Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Laurence Tribe: The Physics of IMPEACHMENT & The Curvature of Constitutional Space (#116)

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Laurence Tribe Is an American legal scholar who is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School of Harvard University. We are discussing the impeachment of Donald Trump and unique aspects of the constitution that have a mathematical connection. Tribe is a constitutional law scholar and co-founder of the American Constitution Society. He is the author of To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. The influence of Euclid on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was profound. The founding fathers were versed in the mathematical principles of the Elements, and used geometric proofs in the drafting of many provisions of the Constitution, as well as on money and measurements. It’s no surprise that you’d look up Euclid in relation to the U.S. Constitution. Thankfully, there’s an easy way for you to see the connection and read about it in this fantastic blog post from this piece in Nautilus. You can find a copy of Larry’s fascinating paper, helped out by a young research assistant named ‘Barack Obama’, here.The Curvature of Constitutional Space_What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics_103 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (1989): https://blog.bkeating.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/64/2021/02/The-Curvature-of-Constitutional-Space_What-Lawyers-Can-Learn-From-Modern-Physics_103-Harv.-L.-Rev.-1-1989.pdf Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating​ And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php​ 📝 Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I'm talking to Lawrence Tribe, the Carlo Lowe professor and university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard. It was taught at its law school since 1968, the year before we landed on the moon. Maybe we'll get to that. He was voted best professor by the graduating class of 2000. The title of university professors, Harvard's highest academic honor awarded to just a handful of professors. at any given time and just to 68 professors at all of Harvard University's history. Why are you slumming it with an astrophysicist here, Larry?

Why are you slumming it with an astrophysicist? Slamming? On the contrary, I feel really honored to be in your presence. You're in touch with things I can barely imagine. Well, we got connected together through a mutual friend, Avi Loeb, I don't think this is as a... related to Carl Loeb, but obviously a good friend, and he is an astronomer, and he is feeling a lot of heat and for the light that he has illuminated about certain astrophysical entities.

But what I wanted to talk to you today about was kind of something that's in the news. You may have heard of it. It's called the impeachment of Donald Trump. And in preparation for this, I said, I assumed, I'm sorry to say, I knew you were a math, you know, had a significant math background. I assumed you were a nerd. And I said, I want to nerd out about the geometry of the Constitution. Because many people may not be aware that Euclid, in particular, and great mathematicians, had a tremendous influence not only on Abraham Lincoln, that's sort of been discussed before.

But also on Thomas Jefferson, in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, he says, we hold these truths to be self-evident. that's directly pulled from Euclid, is it not? It certainly is. And the idea of self-evident truths and of having to begin with a set of axioms or postulates that themselves can't be proved is obviously central to the mathematical enterprise and to the enterprise of mathematical logic, which was one of the things I was most grooving on when I was before I started slumming as a lawyer, as it were.

And we went back and forth. and I want to definitely get your impression about the kind of influence of legal think, on legal thinking of the great minds of mathematicians. And also maybe go into some detail on the influence it had on Lincoln because he sort of modified some of the propositions, et cetera, as you know. But it will be interesting to compare those two different phrasings of things that were held to be self-evident. And I'm reminded of that quote, you know, sometimes the things we think of

as self-evident ain't necessarily so. And so I asked you for some tips or some papers I could read, you know, that would be simple enough for a humble astrophysicist. And you pointed me to eight papers totaling 273 pages, and I only had a day to read it. And I just want to thank you so much, Larry, for confirming my bias that I was never cut out for law school. This is like an easy day for your law students, right?

273 pages in a night? Not really. I took advantage of the fact that you seem to be a really brilliant, fast reader. And you said, you know, I have a little time before lunch. Can you send me some papers? And I thought, oh, well, if Brian is going to be ambitious, no reason to hold back. So I pulled together a few things. And one of those we'll talk about in just a minute. It's called the curvature of constitutional space. And this is in the Harvard Law Review, a little known, you know, the journal that some of us subscribe to on a weekly basis. But for those of us who don't, I'll put some information in the show notes, this article that I absolutely devoured. And now I can say,

you know, Larry, once I was visiting my brother, he went to Berkeley College of Music, and I visited him during the Boston Marathon. And there was a point where I had across, what is it, Boilsdown or Commonwealth Avenue, you know so much better than I. I'm sure you've run it many times.

And I had across the street, and I made sure to run across the street, So I could say I ran in the Boston Marathon. So now I can say I've read. It sounds like you would make a good lawyer. Well, our people are not exactly known for not having arguments. I can't say if I have good arguments. But I, but I think, can I ask you, Brian?

Did you notice footnote one of that paper? It acknowledges the help of my research assistant at the time. Maybe you skipped that. It was Barack Obama. Yes, I was going to get to that. You put not one. That's right. I was going to say that I've read something that has been read not only by a well-known constitutional law professor,

but also someone who held the highest law in office in the land who may still be, well, I don't know, is he subject to impeachment? Because, Larry, the thing I am so interested in, is there, you know, we, and you wax very rhapsodically about this, the goal of science in some sense, in physics at least, is to come up with a theory of everything. It's a shorthand for an all-encompassing theory. I want to ask you, is it the Constitution a theory of everything or is it a theory of anything? Is it relative in the sense that the normal person would say, oh, it's all relative? Or is it relative in the way that I and my colleagues as physicists talk about relativity?

What does it mean? In what sense, is it a theory of everything or anything? Well, it's certainly not a theory of everything because it's contingent on any number of circumstances. It was cobbled together as a compromise among very disparate vectors really pointing in very different directions, some towards slavery, some toward human emancipation, some toward equality, some toward subordination. So it is certainly not all-encompassing. There are alternative universes in which different constitutions might achieve somewhat similar aims in terms of justice, in terms of tranquility, in terms of the benefits of liberty and of equality. And it has internal tensions that have never been fully resolved.

It has pieces that don't make sense in terms of others. The electoral college is incompatible with the principle of one person, one vote, even though. No, slavery has been erased. It hasn't fully been erased because there's an exception written into the anti-slavery amendment for people who are forced to work as part of a penal sentence. So it is certainly not a theory of everything. But seeking coherence, seeking to treat it as a coherent whole, reconciling its tensions is at least for me, one of the central and most exciting aspects of the

constitutional letter prize. That is, if people want to read it in a certain way, one of the arguments is conventionally, well, that's not what they meant when they wrote it. But since the people who wrote it were wise enough to know that they were projecting something into a distant future, it's clear that what they originally meant was not wholly determinant and might not be binding. So then you look at what would make the best sense of it, but best in terms of what? then you have a kind of meta-constitution, that is, what are the principles to which the Constitution should conform? It's an endless enterprise, and a little bit like Gertl's theorem, there's really no way within the context of the finite Constitution, even to decide what is actually a part of it. Because, for example, when an amendment is proposed in 1789 and not ultimately ratified until 1990 or so, and that happened with one amendment,

There are conflicting views as to whether it's really part of the Constitution. I once had an argument with Justice Scalia about that in an elevator at Princeton. And we have very different views. And when I was trying to explain the Constitution to a group of fifth graders, it turned out they were more interested and excited in the, though I didn't use this language, in the indeterminacy of the question of what's really part of the Constitution. And the problem of infinite self-reference of trying to have a rule about the what are the rules? And then a rule about how to read the rules, even fifth graders can get

turned on by puzzles of that kind. And when those puzzles are also relevant to human life and death, and to the question of whether we're going to have a tyrant in charge of all of our lives or govern our lives, and that's what's at stake in the current impeachment trial, then you know that even though it's not cosmology, it's not just spinach either. Those dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.

It's funny you reference Gertil. I was going to get to the fact that the one of the greatest logicians of all time and good friends with a little known patent clerk, former patent clerk by the name of Albert Einstein. He was becoming a citizen in the late 1940s. he consulted with his friend Albert, and he said, hey, Albert, I seem to have discovered a contradiction in the Constitution. Maybe you want to say something about that and what Albert's advice to him was? Well, his advice was, don't let them know that. They might not appreciate that when you seek your papers. By the way, it's a book by Jim Holt. Do you know the book?

I know it. If you flip through it, he called me once, Holt did, and said, you know, I I really wondered whether a constitutional theorist who was also a logician would have anything to say about the fallacy that Gertl thought he found in the Constitution. The fallacy was that the Constitution within its own framework could permit its own self-destruction. And because it could permit its own self-destruction, it was really incoherent and not worthy. And my answer to that is any finite system designed to project human aspirations into the future has bound to have internal contradictions of a sort that would permit the destruction of the Constitution. So you really haven't discovered any unique contradiction in the Constitution. Anyway, I was pleased to see that discussion with Hope appear in a discussion of the conversation. that Gerdl had with Einstein. I felt like it was a very special company.

Yes. Yeah, that description, of course, Gertel is famous for the incompleteness theorem. And I claim, Larry, this is a topic for another day. We're talking with Larry Tribe, Lawrence Tribe, the low professor of law and the Harvard University professor. We're talking about not only all things political, all things constitutional, but also about the applications and the potentiality of physical. law, of scientific law, to influence the laws of human beings. I think Aristotle said something to the effect that humans are animus politicus. In other words, we are nature political. And I found it very interesting reading through this wonderful essay in Harvard Law Review from 1989 called

the curvature of constitutional space, what lawyers can learn from modern physics, is that we are animated in some sense to always maybe see conflict over things. things which are indeterminate, perhaps to say, you know, relativity. Again, I, as a physicist, I hate, oh, it's all relative, you know, that's like a sure way to start, you know, to get me, to get me frustrated and excluding bile. But, but we both talk about things in, in our respective fields, about states, about the positions. And it seems to me that some of the most controversial things we have are not amenable to our classical brains. Our brains evolved to see tigers, to see threats of snakes and is it a snake and we were kind of negativity biased.

We're not quantum beings. We are superpositions of quantum objects. And even though I've had Deepak Chopra on recently, I'm not going to get too woo-woo on you. But the point is that the most frustrating things as classical beings trying to understand the quantum world are superpositions. So the famous, and you make oblique reference to this in this paper, but you talk about Heisenberg. But of course, the most famous one is Schrodinger's cat and this indeterminate state. And it just drives our classical brains wild because we can't comprehend of a superposition.

And I wonder, is that some of the frustration that we see in the law? Reading through this paper, you know, it could have been written in, you know, 2019, 2021 because you talk about abortion. You know, good thing we solve that. Good thing that's no longer controversial. And I was thinking like abortion, one of my friends, Harvard alum, Eric Weinstein, talks about, you know, the frustration of abort. Like, nobody thinks a fetus is anything to do, a living organism before the parents meet each

other and have their big bang, as Fred Hoyle used to say, right? And nobody would say that it's not a baby, you know, like my toddlers are not babies, right? So it's that superposition. Is it a baby? You know, when is it a baby? Talk about the fundamental indeterminacy that you cannot collapse a wave function in jurisprudence space the way we, I can't, I have an easy job. You know, I can make an observation. But talk about what the struggle is as, you know, trying to come to a decision in jurisprudence when these things aren't well determined.

Well, you know, I had a long conversation years ago with, I guess a colleague of yours, Murray Gilman. And we co-edited a book called When Values Conflict. And there were a series of essays in there, but it was really the ultimate idea of sort of not being able to come up with an algorithm for resolving fundamentally conflicting values. I was intrigued not only at a human level, but at a metaphysical level about the problem of abortion because I wrote another book called, I guess, The Clash of Absolutes, and it was about the fact that you have both from one point of view, one view of the universe,

even though what we have inside of women's uterus is obviously not a doctor or lawyer or a physicist, but is also not just protoplasm. And depending on how you think about time and future selves, there's a lot more there than just a bunch of molecules. On the other hand, people who emphasize that collectivity and say it has certain rights are in some instances is treating the woman who carries it as a kind of involuntary uterus. I mean, is it right? Is it wrong to compel someone to make a decision about her future, her life, in a way that she wouldn't choose to do?

I mean, how do you resolve that clash of absolutes? It's really very similar, I think, to collapsing a wave function. And I don't think there is any kind of universally acceptable elixir that will dissolve it. But I'm actually fascinated by your point about how our brains may not be built to resolve certain kinds of conflicts. Indeed, they may not be built to comprehend certain things. I mean, we are biological beings. We're protoplasm, something that the artificial intelligence people sometimes conveniently set aside, assuming that we are only a set of zeros and ones, and some software.

But it may be that the way we are constructed simply doesn't pick up certain signals about the universe, about intelligence. That's why I find of a Loeb's concept that we really ought not to dismiss too easily, the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence having already visited us. We ought not to dismiss it simply because it sounds zany. Anyway, I'm digressing. I'm not sure I'm responding. No, no, it is.

And anyway, we haven't talked about impeachment yet, which I hope we get to because I... Yeah, I want to get to that in just one second. But I did want to bring up artificial intelligence. I had a conversation with your cross-town rival, Nomchomsky, about it last summer. And, you know, he's kind of a strong touringist where he believes that it's meaningless to talk about certain things. And, you know, can machines think? But I'd love to talk maybe some other time about artificial intelligence in the concept of like, can you abort an artificial intelligence beyond as fellow MIT professor, Max Tagmark says, it becomes life 3.0 based on the Moore's law extrapolation of current technology, not even saying things like the singularity or alien civilizations, just that it will have a capability. Can it feel pain? What are the moral obligations? Can you avoid it? And I think, I mean, that's why I'm so fascinated about animals.

rights about which I've written a great deal. I mean, what is it that makes something a rights bearing entity? Is it simply its resemblance to ourselves? Is its capacity to have, to perceive moral obligation, capacity to feel pain? I don't think, you know, the constitution, intriguingly, doesn't necessarily give us any guidance in answering that question. It uses as a kind of blank variable the term person, but it doesn't ever explain what a person is. And beyond that, Constitution actually contains a series of prohibitions that are not dependent on our notion of who or what has rights. Like for example, slavery shall not exist in the United States. That's what the 13th Amendment says.

It doesn't say anything about persons. That's why I've represented elephants and chimpanzees and dolphins in various cases saying they shouldn't be enslaved. It also says there shall be no cruel and usual punishments. It's kind of a negative. It doesn't say no person shall be subjected to a cruel and unusual punishment. That's why I think it's right that we have laws against mistreating little animals. But again, I digress. Yeah.

So I do want to turn to impeachment. I want to phrase it in a physics context. So we have laws that underpin our understanding of nature, but also characterize their ignorance of nature. But one thing is for certain when we are talking. about definitive observations or past events or retradictions, there are limitations. And the limitations in the Constitution seem, I mean, the Constitution, you correct me if I'm wrong, mentions impeachment no fewer than six times. And nowhere does it say you can't impeach a president or can, but it seems clear to me, at least maybe you'll disagree with me.

But at least within the curvature of space time and the constitutional limits in space, It doesn't seem like you could impeach me, Brian Keating, you know, a professor of physics for, you know, for some high crimes, misdemeanors, whatever. But in other words, I'm not in that position in space. But you're claiming, if I'm not mistaken, that you could, that the bounds of time do not, do not apply as well. So can you talk about the constitutionality of it? Right. Well, here we have a lot of guidance from the actual architecture and text of the Constitution. Although it mentions it six times, there are only two important places.

where it's mentioned. The place where it's mentioned in a context that leads some people to make, what I think is the fallacious argument, that it's not permissible to conduct and conclude a trial of Donald J. Trump because he's no longer president. That is in Article 2, Section 4, which says that the president, vice president, and other civil officers of the United States shall be, Impeached upon having committed, I don't have the language in front of me, treason, bribery, are there high crimes and misdemeanors? That's kind of a limitation. It sort of says there are certain things that civil officers cannot do without being impeached and convicted and removed. But it doesn't say that removal is the only thing that can happen.

If that were the case, then clearly it would make no sense to impeach someone. who is non-removable because they've already moved to a different space. They're no longer an officer. The key point, however, is that Article 1, which is the place where the Senate gets its sole power to try impeachments and where the House gets the sole power to impeach, which is like indicting. Article 1 does not contain any limitation that says you must be an officer in order to be impeached. Indeed, when the thing was written, the key example that the framers of our Constitution had in front of them was the example of the Parliament of England impeaching a guy who had since resigned as the Governor General of Bengal. He was impeached in the sense that you can

put a scarlet letter on someone. He was impeached. He was charged with crime. long after he was gone. However, that problem, can you impeach someone who is no longer a public officer doesn't really arise in the case of Donald Trump because he was president when he was impeached. The only question really is having impeached someone, are you unable then to carry the impeachment forward to the point of a conviction just because the person has run out the the clock or committed the most heinous crimes near the very end of his or her term in office. And there I think the answer is quite clear that Senate's sole power to try all impeachments contains no exception for someone who has managed to get out from under the wire just in time.

And the key is that the framers of the Constitution, knowing that you would not want to convict someone of high crimes and misdemeanors unless they were in deep danger to the republic. They provided not only for removal, but for permanent disqualification. That is when someone has shown himself to be a tyrant rather than a Democrat with a small D, you don't just want to get rid of him. You want to make sure that he doesn't return with the private army that he's managed to assemble the way this guy did in taking over the capital, though by remote control. and the power to disqualify someone is central to the impeachment power. That's sort of the way lawyers argue.

They look at the language. They look at the history. They look at the precedent. They look at the purpose. Not everybody agrees, but the overwhelming majority of lawyers think that this impeachment is perfectly legitimate. But because it's a political process and because a lot of the people who are afraid still of Trump's database and of his command over a loyal,

rather violent army, a lot of them look for cover and easy cover might be to say, oh, well, we don't have power to render any decision at all. They were outvoted on that 56 to 44, but they're still going to persist in arguing, just as they're going to argue that since he used words in order to inflict massive injury on the Capitol, he's somehow protected by the freedom of speech, quite a canard and not really a meaningful use of the free speech context. But what we're We don't know, a lot of people say, what's the point of it all? It looks like the votes are not there to convict him. It takes two-thirds of the senators who were voting.

That's quite premature. I mean, one of the main dynamics of any trial, including an impeachment trial, is people start to come forward with information that they have. And there are probably lots of people out there who know exactly what Trump was doing during the riot, which is one of the questions here. I mean, was he really watching the riot and cheering the rioters on? Or was he distractedly watching some daytime TV show and therefore being derelict in his duty, but not really inciting the rioters? That's a question. There may be more evidence about that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the evidentiary standard, you know, in physics is a very different one. You know, we talk about confidence intervals and, you know, five sigma, seven sigma, you know, for evidence, you know, for extravagant claims.

Although I always think, you know, the statement that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don't know if you ever reach into your, when you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court. I'm going to reach into my extraordinary evidence bag now, but you're right. And actually, I think it's one of the reasons I'm against the early voting. Actually, for exactly the reason that you outlined, you know, something could happen between, you know, October 3rd and November 3rd. Like something, he could have done something or the opponents could have done something. But I know you only have a few more minutes. I can't resist asking this from a pure risk management standpoint.

point, you know, you might think all I do is look through telescopes all day, but most of my day is thinking about risks. Like if that concrete doesn't get up to our telescope mount pad by 3 p.m. you know, in next Thursday, the telescope's not going to work. They were not going to have diesel fuel, blah, blah, blah. You know, so I'm thinking about quotidian things, much more than most people assume when they hear the august title of astronomer. But actually, a lot of what is risk management. And I want to ask you completely apolitically, the show is apolitical.

I always say there are no democratic constellations. there's no Republican asteroids out there. Some might claim there, you know, Donald J. Trump was a Republican asteroid. But from a pure risk management standpoint, no partisanship whatsoever. Is it smart for the Democrats to do? Let's say they are successful. Let's do a goodunk and experiment. Let's say Democrats, there's some evidence and the Republicans come through and they vote and they

impeach him. Wouldn't that in some sense from a very broad perspective be very risky for Democrats in that they'll remove him from the possibility? And we didn't even get a chance to talk about, like, what the Constitution doesn't talk about term limits. And obviously, you know, people serve more than two terms, you know, in our past history. So ignoring that. It does. There is a provision that limits presidents to two terms, although this guy, I think, if he had gotten away with what he tried to do in 2020.

And I can't avoid being somewhat political about this. I doubt that he would have been willing to leave after 2020, you know, after serving two terms. Okay. So there was, in the, I'm saying, in the original, French, of the Constitution people, yeah. But ignoring that, so in the constitutional originalism, but just talking about from a risk management standpoint, isn't the best thing that this guy comes back and runs again from the perspective of Democrats, you know, would be enjoying the fracturing of the Republican Party? I'm just speaking for, I'm not, I don't take size. I'm a political

thing. Yeah, go ahead. You know, I thought that one of the House managers, Ted Liu, made a very powerful point, powerful partly because he left it with something that the listener had to think about. He said, you know, I'm not afraid that Donald Trump will return and win reelection. He was pretty confident that the guy is so tarred that he wouldn't win. I'm afraid that he would return and lose. And if he returned and lost, we now know what he is capable of doing in terms of upsetting the ordinary rules of the game. I mean, the ordinary rules, the framers were worried about charismatic demagogues who would raise private armies, mobs of people, well-armed, to basically rip apart the delicate framework that is designed to hold together this set of contradictions.

And if he runs again and loses, and if his private army by then has grown and become all the more angry, God knows what would happen. This time, it really looks like he came awfully close to killing, having this mob kill, the vice president and the Speaker of the House, the entire line of succession. Then what would he have done? He surely would have declared martial law. He would have said, we now are in a state of emergency, a state of exception. A black hole is, as it were, in the Constitution. That could still happen. So, you know, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, in the risk assessment, the risk that that will happen is one that we need to worry about. one of the arguments for convicting and disqualifying him, but it's also an argument, even if it ends up that we don't have the votes or they don't have the votes to be apolitical, even if it turns out the Democrats don't have the votes to convict and disqualify him.

Think of the downside of not having put him on trial. It's true that he will claim some kind of vindication if he is acquitted. But if he wasn't even put on trial for essentially enacting the framers' worst nightmare, and coming very close to ripping apart this delicate experiment in democracy, what would that say to the next tyrant and the next? I mean, I think that the destruction of the republic is a fairly existential singularity that ought to be avoided in an assessment of risks. Absolutely. And I know you only have a few minutes. You've been so gracious with your time.

If you'll indulge me in some more forbearance, I have to ask you a question that I ask all my guests when they come on the nobub. on the into the impossible podcast of Brian Keating and that uh involves um you know dealing with dealing with quote unquote enemies and and and how you um first of all why do you why are you so controversial i see you as a person um who's got extremely strong opinions obviously uh very very studied in history in the mastery of your field in the mastery of other fields or the interest in curiosity which is what we study at the arthur c clark center for human imagination um what is it about your positions that make you controversial.

I've seen you criticize your fellow traveler, Chuck Schumer, and it seems absolute in that sense that you're guided by this compass, which will get to my question. But why do you think you're controversial? What is controversial about the positions of you hope? I think, honestly, I'm controversial because I say what I believe and what I believe is often very unpopular, not always.

But when, I mean, Barack Obama is somebody I trust, to admire. He was my student, my research assistant. I'm very much in favor of taking dramatic steps to deal with climate change, but he had a clean air plan that I thought violated the Constitution. I wasn't happy about that. I thought it, not in some fundamental way, but because it exceeded the power that Congress had delegated the president. And I said so, and I had some success in litigation and Barack wasn't all that happy about it. More often, I'm controversial because I criticize right-wing positions. When I testified against Robert Bork, when he was nominated to the court, a lot of people who otherwise was sort of friendly with, people like Alan Simpson and Orrin Hatch senators said, Larry, you shouldn't have done that.

We would have loved a court with both you and Robert Bork on it. But now you have basically poisoned the water. We're never going to let you get on the court. And sure enough, that's the way it happened. But I'm actually very glad about the trajectory I've had. I don't mind the controversy because I've had a hell of a time. And I've had wonderful students and they've done wonderful things. Not all my students are all that wonderful.

Ted Cruz was one of them. I'm not so proud of him. But Jamie Raskin, I'm very proud of. But I'm controversial because I don't hesitate to speak my mind. Yeah. And that really brings me into my final question, which revolves around this concept. that in Judaism is known as an ethical will, Zaba'a, and in Alfred Nobel actually enacted this in the creation of the Nobel Prize, which was won by your student, Barack Obama, of course.

And that was that the Nobel Prize had to go not only for physicists and chemists, et cetera, but who made great discoveries, but those discoveries had to be for the greater benefit of all mankind, they called it. Nowadays, they say humankind. Yeah, but I want to ask you, when you reach the biblical age of 120, 20 years old. What kinds of a Zava-a, what kind of ethical will do you want to convey? That conveys not your material goods, but as Alfred did, his wisdom, his teaching, his desire to continue to the future, his biological errors, but also his ideological errors. Well, first of all, my Hebrew isn't very good. After my bar mitzvah, I didn't continue with it. So I wouldn't have known how to

phrase that ethical will. I suppose my ethical compass, or my moral compass would be to remember that you never have anything except what you've given away. What you have given, what you've contributed is all you have. That is a very beautiful place to end. And I do want to thank you for being so generous with your time, Larry. Thank you. Incredibly busy. We'll tune into you on TV.

Please, I hope I can get you back to ask you how to unify quantum electrodynamics with the workforce. I know that's your hobby on the week. again. But I would love to have you back on if you're willing to love it. I'd love it. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful. Any sufficient advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you. and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes.

For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director.

Produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.