Transcript

Brian Keating:
Okay, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast, a very special episode featuring my favorite guest, me, Brian Keating, celebrating 400,000 of you multiversal minds that traverse the cosmos from consciousness to astrobiology, there and back. When I started the podcast, I assumed that maybe a few dozen nerds would somehow watch, but we built a community that hundreds of thousands of people are listening to or watching. Over 500K when you include the audio versions, which I hope that you will also enjoy. And whether we’re talking about inflation or artificial intelligence or aliens or black holes, I think that you’re getting something here that you get nowhere else, and that’s access to the greatest minds in the universe, some deep dives. I never pull punches, I never hold back, and I just love, uh, the fact that I get to do this all. And most of what I provide to you is kind of a hobby. I don’t do this for the money. I certainly don’t make money on the podcast.

Brian Keating:
And it’s just been such a delight. So you’ll hear this in the second half. I’m going to answer some questions that were dropped on YouTube, and you can join my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, or my secondary YouTube channel where I do these deep dive explainers into the hottest topics in physics and astronomy, cosmology, artificial intelligence. Those are solo episodes. I do some debunking episodes now called Keating’s Razors, and I also do a lot of very fascinating as I said, solo deep dives on things ranging from negative mass neutrinos all the way up to the solution to the Fermi paradox that I am thinking about working on myself in my other spare time for my side hustle. I need a side hustle. So that other channel is called Keating Experiments.

Brian Keating:
You can find that link below as well.

Brian Keating:
Okay, let’s get on to some of the questions.

Brian Keating:
So let’s go. 400K, Austin Howell, thank you so much. I’m so glad you’re part of the multiverse of minds. And then next question, number 2. Has time ticked at the same pace since the early universe?

Brian Keating:
No.

Brian Keating:
So this is subtle. In general relativity, time can depend on gravity. Gravity depends on matter, and matter in motion also can affect the spacetime metric. So the universe is much hotter and denser than it was in the early universe than it was now. So an atom in the early universe wouldn’t actually notice this because clocks tick locally in the same rate that they do for us in the locally low gravitational environment. Now it is true clocks do tick slightly slower for us nearer to the center of the Earth than for an astronaut orbiting on the International Space Station. But locally, that’s a small effect. And so locally, Einstein realized, and as part of his equivalence principle, that you could basically make a freely falling reference frame where anything would perceive the same spacetime dynamics as if there were no gravity.

Brian Keating:
So flat spacetime is the local approximation, just like a flat Earth is a local approximation for any infinitesimal patch of a highly curved surface, whether it’s positively curved or negatively curved, whether that curvature is coming, you know, kind of built into the universe or from large gravitational fields or distortions. So an atom in the early universe wouldn’t notice anything. And redshift is not caused by time itself changing, it’s caused by the spatial expansion of the universe that stretches wavelength of light and these waves of light as they travel. So this would not change things. So there’s a distinction between gravitational time dilation which is the slowing and changing of clock rates, which is a true effect that’s also responsible for corrections made to the GPS satellite that you and I use to get around in our— using our phones or our cars’ GPS. So that’s different from cosmological redshift, which stretches light because the universe is expanding. So they’re related, but they’re not identical.

Brian Keating:
Great question.

Brian Keating:
Is every location the center of the Big Bang? Yes, this is a very good way to think about it. If every part of the universe is the center of the universe, then no part is the center of the universe.

Brian Keating:
It’s like, where’s the center of the surface of the Earth?

Brian Keating:
There is no center of the surface of the Earth, so all points are equivalent. So the Big Bang was not an explosion into space, it was the expansion of space itself.

Brian Keating:
So we often use these analogies.

Brian Keating:
None of them are perfect because we’re, you know, 3-dimensional beings trying to visualize a 4-dimensional universe, making 2-dimensional analogies that I’m about to make, which is a classic one of the balloon that has dots, you printed on it in the shape of galaxies, if you like. And if you blow that balloon up, it’s expanding into the room, so that makes it a little bit less good of an analogy. But every dot would see every other dot moving away, and I can insert here a visualization that I made on redshift and the wavelength distortion that occurs due to the expanding of spacetime. And each galaxy sees every other galaxy moving away from it. In 3 dimensions, you could have a raisin bread that has raisins inside it, you’re cooking it, it’s expanding, every raisin is moving away from every other raisin, so each raisin could say, Hey, I’m the center of the bread. But of course, if an infinite raisin bread, they’re not— it’s not possible for any of them to be the center. They’re all the center, therefore none of them are the center. So the observable universe does appear to be homogeneous.

Brian Keating:
That means it’s sort of the same in every place in the universe, and isotropic, and then it looks the same on large enough scales. So every observer can legitimately consider themselves to be the center of the observable expansion. And these are things we talk about in the cosmic office hours once a month, which I really look forward to. I hear incredible theories, and it’s a much cheaper alternative alternative, you know, to, uh, to the $1,000 for the first hour and then $2,000, then $4,000, $8,000, etc., that I charge for private consultations. I’m more than willing to do that. That money goes to a local food bank at UCSD’s campus. It’s a 501, uh, charity. There’s a couple of them here on campus that I will donate that money to.

Brian Keating:
And we’ve had many people take me up on that level. But this is sort of the level of, of the conversation that we have on the, on the public office hour, shall we say, or the group office hour that we hold every month. So do join if you’re interested. It’s $19.99 a month. It’s cheap compared to the thousands of dollars that other people will pay, and that my students pay in tuition, quite frankly. And a lot of them don’t come to office hours. So, um, so, uh, hopefully you will, uh, you will adjudicate yourself in such a way that you can make it to an office hour of some kind or another, or you can wait to the next 500K milestone when I’ll answer more of these questions.

Brian Keating:
Okay.

Brian Keating:
Is consciousness This is asked by Innerfield5481. Is consciousness a space like spacetime? I personally don’t know enough about this question to answer it. I’d say I’ve talked to the leading lights in consciousness, from the late, great Daniel Dennett— I was his last interview that he ever did— uh, to Sam Harris, to Robert Sapolsky. So implementation of a physical system occurs while it’s embedded in spacetime. It is not spacetime itself. There’s some pre-existing spacetime. So The question I think you might be asking is whether or not consciousness is fundamental or if it’s emergent based on collective phenomena, it’s computational, maybe it’s quantum. But the hard problem of consciousness, the qualia, what is it like to be something else, we really have no good answer to that.

Brian Keating:
And I always often find that it’s as challenging to me as if we didn’t know what an exoplanet was. We have definitions of it. Yes, we changed the definition of a planet within our solar system not too long ago in my lifetime. And so things could change and maybe we could learn stuff, but it may be unknowable. I mean, there are people that think consciousness is outside the realm of consciousness. And so you need some level of consciousness, as Einstein said, that’s above the level of consciousness in order to understand consciousness. Maybe that will be AI. Maybe AI will be able to look at us outside of our brain.

Brian Keating:
Will JWST ever directly observe a Population III star? Now, Population III stars, I should tell you, are the first generation of stars we call Population III. And so they’re extremely rare, they’re extremely hard to visualize, they’re long gone by now. They were providing the seeds that then became the seeds to make the stars that made the stars like our sun, which is Population I, which is to say that they exploded. They were made of just primordial hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang. They then created and synthesized the heavier elements all the way up to lead and, and, and, and even iron and so forth to make these iron-nickel meteorites that I give away if you have a .edu email address, briankeating.com/edu, and you live in the US. So these are extremely massive, and like rock stars, the more massive, the brighter you are, the shorter you live. So they formed very early on, and they may detect, you know, them in clusters or so forth where the light would have this trace fingerprint of only having hydrogen and helium in their spectrum. And that would be an incredible accomplishment, as would be the observation of a single pristine Population III star.

Brian Keating:
That might be one of the greatest discoveries in astronomy.

Brian Keating:
And if any telescope could do it, it is something like Webb.

Brian Keating:
Thanks for that question. Okay, Cameron Williams asks about LLMs, Lean proofs, formal verification, and fundamental physics. Now, this is one of my most recent and most exciting intersections that I’m involved with. You know, how do we go from mathematicians proving theorems and physicists building models and computers to check these things to actually where they’re generating it? So I came up with something called the Einstein test, which would be to take an LLM, lobotomize it, and give it only knowledge pre-1910 or something, and see if it can come up with general relativity like we just talked about. Can it derive curved spacetime, flat locally, Einstein equivalence principle, all these things that Einstein did so magnificently? So the payoff would be enormous. So can we even verify proofs? When I talked to Terence Tao in September, he’s gonna hopefully come on again for his new book in the fall, he talked about verification being a good thing for AI.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Discovering unknown symmetries perhaps, proving problems, solving problems that didn’t have proofs maybe, but they weren’t at the level of theorems like Erdős problems are not really at the level of a theorem like Pythagorean theorem or Fermat’s Last Theorem, but were proved by or conjectured by Erdős in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and lay dormant until recently when dozens of them are being solved by LLMs.

Brian Keating:
So the physics that I do has to be answerable to nature. And so I’ve been trying to do this with a student and with colleagues.

Brian Keating:
I did find, unfortunately, in some sense, maybe fortunately, I don’t know, it saved me the time, that we were not the first to really think about this. Maybe I was the first to think about it, but I didn’t implement it in time. And there are teams of groups that basically do implementations of pre-1911 LLMs that are not contaminated with the knowledge that even popular science gives to them, like the multiverse and Spider-Verse and—

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
for movies and stuff. So, for me, it’s— it was a little bit disappointing to find that people have thought about this and actually done it. Maybe, again, I might have thought of it first a couple of years ago as that was kind of the key to artificial general intelligence that I would think would rise to the occasion. And thanks to Roman Yampolsky, who did tell me that this had been done, he thought it was a good idea, but he found some examples, which maybe saves me time to work on my other projects like Simon’s Observatory. So there are a lot of experiments that will be coming up. The question is, you know, first, can it verify existing proofs? Second, can it reproduce novel things only based on a pre, you know, corpus knowledge before these discoveries were popularized by human meat computers, natural intelligences? And so I’m not sure that will happen. First, I think it’ll happen in math, and then I think it could happen in physics. Okay, says, what happens to particles in the far future?

Brian Keating:
It depends on the type of particles.

Brian Keating:
If you’re talking about stable particles like photons or electrons, they may survive forever. Protons may decay, we’re not sure. We know that their lifetime is at least, you know, at least a multiple of the age of the universe just from statistical measurements, may even be something like 10 to the 30th years. If protons do not decay, then white dwarfs and neutron stars, which will be the end product of most stars including our Sun, that they’ll last for incredibly long times and that matter will only take on rare sort of interactions as the Universe expands and gets more and more dilute. We won’t know if this will happen, of course, for a very long time, so keep paying your taxes out there. And this dovetails nicely into Trader Timmy, who asked my thoughts on Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology. Very few people fully understand it.

Brian Keating:
I’d say that it’s one of the most creative ideas ever proposed.

Brian Keating:
It’s beautiful, it’s elegant, it’s avoiding the singularity that has a quantum effect that we can’t currently understand using our theory of gravity and our theory of quantum mechanics. It looks in a very serious way at what the far future of gravity and quantum physics would be like, but it’s made a couple of whoppers, you know, that really just don’t bear out. When the BICEP2, my favorite experiment, you know, from the Simons Observatory, came out with our data, he, Roger, said that actually we did detect B-modes, but they were from, you know, these Hawking points that they had these ring-like structures that came from black holes that are the only things that really make it through the conformal rescaling. That’s sort of like the new bang. It also requires the universe to lose information about different mass scales and transition the properties of things like the Higgs boson, which we really don’t have any evidence for.

Brian Keating:
So there’s zero evidence for it.

Brian Keating:
There is actually, counterfactual evidence for his claim that BICEP2’s result came from these Hawking points, and that was that our data were contaminated with cosmic— with not cosmic dust, but with galactic dust.

Brian Keating:
So it’s been falsified. Now, that’s a virtue of the theory, is that it can be falsified.

Brian Keating:
If we were to measure a B-mode background, that would be suggestive of inflation, not the conformal cyclic cosmology that avoids a singularity beginning. Is expansion synchronistic or Coincidental. Hmm, I’m not sure what that means. The expansion seems to be a global property of spacetime, something that, you know, we witness, we are participating in, not like some galaxy decides to go on to start participating in the Hubble flow. So at large scales, we see spacetime evolving according to Einstein’s equation. So it seems more synchronistic, you know, and that it could be that I’m not understanding it unless you mean maybe coincidental. Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure what you mean by that.

Brian Keating:
something.

Brian Keating:
Why doesn’t the Big Bang expand backwards? Now that could be true in sort of the Big Crunch axis. There are models where the universe will actually expand backwards, and meaning a backwards expansion is a contraction. And so you have to be careful looking at diagrams in Wikipedia where these are plotting spacetime, uh, you know, kind of in a 2-dimensional spacetime, but we can’t really even project the 3rd and 4th dimension of spacetime So the forward direction is actually representing the passage of time. Now, if the universe does have this evolving dark energy, eventually it could effectively collapse. The pressure support for the universe would then become negative. The universe would collapse on itself. So it’s not a physical direction, a reversal of the arrow of time, but it would effectively lead to a big, a big, Big Bang in reverse. Mainly could be a Big Crunch or could be a bounce, which some cosmologists favor.

Brian Keating:
Okay.

Brian Keating:
Okay, Bill H. asks, what do I think about the Dark Forest Theory? I think it’s brilliant science fiction. We had Cixin Liu here at UCSD, The Three-Body Problem, 5 years ago maybe. As science though, it’s still pretty speculative. The theory is that everybody’s hiding and everyone’s fearing from everybody else and that first contact is known to represent annihilation. There’s a lot of this in human history where, you know, discovered, you know, tribes, you know, all around the world were later, set upon by great misfortune by the contact with a more technological life, not necessarily more intelligent life. I mean, it’s interesting, they’ve done— they looked at, you know, why didn’t, you know, Aborigines in Australia colonize Europe instead of the other way around? And they’ve actually looked and actually certain things did happen. It had nothing to do with their genetics or inferior or superior because when Europeans tried to colonize Greenland, they failed ultimately as well.

Brian Keating:
So, whereas the natives were able to to persist there. So I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. Well, is it always bad? Does it always suggest superior intelligence? No, it doesn’t necessarily. So we don’t know if civilizations are aggressive inherently. We only have one example of life in the universe that’s conscious and technological, and that’s us. So they could be indifferent to us. It’s a fascinating hypothesis, but it’s not really a prediction. So, okay.

Brian Keating:
We want more real science and less Loeb and Weinstein. Okay. Look, they’re my friends. I’m going to talk to them. I have intellectual diversity. I talk to people that believe in intelligent design. I talk to militant atheists, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins hosted me. I hosted him in Vancouver overnight a year or two ago.

Brian Keating:
And I’ll talk to people like Stephen Meyer because I like the intellectual challenge of wrestling with ideas and seeing where they hold up and they comport with scientific evidence. Sometimes that’ll be with Nobel laureates. Sometimes it’ll be with people I strongly disagree with. I mean, Sam Harris basically won’t come back on the show because he and I disagreed about the, you know, kind of definition of slavery. And he has a very kind of limited capacity to argue, but it doesn’t prevent him from having confidence in his position, even though he knows very little about what these actual prescriptions, parameters were for slavery. And I’m not defending slavery, God forbid. Uh, but I, I am saying that there was a very different— big difference between the slavery that was practiced there and the slavery, uh, in the Bible and the slavery in, say, Southern America.

Brian Keating:
So anyway, uh, I will talk to people that, that are religious Christians.

Brian Keating:
I’ll talk to militant atheists. I love to expose ideas to scrutiny and then evidence. I’m an experimentalist, not like Sean Carroll, not like Sam Harris, not like Lawrence Krauss or Brian Greene.

Brian Keating:
I’m a—

Brian Keating:
I’m an experimentalist. list, or like Eric Weinstein. But sometimes I will have my friends on. Sorry, I have friends. I, I enjoy them. And, um, I haven’t had Eric on in over a year. Um, you know, he’s, he’s less active than Avi Loeb, who’s very active and does a lot of interesting things, and I find him a fascinating person. Uh, next question, I guess, is a part 2 from Max Brooks, who asked, if conformal cyclic cosmology, Penrose’s argument, is true, how old is the universe? Well, in conformal cyclic cosmology, every aeon, which are these epochs that we’re currently in, one of which we would call our current observable universe or the current Big Bang phase of our universe, gives rise to the next.

Brian Keating:
So you have this cyclical universe, and the conformal portion— that’s the cyclical C— the conformal is that angles are preserved and kind of Uh, it’s possible to preserve geometric effects, so there’s rulers and compasses and they adhere to the ordinary behavior. A triangle has 180 degrees, so if you have 3 black holes, which are the only things that really can go through each aeon subsequently, that each one of them in the triangle would have some angle, and locally that would be flat at 180 degrees between them. And whatever angle it is, doesn’t matter if it’s flat or not, would then transform into an identical triplet of black holes, which would also have the same properties on the other side of the next aeon. So there could be a first cycle, but there doesn’t have to be. So each Big Bang is a transition from one aeon to another, not an origin, and that would be very, you know, transformative of our understanding of cosmic history. But it wouldn’t invalidate the physics that we know about, but it would sort of explain mathematically Possibly physically, although again, we have no evidence for it.

Brian Keating:
And it has the virtue that it could be falsified, proven wrong.

Brian Keating:
If we detect primordial gravitational waves, those can only come from inflation, as Sir Roger Penrose admits himself. So it could be falsified, unlike inflation, which can’t be falsified. In other words, if we never see any gravitational waves with the Simons Observatory, it doesn’t mean that inflation didn’t take place. And if we do see them, it doesn’t mean that inflation took place also. It just means that stuff far the most plausible explanation. Some call it the smoking gun. But you can’t prove a physical, uh, fact about the universe. You can only motivate it.

Brian Keating:
And you can certainly disprove physical phenomena and rule them out, but you can’t necessarily prove them. Okay, next question. What’s the most interesting philosophical questions that I grapple with? Okay, things that keep me awake at night. I think number one, why are we here? Why is there something? Why isn’t there nothing? Why is it possible to understand language and humans, and why are we seemingly the only entities that have consciousness? What is consciousness? We don’t know.

Brian Keating:
Are we alone?

Brian Keating:
What’s the nature of the beginning of time? Did time have a beginning? Is the universe eternal? Sort of, people think there’s one Big Bang, but there’s actually many Big Bangs. Not that there’s many Big Bangs.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
theories or that we mean something different. We talk about the Big Bang Theory versus some other cosmological model. We talk about Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the origin of matter. So there was actually an origin of, you know, energy that had to have taken place from preceding either non-energy or non-energetic phase. In other words, truly ex nihilo means there wasn’t even energy. Right now, our cosmology breaks down. We have physical evidence in the form of, you know, water or hydrogen Ratio of deuterium to protium in the ordinary water that we have in the universe that has to be primordial. It’s very close to the primordial ratio and their abundances.

Brian Keating:
And that tells us that the universe had to be a fusion reactor at extremely early times. And in fact, it’s the only epoch at which we— it’s the only evidence we have from the radiation-dominated epoch. We live in the cosmological constant-dominated epoch or dark energy epoch.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
And before that, when life formed on Earth, the Earth formed during the matter-dominated epoch, you know, 4 billion years ago. And before that, the universe was mostly— has been mostly matter-dominated. But the different Big Bangs could be the origin of energy, and then from energy to mass, massive matter, then from massive matter to inert, you know, chemistry, and then from inert chemistry to organic chemistry, organic chemistry to primordial life, from primordial life to consciousness, from consciousness, you know, all these things came from something that wasn’t conscious became conscious. Something that wasn’t living turned into something that was living. Something that wasn’t energy turned into energy. Something that wasn’t matter turned into matter. These are all different types of Big Bangs, ex nihilo or from nothing type creation events. And those to me are the most interesting philosophical questions that we could ever hope to answer.

Brian Keating:
But as I often say, you know, Mother Nature is this infinite army of overwhelming power and force. And the only benefit we have, perhaps the only hope we have against Mother Nature, is that she’s always in retreat. So you can never win science, you can never defeat science. Wheeler said, as the, you know, island of knowledge increases, the boundary of ignorance increases too, but the ratio increases as the radius goes. So you actually take on more knowledge versus more boundary or more ignorance. Okay, Thomas Sousa. Guest I’ve never had on, or I’ve tried to get on and have declined? I really haven’t had too many that I’ve really wanted to talk to but couldn’t. The only one that I wanted to talk to and plausibly could talk to a few years back was Andrea Ghez, who won the Nobel Prize.

Brian Keating:
She works at UCLA. It’s part of the UC system. She came to give a colloquium here. I tried to interview her. I’ve helped her, you know, try to get in touch with the Simons Foundation once upon a time. before she won the Nobel Prize, and I thought that would curry some favor. But I think she’s tired and she thinks I’m going to ask her, you know, do you— what advice do you have for my daughter? And, you know, it’d be— but I’ve never asked that. I’ve had on, you know, 2 female Nobel Prize winners, Katalin Karikó, and also I’ve had on Donna Strickland.

Brian Keating:
And these are, you know, you can go back and look at the interviews, and at no point did I dwell on being a female or not, and I just want to talk about science with her. So she’s probably the only one. Um, I talked to Elon Musk, you know, I don’t think I could get him on for an ordinary episode, um, but I think I have a lot to say with him, uh, you know, for longer than the 15 minutes I talked to him for a couple years ago. Let’s see, dream guests. Um, I’ve had, you know, so many great guests, and the ones that I can’t get are unfortunately not alive. And fortunately, I got some of them on the podcast, like the late, great Dan Dennett. I was the last interview he ever gave on the podcast. Jim Simons, my mentor, friend, father figure to me, he was on.

Brian Keating:
Freeman Dyson was my first ever guest on.

Brian Keating:
You know, there are very few people that I, you know, I don’t really have like idol worship in my genes.

Brian Keating:
I’ve talked to 20, it’ll be 26 Nobel Prize winners pretty soon. Just finished my 25th and scheduling my 26th. They’re ordinary people. You know, they put on their pants one leg at a time. And, uh, and I just, you know, feel so fortunate that you guys have all come along on the ride and the power, the size of the audience. Yeah, maybe it helps to get, you know, if I wanted to have on, you know, Barack Obama, uh, on the podcast or, you know, uh, I don’t know if I actually do, but let’s just say I wanted to. It certainly helps to have a bigger audience. So please do share the Into the Impossible podcast with your friends and neighbors and people that are curious about all things from AI to, uh, to astronomy, to zoology and back.

Brian Keating:
So I think there’s no other place where you go as deep intellectually. And also I give you the opportunity to ask questions of my guests, especially those of you who are channel members that really do support. And I don’t make— I make hardly 99 cents a month before YouTube takes their 20% tax. Like, you know, 70 cents a month. I’m not, you know, putting food on the table, but it does send me a powerful signal that people are willing to pay, you know. And it’s— you value something more that you pay for it. Now you pay attention All of you. And I have a huge cohort of people that are ride or die and listen to the entirety of every single episode.

Brian Keating:
I just love that. And I’ll continue to make content for everybody. And, uh, but the bigger the audience certainly will help get more folks on the podcast. So I’d say, you know, maybe the few people I, you know, would still want to talk to that I haven’t had a chance to and don’t really know how to get in touch with them, although they seem to do a lot of podcasts with people that have bigger audiences, I don’t think that people do a better job necessarily than I do, especially in the technical realm. Uh, Geoffrey Hinton, Demis Hassabis, just, you know, again, the Nobel Prize. But also that I’ve thought about things that I know Demis is very, um, you know, taken with as well, like the Einstein test, which is, you know, can an AI trained only on information and only accessible to information before 1911 come up with GR or, you know, quantum mechanics?

Brian Keating:
And Tried to implement that.

Brian Keating:
I was scooped by, as I said earlier, scooped by another set of researchers, although they didn’t apply the test as I want to do and extend it. I’m not going to say what my application is because there’s still some hope that I can publish a novel paper about AI intelligence and artificial general intelligence, really, which is what interests me the most. But Jensen Huang, I think, is an interesting guy. I’d like to ask him about lock-in and whether or not GPUs and LLMs really, you know, represent the limit of what’s possible. Yes, there are universal Turing machines and they can do anything that we could hope to. And Roman Yampolsky told me that, you know, they’re uncontrollable and unpredictable and there’s no hope for us and we should have paused 10 years ago. I want to get, you know, his take on that. And what are the physical limits to growth? We live on an actual planet.

Brian Keating:
I’m an actual astrophysicist. You know, Dwarkesh Patel and Lex Fridman are not. And I’d love to talk to them from the physics perspective. Other people out there, Certainly, you know, there’s a lot. I have an episode with Sean Ryan coming out that was quite good.

Brian Keating:
Um, you know, I don’t really have this desire to go back on shows.

Brian Keating:
I’ve been on, you know, pretty much every one of the big podcasts. Um, I do like it when the host is, is as well-read as I try to be. I’ve read every single book, and the books behind me are just like the square root of the number of books I have in my, in my library. I read every single author’s book. Um, and it is hard when an author— sorry, when a guest doesn’t have a book. When an author doesn’t have a book, uh, it’s actually easier to interview people that have books. So, um, you know, Terry Tao will be a much better interview the second time, I think, when I get to him. So I hope to go up to UCLA again and sit down with him and interview him again.

Brian Keating:
Um, yeah, other than that, I don’t have—

Brian Keating:
they’re not like some, you know, white whales that I really want to get to and I haven’t had a chance to get to. I love when, you know, people that have big ideas come out with, with great books. I’m trying to do more in-person interviews than Riverside interviews, um, just because I think the vibes are much more, um, highly curated, and, and it just allows for deeper interpersonal, um, you know, uh, gestures to be perceived. And it’s just a much more, uh, intimate— and for me, it’s more fun, and the guests are more vulnerable, and when we get get a lot more real-time feedback. And I just, you know, I like the energy of being in person. I’m a people person, you know, what can I say? Okay, let’s go next. Has physics become too expensive? Yeah, absolutely. Uh, that’s a byproduct of the low-hanging fruit being picked.

Brian Keating:
You know, the first, you know, cyclotron ever invented was this big, you know, it was 20-centimeter circumference. And now, you know, CERN is what, 10,000 times bigger? So there’s no denying it has gotten incredibly expensive and much bigger. And the big science is important. It gives us LIGO, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Simons Observatories, one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, privately funded, predominantly private funded, UC San Diego and Penn and Princeton and Chicago and Berkeley and all of our partner institutions, Japan and the UK. put in tremendous resources, but, you know, $80, $90 million, $100 million plus has come from the Simons Foundation, not from the National Science Foundation. So that’s been, uh, incredibly rewarding. But, um, but yes, it’s not really sustainable. It’ll probably be— could be the last ground-based CMB experiment, you know, for the foreseeable future.

Brian Keating:
There might be spaceborne experiments like LightBird, which you’ll hear more about on my other channel. Don’t forget to subscribe, Keating Experiments. So a lot of it comes down to bureaucracy. It’s hard to get these things through. They take forever, you know, panels and get reviewed, and then they have budgets that they go through, and then they have to get launched or they have to get built. And we have 450 people in the Simons Observatory, and, you know, we started out with 40, 50, you know, 10 institutions. Now we’ve got 50, and we’re literally all around the world. So I think those, you know, kind of big experiments have a place.

Brian Keating:
I think small experiments have a place. place. I’m building a small experiment, you know, for my optical astronomy pursuits to look for the violation of Einstein’s, you know, bedrock was called Lorentz invariance, that the speed of light, for example, doesn’t depend on color. That’s a very cheap experiment. It’s a 20-inch telescope that we had here in UCSD and put it in an observatory, and we have some, you know, high-speed detectors and sensitive detectors on it and filters. And, you know, we hope to do some interesting polarimetry with it, which is is another unexplored area. Very simple sources, supernovae, you know, novae, and what are called eclipsing binary stars.

Brian Keating:
And if we can do that, you know, it’s low risk, high reward.

Brian Keating:
My philosophy, and I tell this to my students as well, always try to do something high risk and low risk at the same time so that you’ll have high reward and you’ll have guaranteed reward. In other words, if you’re successful in the high risk, like the Simons Observatory is is a perfect example. We’re trying to measure inflationary-generated primordial gravitational wave-generated B-modes, which if true herald the inflationary epoch’s existence. And the inflationary epoch’s existence heralds the existence of the multiverse to most people, including Guth and Linde I’ve had on. I should have said Guth would be a great person that I haven’t had on. He and I are co-authors. We had co-advised a former postdoc. And, um, you know, he gets my emails, but he hasn’t replied to them.

Brian Keating:
So I have tried to get him on. Um, it’s harder to get him on than the 27 Nobel Prize winners that I’ve had on. So the Simons Observatory will detect potentially inflation, and according to him and Linde, who I have had on, uh, that would herald the multiverse. So we’d no longer be living in a universe according to them. We’d have overwhelming circumstantial evidence that we live in a multiverse. So what could be a bigger you know, kind of gambit than that. However, we can also detect things like the presence of dark matter, gravitational lensing, the presence of neutrinos, the only form of dark matter that we know to exist, to detect the cosmic neutrino background and make limits and measurements of it. That’s a guaranteed measure.

Brian Keating:
We’re going to do that. We’re going to measure the masses of neutrinos with terrestrial experiments and like the Juno experiment in China and other ones. giving information as well. This will be a huge thing. We’ll determine the number of relativistic species. We’ll measure the existence or lack thereof and set limits on cosmic birefringence, which would mean Lorentz invariance is violated. These are incredible things. Some of them are guaranteed.

Brian Keating:
We could measure Planet 9 if it exists. They’re incredible. And so it’s low risk in that sense that we’re guaranteed to get a lot of science out. We have this large aperture telescope. that’s 6 meters across, that has incredibly high resolution. And then we have the coarse-grained resolution, wide aperture refracting cameras that measure the inflationary B-mode signal.

Brian Keating:
That’s in the unknown.

Brian Keating:
We don’t know if it’s gonna be there. If it’s there, it’s the highest risk, highest reward. And if it’s not, we still are gonna measure with the other instruments the presence or absence of neutrino masses and Planet 9, all these other great things. So it’s an incredibly exciting time to understand the galaxy, understand extra, you know, galaxies outside of our own and clusters of galaxies and gravitational lensing and really refine the cosmological model, measure the Hubble constant. These are spectacular accomplishments. So that’s why I like to do it. You know, we need both, you know, kind of sailboats and aircraft carriers in our arsenal. Okay, What’s the most credible evidence for extraterrestrial life? So I’ve been going off on this a lot lately, including conversations with people like Avi Loeb and Michael Michael Shermer, you know, kind of on opposite sides of the fence, um, and Beatriz Villarroel.

Brian Keating:
And, you know, there really isn’t evidence right now. I mean, there’s, there’s data that we collect that is suggestive, but it’s no— by no means, you know, uh, probative. And so there was a survey done in Nature Astronomy by Vickers et al., and I just learned about this thanks to having a conversation with, uh, with a, um—

Brian Keating:
Hmm.

Brian Keating:
you know, Christian apologist effectively, Hugh Ross, who brought the survey to my attention. It was done in Nature Astronomy. It’s not like, you know, Discovery Institute did the survey.

Brian Keating:
And in it, he—

Brian Keating:
they described that, you know, something like 88% of astronomers or astrobiologists surveyed believe that there is the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Brian Keating:
And I said, that’s—

Brian Keating:
I shouldn’t dignify that question with an answer.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
I don’t believe, you know, is there evidence for it? So, um, there is in fact maybe slight evidence against life in the universe being, you know, abundant. And the large numbers hypothesis is a hell of a drug. You know, people think, well, there’s 10 to the 24th planets. Let’s just say Adam Frank, you know, Professor Adam Frank, who I’ve had on, is right. And yeah, there have been on multiple, you know, planets around multiple star, uh, stars and multiple galaxies and multiple clusters of galaxies going back multiple billions of years. I agree with all those numbers, you know, there could be a factor of 10 either way, but it’s still, you know, a trillion trillion, of order a trillion trillion bodies in the observable universe over the history of the universe, which is important because if life existed, you know, 8 billion years ago, good luck finding it, right? It’s gone now because the average stellar system is not going to live anywhere near that time, especially going back in time when Population III that we heard about earlier was dominant and those stars lasted 50 million years. So good luck trying to find, you know, an exoplanet with life on it in another galaxy, you know, 13 billion years ago. So there are people that say the rapid emergence of life on Earth is evidence, but that’s not really evidence.

Brian Keating:
It’s evidence of how it instantiated itself on Earth itself as one example. Organic chemistry, we find organic chemistry throughout the universe. You know, we find all sorts of elements and we find all sorts of combinations and carbon is a a very abundant element in the universe, in our galaxy, and so on. So to say that it’s there, it’s almost, you know, as Hugh Ross tries to use it as an example of fine-tuning, that actually there could be life everywhere in the universe, but we only find life on Earth, therefore God wanted it to be so. So I think you get into this delicate balance if you’re saying that life is so abundant. Now, I don’t believe that’s a valid argument either. I use my canonical example of being in Antarctica twice in my life. the South Pole, you know, which is 1/7 of the Earth’s continents, right? But it doesn’t have 1/7 of the Earth’s mass, uh, or 1/7 of the Earth’s population.

Brian Keating:
It has almost zero population right now in the middle of winter. It has almost zero, about maybe 200 people on the entire continent, and the other 8.3 billion are elsewhere, right? Including people that are living, you know, under the ocean, and there’s a couple people living in space, right? So there’s, you know, not more than, uh, 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more people living in Antarctica than living on the space station. But that— so, and there’s an awful lot of space in the universe. Do we expect to find life on other, you know, floating around in space in just random locations? So the amount of space in the universe is a fallacious argument. It’s an example of the large numbers hypothesis. So I don’t believe that.

Brian Keating:
And I don’t think you should say belief.

Brian Keating:
You know, I say, do we have evidence? And the last thing which I’ve used, and I have yet to hear a cogent, you know, reply or falsification of my hypothesis that Earth and Mars shared a common history when Mars had liquid water running on it, and we were exchanging meteorites, like these meteorites that you’ll get if you go to briankeating.com/edu and you have a .edu email address, or if you go to briankeating.com/yt and you don’t have one. I do give them away. You have to live in the US because the Postal Service won’t mail these things outside of the US, at least not for like $50, and I’m sorry, I cannot afford that. But I will send them to you no matter what if you have a us.edu email address. So the fact that the Earth, Mars, Moon, all these celestial bodies, but in particular Mars, which has running water, is in the habitable zone, and has, you know, all sorts of the requirements that’s believed to be supportive of life, including carbon dioxide, you know, in its atmosphere. So the fact that we don’t see life on Mars or any evidence of life on Mars, that’s not proof. Again, we can’t look everywhere. We’ve only scratched less than the barest, you know, a few centimeters of its surface throughout a couple of landing spots.

Brian Keating:
And so that’s not proof, but there’s certainly not megacities there and dolphins swimming around with iPhones. So the fact that we could have had life and that we could have been seeded by the cosmos using panspermic logic, the fact that Mars wasn’t seeded and that we are exchanged— like, we’re like a stockroom that’s sending life to these other planets. I mean, Yeah.

Brian Keating:
There is, there are going to be fossils found on Mars someday, probably.

Brian Keating:
It’s not out of the realm of possibility, not from fossilized life that used to live on Mars, but from fossils that lived on Earth that got blasted in meteorite impacts to Mars and to the Moon. Now, maybe there’ll be none, you know, we won’t find them, but it’s not physically impossible, therefore it has some actual probability. Certainly, I wouldn’t say there’s no possibility of life throughout the universe. I would just say that the evidence for intelligent life or, you know, sophisticated advanced life is very, very scant, if not zero. And so multiplying zero by 10 to the 24th still gives you zero. And that’s the large numbers gambler’s hypothesis fallacy. So I’ve seen evidence that, you know, we’re going to hear about things that have life, like signatures, biosignatures. We’ve heard that many, many times.

Brian Keating:
I’m not talking about disclosure. I’m talking about like phosphine on Venus and other, The existence of life on Earth, you know, for now remains our only documented evidence for life in the universe. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be life elsewhere in the universe. We do seed, as I said, other planets. We have biological organisms that can survive the harshest of space. And as you go up the sophistication ladder to bipedal human-like objects, I think that that’s, uh, you know, gets even less plausible. But again, I will never say impossible. After all, the name of the podcast is Into the Impossible.

Brian Keating:
Okay, next question. Am I the experimental version of the Witten family cover-up? Hmm. Now I’ve studied string theory a little bit, enough to make fun of it and poke fun at it and say things like there’s more evidence for intelligent design having falsifiable hypotheses than string theory. Um, you know, very, very, very firmly tongue planted in cheek. But, um, but I don’t know about the cover-up. I, I know that Lewis Whitten, you know, was involved in gravity research and that he, um, you know, he did host this conference in the, in the ’50s at Chapel Hill. Um, uh, but there are a lot of, you know, kind of conspiracies that are spread about The Whitten family and anti-gravity, and there’s memos from Australia in 1971, I’m told, that talk about these things. But there’s nothing documented.

Brian Keating:
There’s no transactions or the government, you know, there’s a check and it’s written to, you know, John Wheeler. And then, you know, they’re making anti-gravity propulsion systems that allow for, you know, TARDIS-like aircraft or spacecraft to fly and be bigger on the inside than they are outside. uh, interdimensional beings and things like that. There’s no evidence for any of that as far as I know. Now, one cool thing is that UNC Chapel Hill is also the, um, the, uh, academic home of Warren Robinett. Now, Warren Robinett, who the heck is that? So he developed, uh, this Atari game that I used to play in the 1980s on my Atari 2600 called Adventure. And Adventure was, uh, crafted by him. And it was, you’re going around this kingdom and you’re fighting dragons and you have a sword.

Brian Keating:
But there was also this magical room that you could go to with a tiny pixel, a single pixel that you’d carry around. And it’s considered the first Easter egg. And if you brought this thing and you went to the secret chamber that my cousin David taught me about, you could go and then drop it off and you’d get this magical screen that would talk about how Warren Robinett was this like kind of master simulator in the simulation hypothesis. So he was there. UNC Chapel Hill. Is that a coincidence or not? You know, kind of the first evidence for the simulation hypothesis validity came from the very place where the UNC Chapel Hill Gravitometrics Conference was held in the ’50s. So what’s the biggest lesson that I take from 400,000 video subscribers, probably another 100,000+ on audio alone? It’s not that, you know, I’ve learned something, which I have, about UFOs or cosmology or Nobel Prizes or AI life or consciousness is that the curiosity of the human mind is unmatched and unbeaten. There’s nothing like it.

Brian Keating:
There’s nothing like these 3-pound supercomputers that we carry on our heads to think of things. We are universal explainers, according to my friend David Deutsch, right? So these are incredible times to be alive. The innovations of AI are both threatening, terrifying, and extremely exhilarating to me. To think that I have this army of unpaid graduate students that are working around the clock and agent swarms that I dispatch to investigate, to research, to do, to help me, you know, think about the different topics I want to cover in different explainer videos, to doing deep research on like what’s the birthday and the place of some guest I’m going to have on. You know, these are things that I couldn’t have done before. I don’t have the team for it. I just don’t have the team or the time. And so to me, it’s that there’s something unique about this podcast.

Brian Keating:
It’s, it’s resonating with, with hundreds of thousands of other minds. I mean, I looked up the number of likes that I’ve gotten, so that’s not even, you know, a metric that you can really interpret other than to say somebody liked the video. It’s like 1 or 2 million people have liked my videos. I mean, they’ve been watched for literally 2— 1— between 1 and 2 million hours just in the last couple couple of years. Um, 60 to 70 million views of all my videos, and this is just on the Into the Impossible, you know, Dr. Brian Keating, and my new channel Keating Experiments. So please go over there, Professor Keating Experiments. But this is just, you know, blows me away, you know, millions of hours of time, you know, thousands of, of human lifetimes.

Brian Keating:
It’s incredible. And that you spend it with me, and I love spending it with you. And without you, I don’t really do this anymore. I’m not just going broadcast into the ether, as much fun as that might be to hear myself talk. I can hear myself talk for free. I don’t have to get all, you know, my hair done and, and get, uh, you know, shave and get these fancy cameras and editors and all the other stuff that I need to do because I want to do it. I feel like I owe it to everybody who’s a scientist, is paid for by the public. Our jobs depend on you.

Brian Keating:
I want to give back to you for free. If you want to get closer, more intimate, I offer things like these office hours that you can be a member of, and that, that’s a very intimate small club. And Patreon, and on YouTube membership, which is different than subscribing— there’s a difference. And on Substack, I have a Substack that I also do these things on. But it’s been an incredible ride, and I keep— I’ll keep going. I have no reason to stop. I really enjoy what I do and get to— who the people I get to talk to. And again, the more of you there are, it does carry some weight, you know.

Brian Keating:
I think To get, you know, maybe Alan Guth is waiting for the 500K mark. I don’t know, but, uh, uh, who knows? Maybe he is, maybe he’s not. But the point is, the more people that get to experience these once-in-a-lifetime conversations— I mean, literally, for Daniel Dennett, it was the last podcast he ever did, and I think I did a great job with it. He certainly was extremely warm and, and, and, and expressed a lot of gratitude for that conversation.

Brian Keating:
He very sick.

Brian Keating:
He had this huge bandage on his head. It wasn’t related to his— the cause of his death, but, um, you know, he took the time, and it was the last— the last hours of his life. And those are some of the million hours that you guys have gotten to watch and spend time with me and with him and with others. And I hope that you’ll continue to do so and spread the channel love. I do think we are, you know, some say criminally undersubscribed. Uh, 69% of you, I’m told, do not subscribe. I don’t know why. You watch regularly and And YouTube has this amazing engine for tracking metrics.

Brian Keating:
And we know you’re watching, but you’re not subscribing. I don’t know why. Subscriptions are the only way publicly that you can sort of gauge a relative channel. You know, it’s kind of like the H-index of a channel in some ways, although views are more important. If somebody said, you know, I’ll watch every single video or I’ll subscribe and watch no videos, obviously I’m going to take the non-subscriber over the subscriber.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
whatever. But it does carry some weight, so please do consider it. And please accept my deepest gratitude for being on this mission, this multiverse of minds that is just in this consonant, resonant phenomenon. And I don’t think we have any real, you know, plans to change anything. I’m not gonna, you know, move into AI, you know, slop and content. And I’m not going to keep reading books, talking to geniuses, poking back, pushing back where necessary, being respectful, having live conversations. Yeah. Getting the biggest names in science and some of the smaller names too.

Brian Keating:
People that you may have never heard of. I did a conversation not too long ago with a professor at Princeton, Tom Griffiths, who studies AI and wrote a book about computational science and the math behind computational cognitive science. He’s a cognitive scientist and a computer scientist. The Laws of Thought, and it’s one of my most popular. It’s almost got 200,000 views in a couple of months. You know, I didn’t know about Tom. I mean, yes, he’s a famous, you know, Princeton professor, brilliant guy, but until I read his book, I didn’t know about him. And now I do, and now you do.

Brian Keating:
And, you know, just having people like that, or, you know, smaller or bigger guests, um, you know, this huge roster of, of episodes that are recorded but not yet released, and you’re going to be blown away by them. Um, and I just have so much fun being with it. Now, I also am going to now segue into the second half of the live stream I just did this week with Avi Loeb, and that had kind of a Q&A session about my thoughts on aliens and UFOs and, and people like David Grusch and Congresswoman Luna and other things. Has a little bit of that and also has a little bit of kind of reflections on 400,000 viewers and a little bit of inside baseball on podcasting. I, I, you know, encourage you to listen to it if you’re interested in getting to know kind of what makes me tick. Um, it’s a little self-indulgent, like all these things are, but, you know, if you don’t celebrate the small things and the big things, you know, what else is there, you know, in life but, you know, compounding misery? So for me, I hope you’ll enjoy this, uh, the second half of this show, where I kind of just talk to the camera after Avi left, and I talk about my philosophy. I’m not afraid to I like to push back, even on friends. I know you guys, you know, some of you don’t want to see Avi Loeb, some of you don’t want to see Eric Weinstein.

Brian Keating:
Fine. I mean, you don’t have to listen to those episodes. You know, we live in a free internet. You can listen or not. So choose your own adventure. I hope you’ll forgive the indulgence, self-indulgence of the second part of this episode, but it was fun to kind of stream of consciousness. You get to see what a scientist thinks about when they’re not thinking about science. And now I’m going to I’m gonna go back to science.

Brian Keating:
I’m gonna finish up those papers before I get scooped again. And again, just, um, 400,000, you know, shining points of light. May there be many more, and, uh, and an infinite amount of gratitude. Okay, now on to part 2. Stay tuned.

Brian Keating:
All right, well, you heard, uh, the inimitable Avi Loeb and And he’s always such a fascinating guest to have on. I’ve had him on many times, but I wanna talk to you now because he’s left the building. You know, he’s dropped his briefcase, he’s no longer here. But I have a lot of thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts. I have a lot of feels from this interview that I just did. You know, thinking about the preparation I did for it involving multiple guests that are coming up this week, including Beatriz Villarreal is coming on Wednesday, Michael Shermer. who’s coming on Thursday, all involved in some form or another what Avi’s doing.

Brian Keating:
So I really, you know, it’s hard because when I do these podcasts, when I do these interviews, especially live, there’s a million things I want to ask. I want you guys to ask. I want you guys to be engaged. I don’t think any other podcast from, you know, the competitors do these kind of live streams. Kirk Jaimungal, a friend of mine, you know, past guest. I’ve been on his show. Sean Carroll, certainly. I don’t think David Kipping, my friend and respected colleague, And so I really do feel like this is a unique opportunity that I give in the comments, but also for you guys to ask questions.

Brian Keating:
And there were literally hundreds of comments, so I did my best. And I always get criticized, why are you looking away? So I bought a teleprompter and now I can put the questions here so it looks like I am indeed doing as I’m doing, paying attention. But I need to be candid with you because I think if I lose my trust with you, I think I lose everything.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
And I want to be honest, you know, I’ve pushed back on Avi since the wee days of when he first came on the podcast in 2020 to talk about his first book, which is mentioned here, Extraterrestrial. And I said, Avi, you know, you believe that, that this object, Oumuamua, comes from an alien civilization, potentially. Maybe it’s not technology itself, but it’s leftover from technology. It could be a garbage barge. It could be a solar sail. I said, Avi, wouldn’t it be great if you knew some billionaires that could spend money to fly a probe and catch up to Oumuamua. And of course, that was tongue-in-cheek, but I was pushing back on him because he did know people like that, Yuri Milner, and he still does. The Breakthrough Starshot enterprise is funded by Avi’s friends and colleagues, Yuri Milner and others.

Brian Keating:
And he’s at Harvard, arguably this hedge fund with a $50 billion endowment that still charges tuition that outpaces inflation. I always forget to criticize Avi for that. and rejects more people, you know, than I got rejected, you know, when I was on the dating market. They serve 1,500 people, you know, in the freshman class. It’s pretty small. It’s like a Chipotle does every day on a decent day. So it’s exclusive. He’s in this multi-billion-dollar orbit.

Brian Keating:
He brags about billionaires coming on his— to his doorstep. And I don’t fault them because he is incredible at what he does. And he’s rigorous and he’s a real scientist. That’s where I just had a video about criticizing Michio Kaku’s most recent appearance on Diary of a CEO, which got 4 or 5 million views, and I’m trying to debunk all these claims, and I ran out of like patience after 15 claims in a 40-minute video. Avi’s not like Michio. Avi’s, you know, working in the trenches, writing papers. I don’t know when the last paper Michio Kaku wrote was. I bet it wasn’t recently.

Brian Keating:
And there are a lot of great— you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn’t written a paper, you know, since the Reagan administration, as far as I can tell. But, you know, they do something important and they have a role and they also have their own, you know, kind of financial incentives because they’re all writing books. And so, look, I write books. I don’t do it for the money. The amount of money I get from my books is near below minimum wage, I think, even here in California. So believe me, I’m not doing it for the money. You know, maybe these other folks are. Maybe Avi is.

Brian Keating:
I don’t know. Maybe David Grusch is. Who knows? I’m not even speculating. They’re involved in movies. That’s never interested me whatsoever. I’m interested in finding out information while I still can, while I still have influence and ability to influence young minds and get into the passion of science. You know, I wouldn’t become a public university professor if I was really interested in the money, okay? So let’s put that to rest. But I told Avi Backman when Oumuamua was in the news, you know, it’s not that far outside of our solar system, it’s your last chance to catch up to it.

Brian Keating:
And he said, well, you know, there’ll be many more coming through. Now there’s been 2 more that have come through. And one of them was known to be a comet, Borisov. And the second one now, or third one now, seems very likely, even according to its greatest champion, Avi Loeb, to be also more likely to be extraterrestrial, you know, natural material than extraterrestrial technological materials. As he just said, he lowered the confidence on his coined Loeb scale. I wouldn’t have called it the Loeb scale, although I do have the Keating Medal. I do give the Keating Medal to people that came in. And just recently, I gave my first Keating Medal for impossible imagination to a man who won the Nobel Prize.

Brian Keating:
So we’re kind of squaring off which one is bigger. And my Keating medal is bigger than the Nobel Prize. Anyway, you’ll see that interview soon.

Brian Keating:
But here’s where I land.

Brian Keating:
Avi is doing rigorous version, the most rigorous version I think that you could do. He wants the instruments. He doesn’t want the feels. He doesn’t want the testimony, the interdimensional beings. I think Luna is really doing something that I think is self-destructive for her cause. She’s criticized Kirkpatrick again. I had him on. I know most of you hate Kirkpatrick.

Brian Keating:
I think that’s nonsense. Don’t you want to see me ask these people questions? I didn’t let him get away with stuff either. I’m going to push these people and I’m going to ask questions because this is the most important thing I think that humanity may ever discover, including what I do, which I think is pretty damn important. Studying galaxies, studying the cosmos, studying the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, Lorentz invariance, all these things. These are incredibly important things. But if we found extraterrestrial intelligence, sentient plasmoids, and interdimensional beings, come on, that would be, you know, I’d stop doing what I’m doing and join up with Avi. But so why haven’t I done that? Because I haven’t seen the sensors. I have— haven’t seen the instruments.

Brian Keating:
I haven’t seen the data. I’ve talked to the people that have talked to the people, and that includes people like Ryan Graves, um, who have, you know, claimed to witness things, uh, to see, to talk to people that he has— he hasn’t claimed to talk to the people, he’s talked to people. They work in a squadron. And but he, he as is often claimed, that he saw these things directly. But he said candidly on my interview with him, maybe, maybe things have changed, but, but that he didn’t witness it, but his colleagues and squadron mates did. And that was fine because you can report on it. Grusch is doing the same thing. He hasn’t seen these things.

Brian Keating:
He’s saying that people that he knows have seen these things. Okay, so where does this sit in the evidentiary scale of science? It’s very low, right? It’s very low. Whereas data, hard evidence, you know, people joke about, well, you believe in dark matter. Yeah, I believe in dark matter because we’ve already detected dark matter. We’ve captured dark matter, we interact with dark matter, we know how to build sensors that do it, and we know how to measure it throughout cosmic history. They’re called neutrinos. Okay, so people say, oh, dark matter, you’re just an idiot, you’re a fantasy, you believe things too. No, I don’t believe in it.

Brian Keating:
We have evidence for dark matter. Neutrinos fit every definition of dark matter. They’re massive, they interact weakly, there’s— and it just happens to be not enough of them to make the universe flat. in terms of its curvature, and so there must be other non-neutrino forms of dark matter. But neutrinos make up every bit of dark matter that any theorist would ever want. They just don’t make up enough to do— well, that’s like saying, well, hydrogen only makes up 74% of the universe’s baryonic mass density, so does that mean that baryons don’t exist?

Brian Keating:
It’s a stupid argument, okay?

Brian Keating:
So we’ve detected dark matter, we have evidence for dark matter. Now, we haven’t detected dark energy in the same way we’ve detected dark matter, Because we don’t have ability to bottle it up. But when we hear these things, this is what drives me crazy. I’m an experimentalist. Avi’s a theorist. Most of the people he’s talking to are theorists. Gary Nolan is not an experimental astrophysicist. He’s not dealing with the same types of sensors.

Brian Keating:
He’s dealing with experiences that he had that he talked about on my show when we did a co-livestream together with Avi Loeb a couple of years back. So you can look that up. Now, what’s important to me? I pushed him on Luna because he has access to her. She is obviously a fangirl of Avi, as are many people. He’s very charming. But we need a whistleblower who has, you know, the power and is not afraid to use it, not to go after people like Kirkpatrick who was serving his country as best as he could. And he got a ton of crap for it. You know, I think after having spoken to him, he would never do it again.

Brian Keating:
You know, death threats and, and all sorts of things going after his family. It’s horrible what happens to people like that. And that’s why I caution Navi, are you sure you want to do this? Because it’s inevitable you’re going to piss people off and you’re going to go up against the Pentagon that has PSYOP.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
information, disinformation, malinformation campaigns against everybody. You think that we don’t spy on the Chinese or the Israelis or, you know, we spy on everybody. And thank God, you know, for that. As Jack Nicholson said, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. Now, I don’t like the fact that my relatives were tortured. You know, I feel like that’s bad, but they’re not babies. They’re some of the strongest men, you know, women that I know. And they do things for volunteer.

Brian Keating:
They didn’t get recruited with a bag over their head and get waterboarded, you know, for grins and giggles.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
That wasn’t what happened. No, that was part of their search, evade, and rescue, uh, uh, training that they had in the military. And thank God that they did. Uh, and I hope that they never have to use that, but they, they’re hardened against it should they ever have to use that. Okay, so let’s, let’s look at this. Where is Luna coming down? She has the power to subpoena people.

Brian Keating:
She has full immunity.

Brian Keating:
Um, I’ve also wondered, and maybe I’m just, you know, foolish about how the government works— again, I don’t want anything bad to happen to anybody. I don’t want Grusch to be attacked. I don’t want him to you know, go to jail for revealing classified information. But we have freedom of the press. We, you know, there could be leaks to the media and so forth in the press. Now, if this is stuff that’s happening, you know, it’s hard to imagine how, uh, you know, how sentient plasmoids— telling us that there are sentient plasmoids and bipedal, you know, organisms, which is very shocking to me. I mean, that’s sort of the most shocking thing I’ve ever heard in this. Not the sentient plasmoids and the interdimensional beings, that doesn’t really kind of rankle me as much as the bipedal, because bipedalism is almost the least likely.

Brian Keating:
I mean, look around your house. You might see 1 or 2 bipedal objects. You might see an equal number of— we have an equal number of bipedal objects around the Keating household, right? They’re called pets. Um, they’re quadri— sorry, quadrupedal as bipedal. Um, you know, and so this is a shocking revelation if true. And, and again, I just pulled up the quote and, and from the article from the testimony on July— on June 9th. Um, so we have to say that this is, that this is, is, is among the most important things. So why isn’t there protection? Why, why isn’t Luna saying, here’s what I found out, go to the people, skip Grusch altogether, and Grusch, and go straight to the source? He can tell them who to talk to, what he saw when he saw these objects, and it can talk— she can talk to Lue Elizondo.

Brian Keating:
He’s already revealed all this stuff. He’s on tour. He talks about this stuff with Jeremy Corbell. Why can’t she talk to them, get the names, and then she’s not going to be subpoenaed. She’s not going to be arrested. She’s leading the damn committee. She’s one of the most powerful people on the planet. I don’t understand it.

Brian Keating:
And again, I, you know, I’d love to talk to her. I’ve asked Avi to introduce me to her. I think maybe one Jewish astrophysicist is enough for her, you know, to kind of make her sick of talking to me and scientists like me. But, you know, I’m happy to host her. I’m happy to host Lou Elizondo, David Grusch, all these people. I’d love to get them on. And I’d love to stop the petty backbiting ad hominem attacks that they do and have done to them. Okay, so that’s number one.

Brian Keating:
Table stakes are they have to be safe, they have to have immunity. But I don’t buy this whole thing that they have to get some whistleblower law. We already have whistleblower laws passed. And again, David doesn’t have to be the one. David can hand off the information to Burchett and Burkhart or whatever and to Luna, and he can be safe and he can know that he doesn’t even have to hand them off. They know who the sources are and they know where the facilities are. They can go into the gifts themselves, and they can find out the information. The other thing I pushed Ami on, as you notice, is on his criticism of Beatriz Villarreal.

Brian Keating:
Now, I have my problems with Beatriz that we’ll talk about on Wednesday. Of course, cordially. I have great respect for her. She’s an incredible intellect, and she has so much passion, charisma. She also gets a ton of hate. I hate the fact that she gets threats and hatred and people attacking, ad hominem attacks. imputing her character as a scientist. I think it’s totally— but everything scientific that she says is fair game.

Brian Keating:
I’m gonna ask her, you know, Avi said this about the solar coronal mass ejections on my show on Monday afternoon, Monday morning, and what do you have to say about that? You have to explain that in order to at least have a comprehensive explanation. You claim that these defects— now I’m an observational astronomer, I know all about these plates, I have some of these plates from Palomar that Beatrice is analyzing, not the ones that show glints and And alleged, according to her and others, evidence of extrasolar— sorry, extraterrestrial, I mean off of the Earth technology that reflects sunlight prior to the Sputnik program. So in other words, prior to low Earth orbit satellites. Now, we don’t know for sure what was up there, right? I mean, there’s always that. It could be, as Avi said, it could have been Chinese or Russian. I kind of doubt that because the Chinese and Russians stole a lot of information about our nuclear program and our space program from the US.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
Not that the Soviets didn’t steal as much from about the space program. They stole a lot more from the nuclear program, as you all know, from Fuchs and other people. And then they ended up building the hydrogen and the fusion devices shortly thereafter, getting the spy information from spies on the US. So 2 scientists are going to come to different conclusions. That’s fine. But we have to hold them both to the same standard. That’s what I’m going to do. And I’m going to get you to decide.

Brian Keating:
I’m going to present the evidence. There’s another thing that I want to challenge Beatrice about, which is that her contention that there were scientists killed in these massive string of deaths, allegedly, which is not actually the case. What, what, you know, that’s massive or aberrant or somehow unusual suicides, homicides, you know, potential accidents and so forth. And then accusing, you know, or suggesting, alleging, as she did on Twitter, that some of them were killed because they had special information or access to the type of science that she does with these glints, orbs, photometry, and these specular reflections. And I want to talk to her about one scientist in particular who died where I do my work in the Atacama Desert, where I’ve been half a dozen times, I can’t even remember. But this is a really important thing for us to discuss. And that’s why I’m going to push these people. And I’m going to push Michael Shermer.

Brian Keating:
I’m going to talk to Michael Shermer this coming week.

Brian Keating:
I know a lot of you don’t find him to be your favorite.

Brian Keating:
your favorite flavor of, of Karspaugh. But you saw Avi has integrity. Avi put him specifically on the, uh, White House counsel, authorized counsel that he’s, uh, in charge of, um, because he wanted someone not just a skeptic. I mean, Michael’s not just like, oh, you’re just, you know, he’s just speculating. He’s trying to be, you know, Debbie Downer, you know, uh, Cassandra wannabe. You know, pessimists, you know, get to be right, but optimists get to be rich. No, no, Michael’s not like that. He, he will talk candidly, as he does in his new book, which is the main reason he’s on.

Brian Keating:
But I’m gonna talk to him about the Galileo Project and this new White House Council, because he’s on it with, with past guests Gary Nolan and, and others. And I’m hot.

Brian Keating:
I want to have them all on.

Brian Keating:
A lot of them say stuff, and I have to hold their feet to the fire. Now, one thing about this council really rubbed me the wrong way, and I wonder if you can tell what it is. I mean, maybe put in the comments if you can suggest what, what do you think really kind of bugged me about what Avi’s what Avi was saying and the power of his committee, I was very concerned about it. And maybe you can guess in the, in the broad— So first of all, put a thumbs up and put a subscribe, you know, please on this, on this channel, because I am doing really, really interesting interviews this week. I like to think I do a lot of education. Most of it’s for free. Again, I teach at a public university, right?

Brian Keating:
I’m not—

Brian Keating:
I don’t have any book to sell or, you know, course to sell or whatever. I do a lot just to get it out there, and I’m Doing a lot more of, you know, kind of debunking style stuff, but not ad hominem. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t go after Michio Kaku in some of the ways that people were saying really awful things about him when I posted on X. I guess I kind of knew that, sort of my fault, that they would say things like, you know, we don’t have the science communicators that we deserve. I’m trying to be one of them. You know, I’m not the best. I’m not the last, but I’m doing my best and I’m doing it all, like I said, You’re watching YouTube for free, right? You watch some ads, maybe, maybe not. If you have YouTube Premium, I don’t get a penny from that.

Brian Keating:
But, but tell me, what do you think was the most concerning thing? If you could guess it, maybe put in the comments after the video. I’ll give you guys, you know, 5 seconds to think about it.

Brian Keating:
I wish I had my clickers that I use with my students. They love these clickers.

Brian Keating:
They come in, I give them 10 points extra credit on their final exam if they brought clickers to class every class and answered the questions. Not even if they got them right, just if they answered. Anyway, builds engagement. You guys are engaging.

Brian Keating:
You’re attractive and engaging.

Brian Keating:
Okay, what was it? Is that he has no money. He got no money from the government, right? So what is this? If you get no money in, in a government that, you know, spends what, $7 trillion a year? And, and this could be the most important thing in human history, i.e., American history. And even if it’s not, even if it fails, you know, as people say, oh, it’s just going to discover, you know, Chinese Bible That’s freaking huge. And even if we discover there’s a huge sign, isn’t that incredibly important to the stated goals of the Trump administration? And I share those goals, right? So having no money, 0%, not even like, oh, we need a, you know, a hundredth of a percent, $0.000, right? I think that’s a fatal mistake. I think, you know, the first thing that I want to know is, am I gonna have a budget? Is there a governance structure? What is the transparency of this organization? Like, how are we going to communicate? What are we going to have access to? Now, Avi’s smart. He said that he’s smart, so he has to be smart, right? No, that kind of bothered me too, that he said, well, I’m smart, so I’ll know that they’re not going to— that they’re not trying to trick me with a psyop. Really, Avi? I mean, I couldn’t push— I can’t push back on everything because Avi charms me. He is one of my— I just like him.

Brian Keating:
I hate to say it. I have weaknesses. I’m only human. That’s one of my biases. But I did push back during the interview. But mostly I feel like to say that you are not— even to say, like, I could say, well, I’m going to take advice from my wife or my husband or my colleagues at Harvard. I mean, say something, right? Say something. There’s someone else besides you.

Brian Keating:
If you are your own arbiter of what is being truthful, if someone is being truthful or not, I feel like this is another kind of It’s just putting a stumbling block in front of the blind. I think it’s, you know, if I had to bet right now that this, this, this council is led by my esteemed friend Avi Loeb, yeah, the, you know, foremost educational institution on Earth, you know, which has its own separate budget, and he has his own budget, and he’s also leading Galileo Project— these are all separate, you know, kind of orbs, so to speak. I would say right now I give it a, you know, a 60/40, you know, chance of not succeeding, um, just because it doesn’t have government backing. I, I also pressed him on a question I got a lot offline asking him, you know, if it’s gonna be recognized by the White House. So far it’s not. And he said that, you know, it’s authorized and it’s consonant with the president’s goals and the administration’s goals and all these national security goals. Well, sorry, Avi, there’s all these agencies are in constant conflict with each other. Part of what I heard from an Air Force, a very, very high-up fighter pilot in the Air Force, is that, um, that there’s infighting between the Air Force and Space Force and the Navy.

Brian Keating:
You notice that many of these sightings from Graves, uh, reporting sightings by squadron mates and others, um, and Fravor, Dietrich, um, are on the— in the Navy side. Grusch was in the Air Force. Um, uh, now we have the Space Force as of, you know, 2018, 2019, whenever that was started. Um, and there’s a huge amount of interagency, you know, Quite frankly, there’s hatred. I mean, unless they’re in war, there are huge territorial pissing contests that you would not believe. I’ve heard some of the most staggeringly inefficient uses of our tax dollars come from the fact that these agencies all want to have their own control. And then you add in the CIA, which is a separate— has its own separate military, paramilitary, intelligence-gathering wings, the FBI, even things like Homeland Security when the drones are flying over airports. These are all so entangled.

Brian Keating:
And to say like Avi’s gonna be their Harvard professor with $0 and they’re just gonna listen to him. They’re not listening to Luna. I mean, they’re not really— where’s this data dump? I mean, like I said, most of the stuff I’ve seen can be identified either by— has been identified by the NASA Blue Ribbon Panel led by my friend and colleague David Spergel and co-advised by our member Shelley Wright, who studies optical transient events. from extraterrestrial civilizations, potentially extraterrestrial civilizations, using optical photo avalanche detectors in the most novel way. She’s invented these telescopes. She’s looking— she would be probably the most thrilled person on Earth if these things were found to be extraterrestrial, but they haven’t. They found 95% in the NASA panel could be explained. Now, what bothers me is that people— and so 5% can’t be explained, but as Michael Shermer puts it, Just because you can’t explain it doesn’t mean that the antithesis is the correct one, right? You can’t just say, oh, because we can’t explain it, it means that it’s unexplained aerial phenomena means that they’re alien phenomena.

Brian Keating:
No, that’s not the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is still it’s unexplained. We just don’t understand what it is. More data is needed, or if it occurred in the past. I mean, if you had asked somebody, you know, 2 years ago, can we get data from the 1950s that could shed light, maybe not prove, but could shed light on the existence of alien artifacts in our local low-Earth environment. You would say, what, are you crazy? There’s not— we don’t even get good video quality today. Like, how are you gonna get— like, what, are people gonna be mediums, you know, seeing back in time? No, no, no. But she went back, Beatrice went back and found these plates from the Palomar Sky Survey.

Brian Keating:
She didn’t look at them for the galaxies and the quasar surveys. You know, first quasar surveys really done here, discovered Martin Schmidt here by Palomar.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
up the road in San Diego County at 6,000 to 7,000 feet up with a 200-inch telescope. It wasn’t the biggest telescope in the world anymore, but it was at the time. She did the hard work, and now we’re going back in time and getting evidence from now. So there could be other things in the oceans, you know, on the Moon there could be artifacts. And that always reminds me, you know, because I’m speaking so much, but, but I do want you to get meteorites, especially those of you who are students in the United States. If you have a .edu email address, you’ll win meteorite. So I want to send these to you. These are true, honest-to-good extraterrestrial, came from beyond our solar system potentially.

Brian Keating:
No, it came from the pre-solar system. But I’m gonna send those to you if you have a .edu email address and live in the United States. If you don’t, I do give away 10 a month to people that don’t have it. Again, you have to live in the US because the US Post Service charged an awful lot of money for this poor state university professor to send you. Okay, now next, here’s what’s, here’s what’s coming up. So So when Beatrice comes in, she’s going to talk to me hopefully about the VASCO project. She’s very, very, very, very, I would say, exercised about these critiques that she’s had that these photographs did not come from the telescope itself, that came from artifacts like cosmic ray smashing that penetrate through the telescope completely and just make an image and an artifact on the photograph. plate.

Brian Keating:
No, she says they went through the optics, and that can be proven. So then we have to press her on this issue of solar activity and coronal mass ejections. These are completely things opposite, you know, kind of, uh, conclusions. Now I want to understand what questions you want me to sort of ask her about things like Disclosure Day, about, uh, about maybe confirmation bias. Put those in the comments after, you know, when the video’s up. It’ll, uh, anyone, not just channel members, can can give comments, just not on the livestream. So, um, and what do you guys think about this fact that, you know, Grusch and others are now involved in the, uh, in, in Hollywood, you know, kind of dramatization? Disclosure Day, is, is that just gonna be, you know, the first of many things? And, and, and as Spielberg said, but Avi didn’t agree with, and I don’t agree with, you know, that he believes that these things are here, and he keeps using that word belief, belief, belief. And, and a lot of people kind of took issue with the video I made with Hugh Ross, again, an intelligent design proponent.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
But I’ll talk to anybody. I talked to Steven C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute. I don’t care. You know, I like to be challenged intellectually. I like to challenge other people intellectually. But I all do— I do it always for the sake of truth, trying to understand what’s true. I’m not selling anything.

Brian Keating:
They might be selling things. I’m happy to promote them. It’s very hard to make your, your living and stuff like that. But what do you believe about these, you know, people that are in the disclosure forefront, tip of the spear for disclosure, like David? But they haven’t seen the craft. They haven’t seen the body. They’ve never touched the technology. They’re not hardcore engineers. I think David does have a background maybe in engineering.

Brian Keating:
People can correct me. But he was a major, major, maybe even a general. I don’t know, in the Air Force. He wasn’t a pilot, but I believe he operated drones. But anyway, to me it does. And it kind of— I sort of brought this up with Avi. He was asked to be in this movie.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
But he’s playing himself, I guess. I don’t think David’s an actor. That’s not really what he wants to do. Or maybe he does.

Brian Keating:
I don’t know. He’s a handsome guy.

Brian Keating:
He could be a great actor.

Brian Keating:
I don’t know.

Brian Keating:
But if he’s an actor, that makes things even worse, right? Because he’s— I mean, the actors are the ones that are most likely to be trained in human psychology and manipulation. Right. So I don’t believe he’s going to do that. But, but he is, you know, kind of held up at this level in a Bruckheimer, you know, kind of consulting role. So I don’t know. Would you do that? Do you find that suspicious in any way? Do you find suspicious in any way the Fravor revelation 3 days ago, 4 days ago? I put on from Reddit and other places, actually it was on Twitter I first heard it, that he believes Roswell was, you know, evidence of non-human bodies, technology. Let me see what he actually said over here. I don’t want to misquote him.

Brian Keating:
But yeah, I mean, I think this was a kind of an interesting, you know, kind of twist that, you know, he was essentially speculating, or saying, I don’t know how he would have evidence of that. I mean, he was a fighter pilot commander of a squadron, right? So why would he have knowledge about something from the 1940s? Right? Like, why would that be what he had special access to? I mean, it— maybe he does. I mean, he might be just getting informed from people. But then that raises the question again, does he not? Do these people have protection? Are they really in danger? I believe David Grusch could be in danger. So if that’s true, you know, then when, when he states something that goes in contradistinction to something that’s going on the record by Steve, by Sean Kirkpatrick, why don’t we wait that? Like, Sean could be, you know, could be committing some classified information faux pas reveal that he shouldn’t be, but he doesn’t, right? So he’s gone on the record and he said he disagrees with it. So I guess, you know, from my perspective, it is, it’s hard to know what’s believe. So yes, retired Commander David Fravor, famous for his Tic Tac encounter, has stated the government has recovered materials from Roswell and has known about a non-human presence on Earth for over 80 years. And then Fravor advocates for official transparency, like we all do, suggesting the world honestly deserves, deserves honesty regarding these issues.

Brian Keating:
So he’s known for the Nimitz encounter. Fravor has called— they have to be honest about the— just to be honest, we’ve known for 80 years that we’re not alone. Now, why would a fighter pilot have special knowledge? Now, maybe he does, but, but as far as I know, he’s retired. I don’t know when he retired, but, but I, you know, 2004, I can do the math. Uh, it was 22 years ago when he had the Nimitz encounter. Why would that then give him official information? Now, he may get information because whistleblowers may come to him hoping that he can get their story out, but he doesn’t have, as far as I know, he maybe never had. I mean, just because you’re in the military, I mean, I’ve had, I have friends that are fighter pilots, my Flight instructor, is a fighter pilot, F-18 pilot, just like him, even maybe at the same rank as him. He doesn’t have special information just because he’s a fighter pilot.

Brian Keating:
And, and, and Schirmer points out in his new book that actually pilots in general, including me— I’m a commercially rated pilot— that we’re some of the least reliable people. And of the least reliable pilots in the world are military pilots. Why is that?

Brian Keating:
Well, you’re telling me they’re not brave?

Brian Keating:
F no. They’re freaking much more brave than I’ll ever be. And they’re badasses physically, mentally. They can kick the crap out of people like me. They could hold their own with Navy SEALs. These pilots are insane. They’re jacked. They’re incredible.

Brian Keating:
Ryan Graves is a beast, right? But they make mistakes at a higher rate. What explains that? Are they stupid? Absolutely not. One of my best friends is a Princeton graduate. He’s an F-18 commander, combat veteran. Okay, so these are not stupid people. Okay, so what happens, and this is what’s been borne out, they are extremely good hand-eye coordination. They are good at training for reactions to threats. Is a Cessna 172 that I fly around California, is that a threat to the F-18s at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station right here? No, they’re not a threat at all.

Brian Keating:
So they’ll ignore those types of threats. So they’re looking for anomalies. You have a filter as a pilot. You filter out things that are nominal, and you look for things that are anomalous, right? So they’re trained and heightened on the state of awareness to look for things that are anomalous. So this is what psychologists psychologists studying the military for other reasons. This is to avoid crashes and, and, and, um, and, and sort of other hazards to flight. Uh, another topic Ryan is, is quite bravely, uh, investing his time and energy in. Uh, and, and, and this is all, you know, again, for, for good purposes.

Brian Keating:
But when the first, you know, statement to go to is, well, Fravor is a fighter pilot, he’s braver than Brian Keating, and he’s, and he’s a better pilot than Brian Keating, none of which I dispute, then we must trust him on everything, including information about Roswell. No, no, sorry. You know, just like if they— if I go out and say, well, look, this is how a CCD or CMOS camera operates, this dark noise, flat field, these are the cosmic ray impacts, these are dark current sensitivity, or a CMB camera works. And then someone says, well, what do you think about aliens? I should say, I know nothing about that, right? I’m not an expert in that. But when they say, like, this object emits blackbody radiation, Well, quite frankly, I am an expert in that. And the US government under the Trump administration just forced the Argentinian government to cancel a high-altitude site near the Simons Observatory in the Andes Mountains, not that near us, but very similar to us, that the Chinese were developing. Why do the Chinese need an observatory in Argentina? Well, that’s weird. No, so they can have hemispherical synoptic observations of blackbody radiation.

Brian Keating:
Okay.

Brian Keating:
That’s what I’m guessing. That’s why they probably did it. So if they’d come to me and said, well, Keating, well, why are they doing this? I would say, well, let’s look at it, you know, but, you know, I’m not going to talk about politics. But my expertise is in that field. Now, if it was to look for aliens, I could also say, yes, we could detect planets and we can detect objects like Oumuamua, anything that gives off heat. And everything in the universe gives off heat, even the universe itself. Right. And I’m an expert in detectors that operate at 1/100th or even 1/1,000th of a degree above absolute zero.

Brian Keating:
So these are things where you want experts in that field. Fravor, I’m sorry, he’s not an expert in the dynamics of UFOs just because he may have seen one that is unidentified anomalous phenomenon, aerial phenomena. He may have seen one, he may not have. And it may have been an actual extraterrestrial object or it could have been a terrestrial object. That’s what Avi seems to be leaning towards. But again, that we should listen to him about Roswell and believe him because he is more brave than Keating. And he’s a better pilot, maybe smarter than me, I don’t know. But to say that, that’s called the halo effect, right? When you ascribe information to and powers to people because their domain expertise lies in one field.

Brian Keating:
It’s like the World Cup’s going on now. Would you like the— this guy’s really good. I heard of this new soccer player. His name is Ronald O. I think he’s Irish. I’m not sure. Anyway, Ronald O. Ronaldo, right? So would you want Ronaldo to be your dentist? Yeah, I just got a cavity filled, right? No freaking way.

Brian Keating:
Right. So you don’t ask. But he’s so great. He’s incredible.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, he is.

Brian Keating:
But he’s not a dentist. So we have to be careful like that. And that’s why when Anna Luna, Congresswoman Representative Luna, she talks about interdimensional beings, it does a disservice. I’m sorry. It just does. It sounds completely ridiculous. There’s no sense in which that sentence can be uttered without the follow-up question is, what do you mean? And then she has to say, I don’t know.

Brian Keating:
Right.

Brian Keating:
No, because there’s no notion of interdimensionality. There’s no evidence for interdimensionality, multiple dimensions, time traveling. When I talked to Tom DeLonge on this podcast with a CIA agent, Jim Semivan, you know, we heard, oh, the To the Stars Academy has objects. And I said, okay, well, what’s their history? How do you trace them back? And he said, oh, we don’t have a full traceable provenance of the object. Oh, that’s as good as nothing. That’s like me showing up with this and saying, this has biological material on it. I licked it. You know, you don’t know.

Brian Keating:
You don’t know what’s happened to this. had the data, the bodies, the craft. So I think that these are, these are big challenges. And, and the final kind of sawhorse and hobby horse that I’ve been on lately involves, you know, this question of belief. Like, what does it mean to believe something? These— that you believe in extraterrestrial life. Like, okay, you believe in it. And these are, these are scientists. These are my colleagues all around the world.

Brian Keating:
And I’m hoping to have, you know, David Kipping back on, maybe Adam Frank back on the podcast, maybe all 3 of us, maybe have a big, you know, kind of debate between— not an argument, but I think we’re all respecting each other. But, when you hear things about non-human biologics, when you hear things about the continuum of life, not even like a continuum, you know, in the Earth’s— I don’t even know what a continuum is. Like, there’s not a continuum we think of sexes, right?

Brian Keating:
Okay.

Brian Keating:
I’m going to get really controversial right now. There’s not a continuum of— it’s not like the electromagnetic spectrum where there’s an infinite number of real numbers and there’s an infinite number of wavelengths. No, no, there’s not a continuum. So how could it be that aliens have a continuum? Maybe they have this incredible diversity of life. Now, why would we have collected all of these, right? So maybe like in the movie Project Hail Mary by my friend and a former UCSD attendee, but he didn’t graduate, Andy Weir, you know, the Rocky character is this, you know, kind of giant spider with a carapace and everything else. Maybe that’s life on someplace. Maybe there’s astrophage on some other star, right?

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
I always say it’s, it’s more plausible— the deep scientific plausibility of Project Hail Mary far exceeds that of Interstellar. Sorry to break that to you. And now there’s a new one, Iron Lung. Has anyone ever seen that movie? Well, that could be even more plausible than either Project Hail Mary or Interstellar. So that’s my hottest hot takes. But anyway, you have a continuum, right, from corporeal bipedal life, which means it’s like us. Okay, I’m sorry to say that means it has a body, corporeal.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Bipedal has 2 legs. We evolved to walk upright under very specific gravitational, optical, and also from emerging from fish-like creatures, is the way we believe it, and having eyes on the side of our heads to having eyes on top of our heads. And the index of refraction difference gave us a predatorial advantage when we came on land. So the first objects had— were fish that came on land, we believe, evolutionarily. And then they had eyes on top of their heads, right? And then they want to see even further, so then they need to get more on land, and then maybe the evolutionary process process started from there. We don’t know. I mean, this is pure speculation, but at least the bipedalism, if we track bipedalism throughout the fossil record, throughout evolutionary biology, it’s an incredibly specific, highly, highly appropriate— I don’t even want to say intelligently designed because I don’t want you to think like I just buy into everything my intelligent design— no, far from it. Although I did have another hot take, which is that string theory has fewer experimentally verified predictions than does intelligent design, because string theory has zero.

Brian Keating:
And according to even the best string theorist, Joseph Conlon, and has been on the podcast, his book on string theory, CRC Press, has a chapter, Experimental Evidence for String Theory, and the entire chapter is there is none. But according to Stephen C. Meyer and other evolutionary biologists that work on this field, that there was a prediction that the human DNA sequence would have so-called junk DNA that would turn out to be functional. And for a long time, they called it junk DNA, and then it was found to be functional. Now, that’s very, very low, what’s called Bayes factor. I’m not being serious, really, but I do like to tease, you know, kind of my colleagues on both sides. I’ll tease the intelligent designers, as you’ll hear in my pushback on Stephen C. Meyer, because he talks about fine-tuning.

Brian Keating:
And I said, no, the universe is extremely poorly tuned. It’s as if I’m playing the violin. You know, I’m a horrible musician. The only instrument I can play is Spotify. But the universe has dark energy, which dominates all other forms of matter and energy, and we could change the amount by a factor of 10, and you wouldn’t notice it at all. We’d still be here. Life would still be here. So to say that it’s exquisitely finely tuned is just false.

Brian Keating:
And then they can cherry-pick and go back to some other time. I also push back on Jewish apologetics. Gerald Schroeder claims the universe 7 days of creation in the Torah corresponds to the astrophysical and physical epochs of quark-hadron separation, electroweak phase transition. Total nonsense, okay? And I push back on that very strongly. So you’re never going to get me— maybe I’m explaining why I’m not invited to many parties. But anyway, I find it fascinating to talk to all these people on different legs of the stool and hopefully come to some conclusion that gets us a little bit closer to truth. You know, I’ve talked about, you know, people that, like Avi, who would talk about things with a straight face, like sentient plasmoid life versus a hypothesis that gets smuggled in in terms of belief. I mentioned that to Avi.

Brian Keating:
This Vickers study kind of shook me that people would state that they believe, not like I believe in God, you know, I believe in astrology. No, I don’t say any of that. I say I don’t believe in that. I say I actually don’t say I believe in God ever. Never say it. I say I am looking for evidence that God is plausible as a scientific hypothesis. And, and, and people like Sean Carroll, who are very simplistic in their knowledge of Judaism or Christianity or any type of religion, will say, oh well, God wouldn’t have created a universe that has, um, so many galaxies, right? Why did he waste so much space? And I’m like, oh yeah, well, you know, God wouldn’t have created an atom that has 99.999999% empty space, right? It’s an idiotic argument to say like what God should or should not do. I mean, I know Sean has an ego, but, but, but really, Sean, I mean, this is like in his, in his most cited work, you know, God Is Not a Good Theory.

Brian Keating:
To appeal to that, it’s like saying, well, you know, why are there so many elements? You know, would God create so many elements? You know, how do you know how many elements? I mean, 190 years ago we thought there was about 10 elements, right? Now we know there’s, there’s 10 times that number So I think these are awesome. I think we need to hold the scientists’ feet to the fire. We need to hold the alien, you know, kind of maximalists’ feet to the fire. We need to hold the religious adherents’ feet to the fire. And I don’t think anyone else is doing this. And that’s why I think this channel is criminally unsubscribed— undersubscribed, not unsubscribed. I don’t want you to hear that. But we crossed 400,000 subscribers.

Brian Keating:
But I really feel like we’re doing— we’re getting these incredible interviews. I just interviewed my 26th Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are asking to come on my show. It’s a great flattery to me, but really, do you? I mean, a lot of these people see the power of the audience, and a lot of people won’t or will— I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson to come on. He said he would, then he backed out. He said he didn’t have time, and then I saw him on Piers Morgan. Like, okay, Piers Morgan’s got 10 times more subscribers than me. I’ll give him a pass. You know, I’ve been on Piers Morgan twice now.

Brian Keating:
But, but, you know, if I had 10 times more subscribers, who knows, maybe he’d say no to Piers Morgan and not to Brian Keating. Now, I know a lot of you don’t like Neil deGrasse Tyson anyway, but he’s an important person, right? I mean, I also push his feet to the fire. He said a lot of nonsensical stuff too. I mean, everything that he said about, you know, spectrums and things like that, we could— I can push back on him like nobody else because we have a respect. I’ve been on his show. In person, you know, I’ve been on the show twice. He’s been on my show 2 or 3 times, and he’ll be back. But I want you guys to ask me the questions that I should be asking on your behalf.

Brian Keating:
I view myself as your ambassador, but I’m also an independent person with my own curiosities, right? Okay, so the last question, you know, I kind of want to leave you guys with is, you know, where do you want to see things in the channel go? I’m not, I’m not like gonna be captured by the audience in the sense of I’ll do whatever you say, and, you know, I’ll do the, uh, the, uh, 100 days in a yacht challenge, and if I spend 100 days in the yacht, uh, I get to keep— I’m not gonna do that, sorry. But, um, no matter how much the audience wants it, right? I miss my, my home cooking, right? Um, but in terms of like the, the disposition, I find a lot of people, you know, either love or hate the kind of content that I do. They either love that I’m talking about religion or hate that I’m talking about religion. Either love that I’m talking, you know, someone who’s interested in investigating alien life, and then people that hate it, or people that love that I’m talking to a skeptic like Shermer, or hate that I’m talking to Shermer. People that think, oh, you’re just, you know, licking the boots of Eric Weinstein. I haven’t had Eric on in over a year. I mean, I talk to him all the time, but, you know, I haven’t found that what he has to say lately is mandatory, you know, content for my channel. And a lot of people like did a poll on the channel, who do you want to see on? And he got more votes than most people, as he usually does.

Brian Keating:
But, but it wasn’t by the same margin. It used to be like 80, you know, 80/20 kind of thing, 80 for Eric and 20 for everybody else. But maybe I need to do more surveys like that. But I’m really enjoying it. But I need to know, you know, kind of where, where, you know, you’re gonna be— you’re gonna be intellectually honest with yourself and have integrity to listen to people you don’t agree with. Yeah. Because what YouTube really rewards, and, you know, I’m not a master of it at all, but, but I find it fascinating because you get instant feedback, you get real-time data, you get to talk to— I mean, I have, you know, half a million followers across the, the video and audio, you know, feeds of this podcast. And it’s a huge— I just looked up that in, in the last 6 months of this year, like a million hours, people have watched a million hours.

Brian Keating:
Wow.

Brian Keating:
of my content. It’s insane. I can’t believe that. I can’t listen to myself for a million. I talked to my mother and she’s like, people pay to listen to you? I wouldn’t listen to you for free. No, she doesn’t say that. That would be horrible. But what YouTube really rewards is, first of all, looking at the video, deciding you want to watch it, sharing it with somebody else, leaving a thumbs up, leaving a comment.

Brian Keating:
Those are huge engagement signals. But the best engagement signal is how long you watch the show for. Like, how long do you tune in for? And I think, you know, a lot of people will either tune in not at all or they watch the whole thing. So I find a lot of people do that. A lot of people are watching— 60% of you are not subscribed that are watching.

Brian Keating:
I don’t know why.

Brian Keating:
It doesn’t cost you anything to click that little subscribe button. And again, we’d have over a million subscribers on YouTube alone, plus even more on audio feeds as well. So I need to know that you’re going to be kind of the ride-or-die audience that I feel like I’ve cultivated. Again, 26 Nobel Prize winners. I’ve talked to more Nobel Prize winners than anyone on Earth as far as I know. And I don’t just do— like, even with my most recent guest, I pushed back on the Nobel Prize winner. It’s fun. They like it.

Brian Keating:
You can’t believe how many podcasts I’ve been on. I’ve been on all the big podcasts, right? I can’t think of one. Maybe put one in the comments that you think I should be on. I don’t know.

Brian Keating:
What’s the guy’s name?

Brian Keating:
Oh, I always get him. He always pops up.

Brian Keating:
How? Lewis How?

Brian Keating:
Is it Lewis How? Anyway, he’s like a really big name podcaster that I’m often— people tell me I should go on and tell my human story. Anyway, put it on there. But I think I’ve been on Rogan. I’ve been on Diary of a CEO. I’ve been on Jordan Peterson multiple times, StarTalk multiple times. I’ve been on Chris Williamson way back when, before he had a video even. And who am I missing? I’ve been on Ben Shapiro’s Sunday Special. I’ve been on, again, I’m blanking.

Brian Keating:
Andrew Huberman, I was on. Sean Ryan, I was on. Mayim Bialik, I was just on. He’s incredibly— these are tens of millions of views, right? But are there people that I haven’t been on? Because I think that that’s sort of a way to get a new audience into the pipeline, but to also know that, to be exposed to the fact that I do something I think that’s unique and that people really need nowadays. And the types of content that I’m doing right now are very different from Lex Fridman. I’ve been on Lex Fridman. I should have— I’m the 10th most popular episode on his show.

Brian Keating:
I don’t know why I forgot that.

Brian Keating:
So I don’t feel like I need to go back on these people’s pod— like, it’s like I leave, you know, the— Jordan said, you know, leave the best on the floor. Like, you don’t have to come back. I don’t care if I ever go back on Rogan or whatever. The one episode I’m mad about is the Portal podcast with Eric Weinstein. I went on the Portal podcast in 2020, recorded it at this huge studio, multiple cameras. I brought him all these things and it never aired. Eric canceled the podcast, shut it down. So leave a comment if you think the Portal should come back on, or at least, at least let me broadcast the episode, Eric.

Brian Keating:
I mean, come on, this is 6 years now. It’s ridiculous. But I thought it was one of our best. And we, you know, we get along. We, we argue like brothers, but we get along like brothers. It’s a lot of fun.

Brian Keating:
know, Eric.

Brian Keating:
But let me know, where do you think the type of Keating approach is most valuable? Because I am doing explainers. I also should say, and I should have said this before, I have another channel where I’m moving my hard physics explanations to based on advice that I’ve been given. You shouldn’t put that type of content on the same content as mainly the podcast or clips from the podcast. So this channel, Dr. Brian Keating, from now on, really, the last few months has been like this, is going to be all about interviews, conversations, sometimes explainers of not the physics but of reactions to other people’s interviews. Like I said, I just did an episode about reacting to Michio Kaku’s appearance on Diary of a CEO where he made so many flaws. I’d like to believe that it was a mistake and he’s just getting older. He’s 80 years old, I think, now.

Brian Keating:
But some of them are just so bad and so pernicious to the human understanding of things like string theory and dark matter. And, and, you know, I felt like it was my responsibility to hold his feet to the fire as a friend, as a, as a someone who really looks up to him. I think I was respectful. I’m not going to ever attack people ad hominem.

Brian Keating:
There’s enough of that on the internet.

Brian Keating:
Uh, the next one’s going to be about, uh, this guy Kevin Knuth, who also is a physicist. He was on Mayim Bialik’s podcast before I was, and he said a lot of, you know, kind of, uh, speculative things about cattle mutilations and, and, and UFO sightings. And he’s done actual hard work in physics research on the unidentified aerial phenomena physics, which I think is interesting. I’d like to talk to him. Maybe he won’t come on after I do my reaction to him, although again, it’s very respectful. But I just take the claims and I hold it up against evidence. I identify where there’s human biases like belief and, and confirmation bias, and all these things apply to me. Brian Keating as much, if not more, than anybody else.

Brian Keating:
The next one after that is about Graham Hancock, who also appeared on Steven Bartlett’s show, and it’s already got 6 million views in like 2 or 3 days, talking about megastructures underneath the pyramids, how the ancient world discovered Antarctica 300 years before the Western world did, and the Younger Dryas impact theory. of, uh, civilizational collapse. And so there’s 3 huge whoppers that he brought up. A little bit reluctant to attack him in any way. I never attack him personally or any of these people personally at Hominin, but he is suffering some medical condition. Apparently he’s having a heart surgery soon. I wish him well, wish him long life. Um, but at the same level, again, he’s getting all this influence.

Brian Keating:
He came on the show, right? So he had the 2 and a half hours or 3 hours that Stephen requires And that does bring me back. I didn’t close the loop. I have an explainer channel, Keating Experiments. Please do subscribe to that. It’s almost 10,000 subscribers over there. That’s where it’s going to be, you know, how does the muon spin tell us about string theory or some extra dimensions? The explainer videos like that are going to appear over there exclusively. And then where Brian Keating is either talking to somebody or talking about somebody, but again, respectfully reacting to somebody, That’s gonna be over here on Dr. Brian Keating.

Brian Keating:
So bifurcation is a worrisome thing, but whatever, it’s fun for me. I have a small team in various countries around the world. Shout out to the team, and they’re keeping me sane. And then I have my day job where I’m publishing incredible video—

Brian Keating:
incredible videos—

Brian Keating:
incredible. I am gonna make a video about some of the science that’s coming out of the Simons Observatory as soon as it’s unembargoed. But I’m just— I am just so excited to share with you guys. I mean, I’m an actual working scientist. I’m an experimentalist. I’m not like Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jim Gates, Eric Weinstein, these brainiac theorists. No, we need them. But some of my best friends are theorists.

Brian Keating:
But I am an experimentalist. I want the evidence. I want the hard data. I want to collect the data. I want to build the instrument that collects the data. I want to analyze data that comes out of it. I want to understand how things like AI and, and these massive revolutions that we’re undergoing for the first time in human history are going to impact me intellectually and you intellectually. So I’m going to have dedicated videos.

Brian Keating:
Those will be on Keating experiments where I go into the experimental, you know, nitty-gritty. But why it’s important to you, why you should care about that. Why do you care if a neutrino has negative mass? What does that even mean? That’s going to be on Keating experiments. Please do subscribe down there for that. I’ll put a link down below. The last thing I want to say is what makes me unique. I have to say this. As I said, the thread that gets lost because I am a professor and I do get absent-minded, is I’ve been on all these huge podcasts from Rogan to Stephen Bartlett to Lex Fridman to Mayim Bialik now to Sean Ryan.

Brian Keating:
I love all those guys and girls.

Brian Keating:
Okay?

Brian Keating:
I want to say that I’m grateful that they gave me their platform. That said, they do things differently than I do. And that is the main thing for me is that I will never have somebody on Who has a book that I haven’t read their book. And I’m not going to name names, but there are some people on that list who was obvious to me within 10 seconds of sitting down with them, putting on the headphones, that they never opened any of my books. Now, I put my blood, sweat, and tears into these 4 books that I’ve written. Soon will be 5. Maybe I have 6 in me before I die. But these books, my self-help guide, for the STEM Curious, Into the Impossible, Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, Into the Impossible, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, distilled wisdom from the greatest geniuses on Earth that have ever lived.

Brian Keating:
I’m almost at the point where I can write a 3rd volume. I don’t know the title. Give me a title for that down below. And then my magnum opus, you know, my first, my memoir, Losing the Nobel Prize, is about what it means to be a cosmologist, but a father, a son, someone who loses a mentor to suicide, someone who loses his father, and trying to operate at the highest levels because I was told I couldn’t get tenure if I didn’t win the Nobel Prize prospectively. Okay, so what does it feel like to be a young scientist with everything to lose and curious about something that has no practical value whatsoever, like inflationary cosmology? How did the universe begin? I write those books, and it takes a lot out of me. It takes a lot of time, opportunity cost, time value of money, all these things.

Brian Keating:
Incredible.

Brian Keating:
Plus, it costs money. I had to hire artists. You know, the publisher doesn’t give you money to get illustrations, but But I felt those are mandatory to explain the science and inflationary cosmology in my first book. I paid for it out of my own pocket. Again, I made almost a tenth of minimum wage, probably a tenth of minimum wage given my advance was what it was and the amount of hours put into it, surely far below minimum wage. Now, I put a lot of time and effort into it. You can distill the wisdom of at that time a 40-year-old, 45-year-old guy, right? And the knowledge, and that’s so pertinent nowadays. We are swimming in knowledge.

Brian Keating:
We have almost no wisdom. We’re dying of thirst for wisdom and we’re drowning in knowledge, AI, the internet. We have abundant information, we have no distillation of that. And that’s what I’m trying to do on this podcast, but that’s certainly what I do in my books. And to have a host fly me out at great expense to them and time expense to me away from my wife, my kids, my teaching, I have to get people to cover for me. Shout out to my colleagues that cover my classes and my postdocs. and supervision. It’s a lot, you know.

Brian Keating:
I have a lot of things on my plate, and I’m going out there. The least you could do is read my book, please. It takes— I mean, some of these books take almost— I have audiobooks for every single book I’ve ever written, including Galileo’s Dialogue. Now, okay, I don’t expect anyone, you know, who’s having me on to listen to a 21-hour-long audiobook, but that was with Carlo Rovelli, and that’s an acted version for the first time in human history of a book by Galileo, the greatest mind in science, I think, that ever lived, you know, maybe with the possible exception of Einstein or, um, or my father-in-law. No, I’m just kidding. But, but the point is, how, how else, you know, why are you having me on, you know? Uh, and, you know, I know you’re having me on because you’re partially— you have a much bigger platform than me, you know, say, uh, I don’t know, someone’s podcast.

Brian Keating:
I haven’t been on, or maybe I have been on.

Brian Keating:
Um, you have a much bigger podcast, and so I appreciate you, and I’m grateful. I have gratitude to you. That’s the most important thing, first of all. But take the time. And so I do that for every one of my guests. I’ve read 500 books. And you know what? I had a brain scan done for some other reasons. You know, everything’s fine, turns out.

Brian Keating:
But they did brain scan on me, and then they did it again a year later, and then at the 5-year mark. My brain is actually increasing in density and and gray matter and vascularity and all the good things about brain. And I think it’s 100% due to this podcast. You know, I do have a selfish reason to do it. It’s not monetary. I don’t— I lose money on this podcast because I pay my editors. I never get somebody to read. I don’t have anyone doing my booking.

Brian Keating:
I don’t have anybody who does, you know, kind of research for me except for my AI tools, which I have handcrafted over the last 2 or 3 years to make them incredibly pertinent to the things that interest me the most. You know, callouts to the things that matter to you the most, and to edit it tightly to get rid of all the verbal yappage that I’m known for, right? You know, I want to cut down on that. I know this is kind of self-indulgent, but, but you’ll excuse me if you’ve lasted this far. I assume that you can handle a little bit of yapping.

Brian Keating:
Let’s see how many people are still listening at this point. Oh my god, there’s more people listening now than was listening before.

Brian Keating:
Okay, there’s over 1,000 people. People listening right now. Um, I just really appreciate you guys. I mean, I can’t, I can’t tell you. I mean, um, it’s, it’s funny, my, my— sometimes I got recognized.

Brian Keating:
I went to Hawaii last year and I was getting on the plane. I’m like, uh, about to get—

Brian Keating:
this guy’s staring at me. I’m like, I passed TSA, you know, why are you looking? He’s like, you’re Brian Keating, right? I’m like, uh, yeah, it depends.

Brian Keating:
Do I owe you money?

Brian Keating:
Like, oh, what’s going on, brother? And he’s like, no, I love your podcast.

Brian Keating:
I get these things all the time.

Brian Keating:
I’m like, it makes me so gratified. Like, this thing didn’t exist, you know, 6 years ago. I started this thing 6 years ago when COVID was raging, and I could— I knew I was smart enough to know that authors like Avi or other people would answer my email if I asked them to come on the show because they weren’t doing book tours. I did, you know, a book tour in 2018, 2019. 2020 was gone, couldn’t go on book tours. So I could get any of the dream guests that I ever wanted. I’ve never had a guest really I can’t think of anyone. I mean, I’ve talked to Elon Musk.

Brian Keating:
Um, you know, I, I would like to talk to him probably again at some point, but, but, um, but, you know, kind of been there. Talked to 26 Noble.

Brian Keating:
The people that I miss talking to are the people that are, um, no longer with us.

Brian Keating:
So best of luck with that. Maybe Anna Luna can get me some interdimensional beings and I can do some interviews. But I did interview Freeman Dyson. That’s one of my most treasured interviews. Him, Jim Simons. These people aren’t alive anymore, and that is my treasure. You know, I have that for all time. And the Nobel Prize winners are just, you know, gonna keep growing.

Brian Keating:
And like I said, they keep— some of them are asking me. I mean, 10 of them have asked to come on my podcast. I don’t think they’re asking to come on, you know, some of these other podcasts, right? I mean, they might appear on them, but I think that they know they get something special, and I’m always gonna read their books. I mean, that’s the least I can And so you’ll never have me unprepared. I will cancel an interview if I haven’t had time to read it or I don’t want to read it. And it really helps when I have on people that have audiobooks, just in case you want to know, because I listen to things. I can listen at 2x speed and I can do things, you know, with audio that I can’t do with printed. But I am reading printed books now.

Brian Keating:
I’m kind of getting back into it. Some fiction. I’ve had on 4 Pulitzer Prize winners. These are the things that really make it so enjoyable. And I always say at work, I have to talk to people. There are people I have to talk to.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
The telescope azimuthal encoder drive is broken and I need to get somebody out at 18,000 feet in Chile and it’s a Chilean holiday and it’s a German company and they can’t get an import for an American part that comes from China. Anyway, you want to know, those are people I have to talk to. Some of them I like a lot. I love my graduate students. I have to talk to them or else they’ll go off in crazy directions. My undergraduates, I have to talk to. I get paid to talk to them. And just the other day I finished up class for the quarter and they all did great and they gave me a standing ovation.

Brian Keating:
It was like emotional for me.

Brian Keating:
I have to be honest with you.

Brian Keating:
A couple of them came up and took a selfie with me and they were like, do you mind if— can I take a selfie with you? Like, they were so— and I was like, yeah, you guys rock. Like, everything I do, I owe to you guys. And, and so this is what I do. This is what I love. I’m always gonna read the books. I’m always gonna go deep. I’m never gonna stop talking to people that I disagree with. You know, I’ve had people not, not want to come on the show.

Brian Keating:
I can name names, right? It’s too bad. You know, it’s too bad for them. I think that they are scared of a little bit of pushback. I think you all know the Malibu meditator that I’m talking about. Just didn’t want to come back on the show ever again because I pushed back on him on his utterly simplistic, ignorant, you know, kind of view of again, some biblical topic that he feels capable of talking about, fine. I’m not gonna say he can’t talk about it, but the fact that he never got pushback once— everyone just tells him what a brilliant genius he is, and everything he says is just so, so wonderful, intellectually deep. I’d love to talk to him. I offered him to stay at my house during the Malibu fires.

Brian Keating:
He politely, you know, turned that down.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Um, but that’s— again, I feel like it’s his loss. I can talk to Richard Dawkins, who hosted me, flew me up to Vancouver to host him for 2 days, um, at this wonderful live show in front of 1,000 people, uh, and it was incredible. And, uh, and he knows I don’t just— I don’t agree with him about a lot of stuff. I push back on Richard Dawkins. Like, who has the chutzpah to do that besides me? I mean, I, I don’t care. I don’t want these interviews where people are just like, oh, you’re so amazing, let me just lick lick your boots. This is incredible. Now, do I talk to people like Avi or my friends and I cut them maybe a little bit more? Okay, I’m a human being.

Brian Keating:
I have friends. Sorry to say I have friends. But you notice even with the friends like Eric, Eric, I think he gets annoyed with me. He’ll tell me that he doesn’t want to talk about a subject because I’m pushing him on something that’s uncomfortable for him. I’ll push him on things like publication. I’m the very person who really forced him to publish on April Fool’s Day 2021 his theory of geometric Now, he didn’t do it to the level that people want him to, and he said he’s an entertainer so that he wouldn’t be liable for people cutting his stuff and he could have legal recourse against them.

Brian Keating:
This is his excuse.

Brian Keating:
But without me and one of my best friends in the world, Stefan Alexander, we pushed him to put it in writing, and he did. And it wasn’t all because of me and Stefan, but I think we played a big role in it. And so I’m going to push back even on my good friends. Okay. So that’s what you’re gonna get. You’re gonna get depth. You’re gonna get someone who’s prepared. I always come prepared.

Brian Keating:
I’ve heard people like Chris Williamson, you know, who I think also has sort of blocked me because I criticized him for, you know, hosting rabid antisemites and people, you know, that are just, just horrific human beings, you know, because they’re of interest to his audience. Fine. I don’t think he’ll ever have me back on, but I was there for him before he had, you know, 1,000 subscribers. Uh, now he’s got 4.5 million, so good for him. I’m really happy for him. But, um, but to hear that, you know, when he told his audience that, you know, he doesn’t read the books effectively, um, because he doesn’t want to be like a short form or, you know, Blinkist for his, uh, audience to skip the book. And, and I don’t want that either. I want you to buy the books.

Brian Keating:
I want you to— you know, I’ve kept these books for years, right? These are, you know, my libraries. That’s like 1/10 of my library behind me. I’ve got 10 times the that in my studio, in my in-person studio. So my books are my treasure. We’re people of the book, right? This is the most important thing to me. So that means I’m gonna take it seriously. I’m gonna read the books. I’m not gonna summarize it so you don’t have to buy it, but I’m gonna read that.

Brian Keating:
I’m gonna pull out the things that are most pertinent, most just fire me up. My Obsidian, my Apple Notes, my second brain is brimming with connections between these 550 now books. between them. So I can ask, you know, upcoming guest Annie Jacobson, who’s coming on for a new book that she’s written called Biological War. That should be fun, right? You know, biological war, a scenario. She’s coming on in July. It’s embargoed. They’re sending me that.

Brian Keating:
That’s incredible that they have trust in me, and I’ve earned the trust. I’ve never broken embargo, never will, even with my own experiments, right? I’ve been under embargoes many times, and for books and for research and And I’ll always respect that. That’s, that’s the duty of a scholar. So in summary, if you want deep dives where people are gonna go be pushed respectfully, friendly— I think I bring more humor to it than most podcasters do. Even I had one producer of a podcast that shall remain nameless, but I went on his podcast and it was right after Joe Rogan was on the podcast with the same host. And the producer said he laughed more when I was on the show. Okay, now I think Joe is a lot funnier than me, but on the same token, I do believe that there’s a role for seriousness and for humility, and quite frankly, to be, you know, kind of respectfully antagonistic. I have to say, to have the chutzpah to back it up with intellect and back it up with preparation.

Brian Keating:
I’m always going to maintain the preparatory standards, Preparation H. I’m always going to maintain it because if I don’t, I feel like a fraud. I feel like people— if I were to have on a guest like Michael Shermer or, you know, so sometimes I like to be a guest on other people’s podcasts. I have to do no preparation, although I even do that. I actually have a self-trained LM specifically for when I’m going to guest on Sean Ryan’s podcast, I do deep research on him. You know, he doesn’t have books, but he has 500 episodes. And what are the themes? What are the things that he goes deep on? What are the things that he doesn’t care about? What are the things that he’s so passionate about he’ll interrupt something even more important to discuss this subject? Does he talk about the news? Does he talk about his kids? Does he talk about his upbringing? He changed his name. You know, what does he do? So I go deep into them when I’m a guest, but it’s a little bit easier easier, uh, to be a guest than to be a host.

Brian Keating:
So it is hard to be a host, especially this week. I have 4 guests on this week, including Avi Loeb, Beatriz Villarreal, Michael Shermer, and then Nate Suarez, who wrote, uh, co-wrote, um, If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Uh, it’s an AI safety researcher. I just released my episode with Roman Yampolsky. Please check that out. I went deep on— and that was not an easy book to read. A lot of math proofs and, uh, and deep excursions into the formal logic behind the assertion that AI is either safe or unsafe. And that has huge implications for governance, for regulations, for our own safety and the flourishing of the human species.

Brian Keating:
And he’s very pessimistic. He made me sort of doubt, but I pushed back on him. I said, you know, you say that AI is unpredictable, therefore it’s uncontrollable. It was sort of a version of the halting problem that Turing popularized in his Turing machine paper. That was the name of it, actually. It was a halting problem, and sort of like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. And I said, you have a version of those 2 massive theorems, Gödel’s theorem and Turing’s theorem, and you’re saying it’s predictable that it’s going to be unpredictable. But isn’t that a tautology? So I want you to watch that episode, hour and a half.

Brian Keating:
I think I went deeper with him than any other interview, certainly than Mike— I love Stephen Bartlett, but I— he can’t get as deep technically because by his own admission, he He didn’t go to college. He didn’t finish college. I think he went for 2 days.

Brian Keating:
But—

Brian Keating:
and I love those guys, and I really appreciate them for hosting me. I just wish that they would maybe spend a little bit more time. If you, if you like me enough this far, you know, to go on a first date, you’re gonna love me once you get to know me. And that’s the way I feel about my guests. I really love each— I haven’t had anyone on— even, even Sam Harris. I love Sam Harris. I— there’s nothing that he could do I pay for his apps and his podcast because he has, he has a fine mind and we disagree on a ton of stuff. But, you know, so be it.

Brian Keating:
He’ll never come on again. Maybe I’ll see him in some, you know, some secret cabal meeting somewhere where he, you know, kind of runs for president to take over, you know, Trump on his 8th term. You know, Sam will be there standing at the vanguard. But until then, Sam, you’re always welcome back on. And everybody else, I don’t want to say you’re welcome.

Brian Keating:
I want to say thank you.

Brian Keating:
I want to say thank you so much. So maybe this is my 400,000 subscriber celebration. Maybe I’ll clip this and make that into that because I want Avi to have his segment standalone from this. But I really can’t resist talking about my favorite subject, which is me. And no, it is just a great thrill. You guys mean so much to me. And so share it with a friend. Try to get some more people involved.

Brian Keating:
Again, I don’t care about the numbers, you know, like I hit 400,000, my kids are really excited about it, but at the same time, like, well, it’s— how is it really different than 399,999? You know, so I posted, you know, here’s— oh, I got to 399,974,000 subscribers. You know, like, okay, that’s what I always wanted. I mean, I know if I go to a million or whatever, half a million, I’m just gonna say, well, you know, there’s another number that’s bigger. That’s the property of natural numbers.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
members.

Brian Keating:
So love you guys.

Brian Keating:
Please stay with it even if you don’t like it, even if you don’t like the content. I promise you, you’re going to grow your pink gray matter, especially when you don’t agree with me or my guest or both or neither. You’re going to grow your mind.

Brian Keating:
And we have so little time.

Brian Keating:
In just a few years, according to Roman, we won’t even have these things anymore. There’ll be no point in having a podcast. Brian Keating will be irrelevant. You’ll just click on something optimized for Stephen Dedalus From night— born in 1974. And it’s gonna look him up and it’s gonna say, oh, these are all the things in a social graph I love. And we’ll just dial it in and they’ll get pumped like soma into his brain and he won’t need me anymore. So until that happens—

Brian Keating:
Until that happens, stay tuned, always be curious, and thank you so much.

Brian Keating:
Please do share it, subscribe, don’t forget to do that.

Brian Keating:
Basic things. Okay, love you all. Talk to you next time.