Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Merchants of Truth and Light: Losing the Nobel Prize - Brian Keating The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey (#339)

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Astrophysicist and cosmologist Brian Keating, Ph.D., talks about the high-pressure world of science. For a decade, Dave Asprey, “the father of biohacking,” elevated what you knew about the capabilities of your mind and body across a thousand episodes of Bulletproof Radio. Now, he’s evolving it even further in his plan to upgrade humanity. You’re invited to expand your knowledge, explore your own performance and embrace possibility with The Human Upgrade™. You’ll meet bright thinkers and radical doers who push the boundaries of science, technology, personal development, and human performance in every way imaginable. You’ll learn from experts around the world who elevate what it means to be human. Every guest you listen to, every topic you learn about, every new idea you discover on this podcast moves you forward. Join The Human Upgrade™ with Dave Asprey on this next evolution to upgrade your mind, body and life. Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who knows how much time we all have left. And so what I tried to do in life is maximize every moment. And that might mean, you know, not getting enough sleep, not doing the meditation, not doing this and that. But to me, it's this, it's this unyielding desire to know as much as I can while I can and be productive and contribute to this chain of knowledge. But I have to say, I had much baser desires when I was a 25-year-old, 30-year-old, in the this field, I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. That was my focus. That was my goal. That was my idol. That was what I was going for above almost everything else. To the point that I really, I did create an experiment that was, you know, going to be, you know, shoe in for the Nobel Prize if our results

held up. And from the title of the book, you can tell it they didn't. And the episode, the aftermath of that episode really affected my own self-reflection as to why I'm a scientist. You know, I could do other things. I could probably program a computer pretty well. I actually liked working on cars and doing physical labor, and that's something I've always been good at. But the bottom line is I'd never take it for granted. I'm here by a whole lucky string and sequence of events,

and I aim to take advantage of all that, and I really want to know everything. And that's what drives me in life, is the humility that I've made so huge mistakes in my life, and I'm going to take advantage of the less. I've learned from those mistakes to capitalize on it and hopefully hopefully make the universe a better place. Welcome to this upgraded high-performance replay episode of Into the Impossible featuring biohacking guru Dave Asprey's interview with your host Brian Keating. Find out what it

takes to do big science and extreme conditions at high altitude and Dave Asprey's unique altitude acclimatization solutions. Listen to Professor Keating, discuss his perspectives on Big Bang Cosmology, theology, and how good science gets done. Find out how Brian is training the next generation of high-performance scientists. You'll get a healthy dose of cognitive enhancement by listening to this lively discussion. If you love hacking high-performance in science and life, please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. Upgrade your curious friends by sharing. this episode, and don't forget to rate us with an asterism of five stars. We appreciate your

suggestions and feedback in the form of a review, and we read everyone. And now for a cognitive upgrade with Dave Asprey interviewing Brian Keating. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot-bay doors, please help. And today's episode is really cool, because you're going to hear what happens in the deep gut, we'll call it the microbiome of science, the stuff you wouldn't hear about, about how we come to believe as a species, as scientists, as academics, what is true and what is not true. And this is an interview with Brian Keating, who wrote a book called Losing the Nobel Prize. He is an astrophysicist who's going to make fun of my cool fact of the day reading today,

and a cosmologist, professor of physics at the U.S. Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences in the Department of Physics at UC San Diego. And Brian became a celestial evangelist when he was 13. He saw Jupiter next to a bright moon and just wondered what would happen in a telescope, and he bought one. And since then, he's built and deployed some of the world's most advanced and powerful telescopes and detectors, and he's trying to find the literal edge of the universe.

In today's episode, we're going to go over the high-pressure world of science, What happens when you think you're right, or maybe you're just looking at a speck of dust? Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dave. It's a big pleasure to be on with you. What led you to decide you were going to write a book not about winning the Nobel Prize, but to losing it? People haven't heard of your work. Tell me about what happened.

Yeah, so the book is sort of an anti-heroes journey of a description of what it's like to aspire to great things on the edge. of human capability, along with teammates and colleagues who at various times will be collaborators and friends, and at other times maybe competitors and nemesies in various forms. And to actually portray science how it's really done and not this neat wrapped up little bow, science is messy, and science is chaotic and oftentimes unknowable. And it has many of the same features that the business world features. And that's been the case all along since the first real establishment. astronomer in history, Galileo, to use a telescope, who had a lot of needs as an entrepreneur to make money and do all sorts of other things, all the way up to Einstein, whose birthday,

as you say, were celebrating his 140th birthday. Unfortunately, he's not here. Had he lived to 180, he would still be in his prime. And it's too bad, as I often say, you know, that he didn't have any brain octane oil, because he could have gone out to some great things and made some great discoveries. But what's so interesting about science and that I've come to learn is how similar it is to the world of the executive of the business person, but how little scientists really recognize that growing up and even as mature scientists. So I aspire to win the Nobel Prize as the ultimate accolade, the same way that, you know, startup founders want to get the triple comma club and found a unicorn as, you know, things that you've done. And you know the intoxication.

of achievement and great success. And in science, you may remember, you know, you come from a family of scientists, physicists, engineers, and you know that we're pretty much the biggest grade grubbers there are. I mean, we want to get the highest grade, the A pluses go to the highest achievement as possible as I'm sure your relatives have convinced you of. So you're talking about scientific hubris there. Yeah, there's a lot of that, but there's also this need to be to be judged, to be graded, to be scored and compared against history's greatest. And there is no, know, I don't get any grades anymore since I was a first year graduate student, right, 20 plus years ago. And for scientists, the last, you know, grade, the ultimate A plus is winning the Nobel Prize.

And there are some books written about winning the Nobel Prize. You'll be interested to know. And I always say those are about as useful as, you know, books on how to win the lottery or how to, you know, winning bingo strategies. Because not that it is purely based on luck, but there is a luck element in particular longevity, which I know you're very interested in. You have to live long enough to see your ideas, theories, experiments validated. But to me, the experience of losing something and failure and resiliency and humility, that all came together in this book. And I realized, you know, most people haven't won a Nobel Prize. Most people haven't won an Oscar or a Grammy or another type of accolator

or our high school class president for that matter. And so it's how you deal with adversity and the failures that you encounter that make scientists, you know, lives very similar to other people that you might encounter, despite the stereotype scientists are normal people. You talk about how, you know, you want to see how you stack up, how everyone sort of wants the Nobel Prize. It reminds me of a book by Candace Purd, who I didn't get a chance to interview because she passed away. She wrote a book called The Molecules of Emotion. And it goes in a great detail about how at the National Institutes of Health there's this competition for, you know, for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

And how nasty the politics are and how competitive it is and how there's this one thing you don't tell someone in the lab. And oh, sorry, I meant to tell you, and now you don't win and I do. And it really highlighted for me how we got to where we are in many different fields where if you don't agree with the predominant paradigm, you can't get funding, no one will talk to you,

you don't get invited to the parties. And it seems like this is happening more and more, whether we're talking politics, you know, autoimmunity, chronic fatigue syndrome, it doesn't really matter. Like, it's getting really one-sided everywhere we go. Is it that bad in physics now, or are we pretty much all in agreement that if, you know, you're not studying the cool thing now, no one even knows your name? No, it's very much, as you describe it. In fact, I was on, I was on a show with Scott Eastwood, who's Clint Eastwood's son, and he's an actor in his own right. He's been in a lot of movies. And we were talking about how the parallels between the Academy,

which by the way, it's the Academy of Motion Arts, pictures, or whatever, and sciences. So there's science in the title of the Oscars. And yet they do things much more, you know, kind of holistically, shall we say, than our Swedish counterpart to award the Nobel Prize in physics and literature, medicine, et cetera. But I said to him, I said to Scott, look, you know, I don't think you're in Hollywood, but, you know, I don't think you're in Hollywood, but, you know, I don't think like most major studios are expecting a movie, you know, like a crummy movie, like, let's just say the Fast and the Furious, you know, is going to win an Oscar. But, and he said, let me interrupt you. I was in the Fast and the Fury. I said, well, I didn't, you know. You did not. Yeah, I did. I swear. Yeah, it's all there. But he's very gracious. And I said, look, I don't think you thought you were going to win an Academy Award for that role that you played, nor do I think the studio did. But you better believe that, you know, the analog of Hollywood producers are the national.

Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, they want, just as the movie studios do, they want a certain number of their films to win the Academy Award. In fact, some of what they do in the popular side where they make these blockbuster, you know, Captain Marvel, whatever movies are really to support the more artsy, creative intellectual films that do go on to win Academy Awards. So it's just like that. There's a herd mentality in a certain sense. And there are plenty of colleagues, I have to say, that do it for the purity of the science. But when you get told things as a young professor that you won't get tenure unless we think you have a good shot at winning a Nobel Prize, or you say things like, you know, the main defining characteristic of a scientist in their

obituary is that they won the Nobel Prize or almost won the Nobel Prize. It sets up this dichotomy of idolatry, as I call it. And I think it's very pernicious and ironic because scientists are supposed to be free of prejudice, idolatry, you know, religion worship, things like that. And yet, I think we're some of the most susceptible to these biases that exists in society. Well, I'm hoping that just talking about this moves the needle a little bit for people listening, if you just believe something is absolutely true, everything we believe about reality is a theory. They just asymptotically approach being an absolute truth, but there's probably a corner case. And all the interesting stuff is the corner cases.

You want to do time travel? I'm pretty sure it's not easy. You want to live to 180? I'm also pretty sure it's not easy or maybe beyond. There's all sorts of stuff. You want to turn off cancer. Just one person has done it somewhere or is doing it right now. It's just,

it's not evenly distributed. And when science acts as an immune system to ignore those things, instead of focus all of our energies on that one person who seems to know what you're thinking and can do it reliably. And you could say there are no people like that out there. Heck, I don't know. But everyone who claims it, like let's,

let's either prove that it's not happening or let's, figure out why and then let's make it teachable. That's what's cool. Yeah, I mean, look, I get a lot of emails every week that say, you know, Professor Keating, you know, Albert Einstein was wrong. Here's why I can prove I'm right. And, you know, most of those go to the waistbin in my email. But on the other hand, you know, sometimes you do get gems in the rough. I once got an email from from a woman and she said, I got some really speculative ideas and cosmology. I'd like to talk to you about. I was about to delete it. And then I saw, oh, by the way, I won the poll. surprise from President Obama last year. Would you like to go out for go? Sure, I'll undelete that.

And we went, her name's Ray Armand Trout. And she ended up writing a poem about the collaboration, the conversation that we had over a period of weeks. And it became ranked as the, one of the best poems of 2012 in America. And if I had been closed-minded and said, look, she's a poet. She isn't anything about physics. When you diversify your curiosity, when you explore different realms of activity. The brain is the most phenomenal, as you know, computer in the world and in the known universe, and it may be the only type of computer of its kind. And some of the work that we do here revolves around possibilities for artificial intelligence and quantum computing and things that, you know, a decade ago would have seemed impossible, let alone a hundred years

ago. So, you know, I salute the people that really are ambitious. And those moonshots and the difficulties as our mutual friend, you know, Peter Diamandis speak about, that that's how progress gets made. You have to have a certain amount of boldness, but when you're in an operational field like mine, where most people don't get their first research grant from the government until they're in their late 30s or early 40s, and by then, you know,

maybe some of their greatest kind of years are behind them in some sense, including myself, it sets up a world which is, you know, has all the negative aspects of the business world, you know, punishing failure, et cetera, but it has very few of the positive ones of entrepreneurial spirit. So unless you win the Nobel Prize, you're probably not going to get rich in academia. That's right.

In order to be on Bulletproof Radio, one of the sort of filters that I run is I want someone who's a game changer, someone who's breaking out and doing impactful things in their field. And it turns out a lot of the time, there is financial success, but no one's targeting that. And you're Eric Candel, who won the Nobel Prize, has been on the show. and some other people at high levels of achievement. But they all kind of share that perspective that being the best is a motivator for them, regardless of whether it's measured in dollar signs. And in business even, I measure success in a number of people who use bulletproof products,

not necessarily in the highest possible revenues or dollars or things like that. In other words, I'll spend more to make it convenient for someone to start doing it. even if I make less on it because I like a world where people are well fed because then they're nice to each other. Everybody wins. You can look at impact or you can look at dollars. And I think you're, you just have an impact filter, which is great. But I got to ask you, when is time travel going to happen? Yeah. So there's a lot of news circulating about time travel just recently from a couple of different particles that were shown to potentially. inhabit

configuration, a sort of state space that they existed in at a previous time. It's very, that's very primitive, I would say. It's not known whether or not time travel between, you know, for macroscopic objects is possible. This, you know, sort of shows in principle for microscopic objects. Now, if you're an atomist,

if you believe that we are essentially a giant assemblage of microscopic particles, then, you know, in principle, there's no reason why something macroscopic could not be, teleported back in time. Let me just take a step back. Your listeners are undoubtedly familiar with the fact that it's possible to move forward, backwards, up, down, left, and right in the three dimensions of space. However, you may have heard also that there's something called space time, that the man born on this day, Albert Einstein pioneered this concept of the intricate

interlocking of the concept of space with time. And yet, we all know, at least, you know, despite your question, that we can't, we can go any direction positive or negative in space, but not in time, at least as far as we know currently, we have not been able to actually teleport back in time. However, there's nothing in the laws of physics themselves. If I showed you a pendulum swinging back and forth, you couldn't tell me if that pendulum movie of a pendulum is running backwards or forwards. Similarly, if you looked at the orbit of the earth from above in a sense, and I didn't tell you which direction you, you were looking at it from, you couldn't tell which way time is going. In other words, the laws of

physics are independent of the time parameters, positive or negative sign. And that implies that there's a symmetry and that going back in time could in fact be possible. What I'm connected to in my research is the ultimate origin of the universe, which seems to be in one class of models the ultimate stopping point. In other words, there's a time before which you could not return. So if time travel is possible. It would it would beggar, you know, a lot of questions. For example, you know, what if you tried to teleport back to before there was a universe to teleport into? That's a question. And so the main, you know, focus, the main answer your question is, I don't know. I don't think anybody knows when time travel will be possible. But I will say

that it's not believed to be fundamentally forbidden by the laws of physics. And as the late great Richard Feynman said and others have said, anything that's not forbidden is mandatory. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? 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. for this day. All right. I actually really like that as one of those people with oppositional defiant disorder. It just resonates with me. So you're saying, right, maybe it's possible.

It certainly hasn't been proven impossible that we'll have time travel at some point. But you're looking at the beginning of the universe and certainly you don't want to understand that. So what's your current theory? Are you a Big Bang guy? I remember my son's like, Daddy, I'm grateful for the Big Bang because without it, there wouldn't be anything. That's a pretty cool gratitude, but I'm not sure that's true. Is he right? So throughout human history, and even back to the biblical days, so, you know, not taking a position on religiosity, if you think about it, the Bible begins with basically the Big Bang. You know, how did the universe begin? And why is that? The rest of the books about, you know, like different kinds of food you can't eat with other types of food or, you know, ways that you do this or that for a tribe of nomadic semites in the Bronze Age. So why did it begin with the Big Bang? And I think the Big Bang is a story.

It's built into our consciousness as human beings, this quest that must have an origin. Human beings are very uncomfortable with them not being in the middle of a story. And media rays, it's called, like almost everything, your life, I mean, you only know who your dad was because your mom told you and you trust your mom, right? No, I use 23 meter verify. Oh, that's true. You do. Just kidding. But if you go back in time, you know, far enough, you might reach a time where there was no, you're not in the middle of anything, you're at the beginning of it.

So what's so interesting to me is that throughout human history, from the ancient Greeks, as I said, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to modern day Einstein himself, believe the universe was static, unchanging and eternal. And the Bible was sort of standing in opposition to that with that, it could be read into it that there was a beginning, a time equals zero. And what's so interesting to me is throughout the last hundred years, the more that we learn about the conditions that prevailed at the earliest epoch that we can measure, which is my field of study, we are learning that it's potentially impossible to know not only if there was a big bang. In other words, if there was a single big bang, but we may not be able ever to know if there are other universes with their own big bangs. That's called the multiverse. And similarly, we may not be able to know if our own universe is just one. cycle out of a potentially infinite number of bangs and collapses and big bangs and big crunches throughout eternity, truly eternity. And the human brain is, you know, even with all the octane oil in the world, it's very difficult for human beings to conceive of the implications of the number infinity. It's the most baffling kind of concept and we think it's only accessible to human consciousness. And yet we don't really have a visceral feeling for what it means. So to answer your

son's question, everything we see is consistent with the big bang, except for the origin of the big bang itself. In other words, we don't know what banged. We don't know what caused the big bang to occur. We don't know if there are other big bangs going on right now, or if there were other big bangs in the past. And similarly, and lastly, perhaps, we don't know if our universe will last forever or will come to a fiery end in a trillion years. But, you know, I say, keep paying your taxes just in case. Love it. Some of my favorite people to get in deep conversations over coffee with are physicists, but also

people who are PhD philosophers. And it's very hard to tell them apart in terms of the thinking model because the question of how did the universe begin also, it's almost identical to the question of how consciousness began. What is your work in physics showing us about how consciousness may have arisen? Yeah, I actually speak of the three questions I would most like to ask, you know, a supreme being, mother nature, whatever, as, you know, what was, you know, what was the nature of the origin of the universe, the real big bang, what we call the big bang. Then the origin

of life must have come at some point from non-life, right? There must have been some molecular combination of enzymes, proteins, amino acids, whatever you want, and that formed the first biological organism in the universe, perhaps here on Earth, perhaps elsewhere, some speculate, concept called panspermia, which sounds dirty, but it's not. And then the origin of consciousness. These are the three big bangs. You must have had an origin of the universe ex nilio, potentially, from nothing, the origin of life from non-life, and the origin of consciousness from non-consciousness. These are the greatest puzzles, I think, that exist. And in some way, my research touches on all three of them. Obviously, through the origin of the universe, we build telescopes, we build detectors,

we build sensors that are cooled down nearly to absolute zero, cooler than the freezer in the background than your office. Cut colder than my cryotherapy chamber. And then it goes to 260 below zero. That's nothing. I go to 454 below zero Fahrenheit. Then there's the obvious creation of life or non-life, which some of the earliest work in that was done here at UC San Diego by, I have a high, Harold Urie, who did an experiment with his graduate student, Stanley Miller, on the origin of what they thought was the prebiotic Earth atmosphere composition, and they put some sparks and lightning, out emerged some amino acids from that. And that was the origin of life, you know, supposedly, it turns out there were some flaws in that we can get to. And then the origin of consciousness, we have great deal of thinkers and people here that study consciousness.

What we do, I'm the co-director of what's called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, which was licensed, the name is licensed to us from the Arthur C. Clark Foundation. So it's a great honor to work with this great scientist, but science fiction author. And we bring in people from around the world, including someone who, if you haven't had on the radio show, you should, Roger Penrose, or Roger Penrose, who is responsible. He's probably the greatest living physicist. It was contemporary of Stephen Hawking, was actually advisor to Stephen Hawking many times. He believes that consciousness is one of the most kind of diabolical mysteries that there is, because you're trying to study yourself. In the same way, you can't really tickle yourself. I don't know if you've tried, but it's very difficult to make yourself laugh if you're tickle. It's just like it's very difficult to put yourself in a basket and pick yourself up. So we don't know if it's even theoretically possible to study the origin of consciousness using the consciousness that we have.

In other words, it might take another three-dimensional system, a quantum computer, a room temperature, liquid, not unlike a brain, to study the brain. Just as the same way, it's very hard to study things that you are a part of. Psychology on yourself is very difficult to do unless you're really good at meditation, et cetera. But in this case, the problem with consciousness of those three big bangs, the origin of the university, origin of life and the origin of consciousness, I feel consciousness is the most mysterious because we can't even agree on what a definition of consciousness is. Right. There are great many people who believe in what's called pan consciousness or panpsychism,

which would mean that not only does your brain have consciousness, but the bulletproof coffee that you drink, the molecules have consciousness too. I do. I put it in there. It's actually part of the third step of distal. Okay. Just kidding. By the way, thanks for the plugs.

And just so you guys all know, I don't even know if Brian uses bulletproof coffee or anything like that, but he's kind enough to mention it. So thank you. Well, yeah. Yes, yes. Well, as you know, the famous mathematician Erdos said that a mathematician is a machine that converts coffee into theorem. So that is a beautiful quote. We do use it.

That should be, you know, and you could get that license for free because he's long dead. Anyway, yeah, the consciousness problem of actually having fundamental attributes of what we, you know, it's kind of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography. Like you know it when you see it. In this case, you know, consciousness sort of, you know it when you see it, and you know it when you take it away. There's a researcher that Sir Roger Penrose works with named Stuart Hammeroff at the University of Arizona who works on these things called microtubules. He and I disagree a lot on the fundamental basis of consciousness, but he's an anesthesiologist. So what does he do? He makes people unconscious all day long.

And from the studies of before and after anesthesia, he's developed these theories of consciousness that are very conscious. But again, point to the fact that in this field, there's no universal definition of consciousness. And it makes it very difficult to make progress when the lexicon vocabulary is not agreed upon, even in principle. So it frustrates me to deal with that. All right. So it's awesome in academia. You say, well, there's this theory. There's that theory. All right. Straight up. You have a $100,000 bet on where consciousness comes from. Where are you going to place it? So, you know, where? I love it. You're already. You're already going off in the professor then.

All right, come give it to me straight. I'm thinking about all the slide rules I can buy. Oh, my God. That's the best answer ever. I still use them. So I would say it's most likely a quantum phenomenon, which doesn't help because actually the quantum mechanics, the properties of the very small microscopic behavior of light and matter are some of the most mysterious laws of nature.

Again, this famous physicist, Richard Feynman said, if somebody tells you that he understands or she understands quantum mechanics. They're a liar. That's the only thing you know about them. And we're learning more and more each day about kind of how ignorant we are. But I would say there are properties of quantum mechanical systems that demonstrate the same types of behaviors as the human brain. And it's called neural networks that can be processed. The problem is that to actually assemble and test these things, we're at really the abacus level, you know, now of quantum computer. It's so primitive. And so the amount that we could actually learn from it, I would say is pretty small. But yeah, if you're forcing me to stake my best,

I would say it originates as some kind of emergence phenomena from the collective behavior of nearly infinite numbers of quantum mechanical systems. But there's a big mystery as to how you can have a liquid, wet room temperature quantum computer. All our quantum computers nowadays are basically almost at absolute zero temperature. And so to have a quantum computer at room temperature, i.e. your brain, it's very mysterious. But I do believe there must be a link between the two. But again, this makes the problem so under-representative of what it actually is. We do know that some parts of our nervous system are superconductive at room temperature,

which is kind of interesting. I wasn't aware of that. I mean, the superconductors that we study in the laboratory, the record for room-temper, for what's called a high-temperature superconductor is not really that high. it's actually about minus 150 Celsius or so where it starts to superconduct. In other words, exhibits zero resistance for your listeners that might not know what superconductor is. It's an actual quantum mechanical phenomenon discovered by one of my teachers at Brown University, Leon Cooper and colleagues.

And this phenomenon was not well understood and still is not very well understood how it occurs near at higher temperatures than close to absolute zero. I love the very polite academic way of saying, Dave, that sounds like bullshit. That was what I translated through my quantum filter. I'm quoting Robert O'Becker in a book called Electromagnetism in Life, which is a fascinating read that really helped, I think I read it in the early 90s. And it really kind of helped to shave my, wow, there's a lot more going on. And he's talking about like the Hall effect and things you can get off nerves that just aren't

called out. Well, look, if it were true, I would be the biggest backer of it. I mean, I would love to see that book, and I will make a note to look at it, but look, if it were true, we'd be using, you know, we'd be extracting this superconducting material from our bodies and using it to do levitating trains and communication with zero resistance. So there would be wonderful application. And it would have, you know, it's like when people say, oh, homeopathy is real or this is real. And the big drug companies, you know, my wife's a big proponent of it. I don't want to ascribe too much negativity to it. And I believe it can help.

And look, placebo is the most effective drug ever invented, right? but so I don't want to rain too much of people's parades. But it's not like Pfizer is going to say, oh, here's this wonderful herb that we can basically get for free from, from Taiwan. And we're just not going to use it because we can't patent it. I just think that's very cynical. And so similarly, if there is a superconductor in the human body, there'd be billions of trillions of dollars of potential revenue for commercial applications. I actually had the same thought when I read the book. And I am completely willing to be proven wrong because while I studied computer science,

not physics. Yeah. And not medicine. Some of my best friends are computer scientists. Yeah, they share a lot with the philosophers and some with physics. Now, getting back to this whole consciousness thing, I love being able to talk about it from a physics perspective. You talked about an emergent phenomenon that happens from a highly distributed system. I believe that most of our egoic behaviors, in fact, the ego itself is an emergent phenomenon,

an emergent consciousness that's held inside our meat that comes mostly from mitochondrial priorities. Going back to Stephen Wolffram's book, which you've probably read and maybe even understood, unlike me, a book called A New Kind of Science. To sum up this incredible book full of equations that I don't understand, is that if you take very simple rules and repeat them almost infinite numbers of times, you get very amazing, complex, beautiful things that don't look like they're based on three rules repeated 20 a billion times. So I think some of our behaviors are that way. But in companies, and I've studied

business at Wharton and I'm a reasonable entrepreneur, there is an emergent behavior set that isn't necessarily conscious. It's what we would call company culture, but it's those hundreds of thousands or millions of micro decisions made every day based on a certain goal. And so I don't think in my experience, almost, I would say almost none of the people running big companies have evil in their heart. They're not out there. No one would ever say, oh, I'm going to screw the planet to do this. What they're saying is, I'm going to set this direction, set this goal. And then two billion micro decisions later, evil happens. And they scratch their head and say, that can't possibly evil, therefore it's not.

In the classical scientific hubris, and then you get Monsanto or whoever else we're talking about. Sorry if they fund you. Yeah, I hope not. No. When you look at that, you're saying, all right, so there's some kind of a quantum thing going on. How does that affect what you do on a daily basis?

I mean, are you kind of living up in the clouds there? Do you wake up in the morning going, I'm going to meditate on my quantum nature and increase my performance? Like, what's the so what behind all this for you personally? Right. So I agree with you 100% just taking, rewinding three or four sentences. You talked about, you know, the culture of entrepreneurs and leaders and CEOs. So whenever you say CEO or you say startup or you say company or entrepreneur, I want you to think experiment or scientist. Because we're exactly the same. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind. I once said this to one of my professor colleagues. Look, I have payrolls. I have travel. I have expense reports. I have receipts. I have shipping. I have receiving. I have logistics. I have all the stuff that you do. in the business world. And then he said, well, but you don't have to, you know, a business person does have to teach

40 hours a week on top of it. So that being aside, you know, putting that aside, still, we have the same needs, same urges, and same ego-driven motivations, except in our world, again, it's not for financial. If you look at some of the greatest inventions, look at Einstein, you know how much money he died with in his bank, the smartest man who ever lived allegedly won the Nobel Prize, could have won it seven times, according to most physicists. He died, you know, a couple, maybe $100,000 in today's dollars. Look at people that invented the GPS, the laser, the laser, the transistor, Shockley, and other people.

These guys died almost penniless. In his case, he was insane, shockly. He was the eugenicist. He wanted to rid the world of African Americans through bribery. Just an awful human being. And on the same token, so the notion of scientists as beard-stroking scholar and intellectual, quiet, book or sure. That's total nonsense. Even going back, as I said to Galileo, Gallo is the prototypical scientist, the lone genius working by himself and discovering things, and then wanting to promote himself,

make money from these discoveries, and support his enterprise, because what is the credit, what is the dollar sign equivalent for scientists? It's citations, it's credit, it's influence, it's setting the priorities for national agendas in science. And there's nothing wrong with that. look, I think there's an, you know, there's an inclination towards good. And then sometimes, as you say, it'll spiral into a Monsanto, you know, who used to sponsor my research until, no, I'm just kidding. Not anymore. But the actual, you know, the stock and trade, the exchange of medium of exchange is credit. And so when you have anything for credit, look at like Neil Armstrong. And did he die with like billions of dollars? No, he died relatively middle class. And yet, you know, he wouldn't trade that experience for all the money.

in the world. And we have to look at ourselves as people. So what I do every day, just getting back to the second to last sentence, you know, is really, I try to be a little bit different because I'm running an enterprise, a hundred million dollar experiment in Chile that has 245 employees, if you like. Some are much more senior, much more brilliant than I am, much more renowned, and down to graduate students and for, you know, 18-year-old freshmen that work in our labs. And I have to somehow get, you know, get them the funding, the resources, the travel, the screws, bolts, and nuts that they need to do their actual work at almost 18,000 feet above sea level. And I look at it and I say, well, how would a business manager do this? How would a business person do this? And I started reading

every day. I try to read as part of my alleged, you know, morning routine after, you know, meditating for four hours. Actually, I should say, I once met the Dalai Lama at UC San Diego. And he said, and somebody asked him, what's his daily routine? He goes, I wake up and I meditate for five hours and I almost threw up because, you know, you can tell he doesn't have any kids, right? Right. No one with kids is meditating for five hours. But anyway, so what I like to do is to read books by Andy Grove or I read books

by Ernest Shackleton's daughter or granddaughter and about how do you manage a culture. And right now I'm reading a book by Simon Seneca called Start with Why. And it's so interesting to me because I keep reading his book and I've noticed it elsewhere. where we are scientific entrepreneurs. We are merchants of truth and light, as we're supposed to be. But we actually end with why. We're terrible at promoting and marketing ourselves. And instead, I think, you know, we could really learn a lot from the business world.

And to not do so, I think, is at our own power. 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 back. Let's talk a little bit more. So you have five hours of meditation, right? I actually did two hours of meditation in the morning until I had kids 11 years ago

and realize kids have an uncanny ability to know when you're meditating because that's when they're going to scream and ask for attention. And if you say, I'm going to wake up early, they're like, yeah, I'll wake up early too. So, yeah, it helps to have an army of monks helping you meditate five hours a day. Exactly. And great respect for the traditions that have done that for thousands of years to study human consciousness, but it's work. Yeah.

Right. And you have other work to do. You're seeking another kind of truth, you know, running a hundred million dollar project is much less internationally is not at all trivial. I want to know, though, to be a merchant of truth and light, you must have a brain that's on. And that was what attracted me to interviewing you. If you're going to be at the elite levels of science, you've got to be able to notice these

facts and do the numbers and ponder and be like a high performance ponderer and, draw models in your head. And I know that when I'm in the phases of my career where I'm running strategy for technology, where's technology going to be in five years and how do we make sure we're at the middle of that? It is such a demanding but nebulous task that I found it to be high energy. It's stimulating. But it's also exhausting. What do you do to turn your brain on so you can lecture the way you lecture and then pick up the phone and talk,

I'm assuming, with the president of Chile or something, and then switch to something else. It's kind of exhausting. What's your regimen for that? Yeah, well, I'm Jewish, and in our tradition, that called the Talmudic tradition, there's a famous statement that a man should have two pockets and a woman too, and those two pockets, and this is the philosophy I live my life by, those two pockets should have two different messages. In one pocket, it should say the universe was made for me. In the other pocket, it should say, I'm nothing but dust and ashes.

In other words, you should have this concept that you're eventually your life is finite. And yet there's a richness to the universe that you, look, the universe doesn't, if you don't exist, Dave, does the universe exist? I mean, it, I don't know. I mean, you don't know what exists other than this kind of construction that people have made for themselves as to what their definition of reality or consciousness is. So I know we're getting a little off track, but, you know, I actually say, you know, people think I'm really smart, but I still have to sing the alphabet song to know what letter comes after Q. And, you know, it's just a different kind of intellectual pursuit. I will say I'm very similar in some ways to you in that I don't like,

or other people that try to achieve at a high level. I don't think it's something magical or special about me. But I think the secret weapon that I have is this passionate curiosity. I have an unyielding scholastic intellect that I'm interested in literally everything. There's nothing that bores me. And my kids say, I'm bored, Daddy. I say, you're boring. You're just like, there's something that you're just not, you have this gift called life. And yeah, I hope I lived 180. I don't know if I will. I hope I live much beyond that, to be honest with you. But on the other hand, who knows how much time we all have left. And so what I tried to do in life is maximize every moment. And that might mean, you know, not getting enough sleep, not doing the meditation,

not doing this and that. But to me, it's this, it's this unyielding desire to know as much as I can while I can and be productive and contribute to this chain of knowledge. But I have to say, I had much baser desires when I was a 25-year-old, 30-year-old in this field. I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. That was my focus. That was my goal. That was my idol.

That was what I was going for above almost everything else. to the point that I really, I did create an experiment that was, you know, going to be, you know, shoe in for the Nobel Prize if our results held up. And from the title of the book, you can tell that they didn't. And the episode, the aftermath of that episode really affected my own self-reflection as to why I'm a scientist. You know, I could do other things. I could probably program a computer pretty well. I actually liked working on cars and doing physical labor, and that's something I've always been good at. But the bottom line is I'd never take it for granted.

I'm here by a whole lucky string and sequence of events. And I aim to take advantage of all that. And I really want to know everything. And that's what drives me in life. Is the humility that I've made so huge mistakes in my life. And I'm going to take advantage of the lessons I've learned from those mistakes to capitalize on it. And hopefully make the universe a better place. So how do you go about doing that?

One thing that attracts me is that your observatory is at 17,500 feet. I first had yak butter tea at 18,000 feet in Western Tibet. And I'm like, wow, my brain just turned back on. So you're physically challenging. I mean, that's pretty much mountaineering territory. It takes time to acclimate and all that. It's base camp of Everest, right? And I mean, your physiology is very different there.

Your brain actually requires oxygen in order to do its maximum thing. So you're sitting there trying to do this. the travel there is rigor and you're at the highest possible demand on your brain. You know, do you, what do you do for that? Yeah. Is there an astronomer diet? Is there, you know, do calisthenics, cryotherapy in the morning? I have no idea.

But like, what's the day in the life of a high altitude, high consciousness, high demand astronomer? Yeah. So we didn't coordinate this again for your listeners. But I do feel like of all the professions that could benefit from a bulletproof. lifestyle astronomers are some of the most likely to benefit. Why? Because we have totally messed up circadian rhythms where we have to work at night and we're up during the day like vampires. We have to operate at extremely high altitudes for long periods of time. And it's not like,

I have no offense, you know, I think a lot of skiers. I'm sure Lindsay Vaughn is brilliant. But, but, you know, she's not relying on doing mathematical calculations and and operating heavy machinery and dealing with science at the literal highest level on Earth, when she's up at those high altitudes, astronomers are. Well, she gets a break. I mean, she trains, but. Right. And how long is she up at high altitude?

Yeah. Two minutes. I mean, if she's good, she's not there very long. Right? She's zipping down. So the other thing is we're also dealing with extreme cold environments. My research in the book takes place in the South Pole Antarctica, the very bottom of the world, or gets to 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

And you can do things there to rejuvenate your soul. So one thing they have there, which, you know, I don't know if I want you to do it because it would mean, you know, probably a six-month break from your family, but they have something called the 300-degree club. And the 300-degree club involves using the sauna at the South Pole. There is a sauna. There's a basketball court.

There's a sauna. It would be surprising to learn for your listeners. But there's a sauna. They heated up almost to the boiling point of water, which is 212 degrees Fahrenheit. And then they go outside in the middle of winter. This is usually on June 21st, which remember is the winter down there. They'll go outside.

It'll be 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. So you've got a 300 degree change in temperature. It's more than the cryotherapy, or at least they use it for more than the cryotherapy. And the goal of this experience is to go outside, run around the geographic South Pole naked. Because if you wear clothes, you're going to get frostbite in some places you really don't want to get frostbitten in it. And you're only wearing boots. And to do this, you join the 300 degree club. So again, these are things where astronomers go that normal people fear to tread. And there hasn't been, although I think there should be. Because when I send one of

my graduate students to Chile, for the first two or three days, you know, she's useless or he's useless. I mean, their brains are foggy. Our base camp is about 9,000, 2,000 meters or so, and 9,000 feet, and then they go up to 18,000 feet. Sometimes in the winter, the day of productivity is only six hours long. It takes an hour to get up and down, the mountain up to 18,000 feet, almost. And so I've been thinking a lot about how do you acclimatize people. There's researchers here in San Diego, Frank Powell and others that have a high altitude research station on White Mountain, which is the second highest mountain in the U.S., one of the top mountains in the U.S., 14,000-something feet.

And we've talked about how you would acclimatize a student before they go down to chill it. Do you want the answer? Yeah. I mean, I actually know this one. I know the chamber, right? No, the chamber's expensive, a huge pain in the ass. Although you're having a hyperbaric chamber up there, it'd be good. We're talking about 400 bucks and 20 days ahead of time.

There's a little company, no one's ever heard of. I don't have a deal with these guys. What they do is they make a little oxygen scrubber. and you breathe for an hour a day through this thing until your blood oxygen level drops. And then you breathe normal air until it goes back up. Then you breathe again until it drops. And you do this for 20 days. And after that, you're acclimated to 15,000 feet elevation.

Wow. And I mean seriously all the way acclimated. And the reason this was invented, it makes me happy. Because the Russian mindset on physics and just on all, hard science is different than most of the rest of the world and admirable. So they thought about this from a military perspective. They said, you know, pressurizing an airplane is really expensive. Wouldn't it be cheaper if we just made the pilots so they didn't need pressurization

up to 15,000 feet? Imagine how many more jets we could have, right? Right. So they developed the basic algorithms to do this. Very cool. So I would be very interested in that because when I send my student down there, you know, it's $1,000 a day per student. You know, if you got 10 students there, that starts to add up into your research budget.

And so making them hit the ground and the mountain running, that would be worth, you know, a couple thousand bucks for each student over the course of their career. The other thing that would probably be profoundly effective, I haven't seen it studied specifically for acclimatization, but it's a very similar, it's basically high intensity interval training for the oxygen receptors on your cells. it affects how easily hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying molecules in your blood, how easily it lets go of oxygen when cells demanded.

Essentially, that's what's happening with acclimatization. There's some other things too, but we do something called, let's see, we call it intermittent, or high-intensity intermittent hypoxic training in Santa Monica at Bulletproof Labs and at the Beverly Hilton. And what you're doing is you're riding an exercise bike, breathing air that has no oxygen. But now it's under load. The thing I talked about before was just sitting at a desk watching Netflix and sort of wanting to pass out. But now you're under load and

it changes things much more dramatically. So you switch from no oxygen in the air you're breathing and then you switch to 100% oxygen. And it takes about a half hour to do this. And it is an intense workout. It just, you're pouring sweat. You don't even know what's going on. You're a little bit dizzy, but it forces yourselves to be able to react to more rapid changes, more rapidly. And that is a very potent mitochondrial enhancement technology, and we've measured that with some of the gear we have there. But the point here is there's all kinds of things you can do that will affect high altitude. We've actually had one of the big organized camps climbing Everest sent photos of Bulletproof coffee from base camp because they're saying, oh, it turns out

the Tibetans knew something when they were putting fat in liquid like that. Right. Yet we also know. They go up there without oxygen, right? They're up there without oxygen. Yeah. No oxygen, no vegetables. What are you going to do?

Well, butter. But there's also the fact that you need more glucose. It's easier to burn glucose than ketones in a low oxygen state. So maybe you want to be ketogenic before you go there. You want to put some brain octane in your stuff to get some ketones because it's nice to have them. But maybe you should have a little bit of raw honey or switch to some more starch. I don't know the full answer there, but it seems like people in a ketogenic state do very well at high altitude.

Yeah, all those ideas I think are really valuable, as I said, you know, just practical costs going up there. And then, you know, it's a really way to you think to think about it. I don't like to think about it. But there's a decent chance that someone will die, you know, building this experiment, simply just taking the tables for for people that have died in the construction of other high altitude telescopes. And that's not lost on me. and, you know, and whether it's, you know, car accident, as recently happened in Chile on a telescope project. And usually, you know, it's, it's an accident. It's not something that could have been foreseen. But who's to say if, you know, had a little bit extra, you know, brain boost that could have avoided it?

I'm not a medical doctor, although I do prescribe medication to certain people. But the, that's legal now in California. No, just it's not. But the thing is, you know, could you actually prevent a loss of the life? That's a really weighty thing that I think about quite frequently. Well, I believe that any time we're in academia, if you can do something to make brains work better, especially something that's not harmful, that you're wasting your tuition if you're not doing it. In fact, I don't think I've ever talked about this.

Back in 2003, I was at Wharton. long, long before Bulletproof Bulletproof started, I started as a blog, basically, 2012. And I'm looking at this, call it a senior thesis for an MBA. It's not really thesis, but it's a big project. And I put mine together around this idea

that I was going to create cognitive enhancement compounds, what we call smart drugs through neutropics today. And I already knew how to do it. I took them to get through school. And I said, no one markets these to parents of college, students saying you just spent $100,000 putting

your kids to school, you should send them a bottle of this stuff because their brains actually will work better. And the name of that product was going to be unfair advantage, which is a name of one of the mitochondrial enhancers at Bullock. You still have it. Yeah, you use it. Yeah. And the funny thing is,

my proposed ad campaign was, it's good to cheat. I'm saying, hey, you know, you take these drugs, maybe you have to study as hard, you know, not drugs, these, these, you know, herbal things. And the professors are like, that's really good, but we hate it. It's so bad.

It's so dirty. Like, could you not say that? So with that, that was my idea and I ended up not doing it because I decided I would, well, go through a breakup and then go to Tibet and learn meditation from the masters instead, which worked out all right. Yeah. And I think things turned out okay. Yeah, it's that idea that cognitive enhancement belongs in academia more than anywhere else

because, I mean, students do two things when they're young. Let's learn how to have healthy adult relationships and let's learn how to have healthy adult relationships and let's learn how to learn. Right. And professors, I feel for you. For five years, I ran a program at University of California teaching working engineers how to build modern Internet stuff. Right.

At Santa Cruz, right? Yeah, it kicked my ass. I mean, just the level of demand, I was exhausted after a lecture. Do you get exhausted after a lecture like that? Yeah, although it also gives me energy as well because, you know, you're performing. You're a theatrical character, an actor, and how. how often in society you get to do that.

And, you know, professors aren't known for our diminutive egos, right? So we like to be up on stage. But it is exhausting. And you do kind of come out of it a little bit drained from the day. So I only do it later on the day. I don't like to use up all the, you know, kind of willpower in the morning, so to speak. And just I try to get some other productive work done. Then I put everything I have midday into teaching.

And then try to wind down. And that's really the hard part. And I think, you know, in terms of lifestyle enhancement, well, first of all, I think a lot of students would benefit from proper sleep, not more sleep, as you always say, but, you know, kind of proper sleep. And they, you know, obviously getting rid alcohol would be a huge plus for most students. But I also believe that they should, just as they, you know, they should delay gratification in some other ways. Like, I think most college students, and I'm a professor saying this against my own financial interest, but they benefit from not going to college for a little bit. And actually working in the, like, because how much you. you having experience in the business world, then also academia, then back in the business, you might not appreciate it. If you went straight through to your MBA, you know, right after college or whatever, you might not be where you're at necessarily. Maybe you would. But I think, you know, kind of, they say the human brain isn't really fully mature until age 25, which is why you can't rent a car most places until you're 25 because they expect your brain needs to be fully

mature before you can drive a used a 1999 Hyundai, I guess. But in any case, the maturity level that you approach college students with, and I've noticed this because I teach in something called the Oshar Lifelong Learning Institute, which is found at many universities around the world. And any of your listeners over age 50 should take advantage of this if there's one locally. They have professors like me who come in and give either a series of five classes or maybe just one class called a master class. And we teach about a subject that we're really, passion about try to cram an entire, you know, semester's worth of learning into, you know, four weeks or one week, depending on how long the classes are. And I get 190 elderly people, you know,

from 50 on up. I don't think 50's elderly. But anyway, that's the cutoff. And, uh, and they appreciate it so much more. And they're like, oh, you know, I wish I had you when I was a kid, you know, an 18 year old. And, you know, I think, well, you probably would have, you know, not benefited just as my 18 year olds don't really care about. But we just appreciate so much more later when you look back at the life of the mind and how, just how much of a privilege it is to be in academia as I am to dedicate my life to learning and teaching. And it's interesting. The word in Russian, you mentioned a Russian scientists earlier on, the word scientist in Russian means someone who was taught. It means that basically this person was taught by somebody else. So from that etymology, what

we learn, it means that science is kind of an oral tradition that passed on received wisdom tradition that also requires that you pass it on in the future to pay back the debt to people that pass it on to you. And I feel very honored to play a very small role in that way. And in my, in my course of my research, I've been honored to create, you know, 10 PhD students. And I've got another nine in the tank now to get their PhDs the next few years. And one of my students, when she graduated, she made a plaque for me, and I have a replica of it in my book. And it shows my genealogy going back to the 1500s. And it's just so amazing to think about, like, I'm just this one person, you know, and this 17, 18 generation long, you know, 23 and me kind of version for

academia. And it's an awesome privilege, and it's a wonderful experience to have as well. That goes back to your Talmudic perspective on the pocketful of dust. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that feels like it really matters, an overall scheme of things. I had someone in interviews in time that, like, what do you want your legacy to be? I thought about that. Do you know what you want your legacy to be?

Yeah. Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. You know, for me, I have a lot of children. Thank God. And I've got a lot of students. And I think they're basically the same. Your student, teaching somebody is an act of love. It's an active trust.

It's an act of vulnerability. And it's an awesome responsibility. especially in this day and age. And I do feel like that is my mission in life is to create souls, so to speak, our lives and to help people become, my goal is for them to all be more successful than me. I mean, who looks at their kid and says,

I hope they're not as good as I am. I want them to have a worse life than I had. No, you never say that. You want them to have a better life than you have. So not only does that apply to my biological children, but applies to my ideological children. I want to create as many souls, as many lives as possible, and I want them to surpass me every which way that they can and be that force multiplier.

You know, if you think about it, let's say you have, I don't know how many employees you have, but if you spend a little bit of time teaching them this act of love, and it increases their throughput, their efficiency, 10%, it might take you two hours, and that's a lot of time, but if they work 2,000 hours a year, you're going to be adding thousands of hours over the course of time just from you investing a tiny bit of energy into the teaching process. And so imagine that biologically for your own children and for your ideological children, the people that you work with. So that's my goal. That's my legacy. I hope that I create a lot of children. That's a beautiful answer.

Mine was, I actually don't care if anyone knows my name other than my close friends and family after I'm dead. That's not what it's about, but I do care very deeply about making the world a better place, but it's not so all be remembered. It's because it's what makes me happy. Like I see the system and I want to hack it, and so that's what I'm going to do. Right. Yeah, exactly. I look at it and I say, you know, you could change the Russian language, you know, term from scientists.

You know, a hacker could be, you know, one who was hacked and you hacked your biology. I think, you know, I think it's a worthy goal to take on. All right. One more weighty question for you before we get up on the end of the show. And it's okay if you want to skip the answer. We touched on human consciousness. We touched on the beginning of the Big Bang. We touched on your Jewish heritage.

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You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Oh, it's one of my favorite subjects I talk about, actually. I have sort of this annoying aspect of my personality that I like to be... Oh, you're a physicist. You have many. That's right. I was going to say infinite, denumerably infinite. And one of those is that I like to give grief to people on both sides of the religion and science debate. I like to say that in my own personal opinion, although I do practice Judaism, I attend a synagogue, my, you know, kind of philosophy guide.

philosophy is Judaism. I've had this conversation with Freeman Dyson, who's one of the greatest physicist of all time, as I said, Sir Roger Penrose. And they agree with me in that the most native state for a scientist, someone who's a curious researcher scholar, is to be an agnostic. Now, most people think of agnostic as, oh, I just don't know, and I'm kind of wishy-washy. But really, those are atheists. They just don't have either the courage or the inclination to call themselves atheists, right? Because they're not going to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to either. You know, it's like, you can't tell the difference between most agnostic. You know, they're not really agnostic, because they're not actually learning or studying or really participating in

this theological tradition. Now, do I, you know, do I raise my kids that they should, you know, stone an adulterer? And no, but I also don't think of it as, as, as, uh, statistically and as simply as, look, these are different things. The word science itself, not in Russian, but in Greek, science means knowledge. What it does not mean is wisdom. And so when I read a book by the late great Stephen Hawking, I get a lot of knowledge. And I learn new things, and I learn about science, and it stimulates my brain. What I don't get is wisdom. It's not a textbook, a brief history of time, is not something I'm going to use to raise my children. I'm not going to use it for teachable moments and lessons in parables the way I would use it. And you know, you were talking about your legacy.

So once author I heard, one said, I would trade 100 readers a year from now for one reader 100 years from now. In other words, you know, I hope my book is completely outdated in most realms, the scientific content, in 100 years. But I hope the wisdom within it is, is permanent, you know, and it sort of endures. And so, too, if you look at the Bible, the Bible is the best, you know, I wish I had 1% of God's sales numbers, right? It's the best selling book of all time, and, you know, there's a reason for that. It has a depth of wisdom, which I don't think is available. You know, the Psalms say, you know, the beginning of wisdom comes from the belief in God.

But I also feel like people put a little too much faith in God. So my really religious friends will say when it's raining, they'll say, oh, God makes it rain. No, they didn't. You know, it caused a condensation event occurred, a nucleation on the dust grain that caused it. and where did the water come from? Oh, God made the water. No, not exactly. I mean, God made, you know, you could say hydrogen and oxygen make water. And I keep pushing that chain of logic back. And I say, at the ultimate, you'll get to a question, the question why, the answer will be because. And we just don't know. But that doesn't mean we should stop thinking. And that's what makes it so nice.

I can be an agnostic, but I'm a practicing agnostic. I'm a devout agnostic to really answer your question. and I think it's I can I can hold my own with either side of the debate and I don't really feel like it's so much of a debate after all. I think that kind of sells and there's a little sizzle in that, but ultimately both things, science and religion are a quest to find ultimate answers, but they don't overlap each other. They're not necessarily related to one another. And so for that reason, they can certainly coexist the same way you can, you know, be interested in meteorology and the history of the National Basketball Association. That's a very beautiful and nuanced answer. And I stand with you there. If you think you know the answer 100% on either side of that, well, any scientist will tell you, you can't really prove the lack of anything. That statement takes faith.

It takes a lot of faith to make the statement that you know. And so if you're a scientist who's on either side of that, really, I like to stop. using the small s in science and use a big s like you do for a religion because you're practicing a religion. And the bottom line is we're pretty darn sure that this is the nature of reality when we're the other. But once you stop being curious about it, you stopped the first step of the scientific method, which is observation. And if you believe your hypothesis so fervently, you will ignore your observations. You're doing science wrong. And that's why I... Yeah, I agree completely. I mean, when you suffer from

you know, kind of this bias towards authority and you worship the great atheists or, you know, it's very, it comes to me. And for me, it was the worship of the Nobel Prize, which, which came down to basically an idolatrous quest to get a tiny golden engraven image, you know, as a way to validate my self-worth as a scientist. And I realized it had a very destructive effect on my soul and another young scientist as well. And so I came to see the pursuit of the Nobel Prize. as a religion of its own, except its adherents are mostly atheist when it comes to formal religion. Where does yourself worth come from now that you've seen the fallacy of chasing a prize that probably won't make you happy even if you get it? I realize that the thing that I like to do the most,

it's kind of like with your kids, you know, when they solve a jigsaw puzzle or they do a Rubik's Cube, and then they'll do it again. It's like, why, you know, why do they have to do it again? They already did it. But they'll do it again because every time they do it, they get a tiny little spark of that excitement that they felt when they solved it the first time. When you solve a puzzle in your lab, it's like when I solve a puzzle in my lab, it gives me a taste of solving, you know, finishing that crossword puzzle. You don't just stop. That's not the end of it. I keep doing it. And that to me is addictive and I'm unapologetic about it. I think it's a healthy addiction to have to want to increase this, this, you know, it was called by John Archer

Bold Wheeler, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, he called, science is basically a battle. You're living on an island, and the island is called knowledge, and the ocean that surrounds the island is called ignorance. And as you expand the island, the size of the island gets bigger, the coastline that divides the ocean of ignorance, you know, that boundary gets bigger too. But the area increases faster than the circumference, so to speak. And what he said is our job to figure out as many puzzles as possible. And I like to do that as well. And I think it's a, it's a very healthy thing to want to want to solve. That's my motivation as a scientist. And then of course, you know, that's only part of my overall identity. I think a lot of what I see myself is now as

sort of getting older as a scientist is to be, you know, be a role model in the sense of, you know, making sure people are doing science for the right reason, as I said, not for the pursuit of of this very capricious goal. Brian, final question on the show. I've been asking people the question that became game changers and really my quest for wisdom from many, many people

and distilling it down. But I changed the question because I've been running an anti-agent group. You know my number is at least 180. Yeah. How long do you think you're going to live? Well, I don't know how long I think I'm going to live.

I often think about, you know, what I want to know the day I'm going to die. Like, would you want to know that? You might want to because you might want to change that. I would just hack it. Sure. Tell me, you're wrong. Anyway. So I would like to live as long as possible.

And actually, you know, and that could be the upper limit of human longevity. I would say, you know, if I delude myself, I could live to 112 because I think that's the oldest lifetimes with quality of life. I think, you know, you could probably put, make someone of vegetables. and they could live pretty long. But I would say quality of life and having intellectual capacity to appreciate it, I'd want to see all the scientific discoveries

that are coming in the future, not just from what I do, but from the infinite array of brilliant people around the world that are just as driven, motivated, and passion as I am, I want to see what they come up with because it's not at all obvious to me,

and this might be a topic for another time, that there is even life that exists throughout, the universe besides us. So this might be the only planet, not only that has life, this might be the only planet where life has ever existed in the 14 billion year history of the universe. And that, to me, is not terrifying. It's actually very inspiring because it makes me want to live forever in a sense and learn as much as possible during the time of quality of life that I hope to have.

Beautiful answer. Brian, thanks for being on the show. Your book is Losing the Nobel prize. And it's actually worth reading for that wisdom thing we talked about. And it's also worth reading if you're in business or academia or science and you just don't understand why dumb stuff happens in science. I think there's a pretty good explanation of what's going on behind the scenes before something hits PubMed, before something hits Science Daily or any of the websites you probably go to, at least on occasion, if you, listen to the show. There's so much going on, and I get to peek into that, and I'm not a full-time academic

by a long shot. So talking to Brian here today has been illuminating for me in reading his book, losing the Nobel Prize. It's worth your time. It's an easy read, and it's exciting, and you just wouldn't believe that the world is the way it is, and both from a cosmology perspective, but also from a here's what's happening when you're not looking perspective. So thanks for your work, Brian.

Thank you so much, Dave. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch, inspired and informed by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday magic email at briankeating.com slash list. And if you have a dot edu domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth, forged in the fire of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Thanks to all our viewers and listeners for helping us reach 100,

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