I Brought Galileo’s Telescope to a Navy SEAL’s Gun Range
What it’s like to be the 316th guest in the history of the Shawn Ryan Show
Picture two men on a hillside outside Nashville, both squinting down an optic at the same tree line. One is a former Navy SEAL and a deadly-serious CIA contractor holding a replica of Galileo’s four-hundred-year-old spyglass. The other is a dad-joke prone cosmology professor pointing a suppressed .300 cal precision rifle downrange. That second man is me. Obviously. And somewhere mid-aim, it hit me: we were doing the exact same thing. Galileo built his telescope for the Venetian navy as a targeting and surveillance instrument before he ever pointed it at Jupiter’s moons. The optic on Shawn’s rifle, the tripod he’d steady it on, the fire-control logic behind it, all of it descends from the object in my hands. We were four centuries apart and holding the same idea.
Nobody clicks a link expecting a physicist and a frogman to end up on a firing range together. But that’s exactly how my day on the Shawn Ryan Show began, and it was one of the strangest, most fascinating 24 hours of my public life. Here’s the whole thing, door to door, the way almost no one on Earth gets to see it. Only 316 people ever have.
Why a SEAL Tracked a Cosmologist for Two Years
When I sat down, Shawn told me he’d been “tracking” me for two or three years. Coming from a man whose previous career involved literally hunting down terrorists as a Navy SEAL and CIA operator, that’s a slightly unnerving compliment. But it tells you something about how he books his show: he doesn’t chase the news cycle. He finds people whose ideas have been rattling around in his head and waits until the timing is right.
I’m a cosmologist. I build telescopes at the South Pole and in the Atacama Desert to photograph the oldest light in the universe. I’ve written books about losing the Nobel Prize and about thinking like the people who win it. On paper, I’m the last guest you’d expect on a show built for veterans, operators, and the disclosure-curious. Which is precisely why millions have watched it in just 3 days.
It just worked. The best conversations happen at the seams between worlds.
Door to Door: The Most Secretive Studio in Podcasting
Unlike my trip to Joe Rogan’s show, where they flew me first class and put me up in a luxury hotel, Shawn’s operation runs differently. You pay your own way. They’ll suggest hotels, but you book your own. What they do provide is the one thing money can’t buy: access to a location they will not disclose.
You don’t get an address. You don’t get directions. You get picked up. The studio sits on 22 acres of private farmland about 45 minutes outside Nashville, deliberately isolated, staffed by a small phalanx of security guards, drivers, bodyguards, and production assistants, and more cameras than I’ve seen anywhere outside a U.S. Open tennis match. As I was being driven in an armored black Cadillac Escalade, I was very appreciative that they didn’t put me in one of those Homeland-style black-hoods.
The night before, I made the rookie mistake of sampling Nashville’s famous Broadway strip, a kind of country-music Bourbon Street that slopes down toward the river, all neon and honky-tonk and questionable decisions.
Then, at 3 a.m., the hotel fire alarm went off in my 11th-floor room. Not a drill, the intercom insisted. I stumbled down eleven flights into the lobby, where I watched a woman calmly checking in to the hotel mid-evacuation, as though the building announcing its own immolation was a minor inconvenience to her travel plans. “Oh, that was just a drill,” they told us afterward. I went back to bed and quietly asked Shawn’s producers for an extra half hour before pickup. They graciously agreed.
The next morning a bodyguard collected me in an enormous, armored black SUV and drove me to the dark site. I had no idea what to expect. What I found, after all that secrecy, was a fully stocked bar and a genuinely warm crew. The fortress has a friendly interior.
Before the cameras rolled for the main event, Shawn took me out to the range. I’d brought a few props, meteorites older than the Earth, a Martian regolith sample, and my replica of Galileo’s spyglass. Shawn brought the firepower.
Here’s a fun fact I learned about myself that day: I outshot one of the Marines who’d recently been a guest on the show. I will be dining out on that for the rest of of my natural life, and I encourage you not to fact-check it too aggressively. I also learned that Shawn Ryan has a handshake like a hydraulic press, which, given the resume, surprised exactly no one.
And this is where the day quietly became the thesis of my entire career. I held up the spyglass and explained that Galileo didn’t invent the telescope to study the heavens. He pitched it to the Venetian Senate as a military instrument, a way to see enemy ships two hours after they crested the horizon and two days before you could see them with the naked eye.. They doubled his salary on the spot. He invented the tripod for the same reason snipers use one today: you cannot hold a precision optic steady enough by hand.
Every fire-control system, every sniper scope, every stabilized optic on Earth descends from the instrument I was holding. Shawn’s rifle and Galileo’s telescope are the same family tree, four hundred years apart.
I didn’t just tell Shawn that on the range. I showed him. And his crew caught it on camera, a cosmologist and an operator demonstrating, without meaning to, that science and the military have never been opposing cultures. They’re the same culture, precision, mission, sacrifice, and accountability, aimed at different targets.
Four Hours in the Chair
Then we sat down for the real thing. five hours. Four coffee/pee breaks. Edited to a tight four hours lol. We covered the disclosure circus, the physics of why I’m a skeptic about alien spacecraft, the origin of the universe, the priest who invented the Big Bang, artificial intelligence as a kind of secular god, the moon landings, and the question of whether science and faith can share a single mind. (My answer: they’ve shared mine my whole life.)
We didn’t agree on everything, and I didn’t want us to. On UFOs, I’m what I’d call a friendly skeptic. I follow the data, and so far, the data hasn’t shown up. Shawn has interviewed more firsthand witnesses than almost anyone alive, and he pushed me on it. That’s the job. I’d rather be honestly challenged by a host who’s done the reading than flattered by one who hasn’t.
What Shawn Ryan Is Actually Like
People ask what he’s like as a host. The honest answer: he interviews the way a Special Operations veteran debriefs. He asks a question, then goes completely silent and lets you talk, sometimes for two or three minutes, without interrupting. Then a single word. “Wow.” A pause. “Interesting”. A pause. And a follow-up that proves he was listening to every syllable. It’s not a conversation in the Rogan sense. It’s a debrief, and you are the source.
He is also one of the most genuinely private people I’ve ever met, which, after the location protocol and the security detail, you absorb in your bones. And he’s thoughtful in small ways that matter. He gave me a bag of his Vigilance Elite gummy bears, the little ritual gift he hands every guest. Being me, I asked whether they were kosher. To my disappointment, they aren’t. I promised them to my favorite (non-Jewish) brother-in-law, who will now have to listen to me explain how I came to be vetting a Navy SEAL’s candy for rabbinic compliance.
The One Gift I Tried to Give Him Back
There was one exchange off-camera that stayed with me more than anything we recorded. We’d been talking about the Sabbath, the one practice that, more than any supplement or hack or morning routine, has kept me sane. One day a week, I disconnect completely. No phone, no email, no work, no achievement. Not even appearing on a top-ten podcast if that was my only opportunity. Sorry. Just family, community, and rest. I told Shawn I thought it might be the single most valuable thing I could offer him, more than any fact about the cosmos.
He told me he’d try it once he hit a certain milestone.
I didn’t push. It wasn’t my place, and he’s earned the right to run his own race. But I’ve thought about that answer a lot since. Because the milestone is the trap. There’s a well-documented phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill: we tell ourselves we’ll rest, we’ll be satisfied, we’ll step off once we reach the next number, and then the number arrives, the goalposts have quietly moved, and we’re chasing the next one before we’ve even celebrated the last. The rest never comes, because the finish line is designed to recede.
I hope Shawn takes the day before he hits the milestone, not after. Not because I’m right and he’s wrong, he’s accomplished things I never will, but because the Sabbath isn’t a reward you earn at the end of the climb. It’s the thing that makes the climb survivable. I offered it as a gift, just as he handed me those gummy bears. Whether he unwraps it is up to him.
One detail his most devoted fans will appreciate: I also got to take questions from Shawn’s Patreon community, the inner circle of 120,000-plus supporters who get everything first. Their questions were sharper and more curious than most of what I field on cable news. If you’re in that community and you ask me something, thank you. You made me think.
Rogan vs. Ryan
Inevitably, people want the comparison. I’ve now done both, and I love both, and they are nothing alike. Here’s a link to my behind-the-scenes trip to the Joe Rogan Experience. Joe Rogan is a comedian and a generalist, boundlessly curious, fast, associative, happy to chase a tangent about elk meat or mushrooms or ancient civilizations for forty minutes. The studio is a clubhouse. Shawn Ryan is a debriefer, patient, deliberate, comfortable with silence, building trust the way an interrogator builds rapport. The studio is a fortress.
Rogan flies you out and puts you up; Ryan makes you find your own way to a place he won’t name. Rogan wants to be entertained; Ryan wants to understand. Both are masters of the form. I’d go back to either in a heartbeat. Just not on Saturday.
Check out my episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube.
The 316th Name
At the end, they walked me over to the Vigilance Elite signature wall, the black wall where every guest in the show’s history signs their name. Operators. Generals. Whistleblowers. Presidents-adjacent. And now, somewhere in that constellation of signatures, a cosmologist.
I signed it as the 316th guest. Joe Rogan has had well over two thousand (I’m #2023). Shawn has had 316. I stood there with the marker in my hand and felt the weight of how few people have ever stood exactly where I was standing, in that room, on that wall, having shot on that range and sat in that chair. It’s a strange and humbling little fraternity, and I’m absurdly grateful to be in it.
And then the Black SUV pulled up. I was whisked off-site to the airport, where I got to savor a sunset like this: the perfect way to end the experience.
A Small Thank-You to Those Who’ve Given More
I want to mention one thing that mattered more to me than anything else about the appearance. I offered to send 250 genuine 4.3-billion-year-old meteorites, older than the Earth itself, to active-duty service members with APO addresses. They were claimed almost instantly.
Most of my career exists because of people in uniform. The only way to get to the South Pole, where I’ve built telescopes, is aboard an Air National Guard LC-130, the largest skiplane in the world. Military crews have flown me and my equipment to the most inhospitible place on Earth and come back months later to bring me home. Every photon of data I’ve ever collected for BICEP exists because someone in uniform made it possible. Handing a piece of the early solar system to an active-duty service member is the smallest possible way to say thank you for something I can never fully repay.
Watch, Listen, and Claim Your Piece of the Cosmos
▶️ My episode of the Shawn Ryan Show Ep. 316
🪐 Active-duty service members: claim a meteorite at BrianKeating.com/srs (while supplies last).
🔭 A telescope I got at age 12 made me the scientist I am today. If you want to show a kid what Galileo saw, my buyer’s guide is at BrianKeating.com/telescope.
🎧 And subscribe to my own show, Into the Impossible, where I do the long-form thing from the other side of the microphone.
P.S. During the show I joked that Shawn’s set had more guns on it than any podcast I’d ever done, with one exception. The Mayim Bialik podcast. Yes, really. Want to hear what it’s like to be a guest on that show, an Emmy-winning actress with a PhD in neuroscience, and how it compares to a SEAL’s compound and a comedian’s clubhouse? Tell me in the comments and I’ll write it up next.
Brian