--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous guest, Brian Keating. Now, you may not have heard of Brian Keating before if you're not super geeky like I am, but I came across Brian Keating and his work on James Altucher's podcast. As you know if you listen to the show all the time, we had James on a few episodes ago, and it was a tremendous conversation. James is a tremendous guy. I heard Brian on his show and they're doing this series about the origin of the universe.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Brian is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science and the Department of Physics at the University of California of San Diego. So Brian is completely legit. He wrote a book called *Losing the Nobel Prize*. He has done all kinds of incredible work on the universe. He's a cosmologist. The dude is smarter than probably all of us listening to this podcast together. Brian is that smart.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I heard him having these really awesome conversations, but it wasn't just about cosmology. You have to be into that stuff to listen to it. I'm into it. I love it. But what I was really enamored by was the way that Brian formulates thoughts and thinks about things like truth. We go a lot of places in this episode. It's a very eclectic episode in terms of the topics that we address. Brian is just someone who I really wanted to put into your ecosystem.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you're into this stuff, if you like the nerdy stuff, Brian is a great guy to follow because he's like a cool nerd. He's super interesting, super fun. He makes the topics digestible, but at the same time, at any given moment, he can drop down into the ones and zeros of cosmology. He also has a tremendous podcast called *Into the Impossible*, where he interviews Nobel Prize winners and people doing and thinking about things that will absolutely bend your brain.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It is a great pleasure to bring another show kind of outside the industry to you, because I think this stuff is really fun. What's great about a lot of these guests that aren't in the insurance industry is they try very hard to pull back some of the concepts to what we do every day. I think that cross-pollination is important. I think you're going to like this one.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But before we get there, I want to give a big shout out to my man, Mick Hunt at Premier Strategy Box. Premier Strategy Box is a no-brainer solution. I haven't had anyone who I've referred over to Mick, back channel on the DMs, text and Facebook Messenger, who hasn't worked with him. What they're doing—the producer training, the producer coaching, the producer managing—all the different things that they're doing at Premier Strategy Box are game changers for agencies because we all have strengths and weaknesses.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have, I would like to believe, a few tremendous strengths. I also have an incredible number of weaknesses. Having someone like Mick and his team who can come in and not just be doers, but be managers, people who are making sure things are getting done and holding your team accountable and coaching them at the same time is invaluable. It's a great honor. Mick's become a very good friend. I've talked about him in the past and I'm honored that Mick wanted to be a sponsor of this show. I always love when it's his turn in the rotation for the reads because I love giving shout outs to Premier Strategy Box.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you want to know more about Premier Strategy Box, first catch up with Mick on any of the socials and then go to mystrategybox.com. That's mystrategybox.com. All right, on to Brian.
--:-- [Transition to interview]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Is this going to be video only or... I mean, yeah, I only produce the audio.
--:-- Brian Keating: Okay, cool. That's fine because I otherwise would have put on a three-piece suit and tie.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, but no, you look great either way, man. So don't worry.
--:-- Brian Keating: Thank you, my friend. Yes, yes. It's been tough with the COVID-90 pounds, but I'm doing my best.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So where are you? Are you in LA or no?
--:-- Brian Keating: I'm in upstate New York.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, okay. Which part?
--:-- Brian Keating: Albany. Well, just outside Albany.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay. I was born on Long Island, so I'm intimately familiar with New York. I lived in Westchester County after that mostly, which for me is downstate, but for you a Long Islander would be upstate.
--:-- Brian Keating: Exactly. People talk about it and they're like, "Putnam is the border of upstate." I'm like, "I don't know if I believe that."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, it is funny. When people tell someone they're from New York, they immediately assume the city.
--:-- Brian Keating: Exactly. As a Long Islander, you can hear the accents. You're like, "Ah, maybe he's from Long Island." But as an upstate New Yorker, I could be from anywhere. I have the most... it's a different state. Different state, different values, different everything. Everything is different.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Cool. So I got until 10 before the hour. Perfect. Your time. And then I got to go pick up some of the kids.
--:-- Brian Keating: No doubt.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You're friends with James, if I remember right?
--:-- Brian Keating: Well, yeah. I just recorded with him last week. His episode actually comes out on Thursday.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, awesome. So this show, just so you know, this probably isn't going to sound humble, though it is what it is. It's okay. I am in a constant competition with a buddy of mine who has the biggest podcast in the insurance industry. We go up and down from some of the biggest carriers in the country all the way down to single person retail insurance shops that just started up last week. We run the gamut of everyone in between.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We focus a lot on issues impacting our industry specifically. But I particularly like to bring in people from outside the industry because the cross-pollination of ideas is very important to me and my own development. I like to share that with the audience. I became familiar with your work through James's show and then started listening to your podcast and then some of the other shows that you've been on. The group of people that you seem to hang with—your dark web buddies—are some of my favorite thinkers in the world today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: As a broad sweeping stroke, what I'm most interested in—I have a whole ton of random notes that I want to walk through—but I really enjoy how you wrap your brain around a thought. In particular, that series of four episodes that you did with James where you were talking through the origin of the Big Bang, the theories that made sense, the theories that didn't make sense, why they didn't. By "make sense," I mean varying degrees of where you both personally or the scientific community fell on them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was intrigued by some of these things. This idea of which one is the truth, what does the truth mean, how do we get there, and how do we examine it. I guess my first question for you in this very long and probably technically terrible first question is: what is it about you that you look at the world this way? Not everyone does. Very few people examine things or are willing to examine them from as many angles as you seem to be willing to do. Where does that come from?
--:-- Brian Keating: For me, I truly believe that if you don't examine the biggest questions, then you're kind of wasting this most precious gift that will soon be over. Your job is to be an expert in minimizing risk and reducing rogue wave impacts and so forth. But my feeling is if I can have that insurance in place—literally, figuratively—then I should take those risks. If you just think about insuring your life or insuring against certain occupational hazards, as I have to, then you're not actually taking full advantage. You're sort of wasting it.
--:-- Brian Keating: It's not to say because I have car insurance I drive recklessly, but I leave my house. What's the safest way to operate your car? Leave it in the garage. But obviously that's not a really full life. For me, I want to answer all these questions because there's a 100% chance there's nothing you or anyone else—from you to Patrick Bet-David, who's been on my show as well—can do to prevent the ultimate destination. We're all born to die. So we must make use of the time we have to live. To me, living is nothing if you don't ask questions with deep and passionate curiosity.
--:-- Brian Keating: It sounds like you really resonate with that. I'm very appreciative of people who think the way that you do because it turns out most of my colleagues don't think this way. Most of my colleagues see it as a job, unfortunately, and don't approach it with the passion, with the curiosity, with the intensity that lay people such as yourself or our mutual friend James Altucher approach it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I agree with you. I think that certainly transcends the academic or the scientific community. I've said this many times. The people who listen to this show in particular, who continue to listen, ask bigger questions—not just about our space, but about our entire lives. The people that don't listen to this show are the people that show up every day and it's just a thing that you do. You're kind of just waiting to be told what to do next. "Someone just tell me what to do because God forbid I have to crack into the next percentage of consciousness in my brain. What if I had to turn on 2% of my brain today? That would be awful. What if I made the wrong decision and people would judge me?" Then down this spiraling path of awfulness that feels like it's manifesting in its worst variety today in our society.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So one of the things that I found—this is going to be as random as a thing because I listened to your content. I came into it about a month and a half ago, maybe three months ago.
--:-- Brian Keating: Yeah, last fall.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that's right. So maybe four months ago. That grabbed me and got me into your space. I heard you in your interview with Eric Weinstein, who I love. I listened to you on Shapiro. I have a couple things from that. This is a random question about your interview with Shapiro. What is it like when he's in mid-sentence speaking to you and then all of a sudden he turns and does a promo right over your shoulder? Are you trying as hard as you can not to make faces at him?
--:-- Brian Keating: It's pretty funny because they don't know what the ads are. I don't know if you do this on your podcast. I just started doing dynamic ad insertion. They have fixed ads. Somebody purchases ads—this was the Ben Shapiro show, something special I was on about a year and a half ago now. He doesn't know what the ad will be. So he goes, "But to hear the answer to that, you'll have to come back. And now a word from our sponsor." And then it's like, he just sits there and goes, "Rolling fake sponsor now." He doesn't know what the ad's going to be. It could be for erectile dysfunction, menopause products, hair plugs, or whatever he gets the big money for. I'm just getting simple requests for organic coffee filters or something.
--:-- Brian Keating: I shouldn't disparage it. I'm actually going to be doing some ads for LinkedIn, if you can imagine that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, these are in the middle of the episode. People can fast forward if they don't like it. But the funny thing is, you can't advertise for our competition. I'm like, "Is there a competition? You guys are worried about competition. Who does LinkedIn compete against?"
--:-- Brian Keating: Exactly right. But then I started thinking, you may wonder who does Brian Keating compete against? I'm an astrophysicist. I'm looking for cosmic origins, the composition of the universe, the structure. Who could compete with me? But there are more people floating above your head right now on the International Space Station than there are cosmologists who have won the Nobel Prize in physics, which is the ultimate accolade in what I do. There are more people in the NBA that do the kind of astronomy that I do, broadly speaking, that are professors at research universities, as I am at UC San Diego.
--:-- Brian Keating: From that perspective, there is competition on all realms. It's kind of foolish to maintain that we're all in this together. We're not all in this together, even in things like podcasting. Ben Shapiro has a different audience, but every minute that your audience is listening to Ben Shapiro or me on the *Into the Impossible* podcast is a minute that, unless they split their earbuds up as I have, they can't listen to your podcast. From that perspective, life is a zero-sum game. But what worries me is when people see science as a zero-sum game. Science is actually not a zero-sum game. There's competition in it, but that's kind of a byproduct of what James and I have talked about—the nature of finite games versus infinite games.
--:-- Brian Keating: A finite game is usually a zero-sum game where there's a winner and a loser. You could tie in certain things like chess. But on the same token, there are infinite games and science is an infinite game. You can't win science. You can't win business. You can't win podcasting. These are all skills that I find very much in harmony with one another because you can't win them. The game goes on forever.
--:-- Brian Keating: I hope that you get a chance someday to read my book, *Losing the Nobel Prize*. I hope that when people come to the end of it, they kind of don't want it to end. I had that experience with many books in my life, from *Moby Dick* to *On the Road* by Jack Kerouac. I wish I didn't read them because then I could have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. I hope that's the case for this. Science is always like that. It never ends. There's no winning science. There's no ending science. So I really love what I get to do. It's kind of the most ambitious thing for me personally that I could do. I want to share that appreciation with others because so many scientists keep their discoveries to themselves and hoard it. I feel like that is not only a dysfunctional way to behave, I actually think it's immoral. I could talk more about that if you want.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So there's a few things in there. It feels like it's an infinite game until someone figures out time travel and then they can just go back and take out all their competition and then they win. So that's basically until that point.
--:-- Brian Keating: I've talked about that. Some of my guests—I've had nine Nobel Prize winners on my show. I've had a couple of aspiring Nobel Prize winners. One even talked about the possibility of humans going into wormholes. This is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Our mutual kind of mentor in some sense, Eric Weinstein, thinks about these things very deeply. He's due any day now to come out with his publication on geometric unity, which he promised me on my show on New Year's Eve he would release by April 1, which is coming up soon. I hope it wasn't a joke.
--:-- Brian Keating: You're right. Time travel would be kind of the ultimate. As I told James Altucher when he was on my show, that's the ultimate in skipping the line. Lines are one-dimensional curves in space and time, but there's nothing that says you can't take the other dimension and go into another dimension—the second dimension, third dimension, fifth dimension—and bypass the line altogether.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was a scientist until thermodynamics, and then I decided that I wasn't smart enough to be—well, let me just put it, my priorities were not aligned enough to be a scientist. I was talking to someone the other day about it and they asked what I went to school for. I ended up getting a math degree, but the only reason I got that was I got to a certain point and I was like, "Nope, thermodynamics is beyond me. I can either chase women, drink beers, and play baseball in college, or I can continue on this science path." I chose the liberal arts version of that path.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would like to go back to your thought on the pursuit of big ideas, that big ideas are a worthy pursuit. What I hear a lot is people often question whether they're worthy of approaching big ideas. I see it even in my own industry, which is a relatively benign example compared to the things that you're studying—growing a business or selling someone something. We tend to minimize or question whether we're the ones that could attack that big idea. You seem to, at least from what I've heard, either overcome that sensation or you never had it. Which is it? How could you help someone? What allows you to open yourself up to approaching those big ideas?
--:-- Brian Keating: Those are really good questions. I can't say that I've fully overcome them. I think that the only question that is a bad question is one you don't ask. To have questions early is great in life when you're young, and you're still young. I do this with my kids. I'm blessed to have children, graduate students, undergraduates, and postdocs that work for me and with me. I'm blessed to have mentors. Those are the people that made me who I am.
--:-- Brian Keating: I just talked to my PhD thesis advisor on my podcast last week for an episode I'll probably put out on Father's Day because he is kind of like a father to me. He's not that much older than me, but maybe he's like a young, cool uncle. This is Professor Peter Kimby of the University of Wisconsin. Peter was my mentor in graduate school. I look at him like a father. Last year I had on Jim Simons, who is the world's smartest billionaire and one of the top 20 wealthiest people in America, a scientist of great renown and a philanthropist of amazing accomplishment. I had him on my podcast on Father's Day because he's also been a mentor to me, a father figure.
--:-- Brian Keating: Here's a billionaire on one side and here's a public university school teacher. It couldn't be more different in many ways. One comes from a Judeo background like I do, one is not like my mentor. It just goes to show that there is a meaning in the word "scientist" in the Russian language. I know you know Russian fluently, right? I'm not going to say that this is news to you, but the word "scientist" in Russian means someone who was taught. It probably means a man who was taught, but that doesn't matter. Half my students are women and half my mentors are women. The point is you have to be taught to be a scientist. That means if you want to be a scientist, you have to teach. You start at a point where you know nothing compared to your teacher and you hopefully move up the ladder.
--:-- Brian Keating: That's part of James's philosophy that I really resonate with. You need someone who's above you in terms of intellect or where you want to go in your career, or it could be in your hobby of chess, in podcasting. I'm looking for mentors. These are people who don't even have bachelor's degrees and I'm learning from them about how to grow my YouTube channel. I feel like it is a game and it's an infinite game too. Then you need somebody who's your equal, someone that you can sharpen each other's minds with. And then someone who's at a level underneath you in the figurative sense that you can teach, because only through teaching do you become a scientist. You become a conveyor of this wonderful, awesome branch of knowledge that we call the scientific tradition.
--:-- Brian Keating: From all those perspectives, I do believe that I have to be humble, but I am a good teacher because I was a good student. The motto of my YouTube channel is: "I'm creating the university that you wish you went to that has no tuition, that you can go to school in your pajamas, and you get graded on a curve." From my perspective, what I really want to do is bring together this multiverse of minds and assemble. Now, thanks to technology, we can do it. There's no excuse not to do it. So I'm trying to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you feel like your openness and candor to these ideas on a platform like YouTube is inspiring others? I know there are others, but is it helping to inspire and build more nodes in the sharing of these concepts and ideas and break down some of the barriers in the scientific and academic space where people hoard information? Do you see that?
--:-- Brian Keating: Absolutely. It's not just because of me. It's because of this technology. It's because of the guests that I get on my show. I've had on people from Ben Shapiro to Noam Chomsky, as opposite as they could possibly be ideologically. I've had on people from Nobel Prize winners to graduate students. I've had on a woman from Egypt who's a devout Muslim, and here I am, a practicing Jew. We have just the most wonderful conversations. I get emails and comments. I can't respond to all of them, but you know how much it's helped them, how it's gotten them through difficult times. Some people say they want to be my unpaid intern. Some say they would pay me to be their mentor. Those rates start at $860 an hour. I'm happy to charge. No, I don't charge.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Just toss your Venmo name out at the end and I'm sure you'll get some.
--:-- Brian Keating: It's in. I got my Patreon. I got some patrons out there. Thank you all. The important thing for me to realize is that I'm doing the hard work. I'm reading all the books, I'm following up on research, I'm animating their work. We put hours and hours of work into each video on YouTube and each audio episode on iTunes and elsewhere. That hopefully shows we're doing what we can to pay back the world, pay back the United States taxpayer, pay back you and your customers and clients. You guys pay your taxes. In part, you're supporting my dream. So why should I not give back?
--:-- Brian Keating: If I don't give back, as 99% of my colleagues don't, sadly—let me put a pin in that for one second—if I don't pay it back, I feel like I am not living up to the meaning of the word "scientist" on one hand. I feel like I'm a mooch off society. On the other hand, I feel like I'm a taker. I feel it's immoral to do that, personally immoral. What other people feel they can do, that's besides the point. Look, I'm not joining the Army. I'm wearing my buddy's shirt that he got in Afghanistan when he was serving his third tour of duty in special forces. I didn't have the courage or bravery to do that. But it doesn't take much courage to put out a video about reality featuring Don Hoffman of the University of California. I just have to read his book and ask him some good questions.
--:-- Brian Keating: Look, I have tenure. I have a certain amount of privilege, as the kids say, in many ways. I am blessed and I'm not going to make apologies for it. But what I am going to do is take advantage of it. I'm the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. I can do pretty much any form of research that I want. I involve people from all races, creeds, colors, genders, whatever, in everything I do. I like it because I get exposed to the most diverse and interesting opinions. If life is not interesting, it's meaningless. From that perspective, I'm doing what I can do. It doesn't take much courage.
--:-- Brian Keating: Coming back to that pin that I said, everybody should do some outreach. I do believe that. If you're getting government money, as we all are, especially because I work at a state university—I'm an employee of Gavin Newsom at some level at this University of California—I'm honored and privileged to be here. I'm not going to get extra accolades or the Nobel Prize for doing the podcast. But by the same token, it's so much fun to share these ideas, creating those new neural nodes that you mentioned in your original question.
--:-- Brian Keating: To me, there are very few ways to grow your brain, my friend, as you know. It's very difficult. You're in good shape physically, I can tell.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I try my best. I put on the COVID-90, as I said.
--:-- Brian Keating: No, no. Anyone who comes out of COVID with a six pack, I'm going to beat down. So look out, Eric Weinstein. But the point is, I'm growing my brain in one of the few ways that you can apply time, energy, and effort and get something out. For me, that's doing things in neuroscience, totally alien to me as a cosmologist, and trying to bring universal scientific approaches to these great questions. For me, it's as much self-interested as otherwise.
--:-- Brian Keating: When I hear my colleagues say, "Oh, I'm not good at that. I'm not good at public speaking." I've had students in my lab that came from Thailand, from China, from Uganda. These people didn't speak English as their native language. And it showed, or it sounded, however you want to say it. But guess what? They're brilliant people. They took the effort. I paid for them to go to Toastmasters to learn how to speak. I don't care what it is. If you can learn quantum field theory in 10 dimensions, Ryan, and you say it's too hard for you to learn how to do a YouTube video, I think that's sad. I do. And I think it's dishonest.
--:-- Brian Keating: I'm not saying everyone needs to be Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's one of my heroes. But on the same token, he's not a scientist. He's not doing active scientific research, and that's fine. He admits and acknowledges as much. But if you're going to not take any effort because it's too hard, I think that's fraudulent. None of them, as brilliant as they are, as many Nobel Prizes as they've won, were ever born knowing quantum field theory. They had to spend time, energy, effort, and do the work. If that's not done, I feel like it's somewhat fraudulent, if not immoral. I'll probably get not invited to as many faculty club dinner parties as possible. But you know what? I think it's worth it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, et cetera. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, immoral or not, it is certainly dishonest. Because not being like you said, I don't care what you do. I don't care if you're studying quantum field theory or you want to sell an auto policy or you're working at Starbucks as a barista, you can learn how to communicate something you're passionate about in the digital space. You can certainly do that. And frankly, out of all the things we just mentioned, I'd much rather create a YouTube video than have to put someone's chai latte together when they're in a rush. Have you ever been in that line? People are a-holes. So the pressure of the amount of cinnamon that you put on top, God forbid. So it's funny.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've been part of the insurance industry for 15 years. Every little boy's dream, right? To be an insurance agent. Growing up, I just want to hawk some home and autos. Everyone gets to achieve their dreams. But it's funny. I'm an enormous fan of Jordan Peterson's. His 12 Rules for Life was a game changer for me as an adult. I wish I had found it earlier in my life. Diving all the way back in his archive as far as I could, his breaking down of Genesis, that 18 hours of YouTube videos, is some of the best work in that area that I've ever come across.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things I subscribe to is that you become passionate about the things that you give passion to, that you give interest to. This whole concept of "I'm not passionate about this, so I'm going to underachieve and blame my lack of passion on the thing as a reason for underachieving" is complete horseshit. The reason I asked the question about whether you're helping create more nodes in the sharing of your field is that in 2016, we had this happen in our industry. Fat old white guys dominate insurance. Broad sweeping stroke here, but not the most open to new ideas or technology. They tend to enjoy the fruits of the standard hierarchies that everyone is fighting so hard against today. What they did was create these little fiefdoms. Anytime they would figure something out, they would put a moat, sticks, fire arrows, murder holes, and vats full of oil around those ideas to protect them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: In 2016, technology, YouTube, and podcasting absolutely broke those barriers down. Now we have people who operate in the same town sharing techniques for either helping serve customers better or prospecting customers in a way you would have never seen. These are people who actually compete against each other head to head day to day, and they're having coffee and telling each other what they're doing. Not everyone, but as a widespread, the cultural barrier has been pretty much taken down. The organizations that aren't open to sharing are actually failing today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My hope, and I've heard you talk about this on James's show and others, is that this will come down for your field as well. We need it to. The things you're talking about—I know as much about quantum theory as you and Eric Weinstein have shared on podcasts, so that's the depth of my understanding. But the concepts and the way you start to look at it, the questions it brings up about the impact of science on religion, on society, on how we treat each other—when you start thinking about the origin of the Big Bang, it feels really hard to be a racist. When did all this start? Are we alone? How did we get here? And then I'm going to worry about someone's religion or skin color? I think it's important that these ideas spread because they make us humble enough to not care so much about some of these physical, more shallow issues that we're dealing with.
--:-- Brian Keating: Yeah, that's right. To have an element of ignorance about the history of science and its potential impact and harm that it caused in many different communities is almost as bad as being ignorant of the benefits of having a true safe space. A space that is politics free, where you don't have to think about someone's skin color or sexual orientation when you're ascertaining their papers or thinking about their ideas or seeing them on YouTube. Look, I might not be able to get something published in the preeminent journal Nature. Maybe I'm not smart enough, or don't have the connections. That's true. But I can make a YouTube channel that has 23,000 rabid subscribers. Technology is totally democratized and flattened, lowercase d, obviously. The playing field for creators, for thought leaders, for people that want to contribute allows you to do that other thing that James advocates for: skip the line. Not only skip the line, but choose yourself when you skip the line.
--:-- Brian Keating: You're still subject in academia to all sorts of hurdles. This is the origin of the multi-part series James and I are doing, where we're jokingly trying to get him a PhD in physics. In my field, you first have to get selected to go to college. You have to do well in high school. There's gatekeeping in high school. Then your guidance counselor has to provide you letters of recommendation. Then you go to college and graduate school. You have to get letters from professors. Then for graduate school, you have to get a postdoc. Then you get a faculty job. You mentioned baseball. When I think about how many people are doing what I do, it's like the square root of the number of people in the MLB. What happens right before the MLB is AAA baseball. In academia, that's called being a postdoctoral fellow or scholar. After your PhD, before you become a professor. I don't know how likely it is in baseball to get into AAA ball. I imagine it's pretty damn hard. But to get a postdoc position, it's almost easy. Almost anybody who wants one can get one. I've never had a student who wanted to be a postdoc who couldn't get one. But imagine it's easy to get into AAA ball and then impossible to get into MLB. That would be a weird industry. Yet that's my industry. It's easy to get into the analog of AAA. It's impossible to get to the majors.
--:-- Brian Keating: I feel it's both my duty and lately I've been saying a lot like this. It's related to a Prager University video I did that's coming out in April about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Following in my hero Jocko Willink's footsteps, another San Diegan, he said discipline equals freedom. My video says knowledge is not equal to wisdom. The word science means knowledge. It doesn't mean wisdom. Wisdom requires knowledge, but knowledge is not sufficient. We all know people, and I can name dozens, who I wouldn't trust with my kids in the backseat of their car because I don't think they're wise enough to drive. Even though they're the most brilliant people in the world, some of whom have Nobel Prizes. Knowledge and wisdom are very different things. It's almost easier to attain knowledge versus wisdom, which is almost impossible to attain. That's the same analogy I made with MLB versus AAA.
--:-- Brian Keating: We can have a computer with a great deal of knowledge. Wikipedia has way more knowledge about physics, about cosmology, than I'll ever have. Instant recall, processing, working memory, connectivity, nodes galore. That's how we make artificial intelligence. We have machine learning algorithms that scour the web, like GPT-3. I'm working a little bit with that, experimenting with it, as James would admonish me to do. I don't care so much about artificial intelligence. Next year they'll have a computer that knows 10% of the content of the World Wide Web. In two years, we'll have something that has 20%, following Moore's law. GPT-4 will do everything GPT-3 did and double it. The sum total of all human knowledge doubled will be available. Does that mean it will be any more wise? I don't think so. Making somebody twice as intelligent doesn't give them twice as much wisdom. I care about artificial wisdom. I'm on a mission to see if that's even possible to attain, because it certainly isn't by modeling the human brain. It requires a different kind of co-processor that is uniquely represented by human beings. That is part of the gift I spoke about in answer to your very first question.
--:-- Brian Keating: We have this knowledge. In fact, the word homo sapien means "man that knows he knows." It's really homo sapien sapien. Sapien is Latin for wisdom. We are wise. We know we understand that we are going to die. Say what you want about reality, about animals being conscious. Certainly they feel pain. But are they conscious? Do they know what reality is? Are they aware of their own death? Certainly not. We are aware of it. We must protect against it. We must buy policies from Ryan left and right to ensure those left behind are taken care of. I actually feel that is a moral obligation, in all seriousness. I am reading a book by a friend and colleague, Sarah Seeger at MIT, called *The Smallest Lights in the Universe*. She'll be on my show soon. She writes about losing her father and her husband. As a 40-year-old new professor, unbelievable pain thinking about that. I couldn't help but think, I hope they had some life insurance. I hope they had something to protect themselves and their kids. But anyway, let's not get into that.
--:-- Brian Keating: If you don't suck the marrow out of life, then you don't need a wisdom insurance policy because you're not really making use of it. You're just passing the time. Animals pass the time much better than humans. They have a ton more fun than we do. They're not subject to any laws. They can do whatever they want. Maybe some of them get eaten. But the point is, they don't have the awareness that we're given. That's a gift. But like every gift, it comes with responsibilities. Wisdom is knowledge plus experience mashed up with a few other things. Wisdom is a lot of things. It's learning from others. It's being a historian. It's understanding your place in the timeline of the universe.
--:-- Brian Keating: When we talk about physics, we talk about things called light cones. The only signals that can get to you, the only information you can get, has traveled at most at the speed of light and reached your perception after traveling from the event that created it. The screen in front of you has traveled one foot between your eyes and the screen in one nanosecond. You're actually seeing the past when you see me. It's even worse than that. You're in New York. I'm in California. We're almost as far apart as possible. That's by design because we can't stand it. No, we love each other. But there's a delay. How many feet are there in the United States? 2,900 miles between us. That's roughly one one-hundredth of the distance light travels in a second. So it's 10 milliseconds, something like that. You start putting all these things together and you're only able to see what's going to happen at a certain distance away from you. You can't see infinitely far back, but you can see back further in time than your eyes can perceive if you understand history.
--:-- Brian Keating: That's part of why I wrote my book. A book is a way to store wisdom and knowledge. My experiences and other people's experiences. I have all these dead mentors: Aristotle, Plato, Galileo, Newton, Emmy Noether, et cetera. Jane Goodall influenced me a great deal. Isaac Asimov influenced me a great deal. Putting those all together, and then you have living embodiments, people you can talk to, modern-day philosophers like James Altucher, Eric Weinstein, Sarah Seeger. I get to talk to them and synthesize their experiences. I hope to God, I already lost my father, so I don't have to lose my father again. I hope I'm forever spared that because I don't know if I can handle it with the strength that she did. How do I learn from that? She's a scientist at the top level. I want to synthesize it.
--:-- Brian Keating: Getting back to your question about racism and diversity. If you can only appreciate something if you are of that exact same racial, ethnic, sexual, gender orientation, then it's hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. Then I have nothing to teach you unless you're me. I have young twins and they're as different as humanly possible. They're completely different. You wouldn't even know they're twins. They don't look like each other. They spent nine months together in an enclosed environment that would give me claustrophobia. They're totally different. We're all different. That's what makes us so beautiful. As Philip Morrison said, more is not better. More is different. More is wonderful. Difference is wonderful. If somebody is discriminatory, they're the biggest idiots. I'm not going to curse, but I feel like racists are the dumbest human beings that could possibly exist because they think something so trivial is meaningful.
--:-- Brian Keating: What I worry about is people obsessing about that, trying to eradicate it, which will never happen, is undoing the basic human project. Those people are punished. Their lives are impoverished. They're mental midgets. Their punishment is their ignoramuses, and they will be forever cursed, in my opinion.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's our current environment, certainly the one in which the story is being told. Living in New York, just think about what happened with Cuomo. He wrote a book about solving the pandemic in August. Come to find out he was lying the whole time. I can tell you firsthand, you didn't solve anything. I lived here. My point, and I think you hit it on the head, goes for all the things we're fighting about today, not just racism. In general, why I wish we spent more time and brain power and energy on issues like you're talking about instead of these shallow topics. I'm a firm believer in the high-level Darwinistic idea of survival of the fittest. If you're making decisions based on these shallow topics—and they shouldn't even be topics, though I do know they still exist, so I don't want to diminish them—if this is how you're making your decisions, you are going to get cut out of the herd.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I felt like that was happening in general. We'd solve this problem. You'd meet someone and they'd say something. You'd look at them and be like, "You stay over here. I see you, but I'm not really into that. That seems ridiculous. So you just hang out over there by yourself." Those people were getting cut out. Then all of a sudden it was like, "Wait, no, everyone is like that." And you're like, "What are we talking about?" My only reason for bringing up that topic is I feel like it dumbs us down in general. Not just the idea of racism, because I do know it exists and it is a problem I don't want to exist. As a purely capitalistic person, I believe in capitalism. Everything that comes from it, the good and the bad. As a capitalist, what are you going to do? Hire someone who's going to give you half the production because they're a certain skin color or religion? That would be a stupid idea. If you want to grow your business, you need more talented people.
--:-- Brian Keating: Same thing. I've had this conversation with Jim Gates, who is the father of string theory, supersymmetry theory, first Black PhD from MIT, and the president of the American Physical Society. He is an amazing intellect. He has made these statements to me that it punishes the racist. Their lives are living hells. To think that that is significant is one of the most asinine things. It's almost not even worth discussing, except that there's been such a backlash to it that we now have to be very alert to it to avoid this cancellation culture. There's something somebody might have said in physics, but then outside of physics they might be outspoken. It's kind of like a tax. I have this conversation with many scientists of different colors, races. They've said that for African Americans, they do pay a tax that I don't have to pay. But on the other hand, they love the science they do.
--:-- Brian Keating: Things are changing. Twenty years ago, we had one female faculty member when I started at UCSD in my group. Now half my group are female professors. That's wonderful. People on the right who I criticize just as much as the left, I always say there's no Republican constellation. There's no Democratic comet. Astronomy is for everybody. People say, "Oh, diversity." I say, "No, there are actual studies." As opposed to implicit assessment tests that have been shown to be completely useless scientifically. There are scientific studies that show if you have a racially diverse jury, you will get on average better outcomes. Why wouldn't you want that? Why would you actively work to have a less diverse science? It's frustrating to me, Ryan.
--:-- Brian Keating: Some of my deepest hope—I've worked with the National Society of Black Physicists. I'm actually an honorary member of that amazing organization. I've spoken at their galas. I'm a contributor to them. My feeling is that I want physics to recognize that we succeed when we welcome this diverse perspective. Not necessarily diversity for its own sake, but to be welcoming, to have a safe space for it. That also means not talking about politics so much. I have so many conversations like, "I don't want to talk about politics. I want to talk about science." I don't have time. Am I going to solve race relations as a freaking astrophysicist? No. But can I give a summer internship program opportunity to a brilliant physicist who happens to be Black when she is at a historically Black college? Abso-freaking-lutely. We did just that with the Simons Observatory. That's what I'll do. I'm going to stick my nose out to do as much of that as possible and as little in politics as possible.
--:-- Brian Keating: Ryan, I got to run, but I'd love to chat again, maybe in the spring as these different videos and productions come out. I really appreciate talking to you, my friend.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I just want to say, thanks, man. This went a whole bunch of places. In the world of interviewing, you're supposed to stay on target, but I appreciate you. I appreciate the way you think, sharing your mind. My hope for this interview is that everyone who's listening finds a way to inject themselves into what Brian's doing, whether it's his book or his podcast, which is tremendous. Look into the other shows you've been on, Ben's show, James's show. I think having your thought process, the way you think through things, the way you talk through things, is going to help people regardless of what space they're in and what they're trying to do day to day. Thanks, man. I really appreciate that. Congratulations on all your success too, my friend. It's really impressive. All right. Take care. Bye.
--:-- Brian Keating: Bye.
--:-- [End of interview. Ad read follows.]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not. With the One Call Close system, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we used to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the One Call Close system eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masteroftheclothes.com. That's masteroftheclothes.com. Do it today.
