moonshots ep48 brian keating ai future transcript

Mo’s law is sort of saturating as resources become more and more capable they become more and more demanded a similar thing can happen with with AGI and I think it could be a because of the utility but B because of the lawyers I think that we are in the process of evolving not just one but two new intelligences can you have truly artificial intelligent you know GI whatever you want to call it AGI without pain are we as humans a series of algorithms I think we have to say there is no evidence right now but there is huge philosophical religious implications absolutely I think in a way the most beneficial use May redown to us in that it is a mirror I love when you geek out like that everybody Welcome to moonshots and mindsets about to dive into a podcast with a dear friend Brian King an astrophysicist a cosmologist and inventor he’s a professor of physics at UC San Diego and he’s also the executive director of the arth C Clark Center for

[00:01:01] human imagination he’s written a number of books including losing the Nobel Prize and into the impossible and we’re going to have fun you’re going to hear a conversation around couple different subjects I’d love to hear your thoughts on them the first is is there intelligent life out there in the universe is there intelligent technological life Brian takes the position that there is not and I take the position that there is I’d love to hear what you think after we share that debate we’re talking about things like Arthur C Clark had a chance to meet him his influence on science on technology are we alone in the universe and are we living in a simulation we’re going to dive deep into artificial general intelligence is it a good or bad thing is it something that’s going to transform life in a positive way or negative should we be going to Mars or living in onal colonies orbiting the Sun ultimately this is a conversation for the 9-year-old kid in you who’s excited

[00:02:01] about the future of humanity in Space the in discovery of intelligent life and really a conversation around the potential for human imagination all right let’s dive in with Dr Brian keing hey Brian Peter good to see BU been a while see yeah you were my uh first bigname guest on the into the impossible podcast when I started it in Earnest in 2020 I started it in in 2018 with Freeman Dyson as my first guest uh but we didn’t record video and I I really didn’t amp it up until uh until you came on and and gave me the uh the patented dandas bump well my pleasure and and pleasure to have you uh reciprocate here and to talk about subjects that I uh I dream about and I love you know I’ve gone hard over on longevity but the 9-year-old Kid in Me is still very much all a space cadet for sure likewise and

[00:03:01] of course you’ve been such a generous and friendly supporter of the Arthur C Clark Center for human imagination where I am the associate director now uh and it’s almost uh 11 years old I think and that is amazing I remember I remember when you and and Eric VY started talking about this and you know I’ve been a huge Arthur C Clark fan forever you know I pride myself in having known him earlier in my life and uh love his story love his work uh and anything I could do to perpetuate his vision uh and his ability to foretell the future uh was something I wanted to do yeah there’s so few people like him uh around and historically speaking both for his scientific you know kind of Science Fiction output but also his quips you know the name of my podcast into the impossible comes from a series of questions that I’ll ask you later on as I ask all my esteemed guests when they come on my podcast but uh he said of of course the only way to know the

[00:04:00] limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible he also said another thing which I like to use at Faculty Club meetings which is the you know for every expert there’s an equal and opposite expert so I like to lay that on my department chair there there’s lots of great CPS right and and it’s like you know uh in the beginning a CRA you know when something’s uh first presented it’s a crazy idea and then the second stage it’s you know well it might work but it’s not worth doing and then the third stage of of a revolutionary ideas you people say I told you that was a great idea all along it was my idea yeah persevered you know I’d love to share if you don’t mind uh my memories of him cuz I met him yeah I met him when I was 21 years old I was at MIT as an undergrad or 20 and uh Todd Holly Bob Richards uh David Webb and I went to the United Nations conference on the peaceful usage of outer space it’s the first international trip I had done my own and it was a big deal I was um uh

[00:05:02] chairman of students for the exploration and development of of space seds at the time and it was incredible when I went there and there’s this giant conference in the middle of Vienna on space and all this was the height of the Cold War right the Reagan Star Wars initiative is going on and uh I walk in to this Hall and there is Arthur C Clark with a group of people around him holding court and uh I didn’t actually know who he was I had read childhood’s end in high school but that was it I’d heard of 2001 and seen the movie but never connected with him and uh so Bob Richards and Todd Holly goes oh my God it’s it’s Arthur C Clark let’s go talk to him and so we go and uh we stand around and we start a conversation with him in the middle of the conversation he just leaves he just

[00:06:00] takes off and I’m like how rude that I’m really pissed uh and so we end up going to hear his presentation and he’s on stage you know in this uh un like Forum you know up in the de and I I lean over to to Todd and Bob and I say he’s going to take us out to dinner cuz he was really rude I was I was just so convicted about uh about had such conviction and so afterwards I go up and uh uh uh I’m I find him and I I say you know you know Mr Clark uh I would love if my colleagues and I could take you out to dinner tonight and uh he he ends up saying yes we go out to dinner of course he pays I win my bet that he would take us out to dinner and it turns out he has a hearing aid and he just thought we stopped talking but he ended up becoming the uh uh the chair of our Advisory board at students for exploration development of space and we

[00:07:01] visited him a number of times in Sri Lanka and the guy just had an incredible View and vision I just saw a post that Elon made recently sharing uh his Arthur’s sort of prediction on computers and on AI and it’s still as relevant today you know basically that we’re birthing a new species on this planet yeah and of course you know this podcast game that you and I are so deeply invested in I think it gives us both a a really surprising amount of joy that we get to talk to people outside of work and at least for me when I get to there’s people I have to talk to Peter and then there’s people I want to talk to right so you’re one of the latter um when I when you we always open the um the show our show with his actual voice saying open the podbay doors Hal uh from 2001 A Space Odyssey and of course the iPod got its name from the pod bay in uh and Arthur C Clark’s 2001 on space

[00:08:00] odysey so very closely related a direct through line from podcasting to Sir Arthur C Clark that I don’t think most people appreciate yeah well a lot uh emanates from his uh his storytelling um and his his stories his uh books are still as relevant today as they always have been what do you think he’d make of of of the kind of you know kind of Singularity that seems to be approaching to quote your good friend ctsw uh with with AI I mean I’ve listened to a lot of your uh your moon shots podcast lately and and they’ve rightfully been you know I think you are you know perhaps the go-to source for for some of these uh great conversations with leaders like like Samir Khan and and and other folks that you’ve talked to and of course you’ve talked intimately with Elon and he’s you’re the only person Peter I think that Elon never you know responds to uh sarcastically to kind of you know he says like I love your I love your optimism Peter and I think if he said that to anyone else they’d be like what the hell did he that I do to deserve his

[00:09:00] wrath but anyway uh what do you think Arthur would think about uh about you know things like chat GPT and I’m using it for teaching I’m using it for basic type setting and research functions and coding uh it’s really blown me away on the other hand it needs more supervision than my you know my twins do and they on a daily basis so uh as a father of twins you know the the pleasures of twins but um but tell me Peter what do you think Arthur would think about I mean if you can invoke his his uh natural intelligence I think he would view Humanity birthing a new species I think that we are in the process of of evolving not just one but two new intelligences one is AI on its own whatever you want to call it uh you know eventually AGI and call it any name you want but it’s an intelligence that is different from ours it’s not structured like our uh cortical columns in our neocortex and doesn’t work the same but

[00:10:00] there is a level of intelligence and growing intelligence there and we’re also giving birth to a hybrid right a human AI hybrid um there will be the those humans who choose not to go on the journey those that merge with technology and those and and and AI on its own uh I think that’s fascinating and I I I you know one of the questions I’ve been pondering and and you’re the right person to talk to about it Brian is is this the inevitable process that goes on in the universe is do does does it have start with biological life always and then biology leads to uh silicon or you know pick your favorite substrate materials yeah I mean I been uh wanting to talk to you about that as well first of all I you you said something I think recently about you know kind of the pathway forward and how um the age of abundance has taken us away from you know using whale oil and and so forth uh as I point out in my first book losing

[00:11:01] the Nobel Prize that was really obviated and superseded by the development of petroleum and and that was really the purview of Alfred Nobel and and the construction and Mining operations that Dynamite enabled but um but I wonder you know if you if you think about it um and I’ll just put it out there the the development of a solar panel in some ways might require whales you know in other words there might be some inevitability that you have to go through this this Pathway to get to kardashev you know logari you know 10 to the minus 3 or whatever we are uh Dyson you know level that we’re uh not even approaching so I love when you pe out like that yeah it’s it’s fun to get paid to do that right um and then on the other hand you know so there is a sort of inevitability towards the the um predecessor primitive Technologies you know I joked about well we needed dinosaurs to get to uh to get to you know petroleum right and people oh it’s not dinosaurs it’s pre okay it’s dinosaur life or it’s it’s

[00:12:00] ancient you know biological hydrocarb right hydrocarbons so does is that is that a necessary step is that is that sufficient step I think there need I think there’s no large jumps in other words our ability to uh need electrons uh would not have happened had we not had oil right in other words we Wen we didn’t create large uh dynamos burning whale oil well oil gave us light and gave us the desire for more light to read and to function during the nights but then it was only higher energy density petroleum coal petroleum other things that allowed us to drive uh these large dynamos that created electrons and then we switched over to an electron driven uh Tech ecosystem and then we said okay how else can we get more efficient electrons in that came from solar and soon Fusion or Micron nukes

[00:13:02] and so I think that is a required predecessor yeah and you look at it and you see things like you know computer was not designed by a computer you know the first programming language chat GPT is programmed on a very Advanced you know programming substrate which itself is predecessors going all the way back to Assembly Language but but that you know is even not the first step so this kind of first start problem or cold start problem I think is an interesting one and and the other thing I like to point out and I’ll I’ll pose this to you do you know what uh Albert Einstein called his happiest thought Peter did you you you’ve experienced this I think I’ve heard this but you’ve experienced this with Stephen Hawking so I’ll leave it at that to jog your memory what was it that you experienced with Steven Hawk I mean it was it was his Joy of of being uh in weightlessness his Joy of being free what was Einstein’s greatest thought so his great his most happy thought he called this my most joyous thought was that in observer in freef Fall will experience no gravitational

[00:14:02] field this led to the notion of the Einstein equivalence principle which led to general relativity now I ask you Peter is it possible a for an artificial AI AE an artificial intelligent Albert Einstein to a experience Joy or B somehow manifest what freefall viscerally feels like in other words the greatest culmination one of my late colleagues professor joh par used to call general relativity or we call it gr as the greatest accomplishment of Western Civilization not not just of mathematical physics or but it was a culminate because it took the work and collaboration and the abundant resources the excess Capital left over to allow people to do stuff the lack of wars and so forth and Communications and math so he called that the greatest Pinnacle so can a computer Peter feel the sensation of Joy that’s going to be the uh uh the question ultimately the question you’re

[00:15:01] you’re poking at which I think about a lot and I ask many people is I will and let’s just call it AI versus AGI but what is it that humans can do that AI cannot right is there anything that that AI cannot accomplish uh one of the conversations I had recently on abundance on the stage at a360 I need to get you there next year by the way is was with imod mustak who is the head of stability AI one of the top um generative AI companies and he was saying the number one uh thing that he selects for in his companies and his employees and his Partners is passion and that that idea of passion May in fact be the most important last last stand for humans um and that passion falls into emotions can can computers emulate love and uh and passion and emotions I I I’m I’m sure they will be able to emulate it uh will they be able

[00:16:03] to exude it where when you as a human on the other side of it you truly feel their passion that’s going to be interesting yeah what do you think what do you feel about that I’m an AI you know kind of minimalist in some sense I’m also an artificial I’m sorry I’m an alien life minimalist too I don’t believe there are any intelligent life forms out there in the universe we’re going to have a great argument about that one okay I believe that if there is life in the universe it originated from Earth uh uh and um and we can sort of talk about some of the ideas behind why I think that way it’s controversial and and we will and even though I’m an astrophysicist I’m not speaking on behalf of a field that I am directly involved in and so like any physicist that frees me up to speculate wildly but uh but the best part about it is I don’t believe it what I’m saying can be falsified at least in the near term so we can make these predictions and and I wouldn’t have to pay the famous Wagers of of sin if I’m wrong but Nicholas TB

[00:17:02] uh you know in cheerful fashion as he’s known to do uh put something out you know that these tests that are passed by by the chat um AI engines uh the the fact that they’re passed says more about the test than it does about the uh the advanced ability of AI and I I sort of agree with that statement as kinly as he normally is uh that you know I mean I think a lot of what we’re seeing is a you know it’s it’s sort of a mirror what we’re putting into like a like a a perfect mirror is reflective of who we are and it can do things that we can do but I’ve often wondered you know can you have U Can you have truly artificial intelligent you know GI whatever you want to call it AGI without pain uh and you know pain is different than love we you talked about you know can they love a few minutes ago I I think it’s it’s interesting to know can they feel pain just like Bentham used to say about the you know being cruel to animals and and and so forth that the question was not you know do they they do they you know have consciousnesses can they feel pain

[00:18:01] and yeah we could talk about that some other time you you’ve written a lot about the the the prospects for artificial meat and and so forth in the future but um and and currently right now I I I’ve talked a lot about but let’s just let’s go there one second because I do think you can I mean what what is pain pain is a you know a negative uh uh across the board uh negative impulse um as a result of uh of an action or a thought or an activity and can you create a pleasure pain Matrix for a computer um that has implications I mean one of the things um uh you know pommer lucky the founder of oculus uh had another conversation with him at a360 this year and and he created a uh a a version of a VR headset that had explosive bolts on it that if you died in the game it would take out your preal cortex right and you’d be dead and

[00:19:00] and he did it just for fun more as a piece of artwork than anything else just to say you know what would it be like if living in the virtual world had real consequences like life and death um could you imagine creating that uh for an AI as well where uh consequences of doing something that caused pain reduced your resources access to power or memory or compute BW a capacitor and would shut you down at the end you know that there would be death and so forth I believe you could um you could create that and and uh in in the algorithms that govern govern that I mean we are one of the questions fundamentally is are we as humans a very robust complex series of algorithms whether we we’ve got uh whether we’ve got Quantum compute in our in our microfibrils of our of our neurons or whether we’re something else I just finished uh reading a book called

[00:20:01] thousand brains uh that looks at you know a theory for for intelligence in the mind um I think you can I think you can program love and and pain uh into computers going back to your original point though Brian um today’s AI today’s generative uh AI open Ai and chat GPT and and the like are all reflections of human data right I mean the large language models simply reflect what we put out into the world um and so it reflects us it doesn’t reflect it reflects extrapolations of what we’ve said and interpolations of what we’ve said but it still reflects us and I think it is exactly right Peter I think I think in a way the most beneficial use May redown to us in that it is a mirror so you and I can nerd out about a great many topics from you know parenting twins to you know writing books uh to

[00:21:00] space to Arthur C Clark but one of our shared passions is Aviation and we both fly our own little planes around and and so forth um so you I recall using Microsoft flight simulator in 1985 I I it was back when I knew all the names of all the astronauts that have ever G come before just got fly in in through the uh Towers in Chicago and and Sh or bana champagne and then you’d fly right through the towers now um and since then we’ve moved up you andly moved up to to larger and larger aircraft you know rather than the Piper Archer that they used to feature in M msfs now we were flying around then and we’d go underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and Stu forth um or at least I would and and I would even do that in some of the more advanced simulators including the moving simulators and if you’ve ever been in one of those it’s really you come out you’re nauseous a little bit you really feel and it’s not like it’s a faithful representation of the graphic capability of a modern you know a PC flight simulator I mean the modern flight simulator gives so much but the addition of motion gives so much

[00:22:00] more reality to it now building on what polymer said and I think he is a great Visionary uh he imagine if in the flight simulator when you tried to go through you know uh the Golden Gate Bridge underpass or between the support cables uh and you hit one of them you got an electric shock you know right to the the sphincter region or wherever you could you could design this or you had on your helmet you know like you got you got a little you know Joy buzzer on you it would in addition to the level up you know the reality of it it would make you more I believe it would make you more uh capable to perceive risks and I think pregaming learn faster and so another way that I think that AI can help but I believe it’s being hindered I I believe this is true that Moore’s Law is sort of saturating uh there we can leave aside the GPU kind of use of it but there’s there’s some principle and I forget the name of it you probably know the name of it as resources become more and more capable they become more and more demanded just like the old saying if you want something if you want something

[00:23:00] done right ask somebody who’s too busy to do it right because they have so many people asking them because they’re so capable now I’ve seen a saturation on the upper end although it’s classified information we use Department of energy computers at Lawrence Berkeley Li uh National Laboratory and in that laboratory they have you know the P pearlmutter machine and we don’t even know how fast these machines are Peter but we know that both our allocations are dropping every year to analyze Cosmic microwave background radiation data that’s my that’s my area of expertise and also the you know the net throughput in these high throughput and high performance Computing systems because of their utility are so in such high demand that actually the Mo’s law of performance where it really counts the actual end use how many actual papers are being written say or how many new uh data sets are analyzed is actually saturating and I think a similar thing can happen with with AGI and I think it could be a because of the utility but B because of the lawyers and let me let me just bring up this this fact so I talked to Eric toal um you

[00:24:00] know very famous physician down here at scripts Research Institute you know involved in OS with the covid-19 we’re not going to talk about that but um but he has a book you know the the patient will see you now and then he has you know a book about Ai and so forth and and data in medicine now one of the most important barriers that he claims is that you know today we see people it used to be the doctor was sitting there you know writing down on his notepad or whatever you guys used to use when you were back in medical school uh and then the patient was like looking up at the ceiling and they weren’t looking at each other right and then now they said like the doctor’s typing into a terminal and the patient’s on their smartphone and that’s how they’re communicating um let’s go back to Aviation when you and I are flying you’re landing at Santa Monica Airport and you’re flying around in a Cessna you have to take your eyes off of the outside world and reach over and dial in a knob an ancient VHF you know radio uh and then you have to wait Peter because you might miss the broadcast of the so called No Tam system you might miss the weather you come in

[00:25:00] late so then you have to listen to the whole two-minute loop again now you’re flying you can’t communicate with anybody else uh and uh and the plane should know where you’re going to land you’re getting frustrated just listening to you describe what actually happens every day imagine forget about a AGI just imagine there was an Alexa I actually changed the name of my Alexa to so it won’t go off when I’m talking to you because I’ll say computer close the pod bay doors let’s see if it’ll do it I Chang the name of it uh he’s busy right now uh but anyway imagine if we had a device and said it knows we’re coming up on Santa Monica Airport let’s tune in the the VR let’s tune in the the uh the notam and then Not only would it broadcast visually because we can read things 60 times faster than we can process auditorally and it would just be a boot now why isn’t that available to Pilots right now it’s a it’s a $29 unit right for God’s sakes connect even worse than that why do I have to use a human in the loop at all right because when air traffic control sends me my my uh Airway vectors and so forth it just uploaded into the computer and I should

[00:26:01] get it and say accept and that’s it instead of it reading it to me me inputting it reading it back them saying yes and it’s fraught with error uh propagation in that regard and congestion when you’re talking on to an air traffic controller no one else can use that frequency it’s not even like CDMA where every other oh you completely blocking it which is actually a safety risk too Peter right I mean some terrorist right could could OCC Aviation makes medicine look advanced which is which is funny um so I think the humans are the ultimate limit and but I do hope that AGI will let us kind of segue out of a world where we’re dominated by you know kind of the needs of catering to to computers and using it more to cater to what we actually need as an end user this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it’s really

[00:27:00] important High prolonged levels of glucose what’s called hyperglycemia leads to everything from heart disease to alzheimer’s to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it’s not good the challenge is all of us are different uh all of us respond to different foods in different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if I eat grapes it doesn’t if I eat bread by itself I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels but if I dip that bread in olive oil it blunts it and these are things that I’ve learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the levels app so levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what’s going on in your body it’s continuous monitoring 24/7 I wear it all the time really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my phys phology and my genetics you know on this podcast I only

[00:28:01] recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for myself and my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person’s life so check it out levels. l/ Peter give you two additional months of membership and it’s something that I think everyone should be doing eventually this stuff is going to be in your body on your body part of our future of medicine today it’s a product that I think uh I’m going to be using for the years ahead and hope you’ll consider as well so going back to the question of are we saturating um you know I I recently uh uh gave a few presentations on AI and you know this already and a lot of people may not so the idea of artificial intelligence has been discussed since 1956 right it was the conferences at Dartmouth and so we’re you know some 60 years later um and so why is why now why just now why

[00:29:01] these last few years is it pivoting and then you can say well it’s because deep learning is now a concept but you know it turns out the first deep learning algorithms actually were described and uh conceived of in the mid 60s so 50 plus years ago but what it is is four factors as you know number one computation is continuing to grow we’re still on Mo’s law we’re still doubling compute I just saw Steve jinon just put out a graph that predicts through 2025 that we’re just still on Mo’s law it’s still doubling every roughly 18 to 24 months uh the second thing is the amount of labeled data is doubling every year so the amount of data that we’re mining in the world is just exploding the third which was blew me away it was the uh efficiency of the algorithms for training large language models has has been over 5 years it’s been compounding at 99.5% increase efficiency and then

[00:30:01] finally its amount of capital flowing into the markets right huge amount of of capital flowing into Ai and which bringing people to it and then it’s self- referential right cuz better coding algorithms are allowing you to more rapidly code and experiment and it’s just it’s accelerating it’s not slowing down and so um you know we’ve got Nvidia producing more and more power powerful compute um than ever before so while certain systems may be coming saturated and you know we have these traditional s-curves right where we have very low uh uh slow growth and then the rapid period and then whatever the medium is get saturated and it falls off but the S curves are stacked and as you all know we have new capabilities coming online so I think what’s interesting is going to be Quantum computation coming online online and Quantum technologies that will uh support Ai and machine

[00:31:02] learning algorithms before the end of this decade yeah I think you know one one kind of concept I’ve been kicking around with but again it’s not my area of expertise which allows me to you know speculate wildly and enjoy that as we phys you know there is this excess pleasure that humans get from planning right um is we need sort of you know and this is now now mixing two controversial opinions okay one uh one is that the uh the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is limited to null and uh B the existence of artificial intelligence is wildely over uh over concerned or people are wildly overc concerned about it now let’s blend them together what is the governing equation of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence it’s the so-called Drake equation and I believe we need a Drake equation for processing the threat or the risks or the pro the prospects for truly you know super Turing level Ai and again it’s not my area of expertise but the one thing I always teach my students and actually I did this recently was I’m teaching

[00:32:00] cosmology to 45 brilliant undergraduates who will have to listen to this podcast and leave a thumbs up for you on your uh podcast Network as well no that’s how I grew my subscribers so so violently 45 students are important they are they’re they’re really the best in the known universe so I told them I I showed them the data from Edwin Hubble now you love to quote things that happened 100 years ago and I have a list of the the 22 things that happened in 2022 and you’ll make your one for 2023 as opposed to 1923 which I love seeing so something happened in 1923 and it was called uh it was called the discovery of an extra an extra Galactic uh Nova in the constellation Andromeda in the so-call Andromeda galaxy was it true that we believed there was only one Galaxy up until then we believed we were it we believed Einstein remember Einstein was 20 years before this in his special relativity days up until general relativity 1915 so we’re talking about 1923 people did not know there were any galaxies outside of

[00:33:00] the Milky Way in fact the Andromeda galaxy Peter is the most distant object the human eye can perceive it’s three million light years away which means the light coming to us left that particular Galaxy when Lucy was walking upright in the serengetti plains it’s just amazing to think about right and you can see it with your naked eye it’s the only extra Galactic thing you can see uh you know not counting the southern hemisphere you can see the magelan clouds but they’re basically satellites of the Milky Way so when you think about the fact that we didn’t know until in Mount Wilson in La where you are that there was the existence of a Nova which is a oscillating brightness or semi regular brightening uh star that that can be used as a distance measuring tool using um tools that uh that uh earlier astronomer named Henrietta lit had come up with so that allowed us to measure this now we’ve only known that the Universe had galaxies other than the milkway for 100 years but we didn’t know the universe was expanding and I showed the students the data that were only

[00:34:00] taken in 1929 by Hubble’s associate vestos slier and other people now you look at that data and the data are horrible they’re like scattered around the the y- axis is labeled wrong instead of being units of velocity he uses kilometers as units of velocity uh distance is but the worst part about it is there’s no error analysis each data point is just put there as if God told you you know there’s no errors associated with it whatsoever and ironically of course he you know as I joke he Mis overestimated the distance which made the age of the universe seven times too small so there were objects in our galaxy which were known at that time in their Earth too to be older than the Milky Way galaxy it’s like you found out one day you’re older than your mom it’s pretty embarrassing right and I don’t mean if your mom you know is your your Dad’s second wife or something I’m not getting into that but if you think about it we’ve only known that the universe is expanding because of this kind of crude data but that’s very important I teach the students never trust an equation or

[00:35:01] a plot or data that don’t have error bars my biggest beef with the Drake equation in rest in peace Frank Drake who passed away last year um is that uh is that there are no error bars associated with it so I did a talk at the SEI Institute up there in in Mountain View a couple years back uh where I went through an exercise I said how many people are visiting the San Diego Zoo right now and it happened to be this time year spring break Etc and you come up with a number and it’s about 7,000 and then if you actually apply an error analysis an error budget to each of the seven terms that goes into that or the Drake equation you get a number that could be plus or minus 10,000 in other words it could be negative people it could be people fleeing the San Diego Zoo and my problem with with both the you know kind of predictions and the and catastrophizing about AGI and extraterrestrial intelligence we don’t pay any attention to the aor analysis which is as a scientist the most important aspect of any scientific Endeavor fascinating yep uh I I agree and it’s I I’m in the midst of these

[00:36:01] conversations on uh fear-mongering around AI my bias has been that AI is most important tool that humans are creating in order to help it uh help Humanity solve the grand challenges and there’s been a lot of fear mongering from from Elon and from uh Bill Gates and from a multitude of other individuals now I’m uh we have to look at what is the basis for that fear and like you said we can we can break it down and I don’t want to go dystopian in this conversation but let’s take one second to go there right there is uh the negative implications of loss of jobs uh which is one category we can come back to that and that will have real implications and like I tweeted the other day you know AI is not going to replace you it’s somebody else using AI that will replace you right we’re going to have a uh we’re going to have a

[00:37:00] astrophysicist co-pilot Brian for you uh that’s going to make your work far more efficient and more rapidly publishable and if you’re not using it you know you won’t compete with your peers uh but of course you will be and you’ll be writing the code as well to support that but so job loss is one area uh the second area that we can name is in fact the use of AI by terrorists by uh negative forces in Society um is the same time that it makes us more capable of solving problems it enables people to cause problems so that is a second um uh part and this this is where we get to on one side of the equation which is AI without AGI on the other side of the equation of uh of AGI um the first thing you bump into in my mind is the terrible twos if you develop a a truly artificial general intelligence that doesn’t know its own strength and is trying to figure things out and is exploring and playing uh

[00:38:03] could it you know pick up the heavy object and hit the glass table without knowing what the implications of that are right so the terrible to is the early adolescent version of a AI could be a problem um and then the extreme is a uh benevolent uh uh malevolent AI that just you know is Terminator and I I think that one is frankly highly improbable I think uh the version of you know AI from the movie her that is like you know uh we’re bored with you humans we’re going off into the Universe I don’t think there’s any special resources we have on the planet that Peter why do they have to get one of the most attractive women in the world to play a part where she’s not even featured in the I’m sorry my my wife is the second is the first most attractive woman but but Scarlet has to well done I’ll take not um so you know I I don’t believe in AI

[00:39:00] is going to destroy us and is The Terminator and I think you know our Hollywood dystopian movies have just gotten us our fear-mongering brain activated way too much do I think that AI could do things um that are uh unfortunate and making mistakes in its Early Learning possibly I think I personally believe that intelligence the greater the level of intelligence the greater um it is in compassion and uh and love and uh all the positive aspects I think that the more intelligent people are the less likely they are to be doing harm to each other um but I do think that in the early days AG is going to cause havoc in the next uh election cycle 2024 is going to be fascinating when a clone of your mother’s voice is asking you to you know to vote for the other party yeah yeah and it’s it’s really happening and there’s there’s no sign of of it letting up the you know deep fakes but yeah as you’re pointing

[00:40:00] out the shallow fakes you know the less famous people and when you have Shirley mlan is always you know reincarnated as someone you know Ultra famous like some Queen uh of Egypt or whatever but they’re never like oh I was the you know wash basin’s you know attendant in 1920s Jazz CL yeah nobody ever gets reincarnated like that right uh but no it’s it’s you we worry about them you know deep faking Elon and he tells you to buy you know Dogecoin or whatever but it’s really yeah you’re right it’s the the level of trust that we have on these on these individuals and yeah your mom asking you to do something is a lot is going to be a lot more persuasive and they’re going to be you know just as video game designers and and casino designers and app designers um you know all kind of traffic in the same mil of human psychology in order to generate outcomes that are beneficial for their product or service I think yeah you’re absolutely right this is going to be a tool that could be you know potentially weaponized uh whether you know you think the uses are benign because it’s for your favorite candidate or not is irrelevant it’s come to they’re about to

[00:41:02] turn five so my boys are 11 and you know I think about where I was when I was 11 and as you go into you know teen years and you go through puberty and you know I’m you know one of the concerns I have uh is the implications of all of this technology on pornography right and um that where all of a sudden there are no limits you know when I was growing up it was a magazine uh but what happens when it becomes uh you know Unlimited in its capacity for perversion and such I think they’re interesting unfortunate uh ramifications that uh that unfortunately our government is not even thinking about or able to uh able to contain and so we have a lot of challenges ahead uh which have nothing to do with killer Terminators coming yeah and on the other end of the bell curve you know it’s it

[00:42:00] is of course you know as a loving father is very concerning of me there are some tools to block you know certain things for my kids and I employ those and Chrome extensions and I I encourage people to do that because simply I believe the most you know people always say time is the most precious res Source because you can’t make more time but Peter really we waste a lot of time I mean it is true I mean you you personally may may not but you know I know I do I’m burned out at the end of the day I’ll scroll you know my YouTube feed and just watch myself on repeat you know because I’m a narcissist but but but the uh no I don’t do that not that much yeah not that much but but then I think about you know kind of the other end of the bell curve which is the seniors which have not only the same kind of vulnerability and I didn’t say what I believe is the most you precious commodity is innocence because innocence and I’ve had on special operators on my podcast I know you’ve worked very closely with them as well I always ask them you know like what what do you regret like and and they’ll tell me Dan Holloway is a wonderful men you should talk to uh eventually and I’ve had very close uh friends and relatives that are

[00:43:01] special forces operators and I always say like I can’t undo I can’t unsee what I did while I was in combat and I can’t undo it and thank God I did it because they wouldn’t be here Peter they they risk life and death unlike me you know fake doctor you know who’s uh you know just like risking getting a chalk you know breaking in the middle of lecture but but these are people who have to have their innocence taken away and you know and thank God in some sense that they didn’t succumb to not being Innocent but kids have this innocence that must be cherished and it must be protected because it’s a one-way ratchet which can never go backwards and on the other end of the bell curve are the people that you just mentioned you know which are the elderly which have real political power they have capital and and they’re also vulnerable to this I mean you think like I mean my twins have have long known that if they want me to shut up they just pretend they’re swiping my face you know they act like I’m an iPad they can just change a video but elderly you know they might not be as as Tech savy as young people are it’s hard enough for me to keep up with it so now they get imagine that that combined

[00:44:01] with purchasing power manipulation combined with purchasing power that’s really scary and I don’t see anybody addressing these ethical implications I wonder what you think about your friend Elon and um and he is such a Mercurial and interesting figure um I I wonder you know if you could kind of you know convey what you think he might answer to the following question he’s obviously a space geek he’s a lover of of not just you know going to Mars and and as Martin Ree said you know Elon wants to die on Mars I hope he doesn’t die on impact uh but he’s willing to take these risks um which is which is saying something because he is a doting you know caring father he’s got 10 kids I believe it’s hard you know when current count yeah when you have pan errors Peter on a number of kids you’re you’re kind of at the upper limit but but God love them I mean he should he should have as many kids as as God or Mother Nature will provide but we have the situation astronomy with with starlink and I have a starlink um you know unit uh but it is

[00:45:01] it is causing you know challenges for optical astronomers but more so will cause problems for microwave and radio astronomers and he’s talked and he’s engaged and it’s true he has endeavored to blacken the satellites to make them less visible but Peter as you know I studi the cosmic microwave background radiation the thermal relic of the Big Bang the most ancient photons in the universe which just so happened to be in the Ku band and Ka band and with uh thousands of satellites darkening the the sky there’s no way to darken something let me just tell you for those that may know there’s no way to darken thermal radiation it makes it worse right um so I wonder you know how does how do you think he weighs these these Grand challenges and it is almost ethical in a sense like if you if he knew you couldn’t darken them optically and they were just going to be glowing bright with the you know alur’s Paradox type brightness what would what do you think he would ende to do I think I I haven’t had this I’ve had many conversations with him I had I had uh I spent hours with him last Sunday at a

[00:46:01] friend’s birthday party um next time I I’ll ask uh but uh number one he’s doing what is legally allowed to be done right so he applies for FCC licenses to launch 30,000 satellites maybe more he’s gotten licenses to launch you know on the order of 10,000 plus um and I think if I’m channeling my inner Elon he would say the best place for these observatories is not Earth orbit it’s on the other side of the moon um it’s going to be in in lrange points it’s going to be away from Earth’s radiation uh you know transmission um and that we have a short period of time during which we are burdened by by that that in you know we’re going to be back on the lunar surface in I don’t know 3 years time probably and uh that start with one of uh the graduates of UCSD Dr Jessica Mayer she

[00:47:01] may be the first female to land on the Moon Yeah well and I’m I’m thinking uh with Starship going there uh uh probably first delivering and and you know the ability I mean Starship once it’s up and operational and we’re recording this a week before the presumed First Flight launch attempt uh the week of April the 20th um and we’ll see um I’m I’m hopefully going to fly in to Bach Chica and uh Elon said his goal for that mission is that it doesn’t blow up the Launchpad uh I said okay that’s a that’s a great goal uh and we’ll see how far it gets um even if it does he’ll say something like ah it’s just a scratch it’ll bu it’ll buffer right out so cheerful when these billion dollar machines explode but yeah uh anyway so I think uh I think that starlink has the potential to do extraordinary good uh for Humanity we’ve seen that in the Ukraine and it’s a new uh you know Communications layer

[00:48:02] wrapped around the planet yeah it is causing Havoc I’m surprised that all of this wasn’t debated by the FCC in granting the license in the first place and by the way it’s it’s a very Niche you know how many uh there there are more NBA players than astrophysicists who study the cosmic microwave background true um but it is a window which once closed can never be reopened and and it’s actually worse than just the thermal radiation which would be bad enough uh because they’re moving and they can’t easily be subtracted although we know they orbits but it’s the fact they transmit in the band that we’re looking at so they’re equivalent to millions of Kelvin uh emission and we’re trying to look for nanoel no it’s impossible it’s it’s like but that if if in I mean what I would be doing as a community is like saying okay Elon fine uh uh but we want an observatory on The Far Side of the Moon I I’ve often thought about that of of how to an approach him and he is a physicist and he did graduate from you know a University of Pennsylvania uh one of our

[00:49:00] close colleagues on the Simon Observatory the most ambitious and most expensive Observatory ever funded to do what we’re doing it’s $190 million project by the time it’s done funded by Jim and Marilyn Simons and the heising Simons Foundation New York and and the Bay Area respectively and what we’re trying to look for has such incredible ramifications and I I want to use this as a jumping off point to maybe you know not just for you to convey to Elon which would be nice but that’s not really why I’m asking the second most famous um and uh you know citizen of Lesbos was a man by the name of Aristotle uh second only to you Peter and uh for clarity my parents were both born on the Island of Lesbos and so on Lesbos there’s a lagoon and there’s a wonderful book called Aristotle’s Lagoon and in it is described the scientific method as as understood by Aristotle and he talks about some of the discoveries which in the world the physics were almost universally incorrect Peter uh he believed heavier objects fell faster

[00:50:01] than lighter ones he believed there were only four elements he had a whole host of of things that could have been falsified easily falsified as Galileo did uh 16 centuries later by just answering a thought experiment by saying well if heavy Things Fall faster than light things what happens if I just tie to light things together to make a heavy thing shouldn’t they fall faster at that point of course they don’t um so that was just a thought exp it didn’t require like a large hyron collider but one of the things um you uh that he brought up was and he was correct about in The Natural Sciences was were uh was that whales were mammals and it really wasn’t understood until Aristotle came up with that by observing in the lagoons of Lesbos uh in ancient Greece uh this fact which he observed constructed a hypothesis did more observations inductive reasoning and then uh you know came up and utilized this disr the scientific method when you uh open your podcast every week I listen to it um you talk about the massive transformative purpose

[00:51:00] and you talk about what the uh what the goal of the massive transformative purpose is to create a dent in the universe unique to the individual right um we’re at the point now Peter where we are actually looking for DSE in the universe and it would be in the form of a collision between universes in What’s called the Multiverse and this to me is the most yeah this is the most you know we we have to as podcasters we have to talk about at least two of the following three things Bitcoin aliens The Singularity or the Multiverse or are we living in a simulation yeah exactly that’s right so uh so we we’ll have to defer some of those in the interest of time but getting to the Multiverse the Multiverse is perhaps the most far-reaching and bizarre you know scientific hypothesis or Paradigm it’s not even really at the level of a a par a hypothesis because it may or may not be testable but one of the ways that you could you could not falsify the Multiverse but you could prove the

[00:52:00] Multiverse it’s very unlike other uh other scientific conjectures to whatever extent you can prove something you know I always say in the name of Isaac azimoff who a great writer who influenced the name of one of my kids I’ll let you guess which one uh he used to say if you think the Earth is flat you’re wrong if you think the Earth is a sphere you’re also wrong but you’re less wrong than if you think it’s flat right the Earth is slightly pear-shaped it has a quadripolar distortion to it because of it rotational act anyway getting back to uh good old Aristotle and and this search for for falsifiability or quote unquote proof if we were to see the following situation two universes that are each expanding since their own Big Bangs which could be wildly different uh ages of their own Universe our universe can exist for another 13 billion years without changing too much prospects for life and so forth um they will eventually come into contact let’s say let’s say they’re one lightyear away away from us is Another Universe and therefore that Universe once our universe expands into it or it expands

[00:53:00] into us will have some combined you know vend diagram um intersection where these two things are sharing some common sphere so imagine two balloons are blowing up they’re right next to each other eventually they hit each other that is what I’m calling the dent in the universe so what will happen is our Another Universe will make a physical Dent which can be perceived according to my colleagues uh in astrophysics and cosmology that you’d be able to to detect The Telltale imprint of the Multiverse by the existence of these certain patterns in the cosmic micro background that I study and those would be unequivocal and you could actually use that to motivate very high confidence the Multiverse exist but is if there is if there’s an Infinity of universes in the Multiverse because I don’t think you can say is is it zero is it one or infinite it could be it could be so there’s multiple multiverses of course right so there’s a Multiverse in time which is where the universe expands and contracts and keeps making more and more universes but they’re actually

[00:54:00] physically distinct in space there’s uh a Multiverse and this is all you know kind of the numbering scheme is courtesy of our mutual friend Max tegmark at your Alma moer and this uh this this impact of the Multiverse would be another distinct Universe another level of the Multiverse in his nomenclature or you know counting scheme there’s four different levels um the uh the Multiverse could be distinct universes it could be one it could be an infinite number or it could be a finite number where that finite number is motivated by something called the string landscape which comes from certain properties of the What’s called the vacuum uh state in phase bace of different models of string theory which is a number which is effectively infinite as Max has pointed out uh it’s actually the number is finite it’s 10 to the 500th universes but Max has shown that once you get above 10 to the 80th which is you know no small number either uh that you also effectively ear an infinite Universe where you’d have infinite copies of or effectively infinite copies of of events

[00:55:00] and people and and and so forth so you’re right there there there are multiple levels one of which is that there’s an infinite number of other universes and one where there’s almost infinite but I mean if that’s the case I would imagine that this indentation uh would have been occurring constantly all the time everywhere unless they’re out of phase in some phase in some fashion or some or or in I guess out of phase way I can describe it well when you go to Texas in a week or so you’ll see you know the gigafactory and so forth uh imagine you bring with you a piece of sand two pieces of sand from Santa Monica and you put one at one end of the gigafactory and you put another one at the other end of the gigafactory those two grains of sand relative to their size are closer to one another than the two nearest stars in the average vicinity of the uh of the sun solar neighborhood in other words space is unimaginably vast right uh and that that shouldn’t stop you know people to try to explore it and so forth colonize whatever but the uh but the

[00:56:01] important fact to not is that it’s very large so so that when Milky Way galaxy combines and forms milk dromeda when the Andromeda galaxy which is only one of 12 galaxies Peter out of a 100 billion to a trillion galaxies being discovered by web and other instruments there’s a trillion galaxies say 12 of them are not moving away from us it it’s spectacular when you think about how rare it is that we inhabit this universe but when one of those 12 crashes into the Milky Way with violent fervor nothing will happen if there are people they won’t even notice the Stars will pass almost right through them just like if you shot you know two grains of sand past each other in the gigafactory not a damn thing would happen right so space is vast and with the universe and the Multiverse the same arguments could apply there it may be extremely rare that’s why I said you can’t falsify you can’t say the lack of observation you detect you could prove it yes um I was curious I was going to ask ask you the question how many how many universes how many galaxies do you hold in your mind as the current number

[00:57:00] I mean I remember sort of an average of 100 billion stars per Galaxy and then it was like at one point it was 100 billion galaxies in the universe and then it was a trillion then I heard as many as 20 trillion and I was so where are you now a couple of trillion is the current estimate yeah it’s all like location location location just like real estate here in California one of the fun things was I I do you remember avagadro’s number from uh from chemistry yep 6.02 * 23rd you know if you uh one estimate of the number of galaxies and the number of stars gives you avagadro’s number of stars in the universe so I thought that that’s right and people people then use that to you know to make a claim of the existence of life elsewhere in the universe and we have to get to that Peter because it’s a mandatory and our contract you know that we both signed to have this prod but let me just get back we don’t know how exactly how many we don’t even know how many stars there are in the Milky Way galaxy let alone uh how many galaxies there are total outside of the Milky Way galaxy and so we make approximations uh it also gives you ever

[00:58:01] um has anyone ever given you a star Peter in the International Star Registry yes I have early on in my life when it first came out I think I have a couple of those Stars it’s an interesting gimmick um yeah what I wanted to just tell you is that you know speaking on behalf of all you know professional astronomers that’s absolutely meaningless nobody looks up there’s the damand HD 246 okay so but that doesn’t stop me from having the idea that now we can sell universes in the Multiverse and so I have the keing if you go to my website Peter Brian king.com I will let you buy me buy a universe for me in the Multiverse actually seriously I want to make an offer to your I want to make an offer to your uh to your listeners I have these chunks of of rocks let me see if I can find one right here I believe is one I don’t know where my kids have taken it yes Drive battery sorry let me get uh let me look around here it is okay so I have chunks here Peter this is a chunk of a 4 billion year old asteroid that it’s a metallic condite looks like

[00:59:00] it’s a metallic condr right so it fell in Argentina and uh about 6,000 years ago it was discovered in the 1500s and uh it was brought to Earth the oldfashioned way by gravity but if you have a.edu email address and you sign up for my mailing list Brian king.com list you will uh automatically win a fragment of this meteorite because my massive transformational purpose which I know you’re going to get to at some point involves you know creating and connecting millions of Minds in a network uh to really bring free education as you do uh so so wonderfully so I believe education is the sinanan of humanity and what we do exquisitly well and which doesn’t actually need a university and and don’t tell Gavin Nome my boss you know but I would do the job I do for free and you know I’m a public school employee so I don’t get paid all that much but but I do what I do because I love it but I also am under no illusions that a there aren’t better teachers than me that AI won’t supersede

[01:00:00] me if I you know I recently translate or not translated recorded the first ever audio book by Galileo with Frank wilch also of MIT and and Carlo relli and others and and this book I realized in doing has a million words three characters it’s it’s like a play gal was a phenomenal writer you can get a copy also on my website of the audio bing.com just to Y reinforce in people’s memory and so um what we did is we took all that and we just read it but I was like why don’t I put this into like some chat engine this is two years ago now so I it really wasn’t as as prominent in my in my frontal cortex but I realized you know Peter I could be replaced by Galileo for a lot of things but one thing I I uh replaced by Galileo in the form of an AI which is easy to do now um and and the fact that nobody has done that yet is is kind of giving me an opportunity to do it but but the bottom line is what I want to do is connect the ability to educate people for free and I think that will unlock cuz nothing’s more abundant than free digital educ I

[01:01:00] mean we can just you know the 5Ds right we can just democratize it and and demonetize it and that’s what I want to do so in particular the edu folks I I’m interested in reaching them because the main obstacle I think to higher education and the unlocking you know Elon is not limited by money Peter he’s limited by brains I mean he’s limited by how many engineers and and and and so so anyway want to scale this up I don’t believe that you need to go to a university even a public one necessarily to get an incredible education and trying to in one way or another to make uh to demonetize it as much as I can yeah and if there’s if there’s two massive disruptions that’s occurring this decade uh it will be education and Healthcare right uh covid was a tipping factor I don’t think we were going to see the full implications of what occurred uh as a result of the the shutdown uh for the next you know 5 years but we’re going to know there is a massive reinvention of education and a massive reinvention of the healthcare Industries both of which are

[01:02:01] unfortunately um performing very poor per dollar uh invested okay now the single most important conversation uh that one could have is is there life out there is there intelligent life out there and uh we can talk about out there being our solar system or our galaxy or our universe welcome to the great debate ladies and gentlemen on one side of the story Brian keing says no we are the only ones out here we are alone do not screw it up you know please technical life technological life speaking of intelligent life technological life yeah technological life uh you’re you a dolphin swimming through the you know the the salt pools of of Titan that would not count I believe that that is possible but I but I’m strictly speaking about intelligent life I think that makes the odds of me winning this debate much higher okay um on the other side Peter diamandis is no intelligent life is ubiquitous in the

[01:03:00] universe it is a forcing function that comes out of the laws of physics it’s reverse entropic and it is something which uh we’re just beginning to understand all right uh you know boxers take your Corners let the ba let the debate begin we need a neutral part since you’re younger smarter and better looking than me you’re first all right Peter I’ve had uh two like Peak experiences uh in my life in terms of my career as a scientist um one has involved launching Rockets into space to look for the signatures of first stars and shooting a Nike missile out of uh wh Sand’s Missile Range and getting clearances and so forth go the other two you know Peak experience is going to Chile uh 17,600 feet above sea level in the AMA desert uh and the other is going to the South Pole Antarctica and all three of these environments share something very starkly um similar and that is they have the possibility for life in the deserts

[01:04:02] of White Sands there there is life um in the desert in the AMA desert there is life and in Antarctica there there is life and it is actually considered a driest desert on Earth it’s actually drier than the Sahara by precipitable water vapor content and it’s also very high it’s 9,000 ft above sea level I’ve gone there every time I go there one of my kids asked me to bring back a penguin you know because he lik you ever meet one of these people that goes to a restaurant and they can’t decide between chicken or fish Peter Well if you eat a penguin it no he he doesn’t eat them he just loves them he thinks they’re the cutest things in the world so uh there’s a couple Penguins there are a couple of giant like imagine a seagull on steroids like just inflated up like Jocko willing flying through the air uh they’re called skua birds and that’s basically it there’s no other you know there’s some seals and stuff that come on the ice some orcas but then when you get to the South Pole there’s nothing there there ain’t nothing in there and in fact 100 years ago 112 years ago humans made it there for the first time and then it sat dormant for

[01:05:01] 50 years in other words we’ve not been back to the Moon in longer than it took for them to discover the South Pole reach the South Pole and then for humans to go back in the 50s and 60s uh only took 40 years to do that we haven’t been back to the Moon in 50 let’s hope that changes at any rate my argument is is connected to this calculation that you did a few minutes ago which is you know avagadro’s number sometimes I call it a guacamole because it’s you know avocado’s number but uh 10 to the 23rd that’s just basically 10 to the 24th take a trillion stars in each Galaxy trillion galaxies nice round number now that’s all fine and good now imagine though that you have just let’s say there are eight hurdles Peter that that life had to get to to get to be technological and let let’s call those hurdles you know first of all there had to be on some particular Planet an abiotic scenario unless we believe that life came from the earth which we know that the solar system exchanges material so I will send youredu listeners one of these meteorites for sure I will not

[01:06:01] send them the little tiny Fleck of Mars that I got uh a long time ago also purchased legally uh through proper channels not you know collected by some Rover and that flake of of Mars meterorite cost more than you know a 10 kilogram fragment of these metallic condres that I will send to you anyway that came to us from Mars the the the more expensive one so that means Mars and the Earth exchanged material and in fact you can buy if you if you get a sample of the Moon Peter collected by the Apollo Astronauts you will go to jail for many many years is a felony if you get one on eBay which I’ve collected them you’ll just you know give them out but they’re expensive the solar system exchanges material back and forth all the time which means not only can stuff come to to Earth from Mars stuff from Earth carrying tardigrades or what have you can go to Mars so first of all the non-observation of life in our solar system it has to count at some level for the facundity factor and I call the fcan factor how probable with life

[01:07:00] pre-existing to find a birth uh a place of residence residing in the solar system it is exquisitly low we don’t know exactly it’s very difficult to quantify it because as our friend Carl Sean U I haven’t had on the podcast but I had his W his widow andrean and his daughter Sasha who are both lovely women I had the first motherdaughter team ever in podcasting history in The Sciences I believe anyway the um the the you know as Carl Sean said lack of evidence is not evidence of lack or somebody said that he could have said it what I’m saying is um let’s say this trillion trillion number let’s say it’s up against the following odds there’s eight hurdles that life elsewhere in the universe had to get to it had to go from inorganic materials it had to go from you know hydrocarbons it had to go from rather hydrogen then carbon and so forth it had a form on a rocky planet perhaps it may not have to be even carbon based it could be silicon based Let’s ignore that you know we had whales as we discussed earlier and that led to and we had you know Prebiotic um

[01:08:02] you know algae and so forth that led to the uh existence of oil and petroleum let’s let’s ignore let’s let’s summarize let’s say there are eight factors like that there has to be an outer planet like Jupiter to suck up all the all the uh inbound asteroids which this thing came from before it impacted the Earth um and sucked up the real killer Planet uh planetesimals that could have destroyed Earth and all life in it uh it has to have a moon not too close to us and a tectonic activity spin rate a dial period uh so there are very many properties that have let’s say there’s eight of those factors and let’s say unlike what most people you know believe that these each individual term is incredibly improbable let’s describe it a pretty high probability for each of the eight terms let’s call it 0.1% so one part in a thousand let’s say there are eight of those what’s you know what happens if you take 10 uh you know you raise 10 Theus 3 to the 8th power you get the same number 10us 24 okay so

[01:09:00] so that means there’d be either zero or one other life form in the known universe now again I said before I hate when scientists don’t use error estimates the problem is how do you estimate something that may have occurred only once all the contingent factors and that’s just get to life let alone that could be a dolphin as I said swimming through a methane pond on Titan uh which we don’t see but um but now to get to you know iPhones and and technological life I just think the the odds are incredibly low and as I said I’ve been to Antarctica Antarctica you know people will say well there’s so much room for stars and and life in the universe and each each star has 10 to the three planets or planetesimals orbiting around it okay so you can increase it to whatever you like but you know Antarctica is 17th of the continents of Earth and I’ve been to it um and as I said just the mere availability of real estate says nothing about the probability for that real estate to be inhabited so I turn it over to you to decimate those arguments as you see fit okay okay fair enough um so

[01:10:04] first of all uh we know that the building blocks of life um the uh basic amino acids uh for even uh even uh nucleotides that make up DNA uh are present in the interstellar medium right we have seen that we’ve observed that through uh uh your colleagues and astronomy so we can say that the the re the prerequisite building blocks uh that could lead to the early formation of Life are out there um and and for that reason any place that has for liquid-based water life um that can that these materials can R upon uh has a possibility of creating early life forms right so our planets 4 call it 4.5 billion and call the

[01:11:01] universe 14.5 for round numbers for the moment so um we believe life came into existence on this planet about a billion years after the Earth roughly cooled and um so if we look at what the most I’m going to be focusing on Advanced life uh if you look at at what the high uh atomic number element that the human being needs to survive I think it’s iodine at around atomic number 56 and if you look back at when iodine probably came into existence in our universe uh after a series of of uh of supernova um I remember I had this conversation with with Dr William Fowler who was the one of the great won the Nobel Prize for Stellar Revolution it was his estimate was about a bill ion years after the big bang we would have had enough birth uh you know death birth cycles of stars to

[01:12:00] get iodine so let’s assume that um that life will have formed on planets because I do think that any planet that has uh liquid water um and is within a decent radiation Shield um that the pre ingredients of Life raining on the surface will ultimately leave to some single cell life form some self-replicating life forms uh we’ve seen the experiments over and over again where you put these materials together and they eventually lead towards that process so now the question becomes how many of those um might have come into existence over the last let’s not say 10 billion years let’s say um a billion years and uh and how far has that come I mean the argument that’s typically made you know FM Paradox is where are they right if in fact they evolved um where

[01:13:02] are they and uh I had an experience which was uh which was a centerpiece for me here I was with my dad in Greece at a place called Mount AOS which was a Observatory up in an observ a uh uh a place of worship a church up in the up in the mountain in Greece and it was 6:00 and uh it was time to call all the priests to prayer and this old priest long white beard long white hair black outfit very typical walks up and there’s this Bell in the center and takes his Cane and he he hits the Bell to call uh all of the priests to prayer and in that moment um my cell phone rings and I it it was like this cathartic moment I’m like oh my God here is this Society

[01:14:00] depending upon audio frequencies to communicate with each other and in that same moment little do they know they’re being bathed at 800 900 megahertz and 2.4 GHz frequencies they just don’t have the the tech to perceive it or communicate and so as we know the Drake equation one of the elements of the Drake equation which is the number of stars and the percentage of stars that have planets and the percentage of planets that are in the right goldilock Zone and the percentage of those that form life and ultimately it ends up with what percentage of those life forms are make it to a point where they’re transmitting in the radio frequency and how long does that species survive was the old dystopian point of view um you know between the time they come up with uh you know radio Marone in the late 1800s to the point where they blow themselves up in a nuclear war that was

[01:15:00] sort of like you know are they 100 years old and I want to interpret that a little bit differently which is I don’t know that the way we can and will be communicating in 50 years even involves radio frequencies anymore is there a more fun I mean we would I would imagine we know very little truly about the extent of all the laws of physics and there may be much more energy efficient and um and uh and and information efficient mechanisms that once they’re discovered will flip a bit and all of this old stuff goes away um but the other side of the equation as well is uh at some point you know have they have these intelligent life forms gone and built starships and gone out and explored the universe and if they have where are they uh then my mind turns to conversations like you know if a life

[01:16:00] form that was much more intelligent and could do Interstellar travel I’m sure they could visit the planet and be undetected I don’t think that we would be uh would be obviously um you know in the scientific method would have them come and observe us and take samples and do everything without disturbing us it’s the prime directive if you would of Star Trek um and then the question would be actually at some point would we become uh digital would we in fact not want to uh physically maintain our bodies and go in Starships would we upload ourselves would we transform ourselves into a uh technological intelligence that doesn’t need uh to go out and explore uh physically so I mean these are the questions I have uh that for me the probability in in in all of these you know two trillion galaxies and 100 billion stars uh that we alone um you

[01:17:00] know seems to me uh uh a a false premise you know we’re you know here’s the question I think we’re going to find out whether life evolved independently we’ll have a few shots on goal on Mars in Europa we’ll find out when you look at its whatever life form whatever coding it uses is it identical we’ll know whether it came from Earth or not right we’ll know whether um it it originated from you know panspermia Theory where life has been reigned uh upon the Earth and that’s where it started hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and here every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neuronet the way I see the World by looking at the

[01:18:01] incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your Health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of use you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode yeah well you you said a lot of very you know I think incontrovertible facts I mean one of the things that we we talk about in space exploration is we looking for water well I’ll I’ll give you water you know that’s table sticks water is made of the most common element in the known universe

[01:19:00] which is hydrogen and the sixth most common element which is oxygen very easy very stable um I’ll stipulate that it’s been found you know in the in craters on the moon in ice form and obviously on regions of Mars um so it water’s not a problem even forming you know the precursors to amino acids the problem is that uh and and I’m glad you brought up Willie Fowler who was a very close colleague of two of my colleagues here at UC San Diego Jeff and Margaret Burbage uh who equally I believe deserve the Nobel Prize but we won’t get into the politics of why that happened and Hoy Hoy too Hoy came up with the theory of panspermia that you mentioned he also came up with uh with the name the Big Bang uh it was a really erasable character I interviewed his best graduate student giant narar who’s still alive and with us in Puna India but at any rate all these precursors again um it it depends on how you do the error analysis uh when you say I believe based on this large number uh that that aliens you know are there’s alien technological

[01:20:00] life okay that’s incontrovertible but you’re using as a predicate the the kind of phase space of available you know objects that could nucleate form habitable nucleation sites for primitive life to form so first we have to stipulate how easy or hard it is for that to happen and another colleague of the bbes in Fowler was located here his name is Harold Yuri and he’s the progenitor of the famous Miller Yuri experiment which uh which when you go through it uh is uh very persuasive sounding and many people have used Neil degrass Tyson you know we talked this is the experiment that lightning caused energetic nucleation of of uh uh cellular forms of life yeah basically you have you have a um you have a a very you know an oxygen vessel uh you put in some phosphorus you put in some you know nitrogen and stuff that was composed they thought at the time of the early Earth’s atmosphere then you shock it and out comes some sludge which when you analyze it has um either some precursors

[01:21:00] to amino acids or amino acids themselves uh but look what went into that um uh and I’m not even going to get into the theological implications but you know they went down to the chemistry stock room which is located here in Yuri Hall and they got a beautifully 99.9 you know 59 pure you know uh isopropyl alcohol and they got this thing and that thing uh sterilized reagents sterilized vessels bunson burner at the exact right temperature you know it’s very different than a stromatolite you know uh in in in Australia very different and there was a mind behind that right there are some people and I’m not getting into intelligent design I I I have my own challenges with that you can see me kind of go off on people like James tour and uh and um and also even on stepen C Meyer who I consider a friend but but the point is Peter that that a lot of these things Trace back to premises which depend very strongly on what’s called The basan Pride PR that you apply so again if if you say the prior is how many stars that could support how many planets I can give you any number you

[01:22:01] like but it’s just like if I said there’s seven continents Peter so you’d expect a uniform prior for one sth of all intelligent life on Earth to be in Antarctica when I go there Peter I’m not even the smartest person there I’m not even I’m I might be the heaviest person there uh you know I might be I might be the only native New Yorker there I I don’t know there’s only 200 people there you know uh the whole continent bigger than Texas but why wouldn’t you stipulate the same as at the at you know at the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench or at the top of the you know of of the troposphere I mean there are going to be in a in a gradation of environments of heat and uh and and and energy food densities and so forth places which are ideal for life to form in places where it’s it’s not ideal and I don’t expect there to be life uh intelligent life across the entire planet um acoss all it

[01:23:00] requires is there to be a single nucleation point if the intelligent life is then able to modify its environment and then it’s going to modify its environment uh at where it takes the least amount of energy to modify its environment it’s going to migrate if it’s intelligent to the places where it can create food and shelter and protection and so forth so the question really is in the course of a period of time is there a local or an absolute Maxima or a local Maxima for that period of time where intelligent life can form and then maintain itself I think that’s really the conversation one argument that people have used not original to me is that you can’t have Metallurgy in the troposphere you can’t have Metallurgy in the Mariana’s Trench you can’t get from basic materials to the forget about going from Prebiotic ooze to you know I always say going from rocks to Ro manof or from you know bacteria to Bach uh you I have a million bad jokes that’s one of the benefits of becoming a father right

[01:24:00] um and so so but the point is uh I don’t believe I don’t I don’t have conviction that just because it’s so improbable for technological life to exist in throughout the universe that there is none but I do believe almost to the fact of Quasi theological conviction not by you Peter but but by many people in in the seti game that this is it’s it’s almost inevitable because the large number of hypothesis and that’s exactly what Carl Sean meant when he wrote with andran my past guest uh in contact that if there is no uh other intelligent life in the universe it’s an awful waste of space as Ellie aro’s dad told her right so um and fun fact that’s modeled on a real person Jill Tarter who’s ‘s a friend she’s a wonderful guest you should have her on um but but the bottom line Peter is you know there’s there’s no saying what a waste of space is it’s a theological implication and I think we need to have a little bit of what Aristotle would would kind of indulge us

[01:25:01] to have and and beg our forbearance that you know there there is a tendency to to extrapolate from you know from sort of our own you know maybe maybe you know kind of pedestrian or or parochial observations and say that these are Universal things but I do think you’re right uh that if there are technological life forms they may be computers they may be artificial intelligences which can defy the laws of physics that afflict us and the namely that they could travel at the speed of light so uh so for all these reasons and and believe me no one would be more uh psyched and pumped uh for the existence of extraterrestrial light as long as it doesn’t want to eat you know middle-aged you know uh New Yorkers like me with a little bit too much of w dupa uh hydrocarbons I’m storing you you know Peter they say you should always have you know 6 months of money and six months of food on hand I keep them the food on body at all times um but maybe

[01:26:01] you can help me with that uh with your medical training but so I I do believe it’s it’s it’s something which Dov Tales back with where we started which is that we need kind of a Drake equation to assess the likelihood uh where we assess the probabilities the priors the uh in aasian sense and take in all the data and assess it maybe this is something where AI can help us with once they have their own kind of brand of direct equation for AI I think you’re you’re right but I I also turned to a recent example it wasn’t too long ago that we thought planets were scarce um that in fact the best uh astrophysicists astronomers uh uh uh scientists in the field when you looked at you know in the early days of the Drake equation the percentage of stars that had planets was see was deemed to be relatively low even though we live on a a solar system of eight planets and one dwarf planet okay fine I’ll I’ll

[01:27:00] I’ll go there um but you know we’re finding planets everywhere now I mean all of the you know the observatories we we’ve launched is disproving that we’re also finding black holes at the center of every Galaxy we’re finding galaxies all over the place I mean whenever we have deemed um constrain uh these things uh we’ve been wrong over and over again I mean that’s my observation of it maybe there’s the reverse which I that’s true and as we said earlier you know we didn’t know of any galaxies outside of the Milky Way until less than a hundred years ago as you will include in your newsletter this year and so it’s a startling testimony to how brilliant and and capable the human mind is but but they the bottom you know kind of under underlying fact is that I think we have to say there is no evidence right now it doesn’t mean that there’s no existence but there’s no evidence that we have of anything remotely like that and for that reason I

[01:28:00] think it’s it’s almost um it’s because people assume that there is life I think it’s important to have maybe it’s my contrarian side but to have you know kind of a counter examples and and and and present things because I think you know it’s like these people that make a bet that their favorite sports team is going to lose the big game and in San Diego that’s no that’s no problem because we’ve never won a championship in any sport whatsoever uh but uh but the the bottom line is no one would be more excited no one would be more thrilled because from these individuals or species or artificial intelligences they have survived they’ve gotten past the great filter perhaps if there is one they’ve also been able to master laws of physics and laws of sociology and communication and and soth so I think a physicist most of all would appreciate the existence and that’s why maybe I’m hedging my bets and being a contrarian but I think I’m bolstered by the fact that there are a great deal of hurdles to it and and the final thing I’ll say Peter is um you know do you care about

[01:29:01] your you know 82nd you know grandchild to the power two to the 8 you know do you care about like 100 Generations a thousand Generations as will mcal talks about you know we’re in the first inning of a of a you know overtime or Extra Innings game I mean I don’t know the names of my great great grandparents right uh it’s likely my great great great grandchild won’t know my name except for you know if they tune into the most popular podcast of all time into the impossible uh so um but I I like to think also we we’ve explored the local area of the Galaxy quite well and we’ve we’ve you know it it’s true we’ve only dipped a thimble into the ocean to use Jill tarter’s metaphor in searching the universe but let’s say there is life in another galaxy it’s three million light years away Peter and I I think I think it’s it’s almost you know it is becoming a a branch of philosophy at that point like could they be existing yeah but what really what do you really care about just like you care about your kids and your grandkids and maybe their

[01:30:01] grandkids you know it’s hard to really think about well I’d really care if there was a a child living in M51 the poster I have behind me the world poool Galaxy that’s 86 light years 86 million Lighty years away but there is huge philosophical religious implications to the to humanity right it I think it’s one of the most one of the top two interesting questions you could ask the other is you know how did the universe come from a non- universe how did life come from non-life how did Consciousness come from non-conscious and then how did technological life come from non-technological I think those are the four big bangs that are most interesting to me and I love those and those are all good sessions for us to have in the future um let me can I ask you one question to to wrap up if I can ask you one question as well do you want to go first absolutely uh turnab as fair play you want to go first sure so as I ask my guest on on on moonshots and mindsets uh if I were to fund an X prize for you uh the keing X prize uh uh what

[01:31:00] would it be what would you want uh innovators around the world uh using their shower time in the morning their sleep and and dream time at night to solve what challenge what would they have to build demonstrate make happen to win the Brian Keening X prise is the mod mon AR amount unlimited or is it still $10 million no it could be $10 to $100 million you know we we have launched $100 million prize and I was very happy Elon funded I’ve got two more $100 million prizes that will be launched hopefully this year um so a lot coming but you know let’s put it in that decade yeah it’s it’s it’s hard and and I know I’m speaking from a place of great privilege to say this but you know we’re we I am among the four or five leaders of an experiment that’s close to $200 million by the time it’s finished and that is kind of born of conversations and visions of Jim Simons and and myself and David spurgle and my colleagu Suzanne Stags Mark develin Adrien Lee and this is to really go back

[01:32:01] to the beginning of time and understand whether or not there was a a big bang we don’t know Peter if the Big Bang occurred once many times is still occurring uh and so I think keep read the the the James web Space Telescope has disproven the bing bang over and over again no that’s all nonsense that’s they they’ve they learned much more than we ever thought possible and they’ve built upon what Hubble’s been able to do uh but there’s no no sense that they’ve done anything to do what the clickbait type headline suggest of disproving the Big Bang but what I mean is we don’t know if it was a singularity we don’t know if the Big Bang occurred once not at all perhaps uh the the big bang is a is a misnomer as as Hoy described it as a euphemism for orgasm meant to disparage and deride the theory that he called atrocious because he believed in a steady state universe well there incarnations of the steady state universe and that’s kind of what I have dedicated my life to along with this desire to bring you know basically zero

[01:33:00] cost education uh to Consumers to think scientifically I think that’s the greatest hope that Humanity has is to really uh completely um uh you know devalue the or de economic uh you know incentivize what I do for a living so I’m undercutting My Own Financial uh you know venal instinct which is uh which is that I want education at least in the stem fields to basically be free and I want it to be the equivalent of an you know we walk around San Diego and and uh you know thank God it’s it’s a very very healthy economy down here but we have our share of homelessness and my wife and I were were voyaging around and we found at least the homeless have have cell phones okay you can debate the policy is that good or bad and and we whatever they have access to information they have access to to to to data they can in rich and better their lives Peter we need to do this at scale and to make it really scale as you’ve pointed out to me we need to make it almost free and and it should be free it does and it

[01:34:01] will be and there’s lots going on right now from the Con Academy and gp4 and what Imad mustak is doing in uh in Malawi with providing tablets and generative AI education platforms for all the students there but coming back to the Brian keing X prize what would be what’s the Grand Challenge what the problem you want to solve is it in education is it in astronomy what would you want teams doing building creating here I I think it would be to to to cultivate uh an education a global brain that would would then turn itself using the power of imagination and curiosity that I again contrarian think are unique to the human uh species uh until proven otherwise I’m open to be being proven wrong but um but yes it would be to to effective to determine a way to make a free University available 247 365.24 uh to every human being on Earth

[01:35:01] because um imagine that you know we had to imagine that you know elon’s parents were they never met right imagine and I know he’s had great troubles with his father I had trouble with my father but but let Let’s ignore that for if you know there’s got to be more elans there should be some elas there should be people the the world is vast and the 8 billion people that need to to maintain our ever burgeoning path to make a dent in the universe as you say I think that that can only occur with stem education Peter I I I think that you can actually learn English from learning science I have a weird you know reading Galileo reading Aristotle come on these are the greatest Minds in history and and reading you ABD Salam Steven Weinberg they’re incredible contributors not just to science or where they excelled in one Nobel prizes or the equivalent thereof but they have a a gift for communication as Fineman would say you have to be able to explain it in simple terms and as Einstein said but no simpler so we have

[01:36:00] to get to this raise the Baseline level of stem education and that will allow us hopefully to Value life to to think of life as precious preserve the the uh precious human capital I believe every person is made in the image of God and then protect the planet which means to expand our Horizons not necessarily outside of Earth I think we should save Earth Beau all right accept it now your question my friend all right your your question is the following and I usually ask four of these questions but I’m going to ask just one and it’s from AR Sir Arthur C Clark your old friend I never got to meet him but uh but Arthur said many things he said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic he said for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert and he said the following uh he said the following thing as well he said when an elderly sorry Peter when an elderly you’re only like two years older than me I think but an elderly but distinguished you are very distinguished when an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible he is very likely to be

[01:37:01] right but when he says something is impossible he’s almost certainly wrong Peter I want to ask you what have you been wrong about you’re the most optimistic person cheerful person I emulate you as best as I can when I think of myself as being depressed I said what would Peter do but I want to ask you what have you been wrong about what have you changed your mind about that you thought was impossible but really as possible well so listen I I take some extreme positions uh one of the positions that I take is that we can extend significantly extend the healthy human lifespan or health span right that we can uh break through what has been 120 year 122 year upper age limit um that uh there are species of Life on this planet the boohead whale that goes for 200 years the Greenland shark can go for 500 years and if they can go that long why can’t we it’s either a hardware problem or software problem and we’re going to be able to solve that problem and that the tools to solve those

[01:38:00] problems are coming online this decade so that’s my belief which I believe is probable um and you know could I be wrong there possibly um but I think uh it’s a matter of time not a matter of if so I guess your question is what do I think is impossible um that uh I could be wrong about so you know the challenge is I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what’s impossible um I think it’s probably impossible for uh today’s governments to deal with the rate of technological change that will be occurring in the next two decades as we head towards Ray Kell’s singularity I think that it’s uh that we’re going to see governments failing as a result of their inability to maintain control and

[01:39:01] so that’s going to be interesting uh the question of whether or not um uh they will be able to reinvent themselves fast enough uh to to stay viable as a government um so that’s one element that I think of is kind of impossible um anything you feel you’ve been wrong about or you know oh I’ve been wrong about timing number things so I mean you know I started an asteroid Mining Company uh a decade ago and uh I remember having a conversation with Elon about it and saying hey would you buy liquid oxygen if I brought it back from these carbonaceous condres and he goes of course I would but I think you’re way too early and he was right um and I’ll take another shot by the way Jim Simons has an asteroid and I told him about your asteroid Mining and he said I have Mining rights on my asteroid so he he’ll be interested too if it does come around a couple billionaire a couple billionaires in your corner W yeah well

[01:40:00] I think uh I think it will I think we’re we’re going to see uh the human species uh evolve off planet um so one of the questions of course I think about is is it uh planetary or uh O’Neal you know Gerard K O’Neal a friend a mentor uh at Princeton you know advocated for creating colonies in space rotating space colonies that would house on average 10,000 individuals there was a wide of genetic pool and a pool of skills and that those colonies would would Bud like uh like amoeba uh and You’ you’d rebuild and you’d you know go on an exponential growth curve but rather than get into the deep gravity well of Mars um and having to use energy to get off it again so you know uh I’m much more of a moon and O’Neal Colony guy than I am a Mars guy um so you know I might be wrong about that maybe Mars

[01:41:00] is the place we need to get ourselves to uh we’ll we’ll see I’m I’m like really it’s kind of i’ I’d rather colonize the moon and start building you know with robots and AIS O’Neal colonies out there uh and and not you know dive back into the gravity well so I mean that’s another area of interesting interesting debate um I don’t know what else where else you want to take it well I think in the interest of time I should wrap up because my uh Young Folks my my twins are getting restless and there’s nothing worse than the terrible the the formidable fours as you know uh Peter it’s been a great Delight it’s always a pleasure to talk to you and anything else you know that you’d like to have my audience be aware of uh on your side I’m going to have a link to your newsletter which I get uh uh and look forward to eagerly devouring every time you write something I subscribe I follow you on Twitter and elsewhere anything else that uh would be of interest to my listeners for my you know my handles are Peter dandis on Twitter

[01:42:01] and uh Instagram uh and Dam andis.com is my website you can learn a lot more and of course uh moonshots and mindsets and Brian how about yourself where can my listeners find you and and which parts of uh of of your life are are the most important for them to dive into I you know I just got one of your final onboarding emails that said I’ll see you in the Multiverse in the metaverse so I’ll see you guys in the in the Multiverse of Minds uh most places I am as Dr Brian keing Twitter Youtube Instagram Etc but the most important thing is is really to connect uh especially the young people uh I I wrote you know several books one of which is called into the impossible named after Arthur C Clark’s phrase in this uh as well it’s really a self-help guide Peter of all I never thought I’d write a self-help book B you endorsed my first book which which I’m so grateful ever grateful and julan Guth who writes about you her she endorses my second book uh but um but

[01:43:01] I’m really trying to really Reach the the the undergraduate High School demographic college and even graduate students in postto and young faculty because there’s a crisis of loneliness and isolation and impostor syndrome and I talk about I open the book with my friend who wrote the forward to the book Barry barish up there in LA who won the Nall R for ligo discovering two black holes crashing together at a quarter of the speed of light a billion light years away Peter imagine that and I asked him like what advice would you give to your former self and he said don’t have the impostor syndrome when you’re 80 and I’m like you can’t possibly have the impostor syndrome you won the freaking Nobel Prize and he said no no no you got it wrong when I won the Nobel Prize I got it worse than ever because when you accept the Nobel Prize which I’ll never find out about because of my first book losing the Nobel Prize which we’ll talk about some other time uh when when you win the Nobel Prize you have to sign a lot a ledger that says I got my check and I got my 24 Karat golden medallion and I’m a curious dude said Barry and he looked through the pages and he saw

[01:44:00] Richard Fineman he said oh my God Marie cury oh my God he saw Einstein same book as me I’m not worthy I said Barry guess what I have good news Einstein thought he was unworthy and he said of who he said I felt the impostor syndrome when it came to someone named Isaac Newton because Isaac Newton did more according to Einstein than any other human being for western civilization and I said that’s not all Barry don’t worry even Isaac Newton had his own impostor syndrome he said you got to be kidding me and I said you know Barry you and I are both Jews but there was a a man that Isaac Newton worshiped and that was Jesus Christ and I said he felt he never lived up to it in fact he felt his greatest accomplishment was he died a virgin like his his mentor Jesus Christ but he failed in in many other ways so Peter I wrote a lot I do a lot go to my website Brian king.com sign up if you have a.edu email address you’ll win a meteorite guaranteed if you don’t have one you’re entered into a drawing uh to

[01:45:00] win one of the first hundred listeners of the podcast but Peter thank you so much this has been a real honor you’ve been so gracious you helped my Tex talk you helped me with my book and uh I can’t wait till we be together in person like we were uh when I was writing the book in 2016 with Sean Carol who is no longer in Los Angeles by the way well buddy a pleasure and uh let’s not wait that many years again for our next podcast not be well great to talk to you [Music] bye