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The Shawn Ryan Show
#316 Brian Keating - Brian Keating - The First Object Ever Found From Another Solar System
03:56:13
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- [00:01]
Brian Keating
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability various 18 plus. Hi, diva. It's Rachel and Jordan. Yeah, hi. Quick question. Why are you not spending your Venmo balance?
- [00:32]
Sean Ryan
Yeah, we're concerned you can, like, buy stuff with it.
- [00:34]
Brian Keating
Ugh.
- [00:34]
Sean Ryan
You love buying stuff and earn cash
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Brian Keating
back on eligible purchases.
- [00:38]
Sean Ryan
Mmm. You love purchasing eligible things.
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Brian Keating
So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's ramen or rideshare or eyepatches.
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Sean Ryan
The skincare kind, not the pyro kind.
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Brian Keating
Spend with Venmo and you can earn cash back with Venmo stash. Venmo stash bundle terms and Exclusions apply.
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Sean Ryan
Max $100 cash back per month.
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Brian Keating
See terms at Venmo Me Terms, Idaho. Verification required to use a Venmo bal.
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Sean Ryan
Brian Keating, welcome to the show, man.
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Brian Keating
It's a great pleasure to be here, Sean. Been. Been a while. I've been hoping to come a couple
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Sean Ryan
years in the making, right? I know, but yeah, we were talking out there. I think. I think I've been tracking you for like two or three years and you finally made it.
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Brian Keating
Yeah, it's kind of scary to hear that Sean Ryan's been tracking you, but I'll take that, my friend.
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Sean Ryan
Oh, man. But, 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?
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Brian Keating
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 imagine you keep asking a girl out, 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. And the whole community is thinking about things and is excited about things. And then, I'm sorry to say I'm just been completely underwhelmed. This, this last release by President Trump and Department of War, Pete Hegsell. I. I tore through that like a kid on, you know, Christmas morning or as soon as it Came out, I'm just.
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Sean Ryan
What'd you find?
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Brian Keating
I, I found, you know, really, it's a, a nice round number. I found like zero. I found zero. That really interested me. And worse than that, I found things that were, you know, your background, you're used to dealing with kind of like psyops and a good friend, my friend Chad Hosh, he was in the psyops, he was in U.S. army, served in the area. You know, they have exposure to things, right? They're going to prime you for certain things. I call these Psyops S C I Ops because it sounds so outlandish, so outrageous. It titillates the mind, especially if you're a nerd like me. I want to know about extra, extra dimensional 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 like to say I've got the square root of your podcast, 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 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, you know, people that have come on recently on his show, it frustrates me because that's not the way science works.
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Sean Ryan
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.
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Brian Keating
Yeah, I mean, have you, have you heard anything that would make you. I mean, these are supposed to be some of the most consequential discoveries of all time, right? Things that could question and have caused people, literally, Sean, to be burned at the stake.
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Sean Ryan
Okay?
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Brian Keating
1600 Giordano Bruno. It 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 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 look ugly today, or some hater on the Internet says something? You don't give a crap about it. But when somebody says something important and it challenges your worldview, like, that's. That's significant. So allegedly, these things could have the most consequential impact on humanity. Has your life changed? Have you questioned your belief in God? Have you thought maybe, you know, there's. There's something to these aliens and. And maybe it could be incompatible with my religion, my faith in Jesus Christ or whatever? No. I mean, I assume. No.
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Sean Ryan
I used to think there was something to this alien. I really did. Now I don't.
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Brian Keating
You know, I just don't.
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Sean Ryan
You know, I've interviewed so many people about this, and I'm not talking about Avi Loeb or. But 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.
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Brian Keating
That's right.
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Sean Ryan
You know, and so, you know, behind closed doors, off camera, they're all talking shit about each other.
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Brian Keating
Exactly.
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Sean Ryan
It's like. It's like, oh, you want disclosure, but only if you're the fucking one to disclose it. Right. You don't want to work with anybody else and actually, you know, figure this out. You just. You want to be the guy. That's what it is. And, 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, you know, the. The latest batch of the alien conspiracy thing is, you know, stopped right. At the height of the Epstein stuff in the Iran war.
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Brian Keating
Yeah.
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Sean Ryan
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 how I think about it now. I'm just like, this fucking bullshit. Of course you drop it right now.
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Brian Keating
Exactly.
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Sean Ryan
And so I think the timing alone is discrediting.
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Brian Keating
So in the ancient Roman times, you had on Jeremy Ryan Slate is a friend of mine. Not too long ago, he talked about ancient Rome and what they used to do and how they keep the masses entertained when there's no Netflix. They had Bread and circus. I call this Bread and Saucers. So 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, you know, the, the moon of Saturn, Titan, you'd be like, holy crap, that's cool. But if I told you there's dolphins swimming around on the ocean, you'd say, that's even cooler, right? And then if I. There's, there's fricking 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, 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, not, not nice to do to people. I think it's morally objectionable if you keep teasing this and just wait till you see it. And by the way, it's not just scientists, it's not just 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, Three Eye Atlas. And we can debate the scientific methods all you want. And there's a lot of objections in science because guess what? That's what scientists do. Scientists don't say, oh, you found a good discovery. Oh, that's great, Sean. You know, one, good for you. We're not like, you know, in the teams or whatever. Like, oh, you text somebody this, I'll take something. 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, Sean, is that she's always in retreat. We're making incredible progress, exciting progress, despite what doomsayers say, despite what people may say about it. And we almost don't need the aliens, like, we almost don't need it for the sense that science is so incredibly interesting, so provocative, so helpful, so useful. But we've come to believe that with science, you get technology. And I kind of say that's the problem. You know, the problem with science is that sometimes it makes technology, and so you come to expect it as a general public, well, what good is this? Why should we spend this money here? Why should we do this? Why should we do that? We 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 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 SCI Ops and let us have access to IT universe. Avi Loeb loves to say, the sky is not classified. I say physics is not classified.
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Sean Ryan
Love that. You familiar with Polymarket?
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Brian Keating
Yeah, of course.
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Sean Ryan
Holly Market only gives a 14% chance that the US will confirm that aliens exist before 2027. Did you see the post that Trump did? Yes, the other day with a. With did anybody? What is that?
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Brian Keating
You know, he's. He's a. He's a master manipulator. He's a vest. And, 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, in a cruel. Yeah, of course. Look, I. People always say to me as a sidebar, I'm sorry to go on a tangent so early in the conversation, but. But they say, like, would you want your kid to be like, President Trump? Isn't he like, oh, I have all these problems. I'm like, no, you know who I want my kid to be like, you know, I try to live a life for my sons to be like me. I try to live a life but not be copies of me. I want them to be who they are, actualize their full potential. That God has given them. But I don't want them to be me. I don't want them to be a politician. I don't want them to be an Instagram influence. I don't want them to be you. I want them, I want to be the influence of my kid, not the President. I never look, oh, John F. Kennedy. I really want my kids to go, you know, all these 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.
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Sean Ryan
Replacement.
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Brian Keating
Exactly. They're your ticket to the afterlife. 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. 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 we need is more biological fathers and more ideological fathers. And you can be both, but you don't have to be both.
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Sean Ryan
Let's get back to aliens. So Polymarker gives a 14% chance that the US government confirms alien life or technology. This year, $38 million in real money has traded on this. You've built telescopes at the South Pole looking for signals from the beginning of the universe. As a physicist, what do those odds tell you?
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Brian Keating
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 the South Pole.
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Sean Ryan
That means you've been on. On a Navy base that I've not been on.
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Brian Keating
And I've probably been on a plane. You know, put in my. The only ways I can say that I've done something Sean Ryan hasn't done is I might have been on a plan 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 F22 or something.
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Sean Ryan
Never even seen one.
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Brian Keating
It's a giant. It's the world's biggest ski plane. It is the coolest thing. It's a C130.
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Sean Ryan
Have you went to Antarctica?
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Brian Keating
I've Been there twice. I spent months of my month.
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Sean Ryan
What's going on down there?
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Brian Keating
So Antarctica is one of the most fascinating, otherworldly, just like extraterrestrial kind of planet, filled with some of the most hard charging people outside of the military you probably ever want to meet people. It's over subscribed. So it's harder to get to the South Pole to work there as a cook than it is to get into Harvard University. There's so many people that want to work there, that be there. They love the isolation, they love the desolation. It's like the movie Star wars or the ice planet Hoth covered over, frozen over in snow.
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Sean Ryan
Isolation, desolation. Sounds like my dream place.
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Brian Keating
For me it's a nightmare. Yeah. For you it's great. I love getting there. I love having been there. I hate being there.
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Sean Ryan
You love getting there. What's that like a. A 25 hour plane ride?
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Brian Keating
It takes seven days. Yeah. From San Diego.
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Sean Ryan
Holy.
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Brian Keating
It's crazy. It's crazy. And. Or you can take two and a half weeks by boat across the world's Southern Ocean, which is the most dangerous and kind of violent sea. I get seasick, so I go on a stand up paddle board. I get seasick, so I'm not taking the boat ride. But so you get there, you go from San Diego, fly to lax. You fly from LAX to either Australia or to the north island of New Zealand to Auckland, New Zealand. 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, 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 then you get there and the US has carved out an army base, a naval base and a provisioning center from this place called Christchurch. And the reason that they're 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 rayshong 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 was the last continent no one had ever seen. Antarctica. You know when Antarctica was discovered? Antarctica was discovered after the planet Uranus was discovered. We found a freaking planet before we went to the world's seventh Continent. It's a continent.
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Sean Ryan
Wow, I did not know that.
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Brian Keating
Yeah, it's an actual continent. Which means unlike the North Pole, if you go to the North Pole, you've seen that when 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 9,500ft of ice, you hit rock. That means it's a continent. So it's, it's one of Earth's seven continents, it has a population. Right now, as we're speaking, it's winter in Antarctica or it's starting to be, you know, the fall. It's going into winter there as we, you know, kind of are in spring going into summ in the Northern hemisphere. There's only about 800 people on the whole continent.
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Sean Ryan
Wow, once again, this sounds like my dream place.
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Brian Keating
Yeah, you got a, you got a 200 mile shooting range you can go out to.
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Sean Ryan
That means everybody there has to have a specific job and has to be very fucking good at it.
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Brian Keating
There's no slackers. That's right.
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Sean Ryan
That's why I imagine there's no slackers.
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Brian Keating
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 dentist. There's. If you have even a 1% chance that you're gonna 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 you could possibly save your life. And you get a toothache. So they have to. And it costs hundreds of thousand dollars for each person to get down there. So the US takes it very seriously. We go down these ski equipped cargo planes, we leave from Christchurch on a C17 if you're lucky, if you're unlucky, you get a C130 again, which is half the speed. And they can only get provisions in or out of there about three months of the year. So the station opens up in November, beginning of their spring, going into their summertime and then it ends in 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. So it's an incredible environment. And it's dark, by the way. It's dark. Pitch black three months of the year.
- [17:32]
Sean Ryan
Foreign 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 a hundred 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?
- [19:21]
Brian Keating
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 cal 1911 as kept in a safe. And there's a station master who's sometimes a scientist. I knew the station master who was a scientist the year I was there. And they have security because some people have gone literally crazy there, as you might expect, right? Complete isolation. You're not going anywhere. You know why a plane can't land there? So if a C130 were to land there in the middle of winter, it gets down to negative 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 LC130 were to land there, the hydraulic fluid and JP8 freezes at like negative 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 a drop chemo. They found out, diagnosed it. She dropped the biopsy kit. She tested that she had breast cancer, stage two or three. Then they dropped chemotherapy. So they had parachutes at night, pitch black from a C17. She ended up living a few more years after that. She wrote a memoir about. But it's the most isolated place on earth. Literally, there's.
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Sean Ryan
There's.
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Brian Keating
Imagine a thousand people in the entire continental U.S. just imagine that. How, how far you'd have to go until you meet. So again, for people like you, you probably sounds amazing. You just catch up on your reading,
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Sean Ryan
you see where we're at. We're out in the woods.
- [21:36]
Brian Keating
I know.
- [21:37]
Sean Ryan
You know?
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Brian Keating
Yeah, exactly.
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Sean Ryan
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?
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Brian Keating
Yeah. Yeah.
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Sean Ryan
What do you think about that?
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Brian Keating
Well, I've seen some stuff from this gentleman, Lou Elizondo. I don't know if you. Lou, on the podcast. Yeah. So he had this book, came out a couple years ago, imminent. I tried to have him on. Look, I. I take a skeptical view. It's like when you were a kid. I'm Jewish, but. But I actually grew up Catholic and it's a long story, but. But you remember, like when, when Christmas would come and you'd be so excited. Like you just knew your mom was gonna, your dad was gonna get you that racetrack or the RC truck or that, 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, oh, you know, that feeling of being let down. You've had it, right? I've had it.
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Sean Ryan
I was gonna ask if you missed Christmas. Maybe not. Huh?
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Brian Keating
We have enough holidays as it is. Yeah. So we are in that same situation. We're promised disclosure. We're promised it's gonna be groundbreaking. Literally yesterday, Congresswoman Luna Burchett, a lot of people you've talked to a lot of people. You know 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.
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Sean Ryan
Why do you think we're not?
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Brian Keating
Ah, man, we can go. We can. We can do eight hours on this if you want. But. But I'll tell you, I think there's a bunch of different things. I don't actually think the. The Epstein filed distraction from the Iran war. I don't think any of really pertinent a. Because a lot of it surfaced in 2017, you know, thanks to Tom DeLonge and to the Stars Academy and, and, and people that you might have interviewed. I, I Talked to Tom DeLong 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. In an extremely low trust environment. In other words, when you've talked to people, you've talked to Ryan Graves. Okay, I've talked to him. I actually talked to him with one of his wingman who's a friend of mine, who's a Naval veteran, an F18 pilot, just like Ryan. And you talk about it. I would say most of the stories that I've heard and even people like David Grush, you know, I respect these people, but I have yet to hear them say, here's the physical evidence, Sean.
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Sean Ryan
If these things never go the full
- [24:13]
Brian Keating
distance, they never produce the evidence.
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Sean Ryan
A lot of it is non human biologics. Yeah, well, that could be a fucking deer carcass on the side of the road, right?
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Brian Keating
I'm not around.
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Sean Ryan
I'm being serious.
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Brian Keating
100.
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Sean Ryan
If you're gonna go, why aren't we going the full distance? Like you're not a fucking whistleblower. You're bringing up bullshit. I'm fucking nothing.
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Brian Keating
I can't say that, you know. Cause 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 Strato tanker 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 F18, F14 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. Sorry, I just didn't have it. I wanted to study the stars. I wanted to not, you know, not miss that opportunity. That's kind of what I'm good at. But on the other hand, this stuff is so interesting, and yet I keep hearing things like, you know, I heard from somebody, or, you know, David Groesch. I can't. You know, these are the testimonies. I haven't seen them. They do. They're interdimensional beings, like Congresswoman Luna. And I would bet it's a spirit. It's a spirit. It's a God. That's why I say I call these aliens of the gaps. It's a form of almost religious worship. Same is happening with AI, by the way. You see this worship, this power, these people involved. Look at the people involved in AI, Sean.
- [25:40]
Sean Ryan
What do you mean, worship and AI? What are you talking about?
- [25:42]
Brian Keating
Worship and AI is creating a God in our image. Okay, so just what God did with us. God created us from dirt. Adam. In Hebrew it means earth. It means dirt. God carved us out of earth. Created. We can believe it literally. 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. It was humans developed technology. They created the first composite building material with straw, with earth, with dirt. That's a composite building material, like rebar and concrete, right? That's come out. And they said, hey, we have technology now. We don't need to go on top of a mountain that God made. We can build a tower ourselves to go to the sky like a twin towers. We can do this. We're so powerful. We're so mighty, right? It's an old tale that we can compete with God. Why does the Bible. Why does the Torah, the Old Testament, say they did it? They wanted to fight with God.
- [26:42]
Sean Ryan
Why?
- [26:43]
Brian Keating
Because God had restricted the knowledge that human beings were capable of having. Again, believe it or not, I really don't care if somebody believes the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, I don't care. The point is these stories are eternal. They have something to teach us. 3,000 years ago, they can teach us stuff to this very day. The story that people are trying to do now is to create a God sort of in our image. Right. That will do things for us. Supernatural, have capabilities, all powerful capabilities, all knowing the Panopticon. Know what you're doing, know. People trust ChatGPT more than they trust 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.
- [27:27]
Sean Ryan
Right.
- [27:27]
Brian Keating
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 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 would be almost. We would be so revolutionarily displaced. The question is, you know, if that's real, if these aliens exist and they have technological capabilities to travel light years across the galaxy, why is it that Congresswoman Luna or somebody else is capable of either suppressing it or disclosing it? I mean.
- [28:35]
Sean Ryan
Yeah, I don't think. I mean, are they capable of that?
- [28:39]
Brian Keating
Well, I'll ask you the question.
- [28:41]
Sean Ryan
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.
- [28:49]
Brian Keating
Boom.
- [28:50]
Sean Ryan
Your front page of every paper, every podcast wants to talk to you, every news network wants to talk to you. It's a great, great PR stunt, right?
- [28:57]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [28:58]
Sean Ryan
I mean, this episode's gonna do good because we started it off talking about aliens. I guarantee, because of Me, I'm joking.
- [29:05]
Brian Keating
I'm joking.
- [29:06]
Sean Ryan
But, but I'm being serious. Like, it always hits. Yeah, it always hits.
- [29:11]
Brian Keating
AI is another.
- [29:12]
Sean Ryan
Nothing ever comes out.
- [29:14]
Brian Keating
So. And there's an incentive to keep it that way. Right? Because if you do disclose, I think
- [29:18]
Sean Ryan
there's something to what you're saying. I mean, I don't, I'm, I'm not, I'm not that interested in it anymore because nothing ever comes. There's no, there's never any breaking that comes out. That's, you know that. And there's nothing you can do about it anyways.
- [29:33]
Brian Keating
Well, you can use critical reason.
- [29:35]
Sean Ryan
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 US Government.
- [29:50]
Brian Keating
That's right. No, I, I agree with you. I guess here's the question I've been wanting to ask you. And, and, and originally when I, you know, I, I actually think I might have invited you on my podcast at one point to do like a Veterans Day celebration. So anyway, at some point, I'd love for you to come on. 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. 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. So. You're welcome. Yeah, thank you for all you do. And we're going to play around with some other stuff now, so keep that handy. We'll go with that later on. So I want to turn, with your permission 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. Let me ask you a question. Some of the pilots who saw things, the Nimitz incident, the Tic Tac incident, Commander Fravor, Lieutenant Commander Alex and Dietrich, they claim they saw things, right? They got back to the boat. 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 Fravors 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.
- [31:30]
Sean Ryan
Okay.
- [31:30]
Brian Keating
If you're on point, if you're going on patrol and one of your buddies says, I think I see this thing, and it's unusual, it could be an IED or not. Like, when you got back to camp, would you like tease that person or would you say we should take this fricking seriously?
- [31:45]
Sean Ryan
Yeah, you would say we should take this seriously.
- [31:48]
Brian Keating
So what do you make of the fact that when they got back and throughout and Ryan Graves 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 to flight risk. Right. For these aircraft that are operating at high velocities. Right. What do you make of the fact that the fellow aviators, they're equivalent of operators and teams, Right. They were teasing them. I just. Psychologically, can you help me get through that?
- [32:20]
Sean Ryan
Well, I mean, I think the, the comparison as you brought up is a little unbalanced. I mean, an IED in the heyday of Iraq or Afghanistan, I mean, that was a. You would see multiple of those a day. Very common. You know what I mean? Very. Nobody would second guess that. I mean, they might second guess you, but they're not going to make, make fun of you. You know, I mean, it was just so prevalent. It's happening multiple times a day. You don't see UFOs popping in and out of the water and, you know, defying physics every day, every year, every decade. Like, you just don't, you know, if you see it, you're very, you're, you're, you're. You know, it's very rare. Right.
- [33:04]
Brian Keating
I can see like my brother, I have three brothers, right. I can see them teasing the out of me. Right.
- [33:08]
Sean Ryan
Like it's kind of like a ghost.
- [33:09]
Brian Keating
Right?
- [33:10]
Sean Ryan
Right.
- [33:10]
Brian Keating
Okay.
- [33:10]
Sean Ryan
Like you might tease somebody if they've seen a ghost. Like, oh, yeah, okay, you've seen a ghost. Right.
- [33:16]
Brian Keating
But if that ghost could take out, you know, the entire intake on your F18, you know, you know, Hornet, wouldn't you be a little bit, you know, like, more interested in seeing if it's not, not teasing them. But actually, let's, let's go through the encounters Like, I'd be interested as a professional. Yeah.
- [33:33]
Sean Ryan
Is a professional. I'd probably crack a little bit of a joke.
- [33:35]
Brian Keating
You would. Okay.
- [33:36]
Sean Ryan
You know what I mean? But I'd also be interested to hear what was going on. I mean, I mean, my own producer is the one that logged it into the logbook. I mean, he was there when that happened. Yeah. And. But, yeah, so I, I'm, I'm not saying, like, they should have been ridiculed or anything like that.
- [33:56]
Brian Keating
Absolutely.
- [33:57]
Sean Ryan
But I, I. All I'm saying is I could understand some heckling.
- [34:01]
Brian Keating
Okay.
- [34:02]
Sean Ryan
You know, going on.
- [34:03]
Brian Keating
Right, right. And then when you hear things again, I'm a civilian. I encourage to do stuff that you and your audience does. Right. Although I do have some gifts for your audience that we're going to talk about later on. So that's a cliffhanger. That's a retention device. Another question. Why I turn the tables on the podcaster and ask you a question in the context of me as a civilian, I'm told, Keating, shut your mouth. These guys saw what they saw. You don't have the balls. Strap on an F18. You didn't serve in the Air Force Intelligence like Grush. What should I say in those situations? It's true. You know, I'm a pilot, but I don't fly F18s. You don't fly Cessnas. Right. But tell me, how should a civilian, you know, questioning what level of deference, what level of credulity. Should I just believe someone because they strapped on a jet and I didn't have the balls to do it? Or, you know, help me, walk me through that, because I get that a lot. Like, you didn't have. You, You. You don't have the skills that, that he has, and you don't have the. You didn't have the fortitude to join, so you can't question them. Even though I'm like, well, I'm a physicist. Like, I know about flir. I know about radar. I know about technology. I know how the. You. How astronomy has always fed into technology for military applications, first and foremost. But you're right, I'm not a military operator. So how do I, as a civilian, you know, kind of navigate that chasm?
- [35:30]
Sean Ryan
I. I don't think any of that's even relevant. You didn't serve. What the. 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 bomb somebody and you're. You're second Guessing the tactics?
- [35:46]
Brian Keating
No, not at all.
- [35:47]
Sean Ryan
They don't have any experience with UFOs or aliens. Just like anybody else, they saw some phenomena, right? So, I mean, I think that's okay.
- [36:00]
Brian Keating
It's not legit.
- [36:01]
Sean Ryan
Not very well crafted defense mechanism, you know, to my opinion.
- [36:05]
Brian Keating
But, but, or, or the, the fact that like, oh, they're, they're, they, they have 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 Kinet, you don't. Keating, you sit behind a chalkboard and teach, you know, quantum mechanics. Like nothing, there's nothing legitimate. The only ones that steal man what
- [36:28]
Sean Ryan
they're saying, the only ones that seem to have an abundance of experience tracking UFOs in real time have pretty much all been debunked and are full of shit. So, So, I mean that's, you know, when it's a continuous thing, it's like, oh, there's the experience. Oh shit, it got debunked again. But I, I don't know. Does that answer your question?
- [36:48]
Brian Keating
Yeah, I think it does, yeah.
- [36:50]
Sean Ryan
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 at $100 million plus telescope array in Chile's. I can't say this Atomic Atomica.
- [37:20]
Brian Keating
Atacama.
- [37:21]
Sean Ryan
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. Into 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, is past. Wow. This past. Guess that's impressive. You are a licensed multi engine turbine rated commercial pilot who has lectured on six of seven continents including Antarctica. And you arrive today with a replica of Galileo's 1609 military telescope, a Martian regalia sample and a 4.3 billion year old meteorite that you will send to 250 members of this audience with APO addresses. That's awesome. Welcome to the show. Thanks. It's quite the intro.
- [38:49]
Brian Keating
Yeah. Better late than never. But you should hear what my mother in law says in her rebuttal to the introduction.
- [38:54]
Sean Ryan
Oh. Oh man. And then before we get too far into it, I got a Patreon account. It's quite the community. They're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. Thank you. 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?
- [39:26]
Brian Keating
So one of the oldest partnerships in science is between astronomy and the military. Most people don't know about that, but the same types of technologies, of inventions, of calculations, of theory are exactly applicable in military situations. For example, the telescope, this replica telescope here of Galileo's 1609 telescope. So Galileo didn't invent the telescope. A lot of people think, oh, he invented it. He actually kind of stole the idea and he sort of admits to it. But that's academia for you. You know, 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 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 quantity has a quality all its own. Creating something for the first time, like creating a telescope, is one thing, but then improving it by a factor of 10, it's almost like it's a new invention. And that's what Galileo did. He didn't invent it. It's the most simple thing you can think about. It's got two lenses. It's got a lens over here. This is called the objective lens. This is the side that faces the object that you're looking for. And then this is called the eyepiece lens. Another lens on the other side. This simple thing has about 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 the type of quality of the glass that he used, the lens material, the spacing of the material. He also did things that are kind of counterintuitive. You see, Shawn, the lens that's here is actually bigger than this brass disc that surrounds it. But the brass disc is actually crucial to the improvement, because what the brass disc does is it focuses the fovea of your eye in the best part of the lens. If you had the whole lens exposed to the light, there's all sorts of artifacts of glints, of glare. It's called ghosting. And those effects reduced the utility of the telescope. So Galileo counterintuitively said, let's take this telescope and make it smaller. It's called stopping down, like an aperture. And f stop on a camera that actually restricts the light, that made it focus better. It was genius. No, I wouldn't have thought of that. Right? Let's make this thing better by making it smaller. Like said, nobody ever. You always want bigger, better. But no, that would have made it worse. He made it better. The other thing that he did, which nobody really had done before. It's crazy. Is put it on a tripod. He invented the tripod. And what do you get when you put an optic on top of a tripod, Shawn?
- [42:42]
Sean Ryan
Stability.
- [42:42]
Brian Keating
Gets 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 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 rifle 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 a trillion dollars. So I can't bring that for you. Maybe next time. But what was so useful about it is Galileo didn't use it for astronomy. That wasn't the first thing he used it for, he did for himself, because that was what his passion was. The first night, he invented this new, improved version of it with the tripod, he looked at the moon, and the Moon at that time was unknown territory. People had no idea what was on it, what it was made of. If there's life there, if it's totally different than the Earth. And he looked at it and he saw it looks perfectly smooth and circular to the eye. It has blotches on it, but he didn't know what those were. He looked at that and he saw the following. He saw mountains. He saw craters. He saw lava flows. He said, wait a second. People are telling us for 2000 years it's perfect. It's a crystalline sphere. This isn't perfect. It's riddled with holes and craters and marks and mountain ranges and rift valleys and craters and canyons. It's kind of like the Earth. That was the first unification of an extraterrestrial object with the Earth. That was amazing. He then looked at other objects and did things, and he wrote these all in his notebook, and he kept them all. In a span of three months, he discovered the following things. The Moon has craters. The Moon has rivers. Looks like rivers to the eye. It looks like it has oceans on it. Doesn't have flowing water anymore or ever did, really. It has valleys, canyons, has vast plains upon it. Okay, he saw all that. That was one night. The next night, he saw the planet Venus goes through certain phases just like the Moon. In other words, sometimes there's a crescent Venus, sometimes there's a full Venus, sometimes there's a waning crescent Venus. Sometimes there's no Venus, and you can't see it. That must have meant that Venus was closer to the sun than the Earth, because that's the only way we get phases of the Moon. 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 three planets touching each other. Okay. And then the last most insane thing that he ever did, in my opinion, again, this is all in just a few weeks in the winter, January of 1610. 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. 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 that seemed to be there every Night that he would look on it, and it was always accompanied by four stars. And the four stars were always like, kind of moving with respect to Jupiter. And then Jupiter was moving with respect to the Earth. And he was such a genius, he said the following. He said, I think what I'm looking at is a miniature version of the solar system with the sun replaced by Jupiter and the planets that orbit around the sun, which was heretical to think back then, by the way. The planets that orbit around the sun are orbiting around Jupiter. So Jupiter's kind of like the sun to this miniature solar system that we saw edge on, like a disk. So he saw these things moving back and forth, always around Jupiter, no matter where Jupiter was, every time of the year that he could see it. And this is just mind blowing. And he raced to publish this. He published in under two months, which is like a record. He published this book called the Sidereus Nuncius the Starry Messenger. And he didn't tell people how to build the telescope. He kept that classified. But he did go to Venice, which, you know, Italy was only a country, you know, in the modern sense, I think, in the 1840s, like, it was unified. It was made up of, like, Florence and Tuscany and Venice. Like, they're disparate doges and kingdoms. Right? Right. So he went to Venice, he shopped it around to different militaries, and he said, look, guys, with this telescope, you can go on top of a tower in the Piazza de 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 onto the ocean and you can see in the lagoon. You can see a boat today that won't be here for three 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 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, 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 Gandalf or something. He knew that. 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 when, but we know that it did not come from our solar system.
- [49:05]
Sean Ryan
How do we know that?
- [49:06]
Brian Keating
It's 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 to it with a rocket, but we know for sure it was there. It was discovered by an Air Force telescope, not an astronomer, not Avi Loeb looking through a telescope. It was discovered by an Air Force telescope on top of Haleakala, which is a mountain in Maui. 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.
- [50:11]
Sean Ryan
Yeah,
- [50:14]
Brian Keating
I love it. The government would never lie. They just have our best interest and always. Forever. They always have, right? I mean, even to Galileo. Eventually. He ran afoul of the government because of these astronomical telescopes, because of the discoveries he made. Bruno ran afoul for the same Catholic government which was the government of the time, the superpower military, undefeated champion of the world. He ran afoul because he suggested that life could have existed on other planets. 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. 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.
- [51:07]
Sean Ryan
Wow. Wow.
- [51:15]
Brian Keating
If you look at it, you know, do governments lie? Of course they do. Is there ever a reason. I'd love your opinion at that time, saying that the Earth orbited the sun would be. It would be like saying the lab leak of COVID If you believe that it would be like that on steroids. 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 steel, man, what the people say that we have to keep this quiet. We can't disclose. Trust me, bro. How do you view that as someone who's deeply involved? Well, I think there's a
- [52:09]
Sean Ryan
staunch difference between flat out lying and just not disclosing. You know, I think. I think there's a. A line there, don't you?
- [52:23]
Brian Keating
I do. And I think that the government, you know, but I guess I'm asking, is there a moral reason to lie?
- [52:28]
Sean Ryan
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 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 yet. You know what I mean? For example, it's like, do we believe them?
- [53:02]
Brian Keating
Them?
- [53:02]
Sean Ryan
Why would we believe them? They've lied about so many other 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.
- [53:22]
Brian Keating
You think that's that far gone?
- [53:25]
Sean Ryan
I think it's Pretty close.
- [53:29]
Brian Keating
Well, you know, I have this debate, you know, I told you before we started recording, my, my brother in law, Jim Brewer is, was a recon marine. And you know, I told him about some of the things that, you know, these, the people that have alien encounters have been reporting. And, and just, and he's, he's like, well, we did what's called siri, like search, evade, rescue, sear training, search. He said when we did that, he, he said, said I got waterboarded. You know, he's, he's like, the government does stuff to us and I'm convinced the government lies. You know, they lie to people that should have the deepest trust. And I don't understand how they expect that trust to be maintained. You know, for example, pilots report things in the skies, right? One explanation is extraterrestrial craft visiting us from other dimensions. Right. Within non human biologics. Okay, That's a hypothesis, right. I'm a scientist, I can test a hypothesis given data, update my priors, update my hypothesis, iterate scientific method in action. Right. Another hypothesis is these are craft from the US from adversarial nations, reporting things, doing things that we don't know about. For example, During World War II, 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 doing good and not trying to kill everybody. But during the Manhattan Project, that gets a lot of attention because it created the atomic weapons that eventually 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, the Heisenberg, just incredible scientific. That's where quantum theory began and nuclear physics was first understood, was in Europe. But there was a parallel effort that almost nobody knows about. And yet you use it every day. You know, if you're driving in a car, if you're flying in a plane. And it was radar. Radar. Radar was one of the most significant military advances of World War II. Almost nobody knows about it. And it was also created by physicists. So two of the most decisive technological enabling things were invented by astronomers and physicists operating in World War II and slightly before Raider was particularly valuable because it was much more deployable than the nuclear technology of Los Alamos. And then leading to the bombs, right. That took this huge effort, know, a trillion dollars in today's dollars. Radar was much more accessible. Any country could develop it. But at that time there was also an effort to do counter radar. You can't have counter nuclear weapons. I guess you could shoot them down with a Patriot missile, but that doesn't really stop the process of nuclear detonation. Right, but you could actually counter the radar with jamming, with stealth. All those things were invented in the 1940s. Some of whom were invented by colleagues of my colleagues that, you know, were still alive in this generation as I essentially. And one of them was a name, a physicist by the name of Louis Alvarez. Have you ever heard the hypothesis that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago? So speaking because, because I, I am an absent minded professor, so I will forget. So I brought some meteors here. Okay, so these are honest to goodness fragments of the early solar system that are older than the Earth. These are 4.3 billion years old. These are found in Argentina. So this one's. And I brought some more.
- [57:24]
Sean Ryan
How old is this?
- [57:25]
Brian Keating
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. Do Mr. Wizard with you today, Sean. Here's a compass, magnetic compass. Put it next to there and maybe show the camera what happens to it.
- [57:49]
Sean Ryan
Well, I don't know if the camera
- [57:51]
Brian Keating
can see it, but yeah, so it's good deflecting it. Because these are magnetic. They're also slightly radioactive. But don't worry, they're perfectly so What I wanted to do because. 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 video box. So I made a special website. Brian Keating.com SRS so if they go in there, whoever gets there first, first come, first serve, I will send them this actual meteorite. Okay?
- [58:38]
Sean Ryan
Oh, damn, that's cool.
- [58:40]
Brian Keating
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?
- [58:50]
Sean Ryan
Don't believe I have. Don't know.
- [58:51]
Brian Keating
You will love it. And here, you know, in God's country. I will give you a list of the four major meteor showers every year. You don't need a telescope. You don't need something, anything. Besides, 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. Four times per year, once per quarter. Basically, these meteors here, okay, these rocks here, these are older than the. Than this. The physicist who discovered that the dinosaurs were killed by a giant version of one of these, 10 kilometers in size. Okay, I can bring that today. That crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. His name is Louis 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. 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.
- [59:52]
Sean Ryan
Radar.
- [59:52]
Brian Keating
He said the following. He said, when an object gets close to a radar station, the radar's pinging it, right? And 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, 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 captain. You say, oh, it's going away. And then it drops a bomb on you. And you see it at the last second. What would you say? You'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 fricking heck. Right? Germans were. Top military empire the world had ever seen. They would say that defied the laws of physics. How do we know that some of the things that are happening now aren't military technology?
- [61:14]
Sean Ryan
We don't out. We have no idea.
- [61:16]
Brian Keating
What's a simpler hypothesis? Occam's razor suggests the simplest hypothesis isn't always correct, but it's more likely than an outlandish or less probable scenario. Right? So interdimensional beings with non human biologics have traversed space and time at distances that we can't traverse in under 30,000 years with our best technology. 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 Patreon tier that I'm a member at and the Vigilance elite. I asked a question of Brian Keating. I said ask Sean if he's ever heard of the Feynman point. You ever heard of the Feynman point? Okay. Richard Feynman, another Titanic physicist, Manhattan Project scientist, professor, Caltech, winner of the Nobel Prize. Discovering a quantum theory. He found an interesting pattern in the number PI. The number PI is the ratio of a circle circumference to its diameter. 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 catches can do it to 22 decimal places.
- [62:36]
Sean Ryan
Wow.
- [62:37]
Brian Keating
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 666-66-6666 in a row. Nothing like that happens before. And that point is called the Feynman point. Do you know where the Feynman point occurs? How many digits of PI you have to memorize out to to get to the Feynman point? Sean?
- [63:05]
Sean Ryan
No idea.
- [63:06]
Brian Keating
762. 762.
- [63:10]
Sean Ryan
It's good caliber.
- [63:11]
Brian Keating
What's that? The great caliber. Right. I always wondered like is your handle because of the by 31 or 50. Hopefully we'll try out the range at some point. So now you might say that's like, hey, well, Sean, that's really cool, right? And you might say like, that's a really cool number and Richard Feynman is really smart. Or is it a coincidence? Scientist has to weigh both options. It could be aliens, it could be human technology. Right now we have no evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt in a scientific sense that aliens exist, that technology is visiting us. 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 estimate it. If I told you, you're just an alien and I say, Sean, Earth is this blue green planet with an atmosphere and life's all around the planet. There's seven continents where land is, where, where land based animals can live. One out of seven continents is called. One of them is called Antarctica. I don't tell you where it is. I don't tell you anything about it. How much of Earth's 8 billion people live on that continent? What would be Your first guess?
- [64:19]
Sean Ryan
800.
- [64:20]
Brian Keating
800. Well, you know me now. Yeah, yeah.
- [64:24]
Sean Ryan
I mean I'd probably take the population divided by seven.
- [64:26]
Brian Keating
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 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, six of the seven continents. But by just pure logical explanation, you should expect to find it everywhere. So I'm not saying logic is a panacea. I'm not saying it's always the solution and you should only think scientifically. But I want to use it as a guide, at least as much as we can as a human being species. To get at knowledge in the most efficient, effective way possible. And if it turns up, when it turns up, let's see what happens. Don't let the people suppress what the information is truly scientific. Perfectly.
- [65:19]
Sean Ryan
Thank you. Thank you. Let's take a quick break. Aging is inevitable. And if you're anything like me, you feel it a little more every year. Sore knees, tight joints. Recovery takes longer than it used to. We can't stop the clock, but we can take care of ourselves. That's why I take Bubs, naturals, collagen peptides. I mix it into my tea every morning. It blends right in. No taste, no Gritty texture. It's simple. I've been using BUBS collagen for a long time and I genuinely notice the difference. My knees feel better, my skin looks better. I recover faster after workouts. I stick with BUBS because I trust the company. Their collagen is NSF certified for sport and sourced from grass fed cattle. So it's clean, tested and exactly what they say it is. And there's a bigger mission here. BUBS was founded in Honor of Navy Seal Glenn Bubb Dougherty. And 10% of all profits go towards helping veterans transition back to civilian life. So you're not just supporting your joints and recovery, you're supporting people who served this country. If you're ready to upgrade your daily routine with Bubs Naturals Collagen, head to Bubsnaturals.com SRS and use code Sean for 20% off your order. Again, that's Bubsnaturals.com SARS 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 versus 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 little flick like that. Right. Seems pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Gotta silence it. In another lifetime. I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazine. Supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're. And now we're bringing them back. It does look pretty cool. I gotta. I gotta admit that. All right, Brian, we're back from the break. I forgot to give you a gift. Vigilance Elite Gummy bears. Made in the USA. Legal in all 50 states. Not that you have to worry about that in California. Right. But anyways, are they kosher?
- [68:07]
Brian Keating
I gotta, I gotta ask the question. Let's see.
- [68:09]
Sean Ryan
I don't know what that means.
- [68:10]
Brian Keating
Corn syrup gelatin, but not kosher. But I'll give it to my brother
- [68:15]
Sean Ryan
in law right off.
- [68:16]
Brian Keating
I'll give it to my Jim Brewer. This is for you brother, but thank you very much.
- [68:20]
Sean Ryan
Yeah, so I want to get into the telescope. Rope the bicep.
- [68:24]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [68:24]
Sean Ryan
Can you. How did you. How did you get involved in that?
- [68:29]
Brian Keating
So you know, a lot of kids when they're young men, they can be, look up to their dad. They can have difficulties with her dad. They can be competitive with their dad. My, you know, father was in the captain of the football team. I got to be captain of the football team, you know, or whatever. Or my, my, my father served. I'm gonna say 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. He actually abandoned my older brother Kevin and me. And we grew up adopted by my stepfather, Ray Keating, who was a Vietnam pilot. F4s and KC135s served in Vietnam. And he adopted us from my family, which was. I grew up Jewish. Like I said, both parents were Jewish. And then my stepfather's family was Catholic and huge, you know, 50 brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. And it was so such an incredible family. I mean, they're still, you know, tighter with me than my own biological family growing up. Except for my brothers, of course, and my mom. But my father just. He abandoned us. So I actually changed my name, was legally adopted kid. My name when I was a kid was not Keating. It was Ax, Brian Axe. So now it's Keating. Changed my name. My brother, too. And. And he left. He just, you know, he abandoned me and my brother. I was seven. He. My brother was 10. And he moved to the West coast. Didn't see him 15, 16 years.
- [70:04]
Sean Ryan
Wow.
- [70:05]
Brian Keating
Until I started to kind of follow in his academic footsteps, which is weird because I didn't remember what he looked like. Like, okay, I was seven. Last time I saw him, my brother was ten. I never understood how he could abandon a ten year old. I was like, I'm seven. I'm not that important. But, like, my brother was like a full. I mean, you have kids, you know what it's like. I. I can't imagine doing it. Anybody. To be honest with you.
- [70:28]
Sean Ryan
Me neither.
- [70:29]
Brian Keating
But he did. And he had his reasons later find out why. But. But I.
- [70:34]
Sean Ryan
What were his reasons?
- [70:35]
Brian Keating
He. He felt like my mother had turned us against him that had, you know, she had kind of pitted us psychologically against him, which wasn't that big of a stretch because he was kind of an a hole. 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.
- [70:59]
Sean Ryan
Tried to beat up a seasoned Vietnam veteran.
- [71:02]
Brian Keating
No. Yeah. He did that work out? It didn't work out that well. Did not work. So. But he was this brutally complex, brilliant. I mean, still the Most. I've interviewed, 23 Nobel Prize winners. Puts all them to shame. I mean, he did. He passed away, as you'll find out. But he was a great scientist. And, you know, when I was going through my formative years, you know, in high school, I got really interested in astronomy. I got a telescope just like this and it changed my life. You know, I had been adopted. I'd been Jewish as from birth, but I was adopted. I got converted to Catholicism by my mom and my stepfather, changed my name, got baptized, confirmed. And instead of being what's called a bar mitzvah when you're in judaism at age 13, you become a man, so to speak. Although having 13 year olds now, it's kind of a far stretch to call them a man. But anyway, it's a rite of passage. I was actually not having my bar mitzvah. I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church of St. John and St. Mary in Chappaquany, 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 love 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, but in, in reality, it kind of, it transformed my worldview and I started to learn more. And this is before the Internet, in 1986, 87. There's no Google, There was no, you know, he had the Sunday New York Times newspaper in Chappaqua, New York, right? So I could look up stuff. Oh, wait, I saw Jupiter. I mean, how many people out there know they can see a planet with their naked eye or see a galaxy with their naked eye? You can do all that stuff. I got this telescope. I worked at a deli down the hall, down the street from where I was living in Dobbs Ferry at the time, New York. And I 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? There, get your kid a telescope. Just do it. It's 50 bucks. Actually, I have a website, briankey.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 it costs a few thousand bucks. It takes Hubble kind of telescope images, you know, incredible stuff. It's all, it's all electronic. You don't put your eye on it, but you can put just the most incredible vision into their mind. And then when they're 10 or 11 years old, maybe they'll be so crazy.
- [74:02]
Sean Ryan
I mean, when I was. Because I've been looking at these for my kids, because they're always. My son's like obsessed with the moon. And I was looking up telescopes on Amazon and I was like, holy, these things will like find the damn stars for you and focus in. You don't even have to do anything.
- [74:18]
Brian Keating
But don't start with that.
- [74:19]
Sean Ryan
Start with I did and I started with the old NASA. Yeah, yeah. You know, yeah.
- [74:23]
Brian Keating
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.
- [74:27]
Sean Ryan
Yeah, I supposed to do that.
- [74:31]
Brian Keating
So. But everything, you can see the exact same things that Galileo saw. And unlike, you know, Sean saying, people say, what's it like to be a scientist? I can't really tell you. You know, 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 it right. But there was one guy who discovered the craters on the moons, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. That's Galileo. And so you can not only see what he saw. This is what's insane about astronomy. For 50 bucks, so go out and get a freaking telescope for all your kids or grandkids or whoever. Sean. It's the cheapest kind of insurance that they'll be curious, thinking for themselves, individuals. You can see exactly what Galileo saw from the middle of San Diego or New York City. He didn't, he didn't need a Hubble telescope to see that stuff. He was in northern Italy. You can see the exact same stuff he saw even from a light polluted place like New York City. Craters, valleys on the moon, canyons, you can see the rings of sound. So what I'm saying is I got addicted to it as a 10, as a 12 year old. 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 2000 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 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. 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.
- [76:46]
Sean Ryan
Really?
- [76:47]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [76:47]
Sean Ryan
Just because you all liked girls?
- [76:48]
Brian Keating
No. Well, that's, that's not like some small thing, Sean. I mean, I decided I didn't want
- [76:54]
Sean Ryan
to be a priest like girls.
- [76:55]
Brian Keating
No, no, I decided I want to be a priest because I like girls. But no, I decided that I don't want to be a part of a religious organization that would punish someone for scientific truth. And at that time, Pope John Paul ii, who's, you know, my favorite Pope, I still love, I still love Catholicism, I still love the Popes, you know, but he was special. He was a very special person. And even he never pardoned Galileo. He just said he was right. Imagine like you do something, you're in service, the president doesn't like, give you a commendation, certainly doesn't give you accommodation. But they're like, 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.
- [77:46]
Sean Ryan
That's when you decided to become an atheist.
- [77:47]
Brian Keating
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. I served in the Catholic Church. I loved it. And for me, I came 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. So if Christianity has these challenges, like they're not gonna accept scientific wisdom or they didn't forgive Galileo. And so, so then I could say, well, Judaism has got to be wrong. Because, you know, if something is based on, you know, if, if, if calculus is based on algebra and, and you know, calculus, you can say, well, calculus or algebra is wrong, then certainly calculus will be wrong. That's not true. But, but that's kind of the analogy I'm making here. So I just felt like all of religion, you know, has these things where you have to listen to these, these authorities, you have to do what they say, you have to think what they do, and you can't think for yourself. Again, 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 that. So at that time, I became a scientist in terms of curiosity because I wasn't only looking at things and oh, cool. I started taking notes, I started doing research. I started. And again, this is before Google. And sometimes the more you struggle to get information, like nowadays I feel bad for my kids, kids in some sense because they want to know, like, 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. No, you literally look it up in one second. You get instant gratification. You don't do any of the muscular work. You don't, you don't damage the muscle to break it down in your brain. And so I feel like they're losing out on that. For me, I was doing all that and I felt like the more I learned about science, the less room there was for God. Look, I'm not the first person to say that right? Nowadays I'm practicing religious, I practice Judaism. So obviously I came back to it. 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 or I grew up in rural upstate New York, Northern Westchester County. 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, let me look up in scientific journals, like whatever happened to him? Jim Ax James Act. Whatever happened to him? What did he do? And I saw these papers about science and it was like the most high level science. The origin of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement, theory of relativity, origin of the universe. And I'm like, this guy has my DNA or I have his DNA, but there's something different. I wasn't raised with him, but I'm doing the same thing as him. It's weird. It felt creepy to be influenced by a ghost. Yeah. I didn't know anything. I didn't even know if he was alive.
- [81:14]
Sean Ryan
Wow.
- [81:15]
Brian Keating
And I hit 22. I was in grad school, 21 at Brown.
- [81:18]
Sean Ryan
So your mom, I mean she would never.
- [81:21]
Brian Keating
Oh, they were, they, they fought so bad. And they did kind of use us between his intermediaries. That's, that was a challenge in 1970s. Happened a lot. He and, and also, you know, to really, you know, give him the kind of negative judgment that he deserved. When you get divorced, you know, hopefully 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 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, Cap. A 10 year old who you were close to. It wasn't like, you know, they weren't close. They were very close. Gave him up because he hated my mother so much and she hated him just as much. Okay. It was a very nasty divorce. And so by the time I hit graduate school, 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 Long Island, New York. Sean. I didn't know what he looked like 15, 16 years later. It's bizarre. And I started to research what he was doing and what kind of research he was doing and what happened to him. And it turned out he was still writing things about, like, quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity, all the stuff that I was, like, fascinated with and I wanted to dedicate my life to. But there was, like, quantum entanglement. Like, somehow he had influenced me from beyond the visual horizon. I hadn't seen him, kept up with him. There was no Internet, really, so it was spooky. A spooky action at a distance. He was influencing me. So I started research him, got more and more involved in it. I had, you know, kind of like a minor medical scare when I was, like, 22, and I thought it could be genetic and. And whatnot. And it turned out that my mother's mother and my father's mother both moved to the same part of Florida, which is called the. The. The Yiddish triangle. You know, all these Jewish grandmothers, they all get together, and then they live. Live, you know, three miles around Sunrise, Florida, on the. On the east coast of Florida. It's a. It's a great place to retire. And they were living basically like retirement community, like phase two, Sunrise Palms, and phase eight, you know, whatever. And they hated each other, too, but they had friends that were friends with each other. So these. These two Jewish grandmothers got connected via their other Jewish grandmother friends. And I call the Yentanet. Like, before the Internet, there was the Yentanet. These old Jewish grandmothers talk, and they started talking, talking, talking. Oh, Brian's at Brown University. He's a scientist. The other one says this. Do you know he's still alive? Oh, you know, somehow my father finds out that not only am I alive, I mean, he didn't know, but. But I'm studying math and science and physics, and I'm at a. Top school at Brown University's Ivy League great school. And one night in my. In my dorm at Brown, I get a phone call, pick up the phone, and he goes, this is Jim Axe. And I. Before he said Jim Axe, I knew it was him. I knew his voice. I don't know, Sean. Sometimes the ear is deeper than the eye. And so we talked for five hours straight. He was living in California? Yep. Everything. Math, science, physics. One thing we avoided is why he abandoned me. But I was just so curious. It's like, imagine if I gave you a book from your great, great, great, 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, someone else is going to write it for you. And your 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?
- [85:33]
Sean Ryan
Not time yet for me.
- [85:35]
Brian Keating
Not time, but. But don't let it go too far. And 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 or. 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 talk 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 don't know how to say it. I've really never talked about it, but I wanted to make him.
- [86:30]
Sean Ryan
Him.
- [86:31]
Brian Keating
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.
- [86:42]
Sean Ryan
Makes sense. You want to make him proud of you.
- [86:45]
Brian Keating
I wanted to make him proud, but I wanted to make him regret a little bit of punishment for him. Even though I let him back into my life and even though he got back with my mother, you know, and they became friends, I didn't get back married or anything. He became friends and bonded over grandchildren later on in life. And he died very young. He died 69 years old, 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. But anyway, that's what I wanted. And so I invented. I said, I gotta Find something that's gonna 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, 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. Gotta have 8 billion people, okay? They're the intellectual, you know, SEAL, you know, SEAL team members, okay? They're the brightest of the brightest of the brightest point, you know, 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. Like, how the heck did the universe come to be? Not just the aliens and the black holes and the galaxy, but the universe itself. And it's a dangerous thought because, you know, people have been killed for this. People have been trotting out. 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. 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 going to compare myself to those people, all right? I can do whatever I want. I have tenure. I have brilliant graduate students, collaborators. I have resource funding supporters. The government's sponsored a lot of stuff. I work at a public university. I got paid. Gavin Newsom's my boss. You know, lucky me. For a few more months left, at least. So this is all to say that I wanted to win a Nobel Prize at all costs, but I was fortuitous because it was also studying something that's guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we could do it, which is to take a snapshot of what happened before the Big Bang, basically, before the universe started off in its incredibly intricate hit and just phenomenal acceleration and expansion. What caused the Big Bang to bang? What's the primer strike? What's the inciting incident that caused the explosion of the universe? Nobody knew it. There were theories about it. And so I designed a telescope that doesn't see Light, it sees heat. It sees microwave radiation. And that microwave radiation is all around us. It suffuses the universe. And it's the leftover heat from the fusion, nuclear fusion, of the first elements, hydrogen and helium, and their isotopes. And that leftover heat is a fossil that travels through space and it travels through time. And we can detect it and we can build instruments that can sense it. And the specific signature that we see will tell us about the conditions that were prevailing during the first moments of the universe's history, before the expansion that started to take over that we call the Big Bang. And crucially, what happened on the. I like to say what happened on a Tuesday before the Big Bang. There was a day, right? If you think back Today, we're in May 2026. It's a Tuesday. We can keep going back, back, back. We think the universe is 13.826 billion years old. Tiny little uncertainty, but we can keep going back. And let's say the Big Bang occurred on a Tuesday, right? Let's just. Just by 24 hours times 365, times 13.826 billion years, right? You can get a number, you can get a day. You can get a calendar day on our calendar. Now, it doesn't mean the calendar existed. Earth didn't exist, right? But there's a day. What happened the day before that, that's 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 my many failures, but one of them was that desire to show up my dad. Wow.
- [91:59]
Sean Ryan
So where do we go from here?
- [92:02]
Brian Keating
Well, it took me to the South Pole. It took me to Antarctica. When you get coffee and you put it in the microwave in a ceramic cup, like your awesome swag and merch outside that I love, you pour it into a cup, right? You can put the coffee in the microwave. You can put it in there for five minutes. Don't do this at home. It's very dangerous, actually. But you can actually microwave it and it'll get above the boiling point of water, right? And then you can take the mug out.
- [92:26]
Sean Ryan
Just.
- [92:26]
Brian Keating
You can just grab the mug. Why is that? You got 300°, you know, 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 what you make ceramic clay and stuff like that. The water in the coffee is not dry, it's wet, it's full of water. Microwaves from the microwave oven jostle water at just the right frequency. It's resonant frequency that it starts to vibrate and interact with other water molecules. That's what causes it to heat up. You can't heat up something in a microwave that doesn't have water in it and that is tuned exactly for the resonant frequency of water molecules and that causes it to heat heat up dramatically. 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 in a telescope in space, very difficult. Takes a long time. It's been done, done. But only three times in all of human history have we had satellites take pictures of the signal from space 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, 17,000ft. So high up that you have to wear oxygen full time in your nose because you're above half the atmospheric water pressure pressure. You're at the flight level 180. For my pilot friends, 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. 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, Martian helicopters and Martian rovers. Oh, before I forget, get this, I won't send to your viewers, but being of Mars, this is a piece of Mars. This is the actual planet Mars. It's a meteor that came from the planet Mars. It was knocked off by a bigger chunk of an asteroid, blasted into space, orbited around the earth for probably 20 million years and landed in northwest Africa. Africa, wow. Okay, so this here you can actually touch.
- [95:10]
Sean Ryan
How do you know that?
- [95:12]
Brian Keating
So the chemistry and the, and the spectra and the, the spectrum that it reflects when we analyze it is 100 match for the loon. For Martian rovers that have been there, like the ones I was just talking about. So this is a gift for you. Pretty rare. And you can see it and it has little bits of like, like. See the little bits of like, orangish flakes. Metal. That's iron. The reason Mars is red is because it's basically rusting. It has iron and iron rusts and oxidizes and those little specks in there are iron. So that's a. Another planet. It's taken millions of years to get here. And here's a cover for it. I have a certificate for you that I'll give you later on. It 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 you asked, where do we go from here? So we built this instrument starting in 2005 that was meant to do just one thing. To take an image of the baby picture of the universe. The oldest light in the universe is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's the heat that's left over when you do nuclear fusion or fission. Heat is given off. When that heat is given off and the universe expands, it cools off. It redshifts and dilutes, gets less energetic. And now we see it instead of being gamma rays or ultraviolet light, we see it in the form of microwaves. Long wavelength radiation, characteristic wavelengths about 2 millimeters corresponds about 150 gigahertz. This radiation was discovered for the first time in 1965 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 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 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.
- [97:41]
Sean Ryan
How do you still see the heat to this day?
- [97:44]
Brian Keating
So when, when the universe starts to expand, everything gets stretched out. There are galaxies. Galaxies are now moving away from each other. Things on earth don't get stretched apart. Things in our solar system don't get stretched apart. Even things in our galaxy don't get stretched apart. They're held together by gravity. 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. Dynamic. It's not static, as Isaac Newton showed. He said, no, space is dynamic. The more energy you put into it, the more space expands. And so originally, Einstein, you know, didn't believe in the Big Bang. He felt the Big Bang was not well justified. He thought it was. It was completely wrong. And he thought it smacked of religion. Actually, Einstein was not religious. He spoke about God sometimes, but he didn't really believe in God the way that we would think of it. And he said that the universe is not expanding. It's static. And the only way that he could get that to be the case is if he inserted into his equations this fudge factor that kept the universe from collapsing on itself. And that expansion, we now find is actually going in reverse. It's not only not static, it's not only not collapsing, it's actually expanding at an accelerating rate. It's like pushing on the cosmic accelerator pedal. It's not a constant velocity. Every galaxy is moving away, and tomorrow the rate of moving away will be bigger than it was today. 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, 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, and there's some doubt about how fast it's expanding. That's another subject. But no one disagrees. No cosmic police officer with a radar going and say, no, you're static or you're collapsing. No, the universe is expanding. And so. 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 bicepta, which is an acronym Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic polarization. And in 2014, we claimed we saw that primer strike that ignited the big Bang. So we claim we did the thing that I wanted to do to show up my father to win a Nobel Prize. And, you know, spoiler alert, you know, my first book's called Losing the Nobel Prize. So something went wrong. Something went really wrong. We made a claim that we saw what caused the universe to begin its expansion. 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, if you want to detect something like you hear someone on the range shooting, right, you can detect that they're shooting in a variety of different ways, right? Visually, you could detect it. You could detect the sonic, you know, impact of it. You could have eyewitnesses to it. You could have photographic cameras watching it. You could have infrared. You could even have, you know, some particles inside the. The potassium inside of gunpowder, 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. I'm making this up. I mean, it's true that you could do that. I'm just saying there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? So there's more than one way to detect something if you can't see it. So we've devised these different types of tools and technology to see things that we could not have possibly witnessed, namely, the origin of the universe. Like, there are no people there. There were not even any stars or galaxies or planets or aliens or anything there. Right. It was the origin of energy and matter itself. But what caused it? If this theory called inflation is right, 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 shock waves that would come with the explosive expansion of space, and those are called gravitational waves. We look for them in the CMB in this cosmic microwave background. And we said on St. Patrick's Day, 2014, at a press conference at Harvard that was led off by Avi Loeb made the introduction. I wasn't there, I had been unceremoniously removed from the leadership of the team that I had first started. That's another story. But the announcement made headlines around the world. 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, sort of the scientific court of law, or if we had seen things that masquerade as a signal that you want to see Richard Feynman again. Feynman.762 digits into PI, six X's in a row. He said, the first principle in science is that you shouldn't fool yourself. But the second principle in science is that you should think that you're the easiest person to fool. It's like you're at a poker table. You don't know who the patsy is. You're the patsy, right? Scientists should always think that he or she is the patsy, that he's going to make a mistake and then do everything in their power to resist that temptation to make an announcement, 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, ronketing.com SRS if you have an APO address. These meteorites are actually the corpses of dead stars. When a star above a certain mass explodes eight times the mass of our sun, it explodes out. And it's a. It's a. A fusion bomb that goes off in space with the equivalent tonnage of, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions of Hiroshima bones bumps. It's eight solar masses converted to energy V equals MC squared when it does that. The reason it does that is because it's tried to make this material iron and nickel.
- [105:08]
Sean Ryan
Okay?
- [105:10]
Brian Keating
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. The last thing that it made and its core, which is iron. That's why this is iron. Guess what else is iron? Hemoglobin. Your blood right now has the same iron isotope as this meteorite. Why is that? Well, your mother lived on Earth. She ate food in the earth. She's made of human biologics, right? Not David. Gretchen's non human. She's made of. Hopefully your mom's not. 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 a explosion, from a supernova. So if this supernova didn't blow up 4.3, 4.5 billion years ago, we wouldn't have this iron. So this iron is older than the earth. It became part of our molten iron core and our solid iron core, and it became part of our food chain. And it's in the blood that we bleed. We all bleed the same iron that came from a supernova.
- [106:47]
Sean Ryan
Wow.
- [106:47]
Brian Keating
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 when we really saw a bunch of meteorites. Basically.
- [107:07]
Sean Ryan
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.
- [107:17]
Brian Keating
Food.
- [107:18]
Sean Ryan
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 three weeks. They've got interactive dialogue, 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 is 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, Babel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to babel.comsrs that's Babel B-A B B E L.comsrs for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. What do you think happened the day before?
- [108:35]
Brian Keating
Well, so I always say things like, you know, people say, do you believe in God? You know, I've heard you. I heard you talk to our mutual friend Andrew Hume. You know, became a Christian. Right. He believes in God. 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, you know, 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, it means faith. It doesn't mean belief. Belief is a different word. Just like it is in English. Right. I always 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 at heaven has. I'm obviously Jewish, so it's not the same theology, but in fact, we have things that we say we believe in, and then we have things we say we know. And that distinction, I think is really important. So you ask me what do I believe happened or what do I think happened? That question to a scientist is anathema because we don't want to be prejudiced to that. That's what got us into trouble with this experiment. We believe we saw the signal that would give Brian Keating the Nobel Prize. Right. I mean, that wasn't the only concept, all of it. But that's where, that's where you get into trouble as a scientist.
- [110:35]
Sean Ryan
We must think about it too.
- [110:37]
Brian Keating
I do, yeah.
- [110:38]
Sean Ryan
Do you have any evidence for what may have happened the day before?
- [110:42]
Brian Keating
Exactly. Like what you and I talked about with aliens. Right? So. So we don't have any evidence for it. The universe, again, is like the most undefeated. You know the movie 300, I was watching that. You, like, imagine, like Xerxes versus the, what's his name? Theodeas or Leopoldus whatever whatever. Like 300 versus an infinite number, right? 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, like Gerald Butler, you know, in that movie. A small group of dedicated people can make great gains, right? I'm trying to get more and more evidence for both believing, you know, what I want to believe to be true or what I hope to be true, both in science and in religion. But I'm not. I am under no illusions that a God cares if I believe in him or not. Just like gravity, you jump out of a plane without a parachute. You know, I always say you don't need a parachute to skydive, right? You only need a parachute if you want to skydive a second time. Like I believe in gravity, you know, to the same extent that I need to. But I have 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 with aliens. Aliens could be real interdimensional non biological beings or whatever, right? They could be AIs traversing the cosmos at light speed. They could be, you know, Chinese psyops, they could be German, like Louis Alvarez playing around with the Germans minds, breaking the laws of physics. They could be a psyop by the government. They could be be a mass delusion or hysteria. Or they could be really truly masters of interdimensional trauma. Okay, Those are different hypotheses. Now we have to go through each one. Evidentiary, what's a 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.
- [112:46]
Sean Ryan
Sense.
- [112:47]
Brian Keating
That's like saying, go to the South Pole with me next time and go south. You know what happens when you go south from the South Pole? At the South Pole, you go north. There's no such thing. It doesn't exist. Some say that's true. Stephen Hawking believed that there's no time before the Big Bang. Others say that a competitive theory is the universe existed before the Big Bang and, and collapsed and crunched, just like the supernova that collapsed and crunched to form our supernova. That Big Crunch led to the Big Bang. Another one says an interdimensional concept called string theory that existed in higher dimensions than we exist in 10 dimensional string theory domain that two different types of what are called membranes came together and ignited what we call the observable big magnet. 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. 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, collapsing like a breathing of a lung coming into and out of creation and producing things. Now, as a scientist, we can't prove something. We cannot prove that the universe had a big bang. We also, strangely enough, we can't prove the Earth is round. I don't know if you're aware of this. We can't prove that the Earth, Earth is round.
- [114:35]
Sean Ryan
Okay, I have this discussion many times
- [114:39]
Brian Keating
now. That's something people say, I believe the Earth is round. I believe the Earth is flat. I always joke, there are people that believe the Earth is flat all around the globe. You know, it's. You'll find them everywhere, Sean. But in reality, you can show that the Earth is not flat, but you can't show that it is curved. Do you understand the difference? You can prove something wrong in science, but you can't prove something is wrong. 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 as wrong, or if you can't at least expose it to the opportunity of it being wrong, then it's not science. Right? Astrology. When I was dating my wife, we went to the downtown, Mission Beach, San Diego, they have, have boardwalk and they had a fortune teller. And she's like, oh, let's see our fortune, see if we're compatible. You know, I'm like, she's an English major. You know, like she fine, you know, I really love this girl, I want to marry her. So I'm going to play around with it, even though it's anathema to everything I believe to go through astrology. The astrologer sits down and says, you know, what's your sign? And you know, I say I'm a Gemini. And she go, okay, you know, Here are these different things. Your personality and your moon sign, your sun sign, and this thing and this. And then I said, oh, thank you very much. And you know, my future wife, my girlfriend at the time, oh, very. You know, it's really good. She's everything sounded really good, like 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. Virgo. But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. In other words, it didn't matter what I said. It didn't matter what evidence I gave her. It was unfalsifiable. It was irrefutable. That's not science. That's fun. You know, it's a card trick. You know, it's entertaining. She made her 50 bucks or whatever, and we're still married 18 years later. But to me, the prospect that you will not submit your theory to falsification. And that's some of the problem I have with Avi Loeb. Okay, I love Avi Loeb. But I said to Avi Loeb on my podcast, when he came on for his first book, I said, avi, you believe that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial. It's like the title of your book, right? You believe it came from another solar system. You believe it's technological. Remember, he told you he thinks it's a thin solar sail. 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 system. Was it intentional? Was it unintentional? He thinks it's could be like a garbage barge or something like that. And I don't know why you'd put like, you know, your, your, your trash bin on a solar sail and send it out into the universe rather than just crash it into the nearest sun. But let's just say he's right. I said, 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, and Jeffrey Epstein at some point, but. And Avi's not involved with any of that, by the way. But I said, you know, Harvard, everyone's above average, and you happen to have access to these, you know, copious supply of billionaires, 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 journal, multiple books. You know, the guy works harder. You know, when I'm interviewing him, sometimes I say, avi, show me your hands. He's like. I said, I want to make sure you're not writing a book while we're talking. You know, he's so productive. I mean, he's off the charts. Okay? But I said, avi, you have access to these billionaires. 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. With it. And he said, as he told you, no, Brian, we'll wait for the ver. Rubin telescope to come online and it will capture many. I said, avi, you're happily married even longer than I am. Imagine like you're with your wife. You don't know she's going to be your wife. You're dating her. Or maybe you just see her in the coffee shop or he met her on a blind date. I think he told you, right? And it's a blind date. And like, you're with her and you're like, oh, she's really nice. But I think someone better 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 obvious say, shut up, you idiot. Ask her out. Keep going on a date with her, because you're going to have two beautiful daughters with her and you're going to have a life of happiness and love. But he is saying the opposite. He's saying, no, I'll just wait 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 do anything, 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.
- [120:01]
Sean Ryan
It's hard to ask questions for people to think like that. Do you Even though with everything that you just said, you still have to think about it, you still have to think, is, Is there a multiverse?
- [120:15]
Brian Keating
No, you're right to press me on that.
- [120:16]
Sean Ryan
You know, and so what, like, what goes through your head without, without making assumptions or, I mean, what are. What are the. What are the ideas? What are the.
- [120:26]
Brian Keating
So this might make people uncomfortable. I approach again, as a scientist, and I'm candid. I'm one of the few scientists that's openly religious, you know, that it. That practices his religion, takes his religion seriously, you know, learned Hebrew at age 30. It wasn't easy to learn Hebrew at age 30. You know, I married someone who's Jewish, which is an important thing for the continuity of the Jewish people in my. In my.
- [120:49]
Sean Ryan
Learned.
- [120:50]
Brian Keating
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 don't know Andrew Huberman, world expert on sleep. And you guys were talking about cannabis and you're talking about gummies, and you're talking about vaping and everything else. And I said, I know what Sean needs, and it's not a product. It's called the Sabbath. You know, we just had this national Sabbath. Donald Trump home. Do you work as much as I think you work? Do you work seven days a week? Pretty much.
- [121:22]
Sean Ryan
Pretty close.
- [121:23]
Brian Keating
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 podcast, been blessed to be on them. You've created this, this huge empire. And it's no secret that your hard work, your work ethic, probably genetically, this is something you're, like, destined to do, 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 do podcasts. If you invited me Here, I think actually I was supposed to come two days from now. It's a holiday two days from now on the Jewish calendar called Shavuot, which means Pentecost in English, we call it Pentecost. It's a biblical holiday. I'm not allowed to work on that holiday. And so I said I can't make it. But luckily, Laura and Sarah, your whole amazing team is just so excellent and elite, for real. But I wouldn't have done it. As much as this is a great opportunity for me, Sean, I wouldn't have done it because I want to be with my God. I want to be with my wife, I want to be with my kids, my community, my family. I want to dedicate 1/7 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 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 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. Yisroel means struggle. El means God. Do 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 exceptions. Substance 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 Yisrael means to struggle with God, to fight with God. And if I don't ask questions and subjects, God in some sense, not to prove him wrong, not to say, you know, like, I'm better than God, is most of my colleague. 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 can't, 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. 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 is 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 said, right. Copernicus published 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, and the slow expansion universe, those are four models of what could have came before the Big Bang. One of them says nothing. One of them says we live in a multiverse that's eternal and has existed for all time. One of them says the universe is slowly changing and modulating, but is eternal. And one says the universe came into time at a specific moment for a specific reason, caught by a specific cause. That one sounds the most like Genesis 1. One 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.
- [127:11]
Sean Ryan
It actually, I feel like that means there's nothing before that.
- [127:13]
Brian Keating
That's right. So what is that you Just projected onto exactly what I'm attempting to do. You constructed a scientific hypothesis that's open to falsification. Okay, pause that. Think about what you just said. That suggests that there's a beginning. What if we find there's not a beginning, whatever that means, that has just falsified that theory. Call it Genesis theory, call it Ryan theory, whatever you want. You could falsify it. Guess what you just did. You proved that's part of science. To me, that's exhilarating. That means I can investigate whether or not the Big Bang occurred, whether or not time came into existence versus whether or not we live in a multiverse. I can investigate that and get paid by the regents of the State University of California. I can do it. I would do it for free, by the way, Gavin, if you're watching. I know you're watching. Gavin, you've got a podcast. You want to be like, sean, I would do it for free, but please, you know, let me keep my salary. The point is, you just suggested a scientific hypothesis that could be refuted. It's falsifiable. Therefore, by the rules that we explicated earlier, it's scientific question. There's nothing wrong with asking questions, seeking proof. Which would you rather have, Sean? Belief that Jesus existed. Can you prove that Jesus existed? Can you prove it?
- [128:36]
Sean Ryan
Can I prove it?
- [128:37]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [128:37]
Sean Ryan
No.
- [128:38]
Brian Keating
Do you think it could be proven by somebody, you know, a billion, a hundred avi. Lobes, or, you know, someone just off the charts?
- [128:45]
Sean Ryan
Maybe.
- [128:46]
Brian Keating
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, as anyone who's ever had a Jehovah's Witness come to their house and knock on the door, or a Mormon and say, like, we'd like to tell you about. Right? Guess who hates to take their religion away most of all? Atheists. You tell an atheist, most scientists this, 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, pies or what? They don't even know that seeking the questions of the type that you and I just discussed is perfectly kosher is perfectly acceptable in the context and domain of scientific reasoning. Would you rather have. I bet it doesn't matter to you. You. Because you do have strong faith. But if someone said, here is proof, like, you know, the Shroud of Turin, or. Or there's, you know, we found some. Some eyewitness estimate, or we found physical evidence that proves not only that Jesus existed, but that he was resurrected and that he was ascended. And this is irrefutable proof of the claims of the gospels. And I said, here, Sean, here's a book.
- [130:05]
Sean Ryan
Book.
- [130:05]
Brian Keating
Do you want to read that book that has all this evidence?
- [130:08]
Sean Ryan
Yeah, of course.
- [130:08]
Brian Keating
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 perish there, and some are rabbis. And in 1943, I believe they were
- [130:28]
Sean Ryan
doing,
- [130:30]
Brian Keating
they decided they would hold a trial and put God on trial. They said, should God have created humanity if it leads to holocaust, genocides and killing? And they put God on trial. These rabbis, they had prosecution and defense. The overwhelming evidence from the rabbis and the jury was that God was guilty and God never should have created the world. And you know what they did? The very next minute, they said, let's go for the afternoon prayers. In other words, some people 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.
- [131:19]
Sean Ryan
Sean, I think it is similar. I mean, you're trying to. How would you word it? Disprove. You cannot disprove Jesus's existence or God or gods. You know, I would assume that's. Maybe. I don't assume, but I mean, that'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.
- [131:48]
Brian Keating
Exactly.
- [131:49]
Sean Ryan
And know. And so it comes down to faith.
- [131:51]
Brian Keating
Exactly.
- [131:52]
Sean Ryan
Why did you go from. I mean, we know why you went from Judaism to Catholicism. Why did you go back to Judaism? Is it because of your father?
- [132:00]
Brian Keating
No, it was because of. It was actually because of 9 11.
- [132:03]
Sean Ryan
It's because of 9 11.
- [132:04]
Brian Keating
Yeah. Yeah. So 911 happened. I was 28, 29, something like that. And I had been in the Catholic Church, you know, the. The previous religion, you know, kind of experience I had was the Catholic Church, which I loved, as I said, said I had difficulty with. With the leadership at the Pope level, in the Vatican. And so. But putting that aside, and then I was, you know, college kind of. I'm so smart. I'll be an atheist. Right. Like all my teachers and my, you know, and my colleagues. And then 911 happened, and I was like, you know what? I know a lot about Christianity and Catholicism from having practiced it for six or seven, eight years. Being an altar boy, wanting to become a priest, priest. Everyone was an expert on Islam, you know, at after 9 11, right? And I realized I knew nothing about the religion that I was born into. And I felt ashamed. I couldn't read Hebrew, you know, I didn't. I never read the Bible, you know, the Old Testament. I mean, I read the Gospels because I was Catholic, right? Very rarely do we go back and read the Old Testament, at least in the. 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. You know, who knows how to do that? And I was like, why does. Why is there this antipathy towards Jews and towards, you know, Judeo Christian, you know, society and civilization? Why is there this conflict? I knew nothing about it. And so I realized that, 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. They're released, they no longer have to go to temple. Temple anymore. They no longer have to sit and learn this archaic language that's spoken on exactly 0.2% of the world's population, like, who the hell needs this when I can do whatever I want? And plus, Hanukkah really sucks compared to Christmas. You know, you asked 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. And even Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who I've hosted most famous atheist a lot, 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 encourage, ignite. 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's 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's a danger of a scientific. You're not going to 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, no, you can't. It's bullshit. The, the disdain that, that the ivory tower has for ordinary lay people and, and people that didn't go to college. It's a dirty little secret that we don't talk about because it makes us look venal, it makes us look pathetic, it makes us deserving the ire. And therefore, if you get ire, you get attention. And then they might take away our tenure and our tuition increases that go faster than inflation. We don't want you guys to look that close at us. That's the scientific technical elite. Eisenhower warned against that in the same breath as the military industrial complex. You never hear about the former. You only hear about the latter. Why is that?
- [137:17]
Sean Ryan
I don't know.
- [137:18]
Brian Keating
People worship college. College is a secular idol that even the most atheistic people worship at. It's a sign that I'm a good parent. My kid goes to Vanderbilt. My kid goes to UC San Diego. It's a sign that you did a good job as a parent. According to who? According to secular society. But that's a danger.
- [137:40]
Sean Ryan
Danger.
- [137:41]
Brian Keating
So getting back to, you know, kind of this, this original part when we went off on this quest a few minutes ago, I think that there's, it's, it's completely legitimate to, to think about these things and to. And to try to approach them with scientific Rigor and to have mutual respect and comedy. Not comedy, but comedy where you can respect the person that you maybe don't necessarily agree with with. And so for me, you know, there's obviously a lot more Christians in the world than there are Jews. But I want to get back to an understanding, what's called first principles thinking. I want to understand what are the base roots of Christianity. What are the challenges to Christianity? You know, there are challenges to Christianity. I'm sure. You know, the Gospels aren't, you know, they're, they, they, they themselves are the. And, and that's what gives them intellectual understand, honesty. They admit there are certain things that they cannot explain. Right. Miracles that Jesus did. Did they say, well, scientifically, if you take the quantum mechanical structure of water, you can. No, they said we don't understand it, but that's what faith means. But I don't want to only have faith. I would like to have proof. Can I convert a faith question into a proof question? That's what I want to do. That's fun as hell.
- [139:02]
Sean Ryan
What's up a faith question into a.
- [139:05]
Brian Keating
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 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 it and, and 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 could 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.
- [140:19]
Sean Ryan
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- [141:46]
Brian Keating
So right now we've discovered a lot of things. Again, we can't prove something inside. I can't prove to you that the earth is round. As I said, 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 IQ billionaires. My colleagues who started the Simons Observatory with me, David Spergel who ran the NASA UAP investigation panel two or three years ago, 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 now $200 million kind of level project. My friend Mark Devlin at UPenn created the six meter diameter telescope and the detectors within it. Like three people can fit inside it. Like standing on the shoulder. It's insane. Suzanne Staggs at Princeton built these detectors that could detect a match at the distance of the moon. I mean these are like insane people. Again, I would pay to work with them and I get to do it for free, right? We have been able to falsify these narratives that suggest there was no period of time when the universe was hotter, denser, more compact. We falsified claims that dark matter does not exist. In other words, we can't prove dark matter exists. But we've shown that in universes models, conceptions where dark matter doesn't exist, it's a hundred times more inconsistent with the data. We've found evidence for dark energy. We found evidence that matter in the Universe acts like a lens that focuses light. If you put a black hole here, you can't see the black hole. It's black. Right. But light would be deflected around it just the same way that we've detected with our instruments as well, that we can see the effects of the curvature of space time you and 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 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. Like we were talking before, if you're out on a boat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousand miles from land in any direction, right. Can you detect. Can you see another boat? No, you can't. You can't see anything over the horizon. Could you detect the boat's existence? Yeah, maybe there's waves, sonic, you know, Sonogram, sonar, whatever. Neutrinos from the nuclear reaction, 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 how to retract that claim. It was very embarrassing thing, 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 to the traditional theological Torah creation story of a single beginning of time. There are people that will attempt to use what are called apologetics, you know, kind of explain things with the assumption that God could do that. As you said, you can't prove God exists. You can't prove God doesn't exist. Right. We can't even prove we're having this consciousness experience that we call reality right now. Right. We could be some brains in a jar stimulated by electromagnetic radiation by some malevolent demon. Right. We don't have evidence for that, but it doesn't mean it's not within the realm of possibilities. So we've discovered a whole host of incredible facts and more to come with the Simons Observatory in the next few years. When we first get data from this instrument, which was created in generosity of my late, great mentor and friend, Jim Simons, who passed away two years ago, established this incredible collaboration with the. It's the people. It's like a team. Without the team. Nothing happens. And I'm just privileged to be, you know, at the. At the heart of it and the start of it.
- [146:43]
Sean Ryan
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.
- [146:52]
Brian Keating
Yeah, you did.
- [146:55]
Sean Ryan
How many times can you observe that from Earth? So, because if the light passes you by, then it's gone. Right? Right.
- [147:03]
Brian Keating
Right.
- [147:03]
Sean Ryan
Is it gone or does it just keep coming?
- [147:05]
Brian Keating
It's.
- [147:06]
Sean Ryan
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.
- [147:13]
Brian Keating
Right, right.
- [147:14]
Sean Ryan
The Big Bang is an explosion. So I mean. Correct. So once the explosion is done, the light is gone. So it would pass you by.
- [147:23]
Brian Keating
Right.
- [147:24]
Sean Ryan
And then there would be nothing after it.
- [147:26]
Brian Keating
If it was an explosion.
- [147:27]
Sean Ryan
Right.
- [147:27]
Brian Keating
If it was an explosion. It's not an explosion in the sense of, you know, a round goes off and there's a shockwave that has a implicit bias that you're embedding an event in a larger space like this room. Right. Explosion in this room is very different than the space time of this room expanding. Right. So what the Big Bang postulates is that if we're galaxies at one time in the past, yesterday we were slightly closer. And if you extrapolate back, extrapolate back, you find that there'll be some point where our chairs are right up against each other. And I like you, but I'm not going to get that close. Right. But at the subatomic scale, you could also keep going back to much, much smaller distances, which would require much, much more energy per cubic millimeter, nanometer, plank size, whatever. But if space comes into existence at the. At that particular moment, then what happens is the expansion occurs. Space itself is expanding for a long time, but there's nothing. There's no process by which you can reveal the presence of any matter or any energy, because it doesn't exist yet. Right. The first galaxies. I've been talking about galaxies. And that's how Hubble, Edwin, Hubble showed 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 they sign over there, and this is the universe expanding, we'd all be expanding. You would see me going away, and you would see him going away from you, but you wouldn't feel like yourself is moving away. But I would see you moving away and I would see him moving away and he would see the same thing, right? So each one of us feels like we're at the center of the universe, but we're not. The space is expanding in between us. And any process that you emit, if you are having, if you look at me with, and you shine a laser at me and it's a green laser, if you start to move away faster, you know, some large velocity, much, much faster than any earthbound speed, say half the speed of light, that light will go from green to red because not only are you moving away, but the wavelength is stretching from short wavelengths to longer wavelengths. 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 fast two galaxies are moving away. Way 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 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 red shifted to longer and longer wavelengths. 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. Refer you guys to episode 146 thank. Episode 146. You talk about the falling into a black hole. Nothing happens when you cross the event horizon. People think it sounds kind of cool. Event horizon. No. Something happens when you get close to the singularity. That's called spaghettification. You get ripped apart. That's irrelevant. The astronaut, right before he falls into the black hole, he waves it. That's the same thing. You see him, he's frozen and he's very red. And that'll just keep continuing as long as you know, as long as you're around to look at him. So the same thing happens with this light, with any process in the universe. And it just so happens that in order to see something that's beyond the event horizon, you can't use light. You have to use something else. Because light can only travel at the speed of light. It's the fastest speed there is. But there has to be some other mechanism by which you could see these processes if they existed before the big. Before this part of the Big Bang occurred. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for not waves of light but waves of gravity. Gravity which is the actual structure of space time. You know, space time. Again, you and Avi did a lot of the prereqs for this course. You talked about waves of gravity. Gravity and space time is a dynamical object. It's not a frozen ice block. Gravity means that distances and time shift according to the local mass distribution there is. So when the universe had all the mass it will ever have at the beginning beginning it had a lot of gravity. And when the expansion took place that gravity could be converted into oscillatory radiation called gravitational waves. That's what we look for. It's not light. It's space time itself. And we've detected that as.
- [152:43]
Sean Ryan
How are you able to see that?
- [152:45]
Brian Keating
So we see that in the distortion of space and time. Remember I said if there's a black hole here, you could actually see something over there because light from over there would get bent by the black hole. And it would appear to be coming from over there, 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. 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 two star of the sun. Right. So you had 16 solar masses in the beginning. 30 and 30, they crash together. They make something that's only 59 solar masses. Where the rest of the energy go. It all went into shaking up and vibrating space time. Those ripples in space time mean that if you were there at one moment of time, your weight would increase on a scale. If you put a scale in here and a gravitational wave comes through 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 space time 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 universe. But one can be proved, one cannot be proven, but one can be falsified, proven wrong.
- [154:52]
Sean Ryan
You know, another thing that I was talking to Avi about is when we talk about the universe expanding, I was asking him about the edge.
- [154:59]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [154:59]
Sean Ryan
Of the universe, and I didn't quite understand what he was talking about.
- [155:04]
Brian Keating
So.
- [155:04]
Sean Ryan
So if we're expanding.
- [155:06]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [155:07]
Sean Ryan
The space is expanding in between us.
- [155:09]
Brian Keating
That's right.
- [155:11]
Sean Ryan
Where is the edge of this?
- [155:13]
Brian Keating
So there doesn't have to be an edge. There may be an edge, but there doesn't have to be an edge. And it's a very ancient question. Aristotle asked, if you go to the edge of the universe and you throw a sphere, where does it go into? Right. It's exactly the same type of question you're asking. So what we do in science is we, in the science of cosmology is we say that. That space time is the set of all possible places in X, Y and Z. And in time, anything that can occur, occurs in those four dimensions. Right. You told me to meet you here exactly in this, you know, latitude, longitude, altitude and time. Right. You specified all those different things. You don't have to specify anything else. Right. That's 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, and it would do it a lot, Right. That would be a huge, huge disruption to space and time. It would change my coordinates. I'd be at a different xyz, time, altitude, whatever. Right? But all of space and time can exist infinitely like an infinite set of monkey bars just going out in all directions, all possible directions, or space is there. Now you might say, what is that space made of? Right? What's in that space? In other words, our universe here is within our horizon. Just like you go down to the beach in San Diego, I can only see out what, four, I don't know. You're a navy guy, tell me. You can see like 4 to 7 miles at sea level out to shore, and then your horizon disappears because the curvature of the Earth, right. Does that mean there's nothing beyond that? Of course not. Right. There's definitely stuff on. The 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. Here. The farthest distance that anything could have traveled to us here. We call that the particle horizon or the observable universe. Okay, but my observable universe looks different than your observable universe because we're not at the same four dimensional space time location. You're six feet away from me. Light travels one, one billionth and one billionth of a second travels one foot. That's a speed of, of light. So I actually see you 6Ns earlier than you are right now. You look wonderful, Sean, by the way, I see you the sun, eight minutes away. We don't know. The sun could have disappeared right now. We won't know for eight minutes. It's not likely. But it's a hypothesis. You could test it, right? The universe, the Big Bang, the stuff that I study happened 13.86 billion years ago. So stuff could have traveled to us from that age. And you take that age of the universe times the speed of light, technically you have to modify it by the expansion of the universe. But once you do that, you get the maximum distance. I can see where I am right here. And that's a sphere whose radius is 45 billion light years. So imagine that centered on me, but now go over a couple billion light years to this galaxy with these two black holes crash 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.
- [158:48]
Sean Ryan
Just another perspective.
- [158:49]
Brian Keating
Yeah. And in a billion years from now, we'll be able to see that. Now if there's another universe there, let's say there's another universe. God comes down, Sean, there's another universe. Episode whatever, 1400, you'll have the other universe, all right? But it's 10 light years away from our universe. You won't know about it for 10 years. Right? So we could exist in this vast universe. It could also be that we're in a compact finite universe where it would make sense to say that there is an edge to it. Just like there's an ed. 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 universe, but instead of having X, Y and Z, it has X, Y, Z and W. It's a four dimensional sphere. 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 approach it and we can ask what would be the signature of another universe that bumps into our universe and people make predictions about it, but there's zero evidence for that. There's zero evidence that our universe is a compact closed spherical universe or that it's an open hyperbolic universe. 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 right beyond it could be another universe. And if you ask what's in that other universe, I have a thought exercise for you. When the Artemis. We should talk about lunar landing conspiracies you had on this guy Gentile.
- [160:29]
Sean Ryan
AJ Gentile.
- [160:30]
Brian Keating
AJ Gentile. That was an awesome show.
- [160:32]
Sean Ryan
I love that guy. He's one of my favorite people.
- [160:34]
Brian Keating
He's, he is, and he's, he's so good at what he does. You know, like imagine how hard it is. Like, you know, it's hard to interview people, but then also to do like explainer content where you explain things. But you know, I was, I can never take the professor out of the laboratory and so he made a couple mistakes in that episode. Episode. And I would love to talk to him sometime. Maybe you can introduce me. But one of the things he said is that the Soviets beat us in every possible thing. And this is part of the conversation you guys had about how the moon landing didn't happen, right? Or how people could say that. I don't actually know what you believe. And this is a case where you could say believe. But we have evidence, right?
- [161:12]
Sean Ryan
What do you believe?
- [161:13]
Brian Keating
I know for a fact we landed on the moon.
- [161:15]
Sean Ryan
How do you know?
- [161:15]
Brian Keating
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.
- [161:27]
Sean Ryan
What's that?
- [161:28]
Brian Keating
Soviet Union. On July 19, 1969, the Soviets knew that the Eagle was on its way to land on the Sea of Tranquility. They had launched six days earlier a spacecraft of their own, uncrewed. No men were on on it, but they were going to go and land on the moon and they were going to take samples and they kind of wanted to steal the thunder, arrive a day earlier and 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. Eagle. And they coordinated their telemetry. And we still have records of their telemetry and the communications between the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where they would do their launches and recoveries, and NASA, Apollo. They wanted to avoid a huge PR disaster, especially since they thought we would die. They thought they would actually crash. People thought the moon landers would keep going down through the surface of the moon. They thought it was made of really loose talcum powder, like dust. 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 a contingency that they'd be lost in lunar orbit or that they would miss the moon and go off into deep space and become a satellite, never to be found again, right? So. So the Russians confirmed it. It that coordinated with our telemetry. When they landed, they congratulated President Nixon and then they also landed on the moon. And the first landing, they landed these retro reflectors called laser lunar laser retroreflectors. You ever run on your bicycle and you see like a bike tail light? The reflectors on the back of a bike. Right. How does that work? How does the bike know where your car is going to be? It could be at any angle, any bearing, any distance. Right. How does it know to reflect? They have the specially designed retro reflectors that always will find the target back to earth. And we bounce lasers off it. My colleague UCA San Diego became retired recently. Tom Murphy, he bounces lasers off these retro reflectors left by the Apollo moon landing, Apollo 11. And he can measure the distance to the moon to the thickness of a paperclip, 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, one part. But I do want to get back to what Gentile is said that's wrong because I think it's important is that the positioning. So you could maybe sort of fake that or whatever. But imagine right now, imagine like Artemis 2, 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. With him. And Piers actually piled on and called him full of. To his credit. But these. The very day that Artemis launched and then went around the moon this last month in April.
- [165:08]
Sean Ryan
Can you imagine land on the moon, though?
- [165:10]
Brian Keating
Not. Not this one. This one was supposed to go around the moon.
- [165:12]
Sean Ryan
They were supposed to land.
- [165:13]
Brian Keating
They will change. No, no, no. It was always planned to do this. First one went around the moon. No one was in it. Second one went around the moon with people in it. Third one's going to be people in it. Sorry. Unmanned landing on the moon. Fourth one's going to be people landing on the moon. Okay, well, let me.
- [165:28]
Sean Ryan
Let me.
- [165:28]
Brian Keating
Let me just finish up this. All right? All right.
- [165:29]
Sean Ryan
I just want to know, why don't we just land on the moon? We did it in the 60s, okay? Correct.
- [165:34]
Brian Keating
Would you Get.
- [165:35]
Sean Ryan
All right. Why are we doing all this crazy, wild shit? Let's just go back.
- [165:40]
Brian Keating
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 any kind of military hardware built by the lowest paying.
- [165:51]
Sean Ryan
In case you ever noticed, I'm a risk taker.
- [165:53]
Brian Keating
I know you are, but would you do it now? I asked Elon Musk on my podcast.
- [165:58]
Sean Ryan
Would I do it right now?
- [165:59]
Brian Keating
Yeah. Would you take it right now? Right. So you do things in steps. Four or five years ago, Kitty Hawk, was that the first time the. The right flyer had ever flown? Oh, they didn't put themselves on it the first time. They did test flights, prototype flights. That's all they're doing. There's nothing nefarious there. But let. Let me just get to the closure of this one argument. A thought experiment. I want you to consider. April 5th, 6th, when they went around the moon. Can you imagine? Ayatollah Khamenei 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, you know, in the 60s, but we can't do it now? I mean. 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 is 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 C130 flight, a C17 flight, land on the Ice. Then I take a seat, ski C130 on that takes me a week. Okay. Poor Brian, you know, play the violin. It took them six months just to get there. Then they got there. They would get there in spring. Cause that's the only time you can really travel there. Then they have to wait until the following spring. They'd stay on the coast of Antarctica for six more months until, or seven, eight months before it came warm enough that they could ski, cross country ski up 9,000ft 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 three weeks, like the British team, Robert Falcon Malkin Scott was the second person to get to the South Pole in 1912. In January 1912, three weeks after Amundsen got there in December 1911, everyone on Scott's team died. Every single one of them froze to death the most excruciating way possible. Ten miles from a cache of supplies that would have saved their lives. They all died. They didn't know about it for another year. And then they got back to England a year after that. Okay, so 1911, our Norwegian guy sets up foot with his teammates on the South Pole. You know when the next Norwegian to get to the South Pole was? Shaw, I'm not expecting you to. 1996.
- [168:55]
Sean Ryan
Wow.
- [168:56]
Brian Keating
So if you're 19, Bart Sibro, 1995, you say, oh wait, how come we went there with technology, with a boat, a wooden boat. Shackleton, we did that 100 years ago, but we can't do that now. It's completely fallacious. I mean, that's not a good one argument. Okay. There are other arguments that are better, like the Van Allen belts.
- [169:15]
Sean Ryan
And so I don't think that, you know that. I'm not saying that we didn't go.
- [169:20]
Brian Keating
Okay, it sounded like.
- [169:21]
Sean Ryan
I'm not saying we.
- [169:22]
Brian Keating
You're open to the hypothesis at least.
- [169:23]
Sean Ryan
I think it's weird that we haven't been back since the 60s.
- [169:29]
Brian Keating
But do you know why we didn't
- [169:31]
Sean Ryan
go back to the South Pole or anybody on Earth.
- [169:35]
Brian Keating
So first of all, it was in
- [169:36]
Sean Ryan
the belt thing that you just brought brought up. I also think is very odd. And there's that guy in NASA that said we lost the technology. I'm sorry, you lost the technology.
- [169:46]
Brian Keating
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.
- [169:54]
Sean Ryan
Well, I mean, I'm just not familiar with.
- [169:55]
Brian Keating
Yeah, I know But. But when you have a platform like you do, and AJ has his platform, I'm just. I would love the scientific rigor to kind of not. You have to get a PhD in quantum mechanics. Astro. I'm just. Just saying, when you think about things, what should be your default base rate hypothesis? Should it be that this is kind of fake? Or as Candace Owens said, this is fake and gay. So she's supposed to be like, America first. She's supposed to really love America. Be patriotic. It's not only the greatest achievement of America, but 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. What we did in a very short amount of time, but it took a level of just incredible, incredible cooperation and technology. Hundreds of thousands of people coordinating across decades. And the evidence against it is so minimal. What's frustrating as a real scientist is say, look, no one would rather these things be false than a scientist, because I get paid not to prove people wrong. Right. My job is not to prove freaking Avi Loeb right. My job is saying, no, you're fricking wrong. Here's a better explanation. Let's go test that. And his job as a good scientist to say, thank you, Brian. You know, you use your experimental technology. I'm a theoretical physicist. Let's work together and come closer to truth, okay? That's the way science should be done. Not like the default assumption is America lied. You know, they lied about COVID I mean, you know, for many reasons, I wish Covid never happened. And I've interviewed, you know, and I'm best friends with one of close friends with the director of the National Institute of. Of Health, Dr. J. Bhattacharya, tortured by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. Horrible thing. And he's a Christian. He's an incredible human being.
- [171:43]
Sean Ryan
All this stuff that you're kind of talking about here. At the beginning, you asked me if I thought it was a good idea for a country to lie to its citizens. Now we're wondering if we fucking landed on the moon. Because a lot of lies have come out of the government. Government.
- [171:59]
Brian Keating
I see what you're saying.
- [172:00]
Sean Ryan
You're a scientist. You know, you understand how to sift through all this data. And I mean, you've spent many, many years studying all the things that it takes to know about landing on the moon. I'm a Navy seal. I spent those years fighting a war. You know what I mean?
- [172:16]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [172:16]
Sean Ryan
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 in to its citizens, citizens are no longer going to believe the government, I
- [172:33]
Brian Keating
guess as, as a question.
- [172:34]
Sean Ryan
So then all these conspiracies start to happen and distrust and then they start digging into everything. What were you saying about Candace?
- [172:43]
Brian Keating
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 your love of America or whatever, just saying if this is the greatest accomplishment that a human being has ever made and it happens to come from the country that you profess your love for and allegiance to, as I do, and as you do. Right. That it doesn't mean they're flawless. I mean, who's flawless, right? I mean, who do you agree with 100% of the time? Like I'll say my wife. Right. But, but that's about it, right? Sometimes you contradict yourself. I contradict myself.
- [173:11]
Sean Ryan
You agree with your wife 100% of the time. That's bullshit.
- [173:14]
Brian Keating
Honey, if you're watching, you know what I did? I made her mad the other day. I said, you know, honey, whenever I'm driving around, like I got to turn off the, the, the, the voice activated directions on the gps. She's like, oh, that's so romantic. You want to listen to me? I'm like, no. I don't want two women yelling at me while I'm. 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, cui bono, 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 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, it's like an atheist who says, I'm going to start with the hypothesis God doesn't exist, Sean. Right? And you have the burden of proof to prove to me that God exists or doesn't exist. Right? Right. That's not approaching things Scientifically, like if you start with. There's a, There's a term in that for. It's called apologetics. You start with a conclusion, you reason towards the conclusion best on the best available data. But you have, you're not going to like, refute God like William Lane Craig or Baron, the Catholic priest. I'm blanking on his name. I think his Baron is the last name. Robert Baron. They're not going to come to a conclusion that disproves God. Right. Let's just be honest. That's not necessarily what their focus is going to be on. Right. But they're going to give explanations why God is a more plausible hypothesis than anything else. 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. Piers Morgan on his show, to give him credit to Bart Sibrol, he said, I flew on the Conchord, you know, in 2001, and I haven't been on a Concorde since. Like, how come there's no frickin, 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, that was built, that was built in 1962, the Concorde. It was before the Apollo landing. We can't do that now. It's an argument that sounds good to people that really might come into a conversation with a predisposition. And that's fine for a person who's not, who's not maybe wanting to portray themselves as being a scientist. You're not a scientist. AJ's not a scientist. But. 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 Sibirol. And then I think AJ kind of got this too. So there's this radiation belt that surrounds the Earth and it's called the Van Allen belts. It is supposedly this impenetrable, instantly fatal trajectory. No person can get through through it. And there's no way to get to the moon without going through these belts. Right? I mean, it surrounds the Earth. So that's. That's like saying there's no way. Let's say you want to land on Saturn, right. For whatever reason Sean's deciding, we're taking the podcast on the road. We're going to Saturn, right. Saturn has this ring system around it'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 existing exist doesn't mean that there's not a symmetrical process. A trajectory that you could go through. It's totally safe. Right. The asteroid belt. You think about the asteroid belt. You shoot a spaceship through the asteroid belt, you're going to get destroyed. No, you won't. 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. Regions. There's two different belts, an inner belt and an outer belt. They mainly go around the equator. The launches to the moon go around the pole. So there's no danger, there's no exposure to it. We know how to do it. Satellites go through it all the time. And anyone who's ever seen Aurora knows about it. It's not dangerous, it's not fatal. It happens to be about the equivalent of two or three chest X rays, which you and I get every year. Every couple of years. Right. So there's some radiation. It sounds scary. You know, one of the Patreon questions that I answered for my fellow Vigilance Elite Patreon members members was about like, how do we make the concept of nuclear power less, 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. So go over there, you'll find out my answer to it. But, but it's sort of, it's, it's manipulative to say radiation scary. Therefore we didn't go to the moon. Let's look at it scientifically. Let's look at the avenue.
- [178:05]
Sean Ryan
If you spend any time off road like I do, you already know how easy it is to end up second guessing where you're at, whether you're still on a legal trail or if the route ahead is even worth taking. That's why I've been using Onx Off Road. It's an off road navigation app that shows trails, public and private land boundaries, places to camp, and detailed trail info all, all in one place. And what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data you can check difficulty ratings, terrain details, trail photos, even recent reports from other riders before you head out there. The other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time because once you lose service out there, your phone is pretty much useless. But with ONX off road, everything still works offline. And if you're riding with a group, their location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map so nobody gets lost or separated. What I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new. I'm not wasting time backtracking, accidentally ending up on private land or trying to figure things out. Once I'm already deep into the trail system, I can plan ahead, know what I'm getting into, and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the whole time. Search ONX Off Road in the App Store or Google Play.
- [179:27]
Brian Keating
Play.
- [179:27]
Sean Ryan
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 for saying the NASA guy. So here is the NASA guy. Go ahead and hit play, let me know what you think.
- [180:25]
Brian Keating
I'd go to the moon in a nanosecond.
- [180:28]
Sean Ryan
The problem is we don't have the technology to do that anymore. We used to, but we destroyed that technology and it's a painful process to
- [180:38]
Brian Keating
build it back again.
- [180:40]
Sean Ryan
When you said that just now.
- [180:41]
Brian Keating
All right,
- [180:45]
Sean Ryan
kind of. So that was. What's this guy's name?
- [180:49]
Brian Keating
Don Pettit, a national astronaut.
- [180:51]
Sean Ryan
Okay, so 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.
- [180:59]
Brian Keating
So that's fine.
- [181:00]
Sean Ryan
What is your take on that? I'm just curious.
- [181:03]
Brian Keating
So 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. So the one thing that's more complicated than physics is psychology is the human mind. So I'm not going to speculate what he meant by it. I'll just say it's the technology can't be destroyed. Right? Technology means a lot of things. It means the physical rockets. Do we have Apollo Saturn V boosters anymore? No. So we don't have those. Did we destroy them? Yeah, I mean, I've got a, a 50 cal bullet that my brother in law, Jim Brewer got me and I use it as a bottle opener. Is it. Is it destroyed? Yeah, it's destroyed. It has a hole in it and the gunpowder has been taken out and it's not alive round. Right, so we. Do we destroy it? Do we destroy the know how on how to do it? Do we just.
- [181:56]
Sean Ryan
That's what. That's the way I take that is they destroyed the know how. So destroyed the blue. Blueprint gives a shit about the fucking booster or whatever or the rocket or whatever it is. They can build it again.
- [182:08]
Brian Keating
It is true, right? I don't think that that's.
- [182:11]
Sean Ryan
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.
- [182:19]
Brian Keating
You know, I have collect aviation, you know, kind of antique artifacts. I have a B17 propeller in my hangar in San Diego where I keep my. My plane. And this thing is amazing. And there's zero chance that we could ever get that to work. We could ever reconstruct a B17 from scrap. There are a couple of B17s flying. I think there's three left or something like that. Again, if we had an infinite amount of money, infinite amount of money. Do you think that, Elon, or do you think that our greatest engineers and scientists couldn't reassemble and build a P38 or a B17? Of course we could. But you have to ask, what's the purpose of that? We have been there, we have done that. I actually think there's a stronger.
- [183:01]
Sean Ryan
What's the purpose of that?
- [183:02]
Brian Keating
What's the purpose of rebuilding?
- [183:03]
Sean Ryan
Was the purpose of coming to North America again?
- [183:06]
Brian Keating
Well, what was the purpose?
- [183:08]
Sean Ryan
So we are settle new 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 moon.
- [183:16]
Brian Keating
That's true.
- [183:16]
Sean Ryan
How do we know there's the up there that we don't need?
- [183:19]
Brian Keating
Same with Antarctica. Why do.
- [183:20]
Sean Ryan
We interviewed this guy Steve Quast and Helium three, he's talking about. We need Helium three. 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 three?
- [183:34]
Brian Keating
Sure.
- [183:34]
Sean Ryan
You know, and so I sense that you get frustrated with skeptics like me or people that don't believe. But what really is the problem is the scientists are doing a very shitty job of explaining why the fuck we haven't been back to the moon. Yeah, to pea brains A.
- [183:53]
Brian Keating
You're not a Pea brain B. My job is to answer questions and I get paid to answer questions.
- [183:58]
Sean Ryan
Right.
- [183:58]
Brian Keating
Instead of a teacher. 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 you know, where's the car? 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? 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 buildings and 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. 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 would have fall. Do we fire a shot? No. 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. Like Roger banister broke the four minute mile 80 years ago, something like that. People still want to break the four minute mile, right? They keep getting better and better. Will that person, the, the second person to break the four minute mile, do you know his name?
- [185:43]
Sean Ryan
No. But I mean, yes, we do need to do it again. I mean since the, since the beginning of time. Time it's been expansion of empires.
- [185:52]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [185:52]
Sean Ryan
The entire planet's occupied now except Antarctica. It's only got 800 people down there.
- [185:57]
Brian Keating
Sell you some land there, but you
- [185:59]
Sean Ryan
know what I mean. So where, where and what what is the fastest growing?
- [186:03]
Brian Keating
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,
- [186:10]
Sean Ryan
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 about expansion of empires, which humanity has been doing since the beginning of time.
- [186:22]
Brian Keating
Right.
- [186:23]
Sean Ryan
The new expansion is space. Absolutely space. I mean, I don't know the correct terminology, but it's been told to me by several people on the show that the real estate law, or whatever the fuck you call it, space law. Space law is the fastest growing. It is, you know, sector of legal or whatever legal space force was created.
- [186:49]
Brian Keating
The first branch of the US military created 50 years, 60 years.
- [186:52]
Sean Ryan
So you can't tell me that, you know, it's not important. And then Steve Kwast is saying China is basically on the moon. I don't know if that's correct or not, but that's what he says. But whatever. Somebody's going to fucking go there and somebody's going to claim it. Why haven't we been back? Been how long? 60 years?
- [187:11]
Brian Keating
Maybe if we had this conversation, you know, 46 days ago, we could say we haven't been back to the moon in 56 years or whatever. But now we have been. We've been around the moon. We went farther than we went even during the Apollo mission. We're testing this thing out. I always say, you know, someone said to me, do you want to be 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 break brothers, what the fatality rate is nowadays? You get on a plane, the fatality rate is 0.001. The only fatality in America since 911 was right after Trump's inauguration. His helicopter hit a commercial jet. That was like the first midair collision that resulted in death or even Sully Sullenberg landed on their. Aviation safety has gotten down to the sub thousandth of a percent level of fatality risk. Space is still about 3%, 4% percent. Now part of that is intrinsic to the environment is the most extreme hostile environment, which is also some of the reason why we might not ever get to Mars and colonize Mars. We might not have the ability, we might not have the wherewithal, but in today's dollars to reproduce what we did. Just go to the moon, walk around, do the samples, if you'd want to do that. It's sort of the analog of what I said before. Go to the south pole, be the 10th person to get to the South Pole. 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. No, no. Women spend more on lipstick in America. America than the NASA budget. Tell me how you're going to get to colonize the interplanetary species like Elon wants to do with a budget that's $25 billion. And some say that's way too high. We should be spending on poverty. We should be sending it. And you got to be sympathetic to some of these things. Right? So the question is one of national will. We had pride in the 1960s. We wanted to beat Russia. We don't really have that with China. We have a very unusual thing with China, our relationship. You know more about the geopolitics than I do. There's an interesting thing that just happened in. 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 US Government coordinated with Argentina and froze the parts at the port in China. I'm sorry, at the port in Argentina. Like, why are they doing that? Well, guess what? When we go up and study the cosmic microwave background, look for the Big Bang and stuff like that, we're on top of these mountains. We're looking for infrared, we're looking for heat. Well, guess what? So are the Chinese. They're probably looking for infrared. From a B2 stealth bomber, you can conceal its radar. That's what stealth means. You can cool the exhaust, but you can't defeat the second law of thermodynamics. When an SR71 is cruising at cruise speed, the windshield gets up to 600 degrees. It had to be three inches of quartz. Well, quartz radiates in the infrared extremely well. You can pick that thing out like a hot knife going through butter. So these are not always peaceful, you know, kind of coordination and scientific benefit. But to coordinate something on a budget of $25 billion. I mean it's, 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 1980s or whatever. Right. And we had the space shuttle program that was kind of a mixed failure blessing in some ways. A Petit was one of the commanders on. So look, 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 going to do that? You love risk. I'm telling you, no risk, you're not going to die.
- [191:11]
Sean Ryan
I mean you're talking to somebody that fought in three different wars and several different conflicts. Yeah, I'd have a huge appetite for risk. Yeah, 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, life for mine and yours kids. You bet your ass I'm gonna be on that flight.
- [191:44]
Brian Keating
So then we have to look at what is.
- [191:46]
Sean Ryan
There are a lot of people that
- [191:49]
Brian Keating
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.
- [191:58]
Sean Ryan
I wasn't ordered to fight. Well, you joined to fight.
- [192:01]
Brian Keating
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 gonna do and which wars you're gonna fight. And in other words, do you, do you, if you knew everything that you knew now are you going to, are you going to say that like this is going to advance humanity? That's what they told us too in Iraq, like this is going to benefit, it's going to protect America, it's going to do all these things. Let's leave aside whether it did or it didn't. But you did it, you signed up for it? Did the promise or the expectations, did it match, you know, all the hardship that you went through on your fellow.
- [192:32]
Sean Ryan
So it was another lie from the US Government, right?
- [192:34]
Brian Keating
So what about this? You're saying you're going to do this because of your love?
- [192:38]
Sean Ryan
If I knew for a fact that it was going to advance humanity and make a better life for mine and yours kids, I would do it. You can bet your ass on it.
- [192:47]
Brian Keating
It's funny.
- [192:48]
Sean Ryan
That's what I said.
- [192:49]
Brian Keating
I asked Elon on my podcast, I had him on very briefly, and I said, elon, you say you want to go to Mars, you want to live on Mars, you want to die on Mars. I said, let's hope it's not on impact. You know, I want you to die on impact, buddy. I think you're too important. But you have 13 to 14 kids. We actually don't know how many kids Elon has. It's either very lucky or very unlucky. But he has at least 13 kids. I said there would be a day when you'd have to say they're not all going to go. His kid, X jaw 72, the one that's named after the blackbird, right? Has an unpronounceable name. He was in the room. I could hear the kid talking on the podcast. When I was talking to Elon, his mom was on the podcast. She was a big space and. And recorded it. And I said, how are you going to say goodbye to another kid? He lost a kid, you know, which is the most traumatic thing that a human being. You and I know, like, I don't even like to talk about it. Parent loses a child, you can't think about it. Now you're volunteering to lose 13 children. Like, how are you going to do that? And it was the first time I ever never heard of Elon being at a loss for words. You can hear it on my pod. I have it on my YouTube channel. He couldn't say it. His mom, May Musk, comes and said, oh, let's not talk about that. Let's not talk about sad things. So it's sad. I know. You do it again. You have courage that mortal men like me, I'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 Shawn 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. 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.
- [194:51]
Sean Ryan
What do you want to talk about?
- [194:53]
Brian Keating
I think AI has a lot of things in common with aliens and that it's sort of. It is potentially kind of a surrogate replacement, secular God, that it gives us the chance to do what God did. You know, God made man. Man. Adam in Hebrew means Earth. God made man out of Earth. We have that impulse. 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. Hm. Where's the hydrogen 32nd wave function? 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. 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 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.
- [196:35]
Sean Ryan
Ourselves.
- [196:36]
Brian Keating
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 sapien means man. Who knows? What does he know? We're the only creatures that exist that know we have a death date. Yes. Elephants will get together and they'll look around and when one dies, they'll all cry. And I don't say they don't know when they're four years old that they're going to die. My daughter asked me the other day, like, are you going to die before me? I said, I hope so. I was like, in tears. We know at a young age we're going to die. That's a good thing. But since biblical time, since early man, we have struggled with this desire to overcome that limitation, to become gods ourselves, to extend our lives, both in lifespan, which is great, and in sort of the power, the omnipotence of the human, which means augmentation. Building silicon brains that live outside of us. Robotic brain, robotic bodies, cryogenics, suspension. Longevity, maybe escape velocity, as Kurzweil called it. You know, he claims at a certain point in three, four, five years, it keeps getting pushed back, like disclosure that will reach, will 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.
- [198:14]
Sean Ryan
Would you live forever?
- [198:16]
Brian Keating
Not by myself. I wouldn't want to be the only one. And it's, it's so complex. But, but look at the urge. What's the urge? Who was the only man that you believe did have a life after death? Anyone else but Jesus. Do you think anyone else besides Jesus? We have an urge to be like Jesus, to live forever, to resurrect ourselves, to extend ourselves forever. What if that's.
- [198:41]
Sean Ryan
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, they're, they're, they have heirlooms. They want pastile on items.
- [198:53]
Brian Keating
That's right. Books, Denial of death. We want something that lives beyond us. In the Holocaust.
- [198:58]
Sean Ryan
Victor Frankl make it Writing death letters, making videos for your kids. You know what I mean? So they remember you interviewing your parents.
- [199:07]
Brian Keating
That's right.
- [199:08]
Sean Ryan
You know, so that writing a Book their kids and their kids and everyone down the line knows who they were.
- [199:13]
Brian Keating
I'm gonna keep pressing you. You gotta write your memoir when the time is right. Look, you can write. Obama has four memoirs. You could do it. He wrote four autobiographies. You can do yours now. Don't put off to 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 on. Well, you were saying? It's not time yet.
- [199:50]
Sean Ryan
Well, writing a book.
- [199:52]
Brian Keating
Yeah, I just.
- [199:53]
Sean Ryan
I'm just not that into myself.
- [199:55]
Brian Keating
It's not about you again.
- [199:57]
Sean Ryan
Sean.
- [199:57]
Brian Keating
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. I got it. Cost me a lot of money, Sean. You know, I could give it to you, but would you pay for it? How much would you pay for that? Your grandmother. I don't care who it is, Sean, someday you're. You are that person. First of all, you're that person to 6,500,000 people. Whatever you people want to know, and it doesn't mean you reveal everything. I don't tell people personal everything in person. This is my autobiography. It's my first autobiography. Maybe it's my last. I don't know. I want to write more. Maybe I will. I think I have one more book left in me. That's the way I feel. Just honestly, my energy, my age, my commitments, my family. All 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.
- [200:50]
Sean Ryan
I mean, my thoughts are all there. You know what I mean?
- [200:52]
Brian Keating
They're all there.
- [200:52]
Sean Ryan
The way I think, what I believe in, what I don't like, what I wear.
- [200:55]
Brian Keating
In the podcast episodes in here, man.
- [200:57]
Sean Ryan
Where it's in this.
- [201:00]
Brian Keating
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 the. That incredible guy, whatever, the, the other sniper guy or what, like, and there's. There's jewels in there. And I'm not saying write a book about podcast. What's that?
- [201:16]
Sean Ryan
It's all in there.
- [201:17]
Brian Keating
It's all there.
- [201:18]
Sean Ryan
I'm not asking my kids to. I'm not asking anybody to. You know what I mean?
- [201:22]
Brian Keating
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.
- [201:28]
Sean Ryan
Like I told you out there, you know we were talking about. You brought up the Sabbath again. And you're like, you got to take a day off and what are you going to do? Just keep being a big podcast. 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.
- [201:46]
Brian Keating
Not by a long time.
- [201:47]
Sean Ryan
Seal a CA contractor, taught tactics like, I've done a lot of shit.
- [201:53]
Brian Keating
Your husband? Yeah. A lot of the guys I make fun of, I love these guys have been on all their shows. No wife, no kids. And, you know, maybe that's why they're so happy and then they're loving their something. 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. You did that with your country and that is so heroic. But when you sacrifice for one woman or for your kids, people ask me, what's the meaning of life? You're a cosmologist, you study the universe, and they always wanna know, what do you think is the meaning of life? I say, for me, it's an easy recipe. First of all, you gotta find a of part partner. And I even have a. I'm a nerd, right? So I had a mathematical algorithm to find my wife.
- [202:34]
Sean Ryan
Okay, wait a minute. You had a. You had a mathematical algorithm to find you? I got to hear this. Okay, so what does that even mean?
- [202:43]
Brian Keating
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. Not like, you know, like for this one, you know, she had a freckle on her butt. That was, 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, no one's ever ready, by the way, like, were you ready to get married and like, commit to one woman that you're the only woman you're ever going to be with, physically, intimately, build a family? No one's ever ready for that. No one's ever ready for kids. No one's ever ready probably for combat. Like, you can't be ready for it, right? These are things that like, make us unique, 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, 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 dated 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 was because she was hot. Okay? I have a lot of weaknesses, Sean, but. But that was one of them. And. But I said, I don't know, let's just take it to the extreme. Like, you're dating some like, Playboy Playmate. I shouldn't say one of my friends is a Playboy Playmate. You're dating some 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 dimension 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, 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 choice, 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. 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.
- [205:48]
Sean Ryan
It's a good algorithm.
- [205:50]
Brian Keating
Served me well.
- [205:51]
Sean Ryan
Good for you.
- [205:52]
Brian Keating
So, and then as far as kids go, you know, no one's ever cheerleader.
- [205:56]
Sean Ryan
Didn't work out, huh?
- [205:57]
Brian Keating
That's right. Yeah, that's right. Well, my wife's not going to watch this, 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 on a scale point. Okay, you know, I had too much coffee, 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 an 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 stasis and equilibrium. And here's an example I like to give 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. I 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. Maybe. But would you be too exy. Say again?
- [207:51]
Sean Ryan
Would you be?
- [207:52]
Brian Keating
I'm asking you.
- [207:53]
Sean Ryan
Probably not.
- [207:54]
Brian Keating
No, you'd be. Would you be any happier?
- [207:56]
Sean Ryan
I doubt it.
- [207:57]
Brian Keating
If you had twice as much money as you have right now, think about all you could do differently. You know, I doubt it. I just remember, like, Monty Burns in, In the Simpsons, he's the, you know, the billionaire, greedy billionaire guy. And Homer Simpson. One day I watched this.
- [208:13]
Sean Ryan
I saw this meme the other. Other day.
- [208:14]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [208:15]
Sean Ryan
Maybe not a meme, a cartoon.
- [208:17]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [208:17]
Sean Ryan
And it was this little kid fishing, and he just had the little cloud, the thought cloud coming out of his head and what he wanted, you know, what. Whatever he wanted. He wanted a new car. And then he's in his new car and you see the thought cloud coming out of his head. And that's what he wants now. Now he wants a plane.
- [208:38]
Brian Keating
Yep.
- [208:40]
Sean Ryan
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.
- [208:49]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [208:50]
Sean Ryan
He just never stopped wanting.
- [208:51]
Brian Keating
Never stop.
- [208:52]
Sean Ryan
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.
- [209:01]
Brian Keating
It's called the hedonic.
- [209:02]
Sean Ryan
More and more and more.
- [209:03]
Brian Keating
Yeah. You never get off it.
- [209:04]
Sean Ryan
And, you know, I feel like I've learned this very early in my journey.
- [209:09]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [209:10]
Sean Ryan
You know, I think a lot of people. It takes a lot longer and a lot more money to learn that lesson. But no, I don't think money is going to bring me more happiness. I don't think. More subscribers, more viewers, more downloads, more better rankings. Like, it's just right.
- [209:33]
Brian Keating
So it's.
- [209:33]
Sean Ryan
I mean, the fun is the climb up.
- [209:36]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [209:36]
Sean Ryan
To me.
- [209:36]
Brian Keating
Yeah. No climb up.
- [209:38]
Sean Ryan
He was really cool doing it. Still is. I love doing this. I love having this conversation with you. I am also a competitive.
- [209:46]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [209:46]
Sean Ryan
And once I hit number one for the first time, knowing I'm not gonna stay there because Rogan's the fucking king and he always will be. But I don't know, he always will be.
- [209:57]
Brian Keating
We'll talk about that.
- [209:58]
Sean Ryan
And he. Of course, he always will be. I don't think. 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.
- [210:14]
Brian Keating
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.
- [210:25]
Sean Ryan
No, but if somebody builds on. Off that book for the next hundred years, absolutely everyone still set the trend. You're the king of it. That's true. And Joe Rogan is the king of podcasting. Everybody else that came after him, no matter what they do, it was built off the Joe Rogan podcast. One way or another. Long form discussion was built off of him.
- [210:47]
Brian Keating
But will he always be number one?
- [210:49]
Sean Ryan
Will he always be number one? No. Obviously won't be because he's a mortal human being. And eventually he will get tired. Tired of this. Somebody else will reinvent.
- [210:58]
Brian Keating
That's all I'm saying.
- [210:59]
Sean Ryan
Change the game. But it's like Babe Ruth. Everybody still knows who the 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 is going to bring more happiness. It will drive your ego through the roof.
- [211:17]
Brian Keating
Yeah.
- [211:17]
Sean Ryan
And will probably ruin you as a person 100 with that amount of success, 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.
- [211:34]
Brian Keating
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 describe 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 up. Someone's always going to have more followers, more money, more women, more guns, more whatever. Right. That's going to get to a point. More guns. I'm not so sure about.
- [211:56]
Sean Ryan
But.
- [211:57]
Brian Keating
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 talk asked that particular question, just said no, you couldn't increase my happiness by even a bit. And I respect that. I'm not. I'm not disputing that whatsoever.
- [212:14]
Sean Ryan
I said with money.
- [212:15]
Brian Keating
With money, okay? Or fame or is there anything material? Not. Not God, not.
- [212:20]
Sean Ryan
I'll tell you how you can increase my happiness. It's gonna sound like a fucking punishment. You take all my social media away. You take my phone away. You take my.
- [212:28]
Brian Keating
I already freaking prescribed that to you on Saturday.
- [212:30]
Sean Ryan
And you.
- [212:30]
Brian Keating
Sunday, Sunday.
- [212:31]
Sean Ryan
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 then. And that will create a happy place.
- [212:44]
Brian Keating
Will you try for me? Will you try for me? I know we don't know each other, but we try one day.
- [212:48]
Sean Ryan
Now think how fucking easy it is. I don't. I'm sure you've done very well. You almost won the Nobel Prize, right? So you've got to be financially stable at least.
- [212:56]
Brian Keating
I'm not saying so.
- [212:58]
Sean Ryan
And so you have the option right now. You could throw it all away, knowing that you would probably be a happier person, but you're not going to do it.
- [213:09]
Brian Keating
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 dealing with your family, your friends, your community. Heck, you can drive. 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 your phone to call somebody. I'm just saying disconnect from the world. The reason is, is. And it's very beautiful. And I think it applies to you. The commandment in Hebrew and the fourth commandment, which is you shall honor the Sabbath, right? It doesn't just say you should take off on Sunday or Saturday and kind of chill out, watch the football game. No, no, no. It says. It says six days. You must work in order. That seventh day is a Sabbath, a rest day for God. Hashem, meaning that the purpose of the week is you must earn your fricking money. The Torah, the. The Bible is very explicit. If you don't work, you don't eat. You can't rely on a miracle or even other people. It's considered, you know, this isn't good to rely on other people, that they're just going to provide for you. No, you have to do it. But if you work seven days a week, I know billionaires, I. I know superstars, you know, millions of Instagram, whatever, they work 24 7. I said to them, I told Stephen Bartland on his podcast, I said, you're so successful, you work seven days a week. Aren't you just a slave? Like you may. It may be to a good, good, you know, outcome. You're doing great. If I could buy a stock option on anybody. He's 32, handsome, fit, great guy, great friends, he has 100 people. His podcast is like, you know, it's almost.
- [214:47]
Sean Ryan
As.
- [214:48]
Brian Keating
Almost as big as this, okay? And that's all he does. And I'm like standing, Stephen, take it from me. I'm an older man. You gotta find a woman. You gotta find a life. You gotta make a family, and you gotta take time off. If you cannot do that, you are a slave. You're a rich slave. I'm a slave, Sean. I'd love to be on doing science every day of the week. I could do podcasts every day of the week. It's a challenge for me to turn it off. I don't like doing it.
- [215:12]
Sean Ryan
How do you turn it off?
- [215:13]
Brian Keating
How do I turn it off?
- [215:14]
Sean Ryan
When you celebrate the Sabbath. Are you telling me that none of your science is education? Your head?
- [215:20]
Brian Keating
That's not the issue. Science is in your head because science is a vehicle to God.
- [215:24]
Sean Ryan
You know what I mean? Your work.
- [215:26]
Brian Keating
I'm not. I don't work on papers. I told you.
- [215:28]
Sean Ryan
But it's in your head. Are you really able to.
- [215:33]
Brian Keating
Policeman. 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 you respect the hell out of and you did that and you're not in a temple, or you're not with your kids and you're not with your wife, and you're kind of. But he doesn't need it for him. God doesn't do this. He's doing it for you. You know, every six years in the Old Testament, you're supposed to let the land lay fallow and not reap every year. How did they eat? So you can go back and dispute and talk about the science, whatever. You had to let the land every seven years, and people would go free. The slaves would go free. If you had a slave, it'll let them go free every 49 years. You know the word jubilee? Jubilee? That comes from Hebrew. It's Yovel, Jubal. It's a Jubilee every 50 years. Everybody would get their land back. Every slave would go free throughout the land. It's on the Liberty Bell. It's on the fricking U.S. 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 in pursuit of something bigger than yourself. And by the way, I Think you do this but you just don't know it. So the only thing I'm saying is it's like an easy prescription from this non medical doctor, okay? But it's the decoupling from the world. And I don't care if somebody's tweeting about me because I said something about Avi Lobe 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 can't wait. 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 a billion dollars on it. You'd be, come on, you'd be a little happy, but you wouldn't be twice as happy. You wouldn't be ten times as happy. But Sean, I'd be happy in the moment. In the moment, yeah, but that's not happiness.
- [217:27]
Sean Ryan
But then it goes away.
- [217:28]
Brian Keating
That goes away. But here's the, here's the sick thing about life. I can't make you happier, guaranteed. Well, I can make you unhappier, guaranteed. Right? This is entropy. Entropy is the concept of disorder, of chaos, of randomness. The things that make us happy. Organization, structure, family, production work. It's organized, this structure. The natural order of the universe is towards disorder and chaos. We must control it by applying energy to reduce entropy.
- [217:57]
Sean Ryan
I mean, happiness is a choice.
- [218:01]
Brian Keating
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's partially, could be a choice, but unhappiness, you have to choose when you
- [218:17]
Sean Ryan
wake up if you're going to be pissed off or if you're going to be happy, right?
- [218:21]
Brian Keating
Yeah. If you're healthy, yeah. But anyone who has care, 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 it. 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 infinite. I know billionaires, Sean, have 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. Things. Not for my ego, not for my bank account, but for. 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. I'm a scientist. Maybe, maybe that doesn't apply to everybody. I'm sure a lot of people be happy with seven Instagram models and a billion bucks, but. 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 that you'll ever know about. So, guys out there, be careful what you wish for.
- [219:49]
Sean Ryan
I got a hot question for you. Ready?
- [219:51]
Brian Keating
Go for it.
- [219:54]
Sean Ryan
Here we go.
- [219:54]
Brian Keating
Coming in hot.
- [219:56]
Sean Ryan
Back in 1950, Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, was having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos when he asked a question that still unsettles science today. Where is everybody? The universe is enormous. It's ancient, and based on the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems like life should exist somewhere else. 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?
- [220:38]
Brian Keating
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 bomb, Right? So the concept is that the universe is vast, but let's just restrict ourselves to the galaxy. Our galaxy is a few hundred, maybe 100,000 light years across, meaning light takes 100,000 years to get from one edge of the galaxy to the other edge. There's about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There's about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, that's 100 billion squared stars in the observable universe, each one with 10 planets, call it around it, you get numbers that are incomprehensible. A million million million million planets in the observable universe. 10 to the 24th planets. Right. 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, 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.
- [222:09]
Sean Ryan
Right. Wow.
- [222:09]
Brian Keating
So this kind of shows you that back then they didn't think they had evidence. It was right before Roswell, by the way. And then nowadays we don't feel like consequential evidence exists at the level of scientific proof. Right. And even those with the most invested in it, like Avila, will not say, as he didn't tell you, he didn't say we have definitive proof. Right. He said he's a careful scientists. Right. He said we don't have evidence yet and that's fine. Does that mean they don't exist? Absolutely not. It could exist and there's many different reasons that could explain why we don't see what we don't see. Some of them come down to reasons, for example, that, that have to do with. There's an equation called the Drake Equation. Radio, an astronomer in the 60s said, let's calculate how many different life forms there could be in the universe and what it would take for us to know that there's 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, you know, 14 light years away. Right. Ten year, ten, four light, whatever you want. Right. We would never know they exist because they don't have technology to broadcast radio waves and light waves for us to see, or neutrino tractor beams or gravitational wave. They don't have technology. Technology, Right. So it's this. How do we know how many technologically advanced civilizations there are in order for us to be able to detect them? Otherwise we can't detect them. Right. We're not going to the other star systems. The fastest thing that humans have ever made, Voyager, it's traveled the farthest away from Earth. It's one light day from the Earth. It was launched 55 years ago, before I was born. And in that sense it's in, you know that that thing is the farthest we've ever gone on. It's only one light day. The nearest star is four 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. One possibility is they don't exist now. They might not exist now, but it doesn't mean that they didn't exist in the past.
- [224:19]
Sean Ryan
Past.
- [224:20]
Brian Keating
Right now there's information from the 1936 Olympics that's getting out. It's about 90 light years away from us. That was the first time humans ever transmitted a globally televised signal. A radio wave that could travel around the world and go into outer space by accident, leak into outer space. Right? That is now traveling at the speed of light 90 light years away from us. There's approximately, you know, maybe a thousand stars that live within a 90 light 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 TWICE 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 gotten almost 100 light years away for us to hear back from them. We heard you, you exist. That'll take another hundred years. Does that make sense? So there's a sphere, It's a radius 100 light years, thousand stars, plus or minus in them, and there's maybe 10,000 planets in those. So right now all we could say is we don't know. There could be stars that are half that distance 50 light years away. Maybe there's 300 of those and there's 3,000 planets on them. So all we can say is that volume of space knows about us and could have returned a signal to us since we started broadcasting information. We don't have any evidence of that. Not for people not looking. But that is such a tiny microscopic number. That's like a shot glass out of the Pacific Ocean in terms of how much the vastness of the universe is. 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.
- [226:08]
Sean Ryan
Travel out.
- [226:09]
Brian Keating
Another solution that people have come up with is that there's lots of life in the universe, but they tend to not live very long because they have these things called wars. And they do battle among themselves. And you see this at every level of speciation, from bacteria to Beethoven. I mean, to us, right? I mean, I don't tell you bacteria have military campaigns against enemy bacteria cultures. They secrete toxins that preclude other bacteria. They spend their biological resources to create bacteriological trenches, warfare to prevent other bacteria from encroaching on their precious 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, so long. Maybe. There's a paper I read about recently. My friend Sabina Hossenfelder made a video about it. Elon Musk is tweeting about it. And it is. I think Avi Loeb is involved in some way or other. It shows there might be an average lifetime of a civilization in order for us not to have seen anybody of about 5,000 years.
- [227:20]
Sean Ryan
Wow.
- [227:20]
Brian Keating
Which is like barely back to the pyramids, right? So some say you hit 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 I take my kids to the San Diego Zoo, and when I take them there, there's a gorilla exhibit. And I love the gorillas, but it says on the sign, it says, don't knock on the glass. It really bothers them, you know, it just makes them anxious. So don't do that. Of course, my kids do that, and then they get kicked out. But what if you 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 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 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 heard about cattle mutilation and like abductions and things like that. Near death experiences. There's only one near death experience that I believe in, by the way. 100% documented fact which has to do with Alfred Nobel. Do you know the story? You know, Alfred Nobel was. He invented dynamite. So he was one of the richest people in the world, kind of like Elon Musk or tesla of the 1800s. And he was one of the richest people in all of Europe and all of the world. And his family was involved with making sea mines for the Russian and Crimean War of 1840, something like that. And so they were arms dealers, Alfred Nobel and his father Emmanuel. And they were trying to invent ways to make their methodology more lethal. And one of Alfred's brothers, his baby brother Emil, started to play around with nitric lord. And nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable. And one day he was in the lack of the family laboratory and he dropped it on the floor and it blew up like enormous explosion, vaporized him and six other people, five other people, six people killed instantly. And this devastated his father, Emmanuel Nobel, and Alfred as well. And Emmanuel ended up basically getting committed to sanatorium. And then he died eight years to the day of his son. His heart was broken. He had a stroke and just devastated him. And Alfred set out to do something to make that never happen again. And he took nitroglycerin and he mixed it with a type of basically like clay, it's called diatomaceous earth. And he mixed it together like chalk or clay with nitroglycerin. And it made it stable so that you could drop it. And that became known as diamond. Dynamite in Greek means powerful rock. 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 he's reading this, so he knows it's not him. Turns out it was his older brother Ludwig who died. 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, no kids. And he decided at that point if he died, then that's the way the world was going to remember him. Like, 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 the 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 force 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, for literature and for physics. How can I forget physics? Physics and these things have had tremendous benefit. The first Nobel Prize ever given was in physics was for the X ray. The X ray machine, which is probably pulled bullets out of people that, you know, it's had so much benefit for diagnostic purposes. I had a toothache. The X rays benefited humankind and it's a physics invention, it's a technology invention. And then the Nobel Peace Project, which has a very checkered past. One of my friends, Uni Tarantini, wrote a book about how, you know, it's gone to like, Yasser Arafat and terrorists and, you know, all sorts of assorted characters. Obama won it after being in office for like nine days. So it's been politicized, but it still has this noble le goal of benefiting all of mankind through science, through peace. And I think it's a wonderful thing and it wouldn't have happened without this near death experience that Alfred Nobel encountered. So that's the only near death experience I believe. I don't know. You might have other stories.
- [233:18]
Sean Ryan
Well, Brian, we're wrapping up the interview here. Last question, who would you recommend for the show?
- [233:26]
Brian Keating
For this show? Oh, that's easy. I don't know if the Internet could handle it though. Eric Weinstein.
- [233:33]
Sean Ryan
Eric Weinstein. Weinstein.
- [233:35]
Brian Keating
Eric Weinstein is one of the. One of the foremost kind of intellectual public intellectuals. He's created concepts and, and he's, 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 get fight like brothers and we have a lot of respect for each other and I think you could, you could, you could handle them. And I think that combination, his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from aliens, theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, economics, and then his very, very interesting perspective on the Epstein he met Epstein. Epstein knew about Eric's research, maybe partially some weird Harvard connection where Epstein had an office and a workspace and he wasn't a professor, he wasn't a PhD. And Eric understands a lot more about Epstein than I think most people do because he saw it from the financial component, the physics component, the Harvard, the institutional, all these different perspectives. And he's just, just. He's so quotable, imaginative and he's such a good spirit. We call him Mench. He's a mensch that you and him together I think would break. Break the Internet line open.
- [235:05]
Sean Ryan
I'll text him. I've never met him. I will.
- [235:08]
Brian Keating
You have his number?
- [235:09]
Sean Ryan
I do have his number.
- [235:11]
Brian Keating
Get in touch with him. I think he be. He's the one, no question.
- [235:15]
Sean Ryan
Well, thank you, Brian. FAS Standing 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.