Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The Realistic Future of AI w/ Brian Keating

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

In this episode, Peter and Brian discuss asteroids, multiverses, and how AI will impact the universe.  Brian Keating is a renowned astrophysicist, cosmologist, inventor, and author. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego and director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination. Keating's groundbreaking research on cosmic microwave background radiation has earned him prestigious awards, and his book "Losing the Nobel Prize" has received critical acclaim.  Subscribe to his Youtube Channel. Follow  Brian’s Podcast, INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE, on Apple devices  https://apple.co/39UaHlB, Spotify spoti.fi/3vpfXok, Audible it’s here: adbl.co/3MeLPTj or,  briankeating.com/podcast _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Moore'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 intelligence, you know, GAI, whatever you want to call it, AGI, without pain? Are we as, 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 redound to us in that it is a mirror. I love when you geek out like that. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm about to dive into a podcast with a dear friend, Brian Keating, an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, an inventor. He's a professor of physics at UC San Diego, and he's also the executive director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for 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 a 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. Clarke. I 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 O'Neill colonies orbiting the sun? Ultimately, this is a conversation for the nine-year-old kid in you who's excited about the future of humanity in space, the discovery of intelligent life, and really a conversation around the potential for human imagination. All right, let's dive in with Dr. Brian Keating. Hey, Brian. Peter. Good to see you, buddy. It's been a while.

Good to see you. Yeah, you were my first big-name guest on the Into the Impossible podcast when I started it in earnest in 2020. I started it in 2018 with Freeman Dyson as my first guest, but we didn't record video. And I really didn't amp it up until you came on and gave me the patented Diamandis bump. Well, my pleasure and pleasure to have you reciprocate here and to talk about subjects that I dream about and I love. You know, I've gone hard over on longevity, but the nine-year-old kid in me is still very much all a space cadet, for sure. Likewise. And, 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.

And it's almost 11 years old, I think. That is amazing. I remember when you and Eric Verri 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 love his stories, love his work, and anything I could do to perpetuate his vision and his ability to foretell the future was something I wanted to do. Yeah, there's so few people like him around and historically speaking, both for his scientific kind of science fiction output, but also his quips.

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 he said, of course, the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. 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 for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. So I like to lay that on my department chair. There's lots of great quips, right? And it's like, in the beginning, when something's first presented, it's a crazy idea. And then the second stage, it's, well, it might work, but it's not worth doing. 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 a revolutionary idea is, you know, people say, I told you that was a great idea all along. It was my idea. Yeah. And, you know, I'd love to share,

if you don't mind, my memories of him, because I met him. Yeah, I met him when I was 21 years old. I was at MIT as an undergrad, or I was 20. And Todd Hawley, Bob Richards, David Webb, and I went to the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. It's the first international trip I had done my own. And it was a big deal. I was chairman of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS, at the time. And it was incredible when I went there and there was this giant conference in the middle of Vienna on space. And this was the height of the Cold War, right?

The Reagan Star Wars initiative is going on. And I walk into this hall and there is Arthur C. Clarke with a group of people around him holding court and 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 so Bob Richards and Todd Hawley goes, oh my God, it's Arthur C. Clarke. Let's go talk to him. And so we go and we stand around and we start a conversation with him. In the middle of the conversation, he just leaves. He just takes off. And I'm like, how rude that I'm really pissed. And so we end up going to hear his presentation. And he's on stage, you know, in this UN-like forum, you know, up in the dais.

And I lean over to Todd and Bob and I say, he's going to take us out to dinner. Because he was really rude. I was just so convicted about that, such conviction. route. I was just so convicted about that, such conviction. And so afterwards I go up and I find him and I say, you know, Mr. Clark, I would love if my colleagues and I could take you out to dinner tonight. And 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. He just thought we stopped talking. But he ended up becoming the chair of our advisory board at Students for Exploration and Development of Space. And we 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 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, 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 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.

Thank you, Sam. and then there's people I want to talk to, right? So you're one of the latter. Thank you, Sam. We always open the show, our show, with his actual voice saying, open the pod bay doors, Hal, from 2001, A Space Odyssey. And of course, the iPod got its name from the pod bay in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, A Space Odyssey.

So very closely related, a direct through line from podcasting to Sir Arthur C. Clarke that I don't think most people appreciate. Yeah. Well, a lot emanates from his storytelling and his stories, his books are still as relevant today as they always have been. What do you think he'd make of the kind of singularity that seems to be approaching, to quote your good friend, Kurzweil, with AI. I mean, I've listened to a lot of your Moonshots podcast lately, and they've rightfully been – I think you are perhaps the go-to source for some of these great conversations with leaders like Samir Khan and other folks that you've talked to and of course you've talked intimately with Elon.

You're the only person, Peter, I think that Elon never responds to sarcastically to kind of – he says like, I love your optimism, Peter. And I think if he said that to anyone else, they'd be like, what the hell did I do to deserve his wrath? But anyway, what do you think Arthur would think about things like chat GPT? And I'm using it for teaching. I'm using it for basic typesetting and research functions and coding. It's really blown me away. On the other hand, it needs more supervision than my twins do on a daily basis. So as a father of twins, you know the pleasures of twins. But tell me, Peter, what do you think Arthur would think about?

I mean, if you can invoke his natural intelligence. I think he would view humanity birthing a new species. I think that we are in the process of evolving not just one, but two new intelligences. One is AI on its own, whatever you want to call it, 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 cortical columns in our neocortex and doesn't work the same, but there is a level of intelligence and growing intelligence there. And we're also giving birth to a hybrid, right? A human AI hybrid. There will be those humans who choose not to go on the journey, those that merge with

technology and those in AI on its own. I think that's fascinating. And one of the questions I've been pondering, 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, does, does it have to start with biological life always, and then biology leads to silicon or, you know, pick your favorite substrate materials? Yeah, I mean, I've been wanting to talk to you about that as well. First of all, you said something I think recently about, you know, kind of the pathway forward and how the age of abundance has taken us away from, you know, using whale oil and so forth. As I point out in my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, that was really obviated and superseded by the development of petroleum. And that was really the purview of Alfred Nobel and the construction and mining operations that

dynamite enabled. But I wonder, you know, if you think about it, and I'll just put it out there, the development of a solar panel in some ways might require whales. In other words, there might be some inevitability that you have to go through this pathway to get to Kardashev, 10 to the minus three or whatever we are, Dyson level that we're not even approaching. I love when you geek out like that. Yeah, it's fun to get paid to do that, right? And then on the other hand, you know, so there is this sort of inevitability towards the predecessor of primitive technologies. You know, I joked about, well, we needed dinosaurs to get to, you know, petroleum, right? And people, oh, it's not dinosaurs, it's pre-barren. Okay, it's dinosaur life or it's ancient, you know, biological hydrocarbons.

So, is that a necessary step is that is that sufficient step i think there need i think there's no large jumps in the words our ability to need electrons uh would not have happened had we not had oil right in the In the words, we didn't create large dynamos burning whale oil. Whale 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 these large dynamos that created electrons. And then we switched over to an electron-driven tech ecosystem. And then we said, okay, how else can we get more efficient electrons? And that came from solar and soon fusion or micro-nukes.

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. ChatGPT is programmed on a very advanced, you know, programming substrate, which itself is predecessors going all the way back to assembly language. 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 the other thing I'd like to point out, and I'll pose this to you, do you know what Albert Einstein called his happiest thought, Peter? Did 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. Jog your memory. What was it that you experienced with Stephen Hawking? jog your memory well what was it that you experienced with stephen hawking i mean it was it was his joy of of being uh in weightlessness his joy of being free so what was einstein's greatest thought so his great his most happy thought he called this my most joyous thought was that an observer in free fall will experience no gravitational 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 Hans Parr, used to call general relativity, we call it GR, as the greatest accomplishment of Western civilization, not just of mathematical physics, but it was a culminate because it took the work of 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 and free fall? That's going to be the question.

Ultimately, the question you're poking at, which I think about a lot and I ask many people is, 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 AI cannot accomplish? One of the conversations I had recently on the stage at A360, I need to get you there next year, by the way, was with Imad Mustaq, who is the head of Stability AI, one of the top generative AI companies. And he was saying the number one thing that he selects for in his companies and his employees and his partners is passion. And that idea of passion may, in fact, the most important last last stand for humans

and that passion falls into emotions can can computers emulate love and uh and passion and emotions i i i'm sure they will be able to emulate it uh will they be able to exude it where when you as a human are 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. And we can sort of talk about some of the ideas behind why I think that way. It's controversial. 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 the best part about it is I don't believe what I'm saying can be falsified, at least in the near term. So, we can make these predictions and I wouldn't have to pay your famous wagers of sin if I'm wrong. But Nicholas Taleb, you know, in cheerful fashion, as he's known to do, put something out that these tests that are passed by the chat AI engines, the fact that they're passed says more about the test than it does about the advanced ability of AI. normally is, that, you know, I mean, I think a lot of what we're seeing is, you know, it's sort of a mirror, what we're putting into it, like 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 truly artificial intelligence, you know, GAI, whatever you want to call it, AGI, without pain? And, you know, pain is different than love.

You talked about can they love a few minutes ago. I think it's interesting to know can they feel pain, just like Bentham used to say about being cruel to animals and so forth, that the question was not do they have consciousnesses, can they feel pain. And we can talk about that some other time. You've written a lot about the prospects for artificial meat and so forth in the future. And currently, right now, I've talked a lot about that. But let's go there one second, because I do think you can, I mean, what board, negative impulse as a result of an action or a thought

or an activity. And can you create a pleasure pain matrix for a computer that has implications? I mean, one of the things, you know, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, had another conversation with him at A360 this year. And he created a version of a VR headset that had explosive bolts on it that if you died in the game, it would take out your prefrontal cortex, right? And you'd be dead. 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? Could you imagine creating that for an AI as well, where consequences of doing something that caused pain

reduced your resources, access to power or memory or compute. Right, blew a capacitor. And would shut you down at the end, you know, that there would be death and so forth. I believe you could create that in the algorithms that 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've got quantum compute in our microfibrils of our neurons or whether we're something else. I just finished reading a book called Thousand Brains that looks at a theory for intelligence in the mind. I think you can.

I think you can program love and pain into computers. Going back to your original point, though, Brian, today's AIs, today's generative AIs, OpenAI and ChatGPT 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. 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 in a way, the most beneficial use may redound to us in that it is a mirror. So you and I can nerd out about a great many topics from

parenting twins to writing books to space to Arthur C. Clarke, but one of our shared passions is aviation, and we both fly our own little planes around and so forth. So I recall using Microsoft Flight Simulator in 1985. It was back when I knew all the names of all the astronauts that have ever come before. And you would fly through the towers in Chicago. In Urbana-Champaign, and then you'd fly right through the towers. Exactly. And since then, we've moved up, you and I moved up to larger and larger aircraft, you Chicago and Urbana-Champaign, and then you'd fly right through the towers. Exactly.

And since then, we've moved up, you and I moved up to larger and larger aircraft, rather than the Piper Archer that they used to feature in MSFS. Now, we were flying around then, and we'd go underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and so forth, or at least I would. 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 more reality to it. Now, building on what Palmer said, and I think he is a great visionary, he, imagine if in the flight simulator, when you tried to go through, you know, the Golden Gate

Bridge underpass, or between the support cables, and you hit one of them, you got an electric shock, you know, right to the sphincter region or wherever, you could design this, or you had on your helmet, you know, like you got a little, you know, joy buzzer on you. It would, in addition to the level up, you know, reality of it, it would make you more, I believe it would make you more capable to perceive risks. And I think pre-gaming flights. And you'd learn a lot faster. And so another way that I think that AI can help, but I believe it's being hindered. I believe this is true, that Moore's law is sort of saturating.

We can leave aside the GPU kind of use of it, but 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 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 National Laboratory. And in that laboratory, they have, you know, the Perlmutter 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 area of expertise. And also 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 Moore's Law of performance where it really counts, the actual end use, how many actual papers are being written, say, or how many new data sets are analyzed is actually saturating. And I think a similar thing can happen with AGI. And I think it could be A, because of the utility, but B, because of the lawyers. And let me just bring up this fact. So I talked to Eric Topol, a very famous physician down here at Scripps Research Institute, involved in imbroglios with the COVID-19.

We're not going to talk about that. But he has a book, you know, The Patient Will See You Now. And then he has, you know, a book about AI and so forth 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. 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. Let's go back to aviation. When you and I are flying and 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 on a knob on an ancient VHF radio. And then you have to wait, Peter, because you might miss the broadcast of the so-called NOTAM system. You might miss the weather, come in 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. 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. Forget about AAGI. Just imagine there was an Alexa. I actually changed the name of my Alexa 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 changed the

name of it. He's busy right now. 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 VOR. Let's tune in the NOTAM. And then not only would it broadcast visually because we can read things 60 times faster than we can process auditorily, and it would just be a boot. Now, why isn't that available to pilots right now? It's a $29 unit, right? For God's sake.

Well, 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 airway vectors and so forth, it's just uploaded to the computer and I should 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 propagation in that regard. And congestion. When you're talking to an air traffic controller, no one else can use that frequency. It's not even like CDMA where every other, oh, you're completely blocking it, which

is actually a safety risk too, Peter, right? I mean, some terrorist, right, could occupy. Aviation makes medicine look advanced, which is actually a safety risk too, Peter, right? I mean, some terrorist, right? Aviation makes medicine look advanced, which is funny. So I think the humans are the ultimate limit, 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 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 important. High prolonged levels of

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body, part of our future of medicine. Today it's a product that I think 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, you know, I recently gave a few presentations on AI and you 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. And so why is, why now? Why just now? Why 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 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 Moore's law. We're still doubling compute. I just saw Steve Jurvetson just put out a graph that predicts through 2025 that we're just still on Moore's law. It's still doubling every roughly 18 to 24 months. 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. is doubling every year. So the amount of data that we're mining in the world is just exploding. The third, which blew me away, it was the efficiency of the algorithms for training large language models has been over five years, it's been compounding at 99.5% increase efficiency.

And then finally, it's amount of capital flowing into the markets, right? A huge amount of capital flowing into AI and which bringing people to it. And then it's self-referential, right? Because 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, you know, we've got NVIDIA producing more and more powerful compute 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, slow growth and then a rapid period and then

whatever the medium is gets saturated and 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 and quantum technologies that will support AI and machine learning algorithms before the end of this decade. Yeah, I think, you know, 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

you know, there is this excess pleasure that humans get from planning, right? Is we need sort of, you know, and this is now mixing two controversial opinions, okay? One is that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is limited to null, and B, the existence of artificial intelligence is wildly over-concerned, or people are wildly over-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 prospects for truly 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, as I'm teaching cosmology to 45 brilliant undergraduates who will have to listen to this podcast and leave a thumbs up for you on your podcast network as well. No, that's how I grew my subscribers so violently. Those 45 students are important. They are. They're really the best in the known universe. So I told them, 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 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 the discovery of an extra galactic nova in the constellation Andromeda, in the so-called 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 in 1915. So we're talking about 1923. People did not know there were any galaxies outside of the Milky Way. In fact, the Andromeda Galaxy, Peter, is the most distant object a 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 Serengeti Plains. It's just amazing to think about, right?

And you can see it with your naked eye. It's the only extragalactic thing you can see. Not counting the southern hemisphere, you can see the Magellanic Clouds, but they're basically satellites of the Milky Way. Not counting the Southern Hemisphere, you can see the Magellanic 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 L.A., where you are, that there was the existence of a nova, which is an oscillating brightness or semi-regular brightening star, that that can be used as a distance measuring tool using tools that that earlier astronomer named Henrietta Lovett had come up with. So that allowed us to measure this. Now, we've only known that the universe had galaxies other than the Milky Way for 100 years, but we didn't know the universe was expanding. And I show the students the data that were only taken in 1929 by Hubble's associate Vesto Slipher and other people. Now, you look at that data,

and the data are horrible. They're like scattered around. The y-axis is labeled wrong. Instead of being units of velocity, he uses kilometers as units of velocity, distances. 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 misoverestimated 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, and they're 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 your mom is 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 a plot or data that don't have error bars. My biggest beef with the Drake equation, and rest in peace, Frank Drake, who passed away last year, is that there are no error bars associated with it. So I did a talk at the SETI Institute up there in Mountain View a couple years

back, where I went through an exercise and said, how many people are visiting the San Diego Zoo right now? And it happened to be this time of 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, it could be people fleeing the San Diego Zoo. And my problem with both the kind of predictions and catastrophizing about AGI and extraterrestrial intelligence, we don't pay any attention to the error analysis,

which is, as a scientist, the most important aspect of any scientific endeavor. Fascinating. Yep, I agree. And I'm in the midst of these conversations on fear-mongering around AI. My bias has been that AI is the most important tool that humans are creating in order to help humanity solve the grand challenges. And there's been a lot of fear-mongering from Elon and from Bill Gates and from a multitude of other individuals. Now, we have to look at what is the basis for that fear. And like you said, 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 the negative implications of loss of jobs, which is one category. We can come back to that,

and that will have real implications. And like I tweeted the other day, AI is not going to replace you. It's somebody else using AI that will replace you, right? We're going to have an astrophysicist co-pilot, Brian, for you that's going to make your work far more efficient and more rapidly publishable. And if you're not using it, you'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. 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. The second area that we can name is, in fact, the use of AI by terrorists, by negative forces in society, is at the same time that it makes us more capable of solving problems. It enables people to cause problems. So that is a second

part. And 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 AGI, the first thing you bump into, in my mind, is the terrible twos. If you develop a truly artificial general intelligence that doesn't know its own strength and is trying to figure things out and is exploring and playing, could it pick up the heavy object and hit the glass table without knowing what the implications of that are, right? So the terrible twos, the early adolescent version of a AGI could be a problem. And then the extreme is a 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 for the movie her that is like you know 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 did I have to get one of the most attractive women in the world to play a part where she's not even featured in them? I'm sorry, my wife is the second, is the first most attractive woman, but Scarlett has to rank up there. Well done. I'll take notes. So, you know, I don't believe in AI 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 that are unfortunate and making mistakes in its early learning? Possibly. I think I personally believe that intelligence, the greater the level of intelligence, the greater it is in compassion and love and all the positive aspects. I think that the more intelligent people are, the less likely they are to be doing harm to each other. But I do think that in the early days, AGI is going to cause

havoc in the next 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 really happening. And there's there's no sign of it letting up the deep fakes. But, yeah, as you're pointing out, the shallow fakes, you know, the less famous people. And when you have Shirley MacLaine is always reincarnated as someone ultra famous, like some queen of Egypt or whatever, but they're never like, oh, I was the Wash Basin's attendant

in 1920s jazz club. Yeah, nobody ever gets reincarnated like that, right? But no, we worry about them deep faking Elon and he tells you to buy a Dogecoin or whatever, but it's really, yeah, you're right. What is the level of trust that we have 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 – just as video game designers and casino designers and app designers,

all kind of traffic in the same milieu 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, whether, you know, you think the uses are benign because it's for your favorite candidate or not is irrelevant. Yeah. How old are your twins? They're about to 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, one of the concerns I have is the implications of all of this technology on pornography, right? And that where all of a sudden there are no limits. You know, when I was growing up, it was a magazine. But what happens when it becomes, you know, unlimited in its capacity for perversion and such, I think there are interesting, unfortunate ramifications that, that unfortunately, our government is not even thinking about or able to able to contain. And so we have a lot of challenges ahead, which have nothing to do with killer terminators coming. Yeah. And on the other end of the bell curve, you know, it's it 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 encourage people to do that because simply I believe the most, you know, people always say time is the most precious resource because you can't make more time. But Peter, really, we waste a lot of time. I mean, it is true. I mean, you personally 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 because I'm a narcissist. No, I don't do that. That's my job. Not that much. Yeah, not that much.

But then I think about kind of the other end of the bell curve, which are the seniors, which have not only the same kind of vulnerability. And I didn't say what I believe is the most 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, like, what do you regret? And they'll tell me. Dan Holloway is a wonderful man and you should talk to him eventually. And I've had very close friends and relatives that are special forces operators.

And they'll always say, like, I can't undo. I can't unsee what I did while I was in always say, 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 risk life and death, unlike me, a fake doctor who's just risking getting a chalk breaking in the middle of lecture. But these are people who have to have their innocence taken away 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 they're also vulnerable to this. I mean, you think like, I mean, my twins 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 the video. But elderly, you know, they might not be as tech savvy as young people are, it's hard enough for me to keep up with it. So now they get imagine that that combined 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 he is such a mercurial and interesting figure. 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 not just, you know, going to Mars. And as Martin Rees said, you know, Elon wants to die on Mars. I hope he doesn't die on impact. But he's willing to take these risks, 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 you do- Yes, I think that's the current minimum count.

Yeah, when you have Poisson errors, Peter, on a number of kids, you're kind of at the upper limit. But God love them. I mean, he should. He should have as many kids as God or Mother Nature will provide. But we have the situation in astronomy with Starlink, and I have a Starlink unit. But it is causing 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 studied 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 thousands of satellites darkening the sky, there's no way to darken something. Let me just tell you, for those that may not know, there's no way to darken thermal radiation. It makes it worse, right? So I wonder, you know, how do you think he weighs these grand challenges? And it is almost ethical in a sense. Like if he knew you couldn't darken them optically and they were just going to be glowing bright with the, you know, Olbers paradox type brightness, what do you think he would endeavor to do? I think I haven't had this conversation.

I've had many conversations with him. I spent hours with him last Sunday at a friend's birthday party. Next time I'll ask. at a friend's birthday party. Next time I'll ask. But 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. 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, uh, Lagrange points.

It's going to be away from earth's radiation, uh, uh, you know, transmission, um, and that we have a short period of time during which we are burdened by that, that, you know, we're going to be back on the lunar surface in, I don't know, three years time, probably. And that started... With one of the other graduates of UCSD, Dr. Jessica Maier, she may be the first female to land on the moon. Yeah, well, and I'm thinking with Starship going there, probably first delivering. 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, the week of April the 20th. And we'll see. I'm hopefully going to fly in to Boca Chica. And Elon said his goal for that mission is that it doesn't blow up the launch pad. I said, okay, that's a great goal. And we'll see how far it gets. Even if it does, he'll say something like, oh, it's just a scratch. It'll buffer right out. It's so cheerful when these billion-dollar machines explode.

But, yeah. Anyway, so I think that Starlink has the potential to do extraordinary good for humanity. We've seen that in the Ukraine, and it's a new communications layer wrapped around the planet. Yeah, it is causing havoc. communications layer 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 a very niche – there are more NBA players than astrophysicists who study the cosmic microwave background. True.

But it is a window which once closed can never be reopened. And it's actually worse than just the thermal radiation, which would be bad enough because they're moving and they can't easily be subtracted, although we know their orbits. But it's the fact they transmit in the band that we're looking at. So they're equivalent to millions of Kelvin emission, and we're trying to look for nano-Kelvin. Yeah, yeah. No, it's impossible. It's like – Yeah.

But you do agree that if – I mean, what I would be doing as a community is like saying, okay, Elon, fine. But we want an observatory on the far side of the moon. I've often thought about that, of how to approach him. And he is a physicist and he did graduate from, you know, a University of Pennsylvania, one of our close colleagues on the Simons Observatory, the most ambitious and most expensive observatory ever funded to do what we're doing. It's a $190 million project by the time it's done, funded by Jim and Marilyn Simons and the Huizing Simons Foundation, New York and the Bay Area, respectively. And what

we're trying to look for has such incredible ramifications. And 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 citizen of Lesbos was a man by the name of Aristotle. Second only to you, Peter. And Aristotle had- Peter T. Leeson Just 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 understood by Aristotle. And he talks about some of the discoveries, which in the world of physics were almost universally incorrect, Peter. He believed heavier objects fell faster

than lighter ones. He believed there were only four elements. He had a whole host of things that could have been falsified, easily falsified as Galileo did 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 two light things together to make a heavy thing? Shouldn't they fall faster at that point? And of course they don't. So that was just a thought experiment. It didn't require like a large hadron collider. But one of the things that he brought up was, and he was correct about in the natural sciences, was that whales were mammals. And it really wasn't understood until Aristotle came up with that by observing in the lagoons of Lesbos in ancient Greece, this fact, which he observed, constructed a hypothesis, did more observations,

inductive reasoning, and then, you know, came up and utilized this to stroll the scientific method. When you open your podcast, every week I listen to it, you talk about the massive transformative purpose, and you talk about what the goal of the massive transformative purpose is to create a dent in the universe unique to the individual, right? We're at the point now, Peter, where we are actually looking for dents 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 – You went there first, good.

Yeah. This is the most – we have to, as modern 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? Exactly. That's right. So 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 scientific hypothesis or paradigm. It's not even really at the, you know, I would say in the name of Isaac Asimov, a great writer who influenced the name of one of my kids, I'll let you guess which one. 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 quadrupolar distortion to it because of its rotational act. Anyway, getting back to good old Aristotle and this search 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 ages of their own universe. Our universe can exist for another 13 billion years without changing too much prospects for life and so forth. They will eventually come into contact. Let's say they're one light year away from us is another universe. And therefore, that universe, once our universe expands into it or it expands into us, will have some combined Venn diagram 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 another universe will make a physical dent, which can be perceived, according to my colleagues in astrophysics and cosmology, that you'd be able to detect the telltale imprint

of the multiverse by the existence of these certain patterns in the cosmic microwave background that I study. And those would be unequivocal, and you could actually use that to motivate very high confidence the multiverse exists. But if there's an infinity of universes in the multiverse, because I don't think you can say, 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 physically distinct in space. There's a multiverse. And this is all, you know, kind of the numbering scheme is courtesy of our mutual friend, Max Tegmark at your alma mater. And this impact of the multiverse

would be another distinct universe, another level of the multiverse and his nomenclature or, you know, counting scheme, there's four different levels. 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 what's called the vacuum state in phase space of different models of string theory, which is a number which is effectively infinite, as Max has pointed out. Actually, the number is finite. It's 10 to the 500th universes. Max has shown that once you get above 10 to the 80th, which is, you know, no small number either, that you also effectively are in an infinite universe where you'd have infinite copies of, or effectively infinite copies of events and people and so forth. So, you're right. 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 would have been occurring constantly all the time everywhere, unless they're out of phase in some fashion, or I guess out of phase the way i could 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 to colonize whatever but the uh but the important fact to note is that it's very large so so that when milky way galaxy combines and Milkdromeda, when the Andromeda galaxy, which is only one of 12 galaxies, Peter, out of 100 billion to a trillion galaxies being discovered by Webb and other instruments, there's a trillion galaxies. Twelve of them are not moving away from us. 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 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. It may be extremely rare. That's why I said you can't falsify it. You can't say the lack of observation of these dense— But if you detected it, you could prove it. Yes. I was curious. I was going to ask you the question, how many universes, how many galaxies do you hold in your mind as the current number? 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. You know, one of the fun things was,

I remember Avogadro's number from chemistry. Yep. 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd. You know, one estimate of the number of galaxies and the number of stars gives you Avogadro's number of stars in the universe. So I thought that was fun. And people then use that 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 contract that we both signed to have this product. But let me just get back. We don't even know how many stars there are

in the Milky Way galaxy, let alone how many galaxies there are total outside of the Milky Way galaxy. And so we make approximations. Has anyone ever given you a star, Peter, in the International Star Registry? Yes, I have. They do? Early on in my life when it first came out, I think I have a couple of those stars. It's an interesting gimmick. Yeah, what I wanted to just tell you is that, you know, speaking on behalf of all professional astronomers, it's absolutely meaningless. Nobody looks up and says, oh, there's the Diamandis HD 24. But that doesn't stop me from having the idea that now we can sell universes in the multiverse.

And so I have the Keating. If you go to my website, Peter, BrianKeating.com, I will let you buy a universe from me in the multiverse. Actually, seriously, I want to make an offer to your listeners. I have these chunks 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. Nope, that's a battery. Sorry. Let me get, let me look around. Here it is. Okay. So, I have chunks here, Peter. This is a chunk of a four billion year old

asteroid that fell. It's a metallic chondrite, it looks like. It's a metallic chondrite, right. So, it fell in Argentina about 6,000 years ago. It was discovered in the 1500s, and it was brought to Earth the old-fashioned way by gravity. But if you have a.edu email address and you sign up for my mailing list, bryanketing.com slash list, you will 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 to really bring free education as you do so wonderfully. So, I believe education is the sine qua non of humanity and what we do exquisitely well, and which doesn't actually need a university. And don't tell Gavin Newsom, my boss, but I would do the job I do for free. I'm a public school employee, so I don't get paid

all that much, 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 me. I recently translated, or not translated, recorded the first ever audio book by Galileo with Frank Wilczek, also of MIT, and Carlo Rovelli and others. And this book, I realized in doing it, has a million words, three characters. It's like a play. Galileo was a phenomenal writer. You can get a copy also on my website of the audio book. BrianKeating.com, just to reinforce in people's memory.

And so 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 it really wasn't as prominent 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 replaced by Galileo in the form of an AI, which is easy to do now. And the fact that nobody has done that yet is kind of giving me an opportunity to do it. 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 – because nothing is more abundant than free digital – I mean we can just – the five Ds, right? We can just democratize it and demonetize it. And that's what I want to do. So

in particular, the.edu folks, 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 so on. So anyway, I 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 to demonetize it as much as I can. Yeah. And if there's two massive disruptions that's occurring this decade, it will be education and healthcare, right? COVID was a tipping factor. I don't think we were going to see the full implications of what occurred as a result of the shutdown for the next, you know,

five years. But we're going to, there is a massive reinvention of education and a massive reinvention of the health care industries, both of which are unfortunately performing very poor per dollar invested. Okay, now the single most important conversation that one could have is, is there life out there? Is there intelligent life out there? And 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 keating says no we are the only ones out here we are alone do not screw it up you know please you're speaking of intelligent life technological life yeah technological life uh you're you want dolphin swimming through the you know the the uh salt pools of pools of Titan, that would not count.

I believe that is possible, but I'm strictly speaking about intelligent life. I think that makes the odds of me winning this debate much higher. Okay. On the other side, Peter Diamandis is no. Intelligent life is ubiquitous in the universe. It is a forcing function that comes out of the laws of physics. It's reverse entropic, and it is something which we're just beginning to understand. All right, you know, boxers, take your corners.

Let the debate begin. We need a neutral party. Since you're younger, smarter, and better looking than me, you're first. All right, Peter. I've had two, like, peak experiences in my life in terms of my career as a scientist. One has involved launching rockets into space to look for the signatures of first stars and shooting a Nike missile out of White Sands Missile Range and getting clearances and so forth together.

The other peak experience is going to Chile, 17,600 feet above sea level in the Atacama Desert, there is life. And in Antarctica, 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 feet above sea level. I've gone there. Every time I go there, one of my kids asks me to bring back a penguin, you know, because he likes – 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 – no, he doesn't eat them. He just loves them. He thinks they're the cutest things in the world. So there's a couple of penguins. There are a couple of giant – like imagine a seagull on steroids, like just inflated up, like Jocko Willink flying through the air. 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 there. And in fact, 100 years ago, 112 years ago, humans made it there for the first time. And then it sat dormant for 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, 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 connected to this calculation that you did a few minutes ago, which is, you know, avocadero's number. Sometimes I call it a guacamole because it's Avocado's number. But 10 to the 23rd, that's just basically 10 to the 24th, take a trillion

stars in each galaxy, a 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 life had to get to, to get to be technological. And 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 your.edu listeners one of these meteorites for sure. I will not send them the little tiny fleck of Mars that I got a long time ago,

also purchased legally through proper channels, not collected by some rover. And that flake of Mars meteorite cost more than a 10-kilogram fragment of these metatalichondrites that I will send to you. Anyway, that came to us from Mars, the more expensive one. So that means Mars and the Earth exchanged materials. And in fact, you can buy, if you get a sample of the moon, Peter, collected by the Apollo astronauts, you will go to jail for many, many years as a felony. If you get one on eBay, which I've collected them,

you'll just 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 Earth from Mars, stuff from Earth carrying tardigrades or what have you can go to Mars. So first of all, the non-observation of all the time, which means not only can stuff come 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 it the facundity factor, how probable with life pre-existing to find a birth, a place of residence residing in the solar system. It is exquisitely low. We don't know exactly. It's very difficult to quantify it because as our friend Carl Sagan, I haven't had

on the podcast, but I had his widow, Ann Drurian, and his daughter, Sasha, who are both lovely women. I had the first mother-daughter team ever in podcasting history in the sciences, I believe. Anyway, as Carl Sagan said, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, or somebody said that. He could have said it. What I'm saying is, 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 hydrocarbons. It had to go from rather hydrogen than carbon and so forth. It had to form on a rocky planet, perhaps. It may not have to be

even carbon-based. It could be silicon-based. Let's ignore that we had whales, as we discussed earlier, and that led to, and we had prebiotic algae and so forth that led to the existence of oil and petroleum. Let's ignore, 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 inbound asteroids, which this thing came from before it impacted the Earth, and sucked up the real killer planet, planetesimals that could have destroyed the Earth and all life in it. It has to have a moon

not too close to us and the tectonic activity, spin rate, a diurnal period. 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 happens if you raise 10 to the minus three to the eighth power? You get the same number, 10 to the minus 24. 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 to get to life, let alone, that could be a dolphin, as I said, swimming through a methane pond on Titan, which we don't see. But now to get to, you know, iPhones and technological life, I just think 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 life in the universe, and 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 one seventh of the continents of Earth, and I've been to it. 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. So first of all, we know that the building blocks of life um the basic amino acids uh for even uh even uh nucleotides that make up dna are present in the interstellar medium right we have seen that we've observed observed that through your colleagues in astronomy. So we can say that the prerequisite building blocks that could lead to the early formation of life are out there. And for that reason, any place that has for liquid-based water life that these materials can rain upon has a possibility of creating early life forms. So our planet's 4.5 billion and call the universe 14.5 for round numbers for the moment. 14.5 for round numbers for the moment. So we believe life came into existence on this planet about a billion years after the earth roughly cooled. And so if we look at what the most,

I'm going to be focusing on advanced life. If you look at what the highest 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, after a series of supernovae, I remember I had this conversation with Dr. William Fowler, who won the Nobel Prize for stellar evolution. His estimate was about a billion years after the Big Bang, we would have had enough death birth cycles of stars to get iodine. So let's assume that life will have formed on planets, because I do think that any planet that has liquid water and is within a decent radiation shield,

that the pre-ingredients of life raining on the surface will ultimately lead to some single-cell life life forms, some self-replicating life forms. 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 might have come into existence over the last, let's not say 10 billion years, let's say a billion years. And how far has that come? I mean, the argument that's typically made, you know, Fermi's paradox is where are they, right? If in fact they evolved, where are they? where are they? And I had an experience which was a centerpiece for me here. I was with my dad in Greece at a place called Mount Athos, which was a place of worship, a church up in the

mountains in Greece. And it was six o'clock, and 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 hits the bell to call all of the priests to prayer and in that moment my cell phone rings and i it it was like this cathartic moment i'm like oh my god here is this society 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 gigahertz frequencies. They just don't have 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 percentage of planets that are in the right Goldilocks 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 marconi in the late 1800s to the point where they blow themselves up in a nuclear war that was 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 information-efficient mechanisms that once they're discovered will flip a bit and all of this old stuff goes away. But the other side of the equation as well is at some point, have these intelligent life forms gone and built starships and gone out and explored the universe? And if they have, where are they? Then my mind turns to conversations like, you know, if a life form that was much more intelligent, it could do interstellar travel, I'm sure they could visit the planet and be undetected. I don't think that we would be obviously, you know, and 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. And then the question would be, actually, And then the question would be, actually, at some point, would we become digital? Would we, in fact, not want to physically maintain our bodies and go in starships? Would we upload ourselves? Would we transform ourselves into a technological intelligence that doesn't need to go out and explore physically. So, I mean, these are the questions I have that, for me, the probability in all of these, you know, two trillion galaxies

and a hundred billion stars that we're alone, you know, seems to me a false premise. You know know here's the question I think we're gonna 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 it originated from, you know, panspermia theory, where life has been rained upon the earth and that's where it started.

Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. 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 hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the 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 news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandist.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. Yeah, well, you said a lot of very, you know, I think incontrovertible facts. I mean, one of the things that we talk about in space exploration is looking for water. Well, I'll give you water, you know, that's table stakes. Water is made of the most common element in the known universe, which is hydrogen, and the sixth most common element, which is oxygen. Very easy, very stable.

I'll stipulate that it's been found in craters on the moon and ice form and obviously on regions of Mars. So water is not a problem, even forming the precursors to amino acids. I brought up Willie Fowler who was a very close colleague of two of my colleagues here at UC San Diego, Jeff and Margaret Burbage, who equally I believe deserve the Nobel Prize but we won't get into the politics of why that happened and Hoyle too. Hoyle came up with the theory of panspermia that you mentioned. He also came up with the name The Big Bang. He was a really irascible character. I interviewed his best graduate student, Jayant Narlikar, who's still alive and with us in Pune, India. But at any rate, all these precursors, again, it depends on how you do the error analysis. When you say, I believe, based on this large number, that aliens, you know, there's alien technological life, okay? That's incontrovertible, but you're using as a predicate the kind of phase space of available objects that could 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 Burbidges and Fowler was located here. His name is Harold Urey, and he's the progenitor of the famous Miller-Urey experiment, which when you go through it is very persuasive sounding. And many people have used it. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you know, we talked about it. This is the experiment that lightning caused energetic nucleation of cellular forms of life. Yeah, basically you have a very, you very – an oxygen vessel. You put in some phosphorus. You put in some 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 either some precursors to amino acids or amino acids themselves. But look what went into that. amino acids themselves. But look what went into that. And I'm not even going to get into the theological implications, but, you know, they went down to the chemistry stockroom, which is located here in Urey Hall, and they got a beautifully 99.9, you know, five nines pure, you know, isopropyl alcohol, and they got this thing and that thing, sterilized reagents, sterilized vessels, Bunsen burner at the exact right temperature. You know, it's very different than a stromatolite, you know, in Australia, very different. And there was a mind behind that, there were some people, and I'm not getting into intelligent design. I have my own challenges with that. You can see me kind of go off on people like James Tour and also even on Stephen C.

Meyer, who I consider a friend. But the point is, Peter, that a lot of these things trace back to premises which depend very strongly on what's called the Bayesian prior that you apply. So again, if you say the prior is how many stars that could support how many planets, I can give you any number you like. But it's just like if I said there's seven continents, Peter, so you'd expect a uniform prior for one seventh of all intelligent life on Earth to be in Antarctica. When I go there, Peter, I'm not even the smartest person there. I might be the heaviest person there. I might be the only native New Yorker there.

I don't know. There's only 200 people there in the whole continent. That's bigger than Texas. But why wouldn't you stipulate the same as at the, you know, at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or at the top of the, you know, the troposphere? I mean, there are going to be in a gradation of environments of heat and energy, food densities and so forth, places which are ideal for life to form and places where it's not ideal. And I don't expect there to be intelligent life

across the entire planet. Across every star, right. All it 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 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 Marianas Trench. You can't get from basic materials to the—for forget about going from prebiotic ooze to, you know, I always say going from rocks to Rachmaninoff or from, you know, bacteria to Bach. You know, I have a million dad jokes. That's one of the benefits of becoming a father, right? And so, but the point is, I don't believe, I don't have conviction that just because it's so improbable for technological life to exist throughout the universe that there is none.

But I do believe almost to the fact of quasi-theological conviction, not by you, Peter, but by many people in the SETI game, that this is, it's almost inevitable because the large number hypothesis. And that's exactly what Carl Sagan meant when he wrote with Andrewian, my past guest, in contact that if there is no other intelligent life in the universe, it's an awful waste of space, as Ellie Arroway's dad told her, right? So, and fun fact, that's modeled on a real person, Jill Tarter, who's a friend. So, and fun fact, that's modeled on a real person, Jill Tarter, who's a friend. Yes, I know Jill. She's a wonderful guest. You should have her on.

But the bottom line, Peter, is, you know, there's no saying what a waste of space is. It's a teleological implication. us to have and beg our forbearance that, you know, there is a tendency to extrapolate from, you know, from sort of our own, you know, maybe, you know, kind of pedestrian or parochial observations and say that these are universal things. But I do think you're right, 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 namely that they could travel at the speed of light. extraterrestrial light, as long as it doesn't want to eat, you know, middle-aged, you know, New Yorkers like me with a little bit too much of water, hydrocarbons I'm storing, you know, they say you should always have, you know, six months of money and six months of food on hand. I keep the food on body at all times. But maybe you can help me with that with your medical

training. But so I do believe it's something which dovetails back with where we started, which is that we need kind of a Drake equation to assess the likelihood where we assess the probabilities, the priors, and the Bayesian 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 Drake equation for AI. I think you're right. But I also turn to a recent example it wasn't too long ago that we thought planets were scarce um that in fact the best uh astrophysicist astronomers 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 deemed to be relatively low, even though we live

in a solar system of eight planets and one dwarf planet. Okay, fine. I'll go there. But, you know, But, you know, we're finding planets everywhere now. I mean, all of the observatories 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 to constrain these things, we've been wrong over and over again. I mean, that's my observation of it.

Maybe there's the reverse, which I just don't know of. 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 100 years ago, as you will include in your newsletter this year. And so it's a startling testimony to how brilliant and capable the human mind is. to how brilliant and capable the human mind is. But the bottom, you know, kind of underlying fact is that I think we have to say there is no evidence right now. It doesn't mean that there is no existence, but there's no evidence that we have of anything remotely like that. And for that reason, I think it's almost, 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 kind of a counter examples and present things. Because I think 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 problem because we've never won a major championship in any sport whatsoever. But 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 so forth. 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 the final thing I'll say, Peter, is, you know, do you care about your, you know, 82nd, you know, grandchild to the power two to the 80s? You know, do you care about like 100 generations, 1,000 generations as Will McCaskill talks about? We're in the first inning of an overtime or extra innings game. I mean, I don't know the names of my great, great grandparents, right? It's likely my great, great, great grandchildren won't know my name except for if they tune into the most popular podcast of all time, Into the Impossible. So, but I like to think also, we've explored the local area of the galaxy quite well. And we've, you know, 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 3 million light years away, Peter. And I think it's almost, you know, it is becoming a branch of philosophy at that point.

Could they be existing? Yeah, but what do you really care about? Just like you care about your kids and your grandkids and maybe their grandkids. You know, it's hard to really think about, well, I'd really care if there was a child living in m51 the poster i have behind me the whirlpool galaxy has 86 light years 86 million light years away but there is huge philosophical religious implications to the humanity right it is 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-consciousness 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 wrap up here i can ask you one question as well. Do you want to go first? Absolutely. Turnabout is fair play. You want to go first? Sure.

So as I ask my guests on Moonshots and Mindsets, if I were to fund an XPRIZE for you, the Keating XPRIZE, what would it be? What would you want innovators around the world using their shower time in the morning, their sleep and dream time at night to solve? What challenge? What would they have to build, demonstrate, make happen to win the Brian Keening X Prize? Is the monetary amount unlimited or is it still $10 million? No, it could be $10 to $100 million. You know, 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.

So a lot coming. But, you know, let's put it in that decade. Yeah, it's hard. And I know I'm speaking from a place of great privilege to say this, but, you know, 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 myself and David Spergel and my colleagues Suzanne Staggs, Mark Devlin, Adrian Lee. And this is to really go back to the beginning of time and understand whether or not there was a big bang. We don't know, Peter, if the big bang occurred once, many times, is still occurring. And so I think- I keep on reading that the James Webb Space Telescope has disproven the big bang over and over again.

No, that's all nonsense. They've learned much more than we ever thought possible, and they've built upon what Hubble has been able to do. But there's no sense that they've done anything to do what the clickbait type headlines 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 the Big Bang is a misnomer. As Hoyle 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 are modern 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 cost education to consumers to think scientifically. I think that's the greatest hope that humanity has is to really completely, you know, devalue or de-economic, you know, incentivize what I do for a living. So I'm undercutting my own financial, you know, venal instinct, 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 – we walk around San Diego and thank God it's a very, very healthy economy down here. But we have our share of homelessness. And my wife and I were voyaging around.

And we found at least the homeless have cell phones. You can debate the policy. Is that good or bad? Whatever. They have access to information. They have access to data. They can enrich and better their lives. Peter, we need to do this at scale.

And to make it really scale, as you pointed out to me, we need to make it almost free. And it should be free. It does and it will be. And there's lots going on right now from the Khan Academy and GPT-4 and what Imad Mustaq is doing in Malawi with providing tablets and generative AI education platforms for all the students there. But coming back to the Brian Keating XPRIZE, what would be what's the grand challenge? What's the problem you want to solve? Is it an education? Is it in astronomy? What would you want teams doing, building, creating here? I think it would be to cultivate an education, a global brain that would then turn itself using the power of imagination and curiosity that I, again, contrarianly think are unique to the human species until proven otherwise.

I'm hoping to be being proven wrong. But yes, it would be to effectively to determine a way to make a free university available 24-7, 365.24 to every human being on earth. Because imagine that we had to – imagine that Elon's parents, they never met, right? Imagine – and I know he's had great troubles with his father. I had trouble with my father. But let's ignore that. There's got to be more Elans. There should be some Elanas.

There should be people – the world is vast and the 8 billion people that need 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 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 reading, you know, Abdesalam, Stephen Weinberg, they're incredible contributors, not just to science. Where they excelled in one Nobel Prize is the equivalent thereof. But they have a gift for communication, as Feynman would say. You have to be able to explain it in simple terms.

And as Einstein said, but no simpler. So we have to get to this, raise the baseline level of STEM education. baseline level of STEM education, and that will allow us hopefully to value life, to think of life as precious, preserve the 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. Beautiful. All right. Accepted. Now, your question, my friend. All right. 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 Sir Arthur C. Clarke, your old friend. I never got to meet him. 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 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 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 say, 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 is possible? Well, so listen, I take some extreme positions. 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 break through what has been 120 year, 122 year upper age limit. That there are species of life on this planet, the bowhead 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 a software problem. And we're going to be able to solve that problem. And that the tools to solve those problems are coming online this decade. are coming online this decade. So that's my belief, which I believe is probable. And, you know, could I be wrong there? Possibly. But I think it's a matter of time, not a matter of if. So I guess your question is, what do I think is impossible that I could be wrong about?

So, you know, the challenge is I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what's impossible. I think it's probably impossible for 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 Kurzweil's singularity. I think that we're going to see governments failing as a result of their inability to maintain control. And so that's going to be interesting, the question of whether or not they will be able to reinvent themselves fast enough to stay viable as a government. So that's one element that I think of as kind of impossible. Anything you feel you've been wrong about? Oh, I've been wrong about or you know oh i've been wrong about timing

so i mean you know i started an asteroid mining company a decade ago and 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 chondrites 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'll be interested too if it does come around. A couple billionaires in your corner, won't it?

Yeah, well, I think we're going to see the human species evolve off planet. So one of the questions, of course, I think about is, is it planetary or O'Neill? You know, Gerard K. O'Neill, a friend, a mentor 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 enough genetic pool and a pool of skills in that those colonies would bud like amoeba, and you'd rebuild and you'd go on an exponential growth curve. But rather than get into the deep gravity well of Mars and having to use energy to get off it again. So, you know, I'm much more of a moon and O'Neill colony guy than I am a Mars guy. So, you know, I might be wrong about that. Maybe Mars is the place we need to get

ourselves to. We'll see. I'm like, really? It's kind of, I'd rather colonize the moon and start building, you know, with robots and AIs, O'Neill colonies out there and not, you know, dive back into the gravity well. So, I mean, that's another area of interesting debate. I don't know. Where else do you want to take it? Well, I think in the interest of time, I should wrap up because my young folks, my twins are getting restless, and there's nothing worse than the formidable fours, as you know. Peter, it's been a great delight. It's always a pleasure to your newsletter, which I get and look forward to eagerly devouring. Every time you write something, I subscribe.

I follow you on Twitter and elsewhere. Anything else that would be of interest to our listeners? My handles are at Peter Diamandis on Twitter and Instagram. And diamandis.com is my website. You can learn a lot more. And of course, Moonshots and Mindsets. And Brian, how about yourself? Where can my listeners find you?

And which parts of your life are the most important for them to dive into? Well, I just got one of your final onboarding emails that said, I'll see you in the multiverse, in the metaverse. I'll see you guys in the multiverse of minds. Most places I am is Dr. Brian Keating, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. But the most important thing is really to connect, especially the young people. I wrote several books, one of which is called Into the Impossible, named after Arthur C. Clarke's phrase in this as well. It's really a self-help guide, Peter, of all things. I never thought I'd write a self-help book for my second book. You endorsed my first book, which I'm so grateful, ever grateful for,

and Julianne Guthrie, who writes about you in her book, she endorsed my second book. But I'm really trying to really reach the undergraduate, high school, demographic, college, and even graduate students and postdocs and young faculty because there's a crisis of loneliness and isolation and imposter syndrome. And I talk about – I open the book with my friend who wrote the foreword to the book Barry Barish up there in LA who won the Nobel Prize 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 imposter syndrome when you're 80. And I'm like, you can't possibly have the imposter 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 my first book,

losing the Nobel prize, which you'll talk about some other time. When you win the Nobel Prize, which I'll never find out about because my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, which we'll talk about some other time. When you win the Nobel Prize, you have to sign a ledger that says, I got my check and I got my 24-carat golden medallion. And I'm a curious dude, said Barry. And he looked through the pages and he saw Richard Feynman. He said, oh my God, Marie Curie. Oh my God. And he saw Einstein, same book as me. I'm not worthy. And I said, Barry, guess what? I have good news. Einstein thought he was unworthy. And he said, of who? He said, I felt the imposter 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

imposter syndrome. He said, you got to be kidding me. And I said, Barry, you and I are both Jews, but there was 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 mentor, Jesus Christ, but he failed in many other ways. So Peter, I wrote a lot. I do a lot. Go to my website, briankitting.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 to 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 me with my TEDx talk. You helped me with my book. And I can't

wait till we be together in person like we were when I was writing the book in 2016 with Sean Carroll, who is no longer in Los Angeles, by the way. Well, buddy, a pleasure. And let's not wait that many years again for our next podcast. Let's not. Be well. Great to talk to you. Bye.