Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Seth Godin On AI, Industrial Capitalism and Solving the Climate Crisis (#350)

Episode Date: September 24, 2023

Is AI real or just magic pretending to be real? What’s the difference between education and learning? And what does global warming have to do with marketing?!  Here today, to answer these questions, is one of my heroes, Seth Godin! Seth is an internationally renowned author and public speaker. His name is synonymous with marketing. For over 30 years, Seth has inspired countless individuals, teams, and tribes to think differently about marketing, leadership, and innovation.  Today, Seth and I sit down to discuss his latest book, The Song of Significance, a manifesto for teams desperately seeking ways to navigate the age of disconnection, AI, the educational system, and global warming.  Strap in for another mind-bending conversation!  Key Takeaways:  Introduction (00:00) Judging a book by its cover: The Song of Significance (01:10) AI, magic, and the future of education (05:22) The half-life of companies (16:29) Seth’s writing process (24:13) Final questions (41:47) Outro (44:41) — Additional resources:  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! 🎤 Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 ➡️ Check out Seth Godin:  📚 The Song of Significance by Seth Godin: https://a.co/d/8nk6Ves  ✍️ Seth’s Blog: https://seths.blog/  📚 The Carbon Almanac by The Carbon Almanac Network: https://a.co/d/8gyGW7V  📱 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethgodin  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He's an internationally renowned author and public speaker. His name is synonymous with marketing. For over 30 years, Seth Godin has inspired countless individuals, teams, and tribes to think differently about marketing, leadership, and innovation. His latest book as a manifesto for teams desperately seeking ways to navigate in the age of disconnection. Strap in for another mind-bending conversation about learning, artificial intelligence, leaderships, and getting scientists together. to build a better tomorrow.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, welcome everybody to a thrill, a treat, a midsummer delight with one of my heroes, Seth Godin, joining us from presumably on the East Coast in his deep work, Lair. How are you, Seth?

It's such a delight to be back. Thank you for having me. You always worry that, like, you blew it last time, but I learned so much about gravity waves and Arthur C. Clark and the rest, how can I say no? We're going to talk about Arthur C. Clark. We're going to talk about managing teams. We're going to talk about scientists because a huge proportion of my audience are scientists.

And maybe we'll get into some AI and blogging resources and a couple of venal self-interested things that I just can't resist when I'm talking to, you know, one of the foremost geniuses of our time in multi-domains and in many different ways. I just, I can't resist. Since you were on three years ago now, I can't believe it, we have adopted some new techniques and technology on the Into the Impossible podcast. And the very first thing that we do nowadays, unlike what was the case, the last time you grace me with your presence, is we judge books by their covers. The thing you're never supposed to do, Seth, but what else do you have to go on? People always do it, for sure.

So I have the audio book. I bought it. You sent me the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the printed book, you sent me the e-book. It's great in all formats. But Seth, I want you to do the following. Take us through the cover, the art, the design, the principles, the colors, everything, and especially the title and subtitled. Please, if you would, in the segment we call judging books by their covers. So the cover has a B on it. And the reason it has a B on it is because my life changes all the time, but it was changed by the work of Jacqueline Freeman and other feral apiurists. She's not feral, but the bees are feral. The research that they've done on bees and colonies, just really transformative. The first thing I'd point out is that the best way to

think of a bee is not as a creature, but as a neuron. That the beehive, the colony is a brain. And each one of the bees is doing part of it in coordination, led without a leader, coordinated without a coordinator. And that is a really powerful metaphor for how we think of the systems of our lives. And in the book, I tell many stories of the bees. It's not a book about bees or it's not four bees. No bee has read it as far as I can tell. But I think it opens the door for us to think differently about what we do all day. And so if we think about science with a capital S, there are scientists, each scientist apparently pursuing their own self-interest. But when they weave together their work, what we end up with is science. And when we establish the rules for that,

and when we swarm and how the maidens work with the queen and everything else, I think we can learn a lot. So that's what's on the cover. I have cover approval and my publisher is a delight to work with. but what that means is my covers go through many more iterations than almost any other book, and this one probably had 40 versions before the one you saw. Well, I have to tell you a couple of things. Normally, the answer that I get for my distinguished author guest is, well, my publisher told me the title, the cover. And it's always boring, and my comments in the YouTube comment box will always say, why do you keep asking that question?

It's always the same answer. but I think when you have someone of your renown and you've published, I think you're writing a book and publishing it as we speak, you know, with your hands. Show me your hands, Suss. Show me your hands. The other thing I wanted to talk about is a guest I haven't had on the podcast, but it's I'm going to give you a book recommendation. And no, it's not my own book and it's no venality involved.

It's called The Mind of a Bee. Have you heard of this book? It's by Lars Chitka. It's a Princeton University Press. You will, I will put a, I will recommend this to you extremely highly. because it's actually taking on the process that is incredibly important to the study of consciousness and what is it like to be a bat. I'm thinking about putting out a paper, you know, what does it like to be Thomas Nagel

written by a bat? But we'll see if that ever comes to fruition. That is brilliant. Yes. And I think this gets, we're going to save AI for later, I think, but this gets into the illusion that so many of us have about AI because we know there's no consciousness, but it may be actually how our brains do work. Own it all.

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You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Yeah, let's let's go there now. Let's dovetail through. First of all, your blog, which, you know, I don't read every day. I'm sorry, but you write it every day. And I just love it. And I love, you know, particularly this quote from Arthur C. Clark. This comes from 2008, September 2008, I believe. What can you learn from Arthur C. Clark? And you give his famous quote that we actually open every episode of The Into the Impossible podcast with his actual voice saying these very words,

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And you're right. In 1983, I was lucky enough to lead a team that turned one of Arthur's novels into a computer game. The first time science fiction authors had worked in that medium. His computer game ended up grossing more than most of all his books did. He really was a genius. The most important thing you could take away, naming things is important. He made magic things real by describing them and talking about them in ways that felt real. Once something feels real, making it real is a lot easier. Seth, are artificial intelligence is real? To what extent would an AI Seth or a Seth bot? I've made a bribe bot and you can access it on my website, Brian Keating.com. I give it to my wife

when she wants to have an argument. Seth, tell me, are these things real? Are they just magical pretending to be real? Magic is always in the eye of the beholder. A mediocre amateur magician. I do not perform magic. What I do is create the conditions for you to imagine that magic happens. So we know exactly how AI is doing what it's doing. We're talking about large language models and things like chat GPT. It has a corpus of billions of words. It is looking for what word is the next word in the sentence most likely to occur. And then it adds a slight randomization so it doesn't become banal and gives you the next word. It does not, quote, understand what it is doing. But I would argue as someone who studied with Dan Dennett

and has been thinking about philosophy my whole life. I think that's how our brains work too. I think we are talking without knowing the whole sentence before we say it, and we have a commentary in our head that is giving the play-by-play that we call consciousness that happens after our brain has already decided what to do, not before.

And so free will is an illusion. And as someone who's spending it half an hour, an hour a day with AI, I have a lot of trouble reminding myself that it's not conscious. It's just so much easier to imagine its intentionality. The issues that I'm having with it have nothing to do with its programming or its technical capabilities. It is the human factor, the hallucination, the hallucinatory behavior of it, not only in the model itself, but in the user, because you are interacting with it.

And I'm actually doing this to embody in literal fashion with a colleague here at UC San Diego and my nephew who's joining me this summer. This is to make artificial intelligences of past living scientists. My goal is to take the greatest scientist in history, say Galileo over here, and have him talk to an Einstein bot over here and have them teach each other. So Einstein will teach him about general relativity and gravity. And then who knows what the sum would be greater than the parts of. But then I keep doing it, Seth, and I get out results that, you know,

chatbot or bribebot, please predict, you know, the law of gravity from this equation. Oh, sure, it's inverse cube law. No, it's not. But it says it with such confidence. And I say, no, you're wrong. And then says, oh, I apologize. I'm so sorry. You're absolutely right.

But if I didn't say you're wrong, then what would have happened? And what do you make of the potential impact of AI, not on industrial capitalism, which is a big subject of your present book and your modern thinking and your recent thinking, I should say, but also on the future of education. This is perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery I think AI can help with, but not if it hallucinates. Talk to me about your thoughts. Are you sanguine? Are you not sanguine about artificial intelligent avatars?

Why learn marketing from Joe Schmoe here at Upstairs Business College when you can learn it from Seth Godin in avatar form? Okay. So you've nested 400 things there. That's my specialty. So when Joseph Weisenbaum wrote Eliza, the code for it enlist is this long. Yeah. And his secretary quit because it's so freaked her out to encounter this Rogarian therapist on her desktop printer at MIT.

So this much code is enough to get someone to quit a good job at a college. It's not hallucinating. You're just imagining it's hallucinating. All it's doing is doing math that takes the form of letters, and the letters do something in our head. So when you seek to have an AI teach another AI, that's not going to happen. And what we know already very clearly is that when you train an AI on anything that an AI has done, it quickly devolves into nonsense.

The images become garbled and the text becomes useless. And that's why they have gone to great lengths to make sure that nothing in the corpus is Corpi that they're teaching an AI is something that came from an AI and why they had to draw a line on the Internet a couple years ago and say, I don't know anything that happened on the Internet after that date because a lot of stuff on the Internet is going to be written by AI and that will corrode the whole thing. So with that said, we now shift to education. I don't care about education one bit. I care about learning a lot. Education is a top-down bureaucratic industrial system designed for compliance, where they push people to trade their effort and compliance for a certificate

that shows they can put in effort and comply. Learning only happens when we do something, when we explore something. You cannot learn to ride a bike by watching a video. It's impossible. You learn to ride a bike by being encouraged enough to ride a bike, figuring out how to do it wrong, and then you know how to ride a bike. And the same thing is true for calculus and science. So what an AI learning bot will do is patiently and tirelessly create the conditions for learning to happen. That's different than education. And if I have the time to synchronize with a human being and bring status and tension to the table, I can teach them a lot of things.

I can teach them out of juggle. I can teach them marketing. but if you're just watching videos of me, that can get to be more like education. And when you think about these developments, the long emergency, the long emergence, I should say, of virtual reality,

seeing a renaissance with perhaps Applevision Pro, if I can write a few more books, you know, maybe I'll be able to afford it. But the notion of finally, the chocolate meets the peanut butter, and we get a clean slate. We shake the etch-a-sketch up, and maybe now, finally, because I've been underwhelmed by,

I have the first oculi and so forth, they have very underwhelming. I use it a couple of days, give it to a kid, and then I give it away. But perhaps the killer app is this virtual reality coupled with an AI avatar, and to point that with some data, or back it with some data, there are many, many studies of widows, in particular, on Instagram, on these social media apps, Facebook, et cetera. And they're being what's called catfish. They're having somebody seeing, oh, it's an old woman.

Unfortunately, it happens mainly to women. And she's posting pictures of herself. And she looks really flattering and beautiful. She's not married, doesn't mention, you know, she's in a provocative post. She's probably single. She probably was married. Therefore, she's either divorced or widowed. And let me start slip into her DMs and start the process of manipulating her for money.

And then even, Seth, even when they know, it's a manipulation, even when they know they're being defrauded of, you know, substantial amounts of money, in some cases, $100,000, but usually the average amount's about $100,000. They keep doing it. So what about this, you know, kind of fraud as a service? I mean, if people know it's an illusion and they have all the benefits of it and they're lonely, is there a harm in that? Is there a harm to the society, the hive of bees, if you will, and to the greater good? I was in the video game business in the 80s. The mistake that the virtual reality people have made is they think that resolution is the point.

Resolution is not the point. Tetris is unbelievably low resolution and it works because it's low resolution. If you made a super high resolution version of Tetris with the bricks and the granite and everything else, it wouldn't be a mind. Right. Right. And virtual reality is. going to start to work when they go to really, really low resolution. When, you know, reading Snow Crash in my head, snow crash is a low resolution simulation of the Earth. It's not real life.

That's why it worked. Because the same way the houses and Monopoly aren't real houses and the horses in chess aren't real horses, that metaphor enables us to alert the right part of our brain. Right now, virtual reality is in the Uncanny Valley, and the Uncanny Valley immediately repulses almost everybody. But next, you're asking about fraud as a service. Is a prostitute a fraud? Well, probably because that person doesn't really care about you. They are doing it for money.

And your therapist doesn't like you either. And so we have a long history of controlled, bounded interactions with service. providers where we give them money and they give us something that we need. And the widows who aren't getting catfished might be spending time in Las Vegas. They might be spending time at the hairdresser. It's all on an arc. The question is, does it have limits that are culturally appropriate or does it lead to all sorts of bad social hazard outcomes? And so, yeah, I think it's already happening that we're going to widen dramatically what porn is to turn it into something that's significantly more socially acceptable, where the providers of it might not be as traumatized, and where the

consumers of it might not be as traumatized, but where certain human needs for men or women are served by these interactions that we have with devices. And you just have to talk to a teenager that's hooked on TikTok, to understand that they're basically pressing a button in exchange for food. 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 ocean front 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 surprisingly. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

So pivoting mostly away from from AI and other topics, let's go to the book. In the book, you talk about the notion of companies being these ephemeral entities, even a company like Microsoft meta, et cetera. You talk about them having a half-life. What is the half? I got excited. I thought you're going to break out some radioactive decay here. We're going to get into Oppenheimer. But what does it mean the half-life of a company? These companies are still around. I can. still get a Nokia, you know, something from Nokia, I believe. And Nintendo started off making, you know, playing card decks, as you know, and then pivoted many, many times. What's their half-life? Can these exceed the human lifetime by a lot? So what is the half-life of a company?

There's plenty of data, and I'm not a data person, that show that big companies less than ever before. And it's really unlikely that a giant company will outlive you. It will, will be merged, it will fade away, it will be replaced. My point is the purpose of culture is not to enable capitalism. The purpose of capitalism is to enable culture. That when a person goes to work, they would be making a mistake if they think that they are the company and that the company is an entity that will live forever. What they're doing is trading precious, irreplaceable time for the things they need to live. And once we have enough to live,

the question that I would ask is, what else are you going to do with that privilege and that opportunity and that surplus? And it turns out that there's two parts that are really interesting to me. The first one is lots of people in California and in other places who have made more than enough decided to make more instead of to make better. And I don't know how you justify that.

I don't know how you decide, you know, back when I was at Yahoo, when Yahoo was the internet, how are we going to make Yahoo into a force for good that people will be glad to see every day? How are we going to make it into something that elevates the human condition? Or how do we make it into something where the stock price goes up tomorrow? And just it, the markets just bend people in the wrong direction. And the irony, the second part is this. When you do that, the market then destroys you. that's why Yahoo doesn't matter anymore because they chased the short term at the very moment

that Google refused to chase the short term. Now, Google is chasing the short term and we're seeing a different arc of companies coming along. So even if you want to argue that your job is to create maximum long-term shareholder value, I can argue that there's no evidence that says the best way to do that is to race to the bottom. Let's pivot to my favorite topic, which is me, and apply what you just said about industrial capitalism and the purpose of capitalism not being to make money necessarily. But let's apply to this very YouTube channel that you're embedded on as we speak. What should the purpose be?

I lose money on every video, so to speak. I pay a small staff. The company is sort of me in a sense. I don't think this would go on if I decide to take a, you know, go into the Alt MBA program and just abandon it. I think it would dissolve and be, the half-life would be, you know,

would be a full life because it'd be over. I am making these videos. I have reasons why I do them. Some are selfish. Some are altruistic. What do you advise somebody like me who's a creator, creating something artistic, you know,

besides my books and so forth? This is my primary creative outlet. What advice do you have to pivot, you know, to not think so much about the capitalistic drives that are pertinent? I have to pay an editor, right? But what would you advise somebody who's doing creative things, maybe not even breaking even or going into debt? What would you say to such a person like me?

Well, I would say exactly the same thing. I would say to you if you were trying to make as much money as possible, which is you need a purpose about the change you seek to make and who you are trying to change. If you can make a change, a significant change for thousands or tens of thousands of people, you will have no trouble making a living. None. And, you will have no trouble making a living. None. And so, you know, I can't remember the name ancient technologies guy, the silent films from Australia where he builds things using Stone Age technology. He was consistent and clear about what these videos were going to be like. He didn't chase formats of other people's videos. It was in and of itself. It stood for something. If you didn't like it, it was very clear

you could go somewhere else. If you did like it, this is what it is. And when we have that chance to make a change for people who want to be changed, and we can double down on that and double down on that, it's easier to avoid racing to the bottom. And so if we look at, you know, I'm going to call it Apple One, Apple Two, and Apple Three. Apple One was the first and second comings of Steve Jobs, where Steve was very clear about the difference he sought to make. And the difference was, how do I bend the gravitational force of technology and find people who want to develop better taste in digital interaction, digital goods, and invent? And the stock price was secondary.

And after he passed and Tim took over, he was very clear, what? I am here to do is to change the stock market to create the most valuable company in the history of the world by making a luxury good that has almost no innovation associated with it. But when you do that for more than 10 years, it is pretty inevitable that Apple 3 will be, well, we're not Apple 2 anymore. And you can't keep a luxury good line at that scale going forever. And so we get to go through cycles, but we get to decide the change we seek to make. And so, you know, your podcast, your YouTube channel is really fun and really great. What change are you seeking to make for who? There's a meme going around, not a meme, just on Twitter. I saw this letter

offer to David Nagy of Las Gatos, California from December 7th, oddly enough, 1989, or Steve Jobs is the vice president of marketing acting for the next computer incorporated. And he's just giving an offer. And he's saying a hiring bonus. You'll be granted stock options. Next offers no employment contracts. And your employment will be at will. And we may be terminated by you or next at any time.

And then so it's just like this real boilerplate, type message, actually type handwritten letter with coffee stains on it. And then parentheses above his, the date where David Nagy is supposed to sign it says I accept this insanely great offer I'm like this like the most robotic you know like almost offensive like if somebody offered me that I'd be like thanks for helping me make my decision not to work with you so just that was in reference to your comments about Apple one two and three and I agree with you wholeheartedly but but let's pivot to why the why of my of my podcast is really because I always wanted to give back I was inspired

by someone who you were friends with which I can't imagine I could imagine wanting to meet you more in person for any other reason than I already did. But now, reading about this recently, your friend Isaac Asimov, is that true? Oh, my God. So, Arthur, Arthur was a correspondent, but I said, study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium 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.m.m.S.C. College PC. Isaac was a friend. Isaac, I named one of my sons, Isaac, in his honor, although my wife tells me it's for Yitzhak Pearlman. But anyway, the point being, Isaac Asimov had a huge impact on the reason I'm having this conversation because I'm a scientist because of him in no small part. Not because of a science fiction. I'm not a huge fan of a science fiction. He wrote like 600 books. He's like you. I mean,

he almost wrote as many as you. And he could have had a good career if he wrote as many as Seth did. But anyway, good old Isaac, he was prolific in science fact, science nonfiction. And I love his books. And I get, I'm trying to find the original copies for my sons to read because they're getting into it too. My daughters too. But the reason I bring this up is because I want to pivot to the why of this podcast is because he inspired me through his books. What are the modern versions of books in some way or another? They're not just audiobooks, although I love your audio books, but they're podcast. And I want to quote a conversation that you quote on Seth's blog from 2013 that I dug up.

In the words of my late friend, Isaac Asimov shared with Carl Sagan, you are my idea of a good writer because you have an unmannered style. And when I read what you're right, I hear you talking. And I want to pivot, if you'll indulge me, one more thing that I, I made notes for this podcast and then I looked at my notes from our previous podcast three years ago. And I have the same exact quote from Carl Sagan. And I'm going to read it to you. And then I want you to talk about the subject of your writing process. Here it goes.

Carl Sagan said, well, an astonishing thing, a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny, dark swiggles. glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe someone dead for thousands of years. They are speaking clearly and silently inside your head. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. There's that word again, Arthur C. Clark magic. So I've redone that and said that a podcast is proof that people can work magic. So my mission, and I want you to give a, you know, a Roman Empire emperors, thumbs up or something. Science authors don't make a lot of money.

and yet they're brilliant and I think a good science author like Carl Sagan, like Al-Leyo, my other hero, they can be seen and they can do double duty. They can teach science, but they also teach great literature because they were great writers, weren't they? And I want to talk about you as a writer. The process that you have,

and you describe in 2013, has it changed in the last 10 years? Are you still kind of, you know, proceeding on that same pattern of writing? And can you explain your writing process? I have many authors that listen to this podcast. Can you talk about your process and how, if all, it's changed, perhaps with the advent of generative AI? Well, the last part's easy. Every word I write,

I wrote by myself. Sure, sure. But for research or something like that, to use it for research. I will ask it to provoke me. I will say, please give me 10 subtitles for my new book, and then I will find one better than those. Please ask me 10, please write in the voice of Brian Keating. Ask me 10 questions embedded as one. Yeah. Exactly. My writing style is different than your YouTube style. And so I will highlight the difference between them because they both work. You say, I have found a human being. I'm going to talk to them in my inimitable style.

And you, my listeners will be able to listen to each one saying something different. What I say is, I noticed something in the world that I didn't understand. I think I understand it now. Let me explain it to you. if you disagree with me, that's fine. It was still worth you hearing me because now you have a new thesis. If you agree with me, that's useful too because now you have a map or a compass. And so when we look at what has achieved significant scale on the internet, particularly on YouTube, is that posture to be able to say, hey, I'm Brian. I almost won the Nobel Prize.

This thing, you don't understand it. I'm going to explain it to you in 12 minutes. And I'm going to explain it to you in a way you will never forget. And that will change the person who sees it. And that might cause them to pass it on to the next person. So I am still motivated by that when I write. I don't write for a living. I don't write because I have to. I write because I have something I think I would like to teach.

And my method, you know, in 2000, I wrote a book where Charles Darwin wrote the foreword. That book took me eight hours a day. for a year to write. Wait, wait. Charles Darwin wrote the forward? How did you? He did, which is not easy to do because he was dead. You can't leave that hanging.

How did that happen? I went to the Gutenberg project and I downloaded, I can't remember which one of the books. And I just deleted everything from that document that wasn't the forward until I was down to three pages. And that was the forward. So every word was his. I just got rid of a lot of the words in between. but what the market told me is they didn't want to hear me write detailed thoughtful metaphors

about how we could use proven science to understand how business and culture work. So instead, my books take me much less time to write, but they land in a different way for people because basically what I'm saying is just a few minutes ago I didn't understand this. Now I think I do. What do you think? and that is what I sound like when I write. Very interesting.

So, as you said, I couldn't resist the ephemeral nature of books. So it turns out that I've looked at one of my great friends, Jay Pasekhov, as an eminent writer, also inspired me to become a scientist. He had a lot of ancient books, and he had the first edition of a Galileo's dialogue, which I was honored enough to produce the very first audiobook by Galileo, exists because of me and my colleagues, Frank Wilcheck, Nobel Prize winner. Carlo Rovelli is a renowned author and many others. But when I went to go see his book, I was like, very nervous. Can I touch it? He's like, do I have to wear gloves? Do I put on an oven

mitt? He said, no, no, no, that's actually worse for it. And it's not that rare. It's rare. It's not as rare as Charles Darwin. I said, that's weird. Like on the origin of species, published 200 years later. Why is that? And he said, because they published it on acid wash paper and Galileo's on parchment. So we think these technological innovations are going to, you know, bring unbridled, you know, benefit. But in fact, they can cause great harm, maybe even scarcity, et cetera. And to that end, I did want to pivot, you know, because my audience is the most brilliant in the known universe, except for maybe, you know, the Akimbo podcast audience. They're tied. They're tied. And I refer everybody to go to Seth's podcast and really just devour it.

I want to talk about the carbon almanac subtitle. It's not too late. I didn't read this all the way through yet, but my audience is very technically minded. A lot of young men listen to this podcast that are aspiring to be graduate students or postdocs or professors or what have you. And a lot of women do too, but trying to up that up. But tell me, Seth, what is that and what is the mission? How can my audience help in any way, if that's possible?

Carbon Almanac. Talk about that project, please. So I wrote my first blog post about the climate 15 years ago. And it didn't solve a problem. And I didn't write that many other blog posts about it because I realized I felt dumb. And the reason I felt dumb was because the oil companies wanted me to feel dumb. And the people who invented carbon footprint, which was British Petroleum, wanted me to feel like a hypocrite. And if you feel dumb and like a hypocrite, you're probably not going to speak up.

And I realized if I felt that way, other people might as well. So I organized 300, it's now 1,900 people, all volunteers, including me, I don't get a penny. And we put together this book, which is filled with graphs and charts and diagrams, all footnoted, some cartoons. And the entire 97,000 word book published without one significant error. And what it does is it's designed in two minutes, you can look at a couple pages and feel smarter. And you can hand it to someone and have a conversation with. them because I believe if we actually understood what is happening, why it's happening, and what our options are, we would almost certainly do something better than we're doing now.

And books are a really useful tool for creating this kind of understanding. And it's books been out for about a year and it is beginning to have that kind of traction. We made a kids edition. We made a photo book. we have more than 60 podcasts that came out of it because we need to talk about it. And I'm amazed when I talk to smart people how little they actually understand because it's invisible and slow. And human beings are bad at things that are invisible and slow.

Very good. Very good. So now staying on the scientific theme, and I should mention I am talking to, there are a lot more books. I mean, just to be respectfully pushed back with love, as I always do, you know, a lot more books are presented about the climate crisis, the climate emergency, the settled science of it all, Michael Mann, to Al Gore, and many of it. So I am having the foremost, I wouldn't say skeptic. He's a scientist. He's a professor at NYU, Steve Coonan. He's coming live in the studio

here next week, all the way from NYU, not far from you. And he and I are going to talk about that. And I'd be delighted if you have comments or questions about his book is called Unsettled. And he goes through as a physicist. He's a theoretical physicist. And he worked at the Department of Energy under Obama. And I wonder if you have any, you're shaking your head. So please, tell me what you're thinking as you shake your head. My heart is breaking. In 1954, the cigarette companies of America came together and ran a full-page ad, newspapers around the country. And they did something brilliant and evil. Just before then, peer-reviewed paper came out that showed pretty clearly that people who smoked were dramatically more likely to get lung cancer and die than people who didn't. And the cigarette

industry, instead of ignoring it or pretending it wasn't true, said, we need more research. And when you say it's unsettled, we need more research. The reason it's so brilliantly evil is people who like science like that, because more science, and people who like the status quo like that, because later, we'll settle it later. And I only have two questions for well-meaning people who want to talk about things being unsettled. And the two questions are this. One, let's say that we invest all of this effort in creating a world that is powered by clean energy that is more resilient and where people are treated more fairly. Why would that be a problem? And number two, what if you're wrong? Because if 90, 9.9% of all the climatologists in the world are wrong, we're going to end up with solar power

and a resilient world and a lot fewer side effects like almost all the species on earth disappearing. But they're not wrong. And if you read this kind of work, the kind of work that we digested, we did no research. We just pointed to stuff that was all peer-reviewed. If you read it with an open mind, the backflips you have to go through to say this is unsettled are almost impossible to go through. It's not like quantum mechanics in Nealzboer versus Albert Einstein. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about graphs that go like this, right? That even if you were trying to make it up, you wouldn't make a graph that went so perfectly like this. And it bothers me that,

that people for their own philosophical or financial gain want to take advantage of science's great asset, which is we can make it better. Damn straight, we can make it better. We can always make science better. But that doesn't mean you say that the smallpox vaccine doesn't work. It doesn't mean you say kids shouldn't get a polio shot. And it doesn't mean you say coal plants aren't that bad. Because I don't have grandchildren. But one day I might, and they're going to ask me, what did you do? And I just want to ask him, what if you're wrong? So, yeah, we need to stand up straight and say, yeah, this is settled. The details are not settled.

The details will never be settled because it's fractal. There's always more details. But no, it's not okay to open a coal plant, and it's not okay to subsidize beef. when I had on the Nobel laureate, Tim Palmer, who won the Nobel Prize, shared with Al Gore for the IPCC report on a global climate change. He also did advocate, and he's a physicist, theoretical physicist, and he did advocate for, you know, basically, I don't want to say a Manhattan-like project, but, you know, because Oppenheimer's, you know, kind of on my mind. But I will say he advocated for a CERN large Hadron Collider to study in, and simulate and progress. And I asked him, well, at that level, we knew there was, if the Higgs boson wasn't there, it would be incredibly interesting. But if we're wrong about the climate, okay, well, whatever that means, Seth, I think you're absolutely right. And I think you're you're being correct in saying science is, science is never settled, by the way. I mean,

it is the whole point, as Richard Feynman said, is science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, that Einstein wouldn't have done what he did if he thought that Newton was the final word or Galileo was the final word. But that said, in the public's, and he agreed more or less Tim Palmer did, Nobel laureate, saying, you know, effectively, we kind of have a little bit of egg on our face from the conflation of things like weather events and the lacuna in our ability to predict weather phenomena and the conflation of that in the public's mind. So that's not really a question, but there's a marketing problem. And I know a little bit about marketing.

I would say so. And here's the deal. People with emphysema, some of them still smoke. Yeah. And there's no question about the causes and effects of emphysema, right? Some of them still smoke. When we start calling this thing global warming, when we allow it to become politicized, we have a marketing problem. We don't have global warming. We have atmosphere cancer. And it's very clear to us that it is a chronic degenerative disease and is very clear to us what makes it worse. And so if people want science to be perfect, then I think they got to go back to being a Zora, Astrian, or some ancient religion. Because ancient religions were perfect in the sense that they said what they said and they left no room for doubt. Science is never like that.

If you want to walk away from all the things that science and engineering has given you, great. Go in the backyard, dig yourself a big hole, but you're not allowed to use a shovel because that came from science too. You go figure it out. But what science has given us is we are the richest, healthiest, best education, version of humans there has ever been. And now we're about to blow it because suddenly, at our convenience, we're deciding that kind of science. We don't want that. Well, you can't take,

you got to take it all. Well, I think, you know, he's a former provost of Caltech. He's not anti-science. But let me ask you a related question. You're interviewing, I'm interviewing somebody. Oftentimes I have the feeling, Seth, and this is a plea for advice, a creed decor if you will indulge me. I'm interviewing somebody, remain nameless, who's got a theory. in physics, you know, the multiverse, the string theory. And this guy's just talking BS. And I know it. And I can prove it because I'm, you know, I may not be a theoretical physicist, but I can

hold my own theory. You know, I've been known to manipulate a pencil or two. What do you do in the situation? Or you're interviewing someone that's kind of adversarial. I've had those conversations. And I'm always trying to be a gentleman about it. But what do you do if you're talking to somebody? And let's say you're talking to Steve Coonan, you know, used to work at BP, used to work

and, you know, et cetera. What do you do? How do you handle that, that, that, you know, without being a jerk, how do you be a mensch, but hold their feet to the fire? Every time science has worked, it's because we assume goodwill. If we assume goodwill, we ought to be able to have conversations where we could switch sides and look for consistency and inconsistency. If we can have a conversation like that, we can work our way to the truth.

So are you asserting A, B, and C? If you are, would that lead to D? Is this a testable hypothesis? Is it falsifiable? Are we looking at things where we are not considering the personal cost or the financial cost? We're just talking about the underlying elements of the science. If we can agree to have a conversation based on mutual goodwill, that's the way scientists should talk to each other. If on the other hand, you're trying to get more YouTube clicks, well, then we know what's fights sell. And I just have no patience for it. I can't do it. I don't know how. Enragement drives engagement.

And I think you know how. You just don't have the appetite for it. And I agree. It's a very short life. And we have to take advantage of it while we have it. Okay, you've got a minute left before your next interview. So I wanted to make this quick. Since our last interview, we've added a touching ending segment where I usually ask four

different questions. But, you know, in the limits of time, well, in the interest of time, maybe if you'll indulge me with your patented forbearance. I'll ask you too. They're both related to Arthur C. Clark. So the first one is a statement that goes like this. He said, when an elderly, and I'm not calling you elderly, Seth, okay. I'm elderly. Okay. When an elderly but distinct, I will call you distinguished, but an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible. He or she is very likely to be correct. But when he or she says something is impossible, they are most likely very much wrong. What, Seth, have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about,

if anything? I've been wrong more than most people. I view that as an attribute. I was wrong about the internet. That cost me $45 or $50 billion, and I remind myself with that all the time. I have been wrong lately, I hope, when I was deep into the first version of the process of building a carbon almanac, I was distraught like most of my peers. I looked at the reality of what we were facing, the lack of attention, the slow responsive technology, and I thought, we're doomed in four years. And in the last couple months, I've started to feel more optimistic that we're going to get carbon pricing and that technology breakthroughs from super white paint to fusion give us a shot as we approach the warning track.

And I hope I'm right about that, but it is giving me. me fuel and optimism. So that could be one of the examples. Okay. And then the other kind of comment based on Arthur C. Clark, going back to your former self, advice to your former self, Arthur C. Clark said famously, the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible, which is, of course, the name of this podcast that you're appearing on. So Seth, don't ask you, in the form of advice to your former self, your 20-year-old self, go back, you got 30 seconds with him. how do you give him the courage to go into the impossible as you have done? So as I said, I failed a lot.

And every one of those failures made me who I am. And I'm pretty okay with who I am. So I would give myself no advice to avoid those failures. There's a time travel book called Replay, best time travel book I've ever read. And it haunts me. But I think if we could just say to our younger selves, it's going to be okay. Because we can just define whatever happens as okay. Very good.

And you share that with another New Yorker, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's the only other person besides you who said he wouldn't tell him a damn thing because he likes the way his life turned out. It's like that episode of the Simpsons where Abraham Simpson, grandpa Simpson tells Homer, if you ever go back in time, don't step on anything. You don't know what will happen. And of course, Homer does and steps on a trilobite and the world blows up 60 million years later.

Okay. Seth Godin can be found everywhere that blogs are pervade. Seth's blog on the internet, the Alt MBA program, LinkedIn learning courses. LinkedIn's one of my advertisers, so I love it. Udemea courses and, of course, the Kimbo podcast, his many books, Seth, we love you. Thank you so much for their generosity of time, spirit, and intellect. And I wish you a wonderful success with this book and all your endeavors, as usual. Appreciate you.

Keep making a ruckus. Thank you, Seth. I'll be in touch of your next book, which will come out, I think, in about 20 minutes. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank.