(electronic music)
- [Woman] Bulletproof Radio,
a state of high performance.
- [Dave] You're listening
to Bulletproof Radio
with Dave Asprey.
Today's cool fact of
the day has two parts.
I'm recording this
episode today, March 14,
which is Albert Einstein's birthday.
He was born on this date
140 years ago in 1879.
If he wasn't so lazy,
he would still be alive,
he was gonna live to 180,
I'm just saying. (laughing)
Aside from that, he was
just proven right again
by two ultra precise clocks.
They made a pair of atomic
clocks from single ions of
you know, this is a word Ytterbium,
which never sounds right when they say it,
but I know I said it right
because I actually did study
physics and chemistry in college.
Anyhow, these two single
ion clocks kept pace
with each other for six
months and they're studying
something called Lorentz
symmetry, which says that
the rules of physics should
remain the same whether you're
standing still, moving
at break neck speed,
and no matter what
direction you're facing.
This is all classic Einstein stuff.
Lorentz symmetry is the
foundation for Einstein's
special theory of relativity,
which is talking about
what happens when we're going
at nearly the speed of light.
What was cool is that these
two positively charged atoms
absorbed and emitted light
at a particular frequency
exactly like the ticking of a clock hand.
They were pointed in different directions.
They rotated as the Earth
turned, they made a full cycle
each day, but they kept
up with each other,
which means that even in
those weird funky things
that tend to break
science, they held true.
The reason this is relevant
to you is that we have lots
of these weird funky situations
in the human condition,
especially studying high performers,
people who break the rules.
Is it genetic?
Is it their gut bacteria?
Well, the typical response
throughout medical history
has been oh that didn't
happen because it can happen
because we know everything.
What we're finding out is we
probably don't know everything.
So there's some questions
of core scientific integrity
that are coming to bear
because we have social media.
We also have big data
and machine learning.
There are a lot of people who
invested billions of dollars
in one theory or another
about what causes disease
and they're wrong and it's
getting easier and easier
to say they're wrong.
In today's episode is really
cool because you're gonna
hear what happens in the
deep gut, we'll call it
the microbiome of science.
The stuff you wouldn't hear
about, about how we come
to believe, as a species,
as scientists, as academics,
what is true and what is not true.
This is an interview with
Brian Keating, who wrote a book
called Losing the Nobel Prize.
He is an astrophysicist
who's gonna make fun
of my cool fact of the day
reading today and a cosmologist,
professor of physics at the
U.S. Center for Astrophysics
and Space Sciences in
the department of physics
at UC San Diego.
Brian became a celestial
evangelist when he was 13.
He saw Jupiter next to the
bright moon and just wondered
what would happen in a
telescope and he bought one.
Since then, he's built and
deployed some of the world's
most advanced and powerful
telescopes and detectors
and he's trying to find the
literal edge of the universe.
In today's episode, we're going
to go over the high pressure
world of science, What happens
when you think you're right
or maybe you're just
looking at a speck of dust.
Brian, welcome to the show.
- [Brian] Thanks Dave it's a
big pleasure to be on with you.
- [Dave] What led you to
decide you were gonna write
a book, not about winning the
Nobel prize, but to losing it?
People haven't heard of your work,
tell me about what happened.
- [Dave] Yeah, so the book
is sort of an anti-hero's
journey of a description
of what it's like to aspire
to great things on the
edge of human capability
along with teammates and
colleagues, who at various times
will be collaborators and
friends and at other times
may be competitors and
nemeses in various forms
and to actually portray
science how it's really done
and not this neat wrapped up little bow.
Science is messy and science is chaotic
and often times unknowable.
It has many of the same
features that the business world
features and that's
been the case all along,
since the first real
astronomer in history,
Galileo to use the telescope,
who had a lot of needs
as an entrepreneur to make
money and do all sorts
of other things, all
the way up to Einstein,
who's birthday, as you say,
we're celebrating his 140th birthday.
Unfortunately he's not here.
Had he lived to 180 he
would still be in his prime
and it's too bad as I often say,
that he didn't have any brain octane oil
because he could have gone
on to some great things
and made some great discoveries.
But what's so interesting about science,
and that I've come to
learn, is how similar it is
to the world of the executive,
of a business person,
but how little scientists
really recognize that growing up
and even as mature scientists.
So I aspire to win the
Nobel Prize as the ultimate
accolade, the same way
that start up founders
want to get the triple comma
club and found the unicorn,
as things that you've done.
You know the intoxication of
achievement and great success.
In science, you may remember
you know, you come from
a family of scientists,
physicists, engineers,
and you know that they,
we're pretty much the biggest
grade grubbers there are.
We want to get the
highest grade, the A+'s,
go to the highest achievement possible,
as I'm sure your relatives
have convinced you of.
- [Dave] So you're talking
about scientific hubris there.
- [Brian] Yeah, there's a
lot of that, but there's also
this need to be judged, to be graded,
to be scored and compared
against history's greatest.
There is no A+--
I don't get any grades anymore
since I was a first year
graduate student right, 20 plus years ago.
For a scientist, the last
grade, the ultimate A+
is winning the Nobel Prize.
There are some books written
about winning the Nobel Prize.
You'll be interested to
know and I always say
those are about as useful as
you know, books on how to win
the lottery or how to,
winning bingo strategies,
because not that it's purely based on luck
but there is a a luck element,
in particular longevity,
which I know you're very interested in.
You have to live long enough
to see your ideas, theories,
experiments validated.
But to me, the experience of
losing something and failure
and resiliency and humility,
that all came together
in this book and I realized
you know, most people haven't
won a Nobel Prize.
Most people haven't won
an Oscar or a Grammy
or another type of accolade
or high school class president
for that matter.
So it's how you deal with
adversity and the failures
that you encounter that
makes scientist's lives
very similar to other people
that you might encounter,
despite the stereotypes.
Scientists are normal people.
- [Dave] You talk about
how you want to see how you
stack up, how everyone sort
of wants a Nobel Prize,
it reminds me of a book by
Candace Pert, who I didn't get
a chance to interview
'cause she passed away.
She wrote a book called
The Molecules of Emotion.
It goes into great detail
about how at the National
Institutes of Health
there's this competition for
a Nobel Prize in medicine
and how nasty the politics
are and how competitive it is
and how there's this one
thing you don't tell someone
in the lab.
You know, I'm sorry I meant to tell you
and now you don't win and I do.
It really highlighted for me,
how we got to where we are
in many different fields,
where if you don't agree
with a predominant paradigm,
you can't get funding,
no one will talk to you,
you don't get invited to the
parties, and it seems like
this is happening more and
more, whether we're talking
politics, autoimmunity,
chronic fatigue syndrome,
it doesn't really matter.
It's getting really
one-sided everywhere we go.
Is it that bad in physics
now or are we pretty much
all in agreement that if you
know, you're not studying
the cool thing now no
one even knows your name?
- [Brian] No, it's very
much as you describe it.
In fact, I was on a show
with Scott Eastwood,
who's Clint Eastwood's
son and he's an actor
in his own right.
He's been in a lot of movies
and we were talking about
how parallels between the
Academy, which by the way,
it's the Academy of Motion
Arts Pictures or whatever
and science.
So there's science in
the title of the Oscars.
Yet they do things much more,
you know kind of holistically
shall we say, than our
Swedish counterparts
who award the Nobel Prize
in physics and literature,
medicine, et cetera.
But I said to him, I said
to Scott, look you know,
I don't think, you're in
Hollywood, but I don't think
like most major studios
are expecting a movie
like a crummy movie like, let's just say,
the Fast and the Furious,
is gonna win an Oscar.
And he said, "Let me interrupt you.
"I was in the Fast and the Furious."
I said, "Well, I didn't
mean you know." (laughing)
- [Dave] No you did not.
- [Brian] Yeah I did, I swear, yeah.
He's very gracious and I
said, "Look I don't think
"you thought you were
gonna win an Academy Award
"for that role that you played,
nor do I think the studio
"did, but you better
believe that the analog
"of Hollywood producers or the
National Science Foundation
"the National Institutes of
Health, Department of Energy,
"they want, just as the movie studios do,
"they want a certain number
of their films to win
"the Academy Award."
In fact, some of what they
do in the popular side,
where they make these
block buster Captain Marvel
or whatever movies, are
really just to support
the more artsy, creative
intellectual films
that do go on to win Academy Awards.
So it's just like that.
There's a herd mentality
in a certain sense,
and there are plenty of
colleagues, I have to say,
that do it for the purity of the science,
but when you get told
things as a young professor
that you won't get tenure
unless we think you have
a good shot at winning a
Nobel Prize or you say things
like you know, the main
defining characteristic
of a scientist in their
obituary, is that they won
the Nobel Prize or almost
won the Nobel Prize.
It sets up this dichotomy
of idolatry as I call it,
and I think it's very
pernicious and ironic because
scientists are supposed
to be free of prejudice,
idolatry, religious
worship, things like that.
Yet I think we're some of
the most susceptible to these
biases that exists in society.
- [Dave] Well, I'm hoping
that just talking about this
moves the needle a little
bit for people listening.
If you just believe
something is absolutely true,
everything we believe
about reality is a theory.
It's as semiotically approach
being an absolute truth.
There's probably a corner case
and all the interesting stuff
is the corner case.
If you want to do time travel,
I'm pretty sure it's not easy.
You want to live to 180, I'm
also pretty sure it's not easy.
Or maybe beyond.
But there's all sorts of stuff,
you want to turn off cancer,
just one person has done it somewhere
or is doing it right now.
It's not evenly distributed
and when science acts
as an immune system to ignore those things
instead of focus all of our
energies on that one person
who seems to know what you're thinking
and can do it reliably.
You can say there are no
people like that out there,
heck I don't know, but
everyone who claims it,
like let's either prove
that it's not happening
or let's figure out why and
then let's make it teachable,
that's what's cool.
- [Brian] Yeah I mean,
look, I get a lot of emails
every week that say you
know, Professor Keating,
Albert Einstein was wrong here's why.
I can prove I'm right.
You know, most of those
go to the waste bin
in my email, but on the other
hand, sometimes you do get
gems in the rough.
I once got an email from
a woman and she said I got
some really speculative ideas in cosmology
I'd like to talk to you about.
I was about to delete
it and then I saw oh,
by the way I won the Pulitzer
Prize from President Obama
last year, would you like
to go out for coffee?
Sure, I'll undelete that email.
Her name's Ray Armantrout and
she ended up writing a poem
about the collaboration,
the conversation that we had
over a period of weeks.
It became ranked as one of the
best poems of 2012 in America
and if I had been close
minded and said look,
she's a poet, she doesn't
knot anything about physics,
when you diversity your curiosity,
when you explore different
realms of activity,
the brain is the most
phenomenal, as you know,
computer in the world and
in the known universe.
It may be the only type
of computer of its kind.
Some of the work that we
do here revolves around
possibilities for artificial intelligence
and quantum computing and
things that a decade ago
would have seemed impossible,
let alone a hundred years ago.
So I salute the people
that really are ambitious
and those moonshots and the difficulties,
as our mutual friend Peter
Diamonda speak about,
that's how progress gets made.
You have to have a certain
amount of boldness,
but when you're in an
operational field like mine,
where most people don't get
their first research grant
from the government until
they're in their late 30's
or early 40's and by then,
maybe some of their greatest
years are behind them in
some sense, including myself.
It sets up a world which
has all the negative aspects
of the business world, you
know punishing failure,
et cetera, but it has very
few of the positive ones
of entrepreneurial spirit.
- [Dave] So unless you
win the Nobel Prize you're
probably not gonna get rich in academia.
- [Brian] That's right.
- [Dave] In order to
be on Bulletproof radio
one of the filters that
I run on someone who's
a game changer, someone
who's breaking out and doing
impactful things in their field.
It turns out a lot of the time,
there is financial success
but no one's targeting
that and Eric Kandel,
who won the Nobel Prize
has been on the show
and some other people at
high levels of achievement
but they all kind of share
that perspective that
being the best is a motivator for them,
regardless of whether it's
measured in dollar signs.
In business even, I measure
success in number of people
who use Bulletproof
products, not necessary in
the highest possible revenues or dollars
or things like that.
In other words I'll spend
more to make it convenient
for someone to start doing
it even if I make less on it
because I like a world
where people are well fed
because then they're nice to each other.
Everybody wins.
So you can look at impact
or you can look at dollars.
I think you just have an
impact filter which is great.
But I gotta ask you,
when is time travel going to happen?
- [Brian] Yeah, so there's
a lot of news circulating
about time travel just
recently from a couple
of different particles that
were shown to potentially
inhabit configuration, a
sort of state space that they
existed in in a previous time.
It's very, that's very
primitive I would say.
It's not know whether or not
time travel for macroscopic
objects is possible.
This sort of shows in principle
for microscopic objects.
Now if you're an atomist,
if you believe that we are
essentially a giant assemblage
of microscopic particles,
then you know, in principle
there's no reason why
something macroscopic could
not be teleported back in time.
Let me just take a step back.
Your listeners are undoubtedly
familiar with the fact
that it's possible to
move forward, backwards,
up, down, left and right in
the three dimensions of space.
However, you may have heard
also that there's something
called space time.
That the man born on this
day, Albert Einstein,
pioneered this concept of
the intricate interlocking
of the concept of space with time.
Yet we all know, at least
despite your question,
that we can't, we can go
any direction positive
or negative in space but not in time.
At least as far as we know currently.
We have not been able to
actually teleport back in time.
However, there is nothing in
the laws of physics themselves.
If I showed you a pendulum
swinging back and forth
you couldn't tell me if that
pendulum, movie of a pendulum,
is running backwards or forwards.
Similarly, if you looked
at the orbit of the Earth
from above in a sense, and
I didn't tell you which
direction you were looking at it from,
you couldn't tell which way time is going.
In other words, the laws
of physics are independent
of the time parameters,
positive or negative sign.
That implies that there's a
symmetry and that going back
in time could in fact be possible.
What I'm connected to in
my research is the ultimate
origin of the universe, which
seems to be in one class
of models, the ultimate stopping point.
In other words, there's
a time before which
you could not return.
So if time travel is possible,
it would beg a lot of questions.
For example, what if you
tried to teleport back
to before there was a
universe to teleport into?
That's a question.
So the main focus, the main
answer to your question
is I don't know, I don't
think anybody knows
when time travel will be possible.
But I will say that it's not
believed to be fundamentally
forbidden by the laws of
physics and as the late, great
Richard Feinman said,
and others have said,
anything that's not
forbidden is mandatory.
- [Dave] All right, I
actually I really like that
as one of those people with
oppositional defiant disorder.
It just resonates with me.
So you're saying maybe it's possible.
It certainly hasn't been proven
impossible that we'll have
time travel at some point.
But you're looking at the
beginning of the universe
and certainly you'd
want to understand that.
So what's your current theory?
Are you a Big Bang guy?
I remember my sons like Daddy
I'm grateful for the Big Bang
because without it there
wouldn't be anything.
I'm like that's pretty cool gratitude,
but I'm not sure that's true.
Is he right?
- [Brian] So throughout human
history and even back to the
you know, biblical days, you
know not taking a position
on religiosity, if you think
about it, the bible begins
with basically the Big Bang.
You know, how did the universe
begin and why is that?
The rest of the book's about you know,
different kinds of food you
can't eat with other types
of food or ways that you do this or that
for a tribe of nomadic
Semites in the Bronze Age.
So why did it begin with the Big Bang?
I think the Big Bang is a story.
It's built into our
consciousness as human beings.
This quest that must have an origin.
Human beings are very
uncomfortable with their not being,
with them not being in
the middle of a story,
in medias res it's called.
Almost everything, your life,
you only know who your dad was
because your mom told you
and you trust your mom.
- [Dave] No, I used 23 and Me to verify.
- That's true, you do.
- Just kidding.
- [Brian] But if you go
back in time far enough,
you might reach a time where
there was no you're not
in the middle of anything,
you're at the beginning of it.
What's so interesting to me
is that through human history,
from the ancient Greeks,
as I said from the bible
to the ancient Greeks to
modern day Einstein himself,
believe the universe was
static, unchanging and eternal.
The bible was sort of standing
in opposition to that,
could be read into it,
that there was a beginning,
a time equals zero.
What's so interesting to
me is through the last
hundreds years, the more that
we learn about the conditions
that prevailed at the earliest
epoch that we can measure,
which is my field of study,
we are learning that it's
a potentially impossible
to know, not only if there was a Big Bang.
In other words, if there
was a single big bang,
but we may not be able
ever to know if there are
other universes with their own big bangs.
That's called the multiverse.
And similarly, we may not
be able to know if our own
universe is just one cycle
out of a potentially infinite
number of bangs and
collapses and big bangs
and big crunches.
Throughout eternity, truly
eternity, and the human brain
is, even with all the
octane oil in the world,
it's very difficult for
human beings to conceive
of the implications of
the number infinity.
It's the most baffling kind
of concept and we think
it's only accessible
to human consciousness
and yet we don't really
have a visceral feeling
for what it means.
So to answer your son's
question, everything we see
is consistent with the Big
Bang, except for the origin
of the Big Bang itself.
In other words, we don't know what banged.
We don't know what caused
the big bang to occur.
We don't know if there are
other big bangs going on
right now or if there were
other big bangs in the past.
Similarly and lastly perhaps,
we don't know if our universe
will last forever or
will come to a fiery end
in a trillion years.
But I say, keep paying
your taxes just in case.
- [Dave] Love it.
Some of my favorite people to
get into deep conversations
over coffee with are physicists
but also people who are
PhD philosophers.
It's very hard to tell them apart in terms
of the thinking model
because the question of how
did the universe begin
also, it's almost identical
to the question of how
consciousness began.
What is your work in
physics showing us about
how consciousness may have arisen?
- [Brian] Yeah, I actually
speak of the three questions
I would most like to ask a
supreme being, mother nature,
whatever, is what was
what was the nature of the
origin of the universe,
the real big bang, what
we call the Big Bang,
then the origin of life must
have come from some point
from non-life, right.
There must have been some
molecular combination
of enzymes, proteins, amino
acids or whatever you want,
that formed the first biological
organism in the universe.
Perhaps here on Earth, perhaps
elsewhere as some speculate,
a concept called panspermia,
which sounds dirty but it's not.
And then the origin of consciousness.
These are the three big bangs.
You must have had an origin
of the universe, ex nihilo,
potentially from nothing, the
origin of life from non-life
and the origin of consciousness
from non-consciousness.
These are greatest puzzles
I think that exist.
In some way, my research
touches on all three of them.
Obviously through the
origin of the universe
we build telescopes, we build
detectors, we build sensors
that are cooled down
nearly to absolute zero,
cooler than the freezer in
the background in your office.
- [Dave] Colder than
my cryotherapy chamber,
the one that goes to 260 below zero.
- [Brian] That's nothing.
I go to 454 below zero fahrenheit.
Then there's the
obvious creation of life from non-life,
which some of the earliest
work and that was done here
at UC San Diego by Harold
Uri, who did an experiment
with his graduate student, Stanley Miller,
on the origin of what they
thought was the prebiotic Earth
atmosphere composition
and they put some sparks
and lightening, out emerged
some amino acids from that.
That was the origin of
life, you know, supposedly.
It turns out there was some
flaws in that we can get to.
The origin of consciousness,
we have great deal
of thinkers and people here
that study consciousness.
What we do, I'm the
co-director of what's called
the Arthur C. Clark Center
for Human Imagination,
which was licensed, the
name is licensed to us
from the Arthur C. Clark Foundation.
So it's a great honor to work
with this great scientist,
but science fiction author
and we bring in people
from around the world,
including someone who,
if you haven't had on the
radio show you should,
Roger Penrose, Sir Roger
Penrose, who is responsible,
he's probably the
greatest living physicist.
He was a contemporary of Steven Hawking,
was actually advisor to
Steven Hawking many times.
He believes that consciousness
is one of the most
kind of diabolical mysteries
that there is because
you're trying to study yourself.
In the same way you can't
really tickle yourself,
I don't know if you've tried
but it's very difficult
to make yourself laugh if you're ticklish.
Just like it's very difficult
to put yourself in a basket
and pick yourself up.
So we don't know if it's
even theoretically possible
to study the origin of consciousness
using the consciousness
that we have.
In other words, it might take
another three dimensional
system, a quantum computer,
a room temperature liquid
not unlike a brain, to study the brain.
Just as the same way
it's very hard to study
things that you are a part of.
Psychology on yourself
is very difficult to do
unless you're really good
at meditation, et cetera.
But in this case, the
problem with consciousness
of those three big bangs,
the origin of the universe,
the origin of life, and the
origin of consciousness,
I feel consciousness
is the most mysterious
because we can't even
agree on what a definition
of consciousness is.
- [Dave] Right.
- [Brian] There are a great
many people who believe
in what's called
panconsciousness or panpsychism,
which would mean that
not only does your brain
have consciousness, but
the Bulletproof coffee
that you drink, the molecules
have consciousness too.
- [Dave] They do, I put it in there.
It's actually part of
the third step of dis--
Okay, just kidding.
By the way thanks for the
plugs and just so you guys
all know, I don't even know if
Brian uses Bulletproof coffee
or anything like that, but
he's kind enough to mention it.
So thank you.
- [Brian] Yes, yes, well, as you know,
the famous mathematician Erdos,
said that a mathematician
is a machine that converts
coffee into theorem.
- [Dave] That is a beautiful quote.
- [Brian] We do use it, that should be,
and you can get that licensed for free
'cause he's long dead.
Anyway, yeah, the consciousness
problem of actually having
fundamental attributes of what we,
you know it's kind of like
the Supreme Court definition
of pornography, you
know it when you see it.
In this case, the consciousness
sort of you know it
when you see it and you know
it when you take it away.
There's a researcher that
Sir Roger Penrose works with
named Steward Hameroff at
the University of Arizona
who works on these things
called microtubules.
He and I disagree a lot
on the fundamental basis
of consciousness, but what
he, he's an anesthesiologist.
So what does he do?
He makes people unconscious all day long.
From the studies of before
and after anesthesia,
he's developed these
theories of consciousness
that are very controversial
but again, point to the fact
that in this field, there's
no universal definition
of consciousness and it makes
it very difficult to make
progress when the lexicon,
vocabulary is not agreed upon,
even in principle.
It frustrates me to deal with it.
- [Dave] All right, so
it's awesome in academia,
'cause you could say
well there's this theory,
there's that theory.
All right, straight up, you
have a hundred thousand dollar
bet on where consciousness comes from,
where you gonna place it?
- [Brian] So, you know where--
- [Dave] I love it, you're
already going off in the
professor line.
Come on, give it to me straight.
- [Brian] I'm thinking
about all the flight rules
I can buy with it.
- [Dave] Oh my God, that's
the best answer ever.
- [Brian] I still use em.
So I would say it's most
likely a quantum phenomena
which doesn't help because
actually, quantum mechanics,
the properties of the very
small microscopic behavior
of light and matter are
some of the most mysterious
laws of nature.
Again, this famous physicist
Richard Fineman said,
if somebody tells you that he understands
or she understands quantum
mechanics they're a liar.
That's the only thing you know about them.
We're learning more and more
each day about kind of how
ignorant we are.
But I would say, there are
properties of quantum mechanical
systems that demonstrate
the same types of behaviors
as the human brain, it's
called neural networks,
that can be processed.
The problem is that to actually
assemble and test these
things we're at really the abacus level
now of quantum computer.
It's so primitive.
So the amount that we could
actually learn from it
I would say is pretty small.
But yeah, if you're forcing
me to stake my bets,
I would say it originates
as some kind of emergent
phenomena from the
collective behavior of nearly
infinite numbers of
quantum mechanical systems
but there's a big mystery
as to how you can have
a liquid, wet, room
temperature quantum computer.
All our quantum computers
nowadays are basically
almost at absolute zero temperature.
So to have a quantum
computer at room temperature,
i.e. your brain, it's very mysterious.
But I do believe there must
be a link between the two.
But again, this makes the
problem so under representative
of what it actually is.
- [Dave] We do know that some
parts of our nervous system
are super conductive at room temperature,
which is kind of interesting.
- [Brian] I wasn't aware of that.
I mean, the superconductors
that we study in the laboratory
the record for what's
called a high temperature
superconductor is not really that high.
It's actually about
minus 150 Celsius or so,
where it starts to superconduct.
In other words, exhibits zero
resistance for your listeners
that might not know
what superconductor is,
it's an actual quantum
mechanical phenomenon
discovered by one of my
teachers at Brown University,
Leon Cooper and colleagues.
This phenomenon was not well
understood and still is not
very well understood how it occurs
near at higher temperatures
than close to absolute zero.
- [Dave] I love the very
polite academic way of saying
Dave, that sounds like bullshit.
That was what I translated.
Through my quantum filter. (laughing)
I'm quoting Robert
O'Becker in a book called
Electromagnetism and Life,
which is a fascinating read
that really helps.
I think I read it in the early
'90s and it really kind of
helped to shape my, wow,
there's a lot more going on
than he's talking about.
Like the haul of fact and
things you can get off nerves
that just aren't--
- [Brian] Well look, if
it were true I would be
the biggest backer of it.
I mean, I would love to see
that book and I will make
a note to look at it,
but look, if it were true
we'd be using, we'd be
extracting this superconducting
material from our bodies
and using it to do
levitating trains and
communication with zero resistance.
So there would be wonderful application.
It would have, it's like when
people say, oh homeopathy
is real or this is real
and the big drug companies.
You know, my wife's a big proponent of it,
I don't know to ascribe
too much negativity to it,
and I believe it can help.
Look, placebo's the most effective
drug ever invented right,
so I don't want to rain too
much on people's parades,
but it's not like Pfizer's
gonna say oh here's this
wonderful herb that we
can basically get for free
from Taiwan and we're
just not gonna use it
because we can't patent it.
I just think that's very cynical.
So similarly, if there is a
superconductor in the human body
there'd be billions and
trillions of dollars
of potential revenue for
commercial applications.
- [Dave] I actually had the same thought
when I read the book.
I'm completely willing to be proven wrong,
because while I studied
computer science, not physics.
And not medicine.
A lot of people think I'm a doctor.
- [Brian] Some of my best
friends are computer scientists.
- [Dave] Yeah, they share
a lot with the philosophers
and some with physics.
Now, getting back to this
whole consciousness thing,
I love being able to talk
about it from a physics
perspective, you talked
about an emergent phenomenon
that happens from a
highly distributed system,
I believe that most of
our egoic behaviors,
in fact the ego itself,
is an emergent phenomenon,
an emergent consciousness
that's held inside our meat,
that comes mostly form
mitochondrial priorities.
Going back to Steven Wolfram's
book, which you've probably
read and maybe even understood, unlike me,
a book called A New Kind of Science.
To sum up this incredible
book full of equations
that I don't understand, is
that if you take very simple
rules and repeat them almost
infinite numbers of times
you get very amazing,
complex, beautiful things
that don't look like
they're based on three rules
repeated 20 kabillion times.
I think some of our
behaviors are that way.
But in companies, and I've
studied business at Wharton
and I'm a reasonable entrepreneur,
there is an emergent behavior
set that isn't necessarily
conscious, it's what we
call company culture.
But it's those hundreds
or thousand or millions
of micro decisions made every
day based on a certain goal.
So I don't think, in my experience,
almost none of the people
running big companies
have evil in their heart.
They're not out there,
no one would ever say,
oh I'm gonna screw the planet to do this.
What they're saying is I'm
going to set this direction,
set this goal and then two
billion micro decisions later
evil happens and they
scratch their head and say
that can't possibly be
evil therefore it's not.
In the classical scientific
hubris, and then you get
Monsanto or whoever else
we're talking about.
Sorry if they fund you,
I hope not. (laughing)
Now, when you look at that,
you're saying all right,
so there's some kind of
a quantum thing going on.
How does that effect what
you do on a daily basis?
Are you kind of living
up in the clouds there?
Do you wake up in the morning
going I'm going to meditate
on my quantum nature and
increase my performance?
Like, what's the so-what behind
all this for you personally?
- [Brian] Right, so I agree
with you 100%, just taking,
rewinding three or four sentences.
You talked about you know,
the culture of entrepreneurs
and leaders and CEOs.
So whenever you say
CEO or you say start up
or you say company or entrepreneur,
I want you to think
experiment or scientist
because we're exactly the same.
I mean, there's no doubt in
my mind, I once said this
to one of my professor
colleagues, look, I have payrolls,
I have travel, I have expense
reports, I have receipts,
I have shipping, I have
receiving, I have logistics,
I have all this stuff that
you do in the business world.
Then he said well, but you
don't have to, a business person
doesn't have to teach 40
hours a week on top of it.
So that being aside, putting that aside,
still, we have the same
needs, same urges and same ego
driven motivations.
Except in our world, again,
it's not for financial.
If you look at some of
the greatest inventions,
look at Einstein, you know
how much money he died with
in his bank, the smartest
man who ever lived allegedly,
won the Nobel Prize, could
have won it seven times
according to most physicists?
He died a couple, maybe a
hundred thousand dollars
in today's dollars.
Look at people that
invented the GPS, the laser,
the laser, the transistor
Shockley and other people,
these guys died almost penniless.
In his case he was insane, Shockley.
He was the eugenicist.
He wanted to rid the
world of African Americans
through bribery, just
an awful human being.
- [Dave] Damn.
- [Brian] And the same token,
so the notion of scientist
as beard stroking scholar
and intellectual, quiet,
bookish, that's total nonsense.
Even going back, as I said to Galileo,
Galileo is the prototypical
scientist, the lone genius,
working by himself and discovering things
and then wanting to promote
himself, make money from
these discoveries and
support his enterprise.
Because what is the credit,
what is the dollar sign
equivalent for scientist?
It's citations, it's
credit, it's influence,
it's setting the priorities for
national agendas in science.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Look, I think there's you
know, there's an inclination
towards good and that
sometimes, as you say,
it'll spiral into a Monsanto,
who used to sponsor my research until now.
No, I'm just kidding.
(laughing)
Not any more!
But the actual, the stock
and trade that the exchange
of medium of exchange is credit.
So when you have anything for credit,
look at Neil Armstrong.
Did he die with like billions of dollars?
No, he died relatively middle
class and yet he wouldn't
trade that experience for
all the money in the world.
We have to look at ourselves as people.
So what I do every day,
you're just getting back
to the second to last sentence you asked,
is really I try to be
a little bit different
because I'm running an
enterprise, a hundred million
dollar experiment in Chile
that has 245 employees,
if you like.
Some are much more senior,
much more brilliant
than I am, much more renowned,
down to graduate students
and for 18 year old freshmen
that work in our labs.
I have to somehow get them
the funding, the resources,
the travel, the screws,
bolts, and nuts that they need
to do their actual work
at almost 18,000 feet
above sea level.
I look at it and I say well,
how would a business manager do this?
How would a business person do this?
I started reading every
day, I try to read as part
of my alleged morning routine,
after meditating for four hours.
Actually, I should say
I once met the Dali Lama
at UC San Diego and he
said, and somebody asked him
what's his daily routine.
He goes, I wake up and I
meditate for five hours
and I almost threw up.
You could tell he doesn't
have any kids, right?
Because no one with kids is
meditating for five hours.
But anyway, so what I like
to do is to read books
by Andy Grove or I read
books by Earnest Shackleton's
daughter or granddaughter
and about how do you manage
a culture.
Right now I'm reading a
book by Simon Sinek called
Start with Why and it's
so interesting to me
'cause I keep reading
his book and I've noticed
that elsewhere, we are
scientific entrepreneurs.
We are merchants of truth and
light, as we're supposed to be
but we actually end with why.
We're terrible at promoting
and marketing ourselves.
Instead, I think you know,
we could really learn a lot
from the business world
and to not do so is at,
I think, our own peril.
- [Dave] Let's talk a little bit more.
So five hours of meditation, right.
I actually did two hours of
meditation in the morning
until I had kids, 11 years
ago and realized kids have
an uncanny ability to know
when you're meditating
'cause that's when they're gonna scream
and ask for attention.
If you say I'm gonna wake
up early, they're like yeah,
I'll wake up early too.
So yeah, it helps to have
an army of monks helping you
meditate five hours a day.
- [Brian] Exactly.
- [Dave] Great respect for
the traditions that have
done that for thousands of years,
to study human
consciousness, but it's work.
And you have other work to do.
You're seeking another kind of truth.
Running a hundred million
dollar project is,
much less internationally,
is not at all trivial.
I want to know though, to be
a merchant of truth and light,
you must have a brain that's on.
That was what attracted
me to interviewing you.
If you're gonna be at the
elite levels of science,
you've gotta be able to notice these facts
and do the numbers and ponder and be like
the high performance ponderer
and draw models in your head.
I know that when I'm in the
phases of my career where
I'm running strategy for
technology, figure out where is
technology gonna be in five
years and who do we make sure
we're at the middle of
that, it is such a demanding
but nebulous task, that I
found it to be high energy.
It's stimulating but it's also exhausting.
What do you do to turn your
brain on so you can lecture
the way you lecture and
then pick up the phone
and talk, I'm assuming,
with the President of Chile
or something and then
switch to something else?
It's kind of exhausting.
What's your regimen for that?
- [Brian] Yeah well, I'm
Jewish and in our tradition,
called the Talmudic tradition,
there's a famous statement
that a man should have two
pockets, and a woman too.
Those two pockets, this is
the philosophy I live my life
by, those two pockets should
have two different messages.
In one pocket it should say
the universe was made for me.
In the other pocket it should say
I'm nothing but dust and ashes.
In other words, you should
have this concept that you're
eventually, your life is finite
and yet there's a richness
to the universe that you,
look, the universe doesn't,
if you don't exist Dave,
does the universe exist?
I mean, I don't know.
You don't know what exists
other than this kind of
construction that people
have made for themselves
as to what their definition of
reality or consciousness is.
So I know we're getting
a little off track,
but you know, I actually say,
you know people think I'm
really smart, but I still
have to sing the alphabet song
to know what letter comes
after Q and you know,
it's just a different kind
of intellectual pursuit.
I will say I'm very
similar in some ways to you
in that I don't like,
or other people that try
to achieve at a high level.
I don't think it's something
magical or special about me.
But I think the secret weapon that I have
is passionate curiosity.
I have an unyielding
scholastic intellect that I'm
interested in literally everything.
There's nothing that bores me.
My kids say, "I'm bored Daddy."
I say you're boring.
You're just like, there's
something that you're just not,
you have this gift called
life and yeah, I hope I live
to 180, I don't know if I will.
I hope I live much beyond
that to be honest with you.
But on the other hand, who
knows how much time we all
have left and so what I try to do in life
is maximize every moment.
That might mean not getting enough sleep,
not doing the meditation,
not doing this and that,
but to me, it's this
unyielding desire to know
as much as I can while
I can and be productive
and contribute to this chain of knowledge.
But I have to say, I had
much baser desires when I was
a 25 year old, 30 year old in this field.
I wanted to win a Nobel Prize.
That was my focus, that was
my goal, that was my idol,
that was what I was going for
above almost everything else.
To the point that I really,
I did create an experiment
that was going to be a
shoe-in for the Nobel Prize
if our results held up.
From the title of the book,
you can tell that they didn't.
They episode, the
aftermath of that episode,
really effected my own self reflection
as to why I'm a scientist.
I could do other things.
I could probably program
a computer pretty well.
I actually liked working on
cars and doing physical labor
and that's something
I've always been good at,
but the bottom line is I
never take it for granted.
I'm here by a whole lucky
string and sequence of events
and I aim to take advantage of all that
and I really want to know everything.
That's what drives me in
life is the humility that
you know, I've made some
huge mistakes in my life
and I'm gonna take advantage
of the lessons I've learned
from those mistakes, to capitalize on it
and hopefully make the
universe a better place.
- [Dave] So how do you
go about doing that?
One thing that attracts me
is that you're observatory
is at 17,500 feet.
I first had Yak butter tea at
18,000 feet in Western Tibet.
I'm like wow, my brain
just turned back on.
So you're physically challenging,
I mean that's pretty much
mountaineering territory.
It takes time to acclimate and all that.
- [Brian] It's base camp
of Everest, basically.
- [Dave] I mean your physiology's
very different there.
Your brain actually requires
oxygen in order to do
its maximum thing.
So you're sitting there,
trying to do this.
The travel there is rigor and
you're at the highest possible
demand on your brain.
Do you, what do you do for that?
Is there an astronomer diet?
Is there you know, do calisthenics?
Cryotherapy in the morning?
I have no idea, but like
what's the day in the life
of a high altitude, high consciousness,
high demand astronomer?
- [Brian] Yeah, so we
didn't coordinate this,
again for your listeners.
But I do feel like of all
the professions that could
benefit from a bulletproof
lifestyle, astronomers are some
of the most likely to benefit.
Why?
Because we have totally
messed up circadian rhythms
where we have to work at night
and we're up during the day like vampires.
We have to operate at
extremely high altitudes
for long periods of time.
And it's not like I have
no, I think a lot of skiers,
I'm sure Lindsay Vaughn is
brilliant, but you know,
she's not relying on doing
mathematical calculations
and operating heavy machinery
and dealing with science
at the literal highest
level on earth when she up
at those high altitudes.
Astronomers are.
- [Dave] Plus she gets a break.
I mean, she trains, but.
- [Brian] Right, and how long
is she up at high altitude?
Two minutes?
If she's good, she's not there very long.
- [Dave] Well said. (laughing)
- [Brian] So the other thing
is we're also dealing with
extreme cold environments.
My research in the book
takes place in the south pole
Antarctica, the very bottom of the world,
where it gets to 100 degrees
below zero Fahrenheit.
You can do things there
to rejuvenate your soul.
So one thing they have
there, which you know,
I don't know if I want you to
do it because it would mean
probably a six month
break from your family,
but they have something
called the 300 degree club.
The 300 degree club
involves using the sauna.
At the south pole there is a
sauna, there's a basketball
court, there's a sauna,
it'd be surprising to learn
for your listeners, but there's a sauna.
They heat it up almost to
the boiling point of water,
which is 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then they go outside in
the middle of winter,
this is usually on June 21,
which remember is the winter
down there, they'll go outside,
it'll be 100 degrees
below zero Fahrenheit.
So you've got a 300 degree
change in temperature.
It's more than the cryotherapy,
or at least they use it
for more than the cryotherapy,
and the goal of this
experience is to go outside,
run around the geographic
south pole naked.
'Cause if you wear clothes
you're gonna get frostbite
in some places you really don't
want to get frostbitten in
and you're only wearing boots.
To do this, you join the 300 degree club.
So again, these are things
where astronomers go
that normal people fear to
tread, and they're hasn't been,
although I think there should be because,
when I send one of my
graduate students to Chile,
for the first two or
three days she's useless
or he's useless.
I mean, their brains are foggy.
Our base camp is about 9,000,
you know 2,000 meters or so.
Yeah, 9,000 feet, and then
they go up to 18,000 feet.
Sometimes in the winter, the
day of productivity is only
six hours long.
It takes an hour to get
up and down the mountain
up to 18,000 feet almost.
So, I've been thinking a lot about
how do you acclimatize people.
There's researchers here
in San Diego, Frank Powell
and others that have a high
altitude research station
on White Mountain, which is
the second highest mountain
in the U.S., one of the
top mountains in the U.S,
14,000 something feet.
We've talked about how you
would acclimatize a student
before they go down to Chile.
- [Dave] Do you want the answer?
- [Brian] Yeah.
- [Dave] I actually know this one.
- [Brian] I know, the chamber right?
- [Dave] No, no the chamber's expensive,
huge pain in the ass.
Although having a hyperbaric
chamber up there would be good.
We're talking about 400 bucks
and 20 days ahead of time.
There's a little company
no one's ever heard of,
I know how to deal with these
guys, what they do is they
make little oxygen scrubber.
You breathe for an hour
a day through this thing
until your blood oxygen level drops.
Then you breathe normal
air until it goes back up.
Then you breathe again until it drops.
You do this for 20 days and
after that you're acclimated
to 15,000 feet elevation.
- [Brian] Wow!
- [Dave] I mean seriously
all the way acclimated.
The reason this was
invented, it makes me happy,
because the Russian mindset on physics
and just on all hard science
is different than most
of the rest of the world and admirable.
They thought about this
from a military perspective
and they said you know,
pressurizing an airplane
is really expensive.
Wouldn't it be cheaper if
we just made the pilots
so they didn't need
pressurization up to 15,000 feet?
Imagine how many more jets we could have.
So they developed the basic
algorithms to do this.
- [Brian] Very cool.
So I would be very interested
in that because when I send
my students down there,
it's a thousand dollars a day per student.
If you got 10 students
there, that starts to add up
into your research budget.
So making them hit the ground
and the mountain running,
that would be worth a
couple thousand bucks
for each student over the
course of their career.
- [Dave] The other thing that
would probably be profoundly
effective, I haven't seen
it studied specifically
for acclimatization,
but it's a very similar,
it's basically a high
intensity interval training
for the oxygen receptors on your cells.
It effects how easily
hemoglobin, the oxygen carrying
molecules in your blood,
how easily it lets go
of oxygen when cells demand it.
Essentially that's what's
happening with acclimatization.
There's some other things too, but.
We do something called let's
see, we call it intermittent
or high intensity
intermittent hypoxic training
in Santa Monica at Bulletproof
Labs at the Beverly Hilton.
What you're doing is you're
riding an exercise bike
breathing air that has no oxygen.
But now it's under load.
The thing I talked about before
was just sitting at a desk
watching Netflix, sort
of wanting to pass out.
But now you're under load
and it changes things
much more dramatically.
So you switch from no oxygen
in the air you're breathing
and then you switch to 100% oxygen.
It takes about a half hour to do this
and it is an intense workout.
It's just you're pouring
sweat, you don't even know
what's going on, you're
a little bit dizzy.
But it forces your cells
to be able to react to more
rapid changes more rapidly.
That is a very potent mitochondrial
enhancement technology
and we've measure that with
some of the gear we have there.
But the point here is
there's all kinds of things
you can do that will effect high altitude.
We've actually had one of
the big organized camps
climbing Everest send
photos of Bulletproof coffee
from base camp because they're saying oh,
turns out that Tibetans knew
something when they were
putting fat in liquid like that.
We also know--
- [Brian] And they go
up there without oxygen.
They're up there without oxygen--
- [Dave] Yeah, no oxygen, no vegetables,
what are you gonna do?
Well, butter.
But there's also the fact
that you need more glucose.
It's easier to burn glucose than ketones
in a low oxygen state.
So maybe you want to be
ketogenic before you go there
you want to put some
brain octane in your stuff
to get some ketones because
it's nice to have them,
but maybe you should have
a little bit of raw honey
or switch to some more starch.
I don't know the full answer
there, but it seems like
people in the ketogenic state
do very well at high altitude.
- [Brian] Yeah, all those ideas
I think are really valuable.
As I said, just practical
costs to going up there
and then you know it's a really
weighty thing to think about
and I don't like to think about it,
but there's a decent chance
that someone will die
building this experiment.
Simply just taking the tables
for people that have died
in the construction of other
high altitude telescopes.
That's not lost on me and
you know, whether it's a car
accident, as recently happened
in Chile on the telescope
project and usually it's an accident.
It's not something that
could have been foreseen,
but who's to say if a
little bit extra brain boost
if that could have avoided it.
I'm not a medical doctor,
although I do prescribe medication
to certain people, but the--
That's legal now in California. (laughing)
But the thing is, you know,
could you, could you actually
prevent the loss of a life?
That's a really weighty
thing that I think about
quite frequently.
- [Dave] I believe that
any time we're in academia
if you can do something to
make brains work better,
especially something that's not harmful,
that you're wasting your
tuition if you're not doing it.
In fact, I don't thing I've
ever talked about this,
back in 2003, I was at Wharton,
long long before Bulletproof.
Long before Bulletproof started,
I started as a blog basically, 2012.
I'm looking at this, call it
a senior thesis for an MBA,
it's not really a thesis,
but it's a big project.
I put mine together around
this idea that I was going
to create cognitive enhancement compounds,
what we call smart drugs
in neutropics today,
and I already knew how to do it.
I took them to get through school.
I said no one markets these to
parents of college students.
You just spent 100,000 dollars
sending your kids to school
you should send them a
bottle of this stuff because
their brains will actually work better.
The name of that product was
going to be Unfair Advantage,
which is a name of one of
the mitochondrial enhancers
that Bulletproof.
- [Brian] You still
have it, you use it now.
- [Dave] Yeah and the funny thing is,
my proposed ad campaign
was "It's Good to Cheat".
I'm saying hey, you take
these drugs, maybe you don't
have to study as hard, not
drugs but these herbal things.
The professor was like that's
really good but we hate it.
It's so bad, it's so dirty.
Like, could you not say that!
But that was my idea and
I ended up not doing it
because I decided I would
well, go through a breakup
and then go to Tibet and learn
meditation from the masters
instead, which worked out all right.
- [Brian] Yeah, I think
things turned out okay.
- [Dave] Yeah, just that idea
that cognitive enhancement
belongs in academia
more than anywhere else
because I mean, students do
two things when they're young.
Let's learn how to have
healthy adult relationship
and let's learn how to learn.
Professors, I feel for you.
For five years I ran a program
at University of California
teaching working engineers
how to build internet stuff.
- [Brian] Right, at Santa Cruz, right?
- [Dave] Yeah, it kicked my ass!
Just the level of demand, I
was exhausted after a lecture.
Do you get exhausted
after a lecture like that?
- [Brian] Yeah, although it
also gives me energy as well
because you're performing,
you're a theatrical character,
an actor, and how often in
society do you get to do that?
You know, professors aren't
known for diminutive egos
right, so we like to be up on stage.
But it is exhausting and you
do, you kind of come out of it
a little bit drained from the day.
So I only do it later on in the day.
I don't like to use up all
that will power in the morning,
so to speak, and just try
to get some other productive
work done then I put
everything I have midday
into teaching.
Then try to wind down.
That's really the hard
part and I think you know,
in terms of lifestyle enhancement.
Well, first of all, I think a
lot of students would benefit
from proper sleep, not more
sleep as you always say.
But you know, kind of proper
sleep and obviously getting
rid of alcohol would be a
huge plus for most students,
but I also believe that they
should, just as they you know,
they should delay gratification
in some other ways,
I think most college
students, and I'm a professor
saying this against my
own financial interest,
they benefit from not going
to college for a little bit
and actually working in--
'Cause think of how much you,
having experience in the business world,
then also academia,
then back into business,
you might not have appreciated it.
If you went straight through to your MBA,
right after college or
whatever, you might not be where
you're at necessarily, maybe you would,
but I think kind of, they say
the human brain isn't really
fully mature until age 25,
which is why you can't rent
a car most places until you're 25.
They expect your brain
needs to be fully mature
before you can drive a
used 1999 Hondai I guess.
But in any case, the maturity
level that you approach
college students with,
and I've noticed this,
'cause I teach in something
called the Osher Lifelong
Learning Institute, which is
found at many universities
around the world.
Any of your listeners over
age 50 should take advantage
of this if there's one locally.
They have professors like
me who come in and give
either a series of five
classes or maybe just one class
called a master class, and
we teach about a subject
that we're really passionate about,
try to cram an entire
semester's worth of learning
into four weeks or one
week, depending on how long
the classes are.
I get 190 elderly people,
from 50 on up, I don't think
50 is elderly, but anyway,
that's the cut off.
They appreciate it so much more.
They're like oh, I wish I
had you when I was a kid,
an 18 year old.
I think well, you probably
would have you know,
not benefited just as my
18 year olds don't really
care about it.
We just appreciate so much
more later when you look back
at the life of the mind and how,
just how much of a privilege
it is to be in academia,
as I am, to dedicate my life
to learning and teaching.
It's interesting, the word in
Russian, you mentioned Russian
scientists earlier on, the
word scientist in Russian
means someone who is taught.
It means that basically
this person was taught
by somebody else.
So from that etymology, what did we learn,
it means science is kind
of an oral tradition
that's passed on,
received wisdom tradition,
that also requires that you
pass it on in the future
to pay back the debt that
people that passed it on to you.
I feel very honored to play
a very small role in that way
and in the course of my
research, I've been honored
to create 10 PhD students
and I've got another nine
in the tank now to get their
PhDs in the next few years.
One of my students, when she
graduated, she made a plaque
for me and I have it,
a replica in my book,
and it shows my genealogy
going back to the 1500's.
It's just so amazing to think
about I'm just this one person
in this 17, 18 generation
long 23 and Me kind of version
for academia.
It's an awesome privilege and
it's a wonderful experience
to have as well.
- [Dave] That goes back to
your Talmudic perspective
on the pocket full of dust?
There's a lot of stuff that
feels like ti really matters
in the overall scheme of things.
I had someone I interviewed
that what do you want
your legacy to be?
I thought about that.
Do you know what you
want your legacy to be?
- [Brian] Yeah, yeah I've
thought about this a lot.
For me, I have a lot
of children, thank God,
and I've got a lot of students.
I think they're basically the same.
Teaching somebody is an act of love.
It's an act of trust.
It's an act of vulnerability
and it's an awesome responsibility.
Especially in this day
and age and I do feel like
that is my mission in
life, is to create souls,
so to speak or lives, and
to help people become--
My goal is for them to all
be more successful than me.
I mean, who looks at their
kid and says I hope they're
not as good as I am.
I want them to have a
worse life than I have.
No, you never say that.
You want them to have a
better life than you have.
So not only does that apply
to my biological children,
but applies to my ideological children.
I want to create as many souls,
as many lives as possible
and I want them to
surpass me every which way
that they can and be
that force multiplier.
You know, if you think about
it, everyone, let's say,
I don't know how many employees you have,
but if you spend a little
bit of time teaching them,
this act of love, and it
increases their throughput,
their efficiency 10%.
It might take you two hours
and that's a lot of time,
but if they work 2,000 hours a year,
you're going to be adding
thousands of hours over the course
of time just from you
investing a tiny bit of energy
into the teaching process.
So imagine that biologically
for your own children
and for your ideological children,
people that you work with.
So that's my goal, that's my legacy.
I hope that I create a lot of children.
- [Dave] Brian, that's a beautiful answer.
Mine was, I actually don't
care if anyone knows my name
other than my close friends
and family after I'm dead.
It's not what it's about.
But I do care very deeply
about making the world
a better place.
But it's not so I'll be remembered.
It's because it's what makes me happy.
I see the system and I want to hack it.
So that's what I'm gonna do.
- [Brian] Right, exactly.
I look at it and I saw you
know, you can change the Russian
language term from scientist.
Hacker could be one who was hacked.
You hack your biology.
I think it's a worthy goal to take on.
- [Dave] All right, one more
weighty question for you
before we get up on the end of the show.
And it's okay if you
want to skip the answer.
We touched on human consciousness,
we touched on the
beginning of the Big Bang,
we touched on your Jewish heritage.
Atheism, science, belief in
God, can they coexist or not?
- [Brian] Oh, it's one
of my favorite subjects
to talk about actually.
I sort of this annoying
aspect of my personality
that I like to be--
- [Dave] You're a
physicist, you have many.
(laughing)
- [Brian] That's right,
I was gonna say infinite,
innumerably infinite, and
one of those is that I like
to give grief to people on
both sides of the religion
science debate.
I like to say that in
my own personal opinion,
although I do practice
Judaism, I attend a synagogue,
my kind of philosophy guiding
philosophy is Judaism,
I've had this conversation
with Freeman Dyson,
who's one of the greatest
physicist of all time,
as I said Sir Roger Penrose.
They agree with me in
that the most native state
for a scientist, someone who's
a curious researcher scholar,
is to be in agnostic.
Now, most people think of
agnostic as oh, I just don't know
and I'm kind of wishy washy.
But really, those are atheists.
They just don't have either
the courage or the inclination
to call themselves atheists, right.
'Cause they're not going
to the same church that
Richard Dawkins doesn't go to either.
It's like, you can't tell
a difference between most
agnostic, you know, they're
not really agnostic,
'cause they're not actually
learning or studying
or really participating in
this theological tradition.
Now, do I raise my kids that
they should stone an adulterer?
No, but I also don't think
of it as sophistically
and simply as look, these
are different things.
The word science itself, not
in Russian, but in Greek,
science means knowledge.
What it does not mean is wisdom.
So when I read a book by the
late great Steven Hawking,
I get a lot of knowledge.
I learn new things, I learn about science
and it stimulates my brain.
What I don't get is wisdom.
It's not a textbook, a
brief history of time,
it's not something I'm gonna
use to raise my children.
I'm not gonna use it for teachable moments
and lessons and parables,
the way I would use it.
And you know, you were
talking about your legacy,
so one author I heard once
said, "I would trade 100 readers
"a year from now for one
reader 100 years from now."
In other words, I hope my
book is completely outdated
in most realms, the scientific
content, in 100 years.
But I hope the wisdom
within it is permanent,
it sort of endures.
So too, if you look at the
bible, the bible's the best,
you know I wish I had 1%
of God's sales numbers.
(laughing)
It's the best selling book of all time
and there's a reason for that.
It has a depth of wisdom, which
I don't think is available,
the psalms say, the beginning
of wisdom comes from
the belief in God, but
I also feel like people
put a little too much faith in God.
So my really religious friends
will say when it's raining,
they'll say oh God makes it rain.
No they didn't, it caused a
condensation event occurred,
a nucleation on a dust grain that causes
and where did the water come from.
Oh God made the water.
No, not exactly.
I mean, God made, you could
say hydrogen oxygen make water.
I keep pushing that chain
of logic back and I say
at the ultimate, you'll get to
a question, the question why.
The answer will be because
and we just don't know.
But that doesn't mean
we should stop thinking.
That's what makes it so nice.
I can be an agnostic, but
I'm a practicing agnostic.
I'm a devout agnostic to
really answer your question.
I think its, I can hold
my own with either side
of the debate and I don't
really feel like it's so much
of a debate after all.
I think that kind of sells
and there's a little sizzle
in that but ultimately, both
things, science and religion
are quests to find ultimate answers.
But they don't overlap each other.
They're not necessarily
related to one another.
So for that reason, they
can certainly coexist,
the same way you can be
interested in meteorology
and the history of the National
Basketball Association.
- [Dave] That's a very
beautiful and nuanced answer.
I stand with you there.
If you think you know the
answer 100% on either side
of that, well, any scientist will tell you
you can't really prove
the lack of anything.
- [Brian] That statement takes faith,
it takes a lot of faith to make
the statement that you know.
- [Dave] It sure does.
So if you're a scientist
who's on either side of that,
really I like to stop using
the small s in science
and use a big s, like you do for religion,
because you're practicing a religion.
The bottom line is we're
pretty darn sure that
this is the nature of
reality, one way or the other,
but once you stop being
curious about it you stopped
the first step of the scientific method,
which is observation. (laughing)
If you believe your hypothesis
so fervently you will ignore
your observations, you're
doing science wrong.
That's why I--
- [Brian] Yeah, I agree completely.
I mean, when you suffer from
kind of this bias towards
authority and the worship the
great atheist or you know,
it's very, it comes to me and for me,
it was worship of the Nobel
Prize, which came down to
basically an idolatrous
quest to get a tiny golden
engraved image as a way
to validate my self worth
as a scientist.
I realized it had a very
destructive effect on my soul
on on other young scientists as well.
So I came to see the
pursuit of the Nobel Prize
as a religion of its own,
except its adherents are mostly
atheists when it comes to formal religion.
- [Dave] Where does your
self worth come from
now that you've seen the
fallacy of chasing a prize
that probably won't make you
happy even if you get it?
- [Brian] I realize that
the thing that I like to do
the most, it'd kind of
like with your kids,
when they solve a jigsaw puzzle
or they do a Rubik's cube,
and then they'll do it again.
It's like why do they have to do it again,
they already did it.
But they'll do it again
because every time they do it
they get a tiny little
spark of that excitement
that they felt when they
solved it the first time.
When you solve a puzzle in your
lab, it's like when I solve
a puzzle in my lab, it
gives me a taste of solving
a puzzle, of solving you know,
finishing that cross word
puzzle, you don't just stop.
That's not the end of it.
I keep doing it.
That to me, is addictive and
I'm unapologetic about it.
I think it's a healthy
addiction to have, to want to
increase this...
It was called by John Archibald Wheeler,
one of the greatest scientists
of the 20th century,
he called science is basically a battle.
You're living on an island
and the island is called
knowledge and the ocean
that surrounds the island
is called ignorance.
As you expand the island,
the size of the island gets
bigger, the coast line that
divides the ocean of ignorance,
that boundary gets bigger
too, but the area increases
faster than the
circumference, so to speak.
What he said it's our job to
figure out as many puzzles
as possible and I like to do that as well.
I think it's a very healthy
thing to want to solve.
That's my motivation as a scientist,
and then of course that's only
part of my overall identity.
I think a lot of what I see
myself as now as this sort of
getting older as a scientist,
is to be a role model
in the sense of making sure
people are doing science
for the right reason, as I
said, not for the pursuit
of this very capricious goal.
- [Dave] Brian, final
question on the show.
I've been asking people
the question that became
game changers and really
my quest for wisdom
from many many people and
just stilling it down,
but I change the question
because I've been running
an anti-aging group, you know
my number is at least 180.
How long do you think you're gonna live?
- [Brian] Well, I don't know how long
I think I'm gonna live.
I often think about you
know, would I want to know
the day I'm gonna die.
Like would you want to know that?
You might want to because you
might want to change that.
- [Dave] I would just hack it.
Sure tell me, you're wrong!
Anyway. (laughing)
- [Brian] So I would like
to live as long as possible.
Actually, and that
could be the upper limit
of human longevity.
I would say you know, if I
delude myself I could live
to 112 'cause I think
that's the oldest lifetimes,
with quality of life.
I think you know, you could
probably put make someone
a vegetable and they
could live pretty long.
But I would say quality of
life and having intellectual
capacity to appreciate it.
I'd want to see all the
scientific discoveries
that are coming in the future.
Not just from what I do
but from the infinite array
of brilliant people around
the world that are just as
driven, motivated, and passionate as I am.
I want to see what they
come up with because it's
not at all obvious to me
and this might be a topic
for another time, that there
is even life that exists
throughout the universe besides us.
So this might be the only
planet, not only that has life,
this might be the only planet
where life has ever existed
in the 14 billion year
history of the universe.
That to me is not terrifying.
It's actually very inspiring
because it makes me want
to live forever in a sense
and learn as much as possible
during the time of quality
of life that I hope to have.
- [Dave] Beautiful answer.
Brian thanks for being on the show.
Your book is Losing the Nobel Prize.
It's actually worth reading
for that wisdom thing
we talked about.
It's also worth reading if
you're in business or academia
or science and you just don't
understand why dumb stuff
happens in science.
I think there's a pretty
good explanation of what's
going on behind the scenes
before something hits PubMed,
before something hits Science
Daily or any of the websites
you probably go to on occasion
if you listen to the show.
There's so much going on
and I get to peek into that.
I'm not a full time
academic by a long shot.
So talking to Brian here today
has been illuminating for me
and reading his book,
Losing the Nobel Prize,
it's worth your time.
It's an easy read and it's
exciting and you just wouldn't
believe that the world is the way it is,
well from a cosmology
perspective, but also from a
here's what's happening when
you're not looking perspective.
Thanks for your work Brian.
- [Brian] Thank you so much Dave.
- [Dave] If you liked today's
episode, there's something
easy you can do to say thanks.
You can leave a review
on iTunes for the book,
for the show, and pick up a
copy of Brian Keating's book,
Losing the Nobel Prize.
If this episode appealed
to you because reading
or listening to a book like
that is one of the fastest
ways to put good stuff in
your brain instead of junk.
Have an awesome day.
(electronic music)
