Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Rebuilding Higher Education for the 21st Century | Brian Keating & James Altucher (#319)

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Dr. Brian Keating and celebrated bestselling author and podcast host James Altucher, discuss and debate ideas for new higher learning frameworks, focused on remote and metaverse learning and the concept of virtual mentors - 3D-rendered avatars of interactive historical figures built using large language models and natural language processing. Dr. Brian Keating - the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences (CASS) in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego - has been working in higher education for 25 years. Still, today he's facing an identity crisis. Brian has become disillusioned with how the university and accreditation system is organized, and he's looking to reinvent how higher education looks, costs, and interacts with students.  Mentioned in the episode: petersonacademy.com/ www.uaustin.org Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join To advertise with us, contact [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Education is skyrocket. The price has gone up 300% in just the past 25 years since I've been in higher education. And is the value any better? I'd argue it's worse. Science as a whole, I'm worried about it. Look at Scientific American. It used to be my favorite journal of all time. And in the back, there'd be a section called amateur scientists,

which taught me how to make rockets and a synchotron accelerator and a bubble chamber. And then I'll do all sorts of other things in chemistry. Then there was Martin Gardner who had the section on puzzles and games and every now and then he talked about chess. That magazine is a shrill political rag now where they talk about their presidential endorsements and they talk about gender identity and all this culture war bull crap. And it's I can't even look at it. I don't want anything to do with it. It's so obviously politically motivated.

I don't see the benefit at all to science. You look at any of the other magazines, it's also becoming true. And so science as a whole, I think, is suffering. Is higher education broken? Is it too expensive, too antiquated? Are students wasting their time and money? Our universities run by an academic cartel keeping prices high and limiting access? Is diversity, equity, and inclusion falling short?

In this collaborative episode of Into the Impossible and the James L. Tucher show, Brian Keating and James L. Tuture discuss and debate the ways that post-secondary education is failing and idea it in perspective solutions. They advocate for more accessible, cost-effective access to education and credentialing. Please keep into the impossible at the top of your feeds by subscribing and following. For more in-depth, free, fun, and education, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, where you can see the video version of our other episodes with James L. Tucher and a galaxy of intellects. Please subscribe there too. Do you want to hear more provocative, open discussions?

Let us know what you think in the form of a review, like this one, from Apple Podcasts. From KG&BK, a fun and exhilarating an adventure into the cosmos. Brian's podcast and YouTube channel are great fun for the layman to be introduced to fascinating insights, exhilarating theories, and mind-expanding ideas. And now, rebuilding higher education for the 21st century, with Brian Keating, and James Altutcher. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please.

Brian, thanks for joining us on the podcast. How are you doing? You're all over the place these days. Yeah, I've become a, you know, multimedia, you know, extravaganza. What are you doing at Berkeley? At Berkeley, I was there for a meeting for the Simon's Array, which is the precursor to the Simon's Observatory. That's in Chile.

We've got three massive telescopes. Each one is about 10 feet in diameter. And we're looking for the signs of the early universe. So every year before the pandemic, we'd get together and meet up in person, usually in San Diego or Berkeley. They're the two leading institutions that are running the project. And just to kind of explain, because we've gone over this through the years, the way a telescope would detect. the early universe. The early universe is surrounded by like the Big Bang, 300,000 years after the Big Bang, this very thick plasma of hydrogen and I guess what else?

Helium and lithium, like the basic atoms. The plasma is just the protons and the neutrons or sorry, you know, mainly atoms. That's right. And so I just want to explain it so that you could correct me if I'm wrong. So I want to make sure I understand. These telescopes are so refined. they're not looking for light waves because the plasma is too thick to let light through, but they're looking for gravitational waves.

And if gravitational waves could be found from 300,000 years earlier than this plasma, and just to put it in context, the universe is like 15 billion years old. So the first 300,000 years is like an instant. But if you can find, detect these gravitational waves, it'll give us a lot of clues as to how the universe began. Up until now, the Big Bang is really just a theory. It's not proven. Well, it's maybe as accepted.

Let me stop you right there. Let me stop you right there. Stop me. So you can't, we don't prove theories. This is a huge, huge misconception. My job or any scientist job in the physical science is not to make proofs. The problem is that when we talk about proving something in the vernacular or, you know, proven beyond a reasonable doubt and legalese, people think about a mathematical proof where you actually

can demonstrate that. If you add one to one, you get two. And that actually takes about 250 pages of rigorous mathematical analysis. You can't just say, oh, look at your fingers and do that. So it has to be built up from more primitive, more basic understandings. Okay. Proof is the wrong word. If you observe something a gazillion times and it's the same thing happens each time,

then you can have a high belief that the theorem is true. Correct. So relativity developed by Einstein is still just a theory, despite many instances of observing the theory in action. It doesn't work, though, at quantum levels in some cases. So that's why it's still just a theory. Or just gravity. You don't have, you know, go back to talk about cosmology and the big, you could just say

gravity. Every time I drop this crystal ball here, you know, it falls. But does that prove forever will always go down? No, of course not. So that what we do as scientists, my job in particular, and there's a lot of, you know, kind of murmurings in the Twitterverse about, you know, people like Michi Okaku and others, you know, who make these kind of outrageous claims about, you know, quantum computers now or string theory and all this stuff. And the problem with those kinds

of claims is that they're irrefutable. They're almost impossible to disprove, which is really the job of what I do as an experimental physicist. My job is to go out and disprove everything else and not to be predisposed to believing something is right or wrong. Of course, I'm a human being, So I've got natural predilection for certain models of how the universe should work. And then I've got needs too. You know, I'm a man, James. You know, I have needs. And one of those needs is to get tenure or to get, you know, a job for my graduate student after she defends her PhD thesis or to get...

What's her PhD thesis about? Like, what kind of PhD pieces do you manage? So what they're mainly working on are these experiments that I'm the co-leader of. One is called the Simon's Array and one is called the Simon's Observatory. And so no one person can do all the work that's required to achieve the goal of that instrument, which is to, as you said, make maps and images from the early universe using light that instead of revealing the light itself, reveal the presence of a more primordial signal that would be indicative, but not prove, you know, this positive of the origin of the universe, a singularity, a big bang emerging from nothing. And that will be manifest by a different type of signal called the gravitational wave that we can detect indirectly. So her thesis is on constructing some component of it, maybe a detector, maybe how the data are analyzed. Those are the roles and kinds of thesis topics that my students work on.

And so it's interesting because let's say, and this goes to very, your research involves very fundamental. issues, like how the universe began. And if you detect gravitational waves or something even before, or, you know, further away, I guess you would describe it than the gravitational waves. It changes our theory of the Big Bang. Like, for instance, there's also the theory that there was a universe before this one, that they had a big bang, and then they had a big contraction into a singularity, and then there was a new Big Bang, and that happens over and over again for infinite universes. So is it possible for you to detect the universe before this one if that theory is true? So what we're able to do is essentially when you have a theory that makes a prediction about something,

you can either observe that thing that was predicted or you can fail to observe it. Now, just because you fail to observe these waves of gravity, it doesn't mean that all the alternatives are correct. I mean, after all, there's an infinite number of alternatives, right? The universe could have been cyclical, varying throughout spaces. in time and contracting and expanding in big bangs and big crunches in memorial, or it could happen once, or it could happen 472 times. In other words, there's an countable number of infinite possibilities that the universe could not be a single big bang.

Does that make sense? Yeah. And you know, it's interesting because most of the time when people have theories about how the universe began, we ridicule them and say, oh, faith-based theories don't mean anything. It's just a cartoon version of what really happened. And yet when you throw in like, oh, there's every single possible world exists in parallel because of, you know, string theory and quantum mechanics and there's 12 dimensions. Like how come this isn't ridiculed, like religion and it was? It was ridiculed for a generation.

So the Big Bang emerged. This is something very interesting. And I've been working on this with my undergraduate cosmology class, which will dovetail into a conversation. of my disillusion with traditional academia, which will then segue for us into a conversation of new models, new academies that are alternatives to the traditional academic model that I've been a part of for the last 40 years or so. Okay. So this is the roadmap of today's podcast. Oh, thank you for, thank you for outlining my podcast. I have my own questions, but you go ahead. Well, yeah, who's who's running the ship, okay? So, uh,

So when I teach cosmology, I'm often hamstrung by the fact that I really enjoy talking about the philosophical, the theological, the metaphysical overtones of what we do. On the other hand, I'm not paid to talk about, you know, the religious implications or even the history of the subject. So I have to do it kind of surreptitiously. I'm not proselytizing. I'm not saying you should believe in ball or, you know, or whoever you want to believe in. All I'm saying is I want to get into what is the underlying motion. motivation that makes cosmology interesting. It's very different from those friends of mine, God love them, that study superconductivity. You don't have like somebody looking at a quantum computer and saying, well, this philosophically will change the way that we look at our relationship to a creator or to a stoic way of live. No, it's only in cosmology, the only branch of hardcore physics that really deals with origins and so forth. And it's akin to people that deal in the origin of life and the origin of consciousness. Those are things that have a boundary that always rubs up and agitates against

the biggest picture questions, which are the things that got me interested in the subject to begin with. So why the heck can't I talk about the very thing that inspired me to become a practicing card-carrying cosmologist? So I asked myself that the dean will- Do you get a card, actually? Yeah, I do. I have my card over here. So James, you'll someday get something like this. This is a YouTube play button. When you hit 100,000 subscribers as I have, humble brag you get a silver encrusted plate from uh with a document signed by none other than susan wojikki who you probably have had on the podcast or you know who she is she's the CEO of

youtube i do not know her on the way out she was married to one of the google guys or their brother sir yeah so um so she's stepping down but anyway she sent me this nice letter congratulations mazzletov and uh you know here's your play but this one means a lot more to me because this was made by my 10 year old and when I had like, you know, 8,000 subscribers. So I'll never get rid of this. The other one, you know, I think it's under a coffee cup somewhere in my office, in the other room of my office. Anyway, all this is to say that when I'm teaching, I don't bring into this perspective

that leads to the big picture questions that made me become a cosmologist. And instead, I do that on my channel. I do that on my podcast. I talk about the big picture, um, the discoveries, and theories and thoughts like you and I are always talking about. And that's interesting to you as a lay person, educated lay person, a bright lay person, but you're not a professional cosmologist, right?

You're a cosmetologist. We've known that from your hair. My wife is a cosmetologist. Oh, that's great. Yeah, she does your hair too, Robin. So what I'm trying to get at is that we as cosmologists have this incredible script. We're given this incredible script that could,

you know, could be the presage of a previous universe to our universe, a multiverse, in addition to our universe, a big crunch, a big rip. And we never talk about that. We just talk about, well, here's a partial differential equation. Here's how you solve it. And so in the course of the last few months, I've really been trying to figure out, you know, as an identity crisis has come upon me in middle age, as sort of, you know, where do I want to go in terms of educational space? What do I want to do? To promote you. What do you mean an identity crisis has come over you? Like, what does that look like for you? So I think you should think about your tombstone almost every day. I'm sure you've talked about this as

Ryan Holiday, who you did a great show. No, actually, Brad Meltzer has a famous article or a TED talk. Oh, yeah. Where he encourages people to do exactly this. Yeah, that's right. And so, and you guys had a great podcast years ago about it. You have such a good memory. So the theory that you should kind of maintain is either write your will and testament while you're still alive or somehow crystallize what you would want on your tombstone. And for me, it would probably just have, you know, three things. It would have, you know, it would have scientist. It would have father and or married father. And it would have, you know, teacher. So teaching is a huge part of my identity. Not only professionally. I mean, you're a teacher, but you're not a professor. You're not paid. You're

job description in the ordinary parlance and conception is not to be a teacher. You do teach and many people teach. My wife is a great teacher better than me in some ways, but she's not a professional teacher. But my identity is concerned with that. And it means teaching people of all different kinds. And what I found from being here for 19 years in San Diego is that the fulfillment of that one third of the triad is just not there in the current constituent of how the university system is organized. In other words, even in cosmology classes, the students are

tremendously concerned about their grades, about what's going to be in the midterm, about homework solutions, and they'll copy down by hand, you know, the equations that I write by hand on the board or on a screen, and then they'll go in the book and read the same thing. And they're basically worried they're going to miss out on a point of their homework or their grades. And that's natural. I'm not, I'm not besmirching that. But at the same time, James, I offer what are called office hours. You probably remember them. I actually never went to office hours as a student, but I also never missed a class.

So I'm teaching 45 of the most brilliant kids in the universe and the university as well. And they're 45, they don't have to take this class. You can graduate, you can even be a physics major or an astronomy major. You don't have to take this class called cosmology. And yet, and yet on any given day of class, There will be 25 kids in class at most. And I've done things to kind of increase participation that none of my colleagues for decades have ever done.

I do experiments in the class. I do explosive fire breathing experiments. I bring in liquid nitrogen to freeze superconductors to teach about phase transitions. I light off huge explosions, you know, demonstrate black body radiation. Were you a tinkerer as a kid? Did you like take apart the radio and put it back together? I took apart my, you know, my Jetta, you know, my 1970, Ford and Volkswagen, you know, a beetle. I was loving to tinker with things when I was a kid.

I built, you know, like telescope parts and I tinkered with computers, which is becoming more and more, you know, of a kind of, you know, passion project for me with the advent of AI, which maybe we'll get into later on. But in terms of our, of what really drove me, yeah, it was tinkering with things. But look, these are not experiments. These are canned experiments that are used to demonstrate, topics in undergraduate physics. So there are things in optics, in electromagnetism. But some of the professors who are, let's say a theorist is teaching about cosmology. One of my colleagues is a theorist. She'll teach about, you know, the theory of, you know, how barions were formed.

Anyway, but she's maybe won't do an experiment to demonstrate, well, here's, you know, here's an isotope of water called heavy water. And the extra neutron on each proton that makes up heavy water came from the Big Bang. It wasn't. wasn't made in some factory somewhere. And we can actually estimate the temperature of the Big Bang James from the amount of deuterium atoms inside this glass of water. And then I'll say it has different properties, because it has an extra neutron.

It's going to be twice the molecular weight of hydrogen in those H2O molecules. So it will be more than twice the weight. But that doesn't make up the bulk of the weight of water. The oxygen does. So I go through all these and then I say, well, here's an ice cube made of heavy water, which I bought myself, which costs 2,000.

you know, an ounce to buy. Can you drink heavy water? You can. In fact, I have a video on my channel where I do just that. I drink heavy. I do a taste test, James, of the five different types of water ranging from free water that you get at Starbucks. It's a taste and price comparison. It's called I drank the most expensive water in the universe. The first water comes from Starbucks, and it's a little known fact. You go into Starbucks. They have to give you. They must give you a glass of water for free. And so that's the cheapest water in the universe. You go in, you get a cup. Sometimes if you're not in California, you actually get a real straw. So it's a wonderful thing that we should take advantage of. That's the cheapest water. Next cheapest water on my tasting flight

was Fiji water. Then I tasted this other type of water called Berg water, not named after one of our fellow tribal members. This is actually cast off of an iceberg in northern Canada's Hudson Bay. And they ship this block of ice and it has like it's incredibly pure it has no minerals it's forty dollars a bottle on amazon uh then after that there's heavy water which you can buy she's like 200 dollars an ounce and it and it doesn't like what if a different effect on the body does it have like heavy when you drink every like do you pee out heavy water when you drink it well yeah yeah i mean the water in your pee will be heavy water but you don't distinguish there's no uh additional effect on the human body it's not toxic there are if you drink

Does it taste different? It doesn't taste any different. No, it's chemically identical. The chemical properties of- Why has someone never made like some weird brand like heavy water? I think we have our first idea of the show, James. It's for people that are, you know, painfully underweight like me. You know, it's, I'm really trying to bulk up.

So I need. Water. I can see it now. Mix it up with some, you know, some jaco greens in the morning. Yeah. And so then after heavy water, which I said is, Then there's actually tritium water, and that's, that is dangerous to drink because that's radioactive. That has radioactive isotope of hydrogen called tritium, and that tritium gives off neutrons and shoots out beta rays and does all sorts of bad stuff to you.

So you don't want to drink that, and it's a controlled substance, but you could drink it. You wouldn't die like instantly. It's just in a large amount. You know, it would not be safe. But you could buy it. That's like $1,000 or more per milliliter. So these are really tiny amounts. And they're trying to use tritium to make nuclear fusion occur and so far.

So it's a controlled substance to some level in the National Regulatory Committee for Nuclear Materials Control. And it's radioactive. And then last but not least, I took, when I was at the South Pole, you know, I've been there twice for a couple of months, maybe total. And on each trip, I would go there and I couldn't resist, like taking some of the snow that had been there and then melting it and drinking it. And then the last time I was there, which is over 10 years ago, I bought an algin bottle in the canteen and from the store there, which is, you know, only open three months of the year and you need to get to the South Pole first, which only 45 people might be there right now. And so I scooped up some ice from the, from the ice sheet. Remember that South Pole is basically made up of snow that's fallen over, you know, 20,000 years or more. And it's built up an ice cap that's almost two miles thick.

And so the very top is just snow and you can walk or cross-country ski on it. So I scoop up with my Naljean bottle and I scooped it, filled it up completely full. And I brought it home with me in my luggage. So this is water from melted snow at the South Pole. And, you know, it gets reduced by a factor of about 10. So it's almost very little of it. That water costs, well, it costs you, you know, total probably about $50,000 for me to get that water. You and every other person that pays their taxes out there.

Because the only way to get that water is to fly on a military cargo plane from San Diego to or on a commercial plane from San Diego to New Zealand. And then from New Zealand to Antarctic's coast, on a military plane that's owned by the New Zealand National Air Guard, which has a flightless bird called a kiwi painted on it, not very inspiring. But then you go from the coast of Antarctica by a plane that's flown by people from New York. state in the New York Air National Guard, and they fly me in a C-130, which is a giant massive cargo plane with skis on it. No, not wheels, but skis. And then you let, so this, you know, one way is probably $50,000. So this is the most expensive water in the universe. And it's all because I went down there to study the origin of the universe, which then produces the type of heavy water that we can then use as a fossil to unravel what were the physical conditions like in the early universe. So

the reason I went to the South Pole was to make a cosmic microwave background. experiment called Bicep, which we've talked about. And that was the subject of my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, available everywhere. Books are sold. Does not come with a forward. I always recommend it, by the way. Thank you. Does not come with a forward written by a Nobel prize winner and also James Altoucher, like my second book, think like a Nobel Prize winner inspired by James. Perfect example of imposter syndrome when I write the forward to a book about the Nobel Prize. alongside another Nobel Prize winner, Barry Barish. Yes.

And I've got an interview with him coming up as well. In person, we did an in-person interview. So anyway, I don't know how we got on this tangent, but the point is I'm doing these experiments in my class, which is a theoretical class, but I'm doing lab experiments, not just boring stuff. And I can't get more than 50% of class to participate, but wait, it gets worse. It gets worse, James. These are some of the most brilliant kids in the world, but they're not very good financially, okay, for a bunch of reasons. One, if they're out of state and they pay all the full freight in states a little bit less, it's a lot less, maybe 10,000. But if you're out of state, you're coming from Florida, Georgia, or wherever, you pay $72,000 full freight, tuition, fees, room and board, you know, books and everything.

It's $72,000. Princeton is $75,000 a year. And I think we give just the same quality education. So, you know. By the way, by the way, I just want to mention something about. about these tuitions. Tuition prices have risen faster than inflation every single year since student loans have been available, like since the mid-60s, whatever the Student Loan Act was,

that inflation is basically, you know, it's not like tuition's, oh, it's normal, tuition's rise to from 60,000 to 75,000. No, they've been rising much faster inflation every single year, not an average, every single year, which shows again, what a scam colleges and why it is worth rethinking what is what are you teaching here are you are you are you the product or are you the the the service provider the educator exactly 100% right and for me

the the challenge has always been that I am teaching and I'm a member of this very exclusive guild called university professors and at the same time I have a I am a member of this you know cartel that is price fixing I mean I just told you that Princeton end, which is Ivy League school, you know, sometimes consider the best school in the world. It's the second best Ivy League school after Brown University, of course. And all these reasons, you know, based. You go to Brown?

I forget. Yeah, I went to Brown for graduates. I lived. I grew up in Princeton. Oh, oh, you did. That's right. Yeah, you were right outside. So anyway, we're basically price fixing.

We raise our prices. And guess what, James? San Diego State, you know, our arch rival, cross-town rivals, which is part of the California state system, not the University of California. California system. They also charge about these same kinds of, in other words, once the cartel fixes its prices like OPEC and it never goes down. There's never been a reduction. During COVID, when I was teaching on Zoom, you know, for three months wearing a mask, I don't know why. Why was that wearing a mask? But that time, I was, we were still charging the exact same amount. We just didn't get room and board, but, you know, whatever. So the university seems to have survived. We got huge buildings going up. Princeton is now. what Malcolm Gladwell calls a perpetual motion machine in that it never has to raise a dime again its endowment is growing the the president just bragged about how faster endowments growing in the last year it grew 12 percent um which is you know six times with the you know what the target rate of

inflation is and maybe it's 50 percent higher than the actual inflation rate anyway they're bragging about that and how important is to have college and some article op ed that they wrote so they're fixing their prices. We're fixing our prices. We're matching these prices. Has the education gotten better? Have we used new and innovative tools? But I'm really not bringing this up to rag on the universities. We can do that some other time. I'm always happy to talk like that about how we do have a monopoly and our main job is to squelch competitors and make exclusivity and scarcity have a higher price tag. And then that's what we do in the university system. In addition to being conscious, and caring attendant professors.

But now I'm actually criticizing my students. And I know they all listen to your show. But they are throwing away probably $500 a class that they don't attend. And if they do that for, you know, there's only 20 classes. Each one's a two hour, you know, 90 minutes long. They're throwing away thousands and thousands of dollars. But wait, it gets worse. Because we also have office hours.

and office hours where I will literally sit in my office, which is right next to class, right before class, and I will sit there and I will talk about anything they want. We can talk about the homework, we can talk about what it's like to go to graduate school, is the lifestyle of a professor really worth, the sacrifice, the hunger games that you and I talked about, the very first podcast we ever did, and we'll talk for, I could talk to them for a full hour. I get two. So I get a click-through rate of about 4%.

And again, I can get paid. What do you mean? Oh, you mean, out of all your students, two of them, two out of 50, come to your office hours. And of the people who come to your office hours, how many are just trying to kiss ass to get better grades and how many have legit questions? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

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and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. slash college PC. I mean, it's always the same to girls, women that come to the class, and they're really smart and they're fun to talk to.

And we'll talk mainly about big picture topics. I don't think that they're there to, you know, kind of be obsequious or what have you. They are interested, but, you know, they talk about the homework, and that's fine. I'm really happy. When they come, James, by the way, I give them a signed copy of the book that bears your name on the cover. So I want that book to be spread and read wide. And so every student that comes to my office hour, I give them a signed copy of Think

like a Nobel Prize winner, forward by Dr. James Altutcher. And that doesn't even entice them. That costs me $16 a pop every time I give it away. I'm paying for it. The university doesn't buy them for me. But I wrote the book. I want the message to spread, and I want to influence students to do good things and to and be aware of the unwritten rules of science that we go through, including the imposter syndrome. Anyway, this is all to say that 90 plus percent, 96 percent of the students are throwing away tremendous amount of value. Not just the book. Okay, the book is condensation of 30 years of my wisdom and knowledge and 30 years of nine Nobel Prize winners, James Altucher, and others included.

So, but last but not least, you know, James, I've been paid a ridiculous amounts of money to go and give a speech in places. I've been paid, you know, all expenses paid, first class airfare for me, my family, my nanny, you know, we have to take a nanny somewhere internationally. I've gotten more than I, you know, more than my first five cars put together, you know, for a single speech that lasted 45 minutes. And, and it's where? What? Where? This was in Atlantis. This was in the Bahamas earlier this year. At a conference or like, why did they pay you?

No, it's a, it was a combined thing with like a charity foundation and a hedge fund. And I'm not supposed to talk about the details. So, but you can probably figure out. What did you talk about? I'm sorry for this interrupt. I'm just curious like, like what do hedge funds like this? Why are they paying like a physicist? Well, this particular hedge fund would have a deep interest in what I'm doing because they run a charity

as well. But, you know, other other funds have done this too. So they had me come in and speak about the biggest picture, philosophical questions of all that you could possibly ask in terms of why are we here? How do we get here? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? This is kind of a team building thing. It wasn't like how to maximize alpha and minimize beta. I mean, I wasn't talking about that. And so it was like an inspirational speech about the, you know, where these young philanthropists, Many of them are young philanthropists, things that they can get interested in that are outside the box that advance the human knowledge without necessarily advancing technology, although many of my students go on to jobs at these very same hedge funds. I've had students, you know, that go on to interview with places. And because the training as a physicist is the most broad and far reaching of all educations, I claim.

Even in terms of like writing and reading, if you do it right, if you read Richard Feynman, and you read Galileo and you read Marie Curie, you will have as well-rounded appreciation of the English language literature as, you know, reading just purely reading Shakespeare or Baldwin or whoever. Because to communicate well as those authors do, and other science authors too, modern or ancient, you will get a tremendous firsthand account

of what was going through a scientist's mind as he or she was making a discovery, which would then change the course of nature and the course of history and the course of technology. And that's just, in other words, you learn cosmology, but then you learn literature? That's pretty cool. I don't think the converse is true. If you learn literature, you don't learn cosmology. So, okay.

I want to roll it back, though, to you have this identity crisis that you're talking about. And I wonder, you know, I've had on, for instance, a guy, you know, Alan Lightman who kind of switched from being like a, a, great physicist to being a really amazing writer about physics. Like, he's written beautiful books for the past almost 30 years about physics. Einstein's Dreams, I think, was his first book that I read. And it's back in the early 90s. And so are you saying, like, this type of philosophical thinking is now more on top of mind? Or what's going on with you?

For me, what's been happening is the intersection of science. and culture has become very, very important to me because I'm worried that the prestige of science has been potentially irreparably damaged due to the pandemic and the response and the lockdowns and everything else. But science as a word, I don't think physics reputation has been ruined. I think maybe the word science, people now, when you say question the science, it sort of determines whether you're a Democrat or Republican, the tone you use to say it, which is ridiculous. And so I agree with you, but physics itself, I don't feel the reputation of physics has changed.

If anything, physics has recovered since its fascination with string theory. Well, yeah, but this fascination only intensifies when you have people like Michi Okaku and Brian Green and others that go on and extoll the virtues of these 11-dimensional vibrating beads of energy that if written down would allow us to know the mind of God. and as Stephen Hawking said about string theory. No, I disagree respectfully because physics is at the core of all this stuff. So here's one example. Climate change. Climate change is the description of atmospheric phenomena on a rotating planet that orbits around a medium, you know, G2 type subdwarf star.

And there's a whole host of astrophysical and physical impact in these things. and the question of the facundity of life on the earth and the future of life on Earth. Then we have things that invoke, you know, computation, quantum computation, artificial intelligence, the web networks, simulation hypothesis, things like that we've talked about. Then you have the intersection of these with life outside of the Earth surface. Okay. But tell me again, like where, where? And I don't mean to interrupt this stuff.

You're right about all these things. I just want to know where you personally are feeling pain right now. So for me, the pain point is coming from a little bit of disillusionment with the kind of hunger or passion that young people have towards physics and science in general, that they are given the keys to this Ferrari. And they don't really understand why that's valuable rather than, you know, they're. just say, oh, there's like 4,200 pounds of aluminum and rubber and some glass. Instead of saying, no, no, no, that's true. That's what makes it up. But it's so much more powerful than just that because it can do so much more and it can

benefit society so much more. And by seeing the students who, you know, are kind of not taking advantage. And I'm not saying, I don't think I'm the greatest professor. I think I'm probably like the 17th best professor out of the top 10 professors that I know. And for that reason, I'm trying to learn from them. I'm asking them advice. I'm trying to be humble. I've been doing this for 19 years.

Plus, as a graduate student teaching assistant, it's about 25 years of my life devoted to teaching, studying the great teachers, both and interviewing them for my podcast and my books. And so I don't think I'm that great, but I don't think I'm that bad. And I'm trying innovative new approaches, including like doing experiments in a purely theoretical. It's outrageous to do that. And people are like, why are you doing that? Like, you know, one day I came in, it was actually April 20th.

I came in with what's called a hoot tube, which shows how sonic vibrations occur in a standing wave in a pipe as you heat it up. This thing's a large cardboard tube with various metal gratings inside of it. And it can set up a standing wave that sounds like a didgeridoo or whatever. But it was, and you have to light it with a blowtorch. And then that sets up oscillations depending on how hot you heat up the blowtorch. So it teaches thermal connection to sound. This is very cool. And as I'm doing it, and you have to hold this thing, and then I lit it.

And I'm like, sorry, you know, I didn't realize this, but it's 420. And this thing looks like an enormous bong. But there's no relationship between this. And that kids are all laughing. And it was all in good fun. But, you know, here I am. I'm trying to come up with innovative things. There's one other piece of depressing data that happened to me.

So last week, we had a survey that went out to all. my students and and they were able to fill out the survey and it's their only opportunity to provide a short answer. And I said to them, guys, look, I've won many, many awards in my life. I'm not saying this to brag. I'm not telling you this, James. You know I've lost more awards than I've won. But I've never won the award of best teacher at UCSD.

And that is my goal before I retire. I want to win that award. I want to do what it takes. I'm not, I don't mean I'm going to give everybody an A plus. No, I said, I want your honest feedback. I was very vulnerable with them. I said, I know I can do better. I know I'm doing okay, but I want it not only for the rest of this quarter, which is another five or six weeks to go, but also for future generations of students that will take the same class with me.

How can I do? What kind of lacunae flaws, gaps do I have? What things do you like? Do you like the experiments? And it's their only time they get asked to evaluate me twice. Once at the end of the year, which is like a Scantron form, just like, do you agree that this is a good professor? or yes or no. Like, it's just binary questions the whole way down. So I get no real signal to noise there. Instead, you get, you know, I get information, but it's not granular at the level that I'd be happy with. This and contradistinction last week, they were able to write little, you know, sentences about why is Brian a good or bad teacher? What do I want to see more of? How can we improve things? What do you think about the book? What are the short? Anyway, long story short. Out of 45 students, only two people filled out the survey. It's probably the same two people. that filled out the that come to my office hours and because the number is so low UCSD will not release

the survey results to me of the two people that submitted the survey results because you don't want them to yeah because they think you're going to figure it out or whatever right exactly and this is down from like 10 or 15 you know last year same size class roughly same caliber of students and I'm just like I'm working harder than ever to engage students to teach them things about you you know, why what they're doing is so interesting and so important that with the students that do come to class are mesmerized and they seem very interested, although who know the hell knows, the same students keep coming and the same students don't keep coming. I want to do better. I asked, I was vulnerable. Give me feedback.

Now, James, I can release a video and tomorrow we'll have 100,000 views. And I'm not bragging about that. And many of them watch my channel and they're just like, they love seeing me on your show. They've actually said that. They've seen me on Lex Friedman and Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and all these podcasts. And they're like, oh, you're so good at doing that. I'm like, then why don't you come to office? Like, I'll sit there and I'll talk to you about anything you want, anything in life.

And some of my colleagues are like, well, maybe they're intimidated by you because you're this YouTuber and whatever. And I'm like, I don't know if that's really true. Like I was intimidated to talk to you, James. You know, and the first time we ever met was, well, we met because we gave a TEDx talk together in San Diego in 2014, which I can't. I can't believe how long ago that was. I know nine years.

We met there. We lost touch. You had a couple of marriages. And then I went on Jordan Harbinger's show, not Jordan Peterson, Jordan Harbinger's show. And that took a long time to organize back in 2018. And I said, I just have one request. I'll never ask you for another introduction again. I really want to reconnect with James Altoucher because he's done so much for me psychologically.

He's stimulated so many ideas. He prompted me to become a stand-up comedian. then he prompted me to really go deep into the podcast. So here I am. And Jordan says hi, by the way. He's super busy, but he loves you. He's coming on soon again, I think. Oh, great.

Yeah, he's the place. So, and I'm like, when I had the opportunity to meet James, I didn't like, I wasn't like, oh, I'm not going to meet Jane. Like, thanks for the introduction. I'm not going to do it. Like, I was intimidated by you. You have this huge audience. And now the student has become the teat.

But now James, I feel like. you know, we've become friends. And so we lost out on that. And by not, if I would have not taken advantage of these opportunities. All this is to say that there's a couple of different dimensions that are causing disillusionment. One is that the students are not getting what they're paying for at a university and they're paying dearly. They're paying tremendous amount of money. And I don't just mean for cosmology and physics, as I obviously think it's the best education you could possibly get in STEM.

But that doesn't mean other forms of it. But I assume this is happening to other professors. like in literature and in um i mean so let me yeah and and sorry sorry to interrupt but it's fine it's your show i've given quite a few lectures at at colleges you know whether it's about entrepreneurship or investing or writing or the economy or whatever and one thing i've noticed is that and usually i'm speaking to like a big class like a class with more than 200 students in it so i don't know if that's like the average size of classes now or or whatever depends on the University obviously.

It depends on that class, yeah. Yeah. So one thing I've noticed over the past decade or so is that before people would sit there and they're looking at you. Now everybody's got their laptop open and they're kind of, I guess you would say multitasking, but I don't believe multitasking is a thing that exists. I think that's like a made up word. And look, I have to work really hard to get their attention.

Like they don't know who I am. They know roughly the topic and roughly. who I am because their professor introduces me. And I have to use all my skills. Like, it's the hardest public speaking I've ever done is speaking to a room full of students. And I, I'm, you know, I think I do a pretty good job. I have to use, like, the comedian skills. I have to use the public speaking skills. I have to use everything to get them to look up from their laptops and engage. And I can feel, you could feel they're engaged when they're engaged. So it's very hard for professors right now, I think, in schools, because you're right. Not

only are the students overpaying, but they're not really learning. They're just there to be there because they think they have to be there. It seems in most cases. It's not in every case. No, yeah, that's right. That's right. But you would think that an elective class in a sub-specialization, by the way, this is spring quarter. A lot of them are seniors and they're graduating and they're going on to graduate school. So they don't have to take this school. They already got into graduate school or they have a job offer. Very high levels of employment and employment satisfaction when you get a graduate degree in physics, an undergraduate degree in physics. An undergraduate degree in physics. So for all these reasons, you think, well, like, why did they sign up for the class?

It's like, I really want to get in better shape. I'm going to pay for a bunch of personal training classes, and I'm just not going to show up to any of them, but I'll pay for them. And worse than that, I'm going to go into debt. I'm going to go into tremendous debt that maybe will be paid off by Joe Biden or some taxpayers down the road, but probably not. You know, that might not happen. So I'm going to go into tremendous debt for my personal training classes. And I'm not even going to show up that's brain training, but I'm not going to show up. I'm not going to show up to that one-on-one consultation that Professor Keating could get $1,000 an hour in consulting fees if I wanted to. And so, you know, for these reasons, it's disillusioning to me.

And it's caused me to start to think about the model of education. Because, listen, the first major university in the Western Hemisphere was in Bologna, Italy, in the year 1080, the University of Bologna, go baloney sandwiches that was their mascot nobody knows that but it's true and uh and it's been a thousand years basically since that first university and you know what and you know you know the big reason why they started universities is who commits the most crimes yes men aged 18 to 22 yes and so the guards at this university were facing inward not outward they weren't protecting the students they were protecting the rest of the population from the quote unquote students getting out that's So previously they had sent them on to the crusades, but now it's like, oh, we can't keep killing people in the Middle East.

Let's just... That's right. That's why I was against the border wall in Mexico, which is nearby from here because, you know, someday, like the first income tax was, you know, 1% right? Now it's like up to 30 plus percent plus California plus, you know, this is pretty expensive. So Camels nose under the tent, in certain speak. So I'm worried the border wall, you know, eventually to be to keep Americans in. Like, forget about keeping, I mean, you know, half of my... you know, the people that I interact with on a daily basis are from Mexico or from Latin America.

I love them and it's great. But like, what if someday it's like, oh, the guards are keeping in just like they used to do with students? But you ever remember from Saturday Night Live, James, when it was funny? There was a segment called Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy. Yeah, yeah. So I remember one of those deep thoughts. And it reminds me of the university situation. And Jack said in the early days in ancient times, fly swatters,

were nothing more than a long stick with a flat piece of wood at the end to smack a fly. And like, my how things have chain. It's like, it's basically the exact same thing, right? Yeah, it's a long piece of stick. Maybe there's a piece of plastic on the end of it. And so I started to think, well, let's look at what were universities like a thousand years ago? Well, there was an older guy, usually it was a guy, sometimes a girl, I guess. There was an older guy and he would take a piece of chalk, you know,

And they had like a big stone wall and that person would like scratch off the chalk onto the wall. And I'm like, wow, you know, things have really changed, you know, in a thousand years. Can you think of anything from medicine to like any form of technology to anything that has changed so little compared to education? I really can't. I mean, yeah, you can have PowerPoint. You can have smart boards and actually my kids, you know, DASA. And I'm going to say the answer is yes, because when you, when you're using the, word education, you're referring to

what we always thought was education. You go to first through 12th grade, then college, then some graduate school, and so on. But now, education could mean a how-to YouTube video. Education could mean I went to

Coursera or Udemean or anything that says. Education could mean a how-to podcast, like kind of like how this one is. So I do think education because of the internet is amazing now. I'm in college education. I'm at college. Yeah, no, college education has not changed, but that led to the rise because

college education is, I don't want to say so bad because I don't want to make too many judgments on it. But because there's something lacking and people like you are having these identity crises, you know, things like Khan Academy and Coursera, they're, they're really excellent. Like I learned so much. Oh, yeah. I learned a tremendous amount from YouTube. I watch YouTube every night.

You know, I don't do anything else, you know, besides, uh, cavort with the misses. I'm not going to get into that. That's a different type of video education, James. But speaking, I'm just, I can only speak about what I know for sure. And then I can start to think about using innovations to improve that. But I would argue it, it's actually gotten much, much worse. There's nothing like it. In other words, medicine, I had a guest on, and he's one of the nine people that we interviewed. I interviewed in my book that you co-authored the forward to. His name is Carl Wyman. He won the Nobel Prize for Desmond. discovering exotic forms of matter. And he's really trying to reestablish and reinvent the way education

takes place for physicists. And it will be hopefully applicable elsewhere. And he told me that in his opinion, education today is at the same level of like bloodletting with leeches and so forth as in like middle age medicine. But I actually made the point to him, no, it's worse because the whatever you want to say, the cost of medical procedures in many realms has come way down. in some ways of course it's gone way up but but like take the cosmetic surgery uh you know you and i both had our brazilian butt lifts a few years ago and that price that was a great vacation that was great that was fun that was a good times james we got to go back for the other cheek we got to turn the other cheek next time so uh when when we did that it was of course the prices come down like more's

law uh as has dropped precipitously but and so in in contradistinction education is skyrocket as you said the price has gone up 300% in just the past 25 years since I've been in higher education. And is the value any better? I'd argue it's worse. I'd argue at least maybe to some extent there are many better professors than me. But, you know, this was true when I was a teaching assistant at Brown or at Stanford or Caltech. You know, the best students are always going to thrive. They're always great.

But, you know, the average student also needs to thrive in order for society as a whole to thrive. And that's so I've become you're saying that physics is being still has the is the rose of the sciences as it was called Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not but but science as a whole I'm worried about it because because we do hear things like look at a scientific American used to be my favorite Journal of all time and in the back there'd be a section called you know the called the amateur scientist which taught me how to make Rockets and a synchotron accelerator and a bubble chamber and and then I'll do all sorts of other things in chemistry. Then there was Martin Gardner who had the section on puzzles and games and every now and then he'd talk about chess.

That magazine is a shrill political, you know, rag now where they talk about, you know, their presidential endorsements and they talk about gender identity and all this culture war bull crap. And it's I can't even look at it. I've like, I block all their authors who are some of them used to be my, I've been on their podcast. I've been on Steve Mersky, you know, science talk. I block it now. I don't want anything to do with it. It's so obviously politically motivated. And I don't see the benefit at all to science.

So many people say, oh, look, but you look at any of the other magazines, it's also becoming true. And so science as a whole, I think, is suffering. And I worry most of all that my colleagues, let's take a colleague who's much better professor than I am, She's much more giving in it, but she still will only teach, let's say she has a hundred percent click through rate. Everybody answers a survey. Everybody comes to office hours. Everybody comes to class, and they're getting every penny out of their tuition. That's still only 45, you know, kids times, you know, say 30 hours of class time.

But let me ask you a question. Like, why can't just everybody learn from, you know, like I could take a physics class on Coursera pay like $10 instead of $12,000 for that class. And, you know, why can't education just change to something that we already have? Like I'm saying there are now fine places to get an education and they're online and they're more legit in many ways than college. Why can't that be the solution you're looking for? I think it can.

The problem is the model of accreditation. So a lot of things could be much better than they are. but for lawyers. And I know you have a lot of lawyers listening. And my brother's a lawyer and he listens. So let me make a point. When you look at, say, there's a device in my room right now. Actually, it's an Alexa.

So I can say Alexa and it won't go off because I changed it to be not using that word. So now I have it the following very, very winsome name. Computer. Who is James Altoucher? James Altutcher is an American hedge fund manager. author, podcaster, an entrepreneur

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Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. So now imagine you're in your doctor's office. I had Eric Topol on a couple years ago during the pandemic's early stages talking about and he's written books about, you know, the doctor, the patient will see you now. It's all about revolutions and medicine. And I said, how come there's not like an Alexa device sitting in the back as you're talking to the patient? You know, I had a consultation, just like an annual consultation with my doctor. over the phone this morning. I'm driving. You know, he's got his iPhone. And I'm like, it was like

14 minutes. It was sorry, it was four minutes long. And I got a $250 bill for it. And I don't know if he's going to follow up. I didn't know like when he said, well, you got to come in and have that that cyst on your butt lift because of the butt lift, James. The complication rate is very high. And so you got to have that looked at. I don't know if I'm going to get a call from a, from a nurse and they're going to tell me I have to make an appointment. But if I had a very intelligent, you know, chatbot sitting right there with him and with me, then they could fight it out and say, well, like, you know, he mentioned getting, uh, you know, getting 70 hour x-ray on your butt. So make sure he follows up and gets that ordered or you could get, you know, the cyst could

pop. I don't know. I want to get too disgusting. But the point being, they don't have that because of like HIPAA regulations and it's not, you can't secure privacy. That comes out. Or here's another example, pilots. When you're flying across the country, every time you stop at an airport, you have to dial in their local weather for that airport and any particular obstructions on the runway. There's a deer on the runway. There's a plane that popped the tire. You won't know that when you took off. If you call them, you know, it could be right, have happened the plane that's landing before you in my little Cessna. So I'm coming in for a landing and there's, holy crap, there's a plane. I have to be familiar with it. So to do that, 10 or 15 minutes before I'm landing, I have to dial

in by hand on a radio, an analog radio from the 1960s, take my eyes off of the outside. side world, take my hands off of the control wheel, and dial in this number. Then I have to listen for two minutes. Each broadcast, the weather takes two minutes. There's a special code they tell you. Then they tell you about any notices. You have to be aware of any obstructions. If the airport's open, and while I'm doing that, I can't talk to anybody else. I'm 100% focused on that. Now, the plane knows where I'm going. I've got a GPS inside the plane, so it knows where it's going. Why can't it call up and have just computers talk back and forth and just put visually up, we can read 60 times faster than we can listen. So I could read these signals and it would just pop up,

it's safe to land, just give me a flag. Again, the FAA is rotten with lawyers. And because of that, it's very vulnerable to shutdowns has happened a couple months ago when the system went down and planes were grounded across the country cost billions of dollars because this totally antiquated system that requires analog radios to be tuned by hand and listen to for two minutes. It's taking attention off of the cockpit and onto, you know, something esoteric while you write something down by hand on a piece of paper. It's crazy. Yeah. So education now. So let's get to education. So that's made me think about, well, what can we do with education? First of all, you encourage me to make the first ever audiobook by Galileo. And I did that with a friend of the show, Carlo Revelli,

who's been on your show many times, and Frank Wilczek, the Nobel Prize, and Fabiola Giannati and James Gates and my friend Lucio. We recorded it. Nathan, who's listening and editing right now, who's instrumental in editing the audio book, 22 hours long. You can get a free copy if you were one of my Twitter subscribers, and I will send you a free copy of 22 hours of blood, sweat, and tears.

But you hear Galileo's, molyfluous, well, my voice, and Carlo's voice, but you hear the ideas that span four generations that determine that the Earth is not the center of the cosmos that ushered in the Copernican Revolution. that then made our way into understanding as we venture out into the universe. So you can hear that. Now I started to think because I got the data, the raw data, in other words, the text of Galileo, in a word document that's 800 pages long, and it's broken out by character and so forth.

I could dump that into a large language model. And then better than that, you must have had this question posed by you and to you a thousand times. James, who would you like to invite for dinner? What would you like to have dinner with? What any celebrity, any historical figure? Have you ever been asked that? You don't have to tell me who it is, but yeah. Okay.

So you've been asked that. Now, I ask you, James, what if you could actually have that person with you? Would that be cool to have dinner prepared by a chef in your home with your friends? For me, it would be Galileo and a 3D rendering of Galileo that you could interact with. You could say, well, like, how did it feel when your daughter died in 1632 when, you know, before you did? And like out of that, what was the impact of losing its every parent's nightmare? And like, and talk to him as a person because I have a million of his words. So we have a million impressions of digital imprints, of thumbprints, of his mind.

And and with Einstein, we could do that. With Archimedes, we could do that. We could go back to, you know, tribal leaders in sub-Saharan Africa. We could do anything, right? So why aren't we using that? As I said, I'm a middling teacher at best. But Galileo is a great teacher. Why am I teaching about balls rolling down inclined planes when he could do it better than anybody?

Because he was the first person to ever think of doing that, of stopping time or slowing time down so that it could be measured by crude measuring instruments that were available at the time. Wouldn't that be a better person to teach than Brian Keating? So we're sclerotically confined in the educational system that is charging, you know, Hermes-like prices, you know, for something that is becoming more. and more as you say commoditized. Why can't we make that model flip? And I think it's because of this accreditation process. And I'll explain what's happening with that. So I've been in a conversation with two new forms of education. One is called Peterson Academy. And it's run by Jordan Peterson,

who I've gotten to know very well over the last few months. And the other one is called University of Austin, Texas. And neither one is like super firmed up in terms of like exactly how I might assist them in their mission, but both are doing very innovative approaches to the learning experience. But the biggest impediment is, again, legal. They cannot get accredited until they've graduated a graduate class. Why do you need accreditation? Well, for graduate school, you need accreditation. Like, to get into physics graduate school, you need an undergraduate degree. But this seems to me, like kind of a scam like, like who gives accreditation? The schools themselves, they form a cartel and they

it's not like it's not like the law does it it's just the school say hey we're going to find one other thing we're going to charge people for yeah Freeman Dyson was my first podcast guest ever progenitor of the Dyson sphere the explicator of quantum mechanics the nobel true Nobel loser unlike me

who wasn't quite as close as he was and Freeman my first guest sadly departed three years ago but he didn't have a PhD and he was at the Institute for Advanced study rubbing shoulders with Einstein, you know, and, uh, and, uh, the, the folks over there for Decker Wheeler and everybody. So, uh, no, you don't need one to do research, but I can't tell you a single scientific paper that has been that I've read that's, let alone not had a bachelor's degree, but didn't have a PhD. It is just not, it's not, there, you know, obstacles to that,

that seem to be insurmountable. And whether it's a way of sorting and and credentialing, and whether that's because of this cartel that sets its own prices, that fixes across state lines, and does all sorts of things that would be illegal if the mafia did it, somehow these universities are getting away with it. And I'm part of the problem. I'm not like going to my chancellor and saying, you know, up yours, I'm not going to take a dime until you lower the prices. But these new institutions are Jordan Peterson and Peterson Academy, which is going to be completely nonpolitical. It's going to have classes about philosophy, psychology, physics.

require a PhD to teach no no it doesn't even require you know that you're a professor anywhere same with uh university of of austin texas for peter bagasian who you've had on the show i think i introduced you guys yeah yeah yeah very smart guy he's one where did he end up because last time i spoke to him he had just quit oregon state university because of an issue there political issue there yeah again so the diversity and equity inclusion you know squad came after him and he quit portland state and he hasn't set foot you know until this just last week when he went to kids what they think about, you know, rights for transgender kids. I mean, he's, he's, you know, very, very controversial guy.

And I love his mind and everything he does. But, but the bottom line is he's one of the founding faculty at the University of Austin, Texas. Barry Weiss, you know, is one of the backers behind it, I believe, for a while. Stephen Payne. University of Austin, Texas, isn't that a real, I guess there's U.T.R. There's University of Texas at Austin. You're saying this is different. Yeah, this one is called U.

Austin, the other one's U.S. Austin. So it would be like the University of San Diego, which is a- Who started that? It's very interesting. So it's a privately funded college. I think there's people, you know, from maybe like the PayPal Mafia days and, you know, that kind of orbit, perhaps. It's definitely not a left-wing institution.

In fact, they were talking to me yesterday about, you know, like you can count the number of folks that are on their bureaucratic staff that do what's called diversity, equity, and inclusion on zero fingers because they just refuse to happen. anything like that. And so here at UCSD we have at least eight people whose title has the word diversity, equity, and inclusion. And each one of them has a staff and each one of them is charged with, you know, maintaining this balance in the university. And it's been, that's been in place since the year 2012. And I've been here since 2004. And the number of black faculty members in my, or you know, you know, ethnic minority members is, is basically unchanged. We don't have a single African American. We have very few female professors. And this has been the job of this institution, of this institutional superstructure architecture. Now, how does that get paid for? I guess

paid for from the tuition and fees of the students and from state funds. So this university is not going to have that, which allows them to offer free tuition, at least for the first graduating class. But the problem is the first graduating class won't get a degree from an accredited school. They'll get a degree from the University of Texas, Austin, Austin, Texas, but it won't be accredited by the state of Texas, even in Texas, you know, which is a very conservative state, obviously. So you still have these same kind of cartel rules in the higher education that are outside the bounds of perhaps what is necessary. So and Peterson Academy is even, you know, more far removed because that's not even in person. That's going to be an online educational facility that will have a total cost, 96% lower than the average. cost of college tuition. It will be accredited eventually, but it'll be online instead of being in

person, so it'll have even lower cost. For me, it's like doing experiments, like you always talk about and skip the line, your most recently published book, that you want to do as many experiments as fast as you can because you want to get the results of those experiments, have them be low cost, but potentially high ROI. And I'm reading from your book, you know, as I say this. And for me, we're going to potentially improve education if we're so sclerotically stuck in this mold that goes back to the year 180 yeah i agree but i again i wonder why can't we just say hey corsera is good enough um and you know even google google says that you could get a a google certificate in you know essentially software and programming at in at quote unquote institutions like corsara and

thousands of companies have said, yeah, we'll hire people with that kind of, quote, unquote, degree. So I feel like this is a problem that is organically being solved, even though it doesn't have the current status of higher education. But that's the same thing like with publishing. So publishing was an antique for 100 years. You had to go through one of the five to 10 publishers to get your book published or else it was like vanity publishing.

But now you can use Amazon self-publishing and, you know, millions of books that are highly ranked, highly reviewed, sell great, are self-published. Yeah, no, I agree. But I mean, so look at places where there has been credentialing. Any place that has an entrance exam from, you know, from the SATs and ACTs, which are no longer required at the University of California, by the way, to the GMAT, to the LSAT, to the MCAT, to the GRE, all those different, all those different three and four letter tests, those are all gatekeepers to a next level of credentialism.

And so for a lawyer, I think you can become a lawyer without even going to law school. I mean, you can't represent yourself. It's very hard. Yeah, it's very hard. So I would ask the same question of you. Why is that so hard? I mean, is it really so important that you go and listen to Larry Tribe at Harvard, you know, wax about, you know, whatever he's going to talk about for three years and pay another $179,000 a year? I don't know.

No, I agree with you. I've tried to become a lawyer without getting a law degree, which is why I know. It's very hard. So, and similarly, the physician, you know, now that in some schools, they don't require the MCATs. But, but, you know, the question is, is there a limited, what's the fundamental constrained resource? Is it the teachers that are teaching? No, because, as you said, it's to cause zero to duplicate an educational experience online. But here's my concern.

I thought that and your past guest, Professor, quote unquote, Professor Galloway, Scott Galloway, who you were very, very kind, James, to introduce me to digitally. I asked you for an introduction to Scott, and I wrote him and invited him on the podcast. I've listened to his podcast with Karas Swisher and with him, have all his books, and, you know, I'm still waiting to hear from him almost a year later. So, you know, thank you, Scott, for, for, you know, causing me to wait in vain. I know, I go bad about that. Yeah, it's not your fault.

I mean, I told him, I wrote him, eventually I wrote him an email and I was just like, look, I've written you five times. You've gone on podcasts with like literally an audience of 300 people. I have as many YouTube subscribers and podcast subscribers probably as you do. I know I have as many on YouTube because it's just shows my channel's subscribers compared to his. And yet, I've interviewed 14 Nobel laureates. Not one of them of the other two or three that I've tried to invite that didn't come on. None of them at least didn't have the courtesy to say no thanks. And I just find it like totally outrageous that somebody who comes from the University of California system, went to UCLA, you went to UC Berkeley, and just like won't even say sorry about that.

I really, you know, I've got too much going on. Not interested. You're not that interesting to me, Brian. I don't want to just say something. Don't make me write like five emails to you asking like when comes. Can we set this up and, you know, thanking Jane. Anyway, that's my rant for the day. But the, but as I think, you know, he teaches this brand strategy and all sorts of things.

He does those online. He's got his own, you know, online educational facility. I think you're going to see more of that. But I don't know if you necessarily need to have more, you know, I don't know if these kind of corsairs could form a cartel, you know, and have some kind of negotiating power. It's not up to me to figure out how can we establish a whole. new educational system. But certainly if reducing the barriers and reducing the cost, those have to be the paramount issues of concern. And I see there's no attention. Like at UCSD, we've got brand new buildings going up. My chancellor just got the highest raise in UC California, Chancellor history,

you know, got a $500,000 raise. You know, some of the highest paid estate employees in any state our college employees that usually on football team coaches they're they're paid by the taxpayer you know it's a tremendous amount of money that flows through these universities and yet you know we're actually not innovating in what we do and we're not even aware of the threat as i thought during covid that it would lay bare uh you know and this is something galloway said a lot in this in his books about corona panic and so forth that we would have the end of the educational system and i don't see any difference fact, I see we're raising prices. We're trying to increase perks. And, but we haven't fundamentally changed anything about what we do educationally. So I'm trying to do, you know, like one of the

ideas I have if I do collaborate with University of Austin, Texas, you know, or, you know, and it wouldn't be like, I'm going to quit my tenure job here and go work in Austin. No, I'm not going to do that. But I might do a seminar where an intercession between my classes and their classes, between Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, that we do this project, like what I've described to you. Take my large language, you know, make a large language chatbot of Galileo who can answer physics questions and then teach him all the physics that's come up since he was alive and then ask him about quantum mechanics and ask him about, you know, interpretation of wormholes and the philosophy of the Big Bang.

I mean, this would be amazing. and it would be a synergy between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, between the literature and English and communication and writing and the hard sciences that Galileo is known for. So those are one of the things I'm interested in. So let's let's okay. We got that. It only took it only took an hour to figure out your existential crisis. And so let me just ask you some question. Yeah.

One is why can't you right now? do that so create you know you know take galileo's writings everything's written feed it into a large language model i could help you do this if you go if i did this for myself i put all my blog posts into notepad.com and there's a i james now which is like a weird more generic version of me and and and uh we could do it i could do it for you and then we could we could take Isaac Newton, heck, we can take Isaac Asimov. Yeah. We could do whoever you want and we'll make like a little virtual AI college and we

could test it out. Yeah. I'm totally, there's nothing. Answer. Or the other thing is like you did a good job. You go to a great, you know, audio book or you didn't write, but I mean, you made a great audio book with Galileo's teachings. Why don't you try setting that up as a course and Coursera experience the process of doing

that so that you don't have the university system behind you to help you, but it's, it's not that hard. It would take just a little bit of effort. And, you know, start off, get, since you want kind of an alternative form of teaching where people are like signing up because they, not because it's a requirement or because getting a degree is important, but because they want to learn about Galileo, why don't you try that experience to see how you feel about it? I exist. Those experiences exist. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I will. But the, the main, point is I don't want to do it not not because I'm lazy although I am and not because I don't have the time although I don't but because it's part of the I

would want this to be done every quarter you know in other words I'd want the students to develop it because for them to wrangle with all these things as you always say like podcasting is not a skill being a comedian is not a skill it's a million micro skills amalgamized together into one you know mellifluous format right so what I would like to do is have that be the course Have it be the course. Make AI Feynman. Make AIAE.

Albert Einstein. I love it. So I can help you put together a course like that. A lot of people can help you. But I think that would be a valuable thing. And then for profit, for profit. So, okay, so there's one thing. And again, I'm paid, you know, I'm a state employee, okay?

I'm never complained about my salary, even though I can make more. And if I am a teacher at Princeton University that we keep talking about, the second best Ivy League school, And my children go to college, as they probably will. Princeton will pay their tuition at Princeton, but they'll also pay their tuition at UC San Diego up to the amount that Princeton would charge. We don't get that at UC California in any of the UCs. In fact, the only benefit we get is a benefit my neighbor gets as well, which is that they pay in-state tuition. My kids will only pay in-state tuition. But let's get back to that.

I don't think money is, I'm not doing any of this for money, although I think that people take things more seriously when they have to pay for them. Anytime I've given out a book, just giving it away to these students, I'm not sure they're ever going to read it. I said part of your accepting this book, by signing this book, I'm encumbering upon you, you have to leave a review. Good or bad, and you can use a pseudonym. That's the whole thing. People think, like, I'm going to track them down. I love bad reviews because at least they're engaging with it. But let's take that aside.

Anytime you've given away something, people treat things with the value that they pay for. So I don't, I think it's important to charge. and therefore and therefore i would like to do the the dinner party you know uh chat dinner party or whatever but i'd like it to be like catered in any city you know Atlanta San Diego you say like 10 people get together we're going to come in there's going to be a catering van that shows up and there's going to be an invidia you know super cluster whatever there's going to be a computer with with you know screen or you're going to get oculi oculi i think that's a word and you're going to have dinner you and you your friends are going to have dinner with a historical figure. And that could be a for-profit,

you know, kind of model. I'd like the educational thing to be, you know, for education. And yes, maybe they pay for it on Coursera. I'd love to know how to do that. I'd love it even more if the students would do it. But the kind of... I think that's a very interesting exercise that. So the exercise for the student is pick a historical figure you want to learn from, accumulate as much materials you can get your hands on, go through this. process of creating the AI version of that human being and make it good enough so that you could then ask it questions and learn from it. And at the end of the semester, you have to kind of do a thesis, what you learned that you didn't know before from this, you know, persona. Right. In other

words, like some of my students now, although it's less in cosmology and the physical sciences, they're obviously using, you know, chat GPT or Bard. I like Bard better for a reason I can Very used, Bard. It's great because you can, so what's the problem for me as an academic? I want to make a plot of like, and I did this, plot the cost of attending UCSD since 1990. And that's how I came up with some of the data that we're talking about. But chat or Bard, they won't let you do that. But what Bard will do that chat, GPT, won't do.

And I shouldn't do this because now more people are going to sign up for Bard, and it's going to tax the resources that I depend on. But anyway, you can say Bard, write a Python script that plots the cost of tuition versus time in state and out of state for UC San Diego or any UCLA or whatever, and then make a Python script, and then it will do it. And then I'll say, would you like to run this in Google Colab, which is their built-in Python, you know, Jupiter and so forth, evaluation platform? So I have an account. It just clicks run and it plots up the data. That's pretty cool. So I like Bard for that reason versus chat. But I'm sure chat can do something similar. But anyway, so my students are using it.

It's obviously they're using it. But here I'd like them to use. use it. In other words, like, I'm learning so much. I don't need to like, I'm a full professor. I don't need to like worry about stuff in terms of like, well, some guy's going to come and take my job, like literally can't take my job until I become an emeritus professor or die. And even then when they take my job, it's not like they're going to plug into the Simon's Observatory and become the leader, you know, with my colleagues. And then they're going to, you know, teach. No, it's not the way it works. They hire a junior professor who makes, you know, half of what a full professor makes or two thirds of what a full. And so that's how they save money.

and pay for, you know, the retirement stuff. Anyway, the point is, I'm learning about this stuff because I find it really interesting. And what's so much fun about it is that you get to play with it. You're interacting with it. And you're interacting with the AI, you know, with the chat itself, the bot itself. But it'll be so much more fun if you're interacting with,

you know, we make a Joe Rogan bot or we make a, you know, we make a Galileo bot or whoever. And by doing that, then they're not only learning, but the entity in which they're interacting has a persona of that's physically and mentally intellectual interesting to them. I have this ability on, we built this ability on Nopad. Really? Oh, awesome.

Yeah. Can you make a BriBot? I could totally make a Brian Keating bot. Awesome. Think like a Nobel Prize winner. Yeah. It could take your. Losing the Nobel Prize.

Losing the Nobel Prize. You can take your Galileo audiobook. It could take all of your podcasts, the transcripts of all your podcasts, and make an AI Brian. Like, we could do that. And we should do that, James. This is something that has to be done. And the other thing is to do.

I think a lot of these issues with education, I mean, education right now is going through an amazing revolution because of online. Look, I'll tell you an experiment that I have not yet launched yet, but I'm about to launch. Jay and I a few weekends ago, we spent about, I sketched it all out. We did, Jay did all the video. We did about 20 hours of video of me teaching a course how to write and publish a quality book in the next 30 days.

I saw that. And, yeah, so I've probably mentioned it here and there, but we haven't yet launched the course officially, but I'm going to. And I'm a little nervous because if nobody signs up. But I've taught writing informally to so many people, you know, people I know who are working on books or articles or whatever. And so it gave me the idea, oh, I really enjoy this. I went through my own existential thing. and I really wanted to, this is my contribution to teaching. And I'm excited to do this.

So this is an experiment for me. And I'm excited. But I do think teaching is going to change because of all this. Like I think I will teach a better course than most courses about writing. We're all courses about writing in college right now. Absolutely. Because you're actually- I mean, I have a ton of experience.

I've written 20 books. I've written many bestsellers. And you can't really find that teaching in college. Absolutely. I mean, the students are hungry for authenticity. They want to see something that's real. And if you look at like who are their heroes, a lot of them are like influencers and people with big, you know, channels and, you know, Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan. Like they want to be like that. Well, they can actually do stuff like that they have not done. Like Joe Rogan hasn't written a book and Lex Friedman hasn't written a book. And maybe because they don't have kind of the, I don't know, the wherewithal or the time or the thought process to do it. But the barriers to entry. could be lowered and then I see this as like a tool like you can't take certain classes without without a computer like we have classes on you know data analysis and Python for physicists you know you need a computer every single one of them has an iPhone or Android so you know so they have these platform the huge

amounts of computing power by the way I love to like troll Elon you know when like whenever the Falcon launches or the you know Starshow I'm like I can't believe he did it with with even less computing power than we have in our pockets right now. He liked one of my tweets about a month ago. It was about a dad joke that I made. So I think it's important, yeah, to kind of like, what can we do that's innovative? That's fun. It has to be in this Venn diagram. It has to be, you know, fun, useful. It has to be something that that there are some barriers to entry to because otherwise, you know, it might already be done. Like, we're not going to make a new chatbot. We're going to make a specific application of a chatbot.

You know, we're not going to make our own LLM. I mean, I would like an LLN chat bot to help me parse through all the different things that I'm told and barraged about every single day that AI can do for me from making sly. Oh, that's another thing. The last rant going back an hour ago. So a lot of the students come in and they're just not as good in calculus as they need to be to take to do well in the class. Or they don't remember special relativity because they took it three years ago or two years. You know, they're seniors and, you know, not everyone's up to spout. I had Lacunae in my knowledge, right?

So I started using this slide, you know, generator and AI, not for the main course material. I think that would be hard. But like, tell me everything you need to know as a freshman in physics about special relativity in 10 slides or less, including examples and images. And this, this, you know, came up for me. And then I just upload it to them. I say, you don't have to read it. But if you're feeling like you need some supplemental material, I've reviewed it.

I've checked it for accuracy. You know, these chat things have a lot of flaws. them. And guess what? It's good. It's here for you. I haven't heard one thing if they like it or they don't, if they even listen to it. It's frustrating because, again, the incentives of feedback are very different in a college thing. I love these online learning sites. I think they're better than college. You know, here's what you get in college. I'm willing to concede. I wasn't willing. I mean, I wrote a book, 40 alternatives or 80 alternatives to college. It was the number one book in the college section for a while on Amazon. So I mean, I've really looked into this. And look, I do think I've

changed my mind a little bit. I do think you get, if you use this aspect of college, you could get a social, you know, career networking connections. Like, like you certainly know all the great physicists in the world because of your networking. Because of college, though. I mean, because of grad school and then going to conferences and the research you did and the people you worked with, like, you know, I just read some book by Sean Carroll. You've worked with him and, you know, all these all these great physicists. And, you know, so I do think that's college is good for it. But I think now is the time, like I would, I would take your class if you were to make,

and we even talked about doing this ones, if you were to make, you know, the 10 different ways the universe might have began according to experimental physics. Yeah. And if you had made that online course, I would pay 50 bucks, 200 bucks, whatever. And I take it and listen to it with my family and so. I mean, you have all these things like master class and so forth and like, oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson teaches astronomy. It's not so that you can go to graduate school. There is a huge thirst for those kinds of things.

But, you know, I also feel like I'm doing a lot of that on YouTube and people can find stuff and also interviewing people besides me. And so I think, yeah, I mean, I guess for me, I'm less interested in the financial thing other than as an incentive for people to value what they pay for. But again, I'm like so torn because here are these students paying. let's say they take four classes and they're paying $9,000 a quarter or whatever. That's ridiculous. And then they're four, you know, so that's $2,500 or whatever, $2,300. And they're not coming to the classes and they're not coming to my office hours. Come on, guys.

I mean, so I'm hoping that these other in person, so I do think that there's a value in the physical world versus the metaverse, which is what we're talking about with these avatars. I think both have a place in education because how do you make something educationally, viable, you have to make it visceral. Like you basically take Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you start taking them away. Like in other words, you make the student feel unsafe like they're going to get a bad grade if they don't learn this. You know, you teach them something very quickly and then you teach them something very primally. And that so in other words, if you can establish the, the synergy between the best of what high online or virtual world or metaverse type stuff could do. And I think Mark Zuckerberg is like a total fool about the metaverse and it's going to go. And it's going to go. I lost billions of dollars on it, but education is the one place where it really is a killer app. And it's education all forms, like from teaching people how to fly, making surgeons and stuff. And all I see is like, oh, play like, you know, crossy road with your friends on the Metavert. Like, it's totally useless.

And so there I agree with Scott Galloway. So, but I have to go to a class now, James in the physical world, although I'll be on Zoom for the first part of it. but please do for the good of humanity, James, make a bribeot. If you can do that. I could do that. And Brian, what I wanted to ask you and we'll do it,

maybe another time, or I'll call it up. I've never called you up and talked you on the phone. Just talk, yeah. You did such a good job taking your podcast and making a good YouTube channel out of it. And I never am able to do that. Maybe it's just the way I look.

Nobody wants to look at it in an hour video of me. but it's like my YouTube, I have 40,000 subs on YouTube, but my YouTube audience per video is like one, one million per podcast. Yeah. So I got to figure it out. Yeah, no, I'd love to do a deep dive into what I did. And we have different kind of niches, although we have a lot of guests that do overlap.

Yeah, I would love that. And, you know, all the more so for kind of doing things to repay you with the gratitude that I always have for you, giving me my start in podcasting and being an inspiration and a co-author on a forward. And yeah, Jordan and I, Arbinger talked on the phone for like two hours a couple days ago. So yeah, we got to, let's schedule a Zoom or a FaceTime call sometime soon, James. Yeah, that would be great. All right, well, good luck in your class, Brian, and I will talk to you soon.

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