Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating

25:22Okay, I don't know why, but that's what she did. So she's a, she likes data. She's got the goal. How do you, okay, everybody's statistics. How do you reduce variability, increase sample size? Yes, right. Less is a systematic error. And that's what I want to talk to you about later when it comes to the eye and other things. You go to CVS, you buy a pregnancy test and you know, she's on their gold plan program. Whatever she got the gold card from CVS because she's on so many times. But when you go there, they know you're getting a pregnancy test. So exactly nine months later, we start getting advertisements for pamper's and for diapers and for diaper creams and wives and stuff.

25:56Because they know this. They're hedging even without knowing the results of the test. What's the downside for them? Well, she buys five tests. They're probably assuming something very different than if she bought one test. Anyway, so the temperature, right? So if you're just dating during summertime versus wintertime, that obviously will have some kind of an effect. I mean, you can tell me a lot more than that. But more than that, you hinted at this. And I'm not going to make you do any math surrounding pregnancy. But God forbid. I sympathize. I put out the question. I was talking fast with the irony of that one.

26:28I'll just say for the record. I'm just blushing. The irony of that one is that we publish numerous times for my lab cumulative probability. And I teach this stuff. So it's oftentimes when you're going fast with that one, I totally deserved it. I love it. Whatever shades of red I might turn to. That's what a good scientist does. But they actually think that the first astronomers were women. Think about it because they noticed this correlation. What's their monthly cycle? Their menstrual cycle is exactly 29 and a half days, which is actually the lunar cycle down to almost a minute. It's insane, right?

27:02That they would have looked up and noticed this renewal and diminishing of the moon. And that there's actually evidence. Now they weren't professional astronomers until, you know, actually the first professional female astronomer was until like the 1700s in England. Where she was recognized for using telescopes and so forth. But, but no, they were very keen on that. And they were, they were probably dialed into that and what that portended as you alluded to for the future of their child. I mean, this is a huge biological investment. Men didn't have, don't have that. So actually we are less symmetrical.

27:31You know this than women, right? We have our testes or different links or whatever. I guess normal, normal men at least, but women are more symmetrical. But they're actually, they have an extra timekeeping device that men, we can't relate to that. Their menstrual cycle. Yeah, some women are keenly aware of the ovulation event. They will describe it as a feeling as if it's breaking off and migrating within them. And I have every reason to believe them. Earlier you asked, and I know this will get some people to ears pricked up. Whether or not when a child is born with respect to the seasonal cycle, it impacts that child.

28:04There are a lot of data around this. It depends on the environment in which one lives. So closer to the equator, it's a very different situation. Equal days all day long. There were some data and I'd love to get an update on this. So somebody knows they can put in the comments that, you know, the schizophrenia was far more prevalent as you move away from the equator. And then there was a guy at Caltechie has since passed, but had some interesting data about mothers who contracted influenza during a certain phase of the second trimester, a heightened probability for schizophrenia offspring. But big, big caveat here.

28:45None of it was causal, of course. And then there are all sorts of interesting things about, you know, placental effects. And so there's, it's a multi variable. And we know that because identical twins, even that share the same Chorionic sac, one can be schizophrenia and the other know, although there is a higher concordance than it say they're different. They're a dichorionic, two different sacs. So, but time of birth relative to the seasons, seasons correlating, of course, with abundance or lack of food, abundance or lack of various infectious diseases, influenza in particular. These things are relevant.

29:18But we'd have to make a real big stretch to then include the effects of the planet Jupiter, which is the biggest planet and is most of the mass of our solar system outside of the sun. And then it would be clear, and you could do this test with identical twins and that are identical for fraternal twins, twins that are raised with the same pairing, or some are separated at birth and they turn out very much more similarly when they're identical twins. So, such as that genetics play more of a role than we like to think that genes are powerful. They are. I realize this is a bit politically incorrect to say in certain venues, but genes are extremely powerful.

29:54Yeah, why wouldn't they be? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, nurture matters as well. Right. The genes are immensely powerful. And I think that gives us help. People say, well, we should not be so hotty, we should not be so arrogant. We have what? 50 % of the same chromosomes as a fruit fly. Who are you to be? And I say, do you want better? I think some bonobos have 98 % similarity, but that should give us more sort of treat ourselves and think of ourselves in a way that's more, you know, more elevated, I would say, because we're not that. There's many species of chimpanzees and primates and so there's only one human, you know, homo sapien, which you know, a lot of people don't know the word, you know, homo sapien, which is our species and our genes.

30:38Sapien doesn't mean, it doesn't mean knowledge like science. Ciencia means knowledge. Sapiens means wisdom. And I like to look at the etymology, I'm fascinated by it, but it kind of highlights what we should be doing. And what is it that we are aware of? And I'm curious, have you ever encountered like why are we called, you know, humans that like the wise hominid? And it's because we're the only entity organism that knows it's going to die. Yes, there's some elephants that, you know, before they and one dies and one will take care, it's not the same as like you knew you're going to die when you were a kid.

31:11Very young. And it's that awareness of death and the awareness of how special we are, I think that's what invests life with a lot more meaning. I don't want to get too full of soft. It's time perception. That's exactly what I mean. I'm an expert on happiness sitting here and then Morgan houses an expert on the relationship between psychological happiness and money sitting here. And he described this cartoon, which inevitably makes me chuckle of a guy and his dog sitting by a lake and there's a bubble, you know, sort of the bubble is coming out of the guy's head. And he's thinking about whatever his stock portfolio and things back home, et cetera.

31:44And out of the dogs head is just a mirror image of him sitting with his own. The dogs are very present. But what that also means is that they are not able to perceive their own existence within, within time and time as you said before. We can forecast we that's how we don't have the strongest muscles, the sharpest claws, the biggest teeth, right? What do we have? We have this frontal prefrontal cortex that allows us to do what are called goodunk and our thought experiments. Einstein said to predict the future to model the future, not really predicted. We can't do that. But we can model likely outcomes and we can simulate inner minds what those would be like.

32:19And we're so dependent on that skill that we sometimes confuse, you know, correlation for causation. And as you know, everyone who confuses correlation with causation ends up dying. So it's very dangerous to do that. But the point is the notion of what's called confirmation bias is prevalent in every human being scientist or not. And in fact, as scientists, we have to guard against that more than anybody. Because nothing really feels better than like thinking of a hypothesis, modeling the future and then feeling like you're right. And then you get celebrated and fed and maybe you went a golden medallion with Alfred Nobel's image on it or whatever.

32:56Those kinds of things are very powerful and those kinds of things are also very dangerous. Which is why it appeals to so many more people to think that the celestial orbs play a role in our lives. It's almost like we've reverted to a paganistic existence where we want to believe there's some some force responsible for our fate. When when maybe it's random on I totally agree with you. I'll play devil's advocate for a moment, not for astrology per se, but for instance, there are many species that use magnetoreception. They can sense magnetic fields. I think turtles do this some migrating birds do this and pigeons.

33:31There's even some evidence that within the I believe this is still true. That within the eye of the fly, the fruit fly that there are some magnetoreceptors. So turns out there are some humans that perform better than chance in a magnetoreception perceptual task. This is very surprising to me. It can be trained up somewhat. But I'm sure there are a number of people hearing this that they themselves feel that they can sense magnetic fields. There is a capacity to do that greater than chance in some individuals. It's a very weak capacity. So I think humans love the idea that there is something skills or qualities beyond our reflexive understanding that we all harbor.

34:19This idea that we have superpowers that we just need to tap into. Six sense, right? Six sense or this person as a stroke and suddenly speaking conversational French and therefore neuroplasticities, etc. Or was a prop reception or our colleague on you were at San Diego. I'm from a chandra. Oh, Ramacharya like synesthesia, right? Certainly synesthesia exists. People who will hear a certain key on the piano and immediately evokes the perception of a particular color, not just red, but a particular shade of red in a very consistent way. Now if that was useful for something, maybe it is useful. I mean, I might be unusual cross modal plasticity is what we would call it.

34:56But so could that not be made into an argument? All that means that this is a general feature that we just don't know how to access. But maybe we could go to the gym and mental gym or do something to enhance that. I don't know. Some people do that with like infrared, near infrared wavelengths. Do some kind of training and they claim they can see certain things. The question is how useful is it and then how predictive is it? And I don't think that we can make a case for the predictive elements of the position. As I said, Mars and Mercury being in retrograde as it is now. But the thing that's shocking is that like, look, there's a whole page in almost every newspaper except the excruable New York button.

35:37I'm just kidding. That New York Times does it. It's very interesting. I'll tell you off the recent recent encounter I've had with the New York Times. But but but most newspapers have more, you know, ten hundreds of times more ink written about astrology than astronomy. I mean, it's barely it'll barely be in there. And why is that it's capitalistic society? So people are crave this notion that there's some explanation for the random seeming events that occur in their lives. And that's an urge as ancient as human civilization itself. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1.

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37:25If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. For this month only January 2025, AG1 is giving away 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3K2. It speaks to what I think is one of the core functions of the human brain, which, you know, umbrellas everything we're talking about, which is the human brain is a prediction making machine. And it wants to make predictions on the basis of things that feel reliable. And the ability for us to go, well, confirmation bias, the ability for us to link A and T as opposed to A, B, C and work through things linearly and try and disprove our own hypotheses is much stronger than any desire to work through things systematically unless you're trained as a scientist.

38:19And so it's no surprise to me that people want to understand themselves and understand others in a way that feels at least semi -reliable and to do that in a way where they don't have to run a ton of experiments and hence astrology. I'd like to stay within this vein of thought, but you said something earlier that's been kind of, you know, nagging the back of my brain. You said we have two refracting telescopes in the front of our skull. I often remind people that your retinas that line the back of your eyes like a pie crust are part of your brain, your central nervous system that was literally squeezed out of your skull during the first trimester through a whole genetic program that's very beautiful.

39:01And this might freak you out, but think about it. This is the only portion of your brain that resides outside the cranial vault. Technically still in your skull, but outside the cranial vault gives humans an enormous capacity that they wouldn't have otherwise because what you can make judgeance about space in time, space based on what's next to what, what's far from what and time based on movement of things relative to stationary objects, etc. That we wouldn't otherwise be able to perform. You could sense odors at a distance smoke, etc. But it's a whole other business to have these two telescopes.

39:33Could you explain what you mean by two refracting telescopes because I think that will set the stage nicely for some of our other discussion about optics. Yeah, so I've in love with telescopes since the age of about 12 when I could first afford one to buy one of my own and that really came out of the fact that I recognize the limitations of the human eye. It turned out I was 12 years old, woke up in the middle of the night one night. There was this incredibly bright light in a brighter than these lights here shining into my room. And I was like, where I don't know there's street light outside and this is crazy.

40:06I mean, look outside and see what it is. And it was the moon and I had never seen it was nearest near moon set, which is near sunrise full moon. And I looked at it and I kept staring at it and there was a star next to it that kind of looked like a piece of the moon had broken off. It was that bright and that clear. And it's unusual to see these kinds of things together. They're actually known as Syziges, which is a great Scrabble word if you're ever and you know pressed for for a win in Scrabble user word Syziges. I think it's like 80 points. And that just means a conjunction an alignment of astronomical objects.

40:37I was like, what the hell is this 1984 Andrew, you know, you're younger than me, but but Google did not exist for another 16 years. And I was kind of impatient. I wanted to know what this thing was. What is this thing? It's not moving. It's not flashing. It's not a drone, you know, back then. It's not a it's not Southwest Airlines. Right. So I'm looking at it. It's not moving. And day after day, it was like that. And I was like, what the hell am I going to find this out? Like imagine. It's not even existed. We're so blessed that we have the Internet and we have these LLM's. It's so easy now to be a scientist or do research and anybody can do research sciences for everybody, right.

41:08You always highlight that fact. So I realized the only way to find out about it was to wait for the New York Times to get delivered on Sunday, because they did have a section back then that they don't have now called cosmos. And in it depicted what the night sky looked like that night, which is a Sunday. And that was like three or four days after what you know I had this observation which you know is incredibly up, you know, observant. And I looked at it and it was the moon that showed the moon and then showed Jupiter. I was like, what you can see a planet with your naked eye. This is around the time Voyager, you know, was going by the planets and the grand tour of the solar system never been done before.

41:42I was like, I thought you need a spaceship, you know. And I realized that was my first bit of astronomical research. You know, I looked up, I had a hypothesis, what is it? I was wrong. I thought it was a start, it was a planet. I was like, this is insane. You know, imagine what I could see if I had a telescope, but I couldn't afford a telescope. We were pretty modest means back then. I had a job working on a delicate test and down the street and I do that once a week. And then, you know, I got a grant from a three letter agency, you know, which is the beginning of many, many scientists careers.

42:10I got a grant from the MOM agency, my mother. She supplemented my $2 an hour salary at the Venice, Delicatesen and Dobbsbury. And I ended up getting a telescope for $75. And I, you know, cherish this thing. And then I was like, oh, let me look at these things in the sky. And it's pretty amazing. I don't know if you know the history of telescopes, but the first ones were invented because of the glass that was present to make eye glasses. So telescopes came from eye glasses. Where was the best glasses? Where were the best glasses made in the Netherlands? So actually the telescope and the microscope were both invented in Holland.

42:47And the guy who invented the telescope was very interesting because it would be like he made the telescope, but he never thought to look at the night sky with it. He only used it as a spyglass to look at objects, you know, on the horizon or in a city or whatever. He never went like this, looked up at, you know, in 45, that required Galileo. So I think it was a solar system in the universe that had never been seen before with a scientific tool. So everybody had used their eyes and back to Tico Braj, Kepler, Copernicus, they had used their eyes, which are telescopes. I'll get back to that, don't worry.

43:29I know you afford me the podcasters, you know, predilection of going off on long -tanded, but I think this is good. Galileo then said, well, I'm going to take this telescope and look at these objects that are otherwise look like stars. And in fact, we're called, you know, basically wanders because they're only things that moved. He first looked at the moon. Now take yourself back to 1609 when he was first looking at these objects. 1609, there were no clocks, there were no scientific tools of any real virtue. He in fact would invent many of these things. There were simple things like a magnetic compass, a slide rule, which, no, but, you know, known in your main demographic will know what a slide rule is, but that's okay.

44:06Very simple tools, you know, they would use tubes and whatnot, but Galileo looked at the moon. And the hypothesis was everything in the universe is orbiting around the earth. The earth is the most perfect place in the universe because God puts the things that are most important, close to Him, then the center of the universe. God is the center of the universe that Catholic Church held this and everything would go around the earth. And in fact, I'm not going to challenge you because I think you'll defeat me in this. But in your audience are probably very many educated, I call them dot edu people.

44:39There's many, many educated people. I find that even with my brilliant students at UCSD, they can't prove that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In other words, I'll say on my astronomy 101 quiz. I'll say prove that the earth is the is not the center of the solar system, which was the whole universe back then, right? And I would say it's about 75 80 % will not get it right. In fact, I can say to most people prove the earth is not flat. I claim the earth is flat. Prove me wrong. Most people can't prove it. They don't know how the proof is constructed. I don't expect them to go and replicate what our star cast did, you know, 2000 years ago.

45:15But this is knowledge we've had for two, as I said 2000 years, the knowledge that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is only about 400 years old. But I would say 99 % I know for a fact. I went to Italy actually 10 years ago. It was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And we had a ceremony to honor the first person who ever came up with a theory of relativity, which is also Gallo. Gallo had the first notion that relative motion is indistinguishable that if you and I are on a bike, I'm stationary, you can't tell if you're moving, I can't tell if I'm stationary.

45:49That's called relativity of motion. It's not motion is not absolute. Einstein would later enhance that, you know, put on steroids and then come up with all sorts of cool stuff that we can get into. But this notion that you could do observations that you could use a scientific tool, couple with a hypothesis and then iterate on those hypotheses to make both the instrument better and your hypothesis better and then expose that the scientific peer review, which was not what we have today. That was done by Galileo. He was the first person to use the scientific method. What did he use it with a telescope?

46:20So a telescope that he used was a refracting telescope lenses like eyeglasses, two of them, one put at the far end called the objective. It's closer to the object, the other one the eyepiece closer eyed. And he was able to magnify things about three to 10 times pretty easily. Can you explain refraction for people that? Yeah, so when light light is the light travels at the fastest speed of any entity, you know, photons travel at roughly 300 ,000 kilometers per second, except when they go into a medium. That's what they travel in in the vacuum of space or in a vacuum in my laboratory or whatever.

46:54But when they go into a medium, that's transparent or translucent, they slow down. You can think of it as the light waves themselves. Imagine light waves as rows of soldiers marching together. And then imagine that they're walking an angle to the beach here in Los Angeles. They're marching an angle. So the ones that encounter the water first, they start to slow down. The other ones keep moving at a fast speed. And then the whole beam of light, the whole beam of soldiers gets bent. That process is called refraction. We can do it. Well, this year, Brahmate is so delicious. We can't do it because it's got a little bit of a scot to it.

47:27Similar to, for instance, if you go and look at a fountain, and you see a coin, and you decide, you know, you're going to be that mischievous kid and you're going to grab that coin. So you can throw it back in like in any, you know, you can recycle the wish. And you reach down to grab it and you miss because where you see it is not word actually. Yes, put a pencil in a clear glass of water, same phenomenon will happen. That's refraction. It's the bending of light by what's called a dielectric or just a medium. That's transparent or translucent. And you can do that in a way that you shape the wave of light coming in that it will be magnified.

48:01And that's in fact what a telescope does. Tell a means distance, scope means viewer. So a telescope really means distance viewer. A microscope means small thing viewer. And so this was kind of revolutionary to use it for scientific purposes. Gallaudet and other things. We just take these for granted. We got all these cool cameras here. These are all refracting telescopes. You can see the lens in one. You can see that it's on a tripod. We take these things for granted, but people didn't realize what a stud. Yeah, I want to get a list of all things that the Galileo did. I'm going to pause you for one second.

48:31And I please your mark where you're at because I have a number of questions that I just can't resist. First of all, if it's too lengthy an answer, feel free to say, you know, pass. But why was the best glass in in Holland? What is about the Dutch and good glass? I think that they were extremely as they are now, I have great colleagues that are from the Netherlands. They were obsessed with with high quality as Germans are. There was very similar Germans very into a very precise instrumentation and a high quality. It's interesting to note that the glasses were only really invented in some sense because of the fact that there was an existing standard for human visual acuity.

49:16We all know we go to the eye glasses. High glasses. Yeah. So we know today, though, when you go to the eye doctor, there's an eye chart. We all know it's called the SNELLEN chart. When you go to the DMV, you use the same thing. Numbers and letters of different sizes that had a given distance. If you can read all of them, then you have whatever. Let's just say high -cute division. We won't get into it. We won't get into it. And if you can only read three lines down and then you're essentially blind to the rest, then you have less than average. There's a huge division and in the state of California, they'll still give you a driver's license.

49:50There are many people by way. There are many people driving in the United States, by the way, who qualifies legally blind. But because when you drive, you mainly use your peripheral vision. They are granted a driver's license. This should terrify everybody. But all those eye charts, every DMV here, has the exact same size for the E at the top. It's a calibration standard. How could they do that 400 years ago? We were talking 430 years ago. Turns out there was one and only one standard that was acceptable across all of Western Europe. It was the Gutenberg Bible. The Gutenberg Bible was set in print by Gutenberg and it had a fixed size of all the characters.

50:27So what they would do is add a couple of feet. They put the Gutenberg Bible in front of people. It's amazing to think about it because there's only like 10 copies of the Gutenberg Bible still left. They're all involved. They're all worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You can't buy them even if you're, you know, Elon. When you look at it, you would be able to tell that you could not see at one foot what I could not see what Andrew could see at one foot. So you knew that there was something diminishing my visual acuity, whether who knows what it was. But they knew that they could then correct that lens to be as good as 2020 or, you know, get up to your standard for me.

50:58And that was the way that they would judge how good your eyes were. And so they then would correct that with lenses. And I always plan on how ironic it is because later on Galileo would take those two lenses instead of putting one on each eye, put one in front of the other one. And then use that to construct a telescope. But he didn't actually invent the telescope, but he perfected the telescope. So just like Apple didn't invent the smartphone, they perfected it. Just like Facebook did an invent social networking. They perfected it. Right. So it's usually the second mouse gets the cheese they like to say he was the ultimate second mouse.

51:30He would always improve things and make them so much better that he would obliterate his competition. Galileo. But it was Copernicus, if I'm not mistaken, that was the first to say that the earth revolves around the Sun while rotating on its axis. And tilt, which gives us the equinox correct. Yes. Okay. So Galileo corrected Copernicus about the math, but it was Copernicus that that gave us the first like trusted statement that the earth and the other planets rotate around the Sun. Yeah, I would say he gave the hypothesis. He wasn't he wasn't wrong. Galileo didn't correct him. It just Galileo brought evidence to the table.

52:06He brought hard scientific. So what was the Copernicus guy was he just sort of like an iconic class he was like, hey, how about we're not the center of the universe. It's the Sun is the center of universe. So what was the milieu of the time was that the earth was the center of the of the universe, which was our solar system effectively was the whole universe. They didn't know about stars and galaxies. Certainly we can get into that later. But there was what's known as the Talameic concept of the organization of the cosmos. So the earliest cosmological models were that the Sun is the center, the earth is the center of the universe.

52:36And everything goes around it. However, these were not dopes. They knew that there were problems with that model. There are certain aspects of the orbits of planets, for example. I mentioned Mercury's retrograde. What does retrograde mean? We don't have to get into it, but there are anomalies that the planets will undergo at different times of the year. Due to the fact that the earth is that we know now rotating revolving around the Sun and rotating on its axis, but the main effect is is revolution around the Sun. And the other planets are two in the same plane with the zodiac plane, the what's called the ecliptic due to the angular momentum of the proto solar system.

53:11And sometimes the earth goes faster than say Jupiter. So originally it'll be out in front, if you will, of the planet, you know, forward center of motion as you'd like to say. And then it'll be behind it later on. And so it looks like the Jupiter is making like this weird S curve. And they couldn't explain that if the earth is the center of the solar system, except that they added on what are called epicycles. They added on extra little orbits of the planets in order to account for that motion that sometimes it appears, yes, we're moving bulk motion, but then sometimes it goes in opposite direction when we're going in the same direction.

53:40So smart. Yeah. And they must have known by modeling this stuff on earth between objects on earth. And that raises for me anyway, an important psychological question. So you've got these Dutch folks with great glass. Yeah. They're using that great glass to correct vision. I should say sorry, Angela. The reason that they had good glasses, they were some of the foremost explorers, right? A lot of the early trade and they were what did exploration give them access to trade so they could get the finest silicon and glass and they could make it themselves. That's their economics again capitalism always wins, right?

54:19This is the lesson that we shouldn't forget. Their commerce, their economies allowed them to do trade and get acquired the best highest quality materials. Then that was used to make the best scientific equipment. And it's just curious that we like, you know, if we they built these scientific tools, but they didn't use them for science. So imagine like building the large Hadron Collider or Slack or something like that. And then just not using it, you know, just like using it to like mess. My first Slack is sitting empty, right? You know, it wasn't originally that's right. It was used for something.

54:50So I so what I'm curious about is why do you think it is that some humans get some technology in this case glass. Yeah. And they want to look at things that are very close up. Yeah. You know, I like microscopes a lot. Yeah. Right now, you know, I don't have my wet lab. We still still involved in some clinical trials. But you know, I love microscopes. So I loved customizing my microscopes. I didn't like them. You know, I don't like a plug -in play. I like them sort of the same way that people like hot rods. I didn't like motorized stages. I like manual stages. This kind of thing. Nowadays you need motorized stages, et cetera.

55:24But what was I going to invest my money into? It was higher numerical aperture. Yes. But basically you're able to see things better. Deep, okay. Yeah. Exactly. See smaller things better. That's what numerical aperture will do for you. So it's like putting more horsepower into a car. Yeah. As opposed to paying more attention to the, you know, the paint job. People do those cameras. Yeah. Sure. Geek out. Everyone's got their thing. Yep. Humans have this glass and they have the option to look at smaller and smaller things or to resolve their vision. Why do you think it is that a subset of humans?

55:58Because I think it's a special subset of humans. Instead, like, I want to look at things really far away. Yeah. You know, and you're one of these humans. I mean, I delight in the stars. I delight in the moon. I have some questions about. Yeah. I think most people have who appreciate sunsets and moon sets and things like that. But why do you think it is that it tends to be a small subset of people who don't just want to appreciate the night sky, but want to figure this stuff out that is so far away. I'll be honest, it never occurred to me. I'm curious about things deep under the ocean. Yeah. I am very interested in fish and fish and aquatic life.

56:36But I like terrestrial things, our boreal things, things and trees. And I think most people orient to the stuff that's more of this planet. Yeah. What do you think it is? I realize you're not a psychologist and there's probably no DSM, whatever, six diagnosis specific for this. Check them all off. But I'll just ask you for you, was it a desire to better understand life here on earth, or was it a desire to kind of leave life here on earth? I think it's a lot of earth. I mean, my childhood was pretty tumultuous. I think you and I have a lot of things in common, both fathers, scientists, physics and math in my case.

57:15Very hard driving, very hard to live up to their shadows that they cast, for example, at least in my case. And you seem to have a beautiful relationship with your dad now, but I'm sure it wasn't always like that. We did a lot of repair work and I'm very grateful for where we're at. And I encourage anyone, son, daughter, mother, father, whatever relationship, the repair work to the extent that it's possible is absolutely worth it. And that episode you get, how do you texted you, is a real gift, not only for all of us who got to witness it, but also for grandchildren, him, his legacy and so forth.

57:50And even, you know, his mom, your dad's wife and your mom, but the point is, yes, it transported me. I was living through after the divorce of my parents. I live with my stepfather who had adopted us, changed our names, moved to different, you know, we were changing, you know, schools every couple of years. And that discovery of the moon next to Jupiter, it was sort of like solving a puzzle. And there's the same famous saying by, you know, Albert Michelson, it was the first Nobel Prize winner in American history. For what? He physics, sorry. Yeah, Michelson Morley, he proved in some sense that the earth is not moving through the ether, you know, that was hypothesized by luminaries before it.

58:31But the point was when a child does like solves a puzzle, like you think, well, like an adult, you solve a Rubik's cube, okay, I did it once, I don't have to do it again. But like my son was like, keep doing it. And I'll keep like showing off, kind of get it faster, video games, same thing. Once you solve the bit, you don't just like throw it out and stop doing it, you get a taste of that thrill of discovery. Yes, it's diminished. And yes, we become ennured to it as we get older and a little bit more, you know, there's just things we have to get, you know, take care of in life, and especially as a professor, scientists, you know, you can't like marvel over the same things you did when you first did these experiments.

59:06But as an expert, you get transported and you get to, you know, encounter something that you feel like no one has ever done before. For example, when I got my first telescope that night, you know, a couple of months after discovering this, I looked through it and I saw the same features on the moon. And I have a 3D printed moon that my son made, you know, to show you. And it has all the creators represented on it so cool. And I saw the exact same creators on the moon that Galileo saw. And then I looked at Jupiter. And when they look at Jupiter, you not only see these beautiful atmospheric bands on it, and I brought you a telescope as your end of the year holiday gift.

59:45It's yours to keep and no money, no money down. And I looked at Jupiter. And when you look at Jupiter, and as I hope you'll do tonight or with your crew later on, you will see not only the planet, not only its little atmosphere, but also the great red spot, which is an amazing three times bigger than the Earth. You can see it from Earth with this little telescope. But you see four little stars. And there are four stars that are to the left to the right. They're in a plane with the midpoint of these equatorial storms that are brewing on Jupiter for four. We know that they've been going on for at least 400 years because Galileo saw them.

1:00:19So that sets a limit. You know, minimum storms. When you say storms, what are these systems? They're enormous hurricanes on the planet. And the equatorial bands like the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn. So there's plenty of water up there that's running down and not water at all. It's methane ammonia, but it's a fluid. So it behaves like a fluid doesn't. So you have these swirling worlds and the colors will amaze you. You'll see colors on an astronomical object. It's going to blow your mind. And not only is it going to blow your mind because you're doing you're going to feel unique in all of science.

1:00:49You will feel what Galileo felt. You won't know that he felt it before you and a billion people have seen it since it because for you, it's new. And for you, you're viscerally connected to the mixture to Galileo and what he did. There's no other branch of science. It's like that. You can't look at the Higgs boson. First of all, no one person to its team of 3 ,700 people that discovered the Higgs boson and seven people predicted the Higgs boson. Higgs is just one of them. One of my professors in Brown was another one to Jerk. Ground that keep passed away. Unfortunately, never won the Nobel Prize.

1:01:20But the point is you can't know what that felt like. You can't know what it felt like to discover gravitational waves because thousands of people did it recently in 2015. But the question of visceral connection to the first discoverer of that phenomenon, it's unique to astronomy. I don't know of another branch of science where you can have that. And best of all, from here in the center of LA, you can see the same craters. You can see these four Galilean. They're called the Galilean moons of Jupiter. And we're sending sprayscraft there now to see if they have life on it. It's incredible. Andrew, there's nothing else like that in all of science.

1:01:54For 50 to $60, I have a list on my website, Brian Keating .com. I have a telescope buyers guide that I sent to people. I don't make any money from it. It's just I love to share science with the public just like you. But in my case, this astronomy and for 50 or $75, you can have this experience that Galileo had. It's an awesome feeling. And I think that's what kept me going. It distracted me from the pains of the life that I had at that time. And you know, just struggling as it must preteens and teenagers did. But to answer your question, you asked 20 minutes ago, it was really to transport teleport exactly the opposite of telescope.

1:02:29I really felt like I was transported to these other worlds. And I could that I could understand them a simple math and simple tools. And I was nine after night, there were reliable companions and that people love to see it. You'll see Saturn, hopefully with it. You can't help but feel this is amazing. It's thrilling. And it allows you to do science with your eyes connected to your mind. It's incredible. So it sounds to me like you were thank you for sharing that by the way, it sounds like you were able to connect to places distant in space, obviously, and time Galileo. That's beautiful. I don't think the same experience occurs when one looks down the microscope.

1:03:10And it's true that the greatest neurologist of all time by a long shot was Ramone Kahal. Supernatural levels of ability to understand what turned out to be the correct function of the nervous system just from anatomical specimens. But when I looked down the microscope and I see even a Kahal retziacel, there's a cell named after after him. You don't really feel a connection to him in the same way, although the neurons are beautiful, but you know, it's not the same the way you described. What's great about science in general is that the best science is a political, but I always say, look, there's no such thing as like, oh, that constellation is a democratic constellation.

1:03:52Oh, you see that asteroid that's a repumped out. It's a it is a safe space. So I think we do need safe spaces. And that best science is a safe space, not meaning it never interacts with politics, because of course it does. But but for those moments, we as humans and you know, that's better than I do. We need to we need to recovery. You can't just work out. You don't work out seven days a week. You've got six days a week or whatever. It's still more than six more than I work out. But the point is, we need to recover as much as we need to pay attention to to to the activity. We need to recover pay attention to that too.

1:04:25And so the question is, where can we recover from social media, from politics, from economic stress, and all. I think science is an ideal vehicle for it. It should be apolitical. We shouldn't be, you know, always concerned with, you know, politics or what's happening on social media. And I'm guilty of this too. I'm, you know, certainly spending way too much time on screens. But but the point being, science can be that an astronomy in particular, like I said, it's apolitical. It is safe to let your mind run to what you used to do when you were on a dorm with your bros, you know, three a .m. Just be asking, right?

1:04:58We don't get a chance to do that when you're thinking about mortgage payments and like who's taking the kids tomorrow and all these different, you know, quotidian things, I say, we need to get back to that more, more than ever. I feel pondering the origins of life and connecting to people who existed thousands of years before us. Do you think that Galileo Copernicus and others were doing the exact same thing that there were, there was a bit of an escapism to it, healthy escapism as opposed to trying to solve the position of the plants and understand ourselves for some other reason. Yeah, I mean, Galileo in particular is sort of this tragic figure.

1:05:39In some ways, you know, he had the first notions and application of scientific method, as I said, using an apparatus to confirm a hypothesis iterating on that. So I said, when he saw the moon, he saw these craters and valleys and riffs and lava fields that you'll see tonight. Again, people, you can buy a telescope on Amazon $50 and you'll see the same things that he saw. And you can connect it to your iPhone and post it on Instagram if you want. And I hope you'll do that. That's your only homework assignment. The only one I'm going to say to you is, I'm going to do it. So I want you to take a picture of the craters on the moon.

1:06:09But the point is you'll see the exact same things from New York City. You can see them from the middle of London. It doesn't matter where you are. If you have a clear sky in the moon is that you'll see the same thing. But when you look at Jupiter, you'll see these four dots. And here's where Galileo just had this otherworldly intellect that, you know, when I saw those, I was like, oh, cool, it's next to some stars until I realized that I had to do more research that those are actually the moons of Jupiter. So in one night tonight, you can, you know, quadruple the number of moons you've ever seen in your life.

1:06:35And some of the things that you can do is you can see the moon. And you can see the moon. And you can see the moon. And you can see the moon. And you can see the moon. And you can see the moon. And you can see the moon. And those moons are almost the size of Armune. Armune is unusually large. And, and those moons sometimes they'll cast shadows on the planet. So there'll be an eclipse. You'll witness an eclipse on Jupiter on another planet with this $50 instrument or whatever. Okay. When he was observing these things, he would do things that were not only psychological. And they were therapeutic for him in his later years.

1:06:58I'll explain that in a minute, he ended up going blind. And, and so losing the site, you know, kind of the recollections that he had. And he lost. his daughter. It was a nun because she was illegitimate, as most of I think all of his kids except maybe one, all this one. He had mistresses. He was married divorce basically and I was kind of like he was Catholic and Italy, you know, primordial Italy basically. It didn't exist as a country, but he was in Tuscany and he had a lot of challenges. He was almost always broke. Even when he invented his version of the telescope, again, he didn't invent the telescope, but he made it so much better.

1:07:3210x, it 20x, it, you know, zero to one. It was incredible what he did with it. He realized I, this is great and all for me to discover these cool things and learn about the universe. He was deeply religious too, but I got to make money. I got to pay for my house. He had like, imagine like your students at Stanford are living with you because that's the only way you can afford to pay rent in your, I mean, and you're cooking meals for them. And they're like slabs, right? I mean, I was a slav in college, right? So the point is he had bills to pay and he was a businessman. He realized, well, look, if I, if I start making these telescopes, everybody will see the things I'm seeing.

1:08:09I don't have any monopolistic advantage over, you know, Kepler, who is his friend, but also his competitor. They were, they were, you know, really vying for who is the best astronomer of all time in Kepler and Germany and obviously Galle and Italy, well, become Italy. And, and he realized Kepler was purely theoretical. He had great math chops. He came up with functions for the Orbit Supplynets before Isaac Newton proved that they came from calculus and universal gravitation. Incredible scientists. But if he gave that and it was like giving a, you know, a free particle accelerator to your arch competitors, right?

1:08:42He didn't do that. He said, no, I'm not going to make these telescopes, but I'm going to, I'm going to sell them only to the government. And they're going to pay me because these are great military devices. And you know, we don't think of them now. But with it, he went, he's so brilliant. He was so charming and charismatic. He said, I'm not, I'm not only going to like sell you these things. First, he went to the Senate in Venice, the Venetian Senate, the Doge, the original Doge. We think Doge is a coin or some department that Elon's going to head. No, no, it was the Doge was like the, the, the chief of the government back in the Venetians, which is one of the most wealthy countries in all of Europe, who's separate from Tuscany and separate from Rome.

1:09:20And he went there and he said, you are at maritime probably, have you ever been to Venice? That's beautiful, right? So he said, look, come with me. I'm going to take you up into the, the, the Piazza San Marco, go up to the tower and we're going to look out and we're going to see there's a ship out there. But you can't see it with your naked eye. But if I give you the telescope, you can see it three days earlier before it comes into your harbor. That's you have an F 35, you know, stealth fighter and you sell the rights to turn off the stealth part on it to your adversary. It's incredibly valuable.

1:09:51It's a time portal. Yes. Yeah, you could tell I'm keep harping on this theme of, you know, the ability to see things in greater distance. That's right. At higher and higher resolution gives you a window into time. Exactly. And we think of that now. That has enormous advantage. Exactly. There, because of, you know, the trajectory of the ship. Yeah. You actually are getting a sort of crystal ball into that into what's going to happen later. In the future, as you're looking at a position of the stars, some anticipation of what's going to happen based on historical charts of the stars. So I can speak of that now and then come to think of it as you're saying it, light years.

1:10:26What is a light year? It's a measurement of distance, but it's in terms of time. So it's exactly what consonant with what you're saying. We are always going to have this combination, this interrelation, this, this, you know, competition between things in space and things in time. And he realized with this tube that he could see the great distances that also afforded him this extra advantage when I came to predicting the future. How's he's like? If we could do a top contour survey of the greats of astronomy, where would it start? Starting with who, people who got it wrong. Yeah. And then we're, and then correct each other.

1:11:01Like if we were going to do a fast, a fast sprint through these. Yeah. Where would we start? Well, you'd have to start with like, you know, God or whatever, you know, the first caveman and women, you know, as I said, to four charting stars on the wall. Exactly. We don't know who they are. Telling their youngsters like, okay, you know, because those stars are there relative to that ridge or etc. Days are getting longer days are getting shorter. That's right. Ergo hunt now, ergo collect stuff to hunker down. Maybe even don't reproduce now. Maybe even behavioral restraint. 100%. Maybe reproduce now.

1:11:38Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be much more, you know, up the more time for that. Exactly. So tens of thousands pre antiquity, you know, would say. Then the, I would say fast forward, you know, to the maybe Egyptian epoch, you know, 5 ,000 BCE, sort of speak, when they had a also a very zodiological and astrological conception of these objects. But and yet they would build things, you know, in relation to the positions of stars and constellations. Sundial emerges. Sundial obelisks, you know, things that were used, primitive things. Stonehenge also, I think it's like 20 ,000 years ago. They believe it's related to some astronomical observations.

1:12:15They're not entirely certain about that. We have to double click on Stonehenge. How do you think it got there? You know, it's one of those great mysteries that's, I think it's less controversial Stonehenge in the pyramids. The pyramids seem to be like, almost, you know, they lead people into thinking about aliens and the most. What do you think of? I mean, given their mass, given their location, given what we knew about populations, then, and given what we know about the strength of people and the tools they had at the time, is it reasonable to assume that people built these things? I mean, certainly, I mean, you'd have to convince me that people didn't build them, but exactly how they built it is a great question.

1:12:54I mean, so for example, I mentioned this when I was on Joe Rogan's show. I said, you know, if you measure the basis of the pyramids, it turns out that they're a ratio of a qubit, which is, actually, qubit's not quantum bits, like you and your dad talked about, but qubits is the length of the pharaoh's forearm. It's basically a foot and a half roughly. So back then, if you were like the president, you were also the metric standard for all of civilization. And it makes it sort of like models on Instagram, right? Everyone's trying to attain these. What's the standard? That's the important thing. And is this about carrying items?

1:13:31Yeah, well, it was just for length or like a foot. We talk about a foot. It was a pharaoh's foot. Yeah, that's where we get those from, right? So there was only kind of one rough standard for calibration, which is incredibly important for removing systematic effects and science in general. So you had a calibration standard. Now we have like a bar of platinum. We've defined, you know, the second in terms of oscillations of a certain atom called cesium and how many times it oscillates per second. Sure, a degree, right? Yeah, a calorie, right? So now we want to define those in terms of physical quantities, not in terms of people.

1:14:04And so doing that has been a great advance forward in science. And we've only recently gotten rid of what are called artifacts. So it used to be there was a rod that was one meter long. And the meter was originally defined as 169, I forget of the distance from the North Pole to Paris. But that obviously depends on assuming the Earth as a perfect sphere, which it's not, right? It's kind of chubby around the middle. Yeah, that's right. Bulge is because it's an omelette spirit, right? Exactly. And so all these things that were relics, we want to get rid of them and tie them to fundamental properties of say a quantum system.

1:14:36That's very pure and we can isolate it. We don't want to use a pharaoh's foot either. So we have to come with a link standard. So now we use the speed of light times the second and we can define things in those terms. But back then, yeah, so they didn't know that. But I told Joe, as I said, if you measure the base of all the the great pyramids at Giza, they're all multiples of a qubit times so many numbers of the number pie. So like pie wasn't known to them. You know, pie wasn't known to be irrational to Greeks. And Euclid proved that it was irrational. And that, you know, it didn't come from a computational.

1:15:11It couldn't easily be obtained had infinite number of digits, right? So how did these Egyptians know that an alien told them, no, the way they did it is they laid it out. They used a surveyors tool. One of the surveyors tool is a stick with a wheel on it. So the wheels of circle. So you got so many multiples they just counted. And that's how we so we confuse a lot of things. They stumbled into pie. Exactly. Right. They walked all over it. So you don't have to always posit supernatural explanations for things. The answer is simply we don't know. I certainly don't know how stone and it was built nor how do I know how the pyramids were built.

1:15:43But it's not you would have to convince me that it was built by some other means other than people and the tools that were available to them. Yeah. Likewise. I'm not convinced it came from extraterrestrials. I don't know how we got on this. But so we were marching through. So we were marching through. So we have the our ancient ancestors. And then at what point do we get to Copernicus in New Orleans? Then it was yeah, then it was Copernicus who had ideas, but couldn't prove them. He had no data to substantiate the Copernican or Sun -centered model of the universe, which is also by the way, you know, almost everything in science is wrong.

1:16:19Right. Copernicus is wrong. The Sun is not the center of the solar system. Right. There's the center of our solar system is inside the Sun because the planets orbit around it and they orbit around an ellipsical pattern, which has two foci. So he believed that the orbits were all circles. So he's wrong, but he's more right than Aristotle. So that's science progresses. Right. Newton was right about gravity until he was wrong when Einstein proved them wrong. Right. So then you go up to after him, Kepler discovered the laws of the elliptical motion of planets and and their patterns that we still use.

1:16:51We discovered exoplanet, my colleague David Kipping on introduced you to. He's discovered exo moons. These are moons around other planets, some of which are in the habitable zone of their host star. And some of them have sunlight stars and our earth -sized planets. It's incredible. There could be, as I said, a link between life evolving on Earth due to the moon on our planet. So two on an exoplanet, it could require an exo moon, which he's discovered or thinks he has. He's actually very cautious and hasn't said it explicitly. So Kepler's laws underpin all those discoveries even to this day, 400 years later.

1:17:23Then Galileo immediately afterwards with the telescope phases of Venus. That only occur if the Earth is not the center of the solar system. The rings of Saturn, he had notions about those. He accidentally discovered the planet Neptune. It's amazing. And then he, of course, the moons of Jupiter falsified the notion that the Earth is a center of the solar system because these moons are going around Jupiter, not around the Earth. So that's completely torpedoed the notion of the true nature of the Aristotelian or Talauméic Earth -centered cosmology. Then soon after that, astronomers measured things like the speed of light using eclipses of moons of Jupiter.

1:18:04They measured distances to Saturn. They mapped out the solar system. And then from there, using parallax, you know, you can kind of gauge the triangulation and using trigonometry. They measured the structure of our galaxy, William Herschel, and his sister, Caroline Herschel, was the first female astronomer, first female scientist. She was the first person to use the scientific method and become a fellow in the Royal Society in Great Britain. Then later off, after that, we come to the era of the big developments in technology. We're photographic plates after that. Spectrographs, dispersion of light onto photographic material.

1:18:42You could preserve your memory. You didn't use sketches like Galileo did. And then up until Hubble, when Hubble discovered two major things, which was one was that the Milky Way was the galaxy. It wasn't the entire universe. There were other galaxies, island universes, billions of stars. And then he discovered the expansion of the universe with help from astronomer who doesn't get a lot of attention. A lot of the women in astronomy got really short shrift. People discovered how fusion works and the sun. Women, Caroline Herschel, got a spotchen at Harvard. And then Henry and 11, who measured this relationship between the size and brightness of objects called saffiate variables that Hubble then used to make his law that proved that the universe is expanding.

1:19:24And then after that, people like Pennsie Sim Wilson discovering the microwave and radio astronomy, Robert Jansky, all the way up until my colleagues today, some of them have interviewed Adam Reece and Brian Schmitt and Barry Barish, who wrote the forward to my second book, Techno -Gravitational Waves, the accelerating expansion of the universe due to dark energy, first Nobel Prize in astronomy, 2011, follow -up 2015, discovery of 2017, discovered gravitational waves from inspiring black holes. You know, there's so many and there's so many, you know, I've been blessed to know many of them and I have them as my academic, you know, pedigree.

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1:23:00Right now, helix is giving up to 25 % off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixleap .com slash huberman to get up to 25 % off. Maybe you can help me here. I've never heard a description of the of the origin of life in the universe that made a lot more sense to me past there were a bunch of big explosions, a bunch of the elements and stuff that you needed came together and then at some point there was water and at some point there were critters that moved and then multi -seller organisms like, what am I missing there? I mean, I'm a man of science and I love science. But why can't I can grasp it when it's told to me?

1:23:41But why is it that it's so hard? Maybe I'm just not smart enough to comprehend this idea that a bunch of star exploded dot dot dot and here we are. I think that's obvious why you have this particular reflection and that's because you're used to doing experiment. You're a scientist. You're core identity. One of your core identities is a scientist. You think of things scientifically. And as I said before, the scientific method as we practice it is based on hypothesis, observation, experimentation, iteration. Well, think about this. If I study, if I have a hypothesis that certain people can detect sunspots.

1:24:21So I want to have a control group and I want to have a variable. So it want to be able to contrast and see if it's statistically significant. And I want to pee hack. So what do I have to do then? Well, I have to control the number of sunspots. Okay, sorry, I'm not used to saying if you weren't around at the creation, the design meeting for human beings. I wasn't consulted at the design phase. And by the way, when Brian says pee hacking, he has to be people tinkering with the numbers or the experiment or the hypothesis after the data are in in order to try and establish statistical significance, which by the way, pee hacking is not just not good.

1:24:57It's bad. It's cheating of a whole. It's not making up data, but it's tweaking the experimental design in hopes that you'll get something where you probably didn't. It's not good. You don't want to do it. You're calling it Stanford. We do Mben's one, the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2021. And he's done tremendous amount of work in this and confounding variables, pee hacking. Where do these things manifest themselves in physics? Well, high temperature super conductors. This goes back to the late 80. I remember graduating from high school. There was a discovery of room temperature. It's called cold fusion.

1:25:31That was one thing that would create also limitless energy to cheap to meter from just using hydrogen and from seawater and palladium and platinum. The turnout to be bogus and the data were manipulated in such a way that we would say, probably fall into the realm of pee hacking, which may not have been maliciously intended, but the goal, the output of it is certainly a driving incentive that influences people to do things that are unethical. And that happens at all levels. And we saw it in my own experiment. Not necessarily accusing my colleagues of being unethical. We were searching and we still are searching for what caused the big bang.

1:26:09We're going to get back to your question of how this comes out. Because I think I can help. That please still spin it back. Yeah, like a planet. It's spinning like our solar system, right? But the the the quarry was so big to unravel what caused the big bang to bang? What ignited the spark that became our universe? It's at least it was called when we announced the discovery at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014. World news covered front page everywhere, New York Times, CNN, every single outlet covered it. It was called one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Not only did it explain how our universe came into existence, it also predicted the existence of other universes and what's called the multiverse, which we've heard about maybe in quantum computing.

1:26:53Most people have heard of it on the Joe Rogan. Yeah, exactly, right. It's right. Among many things that we hear about only on that show. So the point is it was it was an quarry for the ages. And I knew that because that's why I invented the experiment, right? I told you my father and I, you know, we never really had the reproach month that you and your father seemed to have had. And that's great. We always had kind of a difficult relationship. As I said, he abandoned me and my book. I write about this rather. He abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin, I was seven. He was 10 and he just left us.

1:27:22And because of that, he didn't end up paying child support for me or my brother and Alimony to my mother. And so my stepfather adopted us. And my last name was originally not Keating. It was Axe Axe. And so when you adopted, I never saw him. I didn't see him for 15 years. But I knew one thing. He was a brilliant scientist. And he was actually the youngest. He was he was not only a tenured professor. He was full professor with like a chair at Cornell at age 26. So you and I got our professor like our thirties or whatever. I was 40 when I got 10 year. Yeah. I mean, it's like a much as he was 26 20.

1:27:56That was a math. It was a little bit there. But I knew he won. Basically, there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics. There's the fields medal, which is kind of equivalent at some level. But almost nobody knows about it. It's only given every five years. You have to be under 40, whatever. He never won that. But he won't like the prize just beneath that, if you will, called the cold prize. In remarkable scientist got into incredible discoveries in mathematics and physics. And I knew one thing. He never won the Nobel Prize. So as some kids might compete with their father who's, you know, captain of the high school football team and they want to be the captain of the college.

1:28:27Very competitive. Boys can be competitive with their dads, right? You know that. And I wanted to compete with him, but he was an athlete. I was an athlete. I can compete with him and do what he could not do, which was winning a Nobel Prize. And I was estranged from him. And I was like, I'm going to win a Nobel prize. And I'll show him, you know, and he'll regret that he abandoned me and gave me up for adoption. This is my thought problem. I'm not saying it's like the most elevated way to be. But that's the way I thought of it. So I said, I have to invent something, discover something. That's worthy of a Nobel Prize.

1:28:54That's all I have to do, quote unquote. How hard can it be? There's been hundreds of Nobel prizes given out. That's the way you thought about it. I was at Stanford and you're surrounded by Nobel. You know what it's like. I was a postdoc at Stanford for a short time. We can get into that. And the point was I was obsessed with discovering our inventing and experiment that could take us back to the Primordial Universe before what we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang is not the origin of time and space. It's the origin of the first elements in the periodic table of the elements. We still don't know what caused that event to occur.

1:29:27And I realized that if we discovered what caused that event to occur, which is hypothesized to be a phenomenon called inflation, which was co -created by at least three scientists, but two of whom were at Stanford, associate with Stanford, Alan Gooth, who's now at MIT. He was a postdoc at Slack and Andre Linde, who's a, number -known professor at Stanford to this day. So they predicted that there was this mysterious substance called a quantum field and that the fluctuations in this quantum field existing in the four -dimensional infinite space, the random fluctuations of a quantum field, what's called vacuum energy, is unstable.

1:30:05You can't have what's called vacuum or negative energy and have it just sit there permanently. It eventually and exorably must fluctuate and the fluctuations can actually spawn an expansion of that four -dimensional space locally. And that occurred at a specific time. When you say four -dimensional space, can you tell us the axis of that space? So you can think of as just ordinary three -dimensional space, but imagine x, y, and z extend to infinity in all directions. And we're sitting at our local, what we perceive is the center of our universe. It's just our observable universe. We can look out 90 billion light years in any direction, which is longer than the age of the universe, times the speed of light.

1:30:43That's because the universe has been expanding. In addition to having existed for 14 billion years, it's been expanding for that additional power of three times that. And then imagine time. So time is a fourth component and we have to weave those together in order to understand how objects behave in this landscape of what we call the cosmos. But it wasn't limited to just our, what we now see is our universe. We have a horizon just like if you go off to the Pacific Ocean here, away from land, you see a horizon. It's a circular horizon in all directions. So we live on a three -dimensional planet, right?

1:31:17The horizon is two -dimensional. It's one -dimensional circle that we can see any ship that's above the horizon. We can see invisible light coming from it, right? But we can perceive that there are things on the other side of the planet that we can't see. And we have to learn about those through indirect methods. You can talk about that at different time. So there's a horizon on a three -dimensional surface. That's a one -dimensional surface. In four dimensions, it's a two -dimensional surface. So you can kind of lose two dimensions. And that means it's a sphere. It looks like our universe looks like a sphere centered on us.

1:31:48We look in all directions. We see constellations. We see galaxies. We see clusters of galaxies. And you go farther than off back, you see this primemorial heat that's left over from the formation of the elements. That's called the cosmic micro -ate background radiation. That's what I study. It's properties. And what it reveals is the oldest light in the universe. The oldest possible light. It was once visible. You could see it if you existed. But nobody existed back then. And it originates from the formation of the lightest elements and the lightest atoms on the periodic table. So you could look back.

1:32:19And if you could see this, you would see a pattern imprinted on that light called gravitational radiation or waves of gravity. And that would be evidence of something beyond the visible horizon. And that would actually originate from this inflationary epoch if it occurred. So I had the idea to build the first telescope, a refracting telescope of all things, just a telescope with lenses, but lenses that are transparent to microwaves and focus microwaves. But I realized I could build that telescope. And if we were successful, I didn't think we wasn't guaranteed to be successful. But it was a big enough scientific quest that it was guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we were correct.

1:32:56And in fact, spoiler alert, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize because we had to retract the discovery that we made at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014, 10 years ago. So you had a paper that essentially led you to the realistic possibility that you might win the Nobel Prize. Yeah, we did. And then you had to retract it. Do you recall your state of emotional state or state of mind when you realized that you were wrong? Very clear. And that's how it relates to this P hacking and everything else. We actually didn't have this paper peer review. We were so concerned that a competitor, which is a spacecraft, a billion dollar spacecraft, we were just a 10 million dollar experiment, a little telescope at the South Pole Antarctica, or I've been a couple of times.

1:33:40And that instrument bested a scientific telescope led by thousand people costing a billion dollars led out of multiple countries in America and Europe. And we were terrified as many scientists are that we're going to get scooped. In fact, the original discovery of the cosmic mercury background was made by accident. The discovery of this three Kelvin heat source that's coming to us in all directions, IEats a background, was made by accident and Bell Laboratories. And Bell Labs accidentally discovered it because they were looking at the very first communication satellites, you know, AT &T Bell Labs, communication.

1:34:13So they stumbled on it. They accidentally said, I'm looking at the satellite that should have a certain amount of background hiss noise, whatever that was expected. But I'm getting hundreds of times that amount. And where could that be coming from? They did very excruciating, very high precision measurements. And they found they couldn't identify a single terrestrial source or a cosmic source of any other sort, except for the fact that if the universe began essentially with a big bang, they didn't call it that back then, that they would be a pervasive heat left over that would be exactly this temperature, three degrees above absolute zero, three degrees Kelvin.

1:34:46So I knew if they want a Nobel Prize, certainly I'd win a Nobel Prize for discovering why that effect happened, right? It's like you discover, you know, some amino acid and then you discover it was produced by DNA. Well, certainly, you know, if the amino acid won the Nobel Prize, certainly DNA would win the Nobel Prize. Well, hands right. Arthur Cornberg RNA, Sun, you know, structure of RNA. Yeah. So you published a paper that wasn't peer reviewed because you were worried about getting scooped. Scooped is when someone else beats you to publication, folks, and gets credit for the discovery. It's a whole discussion that we could have some other time if we just want to riff on the process of science.

1:35:23But so you published the paper. Yeah. We didn't publish it. We submitted it to the archive. We had a press conference at Harvard Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. And it was televised. And in the audience were Nobel laureates and reporters, but the discovery that, you know, it was clear that we would have wanted. However, at that time, I had been removed from the leadership of the experiment that I created. So I created the predecessor experiment. It's like iPhones. You build one, then you upgrade it, you build a better camera, so the first one I invented when I was a postdoc at Stanford, it was called Bicep.

1:35:56And it's the for background image of cosmic extragalactic polarization. And it's also kind of a play on words because the pattern of microwave polarization, which we can talk about, was a twisting curling pattern. So I made a pun like curl like you do Bicep, the muscle behind curls. Anyway, it's not that funny. And they ended up trying to change the acronym, which pissed me off. But anyway, the the tragic thing is that we built this experiment. We upgraded this experiment. It was very hard to get money to build it. I got money from David Baltimore, who's the president, Caltech. I should say, I was at Stanford.

1:36:33I should say about David Baltimore, just because people might want to go to former president of Caltech. Maybe still? Rockefeller. No, he's former president of the Rockefeller. That's an interesting story. If you want to look it up, you know, look it up as they say. Scientists are human. He landed at Caltech. So they funded you to do this. He gave me a special grant, just presidential, just called Caltech president's fund. He gave it to me and my postdoc advisor, Andrew Lang, his incredible scientist. He was married to Francis Arnold, one of the double prize in 2018, in chemistry. I'm renowned scientist as well.

1:37:08And they were just a power couple. And he invited me to give a talk. And I gave a job talk. He hired me on the spot. I couldn't help myself from saying, yes, before he finished this, I was miserable at Stanford, by the way. It was 19992000 .com boom. I was making 32 ,000 dollars a year living on Alma Street. The cal trains were running every 17 minutes. I know because I was awake from 5 a .m., you know, I couldn't sleep more than four or four or five hours. And I just said, yes, moved down to Caltech. And because of that, I convinced him and my colleague, Jamie Bakus, currently a professor, to build this telescope and put it at the South Paulan in Antarctica.

1:37:42And that was the only place we could do it. And the only university I would fund it was this gift from David Baltimore's presidential fund. So these confluence of events. And by the way, then because I got this job and because I built this telescope with my colleagues, I got the job at UCSD, which then enabled me to meet my wife. So let me an incredible story. You move down to Caltech, which is in Pasadena, one amazing place. And then you get the money, how much was this? Tell me, so long was a million dollars to build the first version. Okay, that's quite a quite a gift for a postdoc. A million bucks.

1:38:13You decide the South Paul will be the place to do it. We can talk about why that is. And then you make this discovery, which turns out to be false. Yeah. So, but it sounds like you have good feelings about the experience on the left. So because I was recognized and the experiment got a lot of attention because it was the really the first one ever designed to look for the spark that ignited the whole big bang. So it became, you know, just the cause celebra of the cosmology field. And are you thinking at this point, for give me for playing therapist here, I'm not one I'm not pretending to. No, it's fine.

1:38:46Were you thinking at this point? Okay, you know, this challenge that I think not all but a lot of sons have with their with their fathers, not necessarily to best to them, but one evaluates themselves relative to like their family lineage. Yeah. Sometimes it's a grandfather. You know, this thing of having some internal friction in order to live up to something. Yeah. Sounds like that was driving you. The Tiger Woods, an understand for the Tiger. Right. Same story. But father hard pushing, driving. And then what does he do after he, you know, is a PGA champion? He wants to like become a Navy SEAL or something like he was hanging out with a lot of SEAL teams.

1:39:20It wasn't enough for him. So, sorry, I interrupt your question. So at the point where you made this discovery, where you where you were you feeling like, all right, check that box. What was kind of revelatory to me is that sometimes you start a quest or you start a journey. And the fuel that gets you going, it's no longer serves you when you get there. You know, my brother always says, you know, baggage has handles so you can put it down. Nice. So that like journey from initiating it, the experiment, to best my dad to show them up to make him regret that he abandoned me and my brother. I mean, I always said I could, I could see a good band of me.

1:39:56I was only seven kind of boring. You know, he used to joke. I only care about kids once they learn calculus. He was a, you know, kind of funny. What a cool thing to say. He would say it in jest. And it is true. We did reunite and we did have a reproach month. But it was after inventing this experiment. After I arrived at Caltech, it was, I mean, he was this kind of intellect. And it was so lovely to see you and your dad, you know, my wish for you is to have kind of an experience, maybe similar, maybe not. But when you do have kids and please God, you will. You get to, you get to do over. You get to kind of correct the mistakes or the ways that you, and you'll never get it right.

1:40:34You know, one of my friends is psychiatrist. He says, your job as a parent is to only pass on half of your neuroticism to your kids. And if every generation does that, you know, eventually be a perfect species. But, but I, but I felt that passion and so forth to kind of best him. And then when we reunited and, and it no longer, as I said, it no longer served me. And, but the, but the trajectory that I had launched this experiment on continued on abated. And so that had this inertia, this momentum that couldn't be stopped. In fact, so many people wanted a part of it. And so much pressure was surrounding it that I think, you know, partially that led to me actually being kind of kicked out of the leadership of the experiment.

1:41:14And, and that was precipitated by a truly tragic event. So, I told you my advisor Sarah, church, you know, set up a job interview for me with her advisor when she was a post -doc at Caltech, in a manger line. Andrew was like a start at that time. I was a stranger. He was like a father figure. He was like, you know, like, ever see the TV show Mad Men like Don Draper, he's like handsome, good looking. Everyone thought he was going to win a Nobel prize. He was stolen from Berkeley. They spent tons of money to recruit him from, you know, from Berkeley to come to Caltech. He only can't, you know, his wife was a power couple, Francis Arnold again, what she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

1:41:53And he just had the world that his fingertips charming, funny, and, and he would say things like, you know, Brian, this is so unrealistic that we have to do it. Like, he was a kid. He loved to play. And he loved, he's the one who inspired me in this, in this way of just never stopping like that passionate curiosity. And the reward that you get, I always say, you know, when you solve a problem, your reward is a harder problem. Like that's, but that if you're a scientist, that feels good. Because it's like, I always say, and I think it's one of your colleagues, so I'm not sure. So I'm just good stuff and going on up there.

1:42:27But, but there's just concept of finite games and infinite games, right? So I always say science is an infinite game. You can't win science. It goes on forever. No one's masters all of whatever science is. You can debate even what it is. But it's composed of an infinite number of finite games. Getting into college, getting into graduate school, getting a postdoc, getting a tenure track position. Those are all finite games, right? And the ultimate, what's the ultimate finite game and Nobel Prize? Because only three people can win it each year. There's only 200 people have ever wanted. You know, there's more people in the NBA than have wanted in physics, right?

1:43:00So this is very exclusive club. And if, you know, if you win it, somebody else isn't going to win it, odds are. And this pressure to kind of get to that level should never exceed the passion that drove you to become a scientist in the first place. And so I was obsessed with that. And what Andrew Lang showed me is that the sciences is its own reward. And the pleasure of finding things out, as you know, finally, I would say, is its reward? Science is its own reward. And that's characteristic of these infinite games. You just want to keep playing them. And the tragic thing is that I'm emotional thinking about this.

1:43:37When Andrew was at the peak of his life, he chose to take it. He took his own life. He killed himself. He killed himself. Ironically, tragically, he used helium, which is, you know, central to the formation of the universe and the creation of our universe is reliant and large part on helium that abundance of it. And he is fixated himself in a in a cheap dirty sleazy motel. Actually, I had stayed at in Pasadena when I was visiting him for my initial job talk. Can I, do you mind if we, we, uh, going to this event? Yeah. I realized it's a, it's a painful memory. And I feel it, you know, it not to shift the focus, but ironically, my, all three of my academic advisors, dead first one shot himself in a bathtub two weeks after we celebrated something for him.

1:44:22Just like, like, you know, suicide is such a peculiar thing. He did for very different reasons, different stage of life. Let's get back to, to Lang. How old was he? He's 41, I think. So he's his own. He had three kids. Three, three, three, five, wife still alive. Yeah. Francis still, you know, renowned professor. Which she shocked. They were separated. They had to be gotten estranged and, um, they weren't living together. It was interesting. He was always very close. She had two children, I think, from a previous marriage or one child from a previous marriage. Um, and he was like a father to that son as well, like a biological father or whatever that means.

1:45:01Um, kids were so dedicated to him. And look, don't cry for me. I mean, I, I, I, still emotional, but because he meant so much to me as a mentor, as a friend, as an advisor, as, as, you know, a father figure, basically, but he had real kids and he had, but, you know, adopted kids and it was tragic for everyone. Suicide is such a peculiar thing because it, in some sense, it can, um, quote unquote, make sense for if somebody we know is very depressed or they have a terminal illness, you know, and, and, but it sounds like it came as a bit of a surprise. Do you think that the, um, sometimes there's this close relationship between genius and, um, let's just say not mentally healthy, um, that, you know, even what you mentioned before, you know, like we have to try this experiment.

1:45:50I mean, there's a bit of a reclessness to that when you're dealing with millions and millions of dollars in postdoc careers and, you know, that there's a, I mean, the delight of a fun experiment and an adventurous experiment, maybe as a, like a project where you kind of wade into it a little bit to see, but that's very different than like we have to do this. Yeah. I mean, there's a risk -taking element there that, that superseeds come, my notions of like what a, what an advisor's job is, which is to make sure that people progress toward, um, do it sure discovery, but also like you want some, um, one of the most important thing to mentoring scientists is that they have some sense that there is a future for them.

1:46:24Yeah. And you can't guarantee it, but you'd like to, like a parent would for a child, you want, you want to give them some sense that like the sun's going to come up tomorrow. That's right. Like, we're not going to implode or explode here. And he was a, he was a pragmatist. He would give me advice, life advice, you know, and again, I was a strength for my father. He was playing this role and he was just so, he was charming. I mean, he's handsome, charismatic. He had just discovered, you know, came off this discovery of proving that the universe has a flat spatial geometry, which just means that any triangle that you make in the universe, whether it's three planets, three stars, three galaxies, three patches of the cosmic microwave background radiation, always the interior angles add up to 180 degrees as they do on a flat table here, as they did for Euclid, and that had astonishing implications for how the universe might have begun.

1:47:13And it's still true. And this is still true. It's more true than ever. So do you think that, um, perhaps, I mean, one of the things that people talk about is the peak and trough of dopamine. You mentioned infinite games, you know, I said many times before that, um, it's very important that you not get fast large amplitude increases in dopamine that are not preceded by effort. Yeah. Methanthetamine will give you a large amplitude, um, you know, fast increase in dopamine, but there's zero effort involved. It's up to procure it. And it syncs you into a post -dopaminurgic peak, trough afterwards that, um, will have you, uh, hanging on for, for the will to live.

1:47:59Um, so what comes up goes down and it often goes down further than when we're talking about dopamine, playing an infinite game is great because it's in the, it's in the, the motivation for answers. It sounds like he, like hit up peak and you do wonder if maybe he was like, okay, now I'm going to check out now. It's going to be hard to keep doing this. I don't think it's explicable. I don't think you, I mean, the human brain is the most complicated thing. And, you know, the human brains can even contemplate, right? It's the solipsistic in a sense, but I couldn't really wait into it. I mean, I know details of his personal life and yes, divorce and separation and, and so forth, but, but, um, I don't think, I don't think that's it just because the, the highs of the new quest and, like, the dopamine hadn't really come in from bicep and it wouldn't come in for four more years after his death in 2010.

1:48:47So you've got to continue the project. We got to continue the project, but because he was removed and he was kind of my, you know, constantly area, you know, whatever, I was to him, I forget how the relationship goes. I'm not, it's conversant with the mafia as that should be, but, but with Andrew with his death, one of the, you know, trivial and comparison consequences was that the main patron and backer of me in my career would, you know, help me get my job at UCSD had helped me get, you know, this, this presidential career grant, which I received from President Bush and all these incredible accomplishments and just been my sounding board on experiments and kept me going and helped me when I had troubles with my graduate students and he would talk to Mike.

1:49:24I mean, it's unheard of, right? The, the, the compassion that this man had and if he had only reached out to it to me, you know, I'm sure he had better friends than me, but like, I wouldn't have gone up in a second, you know, I went to the motel where he took his life when I was writing my book just to put me back and like try it, how can I comprehend it? I couldn't, I just cried. I sat in front of the hotel and I cried, but, but no, I don't think we can understand it, but, but the eventual high wouldn't come and then a much more crashing low after we essentially had to retract it and were disconfirmed as I say.

1:49:55So you continued with the project? Yeah. I was at UCSD, I'd left Caltech. You get your job, you got this telescope down at the, at the South Pole. How do you get to the South Pole? You fly to Chile and then you ride a bicycle? You know, I never had the, the physique to get into the military, although I wanted to, at one point to be a pilot, actually, I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy like my stepfather did, but, but I didn't have the, the physics, I didn't have the HLP diet back then, but the point was you go on a military, it's a whole way and you do it in seven days, eight days, if you're lucky, sometimes you can take three weeks due to the weather down there.

1:50:29It's the most violent weather, most winds, turbulence, everything, a hostile, but that's a cakewalk compared to the explorer, Shackleton, or a Scott and, of course, Amincent. So the quest to get to the South Pole first, which is South Pole, I should say, for people that aren't familiar, amtark because of seventh continents, the last one to be discovered. It was only really discovered. It was thought to be there because it was thought that to balance the the continents in the northern hemisphere, you needed a massive counterweight and the southern, it's so stupid, but anyway, it wasn't discovered till 1900s, really that they truly existed, and then it wasn't explored until 10 or 12 years later.

1:51:05And the quest to get to the South Pole, it was the last unexplored, non -filled in part of the map of the Earth. So the quest to get there was like going to the moon. And in fact, it exactly parallels the moon and that once it was reached for the first time, nobody cared to go back again for many, many years. And we're only going back to the moon now, 60 years later, 50 years later, after the Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 missions. Getting there and setting that bar and making that accomplishment, sometimes that's the extent of it. When you have that dopamine hit of being the first to get somewhere, Scott was a British scientist and an explorer, and Amnison was just an explorer.

1:51:42Amnison rolled Amnison, he tried to get to the North Pole first, he lost somebody else beat him and he said, well, I'm going to keep going with this skis and sled dog team that I have. And he literally went to the South Pole 180 degrees. So the poles are the two endpoints of the Earth's acts of rotation. There's a North Pole, there's no land there, there's no continent there, there's ice there, and Santa is there exactly, right? And then the South Pole is a continent. If you go up brought a piece of it here, then I collected probably illegally from Antarctica, I'll show it to you later. It's just rocks, right?

1:52:13So if you drill under the ice in Antarctica, you come to a continent, that's the difference between the North and South Pole. But the South Pole is 700 nautical miles from the coast of Antarctica. The closest point of approach in the 1900s was you take a ship from New Zealand and you sail to South, and it's no other way to go, and you come to the continental shelf, the coastline's called McMurdo station, which was just, you know, basically there's some sea lines there, and that's it, and Orcas and Penguins and nothing else. At that time, now there's a whole research station. And then they got on skis and skied up 9 ,000 feet from sea level to 9 ,000 feet where the polar plateau of flattened out, and they got to the South Pole.

1:52:50And Amundsen got there three weeks before Scott, and Scott was this British, you know, naturalist and like a Darwin, but also he was a scientist plus an explorer. So he wanted to collect samples and he found Flora and Fauna. There's not much rocks, meteorites. He actually discovered meteorites in Antarctica, incredible scientists. But because he was a scientist, it cost him his life because he was carrying all this scientific equipment and scientific samples, and he had a ski up to, like he would find it, and he's like, I'm not coming back the same way that you got there because of the wind patterns.

1:53:21So he knew he'd never come back. So he couldn't leave it there. So he had a carry extra food, fuel, and man -dedicated to it. Oh, and by the way, the Norwegian team, Amundsen was Norwegian, and they used sled dogs for two reasons. One, they conserved calories, they provided propulsion, and then they provided a tasty snack once you got to the South Pole. Because once you get a South Pole, you can ski downhill 9 ,000 feet to sea level basically. And so they ate, British would refuse to do that. So they knew they couldn't eat their dogs, and they had dogs, but they wouldn't eat them. So they were the sled dogs.

1:53:53And when they got to the South Pole, they came within three or four kilometers and it's totally flat like this table. The South Pole looks like this. Go out in the middle of the ocean, freeze it, paint it white, and that's what it looks like. It's white, 100, you know, 360 degrees around. Okay, it's the most boring place on Earth, literally, and I've been there. He got with, so you can see things really far away. He got there, he got within three kilometers, and he saw something on the horizon, and he's like, oh, you know, bleep, and it was a Norwegian flag. Now, can you imagine Neil Armstrong steps out of, you know, the eagle, and he lands on a Soviet flag.

1:54:31I mean, it would be like the most crushing, it was the most, I think the most depressing moment in human history to come so far. And he actually said, they said, great God, this is a horrible place. And all the more so for having reached it without the benefit of priority. So the king and queen, they were depending on him to make the first, you know, for, for, you know, king and country, right? The seeing the Norwegian flag. So what did he do? He was a good scientist. He said, maybe they made him a steak. Maybe they're off by 10 feet. I can see them. All right, the Norwegians got there first. And because he got there three weeks later in middle of January, by the time he turned around, the winds had died down.

1:55:08They were no longer at his back. He was skiing. He had no food. He died about three weeks later or three months later in March. So his body was later recovered. And it was, you know, it wasn't reported back to England for another six months. So they gave their lives for, for science, for discovery and to come up short to be second, it must have been the most crushing defeat in history. But it happens to be the best place to do astronomy in the world. And you get there by flying to you, Santiago Chile. No, first you first you go to Christchurch, New Zealand, we got Auckland, LAX, Auckland, Auckland to Christchurch.

1:55:40And then the US has a charter with the New Zealand Air Force. And we give them C -130 cargo planes or C -7, we have our own C -17 cargo planes, the jet -powered ones. Unfortunately, I got the C -130s, which is a four -pro plane. And I was on a plane that had the entire winter, summer supply, sorry, the entire winter supply of bananas on this cargo plane, which is as big as room, this is the cargo hold, you know, 12 by 12 or, you know, times 50 feet long. And it was filled with bananas. And at first you're like, oh, cool. This is great. Till you realize there's no bathroom on the plane, there's just literally a five -gallon bucket and a shower curtain.

1:56:20There are no windows on it, because why do, you know, paratroopers need windows and, you know, and then there's enormous crates of bananas, there's 12 tons of bananas. I have not touched a banana in 12 years because of that. I'm not missing potassium or whatever. But the point is you land on the coast and then if you're lucky, you take a flight the next day and it's a ski plane. It's the only plane that the US does not export. In other words, we export the F -35. This is a strategic asset that we will not actually get to. It's very difficult. So why South Pole? And does this take us into the realm of light pollution?

1:56:55Right. I mean, when I look up at the at the starry night here in Los Angeles, even though I'm tucked sort of back towards the eastern hills, I don't live at the coast. I can see some pretty impressive stars. Not as impressive as when I highly recommend people get up to the Osemite High Country in the in the month of August. You can catch some great meteor showers. It's an amazing place to begin with. You have the meteor showers and you're transported to another place. Yeah. And there's a lot of light pollution from cities. Yeah. And it travels very, very far. So I'm guessing you're down the South Pole because there's less light pollution.

1:57:31You're right. A slight deviation from that is it's not light that we're looking for. We're not looking for optical light. We're looking for heat. So it's heat pollution. You're exactly right. We're looking to avoid heat pollution. So we want to be summer cold. We want to be summer that's far away from, you know, manmade sources of RF interference and microwave interference and communications obviously. But the South Pole has a couple of other properties. One, the Sun is below the horizon and the Sun is 5 ,500 Kelvin. And we're looking for something that's a fraction of a Kelvin, maybe a few mille or nano -calvin at most.

1:58:06So it's billions of times that we want to get avoid. Even the Earth itself is still 300, you know, almost to your kelvin down there. Yeah. Freezing is 273. So it does have that property. But the best part about it is above a lot of the Earth's atmosphere because at 9 ,000 feet above sea level. And it's so cold, you don't know this because you're a California baby. But on the east coast, when I would grow up, some days the bane of my existence would be, you'd listen on the radio and they'd announce school closures due to snowfall in the winter. And sometimes they'd say, up, you're out of luck because it's too cold to snow.

1:58:40Sometimes the air temperature cannot saturate and perform precipitation. And the South Pole is like that. It's so cold that if you took this glass, I'm holding a glass here and it was empty at the table here. And I extend this glass up to outer space. The amount of water, if I took all the water in the atmosphere, the humidity in the atmosphere above the South Pole and condensed it into a liquid, it would be a 0 .3 of a millimeter here in Los Angeles. It's about an inch or, you know, 25 millimeters or more. And so you'd like to not go there. Now, why is that important? Well, water absorbs microwaves.

1:59:15And that's how your microwave oven works. It heats up the water molecules. They start to vibrate and jumble. That causes friction. They heat up and eventually they'll boil. Right. So that's why sometimes you can, you know, overheat my, you know, liquid and a microwave, you can't tell, but it's super hot and actually it can be dangerous. But in this case, we don't want a photon coming from the big bang, perhaps or pre -forward the big bang with the spark that ignited it. We don't want that to travel for 14 billion years nearly and then get absorbed in a water molecule above the earth's surface.

1:59:44So the best place to go is space, but space, even with, you know, space that I haven't done any scientific experiments, but it's about a maybe a factor of a thousand to a million times more expensive. So the same satellite that we were, where he was going to scoop us, was exactly a hundred or almost 200 times more expensive than our experiment at the South Pole. Yeah, I was going to ask you about this. A million dollars given to a postdoc. That was a first it tranche of funding. We ended up getting about 10 million. 10 million. I mean, even 10 million dollars is a lot of money by any standard.

2:00:12Yeah. But probably to my mind doesn't seem like enough money to build a high -powered telescope at the South Pole, bring people there, have the infrastructure. I mean, it's not like you're rolling this thing out onto the ice and yeah, and just pointing at the sky. I mean, you need, I mean, I guess you could use the bucket from the plane as a bathroom, but you need a number of things. So, yeah, you probably need hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility right at the South Pole. But those are all funded by you and your listeners and and so forth, the taxpayers. So the National Science Foundation operates those C -130s are part of the National Science Foundation's fleet.

2:00:50We don't pay a dime for them. If I want to build a computer network system down there, we don't pay a dime for it. It's actually a point of contention because now I'm no longer with that experiment. I've recused myself from it for many years, not because of the incident where we were basically disconfirming, later disconfirmed our results. Right, so you let the result out. You do this news conference. I didn't do the news conference. Okay, so it was a big press conference, big press conference. That's right. And you know, fast forward some years it turns out this was not correct. Some months, yeah.

2:01:21Some months, not correct. Well, better to be corrected quickly than, you know, and collect your normal prize and have to like give it back or something, right? I have to say and the pursuit of prizes is a complicated thing. I was always discouraged from pursuing prizes. All my advisors. Well, my graduate advisor was very pure in the sense that she just liked doing experiments. I remember she was very, very smart, very smart. It's Barbara. Barbara Chapman, I mean, and you know, it's not just her pedigree that is evidence of that, but since pedigree is something most people can at least understand internally and externally.

2:01:54I mean, she was, you know, went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then she was at UCSF and Caltech and she, but she actually had a project sending zebrafish up into space looking at, yeah, looking at development of a vestibular system in the absence of gravity. Wow. And then fixing these specimens and bringing them back also did a lot of great work back on earth. But she wasn't somebody who was ambitious for ambition, sake, and then my postdoc advisor was exceedingly ambitious, but he also discouraged prizes and that the pursuit of prizes. That's right. Way to be. Yeah, I think that it's sort of like going into football to get a super bowl ring.

2:02:30These things do represent the pinnacle, but it's dangerous to be chasing that like singular carrot because you can miss the journey. Look, I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud that I had such a base being on, you know, kind of pursuit. I think it was, as I said, compounded by psychological factors, you know, but did you have fun doing the work? Oh, I love that. Yeah, I mean, getting to do what I do now, he and now it's even more exciting in a sense, because the project, you know, and by the way, it's not like we made a blunder and like, you know, Rob, hopefully took the lens cap off the camera.

2:03:01We didn't make a blunder like that. There have been many, many blunders and actually led to much worse retractions. Our results are stronger than ever. I should say our the bicep teams results. I've left the teams I said, but their results are still the very best by almost an order of magnitude. We hope with the Simon's observatory that I'm, you know, co leading with with colleagues at Princeton and Penn and other places that we can actually supersede them, but we haven't yet. And so what we saw, I should be very clear, we didn't make a blunder. We didn't see like put our thumb in front of the viewfinder.

2:03:33We didn't make something stupid. We mistook a signal produced by another astrophysical source as representative of this curling pattern of microwaves for which bicep was named. That would be indicative if confirmed of the inflationary origin of the universe, which by the way would be concomitant with the existence of the multiverse. So the stakes are really high. That means the incentives to make sure you detect that are really high too and not get scooped as happened many, many times. My advisor was scooped. He never won the Nobel Prize. My advisor's advisor. He never won the Nobel Prize. These accidentally discovered serendipitously discovered astronomers, Penn's E.

2:04:12Wilson. They did win the Nobel Prize. So there is a pressure on scientists to get their first, like Falcon Scott, Robert Scott getting to the South Pole first. There is a benefit to priority. It's just a fact of life and science is no different. We teach undergraduates about seven or eight different experiments, all of them won the Nobel Prize at some point in physics history. Doesn't mean they're going to win a Nobel Prize. No, why? Because they didn't get their first.

2:04:39So getting the sign of greatest accomplishments, the sine qua non of accomplishment is that that does lead to Nobel Prize. But the goal is always I have a motto, which is, you know, go as fast as you carefully can. Yeah. But it sounds like you were wrong for the right reasons. Meaning no one made up data. Yeah. There was a confound that you weren't aware of. You became aware of it. Yeah, I should say what we saw. What we missed out as the impromptu of this origin spark of the universe was the humblest substance in the universe, namely dust. So when a star explodes, it produces after its lifetime as expired.

2:05:16It fuses lighter elements into heavier elements. Eventually, it gets to produce iron. And iron is the element for which once it's fused together from, I think it's silicon or two nuclei before it, it produces two little energy to keep the star buoyant and expanded. And so the star immediately starts to collapse. When that collapse occurs, it blasts out into the interstellar medium that surrounds it, all the the byproducts, the silicon nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and the iron. And it blasts it out into the universe surrounding it. And that happens enough times in our galaxy that the galaxy is actually pretty polluted place.

2:05:57It's smoggy, it's dusty, it's dirty. And the dust is actually little microscopic meteorites. So on my website, branketing .com, I give away, actually, I have a special link, branketing .com slash huberman. I will give away actual meteorites that come from your ancestral homelands of Argentina. And you'll see when you get them, they're highly magnetic. They're very dense. And I give you the material, the composition of these meteorites and the assay, we do exorbit crystallography on them. It's really cool. The actual composition of them is determined by this last event that a star does before it dies, which is to produce iron.

2:06:34So we did discover a microwave signal from the galaxy, not from the big bank, not from the cosmos, but from particular and unique to our galaxy, which is that when a star explodes, it produces this material, mostly made of iron, these the micro meteorites that I talked about put on my website for your listeners. And these micro meteorites are also going to act like little compass needles. They're highly magnetically susceptible. So the Milky Way, everything in the universe has a magnetic field. You have a magnetic field, birds have it, even magnet a bacteria can have it, and our planet obviously has it, and the galaxy has it.

2:07:12What happens when you put a compass in a magnetic field? Those needles get aligned with the magnetic field. That then produces a type of polarization. Now polarization is the least familiar. Light has three characteristics. It's intensity, it's color, or spectrum, and it's polarization. Almost nobody knows what polarization is, but it's really the essence of what makes light a wave. If you think about an ocean wave, the ocean wave is going up and down, unculating up and down, and the undulation, the direction perpendicular to the sea surface is sort of its polarization. Happens to be that water waves are actually polarised, longitudinally, but forget that.

2:07:48Or if you and I separated by a meter and a half, two meters, we have a rope between us. If we oscillate that rope up and down at a certain frequency, the frequency of a bit of the spectrum, the color of the light, how hard we do that would be the intensity of the light, and the plane that we're oscillating, the jump rope, or whatever, and that's the plane of polarization. These little needles of cosmic dust from the exploded inner of a star that died to, you know, an Ardalexie many years ago, and many, many billions of these stars, they produce these particles of dust. So we saw that pattern instead of seeing the birth pangs of the big bang, the origin of the universe.

2:08:26I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Roca. Roca makes eye glasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. I've been wearing Roca readers and sunglasses for years now, and I love them. They're lightweight, they have superb optics, and they have lots of frames to choose from. I'm excited to share that Roca and I have teamed up to create a new style of red lens glasses. These red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening after the sun goes down. They filter out short wavelength light that comes from screens and from LED lights, the sorts of LED lights that are most commonly used as overhead and frankly lamp lighting nowadays.

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2:09:42Roca red lens glasses also look cool, frankly. You can wear them out to dinner or to concerts or out with friends. So it turns out it is indeed possible to support your biology to be scientific about it and to remain social after all. If you'd like to try Roca, go to roca .com. That's roca .com and enter the code huberman to save 20 % off your first order. Again, that's roca .com and enter the code huberman at checkout. So I want to talk about what you're working on now. Before I do that, right? It's been many segue. There are a number of questions that I have some of which I sort of know the answers to.

2:10:20Most of which I don't know the answers to, but I think a lot of people either wonder about or if they don't, they can quickly enrich their experience of daily life if we were to get answers on the following. So I'm thinking about this not rapid fire Q &A, but maybe like one to three minute answers about the following. For instance, why does the moon look so much bigger when it's near the horizon as opposed to overhead? Yeah, my son asked me that two days ago. So that's a fun one. So let's go first with that. Sometimes the moon is huge. Sometimes the moon is small. And I'm not talking about when it's full versus a sliver.

2:10:59Tell us why. So the moon is always a half a degree wide. Same exact apparent angular diameter as the sun, which is unique among the two hundred ninety moons in our solar system. Only our moon has the same apparent diameter as seen from its planet as the sun does, meaning we're the only planet that can have a total solar eclipse and exact total solar eclipse that we had a couple of months ago in Austin, Texas. Be that as it may. The moon doesn't change the size. I would hope not. That would that would freak me out. Yeah. The moon is about 60 times the Earth's radius from the Earth. It's 250 ,000 miles away, which is about one and a half light seconds away.

2:11:41And it is about the size of the continental US in diameter. So are a little bit less. So the the moon's size doesn't change. But when the human eye has something to compare to, the the brain has a reference point to compare to. And because it's so big, if there's something in front of it, a 747, a person, a large building, even when you were, if the moon is behind that object, because it's so far away, moving even the Earth's entire radius doesn't change the moon's apparent angular diameter. It's the same in P king as it is here, Beijing as it is in Los Angeles, right? So that means a very small, a very large change in the distance in the Earth would change the building size dramatically, could reduce it to zero basically.

2:12:25But when you compare it to something that's close on the horizon, your brain has something visually to compare to. When it's overhead, and zenith or whatever, it doesn't have anything to compare to. So you're just looking at it. But you can always measure it and you can prove to yourself, it's always the same size. It's about the size of your pinky finger and it'll held it arm's length. Same size as the Sun. And interestingly enough, it's the same. You said one degree. It's half a degree. Half a degree. Half a degree. Yeah. Well, that's why you said pinky. So folks, most people probably aren't familiar with thinking in degrees.

2:12:50If you want to understand a degree, put your right or left doesn't matter, arm out in front of you, raise your thumb like a thumbs up. So at the width of your thumb at arm's length is approximately one degree. That's why you say for your pinky, it's about half a degree. I should also say this is an opportunity to give a fun little lesson and visual acuity. If I were to draw 30 black lines spaced from one another with just the light color of your nail and be between them, we'd say there were 60 lines, you know, black nail, black alternating, your acuity for 2020 vision is approximately 60 cycles per degree.

2:13:30A hawk, any kind of raptor, is about 120 cycles per degree, which is why they can sit up on a lamp post and actually see the rustling of the grass below and probably make out some of the individual furs on the head of a rodent. But you can't. So what do I mean by 60 cycles per degree? If I were to draw 40 black lines, so now you have 80 total of black and then the color of the nail black and the color of the nail. So you would see that as, believe it or not, as solid black. It's beyond your acuity threshold. When you say one degree, so this is important. So when the moon is quote unquote giant at the horizon, put out your pinky.

2:14:14Yep. It covers the moon. You can eclipse the moon. You can eclipse the moon when the moon is overhead. Yep. You can eclipse the moon with your pinky. And most people will probably thinking, no way, that can't be true. But it's absolutely true. Fun fact, which is bigger, the width of a rainbow or the width of the moon? And as a rainbow, a wider than a half degree. You ever see a rainbow? You can. I mean, in the sky, it seems as. I'm not talking about the arc, the band. Sure. From red to blue. Right. From red. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's bigger. Gosh, intuitively, I want to say it's thicker.

2:14:46But now you're going to tell me that it can't be because it's, this is like the the Pink Floyd album, right? This is literally just the end of the poll. The dark side of the moon, the rainbow coming through when you take light and positive. Yeah. I'm going to say it's one, it's one degree. So the rainbow's bigger? No, the moon's bigger. It seems like roughly the same size. But when I think of the rainbow, I just think of like the larger. It's the same size. It's the size of the sun. Well, it's just the opposite. It's actually exactly the right. Thank you very much. There you go. Professor Fass is the test for once.

2:15:19Yeah. Okay. Next question. People obsess over this. I have my theories. I think it's still debated when you watch a sunset. You get that beautiful long wavelength, short wavelength contrast that I blabber about incessantly on the podcast and social media because that's what's setting your circadian clock. It's that orange red tones and the blue tones of the sky. But right as the sun goes down across the horizon, especially over the ocean, there is the phenomenon known as the green flash. Yes. What is the basis for the green flash? Well, I'll tell you something really cool. If you go to the South Pole, which is oversubscribed by a factor of 10 to 1.

2:15:59He believes 10 times as many people want to spend their nine months year of their nine months of their year minimum at the South Pole, then we have room for to actually do work at the South Pole. Carpet games. 10 people total. No, there's 45 people there. Just kidding. Just kidding. And they're all listening to you after that. So when you want to go there, when you go there, they actually don't know where the sun is going to set.

2:16:27Remember, the sun sets is unknown. And actually the days preceding it, the sun is making a big circle around your head. I've seen this with the moon. So the sun and the moon, they just make a circle and slowly after reaching their apex on the first day of summer, which is December 21st for them down there up set. Eventually, it crosses the horizon on March 21st around March 21st. That's the first day of fall or when they start getting ready for winter. They don't know where it's going to go down. We think of it always going to the west, but where is west at the South Pole? Every direction you look is north.

2:16:57So when this occurs, the actual phenomenon that you mentioned, the green flash can last for days or can last for hours. So if you really are an aficionado of Hoberman protocols and you want to see the green flash applied to be down there, but the bad news is you're stuck there for nine more months. Okay. So yes, it's a real phenomenon. Not only can you take pictures of it, but you can see it with your eye. The only correction I would say is you pretty much need to have a perfectly clear day. You can't have any clouds on the horizon. And it's best seen over the ocean. So we're blessed here. But for those of us that don't end up at the South Pole, yeah, God willing.

2:17:33Send me a lot of hot cast. I don't like environments that can really kill it. But but if I watch the sunset over the Pacific or I see the green flash sometimes, what's the basis of that? Yeah. So the earth's atmosphere is actually a it's layered. Okay. But it's actually simpler to think about the earth as being flat. Now there's no hopefully there's no flurifers out there thinking that Brian Keating is advocating the flat earth. But imagine this table we're looking at a table. Imagine there's a slab of you know, translucent glass on it. And we're sitting at the on the table underneath the slab of glass, pretty thick glass, right?

2:18:12And you're looking straight up. You look through a minimum amount of the glass, right? Straight up would be zenith at your local horizon. Every direction you're looking is your horizon. You see off the edge of this flat earth and this and this analogy. When you look at a slight angle, you're going through more path lengths of the substrate of the substance. More glass. More glass. Yeah. Finally, if you did have this thing extending to infinity, you'd be looking through an infinite amount of atmosphere or glass when you're tangent to the horizon, you're going parallel to the earth's surface and this flat earth analogy.

2:18:44The earth's atmosphere is not only made of oxygen, it actually has a lot of particulates. And because it's because of those particulates, a lot of them come from dust and a lot of them come from you know, volcanoes and and and a large amount now comes from human made sources, pollution, so far. The more optical depth, the more path length that you look through, the more scattering of the sun's light occurs. When scattering occurs, the longer wavelength light is eat more easily penetrates through dust, smog particles, even glass, okay? So that goes through easier and the short wavelengths comparable to the intermolecular spacing of the smog, the dust, the gas in the atmosphere of the oxygen, scatters much more efficiently and so that gets scattered out of the beam of light from the sun.

2:19:32The sun's light though actually peaks slightly in the green. We don't actually notice this because our eyes are and we're used to thinking about as very yellow. It happens and the reason for this can be you know substantiated by night vision glasses. What color is the light coming in? It's green right? The amplifiers versions of these things. Why? Because your eyes are very sensitive to green light, it's even more sensitive to green light than yellow light. So and that's because the sun, which is what we've evolved to adapt to, being most sensitive to sunlight, is more greenish than yellow. So there's more power at the wavelength, like somewhere between like 450 and 550 nanometers.

2:20:08Exactly, 100 % right. So at that green flash, at that moment of green flash, you're seeing two things. One is the sensitivity of the human eyes, slightly maximized to that, but that doesn't explain why photographs see it as well. And the other reason is that most of the yellow light and the sunlight is getting scattered away. And so you're mainly seeing that green light, but you're only seeing it at the point of maximum scattering, which occurs exactly when the sun crosses the horizon. Because of the interaction with all that atmosphere. Exactly. That's wild because for the longest time, I had a biological explanation for this that I think was based on a paper that was published maybe in nature, but don't quote me on that.

2:20:50Just because it's published in nature doesn't mean it's wrong. I've got friends with a few nature editors still. And a great journal, look, we do a whole episode about nature, nature, science, and self. But the explanation that was getting kicked around for a while was a biological explanation, which is that our ability to perceive reds and greens and blues and yellows is based on our trichromacy, the presence of these three different photoreceptors. Short, medium and long wavelength or blue, green, red, so to speak, that absorb short, medium or long wavelength light. And then the comparison, there's this opponent C whereby our ability to see red is really contingent on our ability to perceive green.

2:21:35And so for someone who's red, green, colorblind, one in 80 males, for instance, they still see stuff out in the world that's red, but they see as more orange, isher brown. Dogs the same way. They're not colorblind. True monochromats that don't see color are very rare. That is a one form acro, I think it's called acromotopes. Yeah. Don't quote me on that either. But in any case, the idea was that if you're looking at something that's very enriched in long wavelengths, like orange, red, and you stare at it for long enough, have you ever done that like American flag visual optical illusion when you stare at it?

2:22:10Then you look away from it and you see the opposite colors. Yeah. Right. And so one biological explanation is that the sun is setting and you're looking at this orange red thing. When the sun is low in the sky, you can actually look at it without distressing your eyes, right? Because, as opposed to overhead when you should never stare at the sun. And then the moment that that reddish orange disappears, the biological explanation is that there's a kind of perception of a green flash because of the opponent's switch to the other, let's just say wavelength channels. So to speak, I don't think that's in disagreement.

2:22:44I think that might explain the amplification that we see, but then it doesn't explain why you'd see it in a photographic emulsion. Right. There's nothing biological about it. I like your explanation better because it's explained by physics and the biology of color uponancy is also physics, but not as well worked out. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Earlier we were talking about the perceived relationship between the menstrual cycle, which is not always 28 days, but is on average 28 days, and the lunar cycle. Is there any evidence that, well, it'd be amazing if one influenced the other in the other direction that the menstrual cycles were influencing the lunar cycle, but is there any evidence between for a true relationship between the lunar cycle and the menstrual cycle that's been documented?

2:23:36I don't know. It's interesting. The sun also produces tides and produces gravitational effect, but the dominant effect on earth due to that 28 day, 29 day cycle of the moon is its effect on the Earth's oceans, which produces four tides a day, two high and two low, and actually Galileo incorrectly used that phenomenon as a way to buttress his argument that the Earth went around the sun. He basically, if you're listening, I'm taking my glass of Matina. You're a montet. Yeah. So he said that when the Earth is spinning, it rotates one, it's pretty, but it's also revolving around the sun. So these combined motions make this sloshing of the liquid.

2:24:12You see that? And he claimed that is what caused the tides on the Earth, when the brilliant scientists can be. And it's almost like the proportion of their blunder is proportionate to how brilliant they are. Because it also correlates with the height of the problems they're chasing. Exactly. You were saying that Galileo got certain things wrong, but got a number of things right. That's right. Einstein too. And being wrong for the right reasons is actually very important in science. And by the right reasons, I mean that nobody's, you know, p -hacking, p -value hacking or fludging data that they're not tossing data, they're really trying to solve problems.

2:24:51And it's almost like in sports, a great competitor wants great competitors. Yeah. I mean, what's that? Like, why would somebody want to like cheat into a different weight class, knock somebody out and consider themselves the world champion at that weight class? Like, it's just silly. It's right. And in science to not try and seek the truth is anti science. Certainly it happens. But okay, so no clear evidence that the lunar cycle influences the the mental cycle. I would expect that it would influence other animals. I don't know what the mental cycles are, you know, deer or whatever, you know, who knows?

2:25:22Or any animal that has, you know, egg that, you know, a lot of animals have not a menstrual cycle but an ester cycle. So like, a lot of rodents will have like a four day cycle. Okay. So it clearly doesn't map to the lunar cycle. But you hear a lot about, about these things. And humans are amazing at drawing correlations. Again, we're a prediction making machine. We're a storytelling machine. And in the past, by the way, the moon was a lot closer than not a lot, but it was closer. The moon moves about the width of your again, back to your fingers now. So the moon moves away by the width of about your thumbs fingernail every year.

2:25:57So there's a centimeter away from the earth because there's a gravitational competition between the gravitational force of the moon and the earth's oceans provide a source of friction. So over the years, it's getting farther and farther away such that it won't eventually won't be able to have total solar eclipses. It'll be called an annular eclipse where it doesn't obscure it completely. Anyway, so in the past, this is the only way to say millions of years ago in the first hominids we're evolving, you know, the moon was much, much closer. You know, millions of times of the, you know, the fingernails eventually starts to add up.

2:26:27And certainly when the first life formed on the earth, it was only, you know, it's probably 30 times closer than it is now. So yeah. Short answer, I don't know. Where are some of the best places in the northern hemisphere? And please don't say the North Pole, where people can go see spectacular night time stuff. Yeah. So I think of you know, somebody high country in August for the meteor shower. Yeah. Certainly not. It's a level that you're looking, a custom to look at things. But with the naked eye, you're going to be assuming that it's not cloudy, you're going to be treated to. Yeah. A light show that is in my experience beyond anything I've ever experienced.

2:27:08So just expect just extraordinary on my the special website that I made, Brian Katie to come slash Huberman, I list the four major meteor showers and one in each season that people can watch with your naked eye. In fact, it's bad to use a telescope. You don't want a telescope because it juts through the field of view. Yeah, exactly. You want the whole field of view. And humans have amazing as you know, a huge field of 190 degrees or something like that. You know, just so not as big as an owl, but quite big. And you want to take that in because you're looking for motion, you're looking for intensity.

2:27:36Sometimes you can see colors and I list what elements contribute to the colors of different meteorites on this, you know, the website that I have. But yes, the anywhere that's more than say 20, 30, 40 miles away from a big major city is fine. Even in San Diego, there's two dark sky communities. One is called Julian California and the other ones, the Anza Barrego Desert. That's called Barrego Springs. These are areas where they forbid upward shining light. So the only light can be downward facing. It also has to have very narrow spectral bands on it. So like sodium vapor, you know, very high so that you can filter it out.

2:28:13Basically with certain very inexpensive optical filters. But you know, I think it's it almost anywhere. But the good thing to know is that if you get a telescope, again, you can see 90 % of what's going to be fascinating to you as a lay person with a telescope that costs $50. You can see all the creators. You can see mountains on the moon. And again, these mountains were not just like cool things. They destroyed a site. They falsified the scientific paradigm, quote unquote, which was that the moon was perfectly crystalline and and spherical. Galileo showed no, not only does it have mountains, I can measure the height of those mountains.

2:28:48I can measure the planes of lava flows. And eventually they came out theories that it doesn't have tectonic motion. It doesn't have an iron core. I mean, it's amazing. You can see all these things with your with the small telescope, like the one I have for you. But you don't need like the Hubble telescope or Mount will you don't need any of that. You can see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. You can even on a dark sky without a telescope. See an object that's outside of our galaxy. It's called the entromaticaly. It's very important the history of astronomy in 1929, 1923, rather on Mount Wilson not far from here.

2:29:24Edwin Hubble realized that that was not part of the Milky Way galaxy. It was way too far away to be located within the Milky Way. It was about 20 times the radius of the Milky Way. And that revolutionized all of our, you know, conceptions of where the universe is located is a centred on us or read the most important thing. No, he showed that you can see that on most fall nights in the constellation and dramed it with your naked eye. It's six times wider than the full moon. It's incredible. When I look at many of the constellations, I don't see how our ancient predecessors got to the description of a bear or whatever.

2:30:02Is that because they saw more stars than I did? Or is that because they had a wilder imagination? Or were taking psychedelics or something? 20 centuries before TikTok. So I cut them some slack. There are a couple that look similar to what they're, you know, a Ryan. But depends on how you connect the dots. Yes. So the big the big deeper and the little dip are kind of like a okay, you get that. Those are our constellations. Those are our constellations. I have to have to be great. I have to put on my very, very presumptive. Why are they not constellation? So they're portions of a constellation. So they're they're called asterisms.

2:30:34So an asterism is a collection of stars that's associated with each other. But it's not the full composition of a constellation. So the constellation is actually called Ursa Major. The big dippers in the tail and the hindquarters of Ursa Major, which is the great bear. The little dipper is the asterism of seven stars that make up their 80 something stars that make up the little bear, which actually doesn't look like a bear. Ursa Major kind of does look like the California Republic flag. But yes, the the asterism I always asked for people to leave. You can't you know, they're not making new constellations.

2:31:07There's only 88 constellations over the whole four -pies spherical dome of the sky. But you can leave your own asterism on the podcast. You can leave five stars on your podcast and mine. So you can't have a constellation, but you can have an asterism. Love it. Did you catch Haley's comment when it came by when you were a few years older than I was. Yeah, I was 14. It was right after I got my first telescope. Yeah. Come through every seven every 70, 70 years. Yeah, I'm right. Yeah, that was a that's very good. Yeah, I remember 70 something. All right, but it's like the best constellation. It's like the best comment in history.

2:31:41I remember going out to see it. It was a part of a group that went camping and it looked like a smear of a lot. It's hard to know. Did I really see it or not in any case. You're daddy. Probably the only other comment that I that came to mind. Oh, is the San Diego thing was the Hail Bob. Hail Bob. Yeah, there was a group that came in a suit. Yeah, these were people that castrated themselves had been eating a subcaloric. Submagnets, caloric diets, lived forever and then decided to wear converse and kill themselves. Yeah. What do you think? Let's not go dark there. What do you think is the relationship between like comets and these and these wild human behaviors?

2:32:22It's so interesting. You mentioned that and lunacy for that matter like full moon and lunacy. Right. I think crime statistics. So look at these words. Disaster, catastrophe. They asked in both of those means star. They used to believe that stars, comets, eclipses, those things were influence events on earth caused by these celestial forces for not propitiating them, making them gods happy or whatever. And in fact, Columbus owes his life. He was almost killed in Jamaica. And I think it was 15 1498 a couple of years after discovering. He's still exploring. And he was failed to ingratiate himself with the local native inhabitants of Jamaica, wherever he was.

2:33:04And they were going to kill him. And he luckily had on for navigation, astronomy and navigation have always been intimately related. Because first of all, if you know where polaris is, which is not the brightest star, it's in the little dipper. It's the pole starts, the north star effort to north north star. It's actually very close to being if you go to the north pole and look straight up, it's very close to being directly above you. And does it always mark true north? And any human time scale it does over thousands, tens of thousands of years it changes. But right now for the next couple thousand years, so you know, don't worry.

2:33:37It's still be accurate. That is within a half a degree or see your brain things at these timescales. As long as you're talking for the next thousand years, you're good. Well, I say like this, you know, the universe could end in a heat death and a big rip or whatever, but you know, that's not for a trillion years. So everybody keep paying your taxes. So you could use it for a very difficult because you couldn't actually get to know longitude. You need to measure time relative to where Greenwich mean time is. That's how Greenwich became so important. And that's why London had this huge economy. Again, these things are always related capitalism and even how we measure latitude and longitude comes from the fact that London and Thames River, 90 % of the world's commerce flowed through there at one point or another.

2:34:20It's incredible. So anyway, latitude, longitude is very important. People started to know that, yeah, these events would occur and including this event with Columbus and he brought along with him on his voyage and astronomer. And this astronomer knew that in two days time from when these natives had captured some of Columbus's crew, that there was going to be a total solar eclipse and it was going to go through Jamaica. And he said, he told Columbus and Columbus said to the inhabit, if you don't give our people back, our god is going to obscure and kill your god, the sun god. They're like, if you, you know, whatever.

2:34:55And then it happened and they totally believed that they were in control of these celestial events. We better give the people back and Columbus got the hell out of there. So it's an amazing story. But yes, comments have always been so Columbus actually used the sun as manipulative barter to threat as a threat military. Yeah, he used it for military coercion. An important book for anyone to read who's interested in basically why we're still here. In my opinion is the book Longitude. I'm interviewing her. I'm interviewing her. This is an incredible book. It doesn't require any science or technical background to read and appreciate about the development of the first reliable timekeeping devices for navigating at sea, even on overcast nights and longitude and finding Longitude.

2:35:48It's a spectacular read. It is. And change the way that I think about human evolution and technology development generally. Just a direct connection. Sorry to interrupt, but there's a connection between that and the Nobel Prize. So there was something called the Longitude Prize in the 1700s to develop a clock that could be used in the naval and naval situations on boats. He couldn't use a grandfather clock as the pendulum acceleration. So they had to find something in this guy Thompson or somebody else. Harrison, yes, he invented this mechanical clock with predecessors of our modern wind up clocks.

2:36:20Obviously we use CZM and atomic clocks. But that prize for 10 ,000 pounds or whatever it was was an early predecessor of the Nobel Prize. I've been waiting this whole conversation to talk to you about adaptive optics. Let me give just a little bit of backdrop for how I'm approaching this. In the field of neuroscience, there's as with any field of biology, a desire to see smaller and smaller things at higher and higher resolution. And there've been all sorts of incredible discoveries in microscopy like two photon microscopy, one photon microscopy, electron microscopy, you see things down to the tiny, tiny nanometer size.

2:36:58Some years ago, a group out of the University of Rochester developed adaptive optics. I think it was David Williams' group, which is borrowed from astronomy. And my very top contour understanding of this is that you're using the presence of noise in the environment, essentially, as part of the microscope to get a better image. And this was used in the field of ophthalmology to look into the back of the eye. This incredible three cell layer thick pie crust that lines the back of our eyes that it gives us all of our visual perception, not alone, but allows for all of our visual perception. As I mentioned before, the eye has a lens.

2:37:37There's vitreous. There's all sorts of opportunity for light scatter. And then within the eye itself, you've got these multiple layers you have to go through before you can see the photoreceptors, but using adaptive optics, you can take all that noise, all that stuff between the microscope and what you want to see way, way back in the eye and use that in air quotes here. Noise and make it part of the microscope, so to speak. And without going into further detail there, I was always told that adaptive optics was borrowed from your field, astronomy, where people use the presence of atmosphere dust of these stuff in the way and made it part of the lens, if you will, to be able to see things at higher resolution, which I just think is so incredible.

2:38:24It's like saying that the barrier becomes the portal through which you even more than had you had a clear path. The obstacle is the way. Yeah, never met him, but I liked that book very much. Okay, so what is adaptive optics at the lab for astronomers? Okay, so we live in an atmosphere, an planet with an atmosphere, thank God, we wouldn't be here having this conversation, right? And that atmosphere is a dirty window. It's like literally looking through the wind shield of your car and it's cloudy and dusty and contaminated. We live in in its presence. And the best astronomical telescopes are the ones that are launched above the atmosphere, out of the atmosphere, Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, and now the James Webb telescope.

2:39:09Again, those are multi -billion dollar telescopes, the James Webb to build it. And by the way, any one lesson to leave you with and maybe your audience with as well is whenever you hear a scientific instruments cost, always in your mind at least double it. Some Andrew Lang, my late great mentor, he's to say multiply by pie. Because, hey, you're not taking into account the fact that you don't build say a destroyer or an aircraft carrier to build it, you build it to use it. And it's about 10 % of the operating of the construction cost to operate an instrument, a battleship, a telescope, whatever.

2:39:42That's a rule of thumb that project managers love to use. So that means in 10 years is going to double the price. And we hope that Hubble and Webb and Hubble's already lasted 40 years on it. So, last long time. So, whenever you hear this, but it's incredibly expensive. One kilogram used to cost like $10 ,000 to bring to orbit. And Elon keeps talking about how cheap it's going to be, but he has yet to launch a scientific instrument. I talked to him for 10 minutes of my podcast once and I tried to get him to shut off these starlings are amazing. I have one in my house, but they have the property that they go through astronomical images and they leave a satellite trail behind them, which is, you know, can be a company you're taking a picture of a deep star, a deep, you know, a galaxy or whatever.

2:40:22And you see these streaks going through it. It ruins the image and you have to wait until they're gone. But at least an optical astronomy, you can physically literally paint those satellites black and they will no longer reflect. And so they won't obscure the image whatsoever. So you're saying that the starling satellites are going to make your job more difficult. They definitely are because you can, while you can paint an optical satellite black and make it black, we're looking for heat. There's no way to stealth, you know, confuse or block out heat. Sorry, that's a law of thermodynamics. Anything that's above absolute zero will always give off heat.

2:40:55And worst of all, the signals that he uses are in the exact microwave spectral range that we use to look at the CMB, the cosmic microwave background. So what's his response to this? I told him that in this having internet everywhere is more important. No, he said he would look into it. You know, nine months ago, Elon, I know you like the show. So please do reach out to me. But this would be just turning it off when it's over our telescope, basically, that's what I end the south pole. So it's not a big deal. It's a specific request. There's no one at the, it's not like he's getting millions of dollars in ad revenue from people at the south pole.

2:41:24They don't use them. So anyway, that's I'm asking Elon. It's a small ask. But anyway, so we want to be above the atmosphere, but it's millions and maybe billions of dollars to do that for a telescope. Like we're using, or for an optical telescope here on earth. So scientists became very convinced that there has to be a way to mitigate the effects of the atmosphere. Now, what is the main effect of the atmosphere? Will you learn to it when you were a kid? Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are? What is that twinkling? It's called sintillation. Sintillation is the property of a point source, which is a star is so far away, even though they're enormous, they still only subtend a zero -dimensional, almost zero -dimensional dot of light on the sky.

2:42:06When it goes through the atmosphere, the atmosphere has macroscopic turbulence features. The atmosphere is a fluid. There's turbulence, there's roiling columns, there's cells of the atmosphere. And if you've ever looked at a star, they jitter, they they they looks like they're moving around. And that's the combination of the atmospheric cells. Each column of air that has slightly more density will refract light slightly different angles. Remember we talked about light when it goes through a lens, it refracts, it bends. So should we be thinking about the light from stars kind of like a jagged line coming towards our eye?

2:42:37It's coming through, it's getting deflected slightly, and it's moving and it's landing on different retinal cells. And we're perceiving that as this motion or in a CCD array, it's also landing on different pixels. So you can't get away from it by using technology. It's still an effect caused by these atmospheric turbulence cells. And by the way, you can tell and you can identify a planet by the fact it does not sintillate. It does not twinkle, twinkle. So Jupiter's visible tonight. You'll hope you'll see it with the telescope. We can see it after we're done recording. We keep going. We're about halfway done.

2:43:07I figure we'll go outside. We'll look at it and you'll see it's not a stationary. And I actually use that and I'm not going to kiss my wife for the first time. But I'm not going to talk about that. When you look at the planet, you can identify them by their lack of sintillation. It's a way to identify if it's a plane, a star, or a planet. So astronomers, including a colleague of mine, and you see system, Claire Maxx, and other people realized in the 1960s and 70s that if they had a fake star, it's actually called either a guide star or an artificial star, I'll explain how they make that a minute.

2:43:40Then if they knew the exact properties of that guide star, then they could measure just the guide star through the same optics of the telescope. And then they would take the light from that artificial star onto a flexible deformable mirror. So the mirror could actually wobble and wiggle. And it would do so an exactly compensatory way to nullify the atmospheric turbulence. So it's basically what light does when it goes through a cell of the atmosphere. It traverses a slightly longer path difference. So they would shorten the path difference of the mirror. They make it a little bit closer in the direction of that cell and other places they'd make it farther away in vice versa.

2:44:17They compensate for it. And this was done by a combination of two technologies. One was the deformable mirror that reflects 100 times per second. And the other was making these artificial stars. So how do they make an artificial star? They shoot a laser into the troposphere. That laser illuminates the... So the troposphere. The troposphere is the layer of the atmosphere. I used to know all the different layers, but it's okay. Okay, the atmosphere is the farthest away from the troposphere. So some layer of the atmosphere? Yeah, it's 40, 30, 40 kilometers above the earth. It's not quite in space.

2:44:48Far enough away that the laser beam is still collimated. It makes a nice beam and it can illuminate and then cause this sodium ions to floor S basically. So they start to get really stimulated. It looks just like a star. They know exactly how they produced it. They know exactly what phase and wavelength to correct in the mirror. And then they say it's almost as good as going into space. It corrects exactly the compensation of the earth's atmosphere with the combination of this deformable mirror. And it was actually used by my colleague, Andrea Gez here at UCLA, to measure the properties of stars orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and test Einstein's theory of relativity.

2:45:25Without this on the 10 meter diameter kektelescope. So she never won a one that Nobel Prize. So it's amazing technology, but it was classified. It was so useful to astronomers, but it wasn't as useful as to the military. Remember I said Galileo used his telescope to sell to the military of Venice. It was immediately classified by the US military. Because if you think about a spy satellite, what's it doing? All staring down to earth. And it's looking at, you know, looking at whatever on earth. It's also going through the atmosphere. It's going to have the same problems. So they want to use that and have this technological advantage over the Soviets probably in the 1970s and 80s.

2:46:03So they classified it. They didn't let many astronomers could build things. They could deliver the finished product, but they couldn't patent it. They couldn't use it. So Claire Max, as I said, she could have been super rich. But it's interesting because now they're using it. So it's bad enough to look from earth to space. But as I said, if you imagine the earth as having a slab of an atmosphere, imagine a sniper. The sniper is trying to make a kill shot. You know, Jocco's out there trying to hit something five kilometers, three kilometers away or whatever. There's a lot of atmosphere in the way.

2:46:33And if you're looking through a optical site, that will also happen. So now they're actually using this optical compensation and sniper scopes are using this technology adaptive optics. So it's another way that astronomy is, you know, influence military, you know, developments as well. Very interesting. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I'm aware that there are some technologies now to use lasers to extract sound waves in a similar way. So there are technologies that exist where you can try and laser a window on a building from very far away and actually hear the conversation inside the room.

2:47:08By way of the sound waves hitting that window, the conversion of sound waves to optical and then from optical back to sound on your computer allows that. Also, there was a technology that was on publicize a few years back, developed in at least in part at Stanford, the ability to see around corners by shining lasers at the most visible location closest to what you want to see. And then capturing reflections and sound waves at that location and essentially being able to reconstruct images around corners. See how many objects are there. So pretty wild stuff. You can imagine the military and spy implications, but also just, but perhaps just as interesting the ability to, for instance, map the positions and movements of critters in the deep ocean without actually having to quote unquote see them.

2:47:58You could hear them. I had a really interesting experience a few summers back of going to somebody's pool. It wasn't impressive pool, but the most impressive thing about it was that you could hear music perfectly well underwater using adaptive acoustics. And listening to your episode of the goggles. No, you could dive. You could listen to something above water, dive below water and still hear it. I said if it were playing in the headphones, maybe not quite as well as in headphones. But and if you sloshed around in the water, there'd be a little perturbation, but it's pretty spectacular. It wasn't my pool, unfortunately.

2:48:27I have one big question that I think everybody would like the answer to, which is to what extent do you think there's life outside earth or not on earth? And when people hear this, they think aliens, but in like an insect -like creature, single or small multi -cell organism on another planet, that would be a spectacular fine. Beyond spectacular, is there any evidence that that does exist? Is there any reason to think that it couldn't exist? And if it does, would it have to be in a different in a different galaxy altogether? What's the what's the going belief among those who are like real scientists who don't believe that there's whatever, just real scientists like what's the thought?

2:49:19Yeah, I'm like a centipede on Mars. I would only think too many people would be totally surprised. Right. But that'd be pretty wild. Well, yeah, I'm kind of an outlier, so just everyone should, you know, look to the actual experts in this field. But I have some rigorous, you know, kind of logical arguments that I believe the probability of lie, I would never say it's zero, but I think it's very low. And I think I can substantiate that. And the best part is I can't be falsified right now. There's zero evidence that there's life anywhere else in the universe, period, full stop, end of sentence. There's no evidence, conclusive evidence.

2:49:54In fact, lots of drones over in New Jersey right now and not no evidence of high, new and good into drones. So the argument that it would somehow, first of all, transform our understanding of human place is inarguable to me. I believe that's true. Although in this movie, contact is a really wonderful movie. It's not cheesy science fiction. It first to like use a wormhole and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances. But in that movie, there's a scene where President Bill Clinton is talking about the discovery that this fictitious character made, but he's actually talking about a meteorite that was discovered in an article.

2:50:32And they just clip that and the meteorite was believed to have microbial life. And that meteorite's origin was inarguably from Mars. Okay. So the reasoning was this 1997 that there was a meteorite found in an article where it's easy to find meteorites. It's in the movie or in real life. There's a real life in 1997. A scientist announced a discovery of a meteorite from and our it's called Alan Land Hill's meteorite. And it had what they claimed were evidence of microbial life and even respiration byproducts of these microbial life forms. Okay. It was such a big deal that within minutes, you know, Bill Clinton had a press conference on the White House lawn where he goes, this rock speaks to us from across the generations.

2:51:12And if confirmed, well undoubtedly, you know, revolutionize our understanding of the universe around there. Okay. Now the movie clips that clip to make it seem like Ellie the fictitious character discovered like, you know, this steady extraterrestrial technology, not a microbe. But in the public's mind, that actual scientific discovery was never falsified. It was certainly never confirmed. No one's ever come back to say that was correct and that we did find microbial evidence of microbial life on Mars. Now how did that meteorite get there? Well, some asteroids hit the moon. That's why it has craters on it.

2:51:49It hits the earth. That's why we have meteor crater Arizona, Winslayer Arizona, Yucatan, Chicksalab, where the dinosaurs doom was sealed by the giant impactor 66 million years ago. Those impacts occur on every planet, every moon in our solar system. So some asteroid hit the surface of Mars, probably millions of years ago, ejected material, low gravity and Mars, low atmosphere. And that material has been orbiting around and eventually made its way and hit the earth. Okay. So matter from Mars landed on the earth. Does that make sense? That's how I gave you, I have a lunar meteorite that I giving to you again, as a token of my appreciation for all you do.

2:52:29That came the same way. Something hit the moon, blasted off some lunar. It's called breccius, the crust of the moon. Eventually made its way, landed in Northwest Africa and I bought a slice of it from a, I got a dealer, you know, I got a meteorite dealer and I got that for you. Okay. So what's the lesson? Material gets exchanged from planet to planet. Now I asked the following question. If that happened on the Mars to the earth, the moon to the earth, so too has material from the earth been ejected since life emerged 3 .7 billion years ago, there's literally millions of tons of earth that's floating around in space.

2:53:05Some of that will have landed on Mars. So someday we'll get there, we'll find some piece of it. Now could it have some of it have a tardigrade on it? Could some of it have a protozoan on it? Obviously it could. Maybe some interesting microbes. Yeah, maybe some ancient microbes that are no longer an extent. Yeah, I could. It could have, what's an adaptogen? I've no idea. You talk about adaptogens. Debtogens are, it's a broad term used to describe any compound that allows you to modulate the stress response. So maybe increase your stress threshold or recover from stress more quickly. It's sort of like saying stimulant adaptogens.

2:53:45No, it's a broad category. I mean, I think, you know, people say like, you know, certain non -holicene agent mushroom strains are adaptogens. I mean, the ability to buffer the stress response. I mean, things like rodeola have been described as adaptogens and these work through neurotransmitter systems. So broadly speaking, they allow you to perceive effort as less effortful. This kind of thing. Okay. Yeah. So one theory of the formation of life on earth, you asked me about that earlier, the origin of life on earth is a huge mystery. How did life get here? One proposition was made by Fred Hoyle and other people.

2:54:18It sounds dirty, but it's not. It's called pan spermia. Just means that genetic material has been transferred from another another astronomical object landed here on earth. So the converse reaction occurs as well. But the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars. So if I told you, you know, we've discovered a planet and there's another planet right next to it and has almost the same conditions. It's in the so -called Goldilocks zone where the temperatures just right to have liquid water, which Mars can have on it and certain times of the year and certain places on Mars. It had flowing water on it.

2:54:47We know for sure at Mars that flowing water on it. We know for sure that material from the earth got there when earth had life on it. So the absence of life on Mars is a data point. It's not probative or provative or it's just positive rather that life couldn't exist on Mars. We haven't searched all of Mars. But it at least shows that there's an impediment to it. So people are a lot fond of saying, as I told you earlier, there's about 10 to the 24th planet's probably in our observable universe going back to the Big Bang, going out to the farthest reaches of the universe. But even if you just take the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably, literally hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone.

2:55:25And when you look at that, people like to say, as Carl Sagan did, if there's no life, it's an awful waste of space. Why is there so much space and there's no life that seems incomprehensible? But nature, I love an atheist scientist will say, you propose God exists and that's the God of the gaps to explain things that you don't understand. But when science advances, we'll have an explanation for why thunder occurs. It's not because of Thor. We get rid of God's as we learn more and so the gaps shrink smaller and smaller. But they'll say the same argument about life in the universe. They'll say, well, there's got to be life because there's so much room there.

2:55:58But as I told you, I've been in Antarctica twice. The only life forms I saw there, okay, were people. I saw a few penguins in the distance and a couple of dead sea lions. There's no trees. There's no flora at all in the entire continent. It's incredibly barren. Yet, Andrew, it makes up 8 % of the landmass of the earth. You would think, well, it's just proportional to the amount of area, the number of stars. There should be 8 % of the life on earth. There should be a billion people there, whatever, you know, 600 million people. No, there's nothing there except for scientists that go there. So the odds of life, you know, are you can't construct probability for possibility.

2:56:38And many, many other arguments that I could give you, the improbability of life, how hard it is to create life. And, you know, if you just sprinkled, imagine you had a koala cannon, okay, people at Peter are going to give me. I just go to Mars and spray it with koala. It's obviously not going to like, well, I start peeing with probably be, okay, with you, populating with the anaria with koalas. I can't into take out koalas, they were probable. That's right. They would not like that. So yeah, so, you know, possibility is not probability. The number of hurdles to create a single cell is enormous.

2:57:11We have to get to reproduce, you know, to make a functional cell in the laboratory, not that that's a requirement to prove that life could exist elsewhere. I just think it's very hard. Our history of life, we have an end of one. It's very difficult to speculate on. And if we're alone, if life is abundant, as Fermi asked many, many, many years ago, if life is abundant and the galaxy is is old, where are they? Where are the aliens? There should have been plenty of time, not only for them to evolve and be superior to us in many ways and travel the distances of our galaxy, not even of the cosmos of our galaxy.

2:57:44Where are they? Where are they? They've known about us for 80 years because we've been broadcasting radio waves for the last 85 years. Do you know this theory about the gut microbiota? You know, our guts, our skin, our eyes, our nose, but certainly our entire digestive tract, the whole way down from our lips out the other end are populated with these little microbiota that influence everything from fatty acid production, neurotransmitter production, etc. Influence more than human cells. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's powerful for modulating all sorts of biological processes. And every time we interact, shake hands, if people kiss, if you interact with dirt, if you interact with a pet, the microbiome changes.

2:58:24It's an inner reflection of all your outer behaviors. And then we're internet. Yeah. And we're learning a lot about it. There's this one theory that I like that kind of turns life as you and I know it on its head, which is that humans and other species are just vehicles from the microbiome. And that, you know, and so you would take something like, oh, the desire to like, like, populate Mars or to shoot land on the moon as just the microbiota, you know, taking advantage of this weird old world primate species that we call hermosabians that loves to develop technology, almost destroy itself, but then continues to evolve social media, etc.

2:59:04Yeah, can pray that they're on. What warn each other about declining birth rates and then just to basically the microbiota have a what, you know, it's sort of quote unquote, consciousness, not a brain, but consciousness is for their own, which is like all species to make more of itself and to go further and further out and populate. It's hard to punch holes in the logic of this model, but it certainly diminishes our conscious experience. We could go on forever about this trail. I'll just kind of put a kind of a cliffhanger out there. It would be wonderful sometimes to sit down with you and discuss the possibility of rather than thinking about life elsewhere in the galaxy.

2:59:43Given what we know about physics and engineering, astronomy, etc. Would it be possible to build a planet at the appropriate distance from the Sun that we could spawn life by bringing things there as opposed to trying to take it, you know, figure out how to do it at a distance that it might not be amenable to life. Right. You know, maybe creating a garden planet. Maybe we don't put humans there right away, but trying to create a garden that could thrive at some appropriate distance from the Sun. Yeah. Nothing. What nutrients could be grown there. You know, you'd have robots man, this planet, but you'd have to somehow aggregate stuff in space to build this planet or launch this planet up that it would collect things.

3:00:23I mean, that to me feels like a fun experiment. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot less risky than going up to other planets. Yeah, I was kind of blessed as my first guest on the Intelli Impossible podcast, that Freeman Dyson. Now you mentioned with your dad, you were dad mentioned him. One of the greatest intellects of the last hundred years, great physicist. And yeah, these ideas for these Dyson spheres, which would be, you know, energy harvesting. So the first, you know, ingredient that you need to construct that the Hubertman planet habitable zone is to have a self energy as harvest as much energy as possible from a star.

3:00:55So he, he basically conjectured a megastructure, an alien megastructure that could be observable by astronomers could detect these these objects and some of claim that we have, but those have always been refuted. And it would be basically surrounding a star capturing every photon worth of energy that came out of it and then converting that to mechanical energy and then yes. And then once you have infinite energy, you can actually do fusion. You can make up whatever molecules you want. You could make up, you know, print 3D printing at the, at the quark level on up basically. And so that was his, you know, conjecture how super advanced aliens would behave.

3:01:30But again, we have no evidence for it. But it's fun. It's certainly fun to have the science fiction, you know, kind of, a lot of interesting science, you know, originates from ideas and creativity that originates from science fiction. So yeah, be a lot of fun. You and I could talk about the stars, the planets, optics, animals, life here on earth, infinitely. This is what happens, folks, when two real, real nerds get together and want to learn from one another. And I hope you delight it in this, at least half as much as I did, those you listening. I mean, you occupy an incredible place. And I mean that, you know, like your intellectual place since you were a child is a remarkable place that most people, I think, don't occupy, not because they don't have the training, but because they just haven't put their mind on there on these questions.

3:02:24And I think one thing that's so clear is that through your podcast, your books. And certainly through the discussion today, you've placed us in the position of scientist to be able to let ponder these really big questions about really big, really distant things is not typically the way that my brain functions, I think. Most people are more focused on things proximal to them and here on earth. But I'm so grateful that you did. And I'm so grateful that you continue to educate. We didn't even get to talk about, but I'll just mention that you've been a absolutely spectacular proponent for popular science education and the importance of that.

3:03:06I've been very inspired by you and your work. Thank you. Very inspired by your story. Sure, because of some similarities and, you know, fathers and sons and the tribulations, etc. different, but some overlap there. But also just because of the way that you approach life. And it's very clear to me that as a person who's focused on things very, very far away, where apparently there's no observable life yet. That you're also very grounded in this thing that we call daily life and the delight of exploration and asking questions. And if ever there was a call to arms for people to get outside and look at the stars, perhaps through a telescope or perhaps through the telescopes on the front of their skull.

3:03:48Certainly to do that and to think about some of what was discussed today because I'm certainly enchanted and I know those listening and watching are as well. So thank you for everything you do. Keep doing it. Come back. Let's keep talking. We didn't talk about God in the universe and the origins of life, but we'll do that before long. And Brian Keating, thanks for being you. I appreciate you. Thanks, Andrew. You've been a big inspiration to me too. I'm, you know, used your language. Thank you for your interest in science. It's really done so much for the world and you give it all for free. And it's, it's truly an inspiration.

3:04:24And it's really fun to talk to somebody who's, you know, at the level that you're at and so many different things and still has that, you know, as scientists, we get enured, we get kind of used to things. Always a rainbow. There's a meteor, you know, whatever, but you still have that passion. You have that passion, that curiosity. And I think that's what makes it true scientist. And the function of education seems to beat that out of kids, but, but really to have that in the domain and the expertise that you have is, there's a real inspiration. And I think it's a huge service to society. So I want to thank you too.

3:04:53Thank you. Well, it's a labor of love mixed with an affliction. So we'll keep going right back at you. Thanks, Brian. Thanks a lot. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Brian Keating. I hope you found it to be as informative and indeed fascinating as I did. To learn more about Dr. Keating's work, his podcast, his book and other resources, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from Ender and join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. Please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple.

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