Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - James Altucher chats with Brian Keating about news in science, and his upcoming audio book with Carlo Rovelli - Galilleo's Dialogue! ​(#218)

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

James Altucher chats Dr. Brian Keating on his new ventures, sciences, and he teased his upcoming book as well! Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. All 33 Chairs. My All33 Chair is the ideal chair for all of us ‘knowledge workers’ suffering through unending Zoom calls. Sitting still is bad for you. All33 chairs are my choice because they allow your pelvis to move the way it does while you walk — so all 33 vertebrae align into perfect posture. The result? Better breathing, better blood flow, and relief from pain. It’s crazy what you can do when you set your body to it. To get $100 off your order, visit https://all33.com/impossible Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Altiture, everyone. And Brian Keating. And Brian Keating. Former almost Nobel Prize winner, Brian Keating. Brian, now, is there a chance you could win the Nobel Prize in the future? Like, what are the chances? Actually, you know what's funny? That you're nominated for the Nobel Prize this year.

Yeah. So I actually came into my office the other day. And if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see something that's strictly confidential. I got an invitation, James, to nominate the winners of the Nobel prize for physics in 2022. Who should we nominate? Let's figure it out right now. That'll be great. Except, as you know, from reading my book and blurbing my book and writing the forward

to my book with Nobel laureate, your co-lorate, Barry Barish, you have to have your nominations in by January 31st, and this just showed up on February 15th. So what you're saying is basically, is it a scam? Like, they already picked it? Or they just deliberately kind of invited you without inviting you? I think they were, it was malicious and. I think it could have been a slight, although in my book, you know, I talk, my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, I talk about how when I actually got a hold of a Nobel Prize,

when a Nobel Prize winner came to UCSD to give a lecture, Duncan Haldane, he brought his Nobel prize with him. And in the book, I'm pictured, I'm holding it. And I say the author with the last Nobel Prize he'll ever hold and the last nomination he'll ever do. So maybe it's a way for them to have, you know, kind of plausible deniability that, oh, no, we're not mad at Keating. and we invited him. He could have picked it. He had a choice. But he didn't.

Right. He didn't pick as somebody. Oh, man. Yeah. You should call them. You know what? You should just actually, seriously, you should call them and say,

listen, thank you for inviting me to pick the next year's Nobel Prize winners. I just want you to know I got the message in February. Can I still do it and see their response because they should be fair with you. Yeah. You know, as I say, the Nobel Prize, and you've had on my good friend,

Uni, Turitini, and she talked about the Peace Prize. but it says it must reach us not later than January 31st, but it also says the following things. It says it should be given to the person, no matter how long and impressive that had been, not for the lifetime achievement of the person. It says it should be given to a recipient

who has made the most important discovery invention within the field of physics, and it said it could be taken for years and years to have it notified. And you can nominate up to three people. And yet, and yet, it says, and Alfred Nobel's will, that it can only be given to one person, and it has to be done for work done last year. So I could be like, well, now you're not adhering to those rules,

so maybe you'll bend the rules on the deadline. Anyway. Who did the best work last year? The guy who kind of put together the James Webb Telescope, I know that took many years, but there's probably some final. Oh, yeah. I mean, last year there were several breakthroughs that appeared in physics, none of which have been really confirmed yet, but all of which are interesting in their own way,

some of which have dissipated in just a few months since the actual discovery or announcement. And that happens a lot. You know, you have an announcement. It goes on the front page in the New York Times. And then when it's not confirmed or disconfirmed or refuted even, it's, you know, it appears on page, you know, B-17 of the Saturday edition of, you know, the newspaper, which is the least read edition of the newspaper. So a lot of times the public gets left with the false impression that the initial discovery still holds.

In fact, some people, even physicists sometimes say, oh, you were responsible for Bicep 2. Didn't you guys win the Nobel Prize for that? They don't know that we know we retracted it. And that tells me instantly that they didn't read my book, at least. They didn't even know the title of your book. I'm like, spoiler alert. It could be, you know, as I said,

foreshadowing that's right yeah i i have put the spoiler alert in the in the title although it's kind of funny lately i've been asking i got this patented question that i ask on my podcast uh which is called into the impossible and the patented question always has to do with uh authors that write books i call it judging books by their covers and uh you and i talked about this in the past and you said well what else you're supposed to judge a book on you know um so i always ask the authors you know what you know what's the origin, the genesis of the title, and what's the origin of the cover design? And I would say 90% of the time they say, I don't, I didn't have anything to do with it. It was my publisher's decision.

And I'm like, I don't know how true that is. I mean, have you ever been told by a publisher you can't have a title? I've been told I can't use a picture. My original book had a different, had a cover picture that I didn't have any responsibility for and ended up causing a lot of trouble for my publisher later on down the road. But did you ever have a publisher say you can't choose a title for your book? No, but I would say, look, there's a lot of differences between publishing and self-publishing. And there's pros and cons to both.

In the end, I think self-publishing, which is basically what you did with Think like a Nobel Prize winner, your second book, the one I wrote the forward to. You self-published with that and successfully so. And I was successful with many books self-publishing. My most recent book, Skip the Line, was published with Harper Collins. but I've had great success, choose yourself, which was self-published, as sold over a million copies and was far more successful than any mainstream published book I've done. But I would say the title is a collaborative effort.

If they don't like a title, it's not gonna happen. But if you don't like a title, then at least it's a discussion. And if you could come up with something that they like, they'll go with it. Same with the cover. The problem with the cover is, you know, there are some great cover designers that work for some publishers, like famous cover designers,

who've written books about cover design. But often you get a limited amount of choices and you can't keep going back to the well and saying, no, I don't like that. Eventually, they're going to make a decision. And it might not be the one you like. I think a great cover is rare, and that's why the best cover designers

are kind of famous in that field. But I've usually been involved in some aspects of the cover design. Like I'd skip the line, there's a ticketing thing. Like if you're in a butcher shop, you have to get a ticket to where you're online. So there was a number and I changed the number to 42 in deference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's the answer to life, the universe and everything. So I get my own little thing in.

Now, do you know why I agree with that choice? Why is that number the luckiest number known to scientists? No, I'm trying to think of what other characteristics the number 42 has. It's it's not, it doesn't feel like a special number at all. It's the most fortuitous number. In what sense? For two of course. I feel like that's a dad joke.

It is a dad joke. That's a physicist dad joke. I just had one of my best dad joke hits on Twitter. Do you want to hear it? Yes. What do you call material extracted from an ant's eyeball? What? Ant-eye matter.

Got it. Ant-I-Matter. Yeah. That was actually from my nine-year-old. He made a catcher. Did he like it? I like it. Yeah, he's got some good jokes.

He's got some strong dad joke game. I mean, he said, what's the strongest thing in the world? Well, I didn't get this one. I said, what is it? He goes, it's what the earth works out on. It does a core workout. The core is the strongest thing in the world. Well, actually, isn't it the core just like molten, you know, isn't it the hottest thing,

but not necessarily the strongest? There's a solid core and there's a molten outer core. So yes, there are not necessarily the strongest, but it does have both solid and liquid composition. And that's in contradistinction, as you know, as an expert, of the moon. The moon doesn't really have an iron core. It doesn't have a magnetic field like the Earth does. And so it formed from the Earth, but it's different from the Earth. It kind of cleaved off the Earth, which maybe brings us to, you know, an interesting topic,

which is something I've been working on a lot lately. that really is dovetailing along with the spirit of the times, is the zeitgeist, which is science, and science denialism and science suppression, and what I see as a scientist operating in the world, and this has really come about, thanks in part to your suggestion, although you won't be writing a forward to this book.

The books by Galileo have never been made into audiobooks. And so I said Galileo is like my biggest hero. I mean, Einstein said he was the greatest, you know, scientist in history. And even better than Einstein, Einstein had a huge ego. So for him to say that was pretty impressive. And yet, no one's ever made an audiobook. So with your past guest, Carlo Revelli, one of my oldest friends, Lucio Piccherillo, the director of the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, her name is Fabiola Gianati,

Dr. James Gates of Brown University. And with Frank Wilcheck, winner of the 2000. and four Nobel Prize, we are making this book by Galileo into an audio book for the first time. And it's coming out hopefully in about a month. Oh my gosh, that's great. It's unbelievable how prescient and how magnificent Galileo was in his thinking and anticipation of, you know, kind of what science should be and what science shouldn't be and the limits of science, but also some of the delusions and kind of pretences that scientists have.

And that's how I tie it back to what I was saying about the moon. you know, Galileo thought the moon was not the cause of the Earth's tides. And that was the convincing argument. In other words, he wanted to prove that the Earth was going around the sun. I want to ask you, James, how would you prove that the Earth goes around the sun? I teleport you back to 1631, the year before this book was written called the dialogue. And you're just there, and you could tell them about iPhones all you want, but first they're going to want to know, what are your bona fides? And you're going to say, oh, you know, don't you know the Earth is round and don't you know it goes around the sun?

and they'd be like prove it or we're going to put you to death, what would your last words be? Okay. Well, first off, I think this is a great question, but let me ask you first. How would you prove that the earth is round? Let's say you just lived in one farm and you never ventured out of your farm. And someone said to you, the earth is actually round. There are people on the other side who are upside down right now

and thinking that we're upside down. You would say that's ridiculous. Like, how would you prove that the Earth is round? Like, all these things that we assume and we laugh at people who don't say the same things as us. And this could be about quite a few things, but specifically Earth is flat versus Earth is round. How would you prove that the Earth is round? Yeah. So that's an even older question.

And in fact, I can ask most scientists that question, and they'll get it right. But I would say even if you want to make a scientist look foolish, ask them to prove that the Earth does orbit around the sun. If you ask them to prove that the Earth is a sphere, and by the way, it's not a perfect sphere, but if you believe, as Isaac Asimov said, if you believe the Earth is flat, you're wrong. And if you believe the Earth is a perfect sphere, you're wrong, but you're less wrong than if you believe the Earth is flat. So in other words, the Earth is actually slightly bulbous at the equator, like some of us, because it's rotating and it has some flexibility, the plates kind of move around and do sorts of stuff. And so it actually

bulges at the equator, and that has interesting effects. So it's not a perfect sphere. It's this oblate spheroid, but it's certainly not flat. Now, how do we know it has curvature whatsoever and has a spherical characteristic? Well, you can measure the curvature of the earth using many different means, but one of which is to measure the properties of shadows at different points on the earth's surface separated by a known distance. And then if they're separated by a certain distance on the surface, they're separated by an angle if the Earth is a sphere, but they will have the same altitude. I'm trying to do this on YouTube for those they are watching on James' channel on my channel,

but they'll be always perpendicular to the Earth if the Earth is flat. And so we don't observe that. We observe that shadows at different places cast different lengths of different lengths at different points on the Earth. And that's been known since the time of Aristophanes and so forth, 2,000-plus years ago. But the Earth orbiting around the Sun, that's only been proven for about 190. years. I mean, first off, your answer to why the Earth is mostly a sphere, I get it. And I'm sure if I think about what you said, it'll make sense to me. But at the, at first glance, I don't really

understand what you said. So given that there's some level of complexity, even as meager as it is to you, about arguing the Earth is a sphere, I could see why it was confusing for so for thousands of years probably. But if I was to say, why is the Earth rotating the sun? I guess at different points of the year, I would look at the stars in the sky. Wouldn't I see different stars in the sky at different points of the year if the earth's rotating around the sun? It could just be that the sun is moving around the earth. And in fact, every star that we see on the earth, a very good approximation, you know, would be there in the exact same way if there was no sun whatsoever. In other words, if the earth was just there and rotating on its axis, the rotation of the earth that makes our

daily period of 24 hours, that's completely disconnected from its rotation. And it's completely disconnected from rotation, revolution around the sun. And that's what Galileo was trying to establish. But my point that it's so difficult to do is that even the greatest scientist of his age, even Galileo himself, here's a finger puppet, if you're watching on James's YouTube channel, there's Galileo with a telescope, even he was misled by what we call confirmation bias, by the desire to prove the hypothesis that the earth was going around the sun and not the other way around, that he invented an argument that we now know to be completely wrong. And that argument overlooked the effect of the Earth's tides caused by the moon. In other words, he said the Earth is like

this jug of vodka that I have here. And as it rotates on its axis and orbits around the sun, the water slashes around on the Earth's surface. And that's what we perceive as tides. But that's totally wrong. Given his work on gravity, wouldn't he assume that a large entity like the moon would have effect on the tides? Well, it wasn't exactly clear because the calculus and kind of the promotion of these theories, but that came from people like Kepler and Copernicus, he was more kind of, I would say, more obsessed with his own hypothesis. He thought that was the most strong hypothesis that the Earth was in motion and sloshing

and revolving caused this tidal phenomenon. So he was so invested, so much cost sunk into this concept, hypothesis that he did overlook the moon. No, he may have thought about the moon, but he actually didn't, you know, I mean, he observed the moon for the first time with the telescope of any human being, and he used it to say that the moon has mountains. It's not a perfect crystalline sphere, but he didn't discuss its gravity. I mean, that really took Newton. That was the law of universal gravitation, that the same force that keeps the, made the apple hit his head, you know, apocryphly, perhaps, in England during the bubonic plague,

was the same force that kept the moon continually falling around the earth, happened to fall at just the same period that it orbits, and therefore it took exactly one month, one moonth, 29 days approximately, to fall. And so it always was in continual free fall, and that was caused by gravity of a universal type, meaning it holds throughout the entire universe. First off, a couple of things.

One is people often say, oh, people are smarter now than they were 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago. And I actually think, so they assume that the trend of intelligence goes up over time, of global intelligence. I actually think the reverse happens. The fact that the frontier of science for Galileo was whether the Earth rotates around the sun and how do you prove this, whether he was right or wrong,

the fact that he had to think about it, come up with ideas, try to prove it. he didn't have computers or textbooks to just give him the answers. He had to actually come up with the answers. That to me is more intelligence than I can explain to you why the Earth rotates around the sun because I read it in a textbook and it's common knowledge and blah, blah, blah. I feel like people then had to really think about things. And for us, the frontiers of innovation and science are so far advanced. It's very easy to be intellectually lazy and not.

really build your intelligence. It's very easy to stay within this massive comfort zone society has developed for itself. And I think that's why people don't understand what science denialism actually means in today's current age. Everybody accused everybody else of being, oh, I don't believe, you don't believe in science. I do. Nobody even knows what it means. So to that extent, I do think intelligence is not measured correctly. And if you're measuring it just by facts and what you know and so on. So anyway, that was an... Yeah, I mean, it could be.

I don't know if I think that they're smarter in the past. I would say that there was a lot more, you know, kind of more to be discovered on one hand. I mean, that we didn't even know that, you know, that neutrons existed less than 100 years ago. Well, let's look at 20,000 years ago. First off, there is some evidence that the human skull was bigger. But 20,000 years ago, you had to know every plant, animal, weed, other tribe, that was in a, let's say, a five or 10 mile radius of where your hunter-gatherer tribe was staying. And you had to memorize these things. You had to know it was life or death

that you knew these things, which plants were poisonous, which weren't, how do you, which animals were dangerous, which weren't. You had to know these things and remember them and then adjust when your tribe moved. I can't memorize thousands of things like that. Like I said, If I transported you back 300 years ago, even with all the knowledge you have, you'd probably die. Maybe you'd wash your hands or, you know, figure out how to get some soap or anything, but you'd probably die pretty quickly. It wouldn't be like you could recreate, you know, an iPhone. I mean, that would certainly be out of the realm of possibility. No skill I have now would be useful back 200 years ago.

Right. Podcasting, you know, and investment banking. Yeah, exactly. Now, people also say, oh, that's because we're. we have the scientific method, which is generally attributed to Galileo. In the book that he wrote after the dialogue, he was famously threatened with torture. He wasn't actually tortured by the Catholic Church for claiming that the Earth was in orbit around the sun, but he was threatened with torture if he didn't abjure, you know, retract his claim.

And so he did under, you know, penalty of execution and torture. But then he was also forbidden to ever publish again in Italy, or at least in most of continental Europe. And so it took him six years after that to come up with his last book, which is called The Discourse. And that's going to be my next project, you know, hopefully after the dialogue comes out, an audiobook version of that, in which he kind of outlines the principles that we now call the scientific method, which, as you know, from co-authoring the forward to the book into the impossible, it has a very kind of non or ambiguous definition, I would say. People know the scientific.

It's like, you know, what you always say about pornography. I know it when I see it. And that is, you know, there are elements that are part of the scientific method, but there's no one scientific method, nor does any scientist that I've ever met wake up in the morning and say, I've got a hypothesis. And let me assemble some data and then I'll take the data and I will subject it to certain comparisons. I will iterate. I will then do new experiments extrapolated from the implications.

No, nobody does then. It starts off with like, oh, that's kind of weird, this data point. I thought that things would be different. Maybe that's kind of like a hypothesis. And then like a graduate student will, you know, do some research and six years later, you know, they'll have a PhD. And it's nothing like, you know, this clean cut thing that you learned in ninth grade biology. It just doesn't exist. Now, I'm all in favor of teaching it, you know, because as you always say, in chess, a bad plan is better than no plan. Although, I've been reversing my opinion on that, but go ahead. How so?

I think sometimes you don't need to know, like, oh, this huge complicated plan, like the position, most positions and most positions in life are equal. And you just want to make a good move. What's a good next move? You don't need to have an overarching plan. You can make a good next move, which improves the position of your pieces and see. what your opponent does and respond to that. I think, you know, it's interesting.

The person who came up with the quote is better to have a bad plan than no plan at all. The person who in Chester came up with the quote was a Russian grandmaster in the 1950s. And of course, Russia was a very five-year plan-oriented communist country. And I think that quote essentially comes from communism. I think it's actually...

Maybe he's mocking the, you know, communist. Or not mocking. Maybe he just had to do the party line. And like, you know, the 50s, I don't think there was a lot of... of real rebels as much back then and, you know, all right. And it took a lot of courage to disobey the government.

You know, nowadays it's like we're scared to, you know, not put on a mask on an airplane unless we, you know, get, get hectored by the steward or stewardess. And by the way, in business, it's not necessarily necessary to have a plan. You just want to make a good next move. If tomorrow... I got into a huge argument, not argument, but I was on Tom Billia's show last year. I know he's a friend of yours and a friend of mine. I love him.

You know, we opened this conversation and it was just like, well, how does the scientific method work? And I was like, well, first of all, there is no sign. I gave the spiel. There is no one scientific method. There's multiple covers. And he's like, well, I don't think that, you know, because what I do is like the scientific method.

I'm like, you know, explain how that work. You know, what do you mean exactly? And he was saying, well, in, you know, in business, there has to be, you know, some kind of plan. I can tell immediately if something's going to fail or not. But again, that's kind of like one version. You know, you're hypothesizing that there's this, you know, kind of ridiculous idea of, you know,

you're going to have these micro blog posts and I'm going to have 140 characters. And, you know, somebody look at that and say, oh, that's stupid. Like, who's going to read like 140 characters going to fail? And so it's almost like the market is in business is the arbiter of truth and plays the role of confronting your hypothesis against, data perhaps. So I don't know. I mean, there are, you know, we do the scientific by the way, data in, in, like I always, your business is a form of like social psychology. So an experiment, you can ask people, hey, would you like to communicate to other people

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. If everyone says yes, it doesn't even give you any real information. Because they might be saying yes because they just want to get away from you. And they know that if you say no, they're going to ask, well, well, why not? If you say yes, it's confirm it. They're confirming what they think. I actually don't let you go. I think that you can't. The only way to have a gauge, a metric, if you're making an impact,

is almost to do something wrong. I'll give you an example. Like, I used to be, as a graduate student, I used to be going to kindergartens and speak on behalf of NASA who is paying for my graduate student studies. So I'd go in and say all these great things that NASA is doing. And all the kids would love it. I'd bring some, you know, space shuttle tiles, you know, this is back in the 90s. And I'd bring some globes and planetary models and so forth and meteorites. And then one day I was teaching and I was like, well, let's make it more interesting. Let's see what they think about making a mission to Mars, you know, as if anyone will ever think about that. And there was a young kid from South Africa.

His name was Elon and he was in the, no, I'm just kidding. No, he wasn't. You imagine that? Like I was Elon Musk's. He was actually a physics major at Penn, believe it or not. But anyway, I, this is, he's older than, I think he's exactly my age. So anyway, I wasn't teaching him. But there are these kindergartners, super cute. Now it's just hilarious to think, you know, they're like in their mid-20s now. But anyway, this little five-year-old girl, I said, like girls and boys, we're going to be talking about planning a mission to go to Mars.

And in the mission, we have to think about all the things that we need to bring with us and do and when we get there and how we're going to make it. And this girl, like, stands up, tears streaming down her eyes. runs to the back of this huge auditorium with like 200 kids. And I'm like, oh, great. NASA's going to like freaking fire me. I'm done. I'm toast.

You know, so I keep going. I'm like totally flustered for the rest of the hour. At the end, I'm like, what happened? I go up to the teacher and she's like, oh, no, no, don't worry at all. The child, she just said to me, Mrs. Johnson, you know, I didn't know we were going to Mars today. And I didn't tell my mommy and she doesn't know where to pick me up. I was just like, wow, that's pretty visceral.

like I must be a great teacher. And then I remember thinking, you know, back then there were nine planets. Pluto was considered a planet before past guest on my show, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who played the race card on me, as you remember. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, and others got Pluto booted from the orore of planetary objects. And back then, Pluto was a planet. But I remember thinking, like, what if I teach these kids that there's nine planets? and then in 30 years, someone says,

well, let's see how good a teacher Brian Keating was, ask him how many planets are on. And they say nine. Or let's say there were eight, and I say eight. And then, you know, eight, they don't know that I taught them that. Like, they could have learned it from you or from, you know, TV. But if I teach them there are 87 planets and they're named after the dwarves,

you know, whatever, I just make up stuff. Then it'll be very clear if I come back in 20 years and they still think there's 87 planets that I had an impact. Now, but in other words, the only way that you know you make a difference is when you do something wrong. I don't know. Yeah, no, that's a good point. Like, for instance, when does, you know, YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, when did they get over the hump? Probably it's because something controversial happened on them.

Like, I can't think of examples, but it's sort of like when you offend someone with what you're doing, then you know it's going to do pretty well. Like Joe Rogan's an example. Like whether you like his show or not or whatever I know there was this recent controversy But clearly, as other people have said, clearly he is getting more subscribers As a result of the controversy around his podcast And now and you know, and I'm curious how you deal with this

Like sometimes people say to me, James, you should take a stance on an issue And you'll get many more downloads and subscribers And I don't buy into that because I feel like, A, I don't really care about being one of a billion voices on arguing about some issue that's going to be irrelevant a year from now. I kind of always have been writing about and podcasting about things that are important to me, which is how can I improve? How can I be better at what I'm interested in? How can I be better at life? And once I start getting into the mud, you know, that's saying like when you get into the mud with a pig, you become a pig.

Right. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, it's true that to be controversial, it gets you more business, so to speak. Yeah. And it's, and it's, you know, disproportionately asymmetric, you know, that the more, you know, kind of flamboyant brazen you are. And there are people that are like masters of this. And, you know, I saw Catherine was online and in the space. I hope she's still there. Maybe we offended her. She's very sent. Now she's wonderful. But like, I saw her, she was fighting with one of these physicists that I know through Twitter. and I'm like, why are you bothering with this guy?

Like, he's just going to, he's just like, he's far left. You know, I think she's pretty centrist. And he was saying, like, how bad Musk is and how bad Rogan is. And she was like, kind of offending him. And I was like, he's just like using your platform, you know, to amplify his followers. And he's like, when he's verified guys, which, by the way, I'm like permanently, no matter what I do, I can change my pronouns. I can change, you know, I could sell book, whatever.

It doesn't matter. I'm always like, I'm never going to be verified on Twitter. And I've got on Twitter. No, I've given up hope for it. I don't know if it's, they must have something against me since I've been a six-time guest on the James Altoucher show. That's true. But I'm verified. Yeah, you are.

Yeah. Well, the exceo of Twitter verified me because he wrote the forward to choose yourself. That's right. Like somebody was trying to provoke me on a Twitter fight yesterday. And I'm thinking, look, if I respond, I really wanted to respond because I was really annoyed. But I figured if I respond more to this. guy. It really adds a very little benefit to the planet. And if instead I read a book or take a walk with my wife, that is a lot better. Like, I will benefit much more than having, then, then, you know,

smashing this one guy into the ground with my, you know, awesome intellect. Right. It's like, you know, Naval, Ravacant, always, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You know, it's like, okay, so you could do that and you could, you know, increase your follower count by, you know, 10,000 if you're him and zero if you're you. I mean, it's only negative side for you, I would say, versus this guy. But, you know, to me, it's just like I've seen Twitter as, you know, only, it's pretty rare that I get like, oh, I'm so glad I went on Twitter. You know, like, you know, and sometimes I'll have ideas. I'll tweet out dad jokes and that's kind of fun or I'll tweet out stuff about papers or, you know, the whole reason I started my podcast. And I think, you know,

I told you this at one point. I think most people are a podcast and they have no idea why they're podcasted. Like everyone has a podcast and I've come up with like, and my daughter has a podcast. You know, it's like, she's like six years old. Like she doesn't need to have a podcast. Yeah, but she sees me doing it. And like she can literally talk for like 30 minutes and it's the most funny thing in the universe. That's cute.

And I just love it. And my son wants it. But I'm like, it's kind of a metaphor. Like one of the five most annoying words that you'll hear in the English language is like, on my podcast, I was talk, you know, whatever. It's like. have to stop myself when I say it. But I have to keep coming back. Like, why are we doing this? And, you know, like, I mean, some people do it for income. I don't think you do it for income.

I don't think you do it for, I mean, you don't like, sneer at it. And nor do I. I mean, I make a decent living at it. But I put, you know, every penny back into the, into the production and hiring team members and so forth. But, you know, for me, I've had a clear mission that I want to get to a certain number of followers. and listeners because of the metrics that the publishing industry, you know, tells us that, you know, very, I mean, what percentage of people watching, listening to a podcast do you think actually buy a book? You had on Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandes yesterday or the day before. What fraction are going to buy their book? It depends on the podcast because, like, I have a very big book reading audience. I always have. You're a podcast, yeah. I think I do. But I think, I think a successful podcast. let's say you have 100,000 people listen to a podcast. I think it would be great if somewhere between 2 and 5% of them bought the book because of your podcast.

That would be a home run. Yep, 100%. And I think it takes like 10,000 copies to make a New York Times bestseller. So the way I think about it is I'm not going to make you a bestseller or James might not make you a bestseller by yourself with 100,000 people. That would be 5,000, 3,000. For me, I've got half your audience or less than your size of your audience by a lot. but let's say a thousand people listen to my podcast or buy a book based on my they're not going to be a bestseller because of me but they have to hustle their own book

right as Truman Capote said so why not let them go on 10 other you know nine other podcasts and then they could be a best seller so in other words I wanted to promote mostly you know people thinking about the future STEM science technology engineering and math people that are wonderful teachers very rarely I'll have on you know someone in politics I like to keep it kind of a safe zone and then get into, you know, kind of big ideas. And for that reason, I want to promote those authors so that they become bestsellers, if that's important to them.

And I think the podcast is nowadays, it is the only vehicle. I mean, you're not going to get, you know, science authors going on Colbert or something. So I think it's probably the best vehicle for that. And, you know, that's kind of my mission for doing it. But, I mean, I would say, like, most of the other podcasters I listen to, like, they just want to have growth and have, you know, more followers and subscribers. It's like, they don't. have a strategy. And so, yeah, I don't know what to make of that. Why would you do something?

Like, how many things do you do in life or you have no plan and getting back to what we're talking about a few minutes ago? Well, I think I have, you know, and some things probably you do need to plan for, some things you don't. But, you know, also a podcast should change over time. I've been doing this now. Over eight years, I've been doing this podcast. And, you know, I'm sick of authors sometimes. Like, I've talked to 1,200 authors of books. And, you know, And, you know, most people say the same thing. You got to sleep eight hours. That's, and don't eat sugar.

And, you know, and then it varies a little after that. But, uh, uh, I, the cold plunge with Tony. Oh, yeah, the cold plunge. But, uh, I want to, I want to tell more stories on the podcast. I think that initially, you know, I started off getting listeners or readers because I was writing my own personal stories. Yeah. And people enjoyed that.

I want to do more of that. And so I'm kind of veering back towards that with, with the podcast or I, I will be just because there's only so many like first off self-help and self-help business is just boring like that's just done after that okay I'm interested about losing the Nobel Prize I'm interested in people who have stories and then after that but a lot of people who have great stories don't write books so I'm trying trying to get Jay over here to find me a good prostitute to interview or someone like that oh I've got a wonderful person so if you look up Ava Lovia on Twitter. She might even be listening. Maybe I can ping her into the room. But you need to meet her.

She is, she's a friend of mine. I've been on her podcast. And what happened was over the summer, she followed me. And she's got half a million followers or something like that on a blue checkmark, which is very delightful, I'm sure. I can only assume. And, you know, she invited me to come on her podcast. And I was like, well, let me look at her. And she's, you know, she's obviously attractive. I can't say that she's not attractive. And I looked up like all the podcast that she had done. She sent me a link to it. And this was in June and was like, I'd love to have you in podcast. So I looked her up. And she's got like a pin tweet. And it's with Tom Billio, who I hadn't met at the time. And I was very interested in meeting, who I did meet through a friend named Danny Miranda,

who followed me after you and I did our last live Twitter space back in June of last year. So it's all these mysterious kind of mixed up event. right so eva follows me i see that she um has had tom bill you on i'm like oh this is great you know she's she's you know i'd love to get to know her and so i wrote it back i'm like eva it's great to meet you um love to be on the show it seems like you're doing wonderful things i've got daughters myself you know it seems like you know it's so rare that that women are getting into the podcasting game i'd love it if my daughter someday did it little did i know that someday they would um i at at least one of them and um so i wrote her back she invited me on and then july fourth comes along

And I'm looking, scrolling through my Twitter feed, and I see Eva Lovia. And then she's in this very revealing red, white, and blue bikini. I'm like, hmm, this is interesting, you know. So let me do a little bit more research. It turns out she is an adult film star. And she's got this massive following on Instagram, like 3 million followers. And she's a brilliant person. But I was like, did I just tell, like, a porn actress that I want my daughters to turn out?

I don't like her. But anyway, she would be not, not, and by the way, I'm not comparing pornography and prostitution. Please don't, don't assume that. But you did mention that. She is an amazing person. She's been, she talks about, you know, her career. She still was working in that field.

She, and she has her own podcast. You should definitely get her on the show. Yeah. See, stuff like that is interesting to me, as opposed to somebody who's just gone from success to success. I mean, I know everybody's had the hard times, but I feel like I've had really. hard times and have lived to tell the tale. Yeah. And I want to hear about other people who have been

like, you know, at kind of the fringes of this comfort zone we call modern society. And I think that's interesting to me, whether it's, you know, in this case, like a sexual comfort zone or a political one or a depressed one or financial one, whatever. And, you know, it's interesting because I think part of the way you achieve peak performance is by dissecting the, the ways in which you've lost. It's like what you said. You have to do something wrong. When we do something right, we're all geniuses. But when we do something wrong, it's someone else's fault. Or, or, you know, the skies were red that day. Like something bad happened. I was just unlucky. And so it's important to really, we have an aversion to really looking at the times when we lose,

whether it's a game or life or financial or investing or whatever. And it's hard to dissect those. So a podcast could be a safe space to listen to two people dissecting that or one person dissecting that. And, you know, we could learn from others' mistakes as well as our own. Yeah, absolutely. And I do feel like it is kind of the last almost wild frontier. And again, you were kind of early to the trend. But it's sort of, and you see this with the Rogan thing too, that people are saying, well, podcasts are kind of unregulated.

And, you know, there's no centralized authority. and Rick Rogan can say whatever he wants and it's disinformation. And now he's beholden to Spotify. And, you know, that's a little bit different. But for like you or me, like we don't have these networks or whatever we do our stuff, you know, at the behest of Big J. That's about it. You know, Jay runs the podcasting media inside and outside of...

Secretly. Yes, that's right. He's always pulling those strings as Malaysians. And, you know, but besides that, we don't have like some central authority. like Twitter can just like ban you or shadow ban you or whatever but podcasts for now don't do that so I wonder is it just because there's so many of them like maybe that's a benefit of having like two million podcasts you know and a hundred thousand every day yeah no there's kind of a wild west atmosphere it is but you're right there's two million of them now there's not like 300 like when

I started there was probably less than a thousand and now there's there are two over two million podcast. The average podcast episode among those two million gets like 10 downloads. I can't wait to get that level. If I can get to that level someday. Right. You can always hope. But I think you always have to be innovating and switching up what you do. For instance, I know there's infinite things to talk about with physics and that's not what your podcast is about. But imagine if your podcast was just about physics, there's only so much you could talk about there, like before you even get tired of the topic. And, you know, eventually you switch around to things that it interests you. And that might cause you to lose followers or lose listeners or whatever.

But as long as you're true to what you want to talk about, I think that's the best you could do. And then your audience finds you. It's not like you try to build your audience. By the way, though, you've done a really phenomenal job of getting out there, going on other people's podcasts, doing things to build your audience. You're not afraid to ask people to help you. I often am afraid of that.

Like I don't really like, I feel uncomfortable doing that, but I always admire how you'll reach out to me and say, hey, can you introduce me to so-and-so? And you're fearless with that. And I think that that has paid off over time. Like every time you do that, there's some incremental benefit that happens.

So as long as you do it, you know, carefully and politely and so on. But I think you do it that way. I'm careful to not overdo it, hopefully, with friends like you or others. But yeah, I mean, that's actually how we got in touch. Remember, you did 2014 TEDx San Diego. You were the closing act. I was the opening act because I knew I couldn't top what you were going to do.

And when we were there, we met and I was like, I was already listened to your previous show back then. And so I was like, oh, we got to get to it. And then I didn't hear you ghosted me for six years until I went on a Jordan Harbinger's show. and now I'm like advertising for Jordan. It's really funny. So I was on Jordan's show and I said, Jordan, I'll never do this again, but can you please introduce me to just one guest and then I'll stop? And it was you, James Altitcher.

And then he did. And because of that, we then wrote this book. We did all this cool stuff. We're going to start this business together. We're doing this business. And I met so many other people. And it's all because, yeah, I decided, well, I'm going to do this, but you have to do it kind of cordially.

Like as academics, I get. asked every year to write letters or recommendation for my undergraduates to get into graduate school, my graduate students to get what are called postdoctoral scholar or fellowships. My postdoctoral scholars are fellows, I get asked to write them letters or recommendation to be faculty members. Faculty members, I get asked to write them letters or condition. So it's like when somebody asked you- You have a full-time job writing letters. Oh, it is. I mean, some of my friends, I'm lucky in that, you know, because I don't teach like huge, huge undergraduate classes anymore. I teach mostly advanced classes that, you know, but I write 20 or 30 letters and I try to make each one like a home.

I won't agree to write a letter unless it's going to be, you know, like knock their socks off. And luckily, I've had great results. My students have got on to the best schools and I've gotten faculty jobs, help to get faculty jobs. Obviously, they do the work. But for, you know, for, you know, students or postdocs, which is really rare. Now, I mean, as I said once before, we have 400 applications for every professor's spot nowadays. it's like it's harder than getting into the NBA if you're a Jewish or Malaysian superstar like we are. And so, you know, I pride myself on that. But it's kind of funny because when somebody

asked me to write them a letter of recommendation, I'm always thinking, thanks for asking me to write you, you know, four letters of recommendation minimum, because it's going to be like, I'm going to hear from you in grad school, postdoc, faculty, tenure. You know, it's like every recommendation is quadrupled or more. But it's, you know, I view that as, you know, part of the job, like doing peer review. It's part of the job being a scientist. But, you know, it's one of these things you don't think about and being a professor.

And I was joking, you know, being a professor is the hardest three hour a week job in the world. But, you know, most people can't appreciate that. Well, you know, I almost don't think of you as a professor now because you're out there so much with the podcast and your books and things like that. Let me ask you a science question. Yeah.

This James Webb Telescope that is out there. Is this going to achieve what your telescope Bicep 2 didn't achieve, which is being able to look at the gravitational waves that came before or beyond the cosmic radiation, which is the furthest we could currently see with any modern telescopes? Yeah, that's a very good question. So, no, it won't do that. It's not designed to do that. It's designed to do very similar work to Hubble to the Hubble Space Telescope,

much more advanced. It's 30 years younger in some ways than Hubble. but it doesn't have the capability to see the effects of microwaves and radiation from the early universe in the Big Bang. But what it can do, that Hubble can't do, is see the light from the first stars in the universe. So which we can't do with Bicep or the Simon's Observatory. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath looks brand new, while the rest of it looks, well, not so new? It's time for a carpet upgrade. At the Home Depot, we have stylish choices at simple prices from all the top brands.

Best of all, we can install it for you, starting at only 49 cents per square foot. So all you have to do is pick your perfect floor. Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot. How doers get more done. Exclusion supply for licenses, see Home Depot.com slash license numbers. So it will see what's called infrared radiation. And that infrared radiation is the telltel imprimatur of the ignition, nuclear fusion reaction of a star, not today, but at high redshift.

So what is redshift? The universe expands and light gets shifted from shorter wavelengths to have longer wavelengths, and therefore it goes from bluer light, which is the young stars that were first formed in the very early universe, 400 million years after the Big Bang. So it's much later in some sense than Bicep 2 could see had we not been stymied by. cosmic dust. But it's much older light than what Hubble sees. Hubble sees things that are a few billion years old. Webb will see things that are 13 billion years old. And so just like the sound of an ambulance siren gets redshifted, if you will, Doppler shifted. It starts off high when it's

coming towards you, goes low when it's moving away from you. Light does the same thing, gets Doppler shifted by the expansion of the universe. So that means if you just had an optical telescope that's a visible light like our eyes could see, the light from these first stars would be completely invisible to you or to Hubble, because it would be out of the wavelength range of sensitivity. Just like we can't see infrared light on Earth, we can feel it because the chemical bonds in our hand, for example, is about the same scale as the wavelength of infrared light. So the sun puts out infrared light or heat. We can feel it, but we can't see it. And so for these reasons, the web telescope will do things that Hubble didn't do, but it won't

things that Bicep could do. It will see the cosmic background radiation, but it won't see beyond it. No, it won't see the cosmic radiation. So when are we going to finally see the Big Bang? I'm waiting for season two of the creation of the universe. I know. I want you to get this, you know, letter from the Nobel Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences addressed to Dr. James Altucher and asking you to nominate, say, finally, that

I need an honorary doctorate at first. Maybe UCSD should a doctorate in podcast. That's right. Well, we've got openings. There's 401 chance you'll get in. I mean, thank God I achieved my Twitter doctorate in both epidemiology and law. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to understand all the people on Twitter. What about geopolitical strategy with Russia invading the Ukraine that you opine on so frequently? I know. I do have my... Good that you got that. Global policy.

Yeah, my Twitter degree in that is that's okay. I'm a doctor, lawyer, politician on Twitter. So we need to build better and better telescope. So it could be in the microwave telescope. So we need to build bicep that can see both the heat from the Big Bang, the radiation, the microwaves from the Big Bang, and also see dust. And so they're looking to build that. It's called Bicep Array.

And then we and my team members are building the Simon's Observatory in Chile, biceps at the South Pole in Antarctica, and the Simon's Observatories in the High Otocama desert of the Andes Mountains in Chile. So we're scheduled to start taking data next year. Bicep is already taking some data. They're a little bit ahead of us in some ways. And we have different technology. But the key thing that we have to do in science is get confirmation. So with Bicep, we made an announcement. We saw the Big Bang, but it couldn't be confirmed. Therefore, we lost the Nobel Prize. But if it can be confirmed by both Bicep and the Simon's Observatory, then it'll be a much stronger case that the actual signal,

is real and we did witness the origin of the universe. Now, it could be, though, James, that there was no origin of the universe that produced these waves of gravity that could be, in principle, detectable by these instruments because the universe could have not underwent this incredibly violent birth process of a singularity of this kind of black hole in reverse, like a white hole explosive origin rather than sucking everything in, spewing everything out. But it may not have begun like that. It may have been somewhat completely different, as we talked about in our series season one, how the universe got started. Yeah, we do need a second season. There's been some updates to that. But to answer the original question, no, web is going to be like, think of Web as like

a super Hubble telescope for infrared light. I actually don't think it will have the visceral. I mean, this is kind of an unpopular opinion, and it doesn't get me invited to many Nobel Prize ceremonies. But I don't think the Hubble, by the way, the web televised. telescope, it costs $10 billion just to build. And that's equivalent or maybe slightly more than the large Hadron Collider. And it's, you know, it's probably, you know, it's very complicated. It was very difficult to assemble it in space, kind of like putting origami together, a million miles beyond the Earth, like farther four times the distance of the moon.

Unlike Hubble, which was 250 miles, not 250,000 miles or a million months. So it's a technical tour to force. but still, it kind of ate the budget of the entire space agency for doing astrophysics. And that comes with some risks. And one of those risks, I think, is that if the public doesn't perceive these visceral kind of images because they come from infrared light, not from visible light, it's kind of like, I don't expect the bicep images or to have like this visceral impact of, oh, the pillars of creation and the, you know, and all these different, you know, images that are the Hubble Deepfield,

all these iconic classic images. I don't expect my work to do that. And I worry that maybe the NASA scientist kind of sold it a little too hard that it's going to be as visceral. And maybe it will be, but I think it'll be scientifically as interesting if not more interesting.

Another thing I can look for is a signature of life on exoplanets, on planets outside the solar system. So it could actually see if there's like water on planets like 20 light years away, Water is actually not a what's called a biosignature, a signature, a signature of life. Water is extremely abundant. It's made of two molecules, two atoms, hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the entire universe, and oxygen, which is like the fourth or fifth most abundant element in the universe.

For those reasons, it's not particularly uncommon to find, nor does it require life to produce it. Oxygen, on the other hand, pure oxygen, molecular oxygen, or carbon dioxide, oxide, those are a little bit more sophisticated in terms of their capacity to be assembled and therefore may need a living organism to produce. And so it's going to look for those. Methane is a good example. Methane, it's very hard to produce it naturally. It's very abundant in living systems, as we know.

You being a farmer now in... On Twitter. George. And the farmer. You and Tucker doing your Dumer optimistic prepping. I think there are a few molecules like that that would be signatures. We're not going to see like Manhattan on, you know, Proxima Centauri. We're not going to see like a city lighting up and, you know, come visit us or we would

have seen that already or had evidence for that. But we may find primitive life, you know, to which I often ask this quite, I'll ask you, like, what do you think will happen, James, the next day? I talked to Lex Friedman. I was on his podcast in January. And I, and he's kind of like this. really, you know, just so energizing, so full of love of life and literally of life in the universe. And he's had on Elon multiple times. And he's

just so enthusiastic and childlike in a good way. And I was like, I don't think anything will happen the next day. But I want to ask you, like tomorrow the James Webb Telescope's done or six months from now when I observe life on another planet. What happens next? Well, I agree with you, but here's the reason. How many light forms are there? on the earth. There's like a trillion life forms on earth. And so why do we,

when we say life on another planet, we're kind of assuming, hey, we could just make a phone call to these people. And once there's a translator, like in the movie Arrival, we'll be able to talk to them. But it's not, it doesn't really work like that.

Like, if there's life on another planet, the odds are extremely small. It's more likely they'll be like an ant or something that we have no capability we just say, oh, yeah, that's life. All right, cool. And then we move on. Like, it's not going to be that interesting.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's certainly true that there's a higher probability of simple life rather than complex life. You know, it's funny. You know, people make these kind of logical errors all the time. And as a scientist, it's fun to kind of notice them. Like, my kids get a kick out of this. Like, we go to a restaurant or something,

and the waiter comes and says to you, we have like apple pie and we have blueberry pie. What would you like? And then, you know, and I say, let's say you choose the apple pie. And then a minute later, the waiter comes back, says, oh, actually, we have cherry pie too. And then, and then I say like, oh, in that case, I'll have the, I'll have the blueberry pie. And like, what? You know, like, he didn't give you any information that you didn't have, like, you didn't change update.

No, but that's like the Marilyn Vostevant problem. But go ahead. That's an interject. Yeah, exactly. Right. the prisoners or the Monty Hall problem. Yeah. Right. Which, yeah, it's funny because like 99% of the questions that she's allegedly the smartest

human who's ever lived with an IQ of 226, you know, makes Einstein look like a total putts. And they always ask her things like, you know, what's the speed of light, you know? It's like, have you heard of Google? Like Google's got a higher IQ than Marlon Beau Savant. Right. But anyway, so there's another one where it's like, if I tell you, Jane, you. you know, I saw this, I saw this bumper sticker and it said Bernie Sanders for president and it said

like book lover on it, you know, and whatever. And I say like, what are the odds, James, that the driver of that car is a Democrat and you say like pretty high. And then what if I said that and now like, and then I say like, what are the odds of that person is a Democrat and a librarian and like owns a small bookstore. And a lot of people say, oh, the odds are higher than it just being a Democrat. Like, she's a Democrat. You know, probably you could say, she has a Bernie Sanders sticker. She might not be. But then the book lover. But that's actually much lower. Like every condition you add to a conditional statement reduces the odds. But like so many people will do that. And I think it's certainly true that life in the universe, like people think, as you say, life's going to be like this

communicative, you know, technologically advanced, benevolent, you know. And I'm just like, A, we have about 10 trillion life forms down at the beach in San Diego. Like, you don't seem very interested in those, like pumping a lot of sewage into the ocean and like doing, you know, like, we have all this known life. But even more than that, the announcement of discovery of extraterrestrial life has already happened. And it's been peer reviewed. And it hasn't been retracted.

In 1996, there was an announcement made on the White House lawn. and you can see this in the movie Contact with Jody Foster. You can see the actual press comments with Bill Clinton saying, this is a wonderful day and we've discovered, you know, this, you know, what means. It's very good, Bill Clinton. Yeah, it is pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. You should hear my Joe Biden impression.

But anyway, looking at the, looking back into that period in history, that was never confirmed nor refuted, really. So in other words, 30 years almost have gone by. and the reaction hasn't been any different on Earth. What do they discover? I don't even remember that. So they discovered what they claimed could be the products of respiration

on a meteorite that came from Mars. So it turns out the planets interchange material all the time. Stuff smashes into the moon and then eventually the Earth plows through it and a meteorite from Mars landed in Antarctica. And they know it came from Mars because of its chemical composition. And then under a microscope,

they saw things that look like, say, microbes or like some product of respiring microbes that happens on fossils on Earth. And so they said, this is evidence of extraterrestrial life. It's microbes on a Martian rock. It seemed pretty clear. Now, again, no one's refuted it, you know, but it hasn't ever been confirmed either. And there's been no other follow-up to it, basically, in 30 years. Which also kind of brings up this other point that I've been making lately. if life can come to Earth from another planet like Mars, then life from the Earth can get out into space. So let's say we do discover life,

then it could be that that life is just Earth life, like an amino acid or DNA or what a virus or whatever that blasted off the Earth and hit somewhere. I mean, this has been happening much longer than there's been humans on Earth for. I mean, you're talking millions and billions of years to go throughout the solar system. And yet, and yet, you know, on,

Venus or on Mark, we don't see any evidence of earth life. And so it seems to me that's kind of a blow against this theory, which goes by this dirty sounding name called panspermia. The same guy who invented the term the Big Bang invented this term called panspermia. And his name is, yeah, exactly. His name is Sir Fred Hoyle. And the Big Bang means orgasm in British English, apparently. And of course, pansepermia, you can use your own imagination, how that came about. This guy, yeah, had an interesting, interesting, colorful language. He was kind of like Carl Sagan before there was a Carl Sagan. Anyway, so the lack of observation of life in our solar system, except for on the earth, I think, has to cause you to lower your probability of the existence of life elsewhere.

But certainly the existence of life on Earth must make you kind of, in the blasé attitude we have about, look, you know, killed six million Jews in the last, you know, It wasn't like killing some bacteria or, you know, Cambodian, how many Cambodians and Ukrainians and, you know, Ukrainians died and, you know, hundreds of millions of people died a hundred years ago, like despite what Stephen Pinker would say, you know, like, it's not like clear to me that the world is getting so much more, you know, peaceful and enduring, let alone that space has any consideration other than blind indifference to our situation. what activities in life are worth pursuing so for instance there are professional tennis players who spend the majority of their youth and young adulthood and up to the age of 40 just playing tennis and sure it's a great game it's fun to watch and it's fun to watch the limits of physical performance and you spend your life pursuing physics which you know like you say maybe it does satisfy our curiosity and it's an insane curiosity about, like, meaning in an insanely big way about how the universe was

created and what's it made of and all this stuff. But what are things worth pursuing? And again, I won't argue that politics is worth pursuing because I can challenge anyone to name me a good politician, someone who actually did something beneficial to society. It's very few and far between. maybe a writer is good because you could entertain with her books or I don't know. Or maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe this question is fruitless because just pursue anything you love doing and that will add benefit to the world somehow. This is the whole like denial of death, you know, William Becker, you know, kind of book that we spend our whole lives. Because you know what the name, the official, you know, species name is for human beings, James?

Homo sapiens sapiens. Yeah. And do you know what that means? Humans who know that they know. Right. And you know what they know that they know? No. That they're going to die.

Like, we're the only animal that knows they're going to die. Like, I was, one of my friends is a rancher. And he was getting ready to, like, slaughter some cows for meat. And so he, you know, is preparing it. And I was like, can I see the cow? Like, before I don't want to watch it. I just have, you know, I'm a weakness, even though I'm not a weakness, even though I'm not a vegan. I still will like to eat me. But I was like, how do you like deal with that? Like it made me

stop to think about, well, you know, is it ethically done? And it happens to be kosher. And so, you know, I was curious about it. I didn't want to watch the process. But anyway, I wanted to see the cat. And I was like, I went over to like where he's going to do it. Not the day he is going to do it. But I was like, well, you know, this is kind of like trippy because this animal doesn't know what the hell is about to happen to it in the next couple hours or days or whatever it was going to be. I don't even know if it got done. Even though all those cousins were, like, mysteriously were taken to the shed and they never came out. I'm like, this is like this beautiful animal.

You know, it's like this huge beast, which was, by the way, only produced by human beings. It's like one of the few animals that never existed before there were human beings, like dogs and cows. And it's basically made to convert grass into meat and milk. And that's all its purposes to human beings, at least. Obviously, every, you know, life form is precious in some way. But I was like, wow, this really hit home that humans are the only animals, if you want, I don't think humans are animals, but humans are the only organisms that are aware that their lifespan is finite.

And because of that, according to Becker and others, we do all this stuff to stave off that thought of death. Our whole life is based upon doing things that transcend our finite lifetime and our awareness of our own mortality. Namely, we have kids, we try to win Nobel Prizes. We try to get blue check marks. We try to get advertisers. We make money.

We do all this stuff. And it's ultimately, you know, in vain in the sense because we can't do that. And so therefore- I'm waiting for legacy, any kind of legacy, which is pyramids. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right. But I do think, so what is the fundamental goal in so doing that?

I think it's the time, you know, it's like, what would we want then? So if we don't want to die, if we don't want to think about it, what if we could live forever. And in that case, what would that be like? Well, I think we can kind of live forever, or at least we can outlive our mortal bodies. And I think you do that through the people that you influence, both biologically and ideologically. And in doing that, you teleport your values, like what you cared about, your ethical will, your, you know, kind of the things that were important to, your wisdom, your personality, you communicated to your children. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, also to the millions of people that are influenced by you, including me. And because of that,

you do get a sense of a taste of immortality, but the problem is when people want to have their immortality cake and eat it too. In other words, I want to teleport and I want to bring myself with me, you know, and I want to take all my stuff with me and I want to live for, you know, no, well, you might not get everything you want. And how do we become more comfortable adapting to that realization. We can't take it with you, but we can teleport it to the future. I think it's a, it's a hopeful message. Yeah, no, that's a good way to look at it. I mean, at the end of the day, you're dead, though, so you won't be able to see, like many people who who didn't think they would have a legacy, ended up having a legacy, and of course, vice versa. So, you know, it's hard to,

it's hard to determine, which is, again, why it's hard to plan for that. It's just do the right thing, today for that. Like it's hard to plan not only for the future, but for the future beyond your future, I think. So it's hard to know if you're going to have a legacy. Yeah. No, that's certainly true. Excuse me. But if you think about like, you know, why isn't it long enough to live, you know, for 70, 80, 90, 120 years, like how is it that we've become so uncomfortable with that? and we have the Tony Robbins and the Peter Diamandis is and, you know, they want to extend life to infinity or whatever health span to infinity. I think that there's another kind of psychological compunction that must be at work there because it's almost like saying, you know, why, you know, if you knew you're going to live forever, there's a bunch of stuff you'd put, like, I wouldn't go to the DMV, you know, ever again. All right. So they're going to, you know, send me a ticket or, yeah, I'm not going to go sit in some stupid line, you know, for eternity.

But on the other hand, having this awareness that life is finite means you do certain things. I've heard all sorts of statistics. People are putting off all sorts of life things, you know, thanks to the pandemic, people are having these huge changes. You have. I mean, you made some radical changes that if I asked you, you know, two years ago to the day, you know, it's February 18th, 2020, would you have said like you'll be in Georgia after spending a year in Florida? You'll be like your comedy club won't be, you know, part of your life. you won't be in New York, you will have written, you know, a much beloved article by folks

like Jerry Seinfeld about the demise of, I mean, you couldn't have predicted it at all. And all this stuff is happening. I mean, two years ago today, I was in, I was touring around the Netherlands, with Stanley Carmelons. So, yeah, you're right. I mean, that's just it. That's why planning is difficult. Nobody would have been able to answer.

Like, let's say you were applying for a job in December 2019. Yeah. And the boss says, hey, where do you see yourself five years? No one would have said, well, I'll probably be wearing a mask. And I've been like, and I've got an IV vaccine like attached to me now. 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. And I'll work from home and I'm not even going to be at your job. Yeah, exactly. Right, no one would have said any of that. Yeah, I won't get on a plane, you know, unless you put a gun to my head. Yeah, exactly.

No, it's been, I think it's clarified a lot of things. It's like, it's been this accelerant, you know, it's really sped up with people. It's been an accelerant. Divorces have happened. like everything that would have happened in 10 years happened in two years businesses closed divorce has happened people moved uh politicians got elected or not elected and this would have happened eventually but it happened more quickly inventions were created look the technology on vaccines and biotech has drastically accelerated in the past couple years probably more than any other industry

you wouldn't have gotten that face tattoo you did that you have to cover up with your beard face tattoo right because I figured I'd never be outside again, who cares? That's right, the mask will cover up. Do they wear masks in Georgia? No, yeah, well, you know what kids do? Kids wear masks more than adults, I think. I mean, just in general. You don't have to wear masks, but kids wear masks more than adults.

Have you developed, like, more of a, because, you know, I think it's safe to say in some ways you're very extroverted, like when you're on stage and stuff. But, like, I think fundamentally you're introverted. You know, you prefer like one-on-one or like, and even your podcast. is like very intimate, even though you know a million people are listened to it. But have you change at all? And that like has like the urgency of life or like said like, hey, maybe I should like not just, oh, I got to spend more time with my wife and kids, but anything like fundamental that you've realized, like I like people. I don't like people. Have you had any revelations?

I don't know if you say read my shirt. This virus. Sorry. All right. Read it for people that are just listening now, James. Yeah. When I can't read it because back on the, When this virus is over, well, you got to talk because I can't see it when I'm talking. When this virus is over, I still want some of you to stay away from me. I've become more like, like look, before the pandemic, I was performing up to 10 times a week, you know, six or seven nights a week doing stand-up comedy around in the city or I was traveling to do it. And I was really obsessed with it.

And now I'm really not. Like, I enjoy watching comedy. and I'm glad I did that for six years and developed a skill that I never could have imagined I would have developed. But I am so much happier. I mean, it's not like I avoid people.

I like having friends and going out and doing things, but I really don't like it that much. Like, I like being indoors and just doing my thing. You know, I switch from stand-up comedy to obsessively, for instance, playing chess. I'm going to play in a chess tournament tomorrow.

And that's a very solitary kind of thing. That's in person? Yeah, yeah, I've been playing for the first time in 25 years. I've been playing in over-the-board tournaments. It's very interesting doing something that you took a 25-year break from. So something I was very good at that I took a 25-year break from, and the world is different. Like the whole way this happens in that world is different.

So it's very interesting. But I'm playing in the Georgia State Senior Championship. If you're over 50, you're considered a senior. Oh, my God. Maybe by the end of the weekend, I'm aiming for it. Maybe I'll be the Georgia State Senior Champion. So we'll see. Wow.

Yeah, that's kind of surprising how young that is. That's crazy. I know. I have friends who are younger than me who consider themselves old men. And I'm like, I don't feel like an old man. Like, you're not old men. I turned 50 this year and I felt like, you know, there's almost no difference except, you know, people, I tell them that. They're like, you can't be. I was like, no, I know James Altrich's wife, Robin. And she was a cosmetologist.

Yes, true. She is a coiff or extraordinaire. Do you remember the show Sanford and Son with Red Fox? Yeah, of course. So Red Fox was 53 in that show. No way, wow. Yeah. Like, I think people just look younger now.

Like, he looked like an 80-year-old man in that show. Here's a lot. You know how old Homer Simpson is perpetually? How old? 38. I think he's 38. And they're in like their 31st or 32nd season. I know.

It's like he's really 60-something, right? Yeah. So do you have any more books or things coming on down the pipeline. We have our business. We can talk about that. We don't want anyone to steal our idea. No, I'm just kidding. But what about books or other, you know, kind of spin-off cool things besides the chest? You know, I've been writing about for years how when I was really down and out and depressed and broke and whatever, that I started writing 10 ideas a day on a waiter's pet, like, just like this. I'll hold it up for a YouTube, waiters pet. And almost every day,

almost every day since I started writing about this like 10 years ago, somebody writes to me or tweets or whatever, hey, do you have an app or a website where I can write down 10 ideas? What brand of waiters pad do you use? People ask that too, like where do I get cheap waiters? But people always ask me, do you have a website or an app that I can keep track of my 10 ideas a day? And so I just made a website where you could write your 10 ideas a day. You can make it public or private.

It's all searchable. But then everybody else's ideas, that are public, you could search through them and see them. And then also you can do status updates. All the things you can do on Twitter, plus you can keep track of your idea lists. So I made this website. Yeah, it's going to be. I'll tell you where it's going to be.

It's not there yet. We haven't. We might do a beta release in a couple of weeks. Great. It's notepad.com, but with an A, without an A. So N-O-T-E-P-D.com. Oh, it's like Twitter. Without an E at the end.

Yeah. So and we'll see if people, you know, everyone says they wanted and it's a huge help to me for 20 years now. I've been writing 10 ideas a day. Every single day. And every time I ask you if you're in a bad, when you're in a bad mood, I'm like, are you doing it? And you're like, no. Yeah, it's true. If I don't do it, I feel it. Like if I if I don't make it a regular part of my practice, I'm, I feel down because you have to keep that creativity muscle, that possibility muscle, exercised. And now that this nopad.com is about, we're about to launch, at least for me, it'll hold me accountable because I'm going to want to make sure I have the longest streak of, you know, doing it every day as of anyone out there. Oh, so it's going to be like gaming, gamification of it. Yeah. And I'm trying to think of more ways to gamify. Like, obviously,

I want people to use it. But I'm not really thinking of it necessarily as a business. It's just a website we wanted to make and have a lot of people use and help people. And again, people have been asking for this. So we'll see if, you know, it's an interesting thing. Again, if people, it's like what we're talking about before with surveys. If people say they want to use your business, that doesn't mean anything. The only meaningful information you can get is when people say they don't want to use your service, because they're going to have a reason.

But there could be many reasons other than your business that people say yes. Literally, they might just want to get off the phone with you. Yeah. It's like a book. You know, people are like, oh, the best ways to market your book is just give it away. I'm like, no, because most people are just going to, like, throw it away or not read it. And you value the things you sacrifice for. So you value, like, oh, I sacrifice five bucks.

Like, even when I was, when I had the book come out this past year, think like a Nobel Prize winner, I was like, I could set it for free, you know, for the first day or so. But I was like, I don't value stuff that someone just, like, I get books sent to me all the time. And it's kind of flattering, but like, I don't read them. And I can't, I can't throw out a book, James. It's some compulsion to me, maybe because, you know, Jews are called the people. of the book or like I can't just throw it out. I feel like it's like burning a book to me.

So but I'll like leave it in one of these libraries, you know, on the, on the corner that you see popping up. But, you know, it's interesting that you say that because I do think if people are clamoring for it. Like if you make these great cupcakes, you know, it's true that people like your cupcakes, but it's not true. That doesn't follow from that that you should start a restaurant. Like I think within reason, like people are interested in this. They'll probably gamify it, but you're not thinking of a business. And so it takes off the pressure of that. Now, if you were like, I'm going to start a social media. Yeah, that's different.

But, you know, it's funny. Like, this year is the first year in a long time when I have nothing to look forward to. Like, it sounds weird. Like, I'm not like- You have a Galileo audiobook coming out in a month. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, I was reading, you know, our mutual friend, Ryan Holiday. And, you know, he's got this daily stoic thing, which is kind of cool.

And I like these daily things. And maybe we can do a daily thing. But one of the ones, couple days ago, maybe it was yesterday even, talk about the concept of conditional happiness. I will be happy when I graduate. I'll be happy when I get married. I'll be happy when I get this and my best book comes out. So we look forward to these things, but it's like this unending thing, like chasing the horizon, he calls it, you can never get there. And I've been thinking about that a lot. Like, can you ever be happy? Like, can you be in a state of happiness? I claim no.

Like, you can keep working on it. But like, the fact that there's so many ways that you could be unhappy, infinitely more unhappy than you are now, means it's an unstable equilibrium, even if it is an equilibrium, which I'm not convinced it is. Yeah, and look, I'll contrast that with a state, can you be in a state of well-being? Yes. So, well-being means, you know, okay, you're feeling good about, you're feeling you have a sense of improvement in whatever it is you're interested in. You have a sense of community and you have a sense of freedom. And then you're healthy. So in general, you have, you have well-being, which might be different from happiness.

Like, you know, one time I made a list that I published where I mentioned that one of the things I enjoy most is feeling melancholy. And people are like, how could you enjoy that? Melancholy means sad. And I'm like, no, it doesn't really mean sad. You know, I have maybe a bittersweet memory towards something. And happiness is not necessarily the goal, but well-being could be a reasonable goal for the day. But that's like a daily thing. It's not like tomorrow how to be.

Yeah, I'm not like unhappy. But in the past couple of years, I had a book come out last year. I had like babies get born in the past couple years. I had a TED talk. I had this thing. Well, babies will make you unhappy. Oh, yeah. At first they will.

Do I clean out shit from a diaper? Like, that's not fun. Get no sleep for like at least two years and get into unending, you know, arguments with your beloved wife about how little I'm doing. But yeah, but it's, I also think it is that kind of concept of the hedonic treadmill. Like you're just always trying to get the next dopamine hit, the next gamification, the next silly prize. And whereas like sometimes I have to stop myself to say like, wow, this is pretty good. Like life is good.

Like the big thing like recently has been while I, because once you get a taste of some success, like my podcast, you know, was like number one in, you know, it was top 10 or nine in all of science, which is like a very competitive category. And I never thought that would happen. and it was number one in natural science. And I was like, well, how do I keep this going? You know, and like, people are like, oh, you know, including Lex Friedman, was like, oh, you got to go on Rogan's show. This is before Rogan was canceled. It's like, you got to go on Joe Rogan's show.

And I'm like, like, okay, let's say I do that. Like, once you, once you like light that booster rocket, like, there's not another booth. There's not like another Rogan out now. Like, once I go on the James Altoucher, like, there's not another James Altoucher. I know. This is the peak. this is my this is why i don't look forward to anything anymore thanks yeah uh what's it called and and hedonia right and hedonia right yeah yeah where you where you value nothing anymore

that's right like that's what happened to after going on the james altottcher show i value nothing anymore least of all the things that mean the most um so no but like i'm thinking like you know maybe i shouldn't play that card you know at this point yeah you know i'm not even sure I could go on the show. But, you know, but the point being, like, when do you really want to play a certain chip or a move in the chess game, you know, because it kind of like, it then it kind of limits your options by playing that option, if that makes sense. No, that's true.

You can't take the move back. Like, once you make a move, every move you do has, and this is in chess, but it's also in life, every move has pros and cons. if you move from San Diego to New York because you love certain things about New York, you'll miss some things about San Diego. And that's always going to be the case. But it's just sort of like, again, will this move contribute to my well-being? And I think that's the only thing you can ask.

And then that's not a goal. It's more just like you want to keep in this state of well-being. So am I improving? Am I choosing? Do I have a greater percentage of, actions in my life that I choose to do as opposed to someone else choosing it. So that's freedom. And do I have a good community of family, friends, and colleagues, and so on?

Yeah. I'm thinking about that. And it even doesn't have to be a move. It could be not moving. Like for me, you know, there's a lot of talk about California and it's not, you know, has all these problems and homelessness and drugs and crime. And it is true. Like, you know, like on campus, we had an arson yesterday.

What the fuck? You know, like this never happened. Like, I've been here 18 years. It never happened. I don't know. Who knows? We get all these emails. And it's like crime has definitely gone. And I'm like, but in all of California, it's like, L.A. I was there a couple of weeks ago. It's just like, wow, it's pretty scary. And, and yet. Is it different than the last time you were there?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it gets worse every time. I mean, it's been, it's gotten really bad. I mean, the pandemic, again, accelerated everything. So including like, homelessness, drug use, you know, inequality, everything. And think about it. You know how much it costs to run New York City, and I'm sure LA and San Francisco are the same. It's like the James Webb Telescope every year or something. No, 10 times that. It's $100 billion a year is the New York City budget. It's like $97 billion a year, the New York City budget. You know what the budget of Cincinnati, Ohio is? 400 million. So you wonder, like, why are people, you know, New York City is going to be a hard place to run if their tax base goes down. And there's hundreds of thousands of people who left

New York City. Occupancy rates are 20% still. But, yeah. But I feel like, you know, And maybe I have to go, and it's just a couple of minutes to a parent-teacher conference for one of my wayward children. But I started to think, James, you know, I'm living here now. And if I, but there's this wonderful thing called the Pacific Ocean. And the weather is like unbelievable. And my friends are unbelievable. And, you know, I'm like, I can be happy like right now. Like, I don't have to move.

And, you know, I could, and New York is wonderful. And there's wonderful things in New York City. And it's like, if you can't be happy where you are, I think you can't. be half. If you're in a prison or a gulag or, okay, fine. And if you're going through physical pain, obviously mental and physical pain are awful prisons of a different kind. But I start to realize, wow, I can be like, yeah, maybe there's some happiness optimist, you know, optimal happiness that we could do a differential equation solution for. But I can get pretty close. And so realizing that has been liberating. Like, I'm just going to enjoy, like, I don't even like read the news.

And, like, I don't need to know, like, oh, Sacramento, they're going to, like, inject babies in the womb with vaccine. I'm just like, all right, well, you know, okay. I hope they don't do that. But at the same time, I'm like, how does that affect me to, like, my happiness to stay in California, leave California? I'm trying to be happy where I am, basically. I agree. And also, there's a lot of studies that show happiness reverts to the mean. Like, you could be temporarily extra happy about something.

But then eventually, you just go back. You win the Nobel Prize. And a few weeks later, you're just feeling like, oh, where did I put my, you know, shoes? I can't find them. This sucks. Right. Or like, oh, I have to prove that it wasn't a fluke. You know, or like I sold all these books and, you know, this guy like Daniel Pink, and I think you've had on your show. And no, no, I haven't had that pink, but he just came out with the power of regret. I want to, I want to read that. It looks really good. I was listening to him on one of these other podcasts. But he was, you know, he's just like, yeah, I got, you know, my bestseller. I've had like, all my books have been bestsellers.

I'm like, what if there's not? Like, his identity is like tied up in this metric that he doesn't control. And I feel that way about like the YouTube channel, which I see yours is growing and that's wonderful and in your pocket. No, I'm trying to follow in your footsteps. You did a great job growing your YouTube channel. I've never been able to grow mine. It's very hard.

I mean, it's harder than winning a Nobel Prize. But I value every one of my subscribers and friends out there. But we should touch base when the new book, audio book comes out to contradict myself. I do feel like hearing Galileo's words and his imprecations and warnings and his aphorisms, he was such a good writer and such a deep thinker that I think the fact that he didn't have an audiobook, it was so surprised. It's like, you know, when they talk about like when the first Aborigines and New Zealand saw like a boat, they're like, oh, I can't make out what the heck that thing. Like, it was just like, of course there's an audiobook of Galileo.

And then like, but then you think about it. No, there's not. And it's opened up this whole new vista. Like, we do audiobooks for Einstein and Newton and all sorts of things. And I want to give gratitude to you for, you know, kind of giving me the confidence to just do it and ask permission later. And I did get permission from a publisher, which happens to be here in the University of California. Oh, really? That's great. I mean, I can't wait to talk about it.

And, I mean, I do think Galileo is one of two. Let's say there's two people who are the smartest people who have ever lived, the other one being Kanye West. And I can't wait to hear all what you have to say about Galileo because I didn't really know, I don't really know that much about him. 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. Yeah.

And he's so relatable. You think of him as like really stuffy. And Newton was. Newton's words are pretty impenetrable and there's a lot of more equations. and so this is like a conversation between three friends over like glasses of wine on a Venetian canal and like we try to set the mood for it and and it's been great and a lot of the help has come from your inspiration and people like Tim Bader and others who have been helping out Nathan Roxburgh and others that you kind of connected me to.

I will make sure this is the first audiobook. I have not even listened to my own audiobooks even when they were only published as audio books. And so, I think you like it, although it's 23 hours long, so at 1x speed. You need to have like a short and sweet version of it. Yeah, well, that's what I'm going to do. So the hub and spoke model patented by James Altitcher in 2014, suggest what's the next thing I should do after the book comes out or when the book comes

out? Yeah. No, I'm asking you, what would you, what would the, what's the next spoke? I would write articles in as many publications as you possibly can. That's one. What's another one? What are we doing right now? Well, definitely you're going a lot of podcasts.

But what else? Spinoff podcast. Spinoff podcast. Think like Galileo. Think like Galileo is my next podcast. Yeah. And then I'm trying to think. First off, I'd go on Quora and answer any questions.

Like, if I go to Quora right now and I search on Galileo, I'd be surprised. if there isn't like a ton of stuff that comes up, even though I've never even thought of searching on it before. Yeah, there's like hundreds of questions. How do Galileo prove that the earth is spherical? Yeah, there we go. Why is Galileo consider the father of modern science?

So these are well-followed questions. Like I would answer questions on Quora. I would write for like ink or entrepreneur or Forbes, like, you know, what Galileo can teach us about business? Like, I would hit like things and publications or podcasts in different fields. like yoga, business, sports, you know, what can we, how you can be better at golf. I'm going to do that. Business psychology.

He actually invented the Dunning Kruger effect concept. These are all great. Yeah, I like the Quora idea. I've never gone on there. So I'll do an AMA. Now I'd also start thinking about like an NFT thing. So maybe get an artist to do some kind of like wild picture of Galileo. But then if you get the NFT, maybe there's a chapter that you'd,

don't release, that is, if you get the NFT, you can get that chapter from the book. All right. I'll talk to Jay about that. Yeah, I want to do a secret mint. And then physical products, don't neglect physical products. Here's the Galileo Finger Puppet, Keating brand. I'm going to market my own telescopes. Here's a Keating brand, Galileo Explorer 2000.

I'm going to be selling all. You know, it's also like, I have a day job, too. But I'm going to have fun with it. And that's the thing I learned most from you, my friend. I want to wish you a wonderful weekend. And I hope to talk to you next month. Hopefully I'm Georgia's senior state champion by the end of this weekend. May it from your lips to Kasparov's ears.

Bye, guys. See you later, Brian. Thanks so much. Bye, Jay. Bye, everybody. Thanks for everybody for listening. Thanks, guys. Bye, bye, bye, bye.

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