#316 Brian Keating - The First Object Ever Found From Another Solar System

25:01Sorry, I just didn't have it. I wanted to study the stars. I wanted to not, you know, not miss that opportunity. It's kind of what I'm good at. But, on the other hand, this stuff is so interesting, and yet I keep hearing things like, you know, I heard from somebody. Or, you know, David Grosch. I can't, you know, these are the testimonies. I haven't seen them. They're interdimensional beings, like Congresswoman Luna. And I would bet. That's a spirit. It's a spirit. It's a god. That's why I say I call these aliens of the gaps. It's a form of almost religious worship. Same is happening with AI, by the way.

25:35You see this worship, this power, these people involved. Look at the people involved in AI, Sean. What do you mean worship in AI? What are you talking about? Worship in AI is creating a God in our image, okay? So just what God did with us. God created us from dirt. Adam in Hebrew means earth. It means dirt. God carved us out of earth. We can believe it literally. I'm not here to proselytize. I'm not going to say anything about anyone who believes literally or doesn't believe literally. But the point is, gods that we create in our image, it's one of the oldest stories of all time. Tower of Babel.

26:06What was the Tower of Babel? It wasn't just like, oh, we're going to make this tower. It was humans developed technology. They created the first composite building material with straw, with earth, with dirt. That's a composite building material, like rebar and concrete, right? And they said, hey, we have technology now. We don't need to go on top of a mountain that God made. We can build a tower ourselves to go to the sky, like a twin towers. We can do this. We're so powerful. We're so mighty, right? It's an old tale that we can compete with God. Why does the Bible? Why does the Torah, the Old Testament say they did it?

26:39They wanted to fight with God. Why? Because God had restricted the knowledge that humans beings were capable of having. Again, believe it or not, I really don't care if somebody believes the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament. I don't care. The point is these stories are eternal. They have something to teach us 3 ,000 years ago. They can teach us stuff to this very day. The story that people are trying to do now is to create a God sort of in our image, right? That will do things for us, supernatural, have capabilities, all powerful capabilities, all knowing the panopticon, know what you're doing.

27:12People trust ChatGPT more than they trust their priest, rabbi, or minister. You ask stuff to ChatGPT, you probably wouldn't tell your wife. I know I do sometimes, like, why is my wife mad at me? Like, I'm not gonna ask her that. I know why she's mad at me, right? So the point is we're outsourcing that which is ethereal, which is eternal. We're outsourcing that to little bricks of silicon. And we're hoping, but we don't really know about the dangers within. With aliens, what is happening with aliens? That there's some external force that's being suppressed that has the power to transform the world.

27:47I agree 100%. If everything they said was going to be disclosed was disclosed, we would have to reconfront a new reality. I mean, we would be in an environment that is so It would make, like, the Catholic Church burning Bruno alive and imprisoning Galileo, all the other things, it would look like, you know, like when my toddler goes into timeout, okay? It would be almost... We would be so revolutionarily displaced. The question is, you know, if we... If that's real, if these aliens exist, and they have technological capabilities to travel light years across the galaxy, why is it that, you know, Congresswoman Luna or somebody else is capable of either suppressing it or disclosing it.

28:33I mean, yeah, I don't think, I don't think, I mean, are they capable of that? Well, I'll ask you the question. Are they pretending? You're in the, you were. If you talk about aliens and you're in government, that's like an immediate PR boost. Yeah. Boom. Your front page of every paper, every podcast wants to talk to you, every news network wants to talk to you. It's a great PR stunt, right? Yeah. I mean, this episode's gonna do good because we started it off talking about aliens. I guarantee it. Also because of me, Sean. And because of you. I'm joking, I'm joking. But I'm being serious. It always hits.

29:09Yeah. It always hits. AI is another one. Nothing ever comes out. And there's an incentive to keep it that way, right? Because if you do disclose... I think there's something to what you're saying. I mean, I'm not that interested in it anymore because nothing ever comes... There's never any breaking shit that comes out that's ripped. There's nothing you can do about it anyways. Well, you can use a critical reason. What I think might be going on is they've seen how much attention the subject matter demands when it's brought up. And so it's become a tool, a useful tool for the U.S. government. That's right.

29:50No, I agree with you. I guess here's a question I've been wanting to ask you. And originally when I, you know, I actually think I might have invited you on my podcast at one point to do like a Veterans Day celebration. So anyway, at some point, I'd love for you to come on. And when you come on, I'm going to give you this. Well, I'm going to give this to you now because I brought it all to be on. This is, it's not a Nobel Prize, but it is called the Keating Prize. A little bit arrogant, okay? It's for impossible imagination, okay? And it's got your name on the side of it. And it's 3D printed. and there's a replica of the monolith from the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey because my podcast Into the Impossible is named after Sir Arthur C.

30:27Clarke who wrote the book that 2001 A Space Odyssey is based on so you're welcome thank you for all you do and we're going to play around with some other stuff now so keep that handy, we'll go with that later on so I want to turn, you know, with your permission and forbearance I want to ask you a question because Because I can't ask, I've had, as I said, military, I've had operators on. Let me ask you a question. Some of the pilots who saw things, the Nimitz incident, the Tic Tac incident, Commander Fravor, Lieutenant Commander Alex and Dietrich, they claim they saw things, right? They got back to the boat.

31:06When they got back to the boat, they were basically described as being hazed, something like that, teased mercilessly. They said it was bad for their career. David Fravers testified about this. We could talk about the geometry of, you know, how they saw different things. But I want to ask you as an operator, if... I know people that have lost limbs to IEDs, okay? If you're on point, if you're going on patrol, and one of your buddies says, I think I see this thing and it's unusual, it could be an IED or not, like, when you got back to camp, would you, like, tease that person? Or would you say, we should take this frickin' seriously?

31:45Yeah, you would say, we should take this seriously. So what do you make of the fact that when they got back and throughout, and Ryan Graves has done a good job trying to combat this, but what do you make of the fellow people that should also be encountering these things and should be subject if they're just simple, prosaic, man-made, Chinese, whatever you want. They could pose a danger of flight risk, right, for these aircraft that are operating at high, you know, velocities, right? What do you make of the fact that the fellow aviators, Aviators, they're equivalent of operators in teams, right?

32:15They were teasing them. Just psychologically, can you help me get through that? Well, I mean, I think the comparison, as you brought up, is a little imbalanced. I mean, an IED in the heyday of Iraq or Afghanistan, I mean, that was a – you would see multiple of those a day. Very common. You know what I mean? Very – nobody would second guess that – I mean, they might second guess, but they're not going to make – fun of you you know i mean it was just so prevalent it's happening multiple times a day you don't see ufos popping in and out of the water and you know defying physics every day every year every decade like you just don't you know if you see it you're very you're you're you know it's very rare right i can see like my brother i have three brothers right i can see them teasing the shit out of me right like it's kind of like a ghost right okay like you might tease somebody if they've seen a ghost like oh yeah okay you've seen a fucking ghost right but if that ghost could take out you know the entire intake on your f-18 you know uh you know hornet wouldn't you be a little bit you know like more interested in seeing if it's not not teasing them but actually let's let's go to the encounters like i'd be interested as a professional yeah is a professional i'd probably crack a little bit of a joke you would okay you know what i mean but i'd also be interested to hear what was going on i mean it i mean my old producer is the one that logged it into the logbook i mean he was there uh when that shit happened yeah and um but yeah so i i'm not saying like they should have been ridiculed or anything like that absolutely But all I'm saying is I can understand some heckling going on.

34:02Right. And then when you hear things, again, I'm a civilian, I encourage to do stuff that you and your audience does, right? Although I do have some gifts for your audience that we're going to talk about later on. So that's a cliffhanger. That's a retention device. Another question when I turn the tables on the podcaster and ask you a question. But, you know, in the context of me as a civilian, I'm told like, you know, Keating, shut your mouth. These guys saw what they saw. You don't have the balls to strap on an F-18. You didn't serve in the Air Force intelligence like Grush. What should I say in those situations?

34:40It's true. You know, I'm a pilot, but I don't fly F-18s. You don't fly Cessnas, right? But tell me, how should a civilian, you know, questioning what level of deference, what level of credulity, should I just believe someone because they strapped on a jet and I didn't have the balls to do it? or, you know, help me walk me through that. Cause I get that a lot. Like you didn't have, you, you, you don't have the skills that he has and you don't have the, you didn't have the fortitude to join. So you can't question them. Even though I'm like, well, I'm a physicist. Like I know about FLIR. I know about radar.

35:13I know about technology. I know how the, how astronomy has always fed into technology for military applications first and foremost, but you're right. I'm not a military operator. So how do I, as a civilian, you know, kind of navigate that chasm?

35:30I don't think any of that's even relevant. You didn't serve? What the fuck does that have to do with aliens and UFOs? We're not talking about some tactical maneuver that they did and bombed somebody and you're second-guessing the tactics. No, not at all. They don't have any fucking experience with UFOs or aliens just like anybody else. They saw some phenomena, right? So, I mean, I think that's a not very well-crafted defense mechanism, to my opinion. Or the fact that they have great hand-eye coordination or they have great, you know, the sniper knows how to do this and that. And they know about observing things in a high-threat environment at high speeds and kinetic environments.

36:20You don't, Keating, you sit behind a chalkboard and teach quantum mechanics. There's nothing legitimate to steal men what they're saying. The only ones that seem to have an abundance of experience tracking UFOs in real time have pretty much all been debunked and are full of shit. So, I mean, when it's a continuous thing, it's like, oh, there's the experience. Oh, shit, it got debunked again. But I don't know. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think it does, yeah. Well, Brian, let me give you an introduction here. Oh, yeah. Way too far into this. Brian Keating, you are the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, the inventor of the BICEP telescope at the South Pole, and the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory, one of the largest cosmology experiments ever built.

37:11A$100 million plus telescope array in Chile's, I can't say this, Atomica? Atacama. Atacama Desert, involving over 400 scientists from 40 institutions. You have raised approximately $200 million for your research, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers, been elected to a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and been inducted into the International Aviation Hall of Fame as a 2022 Legend of Flight. You're the author of losing the Nobel Prize ranked a best science book of the year by Science Friday, Physics Today, and Forbes, and one of Amazon's editor's best nonfiction books of all time, and the host of the Into the Impossible podcast with over 500 ,000 subscribers where you interview scientific and cultural pioneers, including 23 Nobel Prize winners as past guests.

38:16That's impressive. You are a licensed multi-engine turbine rated commercial pilot who has lectured on six of seven continents, including Antarctica, and you arrive today with a replica of Galileo's 1609 military telescope, a Martian regoliath sample, and a 4.3 billion year old meteorite that you will send to 250 members of this audience with APO addresses. is that's fucking awesome welcome to the show thanks it's quite the intro yeah better late than never but you should hear what my mother-in-law says in her rebuttal to the introduction oh shit oh man and then uh before we get too far into it uh i got a patreon account it's quite the community they're the reason that i get to sit here with you today thank you uh so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question.

39:10This is from Neil Ambrosio Jr. While most technologies to date have been used for space exploration, what are your thoughts on that same technology being used for the weaponization of space? So one of the oldest partnerships in science is between astronomy and the military. Most people don't know about that, but the The same types of technologies, of inventions, of calculations, of theory are exactly applicable in military situations. For example, the telescope, this replica telescope here of Galileo's 1609 telescope. So Galileo didn't invent the telescope. A lot of people think, oh, he invented it.

39:56He actually kind of stole the idea. And he sort of admits to it, but that's academia for you. We're used to kind of taking credit sometimes where credit might not be due. But what he did do is he kind of made it like 10x. I don't know, did you ever have a Blackberry, you know, back in the day, or Nokia, you know, kind of phone, right? The first kind of phones that did more than just, you know, send calls back and forth had early access to the internet. And you could do, you know, very crude browsing. And that's what made them really popular. but what made the smartphone really take off exponentially was that it was 10 to 100 times better than anything that came before.

40:40And so quantity has a quality all its own. Creating something for the first time, like creating a telescope is one thing, but then improving it by a factor of 10, it's almost like it's a new invention. And that's what Galileo did. He didn't invent it. It's the most simple thing you can think about. It's got two lenses. It's got a lens over here. This is called the objective lens. This is the side that faces the object that you're looking for. And then this is called the eyepiece lens, another lens on the other side. This simple thing has about one-inch diameter lens, and it can see everything that you could possibly see with the naked eye, but ten times better.

41:16And that change in humanity's literal perspective on the universe changed the world. But it wouldn't have been possible without Galileo's improvement. And in fact, he not only improved it by the type of quality of the glass that he used, the lens material, the spacing of the material. He also did things that are kind of counterintuitive. You see, Sean, the lens that's here is actually bigger than this brass disc that surrounds it. But the brass disc is actually crucial to the improvement because what the brass disc does is it focuses the fovea of your eye in the best part of the lens. If you had the whole lens exposed to the light, There's all sorts of artifacts of glints, of glare.

42:00It's called ghosting. And those effects reduced the utility of the telescope. So Galileo counterintuitively said, let's take this telescope and make it smaller. It's called stopping down, like an aperture and f-stop on a camera. That actually restricts the light. That made it focus better. It was genius. No, I wouldn't have thought of that, right? Let's make this thing better by making it smaller. Like I said, nobody ever, you know, you always want bigger, better, but no, that would have made it worse. He made it better. The other thing that he did, which nobody really had done before, it's crazy, is put it on a tripod.

42:35He invented the tripod. And what do you get when you put an optic on top of a tripod, Sean? Stability. Get stability. Because a telescope is magnifying not only the object that you're looking at, but it's also magnifying the rotation of the Earth. As we look at the stars, it's actually making them go by faster, right? The stability made when you couple the stability to the optic itself, you could now use this for military purposes. This became the first sniper rifle scope. This is the first optic ever made. It's a replica, but it's the real one. There's only one left and it's about a trillion dollars.

43:09I can't bring that for you. Maybe next time. But what was so useful about it is Galileo didn't use it for astronomy. That wasn't the first thing he used it for. He did for himself because that was what his passion was. The first night he invented this new, improved version of it with the tripod, he looked at the moon. And the moon at that time was unknown territory. People had no idea what was on it, what it was made of, if there's life there, if it's totally different than the Earth. And he looked at it, and he saw it looks perfectly smooth and circular to the eye. It has blotches on it. But he didn't know what those were.

43:43He looked at that, and he saw the following. He saw mountains. He saw craters. He saw lava flows. And he said, wait a second. People are telling us for 2 ,000 years. It's perfect. It's a crystalline sphere. This isn't perfect. It's riddled with holes and craters and marks and mountain ranges and rift valleys and craters and canyons. It's kind of like the Earth. That was the first unification of an extraterrestrial object with the Earth. That was amazing. He then looked at other objects and did things, and he wrote these all in his notebook, and he kept them all. In a span of three months, he discovered the following things.

44:22The moon has craters. The moon has rivers, looks like rivers to the eye. It looks like it has oceans on it. It doesn't have flowing water anymore, or ever did, really. It has valleys, canyons, has vast plains upon it. Okay? He saw all that. That was one night. The next night, he saw the planet Venus goes through certain phases just like the moon. In other words, sometimes there's a crescent Venus, sometimes there's a full Venus, sometimes there's a waning crescent Venus, sometimes there's no Venus and you can't see it. that must have meant that Venus was closer to the Sun than the Earth. Because that's the only way we get phases of the Moon.

44:58Sometimes the Moon is closer to the Sun than it is to the Earth. And then he discovered that the planet Saturn had these ears on it. He thought the planet Saturn, instead of now we know the rings of Saturn, he couldn't resolve them with his first telescopes, but he saw that this had this extended oval shape to it, and it kind of blew his mind. He thought it was three planets touching each other. okay and then the last most insane thing that he ever did in my opinion again this is all in just a few weeks in the winter january of 1610 um it's just mind-blowing no one had ever done that before in history even though the telescope existed no one thought to look at the sky because they didn't have the technology the tripod okay and i'm getting to the question that was asked in just a second um he looked at the planet jupiter and jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system and he saw had all sorts of crazy structure to it.

45:49It had lines on it, like atmospheric storms. It had this blotch on it, this red spot on it, that seemed to be there every night that he would look on it. And it was always accompanied by four stars. And the four stars were always, like, kind of moving with respect to Jupiter, and then Jupiter was moving with respect to the Earth. And he was such a genius. He said the following, he said, I think what I'm looking at is a miniature version of the solar system with the sun replaced by Jupiter and the planets that orbit around the sun, which was heretical to think back then, by the way, the planets that orbit around the sun are orbiting around Jupiter.

46:28So Jupiter's kind of like the sun to this miniature solar system that we saw edge on like a disk. So he saw these things moving back and forth, always around Jupiter, no matter where Jupiter was, every time of the year that he could see it. And this is just mind-blowing. And he raced to publish this. He published in under two months, which is like a record. He published this book called The Sidereus Nuncius, The Starry Messenger. And he didn't tell people how to build the telescope. He kept that classified. But he did go to Venice, which, you know, Italy was only a country, you know, in the modern sense, I think in the 1840s, like it was unified.

47:01It was made up of like Florence and Tuscany and Venice, like there were disparate doges and kingdoms, right? So he went to Venice, he shopped it around to different militaries. And he said, look, guys, with this telescope, you can go on top of a tower in the Piazza di San Marco in Venice. I don't know if you've ever been to Venice. It's a wonderful place. You should go there, especially your Italian, right? Italian origin. So you go on top of the tower in Venice, you can look out into the ocean and you can see in Lagoon, you can see a boat today that won't be here for three days. And that was like stealth, right?

47:37So be like looking at the with a special device, and you could take away the stealth of the stealth bomber. And so this technology between astronomy, which was his main purpose in doing it intellectually, and then selling it to the military, immediately to the Venetian government, gave them this huge advantage. They gave him, like, basically a stipend, tenure, made him like this court astronomer, and he immediately saw how military purposes could be the vehicle to make him wealthy, because he was a real cool guy. He had, he was never married. He had kids out of wedlock. He had mistresses. He had brothers-in-law.

48:15He had people living with him, like students living with him. I can't imagine living with my students. And he was just such a passionate educator. But at heart, he was like a military genius. And his first thing was to be like Merlin or, you know, Gandalf or something. He knew that astronomical discoveries, projectile motion, trajectories, Things like that could immediately go from the realm of physics to being used for war. And the same thing is happening today, to address the question directly. We have technologies, we have tools, we have telescopes, we have things that have been designed. One of the things that Avi Love spoke to you about, this object called Oumuamua, was the first extraterrestrial object discovered by humanity.

48:58It came from another solar system. We don't know where, we don't know when, but we know that it did not come from our solar system. How do we know that? It's velocity and it's orbit. It's not bound to the sun. And it travels at such hypervelocity that it came into our solar system in 2017 and left our solar system. And it's long gone for now, for right now. We can't really catch up to it with a rocket, but we know for sure it was there. It was discovered by an Air Force telescope. Not an astronomer, not Avi Loeb looking through a telescope. It was discovered by an Air Force telescope on top of Haleakala, which is a mountain in Maui.

49:33So this purpose of that telescope is not to look for comets from other solar systems. That's serendipitous. That was accidental that we discovered it. Its real purpose is looking for other things that are up there in space. And the best way to do that is to use the tools of physics, of astronomy. And that's why I keep saying, if you think that these UAPs defy the laws of physics, you would want to have as much input from the physics community, not alienate them, no pun intended, not make them feel stupid or make them feel like they're just eggheads and they're just talking down to people. And we know the truth.

50:06And the government lied about COVID, Sean. You know, the government lied about COVID. So you know that they're lying about aliens. The government would never lie. Yeah. I love it. The government would never lie. They just have our best interest and always forever. They always have, right? I mean, even to Galileo, eventually he ran afoul of the government because of these astronomical telescopes, because of the discoveries he made. Bruno ran afoul for the same Catholic government, which was the government of the time, the superpower, military, undefeated champion of the world. He ran afoul because he suggested that life could have existed on other planets.

50:38Therefore, Jesus could not have possibly been able to visit all of these different planets, according to the Catholic Church at the time. And so they literally accused him of heresy, even though he was a, I believe he was a Jesuit or a Catholic priest. So they burned him alive at the stake as a warning. Do not defy with your science our laws of how the heavens go, because we know, the Bible knows, how they actually work. Wow. Wow.

51:14Well, if you look at it, you know, do governments lie? Of course they do. Is there ever a reason? I'd love your opinion on it. At that time, saying that the Earth orbited the sun would be, it would be like saying, you know, the lab leak of COVID, if you believe that. It would be like that on steroids. Like, does a government or should any entity have responsibility to avoid either mass panic, as in the case of aliens or something like that, or mass pandemics? In other words, do we need any kind of overarching government beneficial? We can debate if they ever could be beneficial. But in your opinion, is it important to have governments?

51:56And do they have a right to have secrecy? In other words, let's steal man what the people say that we have to keep this quiet. We can't disclose. Trust me, bro. How do you view that as someone who's deeply involved? Well, I think there's a staunch difference between flat-out lying and just not disclosing. I think there's a line there, don't you? I do, and I think that the government... But I guess I'm asking, is there a moral reason to lie? If you lie to your people, now you're in a predicament like what we're seeing right now. where I would say the vast majority of people have no trust in any of our institutions or our government at all.

52:44Because they've been caught in so many fucking lies and nobody knows what to believe. Nobody even knows if these are lies. Well, a lot of them are lies. But nobody knows about this alien shit yet. You know what I mean? For example, it's like, do we believe them? Why would we believe them? They've lied about so many other fucking things. They've lied about COVID. They've lied about taxes. They've lied about pretty much everything. And so, and now, I don't even know how they would begin to get the trust back in our institutions and our government. You think that's that far gone? I think it's pretty close.

53:28Well, you know, I have this debate, you know, I told you before we started recording, my brother-in-law, Jim Brewer, was a recon Marine. And, you know, I told him about some of the things that, you know, the people that have alien encounters have been reporting. And he's like, well, we did, what's it called? Ciri, like, search, evade, rescue. Ciri training. Ciri training. He said, when we did that, he said, I got waterboarded. You know, he's like, the government does stuff to us. And I'm convinced the government lies, you know, they lie to people that should have the deepest trust. And I don't understand how they expect that trust to be maintained.

54:07You know, for example, pilots report things in the skies, right? One explanation is extraterrestrial craft visiting us from other dimensions, right, within non-human biologics. Okay, that's a hypothesis, right? I'm a scientist. I can test the hypothesis, given data, update my priors, update my hypothesis, iterate scientific method in action, right? Another hypothesis is these are craft from the U.S., from adversarial nations, reporting things, doing things that we don't know about. For example, during World War II, there were operators of German U-boats. And the Germans had early radar systems.

54:44I don't know if most people know this, but there's the Manhattan Project. Everybody knows about that. The Oppenheimer movie, great movie. And I'm all for celebrating physicists, and it's great. It's rare you have a movie about a physicist who's, you know, doing good and trying to kill everybody. But during the Manhattan Project, that gets a lot of attention because it created the atomic weapons that eventually, you know, most people's opinions brought the end to the war in Japan. We were in a race against the Europeans, the Germans in particular, before they developed a nuclear weapon and dropped it on us, right?

55:17The Japanese weren't really in the danger of doing that. But the Germans had some of the best scientists of the time. You know, the Heisenberg, just incredible scientific. That's where quantum theory began and nuclear physics was first understood was in Europe. But there was a parallel effort that almost nobody knows about, and yet you use it every day, you know, if you're driving in a car, if you're flying in a plane, and it was radar. Radar was one of the most significant military advances of World War II. Almost nobody knows about it. And it was also created by physicists. So two of the most decisive technological enabling things were invented by astronomers and physicists operating in World War II and slightly before.

56:00Radar was particularly valuable because it was much more deployable than the nuclear technology of Los Alamos and then leading to the bombs, right? That took this huge effort, you know, a trillion dollars in today's dollars. Radar was much more accessible. Any country could develop it. But at that time, there was also an effort to do counter radar. You can't have counter nuclear weapons. I guess you could shoot them down with a Patriot missile. But that doesn't really stop the process of nuclear detonation, right? But you could actually counter the radar with jamming, with stealth. All those things were invented in the 1940s, some of whom were invented by colleagues of my colleagues that, you know, were still alive in this generation, essentially.

56:40And one of them was a physicist by the name of Louis Alvarez. Have you ever heard the hypothesis that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago? So speaking, because I am an absent-minded professor, so I will forget. So I brought some meteors here, okay? So these are, honest to goodness, fragments of the early solar system that are older than the Earth. These are 4.3 billion years old. These are found in Argentina. So this one's... And I brought some more. How old is this? 4.3 billion years old. The Earth is about 4.2 billion years old. This material, it's kind of dense, right?

57:31It's pretty heavy. It's also magnetic. Here's a compass. I'm going to do Mr. Wizard with you today, Sean. Here's a compass, magnetic compass. Put it next to there and maybe show the camera what happens to it.

57:49I don't know if the camera can see it. So it's deflecting it, because these are magnetic. They're also slightly radioactive, but don't worry. They're perfectly safe. So what I wanted to do, because I love the audience and the community that you've built, and for the people that serve and have the courage to do things I never had the courage or the ability to do, I want to give away 250 of these to the first members of the Sean Ryan Show that have an APO post office box, which is military or government service post office box. So I can send these all over the world to any, the first 200 people that have an APO box.

58:28So I made a special website, briankeating.com slash SRS. So if they go there, whoever gets there first, first come, first serve, I will send them this actual meteorite, okay? Oh, damn, that's cool. And I'm going to send them information about it, what it's made of, its composition, its age, where it was found, and how they can see meteor shower. Have you ever seen a meteor shower? Don't believe I have. Oh, you will love it. And here, you know, in God's country, I will give you a list of the four major meteor showers every year. You don't need a telescope. You don't need something, anything, even binoculars don't help you.

59:05Just your naked eye, your wife, your kids. Go out on a night. You'll get the list of meteor showers at this website, BrianKing.com slash SRS, and it will tell you how to see them. Four times per year, once per quarter, basically. These meteors here, okay, these rocks here, these are older than this. The physicist who discovered that the dinosaurs were killed by a giant version of one of these 10 kilometers in size, okay, I can bring that today, that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. His name is Luis Alvarez. He'd go on to win the Nobel Prize in physics. He was the only scientist on the Enola Gay when it dropped a bomb in Hiroshima.

59:43Okay, this guy was one of those super geniuses. Almost nobody knows about him. In World War II, his job was radar, not nuclear bombs, but he then got repurposed after he perfected radar. He said the following. He said, when an object gets close to a radar station, the radar's pinging it, right? It's shooting out radar beams, and it's bouncing off, and it's measuring the timing as the plane is getting closer to the U-boat. and the U-boats had pretty advanced radar systems. What he did is he built a spoofing system. He built a system that as it was getting closer, transmitted a signal that got weaker via the inverse square of the distance, which is exactly how a real thing would behave if it was moving away.

1:00:22So imagine you're sitting there in the boat and you're in the U-boat. You're like, my captain, look, look. Oh, it's going away. We have nothing to worry about. The U-boat gets destroyed. it. He spoofed the radar by utilizing the laws of physics, broadcasting a signal decreasing as the inverse square of the law as they were getting closer by the linear distance. Okay? Now imagine you're in the U-boat and you're looking and you're showing your captain. You say, oh, it's going away. And then it drops a bomb on you and you see that the last second. What would you say? You'd say, hey, that object is a UFO.

1:00:57It defied the laws of It got here faster than the speed of light. They knew. They were smart as frickin' heck, right? Germans were top military empire the world had ever seen. They would say they defined the laws of physics. How do we know that some of the things that are happening now aren't military technology? We don't. We have no idea. What's a simpler hypothesis? Occam's razor suggests the simplest hypothesis isn't always correct, but it's more likely than an outlandish or less probable scenario, right? So interdimensional beings with non-human biologics have traversed space and time at distances that we can't traverse in under 30 ,000 years with our best technology.

1:01:36Or the military, Chinese military, whatever military you like, is spoofing us, making us think that that's the case, making it seem like it's defying the laws of physics. Is that proof? But no, a scientist has to think this way, has to think epistemologically. I asked a question in the Patreon tier that I'm a member at, and the Vigilance Elite. I asked a question of Brian Keating. I said, ask Sean if he's ever heard of the Feynman point. You ever heard of the Feynman point? Okay. Richard Feynman, another Titanic physicist, Manhattan Project scientist, professor at Caltech, winner of the Nobel Prize discovering a quantum theory, he found an interesting pattern in the number pi.

1:02:19The number pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Okay? It's approximately 3.14. And if you're a real nerd and you want nerd cred, you memorize it to more digits. 3.14, 1592658. And you keep going. And one of my kids can do it to 22 decimal places. Wow. Feynman measured it, and he found really far out, you get to the number 6 in pi, which goes on forever, But at a certain point, it goes six, six, six, six, six, six, sixes in a row. Nothing like that happens before. And that point is called the Feynman point. Do you know where the Feynman point occurs? How many digits of pi you have to memorize out to to get to the Feynman point, Sean?

1:03:04No idea. 762. 762. It's a great caliber. What's that? It's a great caliber, right? I always wondered, like, is your handle because of the, by 31 or 50? You know, hopefully we'll try out the range at some point. So now you might say that's like, hey, well, Sean, that's really cool, right? And you might say, like, that's a really cool number and Richard Feynman is really smart. Or is it a coincidence? Scientists has to weigh both options. It could be aliens. It could be human technology. Right now, we have no evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt in a scientific sense that aliens exist, that technology is visiting us.

1:03:46Does that mean it's impossible? Like I said, I'm into Antarctica. Antarctica is one seventh of the Earth's continents. If you just estimated, if I told you you're just an alien and I say, Sean, Earth is this blue-green planet with an atmosphere and life's all around the planet. There are seven continents where land is, where land-based animals can live. One out of seven continents is called... One of them is called Antarctica. I don't tell you where it is. I don't tell you anything about it. How much of Earth's 8 billion people live on that continent? What would be your first guess? 800. 800 billion?

1:04:20Well, you know me now, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'd probably take population divided by seven. Yeah, exactly, right? But I already told you, it's over a million times... You know, it's over... Yeah, it's almost a million times smaller than that, right? It's a couple hundred people at a time. So, people like to say, well, the universe is so big, you know, Avi and Loeb and you talked very extensively about this. The universe is really big. Well, the Earth is really big, right? We don't find life everywhere on Earth, right? We only find humans, you know, six of the seven continents. But by just pure logical explanation, you should expect to find it everywhere.

1:04:56So, I'm not saying logic is a panacea. I'm not saying it's always the solution and you should only think scientifically. but I want to use it as a guide, at least as much as we can as a human being species to get at knowledge in the most efficient, effective way possible. And if it turns up what it turns up, let's see what happens. Don't let the people suppress what the information is truly scientifically. Thank you. Thank you. Let's take a quick break.

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1:06:50It's the only one you've got.

1:06:57Welcome to Hollywood vs. Reality. Did I do it? Right?

1:07:05What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong, because I don't watch any of this. Little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Gotta silence it.

1:07:22In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazine, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're f***ing f***ing f***ing. And now we're bringing them back.

1:07:41It does look pretty f***ing cool. I gotta admit that. All right, Brian, we're back from the break. I forgot to give you a gift. The Jones League gummy bears made in the USA legal in all 50 states. Not that you have to worry about that in California, right? But anyways. Are they kosher? I got to ask the question. Let's see. I don't know what that means. Corn syrup. Gelatine. Not kosher, but I'll give it to my brother-in-law. Right on. I'll give it to Jim Brewer. This is for you, brother. but um thank you very much yeah so i want to get into the telescope the bicep yeah can you how did you how did you get involved in that so you know um a lot of kids when they're young men uh they can be look up to their dad they can have difficulties with their dad they can be competitive with their dad um my you know my father was in the captain of the football team I got to be captain of the football team, you know, or whatever.

1:08:48Or my father served, I'm gonna serve, you know. My father, you know, was a scientist. He was a professor. And early on in my life, he got divorced from my mom. And when he did, he actually abandoned my older brother Kevin and me, and we grew up adopted by my stepfather, Ray Keating, who was a Vietnam pilot, F-4s and KC-135s. served in Vietnam and he adopted us from my family, which was, I grew up Jewish. Like I said, both parents were Jewish. And then my stepfather's family was Catholic and huge, you know, 50 brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. And it was so, such an incredible family. I mean, they're still, you know, tighter with me than my own biological family growing up, except for my brothers, of course, and my mom.

1:09:41But my father just, he abandoned us. So I actually changed my name. was legally adopted. My name when I was a kid was not Keating, it was Axe, Brian Axe. So now it's Keating. Changed my name. My brother too. And he left. He just, you know, he abandoned me and my brother. I was seven, my brother was 10. And he moved to the West Coast, didn't see him 15, 16 years. Wow. Until I started to kind of follow in his academic footsteps, which is weird because I didn't even remember what he looked like. I was seven last time I saw him my brother was ten I never understood how he could abandon a ten year old I was like I'm seven I'm not that important but like my brother was like a full I mean you have kids you know what it's like I can't imagine doing it to anybody to be honest with you me neither but he did and he had his reasons later find out why but what were his reasons he felt like my mother had turned us against him that had you know she had kind of pitted us psychologically against him, which wasn't that big of a stretch because he was kind of an a-hole.

1:10:48You know, he tried to beat up my stepfather, came over one night drunk or whatever, trying to beat up my stepfather, take us back. And he'd go through my, you know, visitation. Tried to beat up a fucking seasoned Vietnam veteran? Yeah, he did. How'd that work out? It didn't work out that well. Did not work out that well. So, but he was this brutally complex, I mean, still the most... I've interviewed 23 Nobel Prize winners. Puts all of them to shame. I mean, he did. He passed away, as you'll find out. But he was a great scientist. And, you know, when I was going through my formative years, you know, in high school, I got really interested in astronomy.

1:11:27I got a telescope just like this. And it changed my life. You know, I had been adopted. I had been Jewish from birth. But I was adopted, I got converted to Catholicism by my mom. And my stepfather changed my name, got baptized, confirmed, and instead of being what's called a bar mitzvah when you're in Judaism at age 13, you become a man, so to speak. Although having 13-year-olds now, it's kind of a far stretch to call him a man. But anyway, it's a rite of passage. I was actually not having my bar mitzvah. I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church of St. John and St. Mary in Chappaqua, New York.

1:12:08And I loved it. I had no problems with the Catholic Church. I wanted to be a priest when I grew up until I discovered girls around the same age. And I just loved that whole environment, but along the same time, I got a telescope. And I looked up and I did those kind of observations that I told you Galileo did. I didn't know who Galileo was at first. I looked at the moon, it had craters on it. I looked at Jupiter, it had moons around it. I looked at Saturn, it had rings around it. I looked at my neighbor, Debbie, she was super hot. Sorry, Debbie, if you're still out there. Never saw anything, you know, too bad.

1:12:47But in reality, it kind of transformed my worldview, and I started to learn more. And this was before the internet, in 1986, 87. There was no Google. There was no, you know. He had the Sunday New York Times newspaper in Chappaqua, New York, right? So I could look up stuff. Oh, wait, I saw Jupiter? I mean, how many people out there know they can see a planet with their naked eye? Or see a galaxy with their naked eye? You can do all that stuff. I got this telescope. I worked at a deli down the street from where I was living in Dobbs Ferry at the time in New York. And I saved up enough money, and my mom gave me a little money.

1:13:21And I bought a telescope, and it changed my world. It literally made me into a scientist. That's what I say out there. Any of you dads out there, parents out there, get your kid a telescope. Just do it. It's 50 bucks. I actually have a website, productkiddy.com slash telescope. I don't get sponsored. I don't get big astronomy. NASA's not paying me to do this, but I give recommendations for telescopes for different budgets, and nowadays it's insane. I have a telescope now that costs a few thousand bucks. It takes Hubble kind of telescope images, you know? Incredible stuff. It's all electronic. You don't put your eye on it.

1:13:54But you can put just the most incredible vision into their mind, and then when they're 10 or 11 years old, maybe they'll be... These things are crazy. It's insane. When I was... Because I've been looking at these for my kids, because they're always... My son's like obsessed with the moon. And I was looking up telescopes on Amazon and I was like, holy shit, these things will like find the damn stars for you and focus in. You don't even have to do anything. But don't start with that. Start with something. I did and I started with the old NASA. Yeah. You know. Yeah, just point it and look at whenever it was bright except for the sun.

1:14:25Okay, don't look at the sun with your remaining good eye. You're not supposed to do that. So, but everything. You can see the exact same things that Galileo saw. And unlike, you know, Sean, it's interesting. People say, what's it like to be a scientist? I can't really tell you. Like when they discovered the Higgs boson or they discovered nuclear fusion. Like I don't know what that was like. There wasn't one guy who did it, right? But there was one guy who discovered the craters on the moons, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. That's Galileo. And so you can not only see what he saw. This is what's insane about astronomy.

1:14:59For 50 bucks, so go out and get a freaking telescope for all your kids or grandkids or whoever, Sean. It's the cheapest kind of insurance that they'll be curious, thinking for themselves individuals. You can see exactly what Galileo saw from the middle of San Diego or New York City. He didn't need a Hubble telescope to see that stuff. He was in northern Italy. You can see the exact same stuff he saw, even from a light polluted place like New York City. Craters, valleys on the moon, canyons. You can see the rings of sound. So what I'm saying is I got addicted to it as a 12-year-old. Um, and at that time, Galileo, who had conjectured that because Jupiter has moons around it, that the earth cannot be the center of the solar system because Jupiter's moons are orbiting Jupiter, which itself is orbiting the sun, but it's not orbiting the sun.

1:15:49According to Aristotle, according to the Greeks, according to all of ancient received wisdom, you know, from following the science for the last 2 ,000 years before Galileo, no, the sun was the center of the universe. Sorry, cut that out. The earth was the center of the universe. In fact, that's what the Bible seemed to suggest. That's why he was, that's why Bruno was burned at the stake and that's why Galileo was put in jail eventually. And so when I found out, hmm, what happened to Galileo when he had these ideas? What did the Catholic Church do to him? They threw him in prison for his scientific ideas.

1:16:25And at that time, you know, I can't say it didn't have something to do with discovering girls, to be honest with you, Sean, and like not wanting to go all the way and be a priest and, you know, be around nuns all my life, and that would be the only woman in my life. So, no. So, I decided at that point, like, I'm gonna be an atheist. Like, I actually decided I'm gonna be an atheist. Really? Just because you liked girls? No, well, that's not like some small thing, Sean. I mean, I... You can still believe in God and like girls. I decided I didn't want to be a priest because I like girls. But no, I decided that I didn't want to be a part of a religious organization that would punish someone for scientific truth.

1:17:05And at that time, Pope John Paul II, who's, you know, my favorite pope, I still love him. I still love Catholicism. I still love the popes, you know. But he was special. He was a very special person. And even he never pardoned Galileo. He just said he was right. Imagine, like, you do something, you're in service, or the president doesn't, like, give you accommodation. Certainly doesn't give you accommodation, but they're like, you were right, but we're not even gonna take away the crime that we accused you of. We're not even gonna say that you pardoned him. I mean, there's something that was unsettling to me as a young...

1:17:39Again, I was a 13-year-old nitwit, right? So what do you know, right? But at that time, it was kind of justification. That's when you decided to become an atheist? I literally decided to become an atheist. And there was another reason, because I said I was born Jewish, right? Mm-hmm. But I became Catholic, which is Christianity. Mm-hmm. I served in the Catholic Church. I loved it. And, you know, for me, I came from this... from a tradition that's older than Christianity, right? Jesus Christ was a Jew. And I felt like, well, Christianity came along after Judaism, right? It came along after Judaism, right?

1:18:15And Jesus was a Jew. So if Christianity has these challenges, like they're not going to accept scientific wisdom or they didn't forgive Galileo. And so then I could say, well, Judaism has got to be wrong. Because, you know, if something is based on, you know, if calculus is based on algebra and, you know, calculus, you can say, well, calculus or algebra is wrong. Then certainly calculus will be wrong. That's not true, but that's kind of the analogy I'm making here. So I just felt like all of religion has these things where you have to listen to these authorities, you have to do what they say, you have to think what they do, and you can't think for yourself.

1:18:53Again, I'm a 13-year-old at this point. I'm not a sophisticated 50-year-old professor who has investigated religions and compared things and had much more experience than I do now, okay? And I did that. So at that time, I became a scientist in terms of curiosity because I wasn't only looking at things and, oh, cool. I started taking notes. I started doing research. I started, and again, this is before Google. And sometimes the more you struggle to get information, like nowadays I feel bad for my kids in some sense because they want to know, like, you know, how many golf balls fit inside the Goodyear blimp.

1:19:27Like, literally, I would have to calculate. There was no tool to do that. I'm not saying that's some important thing, but you get the point. No, you literally look it up. In one second, you get instant gratification. You don't do any of the muscular work. You don't damage the muscle to break it down in your brain. And so I feel like they're losing out on that. For me, I was doing all that, and I felt like the more I learned about science, the less room there was for God. Look, I'm not the first person to say that, right? Nowadays, I'm practicing religious. I practice Judaism. So obviously, I came back to it.

1:19:58We can get to that later on. But in the sense of knowing a little enough to be dangerous, that's kind of where I was at age 13. And I devoted my life to science. I taught myself calculus. You know, I didn't have calculus when I was in... Wow. I grew up in rural upstate New York, you know, northern Westchester County. I had to do it myself. I had to teach myself autodidactically, learning all these different things, trigonometry. And then I was doing research in my telescope at night. And I just loved it. I was addicted to it. It was getting to that flow state, and that's all you want to do in life.

1:20:29and then slowly but surely I started to reproduce like the step that my father you know who I hadn't seen in 16 years or 15 you know whatever it was at that point 12 years and I started to reproduce and I was like hmm let me look up in scientific journals like whatever happened to him Jim Axe James Axe whatever happened to him what did he do and I saw these papers about science and it was like the most high level science the origin of quantum mechanics quantum Entanglement, Theory of Relativity, Origin of the Universe. And I'm like, this guy has my DNA, or I have his DNA, but there's something different.

1:21:04I wasn't raised with him, but I'm doing the same thing as him. It's weird. It felt creepy to be influenced by a ghost. I didn't know anything. I didn't even know if he was alive. Wow. And I hit 22. I was in grad school, 21 at Brown. So your mom, I mean, she would never... Oh, they were, they fought so bad, and they did kind of use us between as intermediaries. That sucks, man. That was a challenge. In the 1970s, happened a lot. And also, you know, to really, you know, give him the kind of negative judgment that he deserved, when you get divorced, you know, hopefully, you know, this will never happen, but you have child support, you have alimony, and he was given the opportunity to choose between paying the back child support that he owed for myself and my brother or giving us up to adoption to my stepfather, Ray Keating, who was only a 30-year-old guy at the time.

1:21:59And he said, I don't want to pay the money. So he gave us up for adoption. So my name got changed. Brother's name got changed. I didn't see him. I hated him. I never... I was like, how could you abandon my older brother? Like, I was protecting my older brother. A 10-year-old? Who you were close to. It wasn't like, you know, they weren't close. They were very close. gave him up because he hated my mother so much. And she hated him just as much, okay? It was a very nasty divorce. And so by the time I hit graduate school, got my PhD at Brown University, I started, again, the internet was pretty young, mid-1990s.

1:22:36I started to research, like, what did he do? Like, who was he? Is he alive? I didn't know. I didn't remember what he looked like. The last time I saw him was in a court in Long Island, New York. Sean, I didn't know what he looked like 15, 16 years later. It's bizarre. And I started to research what he was doing and what kind of research he was doing and what happened to him. And it turned out he was still writing things about like quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity, all the stuff that I was like fascinated with and I wanted to dedicate my life to. But there was like quantum entanglement.

1:23:09Like somehow he had influenced me from beyond the visual horizon. I hadn't seen him, kept up with him. There was no internet, really. So, it was spooky. It was spooky action at a distance. He was influencing me. So, I started to research him. Got more and more involved in it. I had, you know, kind of like a minor medical scare when I was like 22, and I thought it could be genetic and whatnot. And it turned out that my mother's mother and my father's mother both moved to the same part of Florida, which is called the Yiddish Triangle. You know, all these Jewish grandmothers, they all get together, and they live, you know, three miles around Sunrise, Florida, on the east coast of Florida.

1:23:55It's a great place to retire. And they were living basically in, like, retirement community, like, Phase 2, Sunrise Palms, and Phase 8, you know, whatever. And they hated each other, too, but they had friends that were friends with each other. So these two Jewish grandmothers got connected via their other Jewish grandmother friends, what I call the Yentenet. Like, before the internet, there was the Yentenet. These old Jewish grandmothers talk. And they started talking, talking, talking. Oh, Brian's at Brown University. He's a scientist. The other one says this. Do you know he's still alive? Oh, you know, he's...

1:24:28Somehow, my father finds out that not only am I alive, I mean, he didn't know, but I'm studying math and science and physics. And I'm at a top school at Brown University, it's obviously a great school. And one night in my dorm at Brown, I get a phone call, pick up the phone, and he goes, this is Jim Axe. And before he said Jim Axe, I knew it was him. I knew his voice. I don't know, Sean. Sometimes the ear is deeper than the eye. And so, um, we talked for five hours straight. He was living in California. Yep. Everything. Math, science, physics. One thing we avoided is why he abandoned me. But I was just so curious.

1:25:15Just like, imagine if I gave you a book from your great-great-great-grandfather. Like, how much would you pay for that book? By the way, you have to write a book. If you don't write your memoir, you know, someone else is gonna write it for you. And your great-great-great-grandkids wanna read that book. Everyone's gotta write a book, but especially people like you. I mean, you've influenced millions. What's that? Not time yet for me. Not time, but don't let it go too far. and um i really hope you do because you'll influence so many people to the good as you've already done and a book it's like i love your podcast you know do i ever go back and listen to like episode like 14 no one's ever gonna you're not gonna go back and listen to it right but you can take all the wisdom that you've distilled not just the not knowledge is like dirt knowledge is everywhere wisdom is nowhere take that wisdom put in a book that's all i'm saying your kids your future kids will anyway so he and i talked for this whole time get back together finally i'm like wow this guy has done so much he's still going he's still hungry yeah he's got all these flaws but where do we go from here and i realized like he had won all these awards as a scientist and i was like i can't i don't know how to say it i've really never talked about it but I wanted to make him...

1:26:31I'm really, like, embarrassed. But I'm gonna say, I wanted to make him regret that he ever gave up on me by doing what he never did, which is winning a Nobel Prize. Makes sense. You wanna make him proud of you. I wanted to make him proud, but I wanted to make him regret. A little bit of punishment for him. Even though I let him back into my life, and even though he got back with my mother, you know, and they became friends, and I didn't get back married or anything, He became friends and bonded over grandchildren later on in life. And he died very young. He died at 69 years old, 20 years ago exactly.

1:27:08But between the time of graduate school, when I was 22 and when he died, I was 33, 34, we became closer than any two sons I've ever known. And during that time, I got incredibly interested. Like I said, I wanted to make him some... There must be a German word for it, like, you know, like schadenfreude. There must be some word for prideful regret. But anyway, that's what I wanted. And so I invented, I said, I got to find something that's going to win the Nobel Prize. And that's the highest award. I don't care what it is, like Olympic gold, Grammy award winner, BET or whatever. I don't care what it is, Signal Award, all the podcast stuff you want.

1:27:47There's nothing like the Nobel Prize. There's only like 200 people on earth that are alive that have Nobel Prizes. Got to have 8 billion people. They're the intellectual SEAL team members. They're the brightest of the brightest of the brightest, 0.001 % of planet Earth. I want to be there partially for these venal ambivalent reasons I had about him, but partially because I'm just so curious about the Earth and the world and nature and science and God and how they all mix together. And for me, the way that was the ticket to do all these things was to build an instrument to explore Genesis 1-1. Like, how the heck did the universe come to be?

1:28:31Not just the aliens and the black holes and the galaxy, but the universe itself. And it's a dangerous thought because, you know, people have been killed for this. People have been trying. Now, nowadays, we don't live in that kind of environment. So when we talk about the government lies, okay, it is true. They probably do, and they've done a lot of bad stuff to a lot of friends of mine as well. But it's nothing in comparison to the lack of freedom that Galileo had, that, you know, Giordano Bruno had. Okay, nothing like that. I'm not going to compare myself to those people, all right? I can do whatever I want.

1:29:05I have tenure. I have brilliant graduate students, collaborators. I have resource funding, supporters. The government's sponsored a lot of stuff. I work at a public university. Now I got paid. Gavin Newsom's my boss. You know, lucky me. For a few more months left, at least. So this is all to say that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize at all costs. But I was fortuitous because I was also studying something that's guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we could do it, which is to take a snapshot of what happened before the Big Bang. basically before the universe started off in its incredibly intricate and just phenomenal acceleration and expansion what caused the big bang to bang what's the primer strike what's the what's the inciting incident that caused the explosion of the universe nobody knew it there were theories about it and so i designed a telescope that doesn't see light it sees heat It sees microwave radiation, and that microwave radiation is all around us.

1:30:09It suffuses the universe, and it's the leftover heat from the fusion, nuclear fusion, of the first elements, hydrogen and helium, and their isotopes. And that leftover heat is a fossil that travels through space, and it travels through time. And we can detect it, and we can build instruments that can sense it. and the specific signature that we see will tell us about the conditions that were prevailing during the first moments of the universe's history, before the expansion that started to take over that we call the Big Bang, and crucially, what happened on the, I like to say, what happened on a Tuesday before the Big Bang.

1:30:54There was a day, right? If you think back, Today we're in May 2026. It's a Tuesday. We can keep going back, back, back. We think the universe is 13.826 billion years old, tiny little uncertainty, but we can keep going back. And let's say the Big Bang occurred on a Tuesday, right? Let's just, just by 24 hours times 365 times 13.826 billion years, right? You can get a number, you can get a day, you can get a calendar day on our calendar now. It doesn't mean the calendar existed. Earth didn't exist, right? But there's a day. What happened the day before that? That's when we want to know. And for the first time in human history, we could possibly do it.

1:31:33Oh, and by the way, if I did it, myself, my colleagues maybe, would win a Nobel Prize and finally get that comeuppance that I saw, you know, whatever. My many failures, but one of them was that desire to show up my dad. Wow.

1:31:59So where do we go from here? Well, it took me to the South Pole. It took me to Antarctica. When you get a coffee and you put it in the microwave in a ceramic cup, like your awesome swag and merch outside that I love, you pour it into a cup, right? You can put the coffee in the microwave. You can put it in there for five minutes. Don't do this at home. It's very dangerous, actually. But you can actually microwave it, and it'll get above the boiling point of water, right? And then you can take the mug out. You can just grab the mug. Why is that? You got 300 degree Fahrenheit water in there potentially, about to explode.

1:32:35And the ceramic cup is room temperature, basically. Why is that? Because ceramic is completely dry. There's no water. It's been baked in an oven for hours. That's how you make ceramic, clay, and stuff like that. The water in the coffee is not dry. It's wet. It's full of water. Microwaves from the microwave oven jostle water at just the right frequency. It's a resonant frequency that it starts to vibrate and interact with other water molecules. That's what causes it to heat up. You can't heat up something in a microwave that doesn't have water in it. And that is tuned exactly for the resonant frequency of water molecules, and that causes it to heat up dramatically.

1:33:19So if you're trying to detect microwaves from a source, from a planet, from a galaxy, from the Big Bang itself, you want to go somewhere where there's no water. Namely, you want to go somewhere very high up. Maybe you could go to outer space. but that's very expensive to put a rocket and satellite and a telescope in space very difficult takes a long time it's been done but only three times in all of human history have we had satellites take pictures of the signal from space uh because of the cost and difficulty to do that and actually nowadays we can do it almost better from the earth from the south pole antarctica where i've been twice and from chile in the atacama desert it's about 5200 meters above sea level 17 000 feet It's so high up that you have to wear oxygen full-time in your nose, because you're above half the atmospheric water pressure.

1:34:12You're at the flight level 180, for my pilot friends. Um, infrared radiation is cooking you. There's huge equipment that can kill you. Bulldozers, people drive off roads. There's no, like, the same kind of road safety that we have. Don't have it down there. Um, it's like being on the planet Mars. In fact, NASA uses it as a test place to test out lunar rovers and lunar helicopter and Martian rovers. Oh, before I forget, this... I won't send to your viewers, but... Being on Mars. This is a piece of Mars. This is the actual planet Mars. It's a meteor that came from the planet Mars. It was knocked off by a bigger chunk of an asteroid, blasted into space, orbited around the Earth for probably 20 million years, and landed in Northwest Africa.

1:35:06Wow. OK? So this here, you can actually touch. How do you know that? So the chemistry and the spectrum that it reflects when we analyze it is 100 % match for Martian rovers that have been there, like the ones I was just talking about. So this is a gift for you. Pretty rare. And you can see it. And it has little bits of like, see the little bits of like orangish flakes metal that's iron the reason mars is red is because it's basically rusting it has iron and iron rusts and oxidizes and those little specks in there are iron so that's a another planet it's taken millions of years to get here and here's a cover for it i have a certificate for you i'll give you later on that tells you all about its properties and so forth.

1:36:01So to test out before we send a Martian rover, they send it to the Atacama Desert where we have the Simons Observatory. So you ask, where do we go from here? So we built this instrument starting in 2005 that was meant to do just one thing, to take an image of the baby picture of the universe. The oldest light in the universe is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's the heat that's left over. When you do nuclear fusion or fission, heat is given off. When that heat is given off and the universe expands, it cools off. It redshifts and dilutes, gets less energetic. And now we see it, instead of being gamma rays or ultraviolet light, we see it in the form of microwaves.

1:36:43Long wavelength radiation, characteristic wavelengths, about two millimeters. It corresponds to about 150 gigahertz. This radiation was discovered for the first time in 1965, um, outside of New York City by two astronomers, Penzias and Wilson, and they went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. And this discovery, uh, was so significant because it was the first physical evidence, in other words, not just philosophical or theoretical, oh, the universe could be expanding, it was proof that the universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state. Hmm. And that can only be possible to create nuclear fusion, which creates the hydrogen that's in the water that you're drinking.

1:37:25It creates the helium that we have in balloons and other uses for. So the elements of the periodic table are made during the Big Bang. But when fusion occurs, heat is left over. We still see that heat to this day. So what we're looking for is that heat. How do you still see the heat to this day? So when the universe starts to expand, everything gets stretched out. There are galaxies. Galaxies are now moving away from each other. Things on Earth don't get stretched apart. Things in our solar system don't get stretched apart. Even things in our galaxy don't get stretched apart. They're held together by gravity.

1:38:00But anything beyond, say, the Andromeda galaxy and beyond is actually expanding away from us. Space itself is expanding. Space, according to Einstein, is dynamic. It's not static, as Isaac Newton showed. He said, no, space is dynamic. The more energy you put into it, the more space expands. And so, originally, Einstein, you know, didn't believe in the Big Bang. He felt the Big Bang was not well justified. He thought it was completely wrong, and he thought it smacked of religion. Actually, Einstein was not religious. He spoke about God sometimes, but he didn't really believe in God the way that we would think of it.

1:38:35And he said that the universe is not expanding. It's static. And the only way that he could get that to be the case is if he inserted into his equations this fudge factor that kept the universe from collapsing on itself. And that expansion we now find is actually going in reverse. It's not only not static, it's not only not collapsing, it's actually expanding at an accelerating rate. It's like pushing on the cosmic accelerator pedal. It's not a constant velocity. Every galaxy is moving away, and tomorrow, the rate of moving away will be bigger than it was today. That's the heart of the Big Bang concept, meaning that if you reverse that, everything gets closer together.

1:39:16So galaxies will be closer in the past, and eventually you reach a point where all the galaxies in the universe are all touching, and all the matter in the universe is in one point, and that point is thought to be a singularity, and that point of singularity is the Big Bang in the Big Bang concept. It doesn't tell you anything about how the Big Bang started, though. It just says once the Big Bang occurred, the universe started expanding and accelerating, and we should see evidence for it scientifically. And we do. We see tremendous amounts of evidence. There's zero doubt that the universe is expanding.

1:39:48And there's some doubt about how fast it's expanding. That's another subject. But no one disagrees. No cosmic police officer with a radar going would say, no, you're static or you're collapsing. No, the universe is expanding. And so there are signatures of that expansion everywhere, like a radar Doppler shift, but of all the galaxies that we see in the universe. And in fact, of all the heat and radiation we see in the universe as well. And the type of radiation that we look for is called the cosmic microwave background. And the best place to look for it is at the South Pole Antarctica or in the mountains of Chile.

1:40:22So I have two different experiments that I've been involved with. One is BICEPTA, which is an acronym, Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization. And in 2014, we claimed we saw that primer strike that ignited the Big Bang. So we claim we did the thing that I wanted to do to show up to my father, to win a Nobel Prize. And, you know, spoiler alert, you know, my first book's called Losing the Nobel Prize. So something went wrong. Something went really wrong. We made a claim that we saw what caused the universe to begin its expansion. And that's a type of quantum field. We call that quantum field the inflaton, or the inflationary field.

1:41:05and we said we detected the shrapnel of the explosion, basically. If you want to detect something, like you hear someone on the range shooting, right? You could detect that they're shooting in a variety of different ways, right? Visually, you could detect it. You could detect the sonic, you know, impact of it. You could have eyewitnesses to it. You could have photographic cameras watching it. You could have infrared. You could even have, you know, some particles inside the potassium inside of gunpowder, potassium-40, it's radioactive. So you could actually see the dispersion of the smoke cloud of radioactive potassium, and you could detect neutrinos, muons, other things coming.

1:41:46I'm making this up. I mean, it's true that you could do that. I'm just saying there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? So there's more than one way to detect something if you can't see it. So we've devised these different types of tools and technology to see things that we could not have possibly witnessed, namely the origin of the universe. Like, there are no people there. There are not even any stars or galaxies or planets or aliens or anything there, right? It was the origin of energy and matter itself. But what caused it? If this theory called inflation is right, there would be a signature, like smoke from the gun, called gravitational radiation, waves of ripples in spacetime.

1:42:25You and Avi Loeb spoke about what spacetime is. Space-time is interconnectedness of all different events that could possibly occur in the entire observable universe back to the beginning of time. And so we're looking for the earliest shock waves that would come with the explosive expansion of space. And those are called gravitational waves. We look for them in the CMB, in this cosmic microwave background, and we said on St. Patrick's Day 2014 at a press conference at Harvard that was led off by Avi Loeb, made the introduction. I wasn't there. I had been unceremoniously removed from the leadership of the team that I had first started.

1:43:04That's another story. But the announcement made headlines around the world. New York Times, CNN, my hometown newspaper. And at that moment, I had been a little bit unsure about the real veracity of the results, if they would hold up in court, you know, sort of a scientific court of law. Or if we had seen things that masquerade as the signal that you want to see. Richard Feynman, again, Feynman point, 762 digits into pi, six sixes in a row. He said the first principle in science is that you shouldn't fool yourself. But the second principle in science is that you should think that you're the easiest person to fool.

1:43:51It's like you're at a poker table, you don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy, right? Scientists should always think that he or she is the patsy, that he's gonna make a mistake, and then do everything in their power to resist that temptation to make an announcement that could win a Nobel Prize or whatever, and do every sort of due diligence check you could do possible. And we thought we did, but we missed one crucial element, that there was a type of signal that comes from the cosmos. It comes from our galaxy, in fact. But it doesn't come from the Big Bang. And it's exactly related to these meteorites.

1:44:24again, ronkeating.com slash SRS if you have an APO address. These meteorites are actually the corpses of dead stars. When a star above a certain mass explodes, eight times the mass of our sun, it explodes out and it's a fusion bomb that goes off in space with the equivalent tonnage of, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions of Hiroshima bombs. It's eight solar masses converted to energy equals MC squared. When it does that, the reason it does that is because it's tried to make this material, iron and nickel. Okay. When a star fuses oxygen, silicon together to make iron, everything else before it gets to iron gives off more heat than it takes in.

1:45:19The fusion reaction always gives off heat, but the heat that's given off when it makes iron is too insignificant to keep the star afloat. So the star runs out of pressure and collapses. And then it detonates out in a shockwave. In one half a second, a star that's been living for 20 million years ends its life in half a second in a nuclear fusion implosion that blows out into the whole universe the last thing that it made at its core, which is iron. That's why this is iron. Guess what else is iron? Hemoglobin. Your blood, right now, has the same iron isotope as this meteorite. Why is that? Well, your mother lived on Earth.

1:46:09She ate food on the Earth. She's made of human biologics, right? Not David Gretchen's non-human. She's made of... Hopefully, your mom's not a thetan or whatever they talk about. So, she ate food. Food is made from the Earth. The Earth has iron in it because it came from an explosion from a supernova. So, if this supernova didn't blow up 4.3... 4.5 billion years ago, we wouldn't have this iron. So, this iron is older than the Earth. It became part of our molten iron core and our solid iron core, and it became part of our food chain. And it's in the blood that we bleed. We all bleed the same iron that came from a supernova.

1:46:46Wow. Wow. So these meteorites float around in space, and it turns out that they can actually mimic the signal that would have represented the primer strike to ignite the Big Bang. So we got tricked into believing we saw the Big Bang, when we really saw a bunch of meteorites, basically. With summer travel, even learning a few real phrases can completely change the experience. You're not just pointing at a menu or hoping someone speaks English. You can order food, ask for directions, and actually connect with people a little more when you're there. That's why I like Babbel. Me and the team have been using it for travel because it's built for real-life conversations, not just memorizing random vocabulary or staring at grammar charts.

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1:48:31What do you think happened the day before? Well, so I always say things like, you know, people say, do you believe in God? You know, I've heard you talk to our mutual friend, Andrew Humer, you know, became a Christian, right? He believes in God. I actually was a little perturbed at Andrew. I told him later when I was on his show. But like a scientist shouldn't say, I believe in something. Okay? So in Hebrew, the word for faith is in Hebrew, emunah. Emunah is where we get the English word, amen. It means I believe. It means I have faith, right? Say amen. In Hebrew, that word means faith. It doesn't mean belief.

1:49:17Belief is a different word, just like it is in English, right? I would say, I don't believe in God, right? I don't believe in gravity either. If I take this, it drops according to the laws of Isaac Newton. This is a law. I have evidence for gravity. So I don't have to say, like, do I believe in something? I should say I should look for evidence of something. Again, I'm not saying this for everybody, but I'm a scientist. I don't want to say I believe in God. I want to say I have evidence for God. Which is stronger? You believe in God or you have evidence for God? Now, you may believe that you have evidence for God, Jesus may be enough, have crossed the evidentiary threshold for you.

1:50:00Many people it has. I'm obviously Jewish, so it's not the same theology. But in fact, we have things that we say we believe in, and then we have things we say we know. And that distinction, I think, is really important. So you ask me, what do I believe happened? Or what do I think happened? That question to a scientist is anathema, because we don't want to be prejudiced to that. That's what got us into trouble with this experiment. We believe we saw the signal that would give Brian Keating the Nobel Prize, right? I mean, that wasn't the only goal of it. But that's where you get into trouble as a scientist.

1:50:35We must think about it. I do. I do, yeah. Do you have any evidence for what may have happened the day before? It's exactly like what you and I talked about with aliens, right? So we don't have any evidence for it. The universe, again, is like the most undefeated You know, the movie 300, I was watching that, you know, like imagine like Xerxes versus, you know, what's his name, Theodias or Leopoldus or whatever, like 300 versus an infinite number, right? Xerxes is like Mother Nature, like just an infinite army, completely unstoppable, technological. Mother Nature doesn't give up her secrets, but like, you know, like Gerald Butler, you know, in that movie, a small group of dedicated people can make great gains, right?

1:51:23I'm trying to get more and more evidence for both believing, you know, what I want to believe to be true or what I hope to be true, both in science and in religion. But I'm not, I am under no illusions that, A, God cares if I believe in Him or not, just like gravity. You jump out of a plane without a parachute, you know? I always say, you don't need a parachute to skydive, right? You only need a parachute if you want to skydive a second time. Like, I believe in gravity, you know, to the same extent that I need to, but I have evidence for gravity. I want to feel the same way about God. So, what are the options?

1:51:56Just as you and I talked about aliens. Aliens could be real, interdimensional, non-biological beings or whatever, right? They could be AIs traversing the cosmos at light speed. They could be, you know, Chinese psyops. They could be German, like Louis Alvarez, playing around with the Germans' minds, breaking the laws of physics. They could be a psyop by the government. They could be a mass delusion or hysteria. Or they could be really, truly masters of interdimensional travel. Okay? Those are different hypotheses. Now we have to go through each one, evidentiary, what's the chain, and so forth. For cosmology, same thing.

1:52:35There are alternatives to the Big Bang. The Big Bang posits that at one moment in time, time came into existence. You couldn't ask what happened the day before. That makes no sense. That's like saying, go to the South Pole with me next time and go south. You know what happens when you go south from the South Pole at the South Pole? You go north. There's no such thing. It doesn't exist. Some say that's true. Stephen Hawking believed that. There's no time before the Big Bang. Others say that a competitive theory is the universe existed before the Big Bang and collapsed and crunched, just like the supernova that collapsed and crunched to form our supernova, that big crunch led to the Big Bang.

1:53:20Another one says an interdimensional concept called string theory that existed in higher dimensions than we exist in, 10-dimensional string theory domain, that two different types of what are called membranes came together and ignited what we call the observable Big Bang. Another theory says we exist in a multiverse, which just as there's more than one planet, there's more than one star, there's more than one galaxy, there's more than one cluster of galaxies, why shouldn't there be more than one universe? What do you think about that? So that's a set... Let me just get to the last... Okay. And then there's a final topic, which is that the universe didn't have a big crunch and singularity.

1:54:02It's just been slowly, over time, interacting, expanding and collapsing, expanding and collapsing, like a breathing of a lung. coming into and out of creation and producing things. Now, as a scientist, we can't prove something. We cannot prove that the universe had a Big Bang. We also, strangely enough, we can't prove the Earth is round. I don't know if you're aware of this. We can't prove that the Earth is round, okay? I've had this discussion many times. Now, that's something people say. I believe the Earth is round. I believe the Earth is flat. I always joke, there are people that believe the Earth is flat all around the globe, you know?

1:54:48It's... You'll find them everywhere, Sean. But in reality, you can show that the Earth is not flat, but you can't show that it is curved. Do you understand the difference? You can prove something wrong in science, but you can't prove something is right. Hmm. You can't prove something is right. I can say I have evidence for evolution, and their competing theories of evolution that existed, but they've been falsified, proven wrong. And if you can't prove something is wrong, or if you can't at least expose it to the opportunity of it being wrong, then it's not science, right? Astrology, when I was dating my wife, we went to the downtown Mission Beach, San Diego.

1:55:32They have a boardwalk and they had a fortune teller. And she's like, oh, let's tell her, let's see our fortune, see if we're compatible. I'm like, she's an English major. You know, like, she, uh, fine. I'm, you know, I really love this girl. I want to marry her. So I'm going to play around with it, even though it's anathema to everything I believe to go through astrology. The astrologer sits down and says, you know, what's your sign? And, you know, I say, um, Gemini. And, uh, she, oh, okay. Um, you know, here are these different things and your personality and your moon sign, your sun sign and this thing.

1:56:04And then I said, oh, thank you very much. and my future wife, my girlfriend at the time, oh, it's really good. Everything's not really good, like we're compatible and everything. And I got up and I, just to be a dick, I said, I just want to confirm, I'm born in September. That's Gemini, right? And she said, no, no, no, that's Virgo. But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. In other words, it didn't matter what I said. It didn't matter what evidence I gave her. It was unfalsifiable, it was irrefutable. That's not science. That's fun. You know, it's a card trick. You know, it's entertaining.

1:56:39She made her 50 bucks or whatever, and we're still married 18 years later. But to me, the prospect that you will not submit your theory to falsification, and that's some of the problem I have with Avi Loeb. I love Avi Loeb. But I said to Avi Loeb on my podcast when he came on for his first book, I said, Avi, you believe that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial. It's like the title of your book, right? You believe it came from another solar system. You believe it's technological. Remember, he told you he thinks it's a thin solar sail. Mm-hmm. Technological. Only technology can build a solar sail that captures solar wind from another star directed from where we don't know, but to where we do know because it came through our solar system.

1:57:20Was it intentional? Was it unintentional? He thinks it could be like a garbage barge or something like that. And I don't know why you'd put like, you know, your trash bin on a solar sail and send it out into the universe rather than just crash it into the nearest sun. But let's just say he's right. I said, Avi, you always brag to me, and you're lucky you're at Harvard University, you know, where everyone's above average, and we should talk about Harvard and Jeffrey Epstein at some point. And Avi's not involved with any of that, by the way. But I said, you know, Harvard, everyone's above average, and you happen to have access to these, you know, copious supply of billionaires.

1:57:54And everyone, you know, loves the Harvard imprimatur. You say Harvard, and that's part of the reason Avi gets a lot of the attention he gets, but also a lot of the hate that he gets. you know, and he's one of the most legitimate scientists, published 757 different articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals, multiple books. You know, the guy works hard. You know, when I'm interviewing him, sometimes I say, Avi, show me your hands. He's like, I said, I want to make sure you're not writing a book while we're talking. You know, he's so productive. I mean, he's off the charts. Okay, but I said, Avi, you have access to these billionaires.

1:58:27Imagine that Oumuamua, at the time, it's the first object ever to come from another town technological solar system like the Earth. And you know a billionaire who can fund a rocket to send a telescope to go catch up with it. And he said, as he told you, no, Brian, we'll wait for the Viral Rubin telescope to come online and it will capture many things. I said, Avi, you're happily married even longer than I am. Imagine, like, you're with your wife. You don't know she's gonna be your wife. You're dating her, or maybe you just see her in the coffee shop. Or he met her on a blind date, I think he told you, right?

1:59:03And it's a blind date, and you're with her, and you're like, oh, she's really nice, but I think someone better is going to come along soon. How do I know someone better is not going to come along, Brian? And I said, you would do anything. This Avi now would do anything to that Avi and say, shut up, you idiot. Ask her out. Keep going on a date with her, because you're going to have two beautiful daughters with her, and you're going to have a life of happiness and love. But he is saying the opposite. He's saying, no, I'll just wait until the next one comes along. I said, Avi, I don't know. Do you really believe this is as technologically advanced as you say it is?

1:59:35Because to me, Sean, I would do anything. If I thought with as much faith and confidence as Avi does that these are extraterrestrial technology, I would do anything, especially if I had access to a couple of billionaires and the endowment of Harvard University. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So we look to falsify things, not to prove things. And that was kind of the tangent we just got off.

2:00:01It's hard to ask questions for people to think like that. Do you... Even though... With everything that you just said, you still have to think about it. You still have to think. Is there a multiverse? No, you're right to press me on that. You know, and so what goes through your head without making assumptions? I mean, what are the ideas? So this might make people uncomfortable. I approach it, again, as a scientist, and I'm candid. I'm one of the few scientists that's openly religious, you know, that practices his religion, takes his religion seriously. You know, learned Hebrew at age 30. It wasn't easy to learn Hebrew at age 30.

2:00:43You know, I married someone who's Jewish, which is an important thing for the continuity of the Jewish people. In my exception, I learned in Israel. I take my God and my religion and my faith seriously. I don't work on Saturdays. You know, one thing, when you were talking to Andrew, sorry to go off on a side quest here, but you know, Andrew Huberman, world expert on sleep, and you guys were talking about cannabis, and you were talking about gummies, and you were talking about vaping and everything else. And I said, I know what Sean needs. And it's not a product. It's called the Sabbath. You know, we just had this national Sabbath Donald Trump had.

2:01:17Do you work, as much as I think you work, do you work seven days a week, pretty much? Pretty close. I see it in you. And it's no surprise, I mean, this... The studio's amazing. I mean, first of all, I have to say, this is the second most number of guns I've ever been around on a podcast. After the Mayim Bialik podcast, that's a joke. She's the girl who played Blossom and was on the Big Bang Theory. This is the most impressive studio. You know, I've been on a really nice podcast. I've been blessed to be on them. You've created this huge empire, and it's no secret that your hard work, your work ethic, Like, probably genetically, this is something you're, like, destined to do.

2:01:58But the one unlock that maybe you haven't, and just pretty humble, I'm trying to be humble. I'm not a medical doctor. I'm not even like Andrew, you know, is in the bio. But the one thing that saved my life is taking one day off a week. It's a Sabbath. For me, it's a Saturday. For you, it could be a Sunday. I don't do email. I don't do podcasts. If you invited me here, I think, actually, I was supposed to come two days from now. It's a holiday two days from now on the Jewish calendar called Shavuot, which means Pentecost in English. We call it Pentecost. It's a biblical holiday. I'm not allowed to work on that holiday.

2:02:32And so I said I can't make it. But luckily, you know, Laura and Sarah, and your whole amazing team is just so excellent and elite, for real. But I wouldn't have done it. As much as it's a great opportunity for me, Sean, I wouldn't have done it. Because I want to be with my God. I want to be with my wife. I want to be with my kids, my community, my family. I want to dedicate one-seventh of my life to something other than achievement and, like, Nobel Prizes and emails and Slack messages. And I'm not saying it's a panacea, but I know, like, I knew Charlie Kirk a little bit through my relationship with Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson, and...

2:03:12And he had his most recent book, which he dedicates to Dennis Prager, for introducing him to, and it's about the keeping of the Sabbath, for Christians. And it was a huge unlock for him. It was literally the last thing he ever wrote. And his wife put it out posthumously. So I just want you to consider it. But for me, this is all a big disclaimer. Maybe it's a little too legalistic or professorial for me to do this. But I want to say that I take my religion seriously. But that doesn't mean I'm not okay with accepting everything the way it is. In Hebrew, the word Israel means to fight with God. Yisra means struggle, El means God.

2:03:56Do you know what Islam means? Islam means submission to God. Those are two different, very different approaches, right? To submit to God and they're valid, right? I'm not going to say which one is which. And Christianity is somewhere in the middle, right? There's the acceptance of Jesus as a personal savior who died for your sins and absolves you of those sins. and God gave his only son, according to Christianity, for your sins, for you, for your personal God. In Judaism, we don't have that concept, but that's okay. We're different religions. That's fine. Otherwise we'd all be one religion. But Israel means to struggle with God, to fight with God.

2:04:32And if I don't ask questions and subject God in some sense, not to prove him wrong. Not to say, you know, like I'm better than God is most of my, 93 % of my colleagues don't believe in God at all. So I'm in the 7%. I think it's probably even smaller than that. Now you asked Avi about that and he kind of gave you a little wishy-washy answer. As much as I love Avi, I wasn't satisfied with that answer. But for me, if I can't question God, if I can't ask for evidence, if I can't demand some level of scientific rigor in my approach to it, I don't feel authentic to who I am. So I gave you the whole preamble about how seriously I take on religion, the Sabbath, and why I recommend it to so many people.

2:05:17But I'm also going to approach it scientifically. So what do I hope in science? Do I hope there's a multiverse? Do I hope there's part of that is connected to my attempt to inculcate my science with religion, to get a sense of, can we test claims in the Bible, in my case, the Torah, the Old Testament? Can I test them scientifically? Can you test them in a lab? Could you test them with a telescope? Obviously, there's some connection between them, right? Otherwise, Galileo wouldn't have been and Bruno wouldn't have been burned alive, as we already said, right? Copernicus published his theory that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

2:06:02He published that the day he died, because he knew he would probably be tortured, and look what happened a couple years later to Bruno and Galileo, right? So God and science and cosmology, they go hand in hand. For me, I've made it kind of an interesting quest, because those different models that I explained to you, the steady state static universe, the big crunch universe, the multiverse universe, and the slow expansion universe. Those are four models of what could have came before the Big Bang. One of them says nothing. One of them says we live in a multiverse that's eternal and has existed for all time.

2:06:43One of them says the universe is slowly changing and modulating, but is eternal. And one says the universe came into time at a specific moment for a specific reason caught by a specific cause. That one sounds the most like Genesis 1.1, right? In the beginning. It doesn't say after the big crunch. It doesn't say like in the multiverse, you know, God created the universe. No, it says in the beginning. In Hebrew, it actually - I feel like that means there's nothing before that. That's right. So what is that? You just projected onto exactly what I'm attempting to do. You constructed a scientific hypothesis that's open to falsification.

2:07:23Okay, pause that. Think about what you just said. That suggests that there's a beginning. What if we find there's not a beginning? Whatever that means, that has just falsified that theory. Call it Genesis theory. Call it Ryan theory, whatever you want. You could falsify it. Guess what? You just did. You proved that's part of science. To me, that's exhilarating. That means I can investigate whether or not the Big Bang occurred, whether or not time came into existence versus whether or not we live in a multiverse. I can investigate that and get paid by the regents of the State University of California.

2:08:03I can do it. I would do it for free, by the way. Gavin, if you're watching, I know you're watching, Gavin, you've got a podcast, you want to be like Sean. I would do it for free, but please, you know, let me keep my salary. The point is, you just suggested a scientific hypothesis that could be refuted. It's falsifiable. Therefore, by the rules that we explicated earlier, it's scientific question. There's nothing wrong with asking questions, seeking proof. Which would you rather have, Sean? Belief that Jesus existed? Can you prove that Jesus existed? Can you prove it? Can I prove it? Yeah. No. Do you think it could be proven by somebody, you know, a billion, a hundred avi lobes, or, you know, someone just off the charts?

2:08:44Maybe. Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe it's not provable. Does that mean that you shouldn't believe in Jesus? Of course not. Of course not. To take away someone's religion is almost impossible. Has anyone who's ever had a Jehovah's Witness come to their house and knock on the door, or a Mormon, say, like, we'd like to tell you about, right? Guess who hates to take their religion away most of all? Atheists. You tell an atheist, most scientists, like, your religion, quote unquote, is more dogmatic than any Christian I've ever met in my life? Oh, come on, they're just, you know, patsies or whatever. They don't even know that seeking the questions of the type that you and I just discussed is perfectly kosher, is perfectly acceptable in the context and domain of scientific reasoning.

2:09:35would you rather have, I bet it doesn't matter to you because you do have strong faith. But if someone said, here is proof, like the Shroud of Turin or we found some eyewitness estimate or we found physical evidence of proofs not only that Jesus existed, but that he was resurrected and that he was ascended. And this is irrefutable proof of the claims of the gospels. And I said, here, Sean, here's a book. Do you want to read that book that has all this evidence? Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. You're a curious person. There are people that wouldn't want to read that book. There are people who would read the book, but it doesn't matter to them.

2:10:15There's a famous story in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A lot of Jews perished there, and some were rabbis. And in 1943, I believe, they were doing... they decided they would hold a trial and put God on trial. They said, should God have created humanity if it leads to Holocaust genocides and killing? And they put God on trial, these rabbis. They had prosecution and defense. The overwhelming evidence from the rabbis and the jury was that God was guilty, and God never should have created the world. And you know what they did the very next minute? They said, let's go for the afternoon prayers.

2:11:04In other words, some people didn't matter. It doesn't matter if you have physical evidence. It doesn't matter if you have scientific evidence. Their faith is unshakable. And finally, I salute that. I'm weaker than that. I don't have that ability, Sean. I think it is similar. I mean, you're trying to... How would you word it? Disprove. you cannot disprove Jesus's existence. Or God. Or God's. You know, I would assume that's what I mean. I don't assume, but I mean, it's probably the same with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. You cannot disprove it. Right. You know, but you also cannot prove it.

2:11:48Exactly. You know, and so it comes down to faith. Exactly. Why did you go from, I mean, We know why you went from Judaism to Catholicism. Why did you go back to Judaism? Is it because of your father? No, it was because of... It was actually because of 9-11. It was because of 9-11? Yeah. Yeah. So, 9-11 happened. I was 28, 29, something like that. And I had been in the Catholic Church, you know, the previous religion, you know, kind of experience I had was the Catholic Church, which I loved, as I said. I had difficulty with the leadership at the Pope level and the Vatican and so forth. But putting that aside, and then I was, you know, college, kind of, I'm so smart, I'll be an atheist, right?

2:12:28Like all my teachers and my colleagues. And then 9-11 happened, and I was like, you know what, I know a lot about Christianity and Catholicism from having practiced it for six or seven, eight years, being an altar boy, wanting to become a priest. Everyone was an expert on Islam, you know, after 9-11, right? And I realized I knew nothing about the religion that I was born into. And I felt ashamed. I couldn't read Hebrew. You know, I never read the Bible, you know, the Old Testament. I read the Gospels because I was Catholic, right? Very rarely do we go back and read the Old Testament, at least in the church that I was an altar boy in.

2:13:13And so I knew nothing about the Old Testament, the Torah. I couldn't read it. I felt embarrassed. You know, who knows how to do it? And I was like, why is there this antipathy towards Jews and towards Judeo-Christian society and civilization? Why is there this conflict? I knew nothing about it. And so I realized that I'd stopped all my learning when I was 13 about religion. And most of the people that you talk to who are scientists, especially Jewish scientists, who are almost all atheists, the last time they encountered religion was on their bar mitzvah at age 13. And for many of them, it's like a graduation from prison.

2:13:58You know, like, they're released. They no longer have to go to a temple anymore. They no longer have to sit and learn this archaic language that's spoken on exactly 0.2 % of the world's population. Like, who the hell needs this when I can do whatever I want? And plus, Hanukkah really sucks compared to Christmas. You know, you ask me about Christmas. Do I miss it? Yeah, totally. So, you know, the negative exposure that you get at age 13, that then carries through these geniuses like Steven Pinker and even, you know, Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who I've hosted, most famous atheist a lot, right?

2:14:36We're at the, you know, the God delusion and... Just an incredible intellect, but incredible atheist. They don't have the most basic level that my kids have about what the Bible actually says, what it means. They just project onto it, making it into a straw man, which they can then ignite. Mm-hmm. I felt as a legitimate scholar, an intellectual, I want to have a conversant level with the Bible, with the Old Testament in my case, at least the same level that I have with quantum mechanics. Why should you say that you don't? Because it's easier? Like, oh, anybody can believe. Look, Sean Ryan doesn't have a PhD.

2:15:18You didn't go to college, right? You were in the teams. You went to, right? Oh, Sean, he knows it. So, you know, but like he doesn't know quantum mechanics. So doesn't that show you that it's not that hard to believe in God? I think these are so infantile. these arguments and the vitriol that people have towards believers in the scientific, in the academic community, in the elite. Let me take one pause for you for one second. You're familiar with the following statement made by President Eisenhower. He said, there's a danger, I want you to finish this sentence, of a military - Industrial complex.

2:15:55Okay. Before he says those words, he says, there's a danger of a scientific... You're not gonna know it. Mm-mm. I didn't know it until very recently. Before he mentions the military-industrial complex and its dangers, which you can testify to as well as anybody, he speaks about the horrors that'll be inflicted upon society should we fall captive to a scientific-technical elite. Who's he talking about? Professors. Academia. You don't know, you didn't go to college, Sean. You can't talk to me about aliens and COVID and disclosure. No, no, no, you can't. It's bullshit. The disdain that the ivory tower has for ordinary laypeople and people that didn't go to college, it's a dirty little secret that we don't talk about because it makes us look venal, it makes us look pathetic, It makes us deserving the ire, and therefore, if you get ire, you get attention, and then they might take away our tenure and our tuition increases that go faster than inflation.

2:17:02We don't want you guys to look that close at us. That's the scientific technical elite. Eisenhower warned against that in the same breath as the military-industrial complex. You never hear about the former, you only hear about the latter. Why is that? I don't know. People worship college. College is a secular idol that even the most atheistic people worship at. It's a sign that I'm a good parent. My kid goes to Vanderbilt. My kid goes to UC San Diego. It's a sign that you did a good job as a parent according to who? According to secular society. But that's a danger. So getting back to, you know, kind of this original part where we went off on this quest a few minutes ago.

2:17:47I think that there's – it's completely legitimate to think about these things and to try to approach them with scientific rigor and to have mutual respect and comity – not comedy, but comedy – where you can respect the person that you maybe don't necessarily agree with. And so for me, you know, there's obviously a lot more Christians in the world than there are Jews. But I wanted to get back to an understanding what's called first principles thinking. I wanted to understand what are the base roots of Christianity? What are the challenges to Christianity? There are challenges to Christianity. I'm sure you know.

2:18:27The Gospels aren't, you know, they themselves are, and that's what gives them intellectual honesty. They admit there are certain things that they cannot explain, right? Miracles that Jesus did. Did they say, well, scientifically, if you take the quantum mechanical structure of water, you can do it? No. They said, we don't understand it. But that's what faith means. but i don't want to only have faith i would like to have proof can i convert a faith question into a proof question that's what i want to do that's fun as hell what's that a faith question into a did god create the universe well if the if the if the old testament says something and it's compatible with observation, that's not proof, but it's evidence.

2:19:16If the Torah, if the Old Testament says the universe came into existence in the beginning, the actual Hebrew word, Hebrew is a very rich language, and the actual, it says with beginningness. Like, in other words, God not only created the universe according to Hebrew in the Torah, he created the concept of the beginningness of something. It's amazing when you think about it. It gives me chills. It's so much deeper than we get when we're kids. The problem is we learn religion when you're a kid, and I went to Sunday school, and I hated it. Nobody likes it. But if you approach it as I did as an adult at age 30 after 9-11, or 28 or whatever I was, it's much richer because you can approach it with the full arsenal of the tools and the weapons that I've developed as a scientist.

2:20:05And therefore, that which I can prove, verify, attempt, or fail to prove will have a lot more sticking power and give me a lot more ironically faith the best investors don't rely on guesswork they have an expert by their side in a system that keeps them on track but most people don't have access to a human advisor that's where stash comes in it gives you a disciplined long-term investing philosophy focused on steady habit building not speculation so you can build your portfolio with confidence stash is a registered financial advisor built right into an app stash shows you way more than just your balance it offers personalized next steps to keep you moving forward in any market scenario so you always know what to do with your money and why stash is guided investing it's not a trading platform and it's not a robo-investor.

2:21:02Stash is the guided middle ground. Don't let your money sit around. Put it to work with Stash. Go to get.stash.com.srs to see how you can receive$25 towards your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. That's get.stash.com.srs. Get.stash.com.srs. Paid non-client endorsement. Not a guarantee nor representative of all clients. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments, LLC, and SEC registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk. What have you proven? So right now, we've discovered a lot of things. Again, we can't prove something inside. I can't prove to you that the earth is round, as I said, but I can prove it's not flat.

2:21:54So, what have we falsified? So, we falsified a huge host with my tools and technology. You know, it's amazing. I get to work with, like, just, like, billionaire brainia, like, like, IQ billionaires. You know, like, my colleagues who started the Simons Observatory with me, David Spergel, who ran the NASA UAP investigation panel two or three years ago, he's the, he was the leader of it. He's the leader of the Simons Foundation. He and I came up with the idea for the Simons Observatory, which is this, you know, now$200 million kind of level project. My friend Mark Devlin at UPenn, you know, created the six-meter diameter telescope and the detectors within it.

2:22:36Like, three people can fit inside it, like, standing on a shoulder. It's insane. Suzanne Staggs at Princeton built these detectors that could detect a match at the distance of the moon. I mean, these are, like, insane people. Again, I would pay to work with them, and I get to do it for free, right? we have been able to falsify these narratives that suggest there was no period of time when the universe was hotter, denser, more compact. We've falsified claims that dark matter does not exist. In other words, we can't prove dark matter exists, but we've shown that in universes, models, conceptions, where dark matter doesn't exist, it's 100 times more inconsistent with the data.

2:23:19We've found evidence for dark energy. We found evidence that matter in the universe acts like a lens that focuses light. If you put a black hole here, you can't see the black hole, it's black, right? But light would be deflected around it just the same way that we've detected with our instruments as well. That we can see the effects of the curvature of space-time, you and Avi talked about. We've detected that. That means that we have falsified these notions that Einstein's theories are wrong or incomplete. We do know that they're incomplete at one level because we don't understand how quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, plays with cosmology and relativity, the physics of the very large.

2:24:01But I'm confident that we'll get there. So to have these abilities to falsify. Now, have we falsified that the Big Bang occurred? No. Have we falsified that the multiverse exists? No. If the multiverse exists, that would be a huge challenge for traditional theology. It would mean there is no one beginning. It would mean the universe is eternal and exists in a vaster cosmic landscape than we can perceive that lies outside of our horizon. You know, like we were talking before, if you're out on a boat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles from land in any direction, right?

2:24:43Can you detect, can you see another boat? No, you can't. You can't see anything over the horizon. Could you detect the boat's existence? Yeah, maybe there's waves, sonograms, sonar, whatever, neutrinos from the nuclear, whatever. There's a million ways you could detect it, right? We're trying to do just that. We're trying to see what lies beyond the horizon. If indeed the inflationary epoch did occur that we claim, we did discover or later had to retract that claim, It was very embarrassing, the subject of the first book that I wrote, losing the Nobel Prize. If we do get to that point where we can sort of have evidence for it, it doesn't prove the multiverse exists, but it kind of rules out the alternatives.

2:25:25And that would present challenges, right, to the traditional theological Torah creation story of a single beginning of time. There are people that will attempt to use what are called apologetics, you know, kind of explain things with the assumption that God could do that. As you said, you can't prove God exists. You can't prove God doesn't exist, right? We can't even prove we're having this consciousness experience that we call reality right now, right? We could be some brains in a jar stimulated by electromagnetic radiation by some malevolent demon, right? We don't have evidence for that, but it doesn't mean it's not within the realm of possibilities.

2:26:07So we've discovered a whole host of incredible facts and more to come with the Simons Observatory in the next few years, where we first get data from this instrument, which was created in the generosity of my late, great mentor and friend, Jim Simons, who passed away two years ago. establish this incredible collaboration with, you know, it's the people, it's like a team. Without the team, nothing happens. And I'm just privileged to be, you know, at the heart of it and the start of it.

2:26:42I can't remember everything I talked to Avi about, but we were talking about the Big Bang Theory and peering back through time. We had that conversation before. Yeah, you did. How many times can you observe that from Earth? Because if the light passes you by, then it's gone, right? Right, right. Is it gone or does it just keep coming? Because if you look at a light source, I mean, it'll be on until it turns off and then it has to, right? Right. The Big Bang is an explosion, so, I mean, correct? So once the explosion is done, the light is gone, so it would pass you by, correct? And then there would be nothing after it.

2:27:25If it was an explosion, right? If it was an explosion. Okay. It's not an explosion in the sense of, you know, a round goes off and there's a shockwave. That has an implicit bias that you're embedding an event in a larger space, like this room, right? Explosion in this room is very different than the space-time of this room expanding, right? So what the Big Bang postulates is that that if we're galaxies, at one time in the past, yesterday, we were slightly closer. And if you extrapolate back, extrapolate back, you find that there'll be some point where our chairs are right up against each other, and I like you, but I'm not gonna get that close, right?

2:28:04But at the subatomic scale, you could also keep going back to much, much smaller distances, which would require much, much more energy per cubic millimeter, nanometer, Planck size, whatever. But if space comes into existence at that particular moment, then what happens is this expansion occurs. Space itself is expanding for a long time, but there's nothing, there's no process by which you can reveal the presence of any matter or any energy, because it doesn't exist yet, right? The first galaxies, I've been talking about galaxies, and that's how Hubble, Edwin Hubble, showed to Einstein that he was wrong.

2:28:41So Einstein believed in a static universe, that the universe was eternal, as everybody did for thousands of years. Aristotle believed that, you know? And it was Einstein, right? Until Hubble showed him evidence, data, that every galaxy you could see in the universe is not static. It's moving away from Earth at huge speeds, fractions of the speed of light. In fact, it moves away faster the farther away two galaxies are. So, if we're in this room and we brought in, you know, your producer, and, you know, they sat over there, and this is the universe expanding, we'd all be expanding. You would see me going away, and you would see him going away from you, but you wouldn't feel like yourself is moving away.

2:29:23But I would see you moving away, and I would see him moving away. And he would see the same thing, right? So, each one of us feels like we're at the center of the universe, but we're not. The space is expanding in between us. and any process that you emit, if you are having, if you look at me with, and you shine a laser at me and it's a green laser, if you start to move away faster, you know, some large velocity, much, much faster than any earthbound speed, say half the speed of light, that light will go from green to red because not only are you moving away, but the wavelength is stretching from short wavelengths to longer wavelengths.

2:30:01Eventually you hit a speed because you're at a distance, and remember the distance, times this constant called the Hubble constant, tells you how fast two galaxies are moving away. You get a velocity that's equal to the speed of light. Okay? And then after you get beyond that distance, there's no reason I can't be moving faster than the speed of light away from you. And at that point, what do you see? So right now you see me, and I'm like, waving at you, right? Mm-hmm. And I keep waving at you, and you keep expanding, and eventually you hit the speed of light, and the last thing you'll see from me is this.

2:30:33it'll appear frozen the beam of light that i'm producing the photons of light i'm generating will keep shining towards you they'll get red shifted to longer and longer wavelengths so you'll see me you'll see me frozen waving and you'll see me extremely red and the same exact thing happens as an observer falls into a black hole they don't get ripped apart at the so-called event horizon you and avi talked about this in great detail i refer you guys to episode 146 I think. Episode 146, you talk about the falling into a black hole. Nothing happens when you cross the event horizon. People think it sounds kind of cool, event horizon.

2:31:11No. Something happens when you get close to the singularity. That's called spaghettification. You get ripped apart. That's irrelevant. The astronaut, right before he falls into the black hole, he waves it, that's the same thing. You see him. He's frozen. And he's very red. And that'll just keep continuing as long as, you know, as long as you're around to look at him. So the same thing happens with this light, with any process in the universe. And it just so happens that in order to see something that's beyond the event horizon, you can't use light. You have to use something else. Because light can only travel at the speed of light.

2:31:46It's the fastest speed there is. But there has to be some other mechanism by which you could see these processes, if they existed, before this part of the Big Bang occurred. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for not waves of light, but waves of gravity, which is the actual structure of space-time. You know, space-time, again, you and Avi did a lot of the prereqs for this course. You talked about waves of gravity. Gravity and space-time is a dynamical object. It's not a frozen ice block. Gravity means that distances and time shift according to the local mass distribution there is.

2:32:24So when the universe had all the mass it will ever have at the beginning, it had a lot of gravity. And when the expansion took place, that gravity could be converted into oscillatory radiation called gravitational waves. That's what we look for. It's not light. It's space-time itself. And we've detected that as... How are you able to see that? So we see that in the distortion of space and time. Remember I said if there's a black hole here, you could actually see something over there, because light from over there would get bent by the black hole and it would appear to be coming from over there, but it's actually coming from behind us.

2:32:58That's called gravitational lensing. Einstein predicted this phenomenon in the 1930s. He also predicted this phenomenon of gravitational waves. It has been detected on Earth from two black holes that existed a billion years ago, a billion light years away, crashed into each other. Each one weighed 30 times the mass of our sun. What was left over was a single black hole that weighed 59 times the mass of the sun. So you had 60 solar masses in the beginning, 30 and 30. They crash together. They make something that's only 59 solar masses. Where'd the rest of the energy go? It all went into shaking up and vibrating space-time.

2:33:41Those ripples in space-time mean that if you were there, at one moment of time, your weight would increase on a scale. if you put a scale in here and a gravitational wave comes through, one moment of time you get heavier, then it oscillates and you get lighter. Heavier, lighter, heavier, lighter. And that process would occur at the speed of light. But it's not light, it's the separation of entities and events in space-time itself. The curvature of which gets distorted, if the universe had a singularity, which would mean we live in a multiverse. They all go together. So we haven't discovered that yet.

2:34:19We may never, even as you said before, eloquently, it can't prove it, can't disprove it, but we can disprove alternatives to it. There's an alternative that says we came from a big crunch. Remember, I said that's a possibility. That, it turns out, for technical reasons, can be disproven if we see these waves of gravity. The waves of gravity cannot occur in a universe with a big crunch, but they can occur in a universe with inflation and the multiverse. but one can be proved one cannot be proven but one can be falsified proven wrong you know another thing that i was talking to avi about is when we talk about the universe expanding i was asking him about the edge yeah of the universe and i didn't quite understand what he was talking about so if we're expanding yeah the space is expanding in between us that's That's right.

2:35:10Where is the edge of this? So, there doesn't have to be an edge. There may be an edge, but there doesn't have to be an edge. And it's a very ancient question. Aristotle asked, if you go to the edge of the universe and you throw a sphere, where does it go into, right? It's exactly the same type of question you're asking. um so what we do in science is we in the science of cosmology is we say that that space time um is the set of all possible places in x y and z and in time anything that can occur occurs in those four dimensions right you told me to meet you here exactly in this you know latitude longitude altitude and time right you specified all those different things you don't specify anything else right?

2:35:57Now, if a gravitational wave comes through this room, it actually changes both the space and time, you know, microscopically, but technically it does. And if two big black holes crash by, it would do it a lot, right? That would be a huge, huge disruption to space and time. It would change my coordinates. I'd be at a different XYZ time, altitude, whatever, right? But all of space and time can exist infinitely, like an infinite set of monkey bars, just going out in all directions, all possible directions, where space is there. Now you might say, what is that space made of? Right? What's in that space?

2:36:32In other words, our universe here is within our horizon. Just like you go down to the beach in San Diego, I can only see out, I don't know, you're a Navy guy. Tell me, you can see like four to seven miles at sea level out to shore, and then your horizon disappears because of the curvature of the Earth, right? Does that mean there's nothing beyond? Of course not, right? There's definitely stuff beyond there. people didn't know that for a long time but now they do right so that that's your horizon your horizon on a two-dimensional surface like the surface of the earth is a circle your horizon in a four-dimensional universe is a sphere every event in space and time that's ever occurred that we could just now get information from lies within our light sphere we call that maximum light sphere, the farthest distance that anything could have traveled to us here, we call that the particle horizon or the observable universe.

2:37:28Okay. But my observable universe looks different than your observable universe because we're not at the same four dimensional space time location. You're six feet away from me. Light travels one, uh, one billionth and one billionth of a second travels one foot. That's the speed of light. So I actually see you six nanoseconds earlier than than you are right now. You look wonderful, Sean, by the way. I see you, the sun, eight minutes away. We don't know, the sun could have disappeared right now. We won't know for eight minutes. It's not likely, but it's a hypothesis, you could test it, right? The universe, the Big Bang, the stuff that I study, happened 13.86 billion years ago.

2:38:06So stuff could have traveled to us from that age, and you take that age of the universe times the speed of light, you technically have to modify it by the expansion of the universe, But once you do that, you get the maximum distance I can see where I am right here. And that's a sphere whose radius is 45 billion light years. Okay, so imagine that centered on me. But now go over a couple billion light years to this galaxy with these two black holes crashed together. That has a slightly different observable universe. Now, what are they seeing? Are they seeing into another universe? No. They just have access to a different light sphere of space that could have communicated with them.

2:38:47Just another perspective. Yeah. And a billion years from now, we'll be able to see that. Now, if there's another universe there, let's say there's another universe. God comes down. It's wrong. There's another universe. Episode whatever, 1400, you'll have the other universe. All right? But it's 10 light years away from our universe. You won't know about it for 10 years. Right? So we could exist in this vast universe. It could also be that we're in a compact, finite universe. It would make sense to say that there is an edge to it, just like there's an edge. There is an edge to the Earth, right? The edge is in the perpendicular dimension to the two-dimensional sphere.

2:39:27In the context of cosmology, the edge of the universe could be if we live in a spherical universe, but instead of having X, Y, and Z, it has X, Y, Z, and W. It's a four-dimensional sphere. A brain, nobody's brain, not even Obvi's. can comprehend what that actually looks like or means. But mathematically, it's a perfectly valid question. We can approach it and we can ask, what would be the signature of another universe that bumps into our universe? And people make predictions about it. But there's zero evidence for that. There's zero evidence that our universe is a compact, closed spherical universe or that it's an open hyperbolic universe.

2:40:03Right now, our best evidence is that our universe is infinite in extent, but that infinity is just a mathematical infinity. We have no idea if right beyond it could be another universe. And if you ask what's in that other universe, I have a thought exercise for you. When the Artemis... We should talk about lunar landing conspiracies. You had on this guy, Gentile? AJ Gentile. AJ Gentile. That was an awesome show. I love that guy. He's one of my favorite people. He's so good at what he does. Imagine how hard it is. You know, it's hard to interview people, but then also to do explainer content where you explain things.

2:40:45But I can never take the professor out of laboratory, and so he made a couple mistakes in that episode. And I would love to talk to him sometime. Maybe you can introduce me. But one of the things he said is that the Soviets beat us in every possible thing. And this is part of the conversation you guys had about how the moon landing didn't happen, right? Or how people could say, I don't actually know what you believe. And this is a case where you could say believe, but we have evidence, right? What do you believe? I know for a fact we landed on the moon. How do you know? I know for a fact, because we have physical evidence, we have eyewitness evidence, we have photographic evidence.

2:41:20But the best evidence we have, Sean, the best evidence we have comes from the Soviet Union. What's that? Soviet Union, on July 19th, 1969, the Soviets knew that the eagle was on its way on the Sea of Tranquility. They had launched six days earlier a spacecraft of their own, uncrewed, no men were on it. But they were gonna go and land on the moon, and they were gonna take samples, and they kind of wanted to steal the thunder, arrive a day earlier, and kind of get a little bit of the credit. And they also kind of hoped that we would crash, and they would all die. I mean, the space race was insane, right?

2:41:59I mean, it was incredible. The Soviets coordinated with the Americans. on that very day, because they were worried that they would crash into the Eagle, and they coordinated their telemetry, and we still have records of their telemetry, and the communications between the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where they would do their launches, and recoveries, and NASA Apollo. They wanted to avoid a huge PR disaster, especially since they thought we would die. They thought they would actually crash. People thought the Moon Landers would keep going down through the surface of the Moon. They thought it was made of, like, really loose talcum powder, like dust, and that it would actually be unstable and would flip.

2:42:40They actually, most people gave it 50-50 odds. In fact, Nixon had recorded a speech in case the astronauts died. And, you know, and he pre-recorded it, and so he would play it on TV and give their condolences. They also planned for a contingency that they'd be lost in lunar orbit, or that they would miss the moon and go off into deep space and become a satellite, never to be found again, right? So the Russians confirmed it. that coordinated with our telemetry. When they landed, they congratulated President Nixon. Um, and then they also landed, uh, on the moon, and the first landing, they landed these retro-reflectors called laser, uh, lunar laser retro-reflectors.

2:43:22Um, you ever run on your bicycle and you see, like, a bike, um, tail light, or the reflectors on the back of a bike, right? How does that work? Um, how does the bike know where your car is gonna be? It could be at any angle, any bearing, any distance, right? How does it know to reflect back? They have specially designed retroreflectors that always will find the target back to Earth. And we bounce lasers off it. My colleague at UCS San Diego, became retired recently, Tom Murphy, he bounces lasers off these retroreflectors left by the Apollo moon landing, Apollo 11, and he can measure the distance to the moon to the thickness of a paperclip, one millimeter or so thickness.

2:44:00So we know the average. That was left by these astronauts. Now, the Russians left these things there too, but the Russians also overflew both our landing sites and their own landing sites. And Tom Murphy and his colleagues found the Russian retroreflectors as well as the American ones exactly where the Americans said they put it and exactly where the Russians said they put it. And the last kind of little bit of convincing evidence, one part, but I do want to get back to what Gentile said that's wrong because I think it's important, is that the positioning, so you could maybe sort of fake that or whatever, but imagine right now, imagine like Artemis II, which just went around the moon, right?

2:44:41I think even, you know, I debated Bart Sibrell on Piers Morgan the day of the launch, and he was like, well, maybe they're going now, but they couldn't have gone then. I'll get back to that in a second. Now, that's a totally fallacious and ridiculous argument that I refuted on air with him, and peers actually piled on and called him full of shit, to his credit. But the very day that Artemis launched and then went around the moon this last month, in April... Can you imagine... Supposed to land on the moon, though, weren't they? Not this one. This one was supposed to go around the moon. I thought they were supposed to land, and then it changed.

2:45:14No, no. No, it was always planned to do this. First one went around the moon, no one was in it. Second one went around the moon with people in it. Third one's gonna be people in it... Uh, sorry, unmanned landing on the moon. Fourth one's gonna be people landing on the moon. Okay. Let me just interrupt this one. All right, all right, all right. I just wanna know, why don't we just land on the fucking moon? We did it in the 60s. Okay. Would you get... Why are we doing all this crazy, wild shit? Let's just go back. Would you get on with your kids, and being here and your wife, and your empire that is so impressive, would you get on, like, the second flight of any kind of military hardware built by the lowest paying contractor.

2:45:51Hey, in case you ever noticed I'm a risk taker. I know you are. But would you do it now? I asked Elon Musk on my podcast. Would I do it right now? Yeah. Would you take it right now? Right. I would have done it right... So you do things in steps. I would have done it right... four or five years ago. Kitty Hawk. Was that the first time the Wright Flyer had ever flown? Oh, they didn't put themselves on it the first time. They did test flights, prototype flights. That's all they're doing. There's nothing nefarious there. But let me just get to the closure of this one argument, a thought experiment I want you to consider.

2:46:19April 5th, 6th, when they went around the moon, can you imagine Ayatollah Khamenei Jr.? Oh, hello. Hi. Mashallah. Mashallah. President Trump. Congratulations. Every country on Earth, including China, which had stolen a lot of our nuclear and space secrets in the 1970s, China, Soviet Union, all these countries called up and congratulated the United States. Now, they were our enemy. It's hard to think of it now because we kind of like whatever, whatever, right? But can you imagine, like, the Ayatollahs right now calling us up to congratulate us? In other words, they would be the most glorified and happy people on Earth to have us not get there and prove that we didn't get there, because that would leave glory for them.

2:47:03So, that's a psychological kind of component, evidence for it. There's overwhelming scientific evidence for it. The evidence against it is minimal. You already mentioned one of them, which is, well, how come they did it, you know, in the 60s, but we can't do it now? I mean, you said that, Gentile said that. Totally fallacious argument. I love you. I love Gentile. I'm going to tell you that's a fallacious argument. And I'm living proof of it, okay? The first person to ever set foot on the South Pole, Roald Emundsen. He's an amazing guy. He went from the North Pole. He almost was the first person to reach the North Pole.

2:47:34He lost, turned around, and went on a huge expedition, and became the first person to land, to reach the South Pole. The South Pole, nowadays, I said, I take a C-130 flight, a C-17 flight, land on the ice. Then I take a ski C-130 on land. It takes me a week. Okay. Poor Brian, you know, play the violin. It took them six months just to get there. Then they got there. They would get there in spring because that's the only time you can really travel there. Then they have to wait until the following spring. They'd stay on the coast of Antarctica for six more months until, or seven, eight months before it came warm enough that they could ski, cross country ski up 9 ,000 feet of ice.

2:48:12Okay. And then they got to the South pole and then had to get back before winter started. And if they missed it by three weeks, like the British team, Robert Falcon Scott, was the second person to get to the South Pole in 1912. In January 1912, three weeks after Amundsen got there in December 1911, everyone on Scott's team died. Every single one of them froze to death the most excruciating way possible. Ten miles from a cache of supplies that would have saved their lives. They all died. They didn't know about it for another year. And then they got back to England a year after that. Okay, we're just...

2:48:42Okay, so 1911, our Norwegian guy sets foot with his teammates on the South Pole. Do you know when the next Norwegian to get to the South Pole was, Sean? I'm not expecting you to. 1996. Wow. So, if you're in 19... Bart Sibbrough, 1995, you say, oh, wait, how come we went there with technology with a boat, a wooden boat, Shackleton? We did that 100 years ago, but we can't do that now? It's completely fallacious. I mean, that's not a good argument, okay? There are other arguments that are better, like the Van Allen belts and so forth. I don't think that, you know, I'm not saying that we didn't go.

2:49:19Okay, well, it sounded like... I'm not saying we didn't go. You're open to the hypothesis, at least. I think it's fucking weird that we haven't been back since the 60s. But do you know why we didn't go back to the South Pole? Or anybody on Earth. Uh, so, first of all, it was... And the belt thing that you just brought up, I also think is very odd. And there's that guy at NASA that said, we lost the technology. I'm sorry, you lost the fucking technology? Okay, there's no NASA guy at NASA. It's like saying, the guy in the Navy SEALs or something. That could mean a lot of things, right? It doesn't.

2:49:53Well, I mean, I'm just not familiar with that. Yeah, I know. But when you have a platform like you do, and AJ has his platform, I'm just, I would love the scientific rigor to kind of, not, you have to get a PhD in quantum mechanics, actually. I'm just saying, when you think about things, what should be your default base rate hypothesis? Should it be that this is kind of fake? Or, you know, as Candace Owens said, this is fake and gay, right? So, she's supposed to be like America first, right? She's supposed to really love America, be patriotic. It's not only the greatest achievement of America, but it's one of the greatest...

2:50:29I think it is, personally, the greatest achievement in all of human history. And I say that as somebody who's a pure scientist. Going to the moon. Well, we did in a very short amount of time, but it took a level of just incredible, incredible cooperation and technology, hundreds of thousands of people coordinating across decades. And the evidence against it is so minimal. What's frustrating as a real scientist is to say, look, no one would rather these things be false than a scientist, right? Because I get paid not to prove people right. My job is not to prove freaking Avi Loeb right. My job is to say, no, you're freaking wrong.

2:51:05Here's a better explanation. Let's go test that." And his job as a good scientist is to say, thank you, Brian. You know, you use your experimental technology. I'm a theoretical physicist. Let's work together and come closer to truth, okay? That's the way science should be done. Not like the default assumption is America lied. You know, they lied about COVID. I mean, you know, for many reasons, I wish COVID never happened. And I've interviewed, you know, and I'm best friends with, one of the close friends with the director of the National Institute of Health, Dr. J. Bhattacharya, tortured by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.

2:51:37Horrible thing. And, you know, he's a Christian. He's an incredible human being. You know, he... All this stuff that you're kind of talking about here, you know, at the beginning, you asked me if I thought it was a good idea for a country to lie to its citizens. Yeah. Now we're wondering if we fucking landed on the moon, because a lot of lies have come out of the government. I see what you're saying. And you're a scientist. You understand how to sift through all this data. I mean, you've spent many, many years studying all the things that it takes to know about landing on the moon. I'm a Navy SEAL.

2:52:12I spent those years fighting a fucking war. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so what I'm saying is, you know, you're looking at straight facts and the rest of us are looking at contexts. You know, and when you add in the context and you see a government that continuously lies to its fucking citizens, citizens are no longer going to believe the government. I guess is a question. And so then all these conspiracies start to happen and distrust, and then they start digging into everything. What were you saying about Candace? So Candace, what I'm saying about Candace is that the America firsters and the American patriots and so forth, and I'm not questioning her love of America or whatever, just saying, if this is the greatest accomplishment that a human being has ever made, and it happens to come that you profess your love for and allegiance to, as I do and as you do, right?

2:53:01That, it doesn't mean they're flawless. I mean, who's flawless, right? I mean, who do you agree with 100 % of the time? Like, I'll say my wife, right? But that's about it, right? Sometimes you contradict yourself. I contradict myself. You agree with your wife 100 % of the time? That's bullshit. Uh, honey, if you're watching, you know what I did? I made her mad the other day. I said, you know, honey, whenever I'm driving you around, like, I gotta turn off the, um, the voice-activated directions on the GPS. She's like, oh, that's so romantic. You want to listen to me?" I'm like, no, I don't want two women yelling at me while I'm on the clock.

2:53:32No. So you don't agree with everybody, right? You don't even agree with yourself. I reserve the right to be wrong all the time, and in fact, that's the best thing a scientist should do. We should have the frickin' balls to say when we're wrong, not just when we're right. From the standpoint of having skepticism of your government and whatnot, you always have to ask the question, qui bono? Like, who benefits from it, right? Who would benefit from the moon landing not occurring? is a question. You can ask that question. You can also say, what are the downstream tangible benefits from doing that work and landing on the moon?

2:54:06You can ask, what were the technological impediments? But if you start with a hypothesis, it's like an atheist who says, I'm going to start with the hypothesis God doesn't exist, Sean. And you have the burden of proof to prove to me that God exists or doesn't exist. That's not approaching things scientifically. If you start with it. There's a term in that for it's called apologetics. You start with a conclusion, you reason towards a conclusion best in the best available data, but you're not going to like refute God, like William Lane Craig or Barron, the Catholic priest, I'm blanking on his name.

2:54:41I think it's Barron is the last name, Robert Barron. They're not going to come to a conclusion that disproves God, right? Let's just be honest. That's not necessarily what their focus is going But they're gonna give explanations why God is a more plausible hypothesis than anything else. But if you... And so there's purely scientific reasons you can debate what happened when we went to the moon. How come we didn't go back? I think I gave some credibility to the argument that just because you do something once, it doesn't necessarily make it easier to do it twice. Like, Piers Morgan on his show, to give him credit, to Bart Sibrol, he said, I flew on the Concorde, you know, in 2001, and I haven't been on a Concorde since.

2:55:19Like, how come there's no frickin Mach 2 transportation right now? How come that's not probably ever gonna happen again? How do we go back into it? You know, that was built. That was built in 1962, the Concorde. It was before the Apollo landing. We can't do that now. It's an argument that sounds good to people that really might come into a conversation with a predisposition. And that's fine for a person who's not... who's not maybe wanting to portray themselves as being a scientist. You're not a scientist. AJ's not a scientist. But there's one more thing about the Van Allen belts, which is the other thing that she, Candace Owens, really got from this guy, Bart Sibrel.

2:55:57And then I think AJ kind of got this too. So there's this radiation belt that surrounds the Earth. And it's called the Van Allen belts. It is supposedly this impenetrable, instantly fatal trajectory. No person can get through it. And there's no way to get to the moon without going through these belts, right? I mean, it surrounds the Earth. So that's like saying, there's no way, let's say you want to land on Saturn, right? For whatever reason, Sean's deciding we're taking the podcast on the road, we're going to Saturn, right? Saturn has this ring system around it. It's like a belt around it, right?

2:56:29So if you're going to land on Saturn, fine. You probably won't take the trajectory that goes right through the ring system, right? Just because a belt exists doesn't mean that there's not a symmetrical trajectory that you can go through. It's totally safe, right? The asteroid belt, you think about the asteroid belt. You shoot a spaceship through the asteroid belt, you're going to get destroyed. No, you won't. If you shot in any direction, you take any trajectory you want, and you'll go out to the edge of the solar system, there's almost a 0 % chance you'll hit anything, even though you kind of depict it as an asteroid belt.

2:57:00The Van Allen belts are like that. They're highly concentrated in certain regions. There's two different belts, an inner belt and an outer belt. They mainly go around the equator. The launches to the moon go around the pole. So there's no danger. There's no exposure to it. We know how to do it. Satellites go through it all the time, and anyone who's ever seen Aurora knows about it. It's not dangerous. It's not fatal. It happens to be about the equivalent of two or three chest x-rays, which you and I get every year, every couple of years, right? So there's some radiation. It sounds scary. You know, one of the Patreon questions that I answered for my fellow Vigilance Elite Patreon members was about, like, how do we make the concept of nuclear power less traumatizing, less kind of scary to the average person?

2:57:42Like, how do we get rid of radiation? So save that. You have to join Vigilance Elite Patreon. I'm trying to sell that to my fellow members. So go over there. You'll find out my answer to it. But it's sort of, it's manipulative to say, radiation's scary, therefore we didn't go to the moon. Let's look at it scientifically. Let's look at the evidence. If you spend any time off-road like I do, you already know how easy it is to end up second-guessing where you're at. whether you're still on a legal trail or if the route ahead is even worth taking. That's why I've been using OnX Off-Road. It's an off-road navigation app that shows trails, public and private land boundaries, places to camp, and detailed trail info all in one place.

2:58:29And what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data. You can check difficulty ratings, terrain details, trail photos, even recent reports from other riders before you head out there. The other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time, because once you lose service out there, your phone is pretty much useless. But with OnX Off-Road, everything still works offline. And if you're riding with a group, their location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map so nobody gets lost or separated. What I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new.

2:59:06I'm not wasting time backtracking, accidentally ending up on private land, or trying to figure things out once I'm already deep into the trail system. I can plan ahead, know what I'm getting into, and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the whole time. Search OnX Off-Road in the App Store or Google Play. Again, that's OnX Off-Road in the App Store or Google Play.

2:59:50All right.

3:00:06brian we're back from the break we pretty much just wrapped up the moon talk but it did bring one thing in here because you gave me a little for saying the nasa guy so here is the nasa guy go ahead and hit play Let me know what you think.

3:00:53So I sounded like an idiot because I didn't know his name or what he was, so I had to go find it and show it to you. That's fine. What is your take on that? I'm just curious. So no disrespect to Don. Again, more courageous than I'll ever be. Launch on top of a 60 ,000 tons of TNT equivalent and risk your life and do everything that he did. So the one thing that's more complicated than physics is psychology, is the human mind. So I'm not going to speculate what he meant by it. I'll just say it's the technology can't be destroyed. Right. Technology means a lot of things. It means the physical rockets.

3:01:31Do we have Apollo Saturn five boosters anymore? No. So we don't have those. Do we destroy them? Yeah. I mean, I've got a 50 cal bullet that my brother in law, Jim Brewer, got me and I use it as a bottle opener. Is it is it destroyed? Yeah, it's destroyed. It has a hole in it and the gunpowder has been taken out. and it's not a live round, right? So do we destroy the know-how on how to do it? Do we destroy... That's the way I take that, is they destroyed the know-how. They destroyed the blueprint. Who gives a shit about the fucking booster or whatever, or the rocket or whatever it is? We can build it again.

3:02:07It is true, right. It's like... I don't think that that's... That's what everybody's doing with these autonomous systems right now. They're building disposable units that can be very cheaply and easily recreated. You know, I have a collect aviation, you know, kind of antique artifacts. I have a B-17 propeller in my hangar in San Diego, where I keep my plane. And this thing is amazing. And there's zero chance that we could ever get that to work. We could ever reconstruct a B-17, you know, from scrap. There are a couple of B-17s flying. I think there's three left or something like that. Again, if we had an infinite amount of money, infinite amount of money, do you think that Elon or do you think that our greatest engineers and scientists couldn't reassemble and build a P-38 or a B-17?

3:02:54Of course we could, but you have to ask, like, what's the purpose of that? We have been there, we have done that. I actually think there's a stronger... What's the purpose of that? What's the purpose of rebuilding... What was the purpose of coming to North America again? Well, what... What was the purpose? So we are... To settle new fucking land, to expand an empire, to fuck... What would the purpose of going to the moon be? I don't know, to claim the fucking moon. That's true. How do we know there's the shit up there that we don't need? Same with Antarctica. Why do we go to Antarctica? I interviewed this guy, Steve Quast, in Helium 3.

3:03:24He's talking about we need Helium 3. It's going to be great for energy. Can't remember everything about the conversation, but you know what I mean? Like, why aren't we going up there and getting fucking Helium 3? Sure. You know, and so I sense that you get frustrated with skeptics like me or people that don't believe. But what really is the problem is the scientists are doing a very shitty job of explaining why the fuck we haven't been back to the moon. Yeah. To pea brains like me. A, you're not a pea brain. B, my job is to answer questions. And I get paid to answer questions, right? And so what a teacher is.

3:03:59At heart, I'm a scientist, right? And scientists answer questions. I'm a professor. I'm a teacher. When they say something like that, there's different reads to saying that. Like, you know, where's the car, you know, to your 16-year-old? Oh, I destroyed it. It's destroyed. Is it destroyed? Like, is it beyond the laws of physics to reconstruct it? Is an astronaut the right person to ask this question about the technology? Do you know the astronauts have almost no knowledge of the engineering and the building of it? Some of them weren't even pilots, right? So that's why I kind of asked you before.

3:04:32Or is my lack of domain expertise in the operator, special teams and Navy aviators, does that preclude me from being able to ask questions that might be uncomfortable for people that believe things that they've seen that I don't believe there's evidence at the scientific evidentiary level for? So that one clip, it doesn't shake me. It doesn't frustrate me. It doesn't make me feel like, oh, well, I really got me. It makes me feel like this guy said something. I don't know the full context. But I know for sure if we had wanted to, there's absolutely no reason not to. Now, why didn't we want to? What was the Cold War?

3:05:08I mean, do we go back and keep bombing Japan and bombing the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union collapsed, right? Part of it was because of the vast military expenditures that we spent during the space race and it was no longer sustainable in the late 1980s and the Berlin Wall. Do we fire a shot? No. I mean, not really. I mean, you guys probably know. But once you do a thing, do you need to do it again? It's not like running a marathon. Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile 80 years ago, something like that. People still want to break the four-minute mile. They keep getting better and better.

3:05:38Will that person, the second person to break the four-minute mile, do you know his name? No, but I mean, yes, we do need to do it again. I mean, since the beginning of time, it's been expansion of empires. Yeah. The entire fucking planet's occupied now, except Antarctica. It's only got 800 people down there. Sell you some land there. But you know what I mean? So what is the fastest growing - Is it though? Is the world overpopulated? I don't think so. I think it's the opposite. I think we're running low on population. If you took every person on earth, Sean - I guess what I'm saying is it's all been settled.

3:06:12I'm not talking about an overpopulation or anything. I'm talking about expansion of empires, which humanity has been doing since the beginning of time right the new expansion is space absolutely space i mean the the what i can't i don't know the correct terminology but it's been it's been told to me by several people on the show that the the real estate law or whatever the fuck you call it space space law is the fastest growing it is you know um sector of legal or whatever legal real estate was created the first place of the US military created in 50 years, 60 years. So you can't tell me that, you know, it's not important.

3:06:55And then Steve Kwas is saying China is basically on the moon. I don't know if that's correct or not, but that's what he says. But whatever, somebody's going to fucking go there and somebody's going to claim it. Why haven't we been back? It's been how long? 60 years, maybe? If we had this conversation, you know, 46 days ago, we could say we haven't been back to the moon in 56 years or whatever, but now we have. But we've been around the moon. We went farther than we went even during the Apollo mission. We're testing this thing out. I always say, you know, someone said to me, do you want to go on a SpaceX rocket and go to the moon?

3:07:28I'm like, yeah, I want to be a customer of 10 ,000. Like, I don't want to be the first guy. You know how many aviation accidents occurred during the first 10 years after the Wright brothers, what the fatality rate is? Nowadays, you get on a plane, the fatality rate is 0.001. The only fatality in America since 9-11 was right after Trump's inauguration. a helicopter hit a commercial jet. That was like the first midair collision that resulted in death. Even Sully Sullenberg landed on... Aviation safety has gotten down to the sub-thousandth of a percent level of fatality risk. Space is still about 3%, 4%.

3:08:02Now, part of that is intrinsic to the environment. It's the most extreme hostile environment, which is also some of the reason why we might not ever get to Mars and colonize Mars. We might not have the ability. We might and have the wherewithal. But in today's dollars, to reproduce what we did, just go to the moon, walk around, do the samples, if you'd want to do that, is sort of the analog of what I said before. Go to the South Pole, be the 10th person to get to the South Pole. You have to justify a huge amount of blood and treasure to do that. And I'm sorry, people in America are not willing to see astronauts die.

3:08:33You know, we've gotten to a point where they, if they were to have one loss of an astronaut, it would set back probably the future lunar colonization, by an incredible, you know, maybe decades. And the budget that NASA is dedicating towards this is minuscule. You know, women in this country, and many men, I don't know, your audience, no, no, women spend more on lipstick in America than the NASA budget. Tell me how you're gonna get to colonize the interplanetary species like Elon wants to do with a budget that's$25 billion. And some say that's way too high. We should be spending on poverty. We should be sending it, and you gotta be sympathetic to some of these things, right?

3:09:11So the question is one of national will. We had pride in the 1960s. We wanted to beat Russia. We don't really have that with China. We have a very unusual thing with China, our relationship. You know more about the geopolitics than I do. There's an interesting thing that just happened in, um... It didn't really make much media attention, I saw it. And the New York Times reported that China was trying to build radio telescopes in Argentina and optical telescopes there. And the US government coordinated with Argentina and froze the parts at the port in China. I'm sorry, at the port in Argentina.

3:09:42Like, why are they doing that? Well, guess what? When we go up and study the cosmic microwave background, look for the Big Bang and stuff like that, we're on top of these mountains. We're looking for infrared. We're looking for heat. Well, guess what? So are the Chinese. They're probably looking for infrared from a B-2 stealth bomber. You can conceal its radar. That's what stealth means. You can cool the exhaust, but you can't defeat the second law of thermodynamics. When an SR-71 is cruising at cruise speed, the windshield gets up to 600 degrees. It had to be three inches of quartz. Well, quartz radiates in the infrared extremely well.

3:10:13You can pick that thing out like a hot knife going through butter. So these are not always peaceful, you know, kind of coordination and scientific benefit. But to coordinate something on a budget of$25 billion, I mean, it's, you know, kind of, it's almost nothing. And so I don't think we're going to get there again, but not because it's some, and that's today when people are excited about the moon. Elon Musk exists. He didn't exist in the 1980s or whatever, right? And we had the space shuttle program. That was kind of a mixed failure blessing in some ways. Pettit was one of the commanders on. So, look, the disposition has to be like, what is the cost-benefit analysis?

3:10:53Is it worth sending people there if they have a high risk of dying? You know, would you want to be, you know, let's say it's safe. You know you're not going to die, but you're going to go on a one-way ticket to Mars. And, oh, your crewmate's going to be Elon Musk because he wants to go there too. Are you going to do that? You love risk. I'm telling you, no risk. You're not going to die. I mean, you're talking to somebody that fought in three different wars and several different conflicts. Yeah. I'd have a huge appetite for risk. Yeah, I have no doubt. And I have an even bigger appetite for risk when it advances humanity, advances our country, you know, things like that.

3:11:29And so if I thought that for one second that by reaching the moon with Elon Musk for whatever reason is going to advance humanity and make a fucking better life for mine and yours kids, you bet your ass I'm going to be on that flight. So, then we have to look at what is there... There are a lot of people that are just like me. But aren't there some... I'm saying this with love and respect, but, like, you were ordered to fight in these wars. I wasn't ordered to fight. I fucking joined to fight. You joined to fight, right? But once you're there, as I understand it, right, you don't have that much say in what you're gonna do and which wars you're gonna fight in.

3:12:07In other words, do you... If you knew everything that you knew now, Are you going to say that this is going to advance humanity? That's what they told us too in Iraq. This is going to benefit. It's going to protect America. It's going to do all these things. Let's leave aside whether it did or it didn't. But you did it. You signed up for it. Did the promise or the expectations, did it match all the hardship that you went through in your fellow soldiers? No, it was another lie from the U.S. government. Right. So what about this? You're saying you're going to do this because of your love of the bench?

3:12:37If I knew for a fact that it was going to advance humanity and make a better life for mine and yours' kids, I would do it. You can bet your ass on it. That's what I said. I asked Elon on my podcast. I had him on very briefly. And I said, Elon, you say you want to go to Mars, you want to live on Mars, you want to die on Mars. I said, let's hope it's not on impact. I don't want you to die on impact, buddy. I think you're too important. But you have 13 to 14 kids. We actually don't know how many kids Elon has. It's either very lucky or very unlucky. But he has at least 13 kids. I said, there would be a day when you'd have to say, they're not all going to go.

3:13:18His kid X, Jaws, 72, you know, the one that's named after the blackbird, right? It has an unpronounceable name. He was in the room. I could hear the kid talking on the podcast when I was talking to Elon. His mom was on the podcast. She was in a big space and recorded it. And I said, how are you going to say goodbye and do another kid? He lost a kid. You know, it's just the most traumatic thing that a human being, you and I know. Like, I don't even like to talk about it. A parent loses a child? You can't think about it. Now, you're volunteering to lose 13 children. Like, how are you gonna do that?

3:13:51And it was the first time I ever heard of Elon being at a loss for words. You can hear it on my podcast. I have it on my YouTube channel. He couldn't say it. His mom, May Musk, comes and says, oh, let's not talk about that. Let's not talk about sad things. So it's sad. I know you do it again you have courage that mortal men like me I'm telling you I couldn't do it but it's also to me it would have to be justifiable and I know as a scientist I can't know for sure guaranteed it's going to benefit your kids and my kids I just can't do it and as a scientist I have to say what could we do with Sean Ryan as fucking badass as you are and no doubt that we can't do with Optimus 27 equipped with chat GPT-100?

3:14:36In other words, why send a human being with wife, kids, family, people that love you, people that depend on you, people that are watching right now, whose life and ears you're in right now? I mean, you're gonna take that away? Tell me, convince me you can't do that with a robot or AI. We haven't talked about AI. What do you want to talk about? I think AI has a lot of things in common with aliens in that it's sort of, it is potentially kind of a surrogate replacement secular God, that it gives us the chance to do what God did. You know, God made man, man, Adam in Hebrew means earth. God made man out of earth.

3:15:12We have that impulse, Tower of Babel. We have that same urge, that same desire, that same craving to be as God. That's why, look, I don't read the Bible as a science book. Sorry. You know, I don't look at it. Hmm. Where's the, um, hydrogen's, uh, 32nd wave fund. It's not in there. It's not what it's supposed to do. I don't read Avi Loeb's books to learn about how to be a better member of my community and a better husband. They're different purposes, right? When you look at that book, though, the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament, you look at what they are designed to do in the time that they were designed to do it and are still relevant in this age.

3:15:47You know, I always joke, I wish I'll have God's book sales. You know, like 1 % of God's book sales in 3 ,000 years? There's no book like that, Sean. You can't tell me there's not something quasi-divine, even if you don't believe. Something that's lasted for 32 centuries, that's as applicable to my daily life right now. I read the Bible. I read Jesus. I read the New Testament. I read it all. Why not? Why wouldn't you? I read Shakespeare. I read Stephen Hawking. I don't care. I'll learn from anybody. When you look at that book, what comes out is the flawed nature of human beings wanting to become gods, frustrated fighting with god building a tower to reach up to the sky not to learn what god knows but to fight against god to show how great we are because we built this tower we don't need your freaking mountain we can do it ourselves we build mausoleums and pyramids and all these things what is it supposed to do it's meant really there's a book by ernest becker it's called the denial of death and ernest becker claims that the human being has one major fear and he spends his attempting to overcome that fear, and that's that he's gonna die.

3:16:54The word homo sapien means man who knows. What does he know? We're the only creatures that exist that know we have a death date. Yes, elephants will get together, and they'll look around, and when one dies, they'll all cry. I don't know. They don't know when they're four years old that they're gonna die. My daughter asked me the other day, like, are you gonna die before me? I said, I hope so. I was like, in tears. We know at a young age we're going to die. That's a good thing. But since biblical time, since early man, we have struggled with this desire to overcome that limitation, to become gods ourselves, to extend our lives, both in lifespan, which is great, and in sort of the power, the omnipotence of the human.

3:17:42which means augmentation, building silicon brains that live outside of us. Robotic brain, robotic bodies, cryogenic, suspension, longevity, maybe escape velocity, as Kurzweil calls it. You know, he claims at a certain point in three, four, five years, it keeps getting pushed back, like disclosure, that we'll reach... Like disclosure. ...we'll reach longevity escape velocity, which means for every year you live, you'll live another 1.1 years or something like that. Once you hit that, you can live forever. Would you live forever? Not by myself. I wouldn't want to be the only one. And it's so complex, but look at the urge.

3:18:23What's the urge? Who was the only man that you believe did have a life after death? Anyone else but Jesus? Do you think anyone else besides Jesus? We have an urge to be like Jesus, to live forever, to resurrect ourselves, to extend ourselves forever. I can't say everybody, but a lot of people are trying to build a legacy. They want to be remembered. Exactly. They have heirlooms. They want passed down items. Books, that's right. Books. Denial of death. We want something that lives beyond us. In the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl... You're making... writing death letters. Making videos for your kids, you know what I mean?

3:19:04So they remember you. Interviewing your parents. That's right. You know, so that... Writing a book. Their kids and their kids and everyone down the line knows who they were. I'm going to keep pressing you. You've got to write your memoir. And the time is right. Look, you can write, Obama has four memoirs. You can do it. He wrote four autobiographies. You can do yours now. Don't put off to tomorrow. You know what? Alfred Nobel, incredible human being, had no kids, no wife. He wrote his will a year before he died. There's a saying in the Talmud, write your will the day before you die. Why? Because you don't know when you're going to die.

3:19:38God forbid, you should live to 120, I will say to you. But we don't know. We don't know how much capacity we'll have. Some law could change, something could happen, right? Don't put it off. You were saying, it's not time yet. What, writing a book? Yeah. I'm just not that into myself. It's not about you. Again, Sean, I hand you your great-great-grandfather's memoir. I said, Sean, I found it. I did some research. You live in Italy, I don't know where. found it and i i got it cost me a lot of money sean you know i could give it to you but would you pay for it how much would you pay for that your grandmother i don't care who it is sean someday you're you are that person first of all you're that person to six million five hundred thousand people whatever you people want to know and it doesn't mean you reveal everything i don't tell people personal everything in person this is my autobiography it's my first autobiography Maybe it's my last.

3:20:32I don't know. I want to write more. Maybe I will. I think I have one more book left in me. That's the way I feel. Just honestly, my energy, my age, my commitments, my family, right? But this is a gift. It's not for you. Don't think about it for you. Like, oh, what am I gonna... I don't want to. Okay, so I bet you've done a lot of things you didn't want to do in your life. I mean, my thoughts are all there. You know what I mean? They're all there. The way I think, what I believe in, what I don't like, what I, you know... Where? In the podcast? Episode 14? It's in here, man. Where? It's in this.

3:20:59Sean, I love you, and I love your show, and I've gone back and listened to so many episodes. I'm not going to go back to episode 45 to hear what you said to that incredible guy, whatever, the other sniper guy. And there's jewels in there. And I'm not saying write a book about your podcast. I'm not asking you to. What's that? It's all in there. It's all there. I'm not asking my kids to. I'm not asking anybody to. You know what I mean? Yeah. But do you also think this is going to be it, or there's another chapter in your life? There's more chapters. That's like I told you out there. Yeah. You know, we were talking about you brought up the Sabbath again.

3:21:32Yeah. And you're like, you got to take a day off. And what are you going to do? Just keep being a big podcast? And I said, this isn't the only fucking thing I've done in my life. This isn't it. A lot of these guys, this is the only thing they've ever done. Right. This is not the only thing I've ever done. Not by the launch. I was a CA contractor, taught tactics. Like, I've done a lot of shit. Your husband. Yeah, a lot of the guys I make fun of, I love these guys. I've been on all their shows. no wife no kids and you know maybe that's why they're so happy and then they're they're loving but but to me the fullness of the life experience you gotta have kids you gotta have a wife you gotta have someone that you commit to and that you're selfless for yeah you did that with your country and that's that is so heroic but when you sacrifice for one woman or for your kids you know people ask me what's the meaning of life you know you're a cosmologist you study the universe and And they always want to know, what do you think is the meaning of life?

3:22:25I say, for me, it's an easy recipe. First of all, you gotta find a partner. And I even have a... I'm a nerd, right? So I had a mathematical algorithm to find my wife, okay? Wait a minute. You had a mathematical algorithm to find your... Yes. I gotta hear this shit. So... What does that even mean? It means you take metrics, you know, what you manage, you measure, or what you measure, you manage, right? So I kept records, you know, just like dates and people's personalities and things like that. Not like, you know, like, well, this one, you know, she had a freckle on her, but that wasn't it. Here's the algorithm in simple terms.

3:22:59You should date, and there is mathematical science to back this up, by the way. You should date, and, you know, for some period of time, once you're ready and you're like, and no one's ever ready, by the way. Like, were you ready to get married and, like, commit to one woman that you're, the only woman you're ever gonna be with physically, intimately, build a family? No one's ever ready for that. No one's ever ready for kids. No one's ever ready, probably, for combat. Like, you can't be ready for it, right? These are things that make us uniquely human. But for me, I said, date for some period of time.

3:23:26Keep a list of women. And you may date for women. I'm sorry, I know you've got women that listen. I'm just going to speak for my person. I'm going to talk only about women, but it applies to women looking for men. Date somebody until you find the following person. If I had a daughter with this woman, would I be okay if my daughter turned out to be like this woman? Okay? So let's say I dated a cheerleader, I dated someone, you know, like just models, I dated wonderful people, whatever. I dated people that were Jewish, people that were Catholic, people that were Muslim. I dated a whole bunch of people, right?

3:24:03And then some I dated for selfish reasons, right? She's hot. You know, she's so fun. Like we just did the coolest things together, whatever. Like mostly just because she was hot. Okay. I have a lot of weaknesses, Sean, but that was one of them. And, but I said, I don't know. Let's just take it to the extreme. Like, you're dating some, like, Playboy, Playmate. I shouldn't say that. One of my friends with Playboy, Playmate. You're dating some, you know, just super hot, smoking hot Instagram model, right? Do you want your daughter to turn out like that Instagram model? Do you want her necessary? Maybe she's a wonderful person, but I'm just saying, by that one dimension, I didn't want my daughter to be like these people, right?

3:24:47Until I met my wife. And I said, God, if I had a daughter, I would get every gun in here, and I would protect this daughter if she's anything like my beautiful wife. I would do anything. She's such—that she is with a piece of human debris like me, you know, that she is willing to be with me and save my life and give me life and give me children. I'd do anything. I found her. I knew it when I found her, but only because I had a statistical sample, you know, for a few decades. You know, I didn't get married until I was in my, you know, mid-late 30s. And that's what I knew. That's the algorithm. Stop dating when you meet the girl whose daughter you would want to be your daughter.

3:25:32Not the super rich, you know, person, not the super wealthy or smarter than... No. Famous, no. someone that you want your daughter to be like. That's how I stop. That's the Keating algorithm. It's a good algorithm. It served me well. Good for you. And then as far as kids go, you know, no one's already... So the cheerleader didn't work out, huh? That's right. Yeah, that's right. My wife's not going to watch this. But people talk about, look, what's the meaning of life? Like, how do you live your life? I'm sure you've been happy at different points. I'm sure you've been low at different points. Happiness is what's called in physics an unstable equilibrium point, right?

3:26:17Technically, if I have a pencil, here's my, you didn't ask me about my professor EDC gear, okay? Here's my EDC as a professor. It's the only thing I could get on TSA, right? It's a tactical pen. And I could theoretically balance this on its point, okay? I had too much coffee, two little gummy bears, but it could balance on its point, right? That's unstable equilibrium. The lightest perturbation, a butterfly flapping its wings, will knock this thing over far away, right? So it's in equilibrium means it's stable, but it's unstable to fall over. Happiness in life is like that. You can be in a state of happiness, and you can be in a state of contentment and flourishing, but it will never last because of a concept called entropy.

3:27:04Entropy is an irrevocable, irreversible tendency for the universe to chaotically and ultimately to destroy both information and stasis and equilibrium. And here's an example I like to give. Right now, let's say your happiness is X, right? This, you know, incredible. Everything you've done, I don't know about your personal life, but I assume it's fantastic. I said, Sean, I want to double your happiness right now. What would I have to do? If I gave you 2x money, 2x podcast downloads, 2x Instagram, would you be 2x happy? You'd be happier, maybe, but would you be 2x? Say again? Would you be? I'm asking you.

3:27:52Probably not. No. Would you be any happier? I doubt it. If you had twice as much money as you have right now? Think about all you could do differently. You know. I doubt it. I just remember Monty Burns in The Simpsons. He's the billionaire, greedy billionaire guy. And Homer Simpson one day... I saw this meme the other day. Maybe not a meme, a cartoon. And it was this little kid fishing. And he just had the little cloud, the thought cloud, coming out of his head and what he wanted, you know, whatever he wanted. He wanted a fucking new car. and then he's in his new car and you see the thought cloud coming out of his head and it's what he wants now and now he wants a plane yep and then he gets the plane and there's a thought cloud coming out of his head and it's what he wants next and then the next thing is he's dead yeah he just never stopped wanting never and that's what i've noticed with the money the more money you make the more once the more you're owned by your fucking possessions.

3:29:00Yeah. It's called the hedonic trap. More, more, more. Yeah, you never get off it. And I feel like I've learned this very early in my journey. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people, it takes a lot longer and a lot more money to learn that lesson. But no, I don't think money's going to bring me more happiness. I don't think more subscribers more viewers more downloads more better rankings like it's just I mean the fun is the climb up to me climb up he was really fucking cool it still is I love doing this I love having this conversation with you I am also a competitive motherfucker and once I hit number one for the first time knowing I'm not going to stay there because Rogan's the fucking king and he always will be.

3:29:55But I hit it. I don't think he always will be. We'll talk about that. And he, of course, he always will be. I don't think so. I mean, he... I don't think so. He... I do. But I don't think anybody can take that away from him. Somebody will outdo him eventually. I think this guy's Steven Bartlett. He was the pioneer. He is the pioneer. He is the goat. But the whole point, at least in my field, if this book is still relevant in 100 years, I'll be a failure. You know why? Because it means science will have stagnated. It means that I... No, but if somebody builds off that book for the next 100 years...

3:30:28Absolutely. Everyone knows they're... You still fucking set the trend. You're the king of it. That's true. And Joe Rogan is the fucking king of podcasting. Everybody else that came after him, no matter what they do, it was built off the Joe Rogan fucking podcast. 100%. 100%. One way or another long-form discussion was built off of him. But will he always be number one? Will he always be number one? No, obviously won't be because he's a mortal human being. And eventually he will get tired of this shit. Somebody else will reinvent. That's all I'm saying. Change the game. But it's like Babe Ruth.

3:31:03Everybody still knows who the fuck Babe Ruth is, right? That's right. And so, anyways, what I was getting at is, no, I don't think any of it. None of that shit is going to bring more happiness. It will drive your ego through the fucking roof. Yeah. and will probably ruin you as a person... 100 % right. ...with that amount of success and money. But it's not gonna bring more happiness. In fact, Jim Carrey has a really good quote, I wish everybody could be rich and famous so they know that's not the answer. But here's where I wanna go with that, back to my pen sticking on its tip. It's unstable, right?

3:31:38So what you described is called the hedonic treadmill. Hedonism is like seeking pleasure, happiness, whatever, wellness, well-being, flourishing. It's a treadmill because it never stops. You just keep running on it. Someone's always gonna have more followers, more money, more women, more guns, more whatever, right? That's gonna get to a point. More guns, I'm not so sure about. But in any case, but let me ask you this. I said, could I double your happiness? You said, absolutely not. What are you crazy? You said, could I increase your happiness? You're the first person I ever asked that particular question who said, no, you couldn't increase my happiness by even a bit, and I respect that.

3:32:11I'm not disputing that whatsoever. I said, with money. With money, okay. Money and shit. Is there anything material? Not God, not... I'll tell you how you can increase my happiness. It's going to sound like a fucking punishment. You take all my social media away. You take my phone away. You take my fucking computer away. I already freaking prescribed that to you on Saturday. Sunday, Sunday. And you take my occupation away and force me to be with my fucking family, where we don't have to worry about money, how we're going to eat, how we're going to get shelter, how we're going to fucking drink water.

3:32:41And that will create a happy person. Will you try it for me? We try for a minute. I know we don't know each other, but we try one day. Now think how fucking easy it is. I'm sure you've done very well. You almost won the fucking Nobel Prize, right? So you've got to be financially stable at least. I'm not saying the clear poverty. And so you have the option right now. You could throw it all away knowing that you would probably be a happier fucking person. But you're not going to do it. I can't throw it all away, but once a week, I can throw it away. once a week, I could see you not on the phone.

3:33:15I could see you not on Instagram. I could see you not doing podcasts. I could see you going to church. I could see you doing with your family, your friends, your community. Heck, you can drive. I'm not allowed to drive on Saturdays. I'm not allowed to use the phone. I'm not saying don't use your phone to call somebody. I'm just saying disconnect from the world. The reason is, and it's very beautiful, and I think it applies to you. The commandment in Hebrew and the fourth commandment, which is you shall honor the Sabbath, right it doesn't just say you should take off on sunday or saturday and kind of chill out watch the football game no no it says it says six days you must work in order that seventh day is a sabbath a rest day for god hashem meaning that the purpose of the week is you must earn your freaking money that's hard the the bible is very explicit if you don't work you don't eat you can't rely on a miracle or even other people it's considered you know this isn't good to rely on other people that they're just going to provide for you.

3:34:12No, you have to do it. But if you work seven days a week, I know billionaires, I know superstars, you know, millions of Instagram, whatever. They work 24 seven. I said to them, I told Steven Bartlett on his podcast, I said, you're so successful. You work seven days a week. Aren't you just a slave? Like you may be, it may be to a good, good, you know, outcome. You're doing great. If I could buy a stock option on anybody. He's 32, handsome, fit, great guy, great friends. He has a hundred people. His podcast is like, you know, it's almost as big as this. Okay. And that's all he does. And I'm like, Steven, take it from me.

3:34:53I'm an older man. You got to find a woman. You got to find a life. You got to make a family and you got to take time off. If you cannot do that, you are a slave. You're a rich slave. I'm a slave, Sean. I'd love to be on doing science every day of the week. I could do podcast every day of the week. It's a challenge for me to turn it off. I don't like doing it. How do you turn it off? How do I turn it off? When you celebrate the Sabbath, are you telling me that none of your science is in your head? That's not the issue. Science is in your head because science is a vehicle to God. You know what I mean, your work.

3:35:25I don't work on papers. I told you. But it's in your head. Are you really able to switch it all the way up? God is not a thought policeman. God is not like Kim Jong-un. He's not policing your thoughts, right? So he doesn't care if you're doing that. He cares if you're on a podcast with someone that you respect the hell out of, and you did that, and you're not in a temple, or you're not with your kids, and you're not with your wife, and you're kind of... But he doesn't need it for him. God doesn't do this for... He's doing it for you. You know, every six years in the Old Testament, you're supposed to let the land lay fallow and not reap every year.

3:36:02How'd they eat? So you can go back and dispute and talk about the science, whatever. You had to let the land every seven years and people would go free. The slaves would go free. If you had a slave, it'll let them go free. Every 49 years, you know, the word Jubilee that comes from Hebrew, it's a yovel, Jubal. It's a Jubilee. Every 50 years, everybody would get their land back. Every slave would go free throughout the land. It's on the Liberty Bell. It's on the fricking us Liberty Bell. It says, you shall, you shall declare freedom throughout the land and Liberty to all its inhabitants. We get that from the Torah, from the Old Testament.

3:36:34And it says freedom is not just that you do whatever you want. It's that you're doing something actively in pursuit of something bigger than yourself. And by the way, I think you do this, but you just don't know it. So the only thing I'm saying is it's like an easy prescription from this non-medical doctor. But it's the decoupling from the world. And I don't care if somebody's tweeting about me because I said something about Avi Loeb. I don't give a flying F. I could care less. I'm not checking it. I'm not seeing, oh, I got this banger tweet, I gotta get it out there. I gotta... I don't care. It can wait.

3:37:09You know why? This comes back to the happiness thing. I told you, and you agree, and you had this eloquent way of saying it. Like, sorry, Brian, like, Elon Musk comes in here and drops a billion dollars on it. You'd be, come on, you'd be a little happy. But you wouldn't be twice as happy, you wouldn't be ten times as happy, but Sean... I'd be happy in the moment. In the moment. But that's not happiness. But then it goes away. That goes away. But here's the sick thing about life. I can't make you happier, guaranteed. Well, I can make you unhappier, guaranteed, right? This is entropy. Entropy is the concept of disorder, of chaos, of randomness.

3:37:43The things that make us happy, organization, structure, family, production, work, it's organized, it's structured. The natural order of the universe is towards disorder and chaos. We must control it by applying energy to reduce entropy. I mean, happiness is a choice. Say more. Say more. Someone who's unhappy, depressed, they can't just choose it. Sometimes they need medication or situate job change or something like that, right? It partially could be a choice. But unhappiness... You have to choose when you wake up if you're gonna be pissed off or if you're gonna be happy, right? Yeah. If you're healthy, yeah.

3:38:25But anyone who has kids, and this is getting back to my meaning of life and how I find me, anyone who has kids, I don't even say it, but I'm not going to say it. I can't make you a little bit happier, but I can make somebody infinitely unhappy. I'm not saying I'm going to do it. I'm just saying they could become infinitely. I know billionaires, Sean, have lost kids. Okay? You think they wouldn't trade all their billions, billions and billions more? Be poverty, paupers, living in the gutter to have their kids back, their sons back. Okay? So you can make someone infinitely unhappy, but you can only make them finitely happy.

3:38:57That's entropy. What does that tell you? Do the things in life that if they got taken away would devastate you. It sounds depressing as you know what, but that's what I think about. I want to construct order. I want to reduce entropy. I want to create things, build things. Not for my ego, not for my bank account, but for the goodness, for the benefit it brings to the world in the future. I think that's what the meaning of life is. I mean, I'm a scientist. Maybe that doesn't apply to everybody. I'm sure a lot of people would be happy with seven Instagram models and a billion bucks. But maybe not.

3:39:37And again, you look at the Torah, you look at the Bible. Anyone who had multiple wives, they were some of the most unhappy people that you'll ever know about. So guys out there, be careful what you wish for. I got a hot question for you. Ready? Go for it. Here we go. Coming in hot. Back in 1950, Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, was having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos when he asked a question that still unsettles science today. Where is everybody? The universe is enormous. It's ancient. And based on the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems like life should exist somewhere else.

3:40:22Yet so far, we have no confirmed signal, no confirmed contact, and no undeniable evidence that another intelligent civilization is out there. Can you break down what Fermi Paradox is? Yeah. One of the people he said that to was an old friend of mine who's deceased now, named Herb York. He's one of the founders of UC San Diego. I miss him a lot. He was a great person. Built the atomic bomb and then spent many years, as many warriors do, advocating for peace afterwards. No one knows more about wanting peace and the goodness of peace, I guess, than you who fight the wars, right? So he helped develop the atomic bomb, and he was at that lunch with Enrico Fermi when he posed this question, you know, kind of a side quest as they're building the atomic bomb, right?

3:41:08So the concept is that the universe is vast, but let's just restrict ourselves to the galaxy. Our galaxy is a few hundred, maybe 100 ,000 light years across, meaning light takes 100 ,000 years to get from one edge of the galaxy to the other edge. There's about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There's about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's 100 billion squared stars in the observable universe, each one with 10 planets, call it, around it. You get numbers that are incomprehensible. A million, million, million, million planets in the observable universe, 10 to the 24th planets, right?

3:41:45So it just becomes crazy. And then you think, well, if only 1 % of them have life on it, that's 10 to the 22nd power. You know, it's an insane number. So the universe is huge. There's a lot of opportunities for life for planets. And yet, as you say, we have no evidence that rises above scientific truth or evidentiary standards. And this is going back 84 years when he said this in Los Alamos, right? So this kind of shows you that back then they didn't think they had evidence. It was right before Roswell, by the way. And then nowadays, we don't feel like consequential evidence exists at the level of scientific proof, right?

3:42:20And even those with the most invested in it, like Avi Loeb, will not say, as he didn't tell you. He didn't say, we have definitive proof, right? He said, he's a careful scientist, right? He said, we don't have evidence yet, and that's fine. Does that mean they don't exist? Absolutely not. It could exist, and there's many different reasons that could explain why we don't see what we don't see. Some of them come down to reasons, for example, that have to do with, there's an equation called the Drake equation. An astronomer in the 60s said, let's calculate how many different life forms there could be in the universe, and what it would take for us to know that they're there.

3:42:56Okay? So how many people are there or how many civilizations are there that we could communicate with? In other words, if there's slime mold, if there's like bacteria on a planet that's four light years away, 10, four light, whatever you want, we would never know they exist because they don't have technology to broadcast radio waves and light waves for us to see. Or neutrino tractor beams or gravitational wave. They don't have technology. So it's this, how do we know how many technologically advanced civilizations there are in order for us to be able to detect them? Otherwise, we can't detect them.

3:43:32We're not going to the other star systems. The fastest thing that humans have ever made, Voyager, it's traveled the farthest away from Earth. It's one light day from the Earth. It was launched 55 years ago before I was born. And in that sense, it's, you know, that thing is the farthest we've ever gone. It's only one light day. The nearest star is four light years away. It's thousands of times closer. And so effectively, we will not be able to find aliens unless they send us information or come and visit us. So if you say that they haven't, if Fermi's saying they haven't and we don't have evidence, that has to be some explanation for them.

3:44:09Otherwise, you could say one possibility is they don't exist. Now, they might not exist now, but it doesn't mean that they didn't exist in the past. Right now, there's information from the 1936 Olympics that's getting out. It's about 90 light years away from us. That was the first time humans ever transmitted a globally televised signal, a radio wave that could travel around the world and go into outer space by accident, leak into outer space, right? That is now traveling at the speed of light, 90 light years away from us. There's approximately, you know, maybe 1 ,000 stars that live within a 90 light-year radius of the planet Earth, right?

3:44:48Each one of them might have tens of planets or something around them. That amount of information for them to know about us, that's just for them to know about us. That's not to send a return signal. That'll be 200 years from now, right? So the quickest we could ever send something is it goes out at the speed of light, reaches a destination, and comes back to us. that light signal left 100 years ago. It's gotten almost 100 light years away. For us to hear back from them, we heard you, you exist. That'll take another 100 years. Does that make sense? So there's a sphere. It's a radius 100 light years caught.

3:45:211 ,000 stars plus or minus in them. And there's maybe 10 ,000 planets in those. So right now, all we can say is we don't know. There could be stars that are half that distance, 50 light years away. Maybe there's 300 of those. and there's 3 ,000 planets on them. So all we can say is that volume of space knows about us and could have returned a signal to us since we started broadcasting information. We don't have any evidence of that. Not for people not looking, but that is such a tiny microscopic number. That's like a shot glass out of the Pacific Ocean in terms of how much the vastness of the universe is.

3:46:00So one thing is that space is very big and the speed of light is very slow, even though it's the fastest speed you could possibly travel at. Another solution that people have come up with is that there's lots of life in the universe, but they tend to not live very long because they have these things called wars and they do battle among themselves. And you see this at every level of speciation from bacteria to Beethoven, I mean, to us, right? I mean, I don't tell you. Bacteria have military campaigns against enemy bacteria cultures. They secrete toxins that preclude other bacteria. They spend their biological resources to create bacteriological trenches, warfare, to prevent other bacteria from encroaching on their precious, you know, goo that they're eating.

3:46:50Every level of, and that's the most primitive life that we know about, all the way up to the most advanced life we know about, namely us. So maybe they only live so long. Maybe there's a paper I read about recently. My friend Sabina Hassenfelder made a video about it. Elon Musk is tweeting about it. And it is, I think Avi Loeb is involved in some way or other. It shows there might be an average lifetime of a civilization in order for us not to have seen anybody of about 5 ,000 years. Wow. Which is like barely back to the pyramids, right? Shit. So some say you hit this filter and then you get filtered out.

3:47:29The question is, are we past the filter? We're not yet there. So there's a lot of explanations. Another one that I like is I take my kids to the San Diego Zoo. And when I take them there, there's a gorilla exhibit. And I love the gorillas. But it says on the sign, it says, don't knock on the glass. It really bothers them. It just makes them anxious. So don't do that. Of course, my kids do that. And then they get kicked out. But what if, you know, you went instead of the San Diego Zoo, we go to the wild animal park. Then you're really far away from the gorillas. You're not going to knock on the glass.

3:48:01You don't even need glass. You're really far away. You observe them at a distance. Maybe there are things lurking, observing us at a distance. But as interstellar species that has the ability to come here or to sense our activity and our presence has advanced technology, what is it that we're going to learn from? I mean, have we learned that much besides about the species of gorillas and bacteria? We learn about those, but like I always say, you know, ornithologists study birds, right? But an ornithologist needs a bird a lot more than the birds need the ornithologist, right? Birds don't care if you study them or not, right?

3:48:36So they might not be interested in us. We might not be able to do anything for them. We might not provide any resources. They're going to eat us. And that's why I'm skeptical of these things. I don't know if you've heard of a cattle mutilation and abductions and things like that, and near-death experiences. There's only one near-death experience that I believe in, by the way, 100 % documented fact, which has to do with Alfred Nobel. Do you know this story? You know who Alfred Nobel was? He invented dynamite. So he was one of the richest people in the world, kind of like Elon Musk or Tesla of the 1800s, and he was one of the richest people in all of Europe and all over the world.

3:49:14And his family was involved with making sea mines for the Russian and Crimean War of 1840, something like that. And so they were arms dealers, Alfred Nobel and his father, Emmanuel. And they were trying to invent ways to make their methodology more lethal. And one of Alfred's brothers, his baby brother, Emil, started to play around with nitroglycerin. And nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable. And one day, he was in the lack of the family laboratory, and he dropped it on the floor, and it blew up, like, enormous explosion, vaporized him, and six other people, five other people. Six people killed instantly.

3:49:56And this devastated his father, Emmanuel Nobel, and Alfred as well. And Emmanuel, um, ended up basically getting committed to the sanatorium, and then he died eight years to the day of his son. His heart was broken, he had a stroke, and just devastated him. And Alfred set out to do something to make that never happen again. And he took nitroglycerin, and he mixed it with a type of basically like clay. It's called diatomaceous earth. And he mixed it together like chalk or clay with nitroglycerin, and it made it stable so you could drop it. And that became known as dynamite. Dynamite in Greek means powerful rock.

3:50:36And he became one of the richest people in the world based on that invention. but it was also used for munitions, and they sold in their arms factory. And reportedly, he had indirectly been responsible for the deaths of more people than any person in human history, so much so that in 1888, he's walking around Paris, and he sees a headline in the Parisian newspaper, and it says, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death, is dead. The man who committed no benefit to humanity and killed more people than any other person in human history is dead. Now, he's reading this, so he knows it's not him. Turns out it was his older brother Ludwig who died.

3:51:18And so, you know, he was kind of sad about that. But it was really a wake-up call for him. He had no wife, he had no kids. And he decided at that point, if he died then, that's the way the world was gonna remember him, like George Bailey in A Wonderful Life, right? You know, he sees the ghost of Christmas present, and Guts of Christmas Past, and Scrooge, same exact story in A Christmas Carol. He got a glimpse of what his own death would be like, and he said, I'm gonna change my life from now on. I don't know how much longer I have to live. He took this huge fortune, and he gave 99 % of it to the Nobel Prize, and he established it.

3:51:57And its goal was to do what this newspaper said he didn't do, which is to make the greatest benefit to mankind. So he created a prize for peace, for chemistry, for medicine, for literature, and, um... for physics. How can I forget physics? And these things have had tremendous benefit. The first Nobel Prize ever given was, uh, in physics, was for the X-ray. The X-ray machine, which is, you know, probably pulled bullets out of people that you know. Like, it's had so much benefit for diagnostic purposes. I had a toothache, they had a pull-up. Well, the x-rays benefited humankind, and it's a physics invention.

3:52:39It's a technology invention. And then the Nobel Peace Prize just has a very checkered past. One of my friends, Uni Tarantini, wrote a book about how, you know, it's gone to, like, Yasser Arafat and terrorists and, you know, all sorts of assorted characters. Obama won it after being in office for, like, nine days. So it's been politicized. But it still has this noble, L-E, goal of benefiting all of mankind through science, through peace. And I think it's a wonderful thing. And it wouldn't have happened without this near-death experience that Alfred Nobel encountered. So that's the only near-death experience I believe.

3:53:14I don't know. You might have other stories. Well, Brian, we're wrapping up the interview here. Last question. Who would you recommend for this show? For this show? Oh, that's easy. I don't know if the internet can handle it, though. Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein is one of the foremost kind of public intellectuals. He's created concepts, and he's incredibly... He's incredibly quotable. He's incredibly courageous. He's incredibly... He gets a lot of hate because people, he's so outspoken. And I have the distinction of being the only person that ever interviews him that pushes back on him.

3:54:01And sometimes we fight like brothers. And we have a lot of respect for each other. And I think you could handle him. And I think that combination, his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from aliens, theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, economics, and then his very, very interesting perspective on the Epstein. He met Epstein. Epstein knew about Erich's research, maybe partially some weird Harvard connection where Epstein had an office and a workspace, and he wasn't a professor, he wasn't a PhD. And Eric understands a lot more about Epstein than I think most people do, because he saw it from the financial component, the physics component, the Harvard, the institutional, all these different perspectives.

3:54:53And he's just, he's so quotable, imaginative, and he's such a good spirit, we call him Mensch, he's a Mensch, that you and him together, I think, would break the internet wide open. I'll text him. I've never met him. I will. You have his number? I do have his number. Get in touch with him. He's the one, no question. Well, thank you, Brian. Fascinating conversation.

3:55:31No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.