AI That Helps, Schools That Don’t, and How Not to Go Crazy with Prof. Brian Keating

Episode Description: James sits down with astrophysicist Brian Keating for a candid, useful tour through three hot zones: how to think about AI (and where it actually helps), what’s broken in higher ed and admissions right now, and why outsourcing your mood to politics is a losing strategy. You’ll hear first-hand stories (from UC San Diego classrooms to New York City politics), specific ways James and Brian really use AI daily, and a simple framework for protecting your attention and happiness—even when everything feels polarized. What You’ll Learn: A practical AI workflow you can copy today (research prompts, personal “style” bots, and where LLMs fail at original insight). A filter for political noise that keeps 99% of your happiness anchored in health, family, friends, and work you control. What the UCSD admissions/placement findings really mean for preparation and standards (and why “remedial” can mask deeper gaps). A simple admissions/common-sense principle: standards matter; “portfolio” evaluation shouldn’t ignore basic skills. How to use AI without losing your own voice—James’ test for “write it in my style” and why generic outputs still fall short. Timestamped Chapters: [02:00] Loft event stories, comedy beats, and setting the tone for a heavy topic. [05:00] NYC politics, leadership, and the “why would they vote for him?” question. [07:32] Slogans vs. reality: chants, charters, and what words actually imply. [09:30] Economics that sound nice vs. incentives that ruin cities. [12:00] “Don’t outsource your happiness to politicians.” A sanity reset. [20:48] Inside UCSD’s placement data: how did calculus passers miss first-grade algebra? [30:02] Standards, SATs, and what “remedial” hides (plus grade inflation). [77:49] How James and Brian actually use AI; “mad-bot disease” and why voice still matters. Additional Resources Brian Keating's "Monday M. A. G. I. C." Newsletter https://big-bang.kit.com/briankeatingBrian Keating — personal website https://briankeating.com/Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor by Brian Keating https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Nobel-Prize-Cosmology-Ambition-ebook/dp/B07889Q65WInto the Impossible: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner by Brian Keating https://www.amazon.com/Into-Impossible-Laureates-Collaboration-Imagination/dp/1544523483/Into the Impossible Volume 2: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner https://www.amazon.com/Into-Impossible-Laureates-Concentrate-Creativity/dp/1544548842/University of California, San Diego — Brian Keating faculty page https://physics.ucsd.edu/~bkeating/Brian_Keating.html physics.ucsd.edu Topics & Documents Mentioned UC San Diego Admissions/Placement Working Group report (PDF) https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf. UCSD Senate https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.comCoverage of UCSD preparedness findings https://ucsdguardian.org/2025/11/17/admissions-report-finds-academic-preparedness-deficiencies-in-incoming-ucsd-students/Hamas charters (1988; 2017 update) & “Intifada” context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Hamas_charterMatt Wolfe — AI tutorials (site & YouTube) https://mattwolfe.com/Book.sv - AI book recommendations based on books you've read. https://book.sv/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At Lowe's this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic MyLowe's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to change.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  You know you don't have to wait to shop Black Friday at Lowe's, right? Save up to $150 now on select power tools, equipment and accessories. Got gifts to get? We've got plenty under $50. Plus, MyLowe's Rewards members get same-day delivery for free. Shop Black Friday deals before the rush at Lowe's. Valid through 11/18. $25 minimum and loyalty membership required. Order eligible items by 2 p.m. Subject to weight and size restrictions and availability. Terms at Lowe's.com/shippingterms.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  This message is brought to you by the Capital One Venture X Card. Venture X offers the premium benefits you expect, like a $300 annual Capital One Travel Credit for less than you expect. Elevate your earn with unlimited double miles on every purchase, bringing you one step closer to your next dream destination. Plus, enjoy access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. The Capital One Venture X Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See CapitalOne.com for details.

• 1:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was there on Election Day, yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  I think I saw that, yeah. I was there, I was speaking on Election Day for this Jewish organization. With the guy, Michael Rappaport, you know, probably know him, comedian.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  It was a bunch of...

• 2:04Speaker 03

  He used to perform... My club.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's an interesting guy. He's kind of, I like him a lot. But, you know, he's just like so intense. Like, there were four of us speaking. This woman, Arielle Novak, who was like a journalist, you know, kind of promoter for mainly Israeli, you know, public relations, just because it's so bad. She spoke and then this guy Peter Himmelman, who is Bob Dylan's son-in-law. So, you know, his father-in-law won the Nobel Prize, which my daughters, you know, kids won't be able to say. But, um, my husband won't be able to say. But, um,

• 2:40Speaker 03

  You never know. The, the, the story is not over yet.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  That's right. And then it was me and, and then Michael spoke and he came like almost at the end. He was the last speaker and I was like, I want to be the last speaker. I want to take James Altucher's advice that, you know, go on before. Everyone's like, oh, he's gonna be amazing. And he was good. But he was very morbid, very depressed. I mean, he hasn't worked a single movie since October 7th. You know, he, nobody returned his phone calls, you know, and he's, uh, he was very emotional about that and explaining his upbringing and, and how, you know, he resonated, connected to Judaism, you know, he married someone who's not Jewish and then she made him, you know, come back. She converted to Judaism and got him into, anyway, I went up third after like this political commentator and then Peter's a musician.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  And I was like, I have one job, which is to only use half as many F-bombs as Michael Rappaport's gonna use. And if I could, I can't promise I can do that, but I will try to do that.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  That's funny.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  And, uh, we had, you know, it was really good. I, I, mine was pretty lighthearted and made a lot of jokes and talked about, you know, it was mostly, it was 150 people in this event space and somebody's, you know, loft, basically this huge loft in, um, mid, it was like, right? It was like the middle of Midtown. Like, it was like 30th Street and Sixth Avenue. Like, you, you can't get any more, you know, close, middle of, at least a Manhattan that we go to, right?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  That used to be a really horrible area. And now it's like, like any other area of New York. It's basically been sanitized and it's totally great because of people who were the opposite of Maldani.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. That's the whole thing. It's like he's uh, he's drafting off the vapors that they all laid, but that's the classic story, you know, in history. I actually, you know, I, I think he's horrible. I think he's a horrible, you know, person and leader, has no experience of leading a budget of $10,000, let alone $100 billion. But, you know, I kind of felt like when I was there, there's so much emphasis placed on energy and the youth and the looks and this and that. And, you know, Cuomo couldn't have been a worse candidate. Like, I thought, you know, he, I didn't even know who's Mondami. I was actually there in the primary too, in June. For some reason, I was there for both political events. And I remember thinking, like, I don't even know who this guy is, but he, you know, he has the benefit of not being

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Mondami. And then this Curtis Lee was guys, like, I remember him as a kid thinking he was a clown. And he did a lot of, you know, damage.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Guardian Angels.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Guardian, but it was always like about him. Like, there's no, like, who's the successor to Curtis Lee? I'm like,

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Good point.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think he's done a horrible job. You know, good leader, you know, creates a lot of people that follow him, but a great leader creates a lot of leaders. There's no one in that organization's done, you know, basically. I mean, I haven't seen a guardian angel, you know, since 1985 or something, right?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  So 30% of Jews, or of the, of the Jews who voted, 30% of them voted for Mondami. Why would any Jew vote for him? And look, I spoke to Jewish people who were in favor of him. And they're like, oh, you know, I haven't really seen any evidence that he is against Jews or Israel. Like, people are just like shutting their eyes.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Like ignorant, right?

• 5:49Speaker 03

  But I've seen, but I've seen people literally, like, Brian, you're very, very smart, you know, you Nobel Prize. I've seen people like you who have said the exact opposite.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Look, Jim Simon's daughter, you know, she's one of the smartest people that I've met. He was certainly the smartest person, you know, that I ever knew as an adult. And she donated a quarter million dollars to Mondami's, you know, campaign. And she's Jewish. She's actually, you know, very connected to Judaism. She doesn't even live in the city. And she don't, she was one of his biggest donors. And, you know, that was a, you know, a surprise. And Jim Simon's daughter, so her young Her sister converted to Judaism and is married in Orthodox to an Orthodox Jew. So they weren't voting for him at all. They were voting against him. And then her sister is Jewish also. Is not only voting for him or couldn't vote for him, but was donated a tremendous amount of money.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  So why do they do this? I think, well, first of all, I have to point out that the humor in the fact that in the election in Minneapolis mayor, which is, you know, equally important to New York City, right? A Jew beat out a Muslim, you know, thanks to the votes of Muslims. Because they didn't vote for the Somali candidate. So Jacob Fry, I think he's Jewish and he won and he wouldn't have won without the support of the Somalis. You know, and their clan, you know, kind of rivalry.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. By the way, though, like just thinking about this conversation. It disturbs me that religions are like political parties. Like we're talking about the Jew beat the Muslim, the Muslim beat the Jew. As opposed like the guy who.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, but in New York, it's tied to, I mean, it's like saying, you know, the Jew. If an Arab, which often happens, wins an election, a Muslim or Druze person in Israel. That's newsworthy, you know, because Israel's a Jewish, you know, is a predominantly by far majority Jewish state. And New York City has the largest population of Jews outside of Israel. So I, I think in this case, I don't think Minneapolis. It makes sense. That was just a joke.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Right, but, but no, but your, but your point is, is true that, look. This is a person who has, you know, in statements that I've seen. Either skirted the issue of like, you know, he has said globalize the.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. In Tefada. No, that's a, that's a call for genocide against Jews.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it literally is. Like it's in Hamas's.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  He rapped about the Holy Land five. I mean, that was like his biggest heroes. They were the, you know, they're designated affiliate with terrorist organization. His, his Imam, one of his Imams, uh, and the worst thing though is his father is a professor at Columbia. And he has these completely virulent and outrageous hatred towards America. He claims that, that the Nazi Germans learned how to exterminate Jews and commit the Holocaust. From America, from Abraham Lincoln, from the treatment of the Indians, as if. There was no, you know, history in Europe for a thousand years or more of persecutions, pogroms, exterminations, Kristallnacht, you know, all sorts of things that happened.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  And so he was making the case that Abraham Lincoln was Hitler's guru. It's so preposterous, but that's his primary influence. Then a secondary influence is this Imam who was an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombings in 1993, which I remember very well. And then the, and then he raps about the Holy Land Five, globalize the Intifada, claims he has the power to arrest Netanyahu as a sovereign, you know, claims that the International Criminal Court trumps the United States laws. So, no, he's, and he doesn't say this about any other, but I want to say one thing. I think that we should be led by the most extreme right wing of the left wing party and the most extreme left of the right party.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  You know, in other words, those are very high agency people, like people that can, you know, see the flaws in their own party, still predominantly defend the ideas, understand the ideas. And, and so I would like to think, you know, if there are people like Mondami supporters who are Jewish, if they are reasonable, if they, if they say, look, I just don't care. Like, he's not the mayor of Jerusalem, he's the mayor of New York City. That's an argument. I mean, you can't ignore the stuff that borders on, you know, Jew hatred or Israel hatred, can't ignore that. But if they said, look, like Elizabeth Simons, you know, so she was the, you know, daughter of James, if I talk to her, I'm sure she has rational reasons, like economic reasons. But I also think his economic things are outrageous, like government run grocery stores and buses.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  You live there for your life, your whole life.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, and I was there on election day and afterwards. And, and look, that really is the reason to not vote over him is that his economic reasons are so infantile. But, you know, I talked to my daughters who live there and they don't know economics and they hear things like, oh, you know, redistribute from people who are too wealthy to people who are poor, but also work really hard. Look, it sounds great. I think these economic issues always start maybe idealistically with good intentions and I'm giving the best. benefited the Dow completely, but I think when taken over by politics, the politicians know that when you cater to that group that isn't motivated by good intentions, you could win elections and not fulfill your promises and keep winning reelections.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  And look, that's how you you get socialist fascist countries like Venezuela is a great example. Chavez was always a proponent of, hey, let's stop the corruption, let's give to the poor. And then what happened? He takes over, he becomes, and then his successor, Madero, becomes the most corrupt. And everybody becomes poorer, like Venezuela is a perfect example. All the well to do, I'm not even talking about rich, but all the well to do and educated. And, you know, people hiring other people and building businesses, they all left. Millions of people left and the rest either got poorer or became corrupt. And the same thing is going to happen like we, and you know, I will say this, and this is happening on local elections, but it started at national elections. Look at the all the elections since, let's say, since 2000 or 2004.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  2004 is W versus John Kerry. They're from the same skull and bones Yale society. I'm not, I'm not saying this from a conspiracy point of view, they were the same, they were the same people. Okay, then you have Barack Obama, John McCain. They weren't all that different on economics and a lot of political issues.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, they were the exact same. I mean, Obamacare is derived from Romney Care in Massachusetts. But then things get a little bit more polarized. You have Trump versus Clinton, Trump versus Biden, Trump versus Harris. Everything is getting more polarized and the people who are active. Now you have guys like Nick Fuentes on the on the right, he's just lunatic.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Owens, who we're going to talk about.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Candace Owens, and then on the left, you have like, yeah, Mamdani and, you know, Ilhan Omar and AOC, like you have these people who are just insane. And they're the ones shaping the narrative of the country. When you're right, that is a great thing you just said, which is that let's have the most left, right wing people run the Republican Party. Let's have the most right, left wing people run the Democrat Party. But then you get into the Republicans, which is what is really the difference.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Right, exactly.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  So, I don't know, there's no solution. You just have to kind of like focus on the things you love and do the best you can.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'm like, I always feel like my, you know, my older brother moved out of California two or three years ago. He moved to a, you know, a conservative state in the South. You know, he just hated, uh, you know, the wokeness in California. One of his sons, he was a valedictorian and these schools, yeah, my graduating class was 65 people and I ranked in the top 10 of those 65 people. I'm very proud of that, James. Uh, but you know,

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Well, there was nine. When you say you're in the top 10, that means you were 10th.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  It's like, oh, I was, I was in the top eight of my class.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Okay, you're right. I won a, I won a Signal Podcasting Award. You, you, you helped vote for that and, uh,

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  You know, I won the award. I don't say it's like bronze award, but you know, if you didn't know, you might think, oh, there is only a bronze award. So if you say like, he's bronze certified, you know, anyway, you're right. So he moved, yeah. So, so his net, my nephew was brilliant kid. Um, he got the, like, he was a valedictorian in a class of 1,500 kids at his school in California. He got a 1560 on the SATs and that was the COVID year, you know, and they didn't take, uh, it was, you know, it was the first year of applications after COVID. So it was like 2020, 2021. So that was Black Lives Matter and that's when California decided they were going to abolish the SAT requirement. So that didn't help him. He didn't get into like UC Berkeley.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  He didn't get into any of the top UC schools. He didn't get into, I don't know if he got into UCSD, but he didn't get into, you know, Berkeley even. He didn't get into Harvard, you know, any of the Ivies. So he went to, you know, one of the best schools in the South. Uh, he ended up dropping out. Now he's, he's, you know, helping this incredible technology firm. Uh, but anyway, you know, so I, I just think it's, it's incredible how much we went through and yet, you know, so we have this wokeness where people are just moving out of town. But I told my brother, I said to him, "Look, if Gavin Newsom determines your happiness, you're, you're doing something wrong." Like unless they're coming to the gates and, you know, like Jason Calacanis, you know, had this tweet last week and he was like, "You gotta start making plans like you're a Jew in Germany

• 14:56Speaker 04

  if you live in California." Not, not from an anti-Semitic perspective, thank God, but, uh, but from a perspective of like wealthy people need to leave California and they need to have five destinations inside the country. And did you see this post by Jason?

• 15:10Speaker 03

  No, I didn't.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  So he's basically like making the claim like there was no flag that went up in 1935 in Germany and there's similar things are gonna happen in California, you gotta get out. And, you know, a lot of people wrote back, oh, Austin, Texas, or Atlanta, you know, like all these. But, you know, some people wrote back, you gotta stay and fight. And, you know, my argument to my brother was like, yeah, I mean, if Gavin Newsom, like, every day is controlling your happiness, then, you know, when, when you move to whatever state you're thinking you're in now, and the local school board is just as woke as any place in California, because that's, he moved to a college town, you know, so it's, you know, same, like, Atlanta is not like some Republican, you know, enclave, right? So I think he's, you know, he's sort of, you know, chased this ephemeral thing, but for

• 15:54Speaker 04

  the wrong reason, then, again, if you let politicians make your life choices for you, or decide your mood setting, I think, I think you're in a world of, you'll never be satisfied. Like, even if you're happy that Trump won, look at the backlash that he's getting. Everybody lost in the elections, you know, the Republicans, and every Democrat won, including Mondami. So it's like a pendulum, and maybe it'll swing back, maybe it won't. But the fact is, 99% of your happiness should come from your, your health, your family, your friends, your work, and things that have nothing, unless you work in government, which, you know, some of my friends do, and all these redistricting things. But it's like, to me, that's outsourcing your happiness in the worst possible way. Like, it's one thing to outsource your happiness in your job. Like, I would like to, you know, have more listeners on my podcast.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  I am jealous of how many listeners you have, the advertisers you have. Now, maybe you're jealous of my YouTube, you know, subscribe, but then I'm jealous of, but like, at least that's something positive, like, it encourages me. Wow, I gotta get LinkedIn back as a sponsor, you know? They're, they're sponsoring James, and James and I are, you know, in kind of, we occupy kind of similar levels of audience, you know, intellect or whatever, right? So I'm like, why aren't they advertising with me? They used to do that. And so, but it's trying to make me better. I'm not thinking like, oh, man, the, you know, Newsom and, and, you know, this other guy, you know, who's poised to take over from me, like, or this woman, like, it's awful, and I'm, like, I can look at the beach. Right now, I'm in the mountains, and I'm looking at the mountains, and they're gonna

• 17:22Speaker 04

  be covered in snow soon, and I'm just like, this is like so beautiful here. Yes, I pay a price, but, you know, I, I don't let people in Sacramento determine my happiness level, like, I can't.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I agree. I agree with you to an extent. Like, let's say, your living surroundings do have an impact, like, and if the people around are all hate Jews, for instance, you don't want to be around them. And I'm not saying people in New York, obviously, New York City is not an anti-Semitic city, but, you know, it's just disturbing when you see some of this stuff and you see people kind of ignoring the things that he said. And, look, I moved out of New York City.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  If he was smart, James, he would put all Jew, like Orthodox Jews, not the crazy, you know, Hasidic people that hate Israel and wanted, you know, wanted Iran to, you know, get the nuclear bomb, because they have this, you know, kind of eschatological perspective on the anti. Those are insane people. But if he got some, like, you know, he's like, look, I want to extend an, he could be mayor. The guy's 35 years, 34 years old. He could be mayor for like, a decade or whatever.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Well, he could be president. I mean, look, he's.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  No, he can't be president. He's born in Uganda.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't know that. He wasn't born here? Because people have been talking about him in that, you know, people are saying he could potentially be a presidential candidate if he does well in New York City, but, right, legally, now he can't, so.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  For now, unless, you know, unless things change. But, but no, no, if he was smart, and that's why, another thing, like, I don't think he's that smart. First of all, he didn't get into Columbia where his dad teaches. His mom's a multi-multi-millionaire success for a Hollywood producer. You know, his dad teaches like, anti-American, anti-Israel studies at Columbia. He didn't get into Columbia. He lied on his application and said he was African-American because he was born in Uganda. He's lied like conspicuously. He said that like, Intifada means, like, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was just an Intifada. Like, no, no, the Intifada is like, always going on and its main goal is, as happened yesterday in Israel, is to, you know, punish, kill, maim as many Jews as possible. It's not the Warsaw

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Ghetto uprising where they were resisting.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just want to say, by the way, that's not just your opinion. That's in there, the charter, the founding charter of Hamas, like, kill Jews is the words in there.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was Israel. I mean, if you want to be technical, I did look at the charter a couple of years ago and they did remove that, you know, that phrase, but it was in their founding charter. You're absolutely right. So, but if you live in Atlanta in the summer, as you do, and you say like, this is pretty miserable and like, my whole life is horrible, you know, like, but you know, you can wait until October. I bet it's pretty nice now in November and like it's decent getting the holidays, right? So like, you know, there's things that are going to change, but like your, your net set point of happiness is not determined by the climate, is it? I mean, or the scenery?

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  So I think the same way about politics, like, you know, I don't have to look at these people at all. Like I can look outside and be super happy right now. You know, I can go to the beach. I can go take my kids and go to an amusement park. There's like, and I hate the, you know, the kind of insane, I mean, we have, we had just last week, I don't know if you saw this online. I mean, it was like a hundred million impressions, but UCSD to their credit, to our credit, released this horrific report that we have this remedial math class and we're one of the-

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I did see that. That, okay. Describe what it is and then I'll ask you a question.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is another example of kind of the extrema within the extrema. I call it like the mini max, like who's the most extreme right in the left, you know, kind of thing. So in this case, it was academics, you know, who by their nature are pretty extreme and they have horrible ideas and should never be allowed near the levers of power. I speak as an academic.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  And we did a study on these, on a course that we offer to incoming students. It's called remedial math and that remedial math class is meant to kind of make sure everyone's on the same page because we got rid of standardized testing, thanks to Governor Newsom and the legislature, you know, 2019, 2020, BLM, you know, and they, Ibrahim X. Kendi was consulted by many states to, you know, to formalize their admissions policies at universities. And he said, it's the most racist, something to the effect, like it's one of the most racist, you know, tools of modern social engineering, the SATs.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  And, and so all these things conspired to get rid of these standards of admission for UCSD. So all these kids would come to UCSD, not all, I mean, it was about 900 a year out of 45,000, you know, 40,000 total students, say 12, 15,000 incoming freshmen. And they take this remedial class and of that 1,000 kids that take the class over the year, 25% of them could not solve problems of the following kind. Six plus X equals seven plus two. And you might say, well, like, okay, well, that's remedial math. So of course they have to take, you know, but something like more than 25% of the kids that took remedial math passed high school calculus.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  This is what I don't understand. I feel like there's something wrong with that test then, because obviously three plus six equals seven plus two. This is you learn this in first grade. And so you're saying they passed calculus. I don't really, there's something doesn't add up. Like, it feels like there's something like really much wronger than just the fact that they're

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's why I said it's, it's impressive that these, that the study was commissioned by the math department. And, you know, and it was, it took a lot of courage to reduce, to produce this. Like John Fetterman, like, again, he's like, very courageous to go against the left, or even Chuck Schumer, you know, like, you may not like that he did that, but it takes, you can't deny it's courageous. The act was courageous. But so they published this report. It was actually published by the academic senate, which is the main governing body of faculty and academic affairs. And, and, no, I mean, now, you can argue, maybe that's like, some of the kids just guessed, or like, they just didn't take the test seriously, or blew it off, or copied off somebody else. And, but anyway, there is certainly, I've

• 23:32Speaker 04

  noticed in my classes, a marked decline in the caliber of the performance of the students that are, of the students that are, you know, from UCSD. I'm teaching a class now in quantum mechanics, including quantum computers, which we got to talk about. But the quantum mechanics students that I have, about a quarter of them are from, it just turns out, they're from Spain. They're like exchange students. And they all come to class every lecture, they all consult with each other, they're all doing really well. And then of my non, you know, of the native UCSD students that are, you know, matriculated since the beginning, they're not as good. I mean, the average one is, is not as good as these exchange students. So like, what is the reason for that? Well, you know, many of them came from

• 24:17Speaker 04

  California schools, many of them were educated during COVID. And it's just a challenge that they are suffering from maybe their high school preparation. But now by the time I see them, they're juniors or seniors even at UCSD. And, and some of them can't pass basic aspects of calculus, which are necessary for this class. So I do think it's, it, there's some correlation with reality in that test. There's, it's not maybe.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  But how could they be passing calculus in high school and failing that one question?

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  That seems like there's something either the test results are wrong or where this is like fake news somehow. Like, I don't, I don't even understand.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  Well, there's a difference between the, the standards of a high school could be totally different. Like, imagine that we lowered our standards and you, as all college, not just at UCSD, but every college, you know, Harvard, Princeton, they stopped taking the, requiring the SATs, right? Um, so they all did this at once, but imagine that also, it was also done at the high school level. And it was also done at the elementary. I remember teaching my kids during COVID. It was horrible, you know, like three different, four different teachers and different subjects in front of a screen. That's not the only reason, but it is a reason.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  It's one thing if you don't know, okay, here's a circle. The diameter is this, what's the area of this circle? I'd understand if somebody didn't know or forgot how to calculate that stuff. Okay, that if you, if you're not, you know, that's not something you need to know every day. And yes, anybody who takes, you know, middle school geometry is going to know the answer trivially. But okay, not everybody knows or remembers, they're interested in something else. And I'm, I'm saying this, I'm being very nice in saying this, like presumably anybody who takes the SATs knows the answer to that question. But that one question, which they said the three, the, the blank plus six equals two plus seven.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  That is so, that is very first, you could count on your fingers, the answer for one thing. And so.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I, I don't, I don't understand, like, what does it mean? How did they pass AP calculus or, you know, advanced calculus? I, I think that there was probably massive grade inflation, massive just, you know, corruption. And don't forget, like, who, who is admitting, who do you think, like, does admissions at Princeton or UCSD?

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Ever thought about that?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I assume the admissions team.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, but who makes up the admissions? Is it like a panel of professors? Is it like an external, you know, committee of, you know, faculty and consultants and?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  I guess I don't know. I assume people are hired just for admissions.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's just, there's just a, there's a, you know, administration, administrative, you know, component of UCSD or any university that just does admission. Now, do you think they're professors? Do you think they have PhDs, any of them? Do you think they have any expertise in education? I mean, many of them don't have the qualifications of a guidance counselor. And yet they're responsible for the most, you know, determinative decision in a 17, 18-year-old's life, you know, up to that point. And so many of them don't, you know, I wouldn't say many of them, you know, they're not all astrophysicists and, you know, mathematicians, right? So there, there's a spectrum of what their accomplishments are. But they're working in like academia at some lower level than academ- like they're working with high school kids, like, so maybe they only need to have high school degrees. I don't know.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  But they're in charge of this most, you know, kind of monumental decision process. And they, you know, I, I don't know what expertise they have. I know for a fact, I've never been asked anything about undergraduate admissions as opposed to graduate admissions where it's only determined by faculty. So I think my graduate student's performance, you know, is, is uniformly, it's as good as anywhere else in the world. But the undergraduate is out of my control as a professor, which is completely insane.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  Again, again, though.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Of course, I'm not asking to get to be on the admissions committee, but I'm asking like, I should get like teaching relief. I should be not forced to, that's the most important thing to a professor is like, you can't te- like, teaching takes up, you know, half my life. Um, you know, teaching, grading, planning, getting guest lectures, getting demonstrations, experiments, lab stuff. So that takes up half my life. So if you want me to do another thing, like review a proposal, and I just remembered I'm, I'm in charge of this committee, I haven't even started it yet, um, you want me to do that, like, you have to either give me more money, which is impossible, um, uh, because there's, the university is a public university and they have no money and whatever. Or you have to say like, look, we're going to get somebody else to take some of the teaching burden off of you. So that you can do this other thing that we're telling you is so important.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  And I just find it, you know, crazy that we have, you know, so much, uh, so much to do, almost no time to do it. And we're expected to do more and more and we have no, we have no, like, imagine you're hiring for a company, James. Which is, you know, the model I'm making up in academia. You're hiring for a company, which are my students, but I have no say in who I hire whatsoever. Like, I can't say.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  I get what you're saying, but it doesn't even explain it to me. Like, again, if they passed calculus, that means they passed. Algebra, that means they passed geometry, maybe trigonometry.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  They've, they've gotten, they've had to get through so many math classes.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  All the way to the bottom.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  First off, this is basic algebra. This is like more base, this is like algebra zero. So I, it does not make sense to me. Maybe corruption, but I don't even understand the point of that kind of corruption. Like it's, are they, nobody's getting paid off. No one's making extra money.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Because I would agree that's suspicious or something weird. But it, it happens at all these schools, like all the UC schools. It, you know, even at like MIT, there's like a remedial math class. Now you're like, why would you, how could you possibly get into MIT and have remedial math? I mean.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Okay, but even remedial math though, in a college level, doesn't explain this problem.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Well, what is remedial math at MIT? What do you think it involves?

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's for people who, I always say, I always say there's a backdoor into MIT, which is if you really want, if you're an 18 years old and you really want to get into MIT, apply to the theater department. And you'll get in because no one else is applying for that at MIT. And so maybe then you need remedial math to, to keep up with MIT students. But then that means you, you know, though, still algebra, you got A's in, you know, you had to still get all A's, you know, which. Because of.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd like to see what they actually teach at the, and the remedial level at these other institutions. But look, this could all be done away with, with some standardized testing, right? I mean, you, you can't imagine that you could do, you know, uh, get above a 200 on the SATs and the math, you know, 300 or whatever. If you, if you don't know that simple algebra problem. Right? So this would, that would have eliminated it, but that was considered to be racist. And it was more important that they learn about social justice in 2020, 2021. And then they show their commitment to it. And that's why people like my nephew said, like, I, I believe all people are equal. You know, that's considered like a microaggression here. And so it was probably disqualifying. So instead of like being, you know, pandering to that level, we should have some standard.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  Now, you know, the standardized tests, you know, should the standardized test companies, ETS or whatever it is, you know, have the power that they have. It should be part of a portfolio of, of evaluation. But these sophisticated people, the admissions department at all these universities, they should be able to weight things. It's not that complicated and say, well, the SAT is important. But they also did this, you know, provided, you know, a thousand mosquito nets to every person in a town in Rwanda or whatever. That's great. So maybe they did a little bit, but if they can't do basic math, then they, they have no business being in a top university like UCSD.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Again, it doesn't explain it to me because that is so out of context, like not being able to answer that question. And yet you're a student at UCSD, even, even in remedial math. And, and I saw people say, oh, well, UCSD part of their admissions because it's a public school. They have to accept, you know, there's some, there is a little bit more. It's not, some of their admissions are not as strict as other of their admissions. I don't know the reasoning behind that, but so it could be the potential, the case that they have very low ranking students. But I still don't understand if there are people who have taken any math classes at all, not answering that question, not, and they're saying 25% of remedial math was, you know, was not able to answer that question.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  It just sounds ludicrous to me. I don't understand. And I'm not saying it's a shame that so many students don't know the answer to that question. I'm saying something seems wrong with the research they did. I don't believe the research they did. I was even going to post this exact thing on Twitter, just to ask someone to explain to me. Like, have you ever met anyone in your life who, who can't do, do that question?

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, but not, uh, but yes, there, there are probably some people that can't do that question. But are they in college or are they, you know, first graders or whatever? Right? So.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Have you ever met anybody at UCSD who you think can't answer that question?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  No, but I, yeah, I don't, you know, but I've met students that, you know, are incapable of doing basic calculus.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I probably can't do basic calculus. I took calculus four years.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  But you're not a physics major. You're not a physics major in upper division class. Like, they shouldn't be here either. And, you know, at that, like, so it's true at all levels. I would say UCSD, you know, probably has as many smart people as Harvard does, but we're also, you know, four, our incoming classes is, you know, eight times bigger than Harvard's. But, you know, the best of my students can compete with any student anywhere. There's just not as many, you know, proportionally as there might be at Harvard. I'm not so sure about anymore. Harvard has really gone, you know, to a dark place in many capacities. And I think, you know, everything from Lawrence Summers, you know, kind of Epstein, the Epstein connection. You know, my friend Eric Weinstein's detail of all these weird things where he's,

• 34:07Speaker 04

  you know, he knew about like quantum mechanical gate, you know, theories of everything, like in the 1980s and 90s and like, he's supposed to be some hedge fund manager, but no one could point to a single hedge fund that he ran. He was advising Lawrence Summers on dating strategies and, you know, in like 2018 or allegedly. It's a crazy place. It's a really, it's like, it could be viewed as a think tank plus a lobbying firm plus like a secret government program. I mean, from the way that Eric describes things and I've heard other people describe as well. And being there, it's, you know, Harvard's like the gold standard, right? You say, oh, it's Harvard, you know, professor, Harvard student. A lot of people, you know, are seeing embers naked, basically.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at [email protected] and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  At Lowe's this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic Milo's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to change.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  When your workday is constantly disrupted, your workflow isn't flowing. It's come to a grinding halt. You don't need an assistant. You need superpowers. Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly is built for how you actually work. No new tabs, no switching apps, no losing your place. Go handles busy work like finding documents or summarizing email threads, so you can focus on the work only you can do. Try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Brought to you by the Capital One Saver Card. With Saver, you earn unlimited 3% cash back on dining, entertainment and at grocery stores. That's unlimited cash back on ordering takeout from home or unlimited cash back on tickets to concerts and games. So grab a bite, grab a seat and earn unlimited 3% cash back with the Saver Card. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  My stance in general is kids shouldn't go to college. I'm, as I get older, I'm a little, I understand why parents want to send, why many parents want to send their children to college. I get it. I'm not really arguing this, even though I strongly feel this. Look, I even sent my kids to college. You can't, you can't say no to your daughters. So, you know, I'm, I believe this, but I'm a hypocrite. So it's hard, it's hard for me to fully argue. But... But look, yeah, people shouldn't send their kids to Harvard. It's a, and by the way, Harvard might be the one school where you can really make the argument, oh, the connections I make are going to be worth it alone. That is the case. Now, now, okay, if I send my kids to UCSD for physics, they get to have Brian Keating as their professor. That's probably worth it, too.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  And that's if they're really into education and changing the field of physics and so on. So there's reasons to go to college for specific professions and purposes. And there's reasons to go to Harvard just for the connections. But I agree, Harvard lately is just very, very disturbing place. All the school, all these Ivy League schools.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  I actually don't know, like, you know, a lot of my friends went to Harvard, Cornell. You know, I went to Brown graduate school, you know, like, but I also met really, you know, high-quality people, you know, in high school. Like, if you ever meet somebody like in your life when you're younger and you're like, I wish I could buy an option on this person, not just financially because they're going to be rich or whatever, but just like, they're going to be successful. Like, there was no doubt in high school, some of my friends would be super successful. And then in college, I went to Case Western, it wasn't like, you know, an Ivy League school. But, you know, some of the, some of the, you know, people there that I met, I'm still friends with to this day and are super successful, you know, like, just top of their game. And the people I know from Harvard and Cornell, like, they would have been successful anywhere.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  They would have made networks anywhere, but, but I don't even know, like, the type of person that networks, it's like physics, I don't have like some network because I went to an Ivy League grad school.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  No, but for physics, then it's, for some professions, it's the quality of training and education. If your goal is to go to school to get rich, which you don't have to go to school for that, but if you do go for that purpose, then a place like Harvard, and if you really are good at networking, that's going to help you. That, you know, it's going to, it's going to, the effort you put into that, into networking at a place like Harvard is going to pay off.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm sure if you're in investment banking and you go to any of these places, yeah, it'll certainly be beneficial to you. But, you know, I just, I, you know, the allure has been gone, at least in my mind, from academia. Like, I started keeping this thing. In in like 2020, you know, during BLM and just all the performative prostrations and land acknowledgements and and crazy, just like posturing in every virtuous signaling lexicon imaginable. And I started this like Apple Notes, you know, just like university rot. And it's like 10 megabytes now and it's all text, you know, maybe a picture here or there.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  But everything from like Ivy League Professor Cornell, you know, feeling exhilarated when October 7th happened.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Yeah, I remember reading that too about I look, I went to Cornell. So I know that.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Reading that as well about about that professor. And yeah, it's really disturbing and upsetting. And look, we've we've focused a lot on October 7th. But how anybody, there's no other event in history, I think, where women, little girls were raped. Grandparents were shot and the videos put on.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Babies were strangled. Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And the and the videos were then put on people's Facebook pages. So everyone can see what.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, you see it now, like Charlie Kirk. Where was Charlie Kirk killed?

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Uh, Utah, some university there. I forget.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, Utah Valley University. So he's killed in a college camp. We had things on our college. We have this free speech zone where anybody can go. And a couple of days after Charlie Kirk was killed, there was a sign. It's like a free speech zone where anyone can go and put graffiti there as long as it's not about like LGBTQ or African American, like you could put anything about Israel as a genocidal state. You can put in, and then there was a sign that said, kill all Nazis.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  And I was just like, well, you know, do you think I'm a Nazi? Like, do you think Charlie Kirk was a? I'm sure a lot of people think he was fascist, not that, you know. Ironically, the people they don't hate are the Nazis themselves. And so, you know, they fancy themselves this, this, you know, kind of cohort, you know, defending freedom and whatnot. But all these things happen at universities. Why is that? Why is that? And a lot of it, you know, all politicians went to universities, all journalists went to universities, business people went to university, very few people didn't go to university. So the university has this outside. Impacted and I felt like during twenty, you remember when we first started talking on podcasts in twenty twenty? You know, I was like, I don't know if the university is going to survive past COVID.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  And AI was just kind of coming into consciousness at that point in the in the consumer realm. And I remember like thinking like, what's the future? What I think I had like, what's alt touch your university? Like, if you have a university, what's going to be in it, James? What do you mandate to teach chess? I mean, what be be, you know, be thoughtful about it? What would you teach at the university? You have complete control as the president of.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think I think a ninety percent would be motivated purely by what you're interested in. And and using AI to guide you and focus your curiosity. And the professor seeing what your, you know, where your where your plateaus are. Where your, you know, what your questions are, what you're interested in, and the professor could guide and direct you according to your curiosity. But I also think the most important things that helped me in my career, that literally has made every success for me, is communication abilities. So ability to write well, speak well, think logically, steel man your arguments.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  The ability to negotiate, the ability, you know, all of these communication skills are a hundred percent the secret to success. As well as the psychology of entrepreneurship, money, these things that are never taught in college that are so important for success. But if I'm not curious about biology, but I take a biology class, I'm going to remember zero afterwards. So there's no point. So so you have to, it really has to be motivated by what you're interested in, what you're curious about. The great thing is, someone could be listening to this and say, oh, I don't know who Mamdani is. And then you use chat GPT and like, oh, well, did he really say? Why would he say he's African American on his college application? Did he really say globalize the infantata, you know? And where did he say it? What's the context? What does that statement mean?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Is it really true what James is saying about it's in the Hamas, you know, founding charter? So so now you can have your your curiosity guide you and the AI is much better than just Google for answering these questions.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  How are you using AI? Because I heard your conversation with Ryan Holiday. And you guys focused on like what AI is not good for. But and and and why, you know, humans are safe for now, which I agree with. I I fully agree that even in science, AI is completely underwhelming. I think we're on the verge of a huge bubble pop like. Does Robin use AI every day?

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I use AI twenty times a day.

• 44:06Speaker 04

  Me too. But does Robin?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Yes, hundred percent.

• 44:10Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  You know, so so for instance, right now, there's a bunch of battleships and aircraft carriers and fifteen thousand troops surrounding Venezuela. So I don't really know anything about the Venezuelan political situation. So I I asked, what spurred the reign of Chavez? When did, you know, I didn't know anything. When did it start? How did he get so? How did he become leader? And then Madero, what was his background? What does he really believe in? What has he done, you know, to the Venezuelan people? And then what companies, as an investor, what companies in the US? Or how might the US benefit if there's a regime change in Venezuela? So AI is really great for this, as opposed to taking my chances. Google gives me, here's ten sites. So a lot of those sites are just bullshit sites, and I have to figure it out.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  AI is really good at giving me really great answers. And then if I'm curious, well, I don't understand, like, you know, did Madero really do social? What's the difference between socialism and fascism? Is Madero a socialist or a fascist? And, you know, AI is really good at taking, you know, hundreds of sources and compiling it together in into something. And then I can ask dumb questions, because I don't know. You know, a lot of people know this stuff, like, it's secondhand to them. I don't know anything. So I can ask dumb questions and not be afraid to ask. I'm just following my curiosity.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  I don't know, you know, like, I I use it hundreds of times a day, probably. You have everything from like contracts, or I'm thinking of switching to a podcast network, and, you know, is that going to save time? And, you know, so I can develop models.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  All right, I'm I'm I'm looking at my AI history. So I'm seeing, okay, US-China tariffs. Uh, what's, you know, what have been the history of US-China tariffs? Now, I've written a lot about this. I've done a lot of research. But, okay, just give me a timeline. Okay, oh, and then I'll ask, oh, in twenty seventeen, we put steel tariffs on. What what was the result in, uh, jobs increase or decrease in the US? What was the result on inflation? What was the result on the market? Okay, so that was one question. Um, I have here, uh, tell me about. This is related to you. Tell me about the relationship between photonic computing and quantum computing. So that I asked AI rather than read myself a bunch of research papers I can't understand.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  I asked about.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Oh, New York City voter turnout in yesterday's elections, how I learned that thirty percent of the Jews who voted voted for Mam Dany. I asked about.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  I didn't know. Everyone's talking about vote for Prop 50 in California. I didn't know what Prop 50 was. So explain to me California Proposition 50. Oh, don't they realize this is against blah, blah, blah. Oh, but here's this Texas thing that they're comparing themselves to.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  You know, so, so everything I'm interested in, I'm asked, and then I know it. Now I know it. Like now I'm able to say, you know, because I checked the sources too, because the AI links to the sources, I'm able to say, oh, thirty percent of these people voted for Mam Dany. And now I know Proposition 50, and they've suspended their California Constitution for two years just because they want to get back at Texas for doing something similar to Prop 50.

• 47:15Speaker 04

  So now I know it's so evil that they have to do it and do it hard. Even if Texas doesn't do it, they took out that provision.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Right, right. There's all this bullshit stuff, but then you find out. If I had just read about it, I could have.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do you even read the news? I mean, I don't read the news. I knew all this stuff. I know all this stuff about New York City. I don't live in New York City. I knew about. You know about this stuff in California. You don't live in California.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  And, and you know, but it's interesting because the Venezuela thing, I did look on the news and I couldn't find anything. And yet we have fifteen thousand troops who have moved to be surrounding Venezuela. So for some, whatever reason, the news is not reporting on this. And yet it's probably the most important geopolitical thing happening for America at least right now because as, and I know this from AI, Rio Machada, who won the Nobel Peace Prize a few months ago, has literally said to Trump, we've got 1.7 trillion dollars in assets here. Come and get it. And so all this stuff I'm learning from AI, and I'm not ashamed to say it. Like I wouldn't have known it. I wouldn't have known where to look and so on. So.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  The thing is like these people like Mike, I asked my, first of all, I asked my students on the first day of class. I said, you're allowed to use any resource you like, a human or silicon, for anything, including the homework solutions. I don't care how many, because like, it's like telling your daughter, you know, it's okay if you, you know, drink while you're in college, if you're 21, you know, like, she's gonna do it no matter what you say, but at least now if she over drinks, she's gonna come and tell you, right? So I said, but you won't be allowed to use anything on the exam, so there's three major exams that count for 50% of your grade, as well as the homework counts 50%. So like, yes, you could do, you could rely on it. And I said, just out of curiosity, how many of your professors allow you to use AI? None of them raised their hand. I'm like, this is like, child abuse, you know, student abuse.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  I, I think it's so, we're not only crippling their ability to do research, we're, we're preventing them from competing in the, in the real world, once they graduate, against people who are, and, but it wasn't just UCSD. I don't want you to think I'm, I'm dumping on UCSD, I love it, it's my, you know, I couldn't be anywhere, like, I got an offer to go to an Ivy League school a couple of years back. I didn't even like, bring it to my chair. We have this stupid policy here, that the only time they would give you a raise, if I, if I wanted a raise, I basically have to tell them, I, not only do I have a job offer from, you know, Cornell or Dartmouth or whatever, but, but here it is in writing. In other words, I have to go so far down the rabbit, which takes a long time in academia to get a, a job offer, first of all, they have to have a position, the money, the startup,

• 49:41Speaker 04

  you know, it's millions of dollars of commitment, it's a lifetime appointment, you know, for somebody like me. And, and so, so this takes, you know, six to eight months of another university doing. And then, and by that time, there's so much sunk cost into it, that you're gonna leave, like, a lot of my friends who didn't, you know, who did leave UCSD, they went to Stanford and other places. You know, they went through the process because they didn't nip it in the butt at UCSD. They could have kept the person, if they didn't have this stupid policy. So we have a lot of stupid policy. One of my other favorite things is, I cannot have an office as a professor that's bigger than the office of a state assembly member. That's actually part of the constitution of the UC. It's so petty, and, and that actually is like, dates back to like, probably, you know, Ronald Reagan or something like that. But, but it's still enforced, and they still do enforce it.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  So, so I went to Princeton. And I asked my good friends and colleagues there. They're like, no, we don't let them use AI. It's like cheating. They won't learn it the real way. I'm like, how do you know what the real way is? Like their minds are so adaptable and malleable. And you didn't know about AI when you were, you know, like eight years ago. And now you're telling them that they can't use it in their career, which can last the next 60 years. Like, that's really a lot of chutzpah.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Right now, I think there's an amazing kind of career arbitrage that can happen, which is the people who are using AI, and by the way, you don't need any expertise to use AI. You just need to open up ChatGPT or Grok or whatever you want and ask questions. The only skill you need is the ability to ask questions. And people who are using AI and not afraid to use it have a significant advantage over the people who don't use AI.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  You know, like I was in a debate a few weeks ago. It was Bitcoin versus gold. I was on the Bitcoin side, obviously arguing for Bitcoin. And my opponent in this debate was arguing for gold. And it was on a stage in front of a thousand people. And I heard in just conversation that this guy I was going to debate said Tether, the biggest stablecoin, has never been audited. Okay, I didn't know that and I didn't really know who to ask to confirm this. So I asked AI and it gave me real details about the difference between audit and what Tether does, which is basically the same thing. And I was able to understand the subtleties of what was going on.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  So I was able to address this if it had come up in the debate, which it didn't. And it took me two seconds. My knowledge of crypto, I'm a crypto expert in general, but I didn't know this one question. I knew that their assets had been confirmed, but I didn't know officially what was the official mechanism that they confirmed them. So that's why I asked the question. And so now I know the official mechanism. Now I can answer this question. And it wasn't much different than what I thought, but now I know specifically.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  Now, you have to be careful.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I do research the source and see that it's accurate because I don't want to be fooled by any AI hallucinations.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  That's part of the thing. That's part of the thing, James, you're doing, you're doing the right thing. But that's part of the vitality and the urgency that we have to teach students how to use it right now. So for example, I go to chat GPT, I say, what books has Brian Keating written? Comes back, Losing the Nobel Prize, Into the Impossible, Galileo's Dialogue, and A Brief History of Time. And I'm like, oh, that's, that's really nice, you know, chat GPT. I, I hope, like, do I get like 1% of the revenue of the book sales, you know, residual? No, I didn't write that, Stephen Hawking. So not only does it flatter you, hallucinates, it's sycophantic. So I get an email a day now with a theory of everything. And the reason that I get so many, I exploded since chat GPT.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  And what happens is these people have these ideas, they're earnest, they're well meaning. And they send me an email and they say, you know, Professor Keating, you know, I value you so much, you do such good work. Here's my theory of everything, I think it changes everything. I'm willing to have you as a collaborator, you know, I won't share the Nobel Prize with you. But, but, and, and here's the deal, just to, just to prove to you that I'm right. Chat GPT's output, you know, and evaluation and 600 different parameters. I literally had a guy I talked to. So what I started to do, James, is I have an auto reply on my phone. And when you write me with your theories of everything, that's great. I say, thank you for your email, due to extreme, you know, overload at work. I can only engage with you for a thousand dollars an hour for private consulting.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Or you can join my group chat once a month on YouTube I host for $20 an hour, for $20 a month. Oh, which is a good deal compared to a thousand dollars an hour. And the thousand dollars an hour goes to charity, a 501(c)(3). Either the UCSD has a food pantry for students that can't afford food. Can you imagine like go to college, but you can't afford food? So there's a food pantry on campus. And then there's a Jewish organization called Haban on campus. So, and I've had dozen, half dozen people. Like, I made thousands of dollars for charity, I don't take it for myself. And that gets rid of about 90% of it. But I still have a lot of people, James, that are coming through. And it's all because, you know, chat GPT is telling them that they've solved everything from entropy, the arrow of time, dark matter, dark energy, and they have to get

• 54:47Speaker 04

  This to the world and they're they're very earnest about it. But before, you know, chat GPT, if I had said something like that, no one would have put their money because they wouldn't have had any confidence in it. Now it's giving him this this like false bravado that they're the next Einstein. And, you know, and the probability of that is, I always say to each one, because at the end of each hour, they always say like, I want to talk to you longer, let's keep going. And I'm like, well, I learned from my friend who's a psychotherapist, you always end at 50 minutes, not an hour, so that you can start wrapping up and then, um, you know, you say my time is like this. And now I just send them like, they say like, nobody else is as smart as me. I say, oh, yeah, well, here's 10 other people that wrote me this week. I took out their names, but here's what their theories of everything are. Here's the chat GPT validation. And, you know, how would you respond if you're me?

• 55:31Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm right. You know, so I'm like, the next hour goes up to 2,000. And then it's just going to keep doubling and doubling. And if they want to, you know, they want to pay $64,000 per hour, you know, to donate to the food pantry. I'm all I'm here for it.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  That that's funny. So some people have have paid and has anybody's, has anybody, I mean, obviously, nobody's theory probably holds up to the math. But has anybody's theory even conceptually made sense?

• 55:59Speaker 04

  It's hard to say. I mean, they're often extremely convoluted and they all have a common theme, which is that they try to solve everything from, like I said, from dark matter, dark energy, entropy, the arrow of time, the ontology of quantum mechanics, everything. And there's like, imagine Einstein, you know, in 1905, Einstein published four separate papers. And I'm, you know, Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, the theory of relativity.

• 56:29Speaker 04

  And, um, one other that I'm blanking on, but it's embarrassing. But anyway, I'm convinced if he published all four at once, you wouldn't know his name. Because it's just too much. Yeah, like proving the existence of molecules, describing a photon, talking about things moving relativistically, electrodynamics of, um, you know, all these things that he did. Nobody would believe, you know, you just couldn't take it seriously. And he was very smart. He didn't have chat GPT and he just broke it into that easily, you know, digestible, you know, kind of core puzzles. And that was then magnified the the response. And still he didn't win the Nobel Prize for 17 years. Because, you know, people that invented the gas regulator for the lighthouse and buoys, you know, that was just a much more important invention than the theory of relativity, as you know.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  You know, it's so fascinating, though. You're right. So AI is a tool, right? And you just, you need some basic skills. So maybe I'm wrong when I say, oh, you just need to ask questions because you could, you're right. AI does want to please, AI wants to please the user. So sometimes it says what you want to hear. That's why you have to, you do have to look at the sources. But AI will give you the sources, so it's easy to do.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  But you have to check it. That's part of the process of using AI kind of responsibly. And that's what I teach my students, even my kids. You know, my kids love it. They'll never know a world that AI didn't exist in. And now, do I think it's going to be, you know, contribute? I read somewhere that, you know, the imputed value of AI in the world economy is like five, at least $5 trillion. I mean, Nvidia is worth $5 trillion, right? So it has to be more than that. Let's say you put a multiple on that of 10x. Like, it has to be at least, you know, like, Apple contributes more than $2 trillion to the world economy over its lifetime, right? It's probably close to 10 or 20 trillion because of all the things that enables and apps. But like, in other words, how much does AI contribute to GDP in billions or trillions of dollars right now?

• 58:23Speaker 03

  Right now, I think it's hard to say, but let's say over the next five years, it'll probably be 30 to 50 trillion dollars.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  So I wonder how you get that valuation, because...

• 58:32Speaker 03

  You just look at like, everybody, you know, Apple's committed to spending $600 billion, Nvidia is committed to spending $600 billion, you know, all this on data centers and, you know, AI compute and inference, you know, TSM is building factories here. By the way, then you have every company, let's say in the Fortune 500, is going to, you know, be 10% profitable.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  I think that's more than the internet. I think that's like more than the internet has contributed.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, AI is going to be, AI is definitely going to be bigger for society than the internet.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  But how is that? I mean, do you feel like you have a bias, you know, because you have a survivorship bias? You know how it works, you use it effectively, you know its limitations, you know its, you know, fallacies.

• 59:11Speaker 03

  That might be, but like, 10 minutes before this podcast...

• 59:14Speaker 04

  Even my student doesn't know, like, even a top student, like, they don't know how to use it. Like, a junior at a top university in the world, they have no idea how to use it or what it's for. And there's so many different kinds of it. And, well, I didn't tell you the answer. So this comes from Aswath Damodaran, who is a famous professor at NYU. Although, like Scott Galloway, your friend Scott Galloway, who ghosted me many years ago.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  I have his book right in front of me.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  Did not come on the show. Is he coming on your show?

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Well, he's come on like seven times before. Jay, as Scott Galloway responded to you.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  I think it's too big for his.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  On, on notes on being a man.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Somehow these guys, you know, are teachers, but they don't live in the city where they teach. Um, anyway, uh, so he, he says something like the amount of, of actual, current actual revenue is under $50 billion. There was like a hundred X.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  But okay, but that's, that's like, he's just looking, I, I don't really think of AI as just chat GPT and, and, and, you know, Grok and, and all that.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  He took everything. He took, you know, uh, Deep Seek. He took, and, and, you know.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  No, no, but like, did he, did he take Tyson Foods tractors? Because some percentage of that now, they use AI to, to more efficiently spray pesticides and they have self-driving tractors.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Sure, but that's, that's going to reduce the tractor inspector is, it's going to take some GDP away as well, right? Cause the tractor inspector or like, look at lawyers. Let's say every lawyer is replaced by chat GPT. Is that net positive for, for GDP or is that negative?

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  It's going to be a net positive because.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  But by a hundred X? I don't know.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  No, no, but it, it might be, you know, it's a net positive. It's like, take the farmer who used to ride the tractor and buy more pesticide. Now he's got more money and more time. And what will he do with that money and time? Well, he's a, he's a, uh, an entrepreneurial person. He's got his farm that he, he, that he, you know, harvests and sells the products and so on. So he's going to use his time and money more efficiently and he's going to be a, probably a better allocator of that money and time. Then, you know, he would have been otherwise. So he'll start other businesses or buy other things that allow other people to start other businesses. Ultimately, we don't know the net result of this sort of economic velocity, but it will be a net positive. I'm, I'm sure of it.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  You know, like kiosks at, at, uh, McDonald's or something like that. Not that I go there, but, but, you know, like it's taken away. Uh, actually don't go to McDonald's, but it's taken away, you know, I go to a healthy place like, uh, Dunkin' Donuts. As you see my coffee cup over here. Uh, so, but you know, it's taken away a lot of entry level jobs and stuff like that. Right? So, um, in that, in that sense, like, you know, was it net accretive or not? It saved money for Mc. Donalds, but like, so anyway, there's two different things. It can either save money, reduce, you know, kind of expenditures, costs and payroll and stuff like that, which is, I agree that benefits, but you can't cut your way to profit. Like, if you don't have a profit, you're not, you can't have a bigger profit if you just keep reducing your expenses to zero.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  So then it has to leverage things. I just think, you know, I tend to be biased by something when I like a product or whatever. It's very different than, than, you know, it's like,

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  Um, and add on, and it's not like we haven't had it. We've had chatbots. We've had, you know, AI assistance. Remember the Microsoft paperclip? You know, we've had things that help us, you know, for a long time and, and these are markedly better, but like, are you deploying agents to do coding, you know, project? And like, how many coding projects do you have? Like, I have one or two. Like, again, we are unusual because we, you know, I can analyze data, but like my neighbor who does like insurance adjustments, you know, and stuff like that. Again, he might be able to like model something that he couldn't do before, but you know, is that a hundred X? What the cop X is currently? Anyway, I know it's not what you want.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  We don't, no, no, we, we don't know. But look, this is an area that I am very familiar with. And, um, so I need, I need an AI assistant to keep reminding me of all the conversations around me.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  I have this pendant that records everything that I say. I forgot to put it on today. That's the other problem.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, but, but I just had a podcast right before this one where I was talking to these two guys who had created a company to do special effects using AI, use it, do special effects on Hollywood movies. And then, you know, each scene now costs one tenth the price. So, so you're talking about instead of having a hundred million dollar budget for visual effects, you could have a $10 million budget now to make the same movie. So across all the movies, okay, it doesn't add up to trillions of dollars, but every industry now is using AI to improve profits. So you can, like a movie that would have been unprofitable can now be profitable because they reduce expenses using AI. And that, that does become a net positive because it does mean the studio can make more movies, hire more actors, hire more crew.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  And again, I'm not saying trillions, you have to kind of add up lots of small things. Things to get to the trillions, but I think that is happening across every industry where money's being saved. And that means it's being more efficiently allocated towards new projects, hiring new employees. So 70% of the companies in the Fortune 500 have filled out a survey and said, yes, we're using AI. But only 4% of those companies have said, oh, this has led to firing employees. So we haven't really seen the mass layoffs yet. We see the headlines of mass layoffs. We haven't seen countrywide.

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  About like, how do you justify, you know, Nvidia being worth more than all the European stock markets put together? You know, just well, and then if that like, and then let's say you took out one of their customer like chat GPT. Like that could be the pinprick that pops everything, right? I mean, because yes, they're gonna, I mean, again, it's not like a consumer thing, like we don't buy the hopper chips. We pay for tokens and then what if that goes to zero? Like the Chinese flooded the market with solar panels in 2000. I remember solar panels was a hot new thing. 2005, 2006, America was going to dominate and be great. And now we don't, there's not a single company in America that makes them. China barely makes a profit, but they make quality products. And but they, you know, now that market's totally gone with deep seek.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  Deep seek costs 10 times less to train and to run per million tokens than chat than Claude does.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. I agree with you about deep seek. I think decentralized, open source, general purpose inference, like a chat GPT, is much better, better done in the long run by a decentralized, open source platform like deep seek. So I think that any one industry, yes, I agree with you. Open AI is probably overvalued. Who knows? I don't know. But it's certainly, you know, up against some, some strong competitors that are one one hundredth the, the price, like deep seek or Mistral. There's plenty of open source, decentralized AI competitors to, to open AI. So we don't know the answer there. And on Nvidia, I agree with you, that might be overvalued only because, not because they're going to run out of the need for GPUs.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Some other company might come up with something better than GPUs. And that's the risk you take when you're an investor in Nvidia, because the demand is still there.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  This is what I've been waiting for. Look, I've done 1,500 podcasts, a ton of podcasts about health and particularly anti-aging. I've had on every anti-aging expert on the planet. And finally, gummy bears to help me with anti-aging. These are the first ever longevity gummies powered by Mitopure. A delicious, easy way to put more energy into your day and to treat yourself. The only clinically proven Urolithin A gummy for strength and healthy aging from the inside out. And I've taken it as supplements, but I'm not really a supplement taker kind of person. I'd much rather just like take a bunch of gummy bears and like eat it like candy.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  You can't really tell how much it's working, you know, and sometimes you don't know for sure. Is it just, are you thinking this? But it does improve energy. Tests showed increases muscle strength by up to 12% after 16 weeks. These gummy bears deliver 6X more Urolithin A than a glass of pomegranate juice, which by the way, I was taking a ton of pomegranates as well. So this is the number one doctor recommended Urolithin A supplement. It's vegan, gluten-free, non-GMO, clean label project certified, NSF content certified and free of major allergens and artificial ingredients. Mitopure is the only clinically proven form of Urolithin A. So if you want to stay strong and energized now and as you age,

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  then you have to try Mitopure gummies. My friends at Timeline are offering 20% off just for my listeners. So head to timeline.com/altiture to get started. That's timeline.com/altiture. Your cells will thank you.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  You mentioned about AI coding. Well, Google and Microsoft have laid off thousands of programmers because they're using AI coding. And Cursor, which is the leader in the space right now, they are the fastest company in history to get to a billion dollars in revenues in their AI coding. And their code is not perfect. Like, you need programmers to go over it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  But it reduces the time for a good Google programmer, it reduces their time and the amount of manpower and man-hours needed to make a program by 90%. So it is valuable. And again, that's built on top of the Anthropic platform and Claude, Cursor is. So there's going to be other, these niche companies that get to a billion dollars in revenues super fast. That means, you know, if they get to a billion dollars in revenues, it's super fast like that. They're probably worth, you know, I think actually Cursor's valuation in the last fundraising was about 30 billion, which actually makes some sense because they're still growing at that rate. And, you know, that's where you start to build all this value, is that the time to build things and the efficiency using AI is really great.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  No, yeah, believe me, I know. But I just feel like the user base, you know, how many millions of people are going to use it? Yes, Cursor and those things are very good. But it's also like, it's like quantum computing, which we're, you know, eventually we'll talk about, maybe not even today because I have to teach quantum mechanics soon. But, but the, you know, quantum mechanical computers are extremely useful at discovering and optimizing the properties of quantum computers. Like, they don't, they don't have tremendous, like, there's no AI, you know, quantum computing, you know, a secret killer app yet. Now, there are certain things that they're very good at. And then the most famous one is like encryption, decryption, and so forth.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  But that might have like a really negative externality in that like it could compromise, you know, like encryption schemes, including those used in Tensor and Bitcoin and other things. Like, we'll get into that at some point. Why is that the case? How does that work? Yeah.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  But, but like, okay, I agree. And it feels almost like a similar bubble when you look at stock market valuations or private company valuations. But here's the one big difference. Quantum computers have zero, zero legitimate users. Now, there are research users and there are users who are trying to build better quantum computers, but there are zero users at the current moment, other than research and kind of academic.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  It wasn't the case, yeah.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  AI has two billion users just using like ChatGPT and and you know competitors to ChatGPT, not counting the tractors spraying pesticides and and all that kind of stuff using AI. So just two billion users on these general inference platforms. That's a real difference.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  I gotta see your tractor. I mean, you keep talking about your tractor. You're a chicken farmer down there? What are you doing down there?

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  KFC? No, I need I need like AI to make the pickleball lines on my on my tennis court, so.

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's that's a that's a number one use case. I think that's how Nvidia is going to stay in business. Now I'm not worried about my position, my one share of Nvidia. I have this friend who who like, he's like this complete genius like programmer and and just like, he's got this whole idea for new new types of AI that's like different from diffusion. It's like diffusion plus like branch and and network theory, like graph theory, like Stephen Wolf from works on and stuff like that. It's this revolutionary thing. He told me to buy Nvidia in like 2019 and he's like almost broke. I'm just like this guy. I mean, literally, if he bought like 100 shares, you know, when it was like $1,000, you know, that would have been $1,000.

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  Like, he could have been, I don't know how much, but we can ask AI. But like, he'd be like well off and now he's he's totally, you know, like, I feel bad for the guy. And I'm like, I didn't I didn't really take your take your advice. But that that's sometimes the problem with it. Yeah, I mean, these these things have such abilities. We impute to them these like almost mythical, magical powers, including the power of the economy and and over science and physics. And and that's why people have this misplaced trust, in my opinion, that their theories of everything are correct because they're vetted by, you know, Gemini or whatever. But like, but Gemini in the hands of a professional physicist is an extremely unusual powerful tool.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, because and I I would say that, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'll ask you the question. Like, I would say the difference between the guy pitching you the theory of everything and someone like you using ChatGPT is you won't ask leading questions. So if I asked to ChatGPT, hey, if I, you know, assume gravitons.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  Are influenced by gravity. Does that have a make a theory of everything? And if chat GPT is gonna say, yes, that's very astute. Like if you do this is so chat GPT is gonna like try to agree with me. Whereas you'll say you'll ask meaningful questions to give you more information. So you can come to a conclusion. You won't ask leading questions. You'll ask information oriented questions. And I think that's a big difference in terms of how to use chat GPT correctly.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, and it is. And that is a huge form of leverage, which is again, why I don't think that it should be really reconsidered by my colleagues and even like my fellow parents. You know, my daughter, one of my daughters is interested in making a song using Sona or whatever.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, Sona.

• 1:13:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, so she's doing it and she's like, oh, make us make a song. You know, with like Taylor Swift singing about my friend, you know, Brittany and my friend Kaylee and Leila and whatever. And then they're going to, you know, try to get me at recess and hit me with a dodgeball or whatever. And it comes like, I'm sorry, Ollie, I can't get back to you on this and we can't, sweetie, we can't deal with this. Because it violates copyright, you know, like not only is her name trademarked, but like even her style, like Taylor Swift's style is trademarked. And that was like kind of revelation. But then she said, oh, okay. Well, how do I get around it? So she asked chat GPT, like, what are like basically synonyms to describe Taylor Swift's voice perfectly?

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  To an LLM that isn't allowed to use. I helped her a little bit.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  But isn't allowed to. And it came back and it was perfect. So what did she learn? She learned how to prompt. She learns that prompt engineering, you know, so to speak, which is an important skill. And she learned that, you know, as a as a kid. And now, you know, that's a lesson that she's not going to forget. And now she knows she can't do certain things. There's guardrails on it. She learned a tremendous amount and I feel like.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  By the way, then she also learned Taylor Swift's style and maybe some music theory around Taylor Swift's, you know, what makes a pop song.

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  And that's incredibly valuable. Taylor Swift is the one of the bestselling artists of all time. So it's kind of incredibly valuable that she wouldn't have learned.

• 1:14:55Speaker 04

  I read, you know, I wrote just in my Monday magic mailing list where you can get it, briankeen.com. Slash mail or list. And I wrote about this, this new site that I found called book.SV. And all it does is give recommendations. I said, do you ever read a book, James, that you kind of wish you didn't read it? Because then you'd be able to read it for the first time. Like, I know you were like that with losing the Nobel Prize, but, but,

• 1:15:24Speaker 04

  but, so it gives you recommendations of similar books. It's pure AI. So,

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  Recently, I typed in, and you could put that in the, in the show notes, James, or, you know, first put in mind mailing list, Jay, and then put in book.SV. It's a great little thing. So, okay. So I put in, of course, you know, my books, but then I put in a choose yourself, be happy, make millions, live the dream. So what do you think are some comparable books, similar books to choose yourself? Besides the choose yourself guide to wealth?

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Okay, maybe Seth Godin's books it would recommend, maybe something like the four hour work week it would recommend.

• 1:16:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's got that. But here were some other ones that I, like, I didn't think about at first, but then I read it and I was like, yeah, you're absolutely right. Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  Scott Adams, how to fail at almost everything and still win big.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  But these are books like if, like, and then Gary Vaynerchuk, jab, jab, jab, right hook. So that's like, first I thought, well, it's just, it's just looking at the title, like, but then it has Josh Waitsky and the art of learning.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  No, and these are all books that I've read pretty heavily, you know, either before or after reading choose yourself.

• 1:16:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  I've interviewed, yeah, and, yeah, mastery with by Robert Green. So, yeah, all of these things were actually.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  Which one of Seth's books is most similar to your book, according to book.SV?

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  I mean, he, I think he actually had a book called Pick Yourself, but, yeah. I, or there was a book I felt like that, but maybe Purple Cow, I would have to think about.

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

  Icarus deception, how high will you fly?

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  Yes, that one was, yeah, that came out a little bit before choose yourself, and I felt it was like a similar, similar theme.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  Isn't that cool? So that's a great application of, and so just that feeling, there must be some Japanese word for that feeling of regret after you finish something you like, you know, like, it's almost like you, you finished eating at this three star Michelin restaurant and now you can't eat anymore. You're like stuffed.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  You know, I just, I just put in my favorite collection of short stories and, and I asked recommendations, every single recommendation I've read and loved.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  That's amazing. Okay. Choose, choose yourself guide to wealth. What do you, so this is a little bit more popular. Now there's reinvent yourself, choose yourself, the rich employee.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had a whole series.

• 1:17:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. Let's see what's one that's not, um, actually this one should have been the Kamal Ravikant's book. I think that should have been, that was, that should have been more similar to choose yourself, but they have.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Only because I wrote, I think I wrote, did I write the foreword to that? I forget. I don't think I did. No, I'm just, I just recommended it. So.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Some of these are not, I don't, I haven't read that book, your book, uh, the wealth guide, but, but I've read the other one.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  It's, it's the same as choose yourself. Just don't read that one.

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So save, save money. And then, um, the other one is, uh, uh, reinvent yourself. Let me just see that one.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Oh, skip the line. Skip the line.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  Skip the line. Yeah. I read that. Obviously I had, I hosted you. Um, but I'm just trying to see any ones that are, that are like really, um, like that resonate in that sense. Like the sense I had when I was, yeah, tribe of mentors, Tim Ferriss. Yeah. Um, so it's an interesting site. So those are great things that like kind of distill the DNA of something. But you know, I'm worried about writing, like I kind of, I'm glad that I never, that chat GPT really came out after my first books were, you know, after I had done a lot of, cause it's very tempting to use it. You know, like I use it for writing, like I write, I write letters of recommendation. I basically, you know, kind of just brainstorm in this AI voice mode.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  And then I have like a boilerplate thing in Claude as a project. I just say like, make sure you interview the candidate, you know, that you're, that you're writing for, you know, you meet with him or her. Like, and I just say like, if you were writing a recommendation, what would you want me to, cause I don't, they've been working for me for six years. I don't. Remember everything they did in 2019, you know? So like, tell me everything you're proud of, like you're writing for, your mother is writing this thing for you. And then I'm gonna make it professional, I'm gonna add it, but I use AI to like, distill what they say, because they're not maybe as good a writer as I am, or they just put it like a CV, like bullet points, like that's not as, I'm not gonna cut and paste that, but then I can convert it and add in my special sauce and spices. Actually, train, have you done any like James bots? I mean, you must have.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  And how did you do that? Because I saw this really good guy, Matt Wolf, he lives in San Diego, actually. And he has this great like tutorial on how to take every single interview you've ever done on YouTube, at least, I don't know how you do it for the audio only ones, but all your YouTube ones.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  I've done all my articles and a bunch of my books.

• 1:20:06Speaker 04

  And what about your podcast?

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  No, I haven't done that. I haven't done that.

• 1:20:10Speaker 04

  So what did you put in it? Like, what tools did you use? Let's, let's make this actionable.

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  I actually don't know, because I, someone else did it for me. So, but one thing I will say is that if I say, okay, now write in the style of James Aldricher. I can see what it's doing, like I do think I have, for better or for worse, a particular style. And, and I could see what it's doing and how it's trying to do it, but it's not working, it's failing. And I don't think, I don't think AI could replace us as writers. And of course, I could be biased, because, you know, I'm a writer. But the problem is, over 50% of content now being written on the internet is written by AI. It's about 52% last month. So now, and AI always only learns from the latest things going on the internet.

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  So it's only learning about writing now from its own writing. So it's kind of, it's kind of.

• 1:21:01Speaker 04

  I call it mad bot disease. Remember mad cow disease? Like when cows would eat other cows and then they'd go, they get this brain disease. So I call it mad bot disease. Yeah, it's exactly right. And that's why there's no chance as LLM, maybe AI will, but there's no chance an LLM plus GPU based architecture will create a theory of everything. I'm going on record, right now, you heard on, there's no, it's not gonna come up, it can't do it, because we haven't done it before. And the only new things that are coming into it are gonna be either new physical laws. New physics discoveries from humans, or it's going to be like, oh, here's a transcript from the Fast and the Furious 11. Like, is that what's missing from the current understanding of physics? Is that the corpus of knowledge and tokens doesn't include the Fast and the Furious 11? No, it has nothing to do with that, right?

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  No, you're absolutely right. Like, for writing, for instance, okay, there's only so many good writers, like, there's only so many Hemingways in the world. So even statistically, you can't analyze, there isn't enough data to give you examples of good writing. Plus, it's very hard to, it's even hard, subjectively, let alone objectively, to determine good writing. So it's never really going to learn to be a good writer. But video is a different story. So there's a million hours a minute being uploaded to YouTube for videos. So there's so much more data on what makes a video look like a real video. Every minute, there's another million hours' worth of real videos being uploaded. So the data is there. The data for good writing is not there. The data for a theory of everything is not there. So

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  you have to understand how AI works. It's dependent on good and marked data. And sometimes it's not able to mark the data.

• 1:22:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, this kind of connects back to what I said in the beginning. Like, my rubric for picking a good politician is like the most liberal person in a red state or something like that, right? But what's like the dumbest take of a smart person? Like, I think Elon Musk, very bright, very high agency, very competent. But I think, you know, he or Sam Altman, like, they really believe that AGI is going to be here, and that it's going to fundamentally do things like create a theory of everything. I mean, they've said such. Like, it's just like a matter of time. And, you know, I understand they have quite an investment with both, you know, a chemical rocket company, plus

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  a AI company, plus a, you know, plus a social media platform. So I understand his incentives, but what do you attribute that to? I mean, it's such a simple proposition. Like, nobody who knows anything about math, or, like, I interviewed Terrence Tao, his IQ was like 260 or something reportedly. Smartest man, he won the Fields Medal, he is just this wunderkind. You know, he's brilliant. He actually like graduated from college, I think in nineteen and then he went to Princeton at twenty one. He got his PhD. But, um, you know, he's like, man, no, they don't even have things that can like literally, James, you can't even check like Andrew Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  Like it doesn't know how to do that. Like you have to basically, and these are very optimized. Only do things like prove math expressions are true or false. And it can't reproduce something that was done thirty years ago by a human. So I think that gives you a lot of, now I believe that it can beat us in chess. I always say like, they'll never beat us in tic tac toe, James. They will never take our tic tac toe crown away from human beings. I think it's impossible. Like, I'm joking. I mean,

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  Well, well, you know, I was, I, I of course, worked on everything, you know, chess software and game software. And I remember going to, when I was in grad school, I went to Kai-Fu Li, who later on in basically invented speech recognition at Apple, then became one of the biggest investors in China. But Kai-Fu Li was a professor at the time of, of computer speech recognition in nineteen eighty nine at the grad school I went to. And I said, let's work on Go, because I knew he was interested in Go and he had created the best Othello program using AI. And he said, no, no, no, Go is too hard. They're never going to solve it. And yet now Go is solved. It was seemed like an impossible problem and it's solved because there was data.

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Right. So those are algorithmic things, but where there's no algorithm, like can, would you ever say like the, you know, the AI sculpture, like this robotic sculpture and it's going to do something that is as evocative as like Michelangelo or, or the Mona Lisa or whatever. Like, yes, it can make incredible art and even music. And in some of, I, I read somewhere that the top ten on Billboard is like half AI in certain categories, like, uh, which is pretty crazy. Um, but then people in there asked about it, do you want an AI thing? You remember this thing, like you must remember, because I think you told, you talked about it first, as far as I don't know, like the uncanny valley. You remember that?

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 04

  Nobody talks about that anymore. We just went like way, like, nobody says like, oh, these AI girlfriends, like, they don't really look identical to like Scarlett Johansson or Robin or my wife. Like, no, no, they look perfect. They're exactly, you know, you can replicate people's exact images. But people, you know, do they prefer it? And, and so I'm worried about writing. I mean, I've seen like a massive decrease, even on like YouTube, like you take some of the most popular YouTubers and except for the very top like Joe Rogan or Stephen Bartlett or whoever, like they're getting way fewer views and and why is that? Like what happened in the last year? I mean, the only explanation is that there's just so much explosion of other content

• 1:26:22Speaker 04

  and some of it's AI. But, you know, in terms of writing, like, are people sitting down like, I I haven't read a physical book like in a long time and I read a lot. Like, I listen to audiobooks, you know, 2X Speed for my podcast. I read a lot of nonfiction, you know, so I read more than 99% of the population. I think I'm unusual and I have a podcast and I do research. So, I mean, I'm I'm worried about like, I'm thinking about writing a traditionally published book, you know, about Jim Simons in, but from his scientific accomplishments, not like, you know,

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  Oh, I would I would totally read that.

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's and and there's so many more insights because if you asked Jim, who is he? Is he a, would he say, I'm a hedge fund manager? Like, no, he was a scientist. His whole life was based on his scientific curiosity. So I think that the financial thing, of course, gets the headlines because it's titillating. But but no, that wasn't his core identity. And so, you know, I knew him, you know, as well as, you know, anyone outside of his family, I would say. And and I think like, that's the story that needs to be told. But like, who's going to read that? You would read it because you're my friend and you're

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  No, no, I would read it. I read it also because I'm fascinated by Jim Simons. So, yes, I would read it because of you and I would read it because I'm. So you're going to get niche audiences, like, like AI and the internet in general has encouraged niche subcultures. And that's what you're going to appeal to. You might appeal to a general

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Publishers don't want, they hear niche and they're like, screw that. I'm not getting into a niche. Like, they can do niche all by themselves.

• 1:27:48Speaker 03

  But that's why I wouldn't, I would not do a traditionally published book.

• 1:27:51Speaker 04

  Are you ever going to do another one?

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  I don't know, I got, last traditionally published book I did was Skip the Line. And I got a great, I got a great advance and, you know, it was nice to have a really great editor. But overall, I enjoy my experience of self-publishing more. I have total control. I make 100% of the profit on the book. I could design a book cover just as well as any editor because I could hire a book designer and I could get just as, I could get better marketing because I can also control the price depending on the marketing campaign. So, so, you know, I don't, I don't really see the benefit other than, you know, advance and prestige.

• 1:28:31Speaker 04

  I'm not thinking in, you know, a book about, you know, five dimensional topology is gonna, you know, be a huge, you know, runaway Wall Street bestseller. But in terms of, and maybe it will because Jim Simon's, you know, involved. But what do you see as the trade-offs? Like, if I just said, I don't care about the money, the advance or whatever, but I want like the full firepower of a publisher, like what is that?

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  What is, what is the full firepower?

• 1:28:55Speaker 04

  That's what I'm asking you.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  Okay, the only firepower with just basic self-publishing compared to traditional publishing, the only firepower traditional publishing has is they can get it into Barnes and Noble. That is the only firepower they have. You know, I say Barnes and Noble in quotes, they get into other bookstores. But, you know, they're not gonna get it into Walmart books. They're not gonna get into Target books because you have to write like a romance novel or a thriller or whatever. So, so Jim Simon's book is not gonna get into Walmart. It'll get into Barnes and Noble in the major cities. And then if it does well in the major city Barnes and Nobles, then it could get into the other cities. But there's no, I would say self-publishing has more firepower. And that, and by the way, the evidence, the statistical evidence is there. So, on average, a self-published book has a higher star rating on Amazon,

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  meaning it's prob, you know, readers like it better than, on average, than an average traditionally published book. And it has, on average, higher rank on Amazon than traditionally published books, meaning they sell more copies if you're self-published. I don't know why that is. It could be because the gatekeepers are just not that good at the traditional publishers. So, you know, so, so there's no real firepower that traditional publishing gets you, other than the fact that, oh yes, my agent got me Simon and Schuster and, you know, the advance was published in Publishers Weekly and now I'm, oh, you can't get me on the New York Times bestseller list if you were self-published. So, you know, that, that's.

• 1:30:18Speaker 04

  So, why doesn't Steve, why does Steven Pinker not publish self-published?

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  I think my guess is he, if I were to estimate, he probably gets about a million dollar advance per book and he's writing a book a year. So that's a decent addition to his Harvard academic salary. And I'm just guessing at this. And, and then he doesn't have to hire-

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  If he sells too many books, he would make it up in the book sales, right?

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he's not, he's probably not going to sell that many books. Like, he, he is kind of like a marquee name for them. And, you know, they don't really make the money on those authors. They make the, publishers make the money on their backlist, but they stay relevant by having, you know, Steven Pinker is our latest author and, you know, we got, we got him on the Today Show, which by the way, doesn't really sell any books. But, you know, they can kind of then, and then when they're pitching like Stephen King's next book, they're like, oh yeah, we just had Steven Pinker, you know, and we'd love to have you. So, so, you know, but I think that's, I think it's a dying business model. And, and for Steven Pinker, he doesn't wanna, he doesn't wanna get, hire a book designer and, you know, I'm a little more entrepreneurial, not that he isn't, but I'm a little more

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  entrepreneurial and, and, you know, I will get a great book designer, I'll figure out how to play with the pricing and I know email lists and podcasts and so on. Like, I don't need a PR firm. His, his book publisher will hire a PR firm for him and, and so on. So, but you know, did Choose Yourself sell more copies than whatever his latest book is? Probably. And that was self-published. And Skip the Line, which was traditionally published, and I got, you know, a good advance, did not make back the advance.

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  I do worry about the self-published, for one thing, the, having an editor, yeah, is, if you have a good editor, I, I think that's extremely powerful. Like, I'm very close to my copy editor, you know, Allegra Houston. She's, she's amazing and she, she does a lot. And I was very close to my original acquiring editor and editor, and then he quit Norton and went off on his own because it's a horrible, it was a horrible job, I'm sure, you know, at that pay rate. And his office was like a janitor's closet somewhere. But the, but, you know, having someone to bounce ideas off of that has a, you know, kind of a financial stake in things. If you hire somebody, you could say, well, like,

• 1:32:36Speaker 04

  you know, first of all, it's pretty hard to, you know, find a group of people that are as good at copy editing. Now, maybe I could hire them again. But, you know, bouncing ideas off of, you know, that was very valuable. It's like AI, I could have AI be my editor, but I think it'll be horrible.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  So, so I think you're right. Like, I've had great editors at traditional publishers. But, okay, choose yourself. I will tell you the team of people I had helping me with edit and, and marketing and design. First, I had this guy, Niels Parker. You might not know him, but he was Tucker Max's editor on all of Tucker Max's books, which were all Tucker Max and Malcolm Gladwell are like the two people who've had, you know, three books at the same time on the New York Times Bestseller list, so.

• 1:33:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. You introduced me to Tucker, so.

• 1:33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, Niels Parker is, is a great editor and writer. Then I had two other people helping me with marketing, design, the thinking of it, the editing of it. I had the young Ryan Holiday, pre-all-his-Stoicism books, and he was, he was a marketer then. I, I hired him. And Tucker Max. So these, that was my group of people to bounce ideas off of. So I had a real professional team that I, made up of, you know, between, between Tucker and Ryan now, there's like 20 million copies of their books. So, so this was like a really super professional team. And I was very fortunate in that, but.

• 1:33:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'm just thinking like someone like Basic Books, who does a lot of science stuff, and, or Norton, who does science. Having that, you know, as an independent person who's gonna read the book and not kiss my butt. And, you know, in the scientific realm, what I've heard from my agent, you know, is like, people don't really care about whether or not a theory is true. Like, they, they just wanna hear it. Like, they hear, "Oh, black holes destroy information," or "Quantum computers are gonna revolutionize, you know, our world." Or, you know, "We, we go to Mars and, and it's gonna change everything for preservation of human life." Or, "There are aliens, you know, throughout the galaxy and the universe."

• 1:34:36Speaker 04

  Like, none of those are provable statements. In fact, some of them are demonstrably false. And the, the biggest one is like quantum gravity and a theory of everything, you know, will, will change, you know, completely change the roadmap for civilization, like the invention of fire, or all these. But, and so they like things like string theory because it's false, it's unfalsifiable. In other words, these authors are like, Stephen Hawking was famous for this, like. Wrote total nonsense BS. I know I wrote his book, A Brief History of Time, but, but nevertheless, there's so much nonsense in that book. He talks about string theory and it's like less reputable cousin called M theory, which, you know, nonsense.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  I never even heard of that.

• 1:35:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, no. So it's all in, but the most people, 90% of the people didn't read it. I, I once was at a talk that when he could still talk or respond in near real time and someone said, why'd you write A Brief History of Time? It's rumored that nobody who buys it reads it. And, uh, and he replied, well, it's only important that they buy it. You know, it's like, my daughter needed to pay for, I needed to pay for private school for my daughter. He literally told me that. I told this stuff. Um, so, but, but people like that. They, it's almost like this hero where like you just want to know that there's some like SEAL Team Six of intellectual, you know, physicists out there, but you, you don't need to know how they do the wet work that they do, you know, in Venezuela or wherever they're going to be. Uh, you just need to know that they're there. Like remember,

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  like A Few Good Men, Jack Nigels, you know, you want them on that wall. You need them on that wall. Like we need these Nobel Prize winners, even though we have no freaking clue what they do, most people. Um, because it's sort of like a, a, a CV enhancer for the human race. And I just feel like, uh, you know, I know how to write a book like Brian Greene and, you know, The Fabric of Reality, or, or, you know, the, the, you know, kind of just, just the breathless tones about string theory. I know how to do that, but I don't want to do that. Like I'd rather do something that's true to like experimental. The ironic thing is that Jim Simons worked on a scientific

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  theory, which not only could be a theory of everything, but it, it also, you know, is verifiable and in some cases verified. In other words, there have been Nobel Prizes given for predictions that stem from his mathematics. He didn't predict a physical application of it. And, and some of them relate to quantum computers, which we have to talk about, but not today because I gotta go teach like right now. Um, but let's, let's catch up again soon and I'll try to get on topic about the moon landing denial.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. The entire purpose of this podcast, the title of this podcast was to talk about Candace Owens. And denying the moon landing and we will just have to reschedule that for next few days or weeks or whatever.

• 1:37:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  It's always going to be a hot topic. So, so we'll talk about it soon.

• 1:37:22Speaker 04

  It's, it's the computing of the future. It always will be and the, the moon landing is always going to be denied like any, anything like the Epstein files. People like, oh, the Epstein files are going to come out. It's going to change everything. I'm like, as long, do you think they're going to reveal everything, James? Like, not even like, like, just is it possible? Like, how many gigabytes of data is that? And even L L Ms, like, a lot of limitations of the L L Ms, they can't go through a context more than like 100 emails or something before they just like forget what they're doing.

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  Let, let me ask a slightly different question, which maybe answers this question, which is, have they ever released anything about anything? So, so where's the, where's the JFK stuff? Where's the UFO stuff? Where's the MLK stuff?

• 1:38:05Speaker 04

  That's coming this week, the UFO.

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  Well, well, I just had someone talk about UFOs and it's like, oh no, they're threatened with death. But, you know, and he didn't quite say that. I'm not, I don't mean to, I'm not making fun of that guy.

• 1:38:16Speaker 04

  You claim that, James. They claim they're going to be, you know, you know, detained and that they now they're whistleblowers. And then, why do you need a whistleblower? Like, I talked to this astronaut, Chris Hadfield. He's like, well, if you're telling the truth, why do you need a?

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  Love Chris.

• 1:38:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was great. You know, he gave me like such a good interview about his new book. But let me just say, as long as there's some capacity for doubt, the human mind will never be satisfied, right? We'll never know exactly like to the molecule, what happened in Dallas in 1963, right? We'll never know exactly why the twin towers, you know, the building seven fell down. Yeah. Yes, there are theories and there's always going to be gaps, right? There's always going to be some plausible, you know, kind of outlet that, and as long as that happens, you can never resolve something. We can't, look, we can't even resolve that the moon landing happened. There's, there's a substantial number of people who are alcoholics or felons or, or truly mentally ill people. I'm not saying that people that don't believe we landed on the moon, you know, are mentally ill.

• 1:39:14Speaker 04

  But I'm just saying, like, 10% of the population are murderers, you know, and alcoholics. And so, you're never going to convince everybody that any- Any event happen, the Epstein files or not, even if like Trump's all over it, he was really down there, he's doing everything bad and and and it's reprehensible what Epstein did, nobody denies that. But that this is going to somehow change everything or like, you know, Scott Galloway, he said, oh, the reason that we have, you know, that Trump is is is releasing, you know, the or is going to declare war on Venezuela. And and did, you know, like, sign these peace accords and is because he wanted to keep Epstein out of the news like. It's so much like wish casting. There are people just and you can wish anything onto it such that if you hate America or you love America.

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  You could have plausible, you know, case for your argument, but none of that has to do with the moon landing or quantum computing. So we have to schedule that. Jay, set it up. You got my email. I'll talk to you guys soon. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Playing chess, playing in the US Masters in Charlotte, North Carolina.

• 1:40:12Speaker 04

  Awesome. That's that's close. That's close to you.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:15Speaker 04

  Maybe, maybe I'll, yeah, I can, my, my, I have some relatives there that would like to meet you. Um, including one that might want to work on quantum computing. We'll talk about that.

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  All right. Excellent. Well, look, Brian, good luck on your teaching today and we're going to talk soon about all these other things.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  I have to figure out what, you know, six plus three equals X plus seven. I.

• 1:40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:38Speaker 04

  If you can get me that information, I will, I'll be eternally grateful.

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

  I, we, we got to get to the bottom of this.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  This message is brought to you by the Capital One Venture X Card. Venture X offers the premium benefits you expect, like a $300 annual Capital One travel credit for less than you expect. Elevate your earn with unlimited double miles on every purchase, bringing you one step closer to your next dream destination. Plus, enjoy access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. The Capital One Venture X Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See CapitalOne.com for details.