Before the Big Bang: God, Alien Life & The Operating System of Reality | Dr. Brian Keating

What if EVERYTHING we know about reality is missing a deeper operating system? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Brian Keating (professor of physics, experimental cosmologist, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast) dives into the biggest unanswered questions in science, consciousness, God, the Big Bang, extraterrestrial life, simulation theory, and the hidden limits of human knowledge. Dr. Keating breaks down: - Why humanity NEEDS a Grand Unified Theory before we can ever reach a true “Theory of Everything”, and how scientists are trying to uncover the operating system of reality itself - “A telescope is a time machine”: How looking into deep space is literally looking backward through time toward the origins of existence - Shocking scientific and philosophical implications of the Big Bang, and the terrifying question: What was BEFORE time? - Could another universe have collapsed to create ours? - Why studying space-time itself may unlock secrets hidden before the beginning of the universe - Why the Big Bang explains the expanding universe, and where modern cosmology still breaks down - How Dr. Keating reconciles being both a scientist & a person of faith - Can God & science coexist? How God may tie into the creation of the universe through a scientific lens - Why God’s existence should not be subjected to scientific testing - Hidden limits of both religion AND scientific data - Where consciousness may actually come from according to modern physics - Why the role of scientists is not to “prove” things - Why even world-famous scientists secretly struggle with imposter syndrome - Deistic implications of the Simulation Hypothesis, and whether reality itself could be engineered - Search for extraterrestrial life: why we still have ZERO confirmed evidence despite viral claims - Debunking alleged “signs of life” on Mars and separating science from speculation - His take on the mysterious deaths and disappearances of U. S. scientists connected to nuclear & aerospace research - Could unexplained events be connected to UAPs, nonhuman intelligence, or classified technology? - Cattle mutilations, alleged energy weapons, and why unexplained phenomena always breed suspicion - Why uncertainty is one of the most dangerous (and fascinating) forces in human civilization This episode explores the edge where cosmology, philosophy, consciousness, religion, and the unknown collide. If you’re fascinated by the Big Bang, aliens, simulation theory, UAPs, consciousness, physics, God, or the future of humanity, this conversation will completely change how you think about reality itself! They can't harm you, if they can't find you! Use code MAYIM at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/mayimReceive a free LMNT Sample Pack with purchase just visit For a limited time only, our listeners get 10% off + free shipping at Tumbleliving.com/BREAK http://Tumbleliving.com/BREAK. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. PLEASE support our show and tell them our show sent you. Go to https://www.helixsleep.com/breakdown for 20% off sitewide. Go to https://tidd.ly/4uVltMe and use the code MAYIM50 to get $50 off your Elastique order. Substack newsletter & transcript: https://briankeating.substack.com//mbbMayim's viewers only — win a real 4.3-billion-year-old meteorite: https://briankeating.com/mbbDr. Brian Keating’s podcast, Into the Impossible: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGKdZD30K_9rVCDAdRSwoJLi5ls6JN-qDr. Brian Keating’s books: https://briankeating.com/books/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  For the universe to come into existence, it needed to have been created. We think there's one Big Bang. No, no, no, there's many Big Bangs. God's existence should be subjected to scientific tests. The highest form that you could possibly approach in science is trying to understand the operating system of reality.

• 0:15Mayim Bialik?

  Where is consciousness?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  The most dangerous words in science are not, "If I didn't see it, I wouldn't have believed it." It's, "If I didn't believe it, I wouldn't have seen it." It's called confirmation bias, and it's the most pernicious, destructive force in all of science.

• 0:27Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Brian Keating. He's an experimental cosmologist, here to discuss what came before the Big Bang and what is it about our universe that seems to indicate that consciousness is fundamental?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  This meteorite, found in northwest Africa, has the chemical composition of parts of Mars that have been surveyed. The reason I collect samples of Mars and the moon is because it shows us not only is our planet active, our solar system's active. It's almost inconceivable that we wouldn't find some evidence of life on Mars.

• 0:55Mayim Bialik?

  There's been recent deaths and disappearances of scientists. Does it give you pause?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Well, that is a sign, perhaps, of...

• 1:11Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:12Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:13Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we're going to be speaking with the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at UCSD, Dr. Brian Keating. He's an experimental cosmologist. Dr. Keating is here to discuss what came before the Big Bang. Can we prove that God exists? And what is it about our universe that seems to indicate that consciousness is fundamental? He's also the author of Into the Impossible and Into the Impossible 2: Incredible Conversations with Nobel Laureates. These are fantastic books. We have so much to talk about with Dr. Brian Keating. Welcome to the Breakdown.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Ah, it's been a long time coming.

• 1:56Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, we're so happy to have you here. You come bearing, I don't know if they're gifts, you show and tell?

• 2:01Speaker 00

  They are gifts, yeah. So maybe we'll get to some of them, maybe we won't, but these are, these are, you know, kind of reveals.

• 2:07Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, got it.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  We'll reveal it.

• 2:09Mayim Bialik?

  There's many places we'd like to begin with you, but I think we'll start with kind of letting you tell us what's sort of your mission in terms of the public part of you. Obviously, you're a professor and a researcher. What do you bring, especially with your writing?

• 2:24Speaker 00

  I think, you know, what my goal is in terms of the public persona such as it is, is to bring an experimentalist point of view to the reality of what physics is and kind of be a champion, be a evangelist, as I call it, for science. So to the extent that the public knows a physicist at all, which is great, it's Michio Kaku, it's Neil deGrasse Tyson, it's Richard Feynman of the past, or Albert Einstein, right? These are all theoreticians. These are all people that dabble in the theoretical, but they're not the ones actually building the telescopes, launching them into space, taking them to the South Pole, taking them to Chile, doing the real, real stuff that we have to do to get the evidence, to not prove them right, but to hopefully prove them wrong. My job is not to prove people right at all. People always say, what do you hope to find? What do you hope to do?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Whose theory do you have? I don't hope they all fail, because the more interesting things are learned, the more that we collect data, the more things that we can actually approach and learn in the future. And I think that's the, you know, rare thing in society nowadays. Everything's so theoretical. Everyone's got their own theory. I call, you know, theories of everything, like the AI slop of science is like, everyone's got one. And so my job is really to bring, you know, hardcore evidence to the problem and then ask where we can go from there.

• 3:33Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that I wonder if you can speak to is, you know, there's a tremendous amount of interest in many aspects of physics that in many cases are actually not grounded in physics, either theories or, you know, kind of practical applications. What have you seen in terms of people's interest in, let's say, life on other planets, even the use of AI to try and, you know, predict things about the nature of reality? What's been your kind of experience as someone who kind of has boots on the ground, but also understands the larger picture of people's interest?

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think, you know, oftentimes I say this, I get into trouble for it. I think like, we have a moral obligation as scientists to share what we do with the public. And I think too many people don't do it. And the ones who sometimes do do it are so poorly trained. And like, I would say it's, you know, as an actress, you'll appreciate it. But, you know, it's like we're handing the greatest script ever written by the greatest author in the noble universe. And here we are fumbling every single line, you know? And so I think we need more training for it. But my scientists that are real scientists will say, you shouldn't have a YouTube channel. You shouldn't be doing these things in outreach. You shouldn't go on the Mayim Bialik breakdown.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Because that's not what a serious scientist does. I say, oh, yeah, yeah, I forgot, you know, you were born knowing quantum mechanics, you know, rolled out of the womb knowing, you know, quantum electrodynamics, right? No. So you have to work at it. And anything you care about, you work at. So I've been working for a while. I try, you know, probably could do better, but, but trying to, to bring, as I said, hardcore data based approach to science. So right now, the best evidence for string theory is that it produces a lot of string theorists. But you have to also understand, there's a huge counter narrative. People like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others that they're saying Eric Weinstein is a very good friend of mine, saying, you know, physics has stagnated for the last five decades, and it's all string theory's fault, or super asymmetry's fault. Remember super asymmetry? From when you used the Nobel Prize? That's right.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  So, so it's all the supers, and it's, it's the god that failed of science. And I can be sympathetic to some of that. But I think they put way too much emphasis on one narrow branch of science. And they kind of are overlooking, you know, we're all looking for this theory of everything, this TOE, the toe. And I always say, you know, we haven't found a grand unified theory, a gut, you know, you're putting the toe before the gut, you know, and I have some experience with the gut. But the point I'm trying to make is, is that it's great to have ambitions, but, and it's great to try to approach the divine. It's the highest form that you could possibly approach in science, is trying to understand the base layer, the operating system of reality. That's what we physicists are trying to do. But so often, it gets completely detached from experimental verification,

• 6:08Speaker 00

  from epistemology, from even the basics of, you know, what you might call the scientific method. And I think that is dangerous. But you have to separate the sociological problems, you know, scientists Are human, you know, despite the stereotype, you know, what's the joke about? How do you know a scientist is outgoing? You know, he looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  In reality, we don't have a great, as I said, we don't get training in how to approach these things. But, uh, but from my perspective, the most fun thing is to collect data, as I said, and prove somebody wrong. When you prove something wrong, you get a little bit closer to truth. And that's my mission.

• 6:41Mayim Bialik?

  I, I think about, you know, um, a bit about sort of your story and also a lot of your writing, you know, geared around understanding, you know, in your own words, like what it's like to not win, you know, a Nobel Prize. And you talk a lot about your dad and how when your dad passed away, you sort of felt like there was nothing to prove anymore to anyone, right? And so that kind of shifted. Can you talk a little about your journey? Because, you know, as you've described it, you get to study the things that as children, we have this natural sense of wonder, this natural sense of awe around. And this is what you do for a living. Can you talk about kind of your path? How that led you essentially to not winning a Nobel Prize?

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So for me, uh, you know, I always loved astronomy ever since I was a little kid and did as we all do and noticed that the moon was following me. I mean, we're pretty important. We like to think of ourselves as really important, but the moon doesn't follow us, you know, spoiler alert. But it felt like that. I was really wondering why that was as a 10 year old, as an eight year old, whatever. And then I realized, well, one, one day I can get a telescope, you know, if I work hard enough, if, if I, if I make enough money and if I get a loan from a three letter agency, not the NSF, but the MOM, my mom gave me a loan, God bless her, and I bought my first telescope. And, um, this was a transformation for me because I realized you could see planets without going on a satellite. You could see the craters of the moon, the mountains of the moon, the rings of Saturn.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  You could see all these things with, you know, your telescope connect, your eye connected to a telescope like this one that my son wanted me to show you. There's a 3D printed telescope that he made using only the finest Chinese parts. And then, yeah, so it's obscured now by something I'm going to reveal later to you. If you stay tuned, that's a, what do you call that in acting? A foreshadow.

• 8:22Mayim Bialik?

  That's right. A tease.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  That's right. So for me, it was like impossible to think someone's going to pay me. To use a telescope, it's like, would you like a job as an ice cream taster? You know, how about a wizard, Jonathan? Would you enjoy being a wizard?

• 8:35Jonathan Cohen?

  We'd enjoy that.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  And we'll pay you, you know? Like, whoa, what this is crazy. I can get a job doing this, which is bizarre because my father had been a professor. But as he said, I kind of had a difficult relationship. I'll get into that later. But, you know, the, the perspective that I brought was this is incredible. I do it for free. It's one of those states with this guy whose name I can't pronounce like Chixal Sanlachab. You guys will know the flow state. When I was in front of a telescope, time disappears. And I still feel like that. So as my telescopes grew from something like this, a couple of inches across when I was a 12 year old pimple faced kid in Dobbs Ferry, New York, you know, growing up to now, where I have a six meter telescope at my disposal, more or less with my 400 colleagues on the Simons Observatory. This is just a natural extension of this pure joy that I get to do. And I would do it for free.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Don't tell Kevin Newsom, please. Don't tell the regions yet, you know, I'm still a public employee. I would do it for free and I just love it. So for me, that and the, the notion that you could have a telescope and you could see back in time, literally a telescope is a time machine. You know, I don't see you as you are this second. I see you actually two nanoseconds and I see Jonathan four nanoseconds ago. So he looks a little bit younger, you know, as he's, he, he looks young, but, but that's because light travels at a finite, but very high speed of about one foot per billionth of a second. So as we look back in space, we're looking back in time. That's why the sun, the sun could, you know, God forbid disappear right now. We wouldn't know it for eight more minutes.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  But this would be the greatest last thing that you guys could possibly do together, right?

• 9:59Mayim Bialik?

  You shouldn't live life like it's your last day. You should live life like it's your last eight minutes.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  That's the lesson. So for me, the, the cutest thing to note about it is there's a quote that I love from Soren Kierkegaard, the, you know, very depressing, you know, Scandinavian philosopher. And he said, you know, life must be lived forwards, but you can only understand it looking backwards. No else in all of science and all of society do you have a time machine to go backwards and look at the past? So I find that just like almost orgiastically pleasurable to think about and that we get to do it for a living. It's just, it's the greatest privilege I think I can have.

• 10:32Jonathan Cohen?

  What are you trying to find?

• 10:35Speaker 00

  So our telescopes right now, I do two different types of astronomy. One is using visible wavelength light to look for forbidden symmetry violations in the early universe. It's called like the, if the speed of light were to change, like red light travels faster than blue light. We don't have any evidence of that, but we could detect that in a very tiny way. And that would show a violation, not only of certain laws of how light travels, but of Einstein's relativity theory. That's one branch, kind of my side hustle. I literally do that for fun.

• 11:03Jonathan Cohen?

  Side hustle is trying to disprove Einstein.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's my side hustle. My main job is, in addition to teaching at UC San Diego, is, is to, is to use the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's the oldest light in the universe. It's the leftover heat after, you know, God pushed the button on the microwave oven and he took out, took out whatever he was creating, cooked the primordial soup. And in that primordial soup is a heat, is a glow, is an afterglow of the fusion of the first nuclei on the periodic table. So hydrogen and its isotopes into helium and so forth. And that's all there was for millions, perhaps billions of years until the first galaxies formed. So it literally is the oldest light in the universe. And as I said, when you look at something back in space, you're looking back in time. So we're seeing a snapshot of the, not just

• 11:48Speaker 00

  the universe, the chemical processes in the universe. Nothing, you know, cultural, there's no, you know, people around or anything like that. The universe is a boiling 3,000 degrees Kelvin, 3,000 degrees above absolute zero at that time, but we see the imprints of it. And now we can take those imprints because it's the oldest light and use that to learn things about the physical nature of the universe at that time. So again, the theme today, for me at least, is evidence, not speculation. We can talk about near death experiences. We can talk about alien visits. I'm sure we will, because you guys are, you know, even more diverse intellectually than I am on my show, but, and I love it, but, but me, for me, I love the hardcore grounding, that we can sample the physical conditions of the early universe from a distance of 45 billion light years away.

• 12:31Mayim Bialik?

  My and the Alex Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? The bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly sourced down jackets, and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves, to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. I'm personally obsessed with Quince's 100% European linen wide leg pants.

• 13:15Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:00Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show. What does it look like? The question that you could ask is like, what color is it? But I know we're talking in a whole different...

• 14:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's part of the reason I started my side hustle of using optical light, because you can actually explain to somebody, what is red light? But when you say what is microwave?

• 14:16Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, what does the oldest light in the universe look like?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  So it originally came out looking like ultraviolet light, like extremely powerful, or even gamma radiation, X-ray radiation. It was extremely hot leftover heat. When you fuse two things together, when you fuse together, it all started with a big bang. When you fuse together a proton and a neutron and another proton to make an isotope of helium, when you do that, there's some heat left over. And that's where fusion energy would get its energy from. That energy is in the form of heat. We just, we call it energy, but it's heat. And that heat is not in the visible wavelength or the infrared wavelength. It's in the microwave today because the universe has stretched. Since the universe has been expanding... For a factor of 1,000 times since this light was produced. We know that extremely accurately, by the way.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And since the universe has been expanding, it's gone from the invisible X-ray radiation or gamma ray radiation to beyond that, to the microwave. So it's called the cosmic microwave background. So it's a cosmological signal. It occurs in all directions, at all times of year, day and night, no matter where you are on Earth, the South Pole, Antarctica, the mountains of Chile, the depths of outer space. It's the same everywhere for everybody at this moment. And it's cooling off, and so now it's cooled off into the microwave. Now, what does it tell you? So it really does tell you about the physical conditions at the time in which it was produced. So the microwaves themselves were produced long before what would become the microwaves. The heat was produced from fusion. But then the universe expanded. It expanded for a long time until about half a million years after the Big Bang.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  When that time period occurred, the universe had cooled enough that hydrogen could form. So before that, it was protons and electrons.

• 15:55Mayim Bialik?

  Just like ping ponging around.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Bouncing around like, oh, West Hollywood nightclub.

• 15:59Mayim Bialik?

  The probability of them.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. So they couldn't come together because as soon as they came together and combined to make hydrogen, they got zapped apart by a high-energy photon. But eventually, the universe expands so much, those photons are really far apart. They're really cold. They've cooled off. I mean, they've cooled off into the infrared and millimeter wave. They've cooled off enough that now hydrogen can be stabilized. When that happens, the universe becomes transparent. The light just goes from straight there to wherever it's going to go, and eventually it ends up in our telescopes in Chile or the South Pole. So it's sampling the physical and chemical properties of the universe by its wavelength, by its spectrum, by its intensity. And what we study specifically is called its polarization. Most people don't know, but light has three properties.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Its intensity, how bright it is, its color, the wavelength it has, and its polarization, which is the orientation of the electromagnetic field. Okay, what does that mean? You have polarized sunglasses, I'm sure. I hope you do in California.

• 16:53Mayim Bialik?

  I don't like them.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 16:54Mayim Bialik?

  I don't like them. I can't look at my phone with them. You have to take it off.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  That's right. But no one else can look at their phone.

• 16:59Mayim Bialik?

  That's true.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  So polarized sunglasses reduce the glare. So glare is polar... Look at this table right here. Okay, here's a perfect example. See how the glare on the table? I don't know if the shots will get it. If we had glasses, we could modulate that, and there would be no glare. That's why if you wear them at the beach, you can see through the glare in the ocean. You can see the fish, the shark that's coming to get you, whatever. That's why polarization's interesting. But polarization tells us about the physical nature of spacetime.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  When these photons were produced that make up the CMB that we observe today. Why is that important? Well, we have this Big Bang Theory. But I like to say, we don't know who put the bang in the Big Bang. I went to England, I gave a talk at the Royal Society, um, Royal Institution, and it was a lot of fun. Because Michael Faraday used to work, or James Clerk Maxwell would hang out. It's a storied place. And I said, you know, we're trying to find today the big banger. And I put up a picture of, you know, sausages and mashed potato. They call sausages bangers.

• 17:51Mayim Bialik?

  Bangers, yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Um, and so the, uh, what, what put the bang in the Big Bang? We don't know. There's a candidate theory for it, proposed in 1980, called inflation. Inflation is the hyper, the accelerated expansion of spacetime that then produced the heat that then became the Big Bang. So most people think the Big Bang is time equals zero. That's wrong. That's absolutely wrong. Scientists don't think the Big Bang is time equals zero. We don't think that's when there was a singularity, or perhaps when there was a preceding universe, which is now another theory we can discuss.

• 18:23Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, what?

• 18:24Speaker 00

  A preceding universe that collapsed to make our universe. Okay, that's a candidate theory. Let's talk about the latter. But we don't know right now, just in the Big Bang Theory. One of the many gaps in our knowledge is what caused it to bang? There was no explanation for it. I always say to my students, I say flaws lead to new laws. In other words, when you discover something is missing in a theory, that's a good place for you to start to do research. Don't do research on the 12th decimal place of some, of some esoteric process, right? And nobody's going to really care about that. You could do it if, if you like, it's each his own, right? So what did the Big Bang come along? Let's start back at the beginning, literally. The Big Bang came along to explain this peculiar expanding universe that Edwin Hubble observed from about eight miles away over there in Mount Wilson, above Caltech.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  He observed galaxies were moving away from each other, with the exception of two or three. Thousands of galaxies on the universe, only two or three are coming towards us. The rest are redshifted, they're moving away from us. The implication is the universe is expanding. If you run that movie back, all the way back, you get a point when all those galaxies were smushing and being intimate, okay? They're right up next to each other. That is what we call the Big Bang. But we don't say what came to ignite that Big Bang. That's when the matter that started to expand today began its process of expansion. What caused that to happen?

• 19:40Mayim Bialik?

  What are our choices?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  So there's many different choices. For a long time, there was no big bang. Actually Einstein, also not far from here at Caltech, he believed for many years the universe was static. And you know, he was a damn good scientist, okay? He, he had, uh, he had this notion that the universe was our galaxy alone, as most scientists did. Nowadays, we take it for granted, right? There's billions of galaxies, literally a trillion galaxies. Each one has a billion or a trillion stars, trillions of stars in it, right? And so you get trillions squared, just incomprehensible numbers, right? But the, the question that Einstein said is, well, I look around the galaxy. I see half the stars are coming towards me, half are moving away, the galaxy's rotating. That's the universe. That's all there is.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  So he had to explain that in a theory where gravity, unlike electricity, is only attractive. Gravity only attracts other things. It doesn't repel, like electrostatic forces, opposites attract and like, there's no such thing as repellent gravity. As far as we know, we're open to ideas for that. But this, so he had to stabilize the universe, or else he wouldn't be here to ask the question of, why is the universe exist at all? So he put something in it. He called it the cosmological constant. It was a form of what we now call dark energy. And it was meant to stabilize the universe against gravity pulling it all together and smushing us into a black hole, basically.

• 21:01Mayim Bialik?

  So basically, there's something keeping us from being smushed.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. And that anti-smushing force, as you know, technically is called, he called that the cosmological constant. And then, he was a good enough scientist to recognize when Hubble took him up to the eyepiece of Mount Wilson, right here. He looked through the telescope, he said, "You're right. I was wrong. And this cosmological term that I fudge factored, I inserted into my equations against my better angels of my nature. It was actually my biggest blunder." Now, fast forward to 1998, cosmologists discover, actually, the universe does have this type of expansive force that's accelerating. And so I always point out that Einstein's biggest blunder was saying it was his blunder. And I use that with my wife. I say, honey, you know, if I made one mistake, I thought I made a mistake. And then I'm sleeping on the couch.

• 21:50Mayim Bialik?

  The stakes are pretty low, but yeah. I can't help but think of sort of the, you know, the Old Testament kind of concept, and also the mystical implications of that. You know, I'm not like, oh, the Old Testament says, and therefore it's a science book, but the mystical implications of, how do you imagine what nothingness looks like? Right? What is before there is? Right? And that's sort of like the mystical concept, and what I love is that you're not afraid to talk about some of these parallels because, you know, we just spoke to Sir Robert Edward Grant, a very, you know, unusual kind of polymath, but his big thing, his overarching thing is like, everything repeats everywhere.

• 22:32Mayim Bialik?

  You can find it everywhere. We're all just mirrors. Everything is like self and shadow and all this stuff. But I think about it even with this, like, what are these patterns that we're seeing? So, yeah, if you could kind of help us understand what could come before, and how do we even imagine that?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  My job is to ask the question, and maybe answer it, but certainly ask it, what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang? There are certain conceptions where that doesn't make any sense. In fact, Stephen Hawking, the late, great Stephen Hawking, said, asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what's north of the North Pole. But we all know what's north of Santa, you know. So, I always turn around, South Pole. I've been to the South Pole. When you get to the South Pole and you go south of the South Pole, you're going north. You know, you're actually, there's nowhere to go but north from the South Pole. So is there a possibility that you could go before time if time came into existence? So not only did the universe, we have to kind of wrap our minds around something, right?

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Not only did all the matter that would later become us, I can take us on that journey too, but for now, we stipulate that we're made of matter, that this came specifically from the Big Bang. It came from the first moments.

• 23:44Mayim Bialik?

  We're all stardust.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Well, stardust is actually, so Carl Sagan made that case, right? He said, we're all stardust. So this is a meteorite, one of my many gifts for you guys today, is a meteorite. So this is real meteorite. This is star stuff. The hydrogen is not star stuff. The hydrogen in your body, in the liquid, whatever that you drink, the hydrogen is Big Bang stuff. It's even more, you know, mind blowing than star stuff. This came from a supernova that exploded in our neighborhood in the galaxy. About 150 million years before the Earth was created. This predates the Earth. And it's made of very different materials than the hydrogen in this guy. This is made of iron, nickel, cobalt. And I'm going to give you some data sheets on this. You can share it with people.

• 24:24Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Give away some to your Substack. Seriously, I have some for your readers because I love that. I'm a paid subscriber. I love it. Come on, I do my homework. But we're mostly made of Big Bang stuff. So what happened the Tuesday before the Big Bang is a legitimate question if and only if the universe existed before then, even if time came into existence as we know it. Right? If time came into existence at some moment, like this is the way I think about it. We're here on a Tuesday. I'm asking the question, what happened on Tuesday before the Big Bang? We can keep going back 24 hour periods, right? We go back seven 24 hour periods last Tuesday. Keep going, keep. You eventually get back 13.826 billion years. And that's some day. Maybe it was a Tuesday, maybe it wasn't. Let's say it was a Wednesday. I want to know what happened the day before.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Now, that question doesn't make sense if time came into existence at that moment, right?

• 25:14Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of people think of, especially like if you're, you know, with no insult, you're not, you're not like trained in science. People think that like time exists and then we got inserted into it. And like the calendar was going and it was going and there was a January or whatever. There was a Tuesday and then we evolved. But time only exists because of matter having, you get it being stretched? Yeah? So it's like, you can't know what happened before time because there was no time.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  So if, if there's a relationship between time and temperature, there's a big mystery in science called the hour of time. The mystery of the hour of time, right? The laws of nature seem to be reversible. In other words, if I show you a ticking grandfather clock, a pendulum going back and forth. And I ask you, turn away and now look at it. Where did it start from? Weeks ago, you can't possibly know. You can't even tell if you're looking at it in reverse or looking at it forward.

• 26:08Mayim Bialik?

  You mean if you take a snapshot?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you just look at it, you can't tell. Same with the solar system. We don't, if you were upside down, looking at the solar system from below.

• 26:14Mayim Bialik?

  What's upside down?

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no notion of what's upside up or upside down. So the question is, does that apply to time? It applies to space, does it apply to time? So where do the laws of physics break off from being time, you know, irreversible and time bound, to being time irreversible? Like when you mix coffee and cream together, you don't spontaneously see them break apart into two different sets of cream and coffee, right? So the hour of time, did that have a starting point? Or did it emerge from a preceding universe that sort of sacrificed itself, collapsed, just like the star that became this meteorite, exploded, spewing its guts all over our solar, all over our galaxy, to birth our solar system? So too, there could be a preceding universe that collapsed, exploded, if you will, and became our existing observance.

• 26:59Mayim Bialik?

  But we can't see that.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Well, can we, can we infer that it exists? So in science, we have multiple ways of arriving at some approximation of truth. Don't forget, you know, when we talk about things, I often hear you, you know, talk to people and ask, you know, what, do you believe in this? Do you believe in? So I, I would say, I don't even believe in gravity. I don't believe in gra, I don't believe in evolution. I have evidence for evolution. I have evidence for science. I have evidence in science. I have evidence for gravity. But in science, our job isn't to prove things. But people confuse us with mathematicians. Mathematician can prove one plus one equals two, despite what my friend Terrence Howard thinks. But you could prove-

• 27:37Mayim Bialik?

  One pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry does not equal two piles of laundry.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  That's right. Exactly, right? But I say, give you one royalty for your movie and I give you another. Would you only take one royalty, Terrence? He wouldn't answer me.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  So, so to prove one plus one equals two, it's a trivial thing, right? No, it's not. It actually takes over 200 pages of rigorous mathematical proof, but you can get there. You could actually prove it. It's called the piano axioms. That's math. Math, proofs exist. Physics, there's no such thing as a proof.

• 28:07Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  I cannot prove that the earth is spherical, right? People write to me all the time, Professor Keating, they, they say, you know, the earth is flat. I have proof. And I say, people write to me from all around the globe, asking me to prove that the earth is flat. The globe around the globe.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  So, uh, so in reality, we can't prove a physical fact. Actually, the earth isn't perfectly spherical. It bulges at the equator, it looks like it. But you can't even get all the coordinate points to define exactly what it is because it's changing. It's dynamic, right? There are no facts in science, but what you can do is you can falsify things. And this is interesting to me because people always ask me, how do you reconcile being religious and being scientific? So the most important thing about a scientific truth, perhaps, the closest you can come to truth and proof is resistance to being wrong, to resistance to what's called falsification. So I can't prove that the earth is a perfect sphere, but I can prove it's not flat. I cannot prove that the sun will always come up in the east, right? That something could physically happen.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  It's not outside the laws of the earth's rotation could switch around and the sun would come up in the world. I'm just saying, it's not outside the laws of physics, therefore cannot be proven. But you could falsify, for today, it did come up.

• 29:17Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, you just defined faith. Because when people ask me especially, like, how can you be a scientist and how can you have faith? And I said, I may say this to my kids, you know, because I have kids at that age, right? Do you believe that the sun will come up tomorrow? And they say, well, yeah, of course. I said, that's what it feels like. Like, that's what it feels like. The way that you honor that, the way that you commemorate it, the way you pray over it, that's culturally specific. And that depends on your particular DNA and your personality and where you raised and how all the things line up. But it's the same faith. Like, to me, it's like, that's why when people are like, how can you be a scientist and a person of faith? How could you not?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Well, I'll never criticize, you know, people for having faith or not having faith. I've talked to the greatest atheists in the world, the greatest agnostics in the world, the greatest, you know, theologically inclined. So I'll never complain. And, you know, you point out, 90% of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the most prestigious scientific society in the history of the planet, does not actively proclaim a belief in God. They're either atheist or they're agnostic. And, and so, look, are they not good scientists? Of course, they're great scientists. Have there been incredible religious scientists throughout history? Of course there have. That was the norm, right?

• 30:26Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  And, and so, that to me is not a question, but you hit the nail on the head. To say, in, in Judaism, we use the term... Amuna, amuna is a sense and it's where the word amen comes from in English or in Latin. These notions are of, so if I had faith in something, that by definition means it's not subject to scientific scrutiny. Otherwise, I could have proof, right? So I say, and you wouldn't get any credit for it either. Having faith, okay, I have faith in you know, and there's a lot of proof for it. No, I would have to subjugate that sense of my needs to, you know, someone's notion of putting me in a box and saying what I am or am not entitled to believe as a scientist. I'll choose for myself. Thank you very much.

• 31:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's go back to the idea of the theory of everything. People are trying to figure out

• 31:14Jonathan Cohen?

  what's happening now. They're looking for clues and they're looking for like what's going to happen in the planet moving forward, right? And a lot of those theories are connected to God.

• 31:25Jonathan Cohen?

  Describe your search for something that unifies everything, even if it has failed. Like where are you in that process?

• 31:35Speaker 00

  So I like to decouple, and I say it's perfectly acceptable. As I said before, here's my land acknowledgement. You don't have to believe in God. You could be a great scientist. Obviously, you could be a great, you can be a great person and be an atheist. You could be religious and be a jerk, whatever. These are not, these shouldn't be controversial things. Unfortunately, a lot of times they are. In my conception, religion and science are like looking at, you know, completely different sides, perhaps of the same coin, but maybe not. We like to say things like, oh, well, you're not good at math, but you're good at music. And, and, you know, they said, they say that music and math are related. I'm like, yeah, Pythagoras did, you know, 4,000, 3,000 years, 2,000 years ago, you know, he thought they were the strings and the rhythm of the cosmos. I mean, the guy was, you know, he was also, you know, did a lot of crazy other things, right?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Let's, let's not base our kind of notions and hopes and trying to build up our self-esteem. You're either good, like I always say, I'm good at math.

• 32:27Mayim Bialik?

  You're not as good as Pythagoras. He was pretty good.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  That's the only, that's right. But, you know, the closest I come to music is, is, you know, playing Spotify. My brother, on the other hand, not good at math, very good at playing music. So, so we can be different people and they can be completely unrelated to each other, right? But for my personal approach to it, when I look and think about questions, first of all, I look at what is the purpose of this, of this subject? What is the ontology that we're trying to capitulate, right? So for religion, in my case, you know, I did have a relatively strange upbringing religiously.

• 33:01Mayim Bialik?

  Unusual.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Born Jewish, two, both Jewish parents, parents got divorced, as was very, you know, I think you got a certificate to do that when, in the 1970s when I grew up. So both parents were divorced, both divorced twice, really good at marriage, really good at divorce. And so I grew up with my stepfather, his name is Keating, my original name is Axe, A-X, my biological father, James Axe. And I grew up in an Irish Catholic background, so I had exposure to Irish Catholic doctrine. I was actually baptized at age nine, converted at age 10, confirmed at age 11, and became an altar boy at age 12.

• 33:40Mayim Bialik?

  Stop it!

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Yep, I loved it. I loved being an altar boy. It was so unlike the Judaism, you know, I called myself, we were two-day-a-year Jews before, you know, we'd go to, we'd go to synagogue on Christmas and Easter, you know, two days a year. And we really didn't have any connection to it. And then I came into Catholicism, and it was like warm and boisterous and loving and passionate, and it could be solemn too. And I just loved that and took to it. And so instead of having a bar mitzvah at age 12, I was an altar boy at the Church of St. John St. Mary. And I just loved it, and I had so much fun with it. Didn't have my bar mitzvah until I turned 52, four times 13. And, and I was able to have my children and my wife at my bar mitzvah. Not too many bar mitzvah boys have their children at the bar mitzvah, at the kotel, at the Western Wall in Israel.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  But anyway, my upbringing and exposure to it took me into explore the doctrines behind Catholicism, you know, Christianity generally. And then I didn't explore Judaism for a long time because I became disillusioned by it thanks to becoming a know-it-all scientist at age 12. You know, at the same time I got my, was being an altar boy and should have had my bar mitzvah, I got my first telescope. And at that time, it was in the mid 1980s, I fell in love with still my current hero in all of science, Galileo. Galileo had provided some of the first empirical evidence-based data that the Earth goes around the Sun. It was the first, Copernicus came up with the idea, he was just kind of guessing. I mean, you know, it made sense, it was, maybe it was more empirical,

• 35:07Speaker 00

  but actually Ptolemaic astronomy, which is the epicycle, cosmology, made a lot more sense. At that time, in 1986, around then, the Catholic Church had not pardoned Galileo for the crime, which they imprisoned him for the remaining nine years of his life. They imprisoned him for exclaiming and teaching that the Earth goes around the Sun.

• 35:26Mayim Bialik?

  His crime was looking up the truth.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:28Mayim Bialik?

  That's what the Indigo Girl said.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  That's right. So, now, as a 12 or 13-year-old, you know, kind of snot-nosed kid, just learning about science, and then kind of looking for an excuse not to go to church, or not to go to temple, I thought, this is horrible. Like, how do you treat people like that? And then wait till you get to Giordano Bruno, you know, burned alive at the stake in 1600 for the heresy of suggesting that stars had planets around them, which, you know, totally off about, you know, guy was, you know, he wasn't ahead of his time by 400 years. So I was like, the Catholic Church is murdering scientists. That's crazy. I don't know if I want to be a part of this anymore. I literally lost my religion, R E M.

• 36:05Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  So, when that came about, I became an atheist for a long time. And then I came back to Judaism later, surrounding 9/11, and other things we can talk about later. Actually, the thing that made me leave Catholicism the most, perhaps, is, you know, I wanted to go all the way. Like, whenever I do something, I want to do it the best, right? I get into science, I want to win a Nobel Prize. I got into altar, but I want to become a priest. But age 13, 14, certain hormones start to kick in, you know, from your sons, right? I realized I couldn't be a priest, and that probably also put me over the edge, like, I'm not gonna do it, right? But, getting back to what I always like to do, I'm a purist, so I like to look at the pure text. What does text say about the claims? Not what do people say the text does. I used to hate it when rabbis or priests would tell me, oh, this is what you have to believe, and this is the path to truth, and I am the conduit for

• 36:49Speaker 00

  your faith. No, I'm a scientist, I'm actually pretty smart, I can figure things out. I can teach myself things if I need to. I may be a monomath. You talk a lot about polymaths in here, but I'm a monomath, but I can be quite good at that. That's my only skill perhaps, right? Is I'm a scholar, right? So I looked into the, what are these books saying? Right? So leaving aside, you know, the New Testament, let's go to the Old Testament. What is the Old Testament saying about the Big Bang? What does it say about science? Why is it, why, why do people even ask the question? You know, if I saw a book like A Brief History of Time, and I read it, I say, there's no tips on improving my long game in golf. Like, this book is, like, you would never say that, right? Because it's not a book about golf, right? It's a book about origin theories of the universe, literally, of time, right? It's wonderful in that domain.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Don't try to use it as a parenting manual. Don't try to use it as a golf, you know, learning golf, right? So what is it actually saying in the Torah about the, not, don't tell me. So it actually has, and I've counted these verses. Torah itself, the Old Testament, the Bible, has 35,000, give or take, verses total in all the five books of Moses, right? This is called. About 35 of those 35,000 verses are about the seven days of creation, the first Shabbat, the creation Cain and Abel killing each other, the Garden of Eden, the expulsion, the snake, all the, that's 35 total verses. And yet it has this enormous impact on humanity, right? For the last, all the major, you know.

• 38:16Mayim Bialik?

  It's also first, so it's like what most people get through.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Right, exactly, right. I say I'd kill for 1% of God's books sales. Yeah, it's still relevant today, right? Three, you know, whatever you want to say, it's an old book, right? It's at least 30, you know, 30 centuries old, right? So when I look at that, I say, what was it trying to do then? And how's it still relevant to today? If it's had 35 verses, and there's 35,000 total verses, that's 0.1% of the Torah of the Bible is about creation, cosmology, DNA, right? If, if, if you read the history of the NBA, there's about 0.1% of the NBA has been Jewish, right? Marty Stoudamire, a couple other guys. Now we have Danny, the important Trailblazers guy from, right? It's only 0.1%, but there's been tens of thousands of players, right? So you, you would say, like, this is not a book about, you know,

• 39:02Speaker 00

  the NBA is not about Jews primarily. I mean, there may be a couple. But let's look at what it's really about, okay? If you want to look at the cosmology in it, the sun, the earth, the moon created on the fourth day. You don't think the rabbis, you know, Moses, or if even it was people that wrote it, they didn't know that the sun is what defines a day. Of course they did. So why does it say that the sun was created on the fourth day? Look at the, look at the realm, the kingdoms that the, that the Israelites were surrounded by. Israel was surrounded by Egypt, by Babylonia. Those were the world powers. What did they believe? They had the god of the sun, Ra. Ra is the god of the sun in Egypt. And that's one of the defining stories of the Jewish faith, which is the narrative underlying Christianity and Islam as well, right?

• 39:44Speaker 00

  So this creation story comes to tell us, no, the sun is so unimportant as a god. It was created not until the fourth day, after herbs and whatever.

• 39:53Mayim Bialik?

  Well, we always used to say, how could you see if the sun wasn't there to give light?

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Right, right. So obviously they knew that, right? You know, when you write a book, there was a purpose for that. That it was to signify it was created. So now, no, it also bothers me when apologetics. I don't know if you guys have had on like a true Christian apologist or Jewish apologist, Gerald Schroeder is a very famous one. Um, in the Jewish faith, uh, my friend Stephen C. Meyer, John Lennox, uh, William Lane Craig is perhaps the most famous one. Apologetics is explaining scientific phenomena with the understanding that they're trying to prove the existence of God. So the most common one, the most famous one traces back thousands of years, actually St. Augustine and others. It's called the column cosmological argument. So it goes like this.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  It says, the, everything that we see that was created was created. It didn't exist and then existed, kind of like what you're saying before about the big bang, right? Except for the universe, for the universe to come into existence at a certain point in time, it needed to have been created. All things that are created have a creator. It may be many chains down.

• 41:00Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, you could have the same conversation about consciousness.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 41:02Mayim Bialik?

  It's, it is the same exact conversation.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:05Mayim Bialik?

  Is it fundamental? Was it inserted? Like how, where did it come from?

• 41:10Speaker 00

  There are sort of like multiple big bangs. We think there's one big bang. No, no, no, there's many big bangs, right? There's a big bang that we talk about as creation of the universe. That created matter, say, from pure energy. So you had non-material entities created, creating something that was matter. Actual massive things you could put on a scale. Then those things later congealed and made planets, right? And then those planets congealed and we can talk about all the different theories of biogenesis, right? And they made life. So life, non-conscious life, basic life, came from matter that was not conscious. So consciousness emerged in a big bang.

• 41:45Mayim Bialik?

  Something from nothing.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Something from nothing. So I'm fascinated to hear what, yeah, that you're mentioning that exact same line of thinking.

• 41:51Mayim Bialik?

  This is, you know, a question that we ask a lot of different ways when we talk to people. We ask astrophysicists. It's at the basis of also the laypeople that we speak to, who travel to dimensions that we cannot understand. So when people are declared dead and zipped into a body bag for two hours, and some EMT in the back of an ambulance decides, "I'm gonna see what happens if I unzip," and shock, right? That's astounding. And when people come back from those experiences and say, "I gotta tell you what just happened," right? And it is beyond articulation. And it shares so many threads in common. That's what we're asking. Like, how are we separate?

• 42:34Mayim Bialik?

  How are you reporting things that happened in a room that your body was locked in? Where is consciousness? Like, where is it? Is it literally this entity that can float around? Like, I have a very hard time with that. And also, when you speak to like, you know, any educated hippie who will say, "There's a plane that I can tap into that many people cannot." And there is information in that plane, the same way if you have bad hearing and you can't hear the radio if it's not turned up enough, they don't need it turned up as high, right? Like, and this is this notion we were just talking about, the infrasonic range. And I was like, "What the fuck is that?" Turns out it's a thing. And there are people who are more sensitive to sounds under 20 Hz. Like, this is news to me. I mean, maybe it was taught to me.

• 43:20Mayim Bialik?

  Sometime, but I'm thinking, what does that mean for our conscious experience? There are people who are more sensitive and you can say that literally, you can say it emotionally and conceptually. There is this variation in the human experience and for some people, they, they will call it God. They will call it, this is my source and other people will not. I mean, the thing that I always say is like, I don't really care what you call it. Like if you drop something, it's gonna drop at 9.8 per second. It's like, that's it, you know? And that's kind of what you were talking about. It's not about belief. I don't have to believe in gravity. It just is, you know? And when people say like, oh, why do bad things happen to good people? I say, well, those are human words that you have human judgment on.

• 44:03Mayim Bialik?

  You don't know the path of the larger universe. And the thought that also we would be, I'm not saying I don't have a God that cares, but those are also human concepts. Like we're just anthropomorphizing the hell out of God, right? Like that's like literally, that's what we do because we're, we're meaning makers. And that's what our brain will do. I see a pattern. I see it, it's clicking together. It's gonna make sense. I'm gonna make it make sense. And then you become a fanatic and you try and make other people believe in your God. And like, that's also insane.

• 44:31Jonathan Cohen?

  This also ties back to the notion of the theory of everything because there are elements that seem to be still, we're not able to describe them. We're not able to understand them. There are phenomenon like the people who have claimed to have near death experiences.

• 44:46Mayim Bialik?

  Well, even dark matter, dark energy, like where does it go?

• 44:49Jonathan Cohen?

  All that, all of that stuff that's in the universe that we don't understand what it is or where it came from, like it seems to be still, we're not able yet to pull together a theory of everything. How do you reconcile?

• 45:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Not your proof in God, but your faith and your personal experience outside of religion? Can you speak to that?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Do you have a sister? Because I'm starting to think like I need a co-host on my podcast. Because you're very good at like bringing us back. Like, I have this like, you know, very volatile, short-term memory and I'm like, "I know he asked me about the theory of everything a couple hours ago."

• 45:28Jonathan Cohen?

  A couple hours ago.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  You know, that's, your time flies when you're having fun, right? So, thank you very much.

• 45:33Mayim Bialik?

  He does have a sister.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  He's very good.

• 45:35Jonathan Cohen?

  She's not as good at this as I am.

• 45:36Mayim Bialik?

  She's not as quick as him. She takes her time.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  She's quicker.

• 45:39Jonathan Cohen?

  She has other skills.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so, to me, there's, you know, first of all, we have to think about like this notion of belief. Like I said, in addition to not looking for things I believe in as a scientist, I also feel like, just as in common sense, like, is God sitting around like, "Wait, I hope Brian believes in me today." Like, "This would make my day, oh boy, my CV." No, I'm totally inconsequential on one hand. On the other hand, we're supposed to have these two different pockets, right? And there's a great Talmudic sage who said, "Man," his name was Shlomo de Bardicha of Poli... Like, some Ukrainian name that I am can pronounce, but I can't pronounce, right? And he said, "A man should have two pockets, and in each one, he should have a note." In one hand, and in one pocket, he should have a note that says,

• 46:26Speaker 00

  "The whole world was created for me." And the other hand, when he feels too haughty, too cocky, he's looks maxing too much, he should pull it out and say, "I am nothing but dust and ashes." So he should have these two, like, opposing forces, and it's very difficult for the human mind. As you said, the human mind likes to create patterns, to draw extrapolations, to do induction, you know, scientific method, inductive version, deductive version. And, and we love to induce patterns because that helps us survive, right? You see the squiggle on the ground, is it a snake or is it a stick? You know, it's not gonna keep you alive.

• 46:57Mayim Bialik?

  He thinks every stick is a snake.

• 46:59Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't like snakes.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  You're an Italian dude.

• 47:01Mayim Bialik?

  He's very tuned in.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  By the way, what's brown and sticky? A stick. Okay, that's a dad joke, courtesy of my son. Okay, this is bizarre.

• 47:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Pretty good, pretty good. I like a dad joke.

• 47:15Mayim Bialik?

  We're gonna hit pause here. There's so much more in part two of our conversation with Dr. Brian Keating. We're gonna talk about religion. Can God's existence be subjected to scientific tests?

• 47:27Jonathan Cohen?

  He's also gonna talk about the near-death experience that Alfred Nobel had. It's an unbelievable story that spawns the creation of the Nobel Prize.

• 47:37Mayim Bialik?

  What does it look like to search for extraterrestrial life? Are we in a simulation? And how does he explain the recent deaths and disappearances of significant US scientists linked to nuclear research and aerospace programs? We cannot wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. Brian Keating.