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

Mehr Feuer, mehr Intrigen. Die Drachen kehren zurück.

Die absolute Macht ist dir zum Greifen nah. Dein Reich wird unbezwingbar sein, Rhaenyra.

Stream die neue Staffel House of the Dragon ab 22. Juni mit WOW. Freu dich außerdem auf Staffel 1 und 2 der Erfolgsserie und weitere Highlights. Es wird keinen Zweifel geben, wen die Götter zum Herrschen auserwählt haben. Drachen heiß zum besten Preis. Jetzt ab 2,98 € im Monat. Geh auf wowTV.de. Streaming war noch nie so wow. Kaffee in seiner besten Form mit der neuen Qubo One Kapselmaschine von Chibo. In jeder Qubo-Kapsel steckt Spitzenkaffee aus besonderen Anbaugebieten. Für Espresso, Kaffee-Crema oder Kaffee-Grande auf Knopfdruck. Die neue Qubo One überzeugt mit Premium-Design, kompakter Größe und kleinem Einstiegspreis ab 29 €. Dank innovativer Press-Brew-Technologie wird jede Tasse besonders aromatisch mitsamt dicker Crema. Entdecke jetzt die Qubo Kapselmaschine in deiner Qubo Filiale und auf qubo.de.

Brian Keating, welcome to the show, man.

It's a great pleasure to be here, Sean. Been a while. I've been hoping to come on.

Couple years in the making, right?

I know.

But yeah, we were talking out there. I think I've been tracking you for like 2 or 3 years and You finally made it.

Yeah, it's kind of scary to hear that Sean Ryan's been tracking you, but I'll take that, my friend.

Oh man. But, uh, yeah, lots of shit going on right now. A lot of stuff going on right now. What do you think about all this alien stuff?

You know, it's, it's either the most exciting time to be alive or it's going to be the most depressing time to be alive. You know, it's like, uh, imagine you keep asking a girl out. She said, yeah, soon, soon I'll, I'll disclose my intentions to you. And, you know, you're just kind of waiting in the wings and you keep hearing things are going to happen, it's going to come out, finally we're going to know the truth. Um, and the whole community is thinking about things and is excited about things. And then I'm sorry to say, I've just been completely underwhelmed. This, this last release by President Trump and Department of War Pete Hegseth, I, I tore through that like a kid on, you know, Christmas morning, or as soon as it came out.

What'd you find?

I, I found, you know, really, it's a nice round number, I found like zero. I found zero that really interested me. And worse than that, I found things that were, you know, your background, you're used to dealing with kind of like psyops. And I have a good friend, my friend Chad Hosh, he was in the psyops, he was in US Army, served in there. You know, they have exposure to things, right? They're gonna prime you for certain things. I call these psyops, S-C-I-O-P-S, 'cause it sounds so outlandish, so outrageous. It titillates the mind, especially if you're a nerd like me. I want to know about extraterrestrial, extradimensional beings. I want to know about non-humanoid biologics. I want to— and all I get to hear from people I respect, some people I've talked to, you know, I say I've got the square root of your podcast size, but I talk to a lot of the same people that you've had the opportunity and honor to talk to. And it's always, you know, comes down to like, trust me, bro, or I heard, or somebody said this and I can't say that. And in the military, I completely understand it.

I understand you've seen things, you've done things, you're not going to be able to talk about things. You're a scientist and you go on a show like my friend Stephen Bartlett's show and you get 10 million views in one night, you say, well, I heard from somebody who heard from somebody. And you're a physicist like this. The, you know, people that have come on recently on his show, it frustrates me because that's not the way science works.

Do you think this is all a distraction? I mean, every time, every time there's a big release or hearing, it just to me it just winds up being a big another fucking nothing burger.

Yeah. I mean, have you heard anything that would make you— I mean, these are supposed to be some of the most consequential discoveries of all time, right? Things that could question and have caused people literally, Sean, to be burned at the stake.

Okay.

1600, Giordano Bruno, who was a priest in the Catholic Church in Italy. He proclaimed that every star you see in the heavens has a planet around it. They said, very nice, you know, what temperature do you want to be cooked to? You know, they burned him at the stake because it was so threatening, which meant it was threatening to the most powerful authority on earth at the time, which is the Catholic Church, the Vatican. And that was like the, you know, United States on steroids, like literally would just kill— no other power was comparable. And he went against them.

Why?

Because it was threatening to them. Why is this something threatening to you? Do you care when your kid says, oh, Daddy, you don't— you look ugly today, or some hater on the internet says something? You don't give a crap about it. But when somebody says something important and it challenges your worldview, like, that's significant. So allegedly these things could have the most consequential impact on humanity. Has your life changed? Have you questioned your belief in God? Have you thought maybe, you know, there's something to these aliens and maybe it could be incompatible with my religion, my faith in Jesus Christ or whatever? No. I mean, I assume no.

I used to think there was something to this alien shit. I really did. Now I don't.

You know, I just don't—

you know, I've interviewed so many people about this, and I'm not talking about, uh, Avi Loeb, or— but, um, you know, the thing is, is one thing that— one red flag to me is you got all these, all these people out there that are screaming disclosure, we want disclosure, they're demanding it. But none of them are really working together.

That's right.

You know, and so, you know, behind closed doors, off camera, they're all talking shit about each other.

Exactly.

It's like, it's like, oh, you want disclosure, but only if you're the fucking one that disclose it, right? You don't want to work with anybody else and actually, you know, figure this out. You, you just, you want to be the guy. That's what it is. And, um, Yeah, it's— so that's like one thing. Another thing is I find the timing very odd of the release of all this shit. I mean, at the, you know, the, the latest batch of the alien conspiracy thing is, you know, it stopped right at the height of the Epstein stuff and the Iran War. Yeah, whether you're for it, against it, whatever, it's very unpopular, you know what I mean? And. And so it's like, give them aliens, you know what I mean? That's, that's how I think about it now. I'm just like, this fucking bullshit. Of course you drop it right now. Exactly. And so it's, I think the timing alone is discrediting.

So, you know, in the ancient Roman times, you had on Jeremy Ryan Slate, is a friend of mine, not too long ago, you know, he talked about ancient Rome and what they used to do and how do they keep the masses entertained when there's no Netflix. They had bread and circus. I call this bread and saucers. This is what they're doing. There's a lot of distraction. Why is it distracting, though? That's what interests me. It's a metacognitive thing. To me, it's interesting because it taps into something primal in the human spirit, which is beautiful, by the way, that people care about the possibility of extra, extra-dimensional, extraterrestrial, not only life. Like if I told you tomorrow we discovered some slime mold on, you know, the moon of Saturn, Titan, you'd be like, holy crap, that's cool. But if I told you there's dolphins swimming around on the ocean, you'd say that's even cooler, right? And then if I said, said there's, there's freaking dolphins with, with opposable thumbs and they're using iPhones, you'd be like, holy freaking crap, you know, right? So it's just, it's this hierarchy of insane, interesting, most fascinating stuff. And it is child abuse, or, or, you know, humanity's curiosity abuse.

When you start saying something is so weighty, so important, so significant, not just to like, you know, your worldview, your religion, your belief in God, all these things, and you start like rug pulling it. I think that's, I think it's not only, you know, kind of not nice to do to people, I think it's morally objectionable. If you keep teasing this and just wait till you see it. And by the way, it's not just scientists, it's not just the military, it's people in Congress, it's people in power. And it's frustrating to me because they'll often be something, you know, they'll say things like, you know, we want someone, you know, these things that we see, defy the laws of physics. Okay, well, like, I'm a physicist, Avi Loeb's a physicist, you know, show us the data. Avi doesn't believe that we're being visited right now. He does believe that there have been extraterrestrial technology potential for them to have visited us via this Oumuamua, this recent, you know, 3i Atlas. And we can debate the scientific methods all you want, um, and there's a lot of objections in science because guess what, that's what scientists do.

Scientists will say, oh, you found a good discovery, that's great, Sean, you know, one good for you. We're not like, you know, in the teams or whatever, like, oh, you take somebody I'll take some. We don't have roles like that. We're all kind of doing battle against an enemy that has infinite resources called Mother Nature, and she doesn't give up her secret. The only thing that we have on our side, John, is that she's always in retreat. We're making incredible progress, exciting progress, despite what doomsayers say, despite what people may say about it. And we almost don't need the aliens. Like, we almost don't need it for the sense that science is so incredibly interesting, so provocative, so helpful, so useful. But we've come believe that with science you get technology. And I kind of say that's the problem. You know, the problem with science is that sometimes it makes technology. And so you come to expect it as a general public. Well, what good is this? Why should we spend this money here? Why should we do this? Why should we do that? We should— we have poor people here in Tennessee or wherever, right?

We should be doing something for them. It's not a zero-sum game. In fact, it's, it's a losing battle. We know we're going to lose against Mother Nature, but don't make it worse. Don't put up false flags. Don't try to do the psyops, sciops, and, and let us have access to it. The the universe. Avi Loeb loves to say the sky is not classified. I say physics is not classified.

Love that. You familiar with Polly Market?

Yeah, of course.

Polly Market only gives a 14% chance that the U.S. will confirm that aliens exist before 2027. Did you see the post that Trump did? Yes, the other day. Did anybody— what is that?

Um, you know, he's, he's a, he's a master manipulator. He's a master. And I, you know, I support what President Trump does in many ways, which makes me, you know, kind of a unicorn in academia. But, you know, does that mean he does everything right? Does that mean, like, you know, I couldn't ever consider not voting for him? Do I— do I think that he does things sometimes in a— in a callous and cruel way? Yeah, of course. Look, people always say to me as a sidebar— I'm sorry to go on a tangent so early in the conversation, but— but they say, like, would you want your kid to be like President Trump? Isn't he like, oh, I have all these problems? I'm like, No, you know who I want my kid to be like? You know, I try to live a life for my sons to be like me. I try to live a life, but not be copies of me. I want them to be who they are, actualize their full potential that God has given them. But I don't want them to be me. I don't want them to be a politician.

I don't want them to be an Instagram influencer. I don't want them to be you. I want them— I want to be the influence of my kid, not the president. I never look, oh, John F. Kennedy. I really want my kids to go, you know, all these guys. I don't say that either. I don't say, you know, I want my kid to be like Stephen Hawking. No, I don't. Nobody.

I want them to be a replacement.

Exactly. They're your ticket to the afterlife in, in reality, spirituality, and ideologically. I think that's— what other gift could you have? And by the way, I like to say for people that don't have kids, a lot of my friends don't have kids, I'm sure you know the same number of people. Um, you don't have to have kids yourself. A, you can adopt. B, you can, you can be a mentor. You know, it's a shame the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson have given like real bad name to like men mentoring younger, younger kids. And I think that's— I think it's a tragedy because I think what you need is more biological fathers and more ideological fathers. And you can be both, but you don't have to be both.

Let's get back to aliens real quick. So Pauli Margi gives a 14% chance that the U.S. government confirms alien life or technology this year. $38 million in real money has traded on this. You've built telescopes at the South Pole looking for signals from the beginning of the universe. As a physicist, what do those odds tell you?

So one of the places I built a telescope is at the South Pole, Antarctica. And I think that means I've been on a Navy base that you haven't been on. Uh, the South Pole—

you've been on a Navy base that I've not been on.

Um, and I've probably been on a plane, you know, put in my— the only ways I can, you know, say that I've done something Sean Ryan hasn't done is I've been— I might have been Plane you've never been on in the military? An LC-130 cargo plane. So it's a ski-equipped cargo plane. The US doesn't export it. It's like the, uh, F-22 or something.

I've never even seen one.

It's a giant— it's the world's biggest ski plane. It is the coolest thing. It's a C-130.

You went to Antarctica?

I've been there twice. I spent months of my life.

What's going on down there?

So Antarctica is one of the most fascinating, um, otherworldly, just like extraterrestrial kind of planet filled with some of the most hard-charging people outside of the military that you probably ever want to meet. Uh, people— it's oversubscribed. So it's harder to get to the South Pole to work there as a cook than it is to get into Harvard University. There's so many people that want to work there, that be there. They love the isolation, they love the desolation. Uh, it's like the movie Star Wars with the ice planet Hoth covered over, frozen over in isolation.

Desolation sounds like my dream place.

For me, it's a nightmare. Yeah, for you it's great. I, I love— I, I, I love getting there. I love having been there. I hate being there.

You love getting there? What's that, like a 25-hour plane ride?

It takes 7 days. Yeah, from San Diego.

Holy— it's crazy.

It's crazy. And, uh, or you can take 2, 2 and a half weeks by boat across the world's Southern Ocean, which is the most dangerous and, and kind of violent sea. I'm— I get seasick, you know, so like I, I go on a stand-up paddleboard, I get seasick. So, you know, I'm not taking the boat ride, but But so you get there, you go from San Diego, fly to LAX, you fly from LAX to either Australia or to the North Island of New Zealand, to Auckland, New Zealand. That takes, you know, 14 hours, whatever flight. Then you get there, then you have to take another flight to get from there to Christchurch, New Zealand, which is on the South Island of New Zealand. New Zealand is like, is where they film The Lord of the Rings. It's the most, it's like Switzerland plus the tropics. It's an incredible, beautiful place. And, uh, and then you get there and the U.S. has carved out an army base, a naval base, and a provisioning center from this place called Christchurch. And the reason that they are there is it's where the historic explorers like Roald Amundsen, who's the first man to reach the South Pole, and Robert Scott, who's a British team— they were in a race, Sean, every bit as competitive as the Cold War space race to get to the moon first.

This battle in 1911 and 1912 was every bit as intense geopolitically, national pride, scientifically. It last continent. No one had ever seen Antarctica. You know, when Antarctica was discovered— Antarctica was discovered after the planet Uranus was discovered. We found a freaking planet before we went to the world's seventh continent. It's a continent.

Wow, I did not know that.

Yeah, it's an actual continent, which means unlike the North Pole— if you go to the North Pole, you've seen that where the submarines go up through there, there's no land at the North Pole. If you go to the South Pole, you dig down through 9,500 feet of ice, you hit rock. That means it's a continent. Continent. So it's, it's one of Earth's 7 continents. It has a population right now as we're speaking— it's winter in Antarctica, or it's starting to be, you know, the fall, it's going into winter there as we, you know, kind of are in spring going into summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Uh, there's only about 800 people on the whole continent.

Wow. Once again, this sounds like my dream place.

Yeah, you gotta— you got a 200-mile shooting range you can go out to.

That means everybody there has to have a specific job and has to be very fucking good at it.

There's no slackers. That's right. That's why I imagine there's no slackers. No, you can't get— first of all, you need a psychological exam if you're going to be there. You can't, because there's no doctors there, there's no dentists there. You— if you have even a 1% chance that you're going to need your molars removed before you go to Antarctica, they force you to pull them out, okay? Because there's no dentist there. Can you imagine the horrific pain that you could possibly have if you were at the South Pole? No doctors, no dentists, no x-rays, nothing, nothing you could possibly save your life, and you get a toothache? So they have to— and it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for each person to get down there. So the US takes it very seriously. We go down these ski-equipped cargo planes. We leave from Christchurch on a C-17 if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, you get a C-130 again, which is half the speed. And, and they can only get provisions in or out of there about 3 months of the year. So the station opens up in November, which is beginning of their spring going into their summertime, and then it ends on February 15th.

And Sean, if you're not out by— oops, sorry. If you're not out by February 15th, you're there until November. You're not going anywhere.

Damn.

So it's an incredible environment and it's dark, by the way. It's dark, pitch black, 3 months of the year.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. We track everything in our lives, our workouts, our sleep, our business metrics. When it comes to our actual health, most of us are just guessing. And that never really made sense to me. And I think we've all had that experience where you go in, get checked out, and leave without any real clarity. No real breakdown of what's going on or what to actually do next. That's why I'm really interested in what Superpower is doing. It's one simple set of lab tests, but you're getting data on over 100 biomarkers. So now you can actually understand what's going on with your body from hormones to metabolism to vitamin levels and more. And for me, that's the biggest thing. I'm always wondering, what should I be doing? What supplements make sense? How to adjust my diet? How to optimize performance? And instead of guessing, Superpower gives you a real plan based on your data. It also tracks everything over time so you can see progress year after year and not just start over every time. Make this the year you stop guessing about your health with Superpower. For a limited time, our listeners get $20 off to unlock their new health intelligence.

Head over to superpower.com and use code SRS for $20 off your membership. That's code SRS. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about Superpower. Do me a favor if you could and tell them The Sean Ryan Show sent you to support the show. What's security like?

So I actually had a friend. There is one gun down there. It's not— there is one gun down there. There's a .45 caliber 1911 that's kept in a safe. And there's a stationmaster who's sometimes a scientist. I knew the stationmaster who was a scientist just the year I was there. And they, uh, they have security because some people have gone literally crazy there, as you might expect, right? Complete isolation. You're not going anywhere. You know why? Plane can't land there. So if, if a C-130 were to land there in the middle of winter, it gets down to -100 degrees Fahrenheit, okay? So that's, that's 200— that's 300 degrees below the boiling point of water. So they actually have a sauna at the South Pole that gets up to 212 almost degrees Fahrenheit. And then the coldest day of the year is usually in July. They go outside and they run around naked around the South Pole. Looks like a barber pole, just like you see in, you know, like Santa would have or whatever. It's a barber pole that marks the geographic axis on which the Earth is spinning. Okay. They run around. It's called the 300-degree club.

You run around every time zone and you're running in negative delta temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay. So if a plane were to land there, if an LC-130 were to land there, the hydraulic fluid and JP-8 freezes at like -50 or something like that. So what would happen is that all the fuel lines would explode and you'd be— you'd have to— the plane would be ruined. You could never use that plane again. So they've never done— they've done airdrops. There was a doctor there who got stranded, Jerry Nielsen, and she was the on-site physician. But that's just for like, you know, cuts and scrapes and stuff like that. She diagnosed a lump and she found that she had this lump in her breast, and they had to drop chemo. They found out, diagnosed it. She dropped the biopsy kit. She tested that she had breast cancer, stage 2 or 3. Then they dropped chemotherapy. So they had parachutes at night, pitch black, from a C-17. She ended up living a few more years after that. She wrote a memoir about it. But it's the most isolated place on Earth. Literally, there's, there's a thousand people in the entire continental U.S. Just imagine that, how, how far you'd have to go until you meet someone.

Again, for people like you, you probably sounds amazing. You just catch up You see where we're at?

We're out in the woods. I know. You know?

Yeah, exactly.

Sounds incredible.

Have you heard of these—

have you heard of these crafts that people think come out of the water from within the earth?

Yeah. Yeah.

What do you think about that?

Well, I've seen some stuff from this gentleman, Lue Elizondo. I don't know if you've had Lue on the podcast.

I had Lue on.

Yeah. So he had this book came out a couple of years ago, Imminent. I tried to have him on. Look, I take a skeptical view. It's like when you were a kid. I'm Jewish, but I actually grew up Catholic. It's a long story, but you remember like when Christmas would come and you'd be so excited, like you just knew your mom was gonna, your dad was gonna get you that racetrack or that RC truck or that .22 or whatever you're gonna get. Like you just knew. And then the next day shows up, oh, thanks mom, a pair of slacks. Like, ugh. You know that feeling of being let down? You've had it, right? I've had it.

I was just gonna ask if you miss Christmas. Maybe not, huh?

We have enough holidays as it is. Yeah. So we, We are in that same situation. We're promised disclosure. We're promised us— it's going to be groundbreaking. Literally yesterday, uh, Congresswoman Luna, uh, Burchett, uh, a lot of people you've talked to, a lot of people you know, um, what's coming next? It's always what's coming next. It reminds me of like nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is said to be the power source of the future, Sean, and it always will be. In other words, we're just not converging on this stuff.

Why do you think we're not Oh man, we can go—

we can do 8 hours on this if you want. But, but I'll tell you, I think there's a bunch of different things. Um, I don't actually think the, the Epstein file distraction from the Iran War— I don't think any of that is really pertinent. A, because a lot of it surfaced in 2017, you know, thanks to, um, Tom DeLonge and to the STARS Academy and, and, and people that, um, you might have interviewed. I talked to Tom DeLonge and Jim Semivan, who's a CIA operator at one point. And, and the challenge is you have all sorts of extremely rich potential scientific content in a very low information environment, in an extremely low trust environment. In other words, you talk to people— you've talked to Ryan Graves, okay, I've talked to him. I actually talked to him with one of his wingmen who's a friend of mine, is a naval, uh, veteran, an F-18 pilot just like Ryan. Um, and you talk about I would say most of the stories that I've heard, and even people like David Grusch, you know, I respect these people, but I have yet to hear them say, here's the physical evidence.

Sean, if these things never go the full distance, they never produce the evidence.

A lot of it is non-human biologics. Yeah, no, no, but well, that could be a fucking deer carcass on the side of the road, right? I'm not fucking around, I'm being serious. 100%, if you're gonna go, why aren't we going the full distance? Like, you're not a fucking whistleblower, you're just Bringing up bullshit. I'm kind of used to fucking nothing.

I can't say that, you know, because I don't have the courage to join. I wanted to join the military. I wanted to go into the Air Force. My stepfather was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and a KC-135 Stratotanker pilot. I wanted to do it, but, you know, discovered girls. I'm like, I don't know if I can handle it. I want to be an F-14 pilot because that's when Top Gun came out when I was a kid. And then my stepfather's like, you know, you know, they say everyone wants to be a cowboy, but no one wants to ride the range. You know, like being out on the boat like my friend Ariel Kleinerman or like Ryan Graves. I'm sorry, I just didn't have it. I wanted to study the stars. I wanted to not, you know, not miss that opportunity. It's kind of what I'm, what I'm good at. 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 Grusch, I, I can't, you know, these are the testimonies. I haven't seen them. Um, they do, they're interdimensional beings, like, and, uh, Congresswoman Luna.

Um, and I, I would say It's a spirit. It's a god. That's why I say I call these aliens of the gaps. It's a form of almost religious worship. Same is happening with AI, by the way. You see this worship, this power, these people involved. Look at the people involved in AI, Sean.

What do you mean worship in AI? What are you talking about?

Worship in AI is creating a god in our image. Okay, so just what God did with us. God created us from dirt. Adam in Hebrew means earth. It means dirt. God carved us out of earth, created— we can believe it literally.

You can't—

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

Why?

Because God had restricted the knowledge that human beings were capable of having. Again, believe it or not, I, I 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. Know it. People 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? You know, 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.

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

I mean, yeah, I don't think, I don't think, I mean, are they capable of that?

Well, I'll ask you the question, are they pretending You're in the—

you were— if you talk about aliens and you're in government, that's like an immediate PR boost. Yeah, boom, your front page of every paper, every podcast wants to talk to you, every news network wants to talk to you. It's, it's a great PR stunt, right?

Yep.

I mean, this episode's gonna do good because we started it off talking about aliens. I guarantee it.

Because of me. And because I'm joking, I'm joking, but, but I'm being serious.

Like, it always always hits. Yeah, it always hits.

AI is another one.

Nothing ever comes out.

So, and there's an incentive to keep it that way, right? Because if you do disclose—

I think there's something to what you're saying. I mean, I don't— I'm not, I'm not that interested in it anymore because nothing ever comes. There's no— there's never any breaking shit that comes out that's real, you know, that it's— and there's nothing you can do about it anyways.

Well, you can use a critical reason.

What I think that they— what I think might be going on is they've seen you know, how much attention the subject matter demands, you know, when it's brought up. And so it's become a tool, a useful tool for the U.S. government.

That's right. No, I agree with you. I guess here's the 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 the way out here. 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. Clarke, who wrote the book that 2001: A Space Odyssey is based on. Well done. So you're welcome. Yeah, thank you for all you do. Um, and we're going to play around with some other stuff now, so keep that handy. That will go with that later on. Um, so I want to turn, you know, with, with your permission and, and forbearance, I want to ask you a question because I can't ask— I've had, as I said, military, I've had operators on.

Um, let me ask you a question. Uh, some of the pilots who saw things, the Nimitz incident, the Tic Tac incident, Commander Fravor, uh, Lieutenant, um, Commander Alex, uh, Andy They claim they saw things, right? They got back to the boat. When they got back to the boat, they were basically described as being hazed, something like that, teased mercilessly. They said it was bad for their career. David Fravor testified about this. We could talk about the geometry of, you know, how they saw different things. But I don't ask you as an operator, if I know people that have lost limbs to IEDs, Okay, if, if you're on point, if you're going on patrol and, and one of your buddies says, I, I think I see this thing and it's, it's unusual, it could be an IED or not, like, when you got back to camp, would you like tease that person or would you say we should take this freaking seriously?

Yeah, you would say we should take this seriously.

So what do you make of the fact that when they got back and, and throughout, and Ryan Graves has done a good job trying to combat this, but what do you make of the fellow people that should also be encountering these things and should be subject— if they're just simple, prosaic, man-made, Chinese-made, 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, their, their equivalent of operators in the teams, right, they were teasing them? I just— psychologically, can you help me get through that?

Well, I mean, I think the, the comparison as you brought up is a little unbalanced. I mean, an IED see 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 you, but they're not going to make fun of you, you know. I mean, it was just so prevalent. It was 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 3 brothers, right? I can see them teasing the shit out of me, right?

Like, it's kind of like a ghost, right?

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 teasing them, but actually let's go through the encounters? Like, I'd be interested as a professional.

Yeah, as a professional, I'd probably crack a little bit of a joke. You would? Okay. You know what I mean? But I'd also be interested to hear what was going on. I mean, I mean, my old producer is the one that logged it into the logbook. I mean, he was there, uh, when that shit happened. Yeah. And. But yeah, so I'm not saying like they should have been ridiculed or anything like that. Absolutely. But all I'm saying is I could understand some heckling.

Okay.

You know, going on.

Right. And then when you, when you hear things— again, I'm a civilian. I don't have the courage 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, that's a cliffhanger. That's a retention device. Another question where I turn, you know, the tables on the podcaster and ask you, and ask you a question. Um, 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, you didn't serve in the Air Force Intelligence like Grusch. What, what should I say in those situations? It's true, you know, I'm a pilot, but I don't fly F-18s. You don't fly Cessnas, right? But, 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, they strapped on a jet and I didn't have the balls to do it? Or, you know, help me, walk me through that, because I get that a lot.

Like, you didn't have— you, you don't have the skills that he has, and you don't have the, you know, enough 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, I know about technology, I know how the— you— how astronomy money has always fed into technology for military applications first and foremost. But you're right, I'm not a military operator. So how do I as a civilian, you know, kind of navigate that chasm?

I, I don't think any of that's even relevant. You didn't serve. What the fuck does that have to do with aliens and UFOs? Like, we're not, we're not talking about— they say like some, some tactical maneuver that they did and bombed somebody and you're, 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— okay, it's not legit, not very well-crafted defense mechanism, you know, to my opinion.

But, but, or, or the, the fact that like, oh, they're, they, they have, um, great hand-eye coordination, or they have great, you know, the sniper knows, you know, how to do this and that, and like they, they know about observing things in a high-threat environment at high speeds and kinetic and mechanic environments. You don't get it. You sit behind a chalkboard and teach, you know, quantum mechanics. Like, nothing— there's nothing legitimate.

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, so I mean, that's, you know, when it's a continuous thing, it's like, oh, there's the exper— 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. A $100 million-plus telescope array in Chile's— I can't say this— Atomic— 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 Scientists and Engineers, been elected to a fellow of the, of the American Physical Society, and been inducted into the International Aviation Hall of Fame as a 2022 Legend of Flight. You're the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, ranked a best science book of the year by Science Friday, Physics Today, and Forbes, and one of Amazon's Editor's Best 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— wow, as past guests. That's impressive. You are a licensed multi-engine turbine-rated commercial pilot who has lectured on 6 of 7 continents, including Antarctica.

And you arrive today with a replica of Galileo's 1609 military telescope, a Martian regolith sample, and a 4.3 billion year old meteorite. That you will send to 250 members of this audience with APO addresses. That's fucking awesome. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Sean.

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. Member. Thank you. Uh, so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This 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, but the, the same types of technologies, of, of inventions, of calculations, of theory are exactly applicable in military situations. Uh, for example, the telescope, this replica telescope here of Galileo's 1609 telescope. So Galileo didn't invent the telescope. A lot of people think, oh, he invented it. He actually kind of stole the idea, um, and he, he sort of admits to it, but that's, that's academia for We're used to kind of, you know, 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, do 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.

And so, uh, 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 time. This simple thing has about a 1-inch diameter lens, and it can see everything that you could possibly see with the naked eye, but 10 times better. And that change in humanity's literal perspective on the universe changed the world. But it wouldn't have been possible without Galileo's improvement. And in fact, he not only improved it by, uh, by the type of quality of the glass that he used, the lens material, the, uh, the spacing of the material, he also did things that are kind of counterintuitive counterintuitive. You see, Sean, the, the lens that's here is actually bigger than this brass disc that surrounds it, but the brass disc is actually crucial to the improvement, uh, because what the brass disc does is it focuses the 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— it's called ghosting, um— and, and those effects reduced the utility of the telescope. So Galileo counterintuitively said, let's take this telescope and make it smaller. It's called stopping down, like an aperture, an 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 made it— would have made it worse. He made it better. The other thing that he did, which nobody really had done before— it's crazy— is put it on a tripod. Tripod. He invented the tripod. And what do you get when you put an optic on top of a tripod?

Sean, stability.

Get stability. Because the telescope is magnifying not only the object that you're looking at, but it's also magnifying the rotation of the Earth as we look at the stars. It's actually making it— them go by faster, right? The stability made— when you coupled the stability to the optic itself, you could now use this for military purposes. This became the first sniper beautiful scope. This is the first optic ever made, okay? It's a replica, but the real one— there's only one left, and it's about, you know, a trillion dollars. I can't bring that for you. Maybe next time. Um, but what was so useful about it is Galileo didn't use it for astronomy. That wasn't the first thing he used it for. He did for himself, 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 there's— if it's it's totally different than the Earth. And he looked at it and he saw it looks perfectly smooth and circular to the eye.

It has blotches on it, but, um, but he didn't know what those were. And he looked at that and he saw the following: he saw mountains, he saw craters, he saw lava flows. And he said, wait a second, people are telling us for 2,000 years it's perfect, it's a 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 the— and he wrote these all in his notebook and he kept them all. In a span of 3 months, he discovered the following things: the Moon has craters, the Moon has rivers, looks like rivers to the eye, looks like it has oceans on it, doesn't have flowing water anymore, or ever did really, Okay, it has valleys, canyons, has vast plains upon it. Okay, he saw 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. 'Cause that's the only way we get phases of the moon. Sometimes 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 they had this, had this extended oval shape to it, and it kind of blew his mind. He thought it was 3 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. He looked at the planet Jupiter, and Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system, and he saw it had all sorts of crazy structure to it.

It had lines on it like atmospheric storms. It had this blotch on it, this red spot on it, uh, that seemed to be there every night that he would look on it. And it was always accompanied by 4 stars, and the 4 stars were always like kind of moving with respect to Jupiter, and then Jupiter was moving with respect to the Earth. And he was such a genius, he said the following. He said, I think what I'm looking at is a miniature version of the solar system with the Sun replaced by Jupiter and the planets that orbit around the Sun, which was heretical to think back then, by the way. The planets that orbit around the Sun are orbiting around Jupiter. So Jupiter's kind of like the Sun to this miniature solar system that we saw edge-on, like a disc. So he saw these things moving back and forth, always around Jupiter, no matter where Jupiter was, every time of the year that he could see it. And this is just mind-blowing. And he raced to publish this. He published in under 2 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. It was made up of like Florence and Tuscany and Venice, like they're disparate, um, uh, doges and, and kingdoms, right? Uh, so he went to Venice, he shopped it around to different militaries, and he said, look guys, with this telescope go. 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 you're Italian, right? Italian origin. So you go on top of the tower in Venice, you can look out into the ocean, and you can see in the lagoon, you can see a boat today that won't be here for 3 days. And that was like stealth, right? So be like looking at the stealth bomber with a special device, and you could take away the stealth of the stealth bomber. And so this technology between astronomy, which was his main purpose in doing it intellectually, and then selling it to the military immediately, to the, to the Venetian government, gave them this huge advantage.

They gave him like basically a stipend, tenure, made him like this court astronomer. And he immediately saw how military purposes could be the vehicle to make him wealthy 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. He had people living with him, like students living with him. I can't imagine living with my students. Um, and he was just such a passionate educator, but at heart he was like a military genius. And his first thing was to be like Merlin or, you know, Gandalf or something. He knew that astronomical discoveries, projectile motion, trajectories things like that could immediately go from the realm of physics to being used for war. And the same thing is happening today, to address the question directly. We have technologies, we have tools, we have telescopes, we have things that have been designed. One of the things that Avi Loeb spoke to you about, this object called Oumuamua, was the first extraterrestrial object discovered by humanity. It came from another solar system. We don't know where, we don't know 10, but we know that it did not come from our solar system.

How do we know that?

Its velocity and its orbit. It's not bound to the sun, and it comes— it travels at such 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 with 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 Hakula, which is a mountain in Maui. So 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, they're just talking down to people and we know the truth and the government lied about COVID Sean, you know the government lied about COVID so you know that they're lying about aliens.

Never lie.

Yeah, I love it. The government would never lie. They just have our best interest and always forever. They always have, right? I mean, even to Galileo, eventually he ran afoul of the government because of these astronomical telescopes. Telescopes because of the discoveries he made. Bruno ran afoul of 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. Therefore, Jesus could not have possibly been able to visit all of these different planets according to the Catholic Church at the time. And so they literally accused him of heresy, even though he was a, he was a, a It was a— I believe he was a Jesuit or Catholic priest. So they burned him alive at the stake as a warning. Do not defy with your science our laws of how the heavens go, because we know the Bible knows how they actually work.

Wow.

Wow. I mean, look at it, you know, do governments lie? Of course they do.

Do.

Is there ever a reason? I'd love— I love your opinion. Like, at that time, saying that the Earth orbited the Sun would, 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, and do they have a right to have secrecy? In other words, let's steelman what the people say, that we have to keep this quiet, we can't disclose, trust me, bro. How do you view that as someone who's—

well, I think there's a staunch difference between between flat-out lying and just not disclosing. You know, I think, I think there's a, a line there, don't you?

I do. And I think that the government, you know, but I guess I'm asking, is there a moral reason to lie?

If you lie to your people, now you're in a predicament like what we're seeing right now, where I would say The vast majority of people have no trust in any of our institutions or our government at all because they've been caught in so many fucking lies. And nobody, nobody knows what to believe. Nobody even knows if these are lies. Well, well, a lot of them are lies, but you know, but there are— nobody knows about this alien shit yet, you know what I mean? For example, it's like, do we believe it 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, you know. And, and so, you know, and now I don't even know how they would begin to get the trust back in our, in our institutions and our government.

You think that's that far gone?

I think it's pretty close.

Oh, 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, these people have alien encounters have been reporting. And, and just— and he's, he's like, well, we did, um, what's called SERE, like search, evade, rescue.

SERE training.

He said when we did that, he's, he's He said, I got waterboarded. You know, he's, he's like, the government does stuff to us, and I'm convinced the government lies. You know, they lie to people that should have the deepest trust, and I don't understand how they expect that trust to be maintained. You know, for example, pilots report things in the skies, right? One explanation is extraterrestrial craft visiting us from other dimensions, right, with 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? Uh, another hypothesis is, um, 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. I 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 that's great. It's rare you have a movie about a physicist who's, you know, doing good and not, you know, 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? The Japanese weren't really in a danger. Of doing that. But the Germans had some of the best scientists of the time, you know, Heisenberg and 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, uh, advances of World War II. Almost nobody knows about it. And it was also created by physicists. Physicist. So the two of the most decisive technological enabling things were invented by astronomers and physicists operating in World War II and, and slightly before. Radar was particularly valuable because it was much more deployable than the nuclear technology of, of, of Los Alamos, and then leading to the bombs, right?

That took this huge effort, you know, a trillion dollars in today's dollars. Radar was much more accessible. Any country could develop it. But at that time, there was also an effort to do counter-radar. You know, like, 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, the process of nuclear detonation, right? But you could actually counter the radar with jamming, with stealth. All those things were invented in the 1940s, some of whom were invented by colleagues of my colleagues that, you know, were still alive in this generation, essentially. And one of them was a physicist by the name of Louis is, 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. Them that are older than the Earth. These are 4.3 billion years old.

Wow.

These are found in Argentina. So this one's— you— and I brought some more.

How old is this?

4.3 billion years old. The Earth is about 4.2 billion years old. This material, it's kind of dense, right? It's pretty heavy. It's also magnetic. Here's a compass. I'm gonna do Mr. Wizard with you today, Sean. Um, here's a compass, magnetic compass. Put it next to there and maybe show the camera what happens to it. Well, I don't know if the camera can see it, but yeah, so it's good deflecting it because these are magnetic. They're also slightly radioactive, but don't worry, uh, they're perfectly safe. So, uh, 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. So I made a special website, briankeating.com/srs. Us. 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?

I don't believe I have.

Don't— oh, you will love it. And here, you know, in God's country, um, I will give you a list of the 4 major meteor showers every year. You don't need a telescope. You don't need something, anything. Even binoculars don't help you. Just your naked eye, your wife, your kids. Go out on a night. You'll get the list of meteor showers at this website, brianking.com/srs. And it will tell you how to see them. 4 times per year, once per quarter, basically. These meteors here, okay, these rocks here, these are older than us. 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 to Okay, they 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 the bomb on Hiroshima. Okay, this guy was one of the super geniuses. Almost nobody knows about him. In World War II, his job was radar, not nuclear bombs, but he then got repurposed after he perfected radar. He said the following. He said, when an object gets close to a radar station the radar's pinging it, right?

It's shooting out radar beams and it's bouncing off and it's measuring the timing as the plane is getting closer to the U-boat. And the U-boats had pretty advanced radar systems. What he did is he built the spoofing system. He built a system that, as it was getting closer, transmitted a signal that got weaker via the inverse square of the distance, which is exactly how a real thing would behave if it was moving away. So imagine you're sitting there in the boat, you're in the U-boat, you're like, come on, Captain, look, look, oh, it's going away, we have nothing to worry about. U-boat gets destroyed. He spoofed the radar by utilizing the laws of physics, broadcasting a signal decreasing as the inverse square of the law as they were getting closer by the linear distance. Okay, now imagine you're in the U-boat and you're looking at— you're showing your cap thin. You say, oh, it's going away, and then it drops a bomb on you and you see it at the last second. What would you say? You'd say, hey, that object is a UFO. It defied the laws of physics. It got here faster than the speed of light.

They knew. They were smart as freaking heck, right? Germans were top military empire the world had ever seen. They would say that it defied 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, uh, scenario, right? So interdimensional beings with non-human biologics have traversed space and time at distances that we can't traverse in under 30,000 years with our best technology, or the military or Chinese military whatever military you like is spoofing us, making us think that that's the case, making it seem like it's defying the laws of physics. Is that proof? But no, a scientist has to think this way, has to think epistemologically. I asked a question in the, in the, in the Patreon tier that I'm a member at, and Sean and the Vigilance Elite— I asked a question of Brian Keating. I said, um, ask Sean if he's ever heard of the Feynman point. You ever heard of the my point. Okay, Richard Feynman, another titanic physicist, Manhattan Project scientist, professor at Caltech, winner of the Nobel Prize discovering quantum theory. He found an interesting pattern in the number pi. The 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: 3.141592658 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 66666, 6 6s 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 get to the Feynman point, Sean?

No idea.

762. 762.

Now, caliber—

what's that? The great caliber, right? I always wondered, like, is your handle because of the— by 31 or 50? Yeah, hopefully we'll try out the range at some point. Um, so now you might say that's like, hey, well, Sean, that's really cool, right? And you might say like, that's a really cool number, and Richard Feynman or is it a coincidence? Scientists have 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. Does that mean it's impossible? Like I said, I've been to Antarctica. Antarctica is 1/7 of the Earth's continents. If you just estimated— if I, if I told you you're, you're just an and I say, Sean, Earth is this blue-green planet with an atmosphere, and life's all around the planet. Um, there's 7 continents where land is, where, where land-based animals can live. Um, 1 out of 7 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. Well, you know me now. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I'd probably take the population divided by 7.

Yeah, exactly right. But we— I already told you, it's over a million, you know, it's over— yeah, it's almost a million times smaller than that, right? It's a couple hundred, uh, 100 people at a time. So people like to say, well, the universe 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, one— 6 of the 7 continents. But by just pure logical explanation, you should expect to find it everywhere. So I'm not saying logic is a panacea. I'm not saying it's always the solution and you should only think scientifically, but I want to use it as a guide, at least as, as much as we can as a human being species to get that 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 saying. Scientifically.

Thank you, thank you. Let's take a quick break. Aging is inevitable, and if you're anything like me, you feel it a little more every year. Sore knees, tight joints, recovery takes longer than it used to. We can't stop the clock, but we can take care of ourselves. That's why I take Bub's Naturals collagen peptides. I mix it into my tea every morning. It blends right in, no taste, no gritty texture. It's simple. I've been using Bub's Collagen for a long time, and I genuinely notice the difference. My knees feel better, my skin looks better, I recover faster after workouts. I stick with Bub's because I trust the company. Their collagen is NSF certified for sport and sourced from grass-fed cattle, so it's clean, tested, and exactly what they say it And there's a bigger mission here. Bubz was founded in honor of Navy SEAL Glenn "Bub" Doherty, and 10% of all profits go towards helping veterans transition back to civilian life. So you're not just supporting your joints and recovery, you're supporting people who served this country. If you're ready to upgrade your daily routine with Bubz Naturals collagen, head to bubznaturals.com/srs and use code Sean Sean for 20% off your order.

Again, that's bubsnaturals.com/srs and use code Sean for 20% off your order. Take care of your body, it's the only one you've got. Welcome to Hollywood vs Reality. They do it right. What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong because I don't watch any of this shit. A little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty fucking cool. Gotta silence it. In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary fucking magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the fucking world. When that breaks, breaks.

You're—

and now we're bringing them back. It does look pretty fucking cool, I gotta, I gotta admit that. All right, Brian, we're back from the break. I forgot to give you a gift. Vigilance League gummy bears. Made in the USA, legal in all 50 states. Not that you have to worry about that in California, right? But, uh, anyways, are they kosher?

I gotta, I gotta ask the question. Let's see.

I don't know what that means.

Corn syrup, gelatin. But not kosher. But I'll give it to 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 soap, to buy soap.

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 the captain of the football team, I got to be captain of the football team, you know, or whatever. Or my, my father served, I'm going 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, 50 brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. And it was such an incredible family. I mean, they're still tighter with me than my own biological family growing up, except for my brothers, of course, and my mom. But my father just, he abandoned us.

So I actually changed my name, was legally adopted. Adopted. Uh, my name when I was a kid was not Keating, it was Ax, Brian Ax. So now it's Keating. Changed my name, my brother too. And, um, and he left. He just, you know, he abandoned me and my brother. I was 7, 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 remember what he like, okay, I was 7 last time I saw him. My brother was 10. I never understood how he could abandon a 10-year-old. I was like, I'm 7, 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, uh, kind of pitted us psychologically against him, which wasn't that big of a stretch because he was kind of an a-hole, you know. He tried to beat up my stepfather, came over one night drunk or whatever trying to beat up my stepfather, take us back, and he'd go through my, you know, visitation.

Um, tried to beat up a fucking seasoned Vietnam veteran.

No, uh, yeah, he did.

That work out?

It didn't work out that That well, did not work that well. So, but he was this brutally complex, brilliant, 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 this great scientist. And, you know, when I was going through my formative years, you know, in high school, I got really interested in astronomy. I got a telescope just like this. And it changed my life. I had been adopted. I'd 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, I It's kind of a far stretch to call them a man. But, 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 Saint John and Saint Mary in Chappaqua, New York. And 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, had craters on it. I looked at Jupiter, it had moons around it. I looked at Saturn, 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. But in reality, it kind of, it transformed my worldview and I started to learn more. And this is before the internet in 1986, '87. '87. There's no Google. There was no— you know, you 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 hall, down the street from where I was living in Dobbs Ferry at the time in New York. And I, um, saved up enough money, and my mom gave me a little money And I bought a telescope and it changed my world. It literally made me into a scientist. That's what I say out there. Any dads out there, you know, parents out there, get your kid a telescope. Just do it. It's $50. I actually have a website, bryankeaney.com/telescope. I don't get sponsored. I don't get, you know, big astronomy. NASA's not paying me to do this, but I give recommendations for telescopes for different budgets. And nowadays it's insane. I have a telescope now that costs a few thousand bucks. It takes Hubble kind of telescope images, you know, incredible stuff. It's all, it's all electronic. You don't put your eye on it, but you can put just the most incredible vision into their mind. And then when they're 10 or 11 years old, maybe they'll be—

things are crazy. 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 I'm 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—

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. Okay, don't look at the sun with your remaining good eye.

You're not supposed to do that.

So, uh, but everything— you can see the exact same things that Galileo saw. And unlike, you know, Sean, what's interesting, people say, what's it like to be a scientist? I can't really tell you. Yeah, like when they discovered the Higgs boson, or, you know, they discovered nuclear fusion. Like, I don't know what that was like because you can't— there wasn't one guy who did it, right? But there was one guy who discovered the craters on the moons, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. That's Galileo. And so you can not only see what he saw— this is what's insane about astronomy— for $50. So go out and get a freaking telescope for all your kids or grandkids or whoever, Sean. It's the cheapest kind of insurance that they'll be curious, thinking for themselves, individuals. You can see exactly what Galileo saw from the middle of San Diego or New York City. He didn't, he didn't need a Hubble telescope to see that stuff. He was in northern Italy. You can see the exact same stuff he saw even from a light-polluted place like New York City. Craters, valleys on the moon, canyons. You can see the rings of Saturn.

So what I'm saying is I got addicted to it as a, as a 10, 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. According to Aristotle, according to the Greeks, according to all of ancient received wisdom, you know, from following the science for the last 2,000 years before Galileo, no, the Sun was the center of the universe. Sorry, cut that out. The Earth was the center of the universe. In fact, that's what the Bible seemed to suggest. That's why he was— that's why Bruno was burned at the stake, and that's why Galileo was put in jail eventually. And so when I found out, 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. And at that time, you know, I can't say it didn't have something to do with discovering girls, to be honest with you, Sean. Like, not wanting to go all the way and be a priest and, you know, be around nuns all my life, and that would be the only woman in my life.

Um, so no, so I decided at that point, look, I'm going to be an atheist. Like, I actually decided I'm going to be an atheist.

Really? Yeah, just because you won't like girls?

No, well, that's, that's not like some small thing, Sean. I mean, I, I decided I didn't want to be a priest.

You like girls?

No, no, I decided I want to be a priest because I like girls. Uh, but no, I decided that I don't want to be a part of a religious organization that would punish someone for scientific perfect truth. And at that time, Pope John Paul II, who's, you know, my favorite pope— I still love him. Yeah, I still love Catholicism. I still love the popes, you know. Um, but he was special. He was a very special person. And even he never pardoned Galileo. He just said he was right. Imagine, like, you do something, you're in service, or the president doesn't, like, give you a commendation— certainly doesn't give you a commendation— but they're like, we— you were right, but we're not even going to take away the crime that we accused you of. We're not even going to say that— pardon you. I mean, there's something that was unsettling to me as a young— again, I was a 13-year-old nitwit, right? So what do you know, right? But at that time, it was kind of justification.

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? But I became Catholic, which is Christianity. Um, I served in the Catholic Church. I loved it. And, um, and, and, you know, for me, I came from this, uh, 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? And Jesus was a Jew. Um, so if, uh, if Christianity has these challenges, like they're not going to accept scientific wisdom, or they didn't, uh, forgive Galileo, um, and And so then I could say, well, Judaism has gotta be wrong because if something is based on, if calculus is based on algebra and calculus, you can say, well, calculus or algebra's 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.

Again, I'm a 13-year-old at this point. I'm not a sophisticated 50-year-old, you know, professor who has investigated religions and, and, and compared things and had much more experience than I do now, okay, than I did then. So at that time, I became a scientist in terms of curiosity because I wasn't only looking at things and, oh cool, I started taking notes, I started doing research, I start— and again, this is before Google. And sometimes the more you struggle to get information, like nowadays I feel bad for my kids in some sense, because they want to know, like, um, you know, how many golf balls fit inside the Goodyear blimp. Like, literally, I would have to calculate— there was no tool to do that. I'm not saying that's some important thing, but, but you get the point. Now you literally look it up in one second, you get instant gratification. You don't do any of the muscular work, you don't, you don't damage the muscle to break it down in your brain. And so I feel like, uh, 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. We 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. I didn't have calculus when I was— I grew up in rural upstate New York, northern Westchester 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. And then slowly but surely, I started to reproduce like the step that my father, you know, who I hadn't seen in 16 years or 15 or 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 ax, James ax. Whatever happened to him?

What did he do? And I saw these papers about science, and it was like the most high-level science— the origin of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement, um, theory of relativity, uh, origin of the universe. And I'm like, this guy has my DNA, or I have his DNA, but there's something different. I wasn't raised with him, but I'm doing the same thing as him. It's weird. It felt creepy to be influenced by a goat.

Host.

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, they fought so bad, and they did kind of use us between as intermediaries. That's, um, that was a challenge. The 1970s happened a lot. Um, he— and, and also, you know, to really, you 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. And he said, I don't 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. Um, and so By the time I hit graduate school, getting my PhD at Brown University, I started— again, the internet was pretty young in mid-1990s. I started research, like, what did he do? Like, who was he? Is he alive? I didn't know. I didn't remember what he looked like. The last time I saw him was in a court in, in Long Island, New York. Sean, I, I didn't know what he looked like 15, 16 years later. It's, it's bizarre. And I started to research what he was doing and what kind of research he was doing, and, and what happened to him. And it turned out he was still writing things about, like, quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity, all the stuff that I was, like, fascinated with and I wanted to dedicate my life to. But there was, like, quantum entanglement. Like, somehow he had influenced me from beyond the, you know, visual horizon. I hadn't seen him, kept up with him. There's no internet, really. So it was spooky. 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 then they They live, you know, 3 miles around Sunrise, Florida, on the, on the east coast of Florida. It's a, it's a great place to retire. And they were living basically like retirement community, like Phase 2 Sunrise Palms and Phase 8, you know, whatever. And they hated each other too, but they had friends that were friends with each other. So these, these 2 Jewish grandmothers got connected via their other Jewish grandmother friends, and I call the yenta net. Like before the internet, there was the yenta net, these old Jewish grandmothers talk, and they started talking, talking, talking. O'Brien's at, um, at Brown University. He's a scientist. The other one says this. Do you know he's still alive?

Oh, you know, somehow my father finds out that not only am I alive— I mean, he didn't know— but, um, but I'm studying math and science and physics, and I'm on a top school at Brown University. It's obviously a great school. And, uh, one night in my, in my dorm at Brown, uh, I get a phone call. Pick up the phone. Phone, and he goes, this is Jim Ax. And I— before he said Jim Ax, 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 5 hours straight. He was living in California. Yep, everything— math, science, physics. One thing we avoided is why he abandoned me. But I was just so curious. It's like, imagine if I gave you a book from your great-great-great-grandfather. Like, how much would you pay for that book? By the way, you have to write a book. If you don't write your memoir, you know, someone else is going to write it for you, and your great-great-great-grandkids will want to read that book. Everyone's got to write a book, but especially people like you.

I mean, you've influenced millions.

What's that? Time yet for me?

Not time, but, but don't let it go too far. And, um, I really hope you do because you'll influence so many people to the good, as you've already done. And a book is 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 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. Well, 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— I'm really, like, embarrassed, but, 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 win a Nobel Prize.

Makes sense. You want to make him proud of you.

I wanted to make him proud, but I wanted to make him regret. A little bit of punishment for him. Even though I let him back into my life, and even though he got back with my mother, you know, and they became friends— they didn't get back married or anything became friends and bonded over grandchildren, um, later on in life. Um, and he died very young. He died at 69 years old, uh, 20 years ago exactly. But between the time of graduate school when I was 22 and when he died, I was 33, 34. We became closer than any two sons I've ever known. And during that time, I got incredibly interested. Like I said, I want to make him Some— there must be a German word for, like, you know, like schadenfreude. There must be some word for, like, prideful regret. Uh, but anyway, that's what I wanted. And so I invented— I said, I gotta find something that's going to win the Nobel Prize, and that's the highest award. I don't care what it is, like Olympic gold, you know, like Grammy Award winner, you know, BET or whatever. I don't care what it is.

Signal Award, all the podcast stuff you want. There's nothing like the Nobel Prize. There's only, like, 200 people on Earth that are alive that have Nobel prizes. Got 8 billion people, okay? They're the intellectual, you know, SEAL, you know, SEAL team members, okay? They're the brightest of the brightest of the brightest, point, you know, 0.001% of planet Earth. I want to be there partially for, you know, 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. How the heck did the universe come to be? Not just the aliens and the black holes and the galaxy, but the universe itself. And it's a dangerous thought because people have been killed for this. People have been tried. 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, to the lack of freedom that Galileo had, that, you know, Giordano Bruno had.

Okay, nothing like that.

I don't—

I'm not gonna compare myself to those people, right? I can do whatever I want. I have tenure, I have brilliant graduate students, collaborators, I have resource funding, supporters. The government's sponsored a lot of stuff. I work at a public university. University. I got paid. Gavin Newsom's my boss, you know, lucky me, for a few more months left at least. Um, so this is all to say that I wanted to, to win a Nobel Prize at all costs, but I was fortuitous because it was also studying something that's guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we could do it, which is to take a snapshot of what happened before the Big Bang, basically before the universe started— 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. Radiation. And that microwave radiation is all around us. It suffuses the universe, and it's the leftover heat from the fusion, nuclear fusion, of the first elements, hydrogen and helium and their isotopes.

And that leftover heat is a fossil that travels through space and it travels through time, and we can detect it, and we can build instruments that can sense emits 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? There was a day, right? If you think back today, we're in, you know, May 2026, it's a Tuesday.

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 What happened the day before that? That's what we want to know. And for the first time in human history, we could possibly do it. Oh, and by the way, if I did it myself, my colleagues maybe would win a Nobel Prize and finally get that comeuppance that I— so, you know, whatever, uh, my many failures, but, but one of them was that desire to show up my dad.

That.

Wow.

So where do we go from here?

Well, it took me to the South Pole. It took me to Antarctica. Um, when you get a coffee and you put it in the microwave in a ceramic cup, like your awesome swag and merch outside that I love, um, you pour it into a cup, right? You can put the coffee in the microwave. You could put it in there for 5 minutes. Don't do this at home, it's very dangerous actually. But you can actually microwave microwave it and it'll get above the boiling point of water, right? And then you could take the mug out, just— you can just grab the mug. Why is that? You got 300-degree, you know, uh, Fahrenheit water in there, potentially about to explode, and the ceramic cup is room temperature, basically. Why is that? Because ceramic is completely dry. There's no water. It's been baked in an oven for hours. That's what makes it— that's That's how you make ceramic clay and stuff like that. Um, the water in the coffee is not dry, it's wet, it's full of water. Microwaves from the microwave oven jostle water at just the right frequency, it's a resonant frequency, that it starts to vibrate and interact with other water molecules.

That's what causes it to heat up. You can't heat up something in a microwave that doesn't have water in it, and that is tuned exactly for the resonant frequency of water molecules, and that causes it heat up dramatically. Um, so if you're trying to detect microwaves from a source, from a planet, from a galaxy, from the Big Bang itself, you want to go somewhere where there's no water. Namely, you want to go somewhere very high up. Maybe you could go to outer space, but that's very expensive to put a rocket and satellite and a telescope in space. Very difficult, takes a long time. It's been been done, but only 3 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 5,200 meters above sea level, 17,000 feet. So high up that you have to wear oxygen full-time in your nose because you're above half the atmospheric water pressure.

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

Wow.

Okay, so this here you can actually touch.

How do you know that?

Um, so the chemistry and the, um, and the spectra, uh, and the, the spectrum that it reflects when we analyze it is 100% match for the, 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 has little bits 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 another planet. It's taken millions of years to get here. And here's a cover for it. I have a certificate for you that I'll give you later on that tells you all about its property and so forth. So to test out before we send a Martian rover, they send it to the Atacama Desert where we have the Simons Observatory. So yes, where do we go from here? So we built this instrument in, um, starting in 2005 that was meant to do just one thing, to take an image of the baby picture of the universe. The oldest light in the universe is called the cosmic microwave background radiation.

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, long wavelength radiation, characteristic wavelengths about 2 millimeters, corresponds about 150 gigahertz. This radiation was discovered for the first time in 1965 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. And that can only be possible possible to create nuclear fusion, which creates the hydrogen that's in the water that you're drinking. It 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 in—

How do you still see the heat to this day?

So when, uh, 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. But anything beyond, say, the Andromeda Galaxy and beyond is actually expanding away from us. Space itself is expanding. Space, according to Einstein, is dynamic. It's not static, as Isaac Newton showed. He said, no, the space is dynamic. The more energy you put into it, the more space expands. And so originally, Einstein, you know, didn't believe in the Big Bang. He felt the Big Bang was not well justified. He thought it was, um, it was completely wrong, and he thought it smacked of religion. Actually, Einstein was not religious. He didn't— he spoke about God sometimes, but he didn't really believe in God the way that we would think of it. And he said, um, uh, that the universe is not expanding, it's static. And the only way that he could get that to be the case is if he inserted into his equations this fudge factor that kept the universe from collapsing on 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 is today. That's the heart of the Big Bang concept, meaning that if you reverse that, everything gets closer together. So galaxies will be closer in the past, and eventually you reach a point where all the galaxies in the universe are all touching, and all the matter in the universe is in one point. And that point is thought to be a singularity, and that point of singularity is the Big Bang in the Big Bang concept. It doesn't tell you anything about how the Big Bang started it though. 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, um, and there's some doubt about how fast is it expanding. That's another subject.

But no one disagrees. No cosmic police officer with a radar going and say, nope, you're static, or you're collapsing. No, the universe is expanding. And And so there are signatures of that expansion everywhere, like a radar Doppler shift, but of all the galaxies that we see in the universe, and in fact of all the heat and radiation we see in the universe as well. And the type of radiation that we look for is called the cosmic microwave background. And the best place to look for it is at the South Pole, Antarctica, or in the mountains of Chile. So I have two different experiments that I've been involved with. One is BICEP, which is an acronym acronym, uh, Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization. And in 2014, we claimed we saw that primer strike that ignited the Big Bang. So we claimed we did the thing that I wanted to do to show up my father, to win a Nobel Prize. And, you know, spoiler alert, you know, my first book's called Losing the Nobel Prize. So something went wrong. Something went really wrong. Uh, we, we made a claim that we saw what caused the universe to begin its expansion.

And that's a type of quantum field. We call that quantum field the inflaton, or the inflationary field. And we said we detected the shrapnel of the explosion, basically. Um, if you want to detect something, like you hear someone on the range shooting, right? Um, you could, you can detect that they're shooting in a variety of different ways, right? Visually, you could detect it, um, uh, you could detect the sonic, you know, impact of it. You could have eyewitnesses to it. You could have photographic cameras watching it. You could have infrared. You could even have, you know, some particles inside the, the potassium inside of gunpowder, um, a potassium-40. It's radioactive. So you could actually see the dispersion of the smoke cloud of radioactive potassium, and you could detect neutrinos, muons, other things coming from— I'm making this up. I mean, it's true that you could do that. I'm just saying there's more than one way to skin that, right? So there's more than one way to detect something if you can't see it. So we've devised these different types of tools and technology to see things that we could not have possibly witnessed, namely the origin of the universe.

Like, there are no people there. There were not even any stars or galaxies or planets or aliens or anything there, right? It was the origin of energy and matter itself. But what caused it? If this theory called inflation is right, there would be a signature like smoke from the gun called gravitational radiation, waves of ripples in spacetime. You and Avi Loeb spoke about what spacetime is. Spacetime is interconnectedness of all different events that could possibly occur in the entire observable universe back to the beginning of time. And so we're looking for the earliest shockwaves 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, the leadership of the team that I had first started. That's, that's another story. Um, but, uh, but the, uh, the announcement made headlines around the world. New York Times, CNN, my hometown newspaper. And at that moment, I had been a little bit unsure about the real veracity of the results, if they would hold up in court, you know, sort of a scientific court of law, or if we had seen things that masquerade as a signal that you want to see.

Uh, Richard Feynman again, Feynman point, 762 digits into pi, 666 is around. He said the, um, the first principle in science is that you shouldn't fool yourself, but the second principle in science is that you should think that you're the easiest person to fool. It's like you're at a poker table, you don't know who the, the 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. It's exactly related to these meteorites. Again, ronkeating.com/srs if you have an APO Jazz. These meteorites are actually the corpses of dead stars. When a star above a certain mass explodes, 8 times the mass of our sun, it explodes out and it's a, it's a, a fusion bomb that goes off in space with the equivalent tonnage of, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions of Hiroshima bombs.

It's 8 solar masses converted to energy via equals mc squared. When it does that, the reason it does that is because it's trying 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. The fusion reaction always gives off heat. But the heat that's given off when it makes iron is too insignificant to keep the star afloat. So the star runs out of pressure and collapses, and then it detonates out in a shock wave in 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 course, 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. She ate food in the Earth. She's made of human biologics, right? Not, not David Grusch's non-human. She's made of— hopefully your mom's she'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 Wow. So, wow, 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. 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. The lessons are quick, practical, and built by more than 200 language experts, so you're learning phrases you'll actually use. And even just 10 minutes a day with Babbel can help you start having real conversations in as little as 3 weeks. They've got interactive dialogues blog, personalized reviews, and even podcasts, so you can work it into your day whether you're traveling, driving, or just trying to get a few minutes in before bed. Babbel's award-winning app has sold over 25 million subscriptions, and it's backed by a 14-day money-back guarantee. If you've got summer travel coming up, now's the time to start so you can actually use what you learn on the trip. Right now, Babbel is offering listeners up to 60% off.

Go to babbel.com/srs. That's Babbel, B-A-B-B-E-L, .com/srs for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. What do you think happened the day before?

Well, so I always say things like, you know, people say, um, do you believe in God? I've heard you talk to our mutual friend, Andrew Hubert, became a Christian, right? He believes in God. 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, uh, it means faith. It doesn't mean belief. Belief is a different word, just like it is in English, right? I would say I don't believe in God, right? Right. I don't believe in gravity either. If I take this, it drops according to the laws of Isaac Newton. This is a law. I have evidence for gravity. So I don't have to say, like, do I believe in something? I should say I should look for evidence of something. Again, I'm not saying this for everybody, but I'm a scientist. I don't want to say I believe in God. I want to say I have evidence for God. Which is stronger, you believe in God or you have evidence for God? Now, you may believe that you have evidence for God. Jesus may be enough, have crossed the evidentiary threshold for you. Many people has. I'm obviously Jewish, so it's not the same theology. But, but in fact, we have things that we say we believe in, and then we have things we say we know.

And that distinction, I think, is really important. So you ask me, what do I believe happened? Or what do I think happened? I— that question to a scientist is anathema, because we don't, we don't want to be prejudiced to that. That's what got us into trouble with this experiment. We believe we saw the signal that would give Brian Keating the Nobel Prize, right? I mean, that was the only like all of it. But that's where, that's where you get into trouble as a scientist.

We must think about it too.

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, 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. Yeah, like imagine like Xerxes versus Theod— What's his name? Theodorus or Leopoldus or whatever. Like 300 versus an infinite number, right? Um, Xerxes is like Mother Nature, like just an infinite army, completely unstoppable technologically. Mother Nature doesn't give up her secrets, but like, you know, like, uh, like Gerald Butler, you know, in that movie, a small group of dedicated people can make great gains, right? I'm trying to get more and more evidence for both believing what I want to believe to be true or what I hope to be true, both in science and in religion. But 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. I always say you don't need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute if you want to skydive a second time. I believe in gravity to the same extent that I need to, but I have evidence for gravity.

I want to feel that same way about God. So what are the options? Just 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 Luis 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. There are alternatives to the Big Bang. The Big Bang posits that at one moment in time, time came into existence. You couldn't ask what happened the day before. That makes no sense. That's like saying, go to the South Pole with me next time and go south. You know what happens when you go south from the South Pole? At the South Pole, you go north. There's no such thing. It doesn't exist. Some say that's true. Stephen Hawking believed that there's no time before the Big Bang.

Others say that a competitive theory is the universe existed before the Big Bang collapsed and crunched, just like the supernova that collapsed and crunched to form our supernova. That big crunch led to the Big Bang. Another one says an interdimensional concept called string theory that existed in higher dimensions than we exist in— 10-dimensional string theory domain— that two different types of what are called membranes came together and ignited our, what we call the observable Big 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— let me just get to the last, the last time. Um, and then there's a final topic, which is that the universe didn't have a Big Crunch and singularity. It's just been slowly over time interacting, expanding and collapsing, expanding and collapsing. Like a breathing of a lung, okay, 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 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. It's— you'll find them everywhere, Sean. But in reality, you can show that the Earth is not flat, but you can't show that it is curved. Do you understand the difference? You can prove something wrong in science, but you can't prove something right. You can't prove something is right. I can say I have evidence for evolution, and there are competing theories of evolution that existed, but they've been falsified, proven wrong. And if you can't prove something is wrong, or if you can't at least expose it to the opportunity of it being wrong, then it's not science, right? Astrology. When I was dating my wife, we went to the, you know, downtown Mission Beach, San Diego. You know, they they have a boardwalk and they had a fortune teller. And she's like, "Oh, let's tell her, see our fortune, see if we're compatible." I'm like, she's an English major. Fine, 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 astrologist.

The astrologer sits down and says, "What's your sign?" And I say, "I'm a Gemini." And she goes, "Oh, okay." 'You know, here are these different things, your personality and your moon sign, your sun sign, and this thing.' And then I said, 'Oh, thank you very much.' And, you know, my future wife, my girlfriend at the time, 'Oh, very— you know, it's really good.' She's— everything sounded really good, like we're compatible and everything. And I got up and I, just to be a dick, you know, I said, 'I just want to confirm, I'm born in September. That's Gemini, right?' And she said, '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, is irrefutable. That's not science, that's fun, you know, it's a card trick, uh, you know, it's entertaining. She made her $50 or whatever, and we're still married 18 years later. But to me, the, the prospect that you will not submit your theory to, to falsification And that's some of the problem I have with Avi Loeb. Okay, I love Avi Loeb, but I said to Avi Loeb on my podcast when he came on for his first book, um, I said, Avi, you believe that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial.

It's like the title of your book, right? You believe it came from another source and you believe it's technological. Remember, he told you he thinks it's a thin solar sail. Technological. Only technology can build a solar sail that captures solar wind from another star, directed from where we don't know but to where we do know because it came through our solar system. Was 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, 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. But, um, and Avi's not involved with any of that, by the way. Uh, but I said, you know, Harvard, everyone's above average, and, and you happen to have access to these, you know, copious supply of billionaires, and 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. People, you know, and he's one of the most legitimate scientists, published 757 different articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals, multiple books. You know, the guy works hard. You know, when I'm interviewing him, sometimes Avi, show me your hands. It'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. Imagine that Oumuamua, at the time, it's the first object ever to come from another technological solar system like the Earth. And you know a billionaire who can fund a rocket to send a telescope to go catch up with it. And he said, as he told you, um, no, Brian, we wait for the Vera Rubin Telescope to come online and it will capture many. I said, Avi, you're happily married even longer than I am. Imagine like you're with your wife, you don't know she's going to be your wife, you're dating her, or maybe she just— see her in the coffee shop, or he met her on a blind date, I think he told you, right?

And it's a blind date and like you're with her and you're like, oh, she's really nice, but I think someone better is going to come along soon, you know. How do I know someone better is not going to come along, you know, Brian? And, and I said, you would do anything— this Avi now would do anything to that Avi, 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, saying, no, I'll just wait till the next one comes along. I said, Avi, I don't know, do you really believe this is, this is as technologically advanced as you say it is? Because to me, Sean, I would anything. If I thought with as much faith and confidence as Avi does that these are extraterrestrial technology, I would do anything, especially if I had access to a couple billionaires and the endowment of Harvard University. So we look to falsify things, not to prove things. And that, that was kind of the tangent we just got off on.

It's hard to ask questions for people to think like 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, like, what goes through your head without, without making assumptions? Or, I mean, what are the— what are the— what are the ideas? What are the—

so this might make people uncomfortable. I approach 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. You know, I married someone who's Jewish, which is an important thing for the continuity of the Jewish people. And 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're talking to Andrew Huber, Gorman, world expert on sleep. And you guys were talking about cannabis and you're talking about, um, gummies and you're talking about vaping and everything else. And I said, I know what Sean needs, and it's, it's not, it's not, it's not a product. It's, it's called the Sabbath. You know, we just had this National Sabbath Donald Trump had. You work as much as I think you work. Do you work 7 days a week? Pretty much.

Pretty close.

I see it in you, and it's no surprise. I mean, the This, the studio is amazing. I mean, first of all, I have to say, this is the second most number of guns I've ever been around on a podcast after the Mayim Bialik podcast. That's a joke. She's, she's the girl who played Blossom and was on The Big Bang Theory. This is the most, this is the most impressive studio, you know. I've been on really nice podcasts, 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. Um, but 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. Is a Sabbath for me, it's a Saturday for you, it could be a Sunday. I don't do email, I don't, I don't, I don't do podcast. If you invited me here, I think actually I was supposed to come 2 days from now.

It's a holiday 2 days from now in 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. And so I said I can't make it. But luckily, you know, Laura and Sarah, like, 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 on 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 And he had his most recent book, which he dedicates to Dennis Prager for introducing him to, and it's about the keeping of the Sabbath for Christians. And it's been a huge— 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 big disclaimer. Maybe it's a little too, you know, 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. Yisro means struggle, El means God. 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 Yisroel means to struggle with God, to fight with God. And if I don't ask questions and reject God in some sense, not to prove him wrong, not to say, you know, like, I'm better than God.

As most of my colleagues, 93% of my colleagues don't believe in God at all. 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 I can't ask for evidence, if I can't demand some level of scientific rigor in my approach to it, I don't feel authentic to who I am. So I gave you the whole preamble about how seriously I take God and religion, the Sabbath, and why I recommend it to so many people, um, but I'm also going to approach it scientifically. So what do I hope in science? Do I hope there's a multiverse? Do I hope there's— part of that's connected to my attempt attempt to inculcate my science with religion to get a sense of, can we test claims in the Bible— in my case, the Torah, the Old Testament— can I test them scientifically? Can you test them in a lab? Could you test them with a telescope? Obviously there's some connection between them, right?

Otherwise Galileo wouldn't have been imprisoned by the church, and Bruno wouldn't have been burned alive, as we already right? Copernicus published his, his theory that the Earth is not the center of the universe— the Earth is not the center of the universe. He published that the day he died because he knew he would probably be tortured. And look what happened a couple years later to Bruno and Galileo, right? So God and science and cosmology, they go hand in hand. For me, I've made it kind of an interesting quest because those different models that I explained to you— the steady state static universe, the Big Crunch universe, the multiverse universe, um, and, um, and the, uh, the, the slow expansion universe. Those are four models of what could have came before the Big Bang. One of them says nothing. One of them says we live in a multiverse that's eternal and has existed for all time. One of them says the universe is slowly changing and modulating but is eternal. And one says the universe came into time at a specific moment for a specific reason, 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. Replication. Okay, pause that. Think about what you just said. That proved— 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 accelerating. That means I can investigate whether or not the Big Bang occurred, whether or not time came into existence, versus whether or not we live in a multiverse. I can investigate that and get paid by the Regents of the State University of California. I could do it. I would do it for free, by the way. Gavin, if you're watching— I know you're watching, Gavin. You've got a podcast, you want to be like Sean. Um, I would do it for free, but please, you know, let me keep my Sorry. 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, 100 Avi Loeb's, or, you know, someone just off the charts. Maybe, maybe, but maybe not. Maybe it's not provable. Does that mean that you shouldn't believe in Jesus? Of course not. Of course not. To take away someone's religion is almost impossible. Is anyone who's ever had a Jehovah's Witness come to their house and knock on the door, or Mormon, say, like, we'd like to tell you about— right? Guess who hates to take their religion away most of all? Atheists. You tell an atheist— most scientist, like, your religion, quote unquote, is more dogmatic than any Christian I've ever met in my life. Oh, come on, they're just, you know, 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. Would you rather have— I bet it doesn't matter you because you do have strong faith. But if someone said, here is proof, like the Shroud of Turin, or there's, we found some eyewitness estimate, or we found physical evidence that proves not only that Jesus existed, but that he was resurrected and that he was ascended.

And this is irrefutable proof of the claims of the gospels. And I said, here, Sean, here's a book. Do you want to read that book that has all this evidence?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, of course, you're a curious person. There are people that wouldn't want to read that book. There are people who would read the book, but it doesn't matter to them. There's a famous story in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A lot of Jews perished there, and some were rabbis. And in 1943, I believe, they were doing, um, uh, they, they decided they would 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 in the jury was that God was guilty, and God never should have created world. And you know what they did the very next minute? They said, let's go for the afternoon prayers. In other words, some people, it didn't matter. It doesn't matter if you have physical evidence, doesn't matter if you have scientific evidence. Their faith is, is unshakable. And fine, I salute that. I'm weaker than that. I don't, I don't have that ability, Sean.

I think it is, uh, similar. I mean, you're trying to— how would you word it? Disprove. You cannot disprove Jesus's existence.

Or God's.

Or God's. You know, I would assume that's— maybe I don't assume, but I mean, it's probably the same with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. You cannot disprove it, right? You know, but you also cannot prove it.

Exactly.

We 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 your father?

No, it was because of— it was actually because of 9/11.

It's 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 they said. I had difficulty with the leadership at the Pope level in the Vatican. And so putting that aside, and then I was, you know, college, kind of, I'm so smart, I'll be an atheist, right? Like all my teachers and my 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 6 or 7, 8 years, being an altar boy, wanting to become a priest. Um, everyone was an expert on Islam, you know, after 9/11, right? Um, 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 didn't— 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.

And so I knew nothing about the Old Testament, the Torah. I couldn't read it. I felt embarrassed. Who knows how to do that? 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, you know, like they're released. They no longer have to go to temple anymore. They no longer have to sit and learn this archaic language that's spoken on exactly 0.2% of the world's population. Like, who the hell needs this when I can do whatever I want? Plus, Hanukkah really sucks compared to Christmas. You know, you ask me about, do I miss it? Yeah, totally. I mean, so, you know, the negative exposure that you get at age 13 That then carries through these geniuses like Steven Pinker and even Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who I've hosted, most famous atheist alive, right?

Wrote 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. Okay, 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. You didn't go to college, right? You were in the teams, you want to— right? Well, 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.

Okay, before he says those words, he says there is a danger of a scientific— you're not gonna know it, 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 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, about aliens and COVID and disclosure. And no, no, you can't. It's bullshit. The, the disdain that, that the ivory tower has for ordinary laypeople and and, and people that didn't go to college. It, 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. We don't want you guys to look that close at us. That's the scientific technical elite. Eisenhower warned against that in the same breath as the military-industrial complex.

You never hear about the former. You You only hear about the latter. Why is that?

I don't know.

People worship college. College is a secular idol that even the most atheistic people worship at. It's a sign that I'm a good parent. I— my kid goes to Vanderbilt, my kid goes to UC San Diego. It's a sign that you did 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, this original part when we went off on this quest a few minutes ago, I, I think that there's— it's, it's completely legitimate to, to think about these things and to, and to try to approach them with scientific rigor and to have mutual respect and comity— not comedy, but comity— where you can respect the person that you maybe don't necessarily agree with. And so for me, 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, the Gospels aren't, you know, they themselves are the— and that's what gives them intellectual intellectual honesty, they admit there are certain things that they cannot explain.

Miracles that Jesus did, did they say, "Well, scientifically, if you take the quantum mechanical structure of water, you can—" No. They said, "We don't understand it." But that's what faith means. But I don't want to only have faith. I would like to have proof. Can I convert a faith question into a proof question? That's what I want to do. That's what you mean? What's up? A faith question into a— did God create the universe? Well, if the, if, if the, if the Old Testament says something and it's compatible with observation, that's not proof, but it's evidence. If the, if the Torah, if the Old Testament says, um, the universe came into existence in the beginning The actual Hebrew word— Hebrew is a very rich language— and the actual, it says, with beginningness. Like, in other words, God not only created the universe according to Hebrew in the Torah, he created the concept of the beginningness of something. It's amazing when you think about it. It like gives me chills. It's so much deeper than we get when we're kids. The problem is we learn religion when you're a kid, and I went to Sunday school and I hated And, you know, like, nobody likes it.

But if you approach it as I did as an adult at age 30 after 9/11, or 28, or whatever 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. And therefore, that which I can prove, verify, attempt, or fail to prove will have a lot more sticking power and give me a lot more, ironically faith.

The best investors don't rely on guesswork. They have an expert by their side in a system that keeps them on track. But most people don't have access to a human 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. Stash 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, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Investing involves risk. What have you proven?

So right now, we've discovered a lot of things. Again, we can't prove something in science. I can't prove to you that the Earth is round. As I said, I can prove it's not flat. So 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 brainiac, 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 2 or 3 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, 200— now $200 million kind of level project. My friend Mark Devlin at UPenn, um, you know, created the 6-meter diameter telescope and the detectors within it. Like, 3 people can fit inside it, like standing on shoulder. It's insane. Um, 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, then I get to do it for free, right?

We have been able to falsify falsify these narratives that suggest there was no period of time when the universe was hotter, denser, more compact. We falsified claims that dark matter does not exist. In other words, we, we can't prove dark matter exists, but we've shown that in universes, models, conceptions where dark matter doesn't exist, it's 100 times more inconsistent with the data. We've found evidence for dark energy. We found evidence that matter in the universe acts like a lens that focuses light. If you put a black hole here, you can't see the black hole— it's black, right? But light would be deflected around it just the same way that we've detected with our instruments as well, that we can see the effects of the curvature of spacetime 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. But I'm confident that we'll get there. So to have these abilities to falsify— now, have we falsified that the Big Bang occurred?

No. Have we falsified that the multiverse exists? No. If the multiverse exists, that would be a huge challenge challenge for traditional theology. Okay? 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, 1,000 miles from land in any direction, right? Can you 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 reactor, 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. Yarsin, the subject of the first book that I wrote, Losing the Nobel Prize. If we do get to that point where we can sort of have evidence for it, it doesn't prove the multiverse exists, but it kind of rules out the alternatives.

And that would present challenges, right, to the traditional theological Torah creation story of a single beginning of time. 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 possibility. So we've discovered a whole host of, 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, which was created in the generosity of my late, great mentor and friend Jim Simons, who passed away 2 years ago, established this, this incredible collaboration with the, you know, it's the people. It's like a team. Um, without the team, nothing happens. And I'm just privileged to be, you know, at the, at the heart of it and the start of it.

I can't remember everything I talked to Avi about, but we were talking about the Big Bang Theory and peering back through time. We had that conversation. Yeah, you did. How many times can you observe that from Earth. So because if the light passes you by, then it's gone, right? Right, right. Is it gone or does it just keep coming? It's, it's— because if you look at a light source, I mean, it'll be on until it turns off, and then it has to— right, right. The Big Bang is an explosion, so I mean, correct. So it's the explosion, the light is gone, so it would pass you die, right? Correct.

And then there would be nothing after it if it was an explosion, right? If it was an explosion. It's not an explosion in the sense of, you know, a round goes off and there's a shock wave. That has 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 if we're galaxies axes. 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 going to get that close, right? Um, but at the subatomic scale, you could also keep going back to much, much smaller distances, which would require much, much more energy per cubic millimeter, nanometer, Planck size, whatever. But if space comes into existence at that particular moment, then what happens is expansion occurs. Space itself is expanding for a long time, but there's nothing— there's no process by which you can reveal the presence of any matter or any energy because it doesn't exist yet, right?

The first galaxies— I've been talking about galaxies, and that's how Hubble, Edwin Hubble, showed that to Einstein that he was wrong. So Einstein believed in a static universe, that the universe was eternal, as everybody did for thousands of years. Aristotle believed that, you know, and it was Einstein, right, until Hubble showed him evidence, data, that every galaxy you could see in the universe is not static. It's moving away from Earth at huge speeds, fractions of the speed of light. In fact, it moves away faster the farther away two galaxies are. So if we're in this room and we brought in, you know, your producer and 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. But I would see you moving away, and I would see him moving away, and he would see the same thing, right? So each one of us feels like we're at the center of the universe, but we're not. The space is expanding in between us, and any process that you emit, if you, if you are having if you look at me with— and you shine a laser at me and it's a green laser— if you start to move away faster, uh, you know, some large velocity, much, much faster than any Earthbound speed, say half the speed of light, that light will go from green to red because not only are you moving away, but the wavelength is stretching from short wavelengths to longer wavelengths.

Eventually you hit a speed because you're at a distance, and remember, the distance times this constant called the Hubble constant tells you how, how fast two galaxies are moving away, you get a velocity that's equal to the speed of light. Okay? And then after you get beyond that distance, there's no reason I can't be moving faster than the speed of light away from you. And at that point, what do you see? So right now you see me and I'm like waving at you, right? And I keep waving at you and you keep expanding, and then, and eventually you hit the speed of light. And the last thing you'll see for me is this: it'll appear frozen. The beam of light that I'm producing, the photons of light that I'm generating, will keep shining towards you. They'll get redshifted to longer and longer wavelengths. So you'll see me, you'll see me frozen waving, and you'll see me extremely red. And the same exact thing happens as an observer falls into a black hole. They don't get ripped apart at the so-called event horizon. You and Avi talked about this in great detail. I refer you guys to episode 146 146, I think.

Episode 146, you talk about the falling into a black hole. Nothing happens when you cross the event horizon. People think it sounds kind of cool, event horizon. No, something happens when you get close to the singularity. That's called spaghettification. You get ripped apart. That's irrelevant. The astronaut, right before he falls into the black hole, he waves it. That's the same thing. You see him, he's frozen, and he's very red. And I'll just keep continuing as as long as, you know, as long as you're around to look at them. So the same thing happens with this light, with any process in the universe. And it just so happens that in order to see something that's beyond the event horizon, you can't use light. You have to use something else because light can only travel at the speed of light. It's the fastest speed there is. But there has to be some other mechanism by which you could see these processes if they existed before the Big— before this part of the Big Bang. Occur. 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 spacetime.

You know, spacetime— again, you and Avi did a lot of the prereqs for this course. You know, you talk about waves of gravity. Gravity and spacetime is a dynamical object. It's not a frozen ice block. Gravity means that distances and time shift according to the local mass distribution there is. So when the universe had all the mass it will ever have at the beginning, it had a lot of gravity. And when the expansion took place, that gravity could be converted into oscillatory radiation called gravitational waves. That's what we look for. It's not light, it's spacetime 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 hole here, you could actually see something over there because light from over there would get bent by the black hole and it would appear to be coming from over there, but it's actually coming from behind us. That's called gravitational lensing. Einstein predicted this phenomenon in the 1930s. He also predicted this— the phenomenon gravitational waves. 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.

Okay, each one weighed 30 times the mass of our sun. What was left over was a single black hole that weighed 59 times the mass of the, of the two— of the sun, right? So you had 60 solar masses in the beginning, 30 and 30, they crash together, they make something that's only 59 solar masses. Where'd the rest of the energy go? It all went into shaking up and vibrating space-time. Those ripples in spacetime mean that if you were there at one moment of time, your weight would increase on a scale. If you put a scale in here and a gravitational wave comes through, you— one second, one moment of time, you get heavier, then it oscillates and you get lighter. Heavier, lighter, heavier, lighter. And that process would occur at the speed of light. But it's not light, it's the separation of entities and events in spacetime itself. The curvature of which gets distorted if the universe had a singularity, which would mean it— we live in a multiverse. They all go together. So we haven't discovered that yet. We may never— even as you said before eloquently, you can't prove it, can't disprove it.

But we can disprove alternatives to it. There's an alternative that says we came from a Big Crunch. Remember I said that's a possibility? That, it turns out, for technical reasons can be disproven if we see these waves of gravity. The waves of gravity cannot occur in a universe with a Big Crunch, but they can occur in a universe with inflation and the multiverse. But one can be 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 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 right. Where, where's the edge of this?

So there doesn't have to be an edge. There may be an edge, but there doesn't have to be an edge. Um, and it's a very ancient question, you know. Um, Aristotle asked, if you go to the edge of the universe and you throw a sphere, where does it go into? Right? Uh, it's exactly the same type of question you're asking. Um, so what we do in science is we— in the science of cosmology— is we say that, that spacetime, um, is the set of all possible places in x, y, and z, and in time. Anything that can occur occurs in those four dimensions, right? You told me to meet you here exactly in this, you know, latitude, longitude, altitude, and and time, right? You specified all those different things. You don't specify anything else, right? That's— now, if a gravitational wave comes through this room, it actually changes both the space and time, you know, microscopically, but technically it does. And if two big black holes crash by, it would do it a lot, right? That would be a huge, huge disruption to space and time. It would change my coordinates. I'd be at a different XYZ, time, altitude, whatever, right?

Um, but all of space and time can exist infinitely, like an infinite set of monkey bars, just going out in all directions, all possible directions, where space is there. Now you might say, what is that space made of, right? What's in that space? In other words, our universe here is within our horizon. Just like you go down to the beach in San Diego, I can only see out, what, 400— you're a Navy guy, tell me— you can see like 4 to 7 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 that? Of course not, right? You could— there's definitely stuff beyond that. People didn't know that for a long time, but now they do, right? So that, that's your horizon. Your horizon on a two-dimensional surface like the surface of the Earth is a circle. Your horizon in a four-dimensional universe is a sphere. Every event in space and time that's ever occurred that we could just now get information from lies within our light sphere. We call that maximum light sphere the farthest distance that anything could have traveled to us here.

We call that the particle horizon, or the observable universe. Okay, but my observable universe looks different than your observable universe because we're not at the same 4-dimensional spacetime location. You're 6 feet away from me. Light travels 1, uh, 1 billionth— and, and 1 billionth of a second travels foot. That's the speed of light. So I actually see you 6 nanoseconds earlier than you are right now. You look wonderful, Sean, by the way. I see you— I— the sun, 8 minutes away. We don't know. The sun could have disappeared right now. We won't know for 8 minutes. It's not likely, but it's a hypothesis. You could test it, right? Um, the universe, the Big Bang, the stuff that I study happened 13.86 billion years ago. So stuff could have traveled to us from 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, the maximum distance I can see where I am right here, and that's a, 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 crashing together, that has a slightly different observable universe. Now, what are they seeing? Are they seeing into another universe? No, they're just— they just have access to a different light sphere of space that could have communicated with them.

Just 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, Sean, there's another universe, episode whatever, 1400, you'll have the other universe. Me, but it's, it's a, it's, um, it's 10 light years away from our universe. You won't know about it for 10 years, right? So we could exist in this vast universe. It could also be that we're in a compact finite universe where it would make sense to say that there is an edge to it, just like there's an edge— there is an edge to the Earth, right? The edge is in the perpendicular dimension to the two-dimensional sphere. In the context of cosmology, the edge of the universe could be, if we live in a spherical universe, a universe, but instead of having X, Y, and Z, it has X, Y, Z, and W. It's a 4-dimensional sphere. A brain— no, nobody's brain, not even Avi's, can comprehend what that actually looks like or means. But mathematically, it's a perfectly valid question. We can, we can approach it, and we can ask, what would be the signature of another universe that bumps into our universe?

And people make predictions about it. Yeah, 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. Right 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, uh, I haven't— I have a thought exercise for you. When the Artemis, uh, we should talk about lunar, uh, landing conspiracies because you had on this guy, uh, Gentile? AJ Gentile. AJ Gentile. That was an awesome show. I love that guy.

He's one of my favorite people.

He's, he's, and he's, he's so good at what he does, you know. Like, imagine how hard it is, like, you know, it's hard to interview people, but then also to do like explainer content where you explain things. Um, but, you know, I was— I can never take the professor out of laboratory, and so he made a couple mistakes in that episode. And I would love to talk to him sometime. Uh, maybe you can introduce me. But one of the things he said is that that the, uh, the Soviets beat us in every possible thing. And this is part of the conversation you guys had about how the moon landing didn't happen, right? Or how people could say that— I don't actually know what you believe, and this is a case where you could say believe, but we have evidence, right?

What do you believe?

I know for a fact we landed on the moon. How do you know? I know for a fact because we have physical evidence, we have eyewitness evidence, we have photographic evidence. But the best evidence we have, Sean, The best evidence we have comes from the Soviet Union. What's that? Soviet Union on, uh, July 19th, 1969. The Soviets knew that the Eagle was on its way to land on the Sea of Tranquility. They had launched 6 days earlier a spacecraft of their own, uh, uncrewed. No men were on it, but they were going to go and land on the moon, and they were going to take samples, and they kind of wanted to steal the thunder, arrive a day and, and kind of get a little bit of the credit. And they also kind of hoped that we would crash and they would all die. I mean, the Space Race was insane, right? I mean, it was incredible. The Soviets coordinated with the Americans on that very day because they were worried that they would crash into the Eagle, and they coordinated their telemetry. And we still have records of their telemetry, um, and the communications between the, um, Baikonur Cosmodrome and Kazakhstan Vandenberg Stand where they would do their launches and recoveries, and a NASA Apollo.

They want 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 they would actually be unstable and would flip. They 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— they pre-recorded it, and so he would play it on TV and give their condolences. They also planned for the contingency that they'd be lost in lunar orbit, or that they would miss the moon and go off into deep space and become a satellite, never to be found again, right? So, um, so the Russians confirmed it, that coordinated with our telemetry. When they landed, they congratulated President Nixon, um, and then they also landed, uh, on, on the moon. And the first landing, they landed these retroreflectors called laser, uh, lunar laser retroreflectors. Um, 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 going to be? You could be at any angle, any bearing, any distance, right? How does it know to reflect? But they have the specially designed retroreflectors that always will find the target back to Earth, and we bounce lasers off it. My colleague at UC San San Diego, uh, 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 paper clip, 1 millimeter or so thickness. So we know the average that was left by these astronauts. Now the Russians left these things there too, but the Russians also overflew both our 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, um, one, one part— and but I do want to get back to what Gentile said that's wrong because I think it's important— um, is that, uh, is that, that, um, the, the positioning— so you could maybe sort of fake that or whatever But imagine right now, imagine like Artemis II, which just went around the moon, right?

I think even, you know, I debated Bart Sibrel 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 totally fallacious and ridiculous argument that I refuted on air with him, and Piers actually piled on and called him full of shit to his credit. But these, the very day that Artemis launched and then went around the moon, Moon this last month in April. Can you imagine to land on the Moon though?

Not, not this one.

This one was just going around the Moon.

We're supposed to land.

They will. No, no, no, it was always planned to do this. First one went around the Moon, no one was in it. Second one went around the Moon with people in it. Third one's going to be people in it— uh, sorry, unmanned landing on the Moon. Fourth one's going to be people landing on the Moon. Okay, let me, let me, let me just finish up.

All right, all right. I just want to know why don't we just land on the fucking moon? We did it in the '60s. Okay, right. Would you get— why are we doing all this crazy wild shit? Let's just go back.

Would you get on with your kids being here and your wife and your empire that is so impressive— would you get on like the second flight of a— of any kind of military hardware built by the lowest paying country?

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. So you do things in steps. 4 or 5 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. April 5th, 6th, when they went around the moon, can you imagine Ayatollah Khomeini Jr.? Oh, Hello, hi, mashallah, mashallah, President, President Trump, congratulations. Every country on Earth, including China, which had stolen a lot of our nuclear and space secrets in the 1970s— China, Soviet Union, all these countries called up and congratulated the United States. Now, they were our enemy. It's hard to think of it now because we kind of like, whatever, whatever, right? But can you imagine, like, the 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.

So 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, uh, 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 Amundsen. He's an amazing guy. He went from the North Pole— he almost was the first person to reach the North Pole. He lost, turned around, and went on a huge expedition and became the first person to land, to 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. Takes me a week. Okay, poor Brian, you know, play the Island. It took them 6 months just to get there. Then they got there. They would get there in spring because that's the only time you can really travel there.

Then they have to wait until the following spring. They'd stay on the coast of Antarctica for 6 more months until— or 7, 8 months before it came warm enough that they could ski, cross-country ski, up 9,000 feet of ice. Okay? And then they got to the South Pole and then had to get back before winter started. And if they missed it by 3 weeks, like the British team— Robert Falcon Scott was the second person to get to the South South Pole in 1912. In January 1912, 3 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, 10 miles from a cache of supplies that would have saved their lives. They all died. They didn't know about it for another year, and then they got back to England a year after that. Okay, we're just— okay, so 1911, our Norwegian guy sets foot with his teammates on the South Pole. Do you know when the next Norwegian to get to the South Pole was? Sure. I'm not expecting you to. 1996. Wow. So if you're in 19— Bart Sibrel, 1995, you say, oh wait, how come we went there with technology, with a boat, a wooden boat like 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, that I'm not saying that we didn't go.

Okay, it sounded like—

I'm not saying you're open to the hypothesis. At least I think it's 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 the belt thing that you just brought up. I also think is very odd. Yeah. And there's that guy in NASA that said we lost the 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 like that. Could mean a lot of things, right? It doesn't—

well, I mean, I'm just not familiar with—

yeah, I know, but, but when you have a platform like you do, and, and AJ has his platform, I'm just— I would love the scientific rigor to kind of— not you have to get a PhD in quantum mechanics, actually, I'm just saying when you think about things, what should be your default base rate hypothesis? Hypothesis? Should it be that this is, this is kind of fake? Or, you know, as, 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 the— this is one of the greatest— I 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. Yeah. Well, we did in a very short amount of time, but it took a level level of, you know, just, just incredible, incredible, you know, cooperation and technology. Hundreds of thousands of people coordinating across decades. And, and the evidence against it is so minimal. What's frustrating as a real scientist is to say, like, look, no one would rather these things be wrong, false, than a scientist, right?

Because I get paid not to prove people right. My job is not to prove freaking Avi Loeb right. My job is to say, no, you're freaking wrong, here's a better explanation, let's go test that. And his job as a good scientist Science is to say, thank you, Brian, you know, you, you use your experimental technology, I'm a theoretical physicist, let's work together and come closer to truth. Okay, that's the way science should be done. Not like the default assumption is America lied, you know, they lied about COVID I mean, I, you know, for many reasons I wish COVID never happened. And I've interviewed, you know, and I'm best friends with the— one of the close friends with the director of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, tortured by Anthony Fauci and, and Francis Collins. Collins. Horrible thing. And, you know, he's a Christian, he's an incredible human being. You know, he—

all this stuff that you're kind of talking about here, you know, at the beginning you asked me if I thought it was a good idea for a country to lie to its citizens. Yes. 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.

You're a scientist, you know, you understand how to sift through all this data. And I mean, just you spent many, many years studying all the things that it takes to know about landing on the moon. I'm a Navy SEAL. I spent those years fighting a fucking war. Yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah. And so what I'm saying is, you know, you're looking at straight facts and the rest of us are looking at contexts, you know. And when you have— 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 government, I guess, is, is the question. So then all these conspiracies start to happen and distrust, and then they start digging into everything. What were you saying about Candace?

So, so Candace— what I'm saying about Candace is that the America Firsters and the American patriots and so forth— and I'm not questioning her love of America or whatever, just saying, if this is the greatest accomplishment that a human being has ever made, and it happens to come from the country that you profess your love for and allegiance to, as I do and as you do, right? That it doesn't mean they're flawless. I mean, who's flawless, right? I mean, who do you agree with 100% of the time? Like, I'll say my wife, right? But that's about it, right? Sometimes you contradict yourself. I contradict—

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 around, like, I gotta turn off the, the, um, the, the voice-activated directions on the GPS. She's like, oh, that's so romantic, you want to listen to me, I'm like, no, I don't want two women yelling at me. Well, um, no. So you don't agree with everybody, right? You don't even agree with yourself. I reserve the right to be wrong all the time. And in fact, that's the best thing a scientist should do. We should have the freaking balls to say when we're wrong, not just when we're right. From the standpoint of having skepticism of your government and whatnot, you always have to ask the question, qui bono? Like, who benefits from it, right? Who would benefit from the moon landing not occurring? Occurring is a question. You can ask that question. You can also, you know, say, what are the downstream tangible benefits from doing that work and landing on the moon? You can ask, what were the technological impediments? But if you start with a hypothesis, you know, it's like an atheist who says, like, I'm going to start the hypothesis God doesn't exist, Sean, right?

And you have to— you have the burden of proof to prove to me that God exists or doesn't exist, That's not approaching things scientifically. If you start with— there's a term in that for it, it's called apologetics. You start with the conclusion, you reason towards the conclusion based on the best available data, but you're not going to refute God like William Lane Craig or Baron, the Catholic priest, I'm blanking on his name. I think Baron is his last name, Robert Baron. They're not going to come to a conclusion that disproves God. Let's just be honest. That's not necessarily that's really what their focus is going to be on. But they're going to give explanations why God is a more plausible hypothesis than anything else. 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 Sibrel, he said, I flew on the Concorde, you know, in 2001, and I haven't been on a Concorde since.

Like, how come there's no freaking, you know, Mach 2 transportation right now? How come that's not probably ever going to happen again? How do we go back into— you know, and that was built— that was built in 1962. The Concorde is before the Apollo landing. We can't do that now. That's— it's an argument that sounds good to people that really might come into a conversation with a predisposition, and that's fine for a person person who's not, who's not maybe wanting to portray themselves as being a scientist. You're not a scientist, AJ's not a scientist. But, uh, but there's one more thing about the Van Allen belts, which is the other thing that she, Candace Owens, really got from this guy Bart Sibrel. And then I think AJ kind of got this too. So there's this radiation belt that surrounds the Earth, uh, and it's called the Van Allen belts. It is supposedly this impenetrable, instantly fatal trajectory. No person can get through it, uh, 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, 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? Um, Saturn has this ring system around it, it's like a belt around it, right? So if you're going to land on Saturn, fine, you probably won't take the trajectory that goes right through the ring system, right? Just because there's a belt exist doesn't mean that there's not a symmetrical process, a trajectory that you go through that's totally safe, right? The asteroid belt. You think about the asteroid belt. You shoot a spaceship through the asteroid belt, you're going to get destroyed. No, you won't. The— if you shot in any direction, you take any trajectory you want, and you'll go out to the edge of the solar system, there's almost a 0% chance you'll hit anything, even though you kind of depict it as an asteroid belt. The Van Allen belts are like that. They're highly concentrated in certain regions. There's two different belts, an inner belt and an outer belt. They mainly go around the equator. The launches to the moon go around the pole. So there's no danger, there's no exposure to it. We know how to do it.

Satellites go through it all the time. And 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 2 or 3 chest X-rays, which you and I get every year, every couple years, right? So there's some radiation. It sounds scary. You know, one of the Patreon questions that I answered for my fellow Vigilance Elite Patreon members, uh, was about like, how do we make the concept of nuclear power less, uh, less traumatizing, less kind of scary to the average person? Like, how do we get rid of radiation? So save that, you have to join Vigilance Elite Patreon, right? I'm trying to sell that, my fellow members. Um, so go over there, you'll find out my answer to it. Um, but it, but it's sort of, it's, it's manipulative to say radiation's scary, therefore we didn't to the moon. Mhm. 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 Offroad. It's an off-road navigation app that shows trails, public and private land boundaries, places to camp, and detailed trail info all in one place. And what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data. You can check difficulty ratings, terrain details, trail photos, even recent reports from other riders before you head out there. The other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time, because once you lose service out there, your phone is pretty much useless. But with onX Offroad, everything still works offline. And if you're riding with a group, their location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map so nobody gets lost or separated. What I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new. I'm not wasting time backtracking, accidentally ending up on private land, or trying to figure things out once I'm already deep into the trail system.

I can plan ahead, know what I'm getting into, and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the whole time. Search OnX Offroad in the App Store or Google Play. Again, that's OnX Off-Road in the App Store or Google Play.

All right, Brian, we're back from the break. We pretty much just wrapped up the moon talk, but I did bring one thing in here because you gave me a little shit for saying the NASA guy. So here is the NASA guy. Go ahead and hit play. Let me know what you think. I'd go to the moon in a nanosecond. The problem is we don't have the technology to do that anymore. We used to, but we, uh, destroyed that technology, and it's a painful process to build it back again.

When you said that just now—

all right, sounds stupid to you? Kind of. So that was—

what's this guy's name? Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut.

Okay, so I, I sounded like an idiot because I didn't know his name or what he was, so I had to go find it and show it to you. So that's fine. What, what is your take on that?

I'm just curious. So, um, no disrespect to Don, again, more courageous than I'll ever be, you know, launch on top of a 60,000 you know, tons of TNT equivalent and risk your life and do everything that he did. Um, so the one thing that's more complicated than physics is psychology, is the human mind. So I'm not going to speculate what he meant by it. I'll just say, um, it's the technology can't be destroyed, right? Technology means a lot of things. It means the physical rockets. Do we have Apollo Saturn V boosters anymore? No. So we don't have Do we destroy them? Yeah, I mean, I've got a, um, uh, a .50 cal, uh, bullet that my brother-in-law Jim Brewer got me, um, and I use it as a bottle opener. Is it— is it destroyed? Yeah, it's destroyed. It has a hole in it and the gunpowder has been taken out and it's not a live round, right? So we— do we destroy— do we destroy the know-how on how to do it? Do we just—

that's what— that's the way I take that, is they destroyed the know-how. So they destroyed the blueprints. Blueprint. So it gives a shit about the fucking booster or whatever, or the rocket or whatever it is.

We can build it again. It is true, right?

Like, I don't think that that's what everybody's doing with these autonomous systems right now. They're building disposable units that can be very cheaply and easily recreated.

You know, I have, um, uh, collect aviation, you know, kind of antique artifacts. I have a, a B-17, uh, propeller in my hangar in San Diego where I my, my plane. And, um, and this thing is amazing. And there's zero chance that we could ever get that to work, we could ever reconstruct a B-17, you know, from scrap. There are a couple of B-17s flying, I think there's 3 left or something like that. Again, if, if we had an infinite amount of money, infinite amount of money, do you think that Elon, or do you think that, that our greatest engineers and scientists couldn't reassemble and build a P-38 or a B-17? Of course we could. But you have ask, like, what's the purpose of that? We have been there, we have done that. I actually think there's a stronger— it's the purpose of that. What's the purpose of rebuilding?

What was the purpose of coming to North America again?

Well, what was the purpose? So we are—

settle new fucking land, to expand an empire, to fuck— what, 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— I interviewed this guy Steve frost and, uh, helium-3. He's talking about we need helium-3, it's going to be great for energy. Can't remember everything about the conversation, but yeah, 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 back to the moon. Yeah, to pea brains like me.

A, you're not a pea brain. B, uh, my job is to answer questions, and I, I get paid to answer questions, right? And so what a teacher is at heart— I'm a scientist, right? And scientists answer questions. I'm a professor, I'm a teacher. When, when they say something like that, there's different reads to saying that. Like, um, you know, uh, where's the car? Um, you know, to your 16-year-old, oh, I destroyed it, it's destroyed. Is it destroyed? Like, with— is it beyond the laws of physics to reconstruct it? Um, is an astronaut the right person to ask this question about the technology? Do you know the astronauts have almost no knowledge of the engineering and the building of it? Some of them have— weren't even pilots, right? So that's why I kind of asked you before, is my lack of domain expertise in the operator, special teams, and the 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, it doesn't frustrate me, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make me feel like, oh well, I really got me.

Um, it makes me feel like this guy said something, I don't know the full context, but I know for sure if we had wanted to, there's absolutely no reason not to. Now, why didn't we want to? What was the Cold War? I mean, do we go back and keep bombing Japan and bombing the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union collapsed, right? Part of it was because of the vast military expenditures that we spent during the Space Race, and it was no longer sustainable in the late 1980s, and the Berlin Wall— did we fire a shot? No. I mean, not really. I mean, you guys probably know, but once you, once you do a thing, do you need to do it again? Like, it's not like running a marathon, right? Roger Banister broke the 4-minute mile 80 years ago, something like that. People still want to break the 4-minute mile, right? They keep getting better and better. Um, will that person, the second person to break the 4-minute mile, do his name?

No, but I mean, yes, we do need to do it again. I mean, since the— since the beginning of time, it's been expansion of empires. 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 where— where— and what— what is the fastest growing?

Is the— 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. I'm not talking about an overpopulation or anything. I'm talking about expansion of empires, which humanity has been doing since the beginning of time, right? The new expansion is space. Absolutely, space. I mean, the, the, the— what I 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— Space Force was created, the first branch of the US military created in 50 years, 60 years.

So you can't tell me that, you know, it's not important. And then Steve Quast is saying China is, is basically on the moon. I don't know if that's correct or not, but that's what he says. But whatever river. Somebody's gonna fucking go there and somebody's gonna claim it. Why haven't we been back? It's been how long? 60 years maybe.

If we had this conversation, you know, uh, 46 days ago, we could say we haven't been back to the moon in 56 years or whatever. But now we haven't— we've been around the moon. We went farther than we went even during the Apollo mission. We're testing this thing out. I always say, you know, someone said to me, uh, do you want to be, uh, go on a SpaceX rocket and go to the moon? I'm like, yeah, I want to be customer 10,000. Like, I don't want to be the first guy. You know how many aviation accidents occurred during the first 10 years after the Wright brothers? What the fatality rate is nowadays, you get on a plane, the fatality rate is 0.001. The only fatality in America since 9/11 was right after Trump's inauguration. These helicopter hit a commercial jet. That was like the first mid-air collision that resulted in death. Or even Sully Sullenberger landed on— their aviation safety has gotten down to the sub-thousandth of a percent level of fatality. Body risk, space is still about 3%, 4%. Now, 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 not have the wherewithal, but in today's dollars to reproduce what we did, just go to the moon, walk around, do the samples, if you'd wanna do that, uh, 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. You 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, John, No, no, women spend more on lipstick in America than the NASA budget. Tell me how you're going to get to colonize the interplanetary species like Elon wants to do with a budget that's $25 billion. And some say that's way too high. We should be spending on poverty. We should be sending it— and you got to be sympathetic to some of these things, right?

So the question is one of national will. We had pride in the 1960s. We want to beat Russia. We don't really have that with China. We have a very unusual thing with China, our relationship. You know more about the geopolitics than I do. There's an interesting thing that just happened in, um, didn't really make much media attention. I saw it in The New York Times, reported that China was trying to build radio telescopes in Argentina and optical telescopes there, and the U.S. government coordinated with Argentina and froze the parts at the port in China— I'm sorry, at the port in Argentina. Like, why are they doing that? Well, guess what? When we go up and study the cosmic microwave background, look for the Big Bang and stuff like that, we're on top of 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 3 inches of quartz. Well, quartz radiates in the infrared extremely well. You can pick that thing out like a, you know, a hot knife going through butter. Better. So these are not always peaceful, you know, kind of coordination and scientific, uh, benefit. But to coordinate something on a budget of $25 billion, I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, kind of— it's, it's almost nothing. And so I don't think we're going to get there again, but not because it's some— it's— and that's today when people are excited about the moon. 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 in some ways. I bet it was one of the commanders on. So look, um, the disposition has to be like, what is the cost-benefit analysis? Is it worth sending people there if they have a high risk of dying? You know, would you want to be— you know, let's say it's safe, you know you're not going to die, but you're going to go on a one-way ticket to Mars, and oh, your crewmate's going to be Elon Musk because he wants to go there too.

Are you gonna do that? You love risk. I'm telling you, no risk. Gonna die.

I mean, you're, you're talking to somebody that fought in 3 different wars and several different conflicts. Yeah, I'd have a huge appetite for risk. Yeah, I— no doubt. And I have an even bigger appetite for risk when it advances humanity, advances our country, you know, things like that. And so if I thought that for one second that by reaching the moon with Elon Musk, for whatever reason, is going to advance humanity and make a fucking better life for mine and yours kids, you bet your ass I'm gonna be on that flight.

So then we have to look at what is— there are a lot of people that are just like me. But aren't there, Sean? And no, you know, I'm saying this with love and respect, but like, you, you were ordered to fight in these wars.

I wasn't ordered to fight.

Well, you just 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 what you're going to do and which wars you're going to fight in. In other words, do you— do you— if you knew everything that you knew now, are you gonna— are you gonna say that like, if this is going to advance humanity— that's what they told us too in Iraq, like, this is going to benefit, it's going to protect America, it's going to do all these things. Let's leave aside whether it did or didn't, but you did it, you signed up for it. Did it— did the promise or the expectations, did it match you know, all the hardship that you went through and your fellow—

so it was another lie from the US government, right?

So what about this?

You're saying you're going to do this because you said if I knew for a fact, okay, 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 fine. 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 die on Mars. I said, let's hope it's not on impact. You know, I don't want you to die on impact, buddy. Uh, I think you're too important. But, um, but you have, uh, 13 to 14 kids. We actually don't know how many kids Elon has. It's either very lucky or very unlucky. But, um, but he has at least 13 kids. I said, there would be a day when you'd have to say— they're not all going to go. His kid X-Jaws-72, you know, the one that's named after the blackbird, right, has unpronounced his principal name, uh, he was in the room. I could hear the kid talking on the podcast when I was talking to Elon. His mom was on the podcast. She was— there's a big space and recorded it. And I said, how are you going to say goodbye to another kid? He lost a kid, you know, which is the most traumatic thing that a human being— you and I know, like, I don't even like talk about it.

Parent loses a child, you can't think about it. Now you're volunteering to lose 13 children. Like, how are you I do that. And 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, Maye Musk, comes and said, oh, let's not talk about that. Let's not talk about sad things. So it's sad. I know you'd do it again. You have courage that mortal men like me— I, 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 ChatGPT-100? In other words, why send a human being with a wife, kids, family, people that love you, people that depend on you, people that are watching right now whose life and ears you're in right now.

I mean, you're going to take that away? Tell me, convince me you can't do that with a robot or AI. We haven't talked about AI. What do you want to talk about? I think AI has a lot of things in common with aliens 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. We have that impulse. Tower of Babel. We have that same urge, that same desire, that same craving to be as gods. That's why— look, I don't read the Bible as a science book. Sorry. You know, I don't look at it, hmm, where's the, um, hydrogen's, uh, 30-second waveform? 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.

You 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 every day. Stoics, I read it all. Why not? Why wouldn't you? I read Shakespeare, I read Stephen Hawking. I don't care, I'll learn from anybody. When you look at that book, what comes out is the flawed nature of human beings wanting to become gods, frustrated, fighting with God, building a tower to reach up to the sky, not to learn what God knows, but to fight against God, to show how great we are because we built this tower. We don't need your freaking mountain, we can do it ourselves. We build 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 whole life attempting to overcome that fear, and that's that he's going to die.

The word Homo sapiens means man who knows. What does he know? We're the only creatures that exist that know we have a death date. Yes, elephants will get together and they'll look around and when one dies, they'll all cry. And I don't know, they don't know when they're 4 years old that they're going to die. My daughter asked me the other day, like, you're going to— are you going to die before me? I said, I hope so. I was like in tears. We know at a young age we're going to die. That's a good thing. But since biblical times, since early man, We have struggled with this desire to overcome that limitation, to become gods ourselves, to extend our lives both in lifespan, which is great, and in sort of the power, the omnipotence of the human, which means augmentation, building silicon brains that live outside of us, robotic brain and robotic bodies, cryogenic suspension, longevity, maybe escape velocity as Kurzweil and, you know, he claims at a certain point in 3, 4, or 5 years— keeps getting pushed back, like disclosure, uh, that we'll reach— we'll reach longevity escape velocity, which means for every year you live, you'll live another 1.1 years or something like that.

Once you hit that, you can live forever. Would you live forever?

Not by myself.

I wouldn't want to be the only one. And it's, it's so complex. But, but look at the urge. What's the urge? Who was the only man that believe did have a life after death? Anyone else but Jesus? Do you think anyone else besides Jesus? We have an urge to be like Jesus, to live forever, to resurrect ourselves, to extend ourselves forever. What if—

Yeah, everybody. I mean, I can't say everybody, but a lot of people are trying to build a legacy. They want to be remembered. They want— Exactly. They have heirlooms that want passed items. That's right, books.

Denial of death. We want something that lives beyond us. In the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl—

making, making, writing death letters, making videos for your kids, you know what I mean, so they remember you. Interviewing your parents. That's right. You know, so that writing about kids, writing your memo— their kids and their kids and everyone down the line knows who they were.

I'm going to keep pressing you. You got to write your memoir when the time is right. Look, you can write— Obama has 4 memoirs. He could do it. He wrote 4 autobiographies. Biographies. 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. God forbid, you should live to 120, I will say to you. But we don't know. We don't know how much capacity we'll have. Some law could change, something could happen, right? Don't put it off. You were saying it's not time yet. What, writing a book?

Yeah. I just, 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, Italy, I don't know where, found it. And I got it. It cost me a lot of money, Sean. You know, I could give it to you, but Would you pay for it? How much would you pay for that? Your grandmother— I don't care who it is, Sean. Someday you're— you are that person. First of all, you're that person to 6,500,000 people, whatever you— people want to know. And it doesn't mean you reveal everything. I don't tell people personal— everything in person. This is my autobiography. It's my first autobiography. Maybe it's my last. I don't know. I want to write more. Maybe I will. I think I have one more book left in me. That's the way I feel. Just honestly, my energy, my age, my commitments, my right? But this is a gift. It's not for you. Don't think about it for you. Like, oh, what am I— I don't want to. Okay, so I bet you've done a lot of things you didn't want to do in your life.

I mean, my thoughts are all there, you know what I mean? The way I think, what I believe in, what I don't like, what I wear in a podcast episode.

Didn't hear, man.

Where? It's in this, Sean.

As 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 or whatever. Like, and there's jewels in there. And I'm not saying write a book about it. 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 you also think this is going to be— this is going to be it, or there's another chapter in your life. There's more chapters.

It's like I told you out there, you know, we were talking about— you brought up the Sabbath again. Again. Yeah. 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. A lot of these guys, this is the only thing they've ever done, right? This is not the only thing I've ever done. I was a SEAL, a CIA 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 that. 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 they always want to know, what's— what do you think is the meaning of life? I say, for me, it's— it's an easy recipe. First of all, you got to find a partner. And I even have a— I'm a nerd, right? So I had a mathematical algorithm to find my wife.

Okay, wait a minute, you had a— you had a mathematical algorithm to find your— I gotta hear this shit. So what does that even mean?

It means you take metrics, you know, what you manage you measure, what you measure you manage, right? So I kept records, you know, just like dates and people's personalities and things like that. Um, not like, you know, like for this one, you know, she had freckle on her butt. That wasn't it. Here's the algorithm in simple terms. You should date— and there is mathematical science to back this up, by the way— you should date and, you know, for some period of time. Once you're ready and you're like— and no one's ever ready, by the way. Like, were you ready to get married and like commit to one woman that you're the only woman you're ever going to be with physically, intimately, build a family? No one's ever ready for that. No one's ever ready for kids. No one's ever ready probably for combat. Like, you can't be ready for it, right? These are that like make us uniquely human. But for me, I said, keep— date for some period of time, keep a list of women. And you may date for women, you know, and I'm sorry, I know you've got women that listen. I'm just going to speak for my person.

I'm going to talk only about women, but it applies to women looking for men. Date somebody until you find the following person. If I had a daughter with this woman, would I be okay if my daughter turned out to be like this woman. Okay, so let's say I dated— I dated a cheerleader, I dated someone, you know, like just models I've dated, and wonderful people, whatever. I dated people that were Jewish, people that were Catholic, people that were Muslim. I did a whole bunch of people, right? And then some I dated for selfish reasons, right? She's hot, you know, she's, she's so fun, like we just do the coolest things together, whatever. Like mostly it was because she was hot. Okay, I have a lot of weaknesses, but, but that was one of them. And, but I said, I don't know, let's say, let's just take it to the extreme. Like, you're dating some, like, Playboy Playmate— and I should say, one of my friends with Playboy— but, uh, 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, that one, by that one mention I didn't want my daughter to be like these people, right?

Until I met my wife and I said, God, if I had a daughter, I would 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, I do anything. I found her. I knew it when I found her, but only because I had a statistical sample, you know, for a few decades. You know, I didn't get married until I was in my, you know, mid-late 30s. Um, and that's when I knew. That's the algorithm. Stop dating when you meet the girl whose daughter you would want to be your daughter. Not this— not the super rich, you know, person, not the super wealthy or smarter than any 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.

Served me well. Good for you. So, and then as far as kids go, you know, no one's ever—

cheerleader didn't work out, huh? That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Oh, my wife's not gonna watch this, so, um But people talk about, look, look, what, what's the meaning of life? Like, how do you live your life? I'm sure you've been happy at different points. I'm sure you've been low at different points. Like, happiness is what's called in physics an unstable equilibrium point, right? Technically, if I have a pencil— here's my— you didn't ask me about my professor EDC gear, okay? Here's my EDC as a professor. It's the only thing I could get on TSA. It's a tactical pen, and I could theoretically balance this point. Okay, you know, I had too much coffee, uh, too little gummy bears, but, 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. Entropy is an irrevocable, irreversible tendency for the universe to chaotically and ultimately to destroy both information and, and stasis and equilibrium.

And here's a— here's an example I like you right now. Let's say your happiness is X, right? This, you know, incredible, everything you've done. I don't know about your personal life, but, but I assume it's, it's, it's fantastic. All right, says Sean, I want to double your happiness right now. What would I have to do? If I gave you X, 2X money, 2X podcast downloads, 2X Instagram, would you be 2X happy? You'd be happier, Maybe, but would you be too happy? Say again? Would you be— I'm asking you. Probably not. No, you'd be— would you be any happier? I doubt it. If you had twice as much money as you have right now, think about what all you could do differently. I'm, you know, I doubt it. I just remember like, um, Monty Burns in, uh, in The Simpsons. He's the, you know, the billionaire, greedy billionaire guy. And Homer Simpson one day—

I watched this, I saw this meme the other day. Yeah, maybe not a meme, a cartoon. Yeah. And it was this little kid fishing and it 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 wants, the more you're owned by your fucking possessions.

Yeah, it's called the hedonic trap. More, more. Yeah, you never get off it.

And, uh, I feel like I've learned this very early in my journey. I think a lot of people, it takes a lot longer and a lot more money to learn that lesson. But no, I don't think money is going to bring me more happiness. I don't think more subscribers, more viewers, more downloads, more better rankings, like like it's just right. So I mean, the fun is the climb up.

Yeah, to me. Yeah, no, climb up.

It was really fucking cool doing it. Still is. I love doing this. I love having this conversation with you. I am also a competitive motherfucker. Yeah. 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, but I hit it.

We'll talk about it.

And he, of course, he always will be. I don't think so.

I mean, he, he, he, he—

I do, but I don't think anybody can take that away from him. Somebody will outdo him eventually. I think this guy Stephen Bartlett, he was the pioneer.

He is the pioneer. He is the GOAT. But the whole point, at least in my field, if I— if this book is still relevant in 100 years, I'll be a failure. You know why? Because it means science will have stagnated. It means that—

no, but if somebody builds off that book for the next 100 years. Absolutely. Everyone knows they're 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%, 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. So, and eventually he will get tired of this shit. Somebody else will reinvent— that's all— change the game. But it's like Babe Ruth. Everybody still knows who the fuck Babe Ruth is, right? You know? And so anyways, what I was getting at is, no, I don't think any of that— none of that 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% with that amount of success. Lots of money, but it's not going to bring more happiness. In fact, Jim Carrey has a really good quote: "I wish everybody could be rich and famous so they know that's not the answer." But here's where I want to go with that, back to my pen sticking on its tip.

It's unstable, right? So 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 going to have more followers and more money, more women, more guns, more whatever, right? That's going to get to a point— more guns, I'm not so sure about. But, um, but in any case, but let me ask you this. I said, could I double your happiness? You said absolutely not. What are you, crazy? You said, could I increase your happiness? You're the first person I ever talked— asked that particular question. Just said no, you couldn't increase my happiness by even a bit. Um, and I respect that. I'm not, I'm not, uh, disputing that whatsoever. I said with money. With money. Okay. Or fame. Is there anything material? Not, not God. Not—

I'll tell you how you can increase my happiness. It's going to sound like a fucking punishment. You take all my social media away, you take my phone away, you take my phone.

I already freaking prescribed that to you on Saturday and 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 gonna eat, how we're gonna get shelter, how we're gonna fucking drink water.

And and that will create a happy— will you try for me? Will you try for me? I know we don't know each other, but we try one day.

Now think how fucking easy it is. I don't— 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— so, 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, I can't throw it all away, but once a week I can throw it away. Once a week I could see you not on the phone, I could see you not on Instagram, I could see you not doing podcasts, I could see you going to church, I could see you doing with your family, your friends, your community. Heck, you can drive. Uh, you know, I'm not allowed to drive on Saturdays. I'm not allowed to use the phone. I'm not saying don't use— don't use your phone to call somebody. I'm just saying disconnect from the world. The reason is, and it's very beautiful, and I think it applies to you. The commandment in Hebrew, and the fourth commandment, which is you shall honor the Sabbath, right? It doesn't just say you should take off on Sunday or Saturday and kind of chill out, watch a football game. No, no, it says, it says, 6 days you must work in order that 7th day is a Sabbath, a rest day for God, Hashem. Meaning that the purpose of the week is you must earn your frickin' making money. The Torah, 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. No, you have to do it. But if you work 7 days a week, I know billionaires, I know superstars, and, you know, millions of Instagram, whatever, they work 24/7. I said to them, I told Stephen Bartlett on his podcast, I said, you're so successful, you work 7 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. One of his 100 people— his podcast is like, you know, it's almost as, almost as big as this, okay? And that's all he does. And I'm like, Steve,— and take it from me, I'm an older man— you got to find a woman, you got to find a life, you got to make a family, and you got to take time off. If you cannot do that, you are a slave. You're a rich slave. I'm a slave, Sean.

I'd love to be on, on doing science every day of the week. I could do podcasts every day of the week. It's, it's a challenge for me to turn it off. I don't like doing it. How do you turn it off? How do I turn it off?

When you celebrate the Sabbath. Yeah. Are you telling me that none of your science is a Science is in your head.

That's not the issue. Science is in your head because science is a vehicle to God.

It's— you know what I mean?

Your work. I'm not— I don't work on papers. I told you.

But it's in your head. That's not— are you really able to switch it all the way up?

God is not a thought police, man. God is not like Kim Jong-un. You know, 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 the temple or you're not with your kids and when 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. Every 6 years in the Old Testament, you're supposed to let the land lay fallow and not reap every year. How'd they eat? So you could go back and dispute and talk about the science, whatever. You had to let the land— every 7 years, and people would go free. The slaves would go free. If you had a slave, he'll let them go free. Every 49 years, the word Jubilee, that comes from Hebrew, it's Yovel, Jubilee. 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 frickin' US Liberty Bell. It says, you shall declare freedom throughout the land and liberty to all its inhabitants.

We get that from the Torah, from the Old Testament. And it says freedom is not just that you do whatever you want. It's that you're doing something actively actively in pursuit of something bigger than yourself. And I'm— by the way, I think you do this, we just don't know it. So the only thing I'm saying is it's like an easy prescription from this non-medical doctor, okay? But it's the decoupling from the world. And not— I don't care if somebody's tweeting about me because I said something about Avi Loeb, and I don't give a flying F. I could care less. I'm not checking it. I'm not seeing, oh, I got this banger tweet, I gotta get it out there, I gotta— I don't care. It You 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 $1 billion on you, you'd be, come on, you'd be a little happy, but you wouldn't be twice as happy. You wouldn't be 10 times as happy. But Sean, I'd be happy in the moment.

In the moment. Yeah. 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. The 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 going to be pissed off or if you're going to be happy, right?

Yeah, if you're healthy, yeah. But anyone who has kids. This is getting back to my meaning of life and how I find me. Anyone who has kids, I don't even say it, but I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna say I can't make you a little bit happier, but I can make somebody infinitely unhappy. I'm not saying I'm gonna do it, I'm saying they could become— I know billionaires, Sean, I've lost kids, okay? You think they wouldn't trade all their billions, billions of 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. That's entropy. What does that tell you? Do the things in life that if they got taken away would devastate you. It sounds depressing as you know what, but that's what I think about. I want to construct order. I want to reduce entropy. I want to create things, build things, not for my ego, not for my bank account, but for the goodness, for the benefit it brings to the world and 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 will be happy with 7 Instagram models and a billion bucks, but maybe not. And again, you look at the Torah, you look at the Bible, anyone who had multiple wives, they were some of the most unhappy people 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's still unsettles science today. Where is everybody? The universe is enormous, it's ancient, and based on the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems like life should exist somewhere else. Yet so far we have no confirmed signal, no confirmed contact, and no undeniable evidence that another intelligent civilization is out there. Can you break down what 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. Well, you know, kind of a side quest as they're building the atomic right? So the concept is, is that the universe is vast, but let's just restrict ourselves to the galaxy. Our galaxy is a few hundred— that may be 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. Stars in the observable universe, each one with 10 planets, call it, around it, you get numbers that are incomprehensible.

A million, million, million, million planets in the observable universe. 10 to the 24th planets, right? So it just becomes crazy. And then you think, well, if only 1% of them have life on it, that's 10 to the 22nd power. You know, it's an insane number. So the universe is huge. There's a lot of opportunities for life, for planets. And yet, as you say we have no evidence that rises above scientific truth or evidentiary standards. And this is going back 84 years when he said this in Los Alamos, right? Wow. 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, we don't feel like consequential evidence exists at the level of scientific proof, right? And 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, he said he's a careful scientist. 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 here. That they're there. Okay, so what— how many people are there? And it's— or how many civilizations are there that we could communicate with? In other words, if there's slime mold, if there's like bacteria, you know, on a planet that's, uh, you know, 4 light years away, right, 10 years, 10, 4 light, whatever you want, right, we would never know they exist because they don't have technology to broadcast radio waves and light waves for us to see, or neutrino tractor beams or gravitational wave. They don't technology, right? So it's this— how do we know how many technologically advanced civilizations there are in order for us to be able to detect them? Otherwise we can't detect them, right? We're not going to the other star systems. The fastest thing that humans have ever made, Voyager, it's traveled the farthest away from Earth. It's one light day from the Earth.

It was launched 55 years ago, before I was born. And in that sense, it's in— you know, that, that thing is the farthest we've ever on. It's only 1 light day. The nearest star is 4 light years away, so 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, if you say that they haven't— if Fermi's saying they haven't, we don't have evidence— that has to be some explanation for them. Otherwise, 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 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, uh, 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?

Each one of them might have tens of planets or something around them. That amount of information for them to know about us— that's just for them to know about us. That's not to send a return signal. That'll be quite— that'll be 200 years from now, right? So, so the, the quickest we could ever send something is it goes out at the speed of light, reaches a destination, and comes back to us. That light signal left 100 years ago. It's gone almost 100 light-years away. For us to hear back from them— we heard you, you exist— that'll take another 100 years. Does that make sense? So there's a sphere, it's a radius 100 light years, called 1,000 stars plus or minus in them, and there's maybe 10,000 planets in those. So right now all we could say is we don't— we don't know. There could be stars that are half that distance, 50 light years away. Maybe there's 300 of those and there's 3,000 planets on them. So we— all we can say is that volume of space knows about us and could have returned a signal to us since we started broadcasting information. We don't have any evidence of that, not for people not looking.

But that is such a tiny microscopic number. That's like, um, that's like a shot glass out of the Pacific Ocean in terms of how much the vastness of the universe is. So one thing is that space is very big and the speed of light is very slow, even though it's the fastest speed you could possibly travel at. Another solution that people have come up with is that there's lots of life in the universe, um, but they tend to not live very long because they have these things called wars, and they do battle among themselves. And you see this at every level of speciation, from bacteria to Beethoven— I mean, to us, right? I mean, I don't tell you— bacteria have military campaigns toxins 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. Every level of— and that's the most primitive life that we know about, all the way up to the most advanced life we know about, namely us. So maybe they only live so long. Maybe— there's a paper I read about recently, uh, my friend Sabina Hossenfelder made a video about it.

Elon Musk is tweeting about it. Um, and it is, uh, I think Avi Loeb is involved in some way or other. Um, it shows there might be an average lifetime of a civilization, in order for us not to have seen anybody, of about 5,000 years. Wow. Which is like barely back to the pyramids, right? Shit. So Some say you, you hit this, this filter and then you get filtered out. The question is, are we past the filter? We're not yet there. So there's a lot of explanations. Another one that I like is, um, I take my kids to the San Diego Zoo, and when I take them there, there's a gorilla exhibit. And, um, I love the gorillas, but it says on the, on the sign, it says, don't knock on the glass, it really bothers them. You know, it just makes them anxious. So don't do that. Of course, kids do that, right? Um, and then they get kicked out. But, um, but what, what if, you know, you went instead of the San Diego Zoo, we go to the Wild Animal Park? Then you're really far away from the gorillas. You're not going to knock on the glass.

You don't even need glass. You're really far away. You observe them at a distance. Maybe there are things lurking, observing us at a distance. But as interstellar species that has the ability to come here or to sense our activity and our presence, has advanced technology What is it that we're going to learn from? I mean, have we learned that much besides about the species of gorillas and bacteria? 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? So 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 cattle mutilation. And, and like abductions and things like that, near-death experiences. Um, there's only one near-death experience that I believe in, by the way, um, 100% documented fact, um, which has to do with Alfred Nobel. Do you know the story? You know, Alfred Nobel was, um, he invented dynamite.

So he was one of the richest people in the world, kind of like Elon Musk or Tesla of the 1800s. And, uh, he was, uh, one of the richest people in all of Europe and all of the world. And his, um, his family was involved with making, uh, sea mines for the Russian and Crimean, uh, war of 1840, something like that. And so they were arms dealers, Alfred Nobel and his father Emanuel. And, uh, they were trying to invent ways to make their methodology more lethal. And, uh, one of Alfred's brothers, his baby brother Emil, started to play around with nitroglycerin nitroglycerin. And nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable. And one day he was in the— the family laboratory, and he dropped it on the floor and it blew up, like enormous explosion, vaporized him and 6 other people— 5 other people. 6 people killed instantly. And this devastated his father, Immanuel Nobel, and Alfred as well. And Immanuel ended up basically getting committed to sanatorium memoriam. And then he died 8 years to the day of his son. His heart was broken, he had a stroke, and just devastated him. And Alfred set out to do something to make that never happen again.

And he took nitroglycerin and he mixed it with a type of basically like clay— it's called 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, um, and he became one of the richest people in the world based on that invention. But it was also used for munitions, and they sold in their arms factory. And reportedly, he had indirectly been responsible for the deaths of more people than any person in human history. So much so that at 1888, he's walking around Paris and he sees a headline in the Parisian newspaper paper, and it says, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death, is dead. The man who committed no benefit to humanity and killed more people than any other person in human history is dead. Now, now, he's reading this, so he knows it's not him. Turns out it was his older brother Ludwig who died, um, and 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 going to remember him. Like George Bailey in A Wonderful Life, right? You know, he sees the Ghost of Christmas Present, Ghost of Christmas Past, and Scrooge, same exact story in A Christmas Carol. He got a glimpse of what his own death would be like. And he said, I'm going to change my life from now on. I don't know how much longer I have to live. He took this huge fortune, and he gave 99% of it to the Nobel Prize, and he established it. And its goal was to do what this newspaper said he didn't do, which is to make the greatest benefit to mankind. So he created a prize for peace, for chemistry, for medicine, uh, for literature, and, um, uh, 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— the X-rays benefited humankind, and it's a physics invention.

It's a technology invention. And then the Nobel Peace Prize has a very checkered past. One of my friends, Uuni Taratini, wrote a book about how, you know, it's gone to like Yasser Arafat and terrorists and, and, uh, you know, in all sorts of, uh, assorted characters. Obama won it after being in office for like 9 days. Um, so it's been politicized, uh, but, uh, it still has this noble— L-E— goal of benefiting all of mankind through science, through peace. And, and I think it's a wonderful thing. And it wouldn't have happened without this near-death experience that Alfred Nobel encountered. So that's the only near-death experience I believe. I don't know, you might have other stories.

Well, Brian, we're wrapping up the interview here. Last question: who would you recommend for the show?

For this show? Oh, that's easy. I don't know, uh, if the internet could handle it though. Uh, Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein is, uh, one of the, one of the foremost of intellectual, 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. And sometimes we fight like brothers and we have a lot of respect for each other. And I think you could, you could, you could handle them. 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 Eric's research, maybe partially some weird Harvard connection where Epstein had an office and in a workspace, and he wasn't a professor, he wasn't a PhD. And Eric understands a lot more about Epstein than I think most people do, because he saw it from the financial component, the physics component, the Harvard, the institutional, all these different perspectives. And he's just, he's so quotable, 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. Kind of open. I'll text him.

I've never met him. I will.

You have his number? I do have his number. Get in touch with him. I think he'd be— he's the one, no question. Well, thank you, Brian.

Fascinating conversation. No 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.