Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 1 of a special 2 part episode - Brian Keating in Conversation with James Altucher: How to become an expert. Do aliens exist? The state of AI, theories of everything (#166)

Episode Date: July 17, 2021

Brian Keating and James Altucher experiment, going live on Twitter! The experience was great and possibly better than the clubhouse!  The conversation started on how to become an expert, to the question of the existence of aliens, to the state of AI, to finally, theories of everything!  James Altucher is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He's achieved the rank of chess master, and is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book “Choose Yourself.” James has started 20 companies, 17 of which have failed. But he's learned a lot along the way. Support our Sponsors LinkedIn Jobs! Use this link to post your first job ad for FREE LinkedIn.com/impossible biOptimizers for better sleep: https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible 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 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into 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. Welcome, everybody, to part one of this special episode of Into the Impossible, featuring a conversation between Brian Keating and James Altutcher. So, Brian, I just heard this interesting article. It has nothing to do with physics, but I just read it, so I want to tell you and Jay about it. It's an article someone sent me about real estate, which basically says BlackRock is buying every house they can find in the country,

and paying 20 to 50% more than the asking price for as many houses as they can. There's so many different interesting things that come out of that financially. One is they view real estate as an interesting investment now, more interesting than other investments. And I'm curious if they're buying in New York, but I think they're buying in all the places that people are leaving New York and L.A. and San Francisco to go to.

The other is, are they making a statement about inflation because real estate goes up. It's basically an inflation event when real estate goes up. And with all this money printing, maybe this is their hedge against inflation. But the third most insidious thing is they get money from the Federal Reserve. Is it dangerous that they're basically getting money from the taxpayer and from all this federal printing?

You know, they have an open window to the Federal Reserve. They're basically taking money from the taxpayer and then screwing the taxpayer out of buying a home because they're overpaying 20, to 30% on every home. So on the one hand, they're doing it their job, making a good investment by buying every house they can find and they think that's a good investment. But on the other hand, are they using taxpayer money to screw all the taxpayers by overpaying for everybody's house and squeezing out all the people who want to buy homes? Yeah, this is a good question.

But once I asked, I was talking to one of my friends who happens to be a rabbi and had to do was something, you know, some holiday was coming up and, you know, most holidays in Judaism are unlike, you know, new moons or, or, you know, full moons or whatever. And I said, you know, when's the full moon? He goes, you're the astronomer asking me, you know, I feel like you're the former hedge fund, you know, investment manager, you know, one who called the, you know, all the housing crisis, all these crises, Bitcoin, predicted Bitcoin in 2010. Where were you when I needed you back then, James? Okay. I have no idea. I know about a different kind of inflation. So where's the physics?

Then I can know. Cosmic inflation. But I am challenging your assumptions about what implies credibility. Like, I am not a, I don't have a PhD in economics. And yes, I've been an investor for a while, but I am notoriously bad at buying a house. In fact, I've written several times about how I don't like to own homes. And now here's one of the best investors on the planet buying homes while we're, you know, the headlines are all about inflation.

But I'm just wondering about the fact that they get money from the fact that they get money from the Federal Reserve to some extent and they get easy lending policies and they could borrow infinite amount of money, but they're using the taxpayer money and they're pricing everybody out of owning a home. And by the way, their biggest investors are the Chinese. So I'm just wondering what is what is happening here at a political level. But right now, after you just said that, I'm challenging your assumption that you should, that you're implying you should stay in your lane and talk just about physics because that's where your PhD is and you almost won the Nobel prize in physics and probably will at some.

some point, I am challenging the assumption that you could be an expert in whatever you want. Yeah, well, you know, it's so funny to me is to think, you know, right now I have been challenging a lot of assumptions. You know, right now there's been a lot of talk in the news about, about UFOs and aliens and the Pentagon release that's about to come up. And our mutual friend, Eric Weinstein, maybe I should ping him to come in the room and listen. But he, you know, he's really quite, quite upset about these phenomena, these unexplained phenomena. what under-explained phenomenon. I mean, there's, there's that case last year where the pilots have a video, you know, army pilots have this video of some mysterious objects speeding away from them

in a coordinated way, but much faster than they could ever possibly hope. It was the first time the Pentagon admitted this was a UFO, meaning an unidentified flying object, not necessarily aliens, but they couldn't identify a flying object, which is the real meaning. There's Avi Loeb's semi-proof that what we saw floating through the asteroid belt or whatever was this Umamua ship for aliens. Easy for you to say. You know, they have a real trouble pronouncing all-titcher. I know.

All-toucher. I'm an expert pronouncing hard names. So exactly. Yeah, there is this kind of in the zeitgeist, in the ghostly, ghost or spirit of the times, there seems to be this percolation of interest that's suffusing the media and in particular, the narratives on and offline, that perhaps there is a first contact, whether it is alien techno-signatures, which would be actual identifiable craft coming from another civilization, or as Avi perhaps maintained, again, he's not a crackpot, he's not a crank, he's not a lunatic, he's the former chairman of the Harvard

University, a small college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as I understand it, Harvard University's astronomy department, you know, an eminent, eminent person. And he claims this is, you know, perhaps this is the detritus. This is a garbage barge or, you know, something from an alien civilization, not in our solar system. So this is in the news. But this is not just last year. This goes back. The first initial encounters that started to make the rounds a couple of years ago were from 2004,

off the coast of San Diego, where I am now, two Navy pilots and F-18 Super Hornets were flying around. and over course of several days, got reports and made contact with objects that they later described as tick-tacks, giant tick-tacks, about the size of a school bus that were submerged, churning the water, and then speeding away at supersonic speeds without making a sound, without making a disturbance with no visible means of propulsion. Do we have video that? Like, how do we know that's true? No, we have eyewitness reports. We have radar signatures. We have, in some cases, we have infrared camera data. But what's so interesting, you know, I'm the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics here at UC San Diego.

I thought you were going to be that, as you know, I'm the professor of aliens. I thought that's what you were going to say. I told you I had an exciting announcement to make, James. No, but I'm also the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations co-director here. And Arthur C. Clark had many famous aphorisms and quips, and one of which was, For every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. So I want to ask you, James, is a pilot an expert? In other words, if you say a pilot is an expert, do you agree with that statement?

You were talking about these Federal Reserve people as experts, and I want to dovetail into that and let's get into that conversation. Is a pilot an expert? Well, a pilot is certainly an expert at flying a plane. And you can argue a pilot is an expert at spotting something unusual in their very unique frame of being 30,000. thousand feet above ground and what you could possibly see out of their window. So you can argue pilots are more used to what it looks like when you're 30,000 feet higher. So if they see something unusual, for them, you know, if you think about it, statistics is a, is mathematical intuition. So whereas an expert uses intuition, somebody else can use statistics and come up with the same conclusion.

So an expert can look at something and say, that's odd. And a statistician, you know, or a physics statistician like Avi Lowe from Harvard can say, this is what random behavior looks like, and this is what statistically significant behavior looks like, and this encounter with a flying object through space is statistically significantly not random. And so is it intuition? Are they experts, or is the statistics can make you an expert?

The answer is yes to all of them. You could have intuition backed up by statistics, and then it's even better. So if these guys see something, and then you can look at the radar trail, and the radar trail says, yes, this is not a random movement like by a flock of birds or whatever,

then that is something worth looking at. Right. So I just want to, you know, let people know we are on, not on Clubhouse, I'm used to saying that. We're on Twitter spaces. This is James and I. We're doing experiments. So James and I are both into experiments.

We're going to be talking, this is James's podcast, actually, the James Altoucher show. On the one-year anniversary, I also want to point out, James, it's kind of a bittersweet day for me. We'll get back into aliens, but today's the anniversary, the 15th anniversary of my father, James Axe is passing away.

And as you know, he's a huge figure in my life, as you know, for my book. But I just want to recognize that fact and take this opportunity to remind people of a certain age to get screened for cancer because, you know, when you hit 50 years old or so, your risk for cancer can really sneak up on you. And I want to take this opportunity. I'd be remiss if I didn't remind people in my father's memory, a beloved memory, to please, you know, if you have any risk factors whatsoever, please take this opportunity to get screened. So I just wanted to recognize that. But getting back to experts.

So, yeah, so pilots are experts at flying. But one of the first, and I'm a private pilot, so I putt around in little Cessna is not far away from where one of these, you know, spacecraft, perhaps, or at least unidentified flying objects, was spotted here in San Diego. And you can fly through that area and not get shot down. It's called a warning area. It's not actually a forbidden area where, you know, you'll get taken, escorted away to some secret. room, but actually it is a, it's permissible to fly and it's called a warning area. And in that area, pilots can operate and you're typically operating on what's called instruments. So one of the first lessons you get as a pilot is don't trust your senses. So you're making the case that, you know,

pilots have expert, you know, abilities, maybe expert skills, which is true and they have expert training. But one of the very first lessons you get is despite the tens of millions of dollars that these expert Navy pilots get, that you may not rely on your senses. In fact, That's why you're trained to fly in reliance to your instruments and to your wingman or wingwoman. But I will qualify what you're saying, and I always apologize for interrupting. But that's because when you're in a plane and the plane is exerting some influence on the cabin pressure and so on, you really have no idea whether you're upside down or right side up or sideways or whatever. Your brain is always going to think that you're flying straight ahead and you're upright.

whereas what your brain is telling you and what reality is saying might be different. But this is a case where I'm saying, are you an expert at seeing objects, what sort of objects you would see outside your window at 30,000 feet? So that's slightly different than trusting your senses about whether you're upside down or not. Like if you're upside down, you could crash. So that's why you need your instruments. But in terms of like what I see, I can know the difference between a cloud, a bird, and some weird object that's flying faster than me.

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like pools and spas and beach fronts and wait I'm not done stop cutting me up yeah so so you're right and actually some of the most you know pernicious illusions that you get as a pilot are called spatial disorientation and you can mimic that in your in your 17,000 dollar Herman Miller chair that I see you in right now and that's by closing your eyes and just spinning around your vestibular organs the fluids in them once you stop moving the fluid has some inertia and so we're getting some physics now we can nerd out that fluid keeps moving and you feel like you're in motion, even though you're stopped. So your body tells itself that you're still in motion.

So you actually try to counteract that and go the other way. Well, that makes things worse. And so you get into these graveyard spirals that's called. But let me tell you something, James. What if I told you that some of the most dubious, most skeptical of these pilots accounts, of these eyewitness accounts are other pilots. In other words, other expert witnesses on the deck of the aircraft carrier.

When these pilots came back, They were putting like alien little green men. They were playing Independence Day movies. They were teasing them. They were very, very skeptical of the accounts of these pilots. In other words, the other people that had tens of millions of dollars of training were also seemingly quite skeptical of these people's accounts. What would you say to that? I don't know because it's like you said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert on the other side.

So it's hard to say. Like you look at economics. I can make an argument that there's inflation. I can also make an argument that there's deflation and that there's massive deflation, even though all the headlines say that there's inflation. So, you know, I think it's a good practice to sometimes formulate both sides of an argument even better than the experts so that you're really prepared for a discussion such as this. So I am willing to believe that there are pilots who are skeptical.

But, you know, and that's why I asked, is there a video? Now, I think I'm looking this up. This is the USS Nimitz, 2000 for encounter. it seems to be that there is video of it. There's video of some of the encounters, video of some of the radar data. There's not actual video of the Tic Tac necessarily itself. There is other video of Fleer.

It was called Forward Looking Infrared Data. Now, so I agree with you. And what I've done on my podcast into The Impossible on YouTube, in other words, I've taken what's called a military red team approach. So a red team approach is when you and I are on opposite sides. And you and I both believe that debate, is basically pointless. I'll know you've had on Peter Bogosian,

I've invited him into the chat room. You know, it's kind of how to have impossible conversations with his co-writer James Lindsay. You know, they kind of make the case how you could convince people, but I basically think, you know, all debate is pointless.

But anyway, but if you can debate with love, in other words, it may not love the other person, but if you can debate with a common goal in mind of getting to some conclusion, maybe not agreement, but clarity, I think there's a purpose to that.

And the military... If you don't have a pre-con, if you don't have... And this is like, anything in life. If you don't have a goal, you're much more likely to be successful in the process. Yes. Yes. So in this case, my goal is just to understand. Look, who would have more of a vested interest than a physicist to understand and want to know and comprehend the physics of the 21st, the 25th century from these alien craft, if they're indeed aliens? Or who would want to know

more than an academician than myself working if our government is concealing stuff? Or if an adversarial government is concealing things. You know, Neil deGrasse Tyson. who's been on a guest on my show. Unfortunately, and called me a racist. I don't know. Did he call you a racist? Because he called me a racist.

He did not call... You know, he might have actually. Maybe that's a good technique of his. Yeah, yeah. Put people off guard first. It's like you're negging someone. Exactly. Exactly.

That's how I got my wife to agree to go on a first date with him. But the, you know, the adversarial approach, when done with love, quote, unquote, is to take two opposing sides from equal and opposite expert. and pit them together to come to a common goal of future understanding, which to me would mean understanding the future of the God equation, or loop quantum gravity, or some other physics that we don't understand. Now, we have to put our thinking caps on and really try to understand it because the implications are astounding.

If these are alien craft, the implications are astounding, because we understand that we are not alone in the universe, in the galaxy, perhaps there are other universes, parallel universes, advanced physics that we're going to get to, Perhaps they understand the secret of the Big Bang that you and I have been working on for the last better part of a decade together that will take us to Stockholm, Sweden on December 10th, the anniversary of not Alfred Nobel's birth, but of his death and lead us to the promised land. Or it could unlock mysteries to protect our planet, to safeguard our species.

They've gone through the great filter. They've avoided global catastrophic warming. They've avoided nuclear holocaust. And it could do so much good for our planet, right, James? So the stakes are incredibly high. The one thing I will say to add to this, and this is a math-based argument that they did not see aliens, is that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Correct. Our civilization, as a civilization with space flying technology is about 50 years old, give or take, a few years?

50 out of 13.8 billion. So what are the – and this is a harder question to answer, but you said, you know, is this 20, 15.5? century technology, that's implying that another civilization is just 400 years older than us. But what are the odds? They could be anywhere from 0 to 13.8 billion years older than us. And if a civilization has been around for a billion years, what are the odds that they have an object that we can humanly see and looks like a plane? Well, James, my grandmother, okay, this is very serious.

My grandmother was born during the time of the horse and buggy. and she lived to make videos on TikTok. Okay, this is very serious stuff, James. No, she saw the space race. She saw, you know, horse and buggy, TikTok. It's incredible, right? I mean, that's in the span of one human lifetime. I mean, you go back two human lifetimes,

you're connected to the Civil War. You go back three, it's the Revolutionary War, right? So it's not that many to get to, you know, physics of... But when I say the physics, I'm really meaning, like, if there is, we discovered unification of forces and fields, you know, and yours and my lifetime almost, right? I mean, just in the last 50 years or so, we've discovered the unification of forces and fields.

You're making my point, though, which is that we've made so many discoveries in the past 100, 200 years. What if there's a civilization out there that had a billion years worth of discoveries? What are the odds that their technology would look anywhere near ours to the extent that we could say,

hey, that's an object like my object and it's flying really fast? That's my, yeah, so that's my argument against these things being real. Not just the physics argument, it's just the common sense argument. These objects have traversed space in time. They've survived the radiation, harsh radiation environment.

They've re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. They've played around, first of all, they've played around in a very strange area of one nation's federal aviation administration's warning area off the coast of a small state. But furthermore, James, they've done so in a way that avoids detection by any other means except for the U.S. Navy, but they have been detected by radar and infrared, which we've been able to avoid. from the stealth bomber and stealth fighters for the last 45 to 50 years, it's very implausible that they could bend space in time, but they can't avoid radio waves. It's very strange to me.

I'm not saying it's impossible. And you know, here's another point, too, which is that when was, when did UFOs, the concept of aliens start becoming popular? And it was mostly, basically after World War II in places like New Mexico. Well, guess what? The source of all the fear,

in civilization in the past 70 years or most of the fear has been the atomic bomb, which was essentially developed in that area around, you know, that time. And so people, you know, the one thing about conspiracy theories is that if you believe in one conspiracy theory, you believe in others. Another aspect of conspiracy theories is that at some point, most likely a major institution has betrayed you or made you afraid. So that puts you into this altered state where you distrust everything. Or you have different concepts about everything. So the creation of the atomic bomb scared people to such an extent

and scared people about our institution of military and government and science and so on that suddenly people started seeing UFOs and believing them. Well, what's happened in the past year? Now that we've had all these different UFO news, we had a pandemic and an economic lockdown that brought the planet to its knees, much in the way nuclear power did. So I'm questioning the psychology, too, of wondering about these theories

as opposed to the science. There's another thing that's hanging over, I think, and I want to get your impression about it and your insight. There's another kind of thing in the zeitgeist now, and I feel like it's not only the virus and so forth, because this actually started to percolate literally two or three years ago before COVID.

And that is like artificial intelligence, machine learning, you know, Moore's Law and other things, and kind of this notion of a singularity sort of approaching, things like that. And I want to know, you know, where do you come down on that? Is that part of the analog of the nuclear kind of threat or the unraveling of the DNA double helix in the 1950s, which concomitant with the UFO sightings, et cetera, brought about this kind of space age, et cetera? Nowadays, do we see that with the rise of China, combined with the rise of AI. I was on an event last night where people were really speculating about how bad AI could be in machine learning and how awful that is in other countries and how bad it's

going to be in America. Do you think that's contributing to it? Because this is kind of like the extension, the simulation hypothesis, one version of it has an alien species creating us, basically. Right. And so let me clarify just one thing. And I say this as someone who went to grad school for computer science who specialized in AI when I was in grad school. I worked on, among other things, worked on what the computer that became deep blue, which was the AI program that eventually defeated the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. AI is BS. And I'm saying not the technology necessarily, but the words artificial intelligence is BS. It's basically statistics that they use the word AI on to convince the Department of Defense to give them money. So scientists would raise

money, oh, we've got, we're going to create an artificially intelligent computer, give us money. And we can, and we can make, you know, AI robots to be soldiers. And it was all BS. AI is nothing more than sophisticated statistics. That's why even earlier I referred to statistics as a mathematical replacement for intuition. So a human, for instance, on chess, has intuition about what the best move is.

And if the better the intuition is, the better the player is. A computer doesn't have intuition, but simulates the appearance of intuition by calculating what a trillion different moves look like. And by using, you know, an algorithm, you know, called, you know, basically an algorithm that searches the tree of move possibilities comes up with the best move. This isn't intelligence. It's just massive processing power. It's brute force.

Yeah, combined with some basic algorithms, very basic algorithms, even if it uses neural networks. Like, I like the word neural in it. It's still a form of basic statistics. So when we use speech recognition, this is nothing more than very sophisticated statistics done by a guy named Kai Fu Lee when he was at Apple. Now he's a very top investor in China. He was at Apple, then Microsoft and Google, and all the top places for speech recognition. And then he became a big investor in China.

But it was all, it's a kind of statistics called Hidden Markov spaces. So it was, now everybody else. can call it AI, he called it what it was. The other thing about AI is it's very particular. You either have a program that plays chess or you have a program that has good computer vision and can recognize objects, or you have a program that can write like Ernest Hemingway.

But these are very particular domains, and they're trained and programmed for those domains. There is not even, we're not even, we're no more advanced than we were in 1950 for an AI that's a more general purpose. Which is pathetic, artificial intelligence. Because we actually could be using it, again, going back to aviation. So there's something that you do.

Every time you fly into us any airport of any size, you have to legally, by FAA regulations, the same ones that keep the UFOs within this very narrowly defined region of airspace off the coast of California. You have to check the weather. And there's a transmitter that transmitted on a unique frequency for each airport. It says automated terminal information service and it broadcast. The sky is clear, or there's a cloud over there. The runway is clear, because you have to know these.

You can't see from the, you know, 10 miles away. There's a fire on the runway. You better not land here. Go somewhere else. You have to divert. You might be low on fuel, right? So you're legally required to check for all these things. Well, you have to physically reach up, tune the radio, listen for a minute,

and then you have to write it down on a piece of paper. And this takes a lot of mental distraction. I mean, imagine it like you're driving a car. And before you pull into your driveway, you have to know, like, is your three-year-old in the drive? You know, like you have to write it down and call your wife or your husband or whatever. Like, it's very distracting. It's very time-consuming. It's time off task.

And pilots aren't like any better at multitasking necessarily. So why don't have an Alexa-like device? It knows I'm 50 miles away from the airport. It knows what I'm going to do. I'm landing because it knows where I took off. It has my flight plan. Tune in the radio and have a little thing come up on a little computer. $50-dollar Alexa can do this thing for me, right?

Pop up the weather and read it in my ear. so I don't even have to look at anything. So it has 100% tas saturation removed right there. Safety would go up tremendously. And it could tune in the radio. It could even tell the control tower that I have that information because there's another dirty secret,

which is that only one pilot can talk at a time. So in other words, when I'm calling to San Diego airport, you know, this is whatever my little Cessna is, I'm coming to land, no one else can talk. No other pilot can talk on the radio. It's a one-wave, one-channel communication, for the whole freaking airport.

JFK, same thing. It's ridiculous. Well, I agree with you. That would be a simple problem for AI, but again, it would be very domain specific. Right. Absolutely. 100%.

I'm not arguing about that at all, yeah. Like AI can, you know, look at x-rays better than radiologists in many cases, in 99% of cases. And that's another thing. So when you're in your doctor's office, so I'm going to get to my point in just a second, but you're in her doctor's office

and you're describing, you know, I've got this like pain. Again, I'm thinking back to my late father. You know, he's got this pain, and it's in his, in his abdomen, and the doctor's like listening, but, you know, maybe he's checking in his TikTok or whatever. You know, but it could be searching every JAMA article ever written

instantaneously and saying in 97.3% confidence, that patient has this form of cancer, and you better have him, you know, have this colonoscopy or whatever. And, you know, but they don't do that. Why? It's the same reason it doesn't happen in aviation. They're lawyers involved. So the thing that's preventing the AI uprising

is so much more pedestrian and boring than we think it is, It has nothing to do with technology. It has nothing to do with, like, AI ethics being imposed. It's this mundanity. It's this boring layer where people are unwilling to turn over any control, even when it would save lives and protect people and enhance your... And I'm an educator, right? So I'm a professor at UC San Diego.

Will my colleagues let an AI intelligent agent in the classroom? So I'm sitting there. Who was this person who came up with the idea in Moscow in 1976 for supercondensation inflation? I don't know. Oh, maybe. And then boom, that could pop up on the screen with like a picture. Or Galileo, my friend Gallo, you know, pop up on the screen and here's his life. Here's his final resting place. Oh, Brian, you said he was tortured and in prison. No, he wasn't. He was actually in the spacious villa. And it could actually correct my misgivings and errors. But why don't we do that? Because the professors don't like that. They don't like supervision. And they use the pretext, which is BS, James. They say, oh, we don't want our kids to be, have their images. And yeah, I don't want a picture of my kids, you know, traffic by Al whatever, you know, on the internet either. But to augment the professionals, my class of so-called people, we are doing a huge disservice to the people we're supposed to be serving. And I'm kind of sick of it.

Well, I agree. And I agree that a lot of it's legal. I look at, take radiology again as an example. It's against the law. You can't just look at an AI result of your x-ray. A radiologist is legally the only one who could tell you what the x-ray said. And that's why nurses won't tell you what it said. But yeah, to your point of, like, is there a singularity, A, for the reasons we just said that they're so niche, there's simply no, we're not even close to a general intelligence.

B, one step further, why, what's so special about human intelligence? Like, there's millions of species on the planet. None of them aspire or even close to specifically human kind of intelligence. Why would a computer, why would we need a human kind of intelligence in a computer? or why is that necessary? The whole basis for thinking that we even need a singularity just doesn't make any sense at all. And then the idea of having a human singularity

is kind of useless and doesn't make any sense. We need, you know, as we develop the need for different tools, like tools you just described even, then AI will be developed. And again, just to repeat, no one's ever built something that could both play chess and taste an apple and tell you if it tastes good. So that just doesn't happen in computer science.

Right. Yeah, so, and again, my thing is, you know, my tagline for what it's worth is I don't care about artificial intelligence. I care about artificial wisdom. And I even care less about artificial wisdom than natural wisdom, because what is it that makes a human being human? And this dovetails nicely into the book that you inspired me to write. And then I just got word from that not only you will write a forward to, but a Nobel Prize winning physicist will also write a forward to entitled and... Shub. Sell out. not only wasn't inspired by you, but I stole the title from you, and it's called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. So I got word that Barry Barish winner co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize

in physics for, it made a tiny discovery, discovered binary black holes crashing together at half the speed of light in a galaxy, 1.3 billion light years away. Anyway, you and Barry are going to write the forward to this book called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, inspired shamelessly by your book of the title, Think Like a Billionaire. Which I was inspired by the 1971 book, Think Like a Grandmaster, by the chess player Alexander Kotev. I didn't know that. Okay, so you have to put that in there because I was born in 1971. And this book is coming out on my birthday in September in 2021 when I turned 50.

So that was going to be amazing, James. That is fantastic. So that makes another birthday present for me. Just to remind people were talking on Twitter spaces with my good buddy James Altoucher, proprietor of the James Altucher Show, stand-up New York, and many other business ventures. And James inspired me to write a book

to take my nine interviews with Nobel laureates and take from them not their knowledge, which you can find in their Nobel lectures, but their wisdom. And their wisdom is replete. And I wanted to do it, James, you know, because there's something that we just touched upon briefly in our nine or so interviews that you and I have done,

which could make a book on its own, that at least, you know, maybe our spouses would buy, perhaps. But that would still, if just our kids buy it, it's a bestseller, right? Neither my kids or my spouse will buy this book probably, but that's okay. But, you know, I was kind of nervous to tell anybody about this book, you know, besides you, because, you know, I was just like, you know, do you need permission to write a book? Like when it's based on interviews, even though I edited it and it's transcribed and so forth.

And it's in their words. I didn't like add words and like give my Nobel Prize to Key. after all, you know, for one thing, I was nervous because I wrote a book that was critical of the Nobel Prize called losing the Nobel Prize. Which was brave on its own, by the way. You kind of guarantee that you're never going to get one. Yeah, although I do say it's a test. You know, if you want to see if Brian Keating is a hypocrite, if they offer me the Nobel Prize and I accept it, then you know, then you know, then you know, then you know, I'm a hypocrite, James. So that's a plus. So that's definitely a plus. So, you know, but in this case, you know, and I interviewed all these Nobel Prize winners and, and then, and then, and then, but I was like, you know, am I glorifying it? lionizing that, you know, how do you do it in a way that that doesn't give too much credit to the institution, but doesn't deny credit to the individuals? Because there's this kind of, you know,

glamorization that I found that occurs where, you know, I don't want to denigrate what they've done, but I wanted to distill what they've done into something that people can use. And you'll see, I sent you the text and, you know, it's only a hundred-something pages. I want to keep it short. I don't want to make it like a 400-page, you know, biogic, you know, huge, you know, massive book that people have to wade through. I wanted to be something that you could read on an airline trip, you know, when people actually start taking flights across the country again. But one thing that, you know, really inspired me was this notion that I found from that very

happy soul Friedrich Nietzsche, you know, who talked about something called the Crutch of Genius. Did you ever see the movie, James, not about Frederick Nietzsche, but called A Few Good Men with Jack Nicholson? I did not see it, no. It's the one with the Marines and they kill a guy. you never saw that no i never saw i should see it i like jack nicholson oh yeah it's really good yeah um so anyway there's a movie called a few good men and and um you know it's kind of about like military code of honor very well acted but there's a part in the movie where at the end basically jack he's trying to justify

the fact that they violated a code of you know law they basically ordered this thing to happen but it was for like the uh own honor and the spirit of the marines whatever whatever people should watch I don't know if you can spoil a movie that's 30 plus years old. So, you know, if you haven't seen it anyway, they end up killing this guy, but it's basically like a hazing thing. And this colonel played by Nicholson is trying to justify the fact that it's good to haze people because it brings out the code of honor of Marines. Anyway, they go through.

And at certain point, he's yelling at Tom Cruise, who's playing this lawyer, who's prosecuting them. And he's like, you don't know what courage is. And like, you want me on the wall. You know, you need people like me on the wall. you mock me, but you sleep better at night because there are people like me in the world. And I started thinking about that, like, do people really want to know what the Nobel Prize winners do? Or do they, like, the meta ideas like, or do they just want to know that people are out there who are smart and won the Nobel Prize?

In other words, like, do you really care what the guy who won the Nobel Prize did? Or do you just want to know that there's smart people in the world? Like, Einstein lived here on planet Earth. I'm a human being. I live on planet Earth, therefore, you know, there's something good about me. Like, what do you think about it? Yeah, well, it depends. Like, I think the answer is yes and no.

Like, ultimately, most people would be fine if they didn't even know that the earth revolved around the sun. Like, no, you know, for thousands of years, society grew and flourished. It's not like all wars ended and peace reigned forever once we learned that this incredibly important thing that the earth revolves around the sun. It doesn't affect the average person.

let's say there's seven billion people on the planet, probably 6.99 billion, their lives are not affected at all by the additional news that the world is not flat. And I think it's nice to know that, oh, here's somebody who wrote poetry and turned them into songs, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Maybe I'll want to learn something about this, you know, Bob Dylan. Or it's also nice to know that I can aspire or are there scientists, any scientists or anybody who writes a book can picture themselves achieving the highest of goals, which in this case might be the Nobel Prize,

or it might be being on a bestseller list, or it might be making some money, or it might be advancing the world in some way, or it's arguable that advancing the world has any relationship to meaning. But I don't know. I think the main people who think about the Nobel Prize are people who want the Nobel Prize. Yeah.

So the quote by Nietzsche that I was going to include in the forward if he'll, I have to get his permission. That's going to be a challenge. But maybe you can help me with that. We can get the AI GPT3 version of Nisha and see. Exactly. So Nietzsche says the following. We think well of ourselves, but nevertheless, we never suppose that we are capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael's or a dramatic play like one of Shakespeare's. We convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvelous, a wholly uncommon accident.

or if we are religiously inclined a mercy from on high. Thus, our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius. For only if we think of him as being very remote from us as a miracle, does he not aggravate us. But aside from the suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics.

All of these activities are explicable, if one pictures to oneself, people who are always thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life, and that of others who perceive everywhere models and incentives who never tire of combining means together. The last thing I think appeals applies to you, James. Genius, too, does nothing, but first learn how to lay bricks and then how to build, and how continually to seek for material and continually form around it. every activity of man is amazingly complicated not only that of the genius but none is a miracle so i think

about you when i was reading that actually like there's a lot to unpack in that quote which is which is let's take let's take physics for instance um you know why is there why is there such reverence for the Nobel prize in physics well two reasons depending on who you are if you're a physicist you know enough about physics to appreciate the nuances of a very sophisticated and complex discovery. And like the guy who, you know, Barry Barish, who you mentioned earlier, who, your co-author, your fellow co-author. My co-author as the forward of your book, you know, he found two black holes that crashed into each other at half the speed of light.

You know, if you're a physicist, you can appreciate the nuances of why this is important, what discoveries can come from that, why even that occurrence of that is something that's perhaps remarkable, or maybe you can appreciate, how did he discover that? Like, what were the measurements and tools he discovered in order to make that observation? So that's one appreciation. And so let's say there's five million physicists in the world.

And that year, he's recognized as number one among five million. Of course, the other five million people who love physics so much that they aspire to be great, they're going to appreciate and not even not even be able to think that i too can be one the number one among five million practitioners uh in in a field i love so much then there's the broader circle of what's a genius now we look at a picture of Einstein we say that's a genius but he has to do something that's genius like as well and you know many people you know out of the seven billion people on the planet maybe half of them want to be a genius but only one is number one and

And, you know, the Nobel Prize culturally has evolved into this thing where we, you know, the Nobel committee says, where are the ones who pick number one? So, and we've given them that cultural responsibility. And so, so yes, it's unfathomable to think that I could be one of three, number one among three and a half billion people who aspire to be geniuses. But the other thing to unpack there in Nietzsche's quote is the word zealously. Like, in order to be good at something, it requires energy. You wake up in the morning and you have a certain amount of energy.

and by the end of the day, you've run out of energy so you need to sleep. But in order to, let's say you want to be a writer. In order to write, you have to love it so much that sitting down and doing the act of writing doesn't require any energy from you. That can only happen if you truly love writing. If you don't love writing, but you feel like, oh, it's going to be good for my career if I write a book,

well, it's going to take you a lot of energy to sit down at a keyboard and doing something so boring as to type keys for four or five hours or more, per day in order to write a book. You have to love writing, or the person who does love it zealously, who does pursue it zealously, will always defeat the person who is using that extra energy to convince themselves to do an activity. You don't have to convince yourself every morning.

Boy, I really need to do experiments to see if there's cosmic inflation at the beginning of the universe, whereas some people might be like, oh, do I have to do this again? And they will waste huge amounts of energy still will never defeat you. no matter how much talent they have, let's say, they will never defeat the person who is zealous and also has taken the time to use that zealotry to learn the skills and nuances and have the aptitude to do what you do.

So there's a couple ways to unpack his quote, and that's how I would unpack it. You need to love what you do. And of course, anything that's worth doing, there's going to be a lot of competition for it, and there's going to be a lot of maybe not jealousy, but professional envy. like I wish I was that smart or I wish I was that good a writer or I wish I was that good a musician.

And, you know, but that's because it's worth doing. No one says, man, I wish I was a good Tick-Tac toe player because that's not an activity worth doing. There's no value to that activity. And it's easy. So we're all the best Tick-Tick-Tick-Tay in five minutes. We're all the best Tick-Tick-Tow players in the world. So it's not worth it.

And so making something worth it is both hard and aspirational. Right. I've been thinking about that in terms of, you know, my niche, so to speak. speak with my podcast. And, you know, there's a lot of very brilliant and respected theoretical physicists, astronomers. You've had them on your show. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. You've had on Mitchie O'Cacou, Carlo Revelli, but you haven't had on many, you know, experimental physicists, experimental cosmologists. Brian Keating. Brian Keating, you know. And I'm not saying this for fame. You know, somebody asked me, like, why are you doing this? And, you know, our mutual friend Noah Kagan.

And I love Noah. And, you know, he's actually hosting his own live stream now, so he's not going to listen to this. Last year, he said, I want to get a lot of. 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. And I was like, why? And he's like, I want 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. I'm like, why? And he had no answer. And now he got to 100,000.

He's like, I want 250,000. And there's just no reason. And he spends a lot of money doing it. And I love Noah. He's a great guy. He loves you. You love him. We're all a big happy family, right?

But I think it's very shallow. Yeah, no is great. And I think it's empty. And I'll tell this to his face. And I love him. But the point is, there's no metric. There's nothing rational behind it. And I said the same thing.

I said, I want 100,000. subscribers. And people are like, you're a hypocrite. You just said, Noah Kagan, you know, and I said, I have a very standardized metric. I want 100,000 subscribers. And if I get, if I get to 100,000, I say, I want a million, you punch me in the face. Because the reason I want 100,000 is very concrete. I want 100,000 subscribers because based on my metric so far, I've got 30,000 almost on YouTube, another 20,000 on iTunes, et cetera. And based on my metric so far, about 1% of my audience buys books of my guests. And my number one thing, is for my physics colleagues and my other authors such as yourself, I want to promote your books.

And you guys are my friends. And I want to, I want you guys to succeed and to be remunerated in some way. And the currency of remuneration is by buying your books and curing your influence through the sales of your books. So if one percent of your books are, you know, from my, or one percent of my audience buys your books, that's 100,000 people will buy a thousand books. Now it won't make you a bestseller, right? But if you go on, it's not my only responsibility to make you a bestseller. In other words, you have to go on 10 Brian Keating-like shows, right? It's not my responsibility alone to make you a best seller. So if you go on 10 shows as a physicist and nonfiction in this niche in science, you will become a bestseller. 10,000 books sold on the first, you know, week of sales, you will become a best seller and I will have done my part to advance your career.

That's why I don't say a million because I don't think you need to go on, you know, sell 100,000 books. You know, very few scientists sell 100,000 books. I haven't sold that many, you know, some total in three years in my book. And I don't care. to. That's not important to me personally. But for my guest to be able to do that, because I will get people who will say how many subscribers, like I'm trying to get Ray Dalio to come on my podcast for Father's Day. I had Jim Simons come on my podcast last year for Father's Day. Unfortunately, these great men, both billionaires, they share a tragic thing in common. They both lost grown children. And they're both very, very just incredible wise souls. They've taught me tremendously, Jim Simons personally,

Ray Dalio remotely. And, you know, they asked me just, I mean that. Ray, not Jim. I mean, he's, he's like a father figure to me. But Ray Dalio's people are just, he's got a lot of demands on his time. They're like, how many subscribers do you have? And, you know, Jordan Harbinger, people like you, you've got way more people that will follow. So now Jay Yao is out there trying to get to Ray Dalio with your download numbers. But anyway, the point is, and he has a scientific research angle that appeals to me. He has an ocean expedition. And so hopefully I'm going to talk to him about research and science and I'll be able to get some connection there. But the point is, I have a metric, but it's based on something scientific.

It's not based on ego or arrogance or whatever. I want to promote my guests in a specific way for a specific reason, and I want to call a line with their values. And that's it. I don't really care to do anything else. Let me unpack that a little bit. So I always say there's a good reason and a real reason. Yeah.

There's nothing wrong with the good reason. The good reason is real also. Yes. You just gave a really good reason to get 100,000 subscribers. And I could say I have the same reason. And also, I like to provide value. like to help people, and I feel a podcast is a good format to do that. But another reason, perhaps maybe more real for me, is that I wasn't loved enough as a child. And so I seek the love and

approval of nameless strangers and others who subscribe to my YouTube channel or my podcast. So funny, James. My wife was asking me yesterday about you, because we invited you to come to my birthday party in San Diego, which I think I'm going to go to. I hope you. You will. I would love that so much. So we invited you and Robin to save the date. It's right next to where you and I gave our TED Talks seven years ago. I cannot believe it. But anyway, but she was like, because, you know, do you and James ever have a conversation that's not recorded?

And now I'm like, not only do we record it, sometimes we do dual recordings. Like today we're on Twitter Spaces and recording for his podcast. We'll probably put on my podcast. Sometimes we do Club. But I'm like, I don't really care. Like, I love James because what he does, and like, we have James Quandrell is on listening on Twitter space. Like, James is, like, I don't know if it's important.

Like, she's like, what is he like offline? And I'm like, I don't really care. Like, what James does is. It's part of who he is. And I just think that's so magical. Like, I don't care. I have friends offline from Twitter and from podcasting. I don't really care.

You're a unique person. What you do for people, James, is incredible. And how you got there, what you've done for me. I mean, I wouldn't have written this book. I wouldn't have started this business idea that you and I have been talking about. I wouldn't. And, like, sometimes I'm kind of mad at you because, like, you send me on these missions. And I'm like, I'm trying to impress James.

Like, am I doing this because I want to do it or am I doing it? I wrote a book. I've got Nobel Prize winners doing stuff, you know, off in the distance. But it's all good. And I know that in the end, it's going to be important, not just for me, but for my audience, which I'm trying to please, but not only for my audience, for me. And actually, as you're saying, to like, we all have these real reasons. And some of them are, you know, to repair and to do the Tika and Olam, the healing of ourselves

and healing of the world. And you do that, you know, that's part of who you are. And, you know, it's interesting, too, because it gets, and I always think physicists are the new philosophers because you wonder at the same thing that philosophers in centuries past have wondered about. How did the universe begin? Was there a reason the universe began or was it a random event? Is there meaning behind the fact that the universe exists? And of course, you know, in some religions and in some philosophies, there is reason and, uh, uh, uh, uh, an argument that, you know, there was, let's say, you know, this religion is true versus this other religion. But there's also plenty of philosophies that say, look, everything's pretty, not only is everything pretty meaningless, but it's pretty, it's actually absurd to assume that there actually is meaning, but that's still a, that doesn't mean you live a, a horrible life. It means you have to search out and find your own meaning instead of outsourcing it to a text or,

a community that shares the same faith or, you know, a society that believes a certain set of rules are better than another set of rules. You kind of have to find, and this is kind of the premise of my book, Choose Yourself, is you kind of have to find your own personal reason to live and do things and love things and share with others. And, you know, doing that, my argument would be you're going to find and do things you love as opposed to live a life filled with hate. because that's even more meaningless than most other things. Because if life is meaningless, it's certainly meaningless to then hate something. Yeah, I heard something that, you know, Sam Harris said to Lex Friedman.

And it was like, you know, you can never be happy. You can only become happy. And I was like, well, is that really true? And I think, well, first of all, none of us who have children, you know, biological or ideological, we both have a mutual friend Melanie Nacken. who doesn't have biological children, but she's got millions of ideological children. We both love her. And it's like, no one who has a stake in the future cannot, can sleep, like, perfectly easy

about the future. We'll always have that concern about it. And I just think it's hard to be, but there'll be these moments. And Kurt Vonnegut said it, you know, like, if this isn't happiness, like, every now and then, just stop and say, like, when you feel happy, you know, like, recognize it. I'm feeling happy. There's something good about life when I feel happy. Who cares how you got that?

I mean, hopefully you're not doing something, you know, destructive and evil. But if you feel happy to recognize that, the more times you do that, that positive self-reinforcement is going to just make you feel like even now, you know, like today is, as I said, the yard site, the anniversary of my father's passing. And there's something good about it, you know, in a sense that I'm thinking about him. I'm remembering the good times that I had with him. I'm thinking about my children and how they, you know, sometimes they'll, they never met him. And they'll connect me to him.

They have like a sense of humor or, you know, they'll do something that just, just reminds me of like how do they know that like how does that happen it's it's miraculous any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic thanks for listening to part one of this special episode of into the impossible featuring a conversation between brian keating and james altutcher they discuss everything from how to become an expert to the existence of UFOs the state of artificial intelligence and theories of everything Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding.

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