Transcript

Brian Keating:
Queens, foreign and domestic, with my. I think my most frequent guest. I’m not even sure. Could be. You could be my most frequent guest. And that’s an honor, I’m sure. All right, let me see if this is working here. We’ll cut this out of the final video, of course.

Brian Keating:
Let’s see if this works. My videos, you channel. Let’s see here. Could be you could be my mom. We’re working. All right. Avi Loeb, welcome back to the into the Impossible podcast.

Avi Loeb:
It’s great to join you, Brian, and as I said before, I really appreciate the dialogue with natural intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.

Brian Keating:
That’s right. You were talking about my brain and how you’re glad to talk to a real brain instead of a silicon one. We’re gonna have a lot of fun today talking about all these exciting things that you’ve been up to, including a new White House position, because I know you don’t have enough jobs, Avi, you must have. You must have been lonely.

Avi Loeb:
This one is particularly important and what I often tell my team members, we should keep our eyes on the orbs, not on the audience. Meaning just like in basketball, you know, I’m sure that the New York Knicks managed to win because they were focusing on the ball, not on the audience. And in the context of what I’m doing, there is a great opportunity. Now that President Trump came with the directive of declassifying videos, imagery, documents as much as possible within the constraints of national security, there is an opportunity for us to look into the question of whether there are unusual objects near Earth that are not human made. And, you know, you might think that I’m approaching it from a perspective of an astrophysicist, but that’s not true, actually. You know, I draw my lesson from going to the kitchen. If I find an ant, a single ant on the kitchen cabinet, then I know that there should be thousands of them under the sink. And I’m very worried about it.

Avi Loeb:
So. So when we shut down the Chinese spy balloon, you know, a few years ago, probably the Chinese intelligence agencies were laughing because we use the missile to shoot down one balloon, but they have many more that we are not aware of. And so the question, you know, the down to earth assumption would be to say all these orbs and unusual objects being identify, being noticed by military personnel near strategic assets of the US Are actually human made. And as a result, if the intelligence agencies are telling us that they cannot figure those out, if the Pentagon cannot really identify the, the senders of these gadgets, and by the way they could be launched from within the US by people who cooperate with adversarial nations. It doesn’t need to arrive from outside the border.

Brian Keating:
That’s right, yeah.

Avi Loeb:
And so I think it’s a serious matter. We’re not dealing with necessarily the exactly the same objects that we dealt with 50 years ago. And so we have.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to ask you because we have a limited amount of time, why go to a Harvard professor as esteemed as you are, as. As renowned as you are? I mean, my main concern is a lot of things are coming out now. Disclosure Day just came out. Popular movie, you just reviewed it. And I think it’s. I’m going to direct everyone to the Medium article about it. But amidst that, there was also a disclosure, you know, kind of revelation by your friend David Grush and your friend Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna.

Brian Keating:
And I want to get right to the point because I’ve been frustrated with both of them. I have, as you know, I’ve wanted to talk to both of them and I’m hoping you’ll make an introduction. A shit, as we say. But Avi, why can’t I understand why David can’t come forward? He could go to jail. And I don’t want him to lose his livelihood or God forbid, Hassel Shalom get injured in any way. I have great respect for him. He’s a great patriot. However, he’s talking about things he’s never seen with his own eyes.

Brian Keating:
He’s talking about things he’s been told and he’s saying he can’t come forward with what he’s been told in more detail than sentient plasmoids and non human biologics. Now, that may be true. I don’t know anything about disclosure in terms of the government crack down on an individual. I don’t want any harm to come to him. But Anna Luna, your friend who went to your observatory, who took a tour with you, who’s on tour with you, she could do this in a heartbeat. And the fact that she’s not releasing everything that she knows and she’s hiding behind this suggests to me as just an independent skeptic, but someone who wants to believe that we’re not alone and wants to know that we’re not alone. I don’t want to believe anything. I want to know.

Brian Keating:
So, Avi, why can’t she come forward and just tell us everything that she knows? She’s not going to be put in jail. Come on.

Avi Loeb:
Well, Representative Luna actually argues that we are not and she is not being privy to all the information that is relevant to this matter and what they are shown under, you know, secrecy in skiff setups, which are basically Faraday cages where no electromagnetic information can penetrate secure, compartmentalized information secure. I mean, what they saw is intriguing, but I don’t think it’s, it’s the actual things that Grush was talking about. So there is here, there is a gap between the access that congresspeople have and what Grush is talking about. There is a gap, and the question is, is it real? The fundamental question is, does the government have materials or even videos of clearly non human made objects and perhaps even biologics. Okay. Which is the claim that is being repeated by a lot of people. But for me, it’s unclear whether the government has it because obviously there should be a retrieval and reverse engineering program within government for things that are found in crash sites of, you know, battlefields or elsewhere where adversarial nations are using technologies that we want to be aware of. So we collect those materials.

Avi Loeb:
We see pilots there as well. So if you wanted to sort of not to make adversarial nations aware of what we know, you might label those documents with aliens. And then if someone looks at these documents, they might think, oh, the US has in its possession extraterrestrial artifacts. And it’s not obvious to me that it’s not just a labeling system, that someone gave it a name and then the rumor was, was spread by a bunch.

Brian Keating:
He talks about interdimensional beings, she talks about interdimensional beings with the confidence that your colleague Kamran Bafa talks about 11 dimensional strings. And I don’t know what that means. And I’m, you know, they always say they defy the laws of physics, but you and I are physicists, Avi. They don’t defy things that we can understand. So when are we going to get the actual hands on data?

Avi Loeb:
I, I, I think it’s so part of the reason that I’m very happy to help government is the first reason. Of course, as a citizen of the US I feel that my duty is to help them develop better sensors so that we can protect the nation. Okay. So it’s really important not to have holes in our defense system, especially in strategic sites. And perhaps some of my insights as a physicist would help them, and I’m happy to do that. I would not feel that my time is wasted if we don’t find anything other than human made technologies. But at the same time, there is a possibility that there is something beyond that, and of course, even if it’s one object out of a million, it will constitute the biggest discovery ever made by. In science.

Avi Loeb:
Now, the government is not a scientific organization, so they may be baffled, they may be uncertain. They may not know what they are dealing with. And in that context, I’m happy to help. If it exists. I don’t. I have not seen it. So, you know, I respond to evidence. I.

Avi Loeb:
I didn’t have a lot of fun in Steven Spielberg’s movie because, you know, the artistic freedom that script writers in Hollywood take is not to my taste. They violate the laws of physics. What people have to understand is, you know, the laws of physics apply everywhere in the universe as far as we know. You know, and, and they apply to every atom. It’s not as if there could be free will of atoms, that one atom will deviate from quantum mechanics because. Because then whoever finds that atom will get a Nobel Prize. So the point is, the laws of physics are based on a huge amount of data that we collected so far. You can’t just say, oh, I will violate it.

Avi Loeb:
The speed of light I would violate. I mean, the speed of light being the limit of travel. I would introduce additional dimensions if, you know, you can imagine those things. But unless you have evidence to support these ideas, they should not be regarded as real possibilities because there are many more possibilities than the reality that we all share. So what we need is better evidence. You can’t look at fuzzy images and say, oh, this is an object that lives in extra dimensions. That’s not a good enough reason. You know, you can imagine extra dimension mathematically, but it’s not supported by data.

Avi Loeb:
So I respond to evidence like a detective. You know, a detective goes to a crime scene and, and there are various possibilities as to who is responsible for the outcome. And a good detective would not listen to what the people say, but would look for evidence that would clench the case. And that’s exactly the work of a scientist. So in that sense, if we don’t have good enough data, if the images are too fuzzy, if we don’t know the distances to objects, what we need to do is not go philosophize about it, argue about it. You know, have forums online, on Twitter and on X, and all this social media about it. What we should do is develop better sensors, get better data, and then assess the situation. And I’m happy to help the government go in that direction rather than regress back in time, because we cannot go back in time and check all these places where the reports indicated something.

Brian Keating:
Well, I’m showing this from the Hollywood Reporter that David Grush is consulting on a new movie that’s going to be about. Did. Have you been asked to be on these films as well as David, or what do you make of it? I mean, do you think it’s. I mean, it’s a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

Avi Loeb:
A couple of months ago, I was on a movie set in New York City. It’s called the Saul Hershkovitz and the Guide to Extraterrestrial Life. And they asked me to appear there for one day on a camera or playing myself because the main character has an encounter with aliens and wants to speak with Professor Abilob. And they bring me to the set and he asks me questions so that I played myself, basically, but that was my only overlap. And in that case, I basically said what I say to you. I spoke like myself. And so. But I assume that David Grusch is in the spirit of Steven Spielberg, talking about, you know, alien bodies and other things that we have not seen yet.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, we have not seen. And that. Yeah. Do you find that that contaminates the waters? I mean, I heard another interview. Again, I have great respect for these military. I was just on Sean Ryan show. You helped me out preparing for that. Thank you very much.

Brian Keating:
Should be out soon. But I told him, you know, I get uneasy criticizing the military because I have so much respect for. My stepfather was a fighter pilot and a refueler attacker in Vietnam War and combat, many 50 combat missions. I have great respect for the military. I wasn’t fit enough to get into them. I would love to be, and I support them. And I’ve had many of the military pilots that have witnessed, you know, encounters, shall we say, like Ryan Graves and others who haven’t witnessed them themselves. I should say that they’ve reported from their own squadron mates what they’ve heard.

Brian Keating:
David Fravor is now reportedly yesterday was talking about Roswell and that the government should just come clean with Roswell. Do you. What do you make of the military? I mean, you and I did. I mean, you. You served, but I didn’t serve. So. So what. What do you make of.

Brian Keating:
Are we as civilians allowed to Criticize people of 100 times bigger cojones than we ever have? I mean, again, I’m speaking for myself. You serve. I know, but tell me, Avi.

Avi Loeb:
Yeah, my impression is these reports are very sincere. I mean, I very much trust the integrity and the honesty of these military people. And obviously they serve the nation and they’re very honorable. The fundamental question as far as I’m concerned, is whether the objects they saw, and these must be real objects, right? Whether they had a good assessment of the distance to these objects, the motion of these objects, and in those cases also whether these objects are produced by adversarial nations that they are not aware of. And that’s a matter of national security. So I think we should clean the uncertainty by simply getting better data, by checking what is flying around strategic assets of the US and once we have better data, most likely it will indicate that we are dealing with some human made technologies. And that by itself would be extremely important, just like the discovery of the Chinese spy balloon. And if it turns out there is something else, that’s just the icing on the cake as far as the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies are concerned.

Avi Loeb:
So I feel that it’s worth doing, that this should be a matter that is, you know, within the mainstream of science and within the mainstream of the intelligence agencies. And it should not be ridiculed the way it was in past decades because now we have much better sensors.

Brian Keating:
But I point out they also ridicule themselves. I told this to Sean and I told this to Lex Friedman when I was on his show. The pilots who were most, or the people that were most likely to haze, to tease, to make fun of, to mock work. Fravor squadron mates and Dietrich squadron mates. In other words, when they get back to the ship, they got mercilessly teased. I asked Sean Ryan, did you ever tease your friend who was worried about IEDs, you know, and them being planted or drones? 20 years ago, drones were very new, they look like alien technology. He said, no, we would never do that because I know people whose legs have been blown off. But by actual, I, I should say

Avi Loeb:
that in the latest release on Friday, which was the most intriguing, there were several pieces of information that were quite noteworthy. One is a letter written by the brilliant Dr. John Kozlowski. He is the director of the old Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. And this letter was written on the 5th of June. So just a week and a half ago. Yeah, and this letter talks about an event lasting two days in October 2023, very recently, where a combination of orbs and kites and objects that were not fully identified that were noticed. And the orbs, for example, they had the ability to generate smaller orbs, which is really strange.

Avi Loeb:
Mother orbital creates a baby or smaller or.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I saw that, but people said it was a flare. Obviously this is the problem. We have people that, yeah, they, they,

Avi Loeb:
they say, I won’t discount it as Flares, because they actually look specifically at flares and other possible explanations. They claim that 40% of the phenomena that were discussed by very reliable law enforcement officials, 40% are not easily explained in terms of you, in terms of what the US currently possesses and adversarial nations, as far as we know, have. So I would not discount it. I would just say, let’s get better data. And that’s serious.

Brian Keating:
What do you make about. Sorry, yeah, one second.

Avi Loeb:
The other thing related closely to what you previously said is that is a report from the CIA in 1992 which says that in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, half of the reports on UFOs were associated with U2 airplanes. This was a new technology, exactly as you are saying now. If in the late 50s it was already operational and the US government denied that it has any such equipment and so it was ridiculing the reports, whereas we know that they were related to UFO to. To these U2 airplanes. So if in the late 1950s these were definitely operational, it must mean that in the early 1950s they must have tested them. And probably the Soviets also had. Before Sputnik, they must have tried to lift the objects, you know, out of the earth gravitational potential wells. So what I’m saying is there are lots of people saying, oh, there was UFO activity before the Sputnik era.

Avi Loeb:
We see it in photographic plates and so forth. But it wouldn’t surprise me if these were glints from, you know, U2 airplanes, which are very high and can reflect sunlight, or the early versions of Sputnik. Before Sputnik.

Brian Keating:
Right. Yeah. And I am talking with Beatriz Villarreal this week, and I know that you guys have had some back and forth about her claims of. That this has to be outside of the atmosphere, not a U2 as high as they fly, or SR71, because they’re showing glints that go into shadow on the Earth’s. We’ll get to that in a minute if we have time, Avi, but I want to. I want to get into the headline news. I mean, we buried the lead for 20 minutes and my audience is dying to ask you questions. And you have to be a member to ask questions.

Brian Keating:
There’s so many people that want to ask questions. You do have to be a channel member. It’s 70 cents or something to be a channel member, but that’s just to keep the volume to a reasonable minimum. Avi, the big question. When did you get the call? When did Trump call you up and say, avi, I got a Mission for you. I’ve got. You’ve got the best hair next to mine. Avi, I need you to help out.

Brian Keating:
When are you going to start this UFO Council? That’s my Trump impersonation.

Avi Loeb:
But it was a messenger that I hosted at my home. It was an in person meeting followed by additional conversations that lasted about a week before I started to assemble the council just a few days ago. And I was aiming to collect brilliant members, people who I know personally that have a very high level of intellect and also knowledge of the subject.

Brian Keating:
And that’s why I didn’t get the call. I don’t think I got the call, but, you know, maybe I was on a break now. I’m just kidding. We’ll talk about the team members in a bit.

Avi Loeb:
I should say one thing, that I selected one member to be a skeptic. It’s very important in every committee to have someone who is the devil advocate that prevents the committee from losing sight of biases. So it’s really important in these days where people’s opinions are very polarized and the two sides of the map always hate each other, they don’t want to speak with each other and they say nasty things on each other online, on both sides. You know, people have to realize that in order to have an effective committee, you really need at least one person from the other side in order to introduce a sanity check that we are not just biased in the way we discuss it. But in addition, I should also say that, you know, the quality of the work that we do really depends on the data that we get access to because, you know, we will make the best lemonade out of the lemons that we get. I mean, if we get very bad lemons, the lemonade will not be so great. And so it all depends on the data. And that’s the way I look at it.

Avi Loeb:
But I assemble a group of people that can give sound scientific advice that has all aspects of the phenomena. It includes, you know, the nerds that will analyze data, machine with AI, machine learning. It includes also people who deal with psychology, anthropology, philosophy of anomalies and theology as well. So because these subjects are interconnected with respect to the impact on humanity, such a finding of something that is not human comes forward. You know, we really need to know how to deal with it.

Brian Keating:
Will there be an official announcement from the White House or from the Office of Science Technology? Like when it will. People online are curious if it’s going to be officially sanctioned by some official White House channel.

Avi Loeb:
Well, my sense right now is that The White House stands behind the President Trump’s directive and that includes all agencies of the intelligence and the Pentagon. And in terms of declassifying what, whatever is not risking national security. And so everyone is on board on that. And, and the question is, what does the government really have? I mean, we hear all these stories as we discussed before, are they real? And of course a lot of people wish to believe that they are real. I mean, Steven Spielberg definitely is confident that the US government has act has bodies of aliens in its possession from crash sites. I’m not that sure. I mean, he, as an artist, he’s allowed to think whatever he wants. But as a scientist, I respond to evidence.

Avi Loeb:
And of course if I have to sign a non disclosure agreement, I would do so just because I think it’s a very important type of evidence for the future of humanity and I don’t need to broadcast it to the public at large if there are reasons not to do it immediately.

Brian Keating:
Will there be a budget that you are author, you have to tell me what it is. But, but will there be a budget? Will there be transparency, oversight, governance, etc.

Avi Loeb:
No, at this time we are an advisory council. So my guess, based on service on similar, in similar committees, that the budget includes travel expenses when we meet in person. That’s basically it. No personal compensation or any financial interest. But I think it’s really very encouraging that the government comes forward to a scientist like myself and asks for assistance because in the past it was more of an approach of keeping a distance from the public, from the scientific community. So just the change in attitude I think is a great blessing and I really appreciate the opportunity that they give us to have a conversation with whoever has the data and help them. Are you, yeah.

Brian Keating:
Are you worried about backlash? I mean, this is not a field where the light of heart fear to tread. And I said, when you go, when you go to Washington, if you want a friend, you know, bring an alien with you. But you know, for example, I’ve also been disappointed. Again, I’d love to talk to Representative Luna because she’s so involved and so energetic and enthusiastic. But sometimes she says things. She says things that quite frankly, I think are harmful to her own cause. For example, she called Kirkpatrick, you know, basically accused him of not being forthright when he was leading Aero because he doesn’t agree with the Lou Elizondo kind of Jeremy Corbell and that sort of faction. So she.

Brian Keating:
And she. And he called into doubt basically Grush’s, you know, testimony. And he was the one that was empowered. Now he. He. He gets the most hate of any guest I’ve ever had on the podcast. I mean, it’s unbelievable how much vitriol he gets. And so at one level, we want to trust Aro, but Aaro.

Brian Keating:
But the other hand, what if you get attacked by Luna in six months because she says you’re not towing whatever line she wants you to tow?

Avi Loeb:
Oh, no, no, I’m not worried about that, because I. I will basically follow whatever the data suggests. I mean, you know, I’m not the kind of person that would. I mean, of course I can suggest interpretations that are not confirmed, and I did that in the context of astrophysics, because that’s the way you operate. You just use your imagination. As Einstein said, the imagination is more important than knowledge. So given the data that we have, you can come up with possibilities, and then you decide which one is the correct one based on additional data. And that’s the way I will operate.

Avi Loeb:
But it’s not as if I will bend my statements to political will because, you know, whether we have a neighbor or not is not a matter of discussion. Either we have a neighbor or not, for the same reason that either the Earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around here now. So it’s really all about the data and the quality of the data and. Or getting new data that will help us figure it out. And so I don’t think it’s a political process. In fact, members of Congress on both aisles, you know, for the political spectrum, they work together. And that’s one of the unifying themes, actually, that everyone engaged with politics seems to be excited about discussing this subject. So I think it will bring actually people together rather than separate them, if we.

Brian Keating:
Yeah.

Avi Loeb:
Where these things are, and not in the. Not in the context of watching a plot on the movie screen, but in reality, which is, by the way, it could be much more inspiring because there may be ways by which aliens visit us that were never envisioned, but in Hollywood, because, you know, the. The training data set that encompasses all the real estate beyond Earth is far greater than. Than what you find here on Earth. And our imagination is dictated by our experiences so far. So we are very limited, and we might be very surprised once we have the first encounter. Just to give you an example, we might think of biological creatures, but it could also be biology that is synthetic. That is something that waits for our.

Avi Loeb:
In our future. Right now, we are producing computer chips out of silicon. That’s the source of artificial intelligence. But imagine us getting to a point where we can use biology to, to create artificial intelligence. That obviously would be far better because the human brain is consuming only 20 watts compared to the.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, that seems to be.

Avi Loeb:
My point is that it could be very surprising for us to encounter something that is synthetic biology from another, from an exoplanet or a robot that is purely technological. I’m saying we, until we, we have that experience, we will not know who our dating partner is.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, and that seems to be consonant with what Grush said, apparently, that there’s a continuum from corporeal bipedal type life, which is a very shocking statement to me. I’m not actually more, you know, kind of perplexed or astonished by the fact that he mention, assuming it’s true, a corporeal bipedal life form. Now, you know as well as anybody that bipedal life existed and evolved on Earth over very, very specific conditions. It’s almost inconceivable that you could have bipedal life that’s extraterrestrial. Right, but. But that’s more shocking than sentient plasmoid life and synthetic life, right? I mean, isn’t it?

Avi Loeb:
Yeah. So yesterday I wrote an essay on the question that I was asked by a fledgling biophysicist. And he asked me, you know, if we find the extraterrestrial life, you know, visiting us or in another place, and how would we be able to tell whether we have common ancestry, whether, you know, we are, we both have the same origin. And I said, I answered it very simply. You know, the life on Earth, the double helix is twisted. The right handed, you know, both the RNA and the DNA have a twist in the right handed direction. Could have been left handed, but the symmetry was broken. We don’t know why.

Avi Loeb:
That’s a mystery. Now, if we meet life that came from a completely separate source, it has 50. Even if it has the same building blocks of the DNA RNA that we have, the amino acids, it could have 50, 50%, the opposite chirality. And therefore, if we find that multiple life forms, extraterrestrial life forms, have the same chirality as life on Earth and the same building blocks, it might argue for a common ancestry. It’s sort of like meeting siblings of our family. And the question is, then who is the parent? You know, if were we introduced here on Earth by some interstellar gardener? And, you know, so extraterrestrial life or technology, you know, in a way also brings us closer to understanding our origins.

Brian Keating:
Now, there’s one thing that I think is most likely knowing, you know, from, for Example my military relatives who are in special operations. I mean these are the most elite people on earth, as far as I know. And that they’ve been waterboarded, they’ve been tortured, they’ve been for our country, by our country, by the Pentagon, by the, you know, all these three letter, five letter agencies that you can imagine that, that they’ve been fed and they’ve been tested to the limits, psychologically, physically, you know, to every level that you could imagine. And they’re the ones that are very skeptical of a lot of these claims. For example, Bobby, if you’re dealing with, you have to know that there is a shadow government that has what I, that Eisenhower called in addition to the military industrial complex. His very last speech that he gave in public life, he said that he’s most worried about a scientific technological elite that would gang together and then have exert their control by their excess wisdom. And he worried there was a shadow scientific academic front that was operating within hedge funds and operating within spy agencies and then Pentagon. So how will you be able to differentiate between evidence that’s manufactured so called psyops by the government that, that you’re alleged that you are earnestly working for, shall I say? But how do you know that they’re not going to work against you? They must be as smart as you, right?

Avi Loeb:
Well, that’s an excellent question. And I have my ways. First of all, I’m using my intelligence and they cannot easily fool me. Okay? I’m not just a robot that will, you know, given the evidence, I will follow, but I will just look for patterns in the evidence and whether they are trying to manipulate me. I mean I can tell if someone tries to manipulate me. The second, of course is that I selected the, some members of my committee that have, you know, inside information and

Brian Keating:
so, or maybe that’s psychology. Right? You have a psychologist on the team too, right?

Avi Loeb:
I also have a psychologist, but I’m saying even, you know, I have people who would be able to alert me to a manipul, manipulative scheme. And you know, some people are worried it will be a repetition of blue project, Blue Book. And I don’t, you know, frankly, my approach is that I don’t care what happened before. You know, I’m, I’m looking at the future and it could be better than the past. And I, I, you know, and the way I see it here is that we have better sensors, better scientific tools that we can apply to this problem and resolve it. You know, the goal is to resolve it, not to listen to the people who jump up and down on social media. I don’t, you know, there are lots of people who have opinions, there are lots of filmmakers that have ideas. But my duty as a scientist is to promote a better understanding of the reality.

Avi Loeb:
And it may well be that the government has nothing, or it may well be that the government has really something that Spielberg doesn’t know about. I want to get to it. And at the very least, I’m saying, even if you are down to earth and you say there is nothing beyond human made objects, I, I say, well, I’m not wasting my time because I help national security in that context.

Brian Keating:
That’s right. Now another question that has come up. Maybe it’s just me who’s interested in it. There was a survey done by Vickers et al in nature astronomy in 2024. I just learned of it recently, talking to some people that believe in things like intelligent design, which, you know, I, I will consult with them and I’ll talk to them, but I say the same thing to them as I say to you and anybody else in the CMB cosmos cosmology continuum as well. I want to see evidence, not, not belief. But this is what bothered me. They did a survey and they found that over, you know, 80% of astrobiologists believe, they use the word belief, you know, in the abstract that alien life exists outside of the Earth.

Brian Keating:
And I said that didn’t bother me. The number what bothered me is that they answered the question at all. Because, Avi, if I say to you, do you believe in astrology? You don’t say, no, I don’t believe in it. You say, I have evidence that it is false, that it is as good as chance at predicting whether Mercury is in the seventh House if you’re going to get a parking ticket that day. What do you make of 87% of astrobiologists said that they believe on it? They didn’t say, oh, I’m waiting for it to be. There’s no evidence yet, which is what I think you should say. And how does that pertain to what you’re doing?

Avi Loeb:
I, I should also mention that many of them said that they started, they went into astrophysics because they were inspired by science fiction stories. What I would say on that is, is make an analogy with a congressman that five years ago, you know, before he retired, he advocated for legislation against gay rights. Okay. And then when he retired from Congress, he admitted that he’s gay. And, and so then you wonder, how is that possible? Well, he said that he wanted to satisfy his constituency and try to be popular. But it went against his personal beliefs, Right? He could not have believed what he’s trying to advocate for. Right? And so you find people in situations, and that happens a lot in society. They are following the herd.

Avi Loeb:
They don’t want to be in constant friction with their environment. So they follow the environment, they follow the herd, they advocate for the same things. And just because right now, the popular view within the astronomy community is to talk about microbes and investing more than $10 billion in the habitable world observatory, they would say, yeah, let’s zero out any federal funding towards searching for technological signatures, because we are very focused on searching for microbes. Now, what I say is this is not a good approach because we don’t know if it will be easier to find microbes than it is to find technological signatures, because we don’t know how many objects might be within the inner solar system that are technological. We try to look for radio signals, but, you know, we ourselves are stopping to use radio communication. In fact, Artemis too, started to use laser communication. So who knows, in a thousand years we might not use radio radio communication. It’s an ancient technology.

Avi Loeb:
So to invest 70 years and then say, okay, there is nothing there, that’s not the right approach. Because looking for a package in our mailbox is a completely different approach than waiting for a phone call. So my point is, you know, the mainstream is at risk by basically trying to reach a consensus. When you try to argue that we need, as a community of scientists, reach a consensus as how to invest all of our funds and we must go in the same direction of looking for microbes, this is actually damaging innovation because you want to encourage at least two approaches or maybe multiple approaches, so that if one of them fails, like for example, the large Hadron collider failed to find super symmetry, fail to find dark matter, okay? So if we get to a situation where we build the habitable world observatory and we have a hard time detecting oxygen, methane in the atmospheres of exoplanets because of some technical problem, because the signatures are not clear, I don’t know what the reason might be. We need to have a diversification of our portfolio so that at the same time we invest billions of dollars in searching for technological artifacts within, you know, the interstellar comets or rocks that arrive into the inner solar system, for example, we can explore them. So my point is we need to diversify the portfolio of the way we invest in science. Not it’s not about consensus. And by the way, right now that the Catal survey is considered to be a consensus document, and the astronomers are all aligned behind a single mission.

Avi Loeb:
I don’t think that’s the right approach. I think we should have multiple missions, especially in the search for life. Because when I was dating early on, before I met my wife, I was aiming high. I always wanted to meet someone more intelligent than I am. And currently the astronomy community is aiming low. They are looking for the most mediocre dating partner. More, you know, microbes rather than intelligent being.

Brian Keating:
Well, yeah, I always tell the young, you know, women that I get to advise or when they ask for, you know, advice from my wife, you know, and how to meet the perfect man. She says, don’t bother looking. I’m already married to him. Okay, Avi, we got questions from the audience here. So many questions. You have to be a channel member, but we’ve got literally hundreds of members. Swain, ME 6969. I don’t know what that code stands for, Avi.

Brian Keating:
Many say we’re on the verge of government trump announcing alien life and craft and bodies. Yet it sounds like this board of yours, your counsel to collect data, analyze it. Is disclosure imminent?

Avi Loeb:
Well, that would be wonderful if it is, because, you know, frankly, my life will be worth living if I realize that, you know, we have a lost sibling out there as someone else. You know, right now, the universe appears to be. And, Brian, you know that in all the textbooks, it’s described as a mix of radiation and matter and the dark energy. These are. This makes the universe feel lonely and cold. However, if we realize there are intelligent beings out there, we will have an emotional connection to the universe. We will have a reason to go interstellar. Not talking about going to Mars.

Avi Loeb:
That’s just another rock that happens to be near us. I’m talking about when we realize that someone is visiting our backyard, we might want to visit their backyard. And. And then it changes everything for us because you know, not only philosophically or theologically about our place in the universe. You know, we. We are not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking, but also in terms of our ambitions and our aspirations and priorities. Instead of killing each other on this rock for territories, you know, like, this is ridiculous. It’s a piece of rock that is, you know, a few times 10 to the minus 6 of the mass of the sun, the.

Avi Loeb:
That happen to be left over, and we fight over it when there is so much more real estate out there. And so we would realize that we have to change our perspective. Sort of like it’s A transition bigger than the Copernican revolution. You know, when in that Galileo helped pioneer. Because it’s not just that we are not at the physical center of the universe, it’s just, it also means that, you know, for us to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy, we have to become interstellar. Not Martians. Interstellar.

Brian Keating:
That’s right. And that reminds me, one of my favorite books. See, this tells me that Avi is, is a close friend because he sent me an early, early copy of that book as well as the first book. Okay, next one comes from Sigil Strategic Research. I’ll add it to the conversation. Reports of strange things before the 18th century are not influenced by Pentagon US security restrictions. The the Roman Legion saw flaming shields in the sky. And we can go back to, you know, Yeshua and the Torah and other things.

Brian Keating:
For example, or this 1933 magenta Italy sighting. And I’ve heard a lot about that. I mean, I think Grush brought up stuff from the 1930s. I mean, is any of that relevant? I mean, we can’t even agree on what happened yesterday.

Avi Loeb:
It’s definitely interesting and intriguing. The problem is that the data is very sparse. It’s not comprehensive, it’s not scientific quality. So we can’t do much with it except for saying, look, these things happen over the past century, they should also happen now. Okay, so for example, you know, there were claims that the Apollo astronauts noticed UFOs around the moon. Well, if that’s the case, then why didn’t the Artemis 2 astronauts notice anything unusual on the, you know, they had much better cameras. There are claims that there were, you know, transients from glints on satellites around the the earth in the 19, early 1950s. Well, surely right now, you know, the Director of National Intelligence should have would have been alarmed if they noticed satellites that do not belong to specific nations that we know about.

Avi Loeb:
If they saw a fleet of a thousand satellites moving around the Earth, they would immediately, this would be a red alert that they would have to figure it out. They would get as much data as possible. So I don’t think right now it’s possible to hide things as much as 50, 100 years ago, when the technologies of sensors were much worse. And therefore if we don’t see right now things that people claim to have seen, let’s say 50 years ago, then I would not buy those stories because verification validation is a very important aspect of science. And of course, if we had excellent data from long ago, for example, if we had a piece of material That I can examine in the laboratory. I can tell you whether it’s extra solar, whether it came from outside the solar system, because even if it has more than one gram of material, I can examine the isotope ratios and tell you that it’s not from the solar system. And so we need good data, scientific quality data in order to assess it. And the problem is many of these reports from the past do not have that high quality data.

Avi Loeb:
And they could be just, you know, misidentification of things that are common, you know, on earth.

Brian Keating:
Now, you mentioned the, you know, kind of the technological aspects of things. One thing that came out recently from the James Webb Space telescope is that 3 Atlas appeared to have some methane emitted from it. And I tweeted that that’s kind of like having a chemistry stock room, room, you know, sent from another, another solar system. What you, I noticed you also lowered the, the value on the lobe scale. Can you talk about the recent, recent findings from James Webb and the methane found from that?

Avi Loeb:
That’s really intriguing because the methane appeared after the, after 3 Atlas came close to the sun when it was warmed up. But methane is, is far more volatile than CO2 carbon dioxide, which was detected already in July when the object was first found. And so the question is, how is it possible that we detected carbon dioxide but not methane when the object was far? Because methane is much more likely to be sublimated, evaporate from the object. And of course, the authors of the paper argue that, well, perhaps it was removed from the outer layer of 3i atlas and buried deep in. So only when it’s sort of like onion shells. Only when you clip off the outer shells by warming from sunlight, you end up reaching the depth where methane is buried. That was the argument. But then carbon monoxide CO was also detected back in August 2025, before perihelion, before the object got closed without methane.

Avi Loeb:
And carbon monoxide has roughly the same volatility as methane saw. So I think it’s a bit puzzling why methane was produced close to the sun. And I just said it’s a biosignature. You know, there are papers in the literature saying methane would be the first molecule to be a biosignature if we find it in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. So I asked, is it possible that there are some microbes that were revived as a result of three ATLAS coming close to the sun, and perhaps they emitted the methane? So I actually am finishing a paper this week with my student estimating how, how much mass in microbes do you need in order to produce the level of methane that was observed? Hmm.

Brian Keating:
Now you wrote recently. Oh sorry. You wrote recently about the Palomar Transient that some of them, most of them perhaps could be cosmic ray hits. I mean 60,000 impacts on a plate that are all aligned and they have three dimensional trajectories. Right now, Beatriz Villaroyle, who again I’m having on in a couple of days this week and I’d like to understand what, you know, she’s saying that it’s highly unlikely according to the Busco and other analyses. So they say that it’s not, it’s not likely at all. So where do you come down now? Do you find her or this other reanalysis?

Avi Loeb:
I mean the reason, the reason I brought this up is first because of the Apollo astronaut images that showed that these blue lights, but they were, they appeared also outside of the, the lens of the camera. So it was clear that these were triggered by something that has nothing to do with, with objects in the sky. Now with respect to the photographic plates, I was intrigued by the fact that there was a paper, you know, analyzing the, the Palomar plates and stating that there is an anti correlation between the UFOs, these transients that appear only in one plate but not in other plates. There is an anti correlation between their appearance rate and the, the geomagnetic storm activity on Earth. So when the sun emits a coronal plume of, of highly high temperature gas and it impacts the Earth, that’s that triggers a geomagnetic storm. Then the number of transients went down, went down. So it was anti correlated. So then they said well maybe the UFOs somehow avoid geomagnetic storms.

Avi Loeb:
I just googled it, I checked and it turns out that cosmic rays have exactly this anti correlation because plumes of plasma that carry magnetic fields, they push away the cosmic rays from the earth and so that there are fewer cosmic ray hits. So I’m saying, look, you identify an anti correlation. I’m. This is a natural consequence for cosmic rays. We know that. We also know that cosmic rays introduce a background. You cannot avoid that. So let’s just not confuse cosmic rays with UFOs.

Avi Loeb:
Okay? That was the only point I made. And they said oh, we are confident it’s not cosmic rays. But why is there this anti correlation? It must mean that at least some of the sources are cosmic rays because otherwise you wouldn’t get why would the UFOs care about geomagnetic storms this way? You know, and the other, the other thing is that now that the CIA report came out. I’m still wondering if there could be human made objects that are part of the other transients that they saw. And they saw transients near nuclear test sites. And obviously that’s a very good location

Brian Keating:
for and military pieces. Yeah, the Tic Tac was seen right off the coast. Yeah.

Avi Loeb:
All the US military trying to monitor the conditions before the explosion takes place.

Brian Keating:
Well, if you had to go back and revise your, your feelings about the first interstellar object, Oumuamua, how would you rank it on the lobe scale today, knowing everything you know?

Avi Loeb:
Well, I think we suffer once again from lack of information. So there were the anomalies of the object being most likely flat and changing its brightness by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours. That is a very extreme shape for an asteroid or a comet. And then there was no cometary tail around it, no gas or dust detected, and yet it was pushed away from the sun by some non gravitational force. So given these anomalies, I, I ranked it at 4. I mean most likely, it’s natural. But, and I should say right now, the comet experts define it as a dark comet, meaning a comet that doesn’t show cometary activity. And they listed additional dark comets within the solar system.

Avi Loeb:
There is one of them that we wrote a paper about with my colleagues and Adam, he and others, and where we showed that one of those is actually following the same path as the Phobos one mission that was failed. That failed. This was a mission by the Russians and they sent the wrong prompt. The technicians send an extra semicolon that triggered the loss of power in that spacecraft. And we show that it could be the dark comet that they’re talking about now. The Japanese, the space agency wants to, they said, oh, let’s first take some data on it. So there was a paper last year of data and it became clear the object is about 10 meters in size and moreover it’s very shiny. It reflects 50% of the light, the, the sunlight impinging on it.

Avi Loeb:
So it’s shiny and it’s spinning really fast every five minutes. So it must be very sturdy. And they want to land Hayabusa2, that’s a spacecraft, they want to land it on top of this dark comet so that we can understand how the outgassing takes place. And I’m saying go ahead, make my day, because they will do it in July 2031 and imagine them landing on this object, the dark comet, trying to figure out how the outgassing comes from it and seeing a Label made in the Soviet ussr. Imagine them doing that and that, that we can test in July 2031. It’s a, is the beauty of science that you can actually check and I wonder if the lesson learned from this experience by the Japanese, if they land on it and it looks like it’s a human made object, whether people would say, oh wait a minute, maybe Oumuamua also was technological.

Brian Keating:
So Stephen asks if there have been several non human species visiting our planet for decades, as Eric Davis and David Grusch claim, could humans coexist peacefully with them if the truth cuts out that they’re here?

Avi Loeb:
Oh, definitely. I mean, I think they had a lot of opportunities to kill us. And it, you know, a very, if they are here, a very reasonable scenario is that they coexist in a way that we can’t easily notice them. And they are sort of, they regard the experience as an experiment where they are, they look at us and see what we are doing, but they do not intervene. We don’t pose a threat to them. They can easily do whatever they want. If they have much more sophisticated technologies. They might have accidents every now and then, like, you know, any endeavor.

Avi Loeb:
So yeah, you know, an interesting question is whether life or intelligent life on Earth was planted by some interstellar gardener. That’s something I really want to know whether what we regard as a natural sequence of events from a primordial soup of chemicals on Earth, you know, to human intelligence, whether that was actually had the milestone along the way, milestones that led to human intelligence that were artificial in origin, that, you know, they introduced things. And we are not aware of that, of course, because documented human history is very limited. So it would be really revealing if it turns out that we think that we live in a brave new world that we created, but in reality it’s just a world that was created by someone else.

Brian Keating:
Now, last couple of questions. Swain asks. It’s very weird. Why are these objects so interested in US Military bases? They must have far advanced technology than our military does.

Avi Loeb:
That goes back to my zero, you know, the null hypothesis that I have that they’re human made objects and they are used for espionage.

Brian Keating:
And then my final question to you is if we do, you know, sort of get, get definitive contact, whatever that might mean, are you going to change anything about yourself? Would that cause you to, to reevaluate, you know, the fact that they would send something biological? Perhaps. And actually before I ask you that, Avi, why would they send something biological when they could send AI? I mean, what do you think is

Avi Loeb:
more likely because maybe for us, AI is made of silicon chips because we are not advanced enough. So actually just a few days ago, every day I get very interesting things that I haven’t anticipated. I got a question and the question was, why haven’t we seen self replicating probes, you know, von Neumann probes? Because, you know, if even if one civilization in the Milky Way galaxy had that ability to create self replicating probes, we would see it because, you know, it would grow exponentially, this population and reach us. Okay? And we don’t see it. Right? So the question is, is that evidence against self replicating probes? And I replied, what are you talking about? We see here, I speak every day, we set for replicating probes. These are biological entities. You know, the human DNA is self replicating. Right? And so an interesting question is perhaps the highest level of technology is one that uses chemistry and uses the raw materials on the surface of a rocky planet to self replicate, which is exactly what we are doing, biology does.

Avi Loeb:
So maybe we are self replicating probes that came from another place.

Brian Keating:
Very good. Now if we do get contact and you do get this private information and Trump brings in back into the office, takes you up to the, to the Oval Office, Avi, and makes you an offer, what are you gonna do? What happens the day after? It just seems like disclosure day. Everyone’s building up. What happens? Disclosure date plus one for you personally.

Avi Loeb:
Well, okay, so for me, it’s like a kid that enters a candy store and just gets a huge candy. And I, I would just enjoy that candy as much as I can. Now there are, of course, implications because it would affect policy, it would affect the stock market, it would affect, you know, our aspirations. And so there would be huge implications for our future. But at first, just this knowledge by itself would take me a while to, to fully digest. I don’t need to speak with anyone. I will just think about the implications. You know, every morning I jog at sunrise in the company of ducks, wild turkeys, birds, and, you know, bunnies.

Avi Loeb:
And I, I just think, and you know, I don’t need to speak when people approach me on, on the road, you know, they say good morning. And that, that bothers me because it cuts off my stream of thought, you know, so I would just think for a while about what it means, what we should do next and how can we promote a better future for all of us. And I think it will be a better future. So a lot of us are frustrated by what we read every day in the news, and I think it’s an opportunity for us to change everything in a better way.

Brian Keating:
Avi Loeb, thank you so much for joining us today. You got to go talk to the big shots at Time magazine, but I do appreciate you and I’m really, really excited to do, to see what you guys come up with, because I think you guys are doing the most rigorous and most important kind of scientific analysis, and you’re doing it as a scientist. You know, the fact is people ascribe a lot of stuff, nonsense to you that you don’t believe in, that you’ve never postulated, and to have a real scientist on of your caliber and, and, and stature and interest, curiosity level, and let’s just see where it goes, right, Navi? So thank you so much.

Avi Loeb:
Thank you for having me.

Brian Keating:
Happy disclosure day.

Avi Loeb:
All I can say is that I will try not to disappoint all of you. I will do my best. And, you know, it’s not about the messenger. It’s about the message.

Brian Keating:
Wonderful. Avi Loeb, thank you so much, my friend. Talk to you next time.

Avi Loeb:
Thanks for having me.

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

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

Brian Keating:
So I did my best, and I always get criticized. Why Are you looking away? You know, like. So I bought a teleprompter, you know, and now I can put the questions here so it looks like I’m, I am indeed doing as I’m doing, paying attention. But I need to be candid with, with you because I mean, I think if I lose my, my, my trust with you, I think I lose everything. And I want to be honest, you know, I’ve pushed back on Avi since the wee days of when, when he first came on the podcast in 2020 to talk about his first book which is mentioned here, extraterrestrial. And I said, Avi, you know, you believe that, that this object comes from an alien civilization potentially. Maybe it’s not technology itself, but it’s left over from technology. It could be a garbage barge, it could be a solar cell.

Brian Keating:
I said, Avi, wouldn’t be great if you knew some billionaires that could spend, spend money to fly a probe and catch up to a more and, and of course that was tongue in cheek. But I was pushing back on him because he did know people like that Yuri Milner and he still does. The, the breakthrough Starshot Enterprises funded by, by Avi’s, you know, friends and colleagues, Yuri Milner and others. And he’s at Harvard, you know, arguably the, this hedge fund with a $50 billion endowment that still charges tuition that outpaces inflation. I always forget to criticize Avi for that and rejects more, more people, you know, than I got rejected, you know, when I was on the dating market. They serve a 1500 people, you know, in the freshman class. So it’s pretty small. It’s like a Chipotle does every day on a decent day.

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

Brian Keating:
And there are a lot of great, you know, Neil DeGrasse Tyson hasn’t written a paper, you know, since the Reagan administration, as far as I can tell. But, you know, they do something important and they have a role and they also have their own, you know, kind of financial incentives because they’re all writing books. And so look, I write books, I don’t do it for the money. The amount of money I get from my books is near below minimum wage, I think, even here in California. So believe me, I’m not doing it for the money. You know, maybe these other folks are, maybe Avia’s, I don’t know, maybe David Gross Russia is, who knows? I’m not even speculating. They’re involved in movies. That’s never interested me whatsoever.

Brian Keating:
I’m interested in finding out information while I still can, while I still have influence and, and ability to influence young minds and, and get into the passion of science. You know, I wouldn’t become a public university professor if I was really interested in the money. Okay, so let’s put that to rest. But I told Avi back then when Oumuamua was in the news, you know, it’s not that far outside of our solar system. It’s your last chance to catch up to it. And he said, well, you know, there’ll be many more coming through. Now. There’s been two more that have come through and one of them was known to be a comet Borisov.

Brian Keating:
And the second one, now a third one now seems very likely, even according to its greatest champion, Avi Loeb, to be, to be also more likely to be extraterrestrial, you know, natural material than extraterrestrial technological materials. He just said he lowered the confidence on his coined Loeb scale. I wouldn’t have called it the Loeb scale, although I do have the Keating medal. I do give the Keating medal to people that came in. And just recently I gave my first Keating medal for impossible imagination to a man who won the Nobel Prize. So we’re kind of squaring off which one is bigger. And my, my Keating medal is bigger than the Nobel Prize. Anyway, you’ll see that interview soon.

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

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

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

Brian Keating:
Grusch is doing the same thing. He hasn’t seen these things. He’s saying that people that he knows has seen these things. Okay, so where does this sit in the evidentiary scale of science is very low, right? It’s very low. Whereas data, hard evidence, you know, people joke about. Well, you believe in dark matter. Yeah, I believe in dark matter because we’ve already detected dark matter, we’ve captured dark matter, we interact with dark matter. We know how to build sensors that do it, and we know how to measure it throughout cosmic history.

Brian Keating:
They’re called neutrinos. Okay. So people say, oh, dark matter, you’re just an idiot. You’re a fantasy. You believe believe things too. No, I don’t believe in it. We have evidence for dark matter. Neutrinos fit every definition of dark matter.

Brian Keating:
They’re massive, they interact weakly. There’s. This just happens to be not enough of them to make the universe flat and curve in terms of its curvature. And so there must be non neutral, there must be other non neutrino forms of dark matter. But neutrinos make up every bit of dark matter that any theorist would ever want. They just don’t make up enough to do well. That’s like saying, well, well, hydrogen, you know, only makes up 74% of the of the universe’s baryonic mass density. So does that mean that baryons don’t exist? It’s a stupid argument.

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

Brian Keating:
He’s not dealing with. With the same types of sensors. He’s dealing with experiences that he had that he talked about on my show when we did a co livestream together with Avi Loeb a couple years back. So you can look that up now. What’s important to me, I pushed him on Luna because he has access to her. She is obviously a fangirl of Avi, as are many people. He’s very charming. But we need a whistleblower who has the power and is not afraid to use it, not to go after people like Kirkpatrick, who was serving his country as best as he could, and he got a ton of crap for it.

Brian Keating:
You know, I think after having spoken to him, he would never do it again. You know, death threats and, and all sorts of things, going after his family. It’s horrible that what happens to people like that. And that’s why I caution. Navi, are you sure you want to do this? Because it’s inevitable you’re going to piss people off and you’re going to go up against the Pentagon that has psyop information disinformation, mal information campaigns against everybody that you think that we don’t spy on the Chinese, Chinese or, or the Israelis or, you know, we spy on everybody and, and thank God, you know, for that. As Jack Nicholson said, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. Now, I don’t like the fact that my relatives were tortured. You know, I feel like that’s bad.

Brian Keating:
But they’re not babies. They’re some of the strongest men, you know, women that I know, and they do things for volunteer. They didn’t get recruited with a bag of their head and get waterboarded, you know, for grins and giggles. That wasn’t what happened. No, that was part of their Search of aid and rescue training that they had in the military, and thank God that they did. And I hope that they never have to use that, but they’re hardened against it should they ever have to use it. Okay, so let’s, let’s look at this. Where is Luna? Coming down.

Brian Keating:
She has the power to subpoena people. She has full immunity. I’ve also wondered, and maybe I’m just foolish about how the government works again. I don’t want anything bad to happen to anybody. I don’t want Grush to be attacked. I don’t want him to, you know, go to jail for revealing classified information. But we have freedom of the press. We, you know, there could be leaks to the media and so forth in the press.

Brian Keating:
Now, if this is stuff that’s happening, you know, it’s hard to imagine how, you know, how sentient plasmoids. Telling us that there are sentient plasmoids and bipedal, you know, organisms, which is very shocking to me. I mean, that’s sort of the most shocking thing I’ve ever heard in this. Not the sentient plasmoids in the interdimensional beings. That doesn’t really kind of rankle me as much as the bipedal, because bipedalism is almost the least likely. I mean, look around your house. You might see one or two bipedal objects. You might see an equal number of.

Brian Keating:
We have an equal number of bipedal objects around the Keating household. Right. They’re called pets. Sorry, quadrupedal is bipedal, you know, and so this is a shocking revelation if true. And again, I just pulled up the quote and, and, and from the article, from the testimony in July on June 9th. So we have to say that this is, that this is, is. Is among the most important things. So why isn’t there protection? Why, why isn’t Luna saying, here’s what I found out.

Brian Keating:
Go to the people, skip Grush altogether and Grush and go straight to the source. He can tell them who to talk to, what he saw when he saw these objects, and she can talk to Lou Elizondo. He’s already revealed all this stuff. He’s on tour. He talks about this stuff with Jeremy Carbo. Why can’t she talk to them, get the names? And then she’s not going to be subpoenaed, she’s not going to be arrested. She’s leading the, the damn committee. She’s one of the most powerful people in the, on the planet.

Brian Keating:
I don’t understand it. And again, I, you know, I’d love to talk to her. I’ve asked Avi to introduce me to her. I think maybe one Jewish astrophysicist is enough for her, you know, to, to kind of make, make her sick of, of talking to me and scientists like me. But, but, you know, I’m happy to host her. I’m happy to host Lou Elizondo, David Garouch, all these people. I’d love to get them on and I’d love to stop the petty backbiting ad hominem attacks that they do and have done to them. Okay, so that’s number one.

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

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

Brian Keating:
You know, Avi said this about the, about the solar coronal mass ejections on my show on Monday afternoon. Monday morning. And what do you have to say about that? You, you have to explain that in order to at least have a comprehensive explanation. You claim that these, that these defect. Now, I’m an observational astronomer. I know all about these plates. I have some of these plates from Palomar that Beatrice is analyzed. Not the ones that show glints and alleged, according to her and others, evidence of extrasolar or, sorry, extra terrestrial.

Brian Keating:
I mean, obviously off of the Earth technology that reflects sunlight prior to the Sputnik Pro. So in other words, prior to low Earth orbit satellites. Now we don’t know for sure what was up there. Right. I Mean, there’s always that it could be as obvious said it could have been Chinese or Russian. I kind of doubt that because the Chinese and Russians stole a lot of information about our nuclear program and our space program from the US not the, the Soviets didn’t steal as much from, about the space program. They stole a lot more from the nuclear program, as you all know, from Fuchs and other people. And then they ended up building the hydrogen and the fusion devices shortly thereafter the getting the spy information from spy spies on the US So two scientists are going to come to different conclusions.

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

Brian Keating:
I can’t even remember. But this is a really important thing for us to, to discuss. And, and that’s why I’m going to push these people and I’m going to push Michael Sherman. I’m going to talk to Michael Shermer this coming, this coming week. I know a lot of you don’t find, find him to be your favorite, your favorite flavor of, of cars. But you saw, Avi has integrity. Avi put him specifically on the White House counsel, authorized counsel that he’s in charge of because he wanted someone not just a skeptic. I mean, Michael’s not just like, oh, you’re just, you know, he’s just speculating.

Brian Keating:
He’s trying to be, you know, Debbie Downer, you know, Cassandra wannabe, you know, pessimists, you know, get to be right, but I optimist get to be rich. No, no, Michael’s not like that. He will talk candidly as he does in his new book, which is the main reason he’s on, but I’m going to talk to him about the Galileo project and this new White House council because he’s on it with Pascal, Gary Nolan and others and I want to have them all on. A lot of them say stuff and I have to hold their feet to the fire. Now one thing about this council really rubbed me the wrong way and I wonder if you can tell what it is. I mean, maybe put in the comments. Comments, if you can suggest what, what you think really kind of bugged me about what Avi’s, what Avi’s was saying and the power of his committee. I was very concerned about it and maybe you can guess in the, in the broad.

Brian Keating:
So first of all, put a thumbs up and put a subscribe, you know, please, on this, on this channel because I am doing really, really interesting interviews this week. I like to think I do a lot of education. Most of it’s for free. Again, I teach at a public university. Right. I’m not, I don’t have any book to sell or you know, course to sell or whatever. I do a lot just to get it out there and I’m doing a lot more of, you know, kind of debunking style stuff, but not ad hominem. I, I didn’t, you know, I didn’t go after Michio Kaku and some of the ways that people were saying really awful things about him when I posted on X.

Brian Keating:
I guess I kind of knew that sort of my fault that they would say things like, you know, we don’t have the science communicators that we deserve. I’m trying to be one of them. You know, I’m not the best, I’m not the last. But I’m doing my, my best and I’m doing it all. Like I said, you’re watching YouTube for free, right? You watch some ads? Maybe, maybe not. If you have YouTube Premium, I don’t get a penny from that. But, but tell me, what do you think was the most concerning thing? If you could guess it, maybe put in the comments after the video. I’ll give you guys, you know, five seconds to think about it.

Brian Keating:
I wish I had my clickers. I use my students. They love these clickers. They come in, I give them 10 points extra credit on their final exam if they brought clickers to class, every class and answered the questions. I don’t even know if they got them right. Just have to answer anyway. Builds engagement. You guys are engaging.

Brian Keating:
You’re attractive and engaging. Okay, what was it? Is that he has no money. He got no money from the government, right? So what is this? If you get no money and a government that, you know, spends what, 7 trillion a year? And this could be the most important thing in human history, that is American history. And even if it’s not, even if it fails, as people say, oh, it’s just going to discover Chinese Bible. That’s freaking huge. And even if we discover there’s a huge silent, isn’t that incredibly important to the stated goals of the Trump administration? And I share those goals, right? So having no money, 0%, not even like, oh, we need a, know, a hundredth of a percent, a thousand dollars, right? I, I think that’s a fatal mistake. I think, you know, the first thing that I want to know is, am I going to have a budget? Is there a governance structure? What is the transparency of this organization? Like, how are we going to communicate? What are we going to have access to? Now, Avi’s smart. He said that he’s smart, so he has to be smart right now.

Brian Keating:
That kind of bothered me too, that he said, well, I’m smart, so I’ll know that there are not gonna, that they’re not trying to trick me with a psyop. Really, Avi, I mean, I couldn’t push, you know, I can’t push back on everything because Avi charms me. You know, he is one of my, my, I just like him. I, I hate, I hate to say it, you know, I have weaknesses. I’m only human. That’s one of my biases. But I did push back during the interview. But, but mostly I feel like to say that you are not even to say, like I could say, well, I’m gonna take advice from my wife or my, my, my husband or my, my colleagues at, at Harvard.

Brian Keating:
I mean, say something, right? Say something. There’s someone else besides you if you are your own arbiter of what is being truthful, if someone is being truthful or not. I, I feel like this is another kind of. It’s just putting a stumbling block in front of the blind. I think it’s, you know, if I had to bet right now that this, this, this council is led by my esteemed friend Avi Loeb, the foremost educational institution on earth, which has its own separate budget, and he has his own budget, and he’s also leading Galileo project. These are all separate kind of orbs, so to speak. I would say right now, I give it a 60, 40 chance of not succeeding just because it doesn’t have government backing. I also pressed him on a question that I got a lot offline.

Brian Keating:
Ask him, you know, if it’s going to be recognized by the White House. So far it’s not. And he said that, you know, it’s, you know, it’s authorized and it’s consonant with the President’s goals and the administration’s goals and all these national security goals. Well, sorry Avi, there’s. All these agencies are in constant conflict with each other. Part of what I heard from an Air Force, a very, very high up fighter pilot in the Air Force is that there’s infighting between the Air Force and Space Force and the Navy. You notice that many of these sightings from Graves reporting sightings by squadron mates and others and Fravor Dietrich are in the Navy side. Grush was in the Air Force.

Brian Keating:
Now we have the Space force as of 2018, 2019, whenever that was started. And there’s huge amount of interagency, you know, hate. I mean quite frankly there’s hatred. I mean unless they’re in war, they’re a huge territorial pissing contest that you would not believe. I’ve heard some of the most staggeringly inefficient uses of our tax dollars come from the fact that these agencies all want to have their own control. And then you add in the CIA which is a separate, has its own separate military paramilitary intelligence gathering wings, the FBI, you know, even things like Homeland Security when the drones are flying over airport. These are all so entangled. And to say like Avi’s going to be their Harvard professor with $0 and they’re just going to listen to him.

Brian Keating:
They’re not listening to Luna. I mean they’re not really. Where’s this data dump? I mean like I said, most of the stuff I’ve seen can be identified either by, has been identified by the NASA, you know, blue ribbon panel led by my, my friend and colleague David Spergel and and code co advised by our member Shelley Wright who studies optical transient events from extraterrestrial civilizations, potentially extraterrestrial civilizations using optical photo avalanche detectors in the most novel way. She’s invented these teles. She’s looking. She would be probably the most thrilled person on earth if these things were were found to be extraterrestrial. But they haven’t. They found 95% in the NASA panel could be explained.

Brian Keating:
Now what bothers me is that people and so 5% can’t be explained. But as Michael Shermer puts it, just because you can’t explain it doesn’t mean that the, the antithesis is the correct one, right? You can’t just say, oh, because we can’t explain it means that it’s unexplained. Aerial phenomena means that they’re alien phenomena. That’s not the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis still it’s unexplained. We just don’t understand what it is. More data is needed or if it occurred in the past. I mean, if you had asked somebody, you know, two years ago, can we get data from the 1950s that could shed light, maybe not prove, but could shed light on the existence of, on the existence of alien artifacts in our, in our local low earth environment, you would say, what, are you crazy? There’s not, we don’t even get good video quality today.

Brian Keating:
Like, how are you going to get, like what are people going to be mediums, you know, seeing back in time? No, no, but she went back, Beatrice went back and found these plates from the Palomar skyscrapers. She didn’t look at them for the galaxies in the quasar surveys. You know, first quasar surveys really done here. Discovered Martin Schmidt here by Palomar up the road in San Diego county at 6,7000ft up with a 200 inch telescope. It wasn’t the biggest telescope in the world anymore, but it was at the time. She did the hard work and now we’re going back in time and getting evidence from that. So there could be other things in these, the oceans, you know, on the moon, there could be artifacts. And that always reminds me, you know, because I’m speaking so much, but, but I do want you to get meteorites, especially those of you who are students in the United States.

Brian Keating:
If you have a dot edu email address, you’ll win a meteorite. So I want to send these to you. These are true, honest to good, extraterrestrial, came from beyond our solar system, potentially. Now it came from the pre solar system. But I’m going to send those to you if you have a. Edu email address and live in the United States.

Avi Loeb:
States.

Brian Keating:
If you don’t, I give, I do give away 10amonth to people that don’t have it. Again, you have to live in the U.S. because the U.S. post Service charged an awful lot of money for this poor state university professor to send you. Okay, now next, here’s what’s coming up. So when Beatrice comes in, she’s going to talk me hopefully about the Vasco project. She’s very, very, very, very, I would say, exercised about these critiques that, that she’s had that these photo photographs did not come from the telescope itself. That came from artifacts like cosmic ray smashing that penetrate through the telescope completely and just make an image and an artifact on the photographic plate? No, she says they went through the optics and that could be proven.

Brian Keating:
So then we have to press her on this issue of solar activity and coronal mass ejection. These are completely things opposite, you know, kind of conclusions. Now, I want to understand what questions you want me to sort of ask her about things like disclosure day, about, about maybe confirmation bias. Put those in the comments after, you know, when the video’s up. It’ll. Anyone, not just channel members, can give, can give comments just on the live stream. So. And what do you guys think about this fact that, you know, Grush and others are now involved in the, in the Hollywood, you know, kind of dramatization, disclosure days? Is that just going to be, you know, the first of many things? And, and as Spielberg said, but Avi didn’t agree with, and I don’t agree with, you know, that he believes that these things are here and he keeps using that word, belief, belief, belief.

Brian Keating:
And, and a lot of people kind of took issue with the video I made with Hugh Ross, again, an intelligent design proponent. But I’ll talk to anybody. I talked to Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute. I don’t care. You know, I like to be challenged intellectually. I like to challenge other people intellectually. But I’ll do, I do it always for the sake of truth, trying to understand what’s.

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

Brian Keating:
People can correct me, but he was a major, major, maybe even a general, I don’t know, in the, in the Air Force, wasn’t a pilot, but. But I believe he operated drones. But anyway, to me it does. And it kind of, you know, I sort of brought this up with Avi. You know, he was asked to be in this movie, but he’s playing himself, I guess. I don’t think David’s an actor and that’s not really what he wants to do. Or maybe he does. I don’t know.

Brian Keating:
He’s a handsome guy. He could be A great actor, I don’t know. But if he’s an actor, that makes things even worse, right? Because he’s, I mean the actors are the ones that are most likely to be trained in human psychology and manipulation, right? So I don’t believe he’s going to do that. But, but he is, you know, kind of held up at this level on a Bruckheimer, you know, kind of consulting role. So I don’t know. Would you do that? Do you find that suspicious in any way? Do you find suspicious in any way the Frank Crave a revelation? Three days ago, four days ago I put on from Reddit and other places, actually it was on Twitter I first heard it, that he believes Roswell was, you know, evidence of non, you know, non human bodies, technology. Let me see what he actually said over here. I don’t want to misquote him, but, but yeah, I mean, I think this was a kind of a, an interesting, an interesting, you know, kind of twist that, that, you know, he was, he was essentially speculating or saying, I don’t know how he would have evidence of that.

Brian Keating:
I mean he was a fighter pilot, commander of a squadron, right. So why would he have knowledge about something from the 1940s, right? Like why would that be what he had special access to? I mean it. Maybe he does. I mean, he might be just getting informed from people. But then that raises the question again, does he not, do these people have protection? Are they really in danger? I believe, believe David Grush could be in danger. So if that’s true, you know, then when, when he states something that goes in contradistinction to something that’s going on the record by Steve, by Sean Kirkpatrick. Why don’t we wait that like Sean could be, you know, could be committing some classified information faux pas reveal that he shouldn’t be, but he doesn’t, right? So he’s gone on the record and he said he disagrees with it. So I guess, you know, from my perspective it’s, it is, it’s hard to know what to believe.

Brian Keating:
So yes, retired Commander David Fraver, famous for his tic tac encounter, has stated the government has recovered materials from Roswell and has known about a non human presence on earth for over 80 years. And then Fravor advocates for official transparency like we all do, suggesting the world honestly deserves, deserves honesty regarding these issues. So he’s known for the Nemet’s encounter. Fravor is called. You have to be honest about the. Just to be honest. We’ve known for 80 years that we’re not alone. Now why would a fighter pilot have special knowledge? Maybe he does, but, but as far as I know he’s retired.

Brian Keating:
I don’t know when he retired but, but I, you know, 2004, I can do the math. It was 22 years ago when he had the Nimitz encounter. Why would that then give him official information. Now he may get information because whistleblowers may come to him hoping that he can get their story out. But he doesn’t have, as far as I know, he maybe never had. I mean just because you’re in the military. I mean I’ve had, I have friends that are fighter pilots. My flight instructor is a fighter pilot, F18 pilot just like him, even maybe at the same rank as him.

Brian Keating:
He doesn’t have special information just because he’s a fighter pilot. And Shermer points out in his new book that actually pilots in general, including me, I’m a commercially rated pilot. That we’re some of the least reliable people and of the least reliable part pilots in the world are military pilots. Why is that? Well, you’re telling me they’re not brave? F. No, they’re freaking much more brave than I’ll ever be. And they’re badasses physically, mentally. They can kick the crap out of people like me. They could hold their own Navy seals.

Brian Keating:
These pilots are insane. They’re jacked. They’re incredible. Ryan Graves is a beast, right? But they make mistakes at a higher rate. What explains that? Are they stupid? Absolutely not. One of my best friends is a Princeton grand graduate. He’s an F18 commander, combat veteran. Okay, so these are not stupid people.

Brian Keating:
Okay, so what happens? And this is what’s been borne out. They are extremely good hand eye coordination. They are good at training for reactions to threats. Is a Cessna 172 that I fly around California. Is that a threat to the F18s at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station right here? No, they’re not a threat at all. So they’ll ignore those types of threats. So they’re looking for anomalies. You have a filter as a pilot you filter out things that are nominal and you look for things that are anomalous.

Brian Keating:
Right. So they’re trained and heightened on the state of awareness to look for things that are anomalous. So this is what psychologists studying the military for other reasons. This is to avoid crashes and, and, and, and, and sort of other hazards to flight. Another topic Ryan is quite bravely investing his time and energy in and, and this is all, you know, again for, for Good purposes. But when the first, you know, statement to go to is, well, Fravor is a fighter pilot, he’s braver than Brian Keating and he’s, and he’s a better pilot than Brian Keating, none of which I dispute, then we must trust him on everything, including information about Roslyn. No, no, sorry. You know, just like if, if they, if I go out and say, well look, this is how a CCD or CMOS camera operates.

Brian Keating:
This dark noise, the flat field, these are the cosmic ray impacts, these are the, or dark current sensitivity or CMB camera works. And then someone says, well, what do you think about aliens? I should say, I know nothing about that. Right. I’m not, I’m not an expert in it. But when they say, like this object emits black body radiation, well, quite frankly, I am an expert in that. And the U.S. government under the Trump administration just forced the Argentinian government to cancel a high altitude site near the Simons Observatory in the, well, in the Andes Mountains. Not that near us, but, but very similar to us that the Chinese were developing.

Brian Keating:
Why do the Chinese need an observatory in Argentina? Well, that’s weird. No, so they can have hemispherical synoptic observations of black body radiation. That’s what I’m guessing that’s why they probably did it. So if they’d come to me and said, well, Keating, well why are they doing this? I would say, well, let’s look at it, you know, but, you know, I’m not going to talk about politics, but, but my, my expertise is in that field. Now if it was to look for aliens, I could also say, yes, we could detect planets and we can detect objects like, oh, anything that gives off heat. And everything in the universe gives off heat, even the universe itself. Right. And I’m an expert in detectors that operate at 100th or even a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero.

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

Brian Keating:
It’s like, you know, the World Cup’s going on now. Would you like the, you know, this, this guy’s really good. I heard of this new soccer player. His name is Ronald O. I think he’s, I think he’s Irish. I’m not sure. Anyway, Ronald. Oh, Ronaldo.

Brian Keating:
Right. So would you want Ronaldo to be your dentist? You know, I just got a cavity filled, right? No freaking way. Right? So you don’t ask. But he’s so great, you know, he’s incredible. Yeah, he is. But he’s not a dentist, so we have to be careful like that. And that’s why when Anna Luna. Congresswoman.

Brian Keating:
Representative Luna, she talks about interdimensional beings, it does a disservice. I’m sorry, it just does. It sounds completely ridiculous. There’s no sense in which that that sentence can be uttered without the follow up question is what do you mean? And then she has to say, I don’t know. Because there’s no notion of interdimensionality. There’s no evidence, evidence for interdimensionality. Multiple dimensions, time traveling. When I Talked to Tom DeLong on this podcast with a CIA agent, Jim Semivan, you know, we heard the to the Stars academy has, has, has objects.

Brian Keating:
And, and I said, okay, well what’s their history? How do you trace them back? And he said, oh, we don’t have a full traceable provenance of the. Oh, that’s as good as nothing. That’s like me showing up with this and saying this has biological material. I licked it. You know, you don’t know. You don’t know what’s happened to this. You haven’t had the data, the bodies, the craft. So I think that these are, these are big challenges.

Brian Keating:
And the final kind of sawhorse and hobby horse that I’ve been on lately involves, you know, this question of belief. Like what does it mean to believe something these, that you believe in extraterrestrial life. Like, okay, you believe in it. And these are, these are scientists, these are my colleagues all around the world. And I’m hoping to have David Kipping back on, maybe Adam Frank back on the podcast. Maybe all three of us maybe have a big, you know, kind of debate between not, not an argument, but I think we’re all respecting each other. But when you hear things about, about non human biologics, when you hear things about the continuum of life, not, not even like a continuum, you Know, in the, in the Earth. I don’t even know what a continuum is like.

Brian Keating:
There’s not a continuum. We think of sex. Right? Okay, I’m going to get really controversial right now. There’s not a continuum of. It’s not like the electromagnetic spectrum where there’s an infinite number of real numbers and there’s an infinite number of wavelengths. No, no, there’s not a continuum. So how could it be that aliens have a, have a continuum? Maybe they have this, this incredible diversity of light. Now why would we have collected all of these? Right? So maybe, maybe like in, in the movie Project Hail Mary by my friend and a former UCSD attendee, but he didn’t graduate.

Brian Keating:
Andy Weir, you know, the Rocky character is this, you know, kind of giant spider with a carapace and everything else. Maybe that’s life on someplace. Maybe there’s astrophage and some other star. Right? I always say it’s, it’s more plausible. The deep scientific plausibility of Project Hail Mary far exceeds that of Interstellar. Sorry to break that to you. And now there’s a new one, Iron Lung. Has anyone ever seen that movie? Well, that could be even more plausible than either Project Hail Mary or Interstellar.

Brian Keating:
So that’s my hottest hot takes. But anyway, you have a continuum, right? From corporeal bipedal life, which means it’s like us. Okay. I’m sorry to say that means it has a body. Corporeal bipedal has two legs. We evolved to walk upright under very specific gravitational, optical. And also from emerging from fish like creatures is the way we believe. Leave it.

Brian Keating:
And having eyes on the side of our heads to having eyes on top of our heads. And the index of refraction difference gave us a predatorial advantage when we came on land. So the first objects had. Were fish that came on land, we believe evolutionarily, and then they had eyes on top of their heads, right? And then they want to see even further. So then they need to get more on land and then maybe the evolutionary process started from there. We don’t know. I mean, this is pure speculation. But at least the, the bipedalism.

Brian Keating:
If you, if we track bipedalism throughout the fossil record, throughout evolutionary biology, it’s an incredibly specific, highly, highly appropriate. I don’t even want to say intelligently designed because I don’t want you to think like, I just buy into everything. My, my intelligent design. No, far from it. Although I did have another hot take, which is that string theory has fewer experimentally verified predictions than does intelligent design. Because string theory has zero. And according to even the best string theorist Joseph Conlon has been on the podcast, his book on string theory, CRC Press has a chapter Experimental Evidence for String Theory. And the entire chapter is there is none.

Brian Keating:
But according to Stephen C. Meyer and other evolutionary biologists that work on this field that there was a prediction that the human DNA sequence would have so called junk DNA that would turn out to be functional. And for a long time they called it junk DNA and then it was found to be functional. Now that’s very, very low. What’s called Bayes factor. I’m not being serious really, but I do like to tease, you know, kind of my, my colleagues on both sides. I’ll tease the intelligent designers, as you’ll hear in my pushback on Stephen C. Meyer, because it talks about fine tuning and I said no, the universe is extremely poorly tuned.

Brian Keating:
It’s as if I’m playing the violin. You know, I’m a horrible musician. The only instrument I can play is Spotify. But the universe has dark energy which dominates all other forms of matter and energy. And we could change the amount by a factor of 10 and you wouldn’t notice it at all. We’d still be here, life would still be here. So to say that it’s exquisitely finely tuned is just false. And then they can cherry pick and go back to some other time.

Brian Keating:
I also push back on Jewish apologetics. Gerald Schroeder claims the universe seven days of creation in Torah corresponds to the astrophysical and physical epochs of quark hadron separation, electro weak phase transition. Total nonsense. Okay. And I push back on that very strongly. So you’re never going to get me. Maybe I’m explaining why I’m not invited to many parties, but, but anyway, I find it fascinating to talk to all these people on different legs of the stool and hopefully come to some conclusion that gets us a little bit closer to truth. Now you know, I’ve talked about, you know, people that, that like Avi, who would talk about things in this with a straight face, like sentient plasmoid life versus a hypothesis that gets smuggled in in terms of belief.

Brian Keating:
I mentioned that to Avi. This vicar study kind of shook me that people would state that they believe. Not like I believe in God, you know, I believe in astrology. No, I don’t say any of that. I say I don’t believe in that. I say I’m. I actually don’t say I believe in God ever. Never say it.

Brian Keating:
I say I am looking for evidence that God is plausible as a scientific hypothesis. And people like Sean Carroll, who are very simplistic in their knowledge of Judaism or Christianity or any type of religion, will say, oh well, God wouldn’t have created a universe that has so many galaxies, right? Why did he waste so much space? And I’m like, oh, yeah, you know, God wouldn’t have created an atom that has 99.999% empty space, right? It’s an idiotic argument to say, like, what God should or should not do. I mean, I know Sean has an ego, but, but, but really, Sean, I mean, this is like in his, in his most cited work, you know, God is not a good theory to appeal to that. It’s like saying, well, you know, why are there so many elements? You know, would God create so many elements? You know, how do you know how many elements? I mean, 190 years ago we thought there was about 10 elements, right? Now we know there’s, there’s 10 times that number plus. So I think these are awesome. I think we need to hold the scientists feet to the fire. We need to hold the alien, you know, kind of maximalist to the feet to the fire. We need to hold the religious adherence feet to the fire.

Brian Keating:
And I don’t think anyone else is doing this. And that’s why I think this channel is, you know, criminally unsubscribe under subscribed, not unsubscribed. I don’t want you to hear that. But, but we cross 400,000 subscribers. But, but I, I really feel like, like we’re doing, we’re getting these incredible interviews. I just interviewed my 26th Nobel Prize winner and Nobel Prize winners are asking to come on my show. It’s a great flattery to me, but really, do you, I mean, a lot of these people see the power of the audience and, you know, a lot of people won’t or will. You know, I asked Neil DeGrasse Tyson to come on.

Brian Keating:
He said he would, then he backed out. He said he didn’t have time. And then I saw him on Piers Morgan, you know, like, okay, Piers Morgan’s got 10 times more subscribers than me. I’ll give him a pass. You know, I’ve been on Piers Morgan twice now, but, but you know, If I had 10 times more subscribers, who knows, maybe he’d say no to Piers Morgan and not to Brian Keating. Now, I know a lot of you don’t like Neil’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson anyway, but he’s an important person, right? I mean, I also push his Feet to the fire. He said a lot of nonsensical stuff, too. I mean, everything that he said about, you know, spectrums and things like that we could.

Brian Keating:
I can push back on him like, no, nobody else, because we have a respect. I’ve been on his show in person. You know, I’ve been on the show twice. He’s been on my show two or three times, and he’ll be back. But I want you guys to ask me the questions that I should be asking on your behalf. I view myself as your ambassador, but I’m also an independent person with my own curiosities. Right, okay. So the last question, you know, I kind of want to leave you guys with is, you know, where, where do you want to see things in the channel go? I’m not, I’m not like to be captured by the audience in the sense of I’ll do whatever you say and, you know, I’ll do the, the 100 days in a yacht challenge, and if I spend 100 days in the yacht, I get to keep.

Brian Keating:
I’m not going to do that. Sorry. But no matter how much the audience wants it. Right. I miss my, my home cooking. Right. But in terms of, like, the, the disposition, I find a lot of people, you know, either love or hate the kind of content that I do. They either love that I’m talking about religion or hate that I’m talking about religion.

Brian Keating:
Either love that I’m talking, you know, someone who’s interested in investigating alien life and then people that hate it or people that love that I’m talking to a skeptic like Shermer or hate that I’m talking to Shermer. People that think, oh, you’re just, you know, licking the boots of Eric Weinstein. I haven’t had Eric on in over a year. I mean, I talk to him all the time, but, you know, I haven’t found that what he has to say lately is a mandatory, you know, content for my channel. And a lot of people. I did a poll on the channel. Who do you want to see on? And he got the more votes than most people, as he usually does. But.

Brian Keating:
But it wasn’t by the same margin. It used to be like 80, you know, 80, 20 kind of thing. 80 for Eric and 20 for everybody else. But maybe I need to do more surveys like that. But I’m really enjoying it. But I need to know, you know, kind of where, where, you know, you’re going to be. You’re going to be intellectually honest with you yourself and have integrity to Listen to people you don’t agree with. Because what YouTube really rewards, and you know, I’m not a master of it at all, but.

Brian Keating:
But I find it fascinating because you get instant feedback, you get real time data, you get to talk to. I mean, I have, you know, half a million followers across the, the video and audio, you know, feeds of this podcast. It’s a huge. I just looked up that in, in the last six months of this year, like a million hours people have watched a million hours of my content. It’s insane. Like, I can’t believe that I can’t listen to myself for a million. You know, I talked to, you know, my, my mother. She’s like, people pay to listen to you.

Brian Keating:
Like, I wouldn’t listen to you for free. No, she doesn’t say that would be horrible. But, but what YouTube really rewards is, is first of all, looking at the video, deciding you want to watch it, sharing it with somebody else, leaving a thumbs up, leaving a comment. Those are huge engagement signals. But the best engagement signal is how long you watch the show for. Like, how long do you tune in for. And I think, you know, a lot of people will either tune in not at all, or they watch the whole thing. So I find a lot of people do that.

Brian Keating:
A lot of people are watching. 60% of you are not subscribed that are watching. I don’t know why. It doesn’t cost you anything to click that little subscribe button. And again, we’d have over a million subscribers on YouTube, a lot alone, plus even more on audio feeds as well. So I need to know that you’re going to be, you know, kind of the ride or die audience that I feel like I’ve cultivated. Again, 26 Nobel Prize winners talk to more Nobel Prize winners than anyone on earth, as far as I know. And I don’t just do like, even with my most recent guest, I push back on the Nobel Prize winner.

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

Brian Keating:
What’s the guy’s name? Not.

Avi Loeb:
Not.

Brian Keating:
Oh, I always get him. He always pops up. How? Lewis. How is it? Lewis Howe. And anyway, he, he’s like a really big name podcaster that I’m, that I’m often, you know, people tell me I should go on and tell my, my human story. Anyway, put it on there. But I think I’ve been on Rogan. I’ve been on diary of a CEO.

Brian Keating:
I’ve been on Jordan Peterson multiple times. StarTalk multiple times. I’ve been on Chris Williamson way back when, before he had a video even. And who am I missing? I’ve been a Ben Shapiro’s Sunday special. I’ve been on, you know, again, not. I’m blank. Andrew Huberman. I was on Sean Ryan.

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

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

Brian Keating:
So leave a comment if you think the Portal should come back on or at least let me broadcast the episode. Eric, I mean, come on, this is six years now. It’s ridiculous. But I thought it was one of our best. And we, you know, we get along. We. We argue like brothers, but we get along like brothers. It’s a lot of fun to know, Eric.

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

Brian Keating:
He’s 80 years old, I think now. But, but some of them are just so bad and, and so pernicious to the human understanding of things like string theory and dark matter and, and, and, you know, I felt like it was my responsibility to hold his feet to the fight as a friend, as a, as a. Someone who really looks up to him. I think I was respectful. I’m not going to ever attack people ad hominem. There’s enough of that on the Internet. The next one’s going to be about this guy, Kevin Knuth, who also is a physicist. He was on May Bialik’s podcast before I was.

Brian Keating:
And he said a lot of, you know, kind of speculative things about cattle mutilations and, and, and UFO sightings. And he’s done actual hard work and physics research on the unidentified Aerial phenomena. Physics, which I think is interesting. I’d like to talk to him. Maybe he won’t come on after I do my reaction to him. Although, again, it’s very respectful. But I just take the claims and I hold it up against evidence. I identify with the human biases like belief and, and confirmation bias.

Brian Keating:
And all these things apply to me, Brian Keating, as much, if not more than anybody else. The next one after that is about Graham Hancock, who also appeared on Stephen Bartlett show and it’s already got 6 million views in like two or three days. Talking about mega structures underneath the pyramids, how the ancient world discovered Antarctica 300 years before the Western world did, and the younger Dryas impact theory of civilizational collapse. So there’s three huge waves whoppers that he brought up. A little bit reluctant to attack him. And anyway, I never attack him personally or any of these people personally ad hominem. But he is suffering some medical condition. Apparently he’s having a heart surgery soon.

Brian Keating:
I wish him well, wish him long life, but at the same level again, he’s getting all this influence. He came on the show, right? So he had the two and a half hours or three hours that Stephen requires. And that does bring me back. I didn’t close the loop. I have an explainer channel, Keating Experiments. Please do subscribe to that. It’s almost 10,000 subscribers over there. That’s where it’s going to be, you know, how do, how does the muon spin tell us about string theory or some extra dimensions? The explainer videos like that are going to appear over there exclusively.

Brian Keating:
And then where Brian Keating is either talking to somebody or talking about somebody, but again, respectfully reacting to somebody that’s going to be over here. And Dr. Brian Keenan. So bifurcation is a worrisome thing, but whatever, it’s fun for me. I have a small team in various countries around the world shout out to the team and they’re keeping me sane. And then I have my day job where I’m publishing incredible video. Incredible videos. Incredible.

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

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

Brian Keating:
But why? It’s important to you. Why should you care about that? Why do you care if a neutrino has negative mass? What does that even mean? That’s going to be on Keating experiments. Please do subscribe down there for that. I’ll put a link down below. The last thing I want to say is what makes me unique. I have to say this. As I said, the thread that gets lost because I am a professor and I do get absent minded is I’ve been on all these huge podcasts from Rogan to Stephen Bartlett to Lex Friedman to Mayim Bialik, now to Shawn Ryan. I love all those guys and girls, okay? I want to say that I’m grateful that they gave me their platform.

Brian Keating:
That said, they do things differently than I do. And that is the main thing for me is that I will never have somebody on who has a book that I haven’t read. Their book. And I’m not going to name names, but there are some people on that list. It was obvious to me within 10 seconds of sitting down with them, putting on the headphones that they never open any of my books. I put my blood, sweat and tears into these four books that I’ve written. Soon will be five, maybe I have six in me before I die. But these books, my self help guide for the stem.

Brian Keating:
Curious into the impossible. Think like a Nobel Prize winner. Into the impossible. Focus like a Nobel Prize winner. Distilled wisdom from the greatest geniuses on earth that have ever lived. I’m almost at the point where I can write a third volume. I don’t know the title. Give me a title for that down below.

Brian Keating:
And then my magnum opus, you know, my first, my memoir. Losing the Nobel Prize is about what it means to be, be a cosmologist, but a father, a son, someone who loses a mentor to suicide, someone who loses his father. And trying to operate at the highest levels because I was told I couldn’t get tenure if I didn’t win the Nobel Prize prospectively. So what does it feel like to be a young scientist with everything to lose and curious about something that has no practical value whatsoever like inflationary cosmology. How did the universe begin? I write those books and it takes a lot out of me, takes a lot of time, opportunity cost, time value of money, all these things incredible. Plus it cost money. I had a higher artist, you know, the publisher doesn’t give you money to, to get illustrations, but I felt those are mandatory to explain the science and you know, inflationary cosmology in my first place I paid for it out of my own pocket. Again I made almost low a tenth of minimum wage, probably a tenth of minimum wage given my advance was, was what it was and the amount of hours put into it, surely far below minimum wage.

Brian Keating:
Now I put a lot of time and effort into it. You can distill the wisdom of at that time a 40 year old, 45 year old guy, right? And the knowledge, and that’s so pertinent nowadays. We were swimming in knowledge. We have almost no wisdom. We’re dying of thirst for wisdom and we’re drowning in knowledge AI the Internet. We have abundant information, we have no distillation of the. And that’s what I’m trying to do on this podcast, but that’s certainly what I do in my books and to have a host, you know, fly me out at great expense to them and time expense to me, away from my wife, my kids, my Teaching. I have to get people to cover for me, you know, shout out to my colleagues that cover my classes and my postdocs and supervision.

Brian Keating:
It’s a lot, you know, I have a lot of things on my plate and I’m going out there. The least you could do is read my book. Please. It takes, I mean, some of these books take almost. I have audiobooks for every single book I’ve ever read written, including Galileo’s dialogue. Now, okay, I don’t expect anyone, you know, who’s having me on to listen to a 21 hour long audiobook, but that was with Carla Ravelli and that’s an acted version for the first time in human history of a book by Galileo, the greatest mind and science, I think that ever lived. You know, maybe with the possible exception of Einstein or, or my father in law. No, I’m just kidding.

Brian Keating:
But, but the point is how, how else, you know, why are you having me on? You know, and you know, I know you’re having me on because you’re partially. You have a much bigger platform than me. You know, say, I don’t know, someone’s podcast I haven’t been on, or maybe I have it on. You have a much bigger podcast. And so I appreciate you and I’m grateful. I have gratitude to you. That’s the most important thing, first of all. But take the time.

Brian Keating:
And so I do that for every one of my guests. I’ve read 500 books, books. And you know what, I had a brain scan done for some other reasons. You know, everything’s fine, turns out, but they did brain scan on me and then they did it again a year later. And then at the five year mark, my brain is actually increasing in density and gray matter and vascularity and all the good things about brain. And I think it’s 100 due to this podcast. You know, I do have a selfish reason to do it. It’s not monetary.

Brian Keating:
I bear, I don’t. I lose money on this podcast because I pay my editors. I never get somebody to read. I don’t have anyone doing my booking. I don’t have anybody who does, you know, kind of research for me except for my AI tools, which I have handcrafted over the last two or three years to make them incredibly pertinent to the things that interest me the most. You know, call outs to the things that matter to you the most and to edit it tightly to get rid of all the verbal yappage that I’m known for. Right. I want to cut down on that.

Brian Keating:
I know this is kind of self indulgent, but you’ll excuse me if you’ve lasted this far. I assume that you can handle a little bit of yapping. Let’s see how many people are still listening at this point. Oh, my God. There’s more people listening now than was listening before. Okay. There’s over a thousand people listening right now. I just really appreciate you guys.

Brian Keating:
I can’t tell you. It’s fun. Money. My, my. Sometimes I got recognized. I went to Hawaii last year and I was getting on the plane, I’m like, about to get the guy staring at me. I’m like, I passed tsa, you know, why are you looking? He’s like, you’re Brian Keating, right? I’m like, yeah, it depends. Do I owe you money? Like, oh, what’s going on, brother? And he’s like, no, I love your podcast.

Brian Keating:
I get these things all the time. I’m like, it makes me so gratified, like, this thing didn’t exist, you know, six years ago. I started this thing six years ago when Covid was raging and I could. I knew I was smart enough to know that authors like Avi or other people would answer my email if I asked them to come on the show because they weren’t doing book tours. I did, you know, a book tour in 2018, 20, 19, 2020 was gone. Couldn’t go on book tour. So I could get any of the dream guests that I ever want. I’ve never had a guest, really.

Brian Keating:
I can’t think of anyone. I mean, I’ve talked to Elon Musk. You know, I like to talk to him probably again at some point, but. But. But, you know, kind of been there. Talked to 26 Noble. The people that I miss talking to are the people that are no longer with us. So best of luck with that.

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

Brian Keating:
And like I said, they keep. Some of them are asking me. I mean, 10, 10, 10 of them have asked to come on my podcast. I don’t think they’re asking to come on, you know, some of these other podcasts. Right? I mean, they might appear on them, but. But I think that they know they get something special, and I’m always going to read their Books, I mean, that’s the least I can do. And so you’ll never have me unprepared. I will cancel an interview if I haven’t had time to read it or I don’t want to read it.

Brian Keating:
And it really helps when I have on people that have audiobooks, just in case you want to know. Because I listen to things. I can listen at 2x speed and I can do things, you know, with audio that I can’t do with printed. But I am reading printed books now. I’m kind of getting back into it. Some fiction I’ve had on four Pulitzer Prize winners. These are the things that really make it so enjoyable. And I always say at work I have to talk to people.

Brian Keating:
There are people I have to talk to. The, you know, telescope azimuthal encoder drive is broken and I need to get somebody out at 18, 000ft in Chile. And it’s a Chilean holiday and it’s a German company and they can’t get an import for an American part that comes from China. Anyway, you want to know, those are people I have to talk to. Some of them I like a lot. You know, I love my graduate students. I have to talk to them or else they’ll go off in crazy directions, right? My undergraduates I have to talk to. I get paid to talk to them.

Brian Keating:
And just the other day I finished up class for the quarter and they all did great and they gave me a standing ovation. It was like, emotional for me. I have to be honest with you. A couple of them came up and took a selfie with me. They were like, do you mind if. Can I take a selfie with you? Like, they were so. And I was like, yeah, you guys rock. Like, everything I do I owe to you guys.

Brian Keating:
And so this is what I do. This is what I love. I’m always going to read the books, I’m always going to go deep. I’m never going to stop talking to people that I disagree with. You know, I’ve had people not, not want to come on the show. I can name names, right? It’s too bad, you know, it’s too bad for them. I think that they are scared of a little bit of pushback. I think you all know the Malibu meditator that I’m talking about just didn’t want to come back on the show ever again because I pushed back on him and his utterly simplistic, ignorant kind of view of, again, some biblical topic that he feels capable of talking about.

Brian Keating:
Fine. I’m not going to say he can’t talk about it, but the fact that he never yet got pushback once everyone just tells him what a brilliant genius he is and everything he says is just so wonderful and intellectually deep. I’d love to talk to him. I offered him to stay at my house during the. The Malibu fires me politely, you know, turn that down. But that’s again, I feel like it’s his loss. I can talk to Richard Dawkins who hosted me, flew me up to Vancouver to host him for two days at this wonderful live show in front of a thousand people. And it was incredible.

Brian Keating:
And, and he knows I don’t dis. I don’t agree with him about a lot of stuff. I push back on Richard Dawson. Like who is the chutzpah to do that besides me? I mean, I don’t care. I don’t want these interviews where people are just like, oh you’re so amazing, let me just lick your boots. And this is incredible. Now do I talk to people like Avi or my friends and I cut them maybe a little bit more. Okay.

Brian Keating:
I’m a human being. I have friends. Sorry to say I have friends. But you notice even with the friends like Eric, Eric, I think he gets annoyed with me. You know, he’ll tell me, you know, like that he doesn’t want to talk about a subject because I’m pushing him on something that’s uncomfortable for him. I’ll push him on things like publication. I’m no big very person who, you know, really forced him to publish on April Fool’s Day 2021, his theory of geometric unity. Now he didn’t do it to the level that people want him to and, and he said he’s an entertainer so that he wouldn’t be liable for people cutting his stuff and he could have legal recourse against them.

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

Brian Keating:
I’ve heard people like Chris Williamson, you know, who I think also has sort of blocked me because I criticized him for, you know, hosting rabid anti Semites and people, you know, that are just horrific human beings beings, you know, because they’re of interest to his audience.

Avi Loeb:
Fine.

Brian Keating:
I don’t think he’ll ever have me back on. But I was there for him before he had, you know, a thousand subscribers. Now he’s got four and a half million. So good for him. I’m really happy for him. But, but to hear that, you know, when he told his audience that, you know, he doesn’t read the books effectively because he doesn’t want to be like a short form or, you know, blinkist for his audience to skip the book. And, and I don’t want that either. I want you to buy the books.

Brian Keating:
I want you to, you know, I’ve kept these books for years, right? These are, you know, my library. That’s like one tenth of my library behind me. I’ve got 10 times that in my studio, in my, my in person studio. So my books are my treasure where people love the book, right? This is the most important thing to me. So that means I’m going to take it serious. I’m going to read the books. I’m not going to summarize it so you don’t have to buy it, but I’m going to read that. I’m going to pull out the things that are most personal, most just fire me up.

Brian Keating:
My obsidian, my Apple notes, my, my second brain is brimming with connections between these 550 now books, between them. So I can ask, you know, upcoming guest Annie Jacobson, who’s coming on for a new book that she’s written called Biological War. That should be fun, right? You know, Biological War, a scenario she’s coming on in July. It’s embargoed. They, they’re sending me that. That’s incredible that they have trust in me and I’ve earned the trust. I’ve never broken an embargo, never will, even with my own experiments, right. I’ve been under embargoes many times and for books and for research and I’ll always respect that.

Brian Keating:
That’s, that’s the duty of a scholar. So in summary, if you want deep dives where people are going to go, be pushed, respectfully friendly. I think I bring more humor to it than most podcasters do. Even I had one producer of a podcast that shall remain nameless. But I went on his podcast and it was right after Joe Rogan was on the podcast with the same host and the producer said he laughed more when I was on the show. Okay. Now I think Joe is a lot funnier than me, but on the same token, I do believe that there’s a role for seriousness and for humility and quite frankly, to be. To be, you know, kind of respectfully antagonistic, I have to say, to have the chutzpah to back it up with intellect and back it up with preparation.

Brian Keating:
Always going to maintain the preparatory standards. Preparation H. I’m always going to maintain it because if I don’t, I feel like a fraud. I feel like people. If I were to have on a guest like Michael Shermer or, you know, so sometimes I like to be a guest on other people’s podcasts. I have to do no preparation, although I even do that. I actually have a self trained LLM specifically for when I’m on a guest on Sean Ryan’s podcast. I do deep research on him.

Brian Keating:
You know, he doesn’t have books, but he has 500 episodes. And what are the themes? What are the things that he goes deep on? What are the things that he doesn’t care about? What are the things that he’s so passionate about? He’ll interrupt something even more important to discuss this subject. Does he talk about the news? Does he talk about his kids? Does he talk about his upbringing? He changes name. You know, what, what does he do? So I go deep into them when I’m a guest, but it’s a little bit easier to be a guest than to be a host. So it is hard to be a host, especially this week. I have four guests on this week, including Avi Loeb, Beatrice Villarrell, Michael Shermer, and then Nate Suarez, who wrote, co wrote, if anybody builds it, Everybody Dies. With Eliezer Yudowski as an AI safety researcher. I just released my episode with Roman Yampolsky.

Brian Keating:
Please check that out. I went deep and that was not an easy book to read. A lot of math proofs and deep excursions into the formal logic behind the assertion that AI is either safe or unsafe. And that has huge implications for governance, for regulations, for our own safety, and the flourishing of the human species. And he’s very pessimistic. He made me sort of debt. But I pushed back on him. I said, you know, you say that AI is unpredictable, therefore it’s uncontrollable.

Brian Keating:
It was sort of a version of the halting problem that Turing popularized in his Turing Machine paper. That was the name of it, actually. It’s a halting problem and sort of like the Girdle’s incompleteness theorem. And I said, you have a version of those two massive theorems, Godel’s theorem and Turing’s theorem. And you’re saying it’s predictable, that it’s going to be unpredictable, but isn’t that a tautology? So I want you to watch that episode. Hour and a half. I think I went deeper with him than any other interview, certainly than Mike. I love Stephen Barlett, but he can’t get as deep technically because by his own admission, he didn’t go to college.

Brian Keating:
He didn’t finish college. I think he went for two days. But. And I love those guys, and I really appreciate them for hosting me. I just wish that they would maybe spend a little bit more time. If you, if you like me enough this far, you know, to go on a first date, you’re gonna love me once you get to know me. And that’s the way I feel about my guests. I really love each.

Brian Keating:
I haven’t had anyone on, even, Even Sam Harris. I love Sam Harris. I, I, there’s nothing that he could do. I pay for his apps and his podcast because he has, he has a fine mind and we disagree on a ton of stuff, but, you know, so be it. He’ll never come on again. Maybe I’ll see him in some, you know, some secret cabal meeting somewhere where he, you know, kind of runs for president to take over, you know, Trump on his eighth term. You know, Sam will be there standing at the vanguard. But until then, Sam, you’re always welcome back on.

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

Brian Keating:
Try to get some more people involved. Again, I don’t care about the numbers, you know, like, I hit 400,000. My kids are really excited about it. But at the time, same, same time, like, well, it’s. How is it really different than 399.99? You know, so I posted, you know, here’s. Oh, I got to 399, 974,000 subscribers. You know, like, okay, that’s what I always wanted. I mean, I know if I go to a million or whatever, half a million, I’m just gonna say, well, you know, there’s another number that’s bigger.

Brian Keating:
That’s the property of natural numbers. So love you guys. Please stay with it. Even if you don’t like it, even if you don’t like the content. I promise you, you’re going to grow your pink gray matter. Especially when you don’t agree with me or my guest or both or neither. You’re going to grow your mind. And we have so little time.

Brian Keating:
In just a few years, according to Roman, we won’t even have these things anymore. There’ll be no point in having a podcast. Brian Keating will be irrelevant. You’ll just like click on something optimized for Stephen Dedalus from born in 1974 and it’s going to look him up and it’s going to say, oh, these are all the things in a social graph I love. And we’ll just dial it in and it’ll get pumped like Soma into his brain and he won’t need me anymore. So until that happens, until that happens, stay tuned, always be curious, and thank you so much. Please do share it. Subscribe.

Brian Keating:
Don’t forget to do those basic things. Okay? Love you all. Talk to you next time.