Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2 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 (#167)

Episode Date: July 19, 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 back, everyone, to part two of this special episode of Into the Impossible featuring a conversation between Brian Keating and James Altutcher. Don't miss part one. You know, one time I wrote an article, and I forget the exact title, was something like 10 things I enjoy. And one of the items I wrote was melancholy. I like feeling melancholy.

And people are like, isn't that sadness? Like, why would you like feeling that? And yet there's something very special and poetic about melancholy. Like, this is the anniversary of your father's death, which makes you think about, you know, your own children and perhaps how they will think about you after you die and maybe it reminds you of your father. And maybe he would like, you would have liked to have seen them now, like making a joke when they're so little and whatever. And that's a melancholy feeling, but it's a really nice feeling. And people sometimes think happiness is just one dimensional.

Like, hey, I want a party now. But really it's all this mixture of feelings. Like we talked about why aspire to do something difficult, you know, when you read the Nietzsche quote. And it's very painful to do something difficult. Think about your own experience. You created such an amazing experiment. I mean, a telescope in Antarctica that's going to be. goal was to see so far into space that you see the beginning of the universe.

Like, if that's not arrogance, I don't know what it is. It's difficult. And then it's painful when you can't achieve the exact results you want, but you still love doing it, even though there's pain, there's just, it's 50% pain, 50% semi good, but you still do it even knowing that. Like, you would be much happier just sitting on a couch watching TV. And instead, you chose to go to Antarctica. and build a giant telescope that maybe it works, maybe it didn't,

and you didn't win the Nobel Prize. But you love doing it. We've talked about it in the past, I think. But, you know, if you think about this concept of entropy, which most people talk about as disorder or chaos, but really you can think about it as like the number of possibilities. And when you're born, you know, there's like infinite possibilities in a certain sense, but there's no energy.

Like you're not organized. You can't do anything. Like the baby's got like all these possibilities, but, you know, he or she can't do anything. And when you're about to die, like a minute before you die, you've got all this wealth, you've got all this attention, fame, power, but you have no energy and you're about to die. And so you've got maximum entropy again, but you've got no free energy to do anything. So it's somewhere in like where we are. And the Talmud, like, breaks down the different ages of our lives.

And like when we're in our 50s, it's actually like peak power. It's like maximum utility of love, of dollars of, you know, whatever they call it. So that's really fascinating, actually. Like, I like this model where at some point in your life where you still have physical health, but you have resources and you have a support system and you have the self-awareness to create the right support system for yourself, that's when you have maximum kinetic energy, let's say. Yes.

And the key is to keep the potential energy that you had as a child into your adult years so you can use that, you can transform that kinetic energy into potential. energy because you can have all these resources and then say, you know what, I've earned it. I'm going to watch TV for the rest of my life. Exactly. And then you're not using your potential energy. But if you keep high, and what is potential energy? Well, it's curiosity, it's questioning the world, it's being a skeptic, and it's falling

in love with different activities and domains and so on. So if you can sort of figure out ways to maximize your potential energy, and there's various methods perhaps of doing that, but, you know, you could read a lot and get excited about things. You could write down, I write down 10 ideas a day. You could meditate on different topics. You could, you know, there's lots of ways to find out what your interests are and combine them and so on and keep your potential energy up. Do you remember what you said in your TED talk here in San Diego in 2014? You said, a child, you know, laughs like 300 times a day and an adult laughs five times a day. And that, I started to translate that into laws of physics. You know,

if you think about it in terms of entropy, like you have a certain. store of happiness now convert happiness into into like energetic terms like it takes energy to laugh okay but beyond that like you're storing up there's like tension and you know this from your stand-up you know new york and your comedian like it's stored up tension and then it's releasing tension that's a form of energy storage that's a form of conversion and from transformation in one form to another but then i started to think leveraging off your idea well like i bet it's the other way around too like when you're a when you're a baby or you're a kid you cry 300 times a day and when you're an adult, you don't cry as much, right?

I cry 400 times a day, but that's okay. Now, I was going to say, but when you're an adult, when you're a kid, you cry because things make you sad, but when you're adult, you cry more when things make you happy, right? I cry when my kids are born. Or, yeah, I cry when my father passed away, obviously. But when you think about, like, things that bring you great joy, they tend to make you really emotional. At least that's the way I feel now. And so it's another optimization or energy curve.

where these things intersect, like the laughter curve declines, but then the happiness curve, you know, can rise, and they're expressing themselves in different ways. And then I started thinking another way, like, again, how many ways, James, could I double your happiness right now? I mean, how many ways, like legally, even illegally, like, you know, whatever, you're going to keep, I don't want you to get divorced, you know, whatever, like, you're not, like Robin, she's beautiful, you love her. You're not going to get like two Robbins. Like, how could I double your happiness right now? You couldn't have more kids. I don't know if that would make your life a lot. lot happier, by the way, if you had like 10 kids right now.

But how can I make your life twice as happy right now? Is there like just, or 10 times, let's say twice as happy right now. How could you do it? If you brought it out as much as possible, what makes people feel well-being? Let me say well-being instead of happiness. Well, a sense of community, a sense of mastery, and a sense of freedom. So community we're participating in. We've become greater and greater friends and we're part of a community of podcasters and

arguably thinkers and, you know, we know a lot of the same people. So we're all, we're building community and that feels good and it makes me happy. And so by having these conversations actually builds our community. And it also builds the community with the people listening to this. A lot of people communicate with you, communicate with me. And they have their own goals and agendas, but I enjoy that community too. Mastery is, you know, learning something that's that you love, that's worthwhile. So, you know, again, mastery is not being the is a tick-tac-toe, but mastery might be, I'm going to unify the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. And moving towards that goal is mastery, and that feels good. It's a huge

dopamine hit. And then freedom could mean money or could mean lack of a need for money, or it could mean lack of a need for certain types of relationships or lack of a need. You know, I think freedom has to do more with a sort of minimalist approach to things so that the things you need to be happy are fewer and fewer. So I feel all those things I'm accomplishing by talking with you and having this conversation. You know, and, you know, I want to throw another analogy by you that is similar to the potential energy and kinetic energy. And of course, I'm going to use chess as an example. So in chess, if you're playing chess, I forget, you know the rules of chess, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in chess, there's two types of advantages. I'm ranked negative. I have a negative

There's two types of advantages, one could have in chess and arguably in life. So there's what's called static advantages and what's called dynamic advantages. So a static advantage is if I win someone's queen, I'm a queen ahead for the rest of the game. And you can't take away the fact that I'm a queen ahead. That's a static advantage. It's somewhat permanent. And a dynamic advantage is, oh, my king right this moment is safer than the other person's king. So now, that's a dynamic advantage that's real and it's on the board.

But I need to transform that dynamic advantage into a static advantage quickly. In that particular case, I need to attack the king because it's weaker than mine. And so he has to force him to eventually give me something. So I then convert that dynamic advantage into a static one. So an equivalence in life is, let's say I really, you know, love being an entrepreneur. I might have a dynamic advantage in that I have a lot of ideas. I have an idea that no one's thought of. I maybe have some resources where I could raise some money.

These are all dynamic advantages. But if I don't use them, they'll disappear. But I can make a company that, you know, using my dynamic resources and convert it into a static advantage by helping many people monetizing my dynamic advantage by maybe selling a lot of products or selling the company. And now I've converted it into a static advantage. Same thing with writing a book. Many people have great ideas for a great book.

They would be the best book in the planet. That's a dynamic advantage because not everyone has an idea for the greatest book ever. But now you have to convert it into a static advantage by sitting down and writing the book. And so in order to do all of this,

you have to have some self-awareness like, what am I good at? What resources do I truly have to convert a dynamic advantage to a statement? Do I have free time? Do I have love for what I'm doing? doing? Do I have the support of others and do I have a network to bring things to fruition? And so you work hard building these dynamic advantage a little bit at a time, incrementally.

They could be all incremental, small dynamic advantages. But always to move forward, you have to convert dynamic advantages as much as possible into static ones and have a methodology for doing that. And that's similar to the kinetic energy to potential energy. It's actually maybe even a little more specific about how to do it. I guess I was even thinking at an even more more fundamental level. Like if you think about like doubling your happiness, that's why I made the joke, like you can't clone Robin or you can't water ski behind two yachts or something like that. But I bet you could think of a lot of ways or, you know, you can't, you know, you've got like double the number of Bitcoin or you've four times many books or whatever that you're, yeah,

okay, it's incrementally happier. But you know that as well as anybody, I don't have to tell you, you know, adding a dollar once you have a certain amount of money doesn't really increase your happiness beyond a certain point because, you know, there's, there are more precious resources than actually money. But actually, the point I'm trying to make is it's just most easier. Happiness is what in physics is known as an unstable equilibrium. So in other words, you can, you can't, you might be able to be happy in contrast to what Sam Harris would say, or even you could become happy without being able to be happy. But once you get happy, there's so many more entropic states of unhappiness. They far outnumber the happy states. You know, for example,

every single relationship you have could go bad or just one relationship between a relationship. Let's say one of your kids and with another one of your kids, that relationship could go bad. They could have a fight. And that will percolate to you. And there's like n factorial ways, you know, let's just say n squared. You have five kids. That's 25 different combinations. Anyway, we went through the math once before. But the point is there's many, more states where James is unhappy than states where James is twice as happy. Hence the importance when you have a dynamic advantage that you know will not last forever, like, oh, I have a good relationship with my kid, even more important to convert it to a

static advantage. So if you value having a good relationship with your kid, which I do and you do, then, oh, maybe now is it time to take a vacation with my kid or at least make an extra phone call to my kid or help them out in some way or have them help me in some way because that might be a pleasure to them. So always important to recognize that happiness is ephemeral, i.e. a dynamic advantage. And depending on you're getting that ephemeral happiness, how do you turn it into something that's static? That's long-lasting and improves your life in a meaningful, long-lasting way. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar

flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Bonjour, compadre.

It's the Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Priceline app. It's got hotel deals. deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle, deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than price line. Hold your horses. There's more. The app let you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level,

and amenities like pools and spas and beach fronts. And wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off. And kids, again, I don't want to, you know, and I'm always thinking about, like, who's my avatar? Like, who am I thinking about? And you talked about this, I think, with James Condrell and other people on the podcast, like, who are you thinking about, or that podcaster, Dumas, or one of these guys that you talk, like, who's your avatar? Like, who are you planning pitching towards? Who's the book for? And yeah, you always have to think about that because the worst thing is like, I wrote the book for everyone, you know, or my podcast is for everyone who likes the Nobel Prize and knitting. Like, no, it's going to suck. And everyone's going to hate the hell out of it. But, you know, I thought about, like, you know, so sometimes I think about it, I think about, like, Melanie, our mutual friend who we love, you know, she doesn't have biological kids. But that doesn't matter. You know, kids. You know, kids. are are interesting to me I've been thinking about this like physicists love the concept of teleportation we love the concept of time travel we love you know we think about these exotic things like wormholes and black holes and other kinds of holes maybe I don't know I don't want to get into that this a clean show we're doing a clean Twitter spaces here James a

family project a tight two hours here but the point is you know we're obsessed with these things but I'm like what if you have that already what if it's called kids let's just say biological ideological you can be you know a big brother big sister at any, you know, you can adopt. I don't care. You know, we happen to have biological kids and ideological kids. I teach students. You teach people around the world. You mentor people. You just can't go there physically. In other words, I can take my values and I can teleport them into the future. And I won't be there for it. But I think we get jealous because we say we want to be there. I want to have my cake and eat it too. And I never really understood,

like, what does that mean? Like, the cake is there, but you ate it, but it's still there. Like, it doesn't taste good. Like, unless you die. But no, like, you want to be, I think what it means in the context of teleportation for a physicist is we want to, like, instantaneously snap our fingers and appear on Mars. And I'm like, well, what's there on Mars? Is there like my office? Is there my podcast?

You know, oxygen in my lungs with me? Like, what comes with me? You know, my memories? Do they stay here? Do they go with? Like, it's so ludicrous to even think about, just like maybe these UFOs, these aliens that we started off talking about. But it's totally dynamic.

You can have teleportation. You can teleport your values. You can teleport your wisdom. You can tell, and some of it's in the form of a book, some of it's in the form of a child or wisdom. And some of it are these little messages that you implant in your children. Because, you know, one of my pieces of advice I give to new parents, you know, is the best time to discipline your 15-year-old daughter is, you know, when she's five. And, you know, and I'm not an expert, you know, by now.

But, you know, it's like another thing I've gotten from physics is, like, you know, in physics, something that reflects all the light that you send on. It's called a mirror, right? So bounces off, comes back to you. Then there's this concept like the cosmic microwave background that I study is called a black body. A black body absorbs and emits all different forms of light. It reflects nothing. It's completely absorbing and it's completely emitting. You look at it, it's completely black. And then there's something that does both, absorbs everything and reflects everything. And that's called a kid. In other words, like you do anything in front of your kid is like a hypocrisy detector, a kid is an absorber, a kid is a

reflector. And it's just like, I think kids, you know, kids are good bullshit detectors. Totally bullshit. You know, it's, but it's, you know, and the question is, how do you avoid trying to make them into your clone? Because I don't want my kids to be my clone. And I, you know, and how do you make them? Because you, you, you don't want to say like, oh, I learn so much for my kids. Like, you know, I love President Obama, you know, but sometimes he said like, oh, I learn this thing, you know, with some world leader. I learned that from my 15-year-old daughter. I'm like, I don't want you learning stuff from your 15-year-old, like the nuclear launch codes. What are we talking to? Like, what exactly did you learn? You know, and recently he's talking about

these UFOs and stuff. Like, what did he learn? But anyway, you know, the point is, like, what do you want to learn and, you know, from your kids? I think you can learn certain things. You know, they have certain traits. But I always say scientists are like kids. You know, they're curious. They're imaginative. They're creative. They don't play well with others. jealous, they want credit, they want funds. It's like, yeah, you have to take the good with the bad. And for me lately, looking at all the developments in physics, you know, we're really competing, you know, for this attention, for constrained resources. And lately I've been really kind of, you know, not panicking, but certainly worried about things like, you know, string theory

and these theories of everything. And what does it mean? Is it reflective of something psychological in physics that's occurring, that that, that physicists maybe are coming to a crisis that we aren't that meaningful. Like, you said we're like modern philosophers. By the way, that's insulting to most physicists. I mean, if you tell Lawrence Krauss, who's going to be coming up on my show in the next couple of weeks, if you say, like, oh, you're like a modern day philosopher, he'll, like, kick you in the, you know, in the nether regions.

Most philosophers are not perceived as contributing something useful to physics. I happen to like philosophy. But what do you make of this? this, you know, kind of obsession with, with theories maybe that aren't testable or, or these biggest picture things. Is it a symptom or is it just, you know, part of the grand tradition of scientists since time immemorial? Well, earlier we said that, you know, 99.99% of people their lives would not change if they thought the earth was flat or if they thought the earth was round. It just does not make any, they don't care, I don't care if the earth is flat or

the earth is round. And I think people have to get used to the things. fact that it really is all absurd. It's absurd that you went to Antarctica with a giant telescope to detect gravitational waves through the cosmic background radiation. And ended up detecting dust, and ended up detecting dust instead, a dust buster. This is the potential energy of a kid. A kid doesn't need a reason to play in the sandbox. It's just fun for them that moment. I think we judge ourselves a lot like on, are we doing something that's worthwhile to society? is a painter more worthwhile than a bank teller or is a bank teller who gives people money more worthwhile than a painter?

I think people get into these questions, but it doesn't matter. If I want to play poker all day, which is what some people do, that's important to me. And I might learn how to play better poker, but I also might learn other things about myself. Like I might learn, you know, how competitive I am and how to be competitive in other situations. I might have friends because now this is the way I can. get to sit around a table with 10 other individuals making fun of each other or maybe, you know, I make money that I could feed myself with and whatever. But a lot of times people say, oh, I feel so bad because I'm doing this all day when other people are, you know, doing brain surgery and saving

lives. You know, it just is what it is. Like I think we can't, I think we have to give ourselves permission a little bit more to go outside of the rules of society. And sometimes, those rules say you have to go to college and then go to graduate school and then get a job. And you have to make money so people will like you and you could support a family. Other rules might be, you know, oh, you have to believe in Democrats or Republicans or whatever. But other things might be like, hey, it's okay to play a game all day. And there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just absurd.

Like I wonder this because there are some days I play games all day. and I play in particular in the past few months I've been obsessively playing chess and trying to get better because it feels good to get better at something I love doing and sometimes I wonder well I've spent the past 20 years

or 30 years helping people or starting businesses or writing what am I doing now? This is like useless and so what? Like I'm a kid playing in a sandbox and every now and then it's like we were saying earlier

it's good to kind of re-energize that potential energy inside of you. Otherwise, you deplete it very quickly. If you, if you hate something, again, it requires more energy. So you're going to deplete your potential energy. And then you really will be doing something useless. Yeah, I've been willing to ask you about that for a long time. Before I do, and I don't want to forget, so first of all, we're talking on Twitter spaces. Usually I'm on Clubhouse. The only place on all the internet and any place in the universe, the known multiverse, where I have more of a social following than James Altutcher.

shout out to people in the room. Danny Miranda is there. I love you, Danny. Listen to you for months and months. James, Quondrell is there. Jay Yao, super producer to the star. Jay Z is there. JZ. I don't think it's the JZ, but there's a JZ there. Anyway, we are... That's the real JZ. He's a buddy. Oh, it is. Okay, cool. Anyway, I want to ask you, James, I've been thinking about this for a lot. Here's a provocative statement that I have been making. I make it to physicist, but I'm going to make it to you in the context of chess. I know that AI, because of you, AI can beat human beings at chess. I don't think AI can create chess.

In other words, I don't care if AI can beat us at chess. And obviously, where I care about this is can AI create physics that humans cannot create. But I want to ask you, can an AI ever create chess? And if not, who gives a crap? Like, why worry about what AI can do? In other words, AI can it create something that human beings? beings will find fascinating for thousands of years, or is it merely just better at it the way that a steam engine is better than a horse or a human being at lifting heavy objects?

Yeah, that's a really good question. It almost suggests that maybe there's some kind of measurement tool for how intelligent an AI is. So, for instance, a car is faster than a marathon runner or is faster than the fastest man on the planet. A car is always going to be faster. Does that mean it's no longer useful to have races in the Olympics? because a mechanical car is faster, no, humans still compete with each other. And then there's a next level, which is like with chess, it's been shown,

not only can you create a program that plays very good chess, you can create a program that by observing other chess games can learn the rules of chess and then become the best in the world at chess. So Google, in four hours, let loose Alpha Zero on a database of chess, games, Alpha Zero learned the rules just by looking at these games and then became the best player on the planet. But then the third level is can an AI come up with the rules of a game as rich and interesting as chess or poker or bridge or back avon or tennis or whatever? Can an AI create those rules? And my guess is, yeah, it's just I have never known anyone to try that,

but my guess is, yeah, an AI can come up with the rules of a game that's interesting by studying all the other fun games. So let's say you gave an AI the rules of thousands of games. And you labeled some of those games fun and some of those games boring. Then I bet you an AI can come up with the rules of, let's say, a card game that is more fun than boring. Although that would be fascinating to try. That's a good experiment to do.

I don't know how to do it, but certainly AI people out there know how to do it. But then maybe another level of intelligence is if a program is like that, can that same program become a good chef and make good recipes? Maybe. Can that same program learn how to recognize objects on the road and then help drive a car? Can that same program design a car that's better than the car? It's currently humans have designed. You know, I think these are all good questions. And my bet is an AI can do these things, but it has to be specifically programmed to do it. I wonder, yeah, the next extension of that would be, you know, can can an artificial intelligence create new laws of physics?

In other words, you put in Newton's laws and does it come up with the theory of relativity? I don't think so. I don't think that there is such a creative leap to think about space time as being a fabric, or think about space time as behaving geometrically, not just thinking about in terms of calculus of variations, thinking about differential geometry.

First of all, I mean, by the way, coming up with that from just the laws of, now perhaps you'd get a parabola from observations. You'd have to put in some observations. But there is sort of this extra special notion. It's almost like, you know, would a computer come up with art?

Yes, but again, it's that kind of bad statistician that you spoke of earlier. That is what we call machine learning. But computers have come up with good musical compositions after being fed Mozart's works and have actually, people couldn't tell if this was a Mozart work or not. Like, computers can do this

if they're programmed specifically enough and trained on enough examples. And it's a good question. Would they come up with Mozart if they only had, you know, twinkle, twinkle little story? In other words, will they come up with something beyond Mozart, not just like analogous

to Mozart? I think that they'd come up with white noise. I think that they could come up with, you know, in other words, would they create cubism from just the, you know, from the Renaissance masters? Yes, my argument is, yes. any, all of these theoretical things,

it's like, by the way, it's like quantum mechanics. If we say can a computer become intelligent, we don't know. But if you suddenly pinpoint the exact thing you want, then the answer turns into yes, even though previously it might not have been possible, we don't know. Once you specifically give a specific use case, the answer is probably, yes, a computer can do that.

And, you know, a lot of people, you know, know me and you from the most recent books we've written. You know, you wrote losing a Nobel Prize. I wrote a book called Choose Yourself and a bunch of other books. But the very first thing I wrote, I'll put it in the chat here, is, and I forget the title now, it was in 1989, and it's called a mechanically assisted constructive proof in category theory. And it was presented at some, the 10th International Conference on Automated, And what it did was is that we wrote code that proved a fairly obscure mathematical concept

from a basic set of assumptions. And using that basic a set of assumptions and putting in a final goal that we wanted it to achieve, it was an AI that does mathematical theorem proving. So once you give it a goal and you work towards it, it can construct, like if it knows twinkle, twinkle little star and it knows that. and it knows the difference between twinkle, twinkle, little star, and some musical compositions by Bach or some predecessor to Mozart,

and it understands like, okay, here's how Bach is a little bit more sophisticated than Twinkle, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and then it applies those tricks to coming up with the next generation of, you know, musical compositions. It could come up with something like a Mozart. Interesting.

So, yeah, I'm going to tweet that out so that people have access. to this because this is really important. I wonder if it's if it's firewalled and paywalled off. I can probably post it. No. Okay, great. I just ordered the book yesterday because I realized they didn't have I didn't have a copy. Oh wow. So this is a whole book. It's not just an article. Oh, it's been cited twice. It was part of a... It's been cited twice. Awesome. You know, your H index then is as calculable. You know what H index says, James?

It's how many people cite a paper I wrote, a scientific paper I wrote? It's the number of citations that have a number of papers that have at least eight citations, H citations. It's analogous page rank that Larry Page invented for a worldwide web searches. So in other words, if you have one paper and has 10 billion citations, that could be like a one-hit wonder. But if you have 100 papers and they each have a thousand citations, to an academic, that's better than one paper with 100,000 citations, because it proves that it wasn't just like a one-hit thing. So your H index, in the case where you have one paper with 100,000 citations would be one. You only have one paper and it has 100,000

citations. The other case, you'd have 100 papers with 100,000 citations. Your age would be 100. So it becomes exponentially harder to add a single digit. So my H index, after 17 years as a professor, is only 45. The most renowned professor, Nobel Prize winners that are on my list, they have an H index of maybe 110, 110. So that means they have 110 papers that, or they probably have 500 papers, but only a hundred of them have been cited more than a hundred times. Isn't that interesting? So your age index is probably two. And you can find this on Google Scholar.

I'll put my Google Scholar on Twitter. What's my Erdos number? Your Erdos number, I'd have to, that would take me some time. So it would take me, I bet your erdos number is larger than your Bacon number, your number of degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. Actually, I interviewed, and you should meet this man. Not only his advisor, Stephen Strogetz, was a professor at Cornell. where you were a student.

But his student, Duncan Watts, wrote a book called Six Degrees, and it's about what's called the Small World Theory of Networks that you and I can both get to, you know, either one of us could get to Pope John Paul's, you know, great nephew, I don't know,

hopefully he doesn't have a great nephew. Although, by the way, the word nepotism, you know where that comes from, right? No. It comes from nephew of the Pope, quote unquote, nephew of the Pope. So when popes would give jobs to their nephews,

it was really their children that they had had illegitimately. So that's where that august term comes from. But anyway, I wonder, yeah, so I think it's interesting. I'm not sure. I'm not a sanguine that we could really come up with, come up with new laws of physics that would be really outside of the domain of what a human being could come up with computers. And it's not for lack of trying. Again, I think it's this AI problem. What's the first principle in physics? Let's just play with this for a second. what are like two or three first principles of physics well so there's the the applicability of mathematics to physics which is unique in physics in some sense like i mean computer you know comp science or whatever has has math embedded within it theoretical computer science is almost pure math as you know but but you know biology you don't have to like no group theory to understand biology necessarily but to understand quantum mechanics at elementary particles so forth you do need to understand group theory topology different differential calculus, et cetera. So that math is the underpinning basis of the model of reality that we associate with physics is a tenant of physics. But the problem is there's no, you know, we don't

know why that's true. And Wigner called that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Well, what's an example where mathematics translates into physics? So I'm holding up a coffee cup here. James can see it. You guys on Twitter or on a podcast can't see it, but it has a mug. It's a handle on it. So this object has a, has different properties. It has a handle, which has a hole in it. So if this were made of clay and not baked clay, I could deform it and I could make it into a donut, a shape of a donut. So it has a topological structure. And that donut, but I couldn't make it into a flat disc or a ball without fusing together the hole. And that would change what's called the genus number, the topological character of this mug. And so all things that have one hole in it

behave the same topologically. In other words, you can embed, you could put a loop on the surface of this. Imagine putting a tiny little loop of dental floss on the surface of this mug, and you can contract that loop anywhere on the surface of the mug, except where the handle is because the hole prevents you from contracting around the handle itself. You can't contract it, right? The handle prevents you from contracting certain loops to a point. So that means there are certain loops that cannot be contracted to a point. Right. But the laws of topot, the rules of topology are derived ultimately from the basics of simple set

theory, right? There are simple set theory. Using just simple set theory and applying more and more either restrictions or loosening restrictions, you can start to come up with, you know, group theory, category theory, and, you know, multiplication, division, addition, and on and on until you come up with topology. And so my argument is you give first principles to a computer and you show it how to either restrict or loosen the roles in different ways. And then it could come up with interesting theories at least and then maybe prove them or maybe not. But what I was going to get to is that

this object here, which is made of matter, say, it's not the properties of the matter that are relevant. It's the properties of the topological nature that I described, the intractability, the impossibility, of contracting the loop to a point on the surface that's relevant to physics. For example, there are types of objects called topological superconductors or topological insulators that in certain situations they behave like microscopic donuts in a sense that you cannot, currents cannot flow through them or currents can flow through them unimpeded. And they will behave in this way exactly without resistance or, you know, or with infinite resistance, for example,

and they'll behave purely quantum mechanically in a way that you could not predict unless you sort of understood that these are manifestations of something purely mathematical, not a mug, but they're manifestations of a purely mathematical concept. In other words, if I say to you, James,

does a triangle exist? You can think of a triangle, but if I say to you, James, what does a triangle weigh? That doesn't make any sense, right? like what's the weight of a triangle you're like what the hell is he talking about like a triangle of what no no no what is a triangle weigh you're like what the hell is he saying like he's an idiot no but that's like that's getting more close to the core of why math is so useful to physics but then all of a sudden

you map on this whole architecture this whole depth this whole richness of math the swagger of mathematics gets mapped onto a physics problem only i think only a mathematical physicist a human brain can conceive of such things. In other words, you wouldn't be able... A computer just seeing millions and millions of equations and data sets of parabolas and even like coffee... Like, it would never guess that,

oh, actually, you know, this current can be modeled as a topological superconductor. And then I can say, hmm, what if... What if I then had a two-handled mug? You ever seen those two-handled mugs? Actually, Jews use those on Friday nights to wash their hands. Oh, and then a prets.

looks like, and then they go through all these machinations, and then those have different properties under certain temperature conditions. And then what if, like, space and time behave like this? Now, one of my counter examples is that, well, these laws have been known and computers have been pretty powerful for a long time. And, yeah, they can get, like, Newton's laws, but the question is, how much do you have to put in? And I always say, like, you know, they're like,

oh, it derived all, classified, like, 80 billion galaxies, in 30 milliseconds. And I'm like, that's great. Did you also account for the six and a half years of the PhD training it took to train the algorithm? Like, is that part of the 30 milliseconds? Yeah, I agree. You're right.

Like, that's like the problem with AI is, how much can it do on its own? Which is when you get into something sufficiently complex, like let's say the human brain, there's no question AI is not going to achieve some sort of singularity. doesn't make any sense as a question. If you say, can a computer recognize if there's a baby crossing the road while I'm driving my self-driving car? Yes, it can easily do that now because of

the computer processing power and- I don't know. It's kind of funny that every time I go on like some website, you know, CAPTCHA is asking me like, is this a traffic light? Is this like our best minds are trying to recognize like stoplights and parking meters and crosswalks. It's like all AI is being used for is to reverse the Turing test to prove that I'm, you know, not a computer. It's like the opposite of what Alan Turing envision. Yeah, no, I agree. This is AI is not intelligence. It's some sort of, it requires some sort of training on maybe in some cases billions or

even trillions of examples and learn and having those examples labeled like this is a traffic light. This is not a traffic light. And then it builds a vector. a traffic light has these nine characteristics, and then it takes a new image and sees how closely does this image match any of the images that I've had billions of examples of in my database, and then it says, oh, it most closely matches the traffic light vector, so it's a traffic light.

Yeah, so that's all how-a-Roch can do. Right. That's all how AI works. The beauty of, like, chess is that you don't need to feed it new examples. Once it gets good enough, it plays itself and can generate a trillion examples and each example is either one or lost. So it knows how to label winning positions versus losing positions. But with something like a traffic light, it can't generate that on its own.

That's why CAPTCHAs, you know how CAPTCHA really works. And I learned this in a podcast. It's not that you're training, you know, when it says, are you a robot and it then tests you on all the traffic lights? And if you recognize the traffic lights, you're not a robot. No, it's not that. While you're doing the CAPTCHA, it's following your cursor around the the screen and is this a way a human moves a cursor or is this the way an AI would move a cursor?

And that's really how it determines if you're a robot or not. That's why sometimes all you have to do is click, I am not a robot and it knows you're not a robot because humans have a particular human way of clicking that AI can't beat. Right. Yeah, and can't mimic it. Exactly. Right. They're too good at being imperfectly imperfect.

Yes. So what do you have next coming up? You said that you had done this kind of like Alexander, the Gets, the Gets, the Gets, you know, great. You had surveyed the landscape of string theory of loop quantum gravity, of quantum mechanics with Carlo Revelli, come to a theory of everything without me. Cut me out of the credit slightly because only three people can win the Nobel Prize. So you, Michio and Carlo are set for Stockholm without me. Thanks, James. No, no. We're going against Michio and Carl on this. So you could do all the math part, the hard part. That's what people always say to me, hey, I have a great idea of a

story. I just need you to write it. And we'll give you 10% of the profits. I get that the Nobel Prize. So quantum mechanics, Carlo Rovelli's theory, is that the reason quantum mechanics work is because he basically says that

every small particle is only information about it is only interesting relative to something else. So if nothing is observing or interacting with an electron, which is small and basically surrounded by

huge amounts of empty space. Like an atom is mostly empty and electrons are like one one millionth part of an atom. Much less than that, yeah. Much less than that. So if anything at all interacts with that electron, that electron has a location and a speed

and relevant to whoever is looking at it. So like if I'm riding in a train and you're standing still and the train's passing you, we both feel like we're standing still but the other person is moving. even though we both, but it's because we're only observing each other relative to what is our context is. So the reason quantum mechanics is interesting on small particles is because small particles

have nothing interacting with it until you actually observe it, almost by definition. They're so small, they're lonely. Like an electron is lonely versus the atoms in your body. They say quantum mechanics doesn't apply to objects that you could see because, and nobody's really figured out why, but my argument is because your large objects are already relative to billions of other objects,

trillions of other objects, all the other atoms and electrons and so on in the same space. So that's why it doesn't seem like quantum mechanics applies to larger objects. My argument is that that's a unifying theory, that everything still is always relative to each other. It's just that we think quantum mechanics

only applies to small, objects because nobody has observed these objects until we observe them, whereas larger objects are being observed all the time. So their level of interaction relative to other objects is huge, is like infinitely larger than an electron. So we can't measure, we can't use quantum mechanics to measure all those interactions and relativities. And then turning it back to where we started with inflation and kind of like self-dealing

and stuff, you know, I've come to feel that string theory. theory, you know, which purports to be a theory of everything, which unifies all the forces of nature and physics in a very mathematical language that is very controversial in some sense, but, you know, it's called by Michi Okaku, the God equation. You notice that he always, he always has to rely on, you know, kind of Einstein being unable to solve it. And then if he does solve it, then he will win a Nobel Prize as if, you know, solving it is not its own reward. But we'll get, we'll get past that. But anyway, the string theorists, I've come to realize, James, you know what string theory is exceptional at contributing to? What's that?

String theory. String theory is perhaps the best theory ever devised to make contributions to string theory. Well, that's probably true because it's kind of like, hey, let's rewrite all the rules of mathematics. And let's also completely invent an entire series of even smaller particles so that every other thing can be made out of this and using our new rules of mathematics. It all makes sense. But it's like, yeah, go ahead. Think at a macro level, Einstein's theory of relativity that, you know, the speed of light is relative to who's looking at it and how fast they are moving.

It's the same relativity. Well, the speed of light is fixed. Sorry, I can't, I can't let that one go. The speed of light is constant, but the, but the observation of time and distance is relative to the observer. Right. So my perception of these things might be different from yours, even though the actual speed through space is constant.

But my argument is that's the same type of relativity that occurs in quantum mechanics. That I can only view an electron's speed and location in the context of how I'm observing it. And it's the same thing with light. I can only measure light based on the context of how I'm observing it. I could only observe you based on the context of how I'm observing you. Now, we're all going to view you in basically the same way because you're a large, set of atoms and electrons and protons and all these things. So they're already interacting with trillions of other things. So it's like quantum mechanics applied to larger objects that are

dense as the same rules of basic quantum mechanics, but they're sort of not measurable because with quantum mechanics is easier. I'm only observing only one particle is being observed by one person, as opposed to trillions of particles being observed by everyone. So your loneliness kind of analogy is kind of interesting because to observe something in quantum mechanics, you have to destroy it. In other words, let's say you're in a room and someone tells you there's a ping pong ball moving around in that room at some speed, some constant speed without friction, and they want you to measure the ping pong ball's speed and where it is.

And you can't see it, but you have your touch. You can sense it with your fingers. in order to measure its speed and its position, what do you have to do? You have to stop it, right? You have to collapse its position. You have to freeze it in place. Then you know exactly where it is, right? But if you do that, you lose all of its knowledge about its speed because you froze it, right?

Now you know it's moving at zero speed. You know exactly where it is. So you had to stop it to do that. And you don't know exactly how fast it was moving at the instant it was stop. Now, you can also measure how fast it's going if you kind of like approach it, you know, very slowly and come up to it and then match its speed, but then it has undefined, it's moving still and has no definite position.

But in order to know, you can't know simultaneously at the electronic level, at the quantum level, you can't know both simultaneously at any particular moment. And so... My argument is it's the same thing as true for large objects. It's just infinitely smaller the level of

information you get from observing it because you're one among trillions observing a larger object as opposed to a lonely object like an electron. Yes. Yes. There is some, certainly there is some truth to that, the line I'm trying to make in sort of the melancholy analogy is that to measure it is almost to destroy it. And you're saying that also applies the macroscopic world, which is even more depressing

or, if you like. And the ultimate end is, of course, you know exactly where you are and you're not moving anymore when you have no more energy and you have maybe gotten to the end of end of life and uh i've i've you know kind of been ruminating on that perhaps more more than i should but i want to ask you james well you're approaching the age of 50 so you know half a century i know it's it's it's natural to think about it you know it's kind of the the back nine but but but definitely thinking about uh you know big picture things and i want to thank you for inspiring me to to really up my game now i've got sponsors. I've got sponsored by Smyranoff vodka. No, no, I'm sponsoring. I've got some good sponsors

and, but I'm not, I'm not doing it for the sponsors. As I said, you know, it's really to do it to up to be more professional. And that's what you said to me a long time ago. You were like, you know, you can have a sponsor, but that's to really show that you're worthy of having a sponsor and to and to really up the game of your craft as a podcaster. And the only thing I feel guilty with and maybe to close on this note, you know, for The Into the Impossible podcast, Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube, James Alltoucher's show and James Altitcher on YouTube, although lately it's mostly a lot of chess streaming, which I like, but we got to up your YouTube game a little bit. Noah would be, upset if we don't up your YouTube game. Although Noah is a good chess player too, so you never know.

He is. He is. Actually, he introduced me to a very good friend of mine here in San Diego, and he and I, he destroys me in chess on a weekly basis. But I, wanted to say that, yeah, so I've been trying to kind of, you know, not to be, you know, a professional, you know, a podcaster. That's not my job. My job is to be a professor at UC San Diego to co-run the Simon's Observatory, to look back to the beginning of time, maybe to write some books. But I have been making this case lately that as a public employee, as anyone supported in the scientific field in America, at some point, he or she was supported by the taxpayers. And I feel like it's almost like my moral obligation to give back. And I've been doing that with videos,

with long-form interviews. But now I'm kind of like, I should use my unfair advantage. You know, like I'm at this top university. We've got like this awesome film studio. We have a green screen. We've got a camera crew. And it's all thanks to, you know, this, this, you know, wonderful setup that we have. And now I can make like educational videos. So I'm doing one on my channel, Dr. Brian Keating on I did one on my channel this week with Delilah Gates, Dr. Delilah Gates. She's the second ever African-American woman to get a PhD from Harvard University in physics. It's unbelievable. She is so brilliant, James.

You're going to be blown away. I want everybody to check out this video on Dr. Brian Keating. Remember where you saw her? She's going to be, she's just like, I'm so lucky. I got her when I did. But we added it all these animations. And it's like everything you wanted to know about black holes, but you were scared to ask. She's so charming, so disarming, and so brilliant.

The stuff that she works on, I have trouble wrestling. I'm just a simple experimentalist. And we're going to have even more stuff like this. So people let me know what you think about it. It's linked in my PIN tweet on Twitter. But also, we're doing more. I'm going to do kind of a battle royale between the kind of rival theories of everything.

Eric Weinstein, Carlo Rovelli, Michi Okaku, and go deep and try to figure out, you know, what is going on with these theorists? Why are we talking so much about the God equation, God particle, the mind of God, Stephen Hawking, the big, you know, all these big questions because, you know, my dream James is now, I want to start the free university, you know, that you wish you went to, that only thinks about the biggest picture questions in life and that you graduate with no student loan debt. and you can attend in your pajamas. And I said that to my son, one of my sons,

who's named after my late father. And he said, Dad, that's redundant. You know, like you said it's a free university, so of course you graduate without tuition. And so I put him in time out. You know, he's still there as we speak. You know, it's like these kids, yeah.

Anyway, James, I want to thank you so much. Say again? What's another big picture issue you would teach at this university? So, okay, a theory of everything, according to physics. What's another big picture issue? I want people to know that there's more than just a theoretical physics approach to things. People get intimidated by the Einstein factor. I call it the Einstein. People say, I'm no Einstein. Well, Jim Gates, who's Delilah Gates's father. He's the Ford Foundation professor at Brown University. Okay, so she had some unfair advantages, maybe that her father's

a super genius. He's the president of American Physical Society. He's one of my best friends and mentors. He wrote a book, Proving Einstein Right. And he'd be a great guest, by the way, for you. But he said Einstein wasn't always Einstein. And in fact, one of the person, the Nobel laureate, who's writing the forward, the backward to James Altutcher's forward and think like a Nobel Prize winner, Barry said to me, when he accepted his Nobel Prize in front of the King of Sweden,

you have to sign this ledger, this logbook. And he looked through the logbook because he's a curious man. And he looked through the logbook, and he saw the signatures of past laureates. And he looked back and he saw Richard Feynman, and he saw Enrico Fermi, and he saw Albert Einstein, and he froze in his tracks, and he said, I'm not worthy. And I said to him, Barry, come on.

You know, Einstein talked openly about how he felt the imposter syndrome when it came to Isaac Newton. He said, no man had done more for culture. And I quote this in the book, and you'll read it. Hopefully when you get around to writing your forward, James. But he said, no man has done more for culture, not physics, James, for culture than Isaac Newton. And then finally, James, guess what?

What's the next thing? So Barry Barish had imposter syndrome over Einstein. Einstein had imposter syndrome over Isaac Newton. What's the next question you would ask? I have writing the forward of your book. I have imposter syndrome with Barry Barish. No, no, no. Well, okay, fine.

That's true. Well, okay, fine. But who else would you ask about the apostasy? Who did Newton have an imposter syndrome for? Well, probably Galileo. Well, not only Galileo. Think earlier than that. Copernicus?

No. Aristotle. No? No. Later than Aristotle. After Aristotle, but before Galileo. Before Copernicus. I don't know.

Sometimes considered a scientist, Jesus Christ. Well, okay, yeah. Jesus was a scientist because it's, you know, the study of the mind and the soul and the existence. you know, starts with religion. And as you pointed out, he gave his life as a ransom for many. You taught that. And he has done many.

He did experiments. The Bible New Testament talks about the experiments that he did to prove things. And the Talmud speaks about him. And also the nature of proof was very interesting with him. Like, you know, there's the whole story of the doubting Thomas. Like, what does proof mean when someone is a skeptic? And without him. him, we wouldn't have one of the fathers of the scientific method and inquiry, Thomas Aquinas.

It's always funny to have two, you know, kind of, you know, devout or practicing or curious Jews talk so lovingly and glowingly about Jesus Christ. I always think that's a great way. A fellow Jew. A fellow Jew and an eve of Shabbat. And so with that, I think maybe we'll wrap it up. But I am interested, James, in what I want to do in addition to getting this book out, And thanks to you. I think like a Nobel Prize. It should be up on Amazon later this month for pre-order. It comes out in September for my 50th birthday.

I hope people will get it. By the time this podcast goes up, maybe it'll be up available. But please subscribe to the YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. And then James's YouTube channel and his podcast. But the last thing is really, yeah, just to what I, my tagline is like from Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, ABC, but it's always be curious. Because I think in my opening of the book, I say, people say follow your passion, and this is where we started today, don't follow your passion.

Passion is like a spark, but curiosity is something different. Curiosity, they've done studies, meditation, quitting substance abuse, quitting weight, you know, for people that struggle with weight loss. Curiosity, investigating, and why are you having these? That's a much more sustainable urge, and it's unfortunate, as Barry Barris says, in the forward that he wrote, that we have this notion, Curiosity killed the cat. It's a negative thing. No, curiosity is one of the most powerful, positive forces in the known universe because with it, you can actually launch something that's much more sustainable than the spark

that is passion. That's great, but you need curiosity to maintain the rocket ride to the multiverse. I love that, ABC. Always be curious. That's a tagline on my YouTube channel. So check it out, Dr. Brian Keating. James, we love you. I hope I will see you.

and someday we'll finish up how the universe got started. Yeah, we only have a few more theories, but I want you to work on my real theory of quantum relativity. That's what I'm going to call it. That's right. We've got to get it together. And yeah, the Nobel Prize are coming up soon. Thank you, James.

This has been awesome. Thank you, Brian. I'll see you soon. All right. See you soon. Bye. Bye. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We hope you enjoy.

listening to part two of this special episode of Into the Impossible featuring Brian Keating in conversation with James Altutcher. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com.

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