#316 Brian Keating - The First Object Ever Found From Another Solar System

Brian Keating is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, and the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory. He is a public speaker, inventor, and expert in the study of the universe’s oldest light, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), using it to learn about the origin and evolution of the universe. Keating is also a writer, podcaster, and best-selling author of “Losing the Nobel Prize,” named one of Amazon Editors’ “Best Nonfiction Books of All Time.” Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Head to https://superpower.com and use code SRS at checkout for $20 off your membership. Unlock your new health intelligence with 100+ biomarkers tested every year. Live better longer with BUBS Naturals. Get 20% OFF on collagen, MCT creamers, and more with code SHAWN at https://bubsnaturals.com/srs Right now, Babbel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to https://Babbel.com/SRS Go to get dot https://stash.com/SRS to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. Search onX Offroad in the App Store or Google Play to access an off-road navigation app with trail maps, land boundaries, camping info, and offline capability. https://www.onxmaps.com/offroad/app Brian Keating Links: X - https://x.com/BrianKeating Instagram - https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating Military members, claim your free meteorite: - htttps://BrianKeating.com/srs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Shawn Ryan?

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.

• 0:30Speaker 02

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• 0:40Speaker 00

  Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compendia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.

• 0:50Shawn Ryan?

  Brian Keating, welcome to the show, man.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  It's a great pleasure to be here, Sean. Been a while, I've been hoping to come on.

• 0:56Shawn Ryan?

  Couple of years, in the making, right?

• 0:58Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 0:59Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, yeah, we were talking out there, I think, I think I've been tracking you for like two or three years and you finally made it.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of scary to hear that Sean Ryan's been tracking you, but I'll take that, my friend.

• 1:12Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, but, uh, yeah, lots of shit going on right now. Lot of stuff going on right now. What do you think about all this alien stuff?

• 1:21Speaker 02

  You know, it's, it's either the most exciting time to be alive, or it's gonna be the most depressing time to be alive. You know, it's like, uh, imagine you keep asking a girl out, she's, yeah, soon, soon, I'll, I'll disclose my intentions to you, and you know, you're just kind of waiting in the wings, and you keep hearing things are gonna happen, it's gonna come out, finally we're gonna know the truth. Um, and the whole community is thinking about things and is excited about things. And then, I'm sorry to say, I've just been completely underwhelmed. This, this last release by President Trump and Department of War Pete Hegseth, I, I tore through that like a kid on, you know, Christmas morning, or as soon as it came out, I'm just.

• 2:00Shawn Ryan?

  What'd you find?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I, I found, you know, really, it's a, a nice round number, I found like zero. I found zero that really interested me, and worse than that, I found things that were, you know, your background, you're used to dealing with kind of like psyops and, and a good friend, my, my friend Chad Haas, he was, he was in the psyops, he was in US Army, served in there. You know, they have exposure to things, right? They're gonna, they're gonna prime you for certain things. I call these sci-ops, S C I-ops, because it sounds so outlandish, so outrageous. It titillates the mind, especially if you're a nerd like me. I want to know about extradimensional beings. I want to know about non-humanoid biologics. And all I get to hear from people I

• 2:46Speaker 02

  respect, some people I've talked to, you know, I like to say I've got the square root of your podcast, but I talk to a lot of same people that you've had the opportunity and honor to talk to. And it's always, you know, comes down to like, trust me, bro, or I heard, or somebody said this, and I can't say that. And in the military, I completely understand it. I understand. You've seen things, you've done things, you're not going to be able to talk about things. You're a scientist, and you go on a show, like my friend, you know, Stephen Bartlett's show, and you get 10 million views, and one night you say, well, I heard from somebody who heard from somebody. And you're a physicist, like this, you know, people that have come on recently on his show. It frustrates me, because that's not the way science works.

• 3:27Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think this is all a distraction? I mean, every time, every time there's a big release or hearing, it just, to me, it just winds up being a big, another fucking nothing burger.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, have you, have you heard anything that would make you, I mean, these are supposed to be some of the most consequential discoveries of all time, right? Things that could question and have caused people, literally, Sean, to be burned at the stake. Okay, 1600, Giordano Bruno, it was, it was a priest, priest in the Catholic Church in Italy. He proclaimed that every star you see in the heavens has a planet around it. They said, very nice, you know, what, what temperature do you want to be cooked to? You know, they burned him at the stake. Because it was so threatening, which meant it was threatening to the most powerful authority on earth at the time, which is the Catholic Church, the Vatican. And that was like the, you know, United States on steroids, like literally, which is killer. No other power was comparable. And he went against them.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Why? Because it was threatening to them. Why is there something threatening to you? Do you care when your kid says, oh daddy, you don't, you look ugly today, or some hater on the internet says something? You don't give a crap about it. But when somebody says something important and it challenges your worldview, like that's that's significant. So allegedly, these things could have the most consequential impact on humanity. Has your life changed? Have you questioned your belief in God? Have you thought maybe, you know, there's, there's something to these aliens and, and maybe it could be incompatible with my religion, my faith in Jesus Christ, or whatever? No. I mean, I assume no.

• 4:55Shawn Ryan?

  I used to think there was something to this alien shit. I really did. Now I don't.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  You know,

• 5:02Shawn Ryan?

  I just don't. You know, I've interviewed so many people about this. And I'm not talking about, uh, Avi Loeb, or, but, um, you know, the thing is, is one thing that one red flag to me is you've got all these, all these people out there that are screaming disclosure. We want disclosure. They're demanding it. But none of them are really working together.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:34Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so, you know, behind closed doors, off camera, they're all talking shit about each other.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:41Shawn Ryan?

  It's like, it's like, oh, you, you want disclosure, but only if you're the fucking one to disclose it, right? You don't want to work with anybody else and actually, you know, figure this out. You, you just, you want to be the guy. That's what it is. And, um, yeah, it's, so that's like one thing. Another thing is I find the timing very odd of the release of all this shit. I mean, it, the, you know, the, the latest batch of the alien conspiracy thing is, you know, it stopped right at the height of the Epstein stuff and the Iran war.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:18Shawn Ryan?

  Whether you're for it, against it, whatever, it's very unpopular. You know what I mean? And, and so it's like, Give them aliens. You know what I mean? That's, that's how I think about it now. I'm just like, this fucking bullshit. Of course you drop it right now.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:33Shawn Ryan?

  And so it's, I think the timing alone is discrediting.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  So, you know, in the ancient Roman times, you had on Jeremy Ryan Slate is a friend of mine not too long ago. Uh, you know, he talked about ancient Rome and, and what they used to do and how they keep the masses entertained when there's no Netflix. They had bread and circus. I call this bread and saucers. This is what they're doing.

• 6:54Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  There's a lot of distraction. Why is it distracting though? That's what interests me. It's a meta cognitive thing. To me, it's interesting because it taps into something primal in the human spirit, which is beautiful, by the way, that people care about the possibility of extra, extra dimensional, extraterrestrial, not only life. Like, if I told you tomorrow, we discovered some slime mold, um, you know, the, the moon of Saturn Titan. You'd be like, holy crap, that's cool. But if I told you there's dolphins swimming around on the ocean, you'd say that's even cooler, right? And then if I said, there's, there's fricking dolphins with, with opposable thumbs and they're using iPhone. You'd be like, holy fricking crap, you know, right? So it's just, it's this hierarchy of insane, interesting, most fascinating stuff.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  And it is child abuse or, or, you know, humanity's curiosity abuse. When you start saying something is so weighty, so important, so significant, not just to like, you know, your worldview, your religion, your belief in God, all these things, and you start like rug pulling it. I think that's, I think it's not only, you know, kind of not, not, not nice to do to people. I think it's morally objectionable. If you keep teasing this and just wait till you see it. And by the way, it's not just scientists, it's not just, um, the military, it's people in Congress. It's people in power and it's frustrating to me because they'll often be something, you know, they'll say things like, you know, we want someone, you know, these things that we see defy the laws of physics.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, like, I'm a physicist, Avi loves a physicist, you know, show us the data. Avi doesn't believe that we're being visited right now. He does believe that there have been extraterrestrial technology potential for them to have visited us via this. This recent, you know, Three Eye Atlas, and we can debate the scientific methods all you want. And there's a lot of objections in the science because guess what? That's what scientists do. Scientists will say, oh, you found a good discovery. Oh, that's great, Sean. You know, one, good for you. We're not like, you know, in the teams or whatever, like, oh, you take somebody this, I'll take some. We don't have roles like that. We're all kind of doing battle against an enemy that has infinite resources called Mother Nature. And she doesn't give up her secret. The only thing that we have on our

• 9:05Speaker 02

  side, Sean, is that she's always in retreat. We're making incredible progress, exciting progress, despite what doomsayers say, despite what people may say about it. And we almost don't need the aliens, like, we almost don't need it for the sense that science is so incredibly interesting, so provocative, so helpful, so useful. But we've come to believe that with science, you get technology. And I kind of say, that's the problem, you know? The problem with science is that sometimes it makes technology. And so you come to expect it as a general public. Well, what good is this? Why should we spend this money here? Why should we do this? Why should we do that? And we should, we have poor people here in Tennessee or wherever, right? We should be doing something for them. It's not a zero sum game. In fact, it's a losing battle. We know we're going to lose against Mother

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Nature. But don't make it worse. Don't put up false flags. Don't try to do the psyops, SCI ops, and, and let us have access to it. The universe, Abi Loeb loves to say, the sky's not classified. I say, physics is not classified.

• 10:02Shawn Ryan?

  Love that. You familiar with Polly Market?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:06Shawn Ryan?

  Polly Market only gives a 14% chance that the US will confirm that aliens exist before 2027. Did you see the post that Trump did?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:17Shawn Ryan?

  The other day, with a, with a, did anybody, what is that?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Um, you know, he's, he's, he's a master manipulator. He's a best, and I, you know, I support what President Trump does in many ways, which makes me, you know, kind of a unicorn in academia. But, um, you know, does that mean he does everything right? Does that mean like, you know, I couldn't ever consider not voting for him? Do I, do I think that he does things sometimes in a, in a callous, in a cruel, yeah, of course, look. People always say to me, as a sidebar, I'm sorry to go on a tangent so early in the conversation, but, but they say like, would you want your kid to be like President Trump? Isn't he like, oh, I have all these problems? I'm like, um, no. You know who I want my kid to be like? You know, I try to live a life for my sons to be like me. I try to live a life, but not be copies of me. I want them to be who they are, actualize their full potential that God has given them.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  But I don't want them to be me. I don't want them to be a politician. I don't want them to be an Instagram influencer. I don't want them to be you. I want them, I want to be the influence of my kid, not the president. I never look, oh, John F. Kennedy, I really want my kids to go, you know, all these guys. I don't say that either. I don't say, you know, I want my kid to be like Stephen Hawking. No, I don't, nobody. I want them to be.

• 11:24Shawn Ryan?

  Replacement.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. They're your ticket to the afterlife in, in reality, spirituality and ideologically. I think that's, what other gift could you have? And by the way, I like to say for people that don't have kids, a lot of my friends don't have kids, I'm sure, you know, the same number of people, um, you don't have to have kids yourself. A, you can adopt. B, you can, you can be a mentor. You know, it's a shame the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson have given like real bad name to like men mentoring younger, younger kids. And I think that's, I think it's a tragedy because I think what you need is more biological fathers and more ideological fathers. And you, you can be both, but you don't have to be both.

• 12:01Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh, uh huh. Let's get back to aliens real quick. So, polymarky gives a 14% chance that the US government confirms alien life or technology this year. $38 million in real money has traded on this. You've built telescopes at the South Pole, looking for signals from the beginning of the universe. As a physicist, what do those odds tell you?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  So, one of the places I built a telescope is at the South Pole, Antarctica. And I think that means I've been on a Navy base that you haven't been on, uh, the South Pole.

• 12:36Shawn Ryan?

  That means you've been on, on a Navy base that I've not been on.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Uh, and I've probably been on a plane, you know, put in my, the only ways I can, you know, say that I've done something Sean, Sean Ryan hasn't done is I've been, I might've been on a plane you've never been on in the military, an LC 130 cargo plane. So it's a ski equipped cargo plane. The US doesn't export it. It's like the, uh, F-22 or something.

• 12:57Shawn Ryan?

  Never even seen one.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  It's a giant, it's the world's biggest ski plane. It is the coolest thing. It's a C-130.

• 13:02Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, you went to Antarctica?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  I've been there twice. I spent months of my life.

• 13:06Shawn Ryan?

  What's going on down there?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  So Antarctica is one of the most fascinating, otherworldly, just like extraterrestrial kind of planet, filled with some of the most hard-charging people outside of the military that you probably ever want to meet. People, it's oversubscribed, so it's harder to get to the South Pole to work there as a cook than it is to get into Harvard University. There's so many people that want to work there, to be there. They love the isolation, they love the desolation. It's like the movie Star Wars with the ice planet Hoth covered over, frozen over in

• 13:38Shawn Ryan?

  Snow. Isolation, desolation. Sounds like my dream place.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  For me, it's a nightmare. Yeah, for you, it's great. I, I love, I, I love getting there. I love having been there. I hate being there.

• 13:49Shawn Ryan?

  You love getting there? What's that, like a 25-hour plane ride?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  It takes seven days. Yeah, from San Diego.

• 13:55Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  It's crazy. And, or you can take two, two and a half weeks by boat across the world's Southern Ocean, which is the most dangerous and, and kind of violent. See, I, I get seasick, you know, so like I, I go on a stand-up paddleboard, I get seasick. So, you know, I'm not taking the boat ride. But, so you get there, you go from San Diego, fly to LAX, you fly from LAX to either Australia or to the North Island of New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand. And that takes, you know, 14 hours, whatever flight. Then you get there, then you have to take another flight to get from there to Christchurch, New Zealand, so on the South Island of New Zealand. New Zealand is like, is where they film the Lord of the Rings. It's the most, it's like Switzerland plus the tropics. It's an incredible, beautiful

• 14:39Speaker 02

  place. And, and then you get there and the US has carved out an army base, a naval base, and a provisioning center from this place called Christchurch. And the reason that they're there is it's where the historic explorers like Roald Amundsen, who's the first man to reach the South Pole, and Robert Scott, who's a British team, they were in a race, every bit as competitive as the Cold War space race to get to the moon first. This battle in 1911 and 1912 was every bit as intense geopolitically, national pride, scientifically. It was the last continent. No one had ever seen Antarctica. You know, and Antarctica was discovered, Antarctica was discovered after the planet Uranus was discovered.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  We found a frickin' planet before we went to the world's seventh continent. It's a continent.

• 15:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, I did not know that.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an actual continent, which means unlike the North Pole, if you go to the North Pole, you've seen that where the submarines go up through there. There's no land at the North Pole. If you go to the South Pole, you dig down through 9,500 feet of ice, you hit rock. That means it's a continent. So it's one of Earth's seven continents. It has a population right now as we're speaking. It's winter in Antarctica, or it's starting to be, you know, the fall. It's going into winter there as we, you know, kind of in spring, going into summer in the northern hemisphere. Uh, there's only about 800 people on the whole continent.

• 15:57Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Once again, this sounds like my dream place.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got a, you got a 200 mile shooting range you can go out to.

• 16:05Shawn Ryan?

  That means everybody there has to have a specific job and has to be very fucking good at it. There's no slackers.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  That's right. That's why I like-

• 16:11Shawn Ryan?

  I imagine there's no slackers.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  No, you, you can't get, first of all, you need a psychological exam if you're gonna be there. You can't, because there's no doctors there, there's no dentist there. You, if you have even a 1% chance that you're gonna need your molars removed before you go to Antarctica, they force you to pull them out. Okay? Because there's no dentist there. Can you imagine the horrific pain that you could possibly have if you were at the South Pole? No doctors, no dentist, no x-rays, nothing, nothing you could possibly save your life. And you get a toothache, so they have to, and it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for each person to get down there. So the US takes it very seriously. Um, we go down these ski-equipped cargo planes. Um, we leave from Christchurch on a C-17 if you're lucky. Um, if you're unlucky, you get a C-130 again, which is half the speed.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  And, um, and they can only get provisions in or out of there about three months of the year. So the, the station opens up in November, which is beginning of their spring, going into their summertime. Uh, and then it ends in February 15th. And Sean, if you're not out by, oops, sorry. If you're not out by February 15th, you're there until November. You're not going anywhere. So yeah, it's an incredible environment. And it's dark, by the way, it's dark, pitch black, three months of the year.

• 17:23Shawn Ryan?

  I've been thinking a lot about this lately. We track everything in our lives, our workouts, our sleep, our business metrics. When it comes to our actual health, most of us are just guessing. And that never really made sense to me. And I think we've all had that experience where you go in, get checked out, and leave without any real clarity. No real breakdown of what's going on, or what to actually do next. That's why I'm really interested in what Superpower is doing. It's one simple set of lab tests, but you're getting data on over 100 biomarkers. So now you can actually understand what's going on with your body, from hormones, to

• 18:07Shawn Ryan?

  metabolism, to vitamin levels, and more. And for me, that's the biggest thing. I'm always wondering, what should I be doing? What supplements make sense? How to adjust my diet? How to optimize performance? And instead of guessing, Superpower gives you a real plan based on your data. It also tracks everything over time, so you can see progress year after year, and not just start over every time. Make this the year you stop guessing about your health with Superpower. For a limited time, our listeners get $20 off to unlock their new health intelligence.

• 18:46Shawn Ryan?

  Head over to superpower.com and use code SRS for $20 off your membership. That's code SRS. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about Superpower. Do me a favor, if you could, and tell them The Sean Ryan Show sent you to support the show. What's security like?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  So, I actually had a friend, there is one gun down there, and it's not... Uh, there is one gun down there. There's a forty-five caliber, uh, nineteen eleven. It's kept in a safe and, uh, there's a station master who's sometimes a scientist. I knew the station master who was a scientist the year I was there. And they, uh, they have security because some people have gone literally crazy there, as you might expect, right? Complete isolation. You're not going anywhere. You know why? Plane can't land there. So if, if, uh, if a C-130 were to land there in the middle of winter, it gets down to negative one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Okay? So that's, that's two hundred, that's three hundred degrees below the boiling point of water. So they actually have a sauna at the South Pole

• 19:54Speaker 02

  that gets up to two hundred and twelve almost degrees Fahrenheit. And then the coldest day of the year is usually in July. They go outside and they run around naked around the South Pole. It looks like a barber pole, just like you see in, you know, like Santa would have or whatever. It's a barber pole that marks the geographic axis on which the earth is spinning. Okay? They run around. It's called the three hundred degree club. You run around every time zone and you're running in negative delta temperature of three hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Okay? So if a plane were to land there, if an LC-130 were to land there, the hydraulic fluid and JP-8 freezes at like negative fifty or something like that. So what would happen is that all the fuel lines would explode and you'd be, you'd have to, the plane would

• 20:36Speaker 02

  be ruined. You couldn't never use that plane again. So they've never done, they've done airdrops. There was a doctor there who got stranded, uh, Jerry Nielsen. And, uh, she was the onsite physician, but that's just for like, you know, cuts and scrapes and stuff like that. She diagnosed a lump and she found that she had this lump in her breast. And they had a drop chemi, they found out, diagnosed it. She dropped the biopsy kit. She tested that she had breast cancer, stage two or three. Then they dropped chemotherapy. So they had parachutes at night, pitch black, from a C-17. She ended up living a few more years after that. She wrote in a memoir about it. But it's the most isolated place on earth. Literally, there's, there's a thousand, imagine a thousand people in the entire continental US. Just imagine that. How, how far you'd have to go until you meet some, again, for people like you, you probably

• 21:21Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds amazing.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  You just would catch up on your

• 21:23Shawn Ryan?

  And you see where we're at. We're out in the woods.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  I know.

• 21:26Shawn Ryan?

  You know.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:27Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds incredible. Have you heard of these? Have you heard of these crafts that people think come out of the water from within the earth?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What do you think about that?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Well, I've seen some stuff from this gentleman, Lou Elizondo. I don't know if you've had Lou on the podcast.

• 21:42Shawn Ryan?

  I've had Lou on.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he had this book came out a couple of years ago, Imminent. I'm trying to have him on. Look, I take a skeptical view. It's like when you were a kid, I'm Jewish, but I actually grew up Catholic. And it's a long story, but, but you remember like when, when Christmas would come and you'd be so excited. Like you just knew your mom was gonna, your dad was gonna get you that racetrack or that RC truck or that 22 or whatever you're gonna get like you just knew. And then the next day shows up, oh, oh, thanks, mom, a pair of slacks. Like, oh, you know that feeling of being let down? You've had it, right? I've had it.

• 22:17Shawn Ryan?

  I was just gonna ask if you missed Christmas, maybe not, huh?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  We have enough holidays as it is. Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  So, so we, we, we are in that same situation. We're promised disclosure. We're promised us it's gonna be groundbreaking. Literally yesterday, Congresswoman Luna Burchett, a lot of people you've talked to, a lot of people you know. What's coming next? It's always what's coming next. It reminds me of like nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is said to be the power source of the future, Sean, and it always will be. In other words, we're just not converging on this stuff.

• 22:53Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think we're not?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  We can go, we can, we can do eight hours on this if you want, but, but I'll tell you, I think there's a bunch of different things. I don't actually think the, the Epstein file distraction from the Iran war. I don't think any of that is really pertinent. A, because a lot of it surfaced in 2017, you know, thanks to Tom DeLonge and to the Stars Academy and, and, and people that you might have interviewed. I talked to Tom DeLonge and Jim Semivan, who's a CIA operator at one point. And, and the challenge is you have all sorts of extremely rich potential scientific content in a very low information environment, in an extremely low trust environment.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  In other words, you've talked to people, you've talked to Ryan Graves. Okay, I I've talked to him. I actually talked to him with one of his wingmen, who's a friend of mine, is an naval veteran, an F-18 pilot, just like Ryan. And you talk about it. I would say most of the stories that I've heard. And even people like David Grush, you know, I respect these people. But I have yet to hear them say, here's the physical evidence. Sean, if these things-

• 24:01Shawn Ryan?

  They never go the full distance.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  They they never produce the evidence. A lot of it is-

• 24:04Shawn Ryan?

  Non-human biologics.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, but-

• 24:06Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that could be a fucking deer carcass on the side of the road.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:10Shawn Ryan?

  I'm I'm not fucking around. I'm being serious.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 24:13Shawn Ryan?

  If you're gonna go, why aren't we going the full distance? Like, you're not a fucking whistleblower.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 24:19Shawn Ryan?

  Bringing up bullshit.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I'm I'm glad you said that.

• 24:21Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking nothing.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I can't say that, you know, because I don't have the courage to join. I wanted to join the military. I wanted to go into the Air Force. My stepfather was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and a KC-135 Stratotanker pilot. I wanted to do it, but, you know, I discovered girls. I'm like, I I don't know if I can handle it. I I want to be an F-14 pilot, because that's when Top Gun came out when I was a kid. And then my stepfather's like, you know, you know, they say everyone wants to be a cowboy, but no one wants to ride the range, you know, like being on the boat, like my friend Arielle Kleinerman, or like Ryan Graves. Sorry, I just didn't have it. I wanted to study the stars. I wanted to not, you know, not miss that opportunity. It's kind of what I'm what I'm good at. But, on the other hand, this stuff is so interesting, and yet I keep hearing things like,

• 25:02Speaker 02

  you know, I heard from somebody, or, you know, David Grush, I I can't, you know, these are the testimonies. I haven't seen them. They do, they're interdimensional beings, like Congresswoman Luna. And I I would-

• 25:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's a spirit.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  It's a spirit. It's a god. That's why I say I call these aliens of the gaps. It's a form of almost religious worship. Same is happening with AI, by the way. You see this worship, this power, these people involved. Look at the people involved in AI, Sean.

• 25:28Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean worship in AI? What are you talking about?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Worship in AI is creating a god in our image, okay? So just what God did with us. God created us from dirt. Adam, in Hebrew, means earth. It means dirt. God carved us out of earth, created. We can believe it literally. I I'm not here to proselytize. I'm not gonna say anything about anyone who believes literally or doesn't believe literally. But the point is, gods that we create in our image, it's one of the oldest stories of all time. Tower of Babel. What was the Tower of Babel? It wasn't just like, oh, we're gonna make this tower, and it was humans developed technology. They created- The first composite building material with straw, with earth, with dirt. That's a composite building material, like rebar and concrete, right? Let's come out and they said, hey, we have technology now.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  We don't need to go on top of a mountain that God made. We can build a tower ourselves to go to the sky like a twin towers. We can do this. We're so powerful. We're so mighty, right? It's an old tale that we can compete with God. Why does the Bible, why does the Torah, the Old Testament say they did it? They wanted to fight with God. Why? Because God had restricted the knowledge that humans beings were capable of having. Again, believe it or not, I really don't care if somebody believes the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Test, I don't care. The point is these stories are eternal. They have something to teach us 3,000 years ago. They can teach us stuff to this very day. The story that people are trying to do now is to create a God sort of in our image, right? That will do things for us supernatural, have capabilities, all powerful capabilities,

• 26:58Speaker 02

  all knowing, the panopticon, know what you're doing, know what? People trust ChatGPT more than they trust, trust their priest, rabbi or minister. You ask stuff to ChatGPT, you probably wouldn't tell your wife. I know I do sometimes like, why is my wife mad at me? Like, I'm not gonna ask her that. I know why she's mad at me, right? So the point is we're outsourcing that which is ethereal, which is eternal. We're outsourcing that to little bricks of silicon. And we're hoping, but we don't really know about the dangers within. With aliens, what is happening with aliens? That there's some external force that's being suppressed, that has the power to transform the world. I agree 100%. If this, if everything they said was going to be disclosed was disclosed,

• 27:42Speaker 02

  we would have to re-confront a new reality. I mean, we would be in an environment that is so unstabilizing. It would make like the Catholic Church burning Bruno alive and imprisoning Galileo. All that thing, it would look like, you know, like when my toddler goes into timeout. Okay, it would be almost, we would be so revolutionarily displaced. The question is, what, you know, if we, if we, if that's real, if these aliens exist and they have technological capabilities to travel light years across the galaxy, why is it that, you know, Congresswoman Luna or somebody else is capable of either suppressing it or disclosing it? I mean,

• 28:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think, I mean, are they capable of that?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Well, I'll ask you the question.

• 28:29Shawn Ryan?

  Are they pretending?

• 28:30Speaker 02

  You're in the, you were.

• 28:31Shawn Ryan?

  If you talk about aliens and you're in government, that's like an immediate PR boost.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:37Shawn Ryan?

  Boom. Your front page of every paper, every podcast wants to talk to you, every news network wants to talk to you. It's, it's a great PR stunt, right?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:46Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this episode's gonna do good because we started it off talking about aliens. I guarantee.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Also because of me.

• 28:53Shawn Ryan?

  And because of you.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  I'm joking, I'm joking.

• 28:54Shawn Ryan?

  But, but I'm, I'm being serious. Like it always hits.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:59Shawn Ryan?

  It always hits.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  AI is another one.

• 29:01Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing ever comes out.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  So, and there's an incentive to keep it that way, right? Cause if you do disclose.

• 29:06Shawn Ryan?

  I think there's something to what you're saying. I mean, I don't, I'm, I'm not, I'm not that interested in it anymore because nothing ever comes, there's no, there's never any breaking shit that comes out. That's real, you know, that, that, that's, and there's nothing you can do about it anyways.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Well, you can use a critical reason.

• 29:23Shawn Ryan?

  What I think that they, what I think might be going on is they've seen, you know, how much attention the subject matter, uh, demands, you know, when it's brought up. And so it's become a tool, a useful tool for the US government.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  That's right. No, I, I, I agree with you. I guess here's a question I've been wanting to ask you and, and, and originally when I, you know, I, I actually think, I might've invited you on my podcast at one point to do like a Veterans Day celebration. So anyway, at some point, I'd love for you to come on. When you come on, I'm going to give you this, well, I'm going to give this to you now because I probably, this is, it's not a Nobel Prize, but it is called the Keating Prize, a little bit arrogant. Okay? It's for impossible imagination. Okay. And it's got your name on the side of it and it's 3D printed. And there's a replica of the monolith from the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. Cause my podcast into the impossible is named after Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the book. That 2001 Space Odyssey is based on.

• 30:21Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  You're welcome. Yeah, thank you for all you do. And we're going to play around with some other stuff now, so keep that handy, that'll go with that later on. So I want to turn, you know, with with your permission and forbearance, I want to ask you a question because I can't ask the I've had, as I said, military, I've had operators on. Let me ask you a question. Some of the pilots who saw things, the Nimitz incident, the Tic Tac incident, Commander Fravor, Lieutenant Commander Alex and Dietrich, they claim they saw things, right? They got back to the boat. When they got back to the boat, they were basically described as being hazed, something like that. Tease mercilessly, they said it was bad for their career.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  David Fravor's testified about this. We could talk about the geometry of, you know, how they saw different things. But I'll ask you as an operator, if I know people that have lost limbs to IEDs, okay? If you're on point, if you're going on patrol and and one of your buddies says, I think I see this thing and it's unusual. It could be an IED or not, like when you got back to camp, would you like tease that person? Or would you say, we should take this fricking seriously?

• 31:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you would say, we should take this seriously.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  So what do you make of the fact that when they got back and throughout and Ryan Graves done a good job trying to combat this? But what do you make of the fellow people that should also be encountering these things? And should be subject if they're just simple prosaic, manmade, Chinese made, whatever you want. They're they compose a danger of flight risk, right? For these aircraft that are operating at high, you know, velocities, right? What do you make of the fact that the fellow aviators, they're they're equivalent of operators and teams, right? They were teasing them. I just psychologically, can you help me get through that?

• 32:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, I think the the comparison that you brought up is a little unbalanced. I mean, an IED in the heyday of Iraq or Afghanistan, I mean, that was a

• 32:21Shawn Ryan?

  You would see multiple of those a day, very common, you know what I mean, very, nobody would second guess that, I mean, they might second guess you, but they're not gonna make fun of you, you know, I mean, it was just so prevalent, it's happening multiple times a day. You don't see UFOs popping in and out of the water, you know, defying physics every day, every year, every decade, like, you just don't, you know, if you see it, you're very, you're, you're, you know, it's very rare, right?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  I can see like my brother, I have three brothers, right, I can see them teasing the shit out of me, right?

• 32:56Shawn Ryan?

  It's kinda like a ghost.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Right, okay.

• 32:59Shawn Ryan?

  Like, you might tease somebody if they've seen a ghost, like, oh yeah, okay, you've seen a fucking ghost, right?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  But if that ghost could take out, you know, the intake on your F-18, you know, uh, you know, Hornet, wouldn't you be a little bit, you know, like, more interested in seeing if it's, not teasing them, but actually, let's go through the encounters, like-

• 33:19Shawn Ryan?

  I'd be interested too.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  As a professional, yeah.

• 33:21Shawn Ryan?

  As a professional, I'd probably crack a little bit of a joke.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  You would, okay.

• 33:24Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? But I'd also be interested to hear what was going on, I mean, I mean, my old producer's the one that logged it into the logbook. I mean, he was there, uh, when that shit happened.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:36Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, but, yeah, so I, I'm not saying like,

• 33:43Shawn Ryan?

  this should have been ridiculed or anything like that.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 33:46Shawn Ryan?

  But, all's I'm saying is I could understand some heckling.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:50Shawn Ryan?

  You know, going on.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Right. And then, when you, when you hear things, again, I'm a civilian, I encourage to do stuff that you and your audience does, right? Um, although I do have some gifts for your audience that we're gonna talk about later on. So, uh, that's, that's a cliffhanger, that's a retention device. Uh, another question where I turn, you know, the tables on the podcaster and ask you, and ask you a question. Um, you know, in the context of me as a civilian, I'm told like, you know, Keating, shut your mouth, these guys saw what they saw, you don't have the balls to strap on an F-18, you didn't serve in the Air Force Intelligence like Rush. What should I say in those situations? It's true, you know, I'm a pilot, but I don't fly F-18s, you don't fly Sastas, right?

• 34:33Speaker 02

  But tell me, how should a civilian, you know, questioning what level of deference? What level of credulity? Should I just believe someone because they strapped on a jet? And I didn't have the balls to do it? Or, you know, help me, walk me through that because I get that a lot. Like you didn't have, you don't have the skills that he has and you don't have the, you didn't have the fortitude to join. So you can't question them, even though I'm like, well, I'm a physicist, like I know about FLIR. I know about radar. I know about technology. I know how astronomy has always fed into technology for military applications first and foremost. But you're right, I'm not a military operator. So how do I, as a civilian, you know, kind of navigate that chasm?

• 35:19Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think any of that's even relevant. You didn't serve? What the fuck does that have to do with aliens and UFOs? Like, we're not, we're not talking about some tactical maneuver that they did and bombed somebody. And you're second guessing the tactics.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 35:35Shawn Ryan?

  They don't have any fucking experience with UFOs or aliens, just like anybody else. They saw some phenomena, right? So, I mean, I think that's

• 35:49Speaker 02

  It's not legitimate.

• 35:50Shawn Ryan?

  Not a very well crafted defense mechanism, you know, to my opinion, but.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  But, or the fact that like, oh, they're, they have great hand eye coordination or they have great, you know, the sniper knows, you know, how to do this and that. And like they, they know about observing things in a high threat environment and high speeds and kinetic, and kinetic environments. You don't kidding, you sit behind a chalkboard and teach, you know, quantum mechanics, like nothing, there's nothing legitimate.

• 36:15Shawn Ryan?

  The only ones that seem

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Steal them in what they're saying.

• 36:17Shawn Ryan?

  The only ones that seem to have an abundance of experience tracking UFOs in real time have pretty much all been debunked and are full of shit. So, so, I mean, that's, you know, when it's a continuous thing, it's like, oh, there's the experience. Oh, shit, it got debunked again. But I don't know. Does that answer your question?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it does. Yeah.

• 36:38Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Brian, let me give you an introduction here.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:41Shawn Ryan?

  Way too far into this. Brian Keating. You are the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego, the inventor of the B I C E P telescope at the South Pole and the principal investigator of the Simons Observatory. One of the largest cosmology experiments ever built. A $100 million plus telescope array in Chile's, I can't say this, atomic, Atomica?

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Atacama.

• 37:09Shawn Ryan?

  Atacama Desert involving over 400 scientists from 40 institutions. You have raised approximately $200 million for your research, received the Presidential Early Career Award for scientists and engineers, been elected to a fellow of the of the American Physical Society and been inducted into the International Aviation Hall of Fame as a 2022 Legend of Flight. You're the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, ranked a best science book of the year by Science Friday, Physics Today and Forbes, and one of Amazon's editors' best nonfiction books of all time. And the host of the Into the Impossible podcast

• 37:53Shawn Ryan?

  with over 500,000 subscribers, where you interview scientific and cultural pioneers, including 23 Nobel Prize winners. His past, wow, his past guests, that's impressive. You are a licensed multi-engine turbine rated commercial pilot who has lectured on six of seven continents, including Antarctica, and you arrived today with a replica of Galileo's 1609 military telescope, a Martian Regoliath sample, and a 4.3 billion year old meteorite that you will send to 250 members of this audience with APO addresses. That's fucking awesome. Welcome to the show.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Thanks, Joe.

• 38:37Shawn Ryan?

  Quite the intro.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, better late than never. But you should hear what my mother-in-law says in her rebuttal to the introduction.

• 38:42Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit.

• 38:45Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. And then before we get too far into it, I got a Patreon account. It's quite the community. They're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. Thank you. So they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from Neil Ambrosio Jr. While most technologies to date have been used for space exploration, what are your thoughts on that same technology being used for the weaponization of space?

• 39:14Speaker 02

  So one of the oldest partnerships in science is between astronomy and the military. Most people don't know about that, but but the the same types of technologies of of inventions, of calculations, of theory are exactly applicable in military situations. For example, the telescope, this replica telescope here of Galileo's 1609 telescope. So Galileo didn't invent the telescope. A lot of people think, oh, he invented it. He actually kind of stole the idea. And he sort of admits to it, but that's that's academia for you. We're used to kind of, you know, taking credit sometimes where credit meant

• 39:56Speaker 02

  not be due. But what he did do is he kind of made it like 10x. I don't know. Do you ever have a BlackBerry, you know, back in the day or Nokia, you know, kind of phone, right? The the first kind of phones that did more than just, you know, send calls back and forth, had early access to the Internet and you could do, you know, very crude browsing. And that's what made them really popular. But what made the smartphone really take off exponentially was that it was 10 to 100 times better than anything that came before. And so quantity has a quality all its own. Creating something for the first time, like creating the telescope is one thing, but then improving it by a factor of 10, it's

• 40:39Speaker 02

  almost like it's a new invention. And that's what Galileo did. He didn't invent it. It's the most simple thing you can think about. It's got two lenses. It's got a lens over here. This is called the objective lens. This is the side that faces the object that you're looking for. And then this is called the eyepiece lens, another lens on the other side. This simple thing has about one inch diameter lens, and it can see everything that you could possibly see with the naked eye, but 10 times better. And that change in humanity's literal perspective on the universe changed the world, but it wouldn't have been possible without Galileo's improvement. And in fact, he not only improved it by, by the type of quality of the glass that he

• 41:20Speaker 02

  used, the lens material, the, the spacing of the material. He also did things that are kind of counterintuitive. You see, Sean, the, the lens that's here is actually bigger than this brass disc that surrounds it. But the brass disc is actually crucial to the improvement. Because what the brass disc does is it focuses the fovea of your eye in the best part of the lens. If you had the whole lens exposed to the light, there's all sorts of artifacts of glints, of glare, it's called ghosting. And, and those effects reduced the utility of the telescope. So Galileo counterintuitively said, let's take this telescope and make it smaller. It's called stopping down, like an aperture, an F-stop on a camera. That actually restricts the light.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  That made it focus better. It was genius. No, I wouldn't have thought of that, right? Let's make this thing better by making it smaller. Like, I said, nobody ever, you know, you always want bigger, better, but no, that made it, would have made it worse. He made it better. The other thing that he did, which nobody really had done before, it's crazy, is put it on a tripod. He invented the tripod. And what do you get when you put an optic on top of a tripod, Sean? Stability. Get stability. Because a telescope is magnifying not only the object that you're looking at, but it's also magnifying the rotation of the earth. As we look at the stars, it's actually making it, them go by faster, right? The stability made, when you coupled the stability to the optic itself, you could now use this for military purposes.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  This became the first sniper rifle scope. This is the first optic ever made. Okay? It's a replica, but the real one, there's only one left and it's about, you know, a trillion dollars. I can't bring that for you, maybe next time. But what was so useful about it is Galileo didn't use it for astronomy. That wasn't the first thing he used it for. He did for himself, because that was what his passion was. The first night he invented this new improved version of it with the tripod, he looked at the moon. And the moon at that time was unknown territory. People had no idea what was on it, what it was made of, if there's life there, if there's, if it's totally different than the earth. And he looked at it and he saw, it looks perfectly smooth and circular to the eye. It has blotches on it, but, but he didn't know what those were. He looked at that and he saw the following.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  He saw mountains, he saw craters, he saw lava flows. He said, wait a second, people are telling us for 2,000 years, it's perfect. It's a crystalline sphere. This isn't perfect. It's riddled with holes and craters and, and marks and mountain ranges and rift valleys and craters and canyons. It's kind of like the earth. That was the first unification of an extraterrestrial object with the earth. That was amazing. He then looked at other objects and did the, and he, and he wrote these all in his notebook and he kept them all in a span of three months. He discovered the following things. The moon has craters. The moon has rivers, looks like rivers to the eye, looked like it has oceans on it.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  It doesn't have flowing water anymore, or ever did really. It has valleys, canyons, has vast plains upon it. Okay. He saw that. That was one night. The next night, he saw the, the planet Venus goes through certain phases, just like the moon. In other words, sometimes there's a crescent Venus, sometimes there's a full Venus, sometimes there's a waning crescent Venus, sometimes there's no Venus and you can't see it. That must've meant that Venus was closer to the sun than the earth. Cause that's the only way we got phases of the moon. Sometimes the moon is closer to the sun than it is to the earth. Um, and then he discovered that the planet Saturn had these ears on it. He thought the planet Saturn, and said, now we know the rings of Saturn.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  He couldn't resolve them with his first telescopes, but he saw that they had, um, this had this extended oval shape to it and it kind of blew his mind. He thought it was three planets touching each other. Okay. And then the last, most insane thing that he ever did, in my opinion, again, this is all in just a few weeks in the winter, January of 1610. Um, it's just mind blowing. No one had ever done that before in history, even though the telescope existed, no one thought to look at the sky, cause they didn't have the technology, the tripod. Okay. And I'm getting to the question that was asked in just a second. He looked at the planet Jupiter. Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. And he saw it had all sorts of crazy structure to it. It had lines on it like atmospheric storms. It had this blotch on it, this red spot on it.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Uh, that seemed to be there every night that he would look on it. And it was always accompanied by four stars. And the four stars were always like, kind of moving with respect to Jupiter. And then Jupiter was moving with respect to the earth. And he was such a genius. He said the following, he said, I think what I'm looking at is a miniature version of the solar system with the sun replaced by Jupiter. And the planets that orbit around the sun, which was heretical to think back then, by the way, the planets that orbit around the sun are orbiting around Jupiter. So Jupiter is kind of like the sun to this miniature solar system that we saw edge on like a disk. So he saw these things moving back and forth, always around Jupiter, no matter where Jupiter was, every time of the year that he could see it.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  And this is just mind blowing. And that he raced to publish this, he published in under two months, which is like a record. He published this book called The Sidereus Nuncius, The Starry Messenger. And he didn't tell people how to build the telescope. He kept that classified. But he did go to Venice, which, you know, Italy was only a country, you know, in the modern sense, I think in the 1840s, like it was unified. It was made up of like Florence and Tuscany and Venice, like they were disparate, um, uh, doges and, and kingdoms, right? Uh, so he went to Venice, he shopped it around to different militaries. And he said, look, guys, with this telescope, you can go on top of a tower in the Piazza de San Marco in Venice. I don't know if you've ever been to Venice, it's a wonderful place, you should go there, especially you're Italian, right, Italian origin.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  So you go on top of the tower in Venice, you can look out into the ocean and you can see in lagoon, you can see a boat today that won't be here for three days. And that was like stealth, right? So be like looking at the stealth bomber with a special device and you could take away the stealth of the stealth bomber.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  And so this technology between astronomy, which was his main purpose in doing it intellectually, and then selling it to the military immediately to the Venetian government gave them this huge advantage. They gave him like basically a stipend, tenure, made him like this court astronomer. And he immediately saw how military purposes could be the vehicle to make him wealthy because he was a real cool guy. He had, he was never married. He had kids out of wedlock. He had mistresses. He had brothers in law. He had people living with him, like students living with him. I can't imagine living with my students. And he was just such a passionate educator, but at heart, he was like a military genius. And his first thing was to be like Merlin or, you know,

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Gandalf or something. He knew that astronomical discoveries, projectile motion, trajectories, things like that could immediately go from the realm of physics to being used for war. And the same thing is happening today, to address the question directly. We have technologies, we have tools, we have telescopes, we have things that have been designed. One of the things that Avi Loeb spoke to you about, this object called Umumua, was the first extraterrestrial object discovered by humanity. It came from another solar system. We don't know where, we don't know when, but we know that it did not come from our solar system. How do we know that? It's velocity and it's orbit. It's not bound to the sun. And it comes, it travels

• 48:59Speaker 02

  at such hypervelocity that it came into our solar system in 2017 and left our solar system. And it's long gone for now, for right now, we can't really catch up with a rocket, but we know for sure it was there. It was discovered by an air force telescope, not an astronomer, not Avi Loeb looking through a telescope. It was discovered by an air force telescope on top of Haleakala, which is a mountain in Maui. So this purpose of that telescope was not to look for comets from other solar systems. That's serendipitous. That was accidental that we discovered it. Its real purpose is looking for other things that are up there in space. And the best way to do that is to use the tools of physics, of astronomy. And that's why I keep saying, if you think that these UAPs defy the laws of physics, you would want

• 49:43Speaker 02

  to have as much input from the physics community, not alienate them, no pun intended, not make them feel stupid, or make them feel like they're just eggheads and they're, they're just talking down to people and we know the truth and the government lied about COVID, Sean, you know, the government lied about COVID. So you know that they're lying about aliens. The government would never lie. Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  I love it. The government would never lie. They just have our best interest and always forever. They always have, right? I mean, even to Galileo, eventually he ran afoul of the government because of these astronomical telescopes, because of the discoveries he made. Bruno ran afoul for the same Catholic government, which was the government of the time, the superpower military, undefeated champion of the world. He ran afoul because he suggested that life could have existed on other planets. Therefore, Jesus could not have possibly been able to visit all of these different planets, according to the Catholic Church at the time. And so they literally accused him of heresy, even though he was a, he was a, he was a, I believe he was a Jesuit or Catholic

• 50:44Speaker 02

  priest. So they burned him alive at the stake as a warning. Do not defy with your science, our laws of how the heavens go, because we know, the Bible knows how they actually work.

• 50:56Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  If you look at it, you know, do governments lie? Of course they do. Is there ever a reason? I'd love, I love your opinion. Like, at that time, saying that the earth orbited the sun would, would be, it would be like saying, you know, the lab leak of COVID, if you believe that. It would be like that on steroids. Like, does a government, or should any entity have responsibility to avoid either mass panic, as in the case of aliens or something like that, or mass pandemics? In other words, do we need any kind of overarching government beneficial? We can debate if they ever could be beneficial, but in your opinion, is it important to have governments? And do they have a right to have secrecy? In other words, let's steel man what the people say,

• 51:49Speaker 02

  that we have to keep this quiet, we can't disclose, trust me, bro. How do you view that? As someone who's

• 51:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think there's a staunch difference between

• 52:01Shawn Ryan?

  flat out lying and just not disclosing. You know, I think, I think there's a line there, don't you?

• 52:12Speaker 02

  I do. And I think that the government, you know, but I guess I'm asking, is there a moral reason to lie?

• 52:17Shawn Ryan?

  If you lie to your people, now you're in a predicament like what we're seeing right now, where I would say

• 52:26Shawn Ryan?

  The vast majority of people have no trust in any of our institutions or our government at all because they've been caught in so many fucking lies and nobody, nobody knows what to believe. Nobody even knows if these are lies. Well, well, a lot of them are lies. But you know, but there, there are, nobody knows about this alien shit yet. You know what I mean? For example, it's like, do we believe them? Why would we believe them? They've lied about so many other fucking things. They've lied about COVID. They've lied about taxes. They've lied about pretty much everything, you know, and, and so, you know, and now, I don't even know how they would begin to get the trust back in our, in our institutions and our government.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  You think it's that far gone?

• 53:14Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's pretty close.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I have this debate, you know, like I told you before we started recording, my, my brother-in-law Jim Brewer is a, was a recon marine. And, you know, I told him about some of the things that, you know, these, the people that have alien encounters have been reporting and, and just, and he's, he's like, well, we did, um, what's it called? Siri, like search evade rescue.

• 53:38Shawn Ryan?

  Sierra training.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Sierra training. He said, when we did that, he, he said, I got waterboarded. You know, he's, he's like, the government does stuff to us. And I'm convinced the government lies, you know, they lie to people that should have the deepest trust. And I don't understand how they expect that trust to be maintained. You know, for example, pilots report things in the skies, right? One explanation is extraterrestrial craft visiting us from other dimensions, right? With a non-human biologics. Okay. That's a hypothesis, right? I'm a scientist. I can test hypothesis, given data, update my priors, update my hypothesis, iterate scientific method in action, right? Uh, another hypothesis is, um, these are craft from the US, from adversarial

• 54:21Speaker 02

  nations, reporting things, doing things that we don't know about. For example, during World War II. There were operators of German U-boats. And the Germans had early radar systems. I don't know if most people know this, but there's the Manhattan Project. Everybody knows about that. The Oppenheimer movie, great movie. And I'm all for celebrating physicists. And it's great. It's rare you have a movie about a physicist who's, you know, doing good and not, you know, trying to kill everybody. But during the Manhattan Project, that gets a lot of attention because it created the atomic weapons that eventually, you know, most people's opinions brought the end to the war in Japan. We were in a race against the Europeans, the Germans in particular, before they developed a nuclear weapon and dropped it on us, right?

• 55:06Speaker 02

  The Japanese weren't really in a danger of doing that. But the Germans had some of the best scientists of the time, you know, Heisenberg, incredible scientific. That's where quantum theory began and nuclear physics was first understood was in Europe. But there was a parallel effort that almost nobody knows about, and yet you use it every day, you know, if you're driving in a car, if you're flying in a plane, and it was radar. Radar was one of the most significant military advances of World War II. Almost nobody knows about it. And it was also created by physicists. So the two of the most decisive technological enabling things were invented by astronomers and physicists operating in World War II and slightly before.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Radar was particularly valuable because it was much more deployable than the nuclear technology of Los Alamos and then leading to the bombs, right? That took this huge effort, you know, a trillion dollars in today's dollars. Radar was much more accessible. Any country could develop it. But at that time, there was also an effort to do counter radar. You can't have counter nuclear weapon. I guess you could shoot them down with a Patriot missile, but that doesn't really stop the process of nuclear detonation, right? But you could actually counter the radar with jamming, with stealth. All those things were invented in the 1940s, some of whom were invented by colleagues of my colleagues that, you know, were still alive in this generation essentially.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  And one of them was a physicist by the name of Louis Alvarez. Have you ever heard the hypothesis that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago? So speaking, because I am an absent minded professor, so I will forget. So I brought some meteors here, okay? So these are honest to goodness fragments.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Of the early solar system that are older than the earth. These are 4.3 billion years old. These are found in Argentina. So this one's.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  And I brought some more. How old is this? 4.3 billion years old. The earth is about 4.2 billion years old. This material, it's kind of dense, right? It's pretty heavy. It's also magnetic. Here's a compass. I'm gonna do Mr. Wizard with you today, Sean. Um, here's a compass, magnetic compass. Put it next to there and maybe show the camera what happens to it.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know if the camera can see it, but. Yeah. So it's deflecting it because these are magnetic. They're also slightly radioactive, but don't worry. Uh, they're perfectly. So, uh, what I wanted to do, because, you know, I love the audience and the community that you've built. Um, and for the people that serve and have the courage to do things I never had the courage or the ability to do. Um, I want to give away 250 of these to the first members of the Sean Ryan Show that, uh, have an APO post office, uh, box, which is military or government service post office box. So I can send these all over the world to any, the first 200 people that have an APO, uh, box. So I made a special website, briankeating.com

• 58:20Speaker 02

  slash SRS. So if they go there, whoever gets there first, first come, first serve. I will send them this actual meteorite. Okay? Oh damn, that's cool. And I'm gonna send them information about it, what it's made of, its composition, its age, where it was found, and how they can see meteor shower. Have you ever seen a meteor shower? Don't believe I have. Don't, oh, you will love it. And here, you know, in God's country. Um, I will give you a list of the four major meteor showers every year. You don't need a telescope. You don't need. Something, anything, even binoculars don't help you. Just your naked eye, your wife, your kids. Go out on a night, you'll get the list of meteor showers at this website, briankeating.com/srs. And it will tell you how to see them.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Four times per year, once per quarter, basically. These meteors here, okay, these, these rocks here, these are older than this. The physicist who discovered that the dinosaurs were killed by a giant version of one of these 10 kilometers in size, okay, I couldn't bring that today. They crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. His name is Louis Alvarez. He'd go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. He was the only scientist on the Enola Gay. And it dropped a bomb in Hiroshima. Okay, this guy was one of the super geniuses, almost nobody knows about him. In World War II, his job was radar, not nuclear bombs, but he then got repurposed after he perfected radar. He said the following. He said, when an object gets close to a radar station, the radar's pinging it, right? It's shooting out radar beams.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  And it's bouncing off and it's measuring the timing as the plane is getting closer to the U-boat. And the U-boat's had pretty advanced radar systems. What he did is he built a spoofing system. He built the system that as it was getting closer, transmitted a signal that got weaker via the inverse square of the distance, which is exactly how a real thing would behave if it was moving away. So imagine you're sitting there in the boat, you're in the U-boat, you go, Captain, Captain, look, look, oh, it's going away, we have nothing to worry about. U-boat gets destroyed. He spoofed the radar by utilizing the laws of physics. Broadcasting a signal decreasing as the inverse square of the law, as they were getting closer by the linear distance, okay?

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Now imagine you're in the U-boat and you're looking at, you're showing your captain. He said, oh, it's going away. And then it drops a bomb on you and you see it at the last second. What would you say? You'd say, hey, that object is a UFO. It defied the laws of physics. It got here faster than the speed of light. They knew, they were smart as frickin' heck, right? Germans were top military empire the world had ever seen. They would say that defied the laws of physics. How do we know that some of the things that are happening now aren't military technology? We don't. We have no idea. What's a simpler hypothesis? Occam's razor suggests the simplest hypothesis isn't always correct, but it's more likely than an outlandish or less probable scenario, right?

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  So interdimensional beings with non-human biologics have traversed space and time at distances that we can't traverse in under 30,000 years with our best technology, or the military, or Chinese military, whatever military you like, is spoofing us, making us think that that's the case, making it seem like it's defying the laws of physics. Is that proof? But no, a scientist has to think this way, has to think epistemologically. I asked a question in the Patreon tier that I'm a member at, and the Vigilance Elite. I asked a question of Brian Keating. I said, "Ask Sean if he's ever heard of the Feynman point." You ever heard of the Feynman point?

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Okay. Richard Feynman, another Titanic physicist, Manhattan Project scientist, professor at Caltech, winner of the Nobel Prize discovering a quantum theory. He found an interesting pattern in the number pi. The number pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Okay, it's approximately 3.14. And if you're a real nerd and you want nerd cred, you memorize it to more digits, 3.141592658, and you keep going. And one of my kids can do it to 22 decimal places. Wow. Feynman measured it, and he found really far out, you get to the number 6 in pi,

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  which goes on forever, but at a certain point, it goes 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, six sixes in a row. Nothing like that happens before. And that point is called the Feynman point. Do you know where the Feynman point occurs? How many digits of pi you have to memorize out to, to get to the Feynman point, Sean? No idea. 762. 762. It's a great caliber. What's that? It's a great caliber, right? I always wondered, like, is your handle because of the, by 31 or 50?

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Hopefully we'll try out the range at some point. So now you might say that's like, hey, Sean, that's really cool, right? And you might say like, that's a really cool number and Richard Feynman is really smart. Or is it a coincidence? Scientists have to weigh both options. It could be aliens. It could be human technology. Right now, we have no evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt in a scientific sense that aliens exist, that technology is visiting us. Does that mean it's impossible? Like I said, I've been to Antarctica. Antarctica is one-seventh of the Earth's continents. If you just estimated, if I told you, you're just an alien and I say, Sean, Earth is this blue-green planet with an atmosphere and life's all around the planet.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  There are seven continents where land is, where land-based animals can live. One out of seven continents is called, one of them's called Antarctica. I don't tell you where it is. I don't tell you anything about it. How much of Earth's 8 billion people live on that continent? What would be your first guess?

• 1:04:07Shawn Ryan?

  800.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  800 billion? Well, you know me now, yeah.

• 1:04:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'd probably take the population divided by seven.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, right? But we already told you, it's over a million, you know, it's over, yeah, it's almost a million times smaller than that, right? It's a couple hundred, 100 people at a time. So people like to say, well, the universe is so big, you know, Avi and Loeb and you talked very extensively about this, the universe is really big. Well, the Earth is really big, right? We don't find life everywhere on Earth, all right? We only find humans, you know, one, six of the seven continents. But by just pure logical explanation, you should expect to find it everywhere. So I'm not saying logic is a panacea. I'm not saying it's always the solution and you should only think scientifically, but I want to use it as a guide, at least as, as much as we can as a human being species,

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  to get at knowledge in the most efficient, effective way possible. And if it turns up what it turns up, let's see what happens. Don't let the people suppress what the information is truly scientifically.

• 1:05:08Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, thank you. Let's take a quick break.

• 1:05:14Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:05:57Shawn Ryan?

  So it's clean, tested, and exactly what they say it is. And there's a bigger mission here. BUBS was founded in honor of Navy SEAL Glenn "Bub" Daugherty. And 10% of all profits go towards helping veterans transition back to civilian life. So you're not just supporting your joints and recovery, you're supporting people who served this country. If you're ready to upgrade your daily routine with BUBS Naturals Collagen, head to bubsnaturals.com/srs and use code Shawn for 20% off your order. Again, that's bubsnaturals.com/srs and use code Shawn for 20% off your order. Take care of your body, it's the only one you've got.

• 1:06:46Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to Hollywood vs. Reality. Did I do it right?

• 1:06:54Shawn Ryan?

  What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong, because I don't watch any of this [BLEEP]. A little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool. It is pretty [BLEEP] cool.

• 1:07:06Shawn Ryan?

  Gotta silence it.

• 1:07:12Shawn Ryan?

  In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living. Proprietary magazines, supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're

• 1:07:23Shawn Ryan?

  And now we're bringing them back.

• 1:07:30Shawn Ryan?

  It does look pretty cool. I gotta, I gotta admit that.

• 1:07:36Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Brian, we're back from the break. I forgot to give you a gift.

• 1:07:44Shawn Ryan?

  The Johnson's League gun and bears, made in the USA, legal in all 50 states. Not that you have to worry about that in California, right? But anyways.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Are they kosher? I gotta, I gotta ask the question. Let's see.

• 1:07:58Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know what that means.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  Gelatin. But not kosher, but I'll give it to my brother-in-law.

• 1:08:04Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  I'll give it to Jim Brewer. This is for you, brother.

• 1:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  But

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 1:08:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so I want to get into the telescope, the Bicep.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Shawn Ryan?

  Can you, how did you? How did you get involved in that?

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  So, you know, um, A lot of kids, when they're young, men, uh, they can be, look up to their dad, they can have difficulty with their dad. They can be competitive with their dad.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  My, you know, my father was the captain of the football team. I gotta be captain of the football team, you know, or whatever. Or my, my, my father served, I'm gonna serve, you know. My father, you know, was a scientist. He was a professor. And, um, early on in my life, he got divorced from my mom. And when he did, he, he actually abandoned my older brother Kevin and me. And we grew up, uh, adopted by my stepfather, Ray Keating, who was a, a Vietnam pilot, F4s and KC-135s. Served in Vietnam. And he adopted us from my family, which was, I grew up Jewish, like I said, both parents

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  were Jewish. And then my stepfather's family was Catholic and huge, you know, fifty brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. And it was so, such an incredible family. I mean, they're still, you know, tighter with me than my own biological family, growing up, except for my brothers, of course, and my mom. But my father, just he abandoned us. So I actually changed my name, was legally adopted. My name, when I was a kid, was not Keating, it was Axe, Brian Axe. So now it's Keating. Changed my name. My brother too. And, and he left. He just, you know, he abandoned me and my brother. I was seven, my brother was 10. And he moved to the West Coast, didn't see him, 15, 16 years.

• 1:09:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Until I started to kind of follow in his academic footsteps, which is weird, because I didn't even remember what he looked like. Okay, I was seven. Last time I saw him, my brother was 10. I never understood how he could abandon a 10 year old. I was like, ah, I'm seven, I'm not that important. But like, my brother was like a full, I mean, you have kids, you know what it's like. I can't imagine doing it to anybody, to be honest with you.

• 1:10:16Shawn Ryan?

  Me neither.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  But he did. And he had his reasons. Later find out why, but, but.

• 1:10:22Shawn Ryan?

  What were his reasons?

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  He, he felt like my mother had turned us against him. That had, you know, she had kind of pitted us psychologically against him, which wasn't that big of a stretch, because he was kind of an a-hole, you know? He tried to beat up, my stepfather came over one night drunk, or whatever, trying to beat up my stepfather, take us back. And he'd go through my, you know, visitation.

• 1:10:47Shawn Ryan?

  Tried to beat up a fucking seasoned Vietnam veteran?

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  No, uh, yeah, he did.

• 1:10:52Shawn Ryan?

  That worked out?

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Didn't work out that well. Did not.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  So, uh, but he was this brutally complex, brilliant, I mean, still the most, I've interviewed 23 Nobel Prize winners, puts all of them to shame. I mean, he did, he passed away, as you'll find out, but he was this great scientist. And, you know, when I was going through my formative years, you know, in the high school, I got really interested in astronomy. I got a telescope, just like this. Um, and it changed my life. You know, I had been adopted, I'd been Jewish from birth, but I was adopted, I got converted to Catholicism by my mom, by my stepfather. Changed my name, got baptized, confirmed, and instead of being, it's called

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  a bar mitzvah, when you're in Judaism at age 13, um, you become a man, so to speak, although having 13 year olds now, it's kind of a far stretch to call him a man, but, uh, but anyway, it's a rite of passage. I was actually not having my bar mitzvah, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church of St. John and St. Mary in Chappaqua, New York. And I loved it. I had no problems with the Catholic Church. I wanted to be a priest, um, when I grew up, uh, until I discovered girls around the same age. And I just loved that whole environment, but along the same time, I got a telescope. And I looked up and I did those kind of observations that I told you Galileo did. I didn't know who Galileo was at first. I looked at the moon, it had craters on it. I looked at Jupiter,

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  it had moons around it. I looked at Saturn, had rings around it. I looked at my neighbor, Debbie, she was super hot. Sorry Debbie, if you're still out there, never saw anything, you know, too bad. Uh, but, but in, in reality, it kind of, it transformed my worldview and I started to learn more, and this is before the internet, in 1986, 87, there was no Google. There was no, you know, he had the Sunday New York Times newspaper in Chappaqua, New York, right? So I could look up stuff. Oh, wait, I saw Jupiter? I mean, how many people out there know they can see a planet with their naked eye? Or see a galaxy with their naked eye? You can do all that stuff. I got this telescope. I worked at a deli down the hall, down the street from where I was

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  living in Dobbs Ferry at the time in New York. And I saved up enough money and my mom gave me a little money. And I bought a telescope and it changed my world. It literally made me into a scientist. That's why I say out there, any dads out there, you know, parents out there, get your kid a telescope. Just do it. It's 50 bucks. Actually, I have a website, probably key.com slash telescope. I don't get sponsors. I don't get, you know, big astronomy. NASA is not paying me to do this, but I give recommendations for telescopes for different budgets. And nowadays it's insane. I have a telescope now. It costs a few thousand bucks. It takes Hubble kind of telescope images, you know, incredible stuff. It's all, it's all electronic. You don't put your eye on it. But you can put just the most incredible vision into their mind. And then when they're 10 or 11 years old, maybe they'll be

• 1:13:49Shawn Ryan?

  These are crazy.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  It's insane.

• 1:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  When I was, because I've been looking at these for my kids. Cause they're always, my son's like obsessed with the moon. And I was looking up telescopes on Amazon. And I was like, holy shit, these things will like find the damn stars for you and focus in. You don't even have to do anything.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  But don't start with that. Start with

• 1:14:08Shawn Ryan?

  I did. And I started with the old NASA.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Just point it and look at whenever it's bright, except for the sun. Okay. Don't look at the sun with your remaining good eye.

• 1:14:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm supposed to do that.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  So, uh, but everything, you can see the exact same things that Galileo saw. And unlike, you know, Sean, it's interesting. People say, what's it like to be a scientist? I can't really tell you, you know, like when they discovered the Higgs boson, or, you know, they discovered nuclear fusion. Like, I don't know what that was like. Cause you can't, there wasn't one guy who did it, right? But there was one guy who discovered the craters on the moons, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. That's Galileo. And so you can not only see what he saw, this is what's insane about astronomy for 50 bucks. So go out and get a fricking telescope for all your kids or grandkids or whoever, Sean. It's the cheapest kind of insurance that they'll be curious, thinking for themselves individuals. You can see exactly what Galileo saw from the middle of San Diego or New York City.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  He didn't, he didn't need a Hubble telescope to see that stuff. He was in northern Italy. You can see the exact same stuff he saw, even from a light polluted place like New York City. Craters, valleys on the moon, canyons. You can see the rings of, of sun. So what I'm saying is, I got addicted to it as, as a, as a 10, as a 12 year old. Um, and at that time, Galileo, who had conjectured that because Jupiter has moons around it, that the earth cannot be the center of the solar system. Because Jupiter's moons are orbiting Jupiter, which itself is orbiting the sun, but it's not orbiting the sun. According to Aristotle, according to the Greeks, according to all of ancient received wisdom, you know, from following the science

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  for the last 2,000 years before Galileo, no, the sun was the center of the universe. Sorry, cut that out. The earth was the center of the universe. In fact, that's what the Bible seemed to suggest. That's why he was, that's why Bruno was burned at the stake and that's why Galileo was put in jail eventually. And so when I found out, hmm, what happened to Galileo when he had these ideas? What did the Catholic Church do to him? They threw him in prison for his scientific ideas. And at that time, you know, I can't say it didn't have something to do with discovering girls, to be honest with you, Sean, like not wanting to go all the way and be a priest and, you know, be around nuns all my life and that would be the only woman in my life.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  So no, so I decided at that point, look, I'm going to be an atheist. Like I actually decided I'm going to be an atheist. Really? Yeah. Just because you liked girls? No, well, that's, that's not like some small thing, Sean. I mean, I, You can still believe in God, you like girls. No, no, I said, I decided I want to be a priest because I like girls. Uh, but no, I, I decided that I don't want to be a part of a religious organization that would punish someone for scientific truth. And at that time, Pope John Paul II, who's, you know, my favorite Pope, I still love him. Yeah, I still love Catholicism. I still love the popes, you know? Um, but he was special. He was a very special person. And even he never pardoned Galileo.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  He just said he was right. Imagine like you do something, you're in service, the president doesn't like give you a commendation. Certainly doesn't give you a commendation, but they're like, "You were right, but we're not even gonna take away the crime that we accused you of. We're not even gonna say that, pardon you." I mean, there's something that was unsettling to me as a young, again, I was a 13-year-old nitwit, right? So what do you know, right? But at that time, it was kind of justification.

• 1:17:34Shawn Ryan?

  That's when you decided to become an atheist?

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  I literally decided to become an atheist, and there was another reason, because I said I was born Jewish, right?

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  But I became Catholic, which is Christianity. I served in the Catholic Church. I loved it. And, you know, for me, I came from this, from a tradition that's older than Christianity, right? Jesus Christ was a Jew. And I felt like, well, Christianity came along after Judaism, right? It came along after Judaism, right? And Jesus was a Jew. So if Christianity has these challenges, like they're not gonna accept scientific wisdom, or they didn't forgive Galileo, and so then I could say, "Well, Judaism's gotta be wrong." Because, you know, if something is based on, you know, if calculus is based on algebra, and, you

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  know, calculus, you can say, "Well, calculus or algebra's wrong," then certainly calculus will be wrong. That's not true, but that's kind of the analogy I'm making here. So I just felt like all of religion, you know, has these things. We have to listen to these authorities, you have to do what they say, you have to think what they do, and you can't think for yourself. Again, I'm a 13-year-old at this point. I'm not a sophisticated 50-year-old, you know, professor who has investigated religions and compared things and had much more experience than I do now, okay? Than I did that. So at that time, I became a scientist in terms of curiosity, because I wasn't only looking at things and, "Oh, cool," I started taking notes. I started doing research. I started, and again, this is before Google. And sometimes the more you struggle to get information, like nowadays, I feel bad for

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  my kids in some sense, because they wanna know, like, you know, how many golf balls fit inside the Goodyear Blimp? Like, literally, I would have to calculate. There was no tool to do that. I'm not saying that's some important thing, but you get the point. Now, you literally look it up, and one second, you get instant gratification. You don't do any of the muscular work. You don't, you don't damage the muscle to break it down in your brain. And so I feel like they're losing out on that. For me, I was doing all that. And I felt like the more I learned about science, the less room there was for God. Look, I'm not the first person to say that, right? Nowadays, I'm practicing religious. I practice Judaism. So obviously, I came back to it. We can get to that later on. But, but in the sense of knowing a little enough to be dangerous, that's kind of where

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  I was at age 13. And I devoted my life to science. I want to, I taught myself calculus. You know, I didn't calculus when I was, I grew up in rural upstate New York, you know, northern Westchester County. I had to do it myself. I had to teach myself autodidactically, learning all these different things, trigonometry. And then I was doing research in my telescope at night. And I just loved it. I was addicted to it. It was getting to that flow state, and that's all you want to do in life. And then slowly but surely, I started to reproduce, like the step that my father, you know, who I hadn't seen in 16 years, or 15, you know, whatever it was at that point, 12 years. And I started to reproduce. And I was like, hmm, let me look up in scientific journals, like, whatever happened to him? Jim Ax, James Ax, whatever happened to him? What did he do? And I saw these papers about science.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  And it was like, the most high level science, the origin of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement, theory of relativity, origin of the universe. And I'm like, this guy has my DNA, or I have his DNA? But there's something different. I wasn't raised with him, but I'm doing the same thing as him. It's weird. It felt creepy to be influenced by a ghost. I didn't know anything. I didn't even know if he was alive. Wow. And I hit 22. I was in grad school, 21 at Brown. So your mom, I mean, she would never... Oh, they were, they, they fought so bad. And they did kind of use us between as intermediaries. That sucks, man.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  That was a challenge. In 1970s, happened a lot. And also, you know, to really, you know, give him the kind of negative judgment that he deserved. When you get divorced, you know, hopefully, this will never happen. But you have child support, you have alimony. And he was given the opportunity to choose between paying the back child support that he owed for myself and my brother, or giving us up to adoption to my stepfather, Ray Keating. He was only 30 year old guy at the time. And he said, I don't want to pay the money.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  So he gave us up for adoption. So my name got changed. Brother's name got changed. I didn't see him. I hated him. I never, I was like, how could you abandon my older brother? Like, I was protecting my older brother, kept a 10-year-old? Who you were close to? It wasn't like, you know, they weren't close, they were very close. Gave him up because he hated my mother so much. And she hated him just as much. Okay. It was a very nasty divorce. And so by the time I hit graduate school, getting my PhD at Brown University, I started, again, the internet was pretty young, you know, mid 1990s. I started researching, like, what did he do? Like, who was he? Is he alive? I didn't know. I didn't remember what he looked like. The last time I saw him was in a court in Long Island, New York.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  Sean, I didn't know what he looked like 15, 16 years later. It's bizarre. And I started to research what he was doing and what kind of research he was doing and what happened to him. And it turned out he was still writing things about like quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity, all the stuff that I was like fascinated with and I wanted to dedicate my life to. But there was like quantum entanglement, like somehow he had influenced me from beyond the visual horizon. I hadn't seen him, kept up with him. There was no internet, really. So it was spooky. A spooky action at a distance. He was influencing me. So I started researching, got more and more involved in it.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  I had, you know, kind of like a minor medical scare when I was like 22 and I thought it could be genetic and whatnot. And it turned out that my mother's mother and my father's mother both moved to the same part of Florida, which is called the Yiddish Triangle. You know, all these Jewish grandmothers, they all get together and they live, you know, three miles around Sunrise, Florida, on the east coast of Florida. It's a great place to retire. And they were living basically like retirement community, like phase two Sunrise Palms and phase eight, you know, whatever. And they hated each other too, but they had friends that were friends with each other. So these two Jewish grandmothers got connected via...

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Their other Jewish grandmother friends, what I call the Yenternet, like before the internet, there was the Yenternet, these old Jewish grandmothers talk, and they started talking, talking, talking, oh, Brian's at Brown University, he's a scientist, the other one says this, do you know he's still alive? Oh, you know, somehow, my father finds out that not only am I alive, I mean, he didn't know, but, but I'm studying math and science and physics. And I'm at a top school, Brown University's obviously a great school. And one night, in my, in my dorm at Brown, I get a phone call, pick up the phone, and he goes, this is Jim Ax. And I, before he said Jim Ax, I knew it was him. I knew his voice. I don't know,

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  Sean. Sometimes the ear is deeper than the eye. And so, we talked for five hours straight. He was living in California, yep. Everything, math, science, physics. One thing we avoided is why he abandoned me. But I was just so curious, just like, imagine if I gave you a book from your great great grandfather, like, how much would you pay for that book? By the way, you have to write a book. If you don't write your memoir, someone else is gonna write it for you, and your great great grandkids will wanna read that book. Everyone's gotta write a book, but especially people like you. I mean, you've influenced millions. What's that? Not time yet for me. Not time, but, but don't let it go too far. And I really hope you do, because

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  you'll influence so many people to the good, as you've already done. And a book, it's like, I love your podcast, you know, do I ever go back and listen to like, episode like 14? No one's ever got, you're not gonna go back and listen to it, right? But you can take all the wisdom that you've distilled, not just the knowledge, is like dirt. Knowledge is everywhere. Wisdom is nowhere. Take that wisdom, put it in a book. That's all I'm saying. Your kids, your future kids. Well, anyway, so he and I talked for this whole time, get back together. Finally, I'm like, wow, this guy has done so much, he's still going, he's still hungry. Yeah, he's got all these flaws, but where do we go from here? And I realized, like, he had won all these awards as a scientist. And I was like,

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  I don't know how to say it. I really never talked about it, but I wanted to make him, I'm really like embarrassed, but I'm gonna say, I wanted to make him regret that he ever gave up on me by doing what he never did, which is win a Nobel Prize.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Makes sense. You want to make him proud of you. I wanted to make him proud, but I wanted to make him regret. A little bit of punishment for him, even though I let him back into my life and even though he got back with my mother, you know, and they became friends. They didn't get back married or anything. They became friends and bonded over grandchildren later on in life. And he died very young. He died at 69 years old, 20 years ago, exactly. But between the time of graduate school, when I was 22, and when he died, and I was 33, 34, we became closer than any two sons I've ever known. And during that time, I got incredibly interested. Like I said, I wanted to make him some, there

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  must be a German word for like, you know, like schadenfreude, there must be some word for like, prideful regret. But anyway, that's what I wanted. And so I invented, I said, I gotta find something that's gonna win the Nobel Prize. And that's the highest award. I don't care what it is, like Olympic gold, you know, like Grammy Award winner, you know, BET or whatever. I don't care what it is, Signal Award, all the podcast stuff you want. There's nothing like the Nobel Prize. There's only like 200 people on Earth that are alive that have Nobel Prizes. Got eight billion people. Okay, they're the intellectual, you know, SEAL, you know, SEAL Team members, okay? They're the brightest of the brightest of the brightest, point, you know, 001% of the planet Earth. I

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  wanted to be there, partially for, you know, these venal and bivalent reasons I had about him, but partially because I'm just so curious about the Earth and the world and nature and science and God, and how they all mix together. And for me, the way that was the ticket to do all these things was to build an instrument to explore Genesis 1:1. Like, how the heck did the universe come to be? Not just the aliens and the black holes and the galaxies, but the universe itself.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  And it's a dangerous thought because you know, people have been killed for this. People have been trying out nowadays. We don't live in that kind of environment. So when we talk about the government lies is okay, it is true. They probably do, and they they've done a lot of bad stuff to a lot of friends of mine as well. But it's nothing in comparison to the to the lack of freedom that Galileo had that, you know, Giordano Bruno had, okay, nothing like that. I don't, I'm not going to compare myself to those people. All right, I can do whatever I want. I have tenure, I have brilliant graduate students, collaborators. I have resource funding supporters, the government's sponsor a lot of stuff. I work at a public university and I got paid Gavin Newsom's my boss, you know, lucky me for a few more months left at least.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  So this is all to say that I wanted to to win a Nobel Prize at all costs. But I was fortuitous because it was also studying something that's guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we could do it, which is to take a snapshot of what happened before the Big Bang. Basically, before the universe started off in its incredibly intricate and just phenomenal acceleration and expansion. What caused the Big Bang to bang? What's the primer strike? What's the what's the inciting incident that caused the explosion of the universe? Nobody knew it. There were theories about it. And so I designed a telescope that doesn't see light. It sees heat, it sees microwave radiation.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  And that microwave radiation is all around us. It suffuses the universe and it's the leftover heat from the fusion, nuclear fusion of the first elements, hydrogen and helium and their isotopes. And that leftover heat is a fossil that travels through space and it travels through time.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  And we can detect it and we can build instruments that can sense it. And the specific signature that we see will tell us about the conditions that were prevailing during the first moments of the universe's history, before the expansion that started to take over that we call the Big Bang. And crucially, what happened on the, like I said, what happened on a Tuesday before the Big Bang? There was a day, right? If you think back, today we're in, you know, May 2026. It's a Tuesday. We can keep going back, back, back. We think the universe is 13.826 billion years old. Tiny little uncertainty, but we can keep going back. And let's say the Big Bang occurred on a Tuesday, right?

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  Let's just, just by 24 hours, times 365, times 13.826 billion years, right? You can get a number, you can get a day, you can get a calendar day on our calendar now. It doesn't mean the calendar existed. Earth didn't exist, right? But there's a day. What happened the day before that? That's what we want to know. And for the first time in human history, we could possibly do it. Oh, and by the way, if I did it, myself, my colleagues, maybe, would win a Nobel Prize. And finally, get that comeuppance that I so, you know, whatever. My many failures, but, but one of them was that desire to show up my dad.

• 1:31:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So where do we go from here?

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  Well, it took me to the South Pole. It took me to Antarctica. When you get a coffee and you put it in the microwave in a ceramic cup, like your awesome swag and merch outside that I love, you pour it into a cup, right? You can put the coffee in the microwave, you can put it in there for five minutes. Don't do this at home, it's very dangerous, actually. But you can actually microwave it and it'll get above the boiling point of water, right? And then you can take the mug out, just, you can just grab the mug. Why is that? You got 300 degree, you know, Fahrenheit water in there potentially, about to explode. And the ceramic cup is room temperature, basically. Why is that? Because ceramic is completely dry. There's no water, it's been baked in an oven for hours.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  That's what makes it, that's how you make ceramic clay and stuff like that. The water in the coffee is not dry, it's wet, it's full of water. Microwaves from the microwave oven jostle water at just the right frequency. It's resonant frequency that it starts to vibrate and interact with other water molecules. That's what causes it to heat up. You can't heat up something in a microwave that doesn't have water in it. And that is tuned exactly for the resonant frequency of water molecules. And that causes it to heat up dramatically. So if you're trying to detect microwaves from a source, from a planet, from a galaxy,

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  from the big bang itself, you want to go somewhere where there's no water. Namely, you want to go somewhere very high up. Maybe you could go to outer space. But that's very expensive to put a rocket and satellite and a telescope in space. Very difficult, takes a long time. It's been done, but only three times in all of human history. We had satellites take pictures of the signal from space because of the cost and difficulty to do that. And actually nowadays, we can do it almost better from the earth, from the South Pole, Antarctica, where I've been twice, and from Chile in the Atacama Desert. It's about 5,200 meters above sea level, 17,000 feet. So high up that you have to wear oxygen full time in your nose because you're above half the atmospheric water pressure.

• 1:34:01Speaker 02

  You're at the flight level 180 for my pilot friends. Infrared radiation is cooking you. There's huge equipment that can kill you. Bulldozers, people drive off roads. There's no like the same kind of road safety that we have. Don't have it down there. It's like being on the planet Mars. In fact, NASA uses it as a test place to test out lunar rovers and lunar helicopter, Martian helicopters and Martian rovers. Oh, before I forget, this, I won't send to your viewers, but being on Mars. This is a piece of Mars. This is the actual planet Mars. It's a meteor that came from the planet Mars.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  It was knocked off by a bigger chunk of an asteroid, blasted into space, orbited around the Earth for probably 20 million years, and landed in northwest Africa. Wow. Okay, so this here, you can actually touch. How do you know that? So, the chemistry and the spectrum that it reflects, when we analyze it, is 100% match for Martian rovers that have been there, like the ones I was just talking about. So this is a gift for you, pretty rare. And you can see it, and it has little bits of like, see the little bits of like, orangish flakes metal? That's iron.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  The reason Mars is red is because it's basically rusting. It has iron and iron rust that oxidizes, and those little specks in there are iron. So that's another planet. It's taken millions of years to get here. And here's a cover for it. I have a certificate for you that I'll give you later on. That tells you all about it, its properties and so forth. So, to test out, before we send a Martian rover, they send it to the Atacama Desert, where we have the Simons Observatory. So you ask, where do we go from here? So, we built this instrument in, starting in 2005, that was meant to do just one thing, to take an image of the baby picture of the universe. The oldest light in the universe is called the cosmic

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  microwave background radiation. It's the heat that's left over when you do nuclear fusion or fission, heat is given off. When that heat is given off and the universe expands, it cools off, it redshifts and dilutes, gets less energetic, and now we see it, instead of being gamma rays or ultraviolet light, we see it in the form of microwaves. Long wavelength radiation, characteristic wavelengths about 2 millimeters. It corresponds about 150 gigahertz. This radiation was discovered for the first time in 1965, outside of New York City by two astronomers, Penzias and Wilson, and they went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. And this discovery was so significant because it was the first physical evidence.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  In other words, not just philosophical or theoretical, oh, the universe could be expanding. It was proof that the universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state. And that can only be possible to create nuclear fusion, which creates the hydrogen that's in the water that you're drinking. It creates the helium that we have in balloons and other uses for. So the elements of the periodic table are made during the big bang, but when fusion occurs, heat is left over. We still see that heat to this day. So what we're looking for is that heat.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  How do you still see the heat to this day? So when the universe starts to expand, everything gets stretched out. There are galaxies. Galaxies are now moving away from each other. Things on Earth don't get stretched apart. Things in our solar system don't get stretched apart. Even things in our galaxy don't get stretched apart. They're held together by gravity. But anything beyond, say, the Andromeda Galaxy and beyond, is actually expanding away from us. Space itself is expanding. Space, according to Einstein, is dynamic. It's not static, as Isaac Newton showed. He said, no, space is dynamic. The more energy you put into it, the more space expands. And so originally Einstein, you know, didn't believe in the big bang. He felt

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  the big bang was not well justified. He thought it was completely wrong. And he thought it smacked of religion. Actually Einstein was not religious. He didn't, he spoke about God sometimes, but he didn't really believe in God the way that we would think of it. And he said that the universe is not expanding, it's static. And the only way that he could get that to be the case is if he inserted into his equations this fudge factor that kept the universe from collapsing on its own. And that expansion we now find is actually going in reverse. It's not only not static, it's not only not collapsing, it's actually expanding at an accelerating rate. It's like pushing on the cosmic accelerator pedal. It's not a constant velocity. Every galaxy is moving away. And tomorrow, the rate of

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  moving away will be bigger than it was today. That's the heart of the Big Bang concept. Meaning that if you reverse that, everything gets closer together. So galaxies will be closer in the past. And eventually you reach a point where all the galaxies in the universe are all touching. And all the matter in the universe is in one point. And that point is thought to be a singularity. And that point of singularity is the Big Bang in the Big Bang concept. Doesn't tell you anything about how the Big Bang started, though. Just says, once the Big Bang occurred, the universe started expanding and accelerating. And we should see evidence for it scientifically. And we do, we see tremendous amounts of evidence. There's zero doubt that the universe is expanding. And there's some doubt about how fast it's expanding.

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  That's another subject. But no one disagrees, no cosmic police officer with their radar going and saying, no, you're static or you're collapsing. No, the universe is expanding. And so there are signatures of that expansion everywhere, like a radar Doppler shift. But of all the galaxies that we see in the universe. And in fact, of all the heat and radiation we see in the universe as well. And the type of radiation that we look for is called the cosmic microwave background. And the best place to look for it is at the South Pole, Antarctica, or in the mountains of Chile. So I have two different experiments that I've been involved with. One is BICEP, which is an acronym, Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  And in 2014, we claimed we saw that primer strike that ignited the Big Bang. So we claimed we did the thing that I wanted to do to show up my father, to win a Nobel Prize. And spoiler alert, my first book's called Losing the Nobel Prize. So something went wrong. Something went really wrong. We made a claim that we saw what caused the universe to begin its expansion. And that's a type of quantum field.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  We call that quantum field the inflaton, or the inflationary field. And we said, we detected the shrapnel of the explosion, basically. If you want to detect something, like you hear someone on the range shooting, right? You could, you could detect that they're shooting in a variety of different ways, right? Visually, you could detect it, you could detect the sonic, you know, impact of it. You could have eyewitnesses to it. You could have photographic cameras watching it. You could have infrared. You could even have, you know, some particles inside the potassium inside of gunpowder. A potassium 40, it's radioactive. So you could actually see the dispersion of the smoke cloud of radioactive potassium. And you could detect neutrinos, muons, other things coming.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  I'm making this up. I mean, it's true that you could do that. I'm just saying, there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? So there's more than one way to detect something if you can't see it. So we've devised these different types of tools and technology to see things that we could not have possibly witnessed, namely the origin of the universe. Like, there are no people there. There are not even any stars or galaxies or planets or aliens or anything there, right? It was the origin of energy and matter itself. But what caused it? If this theory called inflation is right, there would be a signature, like smoke from the gun, called gravitational radiation, waves of ripples in spacetime. You and Avi Loeb spoke about what spacetime is.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  Spacetime is interconnectedness of all different events that could possibly occur in the entire observable universe, back to the beginning of time. And so we're looking for the earliest shock waves that would come with the explosive expansion of space. And those are called gravitational waves. We look for them in the CMB and this cosmic microwave background. And we said, on St. Patrick's Day, 2014, at a press conference at Harvard, that was led off by Avi Loeb, who made the introduction. I wasn't there. I had been unceremoniously removed from the, the leadership of the team that I had first started. That's, that's another story. But, uh, but the, uh, the announcement made headlines around the world.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  New York Times, CNN, my hometown newspaper. And at that moment, I had been a little bit unsure about the real veracity of the results, if they would hold up in court, you know, sort of scientific court of law, or if we had seen things that masquerade as a signal that you want to see. Richard Feynman, again, Feynman point seven six two digits into pi six six sixes in a row. He said, "The first principle in science is that you shouldn't fool yourself. But the second principle in science is that you should think that you're the easiest person to fool." It's like you're at a poker table, you don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy, right?

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Scientists should always think that he or she is the patsy, that he's gonna make a mistake, and then do everything in their power to resist that temptation, to make an announcement that could win a Nobel Prize or whatever, and do every sort of due diligence check you could do possible. And we thought we did, but we missed one crucial element, that there was a type of signal that comes from the cosmos. It comes from our galaxy, in fact, but it doesn't come from the Big Bang. And it's exactly related to these meteorites. Again, ronkeating.com/srs, if you have an APO address. These meteorites are actually the corpses of dead stars.

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  When a star above a certain mass explodes, eight times the mass of our sun, it explodes out, and it's a fusion bomb that goes off in space with the equivalent tonnage of, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions of Hiroshima bombs. It's eight solar masses converted to energy v equals mc squared. When it does that, the reason it does that is because it's trying to make this material iron and nickel. Okay. When a star fuses oxygen, silicon, together to make iron, everything else before it gets to iron gives off more heat than it takes in. The fusion reaction always gives off heat, but the heat that's given off when it makes

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  iron is too insignificant to keep the star afloat.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  So the star runs out of pressure and collapses. And then it detonates out in a shockwave. In one half a second, a star that's been living for 20 million years, ends its life in half a second in a nuclear fusion implosion that blows out into the whole universe. The last thing that it made in its core, which is iron. That's why this is iron. Guess what else is iron? Hemoglobin. Your blood, right now, has the same iron isotope as this meteorite. Why is that? Well, your mother lived on Earth. She ate food in the Earth.

• 1:46:00Speaker 02

  She's made of human biologics, right? Not David Gresham. She's made of... Hopefully, your mom's not a Theoden or whatever they talk about. So she ate food. Food is made from the Earth. The Earth has iron in it because it came from an explosion from a supernova. So if this supernova didn't blow up 4.5 billion years ago, we wouldn't have this iron. So this iron is older than the Earth. It became part of our molten iron core and our solid iron core. And it became part of our food chain. And it's in the blood that we bleed. We all bleed the same iron that came from the supernova. Wow. So these meteorites float around in space. And it turns out that they can actually mimic the signal

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  that would have represented the primer strike to ignite the Big Bang. So we got tricked into believing we saw the Big Bang. We really saw a bunch of meteorites, basically.

• 1:46:56Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:47:36Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:48:20Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think happened the day before?

• 1:48:23Speaker 02

  Well, so I always say things like, you know, people say, um, do you believe in God? You know, I've heard you, I heard you talk to our mutual friend Andrew Hubert, you know, became a Christian, right? He believes in God. Actually, I was a little perturbed at Andrew. I told him later when I was on his show. But like, a scientist shouldn't say, "I believe in something." Okay? So in Hebrew, the, you know, the word for faith is, is in Hebrew, "emuna." "Emuna" is where we get the English word "amen." It means "I believe." It means "I have faith," right? Say "amen." In Hebrew, that word means, uh, it means "faith." It

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  doesn't mean "belief." Belief is a different word, just like it is in English, right? I always say, "I don't believe in God," right? Right? "I don't believe in gravity either." If I take this, it drops, according to the laws of Isaac Newton. This is a law. I have evidence for gravity. So I don't have to say like, do I believe in something? I should say, I should look for evidence of something. Again, I'm not saying this for everybody, but I'm a scientist. I don't want to say I believe in God. I want to say I have evidence for God, which is stronger. You believe in God or you have evidence for God? Now, you may believe that you have evidence for God. Jesus may be enough have crossed the evidentiary threshold for you. Many people it has.

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  Um, I'm obviously Jewish, so it's not the same theology. But, but in fact, we have things that we say we believe in. And then we have things we say we know. And that distinction, I think, is really important. So you asked me, what do I believe happened? Or what do I think happened? I, I, that question to a scientist is anathema. Because we don't, we don't want to be prejudiced to that. That's what got us into trouble with this experiment. We believe we saw the signal that would give Brian Keating the Nobel Prize. Right? I mean, that was the only goal of it. But that's where, that's where you get into trouble as a scientist.

• 1:50:24Shawn Ryan?

  We must think about it.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  Do, I do, yeah.

• 1:50:27Shawn Ryan?

  If you have any evidence for what may have happened the day before.

• 1:50:30Speaker 02

  Exactly like what you and I talked about with aliens, right? So, so we don't have any evidence for it. The universe, again, is like the most undefeated. You know, the movie 300 I was watching, you know, like, imagine like Xerxes versus, you know, Theod, uh, what's his name? Theodas or Leopoldus or whatever, like 300 versus an infinite number, right? Um, Xerxes is like Mother Nature, like just an infinite army. It completely unstoppable, technological. Mother Nature doesn't give up her secrets. But like, you know, like, uh, like Gerald Butler, you know, in that movie. A small group of dedicated people can make great gains, right?

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  I'm trying to get more and more evidence for both believing, you know, what I want to believe to be true or what I hope to be true, both in science and in religion.

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  But I'm not, I am under no illusions that A, God cares if I believe in him or not, just like gravity. You jump out of a plane without a parachute, you know? I always say, you don't need a parachute to skydive, right? You only need a parachute if you want to skydive a second time. Like, I believe in gravity, you know, to the same extent that I need to, but I have evidence for gravity. I want to feel that same way about God. So what are the options, just as you and I talked about with aliens? Aliens could be real, interdimensional, non-biological beings or whatever, right? They could be AIs traversing the cosmos at light speed. They could be, you know, Chinese psyops. They could be German, like Louis Alvarez, playing around with the Germans' minds, breaking the laws of physics.

• 1:52:07Speaker 02

  They could be a psyop by the government. They could be a mass delusion or hysteria. Or they could be really, truly masters of interdimensional travel. Those are different hypotheses. Now we have to go through each one, evidentiary, what's the chain, and so forth. For cosmology, same thing. There are alternatives to the Big Bang. The Big Bang posits that at one moment in time, time came into existence. You couldn't ask what happened the day before. That makes no sense. That's like saying, go to the South Pole with me next time and go south. You know what happens when you go south from the South Pole at the South Pole? You go north. There's no such thing. It doesn't exist. Some say that's true. Stephen Hawking believed that.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  There's no time before the Big Bang. Others say that a competitive theory is the universe existed before the Big Bang and collapsed and crunched, just like the supernova that collapsed and crunched to form our supernova. That big crunch led to the Big Bang. Another one says, an interdimensional concept called string theory that existed in higher dimensions than we exist in, 10-dimensional string theory domain, that two different types of what are called membranes came together and ignited what we call the observable Big Bang. Another theory says we exist in a multiverse, which just as there's more than one planet,

• 1:53:33Speaker 02

  there's more than one star, there's more than one galaxy, there's more than one cluster of galaxies. Why shouldn't there be more than one universe?

• 1:53:41Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about that?

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  So that's a sec. Let me just get to the last, the last topic. And then there's a final topic, which is that the universe didn't have a big crunch and singularity. It's just been slowly over time, interacting, expanding and collapsing, expanding and collapsing, like a breathing of a lung, okay, coming into and out of creation and producing things. Now, as a scientist, we can't prove something. We cannot prove that the universe had a big bang. We also, strangely enough, we can't prove the earth is round. I don't know if you're aware of this. We can't prove that the earth is round, okay?

• 1:54:24Shawn Ryan?

  We've had this discussion many times.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  Now, that's something people say, I believe the earth is round. I believe the earth is flat. I always joke, there are people that believe the earth is flat all around the globe, you know? It's, you'll find them everywhere, Sean. But in reality, you can show that the earth is not flat, but you can't show that it is curved. Do you understand the difference? You can prove something wrong in science, but you can't prove something is right. You can't prove something is right. I can say I have evidence for evolution and there are competing theories of evolution that existed, but they've been falsified, proven wrong. And if you can't prove something is wrong, or if you can't at least expose it to the opportunity of it being wrong,

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  then it's not science, right? Astrology. When I was dating my wife, we went to the, you know, downtown Mission Beach, San Diego. You know, they have a boardwalk and they had a fortune teller. And she's like, oh, let's tell her, let's see our fortune, see if we're compatible. You know, I'm like, she's an English major, you know? Like she, uh, fine, you know? I really love this girl. I want to marry her. So I'm going to play around with it, even though it's anathema to everything I believe, to go through astrology. Just the astrologer sits down and says, you know, what's your sign? And, you know, I say, I'm a Gemini. And she, oh, okay. Um, you know, here are these different things, your personality and your moon sign, your sun sign, and this thing, and this thing. And then I said, oh, thank you very

• 1:55:54Speaker 02

  much. And, you know, my future wife, my, my, my girlfriend at the time, oh, very, you know, it's really good. She's, everything sounded really good, like we're compatible and everything. And I got up and I, just to be a dick, you know, I said, um, I just want to confirm, I'm, I'm born in September. Um, that's Gemini, right? And she said, no, no, no, that's Virgo. But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. In other words, it didn't matter what I said. It didn't matter what evidence I gave her. It was unfalsifiable, it was irrefutable. That's not science. That's fun. You know, it's a car trick. You know, it's entertaining. She made her 50 bucks or whatever, and we're still married 18 years later. But to me, the, the,

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  the prospect that you will not submit your theory to, to falsification. And that's some of the problem I have with Avi Loeb. Okay, I love Avi Loeb. But I said to Avi Loeb on my podcast, when he came on for his first book, um, I said, Avi, you believe that Oumuamua is extraterrestrial. It's like the title of your book, right? You believe it came from another solar system. You believe it's technological. Remember, he told you, he thinks it's a thin solar sail. Technological, only technology can build a solar sail that captures solar wind from another star, directed from where we don't know, but to where we do know, because it came through our solar system. Was it intentional? Was it unintentional? He thinks it's, could be like a garbage barge or something like that. And I don't know why you'd put like, you know, your, your, your trash bin on a solar sail and send it out into the universe

• 1:57:19Speaker 02

  rather than just crash it into the nearest sun. But let's just say he's right. I said, Avi, you always brag to me, and you're lucky you're at Harvard University, you know, where everyone's above average. And we should talk about Harvard and Jeffrey Epstein at some point. But, um, and Avi's not involved with any of that, by the way. Uh, but I said, you know, Harvard, everyone's above average, and, and you happen to have access to these, you know, copious supply of billionaires. And everyone, you know, loves the Harvard imprimatur. You say Harvard, and that's part of the reason Avi gets a lot of the attention he gets, but also a lot of the hate that he gets. People, you know, and he's one of the most legitimate scientists, published 757 different articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals, multiple books. You know, the guy works hard. You know, when I'm interviewing him, some, sometimes

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  I say, Avi, show me your hands. It's like, I said, I want to make sure you're not writing a book while we're talking. You know, he's so productive. I mean, he's off the charts. Okay, but I said, Avi, you have access to these billionaires. Imagine that Oumuamua, at the time, it's the first object ever to come from another technological solar system like the Earth. And you know a billionaire who can fund a rocket to send a telescope to go catch up with it. And he said, as he told you, um, no, Brian, we'll wait for the Vir Rubin Telescope to come online and it will capture many things. I said, Avi, you're happily married even longer than I am. Imagine like you're with your wife, you don't know she's gonna be your wife, you're dating

• 1:58:47Speaker 02

  her, or maybe you just see her in the coffee shop, or he met her on a blind date, I think he told you, right? And it's a blind date, and like, you're with her, and you're like, oh, she's really nice, but I think someone better's gonna come along soon. You know, how do I know someone better's not gonna come along, you know, Brian? And I said, you would do anything, this Avi now would do anything to that Avi, say, shut up, you idiot, ask her out, keep going on a date with her, because you're gonna have two beautiful daughters with her, and you're gonna have a life of happiness and love. But he's saying the opposite, he's saying, no, I'll just wait till the next one comes along. I said, Avi, I don't know, do you really believe this is, this is as technologically advanced as you say it is? Because to me, Sean, I would do anything. If I thought with as much faith and confidence as Avi does that these are extraterrestrial

• 1:59:31Speaker 02

  technology, I would do anything, especially if I had access to a couple billionaires and the endowment of Harvard University.

• 1:59:39Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  So we look to falsify things, not to prove things, and that, that was kind of the tangent we just got off of.

• 1:59:50Shawn Ryan?

  It's hard to ask questions for people to think like that. Do you, even though, with everything that you just said, you still have to think about it? You still have to think, is there a multiverse?

• 2:00:03Speaker 02

  No, you're right to press me on that.

• 2:00:05Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so, what, like, what goes through your head? Without, without making assumptions, or I mean, what are, what are the, what are the ideas? What are the?

• 2:00:15Speaker 02

  So this might make people uncomfortable. I approach it again as a scientist and I'm candid. I'm one of the few scientists that's openly religious, you know, that, that practices his religion, takes his religion seriously, you know, learned Hebrew at age 30. It wasn't easy to learn Hebrew at age 30. Um, you know, I married someone who's Jewish, which is an important thing for the continuity of the Jewish people in my, in my, especially I learned in Israel. Um, I, I take my God and my religion and my faith seriously. I don't work on Saturdays. You know, one thing, when you were talking to Andrew, sorry to go off on a side quest here, but you know, Andrew Huberman, world expert on sleep, and you, and you guys were talking about cannabis and you're talking about, um, gummies and you're talking about vaping and everything else.

• 2:00:55Speaker 02

  And I said, I know what Shawn needs and it's, it's not, it's not, it's not a product. It's, it's called the Sabbath. You know, we just had this national Sabbath, Donald Trump had. You work as much as I think you work, you work seven days a week, pretty much.

• 2:01:11Shawn Ryan?

  Pretty close.

• 2:01:12Speaker 02

  I see it in you and it's no surprise. I mean, this, the studio is amazing. I mean, first of all, I have to say, this is the second most number of guns I've ever been around on a podcast after the Mayim Bialik podcast. That's a joke. She's, she's the girl who played Blossom and, um, was on The Big Bang Theory. Uh, this is the most, uh, this is the most impressive studio, you know, I've been on really nice podcasts, um, uh, been blessed to be on them. You've created this, this huge empire and it's no secret that your hard work, your work ethic, probably genetically, this is something you're like destined to do. Um, but the one unlock that maybe you haven't, and just pretty humble, I'm, I'm trying to be humble. I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not even like Andrew, you know, is in the Bible.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  But the one thing that saved my life is taking one day off a week. Is a Sabbath for me, it's a Saturday for you, it could be a Sunday. I don't do email. I don't, I don't, I don't do podcasts. If you invited me here, I think, actually, I was supposed to come two days from now. It's a holiday two days from now in the Jewish calendar called Shavuot, which it means Pentecost in English. We call it Pentecost. It's a biblical holiday. I'm not allowed to work on that holiday. And so I said, I can't make it. But luckily, Laura and Sarah, your all amazing team is just so excellent and elite for real. But I wouldn't have done it. As much as this is a great opportunity for me, Sean, I wouldn't have done it. Because I want to be with my God. I want to be with

• 2:02:37Speaker 02

  my wife. I want to be with my kids, my community, my family. I want to dedicate one seventh of my life to something other than achievement and like Nobel prizes and emails and Slack messages. And I'm not saying it's a panacea. But I know, like, I knew Charlie Kirk a little bit through my relationship with Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson. And he had his most recent book, which he dedicates to Dennis Prager for introducing him to, and it's about the keeping of the Sabbath for Christians. And it's been, it was a huge unlock for him. It was literally the last thing he ever wrote. And his wife put it out posthumously. So I just want you to consider it. But for me, this is all big disclaimer, maybe it's a

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  little too, you know, legalistic or professorial for me to do this. But I want to say that I take my religion seriously. But that doesn't mean I'm not okay with, with accepting everything the way it is. In Hebrew, the word Israel means to fight with God. Yisrael means struggle. El means God. You know Islam means? Islam means submission to God. Those are two different, very different approaches, right? To submit to God and, and they're, they're valid, right? I'm not going to say which one is which. And Christianity is somewhere in the middle, right? There's, there's acceptance of Jesus as a personal Savior who died for your sins and absolves you of those sins. And, and God gave His only Son, according to Christianity,

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  for your sins, for you, for your personal God. Christian Judaism, we don't have that concept. But that's okay. We're different religions. That's fine. Otherwise, we'd all be one religion. But Yisrael means to struggle with God, to fight with God.

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  And if I don't ask questions and subject God in some sense, not to prove him wrong, not to say, you know, like I'm better than God, as most of my colleagues, 93% of my colleagues don't believe in God at all. I'm in the 7%. I think it's probably even smaller than that now. You asked Avi about that and he kind of gave you a little wishy-washy answer. As much as I love Avi, I wasn't satisfied with that answer. But for me, if I can't question God, if I can't ask for evidence, if I can't demand some level of scientific rigor in my approach to it, I don't feel authentic to who I am. So I gave you the whole preamble about how seriously I take God and religion, the Sabbath, and why I recommend it to so

• 2:05:04Speaker 02

  many people. But I'm also going to approach it scientifically. So what do I hope in science? Do I hope there's a multiverse? Do I hope there's... Part of that's connected to my attempt to inculcate my science with religion, to get a sense of can we test claims in the Bible, in my case, the Torah, the Old Testament? Can I test them scientifically? Can you test them in a lab? Could you test them with a telescope? Obviously, there's some connection between them, right? Otherwise, Galileo wouldn't have been imprisoned by the church and Bruno wouldn't have been burned alive, as we already said, right? Copernicus published his theory

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  that the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Earth is not the center of the universe. He published that the day he died, because he knew he would probably be tortured. And look what happened a couple of years later to Bruno and Galileo, right? So God and science and cosmology, they go hand in hand. For me, I've made it kind of an interesting quest, because those different models that I explained to you, the steady-state, static universe, the big crunch universe, the multiverse universe, and the slow expansion universe, those are four models of what could have came before the Big Bang. One of them says nothing. One of them says we live in a multiverse that's eternal and has existed

• 2:06:31Speaker 02

  for all time. One of them says the universe is slowly changing and modulating but is eternal. And one says the universe came into time at a specific moment for a specific reason, caught by a specific cause. That one sounds the most like Genesis 1:1, right? In the beginning. It doesn't say after the big crunch. It doesn't say like in the multiverse, you know, God created the universe. No, it says in the beginning. In Hebrew it actually- I feel like that means there's nothing before that. That's right. So what is that? You just projected onto exactly what I'm attempting to do. You constructed a scientific hypothesis that's open to falsification. Okay, pause that. Think about what you just said.

• 2:07:17Speaker 02

  That suggests that there's a beginning. What if we find there's not a beginning? Whatever that means. That has just falsified that theory. Call it Genesis theory. Call it Ryan theory, whatever you want. You could falsify it. Guess what? You just did. You proved that's part of science.

• 2:07:36Speaker 02

  To me, that's exhilarating. That means I can investigate whether or not the Big Bang occurred, whether or not time came into existence versus whether or not we live in a multiverse. I can investigate that and get paid by the Regents of the State University of California.

• 2:07:53Speaker 02

  I can do it. I would do it for free, by the way. Gavin, if you're watching, I know you're watching Gavin. You've got a podcast. You want to be like Sean. I would do it for free, but please, you know, let me keep my salary. The point is, you just suggested a scientific hypothesis that could be refuted. It's falsifiable. Therefore, by the rules that we explicated earlier, it's scientific question. There's nothing wrong with asking questions, seeking proof. What would you rather have, Sean? Belief that Jesus existed? Can you prove that Jesus existed? Can you prove it? Can I prove it? Yeah. No. Do you think it could be proven by somebody, you know, a billion, a hundred Avi Loeb's? Or, you know, someone just off the charts? Maybe. Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe it's not provable.

• 2:08:37Speaker 02

  Does that mean that you shouldn't believe in Jesus? Of course not. Of course not. To take away someone's religion is almost impossible. Is anyone who's ever had a Jehovah's Witness come to their house and knock on the door or a Mormon saying like, we'd like to tell you about, right? Guess who hates to take their religion away most of all? Atheists. You tell an atheist, most scientists, like, "Your religion," quote unquote, "is more dogmatic than any Christian I've ever met in my life." "Oh, come on, they're just, you know, patsies or whatever." They don't even know that seeking the questions of the type that you and I just discussed is perfectly kosher, is perfectly acceptable

• 2:09:20Speaker 02

  in the context and domain of scientific reasoning. Would you rather have, I bet it doesn't matter to you, because you do have strong faith, but if someone said, "Here is proof," like, you know, the Shroud of Turin, or, or there's, you know, "We found some eyewitness estimate," or "We found physical evidence that proves not only that Jesus existed, but that he was resurrected and that he was ascended, and this is irrefutable proof of the claims of the Gospels.

• 2:09:52Speaker 02

  And I said, "Here, Sean, here's a book. Do you want to read that book that has all this evidence?"

• 2:09:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:09:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, you're a curious person. There are people that wouldn't want to read that book. There are people who would read the book, but it doesn't matter to them. There's a famous story in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

• 2:10:09Speaker 02

  A lot of Jews perished there, and some were rabbis. And in 1943, I believe, they were doing, uh, they decided they would hold a trial and put God on trial. They said, "Should God have created humanity if it leads to Holocaust genocides and killing?" And they put God on trial, these rabbis. They had prosecution and defense. The overwhelming evidence from the rabbis and the jury was that God was guilty, and God never should have created the world. And you know what they did the very next minute? They said, "Let's go for the afternoon prayers."

• 2:10:53Speaker 02

  In other words, some people, it didn't matter. It doesn't matter if you have physical evidence. It doesn't matter if you have scientific evidence. Their faith is unshakable, and fine, I salute that. I'm weaker than that. I don't, I don't have that ability, Sean.

• 2:11:08Shawn Ryan?

  I think it is, uh, similar. I mean, you're trying to, how would you word it? Disprove, you cannot disprove.

• 2:11:18Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus's existence.

• 2:11:20Speaker 02

  Or God's.

• 2:11:21Shawn Ryan?

  Or God's.

• 2:11:22Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:11:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and I would assume that's, I don't assume, but I mean, it's probably the same with parts of Judaism and parts of Islam. You cannot disprove it.

• 2:11:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:11:33Shawn Ryan?

  You know, but you also cannot prove it.

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:11:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so it comes down to faith.

• 2:11:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:11:40Shawn Ryan?

  Why did you go from, I mean, we know why you went from Judaism to Catholicism. Why did you go back to Judaism? Is it because of your father?

• 2:11:48Speaker 02

  No, it was because of, it was actually because of nine eleven.

• 2:11:52Shawn Ryan?

  It's because of nine eleven?

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So nine eleven happened. I was twenty eight, twenty nine, something like that. And I had been in the Catholic Church, you know, the, the previous religion, you know, kind of experience I had was the Catholic Church, which I loved, as I said. Um, I had difficulty with, with the leadership at the Pope level and the Vatican and so, but putting that aside, and then I was, you know, college, kind of, I'm so smart, I'll be an atheist, right? You know, like all my teachers and my, you know, and my colleagues. And then nine eleven happened, and I was like, you know what? I know a lot about Christianity and Catholicism from having practiced it for six or seven, eight years, being an altar boy, wanting to become a priest. Um, everyone was an expert on Islam, you know, at, after nine eleven,

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  right? Um, and I realized I knew nothing about the religion that I was born into. And I felt ashamed. I couldn't read Hebrew. You know, I, I didn't, I never read the Bible, uh, you know, the Old Testament. I read the Gospels because I was Catholic, right? Very rarely do we go back and read the Old Testament, at least in the church that I was an altar boy in. And so I knew nothing about the Old Testament, the Torah. I couldn't read it. I felt embarrassed, you know, who knows how to do that. And I was like, why does, why is there this antipathy towards Jews and towards, you know, Judeo-Christian, you know, society and civilization? Why is there this conflict? I knew nothing about it.

• 2:13:23Speaker 02

  And so I realized that I'd stop all my learning when I was 13 about religion. And most of the people that you talk to who are scientists, especially Jewish scientists, who are almost all atheists, the last time they encountered religion was on their bar mitzvah at age 13. And for many of them, it's like a graduation from prison, you know, like they're released. They no longer have to go to temple anymore. They no longer have to sit and learn this archaic language that's spoken on exactly 0.2% of the world's population. Like, who the hell needs this when I can do whatever I want? And plus, Hanukkah really sucks compared

• 2:14:05Speaker 02

  to Christmas. You know, you ask me about Christmas, do I miss it? Yeah, totally. I'm so, you know, the negative exposure that you get at age 13, that then carries through these geniuses like Steven Pinker and even, you know, Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, who I've hosted, most famous atheist alive, right? Wrote the, you know, The God Delusion and just incredible intellect, but incredible atheist. They don't have the most basic level that my kids have about what the Bible actually says, what it means. They just project onto it, making it into a straw man, which they can then ignite. Okay. I felt as a legitimate

• 2:14:49Speaker 02

  scholar, an intellectual, I want to have a conversant level with the Bible, with the Old Testament in my case, at at least the same level that I have with quantum mechanics. Why should you say that you don't? Because it's easier? Like, oh, anybody can believe, like Sean Ryan doesn't have a PhD. You didn't go to college, right? You were in the teams, you want to, right? Well, Sean, he knows it. So, you know, but like, he doesn't know quantum mechanics. So doesn't that show you that it's not that hard to believe in God? I think these are so infantile, these arguments and the vitriol that people have towards believers in the scientific, in the academic community, in the elite. Let me take one pause for you

• 2:15:30Speaker 02

  for one second. You're familiar with the following statement made by President Eisenhower. He said, there's a danger, I want you to finish this sentence, of a military-

• 2:15:43Shawn Ryan?

  Industrial complex.

• 2:15:44Speaker 02

  Okay. Before he says those words, he says, there is a danger of a scientific, you're not gonna know it. I didn't know it till very recently. Before he mentions the military industrial complex and its dangers, which you can testify to as well as anybody. He speaks about the horrors that'll be inflicted upon society should we fall captive to a scientific, technical elite. Who's he talking about? Professors, academia? You don't know, you didn't go to college, Sean. You can't talk to me about about aliens and COVID and disclosure and no, you can't. Bullshit. The disdain that that the ivory tower has for ordinary

• 2:16:30Speaker 02

  laypeople and and and people that didn't go to college. It it it's a dirty little secret that we don't talk about because it makes us look venal. It makes us look pathetic. It makes us deserving the ire and therefore if you get ire, you get attention and then they might take away our tenure and our tuition increases that go faster than inflation. We don't want you guys to look that close at us. That's the scientific, technical elite. Eisenhower warned against that in the same breath as the military industrial complex. You never hear about the former. You only hear about the latter. Why is that? I don't know. People worship college. College is a secular idol that even the most atheistic people worship at.

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  It's a sign that I'm a good parent. My kid goes to Vanderbilt. My kid goes to UC San Diego. It's a sign that you did your good job as a parent, according to who? According to secular society. But that's a danger. So getting back to, you know, kind of this this original part where we went off on this quest a few minutes ago, I I think that there's it's it's completely legitimate to to think about these things and to and to try to approach them with scientific rigor and to have mutual respect and comity. Not comedy, but comedy where you can respect the person that you maybe don't necessarily agree with. And so for me,

• 2:17:58Speaker 02

  you know, I'm, there's obviously a lot more Christians in the world than there are Jews. But I want to get back to an understanding what's called first principles thinking. I want to understand what are the base roots of Christianity? What are the challenges to Christianity? And there are challenges to Christianity, I'm sure you know. The Gospels aren't, you know, they're, they, they themselves are the, and that's what gives them intellectual honesty. They admit there are certain things that they cannot explain, right? Miracles that Jesus did, that they say, "Well scientifically, if you take the quantum mechanical structure of water, you can..." No, they said, "We don't understand it." But that's what faith means.

• 2:18:38Speaker 02

  But I don't want to only have faith. I would like to have proof. Can I convert a faith question into a proof question?

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  That's what I want to do. That's fun as hell. What's that?

• 2:18:51Shawn Ryan?

  A faith question into a...

• 2:18:54Speaker 02

  Did God create the universe?

• 2:18:57Speaker 02

  Well, if, if, if, if the, if the Old Testament says something and it's compatible with observation, that's not proof, but it's evidence. If the, if the Torah, if the Old Testament says,

• 2:19:10Speaker 02

  "The universe came into existence in the beginning." The actual Hebrew word, Hebrew's a very rich language. And the actual, it says, "with beginningness." Like, in other words, God not only created the universe according to Hebrew in the Torah, He created the concept of the beginningness of something. It's amazing when you think about it, like, gives me chills. It's so much deeper than we get when we're kids. The problem is, we learn religion when we're like a kid, and I went to Sunday School and I hated it. And like, nobody likes it. But if you approach it as I did as an adult, I aged 30 after 9/11, or 28, or whatever I was, it's much richer, because you can approach it with the full arsenal of the tools and the weapons that I've developed as a scientist.

• 2:19:54Speaker 02

  And therefore, that which I can prove, verify, attempt, or fail to prove, will have a lot more sticking power and give me a lot more, ironically, faith.

• 2:20:08Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:20:51Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:21:31Speaker 02

  What have you proven?

• 2:21:34Speaker 02

  So, right now, we've discovered a lot of things. Again, we can't prove something inside. I can't prove to you that the earth is round. As I said, I can prove it's not flat. So what have we falsified? So we falsified a huge host with my tools and technology. You know, it's amazing, I get to work with like, just like billionaire brainiac, like, like IQ billionaires, you know, like my colleagues who started the Simons Observatory with me, David Spiegel, who ran the NASA UAP investigation panel two or three years ago. He's the, he was the leader of it. He's the leader of the Simons Foundation. He and I came up with the idea for the Simons Observatory, which is this, you know, two hundred, now $200 million kind of level project.

• 2:22:18Speaker 02

  My friend Mark Devlin at UPenn, you know, created the six-meter diameter telescope and the detectors within it. Like, three people can fit inside it, like, standing on shoulder. It's insane.

• 2:22:30Speaker 02

  Suzanne Staggs at Princeton built these detectors that could detect a match at the distance of the moon. I mean, these are like insane people. Again, I would pay to work with them, and I get to do it for free, right? We have been able to falsify these narratives that suggest there was no period of time when the universe was hotter, denser, more compact. We falsified claims that dark matter does not exist. In other words, we can't prove dark matter exists, but we've shown that in universes, models, conceptions where dark matter doesn't exist, it's 100 times more inconsistent with the data. We've found evidence for dark energy. We found evidence

• 2:23:12Speaker 02

  that matter in the universe acts like a lens that focuses light. If you put a black hole here, you can't see the black hole, it's black, right? But light would be deflected around it, just the same way that we've detected with our instruments as well, that we can see the effects of the curvature of spacetime you and Abhi talked about. We've detected that. That means that we have falsified these notions that Einstein's theories are wrong or incomplete. We do know that they're incomplete at one level because we don't understand how quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, plays with cosmology and relativity, the physics of the very large. But I'm confident that we'll get there. So

• 2:23:53Speaker 02

  to have these abilities to falsify. Now, have we falsified that the Big Bang occurred? No. Have we falsified that the multiverse exists? No. If the multiverse exists, that would be a huge challenge for traditional theology, okay? It would mean there is no one beginning. It would mean the universe is eternal and exists in a vaster cosmic landscape than we can perceive, that lies outside of our horizon. You know, like we're talking before, if you're out on a boat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousand, you know, thousand miles from land in any direction, right? Can you detect, can you see another boat? No, you can't. You can't see anything over the horizon.

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  Could you detect the boat's existence? Yeah, maybe there's waves, sonar, you know, sonograms, sonar, whatever. Neutrinos from the nuclear, whatever. There's a million ways you could detect it, right? We're trying to do just that. We're trying to see what lies beyond the horizon. If indeed the inflationary epoch did occur that we claim we did discover or later had to retract that claim, it was very embarrassing, the subject of the first book that I wrote, Losing the Nobel Prize. If we do get to that point where we can sort of have evidence for it, it doesn't prove the multiverse exists, but it kind of rules out the alternatives. And that would present challenges, right?

• 2:25:17Speaker 02

  To the traditional theological Torah creation story of a single beginning of time. There are people that will attempt to use what are called apologetics, you know, kind of explain things with the assumption that God can do that. As you said, you can't prove God exists. You can't prove God doesn't exist, right? We can't even prove we're having this consciousness experience that we call reality right now, right? We could be some brains in a jar stimulated by electromagnetic radiation by some malevolent demon, right? We don't have evidence for that, but it doesn't mean it's not within the realm of possibilities.

• 2:25:56Speaker 02

  So we've discovered a whole host of incredible facts and more to come with the Simons Observatory in the next few years where we first get data from this instrument, which was, which was created in the generosity of my late, great mentor and friend, Jim Simons, who passed away two years ago, established this incredible collaboration with, you know, it's the people, it's like a team. Without the team, nothing happens. And I'm just privileged to be, you know, at the, at the heart of it and the start of it.

• 2:26:31Shawn Ryan?

  I can't remember everything I talked to Avi about, but we were talking about the Big Bang Theory and peering back through time. We had that conversation.

• 2:26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you did.

• 2:26:43Shawn Ryan?

  How many times can you observe that from Earth?

• 2:26:47Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:26:48Shawn Ryan?

  Because if the light passes you by, then it's gone, right?

• 2:26:51Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 2:26:52Shawn Ryan?

  Is it gone, or does it just keep coming?

• 2:26:54Speaker 02

  It's, it's.

• 2:26:55Shawn Ryan?

  Because if you look at a light source,

• 2:26:58Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it'll be on until it turns off, and then it has to, right?

• 2:27:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:27:03Shawn Ryan?

  The Big Bang is an explosion, so, I mean, correct, so once the explosion is done, the light is gone, so it would pass you by.

• 2:27:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:27:12Shawn Ryan?

  Correct? And then there would be nothing after it.

• 2:27:15Speaker 02

  If it was an explosion, right. If it was an explosion.

• 2:27:17Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:17Speaker 02

  It's not an explosion in the sense of, you know, a round goes off and there's a shock wave. That has a implicit bias that you're embedding an event in a larger space, like this room, right? Explosion in this room is very different than the spacetime of this room expanding, right? So what the Big Bang postulates is that if we're galaxies, at one time in the past, yesterday, we were slightly closer. And if you extrapolate back, extrapolate back, you find that there'll be some point where our chairs are right up against each other, and I like you, but I'm not going to get that close, right? But at the subatomic scale, you could also keep going back to much, much smaller distances,

• 2:27:58Speaker 02

  which would require much, much more energy, per cubic millimeter, nanometer, plank size, whatever. But if space comes into existence at that particular moment, then what happens is as the expansion occurs, space itself is expanding for a long time, but there's nothing, there's no process by which you can reveal the presence of any matter or any energy, because it doesn't exist yet, right? The first galaxies, I've been talking about galaxies, and that's how Hubble, Edwin Hubble, showed that to Einstein that he was wrong. So Einstein believed in a static universe, that the universe is eternal, as everybody did for thousands of years. Aristotle believed that, you know? And it was Einstein, right? Until Hubble showed him evidence, data,

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  that every galaxy you could see in the universe is not static, it's moving away from Earth at huge speeds, fractions of the speed of light. In fact, it moves away faster the farther away two galaxies are. So if we're in this room and we brought in, you know, your producer and, you know, they sat over there. And this is the universe expanding. We'd all be expanding. You would see me going away and you would see him going away from you. But you wouldn't feel like yourself is moving away. But I would see you moving away and I would see him moving away. And he would see the same thing, right? So each one of us feels like we're at the center of the universe, but we're not. The space is expanding in between us.

• 2:29:25Speaker 02

  And any process that you emit, if you, if you are having, if you look at me with, and you shine a laser at me and it's a green laser. If you start to move away faster, you know, some large velocity, much, much faster than any earthbound speed, say half the speed of light. That light will go from green to red. Because not only are you moving away, but the wavelength is stretching from short wavelengths to longer wavelengths. Eventually you hit a speed because you're at a distance, and remember the distance. Times this constant called the Hubble constant tells you how, how fast two galaxies are moving away. You get a velocity that's equal to the speed of light. Okay? And then after you get beyond that distance, there's no reason I can't be moving faster than the speed of light away from you.

• 2:30:11Speaker 02

  And at that point, what do you see? So right now you see me and I'm like waving at you, right? And I keep waving at you and you keep expanding and moving and eventually you hit the speed of light. And the last thing you'll see from me is this. It'll appear frozen, the beam of light that I'm producing, the photons of light I'm generating will keep shining towards you. They'll get red shifted to longer and longer wavelengths. You'll see me. You'll see me frozen waving and you'll see me extremely red. And the same exact thing happens as an observer falls into a black hole. They don't get ripped apart at the so-called event horizon. You and Avi talked about this in great detail. I refer you guys to episode 146. Thank you. Episode 146, you talk about the falling into a black hole.

• 2:30:56Speaker 02

  Nothing happens when you cross the event horizon. People think it sounds kind of cool, event horizon. No, something happens when you get close to the singularity. That's called spaghettification, you get ripped apart. That's irrelevant. The astronaut, right before he falls into the black hole, he waves it. That's the same thing. You see him, he's frozen and he's very red. And that'll just keep continuing as long as, you know, as long as you're around to look at him. So the same thing happens with this light, with any process in the universe. And it just so happens that in order to see something that's beyond the event horizon, you can't use light. You have to use something else. Cause light can only travel at the speed of light. It's the fastest speed there is. But there has to be some other mechanism by which you could see these processes,

• 2:31:40Speaker 02

  if they existed before the big, before this part of the big bang occurred. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for not waves of light, but waves of gravity, which is the actual structure of spacetime. You know, spacetime, again, you and Avi did a lot of the prereqs for this course. You talk about waves of gravity. Gravity and spacetime is a dynamical object. It's not a frozen ice block. Gravity means that distances and time shift according to the local mass distribution there is. So when the universe had all the mass it will ever have at the beginning, it had a lot of gravity. And when the expansion took place, that gravity could be converted into oscillatory radiation

• 2:32:24Speaker 02

  called gravitational waves. That's what we look for. It's not light, it's spacetime itself. And we've detected that as. How are you able to see that? So we see that in the distortion of space and time. Remember I said, if there's a black hole here, you could actually see something over there because light from over there would get bent by the black hole and it would appear to be coming from over there, but it's actually coming from behind us. That's called gravitational lensing. Einstein predicted this phenomenon in the 1930s. He also predicted this, the phenomenon of gravitational waves. It has been detected on Earth from two black holes that existed a billion years ago, a billion light years away, crashed into each other. Okay, each one weighed 30 times the mass of our sun.

• 2:33:09Speaker 02

  What was left over was a single black hole that weighed 59 times the mass of the sun, right? So you had 16 solar masses in the beginning, 30 and 30. They crash together, they make something that's only 59 solar masses. Where'd the rest of the energy go? It all went into shaking up and vibrating spacetime. Those ripples in spacetime mean that if you were there at one moment of time, your weight would increase on a scale. If you put a scale in here and a gravitational wave comes through, you, one second, one moment of time, you get heavier, then it oscillates and you get lighter. Heavier, lighter, heavier, lighter. And that process would occur at the speed of light.

• 2:33:49Speaker 02

  But it's not light, it's the separation of entities and events in spacetime itself. The curvature of which gets distorted if the universe had a singularity, which would mean that we live in a multiverse. They all go together. So we haven't discovered that yet. We may never, even as you said before eloquently, you can't prove it, can't disprove it, but we can disprove alternatives to it. There's an alternative that says we came from a big crunch. Remember I said that's a possibility? That, it turns out, for technical reasons, can be disproven if we see these waves of gravity. The waves of gravity cannot occur in a universe of a big crunch, but they can occur in a universe with inflation and the multiverse.

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  But one can be proved, one cannot be proven, but one can be falsified, proven wrong.

• 2:34:39Shawn Ryan?

  You know, another thing that I was talking to Avi about is when we talk about the universe expanding, I was asking him about the edge of the universe. I didn't quite understand what he was talking about. So if we're expanding, the space is expanding in between us.

• 2:34:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:34:59Shawn Ryan?

  Where's the edge of this?

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  So there doesn't have to be an edge. There may be an edge, but there doesn't have to be an edge. And it's a very ancient question. Aristotle asked, if you go to the edge of the universe and you throw a sphere, where does it go into, right? It's exactly the same type of question you're asking. So what we do in science is we, in the science of cosmology, is we say that spacetime is the set of all possible places in x, y, and z and in time. Anything that can occur, occurs in those four dimensions, right? You told me to meet you here exactly in this, you know, latitude, longitude, altitude, and time, right? You specified all those different things. You don't specify anything else, right?

• 2:35:46Speaker 02

  That's... Now, if a gravitational wave comes through this room, it actually changes both the space and time, you know, microscopically, but technically it does. And if two big black holes crash by, and it would do it a lot, right? That would be a huge, huge disruption to space and time. It would change my coordinates. I'd be at a different X, Y, Z, time, altitude, whatever, right? But all of space and time can exist infinitely, like an infinite set of monkey bars, just going out in all directions, all possible directions. There are spaces there. Now, you might say, "What is that space made of, right? What's in that space?" In other words, our universe here is within our horizon. Just like you go down to the beach in San Diego, I can only see out, what, four... I don't know, you're a Navy guy, tell me.

• 2:36:31Speaker 02

  You can see like four to seven miles at sea level, out to shore, and then your horizon disappears because of the curvature of the earth, right? Does that mean there's nothing beyond that? Of course not, right? There's definitely stuff beyond that. People didn't know that for a long time, but now they do, right? So, that's your horizon. Your horizon on a two-dimensional surface, like the surface of the earth, is a circle. Your horizon in a four-dimensional universe is a sphere. Every event in space and time that's ever occurred, that we could just now get information from, lies within our light sphere. We call that maximum light sphere. The farthest distance that anything could have traveled to us here, we call that the

• 2:37:13Speaker 02

  particle horizon, or the observable universe, okay? But my observable universe looks different than your observable universe, because we're not at the same four-dimensional spacetime location. You're six feet away from me. Light travels one billionth, and one billionth of a second travels one foot. That's the speed of light. So, I actually see you six nanoseconds earlier than you are right now. You look wonderful, Sean, by the way. I see you, the sun, eight minutes away. We don't know, the sun could have disappeared right now. We won't know for eight minutes. It's not likely, but it's a hypothesis, you could test it, right? The universe, the Big Bang, the stuff that I study, happened 13.86 billion years ago. So, stuff could have traveled to us from that age.

• 2:38:00Speaker 02

  And you take that age of the universe times the speed of light. You technically have to modify it by the expansion of the universe. But once you do that, you get the the maximum distance I can see where I am right here. And that's a sphere whose radius is forty five billion light years. Okay, so imagine that centered on me. But now go over a couple billion light years to this galaxy where these two black holes crash together. That has a slightly different observable universe. Now, what are they seeing? Are they seeing into another universe? No, they're just they just have access to a different light sphere of space that could have communicated with them.

• 2:38:36Shawn Ryan?

  Just another perspective.

• 2:38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and in a billion years from now, we'll be able to see that. Now, if there's another universe there, let's say there's another universe. God comes down, there's another universe, episode whatever, fourteen hundred, you'll have the other universe, all right? But it's it's it's it's ten light years away from our universe. You won't know about it for ten years. Right? So we could exist in this vast universe. It could also be that we're in a compact, finite universe. Where it would make sense to say that there is an edge to it, just like there's an edge. There is an edge to the earth, right? The edge is in the perpendicular dimension to the two dimensional sphere. In the context of cosmology, the edge of the universe could be if we live in a spherical universe.

• 2:39:21Speaker 02

  But instead of having X, Y, and Z, it has X, Y, Z, and W. It's a four dimensional sphere. A brain, nobody's brain, not even Obie's, can comprehend what that actually looks like or means. But mathematically, it's a perfectly valid question. We can we can approach it and we can ask, what would be the signature of another universe? That bumps into our universe? And people make predictions about it. Yeah, but there's zero evidence for that. There's zero evidence that our universe is a compact, closed spherical universe. Or that it's an open hyperbolic universe. Right now, our best evidence is that our universe is infinite in extent, but that infinity is just a mathematical infinity. We have no idea of right beyond it could be another universe. And if you ask what's in that other universe?

• 2:40:05Speaker 02

  I have a thought exercise for you.

• 2:40:11Speaker 02

  When the Artemis, uh, we should talk about lunar landing conspiracies. You had on this guy, uh, Gentile?

• 2:40:18Shawn Ryan?

  A.J. Gentile.

• 2:40:19Speaker 02

  A.J. Gentile. That was an awesome show.

• 2:40:21Shawn Ryan?

  I love that guy. He's one of my favorite people.

• 2:40:23Speaker 02

  He is, he is, and he's, he's so good at what he does, you know, like, imagine how hard it is, like, you know, it's hard to interview people, but then also to do, like, explainer content where you explain things. Um, but, you know, I was, I can never take the professor out of laboratory. And so he made a couple of mistakes in that episode. And I would love to talk to him sometime. Uh, maybe you can, uh, introduce me. But one of the things he said is that, um, that the, uh, the Soviets beat us in every possible thing. And this is part of the conversation you guys had about how the moon landing didn't happen, right? Or how people could say that I don't actually know what you believe. And this is a case where you could say believe, but we have evidence, right?

• 2:41:01Shawn Ryan?

  What do you believe?

• 2:41:02Speaker 02

  I know for a fact we landed on the moon.

• 2:41:03Shawn Ryan?

  How do you know?

• 2:41:04Speaker 02

  I know for a fact because we have physical evidence. We have eyewitness evidence. We have photographic evidence. But the best evidence we have, Sean,

• 2:41:13Speaker 02

  the best evidence we have comes from the Soviet Union.

• 2:41:16Shawn Ryan?

  What's that?

• 2:41:16Speaker 02

  Soviet Union on, uh, July 19th, 1969, the Soviets knew that the Eagle was on its way to land on the Sea of Tranquility. They had launched six days earlier, a spacecraft of their own, uh, uncrewed, no men were on it. But they were going to go and land on the moon and they were going to take samples. And they're kind of wanting to steal the thunder, arrive a day earlier and, and kind of get a little bit of the credit. And they also kind of hoped that we would crash and they would all die. I mean, the space race was insane, right? I mean, it was incredible. The Soviets coordinated with the Americans on that very day because they were worried that they would crash into the Eagle.

• 2:42:01Speaker 02

  And they coordinated their telemetry and we still have records of their telemetry. And the communications between the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where they would do their launches and recoveries and NASA Apollo, they wanted to avoid a huge PR disaster. Especially since they thought we would die. They thought they would actually crash. People thought the moon landers would keep going down through the surface of the moon. They thought it was made of like really loose talcum powder like dust and that that would actually be unstable and would flip. They actually, most people gave it 50/50 odds. In fact, Nixon had recorded a speech in case the astronauts died. And, you know, and he, they pre-recorded it and so he would play it on TV and give their condolences. They also planned for contingency that they'd be lost in lunar orbit or that they would

• 2:42:46Speaker 02

  miss the moon and go off into deep space and become a satellite, never to be found again, right? So, so the Russians confirmed it, that coordinated with our telemetry. When they landed, they congratulated President Nixon. And then they also landed on the moon and the first landing, they landed these retroreflectors called laser, lunar laser retroreflectors. You ever on your bicycle and you see like a bike taillight, the reflectors on the back of a bike, right? How does that work? How does the bike know where your car is going to be? It could be at any angle, any bearing, any distance, right? How does it know to reflect? They have specially designed retroreflectors that always will find the target back to

• 2:43:28Speaker 02

  Earth. And we bounce lasers off it. My colleague, UC San Diego, became retired recently, Tom Murphy, he bounces lasers off these retroreflectors left by the Apollo moon landing, Apollo 11. And he can measure the distance to the moon to the thickness of a paperclip, one millimeter or so thickness. So we know the average, that was left by these astronauts. Now, the Russians left these things there too. But the Russians also overflew. Both our landing sites and their own landing sites. And Tom Murphy and his colleagues found the Russian retroreflectors, as well as the American ones, exactly where the Americans said they put it and exactly where the Russians said they put it.

• 2:44:09Speaker 02

  And the last kind of little bit of convincing evidence, one part, but I do want to get back to what Gentile said that's wrong, because I think it's important, is that, is that that, the positioning, so you could maybe sort of fake that or whatever, but imagine right now, imagine like Artemis II, which just went around the moon, right? I think even, you know, I debated Bart Sibrel on Piers Morgan, the day of the launch. And he was like, well, maybe they're going now, but they couldn't have gone then. I'll get back to that in a second. Now, that's totally fallacious and ridiculous argument that I refuted on air with him and Piers actually piled on and called him full of shit, to his credit.

• 2:44:49Speaker 02

  But these, the very day that Artemis launched and then went around the moon this last month in April, can you imagine?

• 2:44:57Shawn Ryan?

  It's supposed to land on the moon.

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  Not, not this one. This one was supposed to go around the moon.

• 2:45:00Shawn Ryan?

  I thought they were supposed to land.

• 2:45:02Speaker 02

  It will in two years from now.

• 2:45:03Shawn Ryan?

  And then it changed.

• 2:45:04Speaker 02

  No, no, no, it was always planned to do this. First one went around the moon, no one was in it. Second one went around the moon with people in it. Third one's going to be people in it, sorry, unmanned landing on the moon. Fourth one's going to be people landing on the moon. Okay. Well, let me, let me just finish up this one.

• 2:45:17Shawn Ryan?

  All right, all right. I just want to know, why don't we just land on the fucking moon? We did it in the 60s.

• 2:45:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:45:23Shawn Ryan?

  Why are we doing all this crazy, wild shit? Let's just go back.

• 2:45:28Speaker 02

  Would you get on with your kids, being here and your wife and your empire that is so impressive, would you get on like the second flight of any kind of military hardware built by the lowest paying contractor?

• 2:45:40Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, in case you haven't noticed, I'm a risk taker.

• 2:45:42Speaker 02

  I know you are. But would you do it now? I asked Elon Musk on my podcast.

• 2:45:46Shawn Ryan?

  Would I do it right now?

• 2:45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Would you take it right now? Right. So you do things in steps.

• 2:45:51Shawn Ryan?

  I would have done it probably four or five years ago.

• 2:45:53Speaker 02

  Kitty Hawk, was that the first time that the Wright Flyer had ever flown? No, they didn't put themselves on it the first time. They did test flights, prototype flights, that's all they're doing. There's nothing nefarious there, but let me just get to the closure of this one argument, a thought experiment I want you to consider. April 5th, 6th, when they went around the moon, can you imagine Ayatollah Khomeini Jr.? Oh, hello. Hi, mashallah, mashallah, President, President Trump, congratulation. Every country on Earth, including China, which had stolen a lot of our nuclear and space secrets in the 1970s, China, Soviet Union, all these countries called up and congratulated the United States. Now, they were our enemy. It's hard to think of it now because we kind

• 2:46:35Speaker 02

  of like, whatever, whatever, right? But can you imagine like, the Ayatollahs right now calling us up to congratulate us? In other words, they would be the most glorified and happy people on Earth to have us not get there and prove that we didn't get there, because that would leave glory for them. So that's a psychological kind of component evidence for it. There's overwhelming scientific evidence for it. The evidence against it is minimal. You already mentioned one of them, which is, well, how come they did it, you know, in the 60s, but we can't do it now? I mean, you said that, Jintil said that, totally fallacious argument. I love you, I love Jintil. I'm gonna tell you, that's a fallacious argument, and I'm living proof of it, okay? The first person to ever set

• 2:47:16Speaker 02

  foot on the South Pole, Roald Amundsen, he's an amazing guy. He went from the North Pole, he almost was the first person to reach the North Pole. He lost, turned around and went on a huge expedition, and became the first person to land, to reach the South Pole. The South Pole, nowadays, I said, I take a C-130 flight, a C-17 flight, land on the ice, then I take a ski C-130, it takes me a week. Okay, poor Brian, you'll play the violin. It took them six months just to get there. Then they got there, they would get there in spring, because that's the only time you can really travel there. Then they have to wait until the following spring, they'd stay on the coast of Antarctica for six more months until, or seven, eight months, before it came warm enough that they could ski, cross-country ski, up 9,000 feet of ice.

• 2:48:01Speaker 02

  Okay, and then they got to the South Pole and they had to get back before winter started. And if they missed it by three weeks, like the British team, Robert Falcon Scott, was the second person to get to the South Pole in 1912, in January 1912, three weeks after Amundsen got there in December 1911, everyone on Scott's team died. Every single one of them froze to death the most excruciating way possible, 10 miles from a cache of supplies that would have saved their lives. They all died. They didn't know about it for another year and then they got back to England a year after that. Okay, we're just, okay, so 1911, our Norwegian guy sets foot with his teammates on the South Pole. Do you know when the next Norwegian to get to the South Pole was, Joe? I'm not expecting you to. 1996.

• 2:48:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:44Speaker 02

  So if you're in 19, Bart Sibro, 1995, you say, oh, wait, how come we went there with technology with a boat, a wooden boat, like Shackleton? We did that 100 years ago, but we can't do that now? It's completely fallacious. I mean, that's not a good argument, okay? There are other arguments that are better, like the Van Allen belts and so forth.

• 2:49:04Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think that, you know, that I'm not saying that we didn't go.

• 2:49:08Speaker 02

  Okay, it sounded like.

• 2:49:09Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not saying we.

• 2:49:10Speaker 02

  You're open to the hypothesis at least.

• 2:49:12Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's fucking weird that we haven't been back since the 60s.

• 2:49:18Speaker 02

  But do you know why we didn't go back to the South Pole?

• 2:49:20Shawn Ryan?

  Or anybody on Earth.

• 2:49:23Speaker 02

  Uh, so first of all, it was.

• 2:49:25Shawn Ryan?

  And the belt thing that you just brought up, I also think is very odd. And there's that guy at NASA that said, we lost the technology. I'm sorry, you lost the fucking technology?

• 2:49:35Speaker 02

  Okay, there's no NASA guy at NASA. It's like saying the guy in the Navy SEALs or something like, that could mean a lot of things, right? It doesn't.

• 2:49:42Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, I'm just not familiar with.

• 2:49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, but, but when you have a platform like you do and, and AJ has his platform, I'm just, I would love the scientific rigor to kind of, not, you have to get a PhD in quantum mechanics. I'm just saying, when you think about things, what should be your default base rate hypothesis? Should it be that this is, this is kind of fake? Or, you know, as, as Candace Owens said, this is faking gay, right? So she's supposed to be like America first, right? She's supposed to really love America, be patriotic. It's not only the greatest achievement of America, but it's, this is one of the greatest, I think it is personally the greatest achievement in all of human history. And I say that as somebody who's a pure scientist, going to the moon, yeah.

• 2:50:25Speaker 02

  Well, we did in a very short amount of time, but it took a level of, you know, just, just incredible, incredible, you know, cooperation and technology, hundreds of thousands of people coordinating across decades. And then the evidence against it is so minimal. What's frustrating as a real scientist to say like, look, no one would rather these things be false than a scientist, right? Because I get paid not to prove people right. My job is not to prove fricking Avi Loeb right. My job is to say, no, you're fricking wrong. Here's a better explanation. Let's go test that. And his job as a good scientist is to say, thank you, Brian. You know, you use your experimental technology. I'm a theoretical physicist. Let's work together and come closer to truth. Okay. That's the way science should be done. Not like the default assumption is America lied.

• 2:51:10Speaker 02

  You know, they lied about COVID. I mean, you know, for many reasons, I wish COVID never happened. And I've interviewed, you know, and I'm best friends with, one of the close friends with the director of the National Institute of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, tortured by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, horrible thing. And, you know, he's a Christian. He's an incredible human being. You know, he-

• 2:51:32Shawn Ryan?

  All this stuff that you're kind of talking about here, you know, at the beginning, you asked me if I thought it was a good idea for a country to lie to its citizens.

• 2:51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:42Shawn Ryan?

  Now we're wondering if we fucking landed on the moon because a lot of lies have come out of the government.

• 2:51:47Speaker 02

  I see what you're saying.

• 2:51:48Shawn Ryan?

  And you're a scientist, you know, you understand how to sift through all this data. And I mean, you've spent many, many years studying all the things that it takes to know about landing on the moon. I'm a Navy SEAL. I spent those years fighting a fucking war. You know what I mean?

• 2:52:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:05Shawn Ryan?

  And so what I'm saying is, you know, you're looking at straight facts and the rest of us are looking at contexts, you know? And when you have, when you add in the context and you see a government that continuously lies to its fucking citizens, citizens are no longer going to believe the government.

• 2:52:21Speaker 02

  I guess is a question.

• 2:52:23Shawn Ryan?

  And so then all these conspiracies start to happen and distrust and then they start digging into everything. What were you saying about Candace?

• 2:52:32Speaker 02

  So Candace, what I'm saying about Candace is that the America firsters and the American patriots and so forth, and I'm not questioning her love of America or whatever, just saying, if this is the greatest accomplishment that a human being has ever made, and it happens to come from the country that you profess your love for and allegiance to, as I do and as you do, right? That, it doesn't mean they're flawless. I mean, who's flawless, right? I mean, who do you agree with 100% of the time? Like, I'll say my wife, right? But that's about it, right? Sometimes you contradict yourself. I contradict myself.

• 2:53:00Shawn Ryan?

  You agree with your wife 100% of the time? That's bullshit.

• 2:53:03Speaker 02

  Uh, honey, if you're watching, you know what I did? I made her mad the other day. I said, you know, honey, whenever I'm driving you around, like, I gotta turn off the, um, the voice activated directions on the GPS. She's like, oh, that's so romantic. You wanna listen to me? I'm like, no, I don't want two women yelling at me while I'm on the club. Um, no. So you don't agree with everybody, right? You don't even agree with yourself. I reserve the right to be wrong all the time. And in fact, that's the best thing a scientist should do. We should have the frickin' balls to say when we're wrong, not just when we're right. From the standpoint of having skepticism of your government and whatnot, you always have to ask the question, cui bono? Like, who benefits from it, right? Who would benefit

• 2:53:42Speaker 02

  from the moon landing not occurring? Um, is a question. You can ask that question. Um, you can also, you know, say, what are the downstream tangible benefits from doing that work and landing on the moon? You can ask, what were the technological impediments? But if you start with a hypothesis, you know, it's like an atheist who says, like, I'm gonna start with the hypothesis, God doesn't exist, Sean, right? And you have the, you have the burden of proof to prove to me that God exists or doesn't exist, right? Um, that's not approaching things scientifically. Like, if you start with, there's a, there's a term in that for, it's called apologetics. Uh, you start with a conclusion, you reason towards a conclusion based on the best available data, but you, you're not gonna like refute God, like William Lane Craig or Barron, uh, the

• 2:54:28Speaker 02

  The Catholic priest, I'm blanking on his name. I think it's Baron is the last name, Robert Baron. They're not going to come to a conclusion that disproves God, right? Let's just be honest. That's, that's not necessarily what their, their, you know, focus is going to be on, right? But they're going to give explanations why God is a more plausible hypothesis than anything else. But if you, and, and so there's purely scientific reasons you can, you can debate what happened when we went to the moon. How come we didn't go back? I think I gave some credibility to the argument that just because you do something once, it doesn't necessarily make it easier to do it twice. Like appears Morgan on his show to give him credit to Bart Cibral, he said, I flew on the Concorde, you know, in 2001, and I haven't been on a Concorde since. Like, how come there's no fricking, you know, Mach 2 transportation right now?

• 2:55:11Speaker 02

  How come that's not probably ever going to happen again? How did we go back into, you know, and that was built, that was built in 1962, the Concorde is before the Apollo land. We can't do that now. That's, it's an argument that sounds good to people that really might come into a conversation with a predisposition. And that's fine for a person who's not, who's not maybe wanting to portray themselves as being a scientist. You're not a scientist. AJ's not a scientist. But, uh, but there's one more thing about the Van Allen belts, which is the other thing that she, Candace Owens, really got from this guy Bart Cibral. And then I think AJ kind of got this too. So there's this radiation belt that surrounds the earth. And it's called the Van Allen belts.

• 2:55:54Speaker 02

  It is supposedly this impenetrable, instantly fatal trajectory. No person can get through it. And there's no way to get to the moon without going through these belts, right? I mean, that surrounds the earth. So that's, that's like saying, there's no way, let's say you want to land on Saturn, right? For whatever reason, Sean's deciding, we're taking the podcast on the road, we're going to Saturn, right? Saturn has this ring system around it. It's like a belt around it, right? So if you're going to land on Saturn, fine, you probably won't take the trajectory that goes right through the ring system, right? Just because there's a belt exists, doesn't mean that there's not a symmetrical process, a trajectory that you go through. It's totally safe, right? The asteroid belt, you think about the asteroid belt, you shoot a spaceship through the asteroid belt, you're going to get destroyed. No, you won't. The, if you shot in

• 2:56:39Speaker 02

  any direction, you take any trajectory you want, and you'll go out to the edge of the solar system. There's almost a 0% chance you'll hit anything, even though you kind of depict it as an asteroid belt. The Van Allen belts are like that. They're highly concentrated in certain regions. There's two different belts, an inner belt and an outer belt. They mainly go around the equator. The launches to the moon go around the pole. So there's no danger, there's no exposure to it. We know how to do it. Satellites go through it all the time. And anyone who's ever seen Aurora knows about it. It's not dangerous, it's not fatal. It's, it, it happens to be about the equivalent of two or three chest X-rays, which you and I get every year, every couple of years, right? So there's some radiation. It sounds scary. You know, one of the Patreon questions that I answered for my fellow Vigilance Elite Patreon

• 2:57:22Speaker 02

  members was about like, how do we make the, the concept of nuclear power less, uh, less traumatizing, less kind of scary to the average person? Like, how do we get rid of radiation? So save that, you have to join Vigilance Elite Patreon. Right, I'm trying to sell that to my fellow members. Um, so, and go over there, you'll find out my answer to it. Um, but it, but it's sort of, it's, it's manipulative to say, radiation's scary, therefore we didn't go to the moon. Let's look at it scientifically. Let's look at the evidence.

• 2:57:54Shawn Ryan?

  If you spend any time off-road like I do, you already know how easy it is to end up second guessing where you're at, whether you're still on a legal trail or if the route ahead is even worth taking. That's why I've been using OnX Offroad. It's an off-road navigation app that shows trails, public and private land boundaries, places to camp, and detailed trail info all in one place. And what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data. You can check difficulty ratings, terrain details, trail photos, even recent reports from other riders before you head out there. The other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time because once you lose service out there, your phone is pretty much useless.

• 2:58:37Shawn Ryan?

  But with OnX Offroad, everything still works offline. And if you're riding with a group, their location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map so nobody gets lost or separated. What I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new. I'm not wasting time backtracking, accidentally ending up on private land or trying to figure things out once I'm already deep into the trail system. I can plan ahead. Know what I'm getting into and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the whole time. Search on X, off-road, in the App Store, or Google Play. Again, that's on X, off-road, in the App Store, or Google Play.

• 2:59:54Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Brian, we're back from the break. We pretty much just wrapped up the moon talk. But I did bring one thing in here, because you gave me a little shit for saying the NASA guy. So, here is the NASA guy. Go ahead and hit play.

• 3:00:11Shawn Ryan?

  Let me know what you think.

• 3:00:13Speaker 03

  I'd go to the moon in a nanosecond. The problem is, we don't have the technology to do that anymore. We used to, but we destroyed that technology. And it's a painful process to build it back again.

• 3:00:28Speaker 00

  When you said that just now.

• 3:00:30Shawn Ryan?

  Alright.

• 3:00:31Speaker 00

  It sounds stupid to you? Kind of?

• 3:00:35Shawn Ryan?

  So that was... what's this guy's name?

• 3:00:37Speaker 02

  Don Pettit, a national astronaut.

• 3:00:39Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so...

• 3:00:42Shawn Ryan?

  I sounded like an idiot, because I didn't know his name, or what he was, so I had to go find it and show it to you. So, what is your take on that? I'm just curious.

• 3:00:51Speaker 02

  So, no disrespect to Don, again, more courageous than I'll ever be, you know, launching top of a 60,000, you know, tons of TNT equivalent, and risk your life and do everything that he did. So, the one thing that's more complicated than physics is psychology, is the human mind. So, I'm not going to speculate what he meant by it. I'll just say, it's...

• 3:01:15Speaker 02

  The technology can't be destroyed, right? Technology means a lot of things. It means the physical rockets. Do we have Apollo Saturn V boosters anymore? No, so we don't have those. Do we destroy them? Yeah, I mean, I've got a 50 cal bullet that my brother-in-law Jim Brewer got me. And I use it as a bottle opener. Is it destroyed? Yeah, it's destroyed. It has a hole in it and the gunpowder's been taken out and it's not a live round, right? So do we destroy it? Do we destroy the know-how on how to do it? Do we destroy?

• 3:01:44Shawn Ryan?

  That's what, that's the way I take that, is they destroyed the know-how. They destroyed the blueprint. Who gives a shit about the fucking booster or whatever, the rocket or whatever it is? We can build it again.

• 3:01:57Speaker 02

  It is true, right?

• 3:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  Like.

• 3:01:59Speaker 02

  I don't think that that's.

• 3:02:00Shawn Ryan?

  That's what everybody's doing with these autonomous systems right now. They're building disposable units that can be very cheaply and easily recreated.

• 3:02:08Speaker 02

  You know, I have a collect aviation, you know, kind of antique artifacts. I have a B-17 propeller in my hangar in San Diego where I keep my plane. And this thing is amazing and there's zero chance that we could ever get that to work. We could ever reconstruct a B-17, you know, from scrap. There are a couple of B-17s flying. I think there's three left or something like that. Again, if we had an infinite amount of money, infinite amount of money. Do you think that Elon or do you think that our greatest engineers and scientists couldn't reassemble and build a P-38 or a B-17? Of course we could, but you have to ask like, what's the purpose of that? We have been there, we have done that. I actually think there's a stronger.

• 3:02:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's the purpose of that?

• 3:02:50Speaker 02

  What's the purpose of rebuilding?

• 3:02:52Shawn Ryan?

  What was the purpose of coming to North America again?

• 3:02:54Speaker 02

  Well, what?

• 3:02:55Shawn Ryan?

  What was the purpose?

• 3:02:56Speaker 02

  So we are.

• 3:02:57Shawn Ryan?

  To settle new fucking land, to expand an empire, to fuck. What would the purpose of going to the moon be? I don't know, to claim the fucking moon.

• 3:03:05Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 3:03:05Shawn Ryan?

  What do we know there's the shit up there that we don't need?

• 3:03:07Speaker 02

  Same with Antarctica. Why do we go to Antarctica?

• 3:03:09Shawn Ryan?

  I interviewed this guy Steve Quast in helium three. He's talking about we need helium three. It's gonna be great for energy. Can't remember everything about the conversation, but you know what I mean? Like, why aren't we going up there and getting fucking helium three?

• 3:03:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:03:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so I sense that you get frustrated with skeptics. Like me, or people that don't believe, but what really is the problem is the scientists are doing a very shitty job of explaining why the fuck we haven't been back to the moon.

• 3:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:40Shawn Ryan?

  To pea brains.

• 3:03:41Speaker 02

  A, you're not a pea brain. B, uh, my job is to answer questions and I, I, I get paid to answer questions, right? And so the teacher is, at heart, I'm a scientist, right? And scientists answer questions. I'm a professor, I'm a teacher. When, when they say something like that, there's different reads to saying that, like, um, you know, uh, where, where's the car, um, you know, to your 16 year old, oh, I destroyed it, it's destroyed, is it destroyed? Like with, is it beyond the laws of physics to reconstruct it? Um, is an astronaut the right person to ask this question about the technology? Do you know the astronauts have almost no knowledge of the engineering and the building of it? Some of them have, weren't even pilots, right? So that's why I kinda asked you before, is my lack of domain expertise in the operator,

• 3:04:24Speaker 02

  special teams and the Navy aviators, does that preclude me from being able to ask questions that might be uncomfortable for people that believe things that they've seen that I don't believe there's evidence at the scientific evidentiary level for? So that one clip, it doesn't shake me, it doesn't, it doesn't frustrate me, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make me feel like, oh, well, I really got me. Um, it makes me feel like this guy said something. I don't know the full context, but I know for sure, if we hadn't wanted to, there's absolutely no reason not to. Now, why didn't we want to? What was the Cold War? I mean, do we go back and keep bombing Japan and bombing the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union collapsed, right? Part of it was because of the vast military expenditures that we spent during the space

• 3:05:05Speaker 02

  race and it was no longer sustainable in the late 1980s and the Berlin Wall fall. Did we fire a shot? No, I mean, not really. I mean, you guys probably know, but once you, once you do a thing, do you need to do it again? Like, it's not like running a marathon, right? Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, 80 years ago, something like that. People still wanna break the four minute mile, right? They keep getting better and better. Um, will that person, the second person to break the four minute mile, do you know his name?

• 3:05:31Shawn Ryan?

  No, but I mean, yes, we do need to do it again. I mean, since the, since the beginning of time, it's been expansion of empires.

• 3:05:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:41Shawn Ryan?

  The entire fucking planet's occupied now, except Antarctica, so we got eight hundred people down.

• 3:05:45Speaker 02

  Sell you some land there.

• 3:05:46Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know what I mean? So we're, we're, and what is the fastest growing?

• 3:05:51Speaker 02

  Is the, is the world overpopulated? I don't think so. I think it's the opposite. I think we're running low on population. If you took every person on Earth, John.

• 3:05:59Shawn Ryan?

  I guess what I'm saying is it's all been settled. I'm not talking about an overpopulation or anything. I'm talking about expansion of empires, which humanity has been doing since the beginning of time.

• 3:06:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:06:11Shawn Ryan?

  The new expansion is space.

• 3:06:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 3:06:14Shawn Ryan?

  Space, I mean, the, the, what, I can't, I don't know the correct terminology, but it's been, it's been told to me by several people on the show that the, the real estate law, or whatever the fuck you call it, space.

• 3:06:29Speaker 02

  Space law.

• 3:06:29Shawn Ryan?

  Space law is the fastest growing.

• 3:06:31Speaker 02

  It is.

• 3:06:32Shawn Ryan?

  You know, um, sector of, of legal, or whatever, legal real estate.

• 3:06:37Speaker 02

  Space Force was created, the first branch of the US military created in fifty years, sixty years.

• 3:06:41Shawn Ryan?

  So you can't tell me that, you know, it's not important. And then Steve Kost is saying China is is basically on the moon. I don't know if that's correct or not, but that's what he says. But whatever, somebody's gonna fucking go there and somebody's gonna claim it. Why haven't we been back? It's been how long? Sixty years, maybe?

• 3:07:00Speaker 02

  If we had this conversation, you know, forty-six days ago, we could say we haven't been back to the moon in fifty-six years or whatever, but now we have. But we've been around the moon. We went farther than we went even during the Apollo mission. We're testing this thing out. I always say, you know, someone said to me, uh, do you wanna be, uh, go on a SpaceX rocket? Go to the moon? I'm like, yeah, I wanna be a customer ten thousand. Like, I wanna be the first guy. You know how many aviation accidents occurred during the first ten years after the Wright Brothers? What the fatality rate is? Nowadays, you get on a plane, the fatality rate is zero point zero zero one. The only fatality in America since nine eleven was, uh, right after Trump's inauguration is a helicopter hit a commercial jet. That was like the first midair collision that resulted in death, or even Solis Solonberg landed on.

• 3:07:43Speaker 02

  Their aviation safety has gotten down to the sub thousandth of a percent level of fatality risk. Space is still about 3%, 4%. Now, part of that is intrinsic to the environment, is the most extreme hostile environment, which is also some of the reason why we might not ever get to Mars and colonize Mars. We might not have the ability, we might not have the wherewithal, but in today's dollars to reproduce what we did, just go to the moon, walk around, do the samples, if you'd want to do that, is sort of the analog of what I said before. Go to the South Pole, be the 10th person to get to the South Pole. You have to justify a huge amount of blood and treasure to do that. And I'm sorry, people in America are not willing to see astronauts die. You know, we've gotten to a point where they, if they were to have one loss of an astronaut,

• 3:08:27Speaker 02

  it would set back probably the future lunar colonization by an incredible, you know, maybe decades. And the budget that NASA is dedicating towards this is miniscu... You know, women in this country, and many men, I don't know your audience, women spend more on lipstick in America than the NASA budget. Tell me how you're going to get to colonize the interplanetary species like Elon wants to do with a budget that's $25 billion. And some say that's way too high. We should be spending on poverty. We should be sending... And you gotta be sympathetic to some of these things, right? So the question is one of national will. We had pride in the 1960s, we wanted to beat Russia. We don't really have that with China. We have a very unusual thing with China, our relationship. You know more about the geopolitics than I do.

• 3:09:11Speaker 02

  There's an interesting thing that just happened in, it didn't really make much media attention, I saw it. In the New York Times reported that China was trying to build radio telescopes in Argentina and optical telescopes there. And the US government coordinated with Argentina and froze the parts at the port in China. I'm sorry, at the port in Argentina. Like, why are they doing that? Well, guess what? When we go up and study the cosmic microwave background, look for the big bang and stuff like that, we're on top of these mountains. We're looking for infrared. We're looking for heat. Well, guess what? So are the Chinese. They're probably looking for infrared for a B2 stealth bomber. You can conceal its radar. That's what stealth means. You can cool the exhaust, but you can't defeat the second law of thermodynamics. When an SR71 is cruising at cruise speed, the windshield gets

• 3:09:56Speaker 02

  up to 600 degrees. It had to be three inches of quartz. Well, quartz radiates in the infrared extremely well. You can pick that thing out like a, you know, a hot knife going through butter. So these are not always peaceful, you know, kind of coordination and scientific benefit, but to coordinate something on a budget of $25 billion? I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, kind of, it's, it's almost nothing. And so I don't think we're going to get there again, but not because it's some, it's, and that's today when people are excited about the moon. Elon Musk exists. He didn't exist in 1980s or whatever, right? And we had the space shuttle program. That was kind of a mixed failure blessing in some ways. I pet it was one of

• 3:10:34Speaker 02

  the commanders on. So, look, the disposition has to be like, what is the cost benefit analysis? Is it worth sending people there if they have a high risk of dying? You know, would you want to be, you know, let's say it's safe. You know, you're not going to die, but you're going to go on a one-way ticket to Mars. And oh, your crewmate's going to be Elon Musk because he wants to go there too. Are you going to do that? You love risk. I'm telling you, no risk. You're not going to die.

• 3:11:00Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you're, you're talking to somebody that fought in three different wars and several different conflicts.

• 3:11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:05Shawn Ryan?

  I'd have a huge appetite for risk.

• 3:11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:11:08Shawn Ryan?

  And, and I have an even bigger appetite for risk when it advances humanity, advances our country, you know, things like that. And so if I thought that for one second that by reaching the moon with Elon Musk, for whatever reason, is going to advance humanity and make a fucking better life for mine and yours, kids, you bet your ass I'm going to be on that flight.

• 3:11:32Speaker 02

  So then we have to look at what is the

• 3:11:35Shawn Ryan?

  There are a lot of people that are just like me.

• 3:11:39Speaker 02

  But aren't there, Sean, and no, you know, I'm saying this with love and respect, but like, you, you were ordered to fight in these wars.

• 3:11:46Shawn Ryan?

  I wasn't ordered to fight. I fucking joined to fight.

• 3:11:49Speaker 02

  You joined to fight, right? But once you're there, as I understand it, right? You don't have that much say what you're going to do and which wars you're going to fight in. In other words, do you, do you, if you knew everything that you knew now, are you gonna, are you gonna say that like, if this is gonna advance humanity, that's what they told us too, in Iraq, like, this is gonna benefit, it's gonna protect America, it's gonna do all these things, let's leave aside whether it did or didn't, but you did it, you signed up for it, did it, did the promise or the expectations, did it match, you know, all the hardship that you went through and your fellows?

• 3:12:20Shawn Ryan?

  No, it was another lie from the US government.

• 3:12:22Speaker 02

  Right, so what about this, you're saying you're gonna do this because of your love of religion?

• 3:12:26Shawn Ryan?

  I said, if I knew for a fact

• 3:12:28Speaker 02

  Okay, but we never

• 3:12:29Shawn Ryan?

  that it was going to advance humanity, and make a better life for mine and yours kids, I would do it, you can bet your ass on it.

• 3:12:36Speaker 02

  It's funny.

• 3:12:37Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I said.

• 3:12:38Speaker 02

  I asked Elon, on my podcast, I had him on very briefly, and I said, Elon, you say you wanna go to Mars, you wanna live on Mars, you wanna die on Mars, I said, let's hope it's not on impact, you know, I don't want you to die on impact, buddy, I think you're too important, but, um, but you have a 13 to 14 kids, we actually don't know how many kids Elon has, it's either very lucky or very unlucky, but, um, but he has at least 13 kids, I said, there would be a day, when you'd have to say, they're not all gonna go, his kid X, Jaws 72, you know, the one that's named after the Blackbird, right, he has an unpronounceable name, uh, he was in the room, I could hear the kid talking on the podcast, when I was talking to Elon, his mom was on the podcast, she

• 3:13:19Speaker 02

  was, there's a big space and recorded it, and I said, how are you gonna say goodbye to another kid, he lost a kid, you know, this is the most traumatic thing that a human being, you and I know, like, I don't even like to talk about it, a parent loses a child, you can't think about it, now you're volunteering to lose 13 children, like, how are you gonna do that, and it was the first time I ever heard of Elon being at a loss for words, you can hear it on my podcast, I have it on my YouTube channel, he couldn't say it, his mom, May Musk, comes and said, oh, let's not talk about that, let's not talk about sad things, so it's sad. I know you'd do it. Again, you have courage that mortal men like me, I'm telling you, I couldn't do it.

• 3:14:02Speaker 02

  But it's also to me, it would have to be justifiable. And I know as a scientist, I can't know for sure guaranteed. It's going to benefit your kids and my kids. I just can't do it. And as a scientist, I have to say, what could we do with Sean Ryan, as fucking badass as you are? And no doubt that we can't do with Optimus 27 equipped with ChatGPT 100. In other words, why send a human being with a wife, kids, family, people that love you, people that depend on you, people that are watching right now, whose life and ears you're in right now? I mean, you're going to take that away? Tell me, convince me you can't do that with a robot or AI. We haven't talked about AI.

• 3:14:39Shawn Ryan?

  What do you want to talk about?

• 3:14:42Speaker 02

  I think AI has a lot of things in common with aliens and that it's sort of, it is potentially kind of a surrogate replacement secular god. That it gives us the chance to do what God did. You know, God made man, man, Adam in Hebrew means earth. God made man out of earth. We have that impulse, Tower of Babel. We have that same urge, that same desire, that same craving to be as gods. That's why, look, I don't read the Bible as a science book. Sorry. You know, I don't look at it, hmm, where's the hydrogen's 30 second waveform? It's not in there. It's not what it's supposed to do. I don't read Avi Loeb's books to learn about how to be a better member of my community and a better husband. They're different purposes, right?

• 3:15:26Speaker 02

  When you look at that book, though, the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, you look at what they are designed to do and the time that they were designed to do it and are still relevant in this age. You know, I always joke. I wish I'll have God's book sales, you know, like 1% of God's book sales in 3,000 years? There's no book like that, Sean. You can't tell me there's not something quasi divine, even if you don't believe. Something that's lasted for 32 centuries, that's applicable to my daily life right now. I read the Bible, I read Jesus, I read the New Testament. Every day, Stoics, I read it all. Why not? Why wouldn't I read Shakespeare? I read Stephen Hawking. I don't care. I'll learn from anybody.

• 3:16:06Speaker 02

  When you look at that book, what comes out is the flawed nature of human beings wanting to become gods, frustrated. Fighting with God, building a tower to reach up to the sky, not to learn what God knows, but to fight against God, to show how great we are because we built this tower. We don't need your freaking mountain. We can do it ourselves. We build mausoleums and pyramids and all these things. What is it supposed to do? It's meant, really, there's a book by Ernest Becker. It's called The Denial of Death. And Ernest Becker claims that the human being has one major fear, and he spends his whole life attempting to overcome that fear. And that's that he's gonna die. The word homo sapien means man who knows. What does he know?

• 3:16:48Speaker 02

  We're the only creatures that exist that know we have a death date. Yes, elephants will get together and they'll look around and when one dies, they'll all cry. And I don't, I'm not saying, they don't know when they're four years old that they're gonna die. My daughter asked me the other day, like, you're, are you gonna die before me? I said, I hope so. I was like in tears. We know at a young age, we're gonna die. That's a good thing. But since biblical times, since early man, we have struggled with this desire to overcome that limitation, to become gods ourselves, to extend our lives, both in lifespan, which is great, and in sort of the power, the omnipotence of the human,

• 3:17:31Speaker 02

  which means augmentation, building silicon brains that live outside of us. Robotic brain, robotic bodies, cryogenic suspension, longevity, maybe escapability, as Kurzweil calls it. You know, he claims that a certain point in three, four, or five years, he keeps getting pushed back, like disclosure, that will reach, will reach longevity escape velocity, which means for every year you live, you'll live another 1.1 years or something like that. And once you hit that, you can live forever.

• 3:18:02Shawn Ryan?

  Would you live forever?

• 3:18:05Speaker 02

  Not by myself. I wouldn't want to be the only one. And it's so complex, but but look at the urge. What's the urge? Who was the only man that you believe did have a life after death? Anyone else but Jesus? Do you think anyone else besides Jesus? We have an urge to be like Jesus, to live forever, to resurrect ourselves, to extend ourselves forever.

• 3:18:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, everybody. I didn't. I can't say everybody, but a lot of people are trying to build a legacy. They want to be remembered. They want their their their. They have heirlooms. They want passed down items.

• 3:18:41Speaker 02

  Books, that's right.

• 3:18:42Shawn Ryan?

  Books.

• 3:18:42Speaker 02

  Denial of death. We want something that lives beyond us. In the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl.

• 3:18:47Shawn Ryan?

  Making making writing death letters. Making videos for your kids. You know what I mean? So they remember you interviewing your parents.

• 3:18:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:18:56Shawn Ryan?

  You know, so that

• 3:18:57Speaker 02

  Writing a book, writing your memoir.

• 3:18:59Shawn Ryan?

  Their kids and their kids and everyone down the line knows who they were.

• 3:19:02Speaker 02

  Let me keep pressing you. You've got to write your memoir. And then time is right. Look, you can write Obama has four memoirs. You could do it. He wrote four autobiographies. You can do yours now. Don't put off to tomorrow. You know what? Alfred Nobel. Incredible human being. Had no kids, no wife. He wrote his will a year before he died. There's a saying in the Talmud, write your will the day before you die. Why? Because you don't know when you're gonna die. God forbid, you should live to 120, I will say to you. But we don't know. We don't know how much capacity we'll have. Some law could change, something could happen, right? Don't put it off. You were saying it's not time yet.

• 3:19:39Shawn Ryan?

  What, writing a book?

• 3:19:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19:41Shawn Ryan?

  I just I'm just not that into myself.

• 3:19:43Speaker 02

  It's not about you. Again, Sean, I hand you your great great grandfather's memoir. I said, Sean, I found it. I did some research. Italy, I don't know where. Found it and I got it. It cost me a lot of money, Sean. You know, I could give it to you, but would you pay for it? How much would you pay for that? Your grandmother. I don't care who it is, Sean. Someday you're, you are that person. First of all, you're that person to six million, 500,000 people, whatever you, people want to know. And it doesn't mean you reveal everything. I don't tell people personally, everything in person. This is my autobiography. It's my first autobiography. Maybe it's my last. I don't know. I want to write more. Maybe I will. I think I have one more book left in me.

• 3:20:25Speaker 02

  That's the way I feel. Just honestly, my energy, my age, my commitments, my family, alright? But this is a gift. It's not for you. Don't think about it for you. Like, wow, what am I, I don't want to. Okay. So I bet you've done a lot of things you didn't want to do in your life.

• 3:20:38Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, my thoughts are all there. You know what I mean?

• 3:20:40Speaker 02

  They're all there.

• 3:20:41Shawn Ryan?

  The way I think, what I believe in, what I don't like, what I...

• 3:20:44Speaker 02

  Where? In the podcast, episode 14?

• 3:20:45Shawn Ryan?

  It's in here, man.

• 3:20:46Speaker 02

  Where?

• 3:20:47Shawn Ryan?

  It's in this.

• 3:20:48Speaker 02

  Sean, I love you and I love your show and I've gone back and listened to so many episodes. I'm not going to go back to episode 45 to hear what you said to that, to that incredible guy, whatever, the, the other sniper guy or whatever. Like, and there's, there's jewels in there. And I'm not saying write a book about your podcast.

• 3:21:04Shawn Ryan?

  What's that? It's all in there.

• 3:21:06Speaker 02

  It's all there.

• 3:21:07Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not asking my kids to. I'm not asking anybody to. You know what I mean?

• 3:21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. But you also think this is going to be, this is going to be it, or there's another chapter in your life. There's more chapters.

• 3:21:16Shawn Ryan?

  It's like I told you out there, you know, we were talking about, you brought up the Sabbath again.

• 3:21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:21:21Shawn Ryan?

  And you're like, you gotta take a day off. And what are you gonna do? Just keep being a big podcast? And I said, this isn't the only fucking thing I've done in my life. A lot of these guys, this is the only thing they've ever done.

• 3:21:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:21:33Shawn Ryan?

  This is not the only thing I've ever done.

• 3:21:35Speaker 02

  Not by a long shot.

• 3:21:36Shawn Ryan?

  I was a CIA contractor, taught tactics. Like, I've done a lot of shit.

• 3:21:41Speaker 02

  Your husband. Yeah, a lot of the guys I make fun of, I love these guys that have been on all their shows. No wife, no kids, and you know, maybe that's why they're so happy and then they're, they're loving it. But, but to me, the fullness of the life experience, you gotta have kids, you gotta have a wife, you gotta have someone that you commit to and that yourself was for. You did that with your country and that's, that is so heroic. But when you sacrifice for one woman or for your kids, you know, people ask me, what's the meaning of life? You know, you're a cosmologist, you study the universe, and they always want to know, what's, what do you think is the meaning of life? I say for me, it's it's an easy recipe. First of all, you gotta find a partner. And I even have a nerd, right? So I had a mathematical algorithm to find my wife. Okay?

• 3:22:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wait a minute. You had a you had a mathematical algorithm to find you. I gotta hear this shit.

• 3:22:29Speaker 02

  So.

• 3:22:30Shawn Ryan?

  What does that even mean?

• 3:22:31Speaker 02

  It means you take metrics, you know, what you manage, you measure, or what you measure, you manage. Right? So I kept records, you know, just like dates and people's personalities and things like that. Um, not like, you know, like this one, you know, she had a freckle on her butt. That wasn't it. Here's the algorithm in simple terms. You should date. And there is mathematical science to back this up, by the way. You should date and, you know, for some period of time, once you're ready and you're like, and no one's ever ready. By the way, like, were you ready to get married and like commit to one woman that you're the only woman you're ever going to be with physically intimately? Build a family. No, no one's ever ready for that. No one's ever ready for kids. No one's ever ready probably for combat. Like, you can't be ready for it, right? These are things that like make us uniquely human. But for me, I said, keep date for some period of time.

• 3:23:15Speaker 02

  Keep a list of women and you may date for women, you know, and I'm sorry, I know you've got women that listen. I'm just gonna speak for my person. I'm gonna talk only about women, but it applies to women looking for men. Date somebody until you find the following person. If I had a daughter with this woman, would I be okay? If my daughter turned out to be like this woman? Okay, so let's say I dated, I dated a cheerleader, I dated someone, you know, like just models I dated and wonderful people, whatever. I dated people that were Jewish, people that were Catholic, people that were Muslim. I did a whole bunch of people, right? And then some I dated for selfish reasons, right?

• 3:23:56Speaker 02

  She's hot, you know, she's she's so fun, like we just did the coolest things together, whatever, like mostly this because she was hot. Okay, I have a lot of weaknesses, Sean, but but that was one of them. And but I said, I don't know. Let's say, let's just take it to the extreme, like you're dating some like Playboy Playmate. I shouldn't say that. One of my friends with Playboy. You're dating some, you know, just super hot, smoking hot Instagram model, right? Do you want your daughter to turn out like that Instagram model? Do you want her necessarily? Maybe she's a wonderful person, but I'm just saying that one by that one dimension. I didn't want my daughter to be like these people, right? Until I met my wife and I said, God, if I had a daughter.

• 3:24:42Speaker 02

  I would, I would get every gun in here and I would protect this daughter if she's anything like my beautiful wife. I would do anything. She's such, that she is with a piece of human debris like me, you know, that she is willing to be with me and save my life and, and give me life and give me children. I, I'd do anything. I found her. I knew it when I found her, but only because I had a statistical sample, you know, for a few decades, you know, I didn't get married until I was in my, you know, mid, late 30s. Um, and that's when I knew, that's the algorithm. Stop dating when you meet the girl whose daughter you would want to be your daughter. Not the, not the super rich, you know, person, not the super wealthy or smarter than, no.

• 3:25:27Speaker 02

  Famous? No. Someone that you want your daughter to be like. That's how I stopped.

• 3:25:34Speaker 02

  That's the key to the algorithm.

• 3:25:36Shawn Ryan?

  It's a good algorithm.

• 3:25:38Speaker 02

  Served me well.

• 3:25:40Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you.

• 3:25:41Speaker 02

  So, and then as far as kids go, you know, no one's already-

• 3:25:44Shawn Ryan?

  Cheerleader didn't work out, huh?

• 3:25:45Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah, that's right. My wife's not gonna watch this. Um, but people talk about, look, look, what, what's the meaning of life? Like, how do you live your life? I'm sure you've been happy at different points. I'm sure you've been low at different points. Like, happiness is, what's called in physics, an unstable equilibrium point, right? Technically, if I have a pencil, here's mine. You didn't ask me about my professor EDC gear, okay? Here's my EDC as a professor. It's the only thing I could get on TSA, right? It's a tactical pen. And I could theoretically balance this on its point. Okay? Um, you know, I had too much coffee, uh, two little gummy bears, but, but it could balance on its point, right? That's unstable equilibrium. The lightest perturbation,

• 3:26:28Speaker 02

  a butterfly flapping its wings, will knock this thing over far away, right? So it's an equilibrium, means it's stable, but it's unstable to fall over.

• 3:26:39Speaker 02

  Happiness in life is like that. You can be in a state of happiness and you can be in a state of contentment and flourishing, but it will never last because of a concept called entropy. Entropy is an irrevocable irreversible tendency for the universe to chaotically and ultimately to destroy both information and and stasis and equilibrium. And here's a here's an example I like to give. Right now, let's say your happiness is X, right? This, you know, incredible, everything you've done. I don't know about your personal life, but but I assume

• 3:27:20Speaker 02

  it's fantastic. I said, Sean, I want to double your happiness right now. What would I have to do? If I gave you X, 2X money, 2X podcast downloads, 2X Instagram, would you be 2X happy? You'd be happier, maybe, but would you be 2X? Say again?

• 3:27:39Shawn Ryan?

  Would you be?

• 3:27:40Speaker 02

  I'm asking you.

• 3:27:41Shawn Ryan?

  Probably not.

• 3:27:42Speaker 02

  No, you'd be, would you be any happier?

• 3:27:45Shawn Ryan?

  I doubt it.

• 3:27:45Speaker 02

  If you had twice as much money as you have right now, think about all you could do differently. You know?

• 3:27:51Shawn Ryan?

  I doubt it.

• 3:27:53Speaker 02

  I just remember like, um, Monty Burns in, uh, in The Simpsons, he's the, you know, the billionaire, greedy billionaire guy and Homer Simpson one day.

• 3:28:01Shawn Ryan?

  I watched this, I saw this meme the other day.

• 3:28:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:28:03Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe not a meme, a cartoon. And it was this little kid fishing. And he just had the little cloud, the thought cloud coming out of his head and what he wanted, you know, whatever he wanted, he wanted a fucking new car. And then he's in his new car and you see the thought cloud coming out of his head and it's what he wants now. And now he wants a plane.

• 3:28:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:28:29Shawn Ryan?

  And then he gets the plane and there's a thought cloud coming out of his head and it's what he wants next. And then the next thing is he's dead.

• 3:28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:28:38Shawn Ryan?

  He just never stopped wanting.

• 3:28:40Speaker 02

  Never.

• 3:28:40Shawn Ryan?

  And that's what I've noticed with the money. The more money you make, the more wants, the more you're owned by your fucking possessions.

• 3:28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's called the hedonic trap.

• 3:28:51Shawn Ryan?

  More, more, more.

• 3:28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, you never get off it.

• 3:28:53Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, you know, I feel like I've learned this very early in my journey.

• 3:28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:28:58Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think a lot of people.

• 3:29:02Shawn Ryan?

  It takes a lot longer and a lot more money to learn that lesson, but no, I don't think money's gonna bring me more happiness. I don't think more subscribers, more viewers, more downloads, more better rankings, like it's just.

• 3:29:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:29:22Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, the fun is the climb up.

• 3:29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:29:24Shawn Ryan?

  To me.

• 3:29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no.

• 3:29:25Shawn Ryan?

  Climb up. He was really fucking cool doing. It still is. I love doing this. I love having this conversation with you. I am also a competitive motherfucker.

• 3:29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:29:35Shawn Ryan?

  And once I hit number one for the first time, knowing I'm not gonna stay there because Rogan's the fucking king and he always will be, but I hit it.

• 3:29:45Speaker 02

  He will be. We'll talk about that.

• 3:29:46Shawn Ryan?

  And he, of course, he always will be.

• 3:29:48Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 3:29:49Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, he, he, he, he, I do, but I don't think anybody can take that away from him. Somebody will outdo him eventually.

• 3:30:00Speaker 02

  I think this guy, Stephen Bartlett.

• 3:30:01Shawn Ryan?

  He was the pioneer.

• 3:30:02Speaker 02

  He is the pioneer. He is the goat, but the whole point, at least in my field, if I, if this book is still relevant in a hundred years, I'll be a failure. You know why? Because it means science will have stagnated. It means that my.

• 3:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  But if somebody builds off that book for the next hundred years.

• 3:30:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Everyone knows their.

• 3:30:18Shawn Ryan?

  You still fucking set the trend. You're the king of it.

• 3:30:21Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 3:30:22Shawn Ryan?

  And Joe Rogan is the fucking king of podcasting. Everybody else that came after him, no matter what they do, it was built off the Joe Rogan fucking podcast. One way or another, long form discussion was built off of him.

• 3:30:36Speaker 02

  But will he always be number one?

• 3:30:38Shawn Ryan?

  Will he always be number one? No, obviously won't be because he's a mortal human being. But and eventually he will get tired of this shit.

• 3:30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30:45Shawn Ryan?

  Somebody else will reinvent.

• 3:30:47Speaker 02

  That's all I'm saying.

• 3:30:48Shawn Ryan?

  Change the game, but it's like Babe Ruth. Everybody still knows who the fuck Babe Ruth is, right? You know? And so anyways, what I was getting at is no, I don't think any of that, none of that shit is gonna bring more happiness. It will drive your ego through the fucking roof.

• 3:31:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:31:06Shawn Ryan?

  And will probably ruin you as a person.

• 3:31:09Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 3:31:10Shawn Ryan?

  With that amount of success and money, but it's not gonna bring more happiness. In fact, Jim Carrey has a really good quote. I wish everybody could be rich and famous so they know that's not the answer.

• 3:31:22Speaker 02

  But here's where I want to go with that, back to my pen sticking on its tip, it's unstable, right? So what you describe is called the hedonic treadmill. Hedonism is like seeking pleasure, happiness, whatever, wellness, well-being, flourishing. It's a treadmill because it never stops. You just keep running on it. Someone's always gonna have more followers, more money, more women, more guns, more whatever, right? That's gonna get to a point of more guns, I'm not so sure about. But, um, but in any case, but let me ask you this. I said, could I double your happiness? You said, absolutely not. What are you crazy? You said, could I increase your happiness? You're the first person I ever talked, asked that particular question, who said, no, you couldn't increase my happiness by even a bit. Um, and I respect that. I'm not, I'm not disputing that whatsoever.

• 3:32:02Shawn Ryan?

  I said with money.

• 3:32:03Speaker 02

  With money, okay.

• 3:32:04Shawn Ryan?

  Money and shit.

• 3:32:05Speaker 02

  Is there anything material? Not, not God, not?

• 3:32:08Shawn Ryan?

  I'll tell you how you can increase my happiness. It's gonna sound like a fucking punishment. You take all my social media away. You take my phone away. You take my fucking computer away.

• 3:32:17Speaker 02

  I already fricking prescribed that to you on Saturday. Sunday, Sunday.

• 3:32:19Shawn Ryan?

  And you take my occupation away and force me to be with my fucking family where we don't have to worry about money, how we're gonna eat, how we're gonna get shelter, how we're gonna fucking drink water. And that will create a happy person.

• 3:32:32Speaker 02

  Will you try for me? Will you try for me? I know we don't know each other, but we try one day.

• 3:32:36Shawn Ryan?

  Now, think how fucking easy it is. I don't, I'm sure you've done very well. You almost won the fucking Nobel Prize, right? So you've gotta be financially stable, at least.

• 3:32:45Speaker 02

  Nothing of clear poverty.

• 3:32:47Shawn Ryan?

  And so, and so you have the option right now. You could throw it all away, knowing that you would probably be a happier fucking person. But you're not gonna do it.

• 3:32:57Speaker 02

  I, I, I can't throw it all away, but once a week, I can throw it away. Once a week, I could see you not on the phone. I could see you not on Instagram. I could see you not doing podcasts. I could see you going to church. I could see you dealing with your family, your friends, your community. Heck, you can drive. You know, I'm not allowed to drive on Saturdays. I'm not allowed to use the phone. I'm not saying don't use, don't use your phone to call somebody. I'm just saying, disconnect from the world. The reason is, and it's very beautiful, and I think it applies to you. The commandment in Hebrew, and the fourth commandment, which is that you shall honor the Sabbath, right? It doesn't just say, you should take off on Sunday or Saturday and kind of chill out, watch a football game. No, no, no. It says, it says, six days, you must work.

• 3:33:40Speaker 02

  In order that seventh day is a Sabbath, a rest day for God Hashem, meaning that the purpose of the week is you must earn your frickin money. The Torah, the, the Bible is very explicit. If you don't work, you don't eat. You can't rely on a miracle or even other people. It's considered, you know, this isn't good to rely on other people that they're just going to provide for you. No, you have to do it. But if you work seven days a week, I know billionaires, I, I know superstars, you know, millions of Instagram, whatever. They work 24/7. I said to them, I told Stephen Bartlett on his podcast. I said, you're so successful. You work seven days a week. Aren't you just a slave? Like you may, it may be to a good, good, you know, outcome. You're doing great.

• 3:34:25Speaker 02

  If I could buy a stock option on anybody, he's 32, handsome, fit, great guy, great friends, one of his 100 people, his podcast is like, you know, it's almost as, almost as big as this. Okay? And it's all he does. And I'm like, Stephen, take it from me. I'm an older man. You gotta find a woman. You gotta find a life. You gotta make a family and you gotta take time off. If you cannot do that, you are a slave. You're a rich slave. I'm a slave, Sean. I'd love to be on, on doing science every day of the week. I could do podcasts every day of the week. It's, it's a challenge for me to turn it off. I don't like doing it.

• 3:35:01Shawn Ryan?

  How do you turn it off?

• 3:35:02Speaker 02

  How do I turn it off?

• 3:35:02Shawn Ryan?

  When you celebrate the Sabbath,

• 3:35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:35:04Shawn Ryan?

  are you telling me that none of your science is in your head?

• 3:35:09Speaker 02

  That's not the issue. Science is in your head because science is a vehicle of God.

• 3:35:13Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? Your work.

• 3:35:14Speaker 02

  I'm not, I don't work on papers. I won't, I, I told you.

• 3:35:17Shawn Ryan?

  But it's in your head. That's not, are you really able to switch it all the way off?

• 3:35:22Speaker 02

  God is not like Kim Jong-un, you know, he's not, he's not policing your thoughts, right? So he, he doesn't care if you're doing that. He cares if you're on a podcast with someone that you respect the hell out of and, and you did that. And you're not, you're not in a temple or you're not with your kids and you're not with your wife. And, and you're, and you're kind of, but he doesn't need it for him. God doesn't do this for, for, he's doing it for you. You know, every six years in the, in, in the Old Testament, you're supposed to let the land lay fallow and not reap every year. How'd they eat? So you can go back and dispute and talk about the science, whatever. You had to let the land every seven years and people would go free. The slaves would go free. If you had a slave, they'll let them go free. Every 49 years, you know, the word jubilee that comes from Hebrews, yovel, jubal, it's a jubilee.

• 3:36:07Speaker 02

  Every 50 years, everybody would get their land back. Every slave would go free throughout the land. It's on the Liberty Bell. It's on the fricking US Liberty Bell. It says, you shall, you shall declare freedom throughout the land and liberty to all its inhabitants. We get that from the Torah, from the Old, uh, the Old Testament. And it says, freedom is, is the, is not just that you do whatever you want. It's that you're doing something actively in pursuit of something bigger than yourself. And I'm, by the way, I think you do this, but you just don't know it. So the only thing I'm saying is it's like an easy prescription from this non-medical doctor. Okay. But it's the decoupling from the world and not, I don't care. Somebody's tweeting about me because I said something about Avi Loeb. And I don't give a flying F. I could care less. I'm not checking it.

• 3:36:52Speaker 02

  I'm not seeing, oh, I got this banger tweet. I gotta get it out there. I gotta, I don't care. It can wait. You know why? This comes back to the happiness thing. I told you and you agree, and you had this eloquent way of saying it like, sorry, Brian, like Elon Musk comes in here and drops a billion dollars on it. You'd be, come on, you'd be a little happy, but you wouldn't be twice as happy. You wouldn't be 10 times as happy, but Sean.

• 3:37:12Shawn Ryan?

  I'd be happy in the moment.

• 3:37:13Speaker 02

  In the moment.

• 3:37:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:14Speaker 02

  But that's not happiness.

• 3:37:16Shawn Ryan?

  But then it goes away.

• 3:37:16Speaker 02

  That goes away. But here's the, here's the sick thing about life. I can't make you happier guaranteed. Well, I can make you unhappier guaranteed, right? This is entropy. Entropy is the concept of disorder, of chaos, of randomness. The things that make us happy, organization, structure, family, production, work. It's organized, it's structured. The natural order of the universe is towards disorder and chaos. We must control it by applying energy to reduce entropy.

• 3:37:46Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, happiness is a choice.

• 3:37:49Speaker 02

  Say more. Say more. Someone who's unhappy, depressed, they can't just choose it. Sometimes they need medication or situ, a job change or something like that. Right? It's partially could be a choice.

• 3:38:03Speaker 02

  But unhappiness.

• 3:38:04Shawn Ryan?

  You have to choose when you wake up, if you're gonna be pissed off, or if you're gonna be happy, right?

• 3:38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you're healthy, yeah. But anyone who has kids, and this is getting back to my meaning of life and how I find me. Anyone who has kids, I don't even say it, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say it. I can't make you a little bit happier, but I can make somebody infinitely unhappy. I'm not saying I'm gonna do it, or saying they could become infi- I know billionaires, Sean, have lost kids. Okay? You think they wouldn't trade all their billions? Billions and billions more? Be poverty paupers, living in the gutter to have their kids back, their sons back? Okay? So you can make someone infinitely unhappy, but you can only make them finitely happy. That's entropy. What does that tell you? Do the things in life that if they got taken away, would devastate you.

• 3:38:55Speaker 02

  It sounds depressing as, you know what? But that's what I think about. I wanna construct order. I wanna reduce entropy. I wanna create things, build things, not for my ego, not for my bank account,

• 3:39:10Speaker 02

  but for, for the goodness, for the benefit it brings to the world and the future. I think that's what the meaning of life is. I mean, I'm, I'm a scientist, maybe, maybe that doesn't apply to everybody. Sure, a lot of people would be happy with seven Instagram models and a billion bucks, but, but maybe not. So, and again, you look at the Torah, you look at the Bible. Anyone who had multiple wives, they, they were some of the most unhappy people that you'll ever know about. So, guys out there, be careful what you wish for.

• 3:39:38Shawn Ryan?

  I got a hot question for you, ready?

• 3:39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, go for it.

• 3:39:42Shawn Ryan?

  Here we go.

• 3:39:43Speaker 02

  Coming in hot.

• 3:39:44Shawn Ryan?

  Back in 1950, Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and one of the fathers of the atomic age, was having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos when he asked a question that still unsettles science today. Where is everybody? The universe is enormous. It's ancient. And based on the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems like life should exist somewhere else. Yet so far, we have no confirmed signal, no confirmed contact, and no undeniable evidence that another intelligent civilization is out there.

• 3:40:23Shawn Ryan?

  Can you break down what Fermi paradox is? Yeah.

• 3:40:28Speaker 02

  One of the people he said that to was an old friend of mine who's deceased now named Herb York. He's one of the founders of UC San Diego. I miss him a lot. He was a great person. Built the atomic bomb and then spent many years, as many warriors do, advocating for peace afterwards. No one knows more about wanting peace and the goodness of peace, I guess, than you who fight the wars, right? So he helped develop the atomic bomb and he was at that lunch with Enrico Fermi when he posed this question. Well, you know, kind of a side quest as they're building the atomic bomb, right? So the, the concept is, is that the universe is vast, but let's just restrict ourselves to the galaxy. Our galaxy is a few hundred, that may be a hundred thousand light years across, meaning light takes a hundred thousand years to get from one edge of the galaxy to the other edge.

• 3:41:12Speaker 02

  There's about a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. There's about a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's a hundred billion squared stars in the observable universe. Each one with 10 planets, call it around it. You get numbers that are incomprehensible. A million, million, million, million planets in the observable universe, 10 to the 24th planets, right? So it just becomes crazy. And then you think, well, if only 1% of them have life on it, that's 10 to the 22nd power. You know, it's an insane number. So the universe is huge. There's a lot of opportunities for life, for planets. And yet, as you say, we have no evidence that rises above scientific truth or evidentiary standards. And this is going back 84 years when he said this in Los Alamos, right?

• 3:41:57Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:41:58Speaker 02

  So this kind of shows you that back then they didn't think they had evidence. It was right before Roswell, by the way. And then nowadays we don't, we don't feel like consequential evidence exists at the level of scientific proof, right? Uh, and even those with the most invested in it, like Avi Loeb will not say, as he didn't tell you. He didn't say, we have definitive proof, right? He, he said, he's a careful scientist, right? He said, we don't have evidence yet and that's fine. Does that mean they don't exist? Absolutely not. It could exist and there's many different reasons that could explain why we don't see what we don't see. Some of them come down to reasons, for example, that that have to do with, there's an equation called the Drake equation. An astronomer in the 60s said, "Let's calculate how many different life forms there could be

• 3:42:41Speaker 02

  in the universe and what it would take for us to know that they're there." Okay? So, how many people are there? And it's, or how many civilizations are there that we could communicate with? In other words, if there's slime mold, if there's like bacteria, you know, on a planet that's, you know, one, four light years away, right? 10, 10, four light, whatever you want, right? We would never know they exist because they don't have technology to broadcast radio waves and light waves for us to see. Or neutrino tractor beams or gravitational wave jet, they don't have technology, right? So it's this, how do we know how many technologically advanced civilizations there are in order for us to be able to detect them? Otherwise, we can't detect them, right? We're not going to the other star systems.

• 3:43:24Speaker 02

  The fastest thing that humans have ever made, Voyager, has traveled the farthest away from Earth. It's one light day from the Earth. It was launched 55 years ago, before I was born. And in that sense, it's, you know, that that thing is the farthest we've ever gone. It's only one light day. The nearest star is four light years away, so it's thousands of times closer than that. And so effectively, we will not be able to find aliens unless they send us information or come and visit us. So if if you say that they haven't, affirm me saying they haven't, and we don't have evidence, that has to be some explanation for them. Otherwise, you could say, one possibility is, they don't exist. Now, they might not exist now, but it doesn't mean that they didn't exist in the past.

• 3:44:08Speaker 02

  Right now, there's information from the 1936 Olympics that's getting out, that's about 90 light years away from us. That was the first time humans ever transmitted a globally televised signal, a radio wave that could travel around the world and go into outer space by accident, leak into outer space, right? That is now traveling at the speed of light, 90 light years away from us. There's approximately, you know, maybe a thousand stars that live within a 90 light year radius of the planet Earth, right? Each one of them might have tens of planets or something around them. That amount of information for them to know about us, that's just for them to know about us. That's not to send a return signal. That'll be 200 years from now, right? So the quickest we could ever send something is it goes out at the speed of light,

• 3:44:53Speaker 02

  reaches a destination and comes back to us. That light signal left 100 years ago, it's gone almost 100 light years away. For us to hear back from them, "We heard you, you exist," that'll take another 100 years. Does that make sense? So there's a sphere, it's a radius 100 light years, call it. A thousand stars plus or minus in them, and there's maybe 10,000 planets in those. So, right now, all we can say is, we don't, we don't know. There could be stars that are half that distance, 50 light years away. Maybe there's 300 of those, and there's 3,000 planets on them. So, all we can say is that volume of space knows about us and could have returned a signal to us since we started broadcasting information. We don't have any evidence of that, not for people not looking.

• 3:45:37Speaker 02

  But that is such a tiny microscopic number. That's like, that's like a shot glass out of the Pacific Ocean, in terms of how much the vastness of the universe is. So, one thing is that space is very big and the speed of light is very slow, even though it's the fastest speed you could possibly travel at. Another solution that people have come up with is that there's lots of life in the universe, but they tend to not live very long, because they have these things called wars. And they do battle among themselves. And you see this at every level of speciation, from bacteria to Beethoven, I mean, to us, right? I mean, I'll tell you.

• 3:46:18Speaker 02

  Bacteria have military campaigns against enemy bacteria cultures. They secrete toxins that preclude other bacteria. They spend their biological resources to create bacteriological trenches, warfare, to prevent other bacteria from encroaching on their precious goo that they're eating. Every level of, and that's the most primitive life that we know about, all the way up to the most advanced life we know about, namely us. So maybe they only live so long. Maybe, there's a paper I read about recently, uh, my friend Sabina Hossenfelder made a video about it, Elon Musk is tweeting about it, um, and it is, uh, I think Avi Loeb is involved

• 3:46:58Speaker 02

  in some way or, or other. Um, it shows there's, it might be an average lifetime of a civilization in order for us not to have seen anybody of about 5,000 years. Wow. Which is like barely back to the pyramids, right? Shit. So, some say you, you hit this, this filter and then you get filtered out. The question is, are we past the filter? We're not yet there. So, there's a lot of explanations. Another one that I like is, um, I take my kids to the San Diego Zoo. And when I take them there, there's a gorilla exhibit. And, um, I love the gorillas, but it says on the, on the sign, it says, "Don't knock on the glass, it really bothers them." You know, it just makes them anxious, so don't do that. Of course, my kids do that, right? Um, and then they get kicked out.

• 3:47:42Speaker 02

  But, um, but what, what if, you know, you went instead of the San Diego Zoo, we go to the Wild Animal Park, then you're really far away from the gorillas, you're not gonna knock on the glass, you don't even need glass, you're really far away, you observe them at a distance. Maybe there are things lurking, observing us at a distance, but as interstellar species that has the ability to come here, or to sense our activity and our presence, has advanced technology, what is it that we're gonna learn from? I mean, have we learned that much besides about the species of gorillas and bacteria? We learn about those, but like, I always say, um, you know, ornithologists study birds, right? But an ornithologist needs a bird a lot more than the birds need the ornithologist, right? Birds don't care if you study them or not, right?

• 3:48:25Speaker 02

  So, they might not be interested in us, we might not be able to do anything for them, we might not provide any resources, they're gonna eat us, and that's why I'm skeptical of these things. I don't know if you've heard of cattle mutilation and, and like, abductions and things like that, near-death experiences. Um, there's only one near-death experience that I believe in, by the way, um, 100% documented fact. Um, which has to do with Alfred Nobel. Do you know the story? You know Alfred Nobel was, um, he invented dynamite. So he was one of the richest people in the world, kind of like Elon Musk or Tesla of, uh, the eighteen hundreds and, uh, he was, uh, one of the richest people in all of Europe and all of the world. And his, um, his family was involved with making, uh, uh, sea mines

• 3:49:09Speaker 02

  for the Russian and Crimean, uh, battle war of eighteen forty, something like that. And so they were arms dealers, Alfred Nobel and his father Emmanuel. And, uh, they were trying to invent ways to make their methodology more lethal. And, uh, one of Alfred's brothers, his baby brother Emil, started to play around with nitroglycerin and nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable. And one day he was in the lack of the family laboratory and he dropped it on the floor and it blew up, like enormous explosion, vaporized him and six other people, five other people. Six people killed instantly and this devastated his father Emmanuel Nobel and Alfred as well.

• 3:49:50Speaker 02

  And Emmanuel, um, ended up basically getting committed to sanatorium. And then he died eight years to the day of his son. His heart was broken, he had a stroke and just devastated him. And Alfred set out to do something to make that never happen again. And he took nitroglycerin and he mixed it with a type of basically like clay. It's called diatomaceous earth and he mixed it together like chalk or clay with nitroglycerin and it made it stable so you could drop it and that became known as dynamite. Dynamite in Greek means powerful rock. And he became one of the richest people in the world based on that invention. But it was also used for munitions and they sold in their arms factory.

• 3:50:32Speaker 02

  And reportedly he had indirectly been responsible for the deaths of more people than any person in human history, so much so that at eighteen eighty-eight, he's walking around Paris and he sees a headline in the Parisian newspaper. And it says Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death is dead. The man who committed no benefit to humanity and killed more people than any other person in human history is dead. Now, he's reading this, so he knows it's not him. Turns out it was his older brother Ludwig who died. And so, you know, he was kind of sad about that. But it was really a wake up call for him. He had no wife, he had no kids.

• 3:51:14Speaker 02

  And he decided at that point, if he died then, that's the way the world was going to remember him. Like, um, like George Bailey in A Wonderful Life. Right? You know, he sees the ghost of Christmas present, ghost of Christmas past and Scrooge, same exact story in A Christmas Carol. He got a glimpse of what his own death would be like. And he said, I'm going to change my life from now on. I don't know how much longer I have to live. He took this huge fortune and he gave 99% of it to the Nobel Prize. And he established it. And its goal was to do what this newspaper said he didn't do, which is to make the greatest benefit to mankind.

• 3:51:54Speaker 02

  So he created a prize for peace, for chemistry, for medicine, uh, for literature, and, um, for physics, how could I forget physics? And these things have had tremendous benefit. The first Nobel Prize ever given was, uh, was in physics was for the X-ray. The X-ray machine, which is, you know, probably pulled bullets out of people that you know, like it's had so much benefit for diagnostic purposes. I had a toothache, they have, you know, the, the X-rays benefited humankind and it's a physics invention. It's a technology invention. And then the Nobel Peace Prize, which has a very checkered past. One of my friends, Unai Turtini, wrote a book about how, you know, it's gone to like

• 3:52:36Speaker 02

  Yasser Arafat and terrorists and, and, uh, you know, and all sorts of assorted characters. Obama won it after being in office for like nine days. So it's been politicized, uh, but, uh, it's still has this noble LE goal of benefiting all of mankind through science, through peace. And, and I think it's a wonderful thing. And it wouldn't have happened without this near death experience that Alfred Nobel encountered. So that's the only near death experience, I believe. I don't know, you might have other stories.

• 3:53:07Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Brian, we're wrapping up the interview here. Last question. Who would you recommend for the show?

• 3:53:14Speaker 02

  For the show? Oh, that's easy. I don't know if the internet can handle it, though. Eric Weinstein.

• 3:53:22Shawn Ryan?

  Eric Weinstein?

• 3:53:23Speaker 02

  Eric Weinstein is one of the foremost kind of intellect, public intellectuals. He's created concepts and he's incredibly quotable. He's incredibly courageous. He's incredibly, he gets a lot of hate because people, he's so outspoken. And I have the distinction of being the only person that ever interviews him that pushes back on him. And sometimes we get, fight like brothers. And we have a lot of respect for each other. And I think you could, you could, you could handle him. And I think that combination, his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from aliens,

• 3:54:06Speaker 02

  theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, economics, and then his very, very interesting perspective on the Epstein. He met Epstein. Epstein knew about Eric's research. Maybe partially some weird Harvard connection where Epstein had an office and a workspace. And he wasn't a professor, he wasn't a PhD. And Eric understands a lot more about Epstein than I think most people do. Because he saw it from the financial component, the physics component, the Harvard, the institutional, all these different perspectives. And he's just, he's so quotable, imaginative, and he's such a good spear, we call him mensch,

• 3:54:48Speaker 02

  he's a mensch, that you and him together, I think, would break, break the internet line open.

• 3:54:54Shawn Ryan?

  I'll text him. I've never met him.

• 3:54:56Speaker 02

  I will. You have his number.

• 3:54:58Shawn Ryan?

  I do have his number.

• 3:54:59Speaker 02

  Get in touch with him.

• 3:55:00Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 3:55:01Speaker 02

  He'd be, he's the one, no question.

• 3:55:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you, Brian. Best sounding conversation.

• 3:55:20Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.