Avi Loeb Strikes Back: Answering The Critics

Brian Keating:

K. So I’m broadcasting, and there are about 20 people who’ll be waiting. We’ll record it, and then we’ll upload it and edit it, so the maximum number of people can actually watch it. Let’s see here. Alright. So I believe we’re on live here. Yep. Okay.

Brian Keating:

We’re on live on Twitter, and, and we’re also, I believe, live on YouTube. Let me check Yes. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. We’ll give it a minute. Let people join in. There’s hundreds of people coming around here.

Brian Keating:

Let’s see if they will, see what questions they will come up with as well. We see a lot of things trending from the campus of Harvard, which is not always a good thing. Right, Avi?

Speaker:

Well You’re

Brian Keating:

trending on Twitter.

Speaker:

Like anything, that humanity does these days, it can it can be better.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm. So we got a a 100 plus people already. We’ll give it another minute. Let people trickle in. I’m also on LinkedIn, And Avi is so productive because he does not waste his time on what is known in Yiddish as is stuff for the ego, but he is, extremely prolific and needs basically no introduction. I will give him 1 in in just a minute. Let’s see if it’s live, it should be on LinkedIn. Join here, maybe this will work, maybe it won’t.

Brian Keating:

Yep. Oh it’s wow. Okay so we’ve got this on multi different streams, interdisciplinary streams. So, first off, I wanna welcome you, and it’s been about 3 months since we spoke. We spoke last for your wonderful second book, Inter Stellar. And a lot has happened, since that time. And I cannot ignore kind of the mastodon trampling through the room and not ask you as, as as someone who was born in Israel, who was raised on farm in Israel, who is, one of the most preeminent scientist in the world, but also a very proud Jew and as am I. And I I don’t make any apologies for that.

Brian Keating:

I was in Israel a mere 2 weeks before the October 7th, Hamas terrorist attacks. I was in Tel Aviv. I was in southern Israel. I was in Jerusalem, and I was very close because it was Rosh Hashanah. I actually got to be very close with a lot of, Palestinians, Arabs, because they were the ones working while Jews were enjoying their holiday. So I actually had many meals with with Palestinians, shared many rides with them on public and and private transport, and, had no inkling of what would happen, And the, the insight that I think we need to start with before we turn to to Harvard and then eventually to the, the subject that I originally invited you to speak about which is your area of expertise, which is this interstellar meteorite, which is received some pushback from the community as as happens. Some of it fair, some of it possibly not fair. We’ll talk about that.

Brian Keating:

So 3 things on the agenda today. First of all, Avi, I need to give you a chance to just share your thoughts as as a man of science, as a man of conscience, and as a Jew. How have you been dealt affected by the events of October 7th?

Speaker:

Well, let me first clarify. This is not a war between, the Palestinians and Israel. It’s a war between the Hamas in Israel and there is a clear distinction because, given the charter of the Hamas, there cannot be peace. There cannot be a two state solution. The Hamas calls for, the removal of Israel, for killing all citizens of Israel. There is no room for compromise. And therefore, anyone that’s, sides with a terrorist organization which basically aims to annihilate, -Uh, the state of Israel, kill all the Jews rather than reach a compromise, is basically advocating violence, And that has nothing to do with political opinion. I want to clarify that, you know, my wife is Peace seeking, Israeli, and she was always, on the left advocating for Finding a resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

Speaker:

But, what happened on October 7th was, rape Of women killing of babies, one of whom, you know, the I I will not get into the details. There is actually a film about it, but it was the Most violent, act of barbarism, against humanity. Basically, killing people, that had nothing to do with a military conflict. These are civilians at their homes. And, In a way, you know, it’s sort of like, the reckoning after 9/11, you know, we should all condemn such an act. Now Then you ask yourself, how is it possible that the 25 student organizations at Harvard University would cheer up And say that the victims, deserved it. Irrespective of political views, nobody should celebrate Killing of innocent civilians for any political purpose. And so that is a distortion of, the moral compass.

Speaker:

And you ask yourself, how did we get there? Well, it’s obviously a result of social media where, that polarizes society, but you can’t just relate it to that. There is something wrong with academia. And yesterday, I was actually in Washington DC. I was jogging at 6 AM, on the Arlington Bridge, with a backdrop of a beautiful, sunrise. And it, a few a few hours later, Harvard’s president, along with 2 other university presidents, was testifying, in Capitol Hill where I I met with other people. And she was asked Claudine was asked whether calling for a genocide of Jews should be considered harassment. Yes or no? And she said it depends on the context. And not only she, but the other 2 presidents.

Speaker:

And to me, That is a terrible message because there is no doubt that the genocide of any group of people should be condemned. She should have said no. But instead, she said, if it doesn’t translate into action, Then, you know, we have to deal with it on a case by case basis. And what does it mean action that Jews will be killed on campus. Only then would you consider it as a violation of the code of ethics? I mean, Obviously, a lot of students feel unsafe and classes are disrupted by demonstrators all the time right now at Harvard University. So obviously, you can advocate for freedom of speech, but there is a limit. If someone come comes on campus and, praises Hitler and calls for killing of Jews. Obviously, that is, you know, that person crosses the line.

Speaker:

There is a limit. A university is an educational institution. Okay? And that means you need to educate people. What does it mean to educate people? It means that to tell them when they are wrong, not to allow them to say things that are harmful to other people. And, obviously, this is all recognized in some context of gender diversity, ethnic diversity, but not in this case of the Jews. And you ask yourself, how is that possible, after the holocaust where 6,000,000 people were killed. I mean, don’t we have those sensitivities? And the provost of Harvard, Alan Garber, was sitting just behind Claudine gave when he she gave this testimony. So I won’t say that the dysfunctional leadership at Harvard, It’s just a matter of people not understanding, the Jewish history because there are some Jews involved In in allowing this to happen, like the provost of Harvard, like, the head of the board, of trustees, you know, Pritzker.

Speaker:

And, and something is simply wrong.

Brian Keating:

It shouldn’t take a Jew. Right? It shouldn’t take a look. The same people, the those same provost, the Pritzker family, they were justifiably outraged at the, murder, the death of George Floyd. I remember 3 years ago or more. And we received on this campus, basically, shut down campus. We shut down journals. We shut We protested, on behalf of the, you know, solidarity with, African Americans on campuses. And that was swiftly and roundly condemned, and we had teach ins and so forth.

Brian Keating:

I I tweeted out today, you know, thank God, basically, that UCSD isn’t as prestigious as Harvard or MIT. Because when you’re at an institution like a Harvard, like a Yale, like MIT, like Penn, You have a long way down. When you are the president of that university, that Harvard you know, I I hate to admit it, although we all know it’s true. Harvard is the gold standard. Okay? What happens at Harvard affects the rest of the world, not just higher education, not just the Ivy League. Just as What happens in California academically for under, for students in in schools dominates the rest of the nation because we have the biggest population. So we have the very, very, bright spotlight that burns on campuses. Now here on my own campus

Speaker:

Yeah.

Brian Keating:

Go ahead. Yeah.

Speaker:

No. I just wanted to add that, You know, even on the in the context of freedom of speech, which, was mentioned by the leadership of Harvard, Harvard ranks Very low because there were professors who were fired for just suggesting, you know, that Women, give birth, and and that was considered inappropriate in the current intellectual climate. But on the other hand, you know, calling for, the destruction of Israel and and and, genocide of Jews It’s not considered a deviation from what is acceptable. And if there is freedom of speech, the 1st group of people that should Have it are tenured professors. That’s the whole meaning of tenure. So how is it that there is this cancel culture to basically Remove those who you do not agree with, including speakers, you know, from the other side of the political spectrum. I think that has the consequence of polarizing society even farther because at, an academic institution, you must be taught to listen, to have a dialogue with people that disagree with you. That is the fundamental, ethics of Academia, and that is being violated.

Speaker:

You know, I have this sense that it’s just like 1984 of Orwell where, You know, some people in academia are advocating for principles but are violating them by their own actions. So they are, on the one hand, Virtual signaling as if they are in favor of diversity, but then anyone that disagrees with them on a mat on a on a particular subject is not allowed on campus. And, you know, so just like George Orwell, mentioned the party line, which basically, said war is peace and the ignorance is strength. You know, you you are advocating for something and then violating it Yourself. And I find that to be completely inappropriate, especially for intelligent I mean, you can imagine politicians doing that for political benefits, but Within academia, it’s just unacceptable because we are educating the next generation of leaders, you know, especially at Harvard. We we have to Show some moral compass, when we direct them into their adulthood. So, I really envy

Brian Keating:

said it, but Yep. Yeah. No. I forget who said it, but there’s nothing that’s so ludicrous that it can’t be believed by the world’s most intellectual individuals of which universities are Now I think universities have a special duty as you say because everything in in society is downstream from universities. In other words, every journalist went to a university. Every politician went to University. Every, every, you know, tech worker, every every professor went to a university. We have a huge amount of leverage on society.

Brian Keating:

And since the 19 seventies, and and beyond, we’ve become obsessed with with, you know, what’s called critical thinking and and basically destroying a lot of what, you know, the currency that academia built up over the past 100 years. And I I think it’s, I I feel like it is a sea change. When I see on campus here at UC San Diego, the ISIS flag being raised to intimidate, you know, senators before a student senate meeting. When I see, you know, people, meaning police escorts to leave a student senate meeting, the Jewish students only. When I say

Speaker:

medical work The Bin Laden letter that was spread around the TikTok. You just think about it, where a lot of young people just argue that, it now makes sense sense for what Bin Laden was saying. And, you know, that these are A corrosive, elements that will that could destroy our society. They could lead to violence. They could lead to A a repetition of what the history, did so so badly. I mean, the was going through

Brian Keating:

I mean, to the extent that you know her at all. I mean, I was disappointed. I mean, they all had a script. They all said essentially the same thing. President Gay, your president had an opportunity because She didn’t actually wasn’t president. She hasn’t been president for that long. Although she’s obviously received a ton of of of ire, etcetera. But what do you was going through the minds of of the MIT president and the and the Penn president.

Brian Keating:

Why can’t they why is it so difficult? I mean, what forces would conspire? And at my graduate institution, Christina Pax and at Brown University, Ivy League as well. She refused to say that, you know, prepared remarks in her speech, She was gonna say that you should feel free to wear a kippah, a yamaka, as well as a hijab. And she changed it because there were chance that she’s, you know, a part, of genocide, taking you know, benefiting from it because they won’t boycott, divest, and sanction. Now, by the way, would you be allowed let’s say BDS were to pass. And would you be allowed because you do you still have dual citizenship? Or or

Speaker:

Yes.

Brian Keating:

I I know that my my my, colleagues would not that are in Israel, they would be forbidden to come to campus. So I find this medieval. I find this like a throwback to the dark ages. You could talk about wanting to boycott companies. Fine. But to to to sanction and to boycott individuals, That is an anti intellectual pursuit in my opinion.

Speaker:

Also, I think What

Brian Keating:

do you think was

Speaker:

going through

Brian Keating:

president Gay’s mind? Yeah. Well,

Speaker:

You could see that the answers reflect a very careful, dance around the legal issues, because if she were to admit, that calling for genocide, is inappropriate, then the next question would be, what do you do about it? And then if she says, okay. Since it’s in conflict with the code of conduct within Harvard University, we have to discipline those students. She doesn’t want to go that far. And moreover, she doesn’t want to be sued legally, because of inaction in past events. So I think she was advised by, lawyers to say what she said, but that is very disappointing because leadership is all about, crafting your own words in a sincere, authentic fashion, and actually following the principles that you advocate for. And what you find here is, a situation where universities are failing, to show any moral compass. And, I’m I’m very disappointed because that’s not the environment that I was hoping for. And, actually, if you think about it, before October 7th, a lot of people had this illusion That, their friends on the left will fight for them if a situation like that, rises.

Speaker:

But instead, what you see is A situation where, you know, that you could call it antisemitism. I mean, you basically, some people don’t really care about lives of Jews. And and, I find that amazing, you know, because some of them are actually Jews. And, these yeah. Many are. So so, something is wrong. And by the way, it doesn’t really just ex I think it’s a in a way, it looks to me like craziness. Okay? Loss of sanity in the context of our moral compass.

Speaker:

And, we need to get back to the basic principles, which is to respect Everyone. And, you know, I was, under I was at a dinner, in New York City hosted by Bill Ackman, and He actually is a very strong critic of Claudine Gay, but there were some Harvard faculty there. And at any event, general Patreos, was speaking at that dinner. He was talking about, geopolitical future of the Middle East after the Israel Hamas war. And, again, I’m Emphasizing this is really the Hamas war. It’s not the Palestinians. We maybe it will be, there will be an opportunity to establish something more stable in the future after Trying the hamaz, but, but at any event, so he was giving his forecast which sounded gloomy actually and, the, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, was there and Antonella, Paula Antonelli. And, She summarized her vision in 3 words.

Speaker:

She said, love the aliens. Now what she meant is you should love Those that are different than you. And for me, you know, scientifically speaking, I actually am looking forward to, meeting another civilization that He’s smarter than us because perhaps it will inspire us to do better. It’s just like finding a smarter student in your class. And, for other people, it’s a threat because you want to always believe that you are the most intelligent. But you See the situation right now. We are wasting a lot of resources, effort on military conflicts. $2,000,000,000,000 a year, by the way.

Speaker:

And if we were to direct it to space exploration, we could send a space probe, you know, a cubesat Towards every star in the Milky Way galaxy, billions of them within this century. It’s just a matter of priorities. And for some reason, and you know I always ask the there there was 2 months ago there was a a presentation of a play that was written by a playwright, Josh Ravec, about my research, current research. So he wrote a play that he wants to feature off Broadway in New York City. And in the play, the main character which is me, asks the question, why is childlike bullying More prevalent than childlike curiosity. You know, that’s really the underlying problem we have That people prefer to hate each other rather than to work together towards a better future.

Brian Keating:

So let me ask you. We may contact, you know, next week. And, super powerful alien species been lurking for a long time. We we we kind of, We kinda did the you know, downplay them because they they appear as like dust. You know, they’re just kinda dust. There’s a lot of but they actually they do a demonstration. They they take out series, the asteroid series, just obliterate it. And they say, if you don’t, do the following, to to achieve peace in the Middle East, we’re gonna do this to the whole planet.

Brian Keating:

Okay. Now you are that alien species. You are the dust, Avak, the Avak. Tell me, Avi, what would you do? How could you, one of the most brilliant people I know, How would you approach us a true two state solution, which I assume you advocate for as do I? How would you do it? You’re the king of the universe right now, Steve. This is Not just a Harvard professor.

Speaker:

Yeah. This is really trivial, actually, the solution.

Brian Keating:

Okay.

Speaker:

And by the way, I should mention that in Judaism, there is this concept of The messianic age, which will come, you know, in the future, that’s why we are asked to conduct mitzvahs, which He’s basically trying to fulfill a bet a more ethical, future. And, the goal is to hasten, to to bring the messiah as early as possible because we need peace. And when the messiah arrives, there will be peace. A lot of Jews think that the Messiah might arrive from Brooklyn. I think that, the Messiah will arrive from an exoplanet. Okay. Because it will give us a new perspective. Now what would be the advice of this messiah? Okay? The I think it’s very simple.

Speaker:

You keep fighting, the Messiah will tell us, you keep fighting on a two dimensional surface of a rock Leftover from the formation of the sun. How ridiculous can that be? There is a third dimension out there. It’s called space, the 3rd dimension. Just look up. Instead of looking down on each other, look up. And there is so much real estate out there that you can have not only a 2 state solution. You can have an infinite Number of states out there almost, as long as you travel far enough. So so this is really I mean, we can’t stay on Earth forever, because eventually, the sun will burn up all the oceans, but we can start moving out of it.

Speaker:

It’s really a very limited point of view to Think that we have to stay on this two dimensional surface where the territory is limited. Let’s Imagine together a future on the moon, a future on Mars, and then moving out of the solar system. That would be a very simple solution. You just have to think bigger. Okay? And instead of you know, it’s you know this joke, about A man coming to a rabbi. Okay? And and I’m using this Jewish narrative here because we were discussing it before. Yeah. So and then comes to rabbi and complaints says, you know, at home, we really have no space and we just had a baby and it’s really quite distressing.

Speaker:

What is your advice? And the rabbi said, bring a goat into your home. And the man says, what are you you’re you’re suggesting that I’ll add more living beings and Then he brings the goat and a week later comes back to the rabbi and says, you know, it’s it’s even more terrible. And and the rabbi said, now take the goat out. Once the goat and then he says, don’t you Don’t you feel much better now? And, so another so, of course, I mean, it could have been worse Then we are, feeling right now in terms of the conflicts we have, but it’s all because we are, engaged in zero sum game, you know, where The resources are limited. Then that’s the way it was in the jungle when there was a bunch of bananas and only 1 person could use, let’s say, consume them and then we would we would fight on those resources. And so that’s the way we think. But I think what science and technology offers us Is an infinite sum game where everyone can benefit as long as we cooperate. The meaning of science is cooperation, and that’s what, you You know, the the I I visited, a week and a half ago, I was at CERN.

Speaker:

I gave a public lecture there, and, this Institution was conceived by a theorist. As much as it is an experimental center, that was, Louis de de Broglie, a theorist who won the Nobel Prize for his PhD. And he just conceived of Center of excellence for experimental physics that is international. And, there are 23 Member countries, and this is really the DNA of science working together. And if we were to, you know, Put science as the higher priority in society. Perhaps we will do better.

Brian Keating:

Yep. I hope that we will. So, speaking about aliens and now moving, to the subject of interstellar and extraterrestrial meteorites. And I remind you, if you would like a meteorite. You’re guaranteed to get 1 if you’ve simply visit and you happen to have a e d u email address. Oops. I I made myself disappear. If you go to briankeeting.com, you will get your own meteorite.

Brian Keating:

So please go there if you have a dotedu email address. Avi, we’ve seen, you know, tremendous interest in your book, and that’s been phenomenal. And I wonder what the reaction to the book has been, since we last spoke back in, I guess it was September, late August. And I want to get, your take on just The the popular reaction to your 2nd book, after funk coming as it did on the heels of your phenomenal, some runaway smash hit bestseller, extraterrestrial. So tell us please, Avi, how has been the reaction both, in critical circles and in the consumer circles? And then we’ll move on to, to some some matters that are pressing because they involve a critique as is natural in science to get a critique. Maybe not the way done, but we’ll get into that. So please tell us, Avi, how has been the reaction to the new book?

Speaker:

Giant Well, so the the first book, became a bestseller in many countries, 28 editions, 25 languages, and that attracted a lot of attention I had Of the other of, actually more than 3,000 interviews as a result of that, just over the past couple of months, there were 3 profiles. 1 in the New York Times Magazine, another one in, The Telegraph, and the last one was in The Guardian. You know, there is a lot of attention. There is a documentary being prepared about my research by Netflix and they have been filming for, more than a year and in fact they were following me when I went to the Swiss Alps, last week and they carry the camera all the way up and that was, quite tedious for them. And then they went with me to Washington DC as well, just yesterday. So they are they they keep following me. There are lots of interesting things happening and, you would see them hopefully when it Comes the documentary comes out, hopefully in 2025. Lots of things.

Speaker:

Then, as I mentioned, there is a play, That was presented at my home about the research. It includes a song that was composed by Alan Bergman who won many awards and wrote the Yentl for, Barbara Streisand. And, and then, In addition, there is a sculpture being made about inspired by my research, by an artist in Spain. And so lots of things are happening. You know, it very often happens that I go places and someone comes to me and asks for a selfie, which is something I’m not used to. It happened even on, Richard Branson’s Necker Island when I was there as the entertainer of a group of 40 people with A net worth each of them a net worth above, $400,000,000. And one of them came to me and said And you were on

Brian Keating:

the high side of that. You were on the higher side of Well,

Speaker:

I’m I’m at 0. Average level.

Brian Keating:

You brought it up a little bit.

Speaker:

No. I’m at 0, in that scale. But then, one of them came and said, can I have a, a video selfie with you and I’ll send it to my boss? And, he never replies, but let’s see what happens. And Within minutes, the boss replied and said, you know, I can’t believe that you are with Avi Loeb on this island. I follow his work all the time. And, You know, I went to buy an Apple Watch at the store just after a few minutes. That was the 1st time I went after the pandemic, and someone came to me and said, are you, Avi Lo? And So anyway, people do recognize and it it had impact on and and that’s part of what the mission that I I have aside from practicing science, Which I should say is extremely important. You have to practice science in in order to know what to advocate.

Speaker:

There are many science popularizers who do not practice science. And they are just like commentators looking at a soccer match and telling the players how to pass the ball. Okay. And, how dare they if they are not playing soccer? So my point is that, Aside from practicing science, I I enjoy communicating to the public because, you know, it it it, inspires young people, how exciting science could be and it shows that science should be driven by evidence. And we can talk more about it. But the this was a result of the 1st book extraterrestrial. My, new book, Interstellar, came just a few months ago. And, Just to mention 2 tidbits from it.

Speaker:

1 I call the Hawking limit, and that is, you know, Stephen Hawking was at At my home back in 2016 for a Passover dinner, and, he could hardly move a mass muscle. You know? He’s he could only move his eyebrows, But nevertheless, he had a machine that could translate that into words. And, You could still see the human side of Stephen Hawking at one of the events. He said, I’m bored. Could we have, could we go to the hotel bar and, have some fun, and he had an affair with his caretaker, you know, some years before that. So it was definitely human, but he couldn’t really use, at will his physical body. So that’s the limit That, artificial intelligence works at right now without robots, you know, ChargeGPT or anything more futuristic, could potentially imitate mental states of humans. And so I call that the Hawking limit where It’s not associated with any physical, motion, but actually just the mental states, are human like.

Speaker:

Okay? So that’s an interesting limit where AI systems will Be quite, important in society because you can develop a relationship with them. They would appear just like a human except for the physical aspect. And then and and, of course, for interstellar travel, that’s extremely, important for any probe to be, to have a brain, an artificial brain so that the the probe can decide for itself how to respond to circumstances because the time It takes the signals to travel to the sender. It’s simply too long. Even for light, it takes 1,000 of years across the Milky Way galaxy. So, that AI brain is really essential for interstellar travel. The other thing I mentioned in the book is, classifying civilizations. And, to me, a mark of intelligence is the ability The to recreate your environment.

Speaker:

So the most I mean, we are polluting our planet. We’re sort of like these tourists that Arrive at the national park and throw bottles everywhere. You know, like, we don’t care so much about our environment as of now. Maybe now we will stop. But, the most intelligent way is to actually recreate the environment. So for example, create life in the laboratory. And we are in principle, a scientific civilization can do that, or even better create a baby universe if you understand how to Use quantum gravity, in the lab. And it’s possible that the big bang came to exist that way.

Speaker:

But, that’s one benefit of finding the most intelligent civilization in the Milky Way because we can learn if these things are possible. We can ask them questions. My first question would be, what was there before the big bang? Okay. That would be my because it will teach us about quantum gravity. It will teach us about our cosmic roots. If they know the answer, that’d be wonderful. The second question is, where is the nearest, interstellar bar where, You know, extraterrestrials come together and have conversations. You know? Because, Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Laureate, In his book, The First 3 Minutes, he argued at the end that the more the universe is comprehensible, the, the more pointless it looks.

Speaker:

And The reason I think it looked pointless to Steven Weinberg is because he focused on elementary particles, on things that have no life to them. And we know from our personal experience that finding a partner gives a meaning to your existence. So, if we ever find a partner out there on an exoplanet or in between stars, it could give a meaning to our existence. The universe will not appear to be pointless anymore. And, you know, we could learn from that partner and, You know, this is my romantic version or reason, to find the partner. I do think that it will help us.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. I think the existential loneliness and of, aspects of of, feeling like we lack free will, and and, also the ultimate questions. This is what makes us humans. And I I wanna point out to my to my viewers and actually to my channel members at YouTube. You can watch a video. I made a video about you, Avi. Not about your research, but your work with, Vagozzi, I believe it was, on, falsifying inflation using the cosmic graviton background that comes out tomorrow morning, unless you are A channel member, which I love and appreciate. We’ve got dozens and dozens of them.

Brian Keating:

Then you could watch it basically now.

Speaker:

That so that’s let you know Thank you so much. I should tell you that then I have a follow-up paper I’m working on right now, and so you have a little scoop here that

Brian Keating:

Oh, wow.

Speaker:

If, I mean, we tend to assume that the universe was always the same in all directions, that it was expanding the same rate, and That’s called the isotropic, that the universe was always isotropic. But if you allow a small level of, Anisotropy of, the universe expanding in one direction a little, faster than in in the other direction. Turns out that, early on, the difference was larger actually, and we just found the solutions for that. And what happens is Along one axis, the short axis, you can actually get to a singularity before the other so the other axis can Actually, expand at the time that the short axis collapses, they can bounce. And, so you can get a graviton background With different properties than you expect in an isotropic universe. And, so the you know, that’s the fun of doing, signs that you never know what you might discover tomorrow. And actually, the reason I went to Washington DC is because I had an insight about something that could be useful to people over there. But that’s completely, completely unrelate it’s related to gravity, but not to, anything we discuss so far.

Brian Keating:

Alright. Well, great. We need to get into, the the meat of the subject matter today, which has to do with The claimed I will call it the back reaction to the discovery of spherules of a likely extrasolar composition in the Pacific Ocean site of the CNAS 2014 bolide. So first of all, let’s give a quick recap because I know you’ve got a limited amount of time. I wanna be respectful. We have a lot to cover. Can you summarize, the steps, if you will, that led you to believe that the boli discovered and, with samples collected from Papua New Guinea, that that was likely to be of extra solar origin.

Speaker:

Right. So this was, The fireball from, the object that was roughly the size of a watermelon Was observed by US government satellites on January 8, 2014, almost a decade ago. And, For 5 years, nobody paid attention, but we calculated that the speed of this object was so high that it wasn’t bound to the sun. So it came from interstellar space and moreover, it was moving faster than 95% of the stars near the sun. Uh-huh. At the 60 kilometers per second. So That gave us, the inspiration to, go out there to the Pacific Ocean and look for the materials of these objects. So I led an expedition, and By the way, it took a year of very hard work to plan it, to receive the funding at 1 and a half $1,000,000 to have the best engineers and, navigators involved, and eventually to design the machinery, the tools to collect Any molten droplets from the surface of the object when it exploded, as a result of its friction on air when it Produce this fireball, which carried about a few percent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb energy.

Speaker:

And so, We were looking for millimeter sized particles, the size of a grain of sand, at the bottom of the ocean, which was Roughly a mile deep at that location. About 60 miles from Papua New Guinea. And, And the the region that the Department of Defense, defined for the location of the fireball was, about 7 miles large. So just think about it. Searching across such a huge volume of water and looking for millimeter size particles. It sounds hopeless. A lot of people said you will not find anything. Nevertheless, we went there, and then we ended up finding those molten droplets.

Speaker:

Most of which are background. Okay? Background particles that are not related to the meteor, but we found an enhancement, along the meteor path. So we made the map and indeed found an excess of spherules. And moreover, in That region where the excess was, we found, composition of elements from the periodic table That is distinct. That was never reported in the literature. It has rare elements enhanced by factors of 100 Relative to the standard solar composition. And we had to give it a name because nobody in the literature described that before, And we called it Belau composition, because, Beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium are enhanced. Uranium by a factor of almost a1000 Relative to the standard solar composition.

Speaker:

Now you ask, okay. So what does it mean? We couldn’t match it to rocks on Earth. We couldn’t match it to rocks on Mars or, on the moon or asteroids, and we argued this implies that it Maybe extrasolar in origin completely independently of the evidence about the meteor speed being unbound. And, the question then is what is the origin of this object? And in fact, I wrote a scientific paper that was Submitted for publication that suggests a natural origin, that, has to do with a magma ocean planet. The planet where the, rock was molten. Actually, the earth was in that state early on when it was bombarded by heavy collisions and, the moon was made out of 1 of these collisions and, and then just imagine another planet with molten rock then some elements Are, a sync to the core of the planet, which is usually iron because they have affinity to iron leaving behind other elements. And those elements left behind are in the crust of the planet and that’s those are the elements we found enhanced in the Belau composition. So The suggestion was maybe it’s a it originated from some exoplanet that had molten rock All across, the the volume of the planet.

Speaker:

But then the question is, how do you kick it out of that planetary system at at a speed that is Faster than the speed of stars. The typical speed of stars. And we came up with a very interesting possibility that, you know, the Earth, when, the the Earth, when it’s closed well, we have the moon around it. So the moon raises tides in the oceans. Okay. We are all familiar with the tides. But if you were to replace the moon by the sun, just put the sun next to the earth. Obviously, the tides would be stronger but not strong enough to destroy the Earth by gravity by the gravitational tide because The density of the sun is lower than the density of rock.

Speaker:

Okay? So it cannot destroy the earth. If the Earth comes close to the sun, it will be swallowed once it enters the sun, but it will never be disrupted just by the force of gravity. However, The most common stars are 10 times lower in mass than the sun. They’re called dwarf stars And they are the most common and they are 10 times smaller in size. So it ends they end up being a 100 times denser then the sun. And they can destroy the, an Earth like planet that comes close to them. They will shred it into, we call it spaghettified. The the planet make a spaghetti like stream of rocks and half of the mass of that planet will be ejected interstellar space.

Speaker:

We calculated the speed and amazingly, it’s 60 kilometers per second. So so that could be And origin for this meteor because you expect the highest velocity fragments to be kicked out at the highest Doctor. Steve Marchegiani: Speed, from the crust, from the outer layer of that planet. Of course, there could be also, an artificial origin. We, we don’t know for Sure that it’s natural. And you can imagine melting a computer screen or melting, You know, semiconductor and obviously, the abundance of rare elements will be quite different from that of common rocks. So to find out The origin, we need to find bigger pieces of the meteor, and we are now starting to plan the next expedition to to find those. The machinery that we will use will be bigger and more expensive, but we are hoping to do that in 2024.

Speaker:

And then, you know, I’m always guided by evidence and I always claim that it’s a lot of hard work. You know? We spent 2 weeks In the Pacific Ocean, I didn’t sleep much during during those 2 weeks because we had 26 runs where we lifted, you know, a sled covered with magnets From the ocean floor, after it attracted the magnetic particles, these ferals that we found, and we would scrape the magnets and put it back On the ocean floor. That was a lot of hard work. And the reason I bring this up is because a lot of the critics, First of all, they didn’t do any hard work. They just express an opinion. You know, they don’t have access to the spherules. They just say, oh, well, maybe it’s coal ash. That was the most recent thing argument.

Speaker:

Maybe it’s coal ash. Well, we checked. We have 60 elements, okay, from the periodic table that we analyze. And I can tell you with confidence that it’s Not coal ash. The the critics were were looking at 3 elements out of the 60 and saying, oh, well, it looks Not so far. But if you look at the sixties, clearly not coal ash. We didn’t find coal ash. We found real spherules From a meteor.

Speaker:

And, we can talk about why critics behave this way, which is really not Professional. I mean, they attack on a personal level and so forth. But if I had to summarize it in one word, I would say it’s jealous.

Brian Keating:

Jealousy. So when I look at the, paper, this is, we we should acknowledge again the mastodons in the room. Steve Desch, Alan Jackson. I’m happy to talk to them, you know, when when, you and I hang up. I’m happy to talk to them anytime. They’re always welcome, as long as they adhere to, the rules of decorum and don’t make ad hominem attacks. But they, present a paper last month, I believe it was, which is called a critique of your paper. I’m not gonna read the whole title.

Brian Keating:

But they go through 10 different, claims that would all have to be true in order for your claim to withhold scrutiny. So I wanna go through those really quickly, And you tell me just agree or disagree. So first one you agree with, I’m sure the author’s claim that the bolide was interstellar moving too fast to have been bound in orbit around the sun when it struck the Earth. Agree. Right. Right?

Speaker:

Yeah. Yes.

Brian Keating:

You assert that the significant quantities of materials from the bolide would have survived inter, atmospheric entry to be deposited on the sea floor, mostly as millimeter size ablation spheroids. You already said that. You claim to know the position of where these spherules were deposited to within an area 1 kilometer by 10 kilometers long.

Speaker:

Right.

Brian Keating:

The authors claim that a statistically significant excess of spherules twice as many were collected along the path compared to control regions. Agree? Yep. Yep. The authors measured iron isotope ratios and 11 spherules, including 3 belau spherules and find them to lie along the terrestrial fragmentation line with errors of less than 1%. And show a frag fractionally fractionations consistent with iron loss by vaporization during entry.

Speaker:

Right.

Brian Keating:

One of these spherules s 21 was found to be a compound spherules. Three spherules stuck together while molten. The authors present back of the envelope calculation consists this is also consistent with fireball formation. Right. Others, measure the chemical enrichments of the Balau and other elements, and assert that this composition is not found in any terrestrial sample.

Speaker:

Right.

Brian Keating:

Correct. And they claim Balau is associated with the soon path of the bolide absent from regions far from the path and therefore not associated with the fireball.

Speaker:

Correct.

Brian Keating:

The author’s claim Belau compositions will be uniquely consistent with formation in the magma ocean of a differentiated extrasolar planet. Now I don’t agree with this one. So be careful agreeing to this. Do you claim that they would be uniquely consistent with formation in a magma ocean? Or wasn’t that just one hypothesis?

Speaker:

That’s one possibility, and that’s why we need bigger pieces. I just wanted to, give credit in terms of some of those statements. You know, I’ve been working part of our team, includes, doctor Raul Tagle. He’s the, head of he’s leading the the work at the the Bruker Corporation in Berlin, Germany. For us, he’s using the best X-ray mass X-ray, fluorescence, device that the world has to offer. And then, My colleague at Harvard, professor Stein Jacobsen, who has a group of postdocs working with him, and, they’re using one of the best mass spectrometers in the world, to for the analysis. So Very often, you know, the critics are referring just to me, but I wanted to explicitly say that we are talking about multiple people contributing. A lot of actually, There are tens of people on the paper, and, they include also a collaboration with the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea, the head of the mining engineering, department there, doctor Jim Lem, is part of the analysis team.

Speaker:

So there are lots of people involved. For some reason, these critics prefer to attack me. But, anyway, they know about this group. I can oh, wait. I I just need to mention.

Brian Keating:

Yep.

Speaker:

Why how do I know that they because Steve Dash wrote emails, personal emails to doctor Jim Lamb after I mentioned him in one of my essays, to, professor Stein Jacobson trying to dissuade them from being part Of this scientific research project. And I ask you, how is that ethical? How is that Part of, how should I say, constructive scientific discourse. He was Basically harassing my team members and telling them what you’re doing is wrong, what you said is wrong, and you shouldn’t do it. He was actively Sending them emails. Now they are senior people, but he also sent emails to junior people. Student, my student, My postdoc, and he is a senior faculty sending Intimidating students and postdocs. I just wanted to bring this up because this is completely inappropriate And very aggressive, behavior that has nothing to do with science. It’s the question whether you should intimidate young scholars who are part of a research team examining materials to which you have no access, following a project that took Months to prepare, 2 weeks to collect the materials, and then months to analyze the materials.

Speaker:

This is a lot of work, And you attack them through direct emails to them telling them not to do that. And I just wanted to bring this up because this is not in the public domain, but I can tell you I have access to those emails, And I just decided not to mud wrestle because I will get dirty if I mud wrestle. Right? There is this approach of the eagle, you know, that when there is a crow on the back of the eagle that pecks at its neck, the eagle doesn’t fight the crow off. The eagle rises to greater heights where the oxygen level is low enough for the crawl to drop off the back of the eagle. This is the approach that I’m trying to take. Basically, doing the science to the best of my ability. You know, I may make mistakes, wrong inferences, but that’s part of doing science.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. I know.

Speaker:

I understand. Oh, and my point is, okay, you can disagree with me, but to attack young scholars Personally, through direct emails to them, threatening them and intimidating them, this is bullying And this is unacceptable, but this is being done by those critics that you just mentioned.

Brian Keating:

Well, again, I I don’t like hearing that. I mean, we all live under this fantasy that scientists are somehow exalted individuals with access to special wisdom because we have special knowledge. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I always say that scientists are like children. They have these wonderful qualities of curiosity, of imagination, of of wanting to explore the world with wonder. But just like a child, they also are petty. They’re jealous. They don’t like other people’s toys unless they get to have better toys.

Brian Keating:

And in fact, they’ll do nothing more to get pleasure sometimes than take down a rival. Now I’m not calling, doctor Desch, professor Desch a child. I am inviting him. I’m I’m throwing an invitation out there. If you would like to refute it, I follow him on Twitter. My DMs are open, professor. So you’re welcome, and you’ll get a fair hearing. Avi, you can attest to that.

Brian Keating:

I’ve been I’ve challenged you. As a friend, I still

Speaker:

push that. Point. The biggest damage that Forget about the spherules. You know, that’s not really important here because what he’s doing is sending a message that you dare not deviate from the beaten path that he defines as the as the dogma because if you deviate I will aggressively send you emails and tell you What I think and why you shouldn’t do it. Okay? And that is very damaging because the next time that the same postdoc or student works on dark matter Or works on the beginning of the universe. Those after going through a traumatic experience of this type where a senior person behaves this way, Those young people will not dare anymore. They would worry about their job prospects, and that is very damaging for the Nature of innovation in science. That’s what bothers me.

Brian Keating:

And it’s surprising

Speaker:

debate about these particular items.

Brian Keating:

On one of, Steve Dash’s most recent tweets, he post a a claim from, somebody else’s post, but he retweeted A claim by Jesus and how Jesus, was, claimed that your love for God was measured by your love of your neighbor and even your enemy. So, I wonder if if, professor Desch takes that advice to heart. Anyway, the invitation’s open. I’ll give him a fair hearing, and I will confront him with those as I’ve confronted you with things I disagree with you about. And that’s what friends do, and that’s what science is all about. Anyway, getting back to his paper. So he says that none of these claims, withstand scrutiny. Not any one of those 10, that I mentioned.

Brian Keating:

He got the first thing he says is the the bolide probably wasn’t interstellar. He says probably, which is kind of strange that he’s claiming that this claims that the proves that your claims are incorrect. He says uncertainties in the velocities of objects the I’m gonna just put this up on the screen because it’s I know it’s boring for people that are just listening, but let me put this up on the screen. There it is. Okay. You might not be able to see this, Avi, but you probably seen it before. I’m not gonna okay. The Ebola probably wasn’t zero.

Brian Keating:

Uncertainties and velocities are not reported, but these can be estimated separately, and they are large. A greater than 0.1% probability that it’s not interstellar, which sounds small, but a catalog of a 1000 solar system bollides, the odds are high that one. Okay. So that’s just, 0.1% converted to 1 in a 1,000, appear to be interstellar velocities, and that appears to be that 1, the 1 2014. What do you have to say to that? That you miscalculated the uncertainties or overestimated your answer?

Speaker:

It’s okay. This is not me because, The data was collected by the US Space Command. That’s the organization that gets paid. The its annual budget is bigger than that of NASA. It’s supposed to advise the US president about any ballistic missile that is heading from, North Korea towards US, and suppose they were wrong By a factor of 3, as Steve Dash and colleagues argue in their velocity measurement, they would advise the president of Mexico About a missile heading to Washington, DC, I would be really worried writing a scientific paper or posting this on the archive claiming the government doesn’t really know what they’re doing for a a budget But

Brian Keating:

let let let me let me just strengthen his point.

Speaker:

Let let let me

Brian Keating:

The government has been known to make mistakes. Right?

Speaker:

Okay. Sure. Sure. So that’s exactly right. So I asked them, in 2019 if they can confirm the uncertainty in the data. So they went back for 3 years analyzing the data, and came back with a letter to NASA stating that they are confident that the 99.999% After looking back at the data, that indeed this object was interstellar. So, you know, I don’t, I have no ability to access classified data, but They went out of their way. You know, this is not their day job to help, the frontiers of science.

Speaker:

They are supposed to protect the nation against the national security threats. Nevertheless, they took the time to do that, to write a letter to NASA. And, you know, all I can say is that, you know, when we Analyze data in the scientific literature, we often have to trust the observers, the experimentalists that report about it. So They reported about it. They are a trustworthy, organization that, you know, could have gone back to the data and looked at it. And It’s not just the satellite data. And by the way, many of the critics say, oh, we are talking about ground based data. No.

Speaker:

It’s not ground based. It’s also satellite data. And They combine multiple sensors. We don’t have access to it because many of the sensors are classified, but they went back, checked it, and confirmed this is an interstellar object. That’s my answer.

Brian Keating:

And it just seems like it could be approached from a Bayesian framework that we teach our, you know, freshmen. Right? I mean, what is the false positive rate? What is the false negative rate? And it’s surprising me for an expert in in, you know, in in in calculations of the sort that he just says, you know, quotes vague things like greater than 0.1%. Again, Extended invitation. If you know him out there, please, send him my way. Okay. Next one, he says that it none of it would have survived entry if we’re traveling at the speeds reported. And, then at least 99.8% and probably greater than 6 nines would have been vaporizing the atmosphere leaving insignificant quantities to be deposit. That seems like it could be addressed through a simulation.

Brian Keating:

He just says it’s Great at probably. I I was surprised again by the couching, the the wiggle words here. Why does he say probably? What do you react to that?

Speaker:

No. So the point is, first of all, The number of spherules that we recovered from the meteor path, is fully consistent with a tiny fraction of the material surviving With most of it being evaporated. In fact, we wrote a scientific paper that Dash was, you know, resisting and pushing back against, Where we did a very detailed model with an undergraduate student that worked with me for a summer, and we posted it on the archive where we calculate The size distribution of the spherules, what we found is similar, in magnitude to what we, forecasted based on a Detailed physical model where we, included the evaporation of material, the size distribution that you expect, solving the energy, momentum, Friction equations for those, fragments that may form based on all that is known in the scientific literature. So we actually did the the the hard work of A few months writing a scientific paper, we couldn’t do better than that except go to the place and look for any spheroson. So we did the calculation. It’s a small fraction of the total mass, and, yes, what we found is consistent with that.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm. Okay. So the next one that he claims back is or they claim, I should say, Jackson and, and, Dash. The location of the bolides path is far more uncertain than you realize, and it’s almost certainly miscalculated. The CNAS database reports 2 locations for the fireball, and they’re 55 kilometers apart. If we pick 1 location, there are still large inherent Jeez. Sound waves trying to pinpoint it using sound waves 90 kilometers away. So that that seems like it could have some, validity.

Brian Keating:

What is what is the response to

Speaker:

Right. So the Department of Defense provided the region that was 7 miles in size, and there were 3 flares in the fireball Separated by a tenth of a second, this object was moving at 40 kilometers per second. So over a tenth of a second, it would move About 4 kilometers, you know, like, a few miles. And, if you have 3 flares, obviously, the explosion was spread across the region that Was, you know, of the order of 7 miles or so, so that’s why the localization could not have been better by the Department of Defense. But we also analyze data from a seismometer in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea just to figure out, the distance Of the explosion based on the fact that the sound waves arrive later than the light. We see that in lightnings, you know, the sound that from the explosion, you know, the, the, the thunder that we hear, arrives to us, later. And we can tell the distance of the lightning based on the delay. And that that’s what we used, in figuring out the path of the media.

Speaker:

But more importantly, we had 26 runs, 26 back and forth Scans of the region, and we try to spread it wide enough so that we are not restrict restricting our attention. We went even 20 kilometers away from the location of the meteor path in both directions. So we try to move away from the meteor path as well, and and the map that we made was based on that.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm. Okay. So the next claim he makes here my screen’s going crazy here with a 1000000 different sub screens here. The next point that he makes is, whoops. Let me just close that. Okay. Getting some reports that people can’t see it out there. Put a thumbs up if you’re able to see this conversation on YouTube because, claims that, people aren’t able to see it.

Brian Keating:

So leave a thumbs up, and leave a thumbs up anyway, and please do subscribe to the channel. As I said, I’m gonna have another conversation with Avi, based on Avi’s work tomorrow, for the channel, and that will be a deep dive into the of inflation. So Avi does it all. It’s not just it’s not only interstellar meteorites. By the way, you went to great lengths, 1,000,000 of dollars and, Tens of people to get your meteorite sample. I can give a meteorite sample to any of my guests who happen to win there. My my audience members who happen to subscribe at briaynekeeting.com. So please do that.

Brian Keating:

Okay. Next 1. The specific iron ratios are a smoking gun for the spherules or originating in our solar system. The fact that all these samples alive within less than 1%, it’s a weird symbol there, by the way, of the terrestrial fractionation line, including Bellows spherules they measured indicates greater than 4 nines and a half probability that all the spherules including Belau are from our solar system. What do you say to that?

Speaker:

This is an important issue. We, had very so the preprint that they’re referring to, just consider 10% of the spherules. We just posted the preliminary results. Now we’re going through the 90%, the remaining 90%. So the report about the Iron isotope ratio was really a very preliminary report in one of the spherules, where and it’s true that In principle, if you have different stars exploding in different locations in the Milky Way galaxy, you will end up with different isotope Ratio for iron because different isotopes of iron originate from different processes, like type 1a Tuppernovae or AGB, asymptotic giant branch stars, and we expect variations if this object came from far away. And so it’s still what I would say on that is that what was reported in the Philippines is very early, preliminary analysis of 1 of the spherules and we are now engaged in the full analysis. So we will report whatever we find. You know, when My colleague, Stein Jacobson, comes back to me with results.

Speaker:

We just report them. And here again, I should mention, Dash is very proud of Claiming that he was pushing against our paper. And in one of the arguments, someone looked back at our map and said, Oh, actually the map does not represent exactly the color bar next to it, and maybe they tweaked the colors. And I went I mean, that map was produced by my postdoc, Laura Domeni, and I went to her and said and she said, well, it would have been so much more work for me to actually tweak the Colors. You know, that critic actually magnified the map and tried to look for a different color. She said that would be so much. I just used an off the shelf program to plot this map, And so it just shows you the level of negativity that I’ve never heard, you know, I had more than a 1000 scientific papers. I’ve never heard someone be motivated to use a magnifying glass, look at the plot and say, Oh, you were fudging this because the color scheme does not.

Speaker:

And, you know, It’s not me. It’s a postdoc that came to my group from Stanford, extremely talented, brilliant. She was using the best tools that exist for plotting and This person blames us. So I’m just saying there is a lot of negativity that you don’t find in the context Of other studies, and they’re putting the virus on flight. But you you you guys

Brian Keating:

As we say, you know, as we say in in in Yiddish, the higher you Fly, the easier you are to shoot at. And I think the next but the next one, Avi, I think this is an own goal, professor Desh and Jackson. So you claim and I’m saying you, professor Desch, they claim that all of these have to be true. Okay? So I’m showing it on the line. To claim an interstellar origin for the spherules they collected. All the links in the chain of logic above would have to withstand scrutiny, and he says none of them do. Okay? But now this claim is that the, is that one of the spherules is a compound, spherule. Three spheriles stuck together while molten.

Brian Keating:

That’s your claim, Avi, with your team. And you present a back of the envelope calculation that’s consistent with the formation of fireball. Just speaking logically, Professor Desch, this is, the total logical fallacy and own goal. The triple spherules even if the triple spherules are not, it doesn’t mean that the entire claim is wrong. I don’t know how he could make that assumption. It’s like saying, you know, if you don’t have a Bernie Sanders sticker on your car, you can’t claim that you’re a Bernie Sanders supporter. If this is true or false, it doesn’t it doesn’t either refute or, or neglect The, the base hypothesis. Correct? So in other words, even if let’s say he’s right here on, his point number 6.

Brian Keating:

He says the Triple Spiro s 21 Almost certainly did not form in a fireball event. Let’s say he’s right. Okay? Which you obviously don’t think he’s right. But let’s say he was right. In that case, that sphero is not a compound sphero. Does that mean that the other ones are not interstellar in origin? I mean, isn’t that a logical fallacy, Avi?

Speaker:

I completely agree. And this one was, the biggest spherule that we analyzed in that preprint and 1.3 millimeters in size. And We looked at it first and it showed this Belau sphere, composition, and then we found it in other spherules that do not look like it. So, we’re talking about the class of Spherules that has a composition. By the way, you know, it’s really analysis that requires a huge amount of effort to get to those measurements. So, I mean, if you just look at the scientific literature and spherules, you would see that nobody, Analyze the, you know, so many spherules at the level that we do. We have actually 750 of them. It’s a factor of 10 more than the number of spherules In a typical paper on, meteor sites, you know, and, we go a factor of 10 more.

Speaker:

We we brought them from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. You know, it’s a huge effort and just ridiculing it and bullying people who engage in the, You know, after such a heroic effort, I think what I would say to that is, you know, people who try to terrorize Practicing scientists will not get their way. You know, we will continue the scientific work Irrespective how many emails Steve Dash sends to members of my team because they know the truth. They know what we are doing, and they know the level of scientific, integrity that we’re investing in this.

Brian Keating:

The next one he says, despite your assertions, the Balau patterns have been seen before in cosmic spherules of solar system origin from the Indian Ocean. Again, would this if true, you always have to ask yourself this question as a scientist. If this is true, would this invalidate the base hypothesis, your hypothesis, the prior hypothesis that these are extraterrestrial in origin? So he’s admitting that they could be, that these things have been seen before in, but only in our solar system. That doesn’t invalidate that they could originate from other objects in the solar system, and they’re not even dissimilar to anthropogenic coal ash. I assume he covers that more depth in the paper. I’m not sure why that’s relevant except to say that

Speaker:

I can tell you. So the coal ash thing I can tell you the coal ash claim was made by someone who wrote a research note, which is basically an unreferred 2 pager saying, oh, I found the paper in the literature where if I look at 3 elements, they seem to roughly match The element, abundances that were in the Belau Spheros. That’s that’s the claim. Based on 3 elements, comparing them sort of qualitatively, And that’s it. It has some tick marks, and it’s a research note that is a couple of pages long, not refereed, and then Steve Dash hangs his hat On that. And to that, they say, you know, you should be smart in fighting the right battles. You know? That’s, because if you were to be very aggressive on a wrong statement, you know, it just Shows you, your vulnerability. You know, it exposes your weakness, which is basically to look for anything negative to say.

Speaker:

And on this, you know, we compared 60 elements and I have it, you know, we didn’t post it yet because it will be part of the next paper, But we clearly see that it’s not. He doesn’t have access to the materials, and he makes this very strong statement, went out to the press. There were a number of reporters who mentioned it. You know, the one thing that reporters do not realize is that in science, it’s not about It’s not like politics where, oh, someone says something, therefore, I should present both opinions. It’s not like that because if one side, invested Months of work to do the hard scientific work, and the other side was sitting on his, you know, chair and And and and was just expressing an opinion and saying, oh, baby. It’s. It’s not a matter of giving equal opportunity to both sides. Right? You need to put some weight On the amount of effort.

Speaker:

Right. And and those people that have access to the materials, obviously, they can examine the materials. We have the data. That’s the basic point that science is driven by data, not by opinion. And as much as Steve Dash, you know, does not like the fact that we are doing science, we will continue to do science.

Brian Keating:

Of course, and I I view you as an irrepressible force of nature. The last one has some, you know, kind of ring of authenticity to me as a question. I wanna ask because I’m not an expert. But now going back to, my meteorite, which again can be yours if you, join my if you win the giveaway that I have in my list. I’ll send you one for free. I Keep promising, Yomi. But here’s a meteorite here that, I collected the hard way. I went to Amazon and bought no.

Brian Keating:

I I got that from a special dealer. I get them from a special dealer. The they’re they’re prime. They’re prime. But this, particular sample, you know, is the fragment of the Campo di Cielo event, the explosion of a bolide, about 7000 years ago in Argentina Found about, 5th, in the 1500. The outside of this, you know, kind of has these nodules that some of it has thumbprints on bigger sections of it. But I imagine if I if I cut it open, if I fragmented it, they would look different inside. In that the exterior, this part of it was exposed to the harsh inter interstellar, weather of cosmic rays, and that induces what’s called spallation.

Brian Keating:

I want you to explain spallation in a minute. But wouldn’t this skin depth to spallation preclude the interior of this meteorite or the bolide that you saw? Wouldn’t that be make it harder for cosmic rays to spalate, and then make the Belau material? Or am I getting this wrong? I think of it in terms of skin damage penetration.

Speaker:

Let let me start from, clarification. The Belau composition originated from the source, not from the travel through interstellar space. Now the spallation that you are talking about

Brian Keating:

He’s wrong then. He says he says that the abundance in these spherules so he claims that you claim The high abundance was produced by spallation of atoms and meteoroids by cosmic gamma rays is indicative of cosmic gamma ray radiation during its passage in So No. So he’s wrong. You don’t assume Yeah.

Speaker:

And and and by the way, I I mentioned to you this paper that I wrote where I explained it in terms of, you know, a differentiated planet where, a molten lava or magma ocean, which he actually mentioned in the previous point, you know, that was responsible for the Separation of elements and maintaining those Belau compositions in the crust that was then ejected through the disruption of the planet. So All of that argues that it’s at the source, you know, that Bilal compositions from the source. It has nothing to do with the travel through interstellar space. And, with respect to spallation, this is just a simple process where you have energetic particles. For example, cosmic rays, protons that are moving at the speed very close to the speed of light and they collide with the nucleus and breaking it up. And in fact, There are some elements like Beryllium, which are enhanced as a result of energetic particles colliding, with with material, and like and and breaking it up, you know, and a heavier nucleus. And, we do see enhancement of Beryllium, but that could happen at the source. It doesn’t have to be from spallation.

Brian Keating:

So the other context that he puts into it, would any of it survive entry? He does a back of the envelope calculation and says it was about the mass of half a giraffe. Okay. That’s an interesting mass measurement, 450 kilograms, and therefore, it’s only 48 centimeters sphere in diameter equivalent. Now if it’s going at a 140 times the speed of sound, he says, And, Jackson, the meteoroid would have completely vaporized in the atmosphere.

Speaker:

Well, that’s the calculation. Yeah. That’s the calculation we did with the, summer intern, Emery Thillinghast. And then, you can look at that paper and we did the calculation. So indeed, as I said, most of it is vaporized, but we went through, you know, the equations that describe What what’s left from that? And that would depend on the material strength. So if you assume a rock, you get one answer, and we derive that in the paper. If you assume that it’s made of stainless steel, the way that the Voyager spacecraft was or any, some, you know, artificial alloy that, is related to an alien spacecraft, you know, then the answer would be different. So we know that this object, by the way, exploded in the lower atmosphere and Must have had a very high material strength to survive down to there, and the, it was tougher than iron meteorites.

Speaker:

So actually, with a student That approached me at the conference in Stanford 2 weeks ago. That was a student of material science that he’s doing, a PhD in material science, and he was inspired by my talk about the expedition. So he came to me and said, how can I help? And I said, Well, you have a computer code to calculate material strength given a composition, of material. And so let’s simulate what this meteor was Made of. And, and and see if indeed it was of very high material strength. So we’re doing this. And to that, I say again that When you deal with, innovation in science, it inspires young people. They come to me and want to work with me.

Speaker:

2 of my postdocs, Laura Domeni and Richard Clouet. They they told me that when I called them to offer them the postdoctoral fellowship, you know, that was the thing that they hoped for Their entire career before that because they had no opportunity to work on these subjects. So these people, these young scholars are inspired by innovation, but then comes An arrogant senior person and tries to intimidate them, and that’s what I find inappropriate.

Brian Keating:

Good. Okay. Avi, I know you’ve only got about 10 minutes before your next appointment. So we have a couple of questions and from the audience, and we’ll take some somewhere about academia. We could take some of those if you like. Some are about Israel. We could take some of those if you like. So the, well, the first thing I wanna I wanna get your reaction to is is, there have been some reactions online about The implausibility of statements made by David Grosch and and others that there’s crashed alien spacecraft and and and so forth.

Brian Keating:

And and the the argument seems to go along these lines, and I wanna get your reaction logically to them. One of them is that these aliens are so sophisticated, they can make a space Crap. That can travel interstellar distances, but then they crash on Earth. I wanna point out. I’m a pilot. I fly little tiny Sessnas around. Okay? I’m not like, my past guest, you know, or or, you know, when I when I had on Hazard Lee or ahead on Ryan Graves. And these are great heroes.

Brian Keating:

These are military fighter pilots of the highest order. I’m nothing like that. But I’ll point out that If you look at the FAA’s accident database, where do you think the most outlying probability is for a crash of a commercial pilot piloted plane, not an amateur like me, a commercially trained pilot, somebody Flying, in which of the phases of flight, takeoff, cruise flight, or landing? Which are the most likely to cause an accident? What would you say, Avi?

Speaker:

Probably landing?

Brian Keating:

Landing. It’s like 6 to 8 times more, perilous. In other words, these accidents tend to occur during the landing phase. So I I like to point that out to people that snicker and sneer, including people like Brian Green, who I had on last week on the podcast, who I I did a wonderful interview with him in person at Columbia, right before there was a a a huge protest against Israel. But, but anyway, there, so I just like to point that out. Even human pilots crash more during landing. So And military pilots as well. So anyway, I I think that’s kind of a ridiculous argument.

Speaker:

Well, it also depends It it depends how many things are flying. You know? If there are lots of them, then, the chance even a small chance would lead to some, evidence over decades of time. And, you know, it’s it’s all about evidence. You know, people try to have an opinion. That’s a very easy thing. The difficult part is collecting the evidence. If the government has so do you want my opinion on on Russia? Actually, I wrote then last night when I returned at 10 PM from, Washington, DC, I wrote an essay With the title and you can find it on medium.com with the title of New Physics or Misinformation. You know, that is the dilemma that we face when listening to the testimony of Brashe in front of the House of Representatives.

Speaker:

Now, it’s, you know, it’s completely plausible That, he is sincere, that he just reports what he heard from 40 people who told him about things that happen. And Then, he exaggerated the significance of those and misinterpreted some. And, as a result, I mean, He didn’t witness it himself. He didn’t see the materials, and yet he claimed that there are there are there is material in biologics of, in crash sites. And, you know, as a scientist, I must say that this is not convincing. I need to see the evidence. If the government has this, I really want to to nobody to see it. That’s part of the Schumer Amendment, the UAP Disclosure Act, if there is something to it.

Speaker:

But there is another possibility That, there is a campaign of misinformation that, some people want the public to believe in things that are not real. And we know that in politics, You could have an agenda of that nature just to mislead the adversarial countries or to, make the public, distrust Anything they hear, so that if there are programs to develop new technologies that the US government is funding through the military industrial complex, you know, that It will be lost in the noise. If someone sees something, they will not talk about it because of the stigma associated with very advanced technologies Perhaps coming extraterrestrially. So that could be, in the background. Now, this Schumer amendment is being resisted by Some people, in congress. And the fundamental question is whether the this resistance is superficial. They just do it for political reasons. I mean, even though it was proposed by the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, it was bipartisan.

Speaker:

There was support for it in the Senate. But it’s also possible that there are people who know what the government has. They deal with highly classified information, and they know that there is nothing, to substantiate Russia’s claims. So they go to the chairs of those subcommittees and tell them, look, you know, this would endanger National security, if there will be a committee that will oversee what the government does and ask for all of the information, some of it may leak To our adversaries, and this is not good for the country. So so then there would be opposition, but you will not really understand Why there is this opposite? Of course, there are people who claim there is a conspiracy. The government is trying to hide. I personally, I tend to believe the government is incompetent to hide something of that nature for so long, especially if it involves biological Materials.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. It’s a it would be a conspiracy, you know, that would dwarf the Kennedy assassination and and conspiracy. Okay. I have to ask you this question. It’s from a listener on on YouTube, Herwig Herwig de Wilde. So he’s asking he’s saying, basically, we don’t even know if what he grabbed off the bottom of the sea is anything to do with a bolide, Yet you, Avi, are jumping to alien technology. Is that what you’re saying? Is this alien technology? It’s you’re claiming it is.

Speaker:

I’m I’m not claiming it. I’m saying it’s Possibility. Now let me explain where I’m coming from. You know, just like you, Brian, I worked early on in on, cosmology where, for example, we don’t know what the dark matter is. That’s the 83% of the matter in the universe, we have never witnessed it in the solar system. So in that culture that I worked on for decades, People were proposing different types of dark matter. It could be primordial black holes. It could be a very light particle like the axion.

Speaker:

It could be massive particles like weekly interacting massive particles. It could be all kinds of things. And when you were to propose Observational signatures of a hypothesis. Everyone would cheer because it allows experimentalists to pursue and rule out possibilities. So it’s An integral part of doing science to propose possibilities so that we can rule them out and figure out the truth eventually because one of them might be true. So what the way I approach this subject is if I see an object, a meteor, that was moving faster than 95% of the stars that had material strength Tougher than iron meteorites. I say we should leave on the table the possibility that it is a Voyager like meteor. If Voyager were to collide with a planet like the Earth, It would burn up in the atmosphere of that planet as a very tough object because it’s made of an artificial alloy, it would move faster than usual because it was propelled by a chemical rocket.

Speaker:

So that’s all. I’m saying let’s leave it on the table. And then the public gets extremely excited. And then some reporters report about it as if I’m saying that, and then my colleagues are Arguing that I’m saying that, but I never said that. Listen to my podcast interviews, see what I write on medium.com, and you will never see that as me arguing That it must be an alien spacecraft. I’m just saying this is a possibility we should leave on the table. Just like in the case of dark matter, you would never dismiss Weekly interacting massive party because it’s a possibility because you don’t know the answer.

Brian Keating:

Okay. We have 1 question from friend of the show, Ross at, The event horizon he wants to know who were you meeting with yesterday in Washington DC?

Speaker:

Oh, there were a number of people. Some of them were in congress. Some of them were in the senate. What I should say and some of them were in the Department of Defense. What I should say is, I was amazed. Like, come at least 2 of these meetings, these are high level officials. Okay? They would come to me and say, I I I follow what you do, and I I, really admire your work, And I never imagined that I will meet with you. Now I could never imagine that they would say that because these are people, you know, within, at high level, you know, within the US government that, so apparently, they do appreciate The innovation that I’m pursuing and, I never take it for granted because, you know, overall, I’m just driven by curiosity.

Speaker:

That’s that’s all that motivates me. I’m just a curious farm boy trying to figure out the world, Given the opportunity to be a scientist so that, you know, I can answer questions myself. I don’t need to listen to Grasch telling me what lies outside the solar system. Really, In when he expressed himself as as if what he’s talking about is a result of extra dimensions or the holographic principle. You know, this didn’t sound pro I I know these ideas in the context of string theory. We have no experimental clue to support them. They’re completely speculative, unrelated to any phenomena at low energies, low space time curvature that we have near Earth. So that sounded like Farfetched to me.

Speaker:

But, you know, I I I just believe that evidence will guide us to the answer, and we should collect it rather than say It’s an extraordinary claim. And therefore, since there is no evidence, we should just shy away from it, which is pretty much what all the critics are saying. I say, you know, we need to seek the evidence. So extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary effort. It’s a lot of hard work, And that should be celebrated, the hard work of science where we don’t know the answer in advance. We don’t have an opinion. We just work on collecting the evidence. So What I feel is that instead of that being celebrated within academia, you know, the hard work, I see people like Dash ridiculing it, pushing back.

Speaker:

However, within government, People are supportive, you know, at every I always receive positive feedback. Within the public, people are extremely supportive. So Once again, we come back to where we started. Something is wrong in academia.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Indeed, we do. And I guess, the question I have For you is, where do where do you go from here in both the, search for these these materials origins first and foremost. And then where where where do you go in academia? Is there is there a home? Is there a a place for ideas, that can survive the kind of onslaught that we’ve witnessed in the last 2 months. It’s just it’s just been absolutely shocking. I mean, some people are saying, oh, the donors just have to. And I was I was asked by, you know, people, Well, what if the Jewish donors just stop donating? I I found that very insulting. It’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a very, offensive trope that Jews are mainly interested in how their money is used.

Brian Keating:

And if if we don’t have a a a happy state of affairs, then the Jewish banking bankers and the, and the elders of Zion will just cancel. No. No. No.

Speaker:

That’s what I was trying to Let me explain one Go ahead. Very simple fact. I Was at Harvard University for 30 years, okay? 30 years. Claudine Gay came to Harvard University 8 years ago. Okay. She doesn’t own Harvard University, even though she’s the president. I feel That this is my home and if someone comes to my home and violates my principles, I don’t leave home because of that. I will try to change the intellectual climate we live in for the better.

Speaker:

Okay? That’s my answer. But with respect to the future of, The the meteor research. We are planning an expedition. It will probably cost if you at least, twice or 3 times the previous, cost, probably around 4 to $5,000,000 because We need a much more sophisticated equipment to find bigger fragments of the object. And, you know, once we find them, We can easily tell the difference between a rock and an artificial technological gadget because a gadget could have buttons on it. And I actually asked students in my class whether, if we find gadget, whether we should press any button on it. And Half of them said, please don’t because it will affect all of us. Half of them said, yes, please do because it might be ChargeGPT 100.

Speaker:

And then 1 student asked me, what would you do, professor Loeb? And I said, I will bring it to a laboratory and examine it. No worries. And, actually, after we examine it, I I promised Paul Antonelli in the spirit of love, the aliens, to put it on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art because for us, It will be more than hour to just witness that.

Brian Keating:

Very good, Avi. Well, this has been a treat. I know you have to go. I’m gonna stick around for a few minutes, Talk to the audience a little bit more, answer a couple more questions. But I I really salute you for your courage and and also just The intellectual, striving for truth that I always associate with you, and you’ve got millions of fans around the world. You’re always welcome here on the podcast. We’re overdue for a dinner together, for a lunch, for whatever we can arrange, hopefully, on the, on the East Coast or the West Coast. Maybe you’ll come out here in the winter and, you’ll you’ll get away from it all in southern Thank

Speaker:

you so much. And And if I could just mention, my mantra is maintain your childhood curiosity and never pretend to be the adult in the room. That’s the first thing that I advise young people. But the second is, you know, let’s let’s work together rather than hate each other. You know that? It’s the source of all the problems we discussed starting from the Middle East, going through what happens on campuses, and ending up with scientific discourse. Let’s just be positive rather than negative. And, this will solve all of these problems.

Brian Keating:

Yes. I agree. Science is our, greatest hope or possibly our greatest source of, probability for demise. I I hope we’ll choose the wise path. Avi Loeb, We have your website, avidelobe@loeb, dotmedium.com. It’s on the screen. And, Avi, thank you so much. Stay safe over there.

Brian Keating:

I worry about your safety on campus, to be honest with you.

Speaker:

No worries. I I my Kin is now made of titanium after I survived the attacks by Dish.

Brian Keating:

Not Bilao? It should be made of Bilao. You should have a Bilao

Speaker:

suit. Yeah.

Brian Keating:

Alright. Aviv. Thank you. Well, that was super fun. For me, I just want to Press my gratitude to all of you up there. This might be our last live stream, but we have a lot of cool life last live stream of 2023. Of course, we have many, many Cool things coming your way in 2024. But even before 2024, we’ve got, phenomenal interviews.

Brian Keating:

I conducted an interview, You know, with those of you who think I only talked to Jews or or, you know, I have some propensity for that, that’s absolutely not true. I actually spoke to, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on happiness, Muslim, friend of mine, Mol Gaddad, very famous, thinker, researcher at Google X, made millions, maybe a 1,000,000,000. I don’t know. We talked to him a couple weeks ago, and the interviews, will break your heart. It’s it’s one of the most moving interviews you may know. He lost his son, age about 17, in Boston, not far from where Avi just joined us from, during a routine surgery. And he and I talked about happiness in a time of post October 7th with, a particular emphasis on what be done to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians and Jews. And, as I said, he’s a Muslim, and I’m a Jew.

Brian Keating:

And we had one of the best conversations that I ever had on this channel. Now it’s not a science conversation per se, although we talk a lot half the conversation’s about artificial intelligence, and I think you’ll, very much enjoy that and the prospects for, potential AI convergence in a negative light, which would, lead to a A singularity not of the black hole kind. We talk about that based on his, 2nd book, scary smart. But his 1st book is also a big topic of conversation. It’s called solve for happy. And not to be outdone, I talked to professor Gad Sad in, Concordia University in Canada about his book, The Sad Truth on Happiness. He’s a Jew. He’s not practicing Jew, but he is a Jewish person.

Brian Keating:

And we also talked about regaining and and how do you deal with, for daily life as a scientist, as a parent. I think you’ll really enjoy those interviews. We have, very, very, firm plans to interview Kip Thorne, one of the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize co recipient. The only Nobel Prize winner I haven’t had on The, podcast that won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 from the LIGO experiment, he’ll be on, towards the end of the month. And then, I have a, tentative it’s it’s very tentative, but, but I’ve been invited on Andrew Huberman’s podcast, and I will, certainly keep you posted on that because I intend to flip the script on, my buddy, Andrew, Andy as we used to call him, but now we call him Andrew, the most famous, science podcaster on the planet, a lovely soul. And, I plan to flip the script, and don’t tell him, But I’m gonna ask him some questions because he’s a fascinating and extremely important individual culturally, scientifically, with the research that he’s doing. So send me questions, that you’d like me to ask of him, when and if that does materialize. He’s got an incredibly packed 2024 himself with live tours in Australia and America, but I’m very much looking forward to that.

Brian Keating:

It’s been an incredible year, for me personally. Research wise, we’re coming up on some major major announcements in my research field. Stay tuned for those. And, and also in, you know, personally and professionally when it comes to the podcast, it’s become a huge source of inspiration of of of of relief and release and has allowed me to maintain my sanity, in the last 2 months, especially with all the campus Craziness and and things we’ve been dealing with that we talked about early. I thought it was great that Avi was so willing to talk and criticize his His president there at Harvard and I shouldn’t say that any place else is different. Even my, current institution has its has its flaws and challenges. I don’t know. I don’t know how academia can recover in its current phase when we’re seemingly just so unwilling.

Brian Keating:

And I I fear there’s gonna be sort of this, litmus test. Every single president’s gonna be asked, you know, do you condemn genocide and and so forth? And I think that would be, kind of a negative outcome for academia. I think academia has limited potential for two reasons. 1, to survive in the future, and it should take advantage of them. 1, I think artificial intelligence, personalized tutors, they’re just around the corner. You could basically, for $20 a month, get a imagine uploading all your emails, all your course records, all the transcript, everything you’ve ever done in your life, to an intelligent agent that can then not only assess your weaknesses, but teach you anything you want. And imagine if it’s animated avatar with having, you know, Avi Loeb, you know, right there, and and not having to pay, you know, $72,000 a year for this experience. And and and something like 60% of of, people don’t graduate in 4 years.

Brian Keating:

So you’re talking, you know, maybe even 300 plus $1,000, and many of those people don’t ever graduate. And, and that’s a that’s a huge, drain economically. Person imagine you’re a person. You went to college for 4 years. You didn’t graduate, but you still have the $300,000 in loans that, oh, it’s so nice. The government does not allow you to discharge those loans in bankruptcy. The only type of loan that my colleagues have devised to extract resources from you, the the tax paying public, and not allow you to just charge them back. We we allow you to do that for, you know, MBNA or some other credit card.

Brian Keating:

But, anyway, academia could be threatened. Imagine sitting down with Albert Einstein and asking him, well, Albert, I’d rather learn about, the Lorentz transformation special relativity, from you than from some professor that I have to pay, you know, $7,000 a course. And half my students don’t show up to any given lecture. So these are threats. Now the other threat is that it could be intolerant for certain sets of people. And and although I’ve been asked about donations, and will I give donations, or will I encourage people to give donations? Again, I find that mildly offensive, slightly anti Semitic and, to be honest with you, that that’s the most important thing to to me is where how my money is used or how I advise my my, rich brother-in-law, you know, to give money. No. No.

Brian Keating:

No. That’s not the that’s not the case. It’s actually more important to to vote with your feet, not your pocketbook in this situation. And I wonder, you know, if you got accepted at Harvard you know, if you got accepted at Harvard, be honest out there. And you’re looking forward to you’re a high school senior. You’re and go back to those days. You’re accepted to Harvard. And let’s say you’ve seen what happened on campus and and what Avi has described.

Brian Keating:

Would you really turn it down? Be honest. If you would turn it down, leave a thumbs down. Right now, there’s 13 thumbs downs on this video, and then immediately change it to a thumbs up. But that’s the only way I can really count, because I know you all love this video so much. And it’ll be taken down. I’m gonna take down this video, later on. So, you know, this is your chance to vote for it. I will hopefully, have some way to, to share the content at a later date.

Brian Keating:

But I will take it down, and then we’ll see how we can edit it offline in the near future. But, let’s say, would you, would you Turn down an offer from Harvard. Be honest. I don’t know many people that would. But imagine if if, you know, literally millions of high school seniors say, I’m not doing this. I’m either going to go to the military. I’m gonna go travel for a year. For the same amount of money, you could hire a private tutor to accompany your child around the world, taking lessons from great tutors in all the capitals of the world and get experience.

Brian Keating:

And, yes, go to these places that otherwise you just read about and learn whatever. You can learn physics just as well for me as you can from, professor in in England, Italy, in in Thailand. And, So but see the world, how much broader would your horizons be? Do some service. Anyway, these are ideas that I think universities are ignoring at their peril, and I’m very worried about that, because I think, you know, the time the days may be numbered for my profession, which was the only thing I ever wanted to do. I I’ve had real jobs. I’ve I’ve done actual manual labor in my life. I’ve worked in restaurants. I’ve I’ve, been a mover in a moving company.

Brian Keating:

I’ve done I’ve done a lot of, And this is the only job I wanted to do, and I never wanna stop doing it. But I could see a time when the campus becomes intolerable, and, and just the association with with other faculty, with with students that I teach, you know, would be something I wouldn’t wanna associate with and with presidents of the university or chancellors in the case of the UC system. So it’s an opportunity. It’s also a crisis. And, those words are allegedly, you know, a synonym in in the Chinese pictogram, that represents the word crisis. So I would like to know how you have changed your ideas. Please leave a comment, in the comment section, when the video does go up about your thoughts about it. But, again, this podcast and the opportunity to kinda wax and weighing in in terms of the great speakers and content that I get on this channel.

Brian Keating:

It’s just a a a real thrill. I never take it for granted. It’s all free. Yeah. You have to endure some YouTube ads. I’m sorry about that, but, but that’s that’s a fact of life. But besides that, it’s all gives away for free and also for free if you Have a dotedu email address like my beloved students all do, please and faculty do. Please go to this link down below, brianketing.com, or take a QR code snapshot of this sucker over here.

Brian Keating:

And, and that will whisk you away to my mailing list where I send out, cool information about my guest and thoughts and musings and ruminations and and giveaways and so forth. And one of the things they do give away every month are these meteorites. This is a real meteorite, 4,000,000,000 year old fragment of the solar system, of our solar system, not wherever Avi’s Bilao came from. Who knows? And let me know if you’d like to really, Get a, kind of rebuttal or presentation from Steve Desch. I I didn’t wanna have, you know, Avi and and Steve go at it, you know, live. I don’t I don’t think that’ll be, very productive. But I do wonder if you think it would be a good idea to have Steve on and just interview him or Al or or his colleague Jackson. I think that could be a very, very, illuminating discussion because that’s how science is actually done.

Brian Keating:

Not these sniping. I was disappointed to hear the indeed, if that’s true, which I have no reason to doubt, Avi, you know, that he was writing to junior colleagues. I mean, that’s just not something you do. But, but maybe there’s some explanation or maybe there’s some misinterpretation and so forth. Avi is is not shy, as you know, of kind of being a staunch defender of his scientific ideas, and he’s had millions of them. So, I really, I really, really like to, to get your feedback and also recommendations for upcoming guests. As I said, we’ve got incredible guests coming on, Nobel Prize winners. I’ll be announcing a new book, in 2024.

Brian Keating:

Stay tuned for that. And, and we will hopefully be be a part of, The broader project of, of scientific education. And, also, you know, scientists are human, so I can’t ignore, the situation that affects, you know, millions of people around the world directly and much worse than I’m being affected by it. Although, I do have family members that are directly affected, and even one of my colleagues, in Tel Aviv, his, his cousin is currently a hostage in Gaza. Hell we don’t know if he’s alive or dead. And, actually, his son was also taken hostage. So what is that? I’m I’m allegedly pretty smart, but I can’t, I think it’s a a second cousin or maybe it’s a 1st cousin once removed. Please please put that in the chat right now.

Brian Keating:

What is the son of somebody’s cousin 1st cousin? Are they a 2nd cousin or a 1st cousin once anyway, not important. But, but what is important is that his this Cousin of my, close colleague and collaborator is, is a hostage. So it it’s very difficult for me to be completely impartial. Of course, I sympathize with the sympathy, with the, with the sympathy for the Palestinian people. I think that that is and and I came away as I wrote in my newsletter from my trip to Israel in September. I was there for the high holidays, and I came away with actually a hope for peace in a two state solution for the very first time in all my visits there and the months of time I’ve spent there and the the people that I know and love that live there. And I realize now that what I was exposed to is, is, the is is how I was really, you know, kind of exposed to Palestinians from the West Bank, primarily. And as well as, as as as Bedouins and and people of the Bedouin community, Muslims all, and and it was it was really a hopeful inspiring, situation for me.

Brian Keating:

But now I feel like because the actions of October 7th, those hopes are misplaced. And so I’d love to be proven wrong about that, but I can’t ignore it. And so, so I I appreciate this chance to kind of elaborate along with Avi on what we’ve experienced on campuses or experiencing personally. Obviously, Avi is an Israeli, you know, citizen by birth, dual citizen. You know, he has it much more acutely than I do, but he’s very liberal, you know, in his political orientation before this. You write to him. You get back, you know, his pronouns and and so forth. He’s very, progressive Jew as many are, and I think he was thoroughly, you know, disabused of the of the notion that there could be a real near term, seeking of peace.

Brian Keating:

So I I hope I’m wrong. I hope, I hope that there can be such a solution. I hope that campuses can to gain the glory that they, the ones had. And now I, I’m in serious doubt, and it’s it’s personally depressing to witness that. I used to view the, university as a sanctuary for scholarship. And when you hear calls for banning of specific people and not allocating any space for them on campus, accusations that Chancellors are complicit in genocide and that simultaneously, 1 country on earth should be eliminated, you know, as a Jewish state and not even camp comfortable to to, to, you know, admit that in front of Congress that, that, president Gay was was saying she was in favor of a Jewish state, Israel being a Jewish state or they’re existing in Jewish state. So it’s a very disappointing dark times. When even the president of my alma mater, Brown University, She could not say, you know, that she wanted Brown to remain a place where you could be comfortable wearing a hijab, a kefirah, or a yarmulke, and instead only said hijab or.

Brian Keating:

And that’s just high cowardice, and I’m quite ashamed of of that. She’s the most safe person on that campus, and I don’t know why it’s so difficult to to say such things. I don’t think it, is a fair assessment of the, you know, reasonability of our Palestinian colleagues and students and friends, that they can’t somehow take it when a when a president would say she believes that in, Israelis, have a right to their own country, as much as Palestinians do as well. So, it’s been a dark time, but the season of light is upon us. Happy Hanukkah to all those who celebrate. Coming up tomorrow night. It’s a celebration of of, some very dark forces 2000 years ago that attempted to press, and eliminate, and surely, do an ethnic cleansing on Jewish people. And, it’s become, you know, more commercialized holiday like Christmas because it always comes in December.

Brian Keating:

But, but without that, we might not have, without that Maccabean rebellion, we might not have monotheism, for whatever you may say. Even if you’re an atheist, the the the the difference between monotheistic societies, polytheistic societies, of which we may be in 1, you know, when we have worship of things like the, Ivy League degrees or Nobel Prizes or mime and money. These are not so far removed from the gods of, Zeus and Jove and whatever else, Series, as I alluded to earlier. So, anyway, I appreciate you guys. I really wanna, keep delivering More and more value, and I know that you’re gonna love the interviews I have coming up as I said with, with MogaDot, Gadsad, Kip Thorne, professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, who’s written a book that asserts we have no free will. Interested in getting feedback from you. So you can always ask me questions. I take them live as you saw.

Brian Keating:

I also take them you know, you can submit them, and I’ll post on on YouTube in the community tab. So please, do hit the notification bell because that’s, I think, the only way you get notified that I’m having on you know, I’m gonna be talking to Andrew Huberman. So, if you have any questions for him, you know, that’s where I’m gonna advertise it there and on Twitter at doctor Brian Keating, at symbol doctor Brian Keating. Instagram as well, we’re seeing a a nice explosion of views since my appearance on Joe Rogan this year, and, that’s been a wonderfully gratifying year. I I can’t really say that I could wish for more next year. I I’ve kind of hit you know, maybe I should retire. I’ve kinda hit the peak experiences of podcasting, although, I obviously want to deliver more and more of what you crave, which I think is, interesting analysis and facts about our universe, and I’ll do my best to do that. So, anyway, thank you all.

Brian Keating:

Appreciate you. Maybe do one more Conversation with Eric Weinstein this year. We have tentative plans, to meet up in a couple weeks. And, who knows? We we he’s been in a dark place. I know I have as well. I hope to get him on, maybe in person for a final stream of the year, so stay tuned for that. And let me know, If anything, what you want me to ask these great, wonderful individuals that come on the podcast. So for now, it’s your humble host, Brian Keating, signing off.

Brian Keating:

Don’t forget briankeating.com or snap picture of the QR code on the screen. And you will be entered into winning meteorite, unless you have a dotedu email address, in which case you will win a meteorite. So don’t miss on that. I don’t know if it’ll arrive. It won’t arrive before Hanukkah. I can promise you that, but it’ll arrive. Don’t worry. Gravity got it here, interstellar, travels, notwithstanding, and, the US Postal Service will get it back to you guys.

Brian Keating:

Brian Keating, sending you my love throughout the cosmos. Spread the word. Share the channel with your friends and family. Share this interview while you can because I’m gonna take it down in just a bit and process it. Signing off. Close the pod bay doors. You guys like my new, neon sign over here? Open the pod bay doors. I don’t know if you can see the full thing.

Brian Keating:

There it is. Open the pod bay doors into the impossible. Brian Keating, signing off. Enjoy. Happy holidays,