Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Seth Godin: How Creatives use The Practice to make great art, overcome fear & thrive on constraints! (#088)

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

Seth Godin is a prolific writer, thinker, and self-declared “non-guru” guru to millions around the world. He invented email marketing. He started the AltMBA program. He has written 20 books, including the Practice. He thinks deeply about the way ideas spread whether these be née notions in quantum physics, science fiction, entrepreneurship, leadership, and–most of all- marketing. He’s worked with Nobel Prize winners, industry titans and even Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Seth’s past books include Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, Purple Cow, and What to do When it’s Your Turn (And it’s Always Your Turn). Buy The Practice: Shipping Creative Work: https://amzn.to/3k2BNpY Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog is one of the most popular in the world. In 2013, Godin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. He is the host of AKIMBO podcast: https://www.akimbo.link and has his world famous blog at https://seths.blog Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes A production of  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello there, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this episode of Into the Impossible podcast. I'm your host, your fearful host in this time of pandemic podcasting. Brian Keating, co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And our guest today is none other than Seth Godin, one of the most interesting, charismatic, influential individuals I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing on this podcast. Today we're going to learn about Seth's phenomenal new book called The Practice, as well as his, understanding of science and science fiction, including quantum gravity, and his questions and his appetite for intellectual curiosity and even in science and science fiction, really knows no bounds. It's truly rapacious, as they say. So Seth is a truly influential individual. He's affected me so well. It was such a treat to get to talk to this living legend. And may he live and write

and do well, continue to do well. You'll also learn. about his passion and even his connection to our namesake, Sir Arthur C. Clark, which I never knew. And so today there'll be a couple of exclusives that you'll learn about Seth, but most of all, you'll get a sense of this remarkable mental magician and the things that he does to improve the lives literally of millions of people. So sit back, enjoy this episode of Seth Godin of the Into the Impossible podcast. Please don't forget to like, comment, subscribe, tattoo, no, do whatever you leave a review, especially. I read them all, and they really help us in the all-important algorithmic ascension that we are aspiring to on the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human

Imaginations into the Impossible Podcast. Sit back. Enjoy the ride. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And it's a treat to have Seth Godin on the podcast, a legend in many different ways, an inspiration, a mentor via remote mentorship. And as you know, on this podcast, we talk about painful divorces, embarrassing stories from junior high school. Now, I can't imagine how many podcasts you've done. Actually, I know how many you've done because you posted on your blog. Seth, how do you find the time to do everything you're doing in this hectic time of life? Well, first, I'd like to say that I'm a pretend scientist. So talking actual science with actual

scientists is thrilling for me. I don't go to meetings. I don't watch television. So I get seven or eight hours to other people don't get. The company I started at Kimbo is now an independent B-corp, so I don't have any employees. And I think talking to people who are passionate about what they do, who have an audience that's sizable enough to make it worth it is a privilege. So I keep doing it. It's a great pleasure to have you here. I want to just read a very quick biography since a lot of my audience is comprised of scientists, but not all. We've had on many different guests in all different disciplines, but I just want to give a quick intro to Seth. You founded several companies, including Yo-Yo Dine and Squidoo. Your blog is one of the most popular in the world. You're the host of

the Akimbo podcast, which I've been listening to for many years now. And you're the author of several books, including Lynchpin Tribes, The Dip, Purple Cow, and what to do when it's your turn and it's always your turn. And of course, today, the practice, shipping creative work. And so first of all, Mazel Tov, congratulations on publication of another book. I devoured it in just 52 sittings, which is about three sittings per chapter of the book. It's pretty impressive. You did that. I said to my wife, you know, God only needed 10 commandments, but, you know, Seth has got 230. So you've done so many things. I want to know my podcast, we often talk about alien, alien abductions. We're not allowed to talk about the alleged alien abductions that I've participated in. But I want to know if an alien wakes up Seth Godin, 3 a.m., shakes you and says, who are you? What do you answer? You've completely distracted me with the alien part. So to a human, I would say I'm a teacher. And I've been a teacher since 1977. I like turning lights on for people. I am curious, but then I develop a point of view. And what I have

found is the thing I am hooked on is turning on a light for people. And so, you know, I invented email marketing, but I didn't stick around long enough to start MailChimp or turn it into a $10 billion industry because that wasn't my goal. My goal was to say, here's this thing. Let me teach you how it works. And then I went and taught the next thing. I want to start with a quiz. I'm a professor, as you know, a university professor and we like to give quizzes. I've done extensive research on the following. Do you know what the two most common words are preceding. it was the best thing that ever happened to me. No.

I failed. It's actually I failed. And I want to get that in practice. You talk so much about overcoming these obstacles, which I want to get into how your book, which you wrote primarily for people shipping creative work. But I think it applies a lot to scientists. Oh, yeah.

To the many things that a scientist has to do that an entrepreneur does, the only difference being we don't make any profit on our sales, we don't work 40 hours a week if that would be a nice low number, a vacation week for us. And we don't really have a board to answer to. But all the other things are very similar. And I want to know you talk about kind of your destiny is in your own hands. But as academics, let's first start with that. It wasn't in my hands to get into the college that I got into.

It wasn't in my hands to get into the graduate school, the postdoc, the assistant professorship, the faculty job. and then eventually to be, you know, part of a team that could have won a Nobel Prize. How do you deal with gatekeepers in the sciences versus creative work with the gatekeepers in here? Okay, well, there's a lot nested in that. First, you know, I studied with a Nobel Prize winning physicist at Tufts. I took as much science as I could in high school, and I will tell you that labs in high school and college do not teach you science. They teach you pretend science how to be a cog in the science industrial complex.

But there's zero room to actually do an experiment where you don't know what's supposed to happen. And that's a real shame because I can teach a six-year-old how to do that. And if you want to do good science, you have to do experiments you're not sure are going to work. Because all the ones we're sure are going to work have already been done before. And so that's the essence of the word creative in my title shipping creative work. It is not about design or prettiness or painting or opera. It is creative work is the work of a human that's generous, that connects us, that might not work. And I would argue that every single scientific breakthrough I am aware of fits that description.

So now you nested into that, this idea that there are gatekeepers. and there certainly are. You can't get access to a cyclotron or something to test the Higgs boson if you don't get someone's approval. You can't do that in your garage. But most of the slots are allocated somewhat randomly. I used to be a volunteer contributor at the Engineering School Admissions Office at Tufts. and of every 10 people who applied,

six of them were good enough to get in, and one did. So what they should do is write a letter to the six, and it should say, you were good enough to get in and we randomly picked someone else. But they don't do that. And that's a mistake,

because it makes people who get picked think they got picked on merit when they did it. All of which is a way of saying there are some slots left for people who pick themselves. Those slots go to people who without getting picked did something off the charts. And if you can do something off the charts, you've got the shortcut to be a professor. You've got the shortcut to have your own lab because you developed a mindset, not of what do you want me to do, but I did this, what do you think?

and that's where we need science to go. When you think about scientists as really replicating the failure mechanism, the scientific method is really one of iteration after failure. It's built in that you're going to fail or that you're going to prove somebody else wrong, maybe someone else that was held up and idolized many decades or centuries ago. I want to talk about this process of scientific creation because I think we as physicists, so I get to study the 13.1.3.3.

8 billion year old universe. Some of my colleagues down the hall study exoplanets orbiting around other suns. Other colleagues study the intricacies of the atom, the nucleus, the periodic table behind me over there. And yet, if you ask somebody to name a scientist, they almost can't do it, or they'll name someone who's dead, or they'll say Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's a wonderful marketer, but he's not a scientist in the sense that, you know, my colleagues are. And I want to ask you, how do we improve the marketing skills of a scientist? Because we have the greatest material ever created by God or whoever you like, and we are not effective at communicating it,

as evidenced by the fact that NASA's budget is less than what humans on Earth spend on lipstick in a six-month period. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry and the best heavyweight in the world, Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time.

All right, well, those are two, again, nested questions. If you asked 100 people to name me without telling them, my name, they only one or two could do it. So this idea that you have to be more famous than Neil deGrasse Tyson is nuts. You don't. No. The goal of marketing is not to serve the largest possible audience. It's to seek the smallest viable audience. So the mistake that scientists have made through the years is not figuring who are the nine people or the 90 people or the 900 people they need to market to. Instead, they say, wow, look how famous Mr. Rogers is. I should be that famous. No, don't do that. Find the specifics and be famous to them. I don't think Stephen Hawking

being famous did very much for Stephen Hawking's ability to accomplish anything that he wanted to accomplish. But if you haven't seen the video of him and Paul Rudd playing quantum chess, it's absurd. Like, where did that come from? Anyway, I digress. So then the question is, why is NASA's budget smaller than the budget for lipstick? Well, there are two reasons for that. One, because people who buy lipstick get more out of it than they do from paying taxes to go for NASA. That's just human nature. And NASA's source of funding is always going to be fraught unless they figure out how to hook into human nature. So during the 1960s, 4% of the U.S. budget, the entire government's budget went for the Apollo mission.

4% while we were fighting the most expensive war in our history. Why? Because you can look up in the sky and see the moon. And every time I tell the story about the day I met Neil Armstrong, I get weepy. But I don't feel that way at all about something that's picking up rocks on Mars because it's just not a good story. So that's why the money isn't there, right? But I think the real challenge that scientists have,

as we've industrialized science is they are forgetting to be scientists. There isn't enough failure. It doesn't need to be rocket science failure. Let's come up with something no one ever thought of failure. But there are so many places where science can show up with actual replicatable, insightful experiments that will make things better. But instead, they get hung up on correcting the science that came 10 years before. Right. The flip side, of course, the failure is achieving great success. And I want to have a read you a quote from Nobel laureate, T.S. Eliot. He said the Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has done anything after he got it. You talk about seductive, the seduction of sinecures. Can you first define a sinecure for those out there who may not know it?

And why is it bad to have these, you know, impetus, if you will, that animate many of my colleagues and I freely admit myself as a younger version to win awards and indicate and show the success, not the failures that we're responsible for? So is that a real one? This one? Yeah. Oh, oh, you've got one too. No, this one was edible back in 2010 when I was in Stockholm. Ah, it's guilt. It's guilt, exactly.

No, Belgelt. That's right. Is yours magic? Whoa, close up magic. Anyway. For Zoom. Wow. Anyway.

An exclusive for Seth God and on the end of the impossible podcast. A sinecure is a safe place to hide. It is where the woodpecker hangs out on the tree and the fox can't get them. Cynacures, we probably evolved to like because you're more likely to have grandchildren if you can find a cincere. and it probably doesn't align with our dreams to have a sinecure. So T.S. Eliot is correct, but I think he missed something, which is the purpose of the Nobel is not to win the Nobel, it's to chase the Nobel. Because if you act like someone who wants to win a Nobel Prize, you're more likely to

do the science you ought to be doing. And one of the, you know, I've given a thousand presentations live, and in at least 300 of them, I show a picture of the Solve conference from 1927. And in it are 29 scientists. Einstein's there. Marie Curie is there. Neil's Boer is there. It said that Heisenberg is there, but it's uncertain whether he was or not.

And of the 29 people in the picture, 17 won the Nobel Prize. And almost all of them won it after 1927. That's the punchline, right? The punchline is Heisenberg. But the other punchline is that you won the Nobel Prize because you got invited to Solve, not the other way around. And so you want to live your life so that you get invited to Solve. That's how you win a Nobel Prize.

And the way you get invited to Solve is by being shunned and criticized by people who do industrial science because you are committed to doing creative science. Right. And it said that there are Nobel Prizes that bestow honor beatification upon the recipients. And then there's a converse of those people that you named, arguably the Einstein's, et cetera, they gave prestige to the Nobel Prize in terms of this. I saw a picture from Time magazine that I think it was a day after Einstein died in 1955. And it was an image of the

earth and a giant sign and said Einstein lived here. And we do tend to idolize, of course, and the power of awards is a tangible one. You talk about this quite frequently. But But I think, you know, it is true that there are very few kind of tangible perks, like once academics who are used to being graded and SAT'd and ACT'd and prodded and poked and competing against each other to get to this top level, once we run out of grades, there's almost like this, this sense of disorientation. We're not being graded anymore. I'm a full professor. But maybe there is. There is this Nobel Prize and I could win it. And I was told to get tenure.

I have to be in the running for it, which is a whole other story. But I think, you know, in writing, those things are all up here. But the cohort, the benefit of having this cohort that you talk about of critics that are honest, that won't just tell you everything is great, but they won't tell you that everything's crap either. Can you talk about the value of, you know, as the Talmud says, acquire yourself a teacher, a student, and a friend. So of those three, the friend, the generous critic, tell us about the importance of that. Yeah, so I think it's really important that you start the Keating. prize. And you invite 10 people who are at the prime of their career to be in a circle that's

going to meet by Zoom every week to make a promise to the other people and give an update as to how they're doing on the promise because they don't want to get kicked out. And if they stay for a year, their career will be transformed. You can organize it. You don't need to send someone $765,000 croner. You can just say, you're in. You're in the circle. And that's why I wrote a book, because a book you can hand to other people and say, we're going to do this thing together. And when I think about Fermi sitting around talking to other scientists about aliens, I really wish I could have been at that table because that feels to me like a big part of

what we need more of in modern science. And back when I went to TED, I was lucky enough to meet and hang out with some scientists there. And unfortunately, once scientists get too famous, they start playing the role of scientists instead of actually being scientists. And I don't think that helps. And I fought really hard not to do that with my career. And that's why I have to keep, you know, no sequels for me. Because I don't want to be a version of that.

I want to say, well, this one might not work. So speaking of it might not work. Can I ask you a question? Of course. This is much money. It's sort of complex. It's sort of complicated. So let me warn my way into it.

If I had a photon torpedo and I could blow up the sun, it would take eight minutes for people on Earth to realize it was gone. Right? How long would it take the gravity waves to not affect the Earth? Yeah, that's the same exact speed. So Einstein encrypted in his 1915 laws that also revealed what we call general relative. which I consider the pinnacle of culture. And I'll talk to you about science as a part of culture in a minute. But yes, the same speed that governs the propagation of light waves also is manifest

in the speed of propagation of gravitational waves. So we wouldn't actually notice it because of the gravitational waves. I mean, there's only a very tiny number of detectors that can actually sense a gravitational wave, which distorts a proton just by the half-earth billionth of its width. But we would notice it because the Earth would stop orbiting the Earth. the sun. Yeah, we would go off on our centrifugal way. That's right. All right. So, I can block light waves, Superman reference, with a sheet of lead. Correct. What do I need to block gravity waves? That is such a good question. Actually, it brings up one of my heroes,

and I'll talk about hero worship. This is one of our heroes that we'll talk about. This is Galileo-Galai. And this is the other one, Carl Sagan. When we get to books, I'm going to talk to you about a quote that he said about books. But Galileo is my favorite scientist because he was the most flawed individual with these great talents. So he wrote a book called, as you may have heard, the dialogue, the famous dialogue on the two chief world systems. All right, I have to read it. I haven't, did know anything about that. This book will change your life. In this book, he talks about the Dunning Kruger effect. He writes prose poetry. But this book, Seth, it wasn't originally going to be called the dialogue on the chief world systems. That's a pretty

cool name, right? But guess what its original title was? It was on the flux and reflux of tides and the Earth's rivers and fern. Right. It was the practice part two. But in this, or part one, in this book, he talks about the proof in his mind that the earth went around the sun was generated by the tides on earth, which are caused by, in his proclamation, the sloshing of vodka in a glass as it spun and oriented and revolving. That was proof. Guess what that? We call it. We call it confirmation bias. He so wanted to prove this was right. He was willing to destroy the power. of the tidal and the ideas that he had in there. We now know that the tides on the earth have nothing to do with the Earth's rotation or revolution and instead are caused by the gravitational distortions on the Earth's surface caused by the moon, this tiny little object. So you're absolutely right. Gravity goes through everything and it's unstoppable as far as we can tell because what it does is it distorts the connections between space and time. It fundamentally alters how

matter us travel or light travels throughout the universe. So that is its power. The gravitational gravity's power is by virtue of its all penetrating nature. That's no Superman, no or Spider-Man in the Spider-verse. Okay, so wait. So, but I and then I will get back to our topic at him. But light is a particle in a wave. Correct.

Gravity, which goes exactly the same speed. Yep. Is not a particle. It may be a particle. That is the Holy Grail of so-called theories of everything, which we speak about often on the Into the Impossible Podcasts. If it's a particle, then something could stop it. If it's a particle in a certain domain, it would manifest the gravitational force

via the exchange of what's called a boson, like the Higgs boson, but called a graviton. In order to test that hypothesis, the Godin theory, you would have to go to go to the only epochs or places where gravity's quantum properties are manifest, the singularity that may or may not be present inside of a black hole and the singularity that may or may not have happened in the early portion of the evolution of our universe. We don't know those properties because of a simple reason. We don't even know if anything infinite exists, right? I mean, Seth, have you ever seen a triangle? An actual triangle? Yeah. No, no. They don't exist. Right. They don't exist in a physical world. They exist in the world of ideas. Have you ever seen something of infinite temperature, infinite density,

an infinite extent, infiniteism. So I read about Hilbert's Hotel, which fascinated me. Yes. And that got me on a whole other blood call. Anyway, I got 15 minutes left. So let's go back to the- So let's keep going. Okay.

So I want to talk to you. As I said, the practice contains over 230 commandments. I want to talk to you about the role that religion plays or doesn't play in your life. You should know that many, many Orthodox rabbis quote your sermons and their sermons. What role does Judaism play in your life or has it played in your life? Or do you envision it playing in somebody's life? Yeah, I try very hard not to be a guru. I'm just trying to talk about things that have nothing to do with me.

So I don't talk about my kids. I don't talk about spirituality. Don't talk about my family. Okay, good. I wanted to ask you if you knew what was atop the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. What medal did they choose in the 1800s to crown the cap of the Washington Monument? It's weird because I know that I used to know this. It would take less bits to just know it.

Yes. But I just know that I used to know it. I'm going to say palladium. I can prove that you know, because I think I learned this from you in a podcast from a decade ago. But it's aluminum or aluminum. And the reason why is because that used to be considered valuable and that people had a great deal of difficulty just, you know, purifying aluminum. And so they put that up there.

Now imagine alien comes again, again with the aliens. Keating. So we used to believe that that was much more valuable than golden. I think someone discovering that now, wow, this can of Coors light at the top of the mine. Fascinating. Do you know why they smelt so much aluminum in Iceland? I think they have a lot of bauxite. They have no bauxite. They have one box, not one box. No box. No box. They have to take it in a boat from Colombia or someplace like Colombia all the way to Iceland because it's like a battery. They have free electricity, they smelt it with free electricity, and it captures the value of the electricity, and then they can ship the Reynolds wrap anywhere in the world and make money doing so.

Wow. Bitcoin and aluminum. Wow. That is fascinating. That is thinking outside the box. Now, I have a question for one of my listeners, one of my listeners named Mina, she says, she listens to Alt MBA program. One of the dynamics of the program that you believe allows it to get the results

and experience that it does for its participants. Okay, so the Alt MBA is the opposite of the academic ladder we were talking about. There's no credentialing. There's no degree. There's no exams. It's 30 days, three hours a day. It changes people's lives. Fundamentally rewires what we are capable of because it's all project work.

No gurus. It's simply a group of people working together with coaches sprinting for a month. And what you discover is just what you're capable of. You discover what it's like to be surrounded by people who are on your team. And when you're done, you don't want to go back to the old pace. And so that's why it works. It works because you have to be fully enrolled. You can't just try it out.

It's expensive. But it has a 97% completion rate because the people who sign up for it are into it. They work with each other. small group of 120 people, and it's a game changer. So I'm not part of it anymore, but it's magical, and I strongly recommend it. Yeah. Okay. Now we're into the final three questions that I ask all my guests.

First one, Seth, can you please provide in under a minute a four-dimensional non-abillion quantum gravitational framework that involves Feynman diagrams with no divergent path integrals? I can do them with divergent, but I can't be any of that. All right, all right. Okay. So Into the Impossible is named after. after Sir Arthur C. Clarke's famous third law, which I'll read in a second, but his first law is

any sufficiently advanced society is indistinguishable from magic. His second law, which appeals to you, I'm sure, is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And his third law is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. That's where I get the name for the podcast. What obstacle or achievement seemed impossible to a young Seth Godin that now seems eminently doable because you had the courage and did it. So I worked with Arthur and I love hearing you quoting him back to me. And that is a version of it, which is it was a long time before I got the benefit of the doubt. And I don't think we offer the benefit of the doubt to enough people. I think we restricted to people based on race and

where they're from. But we also start with most people as by default not getting the benefit. of the doubt. And at 23, persuading Arthur to trust me was really, really hard. And now I am stunned and a little scared that I often get the benefit of the doubt, and I wasn't sure it was ever going to happen. It's really beautiful to hear from you. So the next thing is also related to Sir Arthur, and that involves a famous opening scene from a 2001, a space odyssey, where there are primates and the savannas of Africa, and they encountered this mysterious obelisk, which then later makes an appearance on the surface of the moon, I believe, and it's sort of meant to represent time capsules or something meant to be discovered when humanity is mature enough, intellectual enough,

has the capacity to really appreciate what they've discovered. I want to ask you, Seth Godin has a billion-year-long-lasting time capsule. What do you put in it? What do you put on it? What do you do with it? This is like your time capsule for, eternity. So is it to go back or is it to go forward? It's going forward. So this will be viewed in a billion years. It'll be opened. So I've looked at a box site. Don't say I rewatch 2001 a little while ago. The monkeys are terrible. But leaving that aside, one theory is that the monolith's job is to somehow trigger the mutation that taught. that ape to beat up the other apes and turn us into humans.

And so it's poignant in the sense that it took us out of the Garden of Eden, right? I made a time capsule when I was in third grade. Their school put one together. I have no idea where it is now. This is part of the problem with time capsules is by the time they're useful, they're gone and no one can remember where they are. We tend to put the wrong thing in time capsules. because we put in things that we think are important that either are going to stick around, and so they didn't need to be in the time capsule, or they're just not important.

And so I don't know the clever answer here because a billion years is too big a number for me to get my arms around. And it's interesting to note, you know, as you and I are talking in the middle of a fraught week during a fraught year, 10 years from now, what are we going to remember from this? Never mind a billion. And so I'm more focused on, are there 100 people who I can interact with today in a way that they would be glad I did? Are there lights I can turn on?

Is there somebody who needs the benefit of the doubt and maybe I can offer it to them? And so forgive me for not playing the time capsule game, but I'm much more interested in the other one. I want to just close with that. And a question I ask people who are authors, I say, what would you prefer 100 readers a year from now or one reader 100 years from now? And then I'll segue into a final thing from Carl Sagan.

I measure myself on what the people who read my stuff teach other people. And if that cycle continues, then it feels to me like it's got the basis of longevity. The last thing I'll conclude with, I have the honor of interviewing Anjurian, who is Carl, Sagan's widow and his daughter, Sasha Sagan, who are both phenomenal authors. And I read this quote to them. It gave me chills to read to them the words of their late father and husband. Carl Sagan said, what an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts in which are imprinted lots of funny, dark squiggles. But one glance at it, and suddenly you're inside the mind of another person, maybe long did for thousands of years.

Across the millennia, an author is speaking to you clearly and silently inside your head, Writing is perhaps the greatest human invention, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. I want to close with a question tangential maybe to that, which is that one of my kids, I got a bunch of kids,

and one of them was working on something for the Nobel Prize in medicine called the Never Dying Pill, and that would prevent you from dying, being killed also. I want to know, would you take my son Elijah's never dying pill? Would you want to live forever, essentially, so that you could actually have the voice of Seth Godin in person, perhaps a millennia for now? Yeah, you and I have both read enough science fiction to know that that never ends well. They never listen to the scientists, do they say that? Seth Godin, author of the practice, I'm going to title this someday.

Hopefully I'll talk to you about constraints because I think constraints are the most important thing to becoming a good scientist. but I'm going to call this Loose lips sink ships because I think the more you talk about your work the less likely it's going to come into the world I've learned that from you I want to thank you and hope that you've continued to receive the blessings that you deserve

you've helped millions of people south including me thank you so much thank you this was super fun I love talking science thanks for everything I said be well any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review.

Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Heating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, director, Brian Keating, co-director, produced by Brian Keating, co-director, produced by Brian

Keating and Stuart Volko.