Starting point is 00:08:19 for those breakthrough moments. And I actually kind of think of it like going to the gym. Like the most important days of going to the gym aren't the days where you're inspired to go lift heavy weights and break a sweat. The most important days are the days where you don't feel like going and you go anyway and you leave and you're like, ah, that wasn't a great workout today. And it's actually the same thing with creativity because you never know when it's going to come. And if you give yourself the space and the time to sit down and focus, you never know what's going to emerge.

Starting point is 00:08:51 And there's this weird thing where most days feel like a total failure. You feel like you didn't get anything done. And somehow, some way, you look back at what you've achieved over months or years and you're like, wow, how did I do all that? And so once you start showing up every day, you have time on your side where then, you're just putting little bets into the world, and you look back, and you're like, wow, I actually did something. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the kind of length versus time. I think Voltaire said, if I had more time, I would have made it shorter,

Starting point is 00:09:24 which is kind of the paradox of creativity. And I know that you are also in training to become a private pilot. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah, so I've been a pilot for almost 30 years now. Really? Yes, yeah. I started off flying little.

Starting point is 00:09:40 tiny Cessnas and work my way up and have aspirations for even bigger hardware. As you know, it's an addiction. So once you've tasted flight once. So do you go through, you get your instrument? And then you kept going? Yes. I have a commercial. I have a multi-engine. I even have a what's called a type rating, which is to fly a specific jet, which I hope someday to be able to do. And that's a separate rating. And I've started to work on becoming a flight instructor. And that is in part, to work someday to teach my children. I've got several children. They're all interested in aviation. But I also recognize the adage that I was taught the day I got my first private and pilots license, which was that once you stop learning, you stop living. In other words, you're going to start

Starting point is 00:10:30 dying in a sense. And because we have to learn from the mistakes of others as a pilot, the saying is, you won't live long enough to make all the mistakes yourself, literally. I wanted to become a teacher of a flight instruction. Now, I'm a professor at a top 10 research university, and I was never taught how to teach. No one ever sat me down, taught me how to teach. I wrote a best-selling book. No one ever taught me how to write scientifically

Starting point is 00:10:56 or write for the lay audience. And I think it's so scary. It's actually frightening because the FAA, as you're learning, is a government entity. They have rules. They have things. Your flight instructor had to learn what's called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And that is the needs that somebody is requiring in

Starting point is 00:11:15 order to flourish in life, but also to teach somebody something. They need to feel physically safe, mentally, emotionally. They need to have their biological needs met. Can you teach that? I always think it's funny because it's the only branch of the U.S. government. Like, you can't go into the IRS handbook for tax adjusters and find, like, your people need love. You know, like, it's not in there. You know, like, the person you're auditing needs. needs to feel loved, again, with the taxes. But in terms of teaching the teachers, you know, I guess a crisper way to say it is like, how did you learn to teach?

Starting point is 00:11:48 And is that making you a better writer? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I learned to teach by loathing school. Like, I thought school, like, I actually think it's criminal in terms of just how hard it is on people like me who are, have some kind of weird mental stuff. going on in terms of like maybe some dyslexia, just like wires getting crossed and stuff. But in a way that is actually quite helpful for me in terms of being creative, I also have so

Starting point is 00:12:18 much energy and I just have a need to do things. I have a need to be social. I have can then, I'm sort of over there and get really distracted easily, but then also have an ability to focus really intensely. And the thing that I always needed in life was basically just like get away for me and just give me the resources and the tools to help me when I get stuck, but please just let me do things and let me go at my own speed. And it was really hard because in, like, I remember in college, man, it was, I took a media arts and entertainment class, my senior year of college. And during this class, during this class, I got recruited for my first job by the CEO of a major advertising agency in New York that when I went to go work there, we did about four.

Starting point is 00:13:08 $45 million a year in revenue, right? So like we're a decent size. And he recruited me basically saying, oh my goodness, you're 21 years old. I can't believe how well you understand this industry. And that happened at the same time that I got a C in my media arts and entertainment class. And it was just because all of school moved both way too fast for me and way too slow for me. So if there were things that I was interested in, such as the way that Netflix and HBO were, contending with traditional cable networks and how that was intersecting with YouTube.

Starting point is 00:13:41 I was like, oh my goodness, Brian, this is so interesting. But then there were other parts of this class that I just had no interest in whatsoever. And the inability and the actually lack of encouragement as a student to say, hey, you're interested in this thing. Go explore it. Go crazy. And the gift that I had was my dad. My dad, growing up, any single thing that I was passionate about, he was like, dude,

Starting point is 00:14:06 Just go for it. I mean, we lived in a family that didn't have, like, we didn't do gifts. We didn't do birthday presents. We never really went out to dinner. We didn't really do many extravagant trips. I mean, when we did trips, they were really focused around learning. But the one thing that I was just totally spoiled with was if I wanted to learn something, I had an unlimited, an unlimited budget of my, of money, which wasn't that expensive. But the thing that was the gift was my dad. That's time and energy and encouragement. And growing up for 18 years under that, whether it was aviation, whether it was baseball, whether it was golf, whether it was one time in 2006, I was in sixth grade, we had this project called the I-search. And basically, you're just supposed to pick a question and go answer it, whatever. And so I'm like, no, this is not whatever. I'm going to get really into something. So what I did was I asked a very simple question, how will the Boeing 787 fly?

Starting point is 00:15:06 And the Boeing 787 wasn't supposed to come out until 2008, 2009. And this was 2006 when I wrote this. And my dad had known someone from the Schweitzer family, and the Schweitzer family, they're behind one of the big glider companies. And I think that they were bought by Boeing or affiliated by Boeing. So, I mean, we fly up to Seattle. We go to the Boeing factory. I touch and feel the first ever Boeing 787 airplane. I come longer than the average student.

Starting point is 00:15:41 I end up getting more than a perfect score on this project. And this was from somebody who got terrible grades who, I mean, I graduated from high school with a 2.8 GPA. I got roughly average marks on the ACT and the SAT, the two standardized tests. I mean, I say with no hyperbole that I thought that I was going to be. kind of a failure in life for the first 24 years of my life. But this one project, I got the second best grade in the class. I will never forget my friend Alex, who did better than me. And I think that this just gets back to my main point about learning and about teaching.

Starting point is 00:16:19 Like, what if for a certain kind of human, and maybe it's 5% of the world, maybe it's 10%, I don't know, somebody smarter than me can do the science, what if the idea of like curriculums and going at a sense? similar cadence in the whole class, maybe that's just totally wrong. Maybe certain people actually need to just be more unconstrained in what they're able to do. And the problem is that's a high variance strategy. If you do that, you're going to have some people who don't do anything who just sit back and say, you know what, this isn't for me. I'm just not even going to try. And you're going to have other people who just go crazy. And the thing with most education policy that we're trying to do is lower the variance. We're trying to have more equal outcomes. And look, we can debate the merits

Starting point is 00:17:07 of equality versus exceptionalism, as Eric Weinstein says, excellence versus genius. But fine, I'm happy to have that debate. But I think it's really important for us to acknowledge the tradeoffs that we're making when we try to narrow the distribution of outcomes. Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up your high school struggles that you had yesterday. As I mentioned, I talked to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. And he said he did well in the SATs back in the day, but he didn't do, you know, phenomenally well in the verbal component of it. And then about 10 years ago, he got a letter in the mail from the educational testing services. And he was like, oh, no, they thought, you know, they think I cheated or I don't know, they're coming to revoke my score, which was good, you know, it was good, but it wasn't great.

Starting point is 00:17:55 And he opened it up and it said, dear Dr. Tyson, we're writing to ask you if we have your permission to use some of the pros from one of your books as an example for the upcoming SATs, you know, in the future. So basically it would be like a writing sample and then people would analyze it, you know, for example. And he was like, I would react what, wow, you guys want to use losing the Nobel Prize? And he was like, af for you. Like, you made my life a living hell, these standardized tests. And I didn't fit into all the boxes. and I had to work my ass off and eventually he gave them permission.

Starting point is 00:18:29 But just hearing you talk about those struggles, but kind of the only clarity that you achieve in life is sometimes by looking at it in reverse. And I'll get to questions I ask, you know, what would you advise your 20-year-old self? I mean, you're still so young. It's amazing how much you've accomplished in such a short time. But I want to turn to your process because I... Wait, can I say one thing on that real quick?

Starting point is 00:18:48 Of course. So two things. The first is standardized tests are so tricky because... So I have a friend named Rob Henderson, and he grew up without, he was an orphan, and his parents were nowhere to be found growing up. And the reason that he ended up getting into Yale was because his standardized tests were so, were yet such high marks. And so I think that the sort of the subtlety of the standardized tests right now is something that we need to be a little bit more intelligent about as we talk about them societally. Because the thing is, standardized tests for people like myself and maybe Neil DeGress-Tyson just don't measure some sort of ineffable quality. That is absolutely true.

Starting point is 00:19:32 But the problem is a lot of people say that and they're like, oh, it doesn't measure intelligence. Like, let's just ban standardized tests. And in another way, standardized testing is, as far as my read on the data, one of the most equitable tools that we have that allow people who don't come from traditional backgrounds to prove. their merits and their intelligence. And I was reading about this last week, and it seems like standardized test tutoring and stuff actually isn't as effective as we think in terms of people's ability to get better. And so I do just want to say, although standardized test didn't measure something for me, I do think that there are really good things about them.

Starting point is 00:20:17 And I haven't, like, I would like to see sort of more nuanced takes on things. The other thing with Neil deGrasse Tyson, he said something to me that was absolutely life-changing. So I got to interview him in 2016. It just graduated from college. And I went into his office at the Museum of Natural History. And, you know, it's really cool because usually in life, life-changing things, you don't know that they're going to change your life in the moment. Interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson when you're 22 years old, you know it's going to be a life-changing day. And so you can like prepare for the day.

Starting point is 00:20:52 And so I go and I go into his office and, you know, I interview him similar to how we're doing it, but in person. And he said something to me. And he said, you know, I said, how do you communicate so eloquently? You're just a masterful speaker. And he goes, everything that I say in public is something that I've written down before. And I'm thinking to myself, there's no way that that's. true. I get that you speak eloquently, but there's no way. You talk all the time. How could it possibly be that it's something that you've written down before? And in retrospect, now that I've written

Starting point is 00:21:32 every single day, you told me to write every single day, now that I've done it for five years now, I know that that's true. And if you look at Neil deGrasse Tyson's ability to speak well, a lot of that is a result of the diligence that he has to write consistently. Yeah. And, And even more than that, I made the mistake of, you know, asking a question, which I knew the answer to, but I wanted him to elucidate it in his inimitable way. And I said, you know, early in your life, you were encouraged more to pursue athleticism, but you, you know, you were able to succeed in academia, despite, you know, kind of the stereotyping of, you know, that he should go into athletics. And, you know, it was that just that self-confidence that you had is that a byproduct. of natural gifts that you had. And he said, wait a second. You know, like basically, you know, he said, I'm going to play the race card. And I was like, holy crap.

Starting point is 00:22:32 What do you mean you're going to play the race card on me? And he said, you know, that question assumes that I was, if I'm born with something, that I didn't also do a tremendous amount of work. And he went through this vignette, and you'll hear it on my podcast when it comes out next week. But he went through his meticulous, uh, separation process when he goes on the daily show or Stephen Colbert or whatever. He wouldn't just, oh, I'm going to go and have a conversation. He would study past episodes. He would break down the statistics of how long between questions does Stephen Colbert wait. How long in time does he go

Starting point is 00:23:09 back to reference past events so that Neil could have a strict amount of attention to only the most relevant data? And therefore, it was a compression algorithm and something I know you're very fond of discussing. But it was interesting because I actually knew that he had done that, because I had to use the Tyson technique, which I hope that my listeners will take advantage of, and your listeners, I'll send the video to your team as well. But the point being that nobody's born being a good public speaker, as we already established, but the best ones work the hardest. And it's what I call this Tyson technique of treating everything, even as seemingly inconsequential as I'm talking, Okay, it's not inconsequential to talk to millions of people on national TV.

Starting point is 00:23:53 But talking to a comedian as an astrophysicist of his genius, you know, it was very interesting to me to hear that he put such meticulous preparation. So it's not a surprise to me. And I remember you telling that story on one of your podcasts about your encounter with him. Yeah. So yesterday I went to lunch with an actress. And, you know, she was on house and then once upon a time. And she was talking to me about.

Starting point is 00:24:19 what it was like, how she prepares. And so she's been helping her boyfriend, who's also an actor, on a new show that he's working on. And so they were filming in Vancouver, and they had 14 days of quarantine. And she was like, every single day for those 14 days, we went through the script. We talked about exactly how we were going to think about our act. our facial expressions, our body movements, what the script meant. And this was the key moment. It's what I call practice analytically, perform intuitively,

Starting point is 00:25:02 where what you do, and this is exactly what Neil deGrasse Tyson was doing, is exactly what this actor is doing, you begin to know the material and prepare so intensely that you rather than knowing the ideas with your rational conscious mind. You know them with your intuitive body awareness. And rather than thinking about something and then doing that thing, the ideas work through you. And so I think what it means to really be prepared as a speaker is you kind of go over this mountain of complexity. Oliver Wendell Holmes said for an idea on this side of complexity, I would have complexity.

Starting point is 00:25:49 wouldn't give you a fig for an idea on the other side of complexity, I'd give you everything in the world. And so I think that what happens is we start off when we're just BSing something, we're intuitive in this weird way. And then we kind of get into this rational place where we're trying to perform, but our minds are steering the ship. But then once again, we end up intuitively with excellence, which actually comes from the ideas working through you in a way that you're super prepared and I suspect that that's what Neil deGrasse Tyson would would say he's doing. Yeah. So talk about your kind of attention to detail, which I do think comes from attention itself. You've written extensively about your favorite scientific paper, which is called

Starting point is 00:26:35 Driven by Compression Progress. So good. Oh my goodness. By Yergan. You're going to have to help me. Yergen Schmiddenbler, I think. At Cornell. Yes, although I guess he was at Gar-hing when he wrote this paper. What do you make of attention, the attention economy? I'll say one thing and then I want to get your reaction. So Sam Harris has said that the most valuable commodity is not time, because time is fungible in a sense. You can always, you know, not watch that cat video that is playing in the background, right? We have time to do things that are all sorts of wastefulness. Attention is another thing when I'm playing with my kids and scrolling, you know, Instagram or doing something else, thinking, you know, I'm in

Starting point is 00:27:20 synagogue and I'm supposed to be thinking about God and these existential questions. And I'm like, I wonder how many emails, you know, are piling up. I want to ask you, do you agree with that statement that attention is? Because I actually believe there's another commodity even more precious and irretrievable than attention. Say it again? I'm going to guess trust. What is it? So for me, it's innocence. I believe innocence is a ratchet and Paul that it only goes in one direction. Once you have seen something, you can't unsee it. Once you've done something, you can't undo it. And sometimes you can use that to your advantage. As you said, like, you're going to do the work every day. It's like you're going to go to the gym. You're going to write a

Starting point is 00:27:57 thousand, you know, a thousand words a day. You're going to do whatever it is. And so, you know, but it also can be negative. Once you commit adultery, I'm told, it's very easy to do it the second time. Once you commit a robbery, the first time is the hardest. And so I've interviewed people, you know, David on my show that were, you know, war veterans. And they killed people. You know, it was, it was their life or this enemy combatant's life. And they killed them. And they killed dozens of people. And, and he agreed with me. He was like, I can't undo it. I'm glad I did it. My kids would be orphaned, you know, or wouldn't have a father had I not done it, but I cannot undo it. And for me, that meant for my kids, I want to keep them as innocent as possible for as long as

Starting point is 00:28:39 possible. And therefore, I think innocence is the most precious commodity. And maybe that does have trust built into it because they have to trust you as a parent as well. And I'm not expecting you to react necessarily to all of this, but in your estimation, attention seems to play a big deal in your life. So how do you choose what to spend your attention on? I agree. It is a valuable commodity. Yeah. So there's two cuts on this. There's attention in terms of where I place my own attention and then there's attention in terms of the attention economy so just very simply your life is sort of the sum of what you focus on and it sounds trite but i think it's true and what you know it's like a chef if you talk to a really good chef they would say there's no way i'm going to cook a world-class

Starting point is 00:29:37 meal without world-class ingredients. And so a lot of my thinking and in terms of how I collect ideas and consume the world is high-quality inputs, you know, the really good waggo steak or freshly picked strawberries of information. And then there's the flip side of attention, which is the economy of attention. That is how you think about monetization on the internet. And attention is fine, but I don't think that attention really converts into meaningful outcomes without trust. And the thing is you can buy attention. You can go on Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, all of those.

Starting point is 00:30:33 of which have billion dollar marketing departments and you can get people to look at whatever it is that you're selling whoever it is that you are you can buy that the thing that you can't buy is trust you can't buy relationships it's and is actually in the synthesis of trust and attention that i think magical outcomes via the internet happen and when i think about that attention and sort of how computers can act as a second brain. I made this point, actually, to my children, you know, kind of building on what you and Tiago work on, this notion that you have a very good wet supercomputer that's good for ideation, coming up with ideas, and creativity and imagination, which a computer cannot do. You know, I always say people make so much, David, of the fact that

Starting point is 00:31:24 computers can beat any human at chess, computers can beat any human at Go. My whole thing is, I don't care about AI. I don't care about artificial intelligence. I care about artificial wisdom. Can a computer create the game of chess? Can a computer come up with general relativity, just given the laws of Newtonian relativity? I don't think that they can,

Starting point is 00:31:45 but my focus is on the second part that computers are very good at doing things that humans aren't so good at, memorization, storage, compression, et cetera. So I think of this article on compression is sort of the hybrid, because if you can compress information, it allows you to store fewer things to reproduce the whole. But of course, the definition of complexity, something is more complex, the more bits of a computer program would be required to fully explain it. Nowadays, we hear a lot

Starting point is 00:32:15 about AI, and I want to go into your thoughts about AI and how that could build a third brain, perhaps. I am working on a project now the first time in human history, taking the words of Galileo, turning them into an audio book with the famous physicist Carlo Rovelli and others. Oh, cool. Yeah, so no one had ever done it. I took on this project as part of a video I did for Prager University, which is called Galileo's Dialogue, and I was like, I'm going to read this 539-page book in a month.

Starting point is 00:32:43 I mean, I could only get through a couple of pages of it when I was a kid, and I said, I'll just listen to the audiobook, because as you point out, you can listen at 2X speed. So that'll be great, and audible, where is the audio? There's not a single audio book, David, of any of Galileo's books. There's nothing of Newton. And who was a much worse writer in terms of public consumption. Principia is almost unreadable, even for a physicist.

Starting point is 00:33:04 But Galileo, as I showed before, is beautiful. It's majestic. It's evocative. And so I said, this is a shame. I'm going to make the first audiobook of Galileo's in human history. And if that works, we'll continue and do all of his books, because eventually there'll be about two or three million words that Galileo said that no one's ever heard.

Starting point is 00:33:23 read by Italians. And then I said, well, why stop there? Why not dump that into GPT3 and create artificial Galileo, Galileo, and actually have him as an avatar and start to think about him? And I start to think, you know, maybe this is not the first time this has ever been done. If we just take the second brain to its logical conclusion, eventually we get hyper-advanced artificial intelligence, in which case maybe I'm being simulated by this intelligent agent to produce what I think is a work of original thinking. And so I want to ask you, where is the next evolution of, before we get into your speculation on general artificial intelligence and touring machines and so forth, where are we going in terms of augmentation of the human brain? I want to turn Galileo

Starting point is 00:34:10 into a teacher of physics because he's a much better teacher of the inclined plane than I could ever be. So I want to make an artificial Galileo as a teacher, and that maybe could make some kind of impact on education. But where are we going? What's the next brain, if you will, in this hierarchical system? Well, I have no idea. So let me speculate. I mean, I think that one of the most important choices you have to make in your career is, are you going to be more like computers or less like computers?

Starting point is 00:34:43 And I think that that's a question to always be asking. And, you know, there's ways that I see good arguments for both. You know, I think a lot of at times software developers and, you know, want to be more like computers in terms of aligning how they think about the world with the way that a computer actually works. And to actually speak the language of a computer, you know, is probably the highest leverage, one of the highest leverage. one of the highest leverage things that you can do in society right now. But even within that, if you want to think more like a computer in terms of speaking their language, I think that you then want to differentiate yourself from computers and have a kind of division of labor where what you do is sort of like what you were saying. A computer can get really good at chess, but they can invent chess.

Starting point is 00:35:39 They can get really good at Go, but they can invent Go. and get really good at thinking in open-ended ways and unbounded spaces. And I don't actually know enough about the science of AGI to have a sense of how close that actually is. But at the same time, I mean, I just think about this all the time of how do you actually use technology instead of letting it use you. How do you actually cooperate with technology instead of competing against it? And I mean, the way that I think of it is about aligning yourself with the Internet, basically, of saying, okay, the Internet basically, what it gives us is, you know, Naval Robicant says that there's all these little, the robots are already here. They just are working in data centers and they're not just walking on the streets like Asimov's I robot. What that means to me very practically is that take this podcast.

Starting point is 00:36:49 What's happening right now to everybody who's listening, I think of like little minions who are like carrying the ones and zeros across the world, maybe from Indonesia to South Africa to Argentina to Russia. And these ones and zeros are traveling at the speed of light from my mouth into a microphone, then through under underwater cables, and then into somebody's ears. It's absolutely incredible. And I think it's what it means to be what I call a citizen of the internet is to be somebody who is able to put the internet to work for you instead of trying to run and compete against it.

Starting point is 00:37:27 Because guess what? Computers, they don't sleep. They can work way faster than you'll ever be able to. But there are certain things such as about creativity and just the humanity that I think we all crave that humans aren't able to do. And so I really, I'm always thinking about division of labor asking, what are computers really good at, how can I differentiate myself from computers? And in the partnership of men and machine, I think amazing things happen right now. Yeah, I agree. So we'll look forward to the building the fourth brain. We'll have to see how that comes along. Maybe Galileo

Starting point is 00:38:05 can teach writing and physics later on. I want to move to another topic that I kind of just gleaned from you and I refer people to both your course, write a passage, your course with Tiago called Building a Second Brain, and also your website, Porell.com, your Friday newsletter, your Monday newsletter. You don't write enough, David. You really, you're kind of slacking off here. I mean, there's five other days of the week, man. Come on. But I subscribe. I read everyone thoroughly. I click on all the beautiful links. It's a lovely presentation of art, technology, science, and wonderful writing. One thing you said caught my eye a couple of months ago. You said, strive not for fame. And yet strive for niche fame. And you gave an example, which I love.

Starting point is 00:38:51 Your writing is replete with examples, which is what the human brain, the wet one at least, needs in order to construct analogies that allows for actionable activity to take place. You said, an example of niche fame is being a professor, you know, someone who is, you know, respected in her, his field, who can be, you know, relied on to give great keynote presentations and so forth. And I thought, you know, I have a proof that David's actually right. Because you may not know this, but a fellow pilot and a fellow professor was the man known as Neil Armstrong, arguably the most famous person in human history, first human to walk on the surface of the moon. Well, what did he do after he retired from NASA, just a few years after walking on the moon?

Starting point is 00:39:39 He only went once. He made that first step. Lasted the two hours on the moon went home. So how do you come down from that? How do you not go crazy as some people did? And really off the deep end from that experience on the moon, he became a college professor in University of Cincinnati. And I thought that was quite a good proof text, as we say, in the Talmudic business, that's actually true. But maybe flesh that out a little bit. The perils of fame are numerous. I talked to Neil again, as you noted, you know, he's this amazing person with this huge gift that and he's got 14.5 million Twitter followers. He told me during COVID when he's wearing a mask, he is not anonymous. He is not able to walk down the streets of Manhattan. He is not able to

Starting point is 00:40:22 take the subway. He will not open his voice if he's in a crowd of more than a few people because his voice is so iconic. Flash out that idea of niche fame a little bit. Not that I have, you know, too much to worry about. But what are the, you know, kind of the downsides? You have 150,000 followers. You're not kind of the fame that will, unless you walk by my house, you know, people aren't going to recognize you. But talk about that, the tradeoffs with fame and internet fame in particular. Yeah. So really just shook me was Tim Ferriss wrote an article, I think it's called 11 reasons not to be famous. And I was like, wow, I don't want to deal with any of these issues. And it was really scary.

Starting point is 00:41:07 It was just a life-changing article for me. And the thing is that there's a lot of perks of being famous, though. And so it's like, okay, how do we think about this? And what is a categorization and a distinction that we can draw between the kind of fame that we do want and the fame that we don't want? And look, I'm not saying that this will lead to zero. zero bad things. But I'm saying it's a very different kind of fame that the internet has actually enabled. And I call it niche fame.

Starting point is 00:41:46 So what celebrity fame is is a lot of people know you. You're covered in tabloids. And it's just more, more, more, more, more. So you try to reach a mass audience and you're sort of known for your image. And then, look, the lines aren't super clean. So bear with me here. just like, you know, it's a model, right? Some models are useful, but none are accurate. And what niche fame is, is you're known for your ideas. And rather than being well known,

Starting point is 00:42:20 you're well respected. And the reason why I say that it's the fame of a college professor is that what a really good professor has is the ability to meet really anybody that they want to meet in terms of the people in their field, other people are reaching out to them. somebody will say, hey, you've been really influenced by your work. And so your ideas are actually going to work for you. And then they'll reach out to you. You have all this magical serendipity. But they can walk down the street and they can actually open their mouse.

Starting point is 00:42:55 They can take the subway in New York City. They can go out to eat. And they're not like mobbed and attacked by people because the average person has no idea who they are. And I think that what the internet has done is it has, allowed many more people to be niche famous because now what the internet did was it democratized the means of creation and distribution of ideas it's way easier to you know this is almost like producing a radio show but we don't need to go to knbr studios in downtown san francisco to record this you know we can record it from the comfort of our homes the comfort of our offices and then

Starting point is 00:43:33 we don't need to distribute this over very tightly regulated airwaves where you actually have to get permits to go and publish stuff on the radio, you can just sign up for a Libson account and you can publish a podcast. And because of that, the number of people who can be known for their ideas has expanded by an order of magnitude. And the internet has a beautiful way of nicheifying things. And you can pick something that's quite narrow like teaching writing or being really interested in physics or science. And then you can focus on that thing that you want to be known for, not just be totally unknown to the average person who you would see on the street,

Starting point is 00:44:19 and yet have thousands and thousands of people who are interested in your ideas reaching out and creating intellectual serendipity in your life. And I think that that's a really nice way to live. And that nicheification, just to push back a little bit on you, you have an extremely diverse kind of spectrum of talents. I call you the Liam Niesom, Nissen of the inter-Aid. You have a very broad, but a very particular set of skills that bad guys need not trifle with. So are you not taking your own advice? You're not very niche.

Starting point is 00:44:57 A lot of what you're doing is broad. You know, you're doing videos, you're doing exposés and, I mean, exposés. You're doing explorations of Peter Thiel on one hand and David, Hilbert, the mathematician, on another hand, you're studying the assayer by Galileo and philosophy. You're taking pilot, flying lessons. Are you needing to take some of the great David Perrell's advice, or are you able to hand out? Interesting. So I think that there's a lot of ways to think about niche, because, look, on one hand, those things look entirely different. But to me, they're actually all the same thing. I only do one thing. I learn obsessively, collect ideas,

Starting point is 00:45:37 have conversations and I'm driven by what I find to be interesting, inspired by that paper driven by compression progress. Then I distill those experiences through writing, through just and then I share those experiences and I do that through teaching. I do that through podcast. I do that through YouTube videos. I do that through writing essays, sharing newsletters. And really what it is is it's a celebration of learning.

Starting point is 00:46:07 It's going out, trying to reject a lot of conventions in terms of how we should think and trying to find ideas that are in the peripheral vision of society that people are maybe missing and trying to find those things and just following my intuition, kind of skip and dance as I learn and make sense of the world and then share that with other people. And so the only projects that I ever take on are projects that require a tremendous amount of intellectual curiosity. where I have a team, but I have space to sort of wander and sort of move at my own pace and just meander as I go to explore, ones where I can be on the move and just be create and then share that with other people. And by doing that, build an audience.

Starting point is 00:46:55 And so, yes, on one hand, I'm very sort of broad, but in terms of my skills, which is really just collecting ideas, synthesizing ideas, sharing ideas, and then building an audience. through that celebration of learning, it's very specific, and I do nothing else besides that. Very nice. Well, I could talk all day. As I said, we're going to run out of time because I have to teach a bunch of undergraduates about the... What are you teaching? I'm teaching introductory cosmology for advanced undergraduates majors in physics. So it's a lot of fun. It's what I do in my day job, building telescopes that see invisible radiation left over from the Big Bang. And so I get to teach the brightest luminaries in the cosmos

Starting point is 00:47:36 that will make the dent in the universe that we need to make progress. And David, we've come to the final three questions that I ask all my guests, from nine Nobel Prize winners to three billionaires and to brilliant individuals such as yourself. And I would like to begin that process now if you're willing to go with me into the impossible. Let's do it. Okay. The first question is an easy one. Can you provide a 16-dimensional unification of quantum mechanics with the ElectraWeak Force? No, no, I'm just kidding.

Starting point is 00:48:08 Give me a hard question. All right, that'll be our next interview. It's so simple. You'll put it in the margin, as Fermat once said, right? Okay, first of all, this relates to our Judaic connection that I guess I first learned of you through Rabbi Wolpe, your interview, wonderful interview with my friend, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I love. He did such a beautiful job on that interview. All credit to him. That interview, yes, it was far superior to the two interviews I've done with him, and it actually brought me to tears in certain parts.

Starting point is 00:48:36 So I refer people to David's podcast. It's a wonderful podcast. What's the name again? It's the North Star podcast. North Star podcast. I love the Star. I should not have forgotten that. Polaris, right.

Starting point is 00:48:48 So I want to ask you, when you reach the biblical age of 120 years old, what ethical will, what Zava A, as we say in Hebrew, what wisdom or values would you most want to communicate to those people that will become your ideological errors? don't be so quick to dismiss ideas. What I love about philosophy is, I spend a lot of time with philosophers, and what I love about them is that they can entertain ideas, that they disagree with, that they think are absolutely psycho, and they can entertain ideas and play with those ideas, and then only make judgment decisions on those ideas later.

Starting point is 00:49:28 And I think our society would be so much better if people could wait to make value judgments on the merits of an idea and actually understand that. that idea and always ask, what if it's true? And if you do that, you will live a richer life for yourself. And I think the world will be a much better place. That's beautiful, David. And concise, which I love. The next one is also related to the namesake of my center here, the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Arthur, Sir Arthur was, of course, a great scientist, but also a great writer. And he, in 2001 a Space Odyssey, he has these monoliths that are kind of like time capsules meant to preserve some information from a long deceased alien civilization.

Starting point is 00:50:12 If you were to be given a monolith that would last for a billion years, is there anything you would put on it or in it or about it? Hopefully not like a CD-ROM or something, something that will be immediately evident if one were to read it. Could be short or long. I think I would put access to YouTube. I think YouTube is just, and I mean this will. and I'm sort of assuming YouTube in terms of what it's going to become. I think video is the most media media and the access that you have to anything that you could imagine on YouTube I think will stand the test of time and it won't die with the years.

Starting point is 00:51:04 You should get to know my friend Noah Kagan if you don't know him. I ran into him at breakfast two weeks ago. Well, say hi next time you see him, although he's biking across the country right now. question for you, David, asked to do with going the opposite direction on the timeline, going backwards in time. And it relates to Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous laws, one of which is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of my podcast name, into the impossible. Accordingly, what advice to a younger David Perrell, I'll say 10, 15 years ago would you give to give him the courage to go into? the impossible. It's so easy. I'm going to spend the next 10 years delivering this message.

Starting point is 00:51:51 Share your ideas in public. Share your ideas in public. Share your ideas in public. It is, you have been given a gift of a phone in your pocket where you can create media and you can distribute it for free. You are now faced with a tremendous opportunity. And do you have the courage to stick your neck out, to share your ideas, and to then receive all the wonderful serendipity that comes with it. I can just tell you that that's what happens and you won't believe me until you experience these things experientially and actually feel it firsthand. But sharing ideas online right now is one of the best things that you can do with your life. And the aperture of this strategy is so wide, no matter what it is that you're interested in, you can do it. And the

Starting point is 00:52:49 returns on doing it for years and years are extremely high, intellectually, professionally, and socially. I love the way you put it at one point. You said, increase the surface area for serendipity by writing in public. And also, I have to commend you because it's safer to take the middle of road and not be too controversial, even exposing your ideas too much. It could be a famous Italian saying, when you're right over the target, you get the most shots taken at you. But I'll end with an aphorism that I love, which is that if you stand in the middle of the road,

Starting point is 00:53:23 you get hit by both sides of the traffic. So take a side and be brave and be courageous as David is. Find him at porel.com at David underscore Porel on Twitter, where he's got a legion. And I'm just a little bit fearful, but also excited to see what you do with this army of legions, David. It's so impressive to meet you. I will not comment on your age, but I will say, keep going. Hatslaka and blessing to you.

Starting point is 00:53:49 And I wish you, because today is Friday, a Shabbat Shalom. And I hope we meet again, David. Shabbat Shalom. I hope so. I'll let you know when I'm in San Diego. I would really, really love to meet and then go tee it up at Tori Pines next door. I would love it. One of my sons is like a mini David Perel, and he's going to be just like you.

Starting point is 00:54:06 someday hopefully he's the one who carries around a paper notebook so that he can have a second brain as well best to you david shabat shalom bye thank you very much you too any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic thanks for listening to into the impossible with professor brian keating please support the show by rating commenting sharing and leaving reviews we appreciate hearing from you and it really helps keep our universe expanding watch our youtube channel at dr bryan keating that's d r bryan keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his

Starting point is 00:54:55 informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. And Do The Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - I Write Therefore I Am: David Perell— Building A Second Brain + Write of Passage (#139)

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