Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Phillip Greenspun: The Most Interesting Man in Massachusetts (#143)

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

Greenspun grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and received a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT in 1982. After working for Hewlett Packard Research Labs in Palo Alto and Symbolics, he became a founder of ICAD, Inc. Greenspun returned to MIT to study electrical engineering and computer science, eventually receiving a Ph.D. Working with Isaac Kohane of Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Greenspun was the developer of an early Web-based electronic medical record system. The system is described in "Building national electronic medical record systems via the World Wide Web" (1996).[1] Greenspun and Kohane continue to work together on a medical informatics at Harvard Medical School. In 1995, Greenspun was hired to lead development of Hearst Corporation's Internet services, which included early e-commerce sites. In 1997 he co-founded ArsDigita, a web services company which grew to $20 million in annual revenues by 2000. Photo.net and ArsDigita In 1993, Greenspun founded photo.net, an online community for people helping each other to improve their photographic skills. He seeded the community with "Travels with Samantha",[3] a photo-illustrated account of a trip from Boston to Alaska and back. Photo.net became a business in 2000 with the help of some of his cofounders Rajeev Surati and Waikit Lau. Having grown to 600,000 registered users, it was acquired by NameMedia in 2007 for $6 million, according to documents filed in connection with a planned public offering of NameMedia shares. Greenspun founded the open-source software company ArsDigita and, as CEO, grew it to about $20 million in revenue before taking a venture capital investment. Greenspun was an early developer of database-backed Web sites, which became the dominant approach to engineering sites with user contributions, e.g., Amazon.com. Greenspun was also a developer of one of the first Web-based electronic medical record systems. Greenspun's Oracle-based community site LUSENET was an important early host of free forums. Aviation Greenspun has written several textbooks on developing Internet applications, including Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing,[21] SQL for Web Nerds,[22] and Software Engineering for Internet Applications,[23] the textbook for an MIT course. Greenspun is the editor of Medical School 2020, which provides a first-person account by a medical student.[24] Teaching Greenspun and his co-founders at ArsDigita started a non-profit foundation that ran the ArsDigita Prize, an award for young web developers, and the ArsDigita University, a tuition-free one-year program teaching the core computer science curriculum, one course at a time. Winners of the Prize include a 12 year old Aaron Swartz.[25] Greenspun has taught electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.[26] One of Greenspun's most famous students is Randal Pinkett, who built an online community for low-income housing residents in Greenspun's 6.171 Software Engineering for Internet Applications course. Pinkett went on to win NBC TV show The Apprentice. In 2003, 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 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossiblehttp://betterhelp.com/impossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishly from magic. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of Pandemic Podcasts with your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, as I am known. But I'm talking today with a man who became a digital friend. I met him, I followed him 17 years ago. I first learned about today's guest. And over the years, my admiration has only. improved, for he is the man I consider the most interesting man in the multiverse. And that is none other than Philip Greenspun joining us today from Taxatchezs, where it's my second conversation

from Massachusetts today. I had a conversation with your neighbor, Professor Max Tagmark at MIT, your alma mater. How are you doing today, Philip? Very well, but we now refer to it as Massachusetts, not Massachusetts. Ah, well, better here than there or there than here. We have, I just feel emasculated. But that's the only reason I'm doing all these podcasts because it's the one kosher reason you can not wear a mask, besides eating when you're on an airplane.

And we will talk about airplanes because that is the mode, the vector that I came to know about your existence. In 2015 and 2004, rather, I started to get interested, rekindle my love of aviation, which had kind of lay fallow for some time because of the rigors of academia, trying to get a postdoctoral position after going to graduate school, and then going to get a postdoctoral job at Stanford, where I was promptly fired as I recounted my book.

As Phil knows, he was one of my beta readers or early readers of the book. But ultimately, I ran out of time, and then luckily I did get back into it, and Phil deserves a great deal of credit for it because there's a brief window of time between getting a permanent academic track job, as I have now, and having kids, which utterly destroys all semblance of time and space. So, Phil, first of all, thank you for rekindling my love of aviation and my connection to it and really being kind of the person that I aspired to. So let me read your bio. This is from Wikipedia, which is the source of all science. scientific wisdom.

So before you do that, I was asked, I was being deposed by an attorney in a matter where I was in a patent case where I was an expert witness. And he pulled out the Wikipedia page and said, did you write this yourself? And I say, and I responded, does it say that Philip Greenspun is the greatest human being ever to walk the face with the earth? Because if not, then I didn't write it. That's right. I always say like, you know, I write, I wrote the first draft of my Wikipedia entry and then my mother-in-law wrote the rebuttal. Phil, you do so many things and I want to get

into all of them, but let me just, you know, use the cliff notes. My project in 2021 is to take all of Wikipedia and condense it to, you know, single sentences. But for you, you were born in Bethesda, Maryland, and you received a scientific bachelor's degree. in mathematics from MIT in 1982, which meant that you were about 19 years old when you got your bachelor's degree. After you graduated, you worked for Hewlett-Packard, according here. You wrote papers on one of the earliest implementations of a medical record system using the World Wide Web, and that was later used in applications at Harvard Medical School. You worked at Hearst Corporation.

You co-founded Ars Digita in 1997, and it's a company that grew to over 20 million in annual revenues by the year 2000. Earlier than that, you started a company which I knew well, although I never put two and two together until much later that the same Phil was responsible for photo.net, which was a huge leap forward in photo sharing, but also in kind of this notion of communities online. In some ways, it was a precursor to like Reddit and things, at least in my mind it is. I think you might correct me for my stupidity there. And then you got into aviation, I believe you got in around the turn of the millennia, maybe a little bit before. And you quickly graduated up the ranks to get almost every possible rating, including helicopters, as well as instructor ratings.

And you ended up writing a book called Travels with Samantha, maybe we'll get into that. And I also think of you as a teacher. You teach at MIT. You teach courses at MIT and other places. You teach aviation as well. But I want to ask you, Phil, if one of these intelligent aliens comes to Earth, wakes you up in the middle of the night shakes you and says,

who the hell are you? How do you identify yourself? Well, helicopter instructor is usually my opening line. if there's a gathering of people because computer programmer is usually a conversation ender. But I do like to be known for teaching. So, yeah, teaching helicopters, although I also teach airplane instrument students

and jet pilots is a better opener because it's more unusual. It doesn't drive people away. I think it was at a talk of yours in New York. A lot of people showed up to hear about physics. And at the end of your talk, I said, if I offered each of these people, the difference between physics and engineering is if we offered these people $100 to stay for an extra 15 minutes in your lecture on how their smartphone or television work, they would flee to every possible exit.

I just had on Andy Viterbi, who is a well-known MIT alum as well, co-inventor of CDMA technology. And really, before that, I had on Barry Barish, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for co-detecting gravitational waves from black holes crashing together a billion years ago in our distant reach of our galaxy, or maybe another galaxy, rather. And both of them talked about how sad it is that so many people use technology invented by engineers and have no idea of the underlying scientific mechanisms by which these things operate, electromagnetic waves, et cetera. And so I think it's interesting. I'd like to get your reaction. When you encounter people that have maybe a disdain of things like if you tell them databases, but they might roll their own. eyes even more. But, you know, kind of, why do you think it is that so many people use this technology but have no inclination, no curiosity maybe to find out more about the physics or the

underlying mathematics of how it actually works? I think the problem is, you know, that engineering is not taught in public schools. You know, nobody grows up with engineering, except I think James Cameron, the director, movie director, has started his own school somewhere in the LA area where engineering is used. But people don't understand, you know, how interesting it is to take a problem and come up with, you know, alternative solutions to that problem

and finally come up with something that's practical to build. So they just can't appreciate, since they never try to do it, you know, they can't appreciate the activity. When you co-founded Ars Digita, you also started a nonprofit that established a prize, which is, you know, second in prestige only to the Nobel Prize, and that's the Ars Digita Prize, and it's an award for young web developers. Is that still going on? It's not still going on.

We also did a university. You know, we had people, we had a lot of people with strong academic backgrounds that are a little software company. We thought, well, look, as long as we've got a bunch of people who, you know, have PhDs in computer science and would be qualified to teach this material. And there's a big shortage right now of software developers, and there's a lot of people who want to get in on this. So we came up with a one-year post-baccalaureate program where we would teach, we decided we were not going to innovate on the curriculum. We would just teach the standard. MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon courses,

but we innovated on schedule, so they would learn it one course at a time, a month at a time, and we would innovate on environment. So instead of saying the people who are the most diligent about avoiding distractions, they do the best, we said everybody's going to come together in a open office type environment,

and they just have to show up from nine to six and pay attention. And if they have a question, they can ask the person at the next desk, or if that doesn't work, they can ask a teaching assistant who's roaming around the room. And it was highly effective. We took about 35 people who had, you know, poetry backgrounds and other non-technical backgrounds, and we all got them, they got them all the way through, you know, what a bachelor's in computer science would entail and they all got jobs. It was really, that was probably the best non-profit

activity that I've done. Yeah, and I certainly had kind of captivated, maybe it was a precursor to some of these endeavors. I'm going to have Michael Saylor. Do you know who that is? Yeah, I've heard of him. He's an MIT grad as well. A lot of stuff coming out of MIT. He's the chairman of micro-strategy Corporation, which made headlines recently for trying to convince Elon Musk to put much of the cash on hand on their balance sheet into Bitcoin. And so he's a huge advocate of Bitcoin. I don't know. Have you investigated Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies at all? Do you think that that has the potential, as some say, to be, you know, the improvement of the web, whether it be in terms of financial engineering or in terms of, you know, security.

Does Bitcoin or blockchain, rather, play any role in your life or in your mental way of touch? I mean, I'm embarrassed to say that, you know, I didn't catch the Bitcoin wave early on. I did when I started teaching at Harvard Medical School. You can see this on philip.greenspot.com. It's still there. Just to alienate people at Harvard Medical School, I created a web page where you could, if you're a doctor, you could type in the year that you started medical school,

how much tuition that you paid and it would calculate how much you would be worth if you had instead put your med school tuition into Bitcoin. And of course it was in the trillions of dollars in some cases. So that's my main involvement with Bitcoin. You know, I never really got it. It always seemed like something that was going to be mostly useful for evading taxation or, you know, paying off people in criminal activities. And then, you know, it really became kind of uninteresting as a currency replacement when I saw the transaction costs going up. You know, now, I forget, I don't know how much it costs now.

It may be over $100 to record in the blockchain that you bought something. So, you know, if you try to get Bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee, you know, that would have to be at least $104 coffee to pay for these transaction costs. And you don't even know if the transaction will commit. You have to put it in there. This is the dirty secret of Bitcoin. You can't be sure whether you've actually paid in the sense that it's recorded in the blockchain. Because if you don't add enough of a fee for all the miners to put you into the blockchain,

they'll just ignore the transaction and say, look, this guy is only offering to pay us $20, and it'll cost us more than that, so we're going to ignore it. So, you know, I'm not that high on Bitcoin as a real currency. The function of Bitcoin, I think, is helping people who want to, you know, leave the United States and not pay U.S. taxes. Actually, I know some people who are sitting on, you know, tens of millions of dollars of profits in Bitcoin and the government has no idea

that these people are rich. Their wealth is on a posted note. It's the private key to their Bitcoin. So if you think about it, should they cash out their Bitcoin and tell California, yes, oh, I made all this money, here's your 13%.

Tell the federal government, I made all this money. I mean, Joe Biden and President Harris, they're talking about 40% capital gains rates. So should they give more than half their profits, or should they just, you know, quietly move to, you know, a low-tax country and pay the U.S. exit tax when they leave on the assets that the government knows about, carry their post-it with them with the Bitcoin number, and then cash in once they're

in, you know, Singapore or United Kingdom or some other place with a low. Our tax rates is best. That's my plan, that's to retire wealthy on my, you know, 10th of a Bitcoin. But, you know, one of the things that surprises me about you saying that is that I see naively, you know, blockchain as the ultimate expression of the database. And you really convinced me a long time ago. I used to think database is really boring and it's just, oh, my God.

I remember even making a database in 1989 for my computer science course of Case Western in Pascal, which I don't even know if you could like program in Pascal nowadays. There must be some like very high level interpreter of Pascal. But anyway, I did a database for some project. And I remember saying, oh, this is cool. Now I could, you know, use it to keep track of my lemonade stands, you know, profit and loss and inventory. But, you know, then I went on to other things like the high profit world of

experimental astrophysics. But you then later, you know, really convinced me through your work and through discussions that we've had that the, database is almost like the most essential aspect of the human life and even the World Wide Web. And that's why I'm surprised to hear you say that about blockchain, because blockchain is kind of like, as I understand it, that's open database of every transaction preserved and digital amber, you know, for everybody to see, everybody to validate.

And one of the things, certainly it is used for illicit activities, maybe laundering or whatever. But one of the promises of it, like all technology, you know, has limitations. all financial technology has limitations and is built on the fundamental assertion that I don't trust you and we want to have some way of trusting each other. But one of the things that appeals to me is the ability to have a currency that actually does computation in that you can use it as a store of information, not only of a store of wealth. So maybe how do you react to that? Like the notion of these smart contracts that can be used in certain platforms like ether and other

you know, blockchain-based currencies. Is there any not interest from you? I'm surprised that you're so negative about it. I think it could be interesting, but, I mean, you know, Americans already, speaking from a parochial American point of view, you know, for example, if you go over to a lot of European countries and you want to know who has title to a piece of land, you just go down to the city hall and there's a record.

and whatever records they have in the city hall are dispositive. There's no title insurance. People would be confused by the concept of having an argument about who owns something because, you know, the city hall's records are considered to be the last word. So even, you know, blockchain, I guess, it's useful if you don't have some kind of central authority that everybody can trust. But in the U.S., even when we've had these central authorities, that people, you know, do trust, like, you know,

you can trust the government wants to collect property tax, so we should be able to trust them regarding who wants property. But we're still not willing to do it. So I don't know if they really, I think what Americans would need to make better use of databases, you know, is more of a change in attitude rather than an enhancement in technology. Europeans were doing this when the technology was, you know, just pencil and paper.

Right, yes, and maybe even more primitive than that. I want to talk about some of the work that you've done, again, sort of database related. In some sense, photo.net, you know, is kind of a repository, you know, photographers and tips. And as I said, it's kind of like a Reddit, subreddit, just for like the ultra, you know, interested photographers.

But can you talk about that? How did photo.net come about? And why was it so successful, in your opinion? You know, I think it was successful because it was early. You know, there was not much else on the internet if you wanted to learn about photography. So, you know, people say, well, how do you do, how do you do today? how would one do today what you did in 1993?

And the answer is, you know, you can't do it because there's too much competition for people, so time, energy, and attention. But photo.net, it started out, you know, I was really passionate about the World Wide Web, and I said, this is going to be everything. Your spreadsheet's going to be in the browser. Your word processor is going to be in the browser.

You're going to be working cooperatively with other people through the browser. going to be no more desktop applications. You know, I was saying all these things in early 1993 around the hallways of MIT, and everybody told me to shut up. Professors said I was an idiot. In some sense, they were right.

You know, I'm still paying for Microsoft Office today, so the desktop application hasn't gone away. But so I took the summer off, since nobody wanted to listen to me or fund me. And I drove to Alaska. and back wrote up travels with Samantha as a series of emails back to all my friends once a week. And then when I got home, you know, I had a slideshow for all my friends. But for my friends who didn't live in Boston, I thought, well, I'll put up a webpage with the pictures from the slideshow and the text from these letters I've been sending out.

And that yielded all these questions. People kept asking questions about how did you take the picture of those. bears, how does you get the sunset picture, you know, what was your exposure time? So I thought, well, I'll just answer their questions by writing a couple tutorials on how to take pictures, and then they won't have to email me anymore. But of course, the more I wrote, the more questions were raised, because it's an open-ended topic. Then I built a discussion forum. It's just, you know, late 1993 or in 1994, I guess. And I said, well, people can post their questions

and then I'll answer them and then people will see the exchange. And of course, that ended up growing into a community where one reader would ask a question and then another reader would answer it and I wouldn't have to be involved. So that led to a big toolkit of software for photo.net that I was giving way free

to anybody else who wanted it and wanted to build a community maybe on a different topic. So a bunch of big companies called me saying we wanted to use this for internal systems or public-facing websites. And I hung up probably on the first five customers. I said, how many people you got in your IT department? And they would say, you know, 2000. I say, I give you the source code. I give you that's documented.

You've got 2,000 programmers, you know, and you want, you know, these six new features in the software. Why don't you build it yourself? You know, slam the phone down. But after about six of those, I thought, well, maybe there's a business here, you know. They're offering to pay money to add these features to the toolkit. And that was the genesis of ours, Digita, where we did. What's now pretty common, support and service at a fee for what is free and open source. software.

And, you know, that was pretty successful, though, of course, today everything's on a larger scale. So, you know, it's almost an embarrassment to say we had a profitable $20 million a year revenue company. That's by Facebook standards. That's laughable. But as I said, I think it was the, you know, kind of the origin of a lot of these Quora and Reddit sort of, certainly had that DNA as a,

long, early, early precursor to those, to those sites. And that way you were very prescient. I'm just looking now in my Amazon, you know, search history, purchase history. So I purchased Travels with Samantha. The first time I purchased, it was April 18th, 2010. So that was 10 years ago. It was written in July 2000. So, or at least the Amazon version that I have is. The hard copy is from around then, but it was written in 1993. Yeah. I mean, I guess what really distinguished me from, you know, my friends who built Amazon.com, you know, I was building database-backed electronic commerce sites that launched right around the same time as Amazon. You know, what was different is that I wanted to teach other people how to do it, whereas the other working software engineers, you know, either didn't have the time or didn't have the interest.

So, you know, I think I can take credit for a lot of people came to the conclusion at the same time that the relational database management system would be a great tool for managing the concurrency problem of having, you know, hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously trying to update a database by placing an order or adding a comment or bidding on something in eBay or whatever. But what I did that was different was, you know, I wrote it up as a textbook. basically for new programmers and then created a course at MIT where, you know, anybody could learn. And we made all the materials for the MIT course available to other universities. So I think, you know, that's, I don't want to say that I came up with this architecture that became conventional of the relational database management system behind a website. but I did write the textbooks that, you know, enabled a generation of programmers to easily adopt that architecture.

Now, I might be wrong, but you introduced me to another MIT, very popular podcaster, Matt, as a Guthon? Guthamiller. Guthmiller, yeah. So he has a great YouTube channel about flying around the world in his bonanza, and he was one of the youngest, if not the youngest, to circumnavigate the globe. And, of course, we have a mutual friend, Robert De Laurentis, who's been to the polls, both poles, over both poles, at least, in an airplane.

And you, of course, helped advise him, advise me about that particular voyage. He's gone around horizontally and vertically. I want to switch now to aviation. But before I do, maybe it was Matt who told me that basically you invented click-to-pay and things like Amazon uses, but you didn't patent it for some reason. Can you talk about that? What is the role of kind of you, Phil Greenspun, in e-commerce, and why would you not, you know, kind of lock in the potential profits from such a patent of intellectual property? Sure. I can talk about that, but I will say the first time, I'd heard about Matt got familiar, but I hadn't met until

after he'd done this around the world of flight, where he was the youngest, person ever to fly around the world. And he did it in a single engine, beat trap, Bonanza, which requires a level of bravery that is impossible to communicate to society where people are afraid to leave their house now or send their children to school. He launched with extra fuel tanks over the Pacific Ocean for a 16-hour leg lying on one propeller and one piston engine. But anyway, I was giving a talk at MIT on a fun talk on helicopter.

our game. That's the kind of fun talk you can have at MIT. And Matt, you know, towards the middle of the talk or towards the end of the talk, Matt introduced himself and identified himself. And I told the assembled listeners, I said, oh, you guys, you shouldn't be listening to me at all. You know, here's Matt Guff Miller. You know, he should be the one talking, not me. He's much more interesting. So the question was, Because, well, oh yeah, why not patent this stuff? I don't know. You know, I was busy, first of all.

So, you know, and also people kept telling me how bad my ideas were. You know, I was working at Hearst Corporation and at MIT Press. I also helped MIT Press build their online site. I think I implemented one-click ordering for MIT Press. And they liked it reasonably well, so they kept running it. Oh, wow. You know, at Hearst, things that we now take for granted and say, That's a great idea.

At Hearst Corporation, they owned all these newspapers which had classified ads. So I said, look, what about a system where when people place an ad, it also goes into a website database, a centralized nationwide one. And because people might be buying things from across the country, we'll need a reputation system where if you buy from somebody and you have a good experience, you can rate them. and we should have, since it's on a computer, we can let people either sell it for a fixed price or auction it. There's basically every feature of eBay built right around the same time as eBay in eBay in 1995.

And I told the Hearst managers about it. And they said, well, you know, that's a terrible idea. So I said, look, I've already written the software. Do you want to see it? And I would, you know, maybe that could get their attention for five minutes. to look at it and they said it's still a terrible idea. I said, well, can I take the software and run it on my photo.net site so people can buy and saw cameras. I'm like, that's such a bad idea that software is worthless and you can do whatever you want with it. I put it on my photo.net

site. So that's probably the main reason. I don't want to say that I was so altruistic. I mean, I kind of was. I was giving away all my software for free. But it wasn't that I thought I'm giving up the opportunity to become incredibly rich as a patent owner. I asked that of any Viterbi also, the co-founder of Qualcomm and inventor of the Viterbi algorithm. Why didn't they patent it early on? And, you know, because they had these huge government contracts for, and they also had contracts with like HBO because people were stealing their signals from satellite dishes. And so, you know, part of it was like anti-piracy.

led to the creation of this tool that improves the bandwidth of cell phone, CDMA technology. And he made the point that by the time the patents actually would have started reaping, you know, remuneration that many decades had gone by and they weren't where they would have expired. And certainly, you know, Amazon, that's not the case, or eBay, if that's the case. But this theme of like you, because I view you as a person with great conviction and courage. It's surprising, at least before I knew you, that you didn't have the courage of your convictions, or you weren't, like, willing to listen and say, look, I think it's a good idea. I don't care with some Hearst magazine dinosaur, you know, newspaper thinks about what my idea is. I'm going to go ahead.

I'm going to do it. And yeah, you don't have to do it to make money. You could do it to buy a fleet of airplanes to teach, you know, under, you know, privileged kids. But what have you changed in that way? you know, if you do things nowadays, would you be less inclined to listen to what some so-called expert has to say about it? Well, it's not just that. I mean, remember, to patent something and have a legitimate patent, you truly have to be first. And there's just not that much new under the sun. If you'd ask me, when I was developing that classified ad system, has anyone else ever built this, I would have said, you know, no, this is my idea.

Nobody else has built it. I had the idea because I was working at Hearst, which had a big classified ad business to begin with. But, you know, unbeknownst to me, you know, eBay was developing at roughly the same time. So, and probably there was somebody even before eBay, you know, that I don't know about. So I'm not convinced that I was, you know, I was definitely an early person in this area. But even catalog shopping, you know, all the stuff that's on the web today was done with modems. by P-Pod, the grocery delivery company, they were doing, you know, catalog shopping, e-commerce,

which some people did eventually manage to patent. But I don't think the patents, some of them were ultimately invalidated, and probably most of them that were really just on that concept should have been invalidated, because the fact that it was on the web wasn't materially different from having it in the DOS application, you know, modeming into your local grocery.

restore. Right. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is out. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. TV, stream now, pay never. So looking at Philip Greenspun, philop.greenspun.com, I am, of course, you know, familiar with many of your activities. There are four super categories, aviation, photography, travel, and teaching.

We talked a little bit about teaching. I talked a little bit about travel and photography. Let's talk about aviation. What, you know, I remember hearing from John and Martha King, San Diego Heroes. about a very simple definition of why people should become pilots. And their statement was that once you learn to fly, once you even get your, do your first solo, where you're alone in an airplane for the first time,

that your identity is forever changed, that you are now a pilot. And we're not all Chuck Yeager, despite the way we might want to talk to air traffic control. But what is it about aviation that transfixes, you personally? What drew you to it and what continues to keep you held under its gravitational force as opposed to lift thrust and drag? Well, I'm definitely not Chuck Yeager because my most memorable conversation with air traffic control was with New York approach where I got in between them

vectoring air buses out to Europe. I got them to call my mom in Maryland to tell her that I was encountering headwinds and was going to be half an hour late to land at the Gatorsburg, Maryland airport. Simpler times. So yes, that's the difference between me and Chuck Yeager. But, you know, what I wouldn't, I wouldn't, my perspective was a little different than the Kings. You know, I fell in love with aviation because I like being up in the air, looking at the earth from above. So that was the thing that drew me in in the first place. But what I think is great about aviation is it's a combination of physical skills, intellectual skills, planning ahead, and emotional skills. Because if you're not afraid when you're up in the air, then you're probably,

you know, somehow defective. You know, you should be afraid when you're up in the sky. It's not a natural thing for an animal other than a bird. So the question is, can you behave rationally even when you are afraid? And for most people, the answer is no. Actually, corona panic is a perfect example of that. People are afraid of a new virus, which does make sense. But then their reaction is completely irrational. And they tune out all possible rational pathways in favor of stuff that doesn't really make them safer, but will potentially harm them in a lot of other ways.

So in aviation, however, you learn, you know, if you're approaching the runway, I used to fly the Canada Air Regional jet. One of my fun jobs was working for Delta Airlines, so we would fly the Canada Air Force. regional jet, and the final approach speed is 145 knots. So you're going 170 miles an hour, pointed down. It doesn't have leading edge slats like a Boeing or an Airbus. It's an adapted business jet. So the only way to maintain enough air speed to keep the 50,000 or 47,000 pound for landing weight airplane flying at an adequate airspeed is to point the nose down towards the ground

like a lawn dart. And if you're approaching the ground at 170 miles an hour, you know, you should be scared. And in fact, there was a special briefing card for jump seating, you know, mainline airplane pilots. Because so many of them they'd gotten into the cockpit, the jump seat, and they're used to flying Boeing, and they would freak out and start screaming, you know, to pull up, pull up, because they weren't familiar with the Canada Air Regional Jit. So anyway, that is what's great about aviation. You know, part of you is going to be scared on every landing.

You're approaching the runway. It doesn't feel right. Helicopters actually, in some ways, are a little bit less scary because you just slow down, gradually slow down. You know, for people who say they're afraid of aircraft, I often will take them up first in the helicopter rather than an airplane because you don't have that, you know, rushing off the runway sensation and you don't have that hurtling towards the ground sensation.

So that's why I love about aviation. It works your emotional brain, your intellectual brain, and your physical muscles, your coordination all at the same time. And it feels good when you can do, it's hard to do a perfect flight, but it feels great when you can do, you know, any kind of successful flight. Now, any major accident scene you can walk away from, as they said. I remember reading, you know, before I even had the temerity to contact you using email, I remember reading and being really swayed by this argument that you made for certain types of people.

You go to college and you get good grades. But, you know, after that, you can go to graduate school, which is not exactly like super college. I mean, I always say, college, there's homework problems, and they all have solutions. You may not be smart enough to solve them. Not you personally, Phil, but other people may not be. But there is a solution that someone smart enough can answer. In grad school, you have super problems that even your advisor, he or she doesn't know if there's a solution, because it may not be a solution to it.

And then after that, you're like a postdoc, a professor, whatever. There's no more grading. Like, then you're done, unless you go for the Nobel Prize, you know, in my case. or you write a book or you become, you know, Mityo Kaku and Lawrence Krause and start thinking about wormholes in the mind of God. But getting back to this hierarchical kind of hurdle that academics fight with, and then we kind of lose track.

We've been graded for 30 years, and now we're not graded anymore. But aviation offers this unlimited set of challenges you pointed out a long time ago on a blog post that was kind of like a throwaway line, but in many ways it really spoke to me because we were basically saying, if the FAA sets up all these different things, you can challenge yourself on your webpage, you haven't updated it lately, but you go over your milestones in aviation,

starting with exactly 19 years ago last week or so. You had your first lesson in 2001, December 11, not September 11, working your way all the way up to being an airline pilot, helicopter instructor flying across the country, north, south, east, and west. And then right now it terminates with completing training in a Pilates PC12, which is a very, very large, challenging aircraft, the single-engine turbo prop. I know you've gotten pilot or pilot type ratings and jets. How come you haven't updated your milestones yet recently?

Well, that's a good point. You know, I don't have that many left. There's multi-engine seaplane, which I should get. There's a good instructor down in Alabama with a grum and widget. It would be fun. But, you know, no, I'm just enjoying it. You know, we did a trip. A friend of mine recently wanted to be dropped off and bend Oregon.

Yes. I think he'd flown commercial a couple times recently, and there's been some sort of mask altercation either at an airport or on one leg, you know, and I'm involving him. but it was still unpleasant enough that he's like, I just want to be dropped off in Bend, Oregon. So, you know, he loaded the whole family in the back of the fall of us, his family and ours, dropped off some people in Chicago,

went to Mount Rushmore and South Dakota, went to Den, took the family back via San Francisco, Las Vegas, Mammoth Cave in Bowling, Green, Kentucky, and the Corvette Museum stopped to see the grandparents and outside their retirement home in Fess to Maryland and back to Boston. So it was an 11-day trip. You know, it felt great to have gotten the family through this whole thing, to have picked days and times when, you know,

they could be flown and they wouldn't be subjected to getting bumped around, even though we crossed over the mountains. So to me, you know, those are still good milestones. I guess I should put in that I landed. I landed on the space shuttle runway back in January. Oh, wow. In an aviation group, and we were invited by some astronauts who are part of the same group to come visit them. So we landed on the shuttle runway, a spot of fun down in Cape Canaveral.

Very good. Yeah, I had on Jessica my ear. I interviewed her at the beginning of January 2020 while she was on the space station. That was a surprisingly not very long-distance call because she was floating overhead about 200 miles up. just interviewed, and then I interviewed one of her colleagues, Nicole Stott, who flew on the shuttle twice, and they spoke about flying, you know, in some ways, well, Nicole did at least, that she was never scared for herself, but she was scared like what would happen for her kids, like the trauma, if something were to happen to her, as, you know, they lost, you know, 2% of all shuttles in flight or something like that, 2% of, you know, compared to the number of flights, two flights ended in complete loss of crew and vehicle. But she worried about that. And, you know, I wonder, do you ever experience, you know, this kind of nerd? You talked about, you know, you should be scared a little bit, but, you know, but before you fly or consequences of flying. I mean, that was a question I have, you know, get off and ask the cliche, you know, what do you do when the engine quits?

I mean, even in a helicopter, you have to deal with that. So do you deal with fear at all? Or have you, you know, so many hours, so many, so much experience that you've become an old pilot and are not, longer a bold pilot? I do, especially helicopter instruction. You know, there's mistakes that students can make

that are pretty challenging for the instructor to fix. It's not like an earpling where if you have altitude and a little bit airspeed, you're basically can recover from almost any situation. You know, the helicopter,

if you're doing, you know, practice auto-rotations, almost all of the accidents happen where people are, you know, comparing for real-world emergencies that may never arise. Like, you use the throttle or roll the engine off to show people, well, look, this is how dangerous an engine failure could be. I've created this really dangerous situation. You have to do it because it's part of the training to know how to auto-rotate and land the helicopter without an engine.

So I do worry. You know, I try to cut my risk, even though I have an airline transport pilot certificate, the same as a United Airlines captain. You know, I really try, if I can arrange my schedule so that the flight is something that would be doable by a student pilot, then I arrange it that way. So I say, look, I'm going to go to the big airport with the long run way. I'm going to go in daywide hours if I can. I'm going to go in visual weather conditions, you know, if that's at all reasonable.

I'm going to avoid icing conditions and super high, you know, crosswinds and all that other stuff. So I just try to set it up so that I never need to use my higher level of skill. Especially. Blue Angel pilot on say, you know, people say, wow, you fly for the Blue Angels, you must have really good hand-eye coordination. He's like, no, I use my training to avoid needing to have good hand-eye coordination. Yeah. So that's exactly my philosophy. Yeah, so I recognize it as a risk.

And statistically, it is a higher risk, for example, than COVID. I'm constantly being cautioned by every conversation now that I have with people, like, stay safe, stay healthy. They're always telling me this. I'm like, you know, it wouldn't be a good social convention to say, look, I'm a helicopter instructor. Now that all forms of competing recreation have been outlawed by the governor, you know, our flight school is actually pretty busy. COVID is not my, you know, COVID's a risk, but it's not my biggest risk. It's like, you know, coming, finally I can take a test where getting a negative result gives me a lot of pleasure.

I want to close up with a couple of questions I'm going to ask you that I ask all my guests online. But I want to talk just a little bit more about your, you know, kind of current, a pair of granations, shall we say, in the world of computing and teaching at Harvard University, as you do now, running a blog that, you know, your joke is you have an interesting idea, a posting every day and an interesting idea every few months. Today you've got one about American Central Planners tackle vaccine scarcity. You've been talking a lot about COVID, what do you call it, Corona Panic? You talked a little bit before that about the Trump and fewer. What, you know, what are you really most interested in? Again, you do so many different

things. You're so interesting to be around, to fly with. We've flown together. You've given my first helicopter lesson. What would you, you know, what's kind of your dream day like? What do you, what are you looking forward to? And I want to ask you about New Year's resolutions if you indulge in such things. But first of all, take, what does Phil's ideal day look like? I mean, For me, teaching is really what I do love. So at Harvard Med School, for example, you have a big database of insurance claims. And we start with third year medical students.

They're very interesting, intelligent, nice people. But, you know, they don't have any background in software development, usually. You know, in a class of 25 people, we might have four that have significant programming backgrounds. So I just love showing them the power of, you know, learning the SQL language and being able to pull from these billions of medical records, interesting insights to, you know, what's the effect of these different drugs? How effective are they really? How effective are the flu vaccines in terms of reducing the number of people who will eventually file a claim where the doctor says they had the flu. and learning some statistical programming. So I love that.

I do like teaching at MIT, you know, the aeronautical engineering class or the software classes that I taught there for the same reasons. So I think that's where, you know, I experience probably the most joy is working with, you know, smart young people and helping them learn.

And there's the same thing with my website. You know, I just try to take everything that I've learned and write it down so that other people don't have to, you know, spend the time that I spent to study something. The Corona stuff is a bit of a distraction, but I guess, you know, all of America has been pretty distracted by this. So I just look for sort of what's interesting to me is the cognitive dissonance. So, for example, the post from today that you mentioned,

you know, people are saying we need a bigger government. If we had a bigger government, all of our problems will be solved. The government will do the stuff really well. But at the same time, they're saying, look, these state health departments in all 50 states are doing terrible jobs at distributing the coronavirus vaccine. They're just going to let it expire in a refrigerator because they can't figure out how to get into people's arms, which, you know, you can go to the smallest village anywhere on planet Earth and you can buy a Coca-Cola. So obviously the market has a way of distributing stuff.

But yeah, I guess most of my ideas in computing that would really help people are a little bit too big. They involve starting a company working 100 hours a week. And I just don't know if, you know, I have kids. I don't know if it's fair to them for me to go back to that. But one of my ideas is people know how to use their phones. And they're pretty good at that. At the same time, people are terrible at using their desktop and laptop computers. You know, I think, you know, physics professors might be an exception.

But for the average person, it's very burdensome for them to have to learn the Macintosh operating system or Windows when they already have a device that they know how to use. So that's one of my pet ideas is you should be able to have some kind of machine on your desktop where you plug your phone into the machine, and it gives you the illusion that you're still using your phone. So you have all your computing services available. But the interfaces, the software, everything looks the same as if you were still on your phone. But again, that's the kind of thing that a Facebook or Google could do pretty easily. they've just chosen not to. You think that we have suffered because of, you know,

kind of the proliferation of software. I compare software to like theoretical physics where there's, you know, literally, you know, 200 different ideas for theories of everything or wormholes or time warps and stuff. But there's like five experiments that, you know, there's one, you know, major large Hadron Collider. So there's no like proliferation of,

experiments of everything. It's all theory. And I make this comparison that like theory is cheaper because you don't need as much to do it. You don't even need a computer to do it. I mean, most of the best, you know, work that you might know from Einstein was not done using latex or, you know, obviously some fancy word processors. So it was pencil and paper. And, you know, we've gotten a lot, but I wonder, you know, is the kind of exponential, you know, proliferation of COVID, 13 terabytes? What was it like yesterday was, but you know, 10 terabytes or whatever. Data is getting produced so massively. And I wonder, is there any hardware?

Like, are we lacking hardware? Like the phone you just showed, I make the point, you know, at Stanford, you can name like 10 apps or software companies, Google being one of them, you know, YouTube, it came out of Stanford directly in some sense. But, you know, name a cell phone that came out of it. Now, MIT's different because it is, it has a very forward-looking kind of practical application.

We saw the Boston Dynamics, robots, you know, flipping around dancing to do you love me? But the question is, you know, what about this proliferate? Are we, is humanity developing so much code and so much data and not enough hardware to take advantage of it? I mean, the hardware, yeah, the hardware is a little bit stalled right now, right? I've got a four-year-old PC, I think, and I'm not motivated to upgrade it because the new ones really aren't any better. I think the biggest problem in computing right now is that you don't have learning built into the software as a default. So, for example, you can upload your pictures to your desktop computer every day, and maybe you always pick up certain pictures and move them into folders with the conventional naming scheme that you like, how you want to organize your photos. you know, the computer will never learn.

It'll never learn, hey, this is how Brian likes to organize his photos. I'll just, you know, ask, is this what you'd like me to do with these new pictures? So sometimes, you know, if everybody wants to do things a certain way, they'll explicitly build that into the operating system, but the operating system can't learn from you. It's starting to. I mean, when I get in my car now, I have a Tesla, and I'll, you know, drop the kids off at at the local prison. I mean, at their school.

You know, whatever. So it's learning certain things. And my iPhone, you know, well, no, it's a holiday, you know, tomorrow. So it'll let me sleep in, you know, past the crack of noon when I normally get up. Yeah, yeah. But look how bad autocorrect is.

Autorrect is really something that should learn. And it never seems to do very well. So that, I think, shows you the limits of learning. You admitted to being a Microsoft. you know, word user. So you still have a paper clip, presumably, you know, asking you what to do? Yeah, yeah.

I'm talking more about like auto-correct typing on the iPhone, for example. So I think that's, to me, is the limitation, is that software isn't built from day one with the idea that it's going to gradually learn and be trainable because if you rely on human programmers to sort of put in every, you know, possible situation with if statements. It's never going to work.

The world is too big and complicated a place. It's hard. You'll get, you know, disinformation. And, you know, like we were talking today with Max Tagmark, you know, imagine if, you know, Galileo puts up, you know, he's living in today's era. Or Twitter exists in 1632. And, you know, the earth goes around the sun.

And then, like, this information is dispute, this claim is disputed by the Catholic Church. And it's really true. If you go to your iPhone and you say, I want to know what the time is in Jerusalem, Israel, and you go there, Jerusalem is the only city on earth that's not in the country. You know, that's an active decision. Like somebody made the decision not to have that as an active choice. And, you know, so in some ways maybe it would be better, maybe be worse.

The same professor at MIT Max Tagmark was talking about AI, artificial intelligence, really going to the next level when it can write its own code. So you seem to be, I don't know, are you skeptical that AI will be able to basically write itself? And let's ignore the singularity and the destruction of all life after that occurs. But do you see a future where code will just write itself? I mean, already we can do GPT3. We can dump in, you know, I always say like, who would you rather learn physics from me or or Albert Einstein.

Well, Albert Einstein wrote a lot of stuff down. It's digitized. Dump it in. And you'll have, you know, that Professor Einstein teaching you relativity instead of Professor Keating. So what do you make of the prospects and promise of AI, you know, if nothing else, to write code, you know,

that outperforms itself? Well, I mean, that's part of what I was talking about, right? If the machine is trainable, then either it's written some new code to reflect that training or it's got some new data to reflect that training. So I think I'm agreeing with Professor Tegmark. However, you know, AI is it's an industry with a long history of overpromising. You know, when it started, they said, look, it's a 20-year problem.

Give us all this money. And we'll give you an AI in 20 years. And when that didn't work, they said, look, it's a 50-year problem. And it's still, you know, there's all these people, mostly they don't have kids that say, you know, the singularity is near. Most humans won't have jobs. And I say, look, machines are so advanced that they've rendered humans redundant. You know, you go try to find, try to hire a babysitter for less than $25 an hour. It will actually show up to your house.

And then come back to me. up once with my kids. Yeah, and then come back and tell me that, you know, there's this huge surplus of human labor out there, you know, because of machines. So as of right now, you know, a human that will show up and actually work, you know, on the schedule that you've agreed and be reasonably responsible and do something that, you know, doesn't require special training, like being a babysitter. it's harder than ever to hire somebody to do that. And we're very deep into the period of time when the AI enthusiasts said that, you know, half or more humans would just be sitting on the beach

while the robots did their old job. So I think maybe the AI enthusiasts are right, but they're wrong about the timeline. You know, it may not even happen for 50s. or 100 more years, you know, the brain is still vastly more powerful than all of this hardware due to the number of, you know, not that many gates or transistors in your brain, but there's a lot of them, but they're heavily interconnected. So, you know, they're not that fast.

There's a lot of them and they're heavily interconnected. Yeah. And that brings me maybe the last point for, you know, looking in the future, before we look into your personal future, what you're looking forward to in 2021. But that's like quantum computers are very good, or better than any classical computer, at simulating the properties of quantum computers.

And I kind of think, you know, maybe that's what will happen with AI. It'll start to understand itself. But, you know, as I was quipping in my professorial way today, you know, perhaps the thing that we don't, we don't need more intelligence. We need more wisdom. So can we create artificial wisdom?

Because that's what I would really care about. So Max Tagmark, again, I would love to be the matchmaker matching you guys together in 2021. But he has this new feature, this new web project called Improve theNews.org. And it's all about synthesizing. The notion is that there's this overtone window of what's acceptable to someone on the left and acceptable to someone on the right and they used to overlap and now they don't. And so he has this feature where you can, it's a news aggregator, and you can basically crank it all the way left, you know, for a Nome Chomsky fellow MIT professor who I had on my show this year. You know, you can crank it all the way to right, Ben Shapiro who I had on my show this year. And the question is, you know, do you get something in the middle? Like, how does your cortisol level react? When you know, when now you can control, I'm getting, you know, Fox News versus MSNBC or, you know, in New York Times. times. So that's a fun project and it's kind of like simulating or maybe to expose the biases.

I felt like he should have rolled it out in science first to show, you know, just for scientific consensus, how tenuous it is. We're often told, you know, listen to the scientist. And like, I don't know a scientist who just like listens to scientists. Do you? I mean, like, I fight with scientists. That's part of what science is. It's supposed to be argumentative and adversarial. And to say, oh, just listen to them. I'm fine listening to you if you're an expert, you know, on quantum computing, but that doesn't mean you're going to be an expert in epidemiology. But nowadays, we're all epidemiologists, right? I think the wisest thing about the media, so I know a Russian immigrant here in Massachusetts, and regarding our neighbors who, you know, listen to NPR and read the New York

Times, she says the difference between growing up in Russia and the people here is in the Soviet times, we didn't believe the propaganda. Right. The actual, they had two newspapers. One was called news. And I forget how you say that in the Russian. It's Hesda. And then the other one was called Pravda.

Truth. And they used to joke, there's no truth in the news, and there's no news in the truth. And they would say things like, you know, in Russia, you know, the future is always known, but the past is always changing. And I worry about us in these perilous times. But I want to close on a note of optimism, maybe looking forward to the future. As you know, January is named after the Roman god Janus that looks forwards and backwards at both times. What are you looking forward to in 2021?

maybe resolutions that you've made. I made a resolution to drop five pounds, which I did this year. I dropped five pounds from my double chin to my stomach. But what I'd like to do is to actually keep it off. Do you have any New Year's resolutions, and what are you looking forward to in 2021? That's a good question.

Well, my last New Year's resolutions crashed and burned, which was to travel more. I said, look, this is what I really love, was traveling and seeing more new parts of the world. So I signed up, you know, I accepted invitations from all my friends around the world, people that I had met. I was going to go to the Kleinborn Opera in 2020 with this lady. She was in the James Bond movie on Her Majesty's Secret Service back in the 60s.

And I had the plans to go to the stands, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, et cetera, with MIT travel alumni. travel, which I think has now been disbanded and shut down. I was going to go with you to Chile. That's right. That all happened, I'm sure. We'll catch the next eclipse down there someday. I don't know.

My concerns are kind of parochial. Actually, I'm kind of looking for something for our kids. It would be interesting. Maybe we'll have to start a school. So what we would like for our kids is a school where they have reasonably strong academics, a couple hours of physical activity every day, which schools have really cut down on, and no political indoctrination.

So at least here in Massachusetts, the schools have become these centers where they spend a lot of time trying to educate the kids about black lives matter, diversity and inclusion, which is absurd because these are in these suburbs where people have paid,

you know, multiple times the cost in order to get away from diversity. And so it would be nice to have a school that is concentrated on the academic mission rather than on this political mission. It's not that we're, it's not that really, it's not that I'm worried that our kids will be indoctrinated. It's just that now that the schools have this political mission, they've forgotten about academics. They're like, well, as long as we can keep some diversity and inclusion.

and about, you know, all the elements of the rainbow flag, it doesn't matter whether they, you know, learn to read and write. Most enterprises are only good at one thing, if that. So now that the school is a political environment instead of an academic one, the academics are truly terrible. So anyway, that would be the kind of thing that would be interesting. The schools that exist that have a lot of physical activity are mostly like these professional sports academies.

So they're great if you want your kid to become a professional tennis player. But if you don't need five hours a day of activity and training and or your kid is just not that coordinated, there's nothing left. So that's one goal, which is a pretty boring one. Maybe I should get that multi-engine C-plane rating. So I don't know. I don't have a great New Year's resolution, yes. And it would be good to get, I definitely, it's not good having more chin. and the Shanghai phone book.

Oh, God. Oh, on that one, that was an old one. It's a weird Al Yankovic reference, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, last couple of questions I want to ask you. If you've ever seen the movie 2001, a space odyssey, you will surely recognize... What's that? Uh-oh, I didn't understand the last half hour.

That's okay. You have to... This is just going to refer to the first 42 seconds. when these primates in the savannah of ancient Africa come upon this mysterious monolith, this black obelisk-looking thing that is really put there by some unseen, menacing, maybe benevolent civilization billions of years ago to be deciphered when humankind is ready to read the writing on such an obelisk. MIT alum Richard Feynman described what he,

would want to put on such an object a billion year time capsule and he called it uh he said if in some cataclysm all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed in one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures which statement would contain the most information in the fewest words i won't tell you what he said but i want to know what would you put on a billion year long-lasting time capsule oh probably probably maxwell's equations you know know, if you think about it, actually, you know, Americans somehow believe that the U.S. is the center of science. And no offense to you, being an American scientist, but really the stuff that we actually

need and depend on on a daily basis is pretty much all coming from England or Europe. You know, so if you want heat in your house, light in your bedroom, TV, you know, all the things that people love, computing even, you know, people think of computing as an American thing, but it was all developed in parallel over in England. So I think for me, electricity, an understanding, a lot of other stuff can be kind of worked out from intuition, you know, if you watch a coconut fall from a palm tree, then you'll probably pick up the idea of gravity soon enough. but electricity and magnetism is fundamental to everything that we love and it's not intuitive. So that's what I looked on there is Maxwell's equations. And then the update of them, which is more relevant in my daily life are the Yangmills equations, which govern subatomic nuclei.

But that is admittedly more of my persuasion, but those were created many, many decades ago. So the last question I want to ask you, harkens to the name of this podcast, which is one of Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous three laws. His first one being, what we open the show with, read in his voice, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. His second law will appeal to the contrarian greenspun, which is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And the third law is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. So that's kind of the origin of the name of this podcast, the Into the Impossible podcast. So I want to ask you, what was very mysterious about life, the universe, and everything to a 20-year-old Philip, but as you matured and grew older, through your courage, your convictions, et cetera, now is eminently doable.

because you went in to the impossible. Advice to your former self? I don't know if I have a good technical one for that. You know, I do think people overestimate what they can know, I guess. When I was 20 years old, I was probably more sure about the things that I knew. I mean, as you've seen from John Ionidis, right? most published research findings are false. You know, even things that are supposedly scientific are actually, you know, should be doubted.

So I think that's, I see so much of this, you know, in politics around corona plague, people express certainty about something that they really shouldn't be certain about. So I think as I've gotten older, I've become more willing to believe and understand that other people can have a different perspective. It's equally valid to mind. It may reflect their personal situation. You know, before we were talking about, we were talking about this before, you know, the merits of lock. down are going to seem very different to somebody who lives in a 6,000 square foot suburban house compared to somebody who lives with four other people in a two-bedroom apartment in the

middle of the city somewhere. But I think a lot of people lose sight of that and they're saying, well, you know, science proves that I'm right. But often what they're saying is, you know, it's about something that's cool. It's right for me. So I'll just extrapolate to the rest of humanity. It also has to be right for everybody else. Survivorship bias that comes into play.

Well, Phil, I want to thank you very much for being an inspiration to me and to I know millions of people around the world who have benefited from your curious mind in the best sense of the word. And I can think of no one more fitting to hold the mantle of today's guest on the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination than the very imaginative Dr. Philip, Greenspun. He is a doctor. He is not a medical doctor, but he does prescribe medication on demand. And his address is, no, I'm just kidding. Phil, where can people find you online if you have to steer folks to

a couple of your resources? Where would you want them to go? First of all, my brother's a real doctor. I said, I have that right on my resume, so you can't call me Dr. Greenspun. And anybody else who who introduces themselves as doctors at risk of me saying, I'm so glad that you're here because I need my fentanyl prescription renewed. But yes, you can come to my modestly named website, philop.greensfund.com. Okay, great. And then you have a Twitter account, which...

I just fucked up to my blog. I'm still, I'm a web dinosaur, so I'm not a Twitter achiever like you. That's right. Well, from all of us at the Microsoft Paperclip headquarters, Phil, we're on the West Coast. you're going to be cracking open the champagne before we do. Say hello to 2021. And I hope you have a safe, a happy, productive flying career in 2021. I know everything else will work out fine. I'm not going to tell you to stay sanitized because I know you already are. And I really want to thank you.

It's so much fun talking to you. And hopefully you'll make this a traditional comeback every so often. And you and I will speculate and ruminate on the news of the universe. Thank you so much, Phil, from going Into the Impossible. You're welcome. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. 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. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.