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Brian Keating - The Alien Disclosure Nothingburger | SRS #316

Cosmologist Brian Keating tells Shawn Ryan that the government's latest alien disclosure was a nothingburger, then spends nearly four hours showing what real evidence looks like. He walks from Giordano Bruno and Galileo's telescope to a wartime radar trick that made physics appear to break, explains the cosmic microwave background and his own retracted 2014 Big Bang discovery, and defends the moon landing with Soviet telemetry and lunar laser retroreflectors. Along the way he covers falsifiability, faith and the Sabbath, why we have not returned to the moon, AI as a secular God, the Keating Algorithm for choosing a wife, and the entropy behind happiness. It closes on the Fermi paradox and Alfred Nobel's near death reckoning.

Published Jun 25, 2026 3:54:59 video 46 min read Added Jul 4, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

Cosmologist Brian Keating sits down with Shawn Ryan for nearly four hours and argues that the government's latest alien disclosure was a nothingburger, then spends the rest of the conversation showing what real evidence is supposed to look like. He walks from Giordano Bruno burned at the stake to Galileo's homemade telescope, from a radar trick that made German U boats think physics had broken to the 4.3 billion year old meteorites he hands Ryan across the table. He tells the story of the father who abandoned him, the Nobel Prize he chased partly to spite that father, and the galactic dust that turned his 2014 discovery into his most famous retraction. Along the way he defends the moon landing with Soviet evidence, dismantles the Van Allen belt myth, and lays out the "Keating Algorithm" for choosing a wife and the entropy math behind happiness. It closes on the Fermi paradox and Alfred Nobel's own near death reckoning.

The nothingburger

Ryan opens cold: what does Keating think about all this alien stuff? Keating says it is either the most exciting time to be alive or the most depressing, and he compares the endless promise of disclosure to a girl who keeps saying "soon, soon I'll disclose my intentions to you" while you wait in the wings. Then the release actually came, the one from President Trump and the Department of War under Pete Hegseth, and Keating tore through it like a kid on Christmas morning. What he found was a nice round number. Zero. Nothing that interested him, and worse, things that read like what he calls "SCIOPS," a play on psy ops, so outlandish and outrageous that they titillate the mind of a nerd who genuinely wants to hear about extra dimensional beings and nonhuman biologics. All he ever gets is "trust me, bro," or "I heard from somebody who heard from somebody." In the military he understands it, you have seen things you cannot discuss. But when a physicist goes on Steven Bartlett's show, pulls ten million views, and says "well, I heard from somebody," that frustrates him, because that is not how science works.

Ryan says he used to think there was something to the alien material and now does not. His red flag: everyone screaming for disclosure refuses to work together. Off camera they trash each other. Everybody wants to be the one to disclose it. His second red flag is the timing, this latest batch surfacing right at the height of the Epstein story and the Iran conflict. "Give them aliens," he says. Keating agrees the incentive structure is real, that talking about aliens in government is an instant PR boost, front page of every paper, but he reframes the deeper hook. It is metacognitive. The subject taps something primal and beautiful in the human spirit, a hierarchy of fascination: slime mold on Titan is cool, dolphins are cooler, dolphins with opposable thumbs using iPhones would break your brain. To keep teasing something that weighty and then rug pull it, he says, is not just unkind, it is close to morally objectionable, curiosity abuse.

He grounds the stakes in history. In 1600 the church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for proclaiming that every star has a planet around it, and later imprisoned Galileo, because those ideas threatened the most powerful authority on earth at the time, the Vatican, "the United States on steroids." Something is only worth suppressing if it is genuinely threatening to your worldview. On the physics itself Keating keeps returning to one line: if these craft truly defy the laws of physics, you would want maximum input from the physics community, not to alienate it, no pun intended. He notes that Avi Loeb does not believe we are being visited right now, only that interstellar technology could exist, and that scientists argue by design because their real opponent is not each other but nature. As Keating puts it, quoting Loeb's own slogan, the sky is not classified, and he adds his own: physics is not classified.

Ryan raises Polymarket, where a market gives only a 14 percent chance the US confirms alien life or technology before 2027, with roughly 38 million dollars traded on it. Keating uses the number to pivot to his own credentials by way of a story: one of the places he built a telescope is the South Pole, which means he has been on a Navy base Ryan has not, and flown a plane Ryan never has, the ski equipped LC-130 cargo plane, the world's biggest ski plane.

Life at the bottom of the world

Antarctica, Keating says, is one of the most otherworldly, extraterrestrial feeling places on the planet, filled with some of the hardest charging people outside the military you will ever meet. It is oversubscribed. It is harder to get a job there as a cook than to get into Harvard. People love the isolation and the desolation, which sounds to Ryan like his dream and to Keating like a nightmare. "I love getting there. I love having been there. I hate being there." Getting there takes seven days from San Diego, or two and a half weeks by boat across the Southern Ocean, and Keating gets seasick on a paddle board, so he flies: LAX, then Auckland, then Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island, where the US has carved out a provisioning base near where the historic explorers Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott staged their 1911 and 1912 race, every bit as intense as the Cold War space race.

Then come the facts that stick. Antarctica was discovered after the planet Uranus, so humanity found a planet before it found the seventh continent. It is a true continent: dig down through 9,500 feet of ice and you hit rock, unlike the North Pole, which is only ice over ocean. Right now the whole continent holds about 800 people. You need a psychological exam to go, and if you have even a one percent chance of needing your wisdom teeth out, they force you to pull them first, because there is no dentist and no way out. The station opens in November and closes on February 15. Miss that date and you are there until November, in three months of pitch black. It gets to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, so cold that they keep a sauna at nearly 212 degrees and, on the coldest day of the year in July, run naked around the geographic pole marker, a barber pole marking the axis the earth spins on. That is the 300 Club, a 300 degree Fahrenheit temperature swing across every time zone at once.

Security exists because people have gone crazy there. There is exactly one gun on the continent, a .45 caliber 1911 kept in a safe, watched over by a station master. A plane cannot land mid winter because the hydraulic fluid and JP8 fuel freeze around minus 50, so the lines would explode and the aircraft would be ruined forever. When the physician Jerry Nielsen found a lump in her own breast during the dark season, they airdropped a biopsy kit, she diagnosed her own cancer, and they parachuted chemotherapy to her at night from a C17. She lived a few more years and wrote a memoir about it.

Galileo, and the oldest partnership in science

A Patreon member, Neil Embracio Jr., asks the first audience question: what about that same space technology being used to weaponize space? Keating answers through the object in his hands, a replica of Galileo's 1609 telescope. Galileo did not invent it. He stole the idea and admitted as much, "that's academia for you," but he made it ten times better, and quantity has a quality all its own. He improved the glass and the spacing, and counterintuitively he made it smaller. That brass disc around the lens is smaller than the lens itself. It is an aperture that stops the telescope down, cutting the glare and ghosting so the image focuses better, exactly like an f stop on a camera. Then he did what nobody had done: he put the optic on a tripod. Stability. And stability plus optics is a sniper scope, the first optic ever made.

Galileo pointed it at the sky in January 1610 and in a few weeks rewrote the cosmos. The moon was not a perfect crystalline sphere, it had craters, mountains, lava flows, valleys, plains, "kind of like the Earth," the first unification of an extraterrestrial object with our own. Venus went through phases like the moon, which meant it orbited closer to the sun than we do. Saturn had strange ears he could not resolve into rings and mistook for three touching planets. And Jupiter was flanked by four stars that shifted around it every night, a miniature solar system seen edge on, with Jupiter playing the role of the sun. He raced it into print in under two months as Sidereus Nuncius, the Starry Messenger, but he kept the telescope's design classified and took it to the militaries of Venice. From a tower over the lagoon you could spot a ship three days before it arrived. It was anti stealth, like stripping the stealth off a bomber, and it earned Galileo a stipend and a court position. At heart, Keating says, this passionate educator was a military genius, and projectile motion and trajectories moved from physics to war immediately, exactly as they do today.

That is the bridge to the modern object. One of the things Loeb told Ryan about is ʻOumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object, which passed through our solar system in 2017. We know it was not ours by its velocity and orbit, unbound to the sun and moving at hyper velocity, and it is long gone, too fast to chase. Crucially it was discovered not by an astronomer at a telescope but by an Air Force telescope on Haleakalā in Maui whose real job is watching for other things in orbit. Serendipity. The same tools of physics and astronomy that spot a comet from another star are the tools you would want if UAPs really did break physics.

The radar trick, Occam's razor, and the Feynman point

Do governments lie? Of course, Keating says, and Ryan draws a hard line between flat out lying and simply not disclosing. He argues the vast majority of people now trust no institution at all because they have been caught in too many lies, from COVID origins to taxes, and he does not see how the trust comes back. Keating steel mans the case for secrecy, then turns to a story that reframes every "it defied the laws of physics" report.

During World War II, alongside the Manhattan Project, physicists built radar, a more deployable and decisive advance that almost nobody celebrates. One of them was Luis Alvarez, the only scientist aboard the Enola Gay and later famous for the theory that a ten kilometer impactor killed the dinosaurs in the Yucatán 66 million years ago. Alvarez built a radar spoofing system. As an object approached a German U boat, his transmitter sent a signal that got weaker with the inverse square of the distance, exactly how a real object moving away would behave. The captain would relax, "look, it's going away," and then the bomb dropped. To a smart, capable enemy the object appeared to defy physics, arriving faster than light. Keating's point lands hard: how do we know some of what is reported now is not simply military technology, ours or another nation's, spoofing us into thinking physics broke? Occam's razor does not guarantee the simplest hypothesis is correct, but interdimensional beings traversing distances we could not cross in 30,000 years is a heavier lift than a military making us think so.

He tests Ryan with the Feynman point. Richard Feynman, Manhattan Project scientist and Nobel laureate, noticed that if you write out pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, at a certain point you hit six sixes in a row, and nothing like it appears before. Where? At the 762nd digit. Ryan clocks it instantly as a caliber, 7.62. Is it aliens, is it human technology, is it coincidence? A scientist has to weigh all of it, and right now there is no evidence that clears the scientific bar for aliens visiting us. That does not make it impossible. Keating uses Antarctica as the analogy: if an alien told you Earth had seven continents and asked how many of eight billion people live on Antarctica, dividing by seven would be wildly wrong. Logic is a guide, not a panacea, but he wants to use it as far as a species can to get at knowledge efficiently, and to stop anyone from suppressing what the evidence actually says.

The UAP report	Extraordinary reading	The simpler hypothesis Keating offers
Object "defied the laws of physics"	Interdimensional craft moving faster than light	Radar spoofing, the Alvarez inverse square trick that fooled U boat crews
Nonhuman biologics recovered	Bodies of visiting aliens	Unverified testimony, "trust me, bro," never physical evidence you can test
Pilots saw a real anomaly	Confirmation of alien presence	Real phenomenon, unknown cause, possibly adversary tech; pilots are experts in aviation, not UAPs
Timed government "disclosure"	The truth is finally leaking out	A useful tool, an instant PR boost dropped over inconvenient news cycles
Uncanny coincidences (the Feynman point)	A hidden signal or design	Coincidence in a big dataset, weighed, not assumed to be meaning

Figure 1. Keating's running ledger. He is not claiming aliens are impossible, he is insisting that the mundane explanation be ruled out first and that any claim survive a test. Every row on the right is falsifiable; most of the material on the left, he argues, never reaches physical evidence.

To make the point tangible he pulls out meteorites, honest fragments of the early solar system that are 4.3 billion years old, older than the Earth, found in Argentina. They are dense and heavy, and he does a Mr. Wizard bit, deflecting a compass because they are magnetic and mildly radioactive but safe. He is giving 250 of them away to the first Shawn Ryan Show listeners with an APO address, through briankeating.com/srs, along with a guide to the four major annual meteor showers you can see with the naked eye. These rocks, he explains later, are the corpses of dead stars. When a star more than eight times the sun's mass fuses its way up to iron, that reaction gives back too little heat to hold the star up, so it collapses and detonates in half a second, blasting its iron core across the universe. That is why the sample is iron. And so is your blood. The hemoglobin carrying oxygen in your body right now holds the same iron isotope as the meteorite, because a supernova made it, the Earth inherited it, the food chain carried it, and we all bleed the same stardust.

The father who left, and the telescope that made him

Ryan turns to the BICEP telescope, and Keating tells the story from the beginning, which starts with his father. His biological father, the mathematician Jim Axe, divorced his mother and then abandoned Keating and his older brother Kevin. Keating was seven, Kevin was ten. Given the choice between paying back child support or giving the boys up for adoption to their stepfather, Ray Keating, a Vietnam pilot who flew F4s and KC135s, the father chose adoption. Brian Axe became Brian Keating. He did not see his father for roughly sixteen years and did not even remember what he looked like.

The telescope arrived in his teens, bought with deli wages and a little money from his mom, and it changed his life. He looked up and saw exactly what Galileo saw, craters on the moon, moons around Jupiter, rings around Saturn, and got hooked. He learned the price Galileo and Bruno paid to the church for those same discoveries, and at thirteen, partly over that and partly because he had discovered girls and did not want to be a priest, he decided to become an atheist. He also reasoned his way out of Judaism: he had been born Jewish, converted to Catholicism as a boy, served as an altar boy at St. John and St. Mary in Chappaqua, New York, and figured that if the newer religion had these problems, the older one it grew from must be wrong too. The more he learned, the less room there seemed to be for God. He taught himself calculus and trigonometry, did research through his telescope at night, and fell into the flow state that, he says, is all you want in life.

Then something strange happened. In his own research he started reproducing the exact interests of the father he never knew, quantum entanglement, relativity, the origin of the universe. "It felt creepy to be influenced by a ghost." He did not even know whether the man was alive.

Reconnecting, and the Nobel motive

At Brown University, in grad school, with the young internet, he searched for his father's work. Through what he calls the "Yentanet," a network of Jewish grandmothers in the same Florida retirement community who gossiped their two families back into contact, his father learned that his abandoned son was alive and studying physics at a top school. One night in his dorm the phone rang. "This is Jim Axe." Keating knew the voice before the name. "Sometimes the ear is deeper than the eye." They talked for five hours straight about math, science, and physics, and avoided the one subject, why he left. Over the next decade they grew closer than almost any father and son Keating has known, though the father died young, at 69, twenty years ago.

Keating is candid about the ugly seed inside his ambition. He wanted to win a Nobel Prize partly to make his father proud, and partly to make him regret ever giving up on him by doing what the father never did. There are only about 200 living Nobel laureates among eight billion people, the intellectual equivalent of a SEAL team. And Keating had picked a target that could actually win one: a snapshot of what happened before the Big Bang, the "primer strike" that caused it, the inciting incident. His instrument would not see light at all. It would see heat, microwave radiation, the leftover glow from the nuclear fusion of the first hydrogen and helium, a fossil that travels through space and time.

He explains why you go somewhere dry and high to catch it with a coffee mug analogy. A microwave oven heats the water in your coffee at its resonant frequency but cannot heat the dry ceramic cup, which is why the mug stays cool while the coffee boils. To detect cosmic microwaves without your own atmosphere's water swamping them, you go where there is no water: very high or very dry. That means the South Pole, or the Atacama Desert in Chile at 17,000 feet, so high you wear oxygen full time and infrared radiation cooks you. It is so Mars like that NASA tests its Martian rovers and helicopters there, and Keating hands Ryan an actual piece of Mars, a meteorite knocked off the planet and matched to it by its spectrum, its orange flecks the iron that rusts Mars red.

That oldest light is the cosmic microwave background, discovered in 1965 outside New York City by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize because it was the first physical proof, not philosophy, that the universe was once extremely hot and dense. He walks Ryan through why we still see it: as space itself expands, everything beyond gravity's grip stretches apart, and the light stretches with it, red shifting from gamma rays down to microwaves about two millimeters long. Einstein at first refused the expanding universe, inserting a fudge factor to keep it static, until the data showed not only expansion but acceleration, the cosmic gas pedal pressed down.

Figure 2. The whole game of Keating's telescope. Ordinary light cannot show us anything from before the cosmic microwave background, the wall of light released 380,000 years after the Big Bang, because light only travels at light speed and the wall is opaque behind it. Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime itself, so they pass straight through the wall from the inflation era. The catch, and the story of 2014: a foreground of dust from dead stars in our own galaxy sits right in front of the detector and can twist starlight into a pattern that mimics the primordial signal.

BICEP, the announcement, and the retraction

He built the instrument starting in 2005. BICEP stands for Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, and in 2014 the team claimed it had detected that primer strike, the fingerprint of inflation, a quantum field called the inflaton. The theory says inflation would leave a shock wave of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime, imprinted on the microwave background. On St. Patrick's Day 2014, at a Harvard press conference introduced by Avi Loeb, the claim made headlines worldwide. Keating was not there. He had already been removed from the leadership of the team he first started, another story. And the book he later wrote about all this is titled Losing the Nobel Prize, so, spoiler alert, something went very wrong.

He frames the failure through Feynman's rule: the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. A scientist should always assume he is the mark at the poker table. The team did every due diligence check it could think of, but missed one thing. That same galactic dust, the tiny magnetized grains thrown off by supernovae like the ones that made his meteorites, can twist light into a polarization pattern that masquerades as the primordial signal. They had convinced themselves they saw the birth of the universe when they had largely seen dust in our own galaxy. It is the exact trap Keating had warned Ryan about with aliens: believing you have evidence for the thing you desperately want to be true.

Evidence versus belief, and the day before

Ryan asks what Keating thinks happened the day before the Big Bang, and Keating resists the word "think," the way he resists "believe." In Hebrew the word for faith, emunah, is the root of "amen," and it means faith, not belief. He does not want to say he believes in God any more than he believes in gravity. He would rather have evidence for God, which he calls the stronger position. He gives Ryan the menu of options for what preceded the Big Bang, each a testable hypothesis:

Nothing at all. Stephen Hawking's view, that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is south of the South Pole.
A Big Crunch, a previous universe that collapsed and rebounded, like the supernova that collapsed to make his meteorites.
Colliding branes from string theory, higher dimensional membranes meeting in a ten dimensional space.
A multiverse, eternal, with more universes just as there are more stars and galaxies.
A slowly breathing universe, expanding and collapsing forever like a lung.

The key move, and the reason he calls this exhilarating, is falsifiability. You cannot prove a scientific claim true, he says, you can only prove it false. He cannot even prove the Earth is round, only that it is not flat. When Ryan intuits that "in the beginning" in Genesis implies nothing came before, Keating lights up: Ryan has just constructed a scientific hypothesis, because a discovery of no beginning would falsify it. Call it Genesis theory or Ryan theory, it is science because it could be refuted. He contrasts this with astrology. On a boardwalk date with his future wife, a fortune teller read his "Gemini" traits, and when he revealed he was actually a Virgo she said the same things would happen anyway. Unfalsifiable, irrefutable, and therefore entertainment, not science. His frustration with Avi Loeb is similar: Loeb believes ʻOumuamua was a technological solar sail from another star, yet would not spend a billionaire's money to chase it, preferring to wait for the Vera Rubin Observatory to find more. Keating says if he believed with that much confidence, with access to Harvard's endowment and its billionaires, he would do anything to catch it, the way you would chase the person you knew was the one instead of waiting for someone better to come along.

What came before the Big Bang	The claim	Fit with Genesis "in the beginning"	Can it be tested?
Nothing (Hawking)	Time itself began; there is no "before"	Closest, a single beginning of time	Yes, gravitational waves would support it
Big Crunch rebound	A prior universe collapsed and bounced	No beginning, eternal cycles	Yes, can be falsified by the wave signal
Colliding branes	Higher dimensional membranes met	No single beginning	Hard, largely beyond current reach
Multiverse	Ours is one universe among endless others	Challenges theology, eternal and vaster	Indirect, only by ruling out rivals
Breathing universe	Eternal slow expansion and collapse	No beginning	Indirect

Figure 3. The five options Keating lays out. His point is not that Genesis is proven, but that "did time have a beginning?" is a real scientific question. Detecting primordial gravitational waves cannot prove the Big Bang, but it can falsify the Big Crunch, ruling out one rival and tilting the odds toward a single beginning.

Faith, the Sabbath, and Eisenhower's other warning

Keating is one of the few openly religious cosmologists, one of roughly seven percent of his colleagues who believe in God, and he takes it seriously. He learned Hebrew at thirty, married a Jewish woman, studied in Israel, and does not work on Saturdays. He went back to Judaism because of 9/11: after the attacks everyone became an instant expert on Islam, and he realized he knew nothing about the religion he was born into, could not even read the Torah, and felt ashamed. He decided to bring the full arsenal of a scientist to the Old Testament, to reach the same fluency he had in quantum mechanics, precisely because approaching it as an adult is richer than the childhood Sunday school version everyone hates.

He turns the Sabbath into a prescription for Ryan, who admits he works close to seven days a week. Referencing Ryan's conversation with Andrew Huberman about cannabis and sleep, Keating says what Ryan actually needs is not a product but a Sabbath, one day fully disconnected from phone, email, and podcasts, dedicated to family and community. He notes that Charlie Kirk's last book, introduced to the idea by Dennis Prager, was about keeping the Sabbath for Christians. He distinguishes the great faiths by their names: Israel means to struggle or fight with God, Islam means submission to God, and Christianity sits between with Jesus accepted as a personal savior. For him, struggling with God, demanding evidence, is authentic worship, not defiance.

Then he hands Ryan a warning most people only half know. Everyone remembers President Eisenhower warning about the military industrial complex. Almost no one remembers that in the same breath he warned that public policy could become the captive of a "scientific technical elite." That elite, Keating says with unusual candor about his own class, holds a quiet disdain for ordinary people who did not go to college, and college has become a secular idol that even atheists worship as proof of good parenting. He returns to it to defend the legitimacy of a nonscientist asking hard questions.

What the Big Bang really means

Ryan asks a sharp physical question: if the Big Bang was an explosion, once the light passes you it is gone, so how can we still see it? Keating corrects the mental image. The Big Bang is not an explosion inside a preexisting room, it is the room itself, spacetime, expanding. Run the expansion backward and the galaxies crowd together until all matter sits in one point, a singularity. It was Edwin Hubble who showed Einstein he was wrong, that every galaxy is racing away from us, faster the farther it is, so each observer feels like the center though none is.

He explains redshift with a green laser: as you recede faster, the light stretches from green toward red, and at the Hubble distance your recession reaches the speed of light. Past that you can move away faster than light, and the last thing an observer sees is you frozen and extremely red, your final wave stretched forever. The same thing, he says, happens to an astronaut falling into a black hole: nothing dramatic occurs at the event horizon, the spaghettification only happens near the singularity, but from outside you see the astronaut frozen and red at the horizon (he points listeners to his episode 146 for the full version). To see anything from before the wall of light, you cannot use light, which is why he hunts gravitational waves, the actual structure of spacetime.

Those waves are real and detected. LIGO caught two black holes, each about 30 solar masses, that merged a billion light years away into a single hole of only 59 solar masses. The missing solar mass of energy went entirely into shaking spacetime. A gravitational wave passing through the room would make a scale read heavier, then lighter, then heavier, at the speed of light. He explains gravitational lensing too, how matter bends light around it so you can see something hidden behind a black hole, a phenomenon Einstein predicted in the 1930s and Keating's instruments have measured. From all this the field has falsified a great deal: universes with no hot dense phase, models where dark matter does not exist (a hundred times worse fit to the data), and it has found evidence for dark energy. It has not falsified the Big Bang or the multiverse, and a confirmed multiverse would be a genuine challenge to a single creation.

On the edge of the universe, another question from the Loeb interview, Keating says there need not be an edge. Spacetime is the set of all possible places in x, y, z, and time, and it can extend infinitely like endless monkey bars. Your observable universe is a sphere set by how far light could have traveled since the beginning, a radius of about 45 billion light years, the particle horizon. A galaxy a couple billion light years away has a slightly different horizon, not another universe, just a different slice of accessible space. He even notes that because light takes a nanosecond to cross a foot, he sees Ryan as he was six nanoseconds ago, and sees the sun as it was eight minutes ago. A finite closed universe could have an edge, a four dimensional sphere with a w axis our brains cannot picture, but the best current evidence says the universe is flat and infinite in extent, with no evidence of another universe bumping ours.

The moon landing, defended with Soviet evidence

Ryan brings up AJ Gentile's episode about the moon landing, and Keating says Gentile, whom he likes, made real mistakes. Does Keating believe we landed? He says this is a case where he knows it, from physical, eyewitness, and photographic evidence, but the best evidence comes from the Soviet Union. On July 19, 1969, the Soviets, who had launched their own uncrewed lander days earlier hoping to steal the thunder or watch America crash, coordinated telemetry with NASA to avoid a collision, and those records survive. When Apollo 11 succeeded they congratulated President Nixon, even though Nixon had a death speech pre recorded and most observers gave the landing 50/50 odds, fearing the surface was loose talcum that would swallow the lander.

The hardest evidence is the lunar laser retroreflectors. Apollo left corner reflectors, the same trick as a bicycle reflector that bounces light straight back regardless of angle, and Keating's UC San Diego colleague Tom Murphy bounces lasers off them to measure the distance to the moon to about a millimeter, the thickness of a paperclip. The Russians also left reflectors and overflew both nations' sites, and their spacecraft found the American and Russian reflectors exactly where each side said they were. He adds a psychological argument: when Artemis flew around the moon in the recent mission, every rival on Earth, China, the old Soviet states, even adversaries, congratulated the US, when they would be the happiest people alive to prove it never happened and claim the glory for themselves.

Ryan presses the common objection: we did it in the 1960s, why the elaborate step by step Artemis sequence now, why not just go? Keating answers that you do things in stages, the way the Wright brothers ran test flights before flying themselves, and that he would want to be customer 10,000, not the first person on new hardware from the lowest bidder. He demolishes the "we did it once so it should be easy" argument with his own field: Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, and the next Norwegian to reach it did not do so until 1996. Scott's team reached it in January 1912 and every man froze to death, some just eleven miles from a supply cache. Doing a hard thing once, in a wooden boat era, does not mean it stays easy or gets repeated soon. He notes he debated Bart Sibrel on Piers Morgan's show on Artemis launch day, and Morgan piled on, calling Sibrel's argument nonsense.

Ryan pushes back, and this is the spine of their disagreement: he is not saying we did not go, he thinks it is weird we have not returned, and, crucially, he explains the epistemics from his side. Keating reads straight facts, Ryan reads context, and when your government lies continuously about COVID, taxes, and wars, citizens stop believing anything, and every gap fills with conspiracy. Keating concedes the government lies, and mentions his friend Jay Bhattacharya, now NIH director, whom he says was tortured by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. But he argues you still have to ask who benefits, weigh the base rate, and not start from the conclusion, the way apologetics reasons toward a fixed answer, the way William Lane Craig or Bishop Robert Barron will never conclude against God.

Van Allen belts, and why we stopped going

The other objection Ryan and Candace Owens got from Sibrel is the Van Allen belts, the radiation belts around Earth painted as an impenetrable, instantly fatal barrier. Keating dismantles it with geometry. The belts, like Saturn's rings or the asteroid belt, are concentrated in specific regions, mainly around the equator, and are not a solid wall. Fire a spacecraft in almost any direction through the asteroid belt and you will hit nothing. The lunar launches went over the poles, missing the dense zones, and satellites cross the belts constantly. The dose is roughly two or three chest X rays, the same radiation anyone gets over a couple of years, and the aurora is the same phenomenon, beautiful, not fatal. It is manipulative, he says, to make radiation sound scary and conclude we never went.

Ryan plays the clip that started this, Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut, saying "we don't have the technology to do that anymore, we used to, but we destroyed that technology." Keating, with respect for a braver man than himself, parses it. Technology means many things. The physical Saturn V boosters are gone, yes, destroyed like the spent .45 caliber shell his brother in law turned into a bottle opener. But the know how is not beyond the laws of physics to rebuild, and an astronaut is often the wrong person to ask about the engineering, since many barely knew it and some were not even pilots. With infinite money, could Elon or the best engineers rebuild a Saturn V, or a B-17, of which only about three still fly, or a P38? Of course. The real question is why you would.

That opens the deeper argument. Ryan says humanity has always expanded empires, the whole planet is settled except Antarctica's 800 people, and the new frontier is space: Space Force is the first new military branch in decades, space law is a booming legal sector, someone is going to claim the moon, and a guest told him China is effectively already there and that helium 3 could be a game changing fuel. Keating agrees the frontier is real, then explains that the reason we do not rush back is national will and risk tolerance, not lost capability. The 1960s had pride and a Soviet rival; today's China relationship is stranger. He offers a vivid example: China tried to build radio and optical telescopes in Argentina, and the US coordinated to freeze the parts at port, because those same infrared instruments that study the Big Bang can hunt the heat of a stealth bomber. You can cool an exhaust and beat radar, but you cannot beat the second law of thermodynamics: an SR-71 windshield hits 600 degrees at cruise and its quartz glows in infrared like a hot knife through butter. Meanwhile NASA's budget is minuscule, around 25 billion dollars, and Americans spend more on lipstick than that. Space flight still carries a three to four percent fatality rate against aviation's fraction of a thousandth of a percent, and a single lost astronaut could set lunar plans back decades.

Mars, robots, and AI as a secular God

Keating extends the risk logic to Mars. Why send a human with a wife, kids, and people who love him, when you could send an Optimus robot running a future ChatGPT? He recounts asking Elon Musk on his own podcast about wanting to live and die on Mars. Musk has at least thirteen children, one of whom he has already lost, and Keating asked how he would say goodbye to child after child on a one way trip. It was, Keating says, the only time he ever heard Musk at a loss for words, until May Musk, on the call, steered them off the sad subject. Ryan, who fought in three wars, says he has a huge appetite for risk and an even bigger one when it advances humanity, and would take the flight if he knew for a fact it would make a better life for their kids. Keating, as a scientist, cannot promise that guarantee, which is exactly why he cannot justify sending people over machines.

This becomes his theory of both aliens and AI: they are surrogate secular Gods. Building AI lets humans do what God did, make a mind in our image, and it is the same impulse as the Tower of Babel, where humans invented a composite building material, straw and clay like rebar and concrete, and used their new technology not to reach God's knowledge but to rival him. People now trust ChatGPT more than their priest, outsourcing the eternal to bricks of silicon. He reads the Bible not as a science book but as the oldest map of the flawed human craving to become gods, and cites Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death: the human being's one great fear is death, and the whole of civilization is the attempt to overcome it. Homo sapiens means "man who knows," and what we know is that we have a death date, the only creatures that do. That drives everything from pyramids and mausoleums to Ray Kurzweil's longevity escape velocity, the point where every year lived buys more than a year of life. Would Keating live forever? Not alone. He references Viktor Frankl and death letters, the videos and memoirs we make so our children remember us.

Legacy, the Keating Algorithm, and the math of happiness

That flows into Keating pushing Ryan, repeatedly, to write a memoir, arguing that Ryan is that great grandfather whose book his descendants would pay anything to read, that the wisdom is worth more than the podcast archive nobody re listens to, and that, like Alfred Nobel writing his will a year before he died, you should not put it off. Ryan says it is not time yet, he is not that into himself, and it is all already in the episodes.

Keating shares the "Keating Algorithm" for choosing a partner, complete with the nerd's confession that he kept metrics on his dates. The rule: date for some period, keep a real sample, and stop when you meet the person of whom you can say, if I had a daughter and she turned out exactly like this woman, I would be thrilled and would grab every gun in the room to protect her. Not the richest or the hottest, the one whose daughter you would want your daughter to be. He married in his late thirties, has been married eighteen years, and credits the statistical sample for knowing when he had found her.

Then the physics of happiness. Keating balances his TSA legal "tactical pen" on its tip: an unstable equilibrium, stable in theory but knocked over by a butterfly's wing. Happiness is like that. Could he double Ryan's happiness with double the money, downloads, and followers? Ryan says no, probably not any happier at all, and they name it the hedonic treadmill, citing the Simpsons and a cartoon of a boy who wants a car, then a plane, then is dead, never stopping wanting, and Jim Carrey's line that he wishes everyone could get rich and famous so they would see it is not the answer. Ryan says the fun is the climb, and that once he hit number one he knew he would not stay, because Joe Rogan is the king of podcasting and Steven Bartlett the pioneer, and everything after was built off Rogan the way everyone still knows Babe Ruth.

Keating drives to the punchline through entropy. The universe tends irreversibly toward disorder, and the things that make us happy, family, structure, work, production, are all fragile order that takes energy to maintain. Here is the asymmetry: he cannot guarantee to make you even a little happier, but he can make you infinitely unhappy, because billionaires who lost children would trade every dollar to have them back. So do the things in life that, if taken away, would devastate you. Ryan's own version of maximum happiness, when Keating asks what money could add, is to have his phone, social media, and occupation taken away and be forced to be with his family without worrying about survival, which is exactly the Sabbath Keating keeps prescribing. Happiness may be a choice on a healthy day, they agree, but unhappiness can be imposed without consent, and that asymmetry, Keating says, is the whole meaning of life: reduce entropy, build order and family, not for ego or a bank balance but for the good it leaves behind.

The Fermi paradox, the Great Filter, and Alfred Nobel

The closing "hot question" is the Fermi paradox. In 1950, over lunch at Los Alamos, Enrico Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" One of the people at that table was Herbert York, a founder of UC San Diego and an old friend of Keating's, a bomb builder who spent his later years advocating for peace. Keating scales the numbers: about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, roughly ten planets each, giving something like 10 to the 24th planets. Even at one percent bearing life you get an insane 10 to the 22nd, and yet no signal clears the evidentiary bar, a silence noted 84 years ago, right before Roswell. Even Avi Loeb, the most invested, told Ryan he does not claim definitive proof.

Figure 4. Why the silence proves little. The fastest thing humanity ever built, Voyager, is one light day out after 55 years. Our earliest global broadcast, the 1936 Olympics, has reached only about 90 light years, a bubble holding maybe a thousand stars, and any reply would take another 90 years. Against a galaxy 100,000 light years across, that searched volume is a shot glass dipped from the Pacific.

He runs through the leading explanations. Space is vast and light is slow: our earliest global broadcast, the 1936 Olympics, has traveled only about 90 light years, reaching perhaps a thousand stars, and a reply would take another 90 years, while Voyager after 55 years is one light day out against a nearest star four light years away. Civilizations may not last: Sabine Hossenfelder made a video on a paper, one Loeb may be tied to and Musk tweeted, suggesting the average civilization lifetime consistent with our not seeing anyone is about 5,000 years, barely back to the pyramids, a version of the Great Filter. Warfare runs all the way down, he notes, from us to bacteria that wage chemical trench warfare, secreting toxins to hold their territory. Or the zoo hypothesis: like the San Diego Zoo's sign not to knock on the gorilla glass, or the Wild Animal Park where you watch from a distance, advanced observers may simply watch, uninterested in a species that offers them nothing, the way an ornithologist needs birds far more than birds need the ornithologist. That is why he is skeptical of cattle mutilation and abduction stories.

He ends with the one near death experience he believes in, Alfred Nobel's. Nobel grew rich as an arms dealer, and his baby brother Emil was vaporized along with several others when nitroglycerin exploded in the family lab, which broke their father Emanuel, who died eight years later to the day. Alfred set out to make nitroglycerin safe by mixing it with a clay like earth, creating dynamite, "powerful rock" in Greek, and became one of the richest and, by munitions, deadliest men alive. In 1888, walking through Paris, he read his own obituary, printed by mistake when his brother Ludvig died: "the merchant of death is dead." Given a living glimpse of how the world would remember him, like Scrooge shown his own grave, he rewrote his will and left 99 percent of his fortune to found the Nobel Prizes for peace, chemistry, medicine, literature, and physics, to become the benefit to humanity the obituary said he never was. The very first physics prize went to the X ray, a technology that has pulled bullets and diagnosed disease ever since. Asked who Ryan should book next, Keating names Eric Weinstein, the one guest he says he pushes back on and fights with like a brother, and offers to text him.

Key takeaways

Keating's core complaint is procedural, not dismissive: claims of alien visitation almost never reach physical evidence you can test, and "trust me, bro" is not how science works. The sky is not classified, and neither is physics.
The strongest tool he keeps returning to is falsifiability. You cannot prove a claim true, only false. He cannot prove the Earth is round, only that it is not flat, and that is what separates science from astrology.
His own career is a lesson in fooling yourself. The 2014 BICEP announcement that they had seen inflation's fingerprint collapsed when galactic dust turned out to mimic the signal, the subject of Losing the Nobel Prize.
The Alvarez radar spoof shows how a capable adversary can make ordinary technology look like it broke physics, a simpler hypothesis than interdimensional craft.
On the moon, the best evidence is adversarial: Soviet telemetry, Russian and American laser retroreflectors found exactly where each nation said, and the fact that our rivals congratulated us instead of exposing a hoax.
"We did it once, so it should be easy" is the weak argument. Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911; no Norwegian returned until 1996. Capability can lapse without conspiracy.
Aliens and AI scratch the same itch: a surrogate secular God, the Tower of Babel impulse to become gods and deny death.
The math of a good life: happiness is an unstable equilibrium on a hedonic treadmill, and entropy means you can be made infinitely unhappy but only finitely happier. Build the order, family and meaning, whose loss would devastate you.

Chapters

0:00:00 Welcome and Introduction 0:12:22 Life in Antarctica 0:24:23 Aliens, Religion & AI Gods 0:53:30 Radar Spoofing & UAP Explanations 1:07:24 Family, Science & Early Inspiration 1:23:45 Reconnecting with His Father 1:35:12 BICEP, Cosmology & Scientific Controversy 1:51:39 Evidence, Belief & Falsifiability 2:07:32 Faith, Judaism & Science 2:25:46 Big Bang Misconceptions 2:39:17 Moon Landing Evidence 2:54:53 Van Allen Belts & Why We Stopped Going 3:09:57 Mars, Robots & AI as a Secular God 3:19:28 Legacy, Happiness & The Keating Algorithm 3:38:59 The Fermi Paradox

Notable quotes

"The sky is not classified. I say physics is not classified." Keating, 0:04:00, on why the physics community should be included, not alienated.
"It's not only kind of not nice to do to people, I think it's morally objectionable" to keep teasing world changing disclosure and then rug pull it. Keating, 0:07:00.
"We're all kind of doing battle against an enemy that has infinite resources called mother nature. And she doesn't give up her secrets. The only thing that we have on our side is that she's always in retreat." Keating, 0:04:30.
"I love getting there. I love having been there. I hate being there." Keating on Antarctica, 0:13:30.
"Let's make this thing better by making it smaller." Keating on Galileo stopping down the aperture, 0:40:00.
"The first principle in science is that you shouldn't fool yourself. But the second principle is that you should think that you're the easiest person to fool." Keating quoting Feynman, 1:48:00.
"I don't want to say I believe in God. I want to say I have evidence for God. Which is stronger?" Keating, 1:51:39.
"You can prove something wrong in science, but you can't prove something is right." Keating, 1:53:00.
"You didn't serve. What the [expletive] does that have to do with aliens and UFOs? They don't have any experience with UFOs or aliens just like anybody else." Ryan, 0:17:00, on deference to pilots.
"You're looking at straight facts and the rest of us are looking at context." Ryan to Keating, on why citizens distrust the moon landing, 2:52:00.
"You can make someone infinitely unhappy, but you can only make them finitely happy. That's entropy." Keating, 3:35:00.
"Where is everybody?" Fermi, 1950, as recounted by Keating, 3:38:59.
"The merchant of death is dead." The mistaken obituary that remade Alfred Nobel, as told by Keating, 3:52:00.

Resources mentioned

People and guests

Brian Keating, and his podcast Into the Impossible, named for Arthur C. Clarke
Shawn Ryan
Avi Loeb, Harvard astrophysicist, and his book Extraterrestrial
Luis Alvarez and Richard Feynman
Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discoverers of the cosmic microwave background
Edwin Hubble, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking
Simons Observatory colleagues: David Spergel (led the NASA UAP study panel), Mark Devlin, Suzanne Staggs, and the late Jim Simons
Tom Murphy, lunar laser ranging at UC San Diego
Don Pettit, Bart Sibrel, Piers Morgan, AJ Gentile, Candace Owens
UAP witnesses and figures: David Fravor, Alex Dietrich, Ryan Graves, Lue Elizondo, David Grusch, Tom DeLonge and To the Stars, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett
Elon Musk and May Musk; Enrico Fermi and Herbert York; Alfred Nobel
Andrew Huberman, Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, Jay Bhattacharya, Sabine Hossenfelder, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Steven Bartlett, Ray Kurzweil

Ideas, places, and instruments

BICEP telescope and the Simons Observatory
Amundsen Scott South Pole Station and its 300 Club, the LC-130, and Jerri Nielsen
ʻOumuamua and the Pan-STARRS / Haleakalā telescope
Occam's razor, the Feynman point, falsifiability
Inflation, gravitational waves, LIGO, gravitational lensing, dark matter, dark energy
Multiverse, Big Crunch, string theory, observable universe, black holes
Apollo 11, lunar laser ranging, the Artemis program, the Van Allen belts, helium 3, the SR-71
Fermi paradox, Drake equation, Great Filter, zoo hypothesis, Voyager
Tower of Babel, Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, longevity escape velocity, the hedonic treadmill, entropy
Keating's book Losing the Nobel Prize and the giveaway at briankeating.com/srs
Sponsor reads in this episode: Superpower, Bubs Naturals, Babbel, Stash, and OnX Off-Road

Where it stands

Most of the cosmology in this conversation is mainstream and well supported: the expanding universe, the cosmic microwave background, gravitational waves detected by LIGO, gravitational lensing, and the case for dark matter and dark energy are consensus physics, and Keating's account of them is accurate. His own BICEP story is a matter of record: the 2014 claim of primordial gravitational waves was retracted after joint analysis with Planck showed galactic dust could account for the signal. His moon landing evidence, the retroreflectors and Soviet corroboration, is real and checkable, and the Van Allen belt reassurance matches the physics.

The genuinely contested parts are flagged as such by Keating himself. Whether time had a beginning, whether we live in a multiverse, and what preceded the Big Bang are open questions, not settled results, and his framing of ʻOumuamua is a friendly disagreement with Avi Loeb, who holds the minority view that it may be technological; the mainstream reads it as a natural object. On UAPs, Keating's position is not that aliens are impossible but that no public evidence clears the scientific bar, which is where the field currently sits: the government disclosures to date have produced testimony and video, not testable physical evidence, and the NASA UAP study led by his colleague David Spergel reached a similar conclusion. The 5,000 year civilization lifetime, the Great Filter, and the zoo hypothesis are speculative models offered to explain the Fermi silence, not findings. Ryan's contribution is the honest other half of the argument: even where the physics is clean, a public that has been lied to will read everything through the lens of that distrust, and no amount of retroreflector data fully closes that gap on its own.

Full transcript

[music] Brian Keading, welcome to the show, man. >> It's a great pleasure to be here, Sean. Been been a while. I've been hoping to come. >> A couple years in the making, right? >> I know. >> But, uh, yeah, we were talking out there. I think I think I've been tracking you for like two or three years and you finally made it. >> Yeah. It's kind of scary to hear that Sean Ryan's been tracking you, but [laughter] I'll take that, my friend. >> Oh, man. But uh yeah, lots of [expletive] going on right now. Lot of stuff going on right now. What do you think about all this alien stuff, >> you know? It's it's either the most exciting time to be alive or it's going to be the most depressing time to [laughter] be alive. You know, it's like uh imagine you keep asking a girl out. She say, "Yeah, soon soon I'll I'll disclose my intentions to you." And you know, you're just kind of waiting in the wings and you keep hearing things are going to happen. It's going to come out. Finally, we're going to know the truth. Um, and the whole community is thinking about things and is excited about things. And then I'm sorry to say I'm just been completely underwhelmed. This this last release by President Trump and Department of War Pete Hegel. I I tore through that like a kid on, you know, Christmas morning or as soon as it came out. I'm just >> What did you find? >> I I found, you know, really it's a a nice round number. I found like zero. I found zero that really interested me. And worse than that, I found things that were, you know, your background, you're used to dealing with kind of like SCOPs and and have a good friend, my my friend Chad Hos, he was he was in the SCOPS. He was in US Army, served in, you know, they have exposure to things, right? They're going to they're going to prime you for certain things. I call these SCOPS, SCIO ops, cuz it sounds so outlandish, so so outrageous. It it titilates the mind, especially if you're a nerd like me. I want to know about extra dimen extradimensional beings. I want to know about nonh humanoid biologics. I want to and and all I get to hear from people I respect, some people I've talked to, you know, I I like to say I've got the square root of your podcast, but I talked to a lot of the same people you've had the opportunity and honor to talk to. And it's always, you know, comes down to like, trust me, bro, or I heard or somebody said this and I can't say that. And in the military, I completely understand it. I understand. You've seen things, you've done things, you're not going to be able to talk about things. You're a scientist and and and you go on a show um like my friend, you know, Steven Bartlett's show and you get 10 million views and one night you say, "Well, I heard from somebody who heard from somebody and you're a physicist like this, you know, people that have come on recently on on his show." Um it it frustrates me because that's not the way science works. >> Do you think this is all a distraction? Um, I mean, every time every time there's a big release or hearing it, it just to me it just winds up being a big another [expletive] nothing burger. >> Yeah. I mean, have you have you heard anything that would make you I mean, these are supposed to be some of the most consequential discoveries of all time, right? Things that could question and have caused people literally, Sean, to be burned at the stake. >> Okay. 1600 Gono Bruno who's a who was a preach priest in the Catholic church in Italy. He proclaimed that every star you see in the heavens has a planet around it. They said very nice you know what what what temperature do you want to be cooked to? You know they burned him at the stake because it was so threatening which meant it was threatening to the most powerful authority on earth at the time which is the Catholic Church the Vatican and that was like the you know United States on steroids like literally just kill no other power was comparable and he went against them. Why? Because it was threatening to them. Why is it something threatening to you? Do you care when your kid says, "Oh, daddy, you don't you look ugly today." Or some hater on the internet says something. You don't give a crap about it. But when somebody says something important and it challenges your worldview, like that's that's significant. >> So allegedly, these things could have the most consequential impact on humanity. Has your life changed? Have you questioned your belief in God? Have you thought maybe, you know, there's there's something to these aliens and and maybe it it could be incompatible with my religion, my faith in Jesus Christ or whatever? No. I mean, I assume no. >> I used to think there was something to this alien [expletive] I really did. >> Mhm. >> Now I don't. you know, >> I just don't you know, I've interviewed so many people about this and I'm not talking about uh Avi Lobo or but [clears throat] um you know the thing is is well one thing that one red flag to me is you got all these all these people out there that are screaming disclosure, we want disclosure, they're demanding it. But none of them are really working together. >> That's right. >> You know, and so, you know, behind closed doors, off camera, they're all talking [expletive] about each other. >> Exactly. >> It's like, it's like, oh, you want disclosure, but only if you're the [expletive] one to disclose it, right? You don't want to work with anybody else and actually, >> you know, figure this out. You you just you want to be the guy. That's what it is. >> And um >> yeah, it's So, that's like one thing. Another thing is I find the timing very odd of the release of all this [expletive] I mean the you know the the latest batch of the alien conspiracy thing is you know stopped right at the height of the Epstein stuff in the Iran war. >> Yeah. >> Whether you're for it against it, whatever. It's very unpopular. You know what I mean? And and so it's like >> give them aliens. You know what I mean? That's That's how I think about it now. I'm just like this [expletive] [expletive] Of course you drop it right now. >> And so it's I think the timing alone is discrediting. >> So, you know, in the ancient Roman times you had on Jeremy Ryan Slate is a a friend of mine not too long ago. Uh you know, he talked about ancient Rome and and what they used to do and how do they keep the masses entertained when there's no Netflix. They had bread and circus. I call this bread and saucers. This is what they're doing. >> There's a lot of distraction. Why is it distracting though? That's what interested me. It's a metacognitive thing. To me, it's interesting because it taps into something primal in the human spirit, which is beautiful, by the way, that people care about the possibility of extra extradimensional, extraterrestrial, not only life. Like, if I told you tomorrow we discovered some slime mold on, you know, the the moon of Saturn, Titan, you'd be like, "Holy crap, that's cool." But if I told you there's dolphins swimming around on the ocean, you'd say, "That's even cooler, right?" And then if I said there's there's freaking dolphins with with opposable thumbs and they're using iPhones, you'd be like, "Holy freaking crap." You know, right? So it just it's this hierarchy of insane interesting most fascinating stuff and it is child abuse or or you know humanity's curiosity abuse when you start saying something is so weighty so important so significant not just to like you know your worldview your religion your belief in God all these things and you start like rugpulling it I think that's I think it's not only you know kind of not not not nice to do to people I think it's morally objectionable. If you keep teasing this, and just wait till you see it. And by the way, it's not just scientists, it's not just um the military, it's people in Congress, it's people in power. And it's frustrating to me because they'll often be something, you know, they'll say things like, you know, we want someone, you know, these things that we see defy the laws of physics. Okay. Well, like I'm a physicist. Avi's a physicist. You know, show us the data. Avi doesn't believe that we're being visited right now. He does believe that there have been extraterrestrial technology potential for them to have visited us via this iluam mua this recent you know three-ey atlas and we can debate the scientific methods all all you want. Um and there's a lot of objections in science because guess what that's what scientists do. Scientists don't say oh you found a good discovery that's great Sean you know one good for you. We're not like you know in the teams or whatever like oh you take somebody this I I'll take somebody. We don't have roles like that. We're we're all kind of doing battle against an enemy that has infinite resources called mother nature. >> And she doesn't give up her secret. The only thing that we have on our side, Sean, is that she's always in retreat. We're making incredible progress, exciting progress, despite what doomsayers say, despite what people may say about it. And we almost don't need the aliens. Like, we almost don't need it for the sense that science is so incredibly interesting, so provocative, so helpful, so useful. But we've come to believe that with science you get technology. And I kind of say that's the problem. You know, the problem with science is that sometimes it makes technology. And so you come to expect it as a general public. Well, what good is this? Why should we spend this money here? Why should we do this? Why should we do that? We should we have poor people here in Tennessee or wherever, right? We should be doing something for them. It's not a zero- sum game. In fact, it's it's a losing battle. We know we're going to lose against mother nature. But don't make it worse. Don't put up false flags. Don't try to do the scops seiops and and let us have access to it that the universe Alo loves to say the sky is not classified. I say physics is not classified. >> Love that. You familiar with poly market? >> Yeah, of course. >> Poly market only gives a 14% chance that the US will confirm that aliens exist before 2027. Did you see the post that Trump did? >> Yes. >> The other day with a >> Did anybody What is that? Um, you know, he's he's a he's a master manipulator. He's a vest and and I, you know, I support what President Trump does in many ways. Uh, which makes me, you know, kind of a unicorn in academia, but um, you know, does that mean he does everything right? Does that mean like, you know, I couldn't ever consider not voting for him? Do I do I think that he does things sometimes in a in a callous and a cruel? Yeah, of course. Look, I I people always say to me as a sidebar, I'm sorry to go on a tangent so early in the conversation, but but they say like, "Would you want your kid to be like President Trump? Isn't he like, "Oh, I have all these problems." I'm like, "Um, no. You know who I want my kid to be like?" You know, I try to live a life for my sons to be like me. I try to live a life but not be copies of me. I want them to be who they are, actualize their full potential that God has given them. But I don't want them to be me. I don't want them to be a politician. I don't want them to be an Instagram influence. I don't want them to be you. I want them I want to be the influence of my kid, not the president. I never look, oh, John F. Kennedy, I really want my kids to go, you know, all these guy. I don't say that [clears throat] either. I don't say, you know, I want my kid to be like Stephen Hawking. No, I don't. Nobody. I want them to be >> replacement. >> Exactly. They're your ticket to the afterlife in in reality, spirituality, and ideologically. I think that's what other gift could you have? And by the way, I like to say for people that don't have kids, a lot of my friends don't have kids, I'm sure, you know, uh the same number of people. Um, you don't have to have kids yourself. A, you can adopt. B, you can you can be a mentor. You know, it's a shame the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson have given like real bad name to like men mentoring younger younger kids. And I think that's I think it's a tragedy because I think what you need is more biological fathers and more ideological fathers. And you you can be both, but you don't have to be both. >> Mhm. Let's get back to aliens real quick. So, Poly Market gives a 14% chance that the US government confirms alien life or technology this year. $38 million in real money has traded on this. You've built telescopes at the South Pole looking for signals from the beginning of the universe, as a physicist. What do those odds tell you? >> So, one of the places I built a telescope is at the South Pole, Antarctica. And I think that means I've been on a Navy base that you haven't been on. Uh the South Coast. >> That means you've been on on a [laughter] Navy base that I've not been on. >> Um and I've probably been on a plane, you know, put in my The only ways I can, you know, say that I've done something Sean Sean Ryan hasn't done is I've been I might have been on a plane you've never been on in the military, an LC130 cargo plane. This is a ski equipped cargo plane. The US doesn't export it. It's like the uh F22 or something. >> I've never even seen one. >> It's a giant It's the world's biggest ski plane. It is the coolest thing. Stephven 30, >> you went to Antarctica. >> I've been there twice. I spent months of my month. >> What's going on down there? >> So, Antarctica is one of the most fascinating um otherworldly just like extraterrestrial kind of planet filled with some of the most hard charging people outside of the military that you probably ever want to meet. Uh people, it's overs subscribed. So, it's harder to get to the South Pole to work there as a cook than it is to get into Harvard University. There's so many people that want to work there that be there. They love the isolation. They love the desolation. Uh it's like the movie Star Wars with the ice planet Hoth covered over frozen over in snow. >> Isolation. Desolation. Sounds like my dream place. [snorts] >> For me, it's a nightmare. Yeah. For you it's great. I I love I I I love getting there. I love having been there. I hate being there. >> You love getting there. What's that like? A 25 hour plane ride. [laughter] >> It takes 7 days. Yeah. From San Diego. Holy. >> It's crazy. It's crazy. And uh or you can take two two and a half weeks by boat across the world's southern ocean, which is the most dangerous and and kind of violent scene. I'm I get seasick, you know. So like I I go on a stand up paddle board, I get seasick. So, you know, I'm not taking the boat ride. But so you get there, you go from San Diego, fly to LAX, you fly from LAX to either Australia or to the North Island of New Zealand to Auckland, New Zealand. Uh that takes, you know, 14 hours, whatever flight. Um, then you get there, then you have to take another flight to get from there to Christ Church, New Zealand, which on the south island of New Zealand. New Zealand is like is where they fill in the Lord of the Rings. It's the most it's like Switzerland plus the tropics. It's an incredible beautiful place. And uh and then you get there and the US has carved out an an army base, a naval base, and a provisioning center from this place called Christ Church. And the reason that they are there is it's where the historic obser um explorers like Rald Ammonson who's the first man to reach the South Pole and uh Robert Scott who's a British team they were in a race every bit as competitive as the cold war space race to get to the moon first. This battle in 1911 and 1912 was every [clears throat] bit as intense geopolitically, national pride, scientifically exp. It was the last continent. No one had ever seen Antarctica. You know when Antarctica was discovered? Antarctica was discovered after the planet Uranus was discovered. >> We found a freaking planet before we went to the world's seventh continent. It's a continent. >> Wow. I did not know that. >> Yeah. It's an actual continent, which means unlike the North Pole, if you go to the North Pole, you've seen that where the submarines go up through there. There's no land at the North Pole. If you go to the South Pole, you dig down through 9,500 ft of ice, you hit rock. That means it's a continent. So, it's it's one of Earth's seven continents. It has a population. Right now, as we're speaking, it's winter in Antarctica or it's starting to be, you know, the fall. It's going into winter there as we, you know, kind of are in spring going into summer in the northern hemisphere. Uh there's only about 800 people on the whole continent. >> Wow. Once again, this sounds like my dream place. [laughter] >> Yeah. You got a you got a a 200 mile shooting range you can go out to. >> That means everybody there has to have a specific job and has to be very [expletive] good at it. There's no slackers. >> That's right. That's why >> I imagine there's no slackers. No, you you can't get first of all, you need a psychological exam if you're going to be there. You can't because there's no doctors there. There's no dentist there. You if you have even a 1% chance that you're going to need your mers removed before you go to Antarctica, they force you to pull them out. Okay? Because there's no dentist there. Can you imagine the horrific pain that you could possibly have if you were at the South Pole? No doctors, no dentists, no x-rays, nothing nothing possibly saved your life and you get a toothache. So, they have to and it costs hundreds of thousand dollars for each person to get down there. So, the US takes it very seriously. Um, we go down these ski equipped cargo planes. Um, we leave from Christ Church on a C17 if you're lucky. Um, if you're unlucky, you get you get a C130 again, which is half the speed. And, um, and they can only get provisions in or out of there about 3 months of the year. So, this the station opens up in November, which beginning of their spring going into their summertime. Uh, and then it ends in February 15th. And Sean, if you're not out by oop, sorry. If you're not out by February 15th, you're there until November. You're not going anywhere. >> Damn. >> So, it's an incredible environment. >> And it's dark, by the way. It's dark, pitch black three months of the year. >> I've been thinking a lot about this lately. We track everything in our lives, our workouts, our sleep, our business metrics. When it comes to our actual health, most of us are just guessing. And that never really made sense to me. And I think we've all had that experience where you go in, get checked out, and leave without any real clarity. No real breakdown of what's going on or what to actually do next. That's why I'm really interested in what Superpower is doing. It's one simple set of lab tests, but you're getting data on over 100 biomarkers. So now you can actually understand what's going on with your body from hormones to metabolism to vitamin levels and more. And for me, that's the biggest thing. I'm always wondering what should I be doing? What supplements make sense? How to adjust my diet? How to optimize performance? And instead of guessing, Superpower gives you a real plan based on your data. It also tracks everything over time so you can see progress year after year and not just start over every time. Make this the year you stop guessing about your health with Superpower. For a limited time, our listeners get $20 off to unlock their new health intelligence. Head over to superpower.com and use code SRS for $20 off your membership. That's code SRS. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about Superpower. Do me a favor if you could and tell them the Shawn Ryan Show sent you to support the show. What's security like? So, I actually had a friend. There is one gun down there. It's not uh uh there is one gun down there. It's a 45 caliber uh 1911. It's kept in a safe. And uh there's a station master who's sometimes a scientist. I knew the station master who was a scientist the year I was there and they uh they have security because some people have gone literally crazy there as you might expect, right? Complete isolation. You're not going anywhere. You know why a plane can't land there? So if if a if a C130 were to land there in the middle of winter, it gets down to -100° Fahrenheit. Okay, so that's that's 200 that's 300° below the boiling point of water. So, they actually have a sauna at the South Pole that gets up to 212 almost degrees uh Fahrenheit. And then the coldest day of the year is usually in July. They go outside and they run around naked around the South Pole. It looks like a barber pole just like you see in, you know, like Santa would have or whatever. It's a barber pole that marks the geographic axis on which the Earth is spinning. Okay? They run around. It's called the 300°ree club. You run around every time zone and you're running in negative delta temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay? So if a plane were to land there, if an LC130 were to land there, the hydraulic fluid and JP8 freezes at like -50 or something like that. So what would happen is all the fuel lines would explode and you'd be you'd have to the plane would be ruined. You could never use that plane again. So they've never done they've done air drops. There was a doctor there who got stranded, uh Jerry Nielsen, and uh she was the phys on-site physician, but that's just for like, you know, cuts and scrapes and stuff like that. She diagnosed a lump and she found that she had this lump in her breast and they had to drop chemo. They found out diagnosed it. She dropped a biopsy kit. She tested that she had breast cancer stage two or three. Then they dropped chemotherapy. So they had parachutes at night pitch black from a C17. She ended up living a few more years after that. She wrote a memoir about it. But it's the most isolated place on earth. Literally there's a imagine a thousand people in the entire continental US. Just imagine that. how how far you'd have to go until you meet again for people like you. You probably >> Sounds amazing. >> You just catch up on your read. >> Did you see where we're at? We're out in the woods. >> You know. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Sounds incredible. >> Have you heard of these Have you heard of these crafts that people think come out of the water from within the earth? >> What do you think about that? >> Well, I've seen some stuff from um this gentleman, Lu Alzando. I don't know if you've had Lou on the podcast. Had Lou >> Yeah. So, he had this book came out a couple years ago, imminent. I try to have them on. Um, look, I I take a skeptical view. Um, it's like when you were a kid, um, I'm Jewish, but but I actually grew up Catholic, and it's a long story, but but you remember like when when Christmas would come and you'd be so excited, like you just knew your mom was going to your dad was going to get you that racetrack or or that RC truck or that that 22 or or whatever you're going to get. Like, you just knew. And then the next day shows up, oh, oh, thanks, Mom. A pair of slacks. Like, gh. You know that feeling of being let down? You've had it, right? I've had it. [clears throat] >> I was just going to ask if you miss Christmas. Maybe not. Huh? >> Uh [laughter] we have enough holidays as it is. Yeah. Um so so we we uh we are in that same situation. We're promised disclosure. We're promised this is going to be groundbreaking. Literally yesterday Congresswoman Luna uh Burchett uh a lot of people you've talked to, a lot of people you know. Um what's coming next? It's always what's coming next. It reminds me of like nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is said to be the power source of the future, Sean. And it always will be. In other words, we're just not converging on this stuff. >> Why do you think we're not Oh, man. >> We can go we can we can do eight hours on this if you want, but but I'll tell you, I think there's a bunch of different things. Um, I don't actually think the the Epstein file distraction from the Iran war. I I don't think any of that is really pertinent. A because a lot of it surfaced in 2017, you know, thanks to um Tom Dong and to the Stars Academy and and and people that um you might have interviewed. I I talked to Tom Dong and Jim Seivian who's a CIA operator at one point. Um and and the challenge is you have all sorts of um extremely rich potential scientific content in a very low information environment, in an extremely low trust environment. In other words, you've talked to people. You've talked to Ryan Graves, F18. Okay. I I've talked to him. I actually talked to him with one of his wingmen who's a friend of mine who's a naval uh veteran, a F-18 pilot just like Ryan. Um, and you talk about it. I would say most of the stories that I've heard and even people like David Grush, you know, I respect these people, but I have yet to hear them say, "Here's the physical evidence, Sean. If these things, >> they never go the full distance. >> They never produce the evidence. A lot of these are non-human biologics. >> Well, that could be a [expletive] deer carcass on the side of the road. >> Right. >> I'm I'm not [expletive] around. I'm being serious. Like, if you're going to go, why aren't we going the full distance? Like, you're not a [expletive] whistleblower. You're just >> bringing up [expletive] >> I'm used to [expletive] nothing. >> I can't say that, you know, cuz I don't have the courage to join. I wanted to join the military. I wanted to go into the Air Force. My stepfather was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and a KC135 Strat tanker pilot. I wanted to do it, but you know, I discovered girls. I'm like, h I don't know if I can handle it. I I want to be an F8 uh F-14 pilot because that's when Top Gun came out when I was a kid. And then my stepfather's like, you know, you know, they say everyone wants to be a cowboy, but no one wants to ride the range, you know, like being out on the boat like my friend Ariel Kleinerman or like Ryan Graves. I sorry, I just didn't have it. I wanted to study the stars. I wanted to not, you know, not miss that opportunity. It's kind of what I'm what I'm good at. Um, but on the other hand, this stuff is so interesting and yet I keep hearing things like, you know, I heard from somebody or, you know, David Gush, I I can't, you know, these are the testimonies. I haven't seen them. Um, they do they're interdimensional beings like an uh Congresswoman Luna. Um, and I I would bet >> it's a spirit. >> It's a spirit. It's a god. That's why I say I call these aliens of the gaps. It's a form of almost religious worship. Same is happening with AI, by the way. You see this worship, this power, these people involved. Look at the people involved in AI. Sean, >> what do you mean worship in AI? What are you talking about? >> Worship in AI is creating a God in our image. Okay. So, just what God did with us. God created us from dirt. Adam in Hebrew it means earth. It means dirt. God carved us out of earth. Created. We can believe it literally. You can't I don't I'm not here to proitize. I'm not going to say anything about anyone who believes literally or doesn't believe literally. But the point is gods that we create in our image. It's one of the oldest stories of all time. Tower of Babel. What was the T tower of Babel? It wasn't just like, oh, we're going to make this tower. And it was humans developed technology. They created the first composite building material with straw, with earth, with dirt. That's a composite building material like rebar and concrete, right? That's come out. And they said, "Hey, we have technology now. We don't need to go on top of a mountain that God made. We can build a tower ourselves to go to the sky like a twin towers. We can do this. We're so powerful. We're so mighty." Right? It's an old tale that we can compete with God. Why does the Bible, why does the Torah, the Old Testament say they did it? They wanted to fight with God. Why? Because God had restricted the knowledge that human beings were capable of having. Again, believe it or not, I I I really don't care if somebody believes the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Test. I don't care. The point is these stories are eternal. They have something to teach us 3,000 years ago. They can teach us stuff to this very day. The story that people are trying to do now is to create a god sort of in our image right that will do things to us supernatural have capabilities all powerful capabilities all knowing the panopticon know what you're doing know people trust chat GPT more than they trust trust their priest rabbi or minister you ask stuff to chat GPT >> you probably wouldn't tell your wife I know I do sometimes like why is my wife mad at me like I'm not going to ask her that I know why she's mad at me right so the point is We're outsourcing that which is ethereal, which is eternal. We're outsourcing that to little bricks of silicon. And we're hoping, but we don't really know about the dangers within aliens. What is happening with aliens? That there's some external force that's being suppressed that has the power to transform the world. I agree 100%. If this if everything they said was going to be disclosed was disclosed, we would have to reconfront a new reality. I mean, we would be in an environment that is so unstabilizing. It would make like the Catholic Church burning Bruno alive and imprisoning Galileo, all that thing. It would look like, you know, like when my toddler goes into timeout. Okay? It would be almost we would be so revolutionarily displaced. The question is what? You know, if we if we if that's real, if these aliens exist and they have te technological capabilities to travel light years across the galaxy, why is it that, you know, Congresswoman Luna or or somebody else is capable of either suppressing it or disclosing it? >> I mean, yeah, I don't think I don't think I mean, are they capable of that? >> Well, I'll ask you the question. >> Are they pretending? You're in the you were >> if you talk about aliens and you're in government, >> that's like an immediate PR boost. Yeah. Boom. Your front page of every paper, every podcast wants to talk to you. Every news network wants to talk to you. It's it's a great PR stunt, right? Yeah. >> I mean, this episode's going to do good because we started it off talking about aliens. I guarant [expletive] because of me. I'm joking. I'm joking. >> But but I'm I'm being serious. Like it it always hits. Yeah, >> it always hits. >> AI is another one. >> Nothing ever comes out. >> So, and there's an incentive to keep it that way, right? Cuz if you do disclose, >> I think there's something to what you're saying. I mean, I don't I'm I'm not I'm not that interested in it anymore because nothing ever come there's no there's never any breaking [expletive] that comes out that's you know that that that's >> and there's nothing you can do about it anyways. >> Well, you can use critical reason. What I think that they what I think might be going on is they've seen, you know, how much attention >> the subject matter uh demands, you know, when it's brought up. And so it's become a tool, a useful tool for the US government. >> That's right. No, I I I agree with you. I guess here's a question I've been wanting to ask you and and and originally when I you know, I I actually think I might have invited you on my podcast at one point to do like a Veterans Day celebration. So anyway, at some point, I'd love for you to come on. When you come on, I'm going to give you this. Well, I'm going to give this to you now because I brought it all the way out. This is it's not a Nobel Prize, but it is called the Keading Prize. A little bit arrogant. Okay. It's for Impossible Imagination. Okay. And it's got your name on the side of it, and it's 3D printed. And there's a replica of the monolith from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey because my podcast, Into the Impossible, is named after Sir Arthur C. Clark who wrote the book that 2001 of Space Odyssey is based on. So >> you're welcome. Yeah. Thank you for all you do. Um and we're going to play around with some other stuff now. So keep that handy that we'll go with that later on. Um [clears throat] so I want to turn you know with with your permission and and forbearance. I want to ask you a question because I can't ask I've had as I said military I've had operators on. Um let me ask you a question. Uh some of the pilots who saw things, the Nimmits incident, the tic-tac incident, Commander Fraver, uh Lieutenant um uh Commander Alex and Dietrich, um they claimed they saw things, right? They got back to the boat. When they got back to the boat, they were basically described as being hazed, something like that. Um teased mercilessly. They said it was bad for their career. Uh David Fravers testified about this. Um, we could talk about the geometry of, you know, how they saw different things and, but I want to ask you as a as an operator, if >> I I know people that have lost limbs to IEDs, okay? >> If if you're on point, if you're on going on a patrol and and one of your buddies says, "I I think I see this thing and it's it's unusual. It could be an IED or not." Like, when you got back to camp, would you like tease that person or would you say, "We should take this freaking seriously?" >> Yeah, you would say, "We should take this seriously." So, what do you make of the fact that when they got back and and throughout and Ryan Graves has done a good job trying to combat this, but what do you make of the fellow people that should also be encountering these things and should be subject if they're just simple prosaic man-made Chinese whatever you want. They're they can pose a danger to flight risk, right, for these aircraft that are operating at high, you know, velocities, right? What do you make of the fact that the fellow aviators, their their equivalent of operators and teams, right? They were teasing them. I I just psychologically can you help me get through that? >> Well, I mean I think the the comparison as you brought up is a little imbalanced. I mean in IED in the heyday of Iraq or Afghanistan, I mean that that was a you would see multi multiple of those a day. Very common, you know what I mean? Very >> nobody would second guess that. I mean they might second guess you but they're not going to make fun of you, you know? I mean, it was just so prevalent. It's happening multiple times a day. You don't see [clears throat] UFOs popping in and out of the water and, you know, defying physics every day, every year, every decade. Like, you just don't, you know, if you see it, you're very you're you're you're, you know, it's very rare, right? I >> I can see like my brother I have three brothers, right? I can see them teasing the [expletive] out of me, right? Like >> it's kind of like a ghost, >> right? Okay. Like >> you might tease somebody if they've seen a ghost like, "Oh yeah, okay, you've seen a [expletive] ghost, right?" >> But if that ghost could take out, you know, the intake on your F-18, you know, uh, you know, Hornet, wouldn't you be a little bit, you know, like more interested in seeing if it's not not teasing them, but actually let's let's go through the encounters. Like >> I'd be interested >> as a professional. Yeah. >> As a professional, I'd probably crack a little bit of a joke. You would, >> you know what I mean? But I'd also be interested to hear what was going on. I mean, I mean, my old producer is the one that logged it into the log book. >> I mean, he was there uh when that [expletive] happened. Yeah. >> but yeah, so I I'm I'm not saying like >> they should have been ridiculed or anything like that. Absolutely. >> But I I all I'm saying is I can understand some heckling. >> Okay. >> You know, going on, >> right? And then when you when you hear things, again, I'm a civilian. courage to do stuff that you and your audience does, right? Um although I do have some gifts for your audience that we're going to talk about later on. So, uh that's that's a cliffhanger. That's a retention device. Uh [laughter] another question where I turn, you know, the tables on the podcaster and ask you and ask you a question. Um you know, in in the context of me as a civilian, I'm told like, you know, Keing, shut your mouth. These guys saw what they saw. You don't have the balls to strap on an F-18. you you didn't serve in the Air Force intelligence like Rush. What what should I say in those situations? It's true. You know, I'm a pilot, but I don't fly F-18s. You fly Cessnas, right? But but tell me h how how should a civilian, you know, questioning what level of deference, what level of credul should I just believe someone cuz they they they strapped on a jet uh and I didn't have the balls to do it or you know, help me walk me through that cuz I get that a lot like you didn't have you you you don't have the skills that that that he has and you don't have the you have the fortitude to join so you can't question them even though I'm like well I'm a physicist like I know about fleer, I know about radar, I know about technology. I know how the U how astronomy has always fed into technology for military applications first and foremost. But you're right, I'm not a military operator. So, how do I, as a civilian, you know, kind of navigate that chasm? I I don't think any of that's even relevant. You didn't serve. What the [expletive] does that have to do with aliens and UFOs? Like we're not we're not talking about >> some some tactical maneuver that they did and bomb somebody and you're you're secondguessing the tactics. >> No, not at all. >> They don't have any [expletive] >> experience with UFOs or aliens just like anybody else. They saw some phenomena, right? >> So I mean I I think that's is a >> it's not legit. >> Not very wellcraftrafted defense mechanism, you know, to my opinion. But >> but or or the the fact that like oh they're they they have um great hand eye coordination or they have great you know the sniper knows you know how to do this and that and like they they know about observing things in a high threat environment at high speeds and kinetic kinetic environments. You don't kidding. You sit behind a chalkboard and teach, you know, quantum mechanics. Like nothing. There's nothing legit. The only steel man what they're saying. >> The only ones that seem to have an abundance of experience tracking UFOs in real time have pretty much all been debunked and are full of [expletive] So, [laughter] so I mean that's, you know, when it's a continuous thing, it's like, oh, there's the exper Oh [expletive] it got debunked again. [laughter] But I don't know. Does that answer your question? >> Yeah, I think it does. Yeah. Well, Brian, let me give you an introduction here without way too far into this. Brian Keading, >> you are the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego, the inventor of the BIC telescope at the South Pole, and the principal investigator of the Simons observatory, one of the largest cosmology experiments ever built. a $100 million plus telescope array in Chile's I can't say this atomic atomica >> Adakama Atakama desert in involving over 400 scientists from 40 institutions you have raised approximately $200 million for your research received the presidential early career award for scientists and engineers been elected to a fellow of the of the American Physical Society and been inducted into the International Aviation Hall of Fame as a 2022 legend of flight. You're the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, ranked a best science book of the year by Science Friday, Physics Today, and Forbes, and one of Amazon's editor's best non-fiction books of all time, and the host of the Into the Impossible podcast with over 500,000 subscribers, where you interview scientific and cultural pioneers, including 23 Nobel Prize winners as past. Wow, his past guest. That's impressive. You are a licensed multi-engine turbine rated commercial pilot who has lectured on six of seven continents including Antarctica. And you arrived today with a replica of Galileo's 16009 military telescope, a Martian regalia sample, and a 4.3 billion-year-old meteorite that you will send to 250 members of this audience with APO addresses. That's [expletive] awesome. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> It's quite the intro. >> Yeah, better late than never, but you should hear what my mother-in-law says in her rebuttal to the introduction. >> Oh [expletive] [laughter] >> Oh man. And then uh before we get too far into it, uh I got a Patreon account. It's quite the community. They're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. >> Thank you. Uh so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from Neil Embracio Jr. While most technologies to date have been used for sp space exploration, what are your thoughts on that same technology being used for the weaponization of space? >> So, one of the oldest partnerships in science is between astronomy and the military. Most people don't know about that but but the the same types of technologies of of inventions of calculations of theory are exactly applicable in military situations. Uh for example the telescope this replica telescope here of Galileo's 16009 telescope. So Galileo didn't invent the telescope. A lot of people think oh he invented it. He actually kind of stole the idea. Um, and he he he sort of admits to it, but that's that's academia for you, you know, we're used to kind of, you know, uh, taking credit sometimes where where credit might not be due. But what he did do is he kind of made it like 10x. I don't know, do you ever have a Blackberry, you know, back in the day or Nokia, you know, kind of phone, right? Um, the, uh, the the first kind of phones that did more than just, you know, send calls back and forth. um had early access to the internet and you could do, you know, very crude browsing. Uh and that's what made them really popular. But what made the the smartphone really take off exponentially was that it was 10 to 100 times better than anything that came before. And so, uh quantity has a quality all its own. Creating something for the first time, like creating the telescope is one thing, but then improving it by a factor of 10, it's almost like it's a new invention. And that's what Galileo did. He didn't invent it. It's the most simple thing you can think about. It's got two lenses. It's got a lens over here. This is called the objective lens. This is the side that faces the object that you're looking for. And then this is called the eyepiece lens. Another lens on the other side. This simple thing has about 1 in diameter lens. And it can see everything that you could possibly see with the naked eye, but 10 times better. And that change in humanity's literal perspective on the universe changed the world. But it wouldn't have been possible without Galileo's improvement. And in fact, he not only improved it by uh by the type of quality of the glass that he used, the lens material, the um uh the spacing of the material, he also did things that are kind of counterintuitive. You see, Sean, the the lens that's here is actually bigger than this brass disc that surrounds it. But the brass disc is actually crucial to the improvement. Uh because what the brass disc does is it focuses the phobia of your eye in the best part of the lens. If you had the whole lens exposed to the light, there's all sorts of artifacts of glints, of glare, what's called ghosting. Um and and those effects reduced the utility of the telescope. So Galileo counterintuitively said, "Let's take this telescope and make it smaller." It's called stopping down, like an aperture and f-stop on a camera. That actually restricts the light. That made it focus better. It was genius. No, I wouldn't have thought of that, right? Let's make this thing better by making it smaller. Like [laughter] I said, nobody ever, you know, you always want bigger, better, but no, that made it would have made it worse. He made it better. The other thing that he did, which nobody really had done before, it's crazy, is put it on a tripod. He invented the tripod. And what do you get when you put an optic on top of a tripod, Sean? >> Stability. get stability because the telescope is magnifying not only the object that you're looking at, but it's also magnifying the rotation of the Earth as we look at the stars. It's actually making it them go by faster, right? The stability made when you couple the stability to the optic itself. You could now use this for military purposes. This became the first sniper rifle scope. This is the first optic ever made. Okay, it's a replica, but it's the real one. There's only one left and it's about, you know, trillion dollars. So, I can't bring that for you. Maybe next time. Um, but what was so useful about it is Galileo didn't use it for astronomy. That wasn't the first thing he used it for. He did for himself cuz that was what his passion was. The first night he invented this new improved version of it with the tripod. He looked at the moon. And the moon at that time was unknown territory. People had no idea what was on it, what it was made of, if there's life there, if there's if it's totally different than the Earth. And he looked at it and he saw it looks perfectly smooth and circular to the eye. It has blotches on it. But um but he didn't know what those were. And he looked at that and he saw the following. He saw mountains. He saw craters. He saw lava flows. And he said, "Wait a second. People are telling us for 2,000 years it's perfect. It's a crystallin sphere. This isn't perfect. It's riddled with holes and craters and and marks and mountain ranges and riff valleys and craters and canyons. It's kind of like the Earth." That was the first unification of an extraterrestrial object with the Earth. That was amazing. He then looked at other objects and did and he and he wrote these all in his notebook and he kept them all in a span of 3 months. He discovered the following things. The moon has craters. The moon has rivers. Looks like rivers to the eye. Looks like it has oceans on it. It doesn't have flowing water anymore or ever did really. Um it has valleys, canyons, has vast plains upon it. Okay, he saw all that. That was one night. The next night, he saw the the planet Venus goes through certain phases just like the moon. In other words, sometimes there's a crescent Venus, sometimes there's a full Venus, sometimes there's a a waning crescent Venus, sometimes there's no Venus, and you can't see it. That must have meant that Venus was closer to the sun than the Earth because that's the only way we got phases of the moon. Sometimes the moon is closer to the sun than it is to the Earth. Um, and then he discovered that the planet Saturn had these ears on it. He thought the planet Saturn instead of now we know the rings of Saturn, he couldn't resolve them with his first telescopes, but he saw that they had um this had this extended oval shape to it and it kind of blew his mind. He thought it was three planets touching each other. Okay. And then the last most insane thing that he ever did in my opinion, again, this is all in just a few weeks in the winter January of 1610. Um, it's just mind-blowing. No one had ever done that before in history. Even though the telescope existed, no one thought to look at the sky because they didn't have the technology, the tripod. Okay? And I'm getting to the question that was asked in just a second. Um, he looked at the planet Jupiter, and Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system, and he saw it had all sorts of crazy structure to it. It had lines on it, like atmospheric storms. It had this blotch on it, this red spot on it, uh, that seemed to be there every night that he would look on it. And it was always accompanied by four stars. And the four stars were always like kind of moving with respect to Jupiter. And then Jupiter was moving with respect to the Earth. And he was such a genius. He said the following. He said, "I think what I'm looking at is a miniature version of the solar system with the sun replaced by Jupiter. And the planets that orbit around the sun, which was heretical to think back then, by the way, the planets that orbit around the sun are orbiting around Jupiter. So Jupiter's kind of like the sun to this miniature solar system that we saw edge on like a disc. So he saw these things moving back and forth always around Jupiter no matter where Jupiter was every time of the year that he could see it. And this is just mind-blowing. And he raced to publish this. He published in under two months which is like a record. He published this book called the Cedirius Nunius the starry messenger. And he didn't tell people how to build the telescope. He kept that classified. But he did go to Venice which you know Italy was only a country you know in the modern sense I think in the 1840s like it was unified it was made up of like Florence and Tuskanyany and Venice like they're disparate um dojes and and kingdoms right uh so he went to Venice he shopped it around to different militaries and he said look guys with this telescope you can go on top of a tower in the Piaza de San Marco in Venice I don't know if you ever been to Venice it's wonderful place you should go there especially you're Italian right Italian origin. So you go on top of the tower in Venice, you can look out into the ocean and you can see in the lagoon, you can see a boat today that won't be here for 3 days. And that was like stealth, right? So be like looking at the stealth bomber with a special device and you could take away the stealth of the stealth bomber. And so this technology between astronomy which was his main purpose in doing it intellectually and then selling it to the military immediately to the to the Venetian government gave them this huge advantage. They gave him like basically a stipend tenure made him like this court astronomer and he immediately saw how military purposes could be the vehicle to make him wealthy cuz he was a real cool guy. He had he was never married. He had kids out of wedlock. He had mistresses. He had brothers-in-law. He had people living with him, like students living with him. [laughter] I can't imagine living with my students. Um, and he was just such a passionate educator, but at heart he was like a military genius. And his first thing was to be like Merlin or, you know, Gandalf or something. He knew that astronomical discoveries, projectile motion, trajectories, things like that could immediately go from the realm of physics to being used for war. And the same thing is happening today. To address the question directly, we have technologies, we have tools, we have telescopes, we have things that have been designed. One of the things that Avi love spoke to you about this uh object called Umuam Mua was the first extraterrestrial object discovered by humanity. It came from another solar system. We don't know where. We don't know when, but we know that it did not come from our solar system. >> How do we know that? >> Its velocity and its orbit. It's not bound to the sun and it comes it travels at such hyper velocity that it came into our solar system in 2017 and left our solar system and it's long gone for for now for right now we can't really catch up to with a rocket but we know for sure it was there it was discovered by an air force telescope not an astronom looking through a telescope it was discovered by an air force telescope on top of Halakala which is mountain in Maui so this purpose of that telescope was not to look for comets from other solar systems. That's serendipitous. That was accidental that we discovered it. Its real purpose is looking for other things that are up there in space. And the best way to do that is to use the tools of physics, of astronomy. And that's why I keep saying if you think that these UAPs defy the laws of physics, you would want to have as much input from the physics community, not alienate them, no pun intended, not make them feel stupid or make them feel like they're just eggheheads and they're they're just talking down to people and we know the truth and the government lied about CO. Sean, you know the government lied about CO so you know that they're lying about aliens. Never lie. Yeah. >> I love it. The government would never lie. They just have our best interest and and always forever they always have, right? I mean even to Galileo eventually he ran a foul of the government because of these astronomical telescopes because of the discoveries he made. Bruno ran a foul for the same Catholic government which was the government of the time the superpower military undefeated champion of the world. He ran a foul because he suggested that life could have existed on other planets. Therefore, Jesus could not have possibly been able to visit all of these different planets according to the Catholic Church at the time. And so, they literally accused him of heresy even though he was a he was a a he was a believe he was a a Jesuit or Catholic priest. So, they burned him alive at the stake as a warning. Do not defy with your science our laws of how the heavens go because we know the Bible knows how they actually work. >> Wow. Wow. If you look at it, you know, do governments lie? Of course they do. Is there ever a reason? I'd love I'd love your opinion. Like at that time saying that the earth orbited the sun would would be you it would be like saying you know the lab leak of co if you believe that it would be like that on steroids. Like does a government or should any entity have responsibility to avoid either mass panic as in the case of aliens or something like that or mass uh pandemics? In other words, do we need any kind of overarching government beneficial? We can debate if they ever could be beneficial. But in your opinion, is it important to have governments and do they have a right to have secrecy? In other words, let's steal man what the people say that we have to keep this quiet. We can't disclose. Trust me, bro. How do you view that as someone who's >> Well, I think there's a staunch difference between flatout lying and just not disclosing. You know, I think I think there's a a line there. Don't you? >> I do. And I think that the government, you know, but I guess I'm asking, is there a moral reason to lie? If you lie to your people, >> now you're in a predicament like what we're seeing right now where I would say >> the vast majority of people have no trust in any of our institutions or our government at all >> because [clears throat] they've been caught in so many [expletive] lies and nobody nobody knows what to believe. Nobody even knows if these are lies. Well, well, a lot of them are lies, but you know, [clears throat] but there there are nobody knows about this alien [expletive] yet. You know what I mean? For example, it's like, >> do we believe them? Why would we believe them? They've lied about so many other [expletive] things. >> They've lied about CO. >> They've lied about taxes. They've lied about pretty much everything, you know, and and so, you know, and now I don't even know how they would begin to get the trust back [clears throat] >> in our in our institutions, in our >> You think that's that far gone? >> I think it's pretty close. >> Well, you know, I have this debate. You know, I I told you before we started recording. My my brother-in-law, Jim Brewer, is a was a recon marine, and [clears throat] you know, I told him about some of the things that, you know, these the people that have alien encounters have been reporting and and just and he's he's like, "Well, we did um what's it called? Siri, like search, evade, rescue, >> sear training." >> SE training. He said, "When we did that, he's he said, "I got waterboarded." you know, he's he's like the government does stuff to us and I'm convinced the government lies. You know, they lie to people that should have the deepest trust and I don't understand how they expect that trust to be maintained. You know, for example, pilots report things in the skies, right? One explanation is extraterrestrial craft visiting us from other dimensions, right? Within non-human biologics. Okay, that's a hypothesis, right? I'm a scientist. I can test hypothesis given data update my priors update my hypothesis iterate scientific method in action right uh another hypothesis is um these are craft from the US from adversarial nations reporting things doing things that we don't know about for example during World War II um there were operators of German yubot and the Germans had early radar systems I don't know if most people know this but there's the Manhattan project everybody knows about that the Oppenheimer movie. Great movie. Um, and I'm all for celebrating physicists. Uh, and that's great. It's rare. You have a movie about a physicist who's, you know, uh, doing good and not, you know, trying to kill everybody. Um, but, uh, but during the Manhattan Project, that gets a lot of attention because it created the atomic weapons that eventually, you know, most people's opinions brought the end to the war in Japan. Uh, we [clears throat] were in a a race against the Europeans, the Germans in particular, before they developed a nuclear weapon and dropped it on us, right? The Japanese weren't really in a danger of doing that. But the Germans had the some of the best scientists of the time. You know, they Heisenberg just incredible scientific that's where quantum theory began and nuclear physics was first understood was in Europe. But there was a parallel effort that almost nobody knows about and yet you use it every day. You know, if you're driving in a car, uh if you're flying in a plane, and it was radar. Radar was one of the most significant military uh advances of World War II. almost nobody knows about it and it was also created by physicists. So the the two of the most decisive technological enabling things were invented by astronomers and physicists operating in uh World War II and and slightly uh before. Radar was particularly valuable because it was much more deployable than the nuclear technology of of of Los Alamos and then leading to the bombs, right? That took this huge effort, you know, a trillion dollars in today's dollars. radar was much more accessible. Any country could develop it. But at that time there was also an effort to do counter radar. You like you can't have counter nuclear weapon. I guess you could shoot them down with a Patriot missile but that doesn't really stop the the process of nuclear detonation, right? But you could actually counter the radar with jamming with stealth. All those things were invented in the 1940s. Some of whom were invented by colleagues of my colleagues that you know were still alive in this generation essentially. And one of them was a name uh a physicist by the name of Louis Alvarez. Have you ever heard the hypothesis that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago? >> So speaking because I I am an absent minded professor so I will forget. So I brought some meteors here. Okay. So, these are honest to goodness fragments of the early solar system that are older than the Earth. These are 4.3 billion years old. >> Wow. >> These are found in Argentina. So, this one's you. >> And I brought some more. How old is this? >> 4.3 billion years old. The Earth is about 4.2 billion years old. This material, it's kind of dense, right? It's pretty heavy. Mhm. >> It's also magnetic. Here's a compass. Going to do Mr. Wizard with you today, Sean. Um, here's a compass. Magnetic compass. Put it next to there and maybe show the camera what happens to it. >> Well, I don't know if the camera can see it, but >> yeah. So, it's deflecting it because these are magnetic. They're also slightly radioactive, but don't worry. Uh, they're they're perfectly safe. So, uh, what I wanted to do because you I love the audience and the community that you've built, um, and for the people that serve and have the courage to do things I never had the courage or the ability to do. Um, I want to give away 250 of these to the first members of the Shan Ryan show that uh, have an APO post office uh, uh, box, which is military or government service post office box. So, I can send these all over the world to any the first 200 people that have an APO uh, box. So, I made a special website, brian keing.com/srs. So, if they go there, whoever gets there first, first come, first serve, I will send them this actual meteorite. Okay. >> Oh, damn. That's cool. >> And I'm going to send them information about it, what it's made of, its composition, its age, where it was found, and how they can see meteor shower. Have you ever seen a meteor shower? >> Don't believe I have. >> Don't Oh, you will love it. And here, you know, in God's country, um, that will give you a list of the four major meteor showers every year. You don't need a telescope. You don't need something. Anything besid even binoculars don't help you. Just your naked eye, your wife, your kids. Go out on a night. You'll get the list of meteor showers at this website, brianking.comsrs, and it will tell you how to see them four times per year, once per quarter. Basically, these meteors here, okay, these these rocks here, these are older than this. the the physicist who discovered that the dinosaurs were killed by a giant version of one of these 10 kilometers in size. Okay, I can bring that today. That crashed into the Yakatan Peninsula. His name is Louis Alvarez. He'd go on to win the uh Nobel Prize in physics. He was the only scientist on the Anola Gay and it dropped the bomb in Hiroshima. Okay, this guy was one of the super geniuses. Almost nobody knows about him in World War II. His job was radar, not nuclear bombs. But he then got repurposed after he perfected radar. He said the following. He said, "When an object gets close to a radar station, the radar's pinging it, right? It's shooting out radar beams and it's bouncing off and it's measuring the timing as the plane is getting closer to the hubot." And the Ubot had pretty advanced radar systems. What he did is he built a spoofing system. He built a system that as it was getting closer transmitted a signal that got weaker via the inverse square of the distance, which is exactly how a real thing would behave if it was moving away. So imagine you're sitting there in the boat. You're in the Uboat. Oh, come on, Captain. Look, look. Oh, it's going away. We have nothing to worry about. Ubot gets destroyed. He spoofed the radar by utilizing the laws of physics broadcasting a signal decreasing as the inverse square of the law as they were getting closer by the linear >> wow >> distance. Okay. Now imagine you're in the hubot and you're looking and you're showing your captain. You say, "Oh, it's going away." And then it drops a bomb on you and you see it at the last second. What would you say? You say, "Hey, that object is a UFO. It defied the laws of physics. It got here faster than the speed of light." They knew they were smart as freaking heck, right? Germans were top military empire the world had ever seen. They would say they defy the laws of physics. How do we know that some of the things that are happening now aren't military technology? >> We don't. We have no idea. >> What's a simpler hypothesis? Aams razor suggests the simplest hypothesis isn't always correct, but it's more likely than an outlandish or less probable uh scenario. Right? So, interdimensional beings with non-human biologics have traversed space and time at distances that we can't traverse in under 30,000 years with our best technology or the military, Chinese military, whatever military you like, is spoofing us, making us think that that's the case, making it seem like it's defying the laws of physics. Is that proof? But no, a scientist has to think this way. Has to think epistemologically. I asked a question in the in the in the uh Patreon tier that I'm a member at and Sean and the Vigilance Elite. I asked a question of Brian Keading. I said, um, ask Sean if he's ever heard of the Fineman point. >> You ever heard of the Fineman point? Okay. [clears throat] Richard Bman, another Titanic physicist, uh, Manhattan Project scientist, professor at Caltech, winner of the Nobel Prize, discovering a quantum theory. He found an interesting pattern in the number pi. The number pi is the ratio of a circle circumference to its diameter. Okay? It's approximately 3.14. And if you're a real nerd and you want nerd cred, you memorize it to more digits. 3.1415 92658. And you keep going. And one of my kids can do it to 22 decimal places. >> Fineman measured it and he found really far out. You get to the number six in pi which goes on forever but at a certain point it goes six six sixes in a row. Nothing like that happens before. And that point is called the Fineman point. Do you know where the Fineman point occurs? How many digits of pi you have to memorize out to to get to the Fineman point? Sean, >> no idea. >> 762. 762. >> It's a caliber. What's that? The crate caliber, right? I always wondered like is your handle because of the by 31 or 50. [laughter] Yeah. Hopefully we'll we'll try out the range at some point. Um so now you might say that's like hey well Sean that's really cool, right? And you might say like that's a really cool number and Richard Fe is really smart or is it a coincidence? Scientists has to weigh both options. It could be aliens. It could be human technology. M right now we have no evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt in a scientific sense that aliens exist that technology is visiting us. Does that mean it's impossible? Like I said, I've been to Antarctica. Antarctica is 17th of the Earth's continents. If you just estimated I if I told you you're you're just an alien and I say, Sean, Earth is this blue green planet with an atmosphere and life's all around the planet. Um there's seven continents where land is where where land-based animals can live. Um, one out of seven continents is called, one of them is called Antarctica. I don't tell you where it is. I don't tell you anything about it. How much of Earth's 8 billion people live on that continent? What would be your first guess? >> 800. [laughter] >> 800. Well, you know me now. Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, I'd probably take the population, divide it by seven. >> Yeah. Exactly. Right. But we I already told you it's over a million. You know, it's over Yeah. It's almost a million times smaller than that, right? It's a couple hundred hundred people at a time. So people like to say, well the universe so big, you know, Avi and Lo and you talked very extensively about this. The universe is really big. Well, the Earth is really big, right? We don't find life everywhere on Earth, right? We only find humans, you know, one six of the seven continents. But by just pure logical explanation, you should expect to find it everywhere. So I'm not saying logic is a panacea. I'm not saying it's always the solution and you should only think scientifically. But I want to use it as a guide at least as as much as we can as a human being species to get at knowledge in the most efficient effective way possible. And if it turns up when it turns up, let's see what happens. Don't let the people suppress what the information is truly scientifically. >> Thank you. Thank you. Let's take a quick break. >> Aging is inevitable. And if you're anything like me, you feel it a little more every year. Sore knees, tight joints, recovery takes longer than it used to. We can't stop the clock, but we can take care of ourselves. That's why I take Bubs Naturals collagen peptides. I mix it into my tea every morning. It blends right in. No taste, no gritty texture. It's simple. I've been using Bub's Collagen for a long time, and I genuinely notice the difference. My knees feel better. My skin looks better. I recover faster after workouts. I stick with Bubs because I trust the company. Their collagen is NSF certified for sport and sourced from grass-fed cattle. So, it's clean, tested, and exactly what they say it is. And there's a bigger mission here. Bubs was founded in honor of Navy Seal Glenn Bub Dhy. And 10% of all profits go towards helping veterans transition back to civilian life. So, you're not just supporting your joints and recovery, you're supporting people who served this country. If you're ready to upgrade your daily routine with Bubs Naturals Collagen, head to bubsnaturals.com/srs and use code shaun for 20% off your order. Again, that's and use code shawn for 20% off your order. Take care of your body. It's the only one you've got. Welcome to Hollywood versus reality. They do it right. What does he do in the movies? [music] Tell me if I'm doing this wrong cuz I don't watch any of this. Little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Got to silence it. In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're now bringing them back. It does look prettying cool. I got to I got to admit that. All right, Brian, we're back from the break. I forgot to give you a gift. Vigilance League gummy bears made in the USA. Legal in all 50 states. Not that you have to worry about that in California, right? But uh anyways, >> are they are they kosher? I got to I got to ask the question. Let's see. >> I don't know what that means. >> Corn syrup gelatin, >> but >> not kosher, but I'll give it to I'll give it to my brother-in-law. >> I'll give it to Jim Brewer. This is for you, brother. >> But um Thank you very much. >> Yeah. So, I want to get into the telescope, the bicep. >> Can you How did you [clears throat] >> How did you get involved in that? >> So, you know, um, a lot of kids when they're young, men, uh, they can be look up to their dad. They can have difficulty with their dad. They can be competitive with their dad. Um, my, you know, father was in captain of the football team, I got to be captain of the football team, you know, or whatever. or my my my father served. I'm going to serve you now. My father, you know, was a scientist. He was a professor. And um early on in my life, he got divorced from my mom. >> And when he did, he he actually uh abandoned my older brother Kevin and me. And we grew up uh adopted by my stepfather Ray Keading who was a Vietnam pilot F4s and KC135s served in Vietnam and he adopted us um from my family which was I grew up Jewish like I said both parents were Jewish and then my uh stepfather's family was Catholic and huge you know 50 brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and it was so such an incredible family. I mean, they're still, you know, tighter with me than my own biological family growing up, except for my brothers, of course, and my mom. [clears throat] But my father just he abandoned us. So, I actually changed my name. Was legally adopted. Uh, my name when I was a kid was not Keading, it was Axe. Brian Axe. So, now it's Keading. Changed my name. My brother, too. And um and he left. He just, you know, he abandoned me and my brother. I was seven. He my brother was 10. And he moved to the West Coast. didn't see him 15, 16 years. >> Until I started to kind of follow in his academic footsteps, which is weird because I didn't remember what he looked like. Okay. I was seven last time I saw him. My brother was 10. I never understood how he could abandon a 10-year-old. I was like, h I'm seven. I'm not that important. But like my brother was like a full I mean, you have kids. You know what? It's lying. I I can't imagine doing it to anybody to be honest with you. >> Me neither. >> But he did. And uh he had his reasons. uh later find out why. But but I >> What were his reasons? >> He he felt like my mother had turned us against him that had you know she had uh kind of pitted us psychologically against him which wasn't that big of a stretch because he was kind of an a-hole. you know, he he tried to beat up my stepfather. Came over one night drunk or whatever, trying to beat up my stepfather, take us back, and he'd go through my, you know, visitation. Um, >> tried to beat up a [expletive] c seasoned Vietnam veteran. >> No. Uh, yeah, he did. >> How'd that work out? >> It didn't work out that well. Did not work out that well. [laughter] >> So, uh, but he was this brutally complex, brilliant. I mean, still the most I've interviewed 23 Nobel Prize winners. Puts all them to shame. I mean he he did he passed away as you'll find out but >> he was a great scientist and you know when I was going through my formative years you know in the high school I got really interested in astronomy I got a telescope just like this um and it changed my life you know I had been adopted I'd been uh Jewish as from birth but I was adopted I got converted to Catholicism by my mom and my stepfather changed my name got baptized confirmed and instead of being what's called a bar mitzvah when you're in Judaism at age 13, um you become a man, so to speak, although having 13-year-olds now, it's kind of a far stretch to call him a man, but uh but anyway, that's a right of passage. >> I was actually not having my bar. I was an alter boy in the Catholic Church of St. John and St. Mary in Chapa, New York. And I loved it. I had no problems with the Catholic church. I I wanted to be a priest um when I grew up uh until I discovered girls around the same age and I just loved that whole environment. But along the same time, I got a telescope and I looked up and I did those kind of observations that I told you Galileo did. I didn't know who Galileo was at first. I looked at the moon. It had craters on it. I looked at Jupiter. It had moons around it. I looked at Saturn had rings around it. This I looked at my neighbor Debbie. She was super super hot. Uh, [laughter] sorry Debbie if you're still out there. Never saw anything, you know, too bad. Uh, but but in in reality, it kind of it transformed my worldview and I started to learn more and this is before the internet in 1986 87. There's no Google. There was no, you know, you had the Sunday New York Times newspaper in Chapaqua, New York, right? So I could look up stuff. Oh, wait. I saw Jupiter. I mean, how many people out there know they can see a planet with their naked eye or see a galaxy with their naked eye? can do all that stuff. I got this telescope. I worked at a deli down the hall down the street from where I was living in Dobs Ferry at the time, New York. And I um saved up enough money and my mom gave me a little money and I bought a telescope and it changed my world. It literally made me into a scientist. That's why I say out there, any of you dads out there, you know, parents out there, get your kid a telescope. Just do it. It's 50 bucks. I actually have a website.com/tlescope. It's I don't get sponsored. I don't get, you know, big astronomy. NASA's not paying me to do this, but I give recommendations for telescopes for different budgets. And nowadays, it's insane. I have a telescope now. It costs a few thousand bucks. >> It takes Hubble kind of telescope images, you know, incredible stuff. It's all it's all electronic. You don't put your eye on it, >> but you can put just the most incredible vision into their mind. And then when they're 10 or 11 years old, maybe they'll be >> These are crazy. It's when I was >> cuz I've been looking at these for my kids cuz they're always my son's like obsessed with the moon >> and I was looking up telescopes on Amazon and I was like, "Holy [expletive] these things will like find the damn stars for you and focus in. You don't even have to do anything." >> But don't start with that. Start with >> I did and I started with the old NASA. >> Yeah, >> you know. >> Yeah. Just point it and look at whenever it's bright except for the sun. Okay. Don't look at the sun with your remaining good eye. >> You're not supposed to do that. I'm just so uh but everything you can see the exact same things that Galileo saw and unlike you know Sean it's interesting people say what's it like to be a scientist I can't really tell you you know like when they discovered the Higs Bzon or you know they discovered nuclear fusion like I don't know what that was like because you can't there wasn't one guy who did it right but there was one guy who discovered the craters on the moons the rings of Saturn the moons of Jupiter that's Galileo and so you can not only see what he saw this is what's insane about astronomy for 50 bucks. So go out and get a freaking telescope for all your kids or grandkids or whoever. Sean, it's the cheapest kind of insurance that they'll be curious thinking for themselves individuals. You can see exactly what Galileo saw from the middle of San Diego or New York City. He didn't he didn't need a Hubble telescope to see that stuff. He was in northern Italy. You can see the exact same stuff he saw even from a light polluted place like New York City. craters, valleys on the moon, um canyons, you can see the rings of of sound. So, what I'm saying is I got addicted to it >> as as a as a 10 as a 12-year-old. Um, [clears throat] and at that time, Galileo, who had conjectured that because Jupiter has moons around it, that the Earth cannot be the center of the solar system because Jupiter's moons are orbiting Jupiter, which itself is orbiting the sun, but it's not orbiting the sun. According to Aristotle, according to the Greeks, according to all of ancient received wisdom, you know, from following the science for the last 2,000 years before Galileo, no, the sun was the center of the universe. Sorry, cut that out. The earth was the center of the universe. In fact, that's what the Bible seemed to suggest. That's why he was that's why Bruno was burned at the stake and that's why Galileo was put in jail eventually. And so, when I found out, hm, what happened to Galileo when he had these ideas? What did the Catholic Church do to him? They threw him in prison for his scientific ideas. And at that time, you know, I can't say it didn't have something to do with discovering girls to be honest with you, Sean. Like not wanting to go all the way and be a priest and, you know, be around nuns all my life and that would be the only woman in my life. Um, so no. So I decided at that point, I'm going to be an atheist. Like I actually decided I'm going to be an atheist. >> Really? Yeah. >> Just cuz you liked girls. >> No. Well, that's that's not like some small thing, Sean. [laughter] I >> decided I didn't want to be a priest. You like girls? >> No. No. I I decided I want to be a priest because I like girls. Uh but no, I I decided that I didn't want to be part of a religious organization that would punish someone for scientific truth. And at that time, Pope John Paul II, who's, you know, my favorite pope. I still love you. I still love Catholicism. I still love the popes, you know. Um but he was special. He was a very special person and even he never pardoned Galileo. He just said he was right. Imagine like you do something, you're in service or the the president doesn't like give you accommodation. Certainly doesn't give you accommodation, but they're like we you were right, but we're not even going to take away the crime that we accused you of. We're not even going to say that pardon you. I mean, there's something that was unsettling to me as a young again, I was a 13-year-old nitwit, right? So, what do you know, right? But at that time it was kind of justification to >> That's when you decided to become an atheist. >> I literally decided to become an atheist. And there was another reason cuz I said I was born Jewish, right? >> But I became Catholic, which is Christianity. >> Um [clears throat] I served in the Catholic church. I loved it. And um and you know, for me, I came from this uh from a tradition that's older than Christianity, right? Jesus Christ Jesus Christ was a Jew. And I felt like, well, Christianity came along after Judaism, right? It came along after Judaism, right? And Jesus was was a Jew. Um, so if uh if Christianity has these challenges, like they're not going to accept scientific wisdom or they didn't uh forgive Galileo. Um and and so then I could say well Judaism has got to be wrong because you know if something is based on you know if if if um calculus is based on algebra and and you know calculus you can say well calculus or algebra is wrong then certainly calculus will be wrong. It that's not true but but that's kind of the analogy I'm making here. So I just felt like all of religion you know has these things where you have to listen to these these authorities. You have to do what they say. You have to think what they do and you can't think for yourself. Again I'm a 13-year-old at this point. I'm not a sophisticated 50-year-old, you know, professor who who has investigated religions and and and compared things and had much more experience than I do now, okay, than I did then. So, at that time I became a scientist in terms of curiosity because I wasn't only looking at things and oh cool I started taking notes. I started doing research. I started and again this is before Google and sometimes the more you struggle to get information like nowadays I feel bad for my kids in some sense because they want to know like um you know how many golf balls fit inside the Goodyear blimp like literally I would have to calculate there was no tool to do that I'm not saying that's some important thing but but you get the point now you literally look it up in one second you get instant gratification you don't do any of the muscular work you don't you don't damage the muscle to break it down your brain and so I feel like uh they're losing down and that for me I was doing all that and I felt like the more I learned about science the less room there was for God. Look I'm not the first person to say that. Right nowadays I'm practicing religious. I practice Judaism. So obviously I came back to it. We can get to that later on but but in the sense of knowing a little enough to be dangerous. That's kind of where I was at age 13. And I devoted my life to science. I wanted to I taught myself calculus. You know, I didn't have calculus when I was in or I grew up in rural upstate New York, you know, northern Westchester County. I had to do it myself. I had to teach myself autodidactically, learning all these different things, trigonometry. And then I was doing research in my telescope at at night. And I just loved it. I was addicted to it. It was get into that flow state. And that's all you want to do in life. And then slowly but surely, I started to reproduce like the step that my father, you know, who I hadn't seen in 16 years or, you know, whatever it was at that point, 12 years. And I started to reproduce and I was like, hm, let me look up in scientific journals like whatever happened to him. Jim Axe, James A, whatever happened to him? What did he do? And I saw these papers about science. And it was like the most high level science, the origin of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement, um, theory of relativity, uh, origin of the universe. And I'm like, this guy has my DNA or I have his DNA, but there's something different. I wasn't raised with him, but I'm doing the same thing as him. It's weird. It felt creepy to be influenced by a ghost. I didn't know anything. I didn't even know if he was alive. >> And I hit 22. I was in grad school, 21 at Brown. >> So your mom I mean she Oh, they were they fought so bad and they did kind of use us between as intermediaries. >> That's man. >> It was that that was a challenge in 1970s happened a lot. Um he and and also you know to really you know give him the kind of negative judgment that he deserved um when you get divorced you know hopefully you know this will never happen but um you have child support you have alimony and he was given the opportunity to choose between paying the back child support that he owed for myself and my brother or giving us up to adoption to my stepfather Ray Keading who was only 30 year old guy at the time and he said I don't want to pay the So he gave us up for adoption. So my name got changed. Brother's name got changed. I didn't see him. I hated him. I I never I was like, "How could you abandon my older brother?" Like I was protecting my older brother. C a 10-year-old who you were close to. It wasn't like, you know, they weren't close. They were very close. Gave him up because he hated my mother so much and she hated him just as much. Okay. It was a very nasty divorce. Um, and so by the time I hit graduate school, getting my PhD at Brown University, I started, again, the internet was pretty young in mid1 1990s, I started to research like, what did he do? Like, who was he? Is he alive? I didn't know. I didn't remember what he looked like. The last time I saw him was in a court in in in Long Island, New York. Sean, I I I didn't know what he looked like 15, 16 years later. It's it's bizarre. And I started to research what he was doing and what kind of research he was doing and and what happened to him. And it turned out he was still writing things about like quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity, all the stuff that I was like fascinated with and I wanted to dedicate my life to. But there was like quantum entanglement. Like somehow he had influenced me from beyond the, you know, visual horizon. I hadn't seen him, kept up with him. There's no internet really. So it was spooky. a spooky action at a distance. He was influencing me. So, I started to research him, got more and more involved in it. I had, you know, kind of like a minor medical scare when I was like 22 and I thought it could be genetic and and whatnot. And it turned out that my mother's mother and my father's mother both moved to the same part of Florida, which is called the the the Yedish Triangle. you know, all these Jewish grandmothers, they all get together and then they live, you know, three miles around Sunrise, Florida on the on the east coast of Florida. It's a it's a great place to retire. And they were living basically like retirement community, like phase 2, Sunrise Palms and Phase 8, you know, whatever. >> And they hated each other, too. But they had friends that were friends with each other. So these these two Jewish grandmothers got connected via their other Jewish grandmother friends and I call the Yentinet. Like before the internet there was the Yentinet. These old Jewish grandmothers talk and they started talking talking. O'Brien's at um at Brown University. He's a scientist. The other one says this. Do you know he's still alive? Oh you know somehow my father finds out that not only am I alive? I mean, he didn't know, but um but I'm studying math and science and physics and I'm at a top school at Brown University is obviously a great school. And uh one night in my in my dorm at Brown, uh I get a phone call, pick up the phone and he goes, "This is Jim Axe." And I before he said Jim A, I knew it was him. I knew his voice. I I don't know, Sean. Sometimes the ear is deeper than the eye. And so, um, we talked for five hours straight. >> He was living in California. Yep. >> Everything. Math, science, physics. One thing we avoided is why he abandoned me. >> But I was just so curious. It's like, imagine if I gave you a book from your great great great grandfather. Like, how much would you pay for that book? By the way, you have to write a book. If you don't write your memoir, you know, someone else is going to write it for you. And your great great great grandkids will want to read that book. Everyone's got to write a book, but especially people like you. I mean, you've influenced millions. What's that? >> Not time yet for me. >> Not time, but but don't let it go too far. And um I really hope you do because you'll influence so many people to the good as you've already done. And a book, it's like I love your podcast. You know, do I ever go back and listen to like episode like 14 or no one's ever going to you're not going to go back and listen to it, right? But you can take all the wisdom that you've distilled, not just the knowledge is like dirt. Knowledge is everywhere. Wisdom is nowhere. Take that wisdom, put in a book. That's all I'm saying. Your kids, your future kids will. Anyway, so he and I talked for this whole time. Get back together. Finally, I'm like, "Wow, this guy has done so much. He's still going. He's still hungry. Yeah, he's got all these flaws, but where do we go from here?" And I realized like he had won all these awards as a scientist. And I was like, I kind I don't know how to say it. I've really never talked about it, but I wanted to make him I'm really like embarrassed, but but I'm going to say I wanted to make him regret that he ever gave up on me by doing what he never did, which is win a Nobel Prize. >> Makes sense. You wanted to make him proud of you. I wanted to make him proud, but I wanted to make him regret a little bit of punishment for him. Even though I let him back into my life and even though he got back with my mother, you know, and they became friends. I didn't get back married or anything. He became friends and bonded over grandchildren um later on in life. Um and he died very young. He died at 69 years old. Uh 20 years ago exactly. But between the time of graduate school when I was 22 and when he died I was 33 34 we became closer than any two sons I've ever known. And during that time I got incredibly interested. Like I said I wanted to make him some there must be a German word for like you know like shodenro. There must be some word for like prideful regret. Uh but anyway that's what I wanted and so I invented I said I got to find something that's going to win the Nobel Prize and that's the highest award. I don't care what it is like Olympic gold, you know, like Grammy award winner, you know, BET award, whatever. I don't care what it is. Signal award, all the podcast stuff you want. There's nothing like the Nobel Prize. There's only like 200 people on Earth that are alive that have Nobel prizes. Got have 8 billion people, okay? They're the intellectual, you know, SEAL, you know, SEAL team members, okay? They're the brightest of the brightest of the brightest point, you know, 0001% of planet Earth. I want to be there partially for, you know, these venal ambivalent reasons I had about him, but but partially because I'm just so curious about the earth in the world and nature and science and God and how they all mix together. And for me, the way that was the ticket to do all these things was [snorts] to build an instrument to explore Genesis 1:1. Like, how the heck did the universe come to be? Not just the aliens and the black holes and the galaxy but the universe itself and it's a dangerous thought because you know people have been killed for this people have been trying now nowadays we don't live in that kind of environment so when we talk about the government lies and okay it is true they probably do and they they've done a lot of bad stuff to a lot of friends of mine as well but it's nothing in comparison to the to the lack of freedom that Galileo had that you know Geodana [clears throat] Bruno had okay nothing like that I don't I'm not going to compare myself to those people, right? I can do whatever I want. I have tenure. I have brilliant graduate students, collaborators. I have resource funding supporters. The government's sponsored a lot of stuff. I work at a public university. I got paid. Gavin Newsome is my boss. You know, lucky me, for a few more months left at least. Um, so this is all to say that I wanted to to win a Nobel Prize at all costs, but I was fortuitous because it was also studying something that's guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we could do it, which is to take a snapshot of what happened before the Big Bang. Basically, before the universe started off in its incredibly intricate and just phenomenal acceleration and expansion, what caused the big bang to bang? What's the primer strike? What's the what's the inciting incident that caused the explosion of the universe? Nobody knew it. There were theories about it. And so, I designed a telescope that doesn't see light. It sees heat. It sees microwave radiation. And that microwave radiation is all around us. It suffuses the universe. And it's the leftover heat from the fusion, nuclear fusion of the first elements, hydrogen and helium, and their isotopes. And that leftover heat is a fossil that travels through space and it travels through time. And we can detect it and we can build instruments that can sense it. And the specific signature that we see will tell us about the conditions that were prevailing during the first moments of the universe's history before the expansion that started to take over that we call the big bang and crucially what happened on the I like to say what happened on the Tuesday before the big bang. There was a day right if you think back today we're in you know May 2026. It's a Tuesday. We can keep going back back back. We think the universe is 13.826 billion years old. Tiny little uncertainty. But we can keep going back and let's say the big bang occurred on a Tuesday, right? Let's just just by 24 hours time 365 times 13.826 billion years, right? You can get a number. You can get a day. You can get a calendar day on our calendar. Now, it doesn't mean the calendar existed. Earth didn't exist, right? But there's a day. What happened the day before that? That's when we want to know. and for the first time in human history we could possibly do it. Oh and by the way if I did it myself, my colleagues maybe would win a Nobel Prize and finally get that comeuppance that I so you know whatever uh my many failures but but one of them was that desire to show up my dad. So, where do we go from here beer? >> Well, it took me to the South Pole. It took me to Antarctica. Um, when you get a coffee and you put it in the microwave in a ceramic cup, like your awesome swag and merch outside that I love. Um, you pour it into a cup, right? You can put the coffee in the microwave. You can put it in there for 5 minutes. Don't do this at home. It's very dangerous, actually. But you can actually microwave it and it'll get above the boiling point of water, right? And then you can take the mug out. Just you can just grab the mug. Why is that? You got 300 degree, you know, uh, Fahrenheit water in there, potentially about to explode. And the ceramic cup is room temperature, basically. Why is that? Because ceramic is completely dry. There's no water. It's been baked in an oven for hours. That's what makes it that's how you make ceramic, clay, and stuff like that. Um, the water in the coffee is not dry. It's wet. It's full of water. Microwaves from the microwave oven jostle water at just the right frequency. It's a resonant frequency that it starts to vibrate and interact with other water molecules. That's what causes it to heat up. You can't heat up something in a microwave that doesn't have water in it. And that is tuned exactly for the resonant frequency of water molecules and that causes it to heat up dramatically. Um, so if you're trying to detect microwaves from a source, from a planet, from a galaxy, from the big bang itself, you want to go somewhere where there's no water. Namely, you want to go somewhere very high up. Maybe you could go to outer space, but that's very expensive to put a rocket and satellite and a telescope in space. Very difficult. Takes a long time. It's been done but only three times in all of human history have we had satellites take pictures of the signal from space uh because of the cost and difficulty to do that. And actually nowadays we can do it almost better from the earth from the South Pole Antarctica where I've been twice and from Chile in the Ottakama desert which is about 5200 meters above sea level 17,000 ft. So high up that you have to wear oxygen full time in your nose because you're above half the atmospheric water pressure. You're at the flight level 180 for my pilot friends. Um, infrared radiation is cooking you. There's huge equipment that can kill you. Bulldozers, people drive off roads. There's no like the same kind of road safety that we have. Don't have it down there. Um, it's like being on the planet Mars. In fact, NASA uses it as a test place to test out lunar rovers and lunar helicopter. Uh, Martian helicopters and Martian rovers. Oh, before I forget, this I won't send to your viewers, but um speaking of Mars, uh this is a piece of Mars. This is the actual planet Mars. It's a meteor that came from the planet Mars. It was knocked off by a bigger chunk of an asteroid, blasted into space, orbited around the Earth for probably 20 million years, and landed in Northwest Africa. Wow. >> Okay. So, this here you can actually touch. >> How do you know that? >> Um, so the chemistry and the um and the spectra uh and the the spectrum that it reflects when we analyze it is 100% match for the lun for Martian rovers that have been there like the ones I was just uh talking about. So, this is a gift for you. Pretty rare. And you can see it. It has little bits of like, see the little bits of like orangish flakes >> metal? That's iron. The reason Mars is red is because it's basically rusting. It has iron and iron rusts and it oxidizes. And those little specks in there are iron. So that's a another planet. It's taken millions of years to get here. And here's a copper for it. I have a a certificate for you that I'll give you later on that tells you all about its properties uh and so forth. So to test out before we send a Martian rover, they send it to the Ottakama desert where we have the Simons observatory. So you ask where do we go from here? So we built this instrument in um starting in 2005 that was meant to do just one thing to take an image of the baby picture of the universe. The oldest light in the universe is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's the heat that's left over when you do nuclear fusion or fision. Heat is given off. When that heat is given off and the universe expands, it cools off. It red shifts and dilutes, gets less energetic. And now we see it instead of being gamma rays or ultraviolet light. We see it in the form of microwaves. Long wavelength radiation characteristic wavelengths about 2 millimeters corresponds about 150 gigahertz. This radiation was discovered for the first time in 1965 um outside of New York City by two astronomers Pensas and Wilson and they went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics. And this discovery uh was so significant because it was the first physical evidence in other words not just philosophical or theoretical oh the universe could be expanding. It was proof that the universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state. Um, and that can only be possible to create nuclear fusion, which creates the the hydrogen that's in the water that you're drinking. Uh, it creates the helium that we have in balloons and other another uses for. So, the elements of the periodic table are made during the big bang, but when you fusion occurs, heat is left over. We still see that heat to this day. So, what we're looking for is that heat in >> how do you still see the heat to this day? So when uh the universe starts to expand um everything gets stretched out. There are galaxies. Galaxies are now moving away from each other. Things on earth don't get stretched apart. Things in our solar system don't get stretched apart. Even things in our galaxy don't get stretched apart. They're held together by gravity. But anything beyond say the Andromeda galaxy and beyond is actually expanding away from us. Space itself is expanding. Space according to Einstein is dynamic. It's not static as Isaac Newton showed. He said, "No, the space is dynamic. The more energy you put into it, the more space expands." And so originally Einstein, you know, didn't believe in the big bang. He felt the big bang was not well justified. He thought it was um it was completely wrong and he thought it smacked of religion. Actually, Einstein was not religious. He he didn't he spoke about God sometimes, but he he didn't really believe in God the way that we would think of it. And he said um uh that the universe is not expanding. It's static. And the only way that he could get that to be the case is if he inserted into his equations this fudge factor that kept the universe from collapsing on its own. And that expansion we now find is actually going in reverse. It's not only not static. It's not only not collapsing. It's actually expanding at an accelerating rate. It's like pushing on the cosmic accelerator pedal. It's not a constant velocity. Every galaxy's moving away. And tomorrow the rate of moving away will be bigger than it was That's the heart of the big bang concept. Meaning that if you reverse that, everything gets closer together. So galaxies will be closer in the past and eventually you reach a point where all the galaxies in the universe are all touching and all the matter in the universe is in one point. And that point is thought to be a singularity and that point of singularity is the big bang in the big bang concept. It doesn't tell you anything about how the big bang started though. Just says once the big bang occurred, the universe started expanding and and accelerating. And we should see evidence for it scientifically, and we do. We see tremendous amounts of evidence. There's zero doubt that the universe is expanding. Um, and there's some doubt about how fast is expanding. That's another subject. But no one disagrees. No cosmic police officer with a radar go say, "No, you're static or you're collapsing." No, the universe is expanding. And so there are signatures of that expansion everywhere like a radar Doppler shift but of all the galaxies that we see in the universe and in fact of all the heat and radiation we see in the universe as well. And the type of radiation that we look for is called the cosmic microwave background. And the best place to look for it is at the south pole Antarctica or in the mountains of Chile. So I have two different experiments that I've been involved with. one is bicep the uh which is an acronym background imager of cosmic extragalactic polarization and in 2014 we claimed we saw that primer strike that ignited the big bang so we claimed we did the thing that I wanted to do to show up my father to win a Nobel Prize and you know spoiler alert you know my first book's called losing the Nobel Prize so something went wrong something went really wrong uh we we made a claim that we saw what caused the universe to begin its expansion. And that's a a type of quantum field. We call that quantum field the inflaton or the inflationary field. And we said we detected the shrapnel of the explosion basically. Um if you want to detect something like you hear someone on the range shooting, right? >> Um you could you can detect that they're shooting in a variety of different ways, right? Visually, you could detect it. Um, uh, you could detect the sonic, you know, impact of it. Um, you could have eyewitnesses to it. You could have photographic cameras watching it. You could have infrared. You could even have, you know, some particles inside the the potassium inside of gunpowder. Um, a potassium 40. It's radioactive. So, you could actually see the dispersion of the smoke cloud of radioactive potassium, and you could detect nutrinos, muons, and other things coming. I'm making this up. I mean, it's true that you could do that. I'm just saying there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? So, there's more than one way to detect something if you can't see it. So, we've devised these different types of tools and technology to see things that we could not have possibly witnessed. Namely, the origin of the universe. Like, there are no people there. There were not even any stars or galaxies or planets or aliens or anything there, right? It was the origin of energy and matter itself. But what caused it? If this theory called inflation is right, there would be a signature like smoke from the gun called gravitational radiation, waves of ripples in spaceime. You and Avi Lo spoke about what spaceime >> Spacetime is interconnectedness of all different events that could possibly occur in the entire observable universe back to the beginning of time. And so we're looking for the earliest shock waves that would come with the explosive expansion of space. And those are called gravitational waves. We look for them in the CNB and this cosmic microwave background. And we said on St. Patrick's Day 2014 at a press conference at Harvard that was led off by Avi Loe made the introduction. I wasn't there. I had been um unceremoniously removed from the the leadership of the team that I had first started. That's that's another story. Um but uh but the uh the announcement made headlines around the world, New York Times, CNN, my hometown newspaper. And at that moment, I had been a little bit unsure about the real veracity of the results, if they would hold up in court, you know, sort of the scientific court of law, or if we had seen things that masquerade as a signal that you want to see. Uh Richard Feman again, Feman point 762 digits into pi six sixes in a row. He said the um the first principle in science is that you shouldn't fool yourself. But the second principle in science is that you should think that you're the easiest person to fool. It's like you're at a poker table, >> you don't know who the the psy is, you're the psy, right? scientists should always think that he or she is the psy that he's gonna make a mistake and then do everything in their power to resist that temptation to make an announcement that could win a Nobel Prize or whatever and do every sort of due diligence check you could do possible and we thought we did but we missed one crucial element that there was a type of signal that comes from the cosmos it comes from our galaxy in fact but it doesn't come from the big bang it's exactly related to these meteorites Again, ron keking.com/srs if you have an APO address. These meteorites are actually the corpses of dead stars. When a star above a certain mass explodes, eight times the mass of our sun, it explodes out and it's a it's a a fusion bomb that goes off in space with the equivalent tonnage of, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions of Hiroshima bombs. It's eight solar masses converted to energy v equ= mc^². When it does that, the reason it does that is because it's tried to make this material iron and nickel. Okay. >> When a star fuses um oxygen, silicon together to make iron, everything else before it gets to iron gives off more heat than it takes in. The fusion reaction always gives off heat. But the heat that's given off when it makes iron is too insignificant to keep the star afloat. So the star runs out of pressure and collapses and then it detonates out in a shock wave in 1 half a second. A star that's been living for two 20 million years ends its life in half a second in a nuclear fusion implosion that blows out into the whole universe the last thing that it made and its core which is iron. That's why this is iron. Guess what else is iron? hemoglobin. Your blood right now has the same iron isotope as this meteorite. >> Why is that? Well, your mother lived on Earth. She ate food in the earth. She's made of bi human biologics, right? Not not David G's nonhuman. She's made of hopefully your mom's not a theaton or whatever they they talk about. So, she ate food. Food is made from the earth. The earth has iron in it because it came from a explosion from a supernova. So if this supernova didn't blow up 4.3 4.5 billion years ago, we wouldn't have this iron. So this iron is older than the earth. It became part of our molten iron core and our solid iron core. And it became part of our food chain. And it's in the blood that we bleed. We all bleed the same iron that came from a supernova. >> So >> These meteorites float around in space. And it turns out that they can actually mimic the signal that would have represented the primer strike to ignite the Big Bang. So, we got tricked into believing we saw the Big Bang when we really saw a bunch of meteorites. Basically, with summer travel, even learning a few real phrases can completely change the experience. 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So you can actually use what you learn on the trip. Right now, Babel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to babel.comsrs. That's babel b a bbbl.com/srs for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. >> What do you think happened the day before? Well, so I always say things like, you know, people say, um, do you believe in God? You know, I've heard you. I heard you talk to our mutual friend Andrew Hume, you know, became a Christian, right? He believes in God. I actually was a little perturbed at Andrew. I told him later when I was on his show, but like a scientist shouldn't say, "I believe in something." Okay. So in Hebrew the the the you know the word for faith is is in Hebrew amuna. Amuna is where we get the English word amen. It means I believe. It means I have faith. Right? Say amen. In Hebrew that word means uh it means faith. It doesn't mean belief. Belief is a different word just like it is in English. Right. I would say I don't believe in God. Right. Right. I don't believe in gravity either. If I take this, it drops according to the laws of Isaac Newton. This is a law. I have evidence for gravity. So I don't have to say like, do I believe in something? I should say I should look for evidence of something. Again, I'm not saying this for everybody, but I'm a scientist. I don't want to say I believe in God. I want to say I have evidence for God. Which is stronger? You believe in God or you have evidence for God? Now, you may believe that you have evidence for God. Jesus may be enough has crossed the evidentiary threshold for you. Many people it has um I'm obviously Jewish so it's not the same theology but but in fact we have things that we say we believe in and then we have things we say we know and that distinction I think is really important. So you ask me what do I believe happened or what do I think happened? I I that question to a scientist is anathema because we don't we don't want to be prejudiced to that. That's what got us into trouble with this experiment. We believe we saw the signal that would give Brian Keading the Nobel Prize, right? I mean, that wasn't the only goal of it, but that's where that's where you get into trouble as a scientist. >> We must think about it. >> Do I do? Yeah. >> Do you have any evidence for what may have happened the day before? >> Exactly like what you and I talked about with aliens, right? So, so we don't have any evidence for it. The universe again is like the most undefeated. You know, the movie 300 I was watching that. You know, like imagine like Xerxes versus Theod, what's his name? Theodas or Leopoldus or whatever. Like 300 versus an in infinite number, right? Um Xerxes is like mother nature. Like just an infinite army, completely unstoppable technological. Mother Nature doesn't give up her secrets, but like you know like uh like Gerald Butler, you know, in that movie, a small group of dedicated people can make great gains, right? I'm trying to get more and more evidence for both believing, you know, what I want to believe to be true or what I hope to be true, both in science and in religion. It but I'm not I am under no illusions that a God cares if I believe in him or not. Just like gravity, you jump out of a plane without a parachute. You know, I always say you don't need a parachute to skydive, right? You only need a parachute if you want to skydive a second time. Like I believe in gravity, you know, to the extreme extent that I need to, but I have evidence for gravity. I want to feel the same way about God. So, what are the options? Just as you and I talked about with aliens, aliens could be real, interdimensional, non-biological beings or whatever, right? They could be AIs traversing the cosmos at light speed. Um, they could be, you know, Chinese uh scops. They could be German like Louis Alvarez playing around with the Germans minds breaking the laws of physics. Um, they could be a scop by the government. They could be a mass delusion or hysteria. Or they could be really truly masters of interdimensional travel. Okay, those are different hypotheses. Now, we have to go through each one. Evidentiary, what's a chain? And and so forth. For cosmology, same thing. There are alternatives to the Big Bang. The Big Bang posits that at one moment in time, time came into existence. You couldn't ask, "What happened the day before?" That makes no sense. That's like saying, "Go to the South Pole with me next time and go south." You know what happens when you go south from the South Pole? At the South Pole, you go north. There's no such thing. It doesn't exist. Some say that's true. Stephen Hawking believed that there's no time before the Big Bang. Others say that a competitive theory is the universe existed before the big bang and collapsed and crunched just like the supernova that collapsed and crunched to form our supernova. That big crunch led to the big bang. Another one says an interdimensional concept called string theory that existed in higher dimensions than we exist in 10-dimensional uh string theory um domain that two different types of what are called membranes came together and ignited are what we call the observable big bang. Another theory says we exist in a multiverse which just as there's more than one planet, there's more than one star, there's more than one galaxy, there's more than one cluster of galaxies, why shouldn't there be more than one universe? >> So that's a se Let me just get to the last the last topic. Um and then there's a final topic which is that the universe didn't have a big crunch and singularity. It's just been slowly over time interacting, expanding and collapsing, expanding and collapsing like a breathing of a of of a lung, okay? Coming into and out of creation and and producing things. Now, as a scientist, we can't prove something. [snorts] Um, we cannot prove that the universe had a big bang. We also, strangely enough, we can't prove the earth is round. I don't know if you're aware of this. We can't prove that the earth is round. Okay? >> Had this discussion many times? >> Now, that's something people say, "I believe the earth is round. I believe the earth is flat." I always joke there are people that believe the earth is flat all around the globe. You know, it's you'll find them everywhere, Sean. >> But in reality, you can show that the earth is not flat, but you can't show that it is curved. Do you understand the difference? You can prove something wrong in science, but you can't prove something is right. >> You can't prove something is right. I can say I have evidence for evolution and there are competing theories of evolution that existed. Um, but they've been falsified, proven wrong. And if you can't prove something is wrong or if you can't at least expose it to the opportunity of it being wrong, then it's not science, right? Astrology. When I was dating my wife, we went to the, you know, downtown Mission Mission Beach, San Diego, you know, they have boardwalk and they had a fortune teller and she's like, "Oh, let's tell her, see our fortune, see if we're compatible." You know, I'm like, she's an English major, you know, [laughter] like she uh, fine. I'm, you know, I really love this girl. I want to marry her. So, I'm going to play around with it even though it's anathema to everything I believe to go through astrology. So, the astrologer sits down and says, you know, what's your sign? and you know I say I'm a Gemini and uh she go oh okay um you know here are these different things your personality and your moon sign your sun sign and this thing and this and then I said oh thank you very much and you know my future wife my my my girlfriend at the time oh you know it's really good she said everything sounded really good like we're compatible and everything and I got up and I just to be a dick you know [laughter] I said um I just want to confirm I'm I'm born in September um that's Gemini right and she said no No, no, that's Virgo. But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. In other words, it didn't matter what I said. It didn't matter what evidence I gave her. It was unfalsifiable. It's irrefutable. That's not science. That's fun. You know, it's card trick. You know, it's entertaining. She made her 50 bucks or whatever, and we're still married 18 years later. But to me, the the the prospect that you will not submit your theory to to falsification, and that's some of the problem I have with Avi Lo. Okay, I love Avi, but I said to Avi on my podcast when he came on for his first book, um I said, "Avi, you believe that Omu Mua is extraterrestrial?" It's like the title of your book, right? You believe it came from another solar system. You believe it's technological. Remember he told you he thinks it's a thin solar sail. >> Technological only technology can build a solar sail that captures solar wind from another star directed from where we don't know, but to where we do know because it came through our solar Was it intentional? Was it unintentional? He thinks it's could be like a garbage barge or something like that. And I don't know why you'd put like, you know, your your your trash bin on a solar sail and send it out into the universe rather than just crash it into the nearest sun. But let's just say he's right. I said, "Oh, you always brag to me and you're lucky you're at Harvard University, you know, where everyone's above average and we should talk about Harvard and and Jeffrey Epstein at some point." But um and Aby's not involved with any of that, by the way. Uh but I said you know Harvard everyone's above average and and you happen to have access to these you know copious supply of billionaires and [snorts] everyone you know loves the Harvard impro you say Harvard and that's part of the reason Avi gets a lot of the attention he gets but also a lot of the hate that he gets people you know and he's one of the most legitimate scientists published 757 different articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals multiple books you know the guy works hard you know when I'm interviewing him some sometimes AI show me your hands he's like let And I said, "I want to make sure you're not writing a book while we're talking." You know, he's so productive. I mean, he's off the charts. Okay. But I said, "Abby, you have access to these billionaires." Imagine that. Omua Mua at the time, it's the first object ever to come from another technological solar system like the Earth. And you know, a billionaire who can fund a rocket to send a telescope to go catch up with it. And he said, "As he told you, um, no Brian, we'll wait for the Vid Rubin telescope to come online and it will capture many." I said, "Avi, you're happily married even longer than I am." Imagine like you're with your wife. You don't know she's going to be your wife. You're dating her or maybe you just see her in the coffee shop or he met her on a blind date, I think he told you, right? And it's a blind date and like you're with her and you're like, "Oh, she's really nice, but I think someone better's going to come along soon." You know, how do I know someone better's not going to come along, you know, Brian? And and I said, 'You would do anything. This Avi now would do anything to that obby and say, "Shut up, you idiot. Ask her out. Keep going on a date with her cuz you're going to have two beautiful daughters with her and you're going to have a life of happiness and love." But he is saying the opposite. He's saying, "No, I'll just wait till the next one comes along." I said, "Bobby, I don't know. Do you really believe this is this is as technologically advanced as you say it is?" Cuz to me, Sean, I would do anything if I thought with as much faith and confidence as Avi does that these are extraterrestrial technology. I would do anything, especially if I had access to a couple billionaires and the endowment of Harvard University. >> So, we look to falsify things, not to prove things. And that that was kind of the tangent we just got off on. >> It's hard to ask questions for people to think like that. Do you even though with everything that you just said, you still have to think about it? You still have to think is is there a multiverse? >> No, you're right to press me on that, >> you know, and so what like what goes through your head without without making assumptions or I mean what are what are the what are the ideas? What are the >> So this might make people uncomfortable. I approach it again as a scientist and I'm candid. I I'm one of the few scientists that's openly religious, you know, that it that practices his religion, takes his religion seriously, you know, learned Hebrew at age 30. It wasn't easy to learn Hebrew at age 30. Um, you know, I married someone who's Jewish, which is important thing for the continuity of the Jewish people in my in my learned in Israel. Um, I I take my God and my religion and my faith seriously. I don't work on Saturdays. You know, one thing when you were talking to Andrew, sorry to go off on a side quest here, but you're talking to Andrew Huberman, world expert on sleep and and you guys were talking about cannabis and you're talking about um gummies and you're talking about vaping and everything else. And I said, I know what Sean needs and it's it's not it's not it's not a product. It's it's called the Sabbath. You know, we just had this National Sabbath Donald Trump had. Do you work as much as I think you work? Do you work seven days a week? Pretty much >> pretty close. I see it in you and it's no surprise. I mean, this the studio is amazing. I mean, first of all, I have to say this is the second most number of guns I've ever been around on a podcast after the Myialic podcast. That's a joke. She's she's the girl who played Blossom and um was on the Big Bang Theory. Uh this is the most This is the most impressive studio. You know, I've been on really nice podcast. Um uh been blessed to be on them. you've created this this huge empire and it's no secret that your hard work, your work ethic, probably genetically this is something you're like destined to do. Um, but the one unlock that maybe you haven't and just pretty humble. I'm I'm trying to be humble. I'm not a medical doctor. I'm not even like Andrew, you know, is in the B. But the one thing that saved my life is taking one day off a week is a Sabbath. For me, it's a Saturday. For you, it could be a Sunday. I don't do email. I don't I don't I don't do podcast. If you invited me here, I think actually I was supposed to come two days from now. It's a holiday two days from now in the Jewish calendar called Shivuote, which means Pentecost in English. We call it Pent. It's a it's a biblical holiday. I'm not allowed to work on that holiday. And so I said I can't make it uh on that. But luckily, you know, Laura and Sarah, your whole amazing team is just so excellent um and elite for real. But I wouldn't have done it. As much as this is a great opportunity for me, Sean, I wouldn't have done it because I want to be with my God. I want to be with my wife. I want to be with my kids, my community, my family. I want to dedicate one seventh of my life to something other than achievement and like Nobel prizes and emails and Slack messages. And I'm not saying it's a panacea, but I know like I knew Charlie Kirk a little bit through my relationship with Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson and um and he had his most recent book which he dedicates to Dennis Prager for introducing him to and it's about the keeping of the Sabbath for Christians and it's been a it was a huge unlock for him. It was literally the last thing he ever wrote and his wife put it outously. So I just want you to consider it. But for me, I this is all big disclaimer. Maybe it's a little too, you know, legalistic or professorial uh uh for me to do this, but I want to say that I take my religion seriously, but that doesn't mean I'm not okay with with accepting everything the way it is. In Hebrew, the word Israel means to fight with God. Israel means struggle. L means God. Do you know what Islam means? Mhm. >> Islam means submission to God. Those are two different very different approaches, right? To submit to God and and they're they're valid, right? I'm not going to say which one is which. And Christianity is is somewhere in the middle, right? There's there's acceptance of Jesus as a personal savior who died for your sins and absolves you of those sins. Um and and God gave his only son according to Christianity for your sins, for you, for your personal God. In Judaism, we don't have that concept. But that's okay. We're different religions. That's fine. Otherwise, we'd all be one religion. But Israel means to struggle with God, to fight with God. And if I don't ask questions and subject God in some sense, not to prove him wrong, not to say, you know, like I'm better than God, is most of my co 93% of my colleagues don't believe in God at all. I'm in the 7%. I I think it's probably even smaller than that. Now, you asked Avi about that and he kind of gave you a little wishy-washy answer. As much as I love Avi, I don't I wasn't satisfied with that answer. But for me, if I can't question God, if I can't ask for evidence, if I can't demand some level of scientific rigor in my approach to it, I don't feel authentic to who I am. So, I gave you the whole preamble about how seriously I take God and religion, the Sabbath, and why I recommend it to so many people. Um, but I'm also going to approach it scientifically. So what do I hope in science? Do I hope there's a multiverse? Do I hope there's part of that connected to my attempt to inculcate my science with religion to get a sense of can we test claims in the Bible? In my case, the Torah, the Old Testament. Can I test them scientifically? Can you test them in a lab? Could you test them with a telescope? Obviously, there's some connection between them, right? Otherwise, Galileo wouldn't have been imprisoned by the church and Bruno wouldn't have been burned alive as we already said, right? Capernicus published his his theory that the earth is not the center of the univer the the earth is not the center of the universe. He published that the day he died >> because he knew he would probably be tortured and look what happened a couple years later to Bruno and Galileo. Right? So, God and science and cosmology, they go hand in hand. For me, I've made it kind of an interesting quest because those different models that I explained to you, the steadystate static universe, the big crunch universe, the multiverse universe, um and um and the uh the the slow expansion universe. Those are four models of what could have came before the big bang. One of them says nothing. One of them says we live in a multiverse that's eternal and has existed for all time. One of them says the universe is slowly changing and modulating but is eternal. And one says the universe came into time at a specific moment for a specific reason caught by a specific cause. That one sounds the most like Genesis 1:1, right? >> In the beginning. It doesn't say after the big crunch. It doesn't say like in the multiverse, you know, God created the univer. It says in the beginning in Hebrew it actually >> I feel like that means there's nothing before that. >> That's right. So what is that? You just projected onto exactly what I'm attempting to do. You constructed a scientific hypothesis that's open to falsification. Okay, pause that. Think about what you just said. That pro that suggests that there's a beginning. What if we find there's not a beginning? Whatever that means, that has just falsified that theory. >> Call it Genesis theory, call it Ryan theory, whatever you want. You could falsify it. Guess what you just did? You proved that's part of science. To me, that's exhilarating. That means I can investigate whether or not the Big Bang occurred, whether or not time came into existence versus whether or not we live in a multiverse. I can investigate that and get paid by the regents of the state university of California. I could do it I would do it for free by the way though Gavin if you're watching I know you're watching Gavin you've got a podcast you want to be like Sean um I would do it for free but please you know let me keep my salary the point is you just suggested a scientific hypothesis that could be refuted it's falsifiable therefore by the rules that we explicated earlier it's scientific question there's nothing wrong with asking questions seeking proof which would you rather have Sean belief that Jesus existed can you prove that Jesus exist system. Can you prove it? >> Can I prove it? >> No. >> Do you think it could be proven by somebody, you know, a billion 100 Avi loads or, you know, someone just off the charts? >> Maybe. >> Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe it's not provable. Does that mean that you shouldn't believe in Jesus? Of course not. Of course not. To take away someone's religion is almost impossible. Anyone who's ever had a Jehovah's Witness come to their house and knock on the door or a Mormon say like we'd like to tell you about, right? Guess who hates to take their religion away most of all? Atheists. You tell an atheist most scientist. Like your religion quote unquote is more dogmatic than any Christian I've ever met in my life. Oh, come on. they're just, you know, psies or what they don't even know that seeking the questions of the type that you and I just discussed is perfectly kosher is perfectly acceptable in the context and domain of scientific reasoning. Would you rather have I bet it doesn't matter to you because you do have strong faith. But if someone said here is proof like you know the shroud of Turin or or there's you know we found some some eyewitness estimate or we found physical evidence that proves not only that Jesus existed but that he was resurrected and that he was ascended. And this is irrefutable proof of the claims of the gospels. And I said here Sean here's a book. Do you want to read that book that has all this evidence? >> Yeah, of course. You're a curious person. There are people that wouldn't want to read that book. There are people who would read the book, but it doesn't matter to them. There's a famous story in uh Bergen Bellson concentration camp. A lot of Jews perished there, and some were rabbis. And in 1943, I believe, they were doing um uh they they decided they would hold a trial and put God on trial. They said, "Should God have created humanity if it leads to holocaust genocides and killing?" And they put God on trial. These rabbis, they had prosecution and defense. The overwhelming evidence from the rabbis and the jury was that God was guilty and God never should have created the world. And you know what they did the very next minute? They said, "Let's go for the afternoon prayers." >> And there were some people it didn't matter. It doesn't matter if you have physical evidence. Doesn't matter if you have scientific evidence. Their faith is is unshakable. And fine, I salute that. I'm weaker than [clears throat] that. I don't I don't have that ability. Sean, >> I think it is uh similar. I mean, you're trying to I mean, how would you word it? Disprove. You you cannot disprove Jesus's existence >> or gods. Yeah. >> Or gods. >> You know, and I would assume that's maybe I don't assume, but I mean it's probably the same with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. You cannot disprove it, right? >> You know, but you also cannot prove it. >> You know, and so it comes down to faith. >> Exactly. Why did you go from I mean we know why you went from Judaism to Catholicism. Why did you go back to Judaism? Is it because of your father? >> No, it was because of it was actually because of 9/11. >> It's because of 9/11. >> Yeah. Yeah. So 911 happened. I was 28 29 something like that. And I had been in the Catholic church you know the the previous religion you know kind of experience I had was the Catholic church which I loved. as I said, um I had difficulty with with the leadership at the pope level and the Vatican and so but putting that aside and then I was you know college kind of I'm so smart I'll be an atheist right like all my teachers and my you know and my colleagues and then 9/11 happened and I was like you know what I know a lot about Christianity and Catholicism from having practiced it for six or seven eight years being an alter boy wanting to become a priest um everyone was an expert on Islam, you know, at after 9/11, right? Um, and I realized I knew nothing about the religion that I was born into. And I felt uh ashamed. I couldn't read Hebrew, you know, I I didn't I never read the Bible. Uh, you know, the Old Testament. I mean, I read the Gospels because I was Catholic, right? Very rarely do we go back and read the Old Testament, at least in the church that I was an alter boy in. And so, I knew nothing about the Old Testament, the Torah. I couldn't read it. I felt embarrassed. You know, who knows how to do? And I was like, why does why is there this antipathy towards Jews and towards, you know, Judeo-Christian, you know, society and civilization? Why is there this conflict? I knew nothing about it. Um, and so I realized that I'd stopped all my learning when I was 13 about religion. And most of the people that you talk to who are scientists, especially Jewish scientists, who are almost all atheists, um the last time they encountered religion was on their bar mitzvah at age 13. And for many of them, it's like a graduation from prison, you know, like they're they're released. They no longer have to go to temple anymore. They no longer have to sit and learn this archaic language that's spoken on exactly 2% of the world's population. Like, who the hell needs this when I can do whatever I want? And plus, Hanukkah really sucks compared to Christmas. You know, you ask me about do I miss it? Yeah, totally. I mean, so, you know, the the negative exposure that you get at age 13 that then carries through these geniuses like Stephen Pinker and and and even, you know, Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who I've hosted, most famous atheist alive, right? wrote the, you know, uh, the God delusion and and, uh, uh, just an incredible intellect, but an incredible atheist. They don't have the most basic level that my kids have about what the Bible actually says, what it means. They just project onto it, making it into a straw man, which they can then ignite. >> Okay. I felt as a legitimate scholar, an intellectual, I want to have a conversant level with the Bible, like the Old Testament in my case, at at least the same level that I have with quantum mechanics. Why should you say that you don't? Because it's easier. Like, oh, anybody can believe. Look, Sean Ryan doesn't have a PhD. You didn't go to college, right? You were in the teams. You want to, right? Oh, Sean, he knows it. So, you know, but like he doesn't know quantum mechanics. So, doesn't that show you that it's not that hard to believe in God? I think these are so infantile these arguments and the and the vitriol that people have towards believers in the scientific in the academic community in the elite. Let me take one pause for you for one second. You're familiar with the following statement made by President Eisenhower. He said, um, there's a danger of, I want you to finish the sentence, of a military >> industrial complex. >> Okay? Before he says those words, he says there's a danger of a scientific, you're not going to know it. >> I didn't know it till very recently. Before he mentions the military-industrial complex and its dangers, which you can testify to as well as anybody, he speaks about the the horrors that'll be inflicted upon society. Should we fall captive to a scientific technical elite? What was he talking about? Professors, academia, you don't know. You didn't go to college, Sean. You can't talk to me about about aliens and COVID and disclosure and No, no, you can't. It's [expletive] the the disdain that that the ivory tower has for ordinary lay people and and and people that didn't go to college. It it it's a dirty little secret that we don't talk about cuz it makes us look venal. It makes us look pathetic. It makes us deserving the eye and therefore if you get hire you get attention and then they might take away our tenure and our tuition increases that go faster than inflation. We don't want you guys to look that close at us. That's the scientific technical elite. Eisenhower warned against that in the same breath as the military-industrial complex. You never hear about the former. You only hear about the latter. Why is that? >> I don't know. >> People worship college. College is a secular idol that even the most atheistic people worship at. It's a sign that I'm a good parent. I My kid goes to Vanderbilt. My kid goes to UC San Diego. It's a sign that you did your good job as a parent according to who? According to secular society, but that's a danger. So, getting back to, you know, kind of this this original part where we went off on this quest a few minutes ago, I I I think that there's it's it's completely legitimate to to think about these things and to and to try to approach them with scientific rigor and to have mutual respect and comedy. not comedy but comedy where you can respect the person that you maybe don't necessarily agree with. And so for me, you know, I'm there's obviously a lot more Christians in the world than there are Jews, but I wanted to get back to an understanding what's called first principles thinking. I want to understand what are the base roots of What are the challenges to Christianity? And there are challenges to Christianity. I'm sure you know uh the gospels aren't, you know, they're They they they themselves are the and and that's what gives them intellectual honesty. They admit there are certain things that they cannot explain, right? Miracles that Jesus did that they say, well, scientifically, if you take the quantum mechanical structure of water, you can. No, they said we don't understand it. But that's what faith means. But I don't want to only have faith. I would like to have proof. >> Can I convert a faith question into a proof question? That's what I want to do. That's fun as hell. What's that? >> A faith question into a >> Did God create the universe? >> Well, if the if if if the if the Old Testament says something and it's compatible with observation, that's not proof, but it's evidence. If the if the Torah if the Old Testament says um the universe came into existence in the beginning, the actual Hebrew word Hebrew is a very rich language and the actual it says with beginningness. Like in other words, God not only created the universe according to Hebrew in the Torah, he created the concept of the beginningness of something. It's amazing when you think about it. Like gives me chills. It's so much deeper than we get when we're kids. The problem is we learn religion when you're a kid and I went to Sunday school and I hated it and you like nobody likes it. But if you approach it as I did as an adult at age 30 after 9/11 or 28 or whatever else, it's much richer because you can approach it with the full arsenal of the tools and the weapons that I've developed as a scientist. >> Mhm. And therefore that which I can prove, verify, attempt or fail to prove will have a lot more sticking power and give me a lot more ironically faith. The best investors don't rely on guesswork. They have an expert by their side in a system that keeps them on track. But most people don't have access to a human adviser. That's where Stash comes in. It gives you a disciplined, long-term investing philosophy focused on steady habit building, not speculation, so you can build your portfolio with confidence. Stash is a registered financial advisor built right into an app. Stash shows you way more than just your balance. It offers personalized next steps to keep you moving forward in any market scenario, so you always know what to do with your money and why. 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I I get to work with like just like billionaire brainiac like like IQ billionaires, you know, like my colleagues who started the Simons Observatory with me, David Spurggle, who ran the NASA UAP investigation panel two or three years ago. He's the he was the leader of it. He's the leader of the Simons Foundation. He and I came up with the idea for the Simons observatory which is this you know two now $200 million kind of level project. Uh my friend Mark Develin at UPEN um you know created the six meter diameter telescope and the detectors within it like three people can fit inside it like standing on shoulder. It's insane. Um Suzanne Stags at Princeton built these detectors that could detect a match at the distance of the moon. I mean these are like insane people. Again, I would pay to work with them and I get to do it for free. Right? We have been able to falsify these narratives that suggest there was no period of time when the universe was hotter, denser, more compact. We've falsified claims that dark matter does not exist. In other words, we we can't prove dark matter exists, but we've shown that in universes, models, conceptions where dark matter doesn't exist, it's 100 times more inconsistent with the data. We've found evidence for dark energy. We found evidence that matter in the universe acts like a lens that focuses light. If you put a black hole here, you can't see the black hole. It's black, right? But light would be deflected around it just the same way that we've detected with our instruments as well that we can see the effects of the curvature of space time. You and I talked about we've detected that. That means that we have falsified these notions that Einstein's theories are wrong or incomplete. We do know that they're incomplete at one level because we don't understand how quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, plays with cosmology and relativity, the physics of the very large. But I'm confident that we'll get there. So to have these abilities to falsify. Now have we falsified that the big bang occurred? No. Have we falsified that the multiverse exists? No. If the multiverse exists, that would be a huge challenge for traditional theology. Okay? It would mean there is no one beginning. It would mean the universe is eternal and is exists in a vaster cosmic landscape than we can perceive that lies outside of our horizon. You know, like we're talking before, if you're out on a boat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousand, you know, thousand miles from land in any direction, right? Can you detect Can you see another boat? No, you can't. You can't see anything over the horizon. Could you detect the boat's existence? Yeah, maybe there's waves, son, you know, sonograms, sonar, whatever, nutrinos from the nuclear re, whatever. There's a million ways you could detect it, right? We're trying to do just that. We're trying to see what lies beyond the horizon. If indeed the inflationary epoch did occur that we claim, we did discover later how to retract that claim. It was very embarrassing, the subject of the first book that I wrote, losing the Nobel Prize. If we do get to that point where we can sort of have evidence for it, it doesn't prove the multiverse exists, but it kind of rules out the alternatives. And that would present challenges, right, to the traditional theological Torah creation story of a single beginning of time. Um there are people that will attempt to um use what are called apologetics. you know, kind of explain things with the assumption that God could do that. As you said, you can't prove God exists. You can't prove God doesn't exist, right? We can't even prove we're having this consciousness experience that we call reality right now, right? We could be some brains in a jar stimulated by electromagnetic radiation by some malevolent demon, right? >> Um, we don't have evidence for that, but it doesn't mean it's not within the realm of possibilities. So >> we've discovered a whole host of of incredible facts and more to come with the Simons Observatory um in the next few years where we first get data from this instrument which was um uh which was created in the part generosity of my late great um mentor and friend Jim Simons who passed away two years ago um established this this incredible collaboration with you know it's the people it's like a team um without the team nothing happens and I'm just privileged to be you know at the at the heart of it and the start of it. >> I can't remember everything I talked to Aby about, but we were talking about the Big Bang Theory and peering back through time. We had I had that conversation before. >> Yeah, you did. >> How many times can you observe that from Earth? >> So, >> because if the light passes you by, then it's gone. Right. >> Right. Right. >> Is it gone or is it just keep coming? It's it's >> because if you look at a light source, >> I mean it'll be on until it turns off and then it has to right. >> The big bang is an explosion. So I mean correct. So >> once the explosion is done, the light is gone. So it would pass you by. Right. >> Correct. And then there would be nothing after it >> if it was an explosion. Right. If it was an explosion, >> it's not an explosion in the sense of, you know, a round goes off and there's a shock wave. That has a implicit bias that you're embedding an event in a larger space like this room, right? Explosion in this room is very different than the spaceime of this room expanding. Right? So, what the big bang postulates is that if we're galaxies at one time in the past, yesterday we were slightly closer. And if you extrapolate back, extrapolate back, you find that there'll be some point where our chairs are right up against each other. I like you, but I'm not going to get that close. Right? Um, but at the subatomic scale, you could also keep going back to much much smaller distances, which would require much much more energy per cubic millimeter, nanometer, plank size, whatever. But that if space comes into existence at that particular moment, then what happens is the expansion occurs. Space itself is expanding for a long time. But there's nothing there's no process by which you can reveal the presence of any matter or any energy because it doesn't exist yet. Right? >> The first galaxies I've been talking about galaxies and that's how Hubble Edwin Hubble showed that to Einstein that he was wrong. >> So Einstein believed in a static universe that the universe was eternal as everybody did for thousands of years. Aristotle believed that, you know, and it was Einstein, right? Until Hubble showed him evidence, data that every galaxy you could see in the universe is not static. It's moving away from Earth at huge speeds, fractions of the speed of light. In fact, it moves away faster the farther away two galaxies are. So, if we're in this room and we brought in, you know, a your producer and, you know, they sign over there and this is the universe expanding, we'd all be expanding. You would see me going away and you would see him going away from you, but you wouldn't feel like yourself is moving away, but I would see you moving away and I would see him moving away and he would see the same thing. Right? So each one of us feels like we're at the center of the universe, but we're not. >> The space is expanding in between us and any process that you emit. If you if you are having if you look at me with and you shine a laser at me and it's a green laser. If you start to move away faster uh you know some large velocity much much faster than any earthbound speed say half the speed of light that light will go from green to red because not only are you moving away but the wavelength is stretching from short wavelengths to longer wavelengths. Eventually, you hit a speed because you're at a distance. And remember, the distance times this constant called the Hubble constant tells you how how fast two galaxies are moving away. You get a velocity that's equal to the speed of light. Okay? And then after you get beyond that distance, there's no reason I can't be moving faster than the speed of light away from you. And at that point, what do you see? So, right now, you see me and I'm like waving at you, right? M >> and I keep waving at you and you keep expanding and and eventually you hit the speed of light and the last thing you'll see for me is this. It'll appear frozen. The beam of light that I'm producing, the photons of light that I'm generating will keep shining towards you. They'll get redshifted to longer and longer wavelengths. So you'll see me you'll see me frozen waving and you'll see me extremely red. And the same exact thing happens as an observer falls into a black hole. They don't get ripped apart at the so-called event horizon. You and I talked about this in great detail. I refer you guys to episode 146. I think episode 146. You talk about the falling into a black hole. Nothing happens when you cross the event horizon. People think it sounds kind of cool. Event horizon. No. Something happens when you get close to the singularity. That's called spaghettification. You get ripped apart. That's irrelevant. The astronaut right before he falls into the black hole, he waves it. That's the same thing. You see him. He's frozen and he's very red. and that'll just keep continuing as long as you know as long as you're around to look at them. So the same thing happens with this light with any process in the universe. And it just so happens that in order to see something that's beyond the event horizon, you can't use light. You have to use something else because light can only travel at the speed of light. It's the fastest speed there is. But there has to be some other mechanism by which you could see these processes if they existed before the big before this part of the big bang occurred. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for not waves of light but waves of gravity which is the actual structure of spaceime. You know spacetime again you and I did a lot of the prerexs for this course. You know you talked about waves of gravity. Gravity and spaceime is a dynamical object. It's not a frozen ice block. Gravity means that distances and time shift according to the local mass distribution there is. So when the universe had all the mass it will ever have at the beginning it had a lot of gravity. And when the expansion took place that gravity could be converted into ocillatory radiation called gravitational waves. That's what we look for. It's not light. It's spaceime itself. >> And we've detected that as as as >> how are you able to see that? So we see that in the distortion of space and time. Remember I said if there's a black hole here, you could actually see something over there because light from over there would get bent by the black hole and it would appear to be coming from over there, but it's actually coming from behind us. That's called gravitational lensing. Einstein predicted this phenomenon in the 1930s. He also predicted this the phenomenon gravitational waves. Um it has been detected on Earth from two black holes that existed uh a billion years ago a billion lighty years away crashed into each other. Okay. Each one weighed 30 times the mass of our sun. What was left over was a single black hole that weighed 59 times the mass of the of the two of the sun. Right? So you had 60 solar masses in the beginning. 30 and 30. They crash together. They make something that's only 59 solar masses. Where' the rest of the energy go? It all went into shaking up and vibrating spaceime. Those ripples in spaceime mean that if you were there at one moment of time, your weight would increase on a scale. If you put a scale in here and a gravitational wave comes through, you one second one moment of time you get heavier. Then it oscillates and you get lighter, heavier, lighter, heavier, lighter. And that process would occur at the speed of light. But it's not light. It's the separation of entities and events in spaceime itself. The curvature of which gets distorted if the universe had a singularity which would mean it we live in a multiverse. They all go together. So we haven't discovered that yet. >> We may never even as you said before eloquently you can't prove it can't disprove it but we can disprove alternatives to it. There's an alternative that says we came from a big crunch. Remember I said that's a possibility that it turns out for technical reasons can be disproven if we see these waves of gravity. The waves of gravity cannot occur in a universe with a big crunch but they can occur in a universe with inflation and the multiverse. But one can be pro one cannot be proven but one can be falsified proven wrong. >> You know another thing that I was talking to Aby about is when we talk about the universe expanding I was asking him about the edge. Yeah. >> of the universe. And I didn't quite understand what he was talking about. >> so if we're expanding, >> yeah, >> the space is expanding in between us. >> Where where's the edge of this? >> So, there doesn't have to be an edge. There may be an edge, but there doesn't have to be an edge. Um, and it's a very ancient question. You know, um, Aristotle asked, if you go to the edge of the universe and you throw a sphere, where does it go into? Right? uh it's exactly the same type of question you're asking. Um so what we do in science is we in in the science of cosmology we say that that spacetime um is the set of all possible places in X Y and Z and in time. Anything that can occur occurs in those four dimensions. Right? You told me to meet you here exactly in this you know latitude, longitude, altitude and time. Right? You specified all those different things. You don't have to specify anything else. Right? That's spec. Now, if a gravitational wave comes through this room, it actually changes both the space and time, you know, microscopically, but technically it does. And if two big black holes crash by, it would do it a lot, right? That would be a huge, huge disruption to space and time. It would change my coordinates. I'd be at a different XYZ time, altitude, whatever, right? Um, but all of space and time can exist infinitely like an infinite set of monkey bars just going out in all directions. All possible directions where space is there. Now, you might say, what is that space made of, right? What's in that space? In other words, our universe here is within our horizon. Just like you go down to the beach in San Diego, I can only see out what, four, I don't know, you're a Navy guy. Tell me, you can see like four to seven miles at sea level out to shoreb and then your horizon disappears because of the curvature of the earth, right? Does that mean there's nothing beyond that? Of course not. Right? You could there's definitely stuff beyond that. People didn't know that for a long time, but now they do. Right? So that that's your horizon. Your horizon on a two-dimensional surface like the surface of the earth is a circle. >> Mhm. [clears throat] Your horizon in a four-dimensional universe is a sphere. Every event in space and time that's ever occurred that we could just now get information from lies within our light sphere. We call that maximum light sphere. The farthest distance that anything could have traveled to us here. We call that the particle horizon or the observable universe. Okay? But my observable universe looks different than your observable universe because we're not at the same four-dimensional space-time location. You're 6 feet away from me. Light travels one uh 1 billionth and and 1 billionth of a second travels 1 foot. That's the speed of light. So I actually see you six nanose earlier than you are right now. You look wonderful, Sean, by the way. I see you I the sun 8 minutes away. We don't know. The sun could have disappeared right now. We won't know for eight minutes. It's not likely, but it's a hypothesis. You could test it, right? Um the universe, the big bang, the stuff that I study happened 13.86 86 billion years ago. So stuff could have traveled to us from that age and you take that age of the universe times the speed of light. You technically you have to modify it by the expansion of the universe. But once you do that, you get the the maximum distance I can see where I am right here. And that's a a sphere whose radius is 45 billion lightyears. Okay? So imagine that centered on me. But now go over a couple billion lighty years to this galaxy where these two black holes crash together >> that has a slightly different observable univer. >> Now what are they seeing? Are they seeing into another universe? No. They're just see they just have access to a different light sphere of space that could have communicated with them. >> Another perspective. >> Yeah. And in a billion years from now we'll be able to see that. Now if there's another universe there, let's say there's another universe. God comes down. There's another universe. episode whatever 1400, you'll have the other universe on, right? But it's it's a it's um it's 10 light years away from our universe. You won't know about it for 10 years, right? So, we could exist in this vast universe. It could also be that we're in a compact finite universe where it would make sense to say that there is an edge to it just like there's an edge. There is an edge to the earth, right? The edge is in the perpendicular dimension to the two-dimensional sphere. In the context of cosmology, the edge of the universe could be if we live in a spherical universe, but instead of having x, y, and z, it has x, y, z, and w, it's a four-dimensional sphere. Our brain, no, nobody's brain, not even obvious, can comprehend what that actually looks like or means, but mathematically it's a perfectly valid question. We can we can approach it and we can ask what would be the signature of another universe that bumps into our universe and people make predictions about it. But there's zero evidence for that. There's zero evidence that our universe is a compact closed spherical universe uh or that it's an open uh hyperbolic universe. Right now our best evidence is that our universe is infinite in extent but that infinity is just a mathematical infinity. Um we have no idea of right beyond it could be another universe. And if you ask what's in that other universe uh I have an I have a thought exercise for you. when the Artemis uh we should talk about lunar uh landing conspiracies because you you had on this guy uh Gentile >> AJ Gentile >> AJ Gentile that was an awesome show. >> I love that guy. He's one of my favorite people. >> He's he is and he's he's so good at what he does you know like imagine how hard it is like you know it's hard to interview people but then also to do like explainer content where you explain things. Um, but you know, I was I can never take the professor out of laboratory. And so he made a couple mistakes in that episode. And I would love to talk to him sometime. Uh, maybe you can uh introduce me. But one of the things he said is that um that the uh the Soviets beat us in every possible thing. And this is part of the conversation you guys had about how the moon landing didn't happen, right? Or or how people could say that I don't actually know what you believe. And this is a case where you could say believe, but we have evidence, right? >> What do you believe? I know for a fact we landed on the moon. How do you know? >> I I know for a fact because we have physical evidence, we have eyewitness evidence, we have photographic evidence, but the best evidence we have, Sean, >> the best evidence we have comes from the Soviet Union. >> What's that? >> Soviet Union on uh July 19th, 1969. The Soviets knew that the Eagle was on its way to land on the Sea of Tranquility. They had launched six days earlier a spacecraft of their own. Uh uncrrewed, no men were on it, but they were going to go and land on the moon and they were going to take samples and they kind of wanted to steal the thunder, arrive a day earlier and and kind of get a little bit of the credit and they also kind of hoped that we would crash and they would all die. I mean, the space race was insane, right? I mean, it was incredible. The Soviets coordinated with the Americans on that very day because they were worried that they would crash into the Eagle and they coordinated their telemetry and we still have records of their telemetry um and the communications between the um Bikenor Ksmodrome and Kazakhstan where they would do their launches and recoveries and uh a NASA Apollo. They wanted to avoid a huge PR disaster especially since they thought we would die. They thought they would actually crack. People thought the the moon landers would would keep going down through the uh surface of the moon. They thought it was made of like really loose talcum powder like dust and that it would actually be unstable and it would flip. They actually most people gave it 50/50 odds. >> In fact, Nixon had recorded a speech in case the astronauts died and um you know and he they pre-recorded it and so he would play it on TV and give their condolences. They also planned for the contingency that they'd be lost in lunar orbit or that they would miss the moon and go off into deep space and become a satellite never to be found again. Right? So, um so the Russians confirmed it that coordinated with our telemetry when they landed they congratulated President Nixon. Um and then they also landed uh on on the moon in the first landing they landed these retro reflectors called laser uh lunar laser retroreflectors. Um, you ever on your bicycle and you see like a bike um tail light or the the reflectors on the back of a bike, right? >> How how does that work? Um, how does the bike know where your car is going to be? You could be at any angle, any bearing, any distance, right? How does it know to reflect back? They have the specially designed retroreflectors that always will find the target back to Earth. And we bounce lasers off it. my colleague at UC San Diego became retired recently, Tom Murphy. He bounces lasers off these retrorelectors left by the Apollo uh moon landing Apollo 11. And he can measure the distance to the moon to the thickness of a paperclip 1 millm or so thickness. So we know the average that was left by these astronauts. Now the Russians left these things there too. But the Russians also overflew both our uh landing sites and their own landing sites. And Tom Murphy and his colleagues found the Russian retrorelectors as well as the American ones exactly where the Americans said they put it and exactly where the Russians said they put it. And the last kind of little bit of convincing evidence um one one part and but I do want to get back to what Gentile said that's wrong because I think it's important um is that uh is that that um the the positioning so you could maybe sort of fake that or whatever but imagine right now imagine like Artemis 2 which just went around the moon right I I think even you know I debated Bart Cbril on Piers Morgan the day of the launch and he he was like well maybe they're going now but they couldn't have gone men. I'll get back to that in a second. That's totally facious and and ridiculous argument that I refuted on air with with him and peers actually piled on and called him full of [expletive] Uh to his credit, but um these the very day that Artemis launched and then went around the moon this last month in April. Can you imagine? >> Land on the moon though, were >> not not this one. This one was supposed to go around the moon. >> They were supposed to land changed. >> No, no, no. It was always planned to do this. First one went around the moon. No one was in it. Second one went around the moon with people in it. Third one's going to be people in it. Sorry, unmanned landing on the moon. Fourth one's going to be people landing on the moon. >> Well, let me let me let me just finish this. >> All right. All right. I just want to know why don't we just land on the [expletive] moon? We did it in the 60s. >> Okay. Correct. >> Would you get >> Why are we doing all this crazy wild [expletive] Let's just >> go back. >> Would you get on with your kids and being here and your wife and your empire that is so impressive? Would you get on like the second flight of a of any kind of military hardware built by the lowest paying company? >> In case you haven't noticed, I'm a risk taker. >> I know you are, but would you do it now? I asked Elon Musk on my podcast. >> Would I do it right now? >> Yeah. Would you take it right now? Right. >> So, you do things in steps >> four or five years ago. >> Kittyhawk, was that the first time the the right flyer had ever flown? Oh, they didn't put themselves on it the first time. They did test flights, prototype flights. That's all they're doing. There's nothing nefarious there. But let let me just get to the closure of this one argument. A thought experiment I want you to consider. April 5th 6th when they went around the moon. Can you imagine Ayatollah Kmeni Jr. Oh hello. Hi Mah President President Trump. Congratulations. Every country on Earth including China which had stolen a lot of our nuclear and space secrets in the 1970s. China, Soviet Union, all these countries called up and congratulated the United States. Now, they were our enemy. It's hard to think of it now because we kind of like whatever, whatever, right? But can you imagine like the Ayatollas right now calling us up to congratulate us? In other words, they would be the most glorified and happy people on earth to have us not get there and prove that we didn't get there because that would leave glory for them. So, that's a psychological kind of component evidence for it. There's overwhelming scientific evidence for it. The evidence against it is is minimal. You already mentioned one of them which is well how come they did it uh you know in the 60s but we can't do it now. I mean you said that Gentiel said that totally facious argument. I I love you. I love Gentiel. I'm going to tell you that's a facelious argument and I'm living proof of it. Okay. The first person to ever set foot on the South Pole, Rald Emonson. He's amazing guy. He went from the North Pole. He almost was the first person to reach the North Pole. He lost. turned around and went on a huge expedition and became the first person to land to to reach the South Pole. The South Pole nowadays, I said, I take a C130 flight, a C17 flight, land on the ice, then I take a ski C130 on takes me a week. Okay, poor Brian. You'll pay play the violin for it took them 6 months just to get there. Then they got there, they would get there in spring because that's the only time you can really travel there. Then they have to wait until the following spring. and they'd stay on the coast of Antarctica for six more months until or seven, eight months before it came warm enough that they could ski, cross-country ski up 9,000 ft of ice. Okay? And then they got to the South Pole and then had to get back before winter started. And if they missed it by 3 weeks, like the British team, Robert Falcon Scott, was the second person to get to the South Pole in 1912. In January 1912, 3 weeks after got there in December 1911, everyone on Scott's team died. Every single one of them froze to death the most excruciating way possible. 10 miles from a cache of supplies that would have saved their lives. They all died. They didn't know about it for another year and then they got back to England a year after that. Okay, we're just Okay, so 1911, our Norwegian guy sets foot with his teammates on the South Pole. Do you know when the next Norwegian to get to the South Pole was, I'm not expecting you to. 1996. >> Wow. So if you're 19 Bart Cro 1995, you say, "Oh, wait. How come we went there with technology with a boat, a wooden boat like Shackleton, we did that 100red years ago, but we can't do that now." It's completely fellacious. I mean, that's not a good argument. Okay. There are other arguments that are better like the Van Allen belts and so >> I I don't think that you know that I'm not saying that we didn't go. >> Okay. It sounded like >> I'm not saying >> you're open to the hypothesis at least. I think it's [expletive] weird that we haven't been back since the 60s. >> But do you know why we didn't go back to the South Pole >> or anybody on Earth? >> Uh uh. So, first of all, it was >> and the belt thing that you just brought up I also think is very odd. >> And there's that guy in NASA that said we lost the technology. I'm sorry. You lost the [expletive] technology. >> Okay. There's no NASA guy at NASA. It's like saying the guy in the Navy Seals or something like that could mean a lot of things, right? It it it doesn't >> Well, I mean, I'm just not familiar with >> Yeah, I know. But but when you have a platform like you do and and AJ has his platform. I'm just I would love the scientific rigor to kind of not you have to get a PhD in quantum mechanics. I'm just saying when you think about things, what should be your default base rate hypothesis? Should it be that this is this is kind of fake or you know, as as Candace Owen said, this is fake and gay, right? So, she's supposed to be like America first, right? She's supposed to really love America, be patriotic. It's not only the greatest achievement of America, but it's the this is one of the greatest ach I think it is personally the greatest achievement in all of human history. And I say that as somebody who's a pure scient say going to the moon. Yeah. what we did in a very short amount of time, but it it took a level of, you know, just just incredible incredible, you know, cooperation and technology, hundreds of thousands of people coordinating across decades and and the evidence against it is so minimal. What's frustrating as a real scientist is say like, look, no one would rather these things be wrong, false, than a scientist, right? Because I get paid not to prove people right. My job is not to prove freaking avi right. My job is to say, no, you're freaking wrong. here's a better explanation. Let's go test that. And his job as a good scientist is to say, "Thank you, Brian. You know, you you use your experimental technology. I'm a theoretical physicist. Let's work together and come closer to truth." Okay, that's the way science should be done. Not like the default assumption is America lied. You know, they lied about CO. I mean, I you know, for many reasons, I wish CO never happened. And I've interviewed, you know, and I'm best friends with the one of close friends with the director of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bacharia tortured by Anthony Fouchy and and and and Francis Collins. Horrible thing. And you know, he's a Christian. He's an incredible human being. You know, he all this stuff that you're kind of talking about here. You know, at the beginning, you asked me if I thought it was a good idea for a country to lie to its citizens. >> Now we're wondering if we [expletive] landed on the moon because a lot of lies have come out of the government. I see what you're saying. >> And you're a scientist. you know, you understand how to sift through all this data and and you I mean, you you spent many many years studying all the things that it takes to know about landing on the moon. I'm a Navy Seal. I spent those years fighting a [expletive] war. Yeah. >> You know what I mean? Yeah. And so what I'm saying is, you know, you're looking at straight facts and the rest of us are looking at context, you know, and when you have when you add in the context and you see a government that continuously lies to its [expletive] citizens, citizens are no longer going to believe the >> I guess, is as a question. >> So then all these conspiracies start to happen and distrust and then they start digging into everything. What were you saying about Candace? So, so Candace, what I'm saying about Candace is that the America Firsters and the American Patriots and so forth. And I'm not questioning her love of America or whatever. Just saying if this is the greatest accomplishment that a human being has ever made and it happens to come from the country that you profess your love for and allegiance to as I do and as you do, right? That it doesn't mean they're flawless. I mean, who's flawless, right? I mean, who do you agree with 100% of the time? Like, I'll say my wife, right? But but that's about it, right? Sometimes you contradict yourself. I contradict myself. You agree with your wife 100% of the time? That's >> Uh honey, if you're watching, >> you know what I did? I made her mad the other day. I said, you know, honey, whenever I'm driving around like, I got to turn off the the um the the voice activated directions on the GPS. She's like, oh, that's so romantic. You want to listen to me? I'm like, no, I don't want two women yelling at me while um No. So, you don't agree with everybody, right? You don't even agree with yourself. I reserve the right to be wrong all the time. And in fact, that's the best thing a scientist should do. We should have the freaking balls to say when we're wrong, not just when we're right. From the standpoint of having skepticism of your government and whatnot. You always have to ask the question like who benefits from it, right? Who would benefit from the moonlanding not occurring? Um is a question you can ask that question. Um you can also you know say what are the downstream tangible benefits from doing that work and landing on the moon. You can ask what were the technological impediments? But if you start with a hypothesis, you know, it's like an atheist who says like I'm gonna start with the hypothesis God doesn't exist, Sean. Right? And you have to you have the burden of proof to prove to me that God exists or doesn't exist, right? Um that's not approaching things scientifically. Like if you start with there's a there's a term in that for it's called apologetics. You start with a conclusion, you reason towards a conclusion based on the best available data, but you h you're not going to like refute God. like William Lane Craig or Baron uh the uh the Catholic priest. I'm blanking on his name. I think it's Baron is the last name, Robert Baron. Um they're not going to come to a conclusion that disproves God, right? Let's just be honest. That's that's not necessarily what their their you know focus is going to be on, right? Uh but they're going to give explanations why God is a more plausible hypothesis than anything else. But if you and and so there's purely scientific reasons you can you can debate what happened when we went to the moon, how come we didn't go back. I think I gave some credibility to the argument that just cuz you do something once it doesn't necessarily make it easier to do it twice. Like a Piers Morgan on his show to give him credit to Bart Cbril. He said I flew on the Concord, you know, in 2001 and um I haven't been on a Concord since. Like how come there's no freaking, you know, Mach 2 transportation right now? How come that's not probably ever going to happen again? How do we go back into you know when that was built? That was built in 1962. The Concord is before the Apollo landing. We can't do that now. That's it's an argument that sounds good to people that really might come into a conversation with a predisposition. And that's fine for a a person who's not who's not maybe wanting to portray themselves as being a scientist. You're not a scientist. AJ's not a scientist. But uh but there's one more thing about the Van Allen belts, which is the other thing that she Candace Owens really got from this guy Bart Cbril. And then I think AJ kind of got this too. So there's this radiation belt that surrounds the Earth and it's called the Van Allen belts. It is supposedly this impenetrable instantly um fatal trajectory. No person can get through it and there's no way to get to the moon without going through these belts, right? I mean that surrounds the Earth. So that's that's like saying there's no way let's say you want to land on Saturn, right? For whatever reason Sean's deciding we're taking the podcast on the road going to Saturn, right? Um Saturn has this ring system around it. It's like a belt around it, right? So, if you're going to land on Saturn, fine. You probably won't take the trajectory that goes right through the ring system, right? Just because there a belt exists, doesn't mean that there's not a symmetrical proc a trajectory that you could go through. It's totally safe, right? The asteroid belt. You think about the asteroid belt. You shoot a spaceship through the asteroid belt, you're going to get destroyed. No, you won't. the if you shot in any direction, you take any trajectory you want and you'll go out to the edge of the solar system, there's almost a 0% chance you'll hit anything. Even though you kind of depict it as an asteroid belt, the Van Allen belts are like that. They're highly concentrated in certain regions. There's two different belts, an inner belt and an outer belt. They mainly go around the equator. The launches to the moon go around the pole. So, there's no danger. There's no exposure to it. We know how to do it. Satellites go through it all the time. And uh anyone who's ever seen aurora knows about it. It's not dangerous. It's not fatal. It's it it happens to be about the equivalent of two or three chest X-rays, which you and I get every year, every couple years, right? So, there's some radiation. It sounds scary. You know, one of the Patreon questions that I answered for my fellow Vigilance Elite Patreon members, uh, was about like how do we make the the concept of nuclear power less, uh, less traumatizing, less kind of scary to the average person? Like, how do we get rid of radiation? So, save that. you have to join Vigilance Elite Patreon, right? I'm trying to sell that my fellow members. Um, so go over there, you'll find out my answer to it. Um, but it but it's sort of it's it's manipulative to say radiation's scary, therefore we didn't go to the moon. >> Let's look at it scientifically. Let's look at the evidence. >> If you spend any time off road like I do, you already know how easy it is to end up second-guessing where you're at. whether you're still on a legal trail or if the route ahead is even worth taking. That's why I've been using OnX Off-Road. It's an off-road navigation app that shows trails, public and private land boundaries, places to camp, and detailed trail info all in one place. And what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data. You can check difficulty ratings, terrain details, trail photos, even recent reports from other riders before you head out there. The other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time because once you lose service out there, your phone is pretty much useless. But with OnX Off-Road, everything still works offline. And if you're riding with a group, their location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map, so nobody gets lost or separated. What I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new. I'm not wasting time backtracking, accidentally ending up on private land, or trying to figure things out once I'm already deep into the trail system. I can plan ahead, know what I'm getting into, and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the whole time. Search OnX Off-Road in the App Store or Google Play. Again, that's OnX Off-Road in the App Store or Google Play. break. We pretty much just wrapped up the moon talk, but I did bring one thing in here cuz you gave me a little [expletive] for saying the NASA guy. So, here is the NASA [cough and clears throat] guy. Go ahead and hit play. Let me know what you think. >> I'd go to the moon in a nancond. The problem is we don't have the technology to do that anymore. We used to, but we uh destroyed that technology and it's a painful process to build it back again. >> When you said that just now. >> All right, >> that sounds stupid to [laughter] you. >> Kind of as I mentioned. >> So, that was what's this guy's name? >> Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut. >> Okay. So, I just I I sounded like an idiot because I didn't know his name or what he was so I had to go find it and show it to you. So, >> that's fine. What what what is your take on that? I'm just curious. >> So, um no disrespect to Don again, more courageous than I'll ever be. You know, launch on top of a 60,000, you know, tons of TNT equivalent and risk your life and do everything that he did. Um so, the one thing that's more complicated than physics is psychology is the human mind. So, I'm not going to speculate what he meant by it. I'll just say, um it's the technology can't be destroyed, right? Technology means a lot of things. It means the physical rockets. Do we have Apollo Saturn 5 boosters anymore? No. So, we don't have those. Do we destroy them? Yeah. I mean, I've got a um uh a 50 cal uh bullet that my [clears throat] brother-in-law Jim Brewer got me. Um and I use it as a bottle opener. Is it Is it destroyed? Yeah, it's destroyed. It has a hole in it and the gunpowder's been taken out and it's not a live round. Right. So, we do we destroy Do we destroy the knowhow on how to do it? Do we destroy >> that's what that's the way I take that is they destroyed the knowhow >> so >> they destroyed the blueprint >> who gives a [expletive] about the [expletive] booster or whatever the rocket or whatever it is they can build it again >> it is true right >> it's like >> I don't think that that's >> that's what everybody's doing with these autonomous systems right now they're building disposable units that can be very cheaply and easily recreated >> you know I have um collect aviation you know kind of antique artifacts I have a uh a B17 uh propeller in in my hanger in San Diego where I keep my my plane and um and this thing is amazing and there's zero chance that we could ever get that to work. We could ever reconstruct a B7, you know, from scrap. There are a couple of B7s flying. I think there's three left or something like that. Again, if if we had an infinite amount of money, infinite amount of money, do you think that Elon or do you think that that our our greatest engineers and scientists couldn't reassemble and build a P38 or a B7? Of course we could. But you have to ask like what's the purpose of that? We we have been there. We have done that. I actually think there's a stronger >> What's the purpose of that? >> What's the purpose of rebuilding? >> What was the purpose of coming to North America again? >> Well, what >> what was the purpose? So we are to settle new [expletive] land to expand an empire to [expletive] what what would the purpose of going to the moon be? I don't know. To claim the [expletive] moon. >> That's true. >> How do we know there's [expletive] up there that we don't need? >> Same with Antarctica. Why do we >> I interviewed this guy Steve Quast and uh helium 3. He's talking about we need helium 3. It's going to be great for energy. >> Can't remember everything about the conversation, but >> you know what I mean? Like why aren't we going up there and getting [expletive] helium 3? Sure. You know, and so I sense that you get frustrated with skeptics >> like me or people that don't believe. But what really is the problem is the scientists are doing a very shitty job of explaining why the [expletive] we haven't been back to the moon. >> To pee brains like [clears throat] me. >> A you're not a pebbrain. B uh my job is to answer questions and and I I I get paid to answer questions, right? And so what a teacher is at heart. I'm a scientist, right? And scientists answer questions. I'm a professor. I'm a teacher. When when they say something like that, there's different reads to saying that. Like, um, you know, uh, where's the car? Um, you know, to your 16-year-old, oh, I destroyed it. It's destroy. Is it destroyed? Like, with is it beyond the laws of physics to reconstruct it? Um, is an astronaut the right person to ask this question about the technology? Do you know the astronauts have almost no knowledge of the engineering and the building of it? Some of them have weren't even pilots, right? So that's why I kind of asked you before, is my lack of domain expertise in the operator, special teams, and the and a aviators, does that preclude me from being able to ask questions that might be uncomfortable for people that believe things that they've seen that I don't believe there's evidence at the scientific evidentiary level for? So that one clip, it doesn't shake me. It doesn't it doesn't frustrate me. It doesn't it doesn't it doesn't make me feel like, oh, well, I really got me. Um, it makes me feel like this guy said something. I don't know the full context, but I know for sure if we had wanted to, there's absolutely no reason not to. Now, why didn't we want to? What was the Cold War? I mean, do we go back and keep bombing Japan and bombing the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union collapsed, right? Part of it was because of the vast military expenditures that we spent during the space race and it was no longer sustainable in the late 1980s and the Berlin fall. Do we fire a shot? No. I mean, not really. I mean, you guys probably know, but once you once you do a thing, do you need to do it again? Like it's not like running a marathon, right? Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile 80 years ago, something like that. People still want to break the four-minute mile, right? They keep getting better and better. Um, will that person the the second person to break the four-minute mile, do you know his name? >> No. But I mean, yes, we do need to do it again. I mean, since the since the beginning of time, it's been expansion of empires. >> The entire [expletive] planet's occupied now, except Antarctica. It's only got 800 people down there. >> Sell you some land there. But you know what I mean? So we're we're And what what is the fastest growing? >> If you took is the is the world overpop populated? I don't think so. I think it's the opposite. I think we're running low on population. If you took every person on Earth, John, >> I guess what I'm saying is it's all been settled. I'm not talking about an overpopulation or anything. I'm talking about expansion of empires, which humanity has been doing since the beginning of time. Right. >> The new expansion is space. >> Absolutely. >> Space. I mean, the the the what I I can't I don't know the correct terminology, but it's been it's been told to me by several people on the show that the the real estate law or whatever the [expletive] you call it in space. >> Space law is the fastest growing it is, >> you know, um sector of of legal or whatever legal >> space force was created, the first branch of the US military created in 50 years, 60 years. So, you can't [clears throat] tell me that, you know, it's not important. And then Steve Quas is saying China is is basically on the moon. I don't know if that's correct or not, but that's what he says. But whatever, somebody's going to [expletive] go there and somebody's going to claim it. Why haven't we been back? It's been how long? 60 years, maybe. >> If we had this conversation, you know, 46 days ago, we could say we haven't been back to the moon in 56 years or whatever. But now we haven't. We've been around the moon. We went farther than we went even during the Apollo mission. >> We're testing this thing out. I always say, you know, someone said to me, "Do you want to be uh go on a SpaceX rocket and go to the moon?" I'm like, "Yeah, I want to be a customer 10,000." Like, I don't want to be the first guy. You know how many aviation accidents occurred during the first 10 years after the Wright brothers? What the fatality rate is nowadays? You get on a plane, the fatality rate is 0.001. The only fatality in America since 9/11 was right after Trump's inauguration. and his helicopter hit a commercial jet. That was like the first mid-air collision that resulted in death. Even Solisberg landed on there. Aviation safety has gotten down to the sub thousandth of a percent level of fatality risk. Space is still about 3% 4%. Now part of that is intrinsic to the environment is the most extreme hostile environment which is also some of the reason why we might not ever get to Mars and colonize Mars. We might not have the ability. We might not have the wherewithal. But in today's dollars to reproduce what we did, just go to the moon, walk around, do the samples if you'd want to do that. Uh it's sort of the analog of what I said before. Go to the South Pole, be the 10th person to get to the South Pole. Uh you have to justify a huge amount of blood and treasure to do that. And I'm sorry, people in America are not willing to see astronauts die. You know, we've gotten to a point where they if they were to have one loss of of of an astronaut, it would set back probably the future lunar colonization by an incredible, you know, maybe decades. And the budget that NASA is dedicating towards this is minuscule. You know, women in this country and many men, I don't know, your audience, no, no, women spend more on lipstick in America than the NASA budget. Tell me how you're going to get to colonize the interplanetary species like Elon wants to do with a budget that's $25 billion. And some say that's way too high. We should be spending on poverty. We should be sending it and you got to be sympathetic to some of these things, right? So the question is one of national will. We had pride in the 1960s. We wanted to beat Russia. We don't really have that with China. We have a very unusual thing with China, our relationship. You know more about the geopolitics than I do. There's an interesting thing that just happened in um didn't really make much media attention. I saw it in the New York Times reported that um China was trying to build radio telescopes in Argentina and optical telescopes there and the US government coordinated with Argentina and froze the parts at the port in China. I'm sorry at the port in Argentina. Like why are they doing that? Well, guess what? When we go up and study the cosmic microwave background, look for the Big Bang and stuff like that, we're on top of these mountains. We're looking for infrared. We're looking for heat. Well, guess what? So are the Chinese. They're probably looking for infrared from a B2 stealth bomber. You can conceal its radar. That's what stealth means. You can cool the exhaust, but you can't defeat the second law of thermodynamics. When an SR71 is cruising at cruise speed, the windshield gets up to 600°. It had to be 3 in of quartz. Well, quartz radiates in the infrared extremely well. You can pick that thing out like a, you know, a pot knife going through butter. So these are not always peaceful, you know, kind of co coordination and scientific uh benefit, but to coordinate something on a budget of $2 billion. I mean, it's it's it's, you know, kind of it's it's almost nothing. And and so I don't think we're going to get there again, but not because it's some it's and that's today when people are excited about the moon and Elon Musk exists. He didn't exist in 1980s or whatever, right? And we had the space shuttle program that was kind of a mixed failure blessing in some ways that Pettit was one of the commanders on. So look, um the disposition has to be like what is the cost benefit analysis? Is it worth sending people there if they have a high risk of dying? You know, would you want to be, you know, let's say it's safe? You know, you're not going to die, but you're going to go on a one-way ticket to Mars and oh, your crew mate's going to be Elon Musk cuz he wants to go there, too. Are you going to do that? You love risk. >> I'm telling you, no risk. You're not going to die. I >> mean, you're you're talking to somebody that fought in three different wars and several different conflicts. Yeah, >> I'd have a huge appetite for risk. >> Yeah, I doubt and I have an even bigger appetite for risk when it advances humanity, advances our country, you know, things like that. And so if I thought that for one second that by reaching the moon with Elon Musk for whatever reason is going to advance humanity and make a [expletive] better life for mine and yours kids, you bet your ass I'm going to be on that flight. So then we have to look at what is there. >> There are a lot of people that are just like me. >> But aren't there Sean? And no, you know, I'm saying this with love and respect, but like you you were ordered to fight in these wars. >> I wasn't ordered to fight. >> I [expletive] joined to fight. >> You joined to fight, right? But once you're there, as I understand it, right, you don't have that much say what you're going to do and which wars you're going to fight in. In other words, do you do you if you knew everything that you knew now, are you going to are you going to say that like this is going to advance humanity? That's what they told us too in Iraq, like this is going to benefit, it's going to protect America, it's going to do all these things. Let's leave aside whether it did or it didn't. But you did it. You signed up for it. Did it did the promise or the expectations did it match, you know, all the hardship that you went through and and your fellow >> was another lie from the US government, >> right? So, what about this? You're saying you're going to do this because of your >> love? If I knew for a fact that it was going to advance humanity and make a better life for mine and yours kids, I would do it. You can bet your ass on it. That's what I said. >> I asked Elon on my podcast. I had him on very briefly. And I said, "Elon, you say you want to go to Mars, you want to live on Mars, you want to die on Mars." I said, "Let's hope it's not on impact. You know, I [laughter] I don't want you to die on impact, buddy. I think you're too important." But um but you have uh 13 to 14 kids. We actually don't know how many kids Elon has. [laughter] It's either very lucky or very unlucky. But um but he has at least 13 kids. I said there would be a day when you'd have to say they're not all going to go. His kid X Jean 72, you know, the one that's named after the Blackbird, right? Has unpronouncable name. Uh he was in the room. I could hear the kid talking on the podcast when I was talking to Elon. His mom was on the podcast. She was as a big space and and recorded it. And I said, "How are you going to say goodbye to another kid?" He lost a kid, you know, which is the most traumatic thing that a human being you and I know. Like, I don't even like to talk about it. Parent loses a child. You can't think about it. Now, you're volunteering to lose 13 children. Like, how are you going to do that? And it was the first time I ever heard of Elon being on a loss for words. You can hear it on my podcast. I have it on my YouTube channel. He couldn't say it. his mom May Musk comes and said, "Oh, let's not talk about that. Let's not talk about sad things." So, it's sad. I know you do it. Again, you have courage that mortal men like me, I I'm telling you, I couldn't do it. But it it's also to me, it would have to be justifiable. And I know as a scientist, I can't know for sure, guaranteed it's going to benefit your kids and my kids. I just can't do it. And as a scientist, I have to say, what could we do with Shawn Ryan, as [expletive] badass as you are, and no doubt that we can't do with Optimus 27 equipped with chat GPT 100? In other words, why send a human being with a wife, kids, family, people that love you, people that depend on you, people that are watching right now whose life and ears you're in right now? I mean, you're going to take that away? Tell me, convince me you can't do that with a robot or AI. We haven't talked about AI. >> What do you want to talk about? I think AI has a lot of things in common with aliens and that it's sort of it is potentially kind of a surrogate replacement secular God that it gives us the chance to do what God did. You know, God made man. Man, Adam in Hebrew means earth. God made man out of earth. We have that impulse. It's tower of babel. We have that same urge, that same desire, that same craving to be as gods. That's why, look, I don't read the Bible as a science book. Sorry. You know, I don't look at it, where's the um hydrogen's 30 secondond wave fun. It's not in there. It's not what it's supposed to do. I don't read Avi Loe's books to learn about how to be a better member of my community and a better husband. They're different purposes, When you look at that book though, the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament, you look at what they are designed to do in the time that they were designed to do it and are still relevant in this age. You know, I always joke, I wish I I'll have God's book sales, you know, like 1% of God's book sales in in 3,000 years. There's no book like that, Sean. You can't tell me there's not something quasi divine, even if you don't believe >> something that's lasted for 32 centuries that's as applicable to my daily life right now. I read the Bible. I read Jesus. I read the New Testament. I read every day stoics. I read it all. Why not? Why wouldn't you? I read Shakespeare. I read Stephen Hawking. I don't care. I'll learn from anybody. When you look at that book, what comes out is the flawed nature of human beings wanting to become gods. Frustrated, fighting with God, building a tower to reach up to the sky, not to learn what God knows, but to fight against God, to show how great we are, because we built this tower. We don't need your freaking mountain. We can do it ourselves. We build mausoleiums and pyramids and all these things. What is it supposed to do? It's meant really, there's a book by Ernest Becker. It's called The Denial of Death. And Ernest Becker claims that the human being has one major fear and he spends his whole life attempting to overcome that fear and that's that he's going to die. The word homo sapien means man who knows. What does he know? We're the only creatures that exist that know we have a death date. >> Yes. Elephants will get together and they'll look around and when one dies they'll all cry and I don't understand. They don't know when they're four years old that they're going to die. My daughter asked me the other day like, "You're you're are you going to die before me?" I said, "I hope so." I was like in tears. We know at a young age we're going to die. That's a good thing. But since biblical time, since early man, we have struggled with this desire to overcome that limitation to become gods ourselves, to extend our lives both in lifespan, which is great, and in sort of the power, the omnipotence of the human, which means augmentation, building silicon brains that live outside of us. robotic brain, robotic bodies, cryogenic suspension, longevity, maybe escape velocity as Kershw calls it. You know, he claims that a certain point in three, four, five years, it keeps getting pushed back like disclosure. Uh that we'll reach >> we'll reach longevity escape velocity, which means for every year you live, you'll live another 1.1 years or something like that. Once you hit that, you can live forever. >> Would you live forever? >> Not by myself. I wouldn't want to be the only one. And it's it's so complex, but but look at the urge. What's the urge? Who was the only man that you believe did have a life after death? Anyone else but Jesus? Do you think anyone else besides Jesus? We have an urge to be like Jesus, to live forever, to resurrect ourselves, to extend ourselves forever. What about >> Yeah, everybody. I mean, I can't say everybody, but a lot of people are trying to build a legacy. They want to be remembered. They want exactly >> they're there they're there >> they have heirlooms they want pass down items books >> denial of death we want something that lives beyond us >> in the Holocaust Victor Frankle >> you're making you're making writing death letters making videos for your kids you know what I mean so they remember you interviewing your parents >> that's right >> you know so that >> writing about your kids their kids and their kids and everyone down the line knows who they were to keep pressing you got to write your memoir when the time is right. Look, you can write Obama has four memoirs. You could do it. He wrote four autobiographies. You can do yours now. Don't put off to the tomorrow. You know what? Alfred Nobel, incredible human being, had no kids, no wife. He wrote his will a year before he died. There's a saying in the Talmud, write your will the day before you die. Why? Because you don't know when you're going to die. God forbid you should live to 120. I will say to you, but we don't know. We don't know how much capacity we'll have. Some law could change, something could happen, right? Don't put it off. You were saying it's not time yet. >> What? Writing a book? >> I just I'm just not that into myself. >> It's not about you again. Sean, I hand you your great greatgrandfather's memoir. I said, Sean, I found it. I did some research. Italy. I don't know where. Found it. And I I got it. Cost me a lot of money. Sean, you know, I could give it to you, but would you pay for it? How much would you pay for that? Your grandmother. I don't care who it is. Sean, someday you're you are that person. First of all, you're that person to 6 million, 500,000 people, whatever you people want to know. And it doesn't mean you reveal everything. I don't tell people personal everything in person. This is my autobiography. It's my first autobiography. Maybe it's my last. I don't know. I want to write more. Maybe I will. I think I have one more book left in me. That's the way I feel. Just honestly, my energy, my age, my commitments, my family, right? But this is a gift. It's not for you. Don't think about it for you like, "Oh, what am I I don't want to." Okay. So, I bet you've done a lot of things you didn't want to do in your life. >> I mean, my thoughts are all there. You know what I mean? The way I think, what I believe in, what I don't like, what I >> Where in the podcast episodes here, man. >> Where? >> It's in this. >> Sean is I love you and I love your show and I've gone back and listened to so many episodes. I'm not going to go back to episode 45 to hear what you said to the that incredible guy. Well, whatever the the other sniper guy or what like and there's there's jewels in there. And I'm not saying to write a book about it. >> What's up? >> It's all in there. >> It's all there. >> I'm not asking my kids to I'm not asking anybody to. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. But you [clears throat] also think this is going to be this is going to be it or there's another chapter in your life. There's more chapters. >> It's like I told you out there, you know, >> we were talking about you brought up the Sabbath again and you're like, you got to take a day off and what are you going to do? Just keep being a big podcast? Then I said, "This isn't the only [expletive] thing I've done in my life." A lot of these guys, this is the only thing they've ever done, right? >> This is not the only thing I've ever done. I was a SEAL, a CA contractor, taught tactics. Like, I've done a lot of >> Your husband. Yeah. A lot of the guys I make fun of. I love these guys. I've been on all their shows. No wife, no kids, and you know, maybe that's why they're so happy and they're they're loving the but to me, the fullness of the life experience, you got to have kids. You got to have a wife. You got to have someone that you commit to and that you're selfless for. Yeah, you did that with your country and that's that is so heroic. But when you sacrifice for one woman or for your kids, you know, people ask me, "What's the meaning of life?" You know what? You're a cosmologist. You study the universe and they always want to know what's what do you think is the meaning of life? I say for me it's it's an easy recipe. First of all, you got to find a partner. And I even have a a nerd, right? So, I had a mathematical algorithm to find my wife. Okay. >> Wait a minute. You had a you had a mathematical algorithm to find your I got to hear this [expletive] >> what does that even mean? >> It means you take metrics. You know what you manage you measure or what you measure you manage, right? So, I kept records, you know, just like dates and people's personalities and things like that. Um, not like, you know, like this one, you know, she had a freckle on her, but that wasn't it. Here's the algorithm in simple terms. You should date, and there is mathematical science to back this up, by the way. you should date and you know for some period of time once you're ready and you're like and no one's ever ready by the way like were you ready to get married and like commit to one woman that you're the only woman you're ever going to be with physically intimately build a family no one's ever ready for that no one's ever ready for kids no one's ever ready probably for combat like you can't be ready for it right these are things that like make us uniquely human but for me I said keep date for some period of time keep a list of women and you may date for women you know and I'm sorry I know you've got women that listen I'm just going to speak for my person I'm going to talk only about women, but it applies to women looking for men. Date somebody until you find the following person. If I had a daughter with this woman, would I be okay if my daughter turned out to be like this woman? Okay, so let's say I dated I dated a cheerleader. I dated someone, you know, like just models. I've dated and wonderful people, whatever. I dated people that were Jewish, people that were Catholic, people that were Muslim, even I date a whole bunch of people, right? And then some I dated for selfish reasons, right? She's hot, you know? She's she's so fun. Like, we just did the coolest things together, whatever. Like, mostly because she was hot. Okay. I have a lot of weaknesses, Sean, but but that was one of them. And but I said, I don't know. Let's say let's just take it to the extreme like you're dating some like playboy playmate. I shouldn't say one of my friends is a playboy play. Uh you're dating some you know just super hot smoking hot Instagram model, right? [snorts] Do you want your daughter to turn out like that Instagram model? Do you want her necessarily? Maybe she's a wonderful person, but but I'm just saying that one by that one dimension, I didn't want my daughter to be like these people, right? Until I met my wife and I said, "God, if I had a daughter, I would I would get every gun in here and I would protect this daughter if she's anything like my beautiful wife. I would do anything. She's such that she is with a a piece of human debris like me, you know, that she is willing to be with me and save my life and and give me life and give me children. I I do anything. I found her. I knew it when I found her, but only because I had a statistical sample, you know, for a few dec, you know, I didn't get married until I was in my, you know, mid late 30s. Um, and that's then I knew that's the algorithm. Stop dating when you meet the girl whose daughter you would want to be your daughter. Not this not the super rich, you know, person. Not the super wealthy or smarter than no famous. No, someone that you want your daughter to be like. That's how I stop. That's a Keing algorithm. >> It's a good algorithm. >> Served me well. >> Good for you. So, and then as far as kids go, you know, no one's ever >> cheerleader didn't work out, huh? >> That's [laughter] [gasps] Yeah, that's right. Well, my wife's not going to watch this. Um, but people talk about, look, look, what what's the meaning of life? Like, how do you live your life? I'm sure you've been happy at different points. I'm sure you've been low at different points. Like, happiness is what's called in physics an unstable equilibrium point. Right? Technically, if I have a pencil, here's my You didn't ask me about my professor EDC gear. Okay, here's my EDC as a professor. It's the only thing I could get on TSA, right? It's a tactical pen. And I could theoretically balance this on its point. Okay. Um, you know, I [clears throat] had too much coffee, uh, too little gummy bears, but but it could balance on its point, right? That's unstable equilibrium. The lightest pertabbation, a butterfly flapping its wings will knock this thing over far away, right? So it's in equilibrium means it's stable but it's unstable to fall over. Happiness in life is like that. You can be in a state of happiness and you can be in a state of contentment and flourishing but it will never last because of a concept called entropy. Entropy is an irrevocable, irreversible tendency for the universe to chaotically and ultimately to destroy both information and and stasis and equilibrium. And here's a here's an example I like to give. Right now, let's say your happiness is X, right? This, you know, incredible everything you've done. I don't know about your personal life, but but I assume it's it's it's fantastic. I says, "Sean, I want to double your happiness right [snorts] now. What would I have to do if I gave you x 2x money, 2x podcast downloads, 2x Instagram? Would you be 2x happy? You'd be happier?" Maybe, but would you be 2x Say again. >> Would you be? >> I'm asking you. >> Probably not. >> No. You'd be Would you be any happier? >> I doubt it. >> If you had twice as much money as you have right now, think about all you could do differently. I'm, you know, >> I just remember like um Monty Burns in uh in the Simpsons. He's the, you know, the billionaire, greedy billionaire guy. And Homer Simpson one day. >> I watched this I saw this meme the other day. >> Maybe not a meme, a cartoon. >> And it was this little kid fishing and he just had the little cloud, the thought cloud coming out of his head and what he wanted, you know what? Whatever he wanted, he wanted a [expletive] new car. And then he's in his new car and you see the thought cloud coming out of his head and it's what he wants now. And now he wants a plane. Yep. And then he gets the plane and there's a it's what [clears throat] he wants next and then the next thing is he's dead. >> He just never stopped wanting. >> Never. >> And that's what I've noticed with the money. The more money you make, the more wants, the more you're owned by your [expletive] possessions. It's called the hedonic. More more. >> Yeah. You never get off it. >> And uh you know, I feel like I've learned this very early in my journey. >> You know, I think a lot of people it takes a lot longer and a lot more money to learn that lesson. But no, I don't think money is going to bring me more happiness. I don't think more subscribers, more viewers, more downloads, more better rankings. Like it's just >> right. So that's >> I mean the fun is the climb up. >> To me. >> Yeah. No >> climb up. It was really [expletive] cool doing it. Still is. I love doing this. I love having this conversation with you. I am also a competitive [expletive] And once I hit number one for the first time, knowing I'm not going to stay there because Rogan's the [expletive] king and he always will be. >> But it always will be. We'll talk about that. >> And he of course he always will be. >> I don't think so. >> I mean, he he he I do, but I don't think anybody can take that away from him. Somebody will outdo him eventually. >> I think this guy Steven Bartlett, >> he was the pioneer. >> He is the pioneer. He is the goat. But the whole point, at least in my field, if I if this book is still relevant in a hundred years, I'll be a failure. You know why? Because it means science will have stagnated. It means that >> No, but if somebody builds off that book for the next hundred years, >> absolutely everyone still [expletive] set the trend. You're the king of it. >> And Joe Rogan is the [expletive] king of podcasting. Everybody else that came after him, no matter what they do, it was built off the Joe Rogan [expletive] podcast one way or another. Long form discussion >> was built off of him. >> But will he always be number one? >> Will he always be number one? No. Obviously won't be because he's a mortal human being. >> And eventually he will get tired of this >> Somebody else will reinvent change the game. >> But >> it's like Babe Ruth. Everybody still knows who the [expletive] Babe Ruth is, right? >> You know, and so anyways, what I was getting at is no, I don't think any of that, none of that [expletive] is going to bring more happiness. It will drive your ego through the [expletive] roof. >> And will probably ruin you as a person >> 100% >> with that amount of success and money, >> but it's not going to bring more happiness. In fact, Jim Carrey has a really good quote. I wish everybody could be rich and famous so they know that's not the answer. >> Y but here's where I want to go with that. Back to my pen sticking on its its tip. It's unstable, right? So what you describe is called the hedonic treadmill. Hedonism is like so seeking pleasure, happiness, whatever, wellness, well-being, flourishing. It's a treadmill because it never stops. You just keep running on it. Someone's always going to have more followers, more money, more women, more guns, more whatever, right? That's going to get to a point more guns. I'm not so sure about. But um but in any case, but let me ask you this. I said, "Could I double your happiness?" You said, "Absolutely not. Would you crazy?" You said, "Could I increase your happiness?" You're the first person I ever talk asked that particular question. They said, "No, you couldn't increase my happiness by even a bit." Um and I respect that. I'm not I'm not uh disputing that whatsoever. >> I said with money. >> With money. Okay. Or fame or [expletive] >> Is there anything material? Not Not God. Not >> I'll tell you how you can increase my happiness. It's going to sound like a [expletive] punishment. You take all my social media away. You take my phone away. You take my [expletive] >> I already freaking prescribed that to you on Saturday. >> And you Sunday Sunday. >> And you take my occupation away and force me to be with my [expletive] family where we don't have to worry about money, how we're going to eat, how we're going to get shelter, how we're going to [expletive] drink water, and that will create a happy. >> Will you try for me? Will you try for me? I know we don't know each other, but will you try one day? >> Now, think how [expletive] easy it is. I don't I'm sure you've done very well. You almost won the [expletive] Nobel Prize, right? So, you've got to be financially stable at least. I'm not saying clear. >> And so, and so you have the option right now. You could throw it all away knowing that you would probably be a happier [expletive] person, but you're not going to do it. I I I can't throw it all away, but once a week, I can throw it away. Once a week, I could see you not on the phone. I could see you not on Instagram. I could see you not doing podcasts. I could see you going to church. I could see you doing with your family, your friends, your community. Heck, you can drive. Uh, you know, I'm not allowed to drive on Saturdays. I'm not allowed to use the phone. I'm not saying don't use don't use your phone to call somebody. I'm just saying disconnect from the world. The reason is, and it's very beautiful and I think it applies to you. The commandment in Hebrew and the fourth commandment, which is you shall honor the Sabbath, right? It doesn't just say you should uh take off on Sunday or Saturday and kind of chill out, watch the football game. No, no, no. says, it says six days you must work in order that seventh day is a Sabbath, a rest day for God, Hashem. Meaning that the purpose of the week is you must earn your freaking money. The Torah, the the the Bible's very explicit. If you don't work, you don't eat. You can't rely on a miracle. Even other people, it's considered, you know, this isn't good to rely on other people that they're just going to provide for you. No, you have to do it. But if you work 7 days a week, I know billionaires. I I know superstars, you know, millions of Instagram, whatever. They work 24/7. I said to them, I told Steven Bartland on his podcast. I said, "You're so successful. You work seven days a week. Aren't you just a slave?" Like, you may it may be to a good good, you know, outcome. You're doing great. If I could buy a stock option on anybody, he's 32, handsome, fit, great guy, great friends, one has 100 people. His podcast is like, you know, it's almost as almost as big as this, okay? And that's all he does. And I'm like, Stephen, take it from me. I'm an older man. You got to find a woman. You got to find a life. You got to make a family. And you got to take time off. If you cannot do that, you are a slave. You're a rich slave. I'm a slave, Sean. I'd love to be on on doing science every day of the week. I could do podcast every day of the week. It's it's a challenge for me to turn it off. I don't like doing it. >> How do you turn it off? >> How do I turn it off? >> When you celebrate the Sabbath? >> Are you telling me that none of your science is in your head? >> That's not the issue. Science is in your head cuz science is a vehicle to God. >> It's, >> you know what I mean? Your work. >> I'm not I don't work on papers. I I told you. >> But it's in your head. that not are you really able to >> God is not a thought policeman. God is not like Kim Jong-un and you know he's not he's not policing your thoughts, right? So he he doesn't care if you're doing that. He cares if you're on a podcast with someone you respect the hell out of and and you did that and you're not you're not in in the temple or you're not with your kids and you're not with your wife and and you're and you're kind of but he doesn't need it for him. God doesn't do this for for he's doing it for you. You know, every six years in the in in the Old Testament, you're supposed to let the land layow and not reap every year. How'd they eat? So, you can go back and dispute and talk about the sign, whatever. You had to let the land every seven years and people would go free. The slaves would go free. If you had a slave, you'll let them go free every 49 years. You know the word jubilee that comes from Hebrew. It's yo, jubil. It's a jubilee. Every 50 years, everybody would get their land back. Every slave would go free throughout the land. It's on the liberty bill. It's on the freaking US Liberty Bell. It says, "You shall you shall declare freedom throughout the land and liberty to all its inhabitants." We get that from the Torah, from the old uh the Old Testament. And it says, "Freedom is is the is not just that you do whatever you want. It's that you're doing something actively in pursuit of something bigger than yourself." And I'm by the way, I think you do this, you just don't know it. So the only thing I'm saying is it's like an easy prescription from this non-medical doctor. Okay? But it's the decoupling from the world and not I don't care if somebody's tweeting about me because I said something about avi and I don't give a flying f. I could care less. I'm not checking it. I'm not seeing oh I got this banger tweet. I got to get it out there. I got I don't care. It can wait. You know why? This comes back to the happiness thing. I told you and you agree and you you had this eloquent way of saying it like sorry Brian like Elon Musk comes in here and drops a billion dollars on you'd be come on you'd be a little happy but you wouldn't be twice as happy. You'll be 10 times as happy. But Sean, >> I'd be happy in the moment. >> In the moment. >> But that's not happiness. >> But then it goes away. >> That goes away. But here's the here's the sick thing about life. I can't make you happier guaranteed. Well, I can make you unhappier guaranteed. Right? >> This is entropy. Entropy is the concept of disorder, of chaos, of randomness. The things that make us happy, organization, structure, family, production, work. It's organized. It's structure. The natural order of the universe is towards disorder and chaos. We must control it by applying energy to reduce entropy. >> I mean happiness is a choice. >> Say more. Say more. Someone who's unhappy, depressed, they can't just choose it. Sometimes they need medication or situ job change or something like that. Right? It's partially could be a choice. But unhappiness, >> you have to choose when you wake up if you're going to be pissed off or if you're going to be happy. Right. >> Yeah. If you're healthy, Yeah. But anyone who has kids, this is getting back to my meaning of life and how I find me. Anyone who has kids, I don't even say it, but I'm not going I'm going to say I can't make you a little bit happier, but I can make somebody infinitely unhappy. I'm not saying I'm going to do it. I'm just saying they could become infinite. I know billionaires Sean have lost kids. Okay. You think they wouldn't trade all their billions, billions and billions more be poverty poppers living in the gutter to have their kids back, their sons back? Okay, so you can make someone infinitely unhappy, but you can only make them finitely happy. That's entropy. What does that tell you? Do the things in life that if they got taken away would devastate you. It sounds depressing as you know what, but that's what I think about. I want to construct order. I want to reduce entropy. I want to create things, build things. Not for my ego, not for my bank account, but for for the goodness, for the benefit it brings to the world in future. I think that's what the meaning of life is. I mean, I'm a scientist. Maybe maybe that doesn't apply to everybody. I'm sure a lot of people be happy with seven Instagram models and a billion bucks, but [laughter] but maybe not. So, and again, you look at the Torah, you look at the Bible, anyone who had multiple wives, they they were some of the most unhappy people that you'll ever know about. So, guys out there, be careful what you wish for. >> I got a hot question for you. Ready? >> Yeah. Go for it. >> Here we go. >> Coming in hot. Back in 1950, Enrico Fermy, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, was having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos when he asked a question that still unsettles science today. Where is everybody? The universe is enormous. It's ancient. And based on the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems like life should exist somewhere else. Yet so far we have no confirmed signal, no confirmed contact, and no undeniable evidence that another intelligent civilization is out there. Can you break down what Fermy Paradox is? >> Yeah. One of the people he said that to was an old friend of mine who's deceased now named Herby York. He's one of the founders of UC San Diego. I miss him a lot. He was a great person. built the atomic bomb and then spent many years as many warriors do advocating for peace afterwards. No one knows more about wanting peace and the goodness of peace, I guess, than you who fight the wars, right? So, he helped develop the atomic bomb. And he was at that lunch with Enrio Fermy when he posed this question. Well, you know, kind of a side quest as they're building the atomic bomb, right? So, the the concept is is that the universe is vast, but let's just restrict ourselves to the galaxy. Our galaxies few hundred thou maybe 100,000 light years across meaning light takes 100,000 years to get from one edge of the galaxy to the other edge. There's about a 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There's about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's 100 billion squared stars in the observable universe. Each one with 10 planets call it around it. You get numbers that are incomprehensible. A million million million million planets in the observable universe. 10 to the 24th planets, right? So, it just becomes crazy. And then you think, well, if only 1% of them have life on it, that's 10 to the 22nd power. You know, it's an insane number. So, the universe is huge. There's a lot of opportunities for life for planets. And yet, as you say, we have no evidence that rises above scientific truth or evidentary standards. And this is going back 84 years when he said this in Los Alamos, >> So, this kind of shows you that back then they didn't think they had evidence. This was right before Roswell by the way and then nowadays we don't we don't feel like consequential evidence exists at the level of scientific proof right uh and even those with the most invested in it like Avi will not say as he didn't tell you he didn't say we have definitive proof right he he said he's a careful scientist right he said we don't have evidence yet and that's fine does that mean they don't exist absolutely not it could exist and there's many different reasons that could explain why we don't see what we don't see some of them come down to uh reasons for example, that that have to do with there's an equation called the Drake equation. Uh radio an astronomer in the 60s said, "Let's calculate how many different life forms there could be in the universe and what it would take for us to know that they're there." Okay, so what how many people are there and it's or how many civilizations are there that we could communicate with? In other words, if there's slime mold, if there's like bacteria, you know, on a planet that's uh, you know, one four light years away, right? 10 year 10 four light, whatever you want, right? We would never know they exist because they don't have technology to broadcast radio waves and light waves for us to see or nutrino tractor beams or gravitational wave. They don't have technology, right? So, it's this how do we know how many technologically advanced civilizations there are in order for us to be able to detect them? Otherwise, we can't detect them, right? We're not going to the other star systems. The fastest thing that humans have ever made, Voyager, it's traveled the farthest away from Earth. It's one light day from the Earth. It was launched 55 years ago before I was born. And in that sense, it's in, you know, that that thing is the farthest we've ever gone. It's only one light day. The nearest star is four light years away. It's thousands of times uh closer than and so it effectively we we will not be able to find aliens unless they send us information or come and visit us. So if if you say that they haven't if Fermy is saying they haven't we don't have evidence that has to be some explanation for them. Otherwise you could say one op one possibility is they don't exist. Now they might not exist now but it doesn't mean that they didn't exist in the past. Right now, there's information from the 1936 Olympics that's getting out that's about 90 light years away from us. That was the first time humans ever transmitted a globally televised signal, a radio wave that could travel around the world and go into outer space by accident, leak into outer space, right? That is now traveling at the speed of light uh 90 light years away from us. There's approximately, you know, maybe a thousand stars that live within a 90 lightyear radius of the planet Earth, right? Each one of them might have tens of planets or something around them. That amount of information for them to know about us, that's just for them to know about us. That's not to send a return signal. That would be twice that would be 200 years from now, right? So, so the the quickest we could ever send something is it goes out at the speed of light, reaches a destination, and comes back to us. That light signal left a 100 years ago, it's gone almost 100 light years away. For us to hear back from them, we heard you, you exist. That'll take another hundred years. Does that make sense? >> Mhm. So there's a sphere. It's a radius 100 lighty years call thousand stars plus or minus in them and there's maybe 10,000 planets in those. So right now all we could say is we don't we don't know. There could be stars that are half that distance, 50 lighty years away. Maybe there's 300 of those and there's 3,000 planets on them. So we all we can say is that volume of space knows about us and could have returned a signal to us since we started broadcasting information. We don't have any evidence of that. Not for people not looking, but that is [laughter] such a tiny microscopic number. That's like um that's like a shot glass out of the Pacific Ocean in terms of how much the vastness of the universe is. So, one thing is that space is very big and the speed of light is very slow, even though it's the fastest speed you could possibly travel at. Another solution that people have come up with is that there's lots of life in the universe. Um, but they tend to not live very long because they have these things called wars and they do battle among themselves. And you see this at every level of speciation from bacteria to Beethoven. I mean to us, right? I mean, I'll tell you, bacteria have military campaigns against enemy bacteria cultures. They secrete toxins that preclude other bacteria. They spend their biological resources to create bacterological trenches, warfare to prevent other bacteria from encroaching on their precious, you know, goo that they're eating. every level of and that's the most primitive life that we know about all the way up to the most advanced life we know about namely us. So maybe they only live so long. Maybe there's a paper I read about recently. Uh my friend Sabina Hosenfelder made a video about it. Elon Musk is tweeting about it. Um and it is uh I think Avi Lo is involved in some way or other. Um it shows there might be an average lifetime of a civilization in order for us not to have seen anybody of about 5,000 years. >> Wow. which is like barely back to the pyramids, right? >> [expletive] some say you you hit this this filter and then you get filtered out. The question is, are we past the filter? We're not yet there. So, there's a lot of explanations. Another one that I like is um I take my kids to the San Diego Zoo and when I take them there, there's a gorilla exhibit and um I love the gorillas, but it says on the on the sign it says, "Don't knock on the glass. It really bothers them." you know, it just makes them anxious. So, don't do that. Of course, my kids do that, right? Um and then they get kicked out. But, um but what what if you know, you went instead of the San Diego Zoo, we go to the Wild Animal Park. Then, you're really far away from the gorillas. You're not going to knock on the glass. You don't even need glass. You're really far away. You observe them at a distance. Maybe there are things lurking observing us at a distance. But as interstellar species that has the ability to come here or to sense our activity and our presence has advanced technology, what is it that we're going to learn from? I mean, have we learned that much besides about the species of gorillas and bacteria and what we learn about those, but like I always say, um, you know, ornithologists study birds, right? But an ornithologist needs a bird a lot more than the birds need the ornithologist, right? Birds don't care if you study them or not, right? So, they might not be interested in us. We might not be able to do anything for the them. We might not provide any resources. They're going to eat us. And that's why I'm skeptical of these things. I don't know if you heard about cattle mutilation and and like abductions and things like that, near-death experiences. Um, there's only one near-death experience that I believe in, by the way. Um, 100% documented fact. Um, which has to do with Alfred Nobel. Do you know the story? You know who Alfred Nobel was? Um, he invented dynamite. So, he was one of the richest people in the world, kind of like Elon Musk or Tesla of uh the 1800s and uh he was uh one of the richest people in all of Europe and all of the world. And his um his family was involved with making uh sea mines for the uh Russian and Crimean uh battle war of 1840, something like that. And so they were arms dealers, Alfred Nobel and his father Emanuel. And uh they were trying to invent ways to make their methodology more lethal. And uh one of Alfred's brothers, his baby brother Emil started to play around with nitroglycerin. And nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable. And one day he was in the lack of the family laboratory and he dropped it on the floor and it blew up like enormous explosion vaporized him and six other pe five other people. Six people killed instantly. And this devastated his father Emanuel Nobel and Al Alfred as well. And Emanuel um ended up basically getting committed to the sanatorium and then he died 8 years to the day of his son. His heart was broken. He had a stroke and just devastated him. And Alfred set out to do something to make that never happen again. And he took nitroglycerin and he mixed it with a type of basically like clay. It's called dietimmacous earth. and he mixed it together like chalk or clay with nitroglycerin and it made it stable so you could drop it and that became known as dynamite. Dynamite in Greek means powerful rock. Um and he became one of the richest people in the world based on that invention. But it was also used for munitions and they sold in their arms factory. And reportedly he had indirectly been responsible for the deaths of more people than any person in human history. So much so that in 1888, he's walking around Paris and he sees a headline in the Parisian newspaper and it says, "Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death, is dead. The man who committed no benefit to humanity and killed more people than any other person in human history is dead." Now, now he's reading this, so he knows it's not him. Turns out it was his older brother, Levig, who died. Um and so you know he was kind of sad about that but it was really a wakeup call for him. He had no wife. He had no kids and he decided at that point if he died then that's the way the world was going to remember him like um like George Bailey in a wonderful life right you know he sees the ghost of Christmas present ghost of Christmas past and Scrooge same exact story in a Christmas Carol he got a glimpse of what his own death would be like and he said I'm going to change my life from now on I don't know how much longer I have to live he took this huge fortune and he gave 99% of it to the Nobel Prize and he established it and its goal was to do what this newspaper said he didn't do which is to make the b greatest benefit to mankind. So he created a prize for peace, for chemistry, for medicine, uh for literature and um uh for physics. How could I forget physics? And these things have had tremendous benefit. The first Nobel prize ever given was uh was in physics was for the X-ray. >> The X-ray machine which is you know probably pulled bullets out of people that you know like it's had so much benefit for diagnostic purposes. I had a toothache. They pull you the the X-rays benefited humankind and it's a physics invention. It's a technology invention. And then the Nobel Peace Prize has a very checkered past. One of my friends, Uni Tertini, wrote a book about how you know it's gone to like Yaser Arafat and terrorists and and uh you know all sorts of assorted characters. Obama won it after being in office for like nine days. Um so it's been politicized. uh but uh it still has this noblele e goal of benefiting all of mankind through science through peace and and I think it's a wonderful thing and it wouldn't have happened without this near-death experience that Alfred Nobel encountered. So that's the only near-death experience I believe. I don't know you might have other stories. >> Well, Brian, we're wrapping up the interview here. Last question. Who would you recommend for the show? >> For this show? Oh, that's easy. I don't know. Uh, if the internet could handle it, though. Uh, Eric Weinstein. >> Eric Weinstein. >> Eric Weinstein is uh one of the one of the foremost kind of um intellect public intellectuals. He's he's created concepts and and he's he's incredibly um he's incredibly quotable. He's incredibly courageous. Um he's incredibly he gets a lot of hate because people he's so outspoken and I have the distinction of being the only person that ever interviews him that pushes back on him and sometimes we get fight like brothers and uh but we have a lot of respect for each other and I think you could you could you could handle him and I think that combination his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from aliens theoretical physics um artificial intelligence, economics, and then his um very very interesting perspective on the Epstein. He met Epstein. Epste knew about Eric's research, maybe partially some weird Harvard connection where Epstein had an office and a and and a workspace and he wasn't a professor. He wasn't a PhD. And Eric understands a lot more about Epstein than I think most people do because he saw it from the financial component, the physics component, the Harvard, the institutional, all these different perspectives. And he's just he's so quotable, um, imaginative, and he's such a good spirit. We call him mench. He's a mench that you and him together, I think, would break the internet line open. >> I'll text him. >> I've never met him. >> I will. You have his number? >> I do have his number. get in touch with him. I think >> he be he's the one. No question. >> Well, thank you, Brian. Fascinating conversation. [music] No matter where you're watching the Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcast and Spotify and leave us a