Searching for Alien Earths with Lisa Kaltenegger

Searching for Alien Earths with Lisa Kaltenegger Transcript Brian Keating: Carl Sagan died over 25 years ago, but his legacy lives on, and so does the mystery that haunted him all of his life. What if Earth isn’t the only home for life in the universe? Imagine the vast expanse of space filled with planets teeming with life. As Karl said, if there’s no life, it’s an awful waste of space. But what does space look like? Could we even detect life on other planets? These aren’t just sci fi questions. They’re the heart of humanity’s oldest and most profound curiosities. And now, thanks to cutting edge technology and theoretical progress from today’s guest, we’re closer than ever to finding the answers. Lisa Kaltenegger: This is our first step. A biosphere that changes a planet and lets us spot life in the light that we collect with our Brian Keating: Under her leadership, a multidisciplinary team of scientists is developing innovative tools to detect signs of alien life. What exactly do we need for life to begin somewhere else? This is one of Lisa’s key driving questions, and her work propels us into these mysteries and beyond. She’s here today to take us on an extraordinary journey across the cosmology, seeking habitable planets and perhaps the next Earth, the alien Earth. Lisa Kaltenegger: But one of the things we don’t know is what condition do you need for life to get started. Brian Keating: Stay tuned as we embark on this cosmic voyage. You never know who or what we might meet out there. Welcome to an alien episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with a fan favorite, a personal favorite, and to my knowledge, the person who has done the most for spectroscopy since her countryman, Doppler. So Christian Doppler did a lot, and I think he would love to meet you, a fellow, Austrian. How are you doing today? I just talked about Christian Doppler this week, and I told my class, a cosmologist, I’m talking to you. So excited. Lisa, how are you? Lisa Kaltenegger: I am good. Thank you so much, and thanks for having me back on the show. I would love to be Doppler and especially, as you said, Austrian countrymen. Right? One of the things we would sit down with a great Austrian theory, like civilized people discussing science. Brian Keating: I always make, note that he was from the same town as another person who knew quite a bit about, frequency and pitch and melody, and that was, of course, Wolfgang Mozart. They were from the same town. So when I visited Austria for the first and only time, I made sure to pay equal attention and regard to Christian Doppler. So I should give your your your bio. You’ve been a a guest on the Into the Impossible podcast before, but you now have a book, and we’re so excited to talk about it. You are the founding director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University where I was almost born and almost got into, except I was rejected twice. Lisa Kaltenegger: But I said, the offer is open. Come and work for me, you know, any time. Yes. Brian Keating: I wanna do another post doc. The new science of finding toolkits to find life on faraway worlds, and this new book is about exactly that. And I think the thing that most is is just so delightful about you is you’re so authentic, Lisa. You don’t shy away from talking about challenges. You also don’t dwell on them. There’s there’s some aspects of the book where you talk about challenges of, you know, women and minorities and so forth, but you Arthur not by any means, you know, beholden to a class or a status and and you’re just your honesty is is so delightful. As a professional to another professional, I just I wanna congratulate you on that aspect, but the book is is a triumph. It’s one of my favorite new books. Brian Keating: Talk to me as we do. Help me judge the book by its cover. What’s the meaning of the title, the subtitle, and the beautiful artwork, which I only have, you know, half of the artwork, because you have another copy over there. Show me Lisa Kaltenegger: This is what I was was about to say, you know, you can actually take your pick. So you can have the British copy. And you’ve just shown the American copy. And the really interesting thing about this let me just bring it up here. I wrote a book. And then the publishers so Macmillan here at the US, that’s theory, and Penguin Press in the u in the UK. And I had no idea that you get 2 publishers for the same language, but you do. They made up their mind what this book is about, you know, and how they wanted to represent it. And so we’re going with the American first. So the title, I wanted the title to be Alien Earth because it has so much in it. It’s us searching for planets like ours around other stars, so alien Arthur. But it’s also I bring you into the history of our own planet because you need to understand the history of our own planet to be able to not miss signs of life if the planet’s just younger than ours or maybe older than ours. And yesterday was pretty funny. I talked to my husband, and he was like, oh, alien earth, because you’re an alien in science sometimes as the only woman. I was like, oh, that’s a third aspect I hadn’t even considered that he took from that. And so I love the title. Brian Keating: superhero manic. Lisa Kaltenegger: Alien Earth. And then the new science of planet had to get the cosmos. Can I just tell you? It’s so funny because it’s alien Arthur. Right?

Peter Diamandis: Are We Moving Too Fast With AI?

Peter Diamindis: Are We Moving Too Fast With AI?! Transcript Speaker: There’s no on off switch and there’s no velocity switch we can turn down. We’re using faster and faster computers to design and build faster and faster computers. We’re using stronger and stronger AI to write code on its own for stronger and stronger AI. The notion that we’re gonna have AI that is fully human like and then exceed human capabilities. I don’t think it’s a matter of if. It’s only a matter of when.   Brian Keating: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to AI and Your Life, the Essential Summit. I’m joined here. Well, I should say I’m Brian Keating, and I’m joined with my good friend And, mentor and and really, big influence influential person in my life, doctor Peter Diamandis, Who was recently named one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders by Fortune Magazine. Peter is the founder and Co and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, the executive founder and director of Singularity University, and cofounder of Bold Capital Partners, a venture fund with $250,000,000 in investing in in exponential technologies. Doctor Diamandis is also a best selling author New York Times best selling author of 2 books, Abundance and Bold. I’ve got those here. He earned degrees in molecular genetics, aerospace engineering from MIT and did his MD at Harvard Medical School.   Brian Keating: And Peter’s favorite saying is the best way to predict the future is to create it for yourself. Peter, it’s always a treat to be with you. Thank you for Joining us on this AI summit.   Speaker: My pleasure, my friend. A pleasure. And, I was just saying, when we’re getting ready here, how much I enjoy my time speaking with you. So this is always a treat when when you got 2 friends getting together and talking about the amazing world we’re living in.   Brian Keating: Yeah. We’ll we’ll run out of time before we run out of topics. We’ve, both hosted each other on each other’s podcast. Peter’s podcast is, Moonshots and Mindsets, And that’s, really delightful. It’s seen exponential growth of its own, so make sure you subscribe, wherever fine podcasts are bought and sold. So let’s get started. So, I wanna ask you. You are the person I look to, a guru for many things, but lately, there’s so much information coming in on AI, and so much promise, so much hype, so much excitement.   Brian Keating: And I I don’t have time. I I get 20 emails a week as you do, probably even more. But the one I always read is yours, in addition to mine. But I read yours because you distill it, You concatenate and you make sense of the world of the new developments in AI. So we talked a few months ago, but so much has changed. Where are we at right now with artificial intelligence?   Speaker: Wow. So where we are is at a fascinating, transition point, an inflection point. You know, one of the things I wanna just, put this into perspective. Right? I think we might have talked about this before. The first time AI was really discussed, was at a conference at Dartmouth in 1956. And so at that conference, some of the, you know, founding leaders in AI gather. It wasn’t a large group, was a dozen or so, but the the term artificial intelligence and the concepts around AI. And so that’s just 70 years ago or so.   Speaker: Why has it taken so long, to get to where we are today? We’re finally in 2023, and I put that as the inflection point because everybody’s speaking about it. Chat GPT was a user interface moment. I’ll talk about that in a moment too. But why did it take so long? And and it turns out there are really four reasons, that have done to us where we are today. The first is, computational power. Right, what’s called the law of accelerating returns by our friend, Ray Kurzweil, and, you know, Moore’s law, which is integrated circuits. There’s been an exponential growth, it’s continued, you know, doubling in power every 18 to 24 months And it’s just now, really in the last 5, 6, that was almost 7 years that there’s enough computational power you can throw at these deep neural networks to get them to operate. So computational power, and by the way, it’s just exploding still, you know, we’re seeing massive, GPU clouds that are coming on whether it’s Tesla or Microsoft or, you know, Google, everybody.   Speaker: So computational power is not slowing down. In fact, on a log scale, if you graph it, it’s curving upwards. Right, which tells you the rate at which it’s accelerating is itself accelerating. The second thing is the amount of labeled data out there. And this is the Internet, this is everything, every tweet, every Facebook post, every corporate web page, everything you ever put online. This labeled data is what these AI engines are crawling and learning from, they’re learning from us. It’s not like they’re making it up, you know, from 0, they’re basically modeling us, and they’re extrapolating and interpolating from the information we’ve given them. So the amount of data is doubling every 24 months.   Speaker: There’s a new term for the amount of data. We’re gonna hit a yottabyte of data very soon. I love that term. And the third reason is that the models, how we’re modeling AI. There’s been a 99.5% improvement over 5 years, so for a dollar invested. So it’s just getting cheaper and cheaper to create these models. And then the 4th reason, probably the most important one, is, you know, massive amount of money being invested 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars. So all those things are just turning the volume to 11 on AI here.   Speaker: So that isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating.

Gad Saad: How Can You Be Happy After the October 7 Massacre?

Gad Saad: How Can You Be Happy After The October 7 Massacre? Transcript Brian Keating: Today, we feature 2 time guest, doctor Gad Sad, a marketing genius renowned for applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior. He’s a professor at Concordia University, a behavioral scientist, and a best selling author.   Speaker: Can you do something unique that makes you stick out from that clutter?   Brian Keating: You may know him from his strewn successfully in YouTube channel, the sad truth. Or you may know him from his previous appearance on the Into the Impossible podcast where we discussed his book, the acidic mind, in which he foretold of what would become of society starting in 2020. And he was uncannily accurate, explored how infectious Just ideas are killing common sense.   Speaker: But instead of leading us to the proverbial cat, it leads us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.   Brian Keating: Today, though, we dive into a happier topic, the sad truth about happiness. Join us for an insightful conversation. Discover the 8 secrets of living a good life even during times like these of war, conflict, famine, and pestilence.   Brian Keating: Professor Saad, how are you, my good friend?   Speaker: Oh, good to be with you again. Thank you for having me.   Brian Keating: We’re gonna go deep into happiness. We’re gonna go into get into a little, thermodynamics actually today. And I know that with your mathematics background At that, scourge of the Ivy Leagues, Cornell, you will, be able to hang with that. But, the first thing I wanted to ask you is why do we need another book on happiness? Our mutual friend, Dennis Prager, who we’ve both been involved with is Prager University, which Which is you know, we we you and I believe that that’s a real university. Right, Gada? I mean, I just wanna make it clear for the the people in the that’s not a real university. Did you know that? Yes. We’re aware of it. But, but we have all sorts of fake professors in the world, like, my favorite, professor Galloway, Scott Galloway or a professor who also wrote a happiness book or professor Dave Farina who has a bachelor’s degree, I believe.   Brian Keating: So, anyway, Gad, why do we need another happiness book? There’s so many of them out there.   Speaker: That’s a great question, and it actually made it daunting for me to decide whether I should Delve into writing a book on happiness. If you would have asked me 3 years ago on the heels of The Parasitic Mind coming out what would be Some of my future book projects, I would have never told you that, oh, yes. The next one is it looks like it’s gonna be a happiness book. So As many things in life, it was through some serendipitous forces. So it was really two reasons why I wrote the book, and then I’ll I’ll answer the question of, You know, why we need another happiness book in in answering, in the way that I will in a second. Number 1, I would get many, many emails from people Saying, how is it that you can tackle so many difficult, sensitive, dangerous, corrosive subject, and yet you always seem to have a twinkle in your eye. You’re always smiling. You don’t take yourself seriously.   Speaker: You do all these funny satirical skits. You’re Playing around. What’s your secret, professor? How are you so happy? So that was 1. The second thing is that, you know, Whenever I would post something that is prescriptive, usually as an evolutionary psychologist, as a consumer psychologist, I operate in descriptive world. I just Describe why humans do the things that they do. Prescriptive world is typically reserved for clinical psychologists or self help gurus. And but whenever I would post something that was prescriptive on my social media, which to me seemed like a like a banal call to action, That would be some of the stuff that would be most impactful to people. Oh my god.   Speaker: You don’t know how much you’ve changed my life by telling me the 4 steps to losing weight and how you lost weight. That I’ve lost 80 pounds now because of you, professor. And so I thought, okay. Well, people wanna know what’s my secret to happiness. They wanna They seem to really trust trust me as a source of dispensing information. Well, why don’t I take a crack at writing a book? But to your point, If there is 1 topic that philosophers have most written about, it’s the good life. It’s well-being. It’s happiness.   Speaker: So what can I add that’s unique? Well, Here is how I tackle it. My stories, my personal experiences are unique to me. So there is that coupled with the ancient wisdoms Backed up by the contemporary science, put that together, and I think if I’ve done a good job, you have a unique book.   Brian Keating: Yeah. It covers so many different topics, and, there’s there there is a prescriptive element to it, but I would say it’s also exploratory and sort of a hero’s journey fashion of how you have with tangible, you know, outcomes and and supporting anecdotes, which I you know, I always say the plural of data is not anecdotes or The other way around, I guess. But, but in reality, I think for me, looking at all these books, it seems kind of, hopeless. On one hand, Anybody can write a book about happiness. Right? I mean, my my, you know, toddler might be happy, and, oh, you could everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten, which I say, I I updated that. I wrote a book called Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Advanced Relativistic Astrophysics in graduate school. But, but, you know, I think For professors

Avi Loeb Strikes Back:Answering the Critics

Avi Loeb Strikes Back: Answering The Critics Transcript Brian Keating: K. So I’m broadcasting, and there are about 20 people who’ll be waiting. We’ll record it, and then we’ll upload it and edit it, so the maximum number of people can actually watch it. Let’s see here. Alright. So I believe we’re on live here. Yep. Okay.   Brian Keating: We’re on live on Twitter, and, and we’re also, I believe, live on YouTube. Let me check Yes. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. We’ll give it a minute. Let people join in. There’s hundreds of people coming around here.   Brian Keating: Let’s see if they will, see what questions they will come up with as well. We see a lot of things trending from the campus of Harvard, which is not always a good thing. Right, Avi?   Speaker: Well You’re   Brian Keating: trending on Twitter.   Speaker: Like anything, that humanity does these days, it can it can be better.   Brian Keating: Mhmm. So we got a a 100 plus people already. We’ll give it another minute. Let people trickle in. I’m also on LinkedIn, And Avi is so productive because he does not waste his time on what is known in Yiddish as is stuff for the ego, but he is, extremely prolific and needs basically no introduction. I will give him 1 in in just a minute. Let’s see if it’s live, it should be on LinkedIn. Join here, maybe this will work, maybe it won’t.   Brian Keating: Yep. Oh it’s wow. Okay so we’ve got this on multi different streams, interdisciplinary streams. So, first off, I wanna welcome you, and it’s been about 3 months since we spoke. We spoke last for your wonderful second book, Inter Stellar. And a lot has happened, since that time. And I cannot ignore kind of the mastodon trampling through the room and not ask you as, as as someone who was born in Israel, who was raised on farm in Israel, who is, one of the most preeminent scientist in the world, but also a very proud Jew and as am I. And I I don’t make any apologies for that.   Brian Keating: I was in Israel a mere 2 weeks before the October 7th, Hamas terrorist attacks. I was in Tel Aviv. I was in southern Israel. I was in Jerusalem, and I was very close because it was Rosh Hashanah. I actually got to be very close with a lot of, Palestinians, Arabs, because they were the ones working while Jews were enjoying their holiday. So I actually had many meals with with Palestinians, shared many rides with them on public and and private transport, and, had no inkling of what would happen, And the, the insight that I think we need to start with before we turn to to Harvard and then eventually to the, the subject that I originally invited you to speak about which is your area of expertise, which is this interstellar meteorite, which is received some pushback from the community as as happens. Some of it fair, some of it possibly not fair. We’ll talk about that.   Brian Keating: So 3 things on the agenda today. First of all, Avi, I need to give you a chance to just share your thoughts as as a man of science, as a man of conscience, and as a Jew. How have you been dealt affected by the events of October 7th?   Speaker: Well, let me first clarify. This is not a war between, the Palestinians and Israel. It’s a war between the Hamas in Israel and there is a clear distinction because, given the charter of the Hamas, there cannot be peace. There cannot be a two state solution. The Hamas calls for, the removal of Israel, for killing all citizens of Israel. There is no room for compromise. And therefore, anyone that’s, sides with a terrorist organization which basically aims to annihilate, -Uh, the state of Israel, kill all the Jews rather than reach a compromise, is basically advocating violence, And that has nothing to do with political opinion. I want to clarify that, you know, my wife is Peace seeking, Israeli, and she was always, on the left advocating for Finding a resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.   Speaker: But, what happened on October 7th was, rape Of women killing of babies, one of whom, you know, the I I will not get into the details. There is actually a film about it, but it was the Most violent, act of barbarism, against humanity. Basically, killing people, that had nothing to do with a military conflict. These are civilians at their homes. And, In a way, you know, it’s sort of like, the reckoning after 9/11, you know, we should all condemn such an act. Now Then you ask yourself, how is it possible that the 25 student organizations at Harvard University would cheer up And say that the victims, deserved it. Irrespective of political views, nobody should celebrate Killing of innocent civilians for any political purpose. And so that is a distortion of, the moral compass.   Speaker: And you ask yourself, how did we get there? Well, it’s obviously a result of social media where, that polarizes society, but you can’t just relate it to that. There is something wrong with academia. And yesterday, I was actually in Washington DC. I was jogging at 6 AM, on the Arlington Bridge, with a backdrop of a beautiful, sunrise. And it, a few a few hours later, Harvard’s president, along with 2 other university presidents, was testifying, in Capitol Hill where I I met with other people. And she was asked Claudine was asked whether calling for a genocide of Jews should be considered harassment. Yes or no? And she said it depends on the context. And not only she, but the other 2 presidents.   Speaker: And to me, That is a terrible message

Why I Went to War With Stephen Hawking – Leonard Susskind

Why I Went to War With Stephen Hawking – Leonard Susskind TRANSCRIPT Lenny Susskind: Go where your curiosity leads you. Pay no attention to what people are saying is or is not good science. If you are curious and you want to understand something, follow your nose and go where your curiosity leads. That’s the only thing I can say. All of the very, very good theoretical physicists that I know have done exactly that. Brian Keating: What did Steven mean to you personally As a foil, he wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. I I remember hearing that from many people, but, but he had this magical captivating Effect on all of science so much so that if you asked any person who’s the most famous scientist, they would say someone like Stephen Hawking. Not me. Yeah. Lenny Susskind: Well, there were many aspects of Stephen Hawking. First of all, he was a great physicist. There’s no question of that. Maybe it was a little bit of a stretch say that he was Einstein or Newton, but he was a very, very, very important influence in physics. But, you know, there were other aspects to him that, that certainly caught people’s imagination. His stubbornness against, against over overwhelming odds. How he managed to to not just survive, but to flourish and to do great physics when he could barely move no more than his eyelash. This is an incredible story. Lenny Susskind: So he was, in addition to being a great physicist and a hero to physicists because of his physics. He was a gigantic hero, in a in a much bigger sense. That being said, he could frustrate me. He could annoy me. He could anger me, but not because of any personality glitch, but because I was very frustrated by, by let me call it his Incredible stubbornness not to recognize the to to my mind, not to recognize the importance of his own work in a sense. It asked an extremely deep question, Really deep question. A question that, that has dominated theoretical physics ever since the, for, you know, for 30, 40 years now. But I felt he had taken the easy route and tried to find an easy answer when the answer was far more subtle and complex. Lenny Susskind: His recognition of the question was monumental. His answer was probably not. His answer was information is lost in black holes. That seemed wrong, and I wanted Steven very much to realize that His question would lead to something much deeper than what he, than what he had envisioned. So he was that’s right. He was a very complicated man, very complex and interesting, for sure. The problem is it was hard to communicate with him just because of physically hard to communicate Brian Keating: I remember once seeing him speak at a Royal Society meeting that I had somehow, stolen someone’s invitation to attend. And Steven was there, the guest, and it was, 1996 or so. And someone asked him a question, and this was when he could still move his finger. Yeah. So he said, they asked him, why did you write A Brief History of Time? It’s rumored that no one understands the entirety of this book, and no one’s even read it. And Steven answered in his inimitable, synthesized voice, I wrote it because my daughter needed to go to college. And his sense of humor comes across. Of course, your books are known for their clarity, but not for their dumbing down. Brian Keating : I actually, learned quite a great deal. Not that it’s, like, some great encomium to hear from some nobody like Brian Keating that he benefited and profited greatly from your book. But some of the topics that you talk about are more relevant than ever, 9 years after its publication. And I wanna ask you. In the intervening 9 years since you wrote the book, What has changed? What would you write differently if you were to write this book again other than lamenting the loss of your of your friend and and rival in a in a friendly way, Stephen Hawking? Lenny Susskind: Actually, I think I wouldn’t write anything different. I think I would write almost exactly the same thing, but the difference would be that I would have written another book right afterward on the follow-up of what happened afterwards. The follow-up of what happened afterwards in the last well, when did I write that book? 2005, something like that. It is now let’s see if I can do the arithmetic. 15 years later. Mhmm. The subject is the subject, and the subject means the subject of the quantum mechanics of gravity. That subject is not only expanded, but it’s been clarified, not more than clarified, almost revolutionized by new ideas, ideas that I did write about in that book, but which have developed extraordinarily, surprising directions. Lenny Susskind: So I don’t think I would have changed what I wrote in that book. I would have run another book afterwards. Mhmm. So if I have the, I don’t know if I have the endurance to do, to do it. Brian Keating : Yeah. I mean, when we think about books so your most famous paper, I looked up, you know, citations. I forget what it is. It’s several 100 to 1000 citations. This book and your other book, The Cosmic Landscape, I think, that book sold tens of tens and tens of thousands of of copies. What’s the difference when you write a popular a book for a popular audience that has a lot of red meat, sorry to my vegan fans, but, versus writing, you know, a paper, which might be read by a few Thousand nerds at most and maybe not even all the way through versus your book writing for the popular audience that’s consumed rabidly by hundreds of thousands of people. Lenny Susskind: First

Michael Turner Explains Dark Energy

Michael Turner Explains Dark Energy TRANSCRIPT Brian Keating : Michael Turner is a theoretical cosmologist, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, and former director of the Kavli Institute For Cosmological Physics. He’s a pioneer in exploring what he called the dark side of the universe. He actually coined the term dark energy, and his revolutionary ideas led to the cold dark matter theory of structure formation. Mike’s contributions to modern physics are truly invaluable, and I’m beyond thrilled to have him as a guest on my show. Join us in a deep dive into the dark side of our twisted universe. Welcome everybody to a very important, meaningful, and delightful episode of The Into the Impossible podcast with an impossibly brilliant guest who I’ve been, really, you know, in love with his mind since I was a wee lad, a graduate student, he’s a legend in the field, and it’s, professor Michael Turner, University Of Chicago, theoretical cosmologist who among many things is rumored to have coined the term dark energy. Michael, is that correct? Did you coin the term dark matter? Michael Turner : Guilt guilty as charged. Brian Keating : Who claimed that, I guess, Wiki coined the term dark matter in German. Correct? Michael Turner : That’s right. I can’t pronounce the German Dunkelmater or something like that. Brian Keating : Yeah. I think you’re you’re closer than I’ll ever get to it. Michael, where are you joining us from today? Michael Turner : I’m joining, from my office in Venice, California. Brian Keating : I really appreciate your time and whatever you’ll spare in person or online. But, Mike, we have a lot to talk about. We’ll run out of time before I run out of questions. Beg your forbearance as we go into the very first question I ask all my guests who honor me with, their presence on my humble podcast, And that is to judge a book by its cover. And in your case, your book with Rocky Kolb, your, colleague at the University of Chicago, has, really influenced generations of of cosmologists, of of theoretical particle physicists, astrophysicists, experimentalist like myself. And I want to do the following, if you will. To judge the book by its cover, I would like you to describe the cover art, The cover title and the subtitle. How did you and Rocky Kolb come up with it? Michael Turner : The original hardback version had a very boring cover. It was just white And the words early universe. And if my memory serves me correct, there was no subtitle. And, The paperback version which you may be referring to, has a wonderful story with it. The cover is a beautiful image of a galaxy, Actually, for its time. I mean, today, we get much better images from, JWST and and the Hubble. So the title, that was exceedingly easy. Rocky and I, were pioneers of studying the 1st microsecond. And, I like to tell the joke by the time we got to cosmology, you know, everybody specializes. All that was left was the 1st microsecond. And that is the early universe, but we got there at a very good time because the early universe had just opened up. Shortly before we got there, you couldn’t talk about the early universe because it was just a mess. It was nuclei and protons and neutrons sitting on top of one another. And we were there when the doors opened when people realized that it was cork soup. And early universe, it you know, a good title’s gotta be simple. It’s gotta have cosmology, and, early Where it was at? Do you wanna hear the paperback version? Brian Keating : Yeah. Because we’re gonna springboard from the paperback to a discussion of these peculiar properties of galaxies, which in my mind, Michael, I’m not gonna teach I’m not gonna let the student teach the master, but a galaxy is not exactly, at least when I was a kid, An early universe phenomenon of the 1st microsecond. So, yes, how did that come to be? The Whirlpool Galaxy. Michael Turner : So that’s perfect. Our our our book did really, really well, And it was going into paperback, and I was in Aspen, Colorado, and they sent the artwork to me for the new cover. And it was this beautiful picture of a galaxy, and, I called up Rocky, And he said, well, you got the cover artwork. What do you think? And I said, it’s beautiful, but it has nothing to do with our book. And he said, we’ll take it. So our book is about the 1st microsecond, but that’s where the blueprint for the universe got laid out And that’s where galaxies can trace their origins to. So it’s not quite fair to say that, it was a bait and switch, that it’s not really about the Pretty Galaxies You See in the Sky, but the cover was chosen because oh my god. Well, the, I wish I had could easily get copies here. It’s so funny. Rocky and I pioneered a lot of ground there. I think we were at book number 69, And David we we asked David to make some changes because he had a standard preface that talked about, You know, these are not to be designed to be polished, and, they’re typically from mimeograph notes. Yeah. And we said to David, David, what is a mimeograph machine? And, so we changed some of his, forward, but they had a standard. You know, that’s important when you have a brand. Frontiers in Physics was a brand, and it was very simple. It was white and blue. But then when some other publishing company took it over and did the paperback, they made it really fancy. Brian Keating : It’s still in the top 200 of books in astrophysics even, you know, it’s, coming up on its 30th 30th anniversary, incredible, of