Transcript:

Brian Keating:
We understand space, we understand matter, we understand energy. We don’t understand why time works the way it does. Actually, the reason is ’cause there is no time. Time doesn’t exist. The essence of my research is to ask that question. What happened on the Sunday before the Big Bang? Something can’t truly come from nothing. We’re the only creatures that know we’re gonna die. That means that we’re the only creatures that know how precious life is.

Peter McCormack:
We’re really wasting an opportunity now to just improve humanity. It feels a little bit civilizational.

Brian Keating:
Dude, we have to stop apologizing for humanity’s greatness. AI is a tool. It is not a human. Its job is to serve humanity. The computer doesn’t know what it means to be human. It only knows what humans have already done.

Peter McCormack:
If our lives had a forward button, we’d all be dead.

Brian Keating:
It’s not time that’s limited, it’s attention.

Peter McCormack:
All right, Brian, good to see you, man.

Brian Keating:
Peter, thanks for making the short jaunt across the pond, as they say. Actually, 2 ponds.

Peter McCormack:
2 bars. Yeah, look, happy to do it. And I was originally like so excited to talk to you because I, I’m, uh, I look up at the sky and I wonder how we’re here and why we’re here. And, um, and I was all prepared to come to you and ask you about my like biggest questions about the universe and how it works. And then I watched your show with Sean Ryan and I was like, huh. And I then listened to Sean with Tucker and I was like, this has hit me at a time where I’m thinking about life and whatever. And I saw you were quite introspective. And so what I was really thinking, I think where I wanted to ask you first is like, obviously you built a career looking up at the sky and wondering, and now it seems like you’re looking internal a lot.

Peter McCormack:
What’s the connection?

Brian Keating:
I think I, since I was a kid, I always cared about only the biggest topics. You know, I couldn’t get interested in sports or, you know, stocks or, you know, Bitcoin. I was a late adopter, but thanks to you, I came to it. Uh, but, but The fact for me is, yeah, I do recognize maybe more than most because I study something that’s 14 billion years old, but I also constantly recognize how fast time is changing for me right now with family, with my work, with my research, sometimes with the podcast. And for me, the ultimate goal and the thing that fascinates me the most is time. We understand space, we understand matter, we understand energy. We don’t understand why time works the way it does. For example, if I take a pendulum, I didn’t bring a pendulum, but I brought a telescope.

Brian Keating:
Here’s a pendulum swinging back and forth like a grandfather clock.

Peter McCormack:
Right.

Brian Keating:
If I turn away for one second and you look back at it, you can’t tell the way it started. Did you remember where I started it? Did I start like this? Did I start like that? You don’t remember. But the fact is the laws of nature are invariant. They don’t care about which direction you started it, which direction you’re looking at it from. They’re invariant, they’re constant. So that means the laws of this pendulum don’t care about time. They can’t tell time. Yes, you use it in a grandfather clock, that’s a separate thing.

Brian Keating:
There’s a ratchet, there’s a mechanism, whatever. I don’t want to get into that. But the actual laws of physics are invariant. They don’t care about time. So too for, you know, a bowling ball. So too for an electron going around an atom. They don’t recognize why time has an arrow. We don’t understand that.

Brian Keating:
And we, yet we talk about the Higgs boson, or we’ll talk about, you know, extra dimensions, or we’ll talk about, you know, the Big Bang, right? But we don’t understand time. I mean, it’s, it’s sort of embarrassing to me. And so I look for the embarrassment. I look for like, what do we claim that we understand beyond the level that we actually do? And I like to poke and prod and annoy my colleagues by saying, we don’t really know what we claim to know. And I think a lot of times we’re selling people on a bill of goods that these extra dimensions and all these fantastical things, maybe even intelligent aliens, it’s pretty much founded on a foundation that’s relatively weak. And I’m just hoping the public doesn’t find out about it.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
My job is to expose it to them. I’m an experimental scientist. Let me first step back. I’m an experimental physicist. I’m not a theorist, Brian Greene, Eric Weinstein, You know, Michio Kaku. I don’t talk about airy-fairy things, you know, multiple dimensions and curled up, you know, things like that. But I do talk about what can we actually measure? What can we interrogate about Mother Nature or God, if you like? And what can we know while we have this limited capacity to know things? So I’m desperately aware of this clock ticking in my head. You know, if I wasn’t aware of it from looking at my kids growing up or wrinkles going on my face or gray hairs coming in, I I would otherwise be obsessed.

Brian Keating:
This is my one obsession, time. Why does it go the way it does when no law of physics mandates that it be so?

Peter McCormack:
Well, what is time though?

Brian Keating:
So this is another very frustrating topic. When you ask a physicist what is time, the most cogent definition that I’ve ever heard comes from a Nobel laureate, Frank Wilczek, and he said time is what a clock measures. Okay, thanks very much. That’s like a tautology. It’s like a San Diego weather forecast. It’s pretty much constant throughout. That doesn’t help you. It doesn’t really do anything.

Brian Keating:
It’s a tautology. So I said, well, that’s very fine and good, but actually the reason is because there is no time. Time doesn’t exist. Multiple things that are proxies for time exist. One of them is, like I said, the hair color on your chin, the size of your toddler, and then a couple years later, the sensation of being with a beautiful girl and how that, for me and my wife, time passes by until one of the kids comes in and interrupts, right? These are all different notions of time. Some say time has more than one dimension. Our friend Eric Weinstein claims that time actually has multiple dimensions, and then that might not preclude time travel as ordinary conceptions of physics seem to do. Now, that’s one extreme, but the fact is, time is essentially a quantity that we don’t understand how it came to be, and yet everything is predicated on it.

Brian Keating:
My job is predicated on the universe coming into existence. There was some day Right, Peter? We sit here today, it’s a Monday, you know, and God help us, we’ll get through it with enough coffee and good conversation. But we sit here on a Monday, we go back 24 hours, it was Sunday, keep going back, back, back, go back weeks, months, years, billions of years. There was some day 13.826 billion years ago that you could say in terms of 24 hours, there was no sun, there was no Earth, there was no human, but the universe began on that day, right? What does that mean? The universe began at a moment. Well, how does something initiate a moment when there’s no moments before that moment to initiate? What is it? What is it pushing back on? Right? There’s no there’s no action without reaction. Right? So if you’re pushing on this table, I move backwards. Right? It’s basic law of your countryman Isaac Newton. But if there’s no time, how does time come into existence? These are very like mysterious concepts.

Brian Keating:
Right? So the essence of my my research is to ask that question: What happened? On the Sunday before the Big Bang? What was that? There’s a notion you can conceive of it, but you can’t actually say for sure that there wasn’t a universe for which time to emerge out of or out of which time has emerged. So is time emergent? Does it only kind of correspond to the mutual agreement of all other particles, matter, conscious beings in the universe? Or is it completely independent? Is it a dimension? Like space has, you know, 3 dimensions of space, uh, at least according to non-string theorists who believe that there’s 10 dimensions, right? Uh, but for us, we, we have this notion that time sort of is this inexorable thing that just keeps proceeding, but we have no idea why. So my research is sort of focused on those questions. Why does time have a direction? Can we slow down time? Can we modulate time? We can go back and forth in space, right? You can go left. You didn’t have to come here, right? So you can go. Wherever you like in space, you can remember the past, why can’t you remember the future? And what, if anything, does that have to do with the connection to the origin of the universe itself? These are the questions.

Peter McCormack:
That’s like Arrival, isn’t it? Remembering the future.

Brian Keating:
Oh yeah?

Peter McCormack:
Yeah, well, that was the concept. You’ve seen that film, right?

Brian Keating:
Mm-hmm. A while ago. I actually, I feel like it’s very painful for me to watch science fiction movies, even though I like them, I get into them, but but you know, for example, watching Contact or or watching Interstellar, your one of your favorite movies, I understand. And I brought you this book, which I wrote, but with an interview with Kip Thorne, who is the scientific director, who not only advised Christopher Nolan on the film, but he also wrote papers about the simulation and the detailed, accurate, and precise simulations that he did for the first. Imagine writing a paper in a movie, you know, with your director, production, whatever. He wrote a scientific paper published in a physics journal about how they rendered the phys physics so exquisitely accurately. However, yes, the physics is sort of accurate, but there’s so many problems with it from an experimentalist point of view. You just see holes.

Brian Keating:
I see just nonsense like contact. We’re going to generate a wormhole like Interstellar uses, right? And we have the spinning contraption that involves a 1974 Chevrolet bucket seat from an old car, and that you have to wear your seatbelt, and then if you don’t, you’ll get— And I’m just like, what does that have to do with— What does a spinning gyroscope have to do with opening up a wormhole? Which by the way, Peter, has to already been pre-established, the exit point. Let’s say you could even make a wormhole, which is completely non— there’s zero evidence that wormholes exist. Okay? It’s a theoretical concept like anything. I mean, we could make a theoretical concept that there’s a purple unicorn on Neptune’s North Pole. I mean, theoretically you can envision it. Is it completely forbidden by the laws of physics? No. But does that mean it’s probable? Absolutely not.

Brian Keating:
In this case, you know, they make a wormhole. Fine, let’s say you could make a wormhole. Where did you establish the other end of the wormhole where you’re going to come out? Like, did you violate, you know, time? You have to time travel to that point where the wormhole emerges on Cooper’s, you know, planet, whatever, in Interstellar. I’m sorry to burst your bubble if this— I know it’s one of your favorite movies. But in reality, it’s completely implausible. So actually, you know, tweeted out a couple months ago when Project Hail Mary came out, I said, uh, actually Project Hail Mary, which involves a bacteria that eats the sun, is actually more scientifically plausible than Interstellar. And people are like, what are you talking about, you fucking idiot? Uh, but you know, there’s, there’s far more things that are unimaginable and improbable, if not impossible, in Interstellar than even in Project Hail Mary.

Peter McCormack:
But even with time, like, the concept of time for us for day to day is like a human construct that we need because it’s a tool. Time is a tool, and we base it around like a 24-hour day, and that’s how we plan our life. But time itself is just forward motion?

Brian Keating:
Well, not necessarily. So motion and time are connected because through velocity, and there’s an ultimate velocity, and there’s an ultimate degree of motion which will stop at 0 Kelvin after a great scientist from Glasgow. The notion of 0 Kelvin where motion stops is a definition that could involve time if time is driven by the laws of thermodynamics. So people express the unidirectionality of time according to them because of the second law of thermodynamics that says that entropy only increases. And they say, well, time only increases. You can’t go backwards in time. So therefore time only increases. There’s some correlation between entropy, but you can actually locally reduce entropy all the time.

Brian Keating:
Like we just had coffee, we had milk poured into it. It’s become completely disordered now. You can’t separate the coffee and the milk. So on one level, the entropy is very high now, and beginning it was very low. You had pure coffee, pure milk, and they were highly separated. That’s low entropy. Now, if you look at an atomic level, you can’t tell the difference between a cream molecule or a milk molecule and a water molecule. They’re mostly hydrogen, 2 hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom.

Brian Keating:
So it depends really on the scale at which you look at it. So to say that because entropy always increases, it’s not sufficient It might be a component of it, it might be necessary, but it’s not sufficient to explain why time has a direction. And that’s why I think people, and maybe even yourself just now, might mistake motion for time.

Peter McCormack:
Sorry, I mean, it’s just like we’re always moving forward in time. When I say motion—

Brian Keating:
We seem to move always forward in motion. But again, the molecules in here, there’s nothing that prevents them from unmixing, right? We don’t observe that happening, and there are explanations for that that are probabilistic, but they’re not physical. In other words, there’s no like, equivalent of the law of electromagnetism, the inverse square law, Coulomb’s law. There’s nothing that says that these things could not separate. In fact, they will separate given the observable age of the universe times a trillion or something like that. We express them probabilistically. So there’s no absolute notion that time always has to go in this direction. And that’s why I think it’s so interesting.

Brian Keating:
My research currently is concerned with whether or not there’s a cosmological arrow of time, That is separate from, say, the microphysics of coffee or your beard or whatever. There’s something, a cosmological time field, that would cause time to progress only in one direction. It would have the rate of time’s flowing encoded in it. And best of all, it’s potentially observable. And maybe even better, it’s been claimed to be detected at a low level of confidence, but we, with our colleagues and observers on the Simons Observatory, we’re aiming to make the definitive measurement. of what could provide for the first time a mechanism for the reason that time only goes in one direction. You’re right, we seem to see time only going in one direction, but why? Perhaps it’s connected to this cosmological force field effectively that is generating what we consider to be, or is correlated to what we consider to be the flow of time.

Peter McCormack:
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Brian Keating:
So there’s 2 major aspects of my research. Um, one is concerned with the origin of the universe, which in some theories has the origin of time built into it. That’s the Big Bang. So your countryman Fred Hoyle— so now I got a Brit here, and I’m so excited, I’m so excited. Um, so I’m gonna turn the podcast on you.

Peter McCormack:
Good God.

Brian Keating:
Um, so Fred Hoyle was a proponent of what’s called the steady state, which for 2,000-plus years had prevailed over all the best scientists, you know, the, the, you know, the Einsteins, uh, the, the Aristotles, you know, the Tony Fauci— no, no, they go back in time, the best scientists.

Peter McCormack:
Up until—

Brian Keating:
When’s he from?

Peter McCormack:
What era is he from?

Brian Keating:
What era is Hoyle from?

Peter McCormack:
Yeah, I don’t know this guy.

Brian Keating:
Is Hoyle from?

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Oh, Hoyle’s from the 1900s. He coined the term the Big Bang.

Peter McCormack:
Okay, so that is before we realized that the galaxies were spreading apart.

Brian Keating:
Well, so he coined that term as an insult, and the reason I’m asking a Brit is that allegedly, Big Bang, if I say, you and the missus had a big bang, that means something indelicate, right?

Peter McCormack:
I took off something.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, okay, so I’m right. I’ve heard it said by other people that that isn’t true. But I’m glad to have it validated by a direct firsthand source.

Peter McCormack:
We wouldn’t say big bang. You wouldn’t say, oh, I’m gonna go upstairs and give you a big bang. But there is a way, and it sounds derogatory, just to say, I wouldn’t say this to my wife.

Brian Keating:
No, of course, no gentleman would say this.

Peter McCormack:
But if a couple of young lads and one guy met a girl and he took her home, the lads would say, did you bang her?

Brian Keating:
That’s the term. Okay. So he did it. It’s obviously not like a pleasant connotation, right? It’s something derogatory or impolite, right? He hated the Big Bang. What we call the Big Bang, I should encapsulate what that is. That’s the observed expansion of the universe, which if you run the movie of the universe back, everything starts at a single point. In fact, everything would be located inside a very tiny region of space, which then after a very extremely slow, small moment of time, it basically exploded and created the universe that we observe today, which is expanding.

Peter McCormack:
I understand it wasn’t a bang though, an explosion.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Peter McCormack:
It wasn’t that, is that correct?

Brian Keating:
It wasn’t like a firework going off in this room, because it happened at every point in space and time. We can’t visualize what that’s like. For every point to be effectively the center of the universe, the center of its own Big Bang, was essentially what’s mandated in the Big Bang theory. In other words, the entire universe has been stretching. Like if this table were made of rubber, we could stretch it out. And if you didn’t know when you were looking at it, we put little dots on it, those dots will be moving away from, each one would be moving away from each one. And if you were sitting on one of them, you would see another one, it would be moving away from you. You’d say, oh, I’m the center of the universe.

Brian Keating:
Every other dot’s moving away from me. But no, no, no. If you can move over to that universe, to the next dot over, he sees the exact same thing as you see. So the universe expanding, so that means there’s no true center of it. It’s like there’s no center of the surface of the Earth, right? There’s no center of the surface of the Earth. And the center of the 3-dimensional Earth, there is, right? But forget about that. The center of the surface, where is that? There’s no center of the ball, right? It’s just we have a convention because the Earth spins on its axis that we define the North and South Poles and Greenwich Mean Time and so forth. But there’s no privileged point on a sphere in mathematics.

Brian Keating:
Every point is equally good as any other point. So if you blow up the sphere, every point moves away from every other point, right? So if you put dots on a balloon and blow it up, they’ll also move away.

Peter McCormack:
But there’s a center to the sphere.

Brian Keating:
There’s a center to the sphere, but that’s because you’ve embedded it in a higher-dimensional space. Look, there’s a center to this table, Because it’s sitting in a 3-dimensional room. But again, if you had an infinite sheet and you’re sitting on the infinite sheet, you can’t tell where you are with respect to the rest of the sheet. And moreover, every other point on that sheet feels that it too is the center of the universe and they have an equal claim to that. They see the sheet expanding. It’s a very mind-blowing concept. I don’t expect it to be immediately grasped, but this is why it was so resisted for 2,000+ years and why people like Hoyle thought it as a pejorative. This is silly, this is stupid.

Brian Keating:
There’s some big explosion, some big orgasm in the beginning of time, and it’s ludicrous, right? But no, in fact, the most parsimonious, the simplest explanation from an experimental standpoint is that actually, no, the universe was once extremely hot, extremely dense, compactified, and after that moment has been expanding ever since for the past 13.826 billion years, as I said.

Peter McCormack:
But hold on, on that. If it is extremely dense, extremely hot, Does that mean that there was something existed?

Brian Keating:
So, right. So there’s some energy field that came— exactly. You’re exactly grasping what my primary research goal is.

Peter McCormack:
Whoops.

Brian Keating:
So the, the— so something can’t truly come from nothing. I know there are people like my friend Lawrence Krauss who will say, oh, the universe can come from nothing. That’s actually nonsense. There’s no agency to nature’s laws, right? If I give you E equals MC squared, that’s a description of something, but that’s not the thing itself, right? It is true. It explains how 2 massive particles, a positron and an electron can come together and create pure photons, or the reverse, 2 photons, no mass, come together and make 2 massive particles, a positron and an electron. That’s true, but the equations describe something. They don’t instantiate it. They’re not the reason why it happens.

Brian Keating:
They’re a description to us, right? So just as Newton’s law of gravity, they say Newton discovered gravity. Okay, Newton discovered gravity the same way that Christopher Columbus discovered America. It existed beforehand, right? No, he described it. He described how gravity works. He didn’t discover how gravity works. He mathematized it. It’s a huge accomplishment. In the same way, you’re absolutely right.

Brian Keating:
Where does this expansion come from? Well, it must come from either a preexisting universe. It could be that there was a universe for all time. One day it decided to collapse and condense and compress, and there are mechanisms that can explain that. And it compressed to near infinitesimal density, infinite density, infinitesimal size. And then that process caused an unstable reaction, which then causes it to bounce, expand, and rekindle, homogenize, repopulate exactly what our universe looks like today. Now, for that to happen, you needed something that existed before the moment, let’s call time equals zero, the beginning of our observable universe. So our observable universe is 13.826 billion years, but we have no idea what happened again the day before that. Where did that come from? So my primary goal of my research with my first experiments, BICEP, BICEP2, and now with the Simons Array and the Simons Observatory, with my colleagues and my coworkers and my students and my colleagues and friends, is to essentially ask, what did it bang out of? Was it a preexisting universe? Was it a state of pure energy that existed for all time? Energy can exist for all time.

Brian Keating:
It could be static for all time, the energy, and then it can fluctuate into existence, that’s not nothing. Empty space is not empty in the classical sense that we think about a vacuum. We think about it devoid of anything. But in quantum mechanics, that’s not the way it is. Quantum mechanics, the vacuum is unstable. Things can pop into and out of existence in infinitesimal timescales. But when we’re talking about timescales like what’s called the Planck length and the Planck time, extremely small units of time and measurement, those quantities can become significant. And if there is a field that existed, an energy field, like you said, it had to come from something.

Brian Keating:
Physicists believe that energy field is called the inflaton, that there’s a field that pervades all of space and time called inflation that exists now and exists before, you know, now and exists for all time. And it exists in what’s called the multiverse. So you’ve encountered the multiverse in the concept of your simulation theory talks. My friend Rizwan Virk that you spoke with and many other people have talked about that.

Peter McCormack:
Can I ask a question on the multiverse before that?

Brian Keating:
Yeah, of course.

Peter McCormack:
Because I’ve heard the version of the multiverse whereby every version of every possibility exists, right? There’s a version where in this interview you just get up and storm out. There’s like every possibility. But I have another question, uh, which you probably— I don’t know if you can even answer. It’s like, where does the universe exist? Which is probably something you can’t really answer. But if this universe exists in wherever it does, can other universes exist completely isolated from this universe?

Brian Keating:
Part of the challenge is that the, the human vocabulary is insufficient to describe almost anything. As I said, we can’t even describe time, and yet we’re talking about the beginning of time. Like, make that make sense. Okay. But, but really what we do is sort of an inverse thing. We say, like, how did I get here? Like, I don’t know how this building was built. Did you know how it was built? No, no, no. But you know what you were doing 10 minutes before I arrived? An hour ago, you came from London a couple of, you know, 12 hours ago.

Brian Keating:
You’re looking pretty refreshed, you know, thanks to British Airways.

Peter McCormack:
Thank you.

Brian Keating:
And if you go back in time, you can start to go back and piece together your local light cone, like your local past history makes sense to you and maybe to you alone, but that’s okay. So what we do as physicists, we piece back in time everything that we understand about the laws of nature today. We extrapolate them back and then we see when does our understanding break down. Currently, we understand things exquisitely well with tools that are mind-numbingly precise, some built by my colleagues, in fact, uh, some studied purely computationally, theoretically, or with AI. and things like that. But we understand things in the universe’s history going back to about 10 to the minus 12th seconds.

Peter McCormack:
Is that 380,000 years?

Brian Keating:
That’s when the CMB is produced. No, that’s, that’s much, much later, right? So I’m talking about 380,000 years, like trillions of seconds. No, I’m talking about, I’m talking about the, the earliest branch of known physics that we understand, sort of like how far back you could go on the timeline that got you to here. Imagine you could go back and like maybe you could ask a couple of people that built the building and, you know, rented it and whatever. But, you know, to go back when like the Earth formed Like, eventually it’s gonna break down. But for physics, we can go back from today, we can go back 13.826 billion years to 1 trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Now, okay, we don’t know what the Big Bang was, but we know exactly what happened after that moment. Okay, so like, even though like you look away and you see something exploding, you can then look back and say, well, I under— I saw it at this moment and I see it now, and there’s heat coming to me now, and there’s a sound wave coming to me now.

Brian Keating:
So maybe I don’t know exactly what it was like, ’cause nobody could witness, say, a nuclear detonation right at the place in which it occurs, right? But you can extrapolate back from observations, from evidence, from data, everything you can observe currently, and extrapolate the laws of physics back to some finite period of time when your ignorance then begins. So that’s what we do with those.

Peter McCormack:
So you extrapolate back based on, but it’s not, what’s observable?

Brian Keating:
What’s observable is a tremendous amount of physics.

Peter McCormack:
Up until what period of time?

Brian Keating:
So I’m saying a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. When is it observable? About that epoch when the laws of electricity and magnetism sort of cleaved apart, and now we see electricity and magnetism as 2 separate things. But from Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, that they’re actually 2 sides of the same coin. One man’s magnetic field is another man’s electric field, and they’re actually beautifully intertwined. That was the first example. Well, actually Newton was the first unification, grand unified theory, if you like. So physics has this goal of unifying as many forces into one single force as possible. The so-called theory of everything, or TOE, is an attempt to subsume all 4 laws of nature, gravity, electricity, and magnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces into one rubric, one line equation that describes all of physics.

Peter McCormack:
By the way, I have to thank Paul Sutter for this. He introduced me to this.

Brian Keating:
Yes, yes, that was a great interview you guys did. The spaceman. And so you can go back to when very many things were unified, but not everything. And for us, that’s sort of when the electromagnetic theory breaks away from what’s called the weak force. And we understand that because those are energies we can probe at the LHC. The Large Hadron Collider can probe things that are about, what are, 7 trillion electron volts, whatever that means. It’s many billions of times the mass energy of a proton. And if you look at it, then you can start to extrapolate.

Brian Keating:
Well, every mo— imagine this, Peter, every point in all of the universe had the same energy as those extreme collisions that make Higgs bosons. There was some period in the universe’s history when like, it wasn’t just like San Diego and it’s like sunny here and London, it’s cloud.

Peter McCormack:
No, no, no.

Brian Keating:
Every part of the universe had an average energy density equivalent to the combined energy of the protons and antiprotons that collide to make Higgs bosons. That takes 28-kilometer track to smash them together. That has particles that have the energy of a freight train. Okay. That, but every single cubic, uh, Planck length of the universe had that much energy. It’s incomprehensible. And then a minute later, it’s literally a minute later, it cooled off by thousands of times. And it kept cooling and kept cooling such that today it went from that trillions of Kelvin degrees above absolute zero to now it’s just 2.726 degrees above absolute zero.

Brian Keating:
It’s a minuscule whisper of temperature. That’s the average temperature of the universe. You take a thermometer anywhere in the universe except for on Earth or near our sun, in interstellar, intergalactic space, you get the same reading everywhere in the universe. That means the average energy of the universe has that temperature. But if you go back to the very last time when we lose consciousness and cannot remember what happened beforehand, this trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Every part of the universe had this enormous energy. Every thermometer would have the same temperature as the center of mass collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider. It’s mind-blowing.

Brian Keating:
I mean, you don’t look too impressed by this. No, I am.

Peter McCormack:
I’m just taking it all in.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I mean, it is a lot to take in.

Peter McCormack:
And your goal is to find out, you’re trying to look behind the trillionth of a second.

Brian Keating:
So physicists are greedy. That’s not enough for us. Like you could say, you know, well, I mean, 100 years ago, I should say, Even when I was in graduate school in the ’90s, we didn’t know if the age of the universe was 10 billion years or 20 billion years. In other words, 100% uncertainty. Now we know it, 13.826 billion years with an uncertainty of about 1 in the last decimal place. So 1 part in 10 to the 5th. It’s incredible. Before we knew that there were objects, Peter, there were objects called— there are objects called globular clusters.

Brian Keating:
These are like, you know, kind of failed states. These are like mini galaxies that never really kind of got their act together, moved out of their parents’ basement. So they orbit around the— they orbit They orbit around the Milky Way and every other galaxy that’s massive like ours. And they have the energy of about— they have the number like a million stars compared to the Milky Way, which has 100 billion stars, and Andromeda, which has 400 billion or a trillion. So they’re minuscule little things, but they’re very useful. They trace out the properties of where our galaxy’s center of mass is. So they were very useful for proving that our galaxy is actually not the entire universe as most people thought it was up until 100 years ago. But even in grad school in the early mid-1990s, we couldn’t tell if the universe was younger than some of those objects called globular clusters.

Brian Keating:
Now, that’ll be like you, you know, you know, being older than your dad. It was very strange. There were objects in the universe that were older than the claimed age of the universe to some cosmologists. Now we know it much different. Now we know it. I could say, like, looking at you, you’re born in what, 1977?

Peter McCormack:
’78.

Brian Keating:
’78. Close. Okay. So I could say what day, what month, October, whatever, but I can say to the day. It used to be I couldn’t tell you within— it was 1977 or it was 2007. Like, it was insane. But now we have this incredible precision. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Brian Keating:
We’re trying to always push that back because we’re greedy. Scientists should be greedy, because if we’re not, who’s going to be greedy at asking these questions that have no financial benefit? They have no, like, kind of, uh, you know, we don’t get famous from asking these questions. We’re driven by this insatiable curiosity to push back the veil of ignorance and lift it up as high as Mother Nature will allow us to do.

Peter McCormack:
So you’re looking beyond that 20th of a second.

Brian Keating:
Yes.

Peter McCormack:
How do you even know what to look for?

Brian Keating:
So in these models, in science, we never prove anything. I can’t prove to you this table’s flat. You know, actually it’s not flat, right? There’s little— if you zoomed in with a microscope, but it looks flat. So it depends on what question you ask the scale of, like how flat is this table? Very flat compared to, you know, compared to a beach ball, but very, very much more rough compared to a perfect idealized Euclidean plane, right? And it’s just, you know, Or a glass or diamond sheet. I mean, it’s much, much rougher, right? So we are trying to look back basically to a point in time at which time, if this theory was correct, we could disprove— again, we can’t prove anything in science. I can’t prove the Earth is flat or curved or what. I can prove it’s not flat. I can’t prove it is curved or is perfectly spherical, right? So what we are trying to do is falsify the claim that there was no Big Bang.

Brian Keating:
That’s one thing that scientists need to do, right? We need to show that people claim there was no Big Bang, just as they claim the Earth is flat. You know, people around the world, around the globe, believe that the Earth is, is, is flat. In this case, we are trying to disprove many, many theorems, many, many predictions. And then we can’t prove something in science, but we can disprove all the competing alternatives. And like your fellow countryman Sherlock Holmes said, when you’ve eliminated everything but the— but what you might think is impossible, That is the best explanation. It’s sort of simplifying things, eliminating everything. And the things that we want to eliminate are the equivalent of the flat Earth, or the moon landing never happened, or, you know, we’re trying to eliminate as many things with scientific hard data that we collect from telescopes. Not too different from this, you know, kind of a little simple telescope here, but connected to much more advanced technological detectors, taking massive amounts of data, petabytes per year, thousands of terabytes.

Brian Keating:
you know, a terabyte per day. Imagine filling up your whole, you know, 10 iPhones a day with data, with really high-quality data. That’s what my colleagues and I are doing on the Simons Observatory. And the goal is to push back as far as possible such that what’s left is the most plausible explanation, but it may not be the quote-unquote perfect explanation, but that’s okay.

Peter McCormack:
And someone might be spending time then trying to disprove that.

Brian Keating:
Well, people spend time disproving it. They hardly spend any money disproving it. There are people that complain about it, say it never happened. They They cherry-pick data from my colleagues’ research or my research, and they’ll say, look, they don’t even know. Like, I’m open enough to say we don’t know what time really is. Okay, that’s a big admission. Now, if you were persnickety, you might say, well, then how can you do anything? Or my favorite one is, we don’t know what 95% of the universe is made of. You got— you boffins claim it’s dark matter.

Brian Keating:
You say it’s dark energy, 95% of it, but you don’t know what dark energy is. True. We don’t know what it is. We don’t know what dark matter is. True. We don’t know what dark matter is. And the rest is 5% that we do know about. Does that mean we’ve made no progress?

Peter McCormack:
Yeah, I have a question on dark energy and dark matter. Is that just a made-up thesis to solve an equation?

Brian Keating:
So dark energy— so what’s beautiful about science is when we’re wrong, in that we see these flaws in our previously cherished ideals. For example, I told you for most of human history, if you wrote the year on a ping-pong ball, of, you know, starting from the dawn of human time, like from going back to ancient Egypt, okay, 5,000 BC, right? And you put the year, negative 5,000 BC, right?

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
And you put that into a bag every single year in the 7,000 years since then, right? And you put that in a bag and you pulled out that year and you said, what was the prevailing wisdom on cosmology, on the universe? 99% of those balls would say the universe has existed forever in one form or another. Either it cycled into and out of existence or it was eternal. There was only one document, in fact, that ever claimed that it wasn’t, and that was the Old Testament. The Old Testament very clearly asserts that there’s a beginning to time, beginning to space, beginning of the creation of the universe, and that’s what we call Genesis. That’s the first sentence, in the beginning. The beginning of what? The beginning of the universe. So that was the only document, but if you believe that, you were standing against Aristotle. What are you, an idiot? Newton, what are you, a moron? Einstein, come on, you’re a complete fool, right? No.

Brian Keating:
So they turned out, all of them, to be wrong. There was a beginning period to what we call the observable universe. So when we look at it, we have to say that we’re wrong. I have a phrase that I’ve trademarked, which is that the flaws create the laws. So you start off with something that doesn’t seem to be completely perfect, but it’s pretty good, like the steady state universe. If you look up at the night sky, you see stars. You see the Milky Way if you’re in a dark place. You might see the Moon and you might see some planets, okay? The Greeks had a word— there’s so few things that move.

Brian Keating:
In other words, the preponderance of what we see is static. The stars are static, they don’t move. The Moon, the Sun, and the 5 planets move. That’s why we have the days of the week. All the days of the week are named after things that move to the ancients, back up to Saturn. They didn’t know about Uranus, right? So they only named the things that moved. So that tells you that most of those things aren’t days, right? How many more things are static? There’s 6,000 stars that you can see. They never move.

Brian Keating:
They never change, at least in a human lifetime. And so when you have something like that, the theory that prevails had to comport with that. There had to be some explanation why the only things that move are planets in our solar system. Everything else is fixed. Oh, I know. The universe doesn’t change. It’s eternal. It’s been here forever.

Brian Keating:
That was what drove cosmology for 7,000 years almost until 1929 when Hubble observed the expansion of the universe by looking at galaxies and inferring that their motion was such that every moment of time they’re getting farther and farther away. There is no center of the universe. Each one of those is a center of the universe, therefore there is no true center. And if you go back yesterday, they were closer. Go back a day before that, closer, closer. Eventually you reach a time when they were actually touching, connected. one part of one amalgam, whatever that was. And that’s where their ignorance left off in the 1920s.

Brian Keating:
That’s, that’s, that’s the beginning of the Big Bang theory was 1929. Other people thought that was ridiculous, like I said, Hoyle, and made fun of it and called it the Big Bang. It’s so ridiculous. But now every cosmologist believes— and there’s a couple of non-standard, non-professionals, or maybe amateurs or whatever. I’m saying, I’m not saying they’re bad or doing things unprofessionally, but they have an agenda, just like, you know, people believe the moon landing never happened. You know, they have an agenda. And you can refute them with data, but they’ll always kind of have these kind of concerns because it’s true. A good scientist will say, yes, I cannot explain everything, but the fact that I can’t is actually good news because if I could explain everything, we wouldn’t have the static, you know, we would still have the static universe.

Brian Keating:
Look, if Einstein were never wrong, let me put it this way. Einstein called Isaac Newton not only the greatest scientist who ever lived, but the greatest contributor to civilization who ever lived. Okay, so Einstein, he had almost no imposter syndrome, as we say, but he had the imposter syndrome about Newton. Newton, if Newton was the last word, we wouldn’t have Einstein’s relativity, right? We wouldn’t have GPS, we wouldn’t have any of the time travel, we wouldn’t have particle accelerators, we wouldn’t have anything, right? We wouldn’t have quantum mechanics at some level. So there’s a danger in saying that, oh, it’s lasted for so long and we don’t understand something, therefore it’s wrong. Like, no, no, no, if you said that Newton— you’re wrong. You’re actually— you’re right, he is wrong. He’s not— but what comes after Newton has to subsume what Newton did and get that right.

Brian Keating:
You can’t overthrow Newton completely. But Newton didn’t have the extendability to explore extreme gravity, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars. So yes, we don’t understand everything about dark energy. It is a term. It is sort of a proxy for our ignorance about what, what is driving the expansion of the current accelerated expansion of the universe. But that the universe is accelerating, is expanding, is indisputable.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
The mechanism behind which it is is currently unknown. But dark matter is a weaker argument to say, we don’t understand dark matter, so you scientists are stupid, or whatever. Like a lot of scientists will say, you don’t understand it. It’s actually not true. We do understand dark matter. We’ve detected dark matter. There’s things called neutrinos. Neutrinos are subatomic particles, elementary particles, meaning they can’t be chopped up into smaller pieces.

Brian Keating:
They cannot be divided. They seem to be eternal. They last forever as far as we know. And they have mass. They just don’t interact with matter like we’re made of. So if neutrinos right now—

Peter McCormack:
They’re hitting us constantly.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, there’s 100 trillion neutrinos that are gonna go through this room in the time that we’re doing this podcast. We’re not gonna feel any of them, hopefully. Once in a while they’ll interact with your DNA and maybe change something, but cosmic rays are doing a lot more damage. And coffee has probably a lot more radium in it than we like to admit. But the fact is, We have detected actual honest-to-goodness dark matter, massive particles that do not interact with light, therefore they are dark and matter. And it is true, the dark matter that they comprise in the universe is not sufficient to explain all the phenomena that we see. But that’s, you know, it’s like saying, oh, you’ve discovered 4 elements, what makes you think there’s 114 more? That’s kind of a ridiculous specious argument, and a lot of people make it.

Peter McCormack:
So your, your hunt for this, uh, The time before the trillionth of a second.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Peter McCormack:
Is it a hunt that you, you may never actually complete? Is it a—

Brian Keating:
Oh, definitely. Yeah.

Peter McCormack:
How do you feel about that?

Brian Keating:
It’s, it’s, um, it’s like saying, you know, how will you feel that you’ll never meet your great-great-grandchild? Like, um, I hope that I establish something with my colleagues. Again, it’s no scientist works by themselves nowadays, and I have a great team that works with me. Um, and we have great funding, great agencies that support us. Uh, but, um, but our, our job is not to complete the task. You know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s that we are given this great opportunity. Some of us, unfortunately, it’s not evenly distributed and science is having a lot of cutbacks. Your country’s doing the same. Uh, we collaborate very closely with the UK, by the way.

Brian Keating:
There’s a huge component of the Simons Observatory led by, uh, Manchester and other, uh, institutions, uh, the Queen Mary. Um, and we have collaborators throughout the world, but in particular, a huge chunk of our new observatories led out of the UK, which is incredible. Um, it’s allowing us to do things we couldn’t do with just the U.S. component. So, um, no, I don’t, I don’t see it like that. I see it like I’m training.

Peter McCormack:
Is it a baton race? Like, you scientists are just always building and then you depart and then somebody else carries on?

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but it was. But then this project, which I, you know, uh, conceived of with, with my colleague David Spergel and pitched to my mentor and, and kind of father figure, Jim Simons. funded it in 2016. It’s poised to be— because of the recent cancellation of our number one competitor, which is to be located at the South Pole in Antarctica, where I’ve been a couple of times, that was canceled by the government recently. First with the Biden administration, the last year finally killed off by the Trump administration. So we’re kind of the last experiment of its kind. And so There will be a space-based experiment potentially from Japan called Lightbird, which, which may do much more than we can do, and that would be great. But for now, we’re the only really funded operational— we’re taking data.

Brian Keating:
Like I said, we’re getting a terabyte of data. Imagine filling up a hard drive, your phone, 4 or 5 of your iPhones every single day with high-quality data that you need to reduce. And so we have 450 of the smartest scientists on Earth working on this problem now, working on the data, working on the instrument. And by the way, this is at 18,000 feet above sea level, 5,200 meters. Above sea level where you’re wearing oxygen masks and sun protection and hard hats, and it’s a construction site on like a mining field at 17,000+ feet. It’s an incredible place to work, but it’s dangerous. It’s harsh. Things break and you can’t get Amazon.

Brian Keating:
You can’t get FedEx up there. So it’s not as bad as the South Pole. South Pole’s worse in terms of getting stuff too. But so we really have the lead right now. I mean, I don’t like to rest on our laurels, but we have— we just finished up a week-long meeting in Toronto, and I just heard like the most incredible stories and, and, and reduction and analysis and novel use of AI. And now we’ve got like this huge solar panel, uh, array, the very first, you know, kind of time we’ve had a solar array powering a cosmology instrument. Um, it’s just so exciting. I feel like a kid.

Brian Keating:
And it’s a hundred— it’s a $100+ million project.

Peter McCormack:
Wow.

Brian Keating:
It’s not like you can go down to the, to the store and pick one up or buy one on my website. I wish. But, but the fact is, we’re kind of in this wonderful opportunity, but we like to think there are other experiments that could possibly detect this signal. In fact, we in the experiment I started, helped to start, called BICEP, claim we did detect this signal that I’m looking for now. And then we had to retract it. So how do you, how do you know what the signal looks like?

Peter McCormack:
How do you know what you’re looking for?

Brian Keating:
Yeah. So right now, if a plane were to fly out of, you know, San Diego Airport, You couldn’t see it. You know, it’s a nice, beautiful studio. It has no windows, though, unfortunately. So we couldn’t see it, but we could hear it. Right. And that tells you that there’s more than one way to detect something. Yes, you’d like to be able to see it, but— and there are many other ways.

Brian Keating:
Radar, you know, you could look for the neutrinos from the coffee cup, you know, whatever. There’s— you could be very creative to detect that plane, every single plane taking off. You don’t need to see it to detect it. So too with the signal that we’re trying to see. We’re actually not trying to see the light that was produced 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That’s called the CMB, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. It’s a pervasive temperature field, a radiation bath, very cold radiation, 2.7 Kelvin, coming in all directions, all times of day or night, everywhere in the, in the entire universe. Right.

Brian Keating:
We’re not actually looking at that and saying, oh, we’re going to see the origin of time. We’re going to see something that occurred before that. Right. Because that was produced 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We want to see, say, a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. So how do you do that? When you want to look back in time, you have to look further back in space, right? I don’t see you instantaneously as you are right now, right? You know, the sun is 93 million miles away from Earth, right? So that means it takes 8.3 minutes for light to get from the sun to the Earth. In this 8 past past 8.2 minutes, say, the Sun could have blown up, disappeared, right? We wouldn’t know about it for 8, you know, for another 0.1, you know, 10 seconds or whatever, right? Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, right? As nice as it would be to spend the last moments of, you know, existence with you, Peter, but, but nevertheless, there are other people I’d like to be with. Um, but, but the point is there’s a finite travel time for all information, whether it’s light, heat, sound.

Brian Keating:
I mean, certainly is much slower for us. We’re not looking for light, we’re looking for waves of gravity. called gravitational radiation, which is kind of like a sound wave, but it’s a sound wave that vibrates spacetime itself. So if a gravitational wave were to pass through this room right now, we would get a little closer to each other, a little farther apart, and this would travel at the speed of light. And so in the beginning of time, when gravitational waves were produced, this inflation field that I mentioned earlier would’ve made the sort of background boiling sea of gravitational waves. They live forever like neutrinos and light. They travel at the speed of light, like light. And so they, they could exist from, say, a trillionth of a second or a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang to then shake up the universe when the CMB was produced 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Brian Keating:
So they endure. They’re coming through this room right now. But the point is that in the early universe, when things were denser and closer together, It’s a better opportunity to detect them. So we actually use the light as a film. Remember film from the old days, right? So we’re using the light beams themselves as film onto which gets exposed not light, but waves of gravity. And if we see that, there’d be strong circumstantial evidence that this inflation field existed to provide the energy that you asked about earlier. To nucleate the universe from which we emerged. And it doesn’t prove that, but it does disprove the theory that the universe came from nothing.

Brian Keating:
The universe has been here for all time. The universe has cycled into and out of existence for all time. The universe is stretching and will eventually evaporate and will be at the center of a black hole. None of those produce the waves of gravity. Therefore, if we see the waves of gravity, it’s strong, A, circumstantial evidence for inflation, but B, it kills off every other contender. Now, is that proof? No. But was Newton’s law, did it prove that spacetime is curved near a black hole? No, it didn’t prove that, but it showed us how to get to the moon and every other place in the universe. It’s very powerful.

Brian Keating:
It showed the unification of gravity. The same apple that hit him on the head was the same force that was pulling the moon towards the Earth. The moon is falling like the apple was falling. That was a unification of the laws on Earth to the laws in the heavens. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. Dirac and others unified together what we call the weak force with the strong, with the electromagnetic force. These are kind of the goal for us. For us, this would unify gravity and it would be the first sort of framework that unifies the highest laws of physics with some of the lower ones.

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Peter McCormack:
So I want to go back to what I asked you at the very start then, because again, when I watched you with Sean Ryan, you seem very introspective. And I want to go back to the point is like, you obviously started looking up at the skies, this became your career, this became your life.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Peter McCormack:
But you seem to be looking very internal, and you did it at a time where I’m thinking about it. And I said, as I was driving down to get the flight to come out and see you, I was listening to Sean Woetucker, and he was like, I’m off social media, I don’t care about this shit, I don’t care about that shit. And I was sat there thinking, One thing I really hate about the job I do is that I have to create titles that hopefully the algorithm puts in front of enough people to watch it. And I feel dirty and I hate it. And, and then I listen to yours and it seems we’re in a period of time when a lot of people are being introspective. And I’m, I really just want to find out a little bit more about that because it is, has there been, is this just like what every guy goes through? I assume we’re similar age.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Peter McCormack:
Similar age.

Brian Keating:
But yeah.

Peter McCormack:
Or, or is Is the looking up at the sky looking for the meaning, is it the same as looking internal for meaning?

Brian Keating:
I don’t think it’s a— I mean, I had this feeling. I kind of produced the ideas behind this first experiment when I was 29 or something like that. So no, and it was done for the exact same reason I’m doing things today. So not in that sense. I do think you’re right. There is a zeitgeist component, spirit of the times, that is precipitated by things like AI, uh, that we should get into. Um, and disclosure, aliens, the others, there’s, there’s a lot of that. There are many, many similarities between things like AI and UAPs that have a religious overlay on top of them.

Brian Keating:
I’m convinced of that. And I’m convinced that the reason that people’s feelings are so durable are the same as when a Jehovah’s Witness comes to you. I, I assume you’re not a Jehovah’s Witness or Scientologist. I don’t think you’re a Scientologist. They come in, they want to convert you, So have you ever been tempted, Peter, to switch your religions, change team? You want to come over to Judaism and, you know, get a little snip snip and then you’re one of us, right? You’re not tempted to do that, right?

Peter McCormack:
No.

Brian Keating:
I’m not tempted to— I was Catholic, now I’m Jewish, you know, whatever. We can get into it. But the point is, there isn’t— you know, Viktor Frankl said that man has no greater need outside of biological survival than to search for meaning, to have meaning in his life or her life, obviously. And, you know, for me, the reason that I do this is very clear. I, I’m not afraid of the most ridiculous, outlandish questions, but they have to be grounded in something empirical that I can test. Otherwise, it’s just, you know, kind of like whatever intellectual masturbation with a telescope. Like, if it’s not really grounded to something beyond just the science, like most of my colleagues are very uncomfortable talking about God. Religion.

Brian Keating:
They’re also uncomfortable, the same ones, talking about aliens, talking about, you know, AI destroying careers and stuff like that. Most professors are very comfortable in the lives that they have. You know, I always call it the hardest 3-hour-a-week job in the world. You know, we have to show up 3 hours a week. That’s about it. Once you get tenure, you know, that’s basically the end of your ambitions for many people. Not all, but many. And I feel like we have this sense of meaning, like, If you look at recently Fauci’s documents, his internal emails were released, and if you didn’t think he was kind of a slimy character before, now, regardless of him being a good scientist at one point in his career, when you see the hunger for credit, for winning awards, for attribution, and then simultaneously what he did to friends of mine like Jay Bhattacharya and others, trying to smear them, discredit them, even Nobel Prize winners, destroy their careers, destroy their life.

Brian Keating:
It was— it’s very kind of clear and patently obvious to me and to other scientists that most scientists do something that’s important, but it’s not significant. Like, you can do something, you can, you can try to do something that’s, you know, like, it’s very important to build a type of superconducting, you know, type of fusion reactor. You know, it’s important to do that. Is it significant? Well, it could be, you know, if you solve all energy problems and transport problems. But most scientists aren’t doing that, right? They’re making incremental, very small— and it’s important to do that, but it’s not, it’s not significant. It’s not like gonna fill that checkbox for meaning, right?

Peter McCormack:
Is it important for you to do something significant?

Brian Keating:
Oh, so clearly so.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
So that has always been important for me because I feel, you know, a keen awareness about death and always have been. And I don’t think that there’s, you know, another— one of my favorite books is Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, who in his book suggests that everything that man does From like pursuing mates to, you know, building pyramids to launching rockets to Mars and whatnot is all done in a desperate attempt to stave off the incessant horrors of your own mortality and your knowledge of imminent death that only human beings have. You know, we’re called Homo sapiens, right? What are we sapient about, Peter? What does it mean? We’re the only creatures that know we’re gonna die. Yeah, some elephant knows it’s gonna die, kind of like wanders around. No, that’s different. Like when you were 4, you knew what death was, right?

Peter McCormack:
Yeah, of course.

Brian Keating:
So we’re the only creatures that know that. What does that mean? That means that we’re the only creatures that know how precious life is and how little life is and how short a period of time when your 22-year-old, you know, was bouncing on your knee, you know, it was yesterday, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it yesterday?

Peter McCormack:
You know, I remember it viscerally.

Brian Keating:
You remember going on the plane yesterday and you’re fine and you’re sitting up and you weren’t in, you know, you weren’t in premier class this time thanks to BA’s, you know, policy filling up too fast. But I remember this feeling of sitting. I was in premier economy, which gives you, you know, an extra 3 millimeters of space and I mean, slightly better meal. It is. It is. So I was in and I was near the front of the plane, not in first class, but everyone’s walking past me. And I remember thinking, every single one’s younger than me. Like, it was recently I was flying with my family.

Brian Keating:
I was like, every person going past me, you know, and I’m like a little bit vain or whatever, but like every single one’s younger than me. And I’m like, damn. Like, I remember being like, look at that old guy sitting, you know, that guy sitting in, you know, 9A. Like, he’s so old and I got all this time ahead of me. And like, it was yesterday and now I’ve got kids that that are much, much younger, and then they’re looking at me like I’m the old man. When does that happen? I’m keenly aware of that. I always have been, but now I’m on the other side. Now I’m on the back 9 or whatever you want to say.

Brian Keating:
And so, it’s become urgent for me to figure these things out as much as I can. But like I said, it’s not up to me to finish it, but I can’t stop doing it.

Peter McCormack:
So, I want to poke on that because there was something you said that sat with me all last night and I kept thinking of over and over. And you said to Sean, like, you know, when you’re happiest is when you’re with your kids and with your family and you could do it tomorrow. I could afford to just— I could stop tomorrow. Yeah, I could go and spend the rest of my time.

Brian Keating:
So could he, by the way. But he’s not stopping.

Peter McCormack:
And like most of us could, right? Most of us could even scale back our house or where we live or what we do. And I love spending time with my kids. And my son said something to me recently. He’s like, I wish you were more present because I’m not. My brain’s here. They’re everywhere.

Brian Keating:
Phones. Yeah.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah. And I’m searching for like, like my own purpose. What am I going to do? It’s significant. I want to have a big podcast and then, yeah, you get a pat on the back and I’m not, I’m like this C-grade podcaster and I’m like, so then I was saying last night, I go, why am I even here? And then I was thinking, why has Brian even given up 2 hours of his time to come and talk to me? He could have that 2 hours with his kids. I could be home. And I’m like, and then I was thinking of this, uh, Naval quote that Sam Altman mentioned. He said, if our lives had a forward button, We’d all be dead. And I was like, you’re so right.

Peter McCormack:
I didn’t think about it like that. And so I was really interested to just ask you about that kind of introspection, because it seems like you’ve now— you’ve got this recognition of like, death is coming. It may be in 40 years, it may be tomorrow, and yet you’re still chasing this. But is this the most important thing in your life?

Brian Keating:
It’s the nexus of things within my control, things I have capacity for, things that give me what we call life force or energy, and things I have agency over. So it’s this quadrinium of things that position me at this apex thing. I like to say, you know, I’m writing my 5th book now. I think it’s my 5th one.

Peter McCormack:
Your last one?

Brian Keating:
It’s probably, it’s my last of that kind of book. I can keep writing these books ’cause God bless them, these Nobel laureates, they have to move their own books, so they come on my podcast and I love talking to ’em. So every 9 Nobel laureates, the privilege and honor to interview, I make one of these copies and kind of distill their wisdom. You know, like Kip Thorne, like what was it like to, you know, win the Nobel Prize, you know, for basically an artistic sketch that, that he’s doing and a theory that, that he helped to popularize. Um, it’s just incredible. And I get them in a very vulnerable, you know, situation. You know, people on a podcast, it didn’t exist, you know, 20 years ago.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Uh, and so now it’s just this incredible thing, an opportunity for me to talk to people I want to talk to. to. There’s a lot of people I have to talk to. There’s some border problem with one of my graduate students bringing in this type of isotope of helium, and the Chilean authorities don’t like that, whatever. I have to talk. Oh God, do I really have to talk to HR about this? I have to, but I want to talk to you. I want to talk to the people that come on. So will it be my last book? Maybe not, but it’ll be the last of these kind of narrative-driven memoirs of what it’s like to be a scientist, not to you know, collect the gold medal and after you hit the century in cricket or whatever, right? But for me, yes, to be able to do something, I always say I’m only going to write a book if I’m the only human being on Earth.

Brian Keating:
No one else could write that book.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
I was never worried. I told people the title. No one’s going to copy that. No one could scoop me to it. No one could beat me to it. My next book is the same thing. It’s a personal story about how these things mesh together. And yes, it’s always going to involve God.

Brian Keating:
It’s always going to involve spirituality. It’s not going to argue, it’s not going to proselytize, I’m not going to browbeat you over the head. And I’ll be honest with my people that believe in religion and God. I’ve talked to everyone from John Lennox to Stephen Meyer and the greatest theologians on the planet. I’ve talked to Sam Harris. Richard Dawkins is— I’m hosting him for my second time at Carnegie Hall in New York in October. And he knows my views on religion.

Peter McCormack:
I’m going to be in New York in October.

Brian Keating:
Oh, well, I’ll have to get you a ticket then. Now that guy, you look like, why is he doing this? Does he need more attention? It’s 50 years since he published this Does he need to go on tour for the second time in 2 years? No. There’s something that energizes him about it because he can do it. And he’s had a stroke and he’s older than President Biden. I mean, he’s an incredible guy. I hope I can keep doing that when I’m his age. So yes, there is a lot of time we waste and there’s very little time. And that’s why time is so beguiling to me and how I want to understand and the reason that I dedicate the effort to it, because I may not be the only person on Earth who can put these things together.

Brian Keating:
I’m not saying I’m the best scientist, far from it. I’m actually not one of the best for sure. But I think I have an insatiable curiosity. I have an ability to lead and motivate people and recruit things, funding agencies, and influence people to kind of question what we understand because of the greater good of doing what only human beings can do. Again, I only want to write books that only I can write. I only want to do things that are interesting to human beings who have the capability to appreciate it. Yes, if we save the world from global warming, that’s great. You know, benefits animals and whatnot.

Brian Keating:
Or you make some vaccine or whatever, that’s great. I’m not— I can’t do that. Like, that’s not in my wheelhouse, my skill set. I can make podcasts. You know, it’s not beyond my ability to do it. I don’t think it’s the greatest thing that I could possibly do, which is why it’s, you know, kind of a side hobby for me. But it gives me great enjoyment. And I think that’s important.

Brian Keating:
Like, you need some time to yourself.

Peter McCormack:
Like, if you were just—

Brian Keating:
look, Look, you feel this way about your kids. You love your son. You and you’re working with that’s incredible. Like you know my son’s like taking college classes now and he’s a fifteen-year-old, right? And it’s just wonderful. And he’s interested in science and math. He doesn’t want to do exactly what I want to do, but that’s fine. And and I want him to find his own way. Do you wish that like I assume your parents you know loved you the same way you love your son, and so therefore they want to be with you all the time? Did you want to be with your parents all the time? I’m sorry, I don’t want to be with my mom all day.

Brian Keating:
My mom’s still kicking around and I love her. I don’t want to be with her all day. day long all the time. It’s not her— it’s not your path to do.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
So we waste time. We have time. I actually don’t think when I hear it like, oh, Ryan Holiday and, you know, other bro podcasters talking about, uh, like time is the only non-renewable resource. I actually think that’s bollocks, as you would say. I think that’s total nonsense. We have so much time. We waste so much time. We scroll.

Peter McCormack:
We’re not present.

Brian Keating:
Even when we’re there, we’re multitasking. We think we’re— no, no, it’s not time that’s limited. It’s attention. But I think it’s something else. There’s a, there’s a quality which, for lack of a better word, I call innocence, which, you know, when your kids have it and there’s some period of time when you stop being innocent, like before you got the tattoos. I know you had problems with addiction. You went through a lot of struggles. I know you’ve been incredibly courageous with your— you’ve had legal battles that you’ve won.

Brian Keating:
You won a mighty pound, I think. Right. That was incredible. I could buy like another stirrer for our coffee. But you have courage, right? But there was some period of time when you were innocent, you were pure, like when your son was pure. I think that’s the rarest quantity. I wanna maximize that. And like, but the innocence of the human race, like we’re at this precipice now.

Brian Keating:
We don’t understand things like aliens or, or, or the deepest laws of physics. I can contribute a little tiny bit to maybe both, maybe one.

Peter McCormack:
Do you think there’s like, um, a demand now for understanding and a demand for like the weird things that are being discussed on podcasts and things that is outstripping the actual real supply?

Brian Keating:
Oh, for sure. No, that’s a great way to put it. Um, yeah, because it is so It is so mysterious. It’s such a low-information environment. Like I said, we started this experiment 10 years ago, and we first got our first data like a year and a half, 2 years ago, and we’re going to be analyzing it for the next 8, 9 years, right? There’s a tremendous thirst for this. If you had told me on the first day, pay an extra million dollars, get a million dollars more from the UK or the US funding agencies, you’ll get it tomorrow, I would’ve done anything I can, because then they could get onto the next problem. But, but no, I don’t, I don’t. I, I think that there’s, um, there’s 2 things at work.

Brian Keating:
One is that yes, there’s, there’s supply-demand issue that you’ve correctly identified, but there’s also, um, a really misbalanced incentive structure that’s causing what I call a psyop— S-C-I operate, not P-S-Y, but, but scientific operate. In other words, these things are, you know, sometimes I wish we— it was like, you know, looking for yetis or Loch Nessie or whatever, like, like, because it’s so ridiculous. But mixed in with the ridiculous claim— and believe me, they’re replete with ridiculous characters, charlatans, grifters, frauds, liars, um, in the UAP side and the government side, uh, as well— but there’s, there’s also tremendous amounts of scientific interest, military interests, public safety interest, uh, security, national security, uh, global geopolitics. I mean, it’s incredible. There’s nothing else really like this where everything is mixed together— AI and and, you know, power and fusion and all sorts of other things that are mixed in all together with this. And like I said a couple of, you know, I don’t know, tens of minutes ago, it’s— it— there are many, many aspects of science that are so uncomfortable to scientists because they are effectively religious in nature. And my favorite, you know, kind of, um, uh, litmus test, as a chemist would say, for what is science or what is not science is like, what is religious and what is not religious. And that comes down to this notion of belief.

Brian Keating:
When someone says, I believe that UAPs are this and that, like, I think you talked with Pines about this. And he was saying, like, all these phenomena are real. And I was like, I don’t know if all of them are real. I mean, some of them are like, did they happen? Like, there’s some obvious things where there’s a flare, and it’s coming down underneath a parachute. And they identified like the manufacturer of it and the intensity of the flare. Like, is that real? Like, yes, it happened. Is that like anomalous? And this is one of the first things that were released by the Trump administration. And then you’ll have people believe, you know, that, okay, so that, that, like, it happened, you know, to answer Pines’s, you know, say, yes, it did happen.

Brian Keating:
But was that— does that have any relevance to either aliens, you know, propulsion? You— is it even a UAP? No, no, it’s identified, right? We know exactly what, what made that particular signal. Now I’m saying that’s just one example. There are many, many other unexplained examples. What’s so interesting to me is that Even according to like diehard UFO maximalists, right? They will say things like 95% of what we’re seeing has some ordinary explanation. Okay, good. I agree with that. 95%, but not 100%. Okay, well, there’s always some residue of anomalies that will never be explained, right? We will never be able to explain every single particle track that’s made at the LHC.

Brian Keating:
We will never be able to explain every phenomenon that happens in 1947 Over this remote military outpost in, in near north of Las Vegas in Groom Lake. We’re not going to be able to do it. Um, does the immediate Sherlock Holmes reaction to that go to something fanciful and, and very intriguing to me as a scientist? Interdimensional beings, non-human biologics, bipedal organisms. Um, you know, these crafts that are, uh, TARDIS-like, that they’re, they’re bigger inside than outside, um, that, that create local warp drives, zero-point energy. Oh, fantastic things. Very, very— there’s zero evidence. And it’s not even that people are claiming that they’re— like, my favorite piece of counterexample to kind of explain why I’m not— no longer— I’ll never get excited about disclosure.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
And I’ll always say, I think Sean titled my episode The Nothing Burger. is, is Congresswoman Luna in our country, Anna Paulina Luna. She’s a very powerful— I mean, she’s one of the most powerful people on Earth. She knows the whistleblowers, she’s talked to them. And she knows their stories. She knows what they’ve been told from other people. Many of them, almost none of them say that they’ve seen it, by the way. They say that other people have seen it and told them in confidence, and they can’t disclose it for fear of being doxxed.

Brian Keating:
And David Grusch had horrible things done to him. And I think it’s a tragedy that Someone brave in our military would have that done. However, there’s nothing that prevents Ana Paulina Luna from saying, here is the body, here is the biologic, here— like, she knows about it. She says it exists. She talks about interdimensional beings. Okay, so you can do it. I don’t have to see it. Brian Keating, you know, who am I? I’m some nobody, right? But you have to do it if you’re claiming that these things exist and you have unlimited power, immunity from whistleblower status.

Brian Keating:
Like, she’s not gonna get arrested and thrown into jail. She’s on these committees. She works with, you know, the highest levels of— she’s a chairwoman of the committee that’s studying these things. And, and recently they, they, they’ve agreed to, you know, you know, increase protection for whistleblowers and allow government contractors to blow the whistle, not just military. I mean, have you noticed any bodies show up on the White House lawn? I mean, again, I want— I don’t have to see it. I don’t— I’m not that like persnickety as a scientist. Oh, I have to see it in my laboratory. I I know the laws of physics, so I can know what breaks the laws of physics.

Brian Keating:
But I trust people. I can trust Anna, you know, Congresswoman Luna. Please do it.

Peter McCormack:
Do it.

Brian Keating:
I’m out there. If you’re watching, Anna, just do it. What are you worried about? I would like to know. If there’s something that you’re threatened by, then there’s a much deeper crisis. This is why it’s a low-information environment. People’s minds fill in the blanks, and oftentimes it goes in a negative way.

Peter McCormack:
So where do you think we’re wasting time at the moment? Where do you think we should be spending more time on?

Brian Keating:
I think people focusing on events from the ’50s The ’40s. Yes, it is true. And even like the 2020s, right? So people say the following: Fauci lied. He just admitted, according to Rand Paul— again, this is all allegedly, I’m a physicist, I’m not, I’m not a virologist, right? But that, that he knew the wet market, you know, idea that COVID kind of originated from a wet market, um, uh, was not actually true. It was an amplifier, he said in the email, if I’m reading it correctly. Again, billion disclaimers: not financial advice, not virology.

Peter McCormack:
We won’t throw you in jail.

Brian Keating:
It’s the UK. That’s what I’m worried about. So, and you could say, well, look, scientists lie all the time. The problem is he’s not a scientist. Okay? Fauci is not a scientist. When he’s operating in that mode, he was not acting as a scientist. He even talks about in this most recent data dump, you know, how he was angling for certain awards and he was asking people to nominate him for awards and maybe he’ll nominate them. And this is the same time he was besmirching my friend Jay Bhattacharya, saying he’s a fringe epidemiologist for saying we should only use the vaccine for the most vulnerable.

Brian Keating:
Oh, that’s so radical, right? But, but so science can get caught up in this. But when you do that, you automatically are removing yourself from what it means to be a scientist. Scientist doesn’t say things like, trust me, follow me, believe in me. There’s no belief. That’s religion. Fine. If you want to believe in things, that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with you believing in things.

Brian Keating:
I don’t believe in gravity. I have evidence for gravity, right? And so in this case, yeah, we’re wasting a lot of time. Because of the fact that legitimate— once legitimate entities, government entities, universities, and, um, and other organizations, and the military, and civilian contractors— there is a vast amount of undisclosed and unknown information that will never be disclosed to a proper level of satisfaction because the human mind wants complete certainty. You want complete certainty. You take this vaccine, you’re not only gonna get better, you won’t get the virus, and you won’t spread it onto any others. Remember what Joe Biden said in 2020? You take it, you’re not gonna spread it, you’re not gonna get it. It’s total nonsense. Everybody, I took it, I got it, right?

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
I took the vaccine, I got it, right? And so, you know, from this perspective, but that then undermines public faith in science. Public faith in science, public faith in government, these are critical things that we’ve just totally gone off the deep end for. And I don’t know, can we get them back? And so operating within that system, if Luna comes out and says, I’m going to— here’s the body, here’s the biologic, that goes a long way to restoring credibility in the government. But then there’s going to be scientists, and she’s attacked scientists that have led these programs that have said, no, none of these phenomena warrant kind of the level of claims that are being made by these so-called whistleblowers, actual whistleblowers. Right? So I think that we’re so beyond trust because Everybody not only has their own theories, ideas, conjectures, conspiracies maybe, but they have their own epistemology, which is very dangerous. If you say, I have my own ways of getting at the truth, and one of those ways is if Keating says something, I don’t believe it, or Fauci says something, that’s one of my ways. Okay, you could say that, right? Or if the government says it, I don’t believe it. I mean, these are things I hear all the time.

Brian Keating:
Now it’s saturated. With, with complete skepticism. And, you know, I have to say, it’s like, you know, this disclosure is coming and everything’s coming and it’s going on a decade now since the first kind of major stories broke. And I’ve talked to almost everybody in the field that’s, you know, kind of made claims. I haven’t talked to Grusch yet. I’d like to talk to him. But, but, you know, the fact is, I don’t know how much information I’ll get from him. Right.

Brian Keating:
And so we’re going to operate in this, in this scenario where the people that could tell us aren’t telling us, but there’s no— it seems to me there’s no incentive. Again, I know why Grusch isn’t telling me. He’s scared. He has reason to be scared. I, I don’t want anything to happen to him. I can’t say the same of an elected congresswoman whose job is to do this, to chair this, this committee. Now they’ll say, oh, it’s about to happen. If you knew what I knew, I’m gonna— you know how many times I’ve heard that in the last couple of years? And as a physicist, it’s the most cruel thing of all, right? Because what would I get to do? I could say, well, like, stop building this experiment.

Brian Keating:
And, and like, I know how the Big Bang began because, you know, all these aliens are going to tell from the physics of the 27th century that they had to get to come here and walk on 2 legs, which is incredibly astounding if true, right? And to be non-human and interdimensional travelers, we’re gonna learn so much. This is gonna look like, you know, playing with, with a spinning top as a kid. It’s gonna be pathetic, this $100 million instrument that my colleagues and I are building. Oh, forget it, stop it. No, no, that would then allow me to start asking questions of the aliens, right?

Peter McCormack:
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating:
So it wouldn’t stop me from asking, it would just amplify the level of questions that I get to pass.

Peter McCormack:
We seem to be living in this really strange time, Bryan. It’s, um, we have so much opportunity. There’s so much happening right now. There’s like the acceleration with technology and the things we can discover and learn. And I’m so excited by AI, and we’re going to talk about that now. Also at a time when there’s this deep distrust of everything which is an institution.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Peter McCormack:
And it seems like we’re really wasting an opportunity now to just improve humanity. It feels a little bit civilizational Like, I will— I mean, I’m from the UK, I’m naturally worried about our civilization, but like, how do you get away from that deep distrust of the state and how the even deep distrust of science and scientists at the moment to focus? How do you deal with that?

Brian Keating:
Well, I mean, you kind of just sparked something in my mind as you said it. Like, I’m from the UK. Like, you in the UK— I’m not saying you personally, but you, you played a role in it— but, but I mean, the United Kingdom did more for humanity, like planet Earth, than any other entity I can think of right now. And yet the Brits that I know, and I know quite a few—

Peter McCormack:
Have they left?

Brian Keating:
Most of them have left. A lot of them have left. Very few people are moving to it. It’s like California. Like, there’s a lot more people moving out of California lately. But, but then, I mean, I’m sure, yeah, maybe it’s, it’s not a bad place. San Diego happens to be the best place in the world to live. I’m convinced of that.

Brian Keating:
And California, for all its flaws, I’m never gonna leave it. I’m gonna fight. I’m gonna, you know, try to make it make it better and enjoy. But what you just said, I think harkens to, like, there’s almost a little bit of shame. And like, I’ve never heard— like, I heard Chris Williamson was talking on a podcast recently with a man from India, huge pod, like 20 million subscribers, just brilliant young guy. And they were just going on about how bad, you know, the UK was for India and harmful. I’m like, the UK? Yeah. Is anybody perfect? I mean, has any civilization ever been perfect? Like, we here in America have land acknowledgments.

Brian Keating:
Like, you right now are on Kumeyaay land, And we have to acknowledge that. Do you think that they like nucleated from nowhere, like a perfect society with, with, with no challenges and they didn’t subjugate or do battles? Like we’re living next to Mexico. Mexico, you can see from the top of the hill that we’re on now. You can see Mexico. Do you think the Mexican, the indigenous Mexicans, that they didn’t also have their own challenges, say civilizational, and they didn’t also create incredible technology? Like Aztecs are phenomenal, you know, just brilliant. And, and they also were horrific in other ways. Like if you judge everybody by the standards of today, And he’s, oh, Winston Churchill. Yeah, he stopped the, you know, he stopped the tyranny and fascism, Nazism.

Brian Keating:
Uh, but he also was bad to, I don’t know, Bangladeshis, India. Yeah, it’s true. It’s totally true. Guess what? You know, Isaac Newton was a real prick. Okay. But he also gave us, you know, a jumpstart in our knowledge of humanity and, and the laws of the universe. Now, this doesn’t excuse anything they did that was wrong. I mean, George Washington is a hero of mine.

Brian Keating:
He had slaves, right? Do you look at someone and judge them purely by the standards of today, the shifting moral zeitgeist or the kind of ever-changing moral landscape? I don’t know. I’m not saying either way, but the fact that you have to say that leads me to just answer your question. What do we have to do? We have to stop apologizing for humanity’s greatness. Because I think if we do, these AIs are already kind of getting built into it. I asked some questions of AI, just moderate things, And you’ll get answers that are just completely preposterous. I can’t, uh, it violates our trust in safety. And like, does it violate the laws of physics? Like, I want to know the answer to this particular physics problem. Like, like, you can’t trust me with it? Oh, who can you trust? Like, and this is where I do worry about people like Sam Altman.

Brian Keating:
I mean, I’m fascinated by him, but, but I’m worried about him too because he says things that are like just outright, you know, kind of extremely, extremely problematic.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Uh, recently he said, don’t ask questions about like how much energy it costs to train the models and, and, and, you know, data centers, because like if you look at how much energy it costs to, to train your, your, your 18-year-old, it’s far higher. I’m like, that’s completely backwards. Like, AI is a tool. It is not a human. Its job is to serve humanity. I actually don’t think we’re gonna get to AGI and what they call superintelligence. I think that are fundamental barriers with the current way that we’re approaching it with LLMs and GPUs and NVIDIA and OpenAI. I think that there’s fundamental no-go challenges that won’t allow us to supersede that.

Brian Keating:
Can you explain that though? Okay, so what is ChatGPT based on? It’s a large language model. It’s based on a certain type of mathematical embedding. It’s called matrix manipulation. It’s linear algebra. it’s not like super advanced group theory, topology, quantum mechanics, and knot theory. No, it has nothing to do with that. It’s basically sophisticated ways of multiplying matrices. Matrices are tables or grids of numbers, like a spreadsheet, and they have to be operated on in a very special way.

Brian Keating:
And the faster you can do these operations to find local maxima and global minima and things like that, the better the AI will perform. So in this case, the AI is based on this large language model, and because the matrices are kind of like these 2-dimensional tables, they’re like grids. They work best on computers that are also like that. And it turns out that the first types of computers that were optimized to do these types of rapid tabular matrix multiplication operations were graphics processing units, GPUs.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
And the number one company that makes them is Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, I think, still. And they were very well optimized for this. But the very first thing to be optimized is not always the best thing, to be honest. It was optimized such that when you played— do you ever play Doom?

Peter McCormack:
Yes.

Brian Keating:
Or any of those games, or Minecraft, or World of Warcraft, or whatever, any of those games. Those are made that if you had a better GPU from Nvidia, you would beat your friend to the first player shooter a millisecond before him, and you would kill him, and you would win the game, right? So they’re optimized for that. They’re not optimized for superintelligence. They’re optimized for making better, faster, quicker, cheaper, more massive matrix multiplications. Now, is that the way our brain works? No, our brain is nothing like that. Yes, we do use language and they’re very good at figuring out language because you can embed a language network in a system once you’ve trained it on all of human knowledge and the entire internet and trillions of parameters that have already been accomplished, that have already been produced by humans. Right? So my favorite example is like chess. Like humans have not been able to beat chess computers since 1993, like Deep Blue, which then morphed in IBM, and then later on AlphaGo and all those beat Go and so forth.

Brian Keating:
So, but we still play chess. Chess is more popular than ever now. You can actually play online. It’s incredible. Like chess celebrities, ranking systems, tournaments, everything. Why is that? Because chess itself was not made by the LLM. The LM solved it. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube.

Brian Keating:
People buy Rubik’s Cubes all the time, even though a computer, they made a robot that can solve in 0.1 seconds any combination. But the computer didn’t invent the Rubik’s Cube. The computer didn’t invent chess. The computer doesn’t know what it means to be human. It only knows what humans have already done. To make progress now, we’re kind of saturating the curve. This is this thing called Jevons’ paradox. The farther, the more successful something is, the more widely used it is, because costs start to come down, but then usage of it starts to go up.

Brian Keating:
So you start to saturate the amount of, um, of intelligence, not just tokens per second, or tokens or intelligence per dollar, or intelligence per joule, whatever you want to use. And we’re sort of saturating there. And the only way to break through there is to train it with something new. Like, so you need new information to be trained on. When they train on themselves, it’s like your country suffered mad cow disease. Why was that? Because the cows were eating other cows, right?

Peter McCormack:
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating:
They were digesting these prions in the brain of other cows and they would get it and they would go crazy. And it was a horrible problem in Britain, right? So these LLMs can’t train themselves. They need human data to train it. So what are they waiting for? Well, they’re waiting for, you know, Harry Potter 12 to come out. They’re waiting for, you know, The Odyssey to come out. All these things that humans have created that then go into the next level of training data to get better and better. Now they’ll be— they’ve already surpassed people in a lot of math things, not all things. things.

Brian Keating:
But in terms of creativity, in terms of like, where’s the theory of the Big Bang? Where’s the theory of everything? Where is the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics? I do not hear the argument that the best architecture for this is a GPU plus an LLM.

Peter McCormack:
Because they’re only able to build what they’ve done based on previous.

Brian Keating:
That’s not the way that Einstein— say Einstein came up with the theory of general relativity. He didn’t say, hmm, let me just do these math problems like linear algebra grow really fast. In fact, if he had tried to do it, we tried to replicate, we took an LLM, we lobotomized it. We said, you don’t know anything after 1900. Now tell me, LLM, you have the same computing power, the same NVIDIA chips, the same density, number of parameters, same training weights, but not the same training data. We cut it off in 1900. Can you then derive quantum mechanics, general relativity, the cosmic microwave background? Can you derive these things? No, it It tried to break it up into discrete little intervals and cubes and squares. It basically did this brute force.

Brian Keating:
It was very clever, but it couldn’t reproduce curved spacetime, Riemannian manifolds. It couldn’t derive what these essential thing that Einstein had, which is this feeling in the pit of his stomach that we’ve all felt when we go on a roller coaster or we go over a bump or turbulence in a plane. You have this sensation, oh, my pit of my stomach, when you go over these bumps or turbulence or whatever. where that feeling is zero gravity. Einstein realized that when an observer’s in a zero gravity environment, it feels no force, and therefore it takes a path through that space or through that time, which is equivalent to the most effective means of traversing that space called a geodesic. It minimizes these certain properties of energy and whatnot, and that’s what things do naturally. And he called that feeling in the pit of his stomach like the realization that he made, he said, that was the happiest moment of my life. Now, what is your NVIDIA Bracewell, you know, 1200? What’s the happiest day of your, you know, your LLM’s life? It’s a nonsensical question.

Brian Keating:
That inspired him. That made him feel alive. Like you said, he could have stopped Einstein in 1904 and said, you know, why are you doing this? Like, you know, what’s the point of this? You’re gonna be dead soon. You’re gonna die in 1955. You know, 50 years from now, you’re gonna be dead. Why are you doing this now? Go spend time with your kids that you never And he would have said, no, I can’t stop doing it, because he was the only person that could do it. And the insight that gave him was an intrinsically humanistic thing, that he felt in his stomach what it’s like to be in zero gravity long before astronauts, 2 years after the Wright brothers even. And he was able to connect that to a law of physics that survives to this day called the Einstein equivalence principle.

Brian Keating:
And that’s the underpinnings of his theory of gravity. Without that, without that essential human now, how are you going to do that? You’re going to take an NVIDIA computer and drop it off a tower and say, oh, that’s what it feels like? Or painful experience, you’re going to blow out a capacitor in it and make it feel pain? No, these things don’t make sense for a non-embodied system. They can say a robot will do things, but also these things, I mean, have you had this experience, Peter? You’re like playing around with Claude or whatever and it says like update to version 1.4673575 and then I see update and then like, oh, you have to update again. Every day there’s like 1,200 different updates, security things, things, they come up with something else. Uh, my friend Annie Jacobson, who has a new book out called Biological War, she found that one of these ChatGPT things had a location for the stockpile of vaccines in her city. And like, she told Sam Altman about it, and they had a like deep— like, they’re always going to be patching all these bugs and, and, and, you know, trying to prevent the genie from escaping the bottle. It’s very good at doing language, but life is not language. Life is not— life is described by language, like I said before, You know, you can, you can describe something, but that’s not what it is.

Brian Keating:
E equals MC squared is a description. It’s not the phenomenon. It’s very important to make that distinction. I don’t think most people do.

Peter McCormack:
So do you think we’re having all the wrong conversations about AI? Do you think AGI is just—

Brian Keating:
Here’s my— I have 2 concerns. One is that, um, we don’t really understand how it works. That is strange. Another, um, as a friend—

Peter McCormack:
And that’s getting further away, right? Because it’s the Like, I was, um, I was with somebody recently, they’re saying you can’t look inside the box and understand how it works. We just know it works, right?

Brian Keating:
It’s, it’s, it’s so fucking enormous. Well, I think it’s, it surpassed that many years ago. And so like the Turing test, Alan Turing, um, that wasn’t actually like his greatest invention. He, he created something that’s far more important but much less appreciated, and it’s called the halting problem. So he, he— there’s a theory of computer science that you can You couldn’t make a program that would continue forever unless you had certain provisions within it. And he came up with this solution that said you can’t make a program that will cause something always to stop. Like, you can’t say stop when you get to, you know, like 10, you know, print Peter’s awesome, 20, go to 10 and go forever. Like, that loop will go forever.

Brian Keating:
But you— there were certain conditions that you had to install. to prove that something could be halted. Now you could say an exception after 100 iterations, stop, right? Or the computer runs out of energy and gets unplugged or whatever, it will stop. But he proved that in general, you couldn’t like prove whether or not something would halt or not without having like additional knowledge that wasn’t available. Okay, I’m mangling it a little bit. But a modern version of that is you cannot, because you cannot predict what these things are going to do, you cannot control what they’re going to do. So So we basically made all these uncontrollable AIs. And so a lot of people like Roman Yampolsky in Kentucky and Nate Soares in Berkeley and others have looked at this and said, basically, we need it to stop already.

Brian Keating:
The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is now. No, no, no, we need to stop now, according to them. Again, I have kind of doubts about how— because we passed the Turing test, because the imitation game has been passed, and You can chat with any of the LLMs now. You cannot tell that they’re not a human being, right? They’re too good. Maybe that gives it away, but you can even put in things like, I used to use em dashes in my writing, like my books 10 years ago. I use em dashes. I use—

Peter McCormack:
You had to stop.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I had to stop. But now I’m like, no, that’s the flex now. Just, I’m writing with my own mind and I use em dashes. So that proves it’s me. I don’t care if you believe it or not. So you can look up this book from 2018. But the point is, I’m not convinced that these things are able to achieve something that, yes, we might not be able to predict them, but do you know exactly what your teenager is doing right now? Is there complete unpredictability? Could he be jumping around on the moon right now? No. So there’s, yes, you don’t know exactly what your son is doing or my kids are doing.

Brian Keating:
I have teenagers, right? And so yes, I can’t control them. I can attempt to, but— But there are also these limitations built in that subsume that these things will have what is called general intelligence or superintelligence. I think we can get to general intelligence. They can do everything that a computer terminal could do, just like the Turing test. But superintelligence, they can do things that we cannot predict, control, modify, and they have unlimited knowledge. To me, it’s sort of a little bit of the Cassandra symptom. Nowadays, if you say that, if you say we’re going to be okay, you’re either a shill for OpenAI, the ones that are saying it are okay are those people. I actually think the worst scenario could be the following.

Brian Keating:
We end up with extremely powerful general intelligence that can put to shame everything that we’re doing now. It can do anything that a human being can do in, it’s called knowledge work, could make this podcast. Like, but, but who will listen to it?

Peter McCormack:
Fine.

Brian Keating:
But will it, you know, ultimately will become so addicted to it that then when it does go away because these valuations collapse and crater, like OpenAI is losing $10 billion a month or something like that, I think I read. Um, so are they sustainable? Like SpaceX, you know, had the stock offering a month ago, went up almost doubled. Now it’s like way below. Yeah, it’s half from there. Like who’s to say what its true valuation is? And, and if it crashes and the market crashes, and then there’ll just be less money available to, you know, there was a, recently there was a round for the employees of OpenAI to sell some of their private shares. And people were touting, oh, this is a great opportunity to get in at this $800 billion valuation. I’m like, how is this thing gonna double from here? Like if it’s losing this much money, yes, it’s growing at some rate, but it’s losing this much. So what happens if we get addicted to it? The LLMs are sort of training us to be dependent on them, right? Like, could you get along without your smartphone? Yeah, it’d be uncomfortable on the 12-hour flight home, but you could probably do it, right? But when it’s like controlling everything, your health, your relationships, your business, everything is dumped in, it’s so good at doing those things, we’ve become completely dependent upon it, therefore we’ll be crippled by its absence, which could very easily happen, as happened with the dot-com bubble in 1999, 2000.

Brian Keating:
There could be an AI bubble. After that, the strongest ones will emerge, but who’d say those are the best? You know, like, is Facebook like really the best thing for humanity? Instagram, is it really the best? I don’t know. It’s— you can make arguments against it. So I’m worried about that scenario more than I’m worried about these machines are gonna turn us all into paperclips.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah, well, you know, I’ve interviewed Nate recently and I’ve interviewed Roman. And look, it’s a fascinating podcast to make, especially if you’re the first one to make the robot— the AI is gonna kill us all. No, but I’m—

Brian Keating:
Bartlett gets there first.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah. I, I put it— I’m worried about, uh, powerful AI in the hands of dangerous people, you know, enabling people to do—

Brian Keating:
It certainly is true, but I became less, uh, concerned about that in my conversation with Annie Jacobson because she basically said like all these things are completely sandboxed and nerfed when it comes to biology. So you can do biology. In fact, Claude has a new product called Claude Science. I was like, oh, Claude Science. I’m going to have the power of Anthropic. It’s going to help me solve the theory of everything. It’s going to help me do these calculations about inflation, the Big Bang, and alien. Maybe they’ll have some discovery in there and be great.

Brian Keating:
No. Now configure your cloud science. You can have PubMed, you can have AlphaFold, you can have Pharma.net, you can have all these things for biology, biochemistry, pharmacology. Zero. There was not one tool optimized for cosmology, for astrophysics, for For exoplanets, for alien disclosure, nothing. It was all biology because these things are very good. You know, like if you want something to understand the neural network in your brain, a neural network’s pretty damn good at that. It’s a very good simulation.

Brian Keating:
It’s like the best simulation for planet Earth is planet Earth. Like if you wanna know what the weather’s gonna be like, the best computer to predict it is the planet itself. It’s just, you can’t run forward simulations, right? But you can run backward simulations cuz these are complex systems. The, these neural nets are insanely complicated. And like you said, we don’t really fully understand how they work. It kind of emerged from nowhere. You dumped in a lot of attention, a lot of nodes and internet networks. It’s just like social media.

Brian Keating:
We didn’t really understand. There was sort of social media, MySpace and whatever, and Hot or Not and all these things I remember from the 2000s. They all went away, but they weren’t that much. They weren’t like the difference between Newton’s mechanics and Dirac’s quantum mechanics. I mean, they were similar. And, but there’s something about the network. When you get things together, things grow. Gresham’s Law, they grow exponentially, sometimes double exponentially.

Brian Keating:
And that’s when things, yes, they become unpredictable, but to say that they’re definitely extinction-level events, you have to make a stronger argument. And for me to see that in the physics environment that I play in, I don’t see anything that’s threatening like what I’m going to do as an experimental physicist.

Peter McCormack:
Can you support it Do I support— no, does it support what you’re doing?

Brian Keating:
Oh yeah, I use it all the time. But, but what I use it for— so I’m, I’m maybe a non-standard user of it. I started to play around with it recently to ask the following question, which brings me to one of the gifts.

Peter McCormack:
Oh, there we go.

Brian Keating:
So these are, these are meteorites. Now unfortunately, I’m gonna give you all these, okay, Peter? But you have to give me a— you have to promise me that you’re gonna— I have a lot of fans in the UK I can’t mail these from the US to the UK because they’re controlled substances. They’re not controlled, so they’re just like— it’s— they want to know what they are. They’re meteorites. These are meteorites from— collected in Argentina. And, and these meteorites are older than the Earth. These are about 4.3 billion years old.

Peter McCormack:
What?

Brian Keating:
The Earth’s about 4.1 billion years old. And they’re made of very, very interesting components. They’re, they’re made of iron, nickel, cobalt, And you’ll get this information when you go to my website, briankeating.com. And I’ll make a— when this episode comes out, you’ll let me know. I’ll make a special link, Peter/Peter. Okay. And you go to briankeating.com/peter. And if you’re in the UK only, Peter will send you one of these.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
They only cost, you know, they cost nothing to mail, but they’re very interesting and you’ll get all the information about them. And then if you’re in the US, you can always get them, briankeating.com/peter. I like to use X. So these are actual fragments of the early solar system before the Earth was formed.

Peter McCormack:
4.5 billion years old.

Brian Keating:
And I have other fragments of different bodies in the solar system, including one of the planet Mars. So I have a meteorite that was once on Mars. It was a rock on Mars. It got slammed into by an asteroid. It ejected from the surface of Mars and then orbited around Mars and the Earth for about 20 million years, we think. think, based on planetary formation and so forth. And then it crashed into Northwest Africa. These are very expensive, so I can’t give them to you, Peter.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
But, but, but in, in essence, they’re very similar to these meteorites here. So they have this property that they, that they trace the early, the early solar system’s formation, but they also trace the conditions of Mars. So we can look at the conditions, the chemistry, the geography. There’s certain things in there. If there are microbes in there, you can see microbes. But my theory is, well, Well, we don’t— we, we know, at least as far as we’ve looked, there’s no life on Mars. But Mars also has meteorites from the Earth. In fact, this is mine, but there’s probably like a dinosaur fossil on Mars, like fragments of a dinosaur on Mars.

Peter McCormack:
Okay.

Brian Keating:
Because Mars is as old as the Earth, basically. And so there must have been a meteor that hit the Earth with some, you know, it could be— it’s not like a full T-Rex or whatever, but, but it’s, you know, some, I don’t know, some plankton or whatever, a little tiny fish fragment. And it hit where that was on Earth, because there’s a huge biosphere, blasted off the Earth, then orbited around the Earth and Mars, and then eventually landed on Mars and the Moon. The Moon has a fossil like this too, I’m sure.

Peter McCormack:
So where would these have come from?

Brian Keating:
These came from space. They came from deep space. So there was a star that existed in our galaxy around the neighborhood of where the Earth would eventually form. It was one of the first stars ever to form. It was made primarily, almost exclusively, of hydrogen and helium. Those are the only 2 elements made after the Big Bang in sufficient sufficient quantity that could form a star.

Peter McCormack:
And star—

Brian Keating:
enough hydrogen— when you take enough hydrogen and helium and you give it enough time, it makes a star.

Peter McCormack:
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating:
That star is incredibly massive and incredibly hot, and it lives like a rock star, incredibly short. So it blew up after about 50 or 60 million years. But after it was formed, there were 2 great British astronomers, Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, who worked at UCSD for most of their careers. And they and their colleagues, uh, Willy Fowler and Fred Hoyle, the Big Bang guy we talked about earlier, They showed that hydrogen and helium alone can eventually make every element on the periodic table, essentially, including iron. And when it makes iron, the star stops making enough heat to keep it from collapsing. So it started to gravitationally implode, and when it implodes, it explodes eventually, and it becomes a supernova, and it sprays out into the galaxy the last thing that it was producing, which is this iron.

Peter McCormack:
Hmm.

Brian Keating:
So more than this iron just being from the star, here’s a big one. That’s for a very lucky one of your listeners. I’m gonna keep that one. Yeah, give it to yourself.

Peter McCormack:
This is the coolest thing.

Brian Keating:
And when it was created, it spews that out into the galaxy, and eventually it became part of our Earth. Our Earth’s core is made of the same iron. But that’s not all. Your blood has iron in the hemoglobin molecule. That hemoglobin molecule is the same isotope of iron in this meteorite here. So we’re all connected. As Seneca said, we’re all connected like the blood in our veins. This connects us to the cosmos, and it’s fully part of the Big Bang plus Earth formation history.

Peter McCormack:
This is so cool.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Peter McCormack:
So, wow. So I will distribute those. Yeah, I will distribute it. I may keep a couple myself. Do you know what I’ll do?

Brian Keating:
Please do.

Peter McCormack:
I will keep this. Keep a couple. I will keep it in the studio. Yeah, distribute from the studio.

Brian Keating:
Here’s the last thing I want to give you. One more gift for you. Give me one of the meteorites. Give me a small one. Okay, so this is Arthur C. Clarke. Yeah, another one of your great countrymen. Again, not a perfect individual, But he came up with the following statement.

Brian Keating:
He came up with many statements, but one of them was, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Peter McCormack:
Yes.

Brian Keating:
He wrote the book that became the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. And he also said that the only way of knowing the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible, which is the title of my book series and my podcast. So in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is the best science fiction movie, but it also has all these contraptions and crazy things in it and just implausible things, and it makes it a little hard for a physicist to watch. But anyway, I suspend disbelief. The monoliths that appear, we don’t know what they are, but they’re these permanent sentinels that seem to exist for all time. Maybe they’re talismans, maybe they’re time capsules, but this one is magnetic. So we made you this medal. This is the Keating Prize, not the Nobel Prize, the Keating Prize for Impossible Imagination.

Brian Keating:
I want to give it to you. And if you look at this monolith on the back, It’s magnetic.

Peter McCormack:
There we go.

Brian Keating:
So this is for all your great work encouraging curiosity, imagination, and really those are the things that make us human, Peter.

Peter McCormack:
This is gonna have to go up in my studio.

Brian Keating:
I’ll be checking when I see you next.

Peter McCormack:
Brian, I’m so glad I had the opportunity to talk to you, and I’m a little bit blown away that you actually listen to my podcast, which is very cool.

Brian Keating:
Congratulations on your success. You’re actually doing incredible. Don’t give up.

Peter McCormack:
No, I’m not gonna give up.

Brian Keating:
up.

Peter McCormack:
But, uh, and I hope we get to do this again in London. We’ll do it in London. I will become a meteorite distributor. Uh, please, anyone? It looks like we have about 100 or so bits in here, so I will keep one for me. I may give one to my kids. Yeah, you should. And then I’m gonna hand this up. And thank you so much.

Peter McCormack:
This is incredible. This is, this is the coolest. When I tell my kids or my wife that this— they’re gonna go, no way.

Brian Keating:
Just tell the, you know, customs that it’s just vitamins.

Peter McCormack:
Yeah, okay, I may get stopped. Thank you so much, man. Thank you. Love this.

Brian Keating:
Thank you everyone for listening.

Peter McCormack:
We’ll be back in the UK soon. Peace out. Thank you. Love you all. Thank you.