← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The Problems with Science and How to Fix It | Brian Keating (Replay)
02:00:06
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- [00:00]
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- [01:00]
Dr. Brian Keating
Science is you're continually proving that and who came before you wrong. You're showing there is no such thing as an authority, a God, a godhead figure. There's no one like that in science. There never should be or will be. And your job is to prove the earlier generations who were the paradigm of excellence and the the expertise as well as Richard Feynman has another quote, Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the wisdom of experts.
- [01:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Dr. Brian Keating, welcome to the show.
- [01:32]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yes, it's great to be back here, Tom. On the other side of the table,
- [01:34]
Tom Bilyeu
I was going to say, yeah, we've got the the tables are flipped. I had so much fun being interviewed by you and I highly encourage people to check that out. It's one of the more unique interviews that I've done, being able to ask questions that I haven't been asked before. It's not an easy thing given how many times I've been in front of the camera. But I really had fun learning the way that you think and that's where I want to start. So it'll be good for people to get a little bit of background. Professor of Physics I'll let you fill in more details, but it's pretty credible to say that you were up for consideration for a Nobel Prize. Didn't quite happen. And there's reasons for that that we may or may not get to today. But the scientific method is something I become really obsessed with and it happened by accident. So I was trying to figure out how I had taken myself from laying on my couch or honestly laying on the floor trying to Figure out how I was going to make my dreams come true, and then finally learning how to build companies and all of that. And I thought, I've built companies across a couple different industries. It's teachable, it's repeatable. And so I have a course called Business Decision Making, and I was trying to. To just write down what do I do. And I wrote it all down. I called the Physics of Progress, and I show it to the team. And one of my employees is like, you realize this is a scientific method, right? And I was like, what? He's like, no, literally, step by step. And I looked up the scientific method, and I realized, oh, my God, this really is the scientific method recontextualized for business. And that's actually really interesting to me, because when you essentially discover the same thing from different angles, you're probably onto something true. And in your book into the Impossible, you quote Richard Feynman, who says, in regards to first principles, the first principle is not to fool yourself. And you're the easiest one to fool. So what does that quote mean? What is the scientific method and how do we use it in our lives to unburden ourselves from either willful blindness or accidental blindness?
- [03:42]
Dr. Brian Keating
I think it's. It's probably most economical to say that the scientific method is a way of not fooling yourself. It is a way to ensure you're not drinking your own Kool Aid or somebody else's, which is worse. It's a way of being as authentic as possible to this pursuit of truth, presuming that that's what you're interested in. I mean, some people are, you know, willing to deny themselves access to truth or they're not interested in truth. But those of us who strive, who seek and don't want to yield to kind of our baser urges to confirm what we already think is true, to be influenced by prejudice, by bias and confirmation bias or some other form of authority bias that. Feynman's words are really resonant with me because it is really where science meets psychology and meets humanity. You know, the old joke is, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? Well, he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. You know, I'm definitely guilty of that. I have that tendency as well. We're introverted, typically by nature, but in. In reality, we forget that scientists are human.
- [04:45]
Tom Bilyeu
And because of that, we think prone to biases.
- [04:48]
Dr. Brian Keating
And I was gonna say that we're. We're. We have all the same peccadillos as any normal quote, unquote, Normal person peccadillas. Yeah, peccadillos.
- [04:55]
Tom Bilyeu
What hell is a peccadillo?
- [04:56]
Dr. Brian Keating
It's a Mexican treat. It's a delightful dish that you should try here in la. Peccadillos means like foibles, flaws, a little idiosyncrasies perhaps, that we all have as human beings. You know, that your, your kid is the best or your, you know, your, your pet, your favorite home team is, is the best team. And you can justify why, even though on paper, like for me, the San Diego Padres have never, you know, the only team and the only city in America that has no professional sports championships at all is San Diego. Unfortunately, I always say it's compensation, right? The easiest job in the world, the San Diego weather weatherman. And, and the hardest job is San Diego sportscaster. So, yeah, we just don't win and we surrender. But anyway, maybe that'll turn around. But thinking about what it really means to want to try to make progress means that you cannot deny things that go against your pet theory. In other words, you and I, if we differ on some scientific hypothesis or some business strategy, you should be able to take my point of view and I should be able to take your point of view. But we should do that with love. We should do it for a common goal. And you see this in the military. Most people don't think of the military as I'm loving, touchy feely organization. But when they have this red team approach and they're like, get the best on one side, the best on the other side, they're fighting. And they may be screaming at each other, yelling, but at the end of the day, they love each other in the sense that they want to preserve their life and maximize the impact on the enemy. And so if they're doing it from a point of love, and I feel like we scientists want to do that too, at our best. Of course, I say that scientists are humans, but. And that means all the good things about being humans. And in fact, oftentimes I say scientists are like kids. You know, kids are curious, they're inquisitive, they can be charming, they can be mischievous. They can also be jealous, they can be petty. They can not want to play with, give me my toy, I want to take it home, it's mine.
- [06:38]
Tom Bilyeu
And so where does the scientific method fit into all this? And maybe even before we get to that, why does the truth matter?
- [06:44]
Dr. Brian Keating
I think, you know, the truth is what anchors us to reality. If you and I have different versions of reality, relative truth, I think chaos ensues from that.
- [06:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Can I give you a stat?
- [06:54]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
The more delusional somebody is, the more likely they are to be happy. Self delusional?
- [07:00]
Dr. Brian Keating
Sure.
- [07:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Because I had. So at one point I was writing a book and I had a ghostwriter that I was working with and I was telling her, I'm not interested in what's true, I'm only interested in what moves me towards my goals. And she really had a stroke on that. And she was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like I need you to go into more detail. That does not make sense to me. And I was like, you know what, that's actually a really good point because I'm obsessed with the truth in terms of I need to know how the world really works. But when it comes to myself, I'm not prone to. I'm prone to believing the worst about myself. And it seems self evidently true that those bad things are real and right. And so what I had to do was stop thinking about the truth as it related to myself. But in the real world, the only thing that matters is the truth, because it's the only way you can make progress. And so there's this really weird like thing of like, the truth matters, but the odds of you recognizing it are problematic. And especially like, you have to, I think you have to delineate between understanding what is true about yourself, which you're going to have a very hard time doing, and understanding what is true about the way the world works.
- [08:15]
Dr. Brian Keating
I think, I think that is perceptive in the sense that there are absolute facts. Like people say, you know, you never hear someone say I believe in gravity. Like you say, no, no, I have evidence for gravity. You don't even have people necessarily anymore that will credibly say I believe in evolution the same way they might say I believe in Santa Claus or whatever. Like people believe in something that means perforce they don't have evidence for it. You don't have to believe in something. And I'm not denigrating faith or whatever, as you know, you would chat a little bit. I do have a, you know, professor, I'm an active, you know, participant in religion, et cetera, et cetera. We can get into that. As your past guest, you know, Richard Dawkins would say about, you know, belief in God, like the flying Spaghetti Monster. Is this like, you know, kind of catch all for everything? I have my issues with Richard. We'll talk about that if we have time. If you want to get super controversial, I can go off on that. But, but, but the point being there's a qualitative difference between that which I need evidence for, to claim is true, which is repeatable, which is built upon with consensus, which arrives at, from multiple different perspectives to get at reality. We have evidence for gravity from many, many levels, from the smallest scales, you know, almost atomic scales, even close to the nuclear scale, all the way up to the scale of the literal cosmos itself that I study. So we don't need that. We have evolutionary evidence from all different scales, from cellular, macroscopic, microscopic evolution. Though there's missing gaps, literally missing links in all these theories. We don't have a fundamental theory of quantum gravity. That's a huge lacuna gap in our knowledge of physics and so on what, on what grounds can we say we understand anything if we don't understand the most basic aspects of reality? However, what the scientific method does is it doesn't say that's right. It says that's not wrong. It says I can't tell you. Do you believe that the Earth is a sphere?
- [09:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
- [09:58]
Dr. Brian Keating
Okay, so you're not a flat Earther.
- [09:59]
Tom Bilyeu
I am not.
- [10:00]
Dr. Brian Keating
So, so you are wrong, but you're less wrong than a flat Earther. You know, flat Earther believes that literally then. And we can show there's evidence in unequivocal proof the Earth is.
- [10:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Because the Earth isn't a true sphere. That's why I'm wrong.
- [10:12]
Dr. Brian Keating
It's not a perfect sphere. Yes, because the Earth, as it spins, it kind of bulges out like a ballerina doing a twirl or a figure skater on the ice. It bulges at its equator, kind of like I bulge at my equator, no thanks to anything you did with Quest. But. But it gets squished and squashed, so it has what's called a quadrupolar moment. Now you're less wrong if you say the Earth is a sphere than if you say it's flat. But technically, aren't you wrong? Well, this is a matter of degree. We can say that Newton was right. Newton got us the laws of the fundamental nature of physics that allows us to get from the Earth literally to the stars, to the moon, beyond the moon, the planets.
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Tom Bilyeu
But get to meaning, predict. We can predict how they predict trajectory.
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Dr. Brian Keating
Exactly. We would predict where they're going to be if 10,000 years from now where they were 10,000 years ago. But it wasn't precisely right. In fact, it fails. It doesn't fail in like some far off galaxy, Newton's laws fail in our solar system. Newton was wrong on the scale of our, of the planet Mercury. So he could not explain or understand. He wasn't wrong. He didn't like, claim there was some demon or something that was doing something. It's just his laws were incapable due to the understanding, the lack of understanding at the time of the nature of what gravity is that Einstein later would come along and correct. Now, Einstein isn't the final word either, most likely. That's the lesson of science. Science is. You're continually proving that on who came before you wrong. You're showing there is no such thing as an authority, a God, a godhead figure. There's no one like that in science. There never should be or will be. And your job is to prove the earlier generations who were the paradigm of excellence and the expertise as well as Richard Feynman has another quote. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the wisdom of experts, not the knowledge of experts. Because look, if Einstein just came along and said, well, Newton's pretty smart, you know, I'm not gonna outdo Newton. Like, who the heck am I? Some. Some guy from, you know, Germany. No, he said Newton could be wrong, even though he credits him with. With being the foremost contributor not only to science, but Western civilization. Einstein had great respect for Newton. And yet he said, I have enough swagger to know I can be right where Newton the great was wrong. And I think that's a core element that only the scientific method can validate who is right, but not necessarily only who is right, who is less wrong.
- [12:25]
Tom Bilyeu
That's a breakdown. What is the scientific method? Like, what are the steps? Yeah, how are we using them? And then I really. I'm going to keep pinning you down until we get to why truth matters. I have a theory as to why I think truth matters, but I'm really curious to hear in a single sentence with no commas, parentheticals, it's almost impossible
- [12:44]
Dr. Brian Keating
for a New York Jew to talk without any commas. Next you'll tell me I can't move my hands. So truth is again, for me, the core element of establishing what is real such that I can function is to know that there's a core bedrock of fact.
- [13:00]
Tom Bilyeu
So that's what I want to talk about, that I can function. What do you mean? How do you use the truth? Like, when you say so, you're dealing at a cosmological level. And so I don't know, for most people that just spirals. It's so big and so grandiose and like, doesn't help, you know, go to the grocery store and get a pint of milk, quart of Milk? I don't drink milk. Leader metric system, please. So, yeah, so take me to. As you think about the truth, is there like just sort of a grounded thing that you consider a life well lived, that you need to understand the truth in order to move in a way that makes sense, or is it something different than that?
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Dr. Brian Keating
I think, well, there's one law of nature that will probably never be overthrown, and it's the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. And we chatted about that a little bit, and I want to get a little deeper into it maybe if time permits. So entropy is a fundamental realization that there is order and there's chaos. And the separation between order and chaos, the mixture between the two, can lead to some startling, inconvenient, and perhaps, you know, completely destabilizing effects if everything is chaotic. Just think about in your own life, if you didn't live in a country where the rule of law prevails, you would have a very tough time being happy organizing your life and living and functioning. And so in that sense, yeah, you might, you know, not like the cop that gives you a speeding ticket or whatever, but you thank goodness that there is such a thing as a law and order, because everybody does everything. It is pure chaos. Interestingly, the second verse in the, in the Bible, in the Old Testament, in the Torah is everything was chaotic and void. So when something is chaotic, it lacks organization to do work. So if you have ever seen a fighter jet take off an afterburner on, just like blasting away, it's tremendous amount of heat, tremendous amount of energy. But if it just exploded out in all directions, the fighter jet wouldn't move at all. The fact that it can propel itself near Mach 1 or 2 is because it's organized through the jet, through the afterburner, you, you organize energy. Energy by itself is meaningless. It's almost nothing. But organized energy can do anything. And that's, I think the core principle is that you need organization. Organization implies order. And we can argue, is there a fundamental lawgiver that is a God or something like that? Or are the laws of nature kind of evolutionary? Or do we recognize the patterns of nature? In other words, is math at the core of physics? Is math created? Is it invented or is it discovered? Discovered? These are all things that are describing laws of nature. But if one day two plus two equals five, and the next day it equals four, and the next day it equals a pineapple, that life would be completely unlivable and unworkable. The fact is we live in a Universe of order. And it's pretty surprising because you look out in the universe, the natural tendency to things, you know, from the second law of thermodynamics is towards disorder. And that's why I believe that that which gives order is, Is perceptible as almost like a symmetry, something organized, orderly, you know, precise. That to me, is what I call the nature of livable life, is that you have some kind of structure. And that implies there is some sort of nature of truth. And it can be extended on multiple levels, from individuals to collectives. But to say that, like, there are only relative laws, I mean, that's not what we mean. Most people think, oh, Einstein showed everything is relative. No, he said everything is exactly ordered and organized and in a specific way. But it happens to be certain. Certain physics equations can depend on what the observer is doing. So in that sense, it's relative to his or her state of motion. It didn't mean that, like here you add the two velocities together, and on Jupiter, you have to divide by a pineapple and plus a can. No, it's very, very organized. It's not relative at all.
- [16:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so I actually think there was a really powerful answer in there, which is this idea of entropy. So when I talk about business a lot, I talk about entropy. And I'm like, look, there is a reason that if you just keep doing what you're doing now, your company's not going to go where you want it to go. And that's because everything is moving towards chaos. You have to inject a ton of energy to your afterburner example. This is exactly why I think the truth matters, that if you don't understand the way the world works, you're unable to accurately channel that energy or even to know where to apply that energy in order to change the world in the way that you want to change it. So to inject that directionality, the order into the system, to get a desired outcome set another way. And it's weird to me that this has become like a controversial word, but power. To me, power is the ability to close your eyes, imagine a world better than this one, and then open your eyes, go get the skills you need to make that world come true, and then actually do it. That's just self evident. And so when I say power, I mean it's that ability to put the energy into the system to create order in the way that you want it to. Now, what gets very confusing, and I think about this a lot in terms of relationships. There are things that we want to be true because they just, they feel better, they feel more fair, whatever. But when you try to deal with like relationships that men and women are the same, it gets crazy making because in reality, just the way that the brains are wired, they're not. And so if you're trying to treat them as if they are, it's wonderful. But the, the point I'm making is that it becomes crazy making to not accept that they are different. And therefore when you try to inject directed energy into that relationship to make things functional, you can't and you can't figure out why it isn't working. And so truth to me matters because it allows you to figure out how to improve things. And so as I think about the scientific method, I'm like, okay, either it's just me or everybody falls into the following camp. I certainly am not smart enough to guess right all the time. And so once I know that I can't guess right all the time, I need a process by which to figure things out. And the process by which to figure things out, as it turns out, even in business, is the scientific method. What are the steps of the scientific method so that the audience may channel their energies intelligently to discover what is true so that they can make progress.
- [19:11]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, so the first thing to note is that there is no scientific method. There's no one single scientific method. There's no one father of the scientific method. Sometimes it's credited with Galileo, and he did use aspects of the scientific method that we in its modern form. There are earlier, you know, Muslim, Islamic scholars that are credited with it, even thousand years before Galileo perhaps. And so in my mind, there's two broad ways of thinking about it. And one is called the deductive scientific method approach, and the other one's inductive. So in the deductive, you're starting, I like thinking, deduct is going down. You're starting from some hypothesis and you're making some predictions, some projections about what you'd see if that hypothesis is true, then suggest some analysis, some observation that can produce data. The data then can be compared to the original hypothesis. And there's a flywheel that starts to spiral and spin. So you might say, well, there might be a market for, you know, these tokens that could then be used in a, in a, in a sense to build up a brand, to build an organization, to build a network, to build a self organizing system. And remember the, the word organize is kind of a weird word. It has the word organ in it. Like we think organ inside of Our body isn't that weird? Well, organization means that our body has organs. They're very constant, they have a specialized function. Your pancreas is not pumping blood around your body. If you did, you'd be in serious physical trauma. Right. The other method is called the inductive method, kind of going up. So you start with some observation. It might be serendipitous in my field, which is the cosmic microwave background radiation, the oldest, most ancient photons that exist in the universe. These are 13,820,000,000 year old photons artifacts.
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Tom Bilyeu
Is that all?
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Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, that's right. They should be, you know, they belong in la. They make everyone feel young in Hollywood here. Instead, the inductive method is starting maybe with some surprising observation that demands an explanation. Then the explanation could be used to go back and say, let me construct a more general theory hypothesis, which will then perhaps suggest more data that can be taken and used to then explain why that evidence for the original theory is true or the original observation took place. So in the field of ancient photons, it was discovered serendipitously, there were two guys in New Jersey of all places. I can't believe it. I'm a New Yorker. Can't believe I had to give credit to people from New Jersey. But these two radio astronomers working at AT&T Bell Labs. Now why would two radio astronomers be working at Bell Labs? Well, because back then they viewed diversive intellectual pursuits as extremely valuable. Not for scientific reasons, for monetary reasons. In other words, that's where the first cell phones were invented. That's where the first radio transmitters. They were looking up at the satellite that had been launched at great cost, maybe an equivalent dollars today, $100 billion. And every time they looked at this satellite, which is the only satellite, it was the only Internet in 1965. Every time they looked at it, they got some signals, you know, they were getting their, their, you know, their, their Internet cover, their WI fi. But it was extremely noisy, unreliable, low bandwidth, terrible. And they couldn't figure out why is the noise so high. So they constructed what's called the signal to noise ratio. How pure is the signal that they're trying to transmit, which they knew there's some radio signals, a message, you know, hi, I'm, you know, it's Brian and Tom, we're calling New Jersey for some reason. And, and, but the noise, it was horrible, static. Why is it so large? They had a model for how their telescope, their receiving instrument should behave and it was totally crapping out. It wasn't behaving as well as it should. Not because of anything in the instrument, but because of the cosmos itself. The cosmos is raining down static, static, noise. Them radio signals stack just like in the old days. Nowadays, kids, I tell my kids, you know, go on the TV and tune to you and they're like, what are you talking? YouTube is where it's. There's no static on YouTube. In fact, you can search static on YouTube if you. If you must. But that static is coming from the origin. Is that what that really is? That's what I'm coming from.
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Tom Bilyeu
OGTV.
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Dr. Brian Keating
About 1% of it. Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
So I need to get back to the method. Yeah. You're saying there really is no method because if you look it up on Google.
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Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
It's going to tell you that there are steps. And those steps so match what I use in business. That now, now I want to fight. These are fighting words, Brian. I'm going to tell you the steps that I use and then help me understand, because if I were a budding scientist and I just heard what you said, I wouldn't know how to do anything. And I want to. I want to see if there's a process that people can loop on like they can in business. So in business it goes like this. You have a goal, you have to have that goal. If you don't have your goal super clear, none of this is going to work. So very clear goal. Then you identify the impediment that stands between where you are and your goal. Then you come up with your best guess. So your hypothesis on what you would need to do in order to overcome that impediment and reach your goal, you then make that thing that you can do actually doable, and you do it. So you run that experiment as it
- [23:56]
Dr. Brian Keating
work, but it might fail it, and
- [23:58]
Tom Bilyeu
it almost certainly will fail to some extent. Right. So if it's very rare that it just works. Oh, and here we go. So sometimes it works a little, sometimes it's a catastrophic failure, sometimes you stay steady. But you paint a picture of what success would look like in math. You run the experiment and you check the math and did it move you towards hold steady or move you away? And in that, if you're willing to truly look at the data, because a lot of times people get emotional, to Richard Feynman's point, they fool themselves because they don't want to be wrong, they don't want to be embarrassed. Like a number of times in business, I embarrassed myself because I was just wrong. Just like it didn't work and there's so much sort of emotional stuff at stake. When you're on a YouTube show or, you know, you're on Twitter, Instagram, and you're wrong. People like, ah, this guy's a sucker. And so it's difficult. So you want to see in the numbers what you want to see. But if you can objectively look at the data, then it tells you to some extent what you might have done, done wrong, which you were mentioning earlier. And then as Henry Ford says, failure is merely the beginning, the ability to begin again more intelligently. So you figure out what that was, you formulate a new hypothesis and a new experiment and you run it. And that loop of try fail to some extent, learn, reformulate, try fail to some extent. That's what I call the physics of progress.
- [25:14]
Dr. Brian Keating
And I think that is the parallel. Exactly. And I could translate into the deductive scientific method where you have an idea which is, you know, sort of going to lead to a tentative hypothesis. Yep, it's going to lead to a tentative hypothesis. Then you're data driven. You have to be quantitative. It's not science, it's not quantitative. In some level you have to have the ability to prove that you're not drinking your own Kool Aid. As I said, that's called falsification. How could I be wrong about this? I thought everybody wanted, you know, you know, whatever widget or whatever you had. It turns out nobody wants it. But this model suggested. No, the total addressable markets. You know, everyone eats. Right. But, you know, but, but my hypothesis, people like something that's bland, tasteless, does, you know, doesn't look like any kind of food that I would ever have, you know, but it's just healthy. It's purely satisfying their nutrition. No, nobody's going to. So then if you're not.
- [26:00]
Tom Bilyeu
There was a business that did that though. The Soylent.
- [26:04]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, exactly. And maybe they're not as quite as good as Quest. Now, there's another way. There's another method which is the inductive method. Twitter. I don't know. Do you know how Twitter started? What it was original purpose was? So it was like, it was like a podcasting software of some kind or something. Yeah, Twitter, podcast. This is what I'm saying. Yeah. It started off as like micro thing.
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Tom Bilyeu
Publishing.
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Dr. Brian Keating
Not publishing. No. It had something to do with like early like analyzing or categorizing podcast. Okay. Had some weird startups. Instagram also had a weird. Totally unrelated to what it would later become. But then serendipity struck, like with these CMB photons. Raining down on us. We have exploration. Why are they coming in? Why are they increasing the noise? The guys at Twitter, the guys at Instagram, they said, wait a second, people are using this not to share like some weird RSS links or whatever for podcasts. They're actually using it for micro blogs. Wow. Now they see this. That flywheel then spun up. They said, well, our users care about this. Let's jettison. We were wrong about our original thought of what this could be. Serendipity proved where the market wanted us to be. That's kind of the inductive method. So that's. Then they said, well, give that to me in steps.
- [27:06]
Tom Bilyeu
So I'll, I'll use YouTube because I know that story quite well. So started as a dating service and wasn't going well. Nobody wanted to do that. But they found that people were watching these really sort of funny videos just as like entertainment. And so then they get the idea, okay, well maybe then this is a form of entertainment and people can just upload whatever videos they want, right? And it starts to take off that way. So if you were looking at that from a scientific standpoint and that were, you know, like the Bell Labs example, what's. So first you have the idea people.
- [27:42]
Dr. Brian Keating
That was, that was first, I would say that was more the serendipitous, like they discovered almost despite themselves. Like there are people that probably went down that road and kept saying, oh, let's keep making a dating service that has, you know, whatever features. But in this case, they kind of discovered by accident that it was very, very powerful as a vector in a different direction.
- [28:00]
Tom Bilyeu
By looking at the data.
- [28:01]
Dr. Brian Keating
By looking at the data. So it's scientific method. They then analyze, assessed, appraise. The flywheel starts to kick in. But it's different than say like Quibi. Do you remember Quibi from like a year ago? But almost nobody. So Quibi was like, well, people really want like highly produced things, but 10 minutes long. They're kind of like melding you. So they had, they had a hypothesis and then they sunk tons of money into it without ever doing the market research. People don't want 10, 15, 20 minute produced content. They want TikTok, they want YouTube shorts or whatever. And so that hypothesis ended up having a huge flywheel sucking up cash because they didn't actually have find that their hypothesis was valid. They went down this huge rabbit hole. We see it in science too. There are theories, like there's a theory, there's a theory originally that if you took a lump of material and Put it on a table, it would spontaneously produce life. That was the hypothesis. Life existed in molecules and was purely chemical. In fact, you could get organic life, like maggots, from iron and like inorganic compounds. That was called the. The. This original kind of spontaneous generation. That was the name of that hypothesis. Totally blown away once the theory of cell structure came along. And then eventually natural selection and so forth. Another one is they used to think that something that was flammable had a substance in it called phlogiston flow. Justin is kind of sounds like it's dirty, but it's not. And floor Justin would be the substance that, when ignited, would burn. But it turned out it really wasn't that at all. It was the reaction between something that had carbon and the element oxygen, which wasn't discovered. We take for granted.
- [29:30]
Tom Bilyeu
This is interesting. I think I'm beginning to understand the disconnect between the way that the science community is thinking about the scientific method and what I think about in terms of the physics of progress is that you guys are trying to discover things. You don't know what they are. And so your goal is a goal of discovery of sort of fundamental truth, which whereas mine is a sense of I'm trying to get there. I'm trying to get to a given state.
- [29:54]
Dr. Brian Keating
You have a teleology, you have a purpose, you have an organized purpose in mind. Whereas in science we might have lofty goals, like we want a theory of everything. We want to understand quantum gravity. Those are kind of broad goals. But usually if you start off, there's a danger in science. And I experienced this with my experiments.
- [30:12]
Tom Bilyeu
I wanted to experiment in this book.
- [30:14]
Dr. Brian Keating
Losing the Nobel Prize.
- [30:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, walk me through that. Because I actually don't know what the experiment was that got everybody so hyped.
- [30:20]
Dr. Brian Keating
So let me take a big step back. I have kind of a weird upbringing story. My origin story from your comic book days is very, very kind of abstruse and strange. I was born, two parents, both Jewish, in Long Island. My dad was a math professor. They end up getting divorced, as many people did in the 1970s. Separated, my mom remarried. I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church. Strange thing for a young Jewish kid to do. But I was always interested in, like, the big picture questions, existence. So I want to know about God and I want to understand, you know, Jesus Christ and what I learned about. And I said, if I'm going to do anything, Tom, I'm going to do it full on. I'm going to go as far as you can go. And I don't know if you remember when you were 13, you know, which is the age I was when I became an altar boy. To go full on meant I had to become a Catholic priest. Age 13, I knew enough about priests that they couldn't have relations with women. I knew at least that was one of the forbidden. And I was like, hmm, do I really want to do this? Or can I, you know, can I do it from the side? And so I abandoned that aspect of my.
- [31:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Understandably. So, yeah, at 13, you could not have convinced me to do that.
- [31:23]
Dr. Brian Keating
So, yeah, at the same time, when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah lessons as a Jewish person, I got a telescope. I got a small little refracting telescope, which I tell all parents out there and even adults to get a telescope. Because with a telescope, unlike any other piece of scientific apparatus, you can not only replicate the distance discoveries of these ancient and earlier astronomers, including Galileo, my hero, but you can replicate how they felt when they made the discovery. Now, Tom, try imagining how did it feel when they discovered the Higgs boson? Well, first of all, there was no, like, one day when they discovered. Took 14 years, $10 billion, 8,000 people. And there wasn't just, like, some moment where you say, eureka there. No. But what Galileo saw when he turned this tiny little telescope and he looked at the moon, he saw it has these weird holes on it, it has these weird mountain ranges on it. I thought it was supposed to be a perfect crystalline sphere that Aristotle told me it was. Maybe. I have a hypothesis that those craters are caused by the impact of meteors or asteroids hitting into the surface. Maybe those mountains are some kind of tectonic phenomena.
- [32:30]
Tom Bilyeu
What on Earth did he write about this? What would make him think that there were other things flying around that would hit it?
- [32:36]
Dr. Brian Keating
So they had seen things in the skies. And actually, there was a big debate. You've heard about comets and you've probably seen meteors. I hope you have it. Some of the most beautiful phenomena, as you can see, there was a debate, are comets in our atmosphere. We know now that they're orbiting around the sun the same way the Earth is. They're just highly elliptical, elongated orbits, highly eccentric, and they come closer and farther away from the sun. They're made of ice, and they start to melt and boil off ice and dust.
- [32:59]
Tom Bilyeu
And they were guessing at that.
- [33:01]
Dr. Brian Keating
They were. So some people felt that they were. That they were objects in the solar system. Some people thought, like Galileo, that they were in the atmosphere, that they were cruising through the way that meteors are. It was, it was found from the speed of the meteors and how fast they travel in a meteor shower that they had to be much closer to us than comets. But it wasn't clear if maybe a comet's just like a really slow.
- [33:20]
Tom Bilyeu
They understood that a meteorite, a shooting star was something burning up in the atmosphere.
- [33:25]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah it seemed to make sense to them that it was because they would
- [33:27]
Tom Bilyeu
also early did they understand, understand that
- [33:29]
Dr. Brian Keating
I think that they would find these objects. There was, you know, there are natural craters that you can see. Some people actually seen actual objects impact the Earth. There's a woman I think in Connecticut who's hit twice by meteorite. I mean not, not this is not 400 years ago. This is like 1950s or something. So impact, they do impact quite frequently and you could find them and it was more or less. And sometimes they make noise, sometimes they're incredibly bright and then they're found not too far away. So they, there was some phenomena that these were some objects that were coming from.
- [33:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Then you look at the moon, you think okay, same thing's happening up.
- [34:01]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, what if that. And if you've ever gone down to the beach, you take a baseball, throw it into the sand, it makes a crater exactly like Galileo saw. So he was like I made a hypothesis that these objects on the moon is basically just like the Earth and in fact the moon is orbiting around the Earth. And that wasn't really well understood how the dynamics of that worked until Isaac Newton came along with the real theory of gravity and how to hides on Earth way. But when I saw the telescope through the telescope I saw the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. So Jupiter has four enormous moons that you can see through a telescope from right here in the heart of Los Angeles. You can see the exact same things that he saw and you can feel the things he felt. Tom, how often do you experience a visceral sensation that unites you with a great scientist from human history? Doesn't matter. You are not the first person to make the the observation. You're making it the first time for yourself. So I tell all parents do that for your kids and in fact do that. It's $50 on Amazon. I always joke I should make Keating brand telescopes, you know, my own, you know, NFTs of a certain kind, non fungible telescopes. Someday maybe I will, but for 50 bucks even you can do it. Just don't look at the sun, okay? That's the only thing I ask you to do. But you can replicate that emotional experience and When I did that, I fell in love with astronomy. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more.
- [35:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Grainger gets it and knows there's no
- [35:21]
Dr. Brian Keating
time for managing multiple suppliers and no
- [35:23]
Tom Bilyeu
room for shipping delays.
- [35:25]
Dr. Brian Keating
That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery.
- [35:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So you can keep your facility stocked,
- [35:32]
Dr. Brian Keating
safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. I didn't know you could do it for a career. It's like if somebody told you fall
- [35:46]
Tom Bilyeu
in love with it.
- [35:47]
Dr. Brian Keating
I think the, the connection between something with regularity. At that time, my parents having been divorced growing up, we were kind of broke all the time. It was chaotic in my home life. I wasn't like super popular in high school. I had a couple friends. I'm still friends with them now. I pimple face. I was overweight and I wasn't super happy. And. And it literally transported me because I could learn about these things during the day. This is 14 years before Google was invented, right? So you had to do real research. It wasn't just like looking it up on you Google, like you were explaining about the scientific. You had to go to like the library or wait for the Sunday New York Times to come out with like one inch page about, on the page about what's happening in the heavens nowadays. It's trivial and it's almost too, it's almost too easy nowadays. And I'm gonna relate a story. Just put a pause in the origin story for one second. Einstein said he wasn't an inquisitive kid. He wasn't super inquisitive as a kid. In fact, he said, I discovered relativity because I never asked my dad the question of what would happen if I was going at the speed of light and I looked at myself in a mirror. He never asked his dad that. And it's good. He said, had I asked my dad that question, Einstein said he would have given me the wrong answer by definition because Einstein, the elder Einstein, Albert had it come of age and invented himself so he would have been deflected, detracted from the right path.
- [37:02]
Tom Bilyeu
What would happen? Not, this is like we're nesting these ideas here, but what would happen if you were traveling at the speed of light and you looked into a mirror?
- [37:09]
Dr. Brian Keating
Well, so nothing with mass can travel at that speed. So you can travel close to the speed of light.
- [37:14]
Tom Bilyeu
So the punchline is you can't.
- [37:15]
Dr. Brian Keating
You can't do it. But even if you travel at large speeds, you would still see yourself because light is the only thing that always moves at the speed of light. So you would see your reflection off the mirror. But now what an observer on Earth would see. Stationary observers, right? Radically different. And that does throw into almost quasi chaotic nature, the nature of what does it mean to be simultaneous. So if I tell you, I snap my fingers at the same time, you know what that means. But if I'm in motion and you're stationary, you'll hear and it'll look different. Similarly, if you're in motion, the color of light will change and there are all sorts of strange phenomena that take place. But getting back to the origin story, when I looked up and saw that there was order in the heavens, I could do research during the day at the library. Pieces of paper, dead trees, and I could do research. And I had invested energy. And that gave me power. Like you said before, investing energy, organizing it into something that gave me intellectual power. I wasn't a great student. I didn't, like, get the highest scores in SATs and APs and stuff like that. Went to public school, modest means. And what I wanted to do is just go as far as I could. But I never knew. No one ever told me. Because I wasn't in that milieu where I could learn about. I could be a professor someday of astronomy. It's like if somebody told you you could have your job today. First of all, it didn't exist when you were a kid. But you'd be like, why would somebody pay me? Or why would I get remunerated for something I would do for free? Because I know this about you. You would do this all for free. You love doing this. You love the connectivity, you love the bonding between people that maybe you'll never meet. You do it for free. I would be a professor for free. Don't tell Gavin Newsom, please, because he might take you up on it, but as a public employee. But I wanted to do it. But I was like, who the hell's gonna pay? It's like being an ice cream taster, you know, Is anyone gonna pay you to be a wizard? You know? No, I just. It didn't enter my lexicon. It wasn't. It wasn't even possible for me to become a professor. Little did I know, you know, it is possible. It's just there are more people that play in the NBA, you know, starting teams in the NBA, than all the professors of cosmology in America. It's Not a very, very popular, you know, by now numbers. And that's partially because it, you know, it takes a long time to get there. But, you know, I definitely feel like the, the path from the inquisitive, curious kid that I was at age 12 did give me. Not that, just the passion. Because I always think of passion is kind of like. Passion's like a spark that can ignite the afterburner, but you need the fuel to keep the afterburner going. And curiosity is that fuel. So I'm, I am nothing if, as Einstein, but if not passionately curious, only I get such a thrill, such a dopamine hit. You and Andrew Huberman talked about this. Like, that's like the fundamental currency of the human body is dopamine. Well, scientists, I'm sure you know this have shown you get a little hit of dopamine when you investigate curiosity. People use this in meditation for weight loss and for smoking cessation, drug addiction problem that if you now surf the urge, you get curious, why do I feel hungry? I just ate. I just had a quest bar, you know. But if you get curious, you can overcome addiction. That's because it'll satisfy a tiny bit of the dopamine sensor. I get those dopamine hits all the time, courtesy of this thing I've been really passionate and curious about since age 12.
- [40:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Very interesting. Now, going back to the experiment, what was the experiment that you ran that got everybody hot and bothered the way I heard you tell? And for anybody looking at the screen here, the book that you are showing, losing the Nobel Prize, is not the book that we're actually going to be talking about, which is into the impossible, which is what I read for this interview. But I had heard you intimate that you specifically set out to create a experiment that would get you a Nobel Prize. So what was the experiment?
- [41:02]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. So first of all, I should say with the Nobel Prizes, the Nobel Prize is the most important award I claim, of any kind on earth, including the Oscars, the Grammys, the Latin Emmys, whatever they are, right? Yes.
- [41:14]
Tom Bilyeu
I would hope it's more important than the Oscars not to diminish. As somebody who would love to win an Oscar, trust me, I'm not in any way, shape or form diminishing that.
- [41:21]
Dr. Brian Keating
So it's given out in six different subjects every year, predominantly in Sweden and Norway in categories like medicine, chemistry, physics. Obviously there's a peace prize. There's a prize in economics, et cetera, et cetera, and literature. And these prizes are supposed to award those people for Whom made the greatest impact not only in their field, but on all of humanity. In other words, a physics discovery that not only, you know, satisfied the curiosity of nerds like me, but actually had some. Some tangible benefit for all of humanity. So the first person to win the Nobel Prize is the guy who came up with the X ray machine, who discovered the, you know, that bones could be cracked, you could see teeth, it cured people, and within a couple of months it was used all over the world after its invention. He was William Rentgen. He won the Nobel Prize for that. Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. So he made probably he was thought of, he had 355 patents, one of which was dynamite. And he was kind of like the Steve Jobs or Elon musk of the 1800s. And after he had no wife, no kids, and when he died, he endowed all of his fortune, which was in a massive amount of money, to this prize. To not only scientific discoveries, but scientific discoveries that changed the world and made humanity better. So ultimate kind of impact on the world. And so it's very intoxicating. Not only will you be kind of a hero among nerds in my career, and you'll be as world famous and as an idol as anybody can be in science. You know, besides Neil DeGrasse Tyson, there's only one of him. But, you know, for most scientists, this is the ultimate goal. This is the promised land that you aspire to get into. And I didn't mention about my father. My father was an eminent mathematician who became a scientist and we were pretty competitive. I don't know, you doing a public
- [43:03]
Tom Bilyeu
school if your dad is like a super high level mathematician?
- [43:06]
Dr. Brian Keating
Very good question. So my parents got divorced and he basically gave us up for adoption. So I was adopted by my, my mother, my biological mother and my stepfather.
- [43:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Some heavy shit.
- [43:16]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, it was, it was really heavy. And growing up.
- [43:18]
Tom Bilyeu
How old are you when this happened?
- [43:19]
Dr. Brian Keating
So they were separated when I was three and then divorced when I was seven. And I have an older brother and he was also abandoned by my father. So my father moved out, moved to the west coast. And yeah, I didn't see him for 15 years.
- [43:31]
Tom Bilyeu
I just did another interview today on the Boy Crisis.
- [43:34]
Dr. Brian Keating
Have you heard of this? I've heard of it, of course.
- [43:36]
Tom Bilyeu
So interesting. Warren Farrell. Okay, finish the story. And then I want to come back to what. How that would have set you up.
- [43:41]
Dr. Brian Keating
So, yeah, so I didn't have this, you know, I didn't have my biological father in the picture.
- [43:46]
Tom Bilyeu
So he's in.
- [43:46]
Dr. Brian Keating
He moved to the West Coast. He moved to la.
- [43:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay.
- [43:49]
Dr. Brian Keating
And I.
- [43:50]
Tom Bilyeu
And you know, he's a mathematician.
- [43:51]
Dr. Brian Keating
I knew he was a mathematician. I knew he was a professor.
- [43:53]
Tom Bilyeu
And you're struggling in public school and Math.
- [43:56]
Dr. Brian Keating
Public school math. Getting angry. Getting a little bit angry. And then I was like, you know, I wanted to. And then I was applying to colleges and I was like. He taught at Cornell. He was one of the youngest tenured full professors of math at Cornell.
- [44:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Are you guys still in contact?
- [44:08]
Dr. Brian Keating
He unfortunately passed away.
- [44:10]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, at that.
- [44:11]
Dr. Brian Keating
Oh, at that time. No, no, no. I had a chip on my. I don't want to talk to him really. Anything to do with it. I mean, he like, you know, abandoned me. And I always felt for me, Tom, you know, I was seven. You know, this is crazy to think like this, but as a seven year old this way, you think it's like, how, how could you abandon Kevin, my older brother? He's 10. He can do stuff with you. You guys used to go fishing. Like, I don't remember doing much with him. I think he taught me how to ride a bicycle. But that was basically all. But, you know, there's an exponential growth in connections in the neurons in the brain between a boy and his father especially. I have sons and brothers, and there's a huge connection that takes place from 7 to 10. So I was like, how the hell. I was pissed off at him. I didn't want to talk to him. In fact, he was a professor at Cornell. Famous, world famous professor. And I applied to Cornell and I never once mentioned. And we had different last names. I never once mentioned that he. My father taught there and I didn't get in. Consequently, I didn't get in twice to Cornell. I was rejected twice by Cornell. But it's okay.
- [45:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Did you ever consider giving?
- [45:06]
Dr. Brian Keating
No. I never wanted to owe him anything.
- [45:08]
Tom Bilyeu
But you wanted to go to the school that he taught at.
- [45:10]
Dr. Brian Keating
Because it was a great school and because it had Carl Sagan.
- [45:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that really it? I mean, that's like, that's.
- [45:16]
Dr. Brian Keating
It wasn't the only place I applied. No, for sure. No, I'm saying was.
- [45:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Was the fact that your dad was there part of the reason? Did you want to show him that you could hang?
- [45:24]
Dr. Brian Keating
It was more. My mom went there. My mom is a brilliant woman who's. Who's got the other side of the brain. I always forget which is la, left or which is right. Which probably means I'm either left or right. So my mom was this wonderful, gracious, thank God she's still here and living and she's so brilliant and worldly and erudite. She just doesn't know anything about math, physics, science or whatever. And, and so she spoke so incredibly about the scholastic environment of what Ithaca was like in Cornell that it really made this, you know, it was very romantic, the notion of going there and being in the cold and the gorges and just like in the Ivy League, you know, it was the one that school that I knew best by proxy. And so it just, it felt like it was interesting. But no, it wasn't approved. That wasn't approved to him. I'm going to get to where I was trying to one up him in about two seconds. So I. He was a famous mathematician, won a bunch of math prizes. Never won. There is no Nobel prize in math.
- [46:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Isn't there like a field?
- [46:15]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, very good. So he won a prize that's kind of like two or three levels down from that eminent mathematician. But later in his life he abandoned mathematics too and went into physics. Now he's playing in my turf again.
- [46:27]
Tom Bilyeu
You're already a physicist at this point.
- [46:29]
Dr. Brian Keating
I'm now in Graduate School. 1993, Brown University finally made the Ivy League and I went to Brown and I started to do. I was living with a roommate who is a guy from a foreign student, Tomas. And he, he had been abandoned by his father too, but they had a rapprochement, they had gotten back together. And he said it made him so much more psychologically healthy. As I talk about in the book, he said but Brian, you're carrying all this baggage, but the reason baggage has handles, so you can put it down. And he was like, you're so full of anger at your dad that you don't even remember. I didn't remember what he looked like. It was unbelievable. I grew up, I felt like I grew up without a father, but I didn't need him, you know, I got into a pretty good schools and I'd done pretty well and nothing. No thanks to him. People nowadays even say, oh, you're only good at math because you're dialing. It's like I'm good at math despite my dad, you know, like I worked hard as far as frickin hell to learn the math, to learn the physics. It never came easy to me. And I like to think of because of that, that struggle that can relate to people that may not be so proficient in math or scientific thinking or reasoning. So when I got to grad school, I looked up my father's old papers. I saw he was getting into physics and I was like, all right, this is interesting. This is like a sign. And then one thing led to another, and it turned out both my grandmothers at the time were still alive, long since passed away, but they were kind of. They had friends of friends in common. They didn't talk to each other either. After the divorce, I never saw my grandmother, my father's mother. Never saw her again in my life. It's crazy. You can almost see how the father would abandon the kid because, you know, he hates the mother. It feels like the kid's poisoned against him. I mean, I hope to never know anything like this. But how can a grandmother, you know, that abandoned her grandson? It was very strange to me. But anyway, she was living not far away from my other grandmother, who I was blessedly in love with. And I love my. And she loved me, my mother's mother. And they lived a couple miles away from each other in South Florida, as many Jewish grandmothers like to live. And through what I call the Yentanet, you know, they communicate via their friends over, you know, at the deli, they found out that, you know, I was going to graduate school at Brown, and I had some questions about, you know, what my father was up to, how his health was, because he had this. He had, you know, had some health issues as a kid. And I was like, well, I'd like to know about my own health issues. And one thing led to another, and the two grandmothers passed on my phone number to my father and. And he started. He called me one day, and this just, like, ignited this thing in me, both the kind of, like, curiosity. We talked for five hours. You know, good conversation. Very good. Yeah. Of course, there were some recriminations and issues with my mother, who I'm fiercely defending to the death, sure. But it brought out a little competitive streak in me that I could do what he never did in physics, at least win a Nobel Prize. And that year, 1993, two men, Hulse and Taylor, won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering what are called gravitational waves, the shaking up of the fabric of space time due to the massive objects in motion around one another called binary pulsars. And this guy Hulse, who won it, he was the same age I was at the time. In other words, he was a graduate student at Princeton. When he did the work that 20 years later would earn him a Nobel Prize, I was like, if he can do it, I can do it. And so I set off on a quest to really do as much as I could to win a Nobel Prize, partially for the Venal, you know, getting credit and being an idol of physics, but also to one up my dad. And I'm not proud of either one of those motivations.
- [49:48]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm just being so interesting because you're being so honest. Fucking incredible. Yeah, keep going. You have my rapt attention.
- [49:54]
Dr. Brian Keating
So we, you know, would engage in these mass, you know, just mega conversations all night.
- [49:59]
Tom Bilyeu
You and dad?
- [50:00]
Dr. Brian Keating
Me and my dad. Finally, my brother got reunited with him. I flew out here to meet him. I'd never been to la. I never had any interest in California whatsoever. He's in. Proud New Yorker, living in East Coast. I didn't care. Came out here and it was just like I saw him like walking towards me and I was like, that guy. I didn't know what he looked like. Remember, I hadn't seen him from. Since I was 7 until I was 22. Whoa. I'm like, that guy's walking like. Kevin, my older brother. There were like two, like twins. And he looks like my brother. My brother looks like my. And I was just like. I was floored because, you know, I. I know obviously I knew about genetics and stuff, but, like. And I'd like to think there's not so much investiture in blood and like, I could be an adopted parent or whatever, but. But anyway, and, and, oh, it matters. Statistically.
- [50:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I will just tell you.
- [50:42]
Dr. Brian Keating
Huge nurture and there's a huge nature. It's like you need both. Right? Right. And so we got together and we just could not stop talking about physics. It was like he. He used to joke. As a mathematician, he was never interested in kids. He probably only had kids to please my mother and make her happy, and then they end up getting divorced. So it wasn't like it was permanent. He was like. But he used to joke, like, when my brother's kids were born, my older brothers, my nephews, he would say, well, tell me when they learn algebra, you know, then we can talk. He's joking. But. But he was just this pure intellect, super smart, you know, I always feel like he had that. That purity of a quest to understand the mathematical nature of the universe. And I wanted to do the same in terms of physics. So I came up with an experiment called bicep, Tortured acronym that stands for Background Image of Cosmic Extra Galactic Polarization. And it's kind of a play on words because the signal that we're looking for is kind of this twisting curling pattern in outer space of these ancient photons that come to us as relics traveling through time from the epoch of the Big Bang. Itself, they're the oldest light in the universe. And taking that to its extrapolation, I realized that we could discover what ignited the Big Bang. In other words, we know the explosion took place. Imagine you come to a crime scene, there's some big explosion or firecracker goes off, you see all the shrapnel. What ignited? Who ignited it? Is it God? Was it some force of nature? Quantum field, the fluctuate, who knows? I wanted to find out what that was. More than that, if I did, because everybody, like the Guy Hulse who won the Nobel Prize for the work he did as a graduate student to these two guys in New Jersey, Penzias and Wilson, who discovered the cmb, the cosmic microwave, they all won Nobel prizes. It was like showering Nobel Prizes from the sky. So what better way to increase the odds, to do what my father never could have done and also answer this fundamental question of what caused the universe to begin. It was really intoxicating. And before I could do that, I had to get fired. I had to get fired from Stanford University. So in academia you actually had to get fired. I got fired. Well, if I hadn't been fired, I wouldn't be talking to you today. Let me explain how. So I went to Brown, prestigious university. And after you get your graduate degree, it's kind of like you. You don't go from AA baseball to the majors. You have to play in aaa.
- [53:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Right? Right.
- [53:02]
Dr. Brian Keating
As I understand it, of course, coming from the Padres hometown, it's a little hard to know like what makes the best baseball. But anyway, so there's a. There's an equivalent step to single A, double A and AAA before you get to become a professor called at the major leagues. So undergraduate is like single A. Graduate school is double A. You get your PhD, then you have to show you're capable of independent research. When you're in graduate school, it's like your employees, you still have to tell them what to do. Right. But what you really want to do, I think as a leader, and I've heard you talk about this elsewhere, you don't want to be concerned with just like leading people and creating a lot of followers. You seem to me, sir, to want to create a lot of leaders. And doing that in academia means you have to prove that you're independent and capable of leading a research campaign on your own, not doing what your PhD advisor told you to do, and certainly not doing homework problems like you had to do for undergraduate. That's called a postdoctoral scholar. I got a job working for a new Brand new professor at Stanford University, one of the most prestigious universities on the planet. It was my dream job, moving out to California to be close to my dad, moving from Providence to, to out to the west coast at least. And he had actually been a graduate, a postdoc himself, so to speak, at Stanford in the math department, 1960s, so it's kind of following in his footsteps. Thought I'd make him proud. And I got out to Stanford, but I was being paid to work on a completely different telescope project that my postdoctoral employer, she wanted me to work on this, and she had every right to demand that I work on it, but I couldn't get this out of my mind. That working for her, maybe she would win a Nobel Prize. I wasn't going to win it. That wasn't going to satisfy a. My curiosity of understanding how the universe began. She worked on galaxies and cloud clusters and stuff, really cool stuff, but not the origin of time, space, matter, theology, philosophy that I was most consumed with. And so I started to. Just couldn't stop. I could not stop hypothesizing, thinking up, writing down the equations for this experiment that could take me to Stockholm, Sweden someday. And she got really freaking pissed off at me, as she had every right to do. And she fired me one day. She said, it's not my job, you know, to like, have your dreams come true, you know, you have to work for me. And she's totally right. Like, if my postdocs, nowadays, I have postdoc. They were doing this, like, guys, they might be listening, you know, don't get any crazy ideas from your, your mentor now. And she said, you're fired. But she did me a huge solid favor and she got me an interview with a man here in Pasadena. His name is Andrew Lang, and he was her postdoctoral manager, mentor, one of the most eminent scientists in the last 50 years in this field of experimental cosmology, which is what I do, building telescopes to observe the universe. And he had just discovered, along with colleagues and competitors around the world, that the universe is flat. The universe is flat, not like the table is flat. And what it means to be flat has a very precise definition in physics. And, and it's not that hard to explain. So let me, I'll try to explain it. And if I make a mistake, you just let me know if you make
- [56:09]
Tom Bilyeu
a mistake, because I'll know if you're confusing. I will ask questions, but I have a feeling I will not know if you make a mistake.
- [56:16]
Dr. Brian Keating
There's a guy named Euclid who lived about 2,400 years ago. And he came up with all these postulates for geometry. It's probably the bane of many kids listening out there. These postulates to describe the properties of lines and angles and so forth. And one of his postulates is if you draw a triangle and you, and you measure the angles of each of those three angles and you add them together, you sum them up, they'll always add up to 180 degrees, which is true on any flat surface you draw it on. That'll be true, however, on a sphere. We can go from here in la, go all the way around the equator, go around to Bangkok, Thailand, and that's exactly 180 degrees around on the Earth's surface. Then we go up to the North Pole and then we come back down to LA. That triangle has basically two 180 degree angle. In other words, its angles sum up to 360 degrees or more. And so it's not true unless you're on a flat surface. Now, it could be our universe, even though the Earth is curved. That the universe is flat in the following way could be proved. Take three. Any three triangle points in the universe, three stars, three galaxies, or three blobs of the cosmic microwave background, measure their angles and if they add up to 180 degrees, the spatial plane in which those three objects lie is a flat plane. So that is what it meant. And he measured this, this, this value that they summed up to 180 degrees. Along with colleagues and competitors. And Andrew Lang and his team measured this experiment called Boomerang, which was launched, it flew around the antarctic continent about 20 years ago now. And it was a shoo in for a Nobel Prize. And I just thought if anybody could appreciate these big ideas, to go back even further in time to when the universe itself came to be, not just when the universe adopted the curvature that we measure it to have. It was him. It was Andrew. And he believed in me. Hired me on the spot. I gave a job talk, he offered me a job, moved down there. And he was like a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, super charismatic, except he was, he was a sweet individual. Like I've heard about Elon, you know, no offense, he's a genius, wonderful guy, but he's not the easiest guy in the world to work for. Okay, that, that he, you know, doesn't suffer fools lightly. Andrew Lang didn't either. But he would also engage in much more of a personable relationship, offering me fatherly advice, you know, when should I get married? I mean, it wasn't things that like normal bosses would. But he was kind of adopting that father figure role that I had missed as and as a scientist because my father himself wasn't there. And so taking on, learning from him, developing the tools, skills and tactics to lead a successful scientific experiment. And he believed in this idea that would become bicep. We proposed it to the president of Caltech, who is named David Baltimore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And he wrote us a million dollar check to start building that experiment in 2001. So we started building it and we couldn't keep it here in LA or San Diego. We, we had to take it to the South Pole, Antarctica. And the South Pole is a desert. Most people don't think about it like that. It's one of the driest places on Earth. It's drier than the Sahara Desert, and it's incredible. It's drier than Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert. It's much, much dry because it's so cold. You grew up, I don't know if you grew up in a cold climate ever, but on the east coast where I grew up, oftentimes we'd get pissed off because on a snow day, sometimes the weather be so cold it's too cold to snow. All the water vapor that could precipitate as snow condenses and basically comes down as frost, so it wouldn't snow. So the South Pole is like that, but it's a whole continent. So imagine, imagine it's a continent. So it's made of rocks and rocky material. Unlike the North Pole, where Santa lives, that is pure ocean underneath it. And there's 9,000ft of ice over the years of precipitation out over tens of thousands of eons. And it's built so it's 9,000ft above sea level. It's incredibly cold, incredibly dry, incredibly high, very windless. Perfect place for astronomy. It turns out the sun is down half of the year. The sun comes up on September 21st, and it goes down on March 21st. And that's it. It doesn't go. That's one day, one day per year. So we want people to work there. We say we'll pay you 75 grand. You just have to work for one night. That's all we want you to do.
- [60:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Nice.
- [60:29]
Dr. Brian Keating
And then you'd be surprised how many guys do it. And so we built this telescope, built it here in Pasadena and in San Diego, assembled it, shipped it to the South Pole, assembled it, took data for years with it and realized we had to upgrade it. And make it better. And we. Like an iPhone gets bigger.
- [60:45]
Tom Bilyeu
But you're actually down there yourself.
- [60:47]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I've been there twice.
- [60:48]
Tom Bilyeu
For how long?
- [60:49]
Dr. Brian Keating
It's like about a month total.
- [60:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Jesus.
- [60:51]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. Not the winter over, you know, with the family and teaching responsibilities. But it's like the planet Hoth. I mean, it's. It's frozen white. The buildings have to be built up on stilts.
- [61:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have to have like a surgeon there in case something goes wrong?
- [61:05]
Dr. Brian Keating
No, you worse. You have to get. If your appendix is the slightest hint of inflammation, they take it out or you can't go. If you have a wisdom tooth problem, they take it out before you even go there. And sometimes they say after they take it out, you can't go because we're afraid. It's not the cert. You have an infection. So it is. There's no doctor there. There's a doctor there during the winter, but not during the summer when I go. And it's the most. One of the most remote places on earth right now, which is the end of the winter season down there, beginning to go in the summer. There could be 40 people in the whole station, and those are the only 40 people within a 700 mile radius.
- [61:39]
Tom Bilyeu
You see John Carpenter's the Thing.
- [61:42]
Dr. Brian Keating
I have. I've said they. Not only have I seen it, they watch that as the last plane leaves. They watch that. And in the middle would be so fun. In the middle of winter, they watch. What's the Jack Nicholson movie with the one.
- [61:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, the Shining.
- [61:56]
Dr. Brian Keating
The Shining.
- [61:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [61:57]
Dr. Brian Keating
They're like. So they have a kind of a macabre sense of humor. So built this experiment, took it down there, realized it's not quite powerful enough. We got to Upgrade it like iPhone One to iPhone Two. It gets twice as more powerful. Chips are better, more sensitive, cameras better. And we're building cameras, right? So we're making it better and better. Deploy that one. In 2009, 2010, come back, get a phone call. And I had been in communication with Andrew for a while, but I hadn't talked to him in like a month. And he took on all these extra responsibilities. He's dealing with a divorce. And we got a phone call. I was in a scientific meeting with. With his PhD advisor at UC Berkeley. We had a meeting up there, and he just turned. He's like, Andrew's dead. He's 47 years old. Whoa. He had taken his own life.
- [62:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, God.
- [62:50]
Dr. Brian Keating
This is a man. Handsome, tall, young, vibrant, three kids at the premier place on Earth. Shoo in for the Nobel Prize. He was like a father figure to me.
- [63:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Why did he kill himself?
- [63:04]
Dr. Brian Keating
We don't know. He left a note. We don't know. We don't know. We have no idea. And the tragic thing is not. Look, winning a Nobel Prize or not, it ended up. His wife won the Nobel Prize for a different. In chemistry. She's a professor at Caltech. In chemistry, this is like royalty. But we. I don't think it had anything to do with that. I think what it had to do with was, you know, he had some demons. And the thing that hurt me the most, Tom, and this is Veno and Stuart. Stupid of me, but, like, God damn it, why didn't you freaking pick up the phone? I would have done anything for him. He would have done anything for me. I'm sure if I had called him up, threatening to potentially inflict harm upon myself, he would have, like, raced down to San Diego. That was the relationship we had. And that I had no idea that he was wrestling with whatever he was wrestling with. And, yeah, a couple years ago, I drove by, and it was in a hotel or. He took his life. And I went to the hotel. I just sat outside and cried. I was like, why didn't you? I. You know, it's irrational. Like, who the hell am I? He's got kids. Like, nobody, right? But still, like, we always react with a personal lens on us. And then. Then fast forward four more years later, we come to this announcement that we actually discovered the spark that ignited the Big Bang. The signal called inflation. These waves of gravity permeating the entire universe that. That he had seen in me and other team members that we could do. And we did it. He wasn't there to see it. Now, this is in 2014. We make this discovery. It's on the front page of the New York Times. It's on the front. It's on cnn. It's on any newspaper, any TV around the world. Headlines. Scientists discover the smoking gun behind the Big bang. What caused it to ignite? And I wasn't there. I wasn't there at the press conference was held at Harvard University because after Andrew died, he was my kind of protector. He was like my Don and the other guys in the team. They wanted credit, and they had done a tremendous amount of work, and they didn't feel like I fit in, especially since I kind of started another project with team members at UC Berkeley and become collaborators and friends as well. And they didn't want me at this press conference. And so I didn't get a ticket. And it Turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me too. Again, like getting fired. See, that's the thing, Tom. I once did a Google search. You know, you could do these N gram searches and search on the popularity of a phrase. You can search on impact theory and see, and you'll see it'd be zero. And then all of a sudden, when did you start it? Like 2015, 2016, it'll go like that. Search, Pulitzer Prize search, Nobel Prize search, whatever you want. And in this context, I once did a search, I said, take the words, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and tell me, what were the words that. Or just said the sentence before that sentence. It's always, I got fired. I lost my job. The forklift, somebody needed to use a forklift. I was the only one who could do it right. And, and it seemed catastrophic. But that's what, that's where the magic lies in life, when you think it's going to be really bad, because that's the entropic flip.
- [66:02]
Tom Bilyeu
How did this become good, though?
- [66:04]
Dr. Brian Keating
So we were eventually proven wrong, that we hadn't discovered it, that we weren't going to win a Nobel Prize. Like everybody said, including the New York Times, including the Washington, everybody saying that we not only discovered the origin of our universe, but concomitant with that is something called the multiverse, which is a fascinating corollary to the theory of how our universe came to be. And it's not too dissimilar to the notion that, as you know, there's seven other planets in our solar system since Pluto got demoted by Neil Degrasse Tyson and others. So there's only seven other planets, but we know there's literally a hundred billion suns, just like our sun stars in our galaxy. There's not only that, there's a hundred billion galaxies or more in the observable universe. So if there's many planets, if there's many people, if there's many solar systems, if there's many galaxies, why can't there be many universes? And that concept is called the multiverse, which literally says there could be an infinite number of other universes that exist in what's called the multiverse. And that was a direct corollary and direct implication of the announcement that we made on this day in 2014. People said, Goodbye universe, hello multiverse. You know, inflation, the spark that ignited the Big Bang, hello Nobel Prizes. And so, yes, you said in the beginning, like, I was like. And almost, almost ran for the Nobel Prize because people noted That I had created the experiment that eventually morphed into the second experiment along with Andrew and others, and that if the committee does their homework, they'll see the contributions that Brian Keating played. Now it turns out in science, using the scientific method, there should be a little bit of add on where you check to see, am I fooling myself? Fooling yourself in science means that you're a victim of confirmation bias. You have a hypothesis you're going to drill into it. Nothing can dissuade. You know, disconfirming evidence can prove you wrong. No, confirming evidence will not be included in your list of things of proving why you're right. It comes up all the time and people that believe in the flat earth or believe in UFOs, or believe in things that are actually true. So it's a hell of a drug. You know, it might even rival for scientists, dopamine for lay people. And so we were so convinced that the signal we saw was the very signal we sought, the one that I sought to win the Nobel Prize that my father hadn't won, that we almost didn't consider the alternatives. We did, it turns out we did consider the alternatives, but we had enough kind of a feeling to rule them out. So we didn't allow the full brunt of the scientific method to play out. And instead we didn't have the paper peer reviewed. So we submitted it and the media knew about it. And there was a press conference. And I was not at that press conference. And to me, I wouldn't have attended, most likely. I mean, I felt like left out at the time. And that's when I came up with the idea for the name of this book. Because I knew one of two things was going to happen. I was going to be kind of vindicated that we weren't really fully correct, that we had observed an imposter signal, which in this case is called dust. There's dust in the universe, just like micrometeorites that pervade the cosmos and they can align and make in the magnetic field of the Milky Way, reproduce the signal exactly mimicking what we saw. And so that was so we wouldn't win the Nobel Prize because we were wrong. That was one possibility. Or we would win the Nobel Prize because we were right. We just need to be confirmed by somebody else. But I wasn't going to win it, so hence the title Losing the Nobel Prize. It also has to do with the fact that there are aspects of the Nobel Prize I believe need to be jettisoned and we need to lose those Aspects. So it's kind of a double entendre, as the French would say. And in that whole event, figuring out that I wasn't at the press conference, I didn't get the limelight, so I didn't have to eat as much crow, perhaps, as I should have. And it always resonates a little bit sourly with me just in the following sense. To this day, I meet fellow scientists or people and say, oh, you were part of that team that discovered the origin of the Big Bang. In other words, they don't know that we retracted that claim. And why is that? Because the claim comes on page one of the Tuesday edition of the New York Times Science Times and the retraction see 17 section, page 12, column 4 on the Saturday edition that nobody reads. And that's a big problem in science. And one of my goals in science is to make sure if you have a PR budget that you reserve a little bit as a put, just in case your theory has to be retracted, your experimental data has to be retracted. And this has happened not only to us. We didn't make a blunder. We actually measured exquisitely accurate the signal, and the. The experiment continues to this day. So it's not a failure, it's not an error, and it's an error in interpretation and overreach that wasn't wrong. So to my mind, we should be careful as scientists to not communicate to the public that we are infallible. I think that's. And that's kind of a big lesson in my second book that, again, humanizes these otherworldly intellectual titans, these nine Nobel
- [71:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Prize winners, into the impossible.
- [71:09]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yep.
- [71:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Why. Why that title?
- [71:12]
Dr. Brian Keating
So the podcast that I run at UC San Diego is part of the Arthur C. Clarke center for Human Imagination. And we are affiliated with Arthur C. Clarke, the late Arthur C. Clarke, who conceived of the first geosynchronous satellites. He had ideas for iPads. And so for you, watch 2001 A Space Odyssey. He has extremely large contributions to both arts and science, science fiction, fiction, science, fact, hard science. And we wanted to kind of bring together a center that would. That would kind of emulate him, that would have the two hemispheres of the brain and not have this secondary division between the two. And so we created the center, the Arthur C. Clarke foundation, that he had no children, I think. No. No next of kin, so to speak. So we have access to this name. And I decided, because of all the great intellects that come through, from Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, we have Richard Dreyfuss, all these Great intellects that come through, including nine Nobel Prize winners that would come through in one way or another. That it would be a real shame were I not to preserve conversations like you and I are having. But for everybody to learn from these laureates at scale. So not just for me to benefit from their lecture, but to record it and then put it on the Internet. So I started doing that and I thought with our colleague Patrick Coleman at who runs the Clark center, we came up with a name. It had to be one of Clark's famous quips. And he had many. One of the most famous ones. I open every show with any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He had another saying which kind of resonant with Richard Feynman. He said, for every expert there's an equal and opposite expert. Then he had a third one which is the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
- [72:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Now that's very poetic, but back it up for me. How do we actually go beyond the possible into the impossible? What does that mean?
- [73:01]
Dr. Brian Keating
So there will be things that will be said of you as a scientist that you cannot do that. Einstein failed at that. He died trying to come up with a 1 inch long equation, the God equation, as Michio Kaku calls it. String theorists. Who are you to come up with this? It's impossible, but it's actually oftentimes people short the human intellect and what we're capable of doing. I mean if you just look back in history and go like on the savannah, like your conversation with Richard Dawkins. He was thinking about if you looked at these primates on the savanna in Africa, there is no way you could predict that someday they'd be zipping around interplanetary. You know, as an interplanetary species, there's just no logical. So what would you have said? Those are impost. That's impossible.
- [73:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Possible.
- [73:44]
Dr. Brian Keating
But what would you be? You'd be incredibly wrong. But you'd also be doing child abuse. I think of as child abuse, which
- [73:50]
Tom Bilyeu
is why child abuse?
- [73:51]
Dr. Brian Keating
Because you were telling a kid that he or she can't do something because it's never been done before.
- [73:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you know Moran Surf by any chance? Sounds familiar, but no interesting guy had him on the show really, really early. And that was sort of his punchline. He had been doing this dream recording, basically trying to record areas of the brain. And much like you were saying it got picked up by the news and somebody called him and asked him if, you know, given the brain Signals you're picking up on could you end up recording somebody's dreams? And he was like, yeah, I guess actually you could. And so it becomes this huge story. He starts panicking. He was like, no, they woke me up. I wasn't thinking clearly. Of course you can't record people's dreams and it's not possible. And then like a year later, this Japanese researcher, because Moran had said that, and he didn't see that Moran has been desperately trying to retract the statement goes, and actually starts an experiment to actually record people's dreams and, like, ends up showing that it probably on a long enough timeline, it's going to be possible. And so Moran said the punchline wasn't that I was right when I said that you couldn't record dreams. It was that you can't ever say that something can or can't be done until. Because you're just gonna stop somebody from even trying.
- [75:09]
Dr. Brian Keating
Exactly.
- [75:10]
Tom Bilyeu
And I thought that was really interesting. To your point about child abuse, that saying that it's impossible is the wrong statement. Because you never know.
- [75:19]
Dr. Brian Keating
That's right. You sound called the Banister effect, named after Roger Bannister.
- [75:22]
Tom Bilyeu
I know it well.
- [75:23]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, the first person. So that was thought to be impossible. Now I looked it up. One of my kids is like super fast. And I looked up and it must be an error. It's like, how. What's the fastest, you know, that some kid can run a race in junior high school? And it's like five minutes. And I was like, that's insane. Because like 100 years ago, that was like Olympic caliber, you know, race. But that was thought to be impossible. Once somebody does something or. You ever play video games, your sister or somebody around here, you got a lot of video games, right? They get a high score, they kill the big boss and level. That's like. And then you do it. Literally the thing that you couldn't do for weeks now, you do it the next day. Day. So things are only impossible until they're not impossible. And so to short the human. And that's why I don't like this, this. This saying, follow the science. You know, science is supposed to be about questioning authority. And now we're in this land where you have to follow authority. I think almost nothing could be less scientific than saying, like, oh, because this particular person, like Feynman, would say something that. I'm not going to question it. Of course he has to be wrong. Just as Newton was wrong, just as Galileo was wrong many times, by the way, Einstein, I was having A debate with my friend Stefan Alexander as an author and the president, National Society of Black Physicists and a professor at Brown University where I went to. He and I were grad students together and I was like, you know that man, friggin Einstein. I know you love him, but he had, he was wrong more than he was right. And he's like, what are you talking about? That guy's. I was just like, here are like seven different ways that he was wrong. And he was right when it counts. And he goes, yeah, but because of relativity he gets a passion. And I was like, all right, I gotta give it to you. And I was, I always joke, you know, like, it's too bad he made those seven mistakes because otherwise he could have had a good career. You know, he could have been known as somebody. But, but in reality, he's definitely wrong about. He's wrong about seven major things. He's called his biggest blunder even. And if you think about that, if you teach kids that Einstein is an infallible, you know, omnipotent genius, no kid. Einstein himself wouldn't have said, I am an Einstein. And so we shortchange the potentiality for young people to enter into science. When we say that something is solved, everyone agrees and there's no, no room for progress. So I think of that and the into the impossible kind of mantra as a way to inspire people to think about it may be not possible, but, but you won't know until you really give it a true try and give it all, you can leave it all out there on the floor. And I think that there's, that's the, that's the, that's the thing that only curiosity can sustain that kind of a quest, multi decade long quest, as it did for Einstein. Try and fail to come up with a theory of everything. But that's beautiful in a way. Look, I know you're not, I don't know, you're not super religious, maybe like I, but look at the essence of, like Moses, you know, the founder of Judea. Like, the key lesson is he does not get into the promised land. We all have a promise, promised lands. We all have things that we aspire to that we want to do. But he never stopped asking God, please let me in, even fly me over it, like let me see it from a mountain. And then we don't even know where he was buried because that great man, we don't want to have it as a place of worship because he was just a man, he wasn't a God himself. And I Look at that. I say, like, you know, the Nobel Prize for me, became an idol. It became a promised land. Even if I get into it, like, the characters, the real people, but I. You know, I can think of them as into the impossible. They have all won the Nobel Prize, but seven out of the nine tell me that they have the imposter syndrome in these interviews. And I'm like, what are you talking about? In fact, Barry Barish, who won the Nobel Prize for just a little thing of detecting two ginormous black holes colliding together near the speed of light a billion years ago in a galaxy we don't even know exists anymore, he discovered those with his teammates on the LIGO experiment, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory. And he said, when you win a Nobel Prize, which I'll probably never know now, you win a Nobel Prize, you go to Stockholm, you meet the king, you have a reindeer sandwich with the king, and then you bend down and he puts a gilded graven image of Alfred Nobel around your neck. And then they say, oh, you win a million dollars, too, or some fraction of a million dollars with the people that you want it. You have to sign this book. And the book has all the people that have ever won the Nobel Prize in physics. And he's a curious guy. So he opens it up, he turns, oh, won it last year, two years ago, five years ago. Oh, there's Feynman. There's Feynman. Wow. There's. Oh, there's Marie Curie. That's pretty. There's Einstein. And he said, I'm not worthy. I'm an imposter. And I said, how do you feel that now after winning the Nobel Prize? He goes, I can't live up to what he did. I said, barry, I have to tell you something. Albert Einstein had the imposter syndrome. He's like, what are you talking about, Albert? He said that Isaac Newton did more not only for physics, but for Western civilization than any person before or since. Meaning even including Einstein himself.
- [80:12]
Tom Bilyeu
I remember hearing a quote, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but where somebody said to Einstein, what's it like to be the smartest man alive? And he said, I don't know. You'll have to ask Nicholas Tesla. I always found that interesting, you know, to your point about the. The imposter syndrome. But there's also something more that you discount the thing that you're good at, because it. Like, I'll take speaking. So my wife decided to start speaking. And so she. When she did her, her only TED talk thus far. But when she went to do a TED talk, she, you know, had me like coaching her. And so I'm training her all this stuff. And for her it was a magic trick. It was a sufficiently advanced technology, my understanding of speaking that to her it seemed magical, whereas to me it's so self evident as to be not impressive.
- [81:03]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [81:03]
Tom Bilyeu
And so it's really interesting how when you have. So I think all of us have something where we get disproportionate returns. Right. So, so I've put an inhuman amount of energy and effort getting good at speaking. So it is not something that just came naturally, but it is something to which I have always, if I put an hour of energy into speaking, I get a 1.3x, let's say. Right. And somebody else might get a 0.6x. And so now the differential between me putting an hour of energy into it and them putting an hour of energy, you can see how it would be very frustrating very quickly. But it doesn't feel like it's hard to be impressed by the things that you get that disproportionate return on. So I can see how everybody begins to discount their own called the curse
- [81:47]
Dr. Brian Keating
of knowledge, which is like you maybe have experience with professors or teachers. Like, they're so erudite, they're so intelligent, they're so smart that they forget what it was like not to know. And therefore they can't communicate the N levels between you and them to get you to level N plus one where you're at, like, that's all you need from a teacher. I think of teachers as hacks. Like they let you hack on and get up. And I want to just resonate with something because something I used to prepare for this interview is something that I Learned from Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an episode of into the impossible on my YouTube channel where he actually semi hinted that my question was almost racist and actually said the episode's called Neil DeGrasse Tyson Plays the race card on Brian Keating. And what it was was I said to him, you know, when he was a kid, he was a great athlete and he went to Bronx Science. Best high school in the world in anything, but especially in science. And he was also pretty big and good as an athlete. Six two, six three, couple, you know, 180, 100. And he took it seriously. And they wanted him to wrestle and they were like, apply to college on a wrestling scholarship. He's like, I don't want to do that. And I want to do it, you know, intellectually. And I said to him, like, where did you get that from? Because he wasn't, like, saying, like, the courage to make that decision. Like, I probably would have just taken, you know, I'll get into Harvard any way I can. You know, Cornell. Right. I would have done it. He didn't want to do that. And I said, what gave you that strength? Was it something that you're born with some. Some preternatural gift that you have that gave you the confidence to say no to the trope of African American, let's put him into sports. And he said, I'm now going to mention the race car to you because you see somebody who's eloquent and gifted and as a black man, and you say, oh, it must be a gift, implying that he didn't have to work on it. I actually disagree with him, and I pushed back on him. But then he said, you see me when I go on Colbert Report or whatever, the Late show, and you see me and you look like it's so easy, and I'm having this great conversation is flowing back and forth, and you think that's just a gift because I'm a black man, and you think I might have the gift of gab. And he said, no, no, no, no, you're wrong. What it comes from is I am a scholar of whatever craft I'm doing. In that case, it's of part public speaking. I watch every episode of Jon Stewart or Colbert for the last two months before I go on every time. And I time the amount of space between the questions and the pause and response. I time what are the levels of kind of jokes to, you know, per unit time that I can lay in? How much deep science can I lay in? And then. And then he says I have to go back four days because it's not five and it's not three. I go back four days, and I look at the news cycle, and Steven's going to ask me something in that three days, but not five days. So I don't waste my time. Go back 10 months ago or yesterday. He's going to ask me what happened last three days. So he's a scholar of that one niche. And so he gets this disproportionate return. Now I look at that, I'm like, oh, I'm going. But now, I took that. I used it. I said, tom asked certain questions. He will talk. You talk, by the way, for an average of 3.5 minutes per question, which I love. So I know that I'M not. I'm going to shut up because he's going to ask these questions. So great to hear and learn from you and. But he's also going to let me ramble on too. And I want to, you know, tie things into the past episodes because I want to go back to your first episode, this guy Moran. Maybe no one will watch it. It's too long a tale. But you had on Richard Dawkins recently or Andrew Huberman or you have, you know, just amazing guests. And you know, so I benefit from. Even though it's kind of like leveling on me. But it's so evident that someone, it's hard to teach that. Like he gave me a recipe but there's still some secret sauce that he has. I don't, I don't think it's an insult to say someone's gifted in something, but you might be gifted in public speaking. And how do you convey a gift to somebody else? Like Lisa might not be so easy.
- [85:26]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. So I think that it's probably misleading. The only person I know who just claims straight up like this is a gift is Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson was like I never had to work for, for it. Like, I mean he just owns.
- [85:38]
Dr. Brian Keating
Really wow.
- [85:39]
Tom Bilyeu
And was obscenely gifted.
- [85:41]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [85:42]
Tom Bilyeu
But most people, even somebody like Lionel Messi, who's just known for being completely talented, he says, you know, look, I've had to work my ass off. So I think that it is a one, two punch of you get that disproportionate return. But it's kind of like steroids. You can take steroids, not add any muscle at all. You still have to go work you face off in the gym. So I think it, you know, it, it is that double thing. And it is a little like if somebody were to say, well, it's easy for you Tom, because you're naturally gifted at speaking. It's like, no, I get a disproportionate return. But I've had to put an insane like Starting at age 12 or 13, I started practicing in front of the mirror, modulating my voice, looking at my facial expressions, you know, practicing, practicing. At the time I thought I was going to, to be a stand up comic. So it was like you, you end up having to still put an inhuman amount of time and energy into something. But yes, I do think it matters if people identify the thing that they get the disproportionate returns. And if you love that and can also leverage that. Now I believe you also have to work on your Weaknesses if your goals demand it. But yeah, it's. I don't know a lot of people that are just gifted.
- [86:56]
Dr. Brian Keating
But I see, like if you lost, you know, God forbid you lost, whatever you do. I mean, just the fact that you've had multiple, you know, bites at this app, different apples, you know, if you lost it, I heard maybe it was Gary Vaynerchuk on your show or maybe it was Jordan Harbinger show, but he's like, like, sometimes I wish I could lose it all, you know, just to do it again. And I'm like, in science, you kind of feel that way too, for one reason is there are 500 companies in the Fortune 500, right? There's only one company, if you like, that wins the Nobel Prize. There's only one experiment. Every year there's more people on the space station than I won the Nobel Prize in the last couple of years. Like right now, it's insane. So it's like a monopoly and it's very hard and. But a lot of these guys, once they win the Nobel Prize, they do something totally different. Pivoting, as the kids say, right? They want to do something else. Why? Because they don't get the same dopamine hit. Like, once you win it, like you've basically come as far as you can go in that specific sub discipline and now you want to do something because you've got this, you know, 8, 000 horsepower brain and, and you don't want your career to be over and so they pivot in something else. Now sometimes they take these flights of fancy and they don't do anything. It's kind of crazy. Someone go off the deep end, become eugenicist or racist or whatever. I mean, this has happened. Yeah, they invented the transistor, became like a real eugenicist who came up with the idea that we should actually encourage blacks not to reproduce. And he contributed to what's called the Nobel Prize sperm bank. The repositories. Yeah, this guy's.
- [88:22]
Tom Bilyeu
But is that a one off? Just that guy. Are you saying there's something about the mega maniacal nature of winning something like that?
- [88:28]
Dr. Brian Keating
There could be. I mean, you look at, you know, where do you go from here? And I actually had this astronaut Chris Hadfield on my show a couple, a couple months ago. He's the guy who's like playing Major Tom's a junkie in the space station Canadian restaurant. And I asked them, I'm like, are you familiar with the hedonic treadmill? Like once you make this achievement, being an Astronaut living on a space station. Where do you go from there? And he had an author and he wrote a fiction book. He's written two nonfiction books, a kids book, now he's written a murder mystery. But it's clear he's wired in this way that he cannot stop doing achievement. And a lot of these people in this book are like that too. And sometimes they think that because they've won it now, everyone should listen to them and really pay heed to some of their loony notions. The co discoverer of the double helix, James Watson, said like really negative things about women and minorities. And yet he still has his Nobel Prize, the one award that never gets retracted. Harvey Weinstein had his membership in the Academy Awards, whatever, retracted, rescinded. Many prizes have been taken away. Not the Nobel Prize. They never take it away. And why? Maybe because it's the most prestigious idol on earth. But it only is that for now, if it continues to maintain some sense of integrity, and I hope it will. And part of the goal of into the Impossible was to bring out the human side of these laurias and show they do. I mean, they suffer from some of the things that you and I suffer from, except they can crush it. They can crush the imposter syndrome to really unlock, you know, for on a sustainable basis.
- [89:59]
Tom Bilyeu
And what is that key? Like how do you step into the impossible? How do you get past imposter syndrome? How do you believe that, yes, you can do it? Like what's that key for really getting into something that's grand?
- [90:13]
Dr. Brian Keating
I think it has to be a balance. It can't be only that you are defined by what you do in the laboratory or on a chalkboard or whatever. You have to have some scaffolding, some superstructure outside of your business, outside of what your career is, outside of science. In a sense, all of them had very, very deep gratitude for father figures in their lives, for people that were mentors to them and for them to be mentors. And I point out in the book, in the Russian language, the word for scientist is one who was taught. In other words, if you're taught, you're a scientist. And it kind of harkens back to the science, scientific method that we start. Like kids are natural scientists. You see them doing stuff, they make up concoction, they blow up stuff. You know, they're curious what happens. They test the limits of their parents, you know, doing crazy crap. So they're testing, they're doing hypothesis, they're refining. And then they become like, you know, hairless apes that Actually behave properly. Hopefully in this case, having, you know, a passionate level of curiosity, but also being able to collaborate, to work with other people, to listen to your critics, but not so much that it goes to your heart and listen to your complimenters, but don't let it go to your head. Like, you get to this level and you might have objective metrics. You could be a billionaire. You could win a Nobel Prize. You have these objective metrics. Very tempting then, to let that be your definition. So, therefore, you must define yourself by activities and people and your network outside. So they all have broad networks, and I don't just mean, like social networks or whatever. They have broad interests. They are into, you know, like hobbies, scuba diving and, you know, flying planes or, you know, doing cool crap. And. And it keeps them diverse and thinking about stuff from art, music, you know, archaeology, things like that. To me, that's kind of the notion that speaks to me that you can't just only do what you do. You must also have something that you're doing it for. There's a sciences. Robert Wilson, who said something when he was asked about, why should we build these particle accelerators that cost billions of dollars, you know, shouldn't we use that to build up, you know, the military and keep. This is during the, you know, the Cold War. And he's like, well, the military is great because it defends the country, but when we do science like this, it makes the country worth defending. And I think doing what one of my laureates in the book said, Sheldon Glashow, who's the inspiration for Young Sheldon and Big bank there, he said, there's a power in useless ideas. And it's kind of like you talked about once, like, the blank space on your calendar. Like, you should have blank space in your calendar because it's in those interstices that creativity comes out. And it's no secret. Part of that's why you get ideas in the shower and you're thinking about stuff all the time. You need that blank space and sometimes those hobbies and that's blank space from thinking about grand unified field theories. And you need that in order to then pour that energy into these things. That's not going to make a faster Internet connection. It's not going to build a more efficient, you know, solar panel or it's useless in that way. But sometimes we think of science in the wrong way. We think of science as so valuable. We want our kids to do stem right? Why? Because it makes technology. But science can be much more than that. You know, I Always say, like what the value of science that doesn't produce some widget that does something better. What's the use of a baby? Babies don't do anything. You know, they come into your house, they poop on your floor, they don't
- [93:33]
Tom Bilyeu
carry your genetics into the future. And that's nature's trick. So I get a. That one is.
- [93:40]
Dr. Brian Keating
All right, all right, let me push back. So people talk about carrying genetics and stuff into the future. So we talk when you're on my show about kids. And you were very candid, honest, authentic about that. And I really love it. I don't want to recapitulate that I'm a people to watch the interview on my channel into the impossible. But you said you want to have this impact. You want to go to your deathbed and on your deathbed not have to say, I regret the choice of not having kids because it would have precluded me from doing the impact in my business, in my work, with my wife, with my network that would have done it. Now I think that's admirable. And I've been thinking about that, ruminating on that since we spoke in October. I actually have not stopped thinking about that because I'm like, there's something about what Tom saying that's resonant with me, but I want to work through it. And first of all, I started thinking about this teleportation into the future. Like, are kids the only way to do it? Like you said it and you don't have kids. It's very impressive that you say that. I'm always a little bit reluctant. I have kids. I don't like to talk about the kids personal stuff, but I have kids and I think about them as little robots and little, not in a good way. They're going to be able to do stuff on their own. They'll be independent for the first, you know, 18 years of life. They're almost. They can't sustain themselves, unlike every other animal on Earth. It's not interesting. Even though we share 99% of our chromosomes with apes, the apes are free at age 1. You know, they go off to college or whatever they do, right? Our kids, 18, like, and even then they're not even that, that ready, right? So I started thinking like, is that the only way? Because I get a little self conscious like you maybe. I have a friend, she couldn't have kids. Like, I don't want to say the only way to transmit your, your genetics into the future is if she has kids, because that's offensive. Right. It's not fair to her. She couldn't have kids.
- [95:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Why is it offensive? If it's true, you can't do it right now. Yeah, look, I feel bad if somebody wants kids and can have kids, but that doesn't mean that it isn't true. And so genetically the only way to get your genetics into the future is to get your genetics into the future, if you see what I'm saying. Okay, so it, I guess theoretically it could be donating eggs or sperm or whatever and something is the future will happen.
- [95:41]
Dr. Brian Keating
That's one way.
- [95:42]
Tom Bilyeu
But my thing is that kids are ready made fulfillment. And I think fulfillment is the ultimate aim. I think that I've chosen a much harder path to fulfillment. Maybe a better way to say it, a much more dangerous path to fulfillment. Because it may not. Yeah, it may not be harder because being a parent, truly, I wish I knew who said this, but I heard a quote that the only impossible job is raising children. That strikes me as abundantly true. And I have started thanking people for having kids because somebody needs to do it. And I'm super grateful. You need fulfillment. I have chosen a more dangerous path where I'm trying to build something that will outlast myself. And it's incredibly rewarding, but it's also very high risk. So I don't get why it would be offensive to say something is true. Even though my heart breaks for somebody that wants kids.
- [96:33]
Dr. Brian Keating
So strictly speaking, I actually don't. As I said before, there's nature, there's nurture. I don't put as much weight on nature as you might think. Even as a scientist, I don't particularly think like imagine, you know, I have kids. Again, if somebody came to me and said, actually, you know, your second kid, he's not yours, he happens to look just like me. But anyway, he's not your kid. All right, I don't care. You're not going to transmit my genetics. So I don't. Of course not. Similarly, you know, if there was someone who was your kid and he does something a despicable as a murderer does. Horrible. I mean like. Yeah, it's not my genetics though. Into the future. No. But instead what is important is teleporting into the future your ideological values, not your biological values. And this.
- [97:17]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't think it's the only thing that matters.
- [97:18]
Dr. Brian Keating
I don't think it's the only thing
- [97:19]
Tom Bilyeu
that I'm with you.
- [97:20]
Dr. Brian Keating
And by the way, she can adopt. Like it's. But you know, it's. Again, it's much more I'm much more of a values and behaviorist type personality where I think that that is, your actions are much more valuable. Which is why, you know, I do certain things religiously and so forth. Like, I don't necessarily believe in certain things. Like Richard Dawkins and I both don't believe God is some guy with a white beard. You know, we also, we have very radical difference of opinion other ways. But thinking about what is meaning of life and if you don't have kids, can you have the same meaning in life? And I started to think about what, what is, what should you do in life? And I came up with an analogy from physics because that's basically my, you know, I don't have claws, I don't have sharp teeth, I've got a brain. And I try to work on stuff through ideas. I started to think about that. I said, well, Tom, right now, could I double your happiness? Could I make you twice, ten times as happy right now without drugs? I don't think drugs would make you happy for more than I think they make you much less happy.
- [98:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Now. Now we have to define happiness. So because I think of happiness as something so transitory. Yes, I think you probably could. If you put me on mdma, I think for the next couple of hours I would be 10 times happier. Especially if you let me be around my wife. Oh, my God. I have fantasized about doing MDMA with my wife. I think it would be insane.
- [98:40]
Dr. Brian Keating
Like, he was like, oh, have you ever tried sex toys? It makes sex more fun. I'm like, you're doing it wrong. Like it's pretty fun, right?
- [98:45]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, you remember you brought it up, but now we'll say, so I don't do drugs.
- [98:50]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I've never done a drug in my life.
- [98:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so now I have something for you. Smoke weed and then have sex. Report back, dude. So, first of all, I am not a proponent of drugs. I think people should avoid them. Like they are bad news. But if you're going to try something once, smoking weed and having sex, it's a totally different sport. It's unreal.
- [99:09]
Dr. Brian Keating
Can you be happy? Is it possible for you to be happy? Not you, anybody. Well, that's the question.
- [99:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, I totally believe in happiness. I think happiness is amazing. I think you can get happiness from a bowl of ice cream. This is not universally defined, but I have found that using happiness as the word to describe very momentary, very transient happiness is very useful. And there are many things that give me momentary happiness. Then there is joy, which is. Joy is a Deeper, more resilient form of happiness, which has a deeper do with, like, contributing to other people and doing things where you feel like, yeah, you're progressing and elevating other people. And then there's the ultimate one for me, which is fulfillment, which is a positive state of mind without being sort of that questy dopamine kind of thing that we think of with, like, ice cream or sex happiness. But yes, I believe in those and think that people should optimize around fulfillment, film and enjoy personally.
- [100:09]
Dr. Brian Keating
So have you ever heard that, like, Inuits or Eskimo people have, like, 80 words for snow? Yes. So Judaism has, like, many. Or Hebrew has many words for, like, intelligence and has many. It has many words for happiness. There's kind of happiness. Like, like you said, there's Simcha, there's Reena, there's like, laughter kind of happiness. Then there's. There's like bittersweet happiness. Like, you can be happy because you fail.
- [100:29]
Tom Bilyeu
But preach, man. Some of that is the juice.
- [100:32]
Dr. Brian Keating
But what you said is so interesting. I claim that you can continue to become happy, but you cannot be happy. In other words, you meditate, right?
- [100:39]
Tom Bilyeu
You can't stay happy with that. Like, would I be understanding you if I said that?
- [100:43]
Dr. Brian Keating
I say happiness is like an unstable equilibrium. It's something that. Which small perturbations around where you are can make you only less happy or more happy. In other words, you can meditate, right? You meditate. So when you're meditating, like, you don't win meditating, right? But you get to a place of more and more equal equanimity, and then it ends already. But imagine, like, if you could continue meditating, whatever that means, like the kind of. Not. It's not dopamine. It's some deep sense of equanimity where you're just like.
- [101:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, literally a different brain wave.
- [101:11]
Dr. Brian Keating
It's a different brain. And it is in parallel to drugs. So that's the only type of drug I do is. And dopamine eating, you know, whatever. But. So in other words, you can progress. And it might be this jagged kind of. You're climbing this mountain, you're getting to the top, but then you get a phone call and Mary Mods, you know, has been hacked. And like, in other words, my point is that it would be very.
- [101:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Thanks for bringing up Mary Mods, by the way. That's nice.
- [101:32]
Dr. Brian Keating
That's nice.
- [101:32]
Tom Bilyeu
I did not ask for that. I just want the record to.
- [101:34]
Dr. Brian Keating
But imagine I said to you, marymod's doubled. Like, would you be Twice as happy.
- [101:39]
Tom Bilyeu
I'd be.
- [101:40]
Dr. Brian Keating
I'd be happy. What if I bought you two houses? Can you use two houses?
- [101:43]
Tom Bilyeu
No.
- [101:44]
Dr. Brian Keating
What about you? Two jets.
- [101:45]
Tom Bilyeu
That would make me deeply uncomfortable. Oh, what's happening?
- [101:48]
Dr. Brian Keating
Right. So in other words, most people say, yeah, if I won the lottery, I'd be much more. I'm not denying it would make you happier if you won the lottery, even temporarily.
- [101:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, right.
- [101:57]
Dr. Brian Keating
It would make you a hedonically treadmill of satisfaction. But now let me ask you, and this. You don't have kids, it's a little different. But I can make your life 10x worse in a nanosecond, right? I mean, in theory, like a meteor hits, whatever, right? For people. I don't even want to say it. Me thinking about it, like, brings tears. Death of a child thinking about kids,
- [102:15]
Tom Bilyeu
dude, that's one of the reasons I don't have kids.
- [102:17]
Dr. Brian Keating
I know, you said that. Okay, so the point is, this goes back to entropy. What is entropy? Entropy is chaos, randomness disorder. But what it really is is there's more states for an egg to be broken than there is for an egg to be whole, right? There's more states where you put coffee and cream together, where it's mixed together than when you. Eventually, the laws of physics don't prevent it from being half coffee and half cream forever, right? But there's many more infinite number, almost more states where they're mixed together. So life tends to more entropy, which means more availability of possibility. So therefore we. When you get to a peak, the only way down, as they say, the only way, you know, off of the peak is down. So there's 10x,000x more ways to make your life infinitely worse than to make it infinitely better. I don't even think you can make it. I haven't told this many times, but Jim Simons, who's the man who funds my experiment, he's like a hero to me. He's a mentor to me. He's an incredible soul. He's one of the richest men in the world. Gulf Stream, yacht, everything. And he's a brilliant scientist as well. And people say, oh, he's got so great. I do anything to be Jim Simons. Oh, yeah. Jim lost two adult sons in different accidents. Oh, God. And. And we named our telescopes after his sons. He is. And, and he, he has this. He's just like, almost like a Buddha, you know, there's something about him and his wife Marilyn, and they're just. They're just like angels on Earth. And the older I get, I don't like get angry at the bad people on earth. The devils that there are plentiful on earth. They're multitudes that you meet those angels and they're just like. They just give you faith in the world. But anyway, so would you trade? No, you wouldn't trade with him, so shut the F up. You wouldn't trade in a second. So don't ask about that now. I started to think though, Tom, I said, so that's something very valuable. Because I have a lot invested in my kids more than anything. And my wife. And you have it with your wife. I said, do those things. This is my meaning of life, okay? I'm lay on it. Do those things that. Which if taken away from you would devastate you. Maximize the number of things, the connections, the businesses, the brands, whatever. The connection that if it were taken away from you, yeah, you could build another business. You would be pretty devastated, but you could do it. But like your relationship with your wife. No, I'm not saying get married multiple times. I mean, that could be.
- [104:29]
Tom Bilyeu
That's a really interesting statement. It's really interesting statement that's making me strangely emotional.
- [104:36]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I feel that way. And it's because of you I came up with this kind of analogy to think about it like that. In other words, it's a horrible way. It is hard.
- [104:44]
Tom Bilyeu
It's beautiful. At the same time, do that which you would be devastated if it got taken away. God damn. I do sometimes think I'm. I'm tortured by my decision not to have kids. It's really fascinating. And when I think about entry. I wouldn't have used these words, but because you're priming me with it. When I think about kids, entropy creeps into the scenario. There are so many more ways for it to go wrong than there are for it to go right. That because I love my life so much that I just can't bring myself. But you know what really worries me? Part of my brain was betting on the fact that I would be an uncle.
- [105:30]
Dr. Brian Keating
Really?
- [105:31]
Tom Bilyeu
And it's not come true. My entire fucking family, both sides, My side, my wife's side. No one has children. So I'm just like.
- [105:39]
Dr. Brian Keating
You are the paradigm of uncle. Like having Tom as your uncle.
- [105:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Dude, I would be such a good uncle. I'm heartbroken that my name is Tom. So I would be Uncle Tom. That's fucking terrible.
- [105:48]
Dr. Brian Keating
But you know, something that's come up and it really makes me feel real antipathy towards my fellow scientists. There's a crisis of, like you said, something beautiful you said, like, I'm so glad that people have kids. Like, and I know that's genuine. There are people that think of kids as like, a plague. You may know this, that there's this whole movement of not reproducing kids, women especially. It's incredibly jaded. And I think that's one of the worst qualities you see in a kid. And by the way, like, I look at you, Tom, and I see. I see this potential. This, this, this JT11 engine, that's F18
- [106:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Super Hornet quality planes, okay? So I don't know if I'm being complimented right now.
- [106:26]
Dr. Brian Keating
JT11 engine has 18,000 pounds of thrust. It's used on an F18 Strike Hornet. And, you know, putting it out there. And I'm like, you know, Tom, there, There are kids out there. I think about. I have kids. I think about adopting kids. When I hear about, like, the guy, Dave Thomas, he founded Wendy's, or he was adopted. And because he was adopted out of force, foster care, he was able to change the lives of millions of people. Because he came a billionaire. He was able to not only have, like, foster kids, but to have, like, foster care siblings. It's wrenching. Like, if I didn't have my brother, I was adopted by my stepfather. If he went to, like, a different. Like, he went to live, I wouldn't. I don't know where I'd be. Tom. I think about that with, like, adopt. Like, I sometimes think about adoption to kill me when I think, because it's like, low, much below, you know, And I don't want it to be like, oh, it's like getting a pup. No, it's the hardest thing. But it's also like, when you get that, when you have that sense and it's not. By the way, the beginning years are pretty frustrating. And not like, yeah, the first time they hold your hand when they come out of the mother, that's awesome. That is unlike any. That's like making contact with the species on another planet times a billion. And their whole hand, Tom, fills up one knuckle, bananas. And you're the first human being they've ever taught. Now for the next six months, they're barfing, peeing, puking, they don't speak English, they're crapping on the floor. And the father can almost do nothing. Right? You know, like. But when you're influencing people, connecting people, that's the only form of time, of time travel and teleportation. People are so freaking greedy. People want to teleport and bring their body with them. And you can't do that. You can't go into the future as far as we know right now, can't go into the past, but you can take your values into the future. So I think you are doing that.
- [108:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Here's something interesting and I am literally forgetting that there are people watching this and I'm just going into shit that's fascinating. But nature plays games that are incredibly subtle. And I don't think we fully. Maybe it is only the poets among us that can fully, fully articulate it. But I know because I, because I'm a human. And so I have been on both sides of this equation. Because I have a brain like everybody else, I can predict this. And because I big brothered for so long, I know what it means to, to look at an external instantiation of this thing that you love. And you mentioned earlier those feelings of. It's a happiness, but it's tinged with something bittersweet. And for me, those might be my favorite emotions. That melancholy, the knowing that they won't be young forever and that you know, they. They go beyond you into the world in a way that is joyful and sad all at the same time.
- [109:18]
Dr. Brian Keating
And so vulnerable.
- [109:20]
Tom Bilyeu
And so vulnerable and just terrifying. It is that. That's a gift. The fact that it is sad and joyful like I mean just the, the. I've had a very good life. So let me say I'm coming from the perspective of somebody who, despite it not being perfect, like you know, loving parents and all that, pretty blessed. It. It's just a wild ride that we're on that you ultimately lose everything. And yet while it's here, it's fucking beautiful and you can make of it what you will. And I don't know, there's something about the, the ride, as it were. And I'm not, because I am not a poet, I'm not able to capture this subtle thing that nature does. When you were describing the baby's hand like, like wrapping around yours like that didn't need to be a poetic moment, but nature has made it so that it is and that people are just flummoxed by that moment.
- [110:23]
Dr. Brian Keating
And there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with. We told in society to like take care of yourself and go for yourself and do for. And. And it. But we're almost told that it's selfish to do things like for global warming there's a mathematician and, and he put out like one of the best things. He listed all the things you can do to Reduce your carbon footprint, don't eat meat. Fine. Like I could cut down a number, you know, of burgers I eat. I could probably do that for health reasons too. And like many things, just double edged sword, you know, reducing climate change, impacts of greenhouse gases, probably helps with asthma and helps with other childhood mortality. So we went through this whole list of things. Don't eat meat, don't travel on airplanes, don't do this, don't have a car, live in a city, city, and a lot. And all these were reduced by like 10 metric tons per year per family and the Last one was 9,000 tons. Consider a smaller family. I was like you, how dare you tell me that again. It's the same thing. It's like, oh yeah, what if Einstein's parents did the same thing? What if back then, by the way, in the 1800s and 1900s they had their own versions of like climate change or like, you know what the number one problem was on Wall street street in 1909 or something like that lately, before the Depression, it was, there was too much horse crap.
- [111:34]
Tom Bilyeu
And let me say something to this, what if it's true? And so my thing is like one, I think there are second and third order and fifth order and six order consequences that people are not thinking about when they talk about reducing the population. Yeah, I know about this. I want to be very clear, I am not an expert. I have no idea what people should do. Truly. Truly. So this is merely me saying there might be a way to think through this that's more useful than another way. 1. I just, I want that person to be able to say what they think is true.
- [112:04]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [112:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Now it might not be the right answer, but I want to make sure that people can throw it out and that we can look at it.
- [112:14]
Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [112:14]
Tom Bilyeu
So for instance, that we can actually find the truth. But the thing that freaks me out right now, you said something earlier that really resonated with me, which is I loved the phrase follow the science until you just said, but wait a second. The whole point about science is to recognize these people are almost certainly wrong in some way. And to be scientific is to challenge it all and say, hey, there might be a better truth here. And that's actually what I love. So I just want to make sure that we don't lose sight of that. That feels like something that we have a real tenuous grasp on right now. That people, they, they are convinced that they know what is right and they're so convinced that they're prepared to make that like a blanket statement. Do what I think. Like, even in this company, I am utterly convinced that I don't know enough for people to just do what I say. And so I go way the out of my way to make sure everyone in the company feels very comfortable challenging my. My ideas. Because I don't think I'm smart enough to come to the right answer all the time by myself. There's only one thing where I feel that people should literally just listen to me and do exactly what I say, and that's Los Angeles house design. Because I don't feel like people are doing a good enough job of that. I'm kidding. People should be able to do whatever they want.
- [113:34]
Dr. Brian Keating
Parking.
- [113:35]
Tom Bilyeu
But yeah, that, that to me, like that level, when people have that kind of certainty, that's scares.
- [113:41]
Dr. Brian Keating
Oh, it's very dangerous. You see it in lots of different aspects. People go into military things or. But let me just take that. So I think it's important. What you're talking about is. Goes by the name of epistemic humility, that you don't know the right answer. But the epistemology is you want to find the right answer. You want to search for what is quote unquote true, and you should do so with love. You should have a debate and you should have the red team approach with the same common goal.
- [114:03]
Tom Bilyeu
That's the second time you brought it up. You have to say what it is.
- [114:05]
Dr. Brian Keating
The red team is an approach. Usually it's a. You have the military, where you've got different red team and blue team, just opposing sides.
- [114:11]
Tom Bilyeu
You're asking people to argue from the
- [114:14]
Dr. Brian Keating
other side, even if they believe.
- [114:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Blue side.
- [114:17]
Dr. Brian Keating
Right.
- [114:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Even if the smartest people, you put them on red team. You say fucking go after the conventional.
- [114:23]
Dr. Brian Keating
Here's an example. A jury system. So people have a diversity. Oh, we should have diversity. Let's sprinkle some diversity dust on. No, it's actually true. The more diverse a jury is, the more likely they are to come to a correct decision. It's not just bullshit and a lot of my friends on the right or whatever, diversity is bs. No, actually it's been proven. More diverse the jury is, the more accurate the judgment. And isn't that what we want in our jurisprudence system? Of course we do. Right, so you should take that. But that is kind of an adversarial notion. A jury shouldn't just like be unanimous. Actually, in the past in the Sanhedrin, which is the highest court in Judaism, that was the only court responsible for killing somebody for adult or whatever. If the judges 70 judges, if they came to a unanimous decision, this person should be killed, they would then vacate the decision, go free, because the supposition was there has to be one member who doesn't, you know, toe the line and has to have someone advocating for it. And this is 2,500 years ago. It's pretty advanced. Anyway, the red team is that it's. Have the best on both sides, fight it out for a common goal. Like, ever hear a presidential debate? 2020 presidential debate. Oh, I was going to vote for Biden, but you know, Trump has such a good debate. No, never have. Nobody changes minds. Why? Because they're, they're not debating for love, they're debating to win. The great thing about science, Thomas, you never win science. There's no such thing as winning science. You might win a Nobel Prize or win tenure or get into a good school, but you're not winning science because it's an infinite game, it cannot be won. That's what's so magical about it. Similarly, too, when we have a problem, you notice a problem. There will be people, entrepreneurs and people like that that are often demonized. People like Musk or even yourself. Talking about, let's have a technological approach to these vexing problems. Globe is changing, its climate is warming. Does that mean it will continue infinitely? Absolutely not. There's only so much carbon on Earth, right? There's only so much way that we can convert to carbon dioxide. The planet, by the way, is going to be just frickin fine without us if we don't, if we disappear, I hope God that we won't. But you know, I always think about this in the context of alien life. Like if I told you, if tomorrow I say my name. Shelly Wright's a wonderful, brilliant professor at UC San San Diego. She's looking for technological signatures of extraterrestrial intelligence. If I told you she just found some. Not extraterrestrial intelligence, but she found unequivocal evidence for amoebic life on planet, you know, Procyon B. How would you react and how would the world react to a discovery? Unequivocal positive evidence. Aliens exist, but they're microbes. For now, how would you react and how would the world react?
- [116:48]
Tom Bilyeu
I would be so stoked.
- [116:49]
Dr. Brian Keating
Okay. Why?
- [116:51]
Tom Bilyeu
It's so much more interesting to me. So one, when we were talking about looking up at the moon with a telescope and you said, you know, there's order in the world. And I thought, whoa, that's really interesting. That's not at all what I find interesting about it. What I find interesting is it triggers the same thing in me that science fiction triggers. It's just expansive. It's so interesting to think about that little amoeba on some other planet. And then it makes me think, think what else is there? And then I end up at Star wars, and I'm just like, oh, this is so cool. And so, yeah, to me, anything that makes my mind feel like it's expanding, I find that intoxicating.
- [117:29]
Dr. Brian Keating
I think it's brilliant. How would the world react? How would it change?
- [117:32]
Tom Bilyeu
I think it'll be a mixed bag. Some people are going to freak out anybody that has sort of a traditional religious bent where we're the only ones. I think it might be a little hard to swallow, but I also find. Feel like, I don't know, we're living in a. We're living through a time where it's just sort of become so pervasive in the culture that there's probably life out there, that aliens are probably visiting us. I mean, you know, it's like that's become such a popular notion that I don't think people now are just debating whether they've actually already landed and the government is covering it up. It doesn't seem as big of a thing. So I think people would just sort of go on with their day.
- [118:08]
Dr. Brian Keating
And some people say, like, oh, connect us with the cosmos and make us feel this harmony throughout the universe. And I say, you know what, Tom? I have good news for you. You can take this cup, take it about 15 miles to the west, go out there, Pacific Ocean, scoop it up, and you'll find more amoebas there than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
- [118:26]
Tom Bilyeu
That's crazy.
- [118:26]
Dr. Brian Keating
Okay, so you pick it up. Now, does that change your notion of, you know, where we fit in the cosmos? Maybe it changes it slightly until you think, what are we doing to these ocean? What are we doing to, you know, dumping and awful economic. You know, and I'm an economic positivist. I want to. I'm a technological optimist. I want to keep growing and improving as a science. You know, Feynman once said that no scientist does not wish to live forever because he or she wants to see these cool scientific discoveries. Most people ask my mom. She's lived a long life. You know, when I'm time to go, I'm gonna go. But most. She's not science, you know, so when I think about that, then I think about, well, forget about Imamus for a second. What if I told you there's this, like, there Are these people. They're called. They're called Cambodians. They live there and, you know, and they're, they're infinitely complex. I believe they're created in the image of God, you know, infinite, superior to any other creation on Earth. And guess what? You know, about 6 million of them were slaughtered by their own government just in the last 50 years, in my lifetime. Be like, how could that possibly happen? When we're thinking about we're going to cherish, you know, this microbe that we find on the planet Procyon B. And I just think, like, everything about humanity, like, I want to turn it inwards. I care more about the planet than, you know, I could imagine caring about. On the other hand, I also don't want to deny, as you said in reference to something we earlier said, when you say follow the science or whatever you say, listen to the experts, you're implicitly, tacitly saying you can't do better. Like, we're not going to find a solution to this vexing problem. I think we are. But to cap it at literally, the oxygen mask that's going to save us, namely the children, saying to me, as this professor did, don't have kids or consider not having kids. I think it's awful. I think that denies the predicate of science, which is that the future will be better than the past. And we all see it. We all live better than the richest kings and queens of Europe 80 years ago, not like a thousand. You know, it's amazing. And that's large part thanks to technology, and that's a large part thanks to science. So for me, I'm not as worried about that. And I don't want to stem, you know, cut the seed corn and throw it away, which could be the children that we won't have. I think you want to sacrifice. Don't eat meat, you know, don't go to conferences in your jet, whatever. Don't do that. Fine. But also look at things like nuclear power, which we know in San Diego we got six nuclear reactors within, you know, the city limits. You know, they're in nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. We live with those for 60 years now. There's nothing wrong with it. We could use that to power cities. Why not do it? And there you get into politics. And that's where I find it. Less. I always joke I got into astronomy because there's no Democratic constellations, there's no Republican comets. You know, it's all. It's all extra, extraterrestrial off of this Earth for the sake of the heavens.
- [121:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Brian I have really enjoyed my time with you yet again. This was so much fun. Where can people follow you?
- [121:16]
Dr. Brian Keating
YouTube Dr. Brian Keating into the Impossible podcast and Twitter Dr. Brian Keating those are the main ways.
- [121:22]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. Thank you man so much for joining us. A lot of fun guys. Speaking of things that are a lot of fun, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [121:31]
Dr. Brian Keating
Peace.
- [121:37]
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