Brian Keating on Humility, Chutzpah, and the Arrow of Time | The James Altucher Show

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Brian Keating and James Altucher have an unfiltered talk on humility, arrogance, and the strange mix of traits needed to achieve great things. From the wisdom of the Talmud to the Dunning–Kruger effect, they explore why even Nobel Prize winners wrestle with imposter syndrome. James shares how writing books requires a mix of blind confidence and humility, while Brian connects scientific resilience to obsession, quests, and flow states. The two also talk candidly about the challenges of writing and publishing science books in today’s world—and Brian previews his bold new project exploring Jim Simons, “Chern–Simons Theory,” and the very arrow of time itself. What You’ll Learn Why success requires balancing humility with courage—and sometimes arrogance with ignorance How Nobel Prize winners secretly struggle with imposter syndrome Why writing books demands both blind confidence and ruthless editing The difference between obsession and quest when pursuing success What “Chern–Simons Theory” reveals about time, space, and the structure of the universe Timestamped Chapters 00:00 Humility and Chutzpah in Science 06:35 "Feel Good Productivity Insights" 08:08 Considering Career Change for Fulfillment 10:36 "The Genius of Science" 13:54 Topology Links Time and Dimensions — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter:⁠ ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating⁠ 🔔 YouTube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1⁠ 📝 Join my mailing list:⁠ ⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠ ✍️ Check out my blog:⁠ ⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/⁠ 🎙️ Follow my podcast:⁠ ⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/podcast⁠ — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:57Speaker 02

  Today on the James Altucher Show.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  In order to become the best writer in the world, you have to spend many years as a horrible writer, believing you're the best writer in the world. Because to write a book, as you know, is really hard.

• 1:11Brian Keating?

  I usually tell them, only do it if you'll regret it for the rest of your life. Because that's the regrets of the dying, so to speak.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  I'm going to have a quest. I'm going to figure out what happened at the beginning of time. So now, okay, what are the steps? I'm going to build this. This quest fills me with joy and progress on this quest fills me with joy. And I'm going to make progress and feel joy every step of the way.

• 1:31Brian Keating?

  There are so few books about non-nonsense nowadays, like not about string theory or not about like multiple universes. Most of the science books are about those things because they can't be proven. So the author will never be proven wrong in his lifetime.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

• 2:05Brian Keating?

  So James, there's a famous statement by Talmudic scholars that really echo what I think it takes to be a great scientist is to have both humility and be humble, but also a lot of chutzpah and courage. Because if you're only humble, you won't feel that you can accomplish and take on the greatest warrior of all time, which is Mother Nature. Like, Mother Nature does not give up her secret. It's very hard to win a Nobel Prize, to discover something new, to prove a new law, theorem, or whatever. But on the other hand, if you're only humble, you won't have that swagger. Let's just say swagger, not arrogance, because arrogance gets a bad name. So there's a famous passage in the Talmud, and it says, "A man should have two pockets. In one pocket, he should have the statement from the Bible

• 2:47Brian Keating?

  that the whole world was created for me, just for me. And the other pocket should say, 'I'm nothing but dust and ashes.'" Because if you don't have that, you will not be humble, and you will be arrogant, and then you're prone to the fall. That pride always goes before. So it's very interesting to know that you're also arguing that. In some ways, you are the best writer in the world, right? I mean, let's not be falsely humble, but you're not only the best writer in all categories in the world, right? You wouldn't say that.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Right. But what's interesting there is that, and then this kind of goes side by side with the Dunning Kruger effect. Think about writing. In order to become forever, I'm not even saying about me or anybody, in order to become the best writer in the world, you have to spend many years as a horrible writer, believing you're the best writer in the world. Because to write a book, as you know, is really hard. You have to sit down and write like a thousand words a day for, let's say, hundreds of days. And then, of course, that's before the 18 rewrites to have a finished copy, and combined with the humility to do the editing and the format and everything that's required to put together a book. And then, by the way, your first effort is gonna suck. Like, there's no way

• 3:57Speaker 03

  to avoid it. And I wrote at least three or four books before I would say I even got a glimmer of skill into writing. But every step of the way, I thought I was the best. So I was lying to myself. And you have to be able that Dunning Kruger blindness is so important to excellence. So either you have this kind of humility combined with confidence where you can do that, or you have to be arrogant combined with stupidity in order to do that, one or the other. And so I don't know if it's the Talmudic advice or just being arrogant and stupid at the same time, the Dunning Kruger solution that does it, but you have to have one or the other.

• 4:35Brian Keating?

  Exactly. Yeah, I do believe that, you know, without without equal amounts of both, so to speak, we can't really make any progress. And to me, these laureates that I talked to, I said, you know, earlier, only two of the 22 I've ever interviewed said, yes, of course, I knew I was going to win the Nobel Prize. I should have won it earlier. You know, I won't say who they are, but you know, people might be able to figure it out. But the rest were like, no, I really didn't believe I would win it. Barry Barrish, who wrote the foreword with you on the first volume, he said that he had the Nobel Prize apostle syndrome. In other words, he didn't feel like he should have won the Nobel Prize after he won the Nobel Prize. So like, how bad can it get? Because he thought Einstein was in a different universe than him. He didn't belong in this same, you know, universe, let alone the same book of Nobel laureates as he was in.

• 5:19Brian Keating?

  So, yeah, I think it's important to have those balances. Don't be falsely humble. But at the same time, you know, these, these people are so interesting and so so determined. But my whole thing is like nowadays resilience, like the David Goggins portrayal, when you interviewed him, is just so fascinating. But I don't know that it directly applies. Just, just keep toughing out. I mean, we don't have like Bud's Week, you know, SEAL Team Six and, you know, like you're just in water and freezing water for a week straight and then attrition, you know, just naturally sets in. We do have, you know, kind of qualifying exams and we have, you know, other things meant to, you know, kind of weed out, but it's, it's not exactly like The Hunger Games, the way the Navy is. And nor do I think it should be. But at the same time, you know, people should go into it with open eyes

• 6:02Brian Keating?

  that this isn't like, you should only do it if you can't see not doing it. When someone asked me, they want to go back to grad school, they didn't, you know, they didn't go to grad school after undergrad, as most people do, go through grad school at least. They want to go back. I usually tell them, only do it if you'll, you know, regret it for the rest of your life. Because that's the, you know, regrets the dying, so to speak. Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  And that's true not only for science, obviously, it's true with, oh, should I write a book? Should I not write a book? Should I move to LA and try to become an actor or not? Or, you know, but let me ask you a question, because this is related to my next book, you know. What is the role? There's two ways of approaching success, I feel. One is you become obsessed with something, and you talk about this in your book. You become obsessed with something, and like you say, you can't not do it because you're obsessed and it fills up every part of your brain. It fills up waking time, and that's how you're able to compete against the people. If they're not obsessed, it's not going to fill up their waking time, and you'll, the obsessed person will compete successfully against the not obsessed person.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  But the other thing is, is to approach things like a quest, which is, I'm going to have a quest, I'm going to figure out what happened at the beginning of time. So now, okay, what are the steps? I'm going to build this, this quest fills me with joy, and progress on this quest fills me with joy, and I'm going to make progress and feel joy every step of the way. I mean, they're both really analogies, but what do you think is more important for success? Or what's more interesting to read as a book? The power of obsession or the power of quest?

• 7:31Brian Keating?

  Well, so my friend Ali Abdaal, who's a big YouTuber and podcaster, he wrote a blurb on the back of the book, and his book is called Feel Good Productivity, and he wrote, Professor Keating's book, Surprising Habits: Mental Models and Mindset Shifts, shared by dozens of Nobel Prize winners. Keating reveals the hidden scaffolding of genius and how anyone can adapt it to do their life's best work. It's a masterclass in focus from those who have changed the world. The reason I interviewed him is because he quotes in his book, Feel Good Productivity, Donna Strickland, the famous Nobel laureate who invented Lasik surgery techniques, and who refused to be like you, unlike you, rather, she refused to write the foreword because she's too damn busy boxing her time, doing deep work, as my friend Cal Newport, who also

• 8:15Brian Keating?

  wrote a blurb, very honored to have all these blurbs on the back, but they're all productivity blurbs. And, you know, he says in his book, quoting her, that the most important trait she had was play. Winning the Nobel Prize, he says in his book about her, felt like play. And so I quote that in my book. So in other words, do what passes the time so quickly, do what gets you in that flow state, because you can't, like, I don't know anyone who gets in a, in a flow state, you know, getting a colonoscopy, right? I mean, maybe there are people, it's kind of sick, but, and I'm, thank God that people... People do it. Like, here's an example. I have a good, good friend goes to the same temple I go to. He's a pediatric neuroscientist. That means he deals with kids and he operates on kids that have brain tumors, sometimes they're inoperable, and he has to tell the parents that.

• 9:01Brian Keating?

  I don't think he's ever in a flow state, James. And so now he's like, maybe I should leave. I feel horrible for him. He comes home and he's depressed and he's, you know, and I couldn't do, I hope he doesn't because it would be a blow to the world and these kids, but I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't blame him if he did. But I don't know why he got into that field, you know, in knowing how sensitive he was. Maybe it came upon him less as a kid and more as an adult with his own kids. The thing I would say is, you know, you want to go for that thing that gets you into that flow state that you would do for free because, you know, as they say, do what you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life. And then people say because you'll be unemployed. With that, James, I can't wait to hear about your new book. You gotta come back on the into the, maybe we'll do another one

• 9:43Brian Keating?

  because I do want to explore the attributes of the books because right now, you know, the book sales and book, you know, publishing for science books is very, very challenged and it's kind of unlike any other time in history. Like, I do feel like it's different. You know, there's so much, you know, teaching and nonfiction you can get from AI or from, you know, blog posts. So like, what are the arguments? Why should I write a book about Jim Simons? You know, what's the market like for it? And how do you do it in a way that doesn't dumb stuff down? I never like to dumb stuff down. But that makes it accessible too. So I hope we can talk about that and your new book. What are you thinking about? What's your, what's your inner book publisher and so forth tell you?

• 10:22Speaker 03

  I don't know. It's one of those things where, and this has been happening to me a lot lately. A lot of times, let's say I have to give a talk. Into, I had, I had this happen the other day. I had to give a talk at Google and about two weeks in advance, I didn't really know what I was going to talk about. And I just kept thinking about it and thinking about it. And literally, no joke, three in the morning, I wake up and it's as if the talk is downloaded to me. And this has been happening to me more, it almost, like 10 years ago, if you told me people come up with ideas like this, I would say that's a cliche. But it's been happening to me more and more where I don't. Don't know something and I'm just mulling it over, mulling it over, mulling it over. And then unexpectedly, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and figure it out.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  And so I don't really know the answer. I know the story and I know, I know roughly the story. I know roughly the amazing adventures I've had in the past couple of years and I know roughly how I will tell it. I just don't, it hasn't really fully congealed in my brain yet, but I have faith it will at some point. And get downloaded in some way, but you know, but part of the process is asking these questions to people I respect and want to hear the answers to.

• 11:31Brian Keating?

  Well, that reminds me, in the back of the Nobel Prize in Physics, the front has Alfred Nobel's image on it. And the back is called the genius of science. So the genius was like the spirit, this goddess that would visit you in the night and make apparitions that would then be perceived as basically effortless and so forth. But I think that kind of is, you know, is belied by the fact of how hard it is to write a book, how lonely it is to write a book, how incredibly painful, you know, Hemingway said it's like you sit in front of a typewriter and bleed. Uh, you know, nowadays we have Scrivener or Google Docs or whatever, but a lot of stuff hasn't changed. You know, I talked to my agent and, you know, he's basically kind of like discouraging me. Maybe we'll do this for one more minute because I do have to go and have some birthday cake at some point.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 12:16Brian Keating?

  He told me, he's like, there are so few books about non-nonsense nowadays, like not about string theory or not about like multiple universes, that most of the science books are about those things because they can't be proven. So the author will never be proven wrong in his lifetime. Like Stephen Hawking famously wrote tons and tons of nonsense in A Brief History of Time, which is one of the greatest science books of all times. But it's, it's really, he was a salesman. He knew how to pitch something that he couldn't be wrong about, that would stimulate the mind, that would be perennial seller, like Ryan Holiday talks about, because it would, it would never be able to be proven wrong. It's like predicting cold fusion or something like, you'll always be right. It's always the future energy source and it always will be.

• 12:59Brian Keating?

  In this case, my agent, you know, Brockman, Max Brockman, whose dad is John Brockman, like Titanic.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, name is Agent.

• 13:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so he's a super fa- old New York Jew, you know, kinda agent, uh, just lovely guy, office and, you know, but it's a dying, you know, kinda industry and they're like, I mean, um, their logo is like, has a floppy disk on it, okay. But I love Max and, and he just gives it to me straight. He's like, you know, your book about how the experiment is built, is not gonna sell, no one's gonna care about that, cuz that's like, you, you can understand it and it's like provable and, but if you can write about something that nobody understands, uh, like string theory or, you know, um, my favorite thing is like quantum entanglement. Um, it's funny that you mentioned, I should write this book on quantum computers, because that's actually the one implication where quantum entanglement does take place and people say we do have proof of

• 13:47Brian Keating?

  multiple universes via quantum entanglement as exhibited in quantum computing. I talked with David Deutsch, who's the pioneer of that, on my show. But anyway, um, so now I start to lean towards, well, actually, there is a theory of everything, and it is, it has like nine out of the 10 predictions it makes have been proven, uh, and nobody knows about it, but best of all, Jim Simons invented it, and it's called Chern Simons theory, and it plays a role in many branches of physics, including quantum computing, but even biology, even geometry and other things.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Churn's Simons, C H U R N S, Simons?

• 14:22Brian Keating?

  C H E R N, space Simons, so Chern Simons. Uh, this is the, the main accomplishment that Jim Simons had mathematically before he left and started, you know, in the hedge fund world. But this relates the properties of geometry to the properties of topology. So topology is like this coffee cup here, how many holes does it have in it? Like a pretzel has two, and so if you tried to put a rubber band around it, there are certain, you know, pathways that you couldn't deform it into a perfect ball. It would always have a hole in it like a donut. So a cup, a mug is not translational, isomorphic, as it's called, to a donut, to a ball, but one of those, you know, Japanese, you know, kinda cups you get at the, or Chinese restaurant, you know, teacups, those could be squished into a ball.

• 15:05Brian Keating?

  Anyway, Jim showed how you could relate topology to geometry, which is like angles of triangles on a surface. And it turns out that actually the universe may show this property, and it may be- Related to why we have an arrow of time. In other words, why does time flow in one dimension only? Uh, Jim showed is that there's a reason that space has the dimensions it has. But we think, I think with the Simons Observatory, we might be able to prove why time has the arrow that it does have. So I'm going to leave you with that. But that's sort of the bold prediction of my new book. And I think that'll make it more exciting and palatable because this one will be traditionally published. And so this one, the publisher will want to make money. Like my book, I self-published it. I hope I make some money out, but I really hope people read it. But the publisher is going to really want this book to sell rather than just be out there.

• 15:50Brian Keating?

  So anyway, James, love you. Thank you so much for the time.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Happy birthday. Come back again soon.

• 16:08Speaker 05

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