400K Subscribers Asked Me Anything. The Answers Got Weird.

400,000 of you showed up for physics with no compromises, so I did something different for the milestone. No highlight reel. I took your hardest questions live and answered them, then got honest about the part of this job nobody asks about: the discipline behind running a serious science podcast. We get into why clocks didn't tick differently in the early universe, what it actually means that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once, and whether JWST has any real shot at catching a Population III star before it's gone. Then it gets contested. I make the case that language models may rediscover physics before they rediscover mathematics, walk through why enormous numbers do not get you to alien life, and look at the moment Avi Loeb quietly softened his ʻOumuamua position. In this conversation: Why the early universe didn't run on a different clock The Big Bang as an everywhere-at-once event, not an explosion in space JWST and the hunt for the first generation of stars Whether an LLM could rediscover Einstein, and what that would mean for who controls discovery Why I read every book my guests write, and why that habit is the channel Get the transcript, bonus content, and my Monday M. A. G. I. C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://briankeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Timestamps 00:00 Did time always tick the same? 02:05 Is every point the Big Bang's center? 07:22 Could consciousness be space-time? 09:03 Will Webb see the first stars? 10:20 Can an LLM rediscover Einstein? 13:30 Has Penrose's CCC been falsified? 16:48 Dark Forest theory: science or sci-fi? 21:30 Can inflation ever be falsified? 29:04 Physical limits of AI compute growth 32:58 Is this the last CMB experiment? 37:30 Why large numbers don't prove alien life 55:30 Loeb quietly walks back Oumuamua 01:13:10 The null hypothesis on UAP 01:28:50 String theory vs. intelligent design 01:31:10 God as a scientific hypothesis 01:45:10 Drowning in knowledge, starving for wisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:59Brian Keating?

  Okay, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast, a very special episode. Featuring my favorite guest, me, Brian Keating, celebrating 400,000 of you multiversal minds that traverse the cosmos from consciousness to astrobiology, there and back. When I started the podcast, I assumed that maybe a few dozen nerds would somehow watch, but we built a community that hundreds of thousands of people are listening to or watching over 500K when you include the audio versions, which I hope that you will also enjoy. And whether we're talking about inflation or artificial intelligence or aliens or black holes, I think that you're getting something here that you get nowhere else and that's access to the greatest minds in the universe, some deep dives. I never pull punches.

• 1:44Brian Keating?

  I never hold back. And I just love the fact that I get to do this all. And most of what I provide to you is kind of a hobby. I don't do this for the money. I certainly don't make money on the podcast and it's just been such a delight. So you'll hear this in the second half, I'm going to answer some questions that were dropped on YouTube and you can join my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, or my secondary YouTube channel where I do these deep dive explainers into the hottest topics in physics and astronomy, cosmology, artificial intelligence. Those are solo episodes. I do some debunking episodes now called Keating's Razors. And I also do a lot of very fascinating, as I said, solo deep dives on things ranging from

• 2:25Brian Keating?

  negative mass neutrinos all the way up to the solution to the Fermi paradox that I am thinking about working on myself in my other spare time for my side hustle. I need a side hustle. So that other channel is called Keating Experiments. You can find that link below as well. Okay, let's get on to some of the questions. So let's go 400K Austin Howell. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you're part of the multiverse of minds. And then next question, number two, Juan del Salgado asks, has time ticked at the same pace since the early universe? No. So this is subtle. In general relativity, time can depend on gravity. Gravity depends on matter and matter in motion also can affect the spacetime metric. So the universe is much hotter and denser than it was

• 3:08Brian Keating?

  in the early universe than it was now. So an atom in the early universe wouldn't actually notice this because clocks tick locally in the same rate that they do for us in the locally low gravitational environment. Now, it is true, clocks do tick slightly slower for us, nearer to the center of the earth than for an astronaut orbiting on the International Space Station. But locally, that's a small effect. And so locally Einstein realized and is part of his equivalence principle that you could basically make a freely falling reference frame where anything would perceive the same spacetime dynamics as if there were no gravity. So flat spacetime is the local approximation, just like a flat earth is a local approximation

• 3:52Brian Keating?

  for any infinitesimal patch of a highly curved surface, whether it's positively curved or negatively curved, whether that curvature is coming. Built into the universe or from large gravitational fields or distortions. So an atom in the early universe wouldn't notice anything. And redshift is not caused by time itself changing. It's caused by the spatial expansion of the universe that stretches wavelength of light and these waves of light as they travel. So this would not change things. So there's a distinction between gravitational time dilation, which is the slowing and changing of clock rates, which is a true effect that's also responsible for corrections made to the GPS system satellite that you and I use to get around in our, using our phones or our cars' GPS. So that's different from cosmological redshift, which stretches light because the universe is expanding.

• 4:36Brian Keating?

  So they're related, but they're not identical. Great question. Okay. At merge form, is every location the center of the big bang? Yes, this is a very good way to think about it. If every part of the universe is the center of the universe, then no part is the center of the universe. It's like, where's the center of the surface of the earth? There is no center of the surface of the earth, so all points are equivalent. So the big bang was not an explosion into space. It was the expansion of space itself. So we often use these analogies. None of them are perfect because we're, you know, three-dimensional beings trying to visualize a four-dimensional universe, making two-dimensional analogies that I'm about to make, which is the classic one of the balloon that has dots, you know, printed on it and the shape of galaxies, if you like.

• 5:20Brian Keating?

  And if you blow that balloon up, it's expanding into the room, so that makes it a little bit less good of an analogy. But every dot would see every other dot moving away. And I can insert here a visualization that I made on redshift and the wavelength distortion that occurs due to the expanding of spacetime. And each galaxy sees every other galaxy moving away from it. In three dimensions, you could have a raisin bread that is, has raisins inside it, you're cooking it, it's expanding. Every raisin is moving away from every other raisin. So each raisin could say, hey, I'm the center of the bread. But of course, if an infinite raisin bread, they're not, it's not possible for any of them to be the center. They're all the center, therefore, none of them are the center. So the observable universe does appear to be homogeneous.

• 6:02Brian Keating?

  That means it's sort of the same in every place in the universe and isotropic, and then it looks the same on large enough scales. So every observer can legitimately Consider themselves to be the center of the observable expansion. And these are things we talk about in the cosmic office hours once a month, which I really look forward to. I hear incredible theories and it's a much cheaper alternative, you know, to the thousand dollars for the first hour and then two thousand, then four thousand, eight thousand, et cetera, that I charge for private consultations. I'm more than willing to do that. That money goes to a local food bank at UCSD's campus. It's a 501(c)(3) charity. There's a couple of them here on campus that I will donate that money to. And we've had many people take me up on that level.

• 6:43Brian Keating?

  But this is sort of the level of the conversation that we have on the public office hour, shall we say, or the group office hour that we hold every month. So do join if you're interested. It's nineteen ninety-nine a month. It's cheap compared to the thousands of dollars that other people will pay. And that my students pay in tuition, quite frankly. And a lot of them don't come to office hours, so. So hopefully you will adjudicate yourself in such a way that you can make it to an office hour of some kind or another, or you can wait till the next five hundred K milestone and I'll answer more of these questions. Okay, is consciousness, this is asked by Innerfield5481, is consciousness a space-like spacetime?

• 7:25Brian Keating?

  I personally don't know enough about this question to answer it. I'd say I've talked to the leading lights in consciousness from the late, great Daniel Dennett. That was his last interview that he ever did, to Sam Harris, to Robert Sapolsky. So implementation of a physical system occurs while it's embedded in spacetime. It is not spacetime itself. There is some pre-existing spacetime. So the question I think you might be asking is whether or not consciousness is fundamental or if it's emergent, based on collective phenomena, it's computational, maybe it's quantum. But the hard problem of consciousness, you know, the quality of what is it like to be something else? We really have no good answer to that. And I always often find that it's as challenging, you know, to me as if we didn't know what an exoplanet was.

• 8:09Brian Keating?

  We have definitions of it. Yes, we changed the definition of a planet within our solar system not too long ago in my lifetime. And so things could change and maybe could learn stuff, but it may be unknowable. I mean, there are people that think consciousness is outside the realm of consciousness. And so you need some level of consciousness, as Einstein said, that's above the level of consciousness in order to understand consciousness. Maybe that will be AI. Maybe AI will be able to look at us outside of our brain. Constellation Pegasus asks, will JWST ever directly observe a population three star? Now, population three stars, I should tell you, are the first generation of stars we call population three, and so they're extremely rare, they're extremely hard to visualize, they're long gone by now. They were providing the seeds that then became the seeds to make the stars that made the

• 8:54Brian Keating?

  stars like our sun, which is population one, which is to say that they exploded, they were made of just primordial hydrogen and helium from the big bang. They then created and synthesized the heavier elements all the way up to lead and even iron and so forth to make these iron nickel meteorites that I give away if you have a .edu email address, briankeating.com/edu, and you live in the US. So these are extremely massive, and like rock stars, the more massive, the brighter you are, the shorter you live. So they form very early on, and they may detect, you know, them in clusters or so forth where the light would have this trace fingerprint of only having hydrogen and helium in their spectrum.

• 9:34Brian Keating?

  And that would be an incredible accomplishment, as would be the observation of a single pristine population three stars. That might be one of the greatest discoveries in astronomy, and if any telescope could do it, it is something like Webb. Thanks for that question. Cameron Williams asks about LLMs, lean proofs, formal verification, and fundamental physics. Now, this is one of my most recent and most exciting intersections that I'm involved with. You know, how do we go from mathematicians proving theorems and physicists building models and computers to check these things to actually where they're generating it? So I came up with something called the Einstein test, which would be to take an LLM, lobotomize it, and give it only knowledge pre-1910 or something, and see if it can come up with

• 10:18Brian Keating?

  general relativity like we just talked about. Can it derive curved spacetime, flat locally, Einstein equivalence principle, all these things that Einstein did so magnificently. So the payoff would be enormous. So can we even verify proofs? When I talked to Terrence Tao in September, he's going to hopefully come on again for his new book in the fall, he talked about verification being a good thing for AI, discovering unknown symmetries perhaps. Proving problems, solving problems that didn't have, you know, proofs maybe, but they weren't at the level of theorems like Erdos problems are not really at the level of a theorem like Pythagorean theorem or Fermat's less theorem, but were proved by or conjectured

• 10:58Brian Keating?

  by Erdos in the 40s, 50s, 60s and lay dormant until recently, dozens of them are being solved by LLMs. So the physics that I do has to be answerable to nature and so I've been trying to do this with a student and with colleagues. I did find unfortunately, in some sense, maybe fortunately, I don't know, to save me the time, that we were not the first to really think about this. Maybe I was the first to think about it, but I didn't implement it in time and there are teams of groups that basically do implementations of pre 1911 LLMs that are not contaminated with the knowledge that even popular science gives to them, like the multiverse and spiderverse and for movies and stuff. So for me, it's, it's, it was a little bit disappointing to find the people had thought

• 11:43Brian Keating?

  about this and actually done it. Maybe, again, I might have thought of it first a couple of years ago as that was kind of the key to artificial general intelligence that I would think would rise to the occasion. And thanks to Roman Yampolsky who did tell me that this had been done, he thought it was a good idea, but he found some, he found some examples, which maybe saves me time to work on my other projects like Simon's Observatory. So there are a lot of experiments that will be coming up. The question is, you know, first, can it verify existing proofs? Second, can it, can it reproduce novel things only based on a pre, you know, corpus knowledge before these discoveries were popularized by human meat computers, natural intelligences? And so I'm not sure that will, that will happen.

• 12:28Brian Keating?

  First, I think it'll happen in math and then I think it could happen in physics. Okay, Shion Ray says, what happens to particles in the far future? It depends on type of particles. If you're talking about stable particles like photons or electrons, they may survive forever. Protons may decay. We're not sure. We know that their lifetime is at least, you know, at least a multiple of the age of the universe, just from statistical measurements, may even be something like 10 to the 30th years. If protons do not decay, then white dwarves and neutron stars, which will be the end product of most stars, including our sun, that they'll last for incredibly long times. And that matter will only take on rare sort of interactions as the universe expands and

• 13:12Brian Keating?

  gets more and more dilute. We won't know if this will happen, of course, for a very long time, so keep paying your taxes out there. And this dovetails nicely into trader Timmy, who asked my thoughts on Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology. Very few people fully understand it. I'd say that it's one of the most creative ideas ever proposed. It's beautiful, it's elegant, it's avoiding the singularity that has a quantum effect that we can't currently understand using our theory of gravity and our theory of quantum mechanics. It looks in a very serious way at what the far future of gravity and quantum physics would be like. But it's made a couple of whoppers, you know, that really just don't bear out.

• 13:53Brian Keating?

  When the bicep 2, my favorite experiment, you know, aside from the Simons Observatory, came out with our data, he's, Roger, said that actually we did detect B modes, but they were from, you know, these, these Hawking points that they had these ring-like structures that came from black holes that are the only things that really make it through the conformal rescaling that's sort of like the new bang. It also requires the universe to lose information about different mass scales and transition the properties of things like the Higgs boson, which we really don't have any evidence for. So there's zero evidence for it. There is actually counterfactual evidence for his claim that bicep 2's result came from these Hawking points, and that was that our data were contaminated with cosmic, with,

• 14:36Brian Keating?

  not cosmic dust, but with galactic dust. So it's been falsified. Now, that's a virtue of the theory, is that it can be falsified. If we were to measure a B-mode background, that would be suggestive of inflation, not the conformal cyclic cosmology that avoids a singularity beginning. Okay, careful carpenter. Is expansion synchronistic or coincidental? Hmm, I'm not sure what that means. The expansion is, it seems to be a global property of spacetime, something that, you know, we witness, we are participating in, not like some galaxy decides to go on to start participating in the Hubble flow. So at large scales, we see spacetime evolving according to Einstein's equation. So it seems more synchronistic, you know, and that it could be that I'm not understanding

• 15:21Brian Keating?

  it unless you mean maybe coincidental. So. Max Brooks asks, why doesn't the big bang expand backwards? Now, that could be true in sort of the big crunch axis. There are models where the universe will actually expand backwards, meaning backwards expansion is a contraction. And so you have to be careful looking at diagrams in Wikipedia where these are plotting spacetime, you know, kind of in a two dimensional spacetime, but we can't really even project the third and fourth dimension of spacetime itself. So the forward direction is actually representing the passage of time. Now, if the universe does have this evolving dark energy, eventually it could effectively collapse. The pressure support for the universe would then become

• 16:03Brian Keating?

  negative, the universe would collapse on itself. So it's not a physical direction of reversal of the arrow of time, but it would effectively lead to a big, a big, a big bang in reverse, mainly could be a big crunch or could be a bounce, which some cosmologists favor. Okay, Bill H. asks, what do I think about the dark forest theory? I think it's brilliant science fiction. We had Ching Sun Lu here at UCSD, the three body problem, five years ago, maybe. As science, though, it's still pretty speculative. The theory is that everybody's hiding and everyone's fearing from everybody else and that first contact is known to represent annihilation. There's a lot of this in human history where, you know, discovered, you know, tribes, you know, and all around the

• 16:48Brian Keating?

  world were later set upon by great misfortune by the contact with a more technological life, not necessarily more intelligent life. I mean, it's interesting, they've done, they've looked at, you know, why didn't, you know, Aborigines and- And Australia colonized Europe instead of the other way around. And they've actually looked and actually certain things did happen. It had nothing to do that their genetics are inferior or superior. Because when Europeans tried to colonize Greenland, they failed ultimately as well. So whereas the natives were able to persist there. So I think it's an interesting thing to think about, well, is it always bad? Does it always suggest superior intelligence? No, it doesn't necessarily. So we don't know if civilizations are aggressive inherently. We only have one example of life in the universe that's conscious and technological, and that's us.

• 17:32Brian Keating?

  So they could be indifferent to us. It's a fascinating hypothesis, but it's not really a prediction. So, okay. Peter says, "We want more real science and less Loeb and Weinstein." Okay, look, they're my friends. I'm gonna talk to them. I have intellectual diversity. I talk to people that believe in intelligent design. I talk to militant atheists, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins. Hosted me, I hosted him in Vancouver overnight a year or two ago. And I'll talk to people like Stephen Meyer. Because I like the intellectual challenge of wrestling with ideas and seeing where they hold up and they comport with scientific evidence. Sometimes that'll be with Nobel laureates, sometimes it'll be with people I strongly disagree with.

• 18:17Brian Keating?

  I mean, Sam Harris basically won't come back on the show because he and I disagreed about the, you know, kind of definition of slavery and he has a very kind of limited capacity to argue, but it doesn't prevent him from having confidence in his position, even though he knows very little about what these actual prescriptions, parameters were for slavery. And I'm not defending slavery, God forbid, but I am saying that there was a very different, big difference between the slavery that was practiced there and the slavery in the Bible and the slavery in Southern America. So, anyway, I will talk to people that are religious Christians, I'll talk to militant atheists. I love to expose ideas to scrutiny and then evidence. I'm an experimentalist, not like Sean Carroll, not like Sam Harris, not like Lawrence Krauss

• 19:02Brian Keating?

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

• 19:47Brian Keating?

  gives rise to the next. So you have this cyclical universe. And the conformal portion, that's a cyclical C. The conformal is that angles are preserved and kind of, it's possible to preserve geometric effects. So there's rulers and compasses, and they adhere to the ordinary behavior. A triangle has 180 degrees. So you have three black holes, which are the only things that really can go through each aeon subsequently. That each one of them in the triangle would have some angle. And locally, that would be flat, 180 degrees between them. And whatever angle it is, doesn't matter if it's flat or not, would then transform into an identical triplet of black holes, which would also have the same properties on the other side of the next aeon.

• 20:32Brian Keating?

  So there could be a first cycle, but there doesn't have to be. So that each Big Bang is a transition from one aeon to another, not an origin. And that would be very transformative of our understanding of cosmic history. But it wouldn't invalidate the physics that we know about. But it would sort of explain mathematically, possibly physically, although, again, we have no evidence for it. And it has the virtue that it could be falsified, proven wrong. If we detect primordial gravitational waves, those can only come from inflation, as Sir Roger Penrose admits himself. So it could be falsified, unlike inflation, which can't be falsified. In other words, if we never see any gravitational waves with the Simons Observatory,

• 21:15Brian Keating?

  it doesn't mean that inflation didn't take place. And if we do see them, it doesn't mean that inflation took place also. It just means that's by far the most plausible explanation. Some call it the smoking gun. But you can't prove a physical fact about the universe. You can only motivate it. And you can certainly disprove physical phenomena and rule them out, but you can't necessarily prove them. Okay, next question. Sociotarian. What's the most interesting philosophical questions that I grapple with? Okay, things that keep me awake at night. I think number one, why are we here? Why is there something? Why isn't there nothing? Why is it possible to understand language and humans?

• 21:58Brian Keating?

  And why are we seemingly the only entities that have consciousness? What is consciousness? We don't know. Are we alone? What's the nature of the beginning of time? Did time have a beginning? Is the universe eternal? Sort of, people think there's one big bang, but there's actually many big bangs. Not that there's many big bang theories or that we mean something different. We talk about the big bang theory versus some other cosmological model. We talk about big bang nucleosynthesis, the origin of matter. So there was actually an origin of, you know, energy that had to have taken place from preceding either non-energy or non-energetic phase. In other words, truly ex nulio means there wasn't even energy. Right now, our cosmology breaks down.

• 22:41Brian Keating?

  We have physical evidence in the form of, you know, water or the hydrogen ratio of deuterium to protium in the ordinary water that we have in the universe that has to be primordial. It's very close to the primordial ratio. And their abundances, and that tells us that the universe had to be a fusion reactor at extremely early times. And in fact, it's the only epoch at which we, it's the only evidence we have from the radiation-dominated epoch. We live in the cosmological constant-dominated epoch or dark energy epoch. And before that, when life formed on Earth, the Earth formed during the matter-dominated epoch, you know, four billion years ago. And before that, the universe was mostly, has been mostly matter-dominated. But the different big bangs could be the origin of energy, and then from energy to

• 23:25Brian Keating?

  mass, massive matter, then from massive matter to inert, you know, chemistry.

• 23:31Brian Keating?

  And then from inert chemistry to organic chemistry, organic chemistry to primordial life, from primordial life to consciousness, from consciousness, you know, all these things came from something that wasn't conscious became conscious. Something that wasn't living turned into something that was living. Something that wasn't energy turned into energy. Something that wasn't matter turned into matter. These are all different types of big bangs, ex nulio, or from nothing type creation events. And those, to me, are the most interesting philosophical questions that we could ever hope to answer. But as I often say, you know, Mother Nature is this infinite army of overwhelming power and force. And the only benefit we have, perhaps, the only hope we have against Mother Nature is that she's always in retreat. So, can

• 24:15Brian Keating?

  never win science, you can never defeat science. Wheeler said, as the, you know, island of knowledge increases, the boundary of ignorance increases too, but the ratio increases as the radius goes. So you actually take on more knowledge versus more, a more boundary or more ignorance. Okay. Thomas Sousa, guests I've never had on, or I've tried to get on and have declined. I really haven't had too many that I've really wanted to talk to but couldn't. The only one that I wanted to talk to and plausibly could talk to, a few years back, was Andrea Gez, who won the Nobel Prize. She works at UCLA, is part of the UC system. She came to give a colloquium here. I tried to interview her. I've helped her, you know, try to get in

• 25:00Brian Keating?

  touch with the Simons Foundation once upon a time, before she won the Nobel Prize. And I thought that would curry some favor. But I think she's tired and she thinks I'm gonna ask her, you know, do you, what advice do you have for my daughter? And, you know, but I've never asked that. I've had on, you know, two female Nobel Prize winners, Katalin Karakó, and also I've had on Donna Strickland. And these are, you know, you can go back and look at the interviews, and at no point did I dwell on being a female or not, and I just want to talk about science with her. So she's probably the only one. I talked to Elon Musk, you know, I don't think I could get him on for an ordinary episode. But I think I have a lot to say with him, you know, for longer than the 15 minutes I talked to him for a

• 25:45Brian Keating?

  couple of years ago. Let's see, dream guests. I've had, you know, so many great guests. And the ones that I can't get are unfortunately not alive. And fortunately, I got some of them on the podcast, like the late, great Dan Dennett. That was the last interview he ever gave. On the podcast, Jim Simons, my mentor, friend, father figure to me, he was on Freeman Dyson was my first ever guest on. You know, there are very few people that I, you know, I don't really have like idol worship in my genes. I've talked to 20, it'll be 26 Nobel Prize winners pretty soon. Just finished my 25th and scheduling my 26th. They're ordinary people, you know, they put on their pants one leg at a time. And, and I just feel so fortunate

• 26:29Brian Keating?

  that you guys have all come along on the ride and the power, the size of the audience. Yeah, maybe it helps to get, you know, if I wanted to have on, you know, Barack Obama on the podcast or, you know, I don't know if I actually do, but let's just say I wanted to. It certainly helps to have a bigger audience. So please do share the Into the Impossible podcast with your friends and neighbors and people that are curious about all things from AI to astronomy, zoology and back. So I think there's no other place where you go as deep intellectually. And also I give you the opportunity to ask questions of my guests, especially those of you who are channel members that really do support. And I don't make, I make hardly any, 99 cents a month before YouTube takes their 20% tax, like

• 27:12Brian Keating?

  70 cents a month. I'm not, you know, putting food on the table, but it does send me a powerful signal that people are willing to pay, you know, and it's, you value something more that you pay for. Now you pay attention, all of you, and I have a huge cohort of people that are ride or die and listen to the entirety of every single episode. I just love that. And I'll continue to make content for everybody. And, but the bigger the audience certainly will help get more folks on the podcast. So I'd say, you know, maybe the few people I, you know, would still want to talk to that I haven't had a chance to, don't really know how to get in touch with them, although they seem to do a lot of podcasts with people that have bigger audiences. I don't think they do a better job necessarily than I do,

• 27:53Brian Keating?

  especially in the technical realm. Jeffrey Hinton, Demis Hassabis, just, you know, again, the Nobel Prize, but also that I've thought about things that I know Demis is very, you know, taken with as well, like the Einstein test, which is, you know, can an AI trained only on information and only Accessible to information before nineteen eleven. Come up with G R or, you know, quantum mechanics and try to implement that. I was scooped by, as I said earlier, scooped by another set of researchers, although they didn't apply the test as I want to do and extend it. I'm not going to say what my application is because there's still some hope that I can publish a novel paper about A I. Intelligence and artificial general intelligence, really, which is what interests me the most. Jensen Swang, I think, is an interesting guy.

• 28:37Brian Keating?

  I'd like to ask him about lock-in and whether or not G P U's and L M's really, you know, represent the limit of what's possible. Yes, they're universal Turing machines and they can do anything that we could hope to. And Roman Yampolsky told me that, you know, they're uncontrollable and unpredictable and there's no hope for us and we should have paused ten years ago. I want to get, you know, his take on that and what are the physical limits to growth? We live on an actual planet. I'm an actual astrophysicist, you know, Dwarkesh Patel and Lex Friedman or not, and I'd love to talk to them from a physics perspective. Other people out there, certainly, you know, there's a lot. I have an episode with Sean Ryan coming out. That was quite good.

• 29:19Brian Keating?

  You know, I don't really have this desire to go back on shows. I've been on, you know, pretty much every one of the big podcasts.

• 29:26Brian Keating?

  I do like it when the host is as well-read as I try to be. I've read every single book. And the books behind me are just like the square root of the number of books I have in my, in my library. I read every single author's book. And it is hard when an author, sorry, when a guest doesn't have a book, when an author doesn't have a book. It's actually easier to interview people that have books. So, you know, Terry Tao will be a much better interview the second time, I think, when I get to him. So I hope to go up to UCLA again. And sit down with him and interview him again.

• 29:58Brian Keating?

  Yeah, other than that, I don't have, they're not like some, you know, white whales that I really want to get to and haven't had a chance to get to. I love when, you know, people that have big ideas come out with, with great books. I'm trying to do more in-person interviews than Riverside interviews, just because I think the vibes are much more highly curated and, and it's just allows for deeper interpersonal.

• 30:23Brian Keating?

  You know, gestures to be perceived and it's just a much more intimate. And for me, it's more fun and the guests are more vulnerable and we get a lot more real time feedback and I just, you know, like the energy of being in person. I'm a people person, you know, what can I say? Okay, let's go next. Chris McMullen. Has physics become too expensive? Yeah, absolutely. And that's a byproduct of the low hanging fruit being picked. You know, the first, you know, cyclotron ever invented was this big. And it was 20 centimeter circumference and now, you know, CERN is what? 10,000 times bigger. So there's, there's no, there's no denying it has gotten incredibly expensive and much bigger. And the big science is important.

• 31:06Brian Keating?

  It gives us, you know, LIGO, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Simons Observatories. The, one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive privately funded, predominantly private funded, I mean, UC San Diego and Penn and Princeton and Chicago and Berkeley and all of our partner institutions, Japan and the UK, they put in tremendous resources. But, you know, 80, 90 million, 100 million plus has come from the Simons Foundation, not from the National Science Foundation. So that's been incredibly rewarding, but, but yes, it's not really sustainable. It'll probably be, could be the last ground based C and B experiment, you know, for the foreseeable future. There might be spaceborne experiments like Lightbird, which you'll hear more about on my other channel. Don't forget to subscribe, Keating Experiments.

• 31:51Brian Keating?

  So a lot of it comes down to bureaucracy. It's hard to get these things through. They take forever, you know, panels and get reviewed and then they have budgets that they go through and then they have to get launched or they have to get built. And we have 450 people in the Simons Observatory. And, you know, we started out with 40, 50, you know, 10 institutions. Now we've got 50 and we're literally all around the world. So I think those, you know, kind of big experiments have a place. I think small experiments have a place. I'm building a small experiment, you know, for my optical astronomy pursuits to look for the violation of Einstein's, you know, bedrock was called Lorentz Invariance, that the speed of light, for example, doesn't depend on color. That's a very cheap experiment. It's a, it's a 20 inch telescope that we had here and

• 32:33Brian Keating?

  UCSD and put an observatory and we have some, you know, high-speed detectors and sensitive detectors on it and filters and, you know, we hope to do some interesting polar imagery with it, which is another unexplored area of very simple sources, supernovae, you know, novae and what are called eclipsing binary stars. And if we can do that, you know, it's low risk, high reward. My philosophy, and I tell this to my students as well, always try to do something high risk and low risk at the same time, so that you all have high reward and you'll have guaranteed reward. In other words, if you're successful in the high risk, like the Simons Observatory is a perfect example, we're trying to measure inflationary-generated primordial gravitational

• 33:13Brian Keating?

  wave-generated B-modes, which if true herald the inflationary epoch's existence, and the inflationary epoch's existence heralds the existence of the multiverse to most people, including Guth and Linde I've had on. I should have said Guth would be a great person that I haven't had on. He and I are co-authors. We had co-advised a former postdoc and, you know, he gets my emails, but he hasn't replied to them. So I have tried to get him on. It's hard to get him on than the 27 Nobel Prizes soon that I've had, winners that I've had on. So the Simons Observatory will detect potentially inflation, according to him and Linde, who I have had on, that would herald the multiverse. So we'd no longer be living in a universe, according to them, we'd have overwhelming

• 33:57Brian Keating?

  circumstantial evidence that we live in a multiverse. So what could be a bigger, you know, kind of gambit than that? However, we can also detect things like the presence of dark matter, gravitational lensing, the presence of neutrinos, the only form of dark matter that we know to exist, to detect the cosmic neutrino background and make limits and measurements of it. That's a guaranteed measure. We're gonna do that. We're gonna measure the masses of neutrinos with terrestrial experiments and like the Juno experiment in China and other ones, giving information as well. This'll be a huge thing. We'll determine the number of relativistic species, we'll measure the existence or lack thereof and set limits on, cosmic birefringence, which would mean Lorentz invariance is violated.

• 34:42Brian Keating?

  These are incredible things. Some of them are guaranteed. We could measure Planet Nine if it exists. They're incredible. And so it's low risk in that sense, and we're guaranteed to get a lot of science out. We have this large aperture telescope that's six meters across that has incredibly high resolution. And then we have the coarse grain resolution wide aperture refracting cameras that measure the inflationary B-mode signal. That's in the unknown. We don't know if it's going to be there. If it's there, it's the highest risk, highest reward. And if it's not, we still are going to measure with the with the other instruments. The presence or absence of neutrino masses and Planet Nine, all these other great things. So it's an incredibly exciting time. Understand the galaxy, understand extra, you know,

• 35:24Brian Keating?

  galaxies outside of our own and clusters of galaxies and gravitational lensing. And really refine the cosmological model, measure the Hubble constant. These are spectacular accomplishments. So that's why I like to do it. You know, we need both, you know, kind of sailboats and aircraft carriers in our arsenal. Okay, Justin White. What's the most credible evidence for extraterrestrial life? So I've been going off on this a lot lately, including conversations with people like Avi Loeb and Michael Shermer. You know, kind of on opposite sides of the fence.

• 35:55Brian Keating?

  And Beatrice Villarreal. And, you know, there really isn't evidence right now. I mean, there's there's data that we collect that is suggestive, but it's no by no means, you know, probative. And so there was a survey done in Nature Astronomy by Vickers and all. And I just learned about this thanks to having a conversation with a with a, you know, Christian apologist effectively. Hugh Ross, who brought the survey to my attention. It's done in Nature Astronomy. It's not like, you know, Discovery Institute did the survey. And in it, he they described that, you know, something eighty-eight percent of astronomers or astrobiologists survey believe that there is the existence of extraterrestrial life.

• 36:39Brian Keating?

  And I said, that's I shouldn't dignify that question with an answer. He said, I don't, you know, is there evidence for it? So there is, in fact, maybe slight evidence against life in the universe being, you know, abundant. And the large numbers hypothesis is a hell of a drug. You know, people think, oh, there's ten to the twenty-fourth planets. Let's just say Adam Frank, you know, Professor Adam Frank, who I've had on, is right. And, yeah, there've been on multiple, you know, planets or on multiple stars and multiple galaxies and multiple clusters of galaxies going back multiple billions of years. I agree with all those numbers, you know, there could be a factor of 10 either way, but it's still, you know, a trillion trillion, of order of trillion trillion bodies in the observable universe over the history of the universe, which is important because if life existed,

• 37:24Brian Keating?

  you know, eight billion years ago, good luck finding it, right? And it's gone now because the average stellar system is not going to live anywhere near that time, especially going back in time when population three that we heard about earlier was dominant and those stars lasted 50 million years. So, good luck trying to find, you know, an exoplanet with life on it in another galaxy, you know, 13 billion years ago. So, there are people that say the rapid emergence of life on Earth is evidence, but it's not really evidence. It's evidence of how it instantiated itself on Earth itself is one example. Organic chemistry, you find organic chemistry throughout the universe, you know, we find all sorts of elements and we find all sorts of combinations and carbon is a very abundant element in

• 38:04Brian Keating?

  the universe, in our galaxy, and so on. So, to say that it's there, it's almost, you know, as Hugh Ross tries to use it as an example of fine tuning, that actually there could be life everywhere in the universe, but we only find life on Earth, therefore, God wanted it to be so. So, I think you get into this delicate balance. If you're saying that life is so abundant, no, I don't believe that's a valid argument either. I use my canonical example of being in Antarctica twice in my life at the South Pole, you know, which is one-seventh of the Earth's continents, right? But it doesn't have one-seventh of the Earth's mass, or one-seventh of the Earth's population, it has almost zero population. Right now, in the middle of winter, it has almost zero, about maybe 200 people on the entire continent, and the other 8.3 billion are elsewhere, right? Including people that

• 38:49Brian Keating?

  are living, you know, under the ocean and there's a couple of people in, living in space, right? So, there's, you know, not more than one or two orders of magnitude more people living in Antarctica than living on the space station. But that, so, and there's an awful lot of space in the universe. Do we expect to find life on other, you know, floating around in space in just random locations? So, the amount of space in the universe is a fallacious argument. It's an example of the large numbers hypothesis. So, I don't believe that. And I don't think you should say belief, you know, I say, do we have evidence? And the last thing in which I've used, and I have yet to hear a cogent You know, reply or falsification of my hypothesis that Earth and Mars shared a common history when Mars was li- had liquid water running on it.

• 39:31Brian Keating?

  And we were exchanging meteorites like these meteorites that you'll get if you go to briankeating.com/edu and you have a .edu email address, or if you go to briankeating.com/yt and you don't have one, I do give them away. You have to live in the US because the postal service won't mail these things outside of the US, at least not for like 50 bucks. I'm sorry, I cannot afford that. But I will send them to you no matter what if you have a US.edu email address. So the fact that the Earth, Mars, Moon, all these celestial bodies, but in particular Mars, which had running water, is inhabitable zone and has, you know, all sorts of the requirements that's believed to be supportive of life, including carbon dioxide, you know, in its atmosphere. So the fact that we don't see life on Mars

• 40:14Brian Keating?

  or any evidence of life on Mars, that's not proof. Again, we can't look everywhere. We've only scratched less than the barest, you know, few centimeters of its surface throughout a couple of landing spots. And so that's not proof, but there's certainly not mega cities there and dolphins swimming around with iPhones. So the fact that we could have had life and that we could have been seeded by the cosmos using panspermic logic, the fact that Mars wasn't seeded and that we are exchanging, like we're like a stockroom that's sending life to these other planets. I mean, there is, there are going to be fossils found on Mars someday, probably. It's not out of the realm of possibility, not from fossilized life that used to live on Mars, but from fossils that lived on Earth that got blasted

• 40:54Brian Keating?

  in meteorite impacts to Mars and to the Moon. Now, maybe there'll be not, you know, we won't find them, but it's not, it's not physically impossible. Therefore, it has some actual probability.

• 41:07Speaker 00

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• 41:36Brian Keating?

  Certainly, I wouldn't say there's no possibility of life throughout the universe. I would just say that the evidence for intelligent life, or sophisticated advanced life, is very, very scant, if not zero. And so multiplying zero by 10 to the 24th still gives you zero. And that's the large numbers gambler's hypothesis fallacy. So I've seen evidence that we're gonna hear about things that have life, like signatures, biosignatures. We've heard that many, many times. I'm not talking about disclosure. I'm talking about like phosphine on Venus and other extremophiles. The existence of life on Earth, for now, remains our only documented evidence for life in the universe. That doesn't mean there couldn't be life elsewhere in the universe. We do see, as I said, other planets.

• 42:21Brian Keating?

  We have biological organisms that can survive the harshest of space. And as you go up the sophistication ladder to bipedal, human-like objects, I think that that's, you know, gets even less plausible. But again, I will never say impossible. After all, the name of the podcast is Into the Impossible. Okay. Next question. Screwdriver turning. Am I the experimental version of the Witten family cover-up? Hmm. Now, I've studied string theory a little bit, enough to make fun of it and poke fun at it and say things like, there's more evidence for intelligent design, having falsifiable hypotheses than string theory.

• 43:05Brian Keating?

  You know, very, very, very firmly tongue planted in cheek. But I don't know what the cover-up. I know that Louis Witten was involved in gravity research and that he, you know, he hosted this conference in the 50s at Chapel Hill. But there are a lot of, you know, kind of conspiracies that are spread about the Witten family and anti-gravity and there are memos from Australia in 1971, I'm told, that talk about these things. But there's nothing documented. There's no, you know, transactions or the government, you know, there's a check and it's written to, you know, John Wheeler and then, you know, they're making anti-gravity propulsion systems.

• 43:45Brian Keating?

  Allow for, you know, TARDIS-like aircraft or spacecraft to fly and be bigger on the inside than they are outside, uh, interdimensional beings and things like that. There's no evidence for any of that, as far as I know. Now, one cool thing is that, uh, UNC Chapel Hill is also the, um, the, uh, academic home of Warren Robinette. Now, Warren Robinette, who the heck is that? So he developed, uh, this Atari game that I used to play in the 1980s on my Atari 2600 called Adventure. And Adventure was, uh, crafted by him. And it was, you're going around this kingdom and you're fighting dragons and you have a sword. But there was also this magical room that you could go to with a tiny pixel, a single pixel that you'd carry around. And

• 44:29Brian Keating?

  it's considered the first Easter egg. And if you brought this thing and you went to the secret chamber that my cousin David taught me about, and you could go and then drop it off and you'd get this magical screen that would talk about how Warren Robinette was this like kind of master simulator in the simulation hypothesis. So he was there, UNC Chapel Hill. Is that a coincidence or not? You know, kind of the first evidence for the simulation hypothesis validity came from the very place where the UNC Chapel Hill Gravitometrics Conference was held in the 50s. So what's the biggest lesson that I take from 400,000 video subscribers, probably another 100,000 plus on audio alone? It's not that, you know, I've learned something, which I have, about UFOs or cosmology or

• 45:12Brian Keating?

  Nobel Prizes or AI or life or consciousness. It's that the curiosity of the human mind is unmatched and unbeaten. There's nothing like it. There's nothing like these three-pound supercomputers that we carry on our heads to think of things. We are universal explainers, according to my friend David Deutsch, right? So these are incredible times to be alive. The innovations of AI are both threatening, terrifying, and extremely exhilarating to me. To think that I have this army of unpaid graduate students, uh, that are working around the clock and agents swarms that I dispatch to investigate, to research, to do, to help me, you know, uh, think about the different topics I want to

• 45:55Brian Keating?

  ...and different explainer videos, uh, to doing deep research on like, what's the birthday in the place of some guest I'm gonna have on? You know, these are things that I couldn't have done before. I don't have the team for it. I just don't have the team or the time. And so to me, it's that there's something unique about this podcast. It's, it's resonating with, with hundreds of thousands of other minds. I mean, I looked up the number of likes that I've gotten. So that's not even, you know, a metric that you can really interpret, other than to say somebody liked the video. It's like one or two million people have liked my videos. I mean, they've, they've been watched for literally two, one between one and two million hours, just in the last couple of years. Um, sixty to seventy million views of all my videos.

• 46:39Brian Keating?

  And this is just on the Into the Impossible, you know, and Dr. Brian Keating and my new channel, Keating Experiments. So please go over there, Professor Keating Experiments. But this is just, you know, blows me away. You know, millions of hours of time, hu- million, you know, thousands of, of human lifetimes. It's incredible in that you spend it with me and I love spending it with you and without you, I don't really do this anymore. I'm not just gonna broadcast into the ether as much fun as that might be to hear myself talk. I can hear myself talk for free. I don't have to get all, you know, my hair done and, and get, uh, you know, shaved and get these fancy cameras and editors and all the other stuff that I need to do, cause I want to do it. I feel like I owe it to everybody who's a scientist, is paid for by the public.

• 47:20Brian Keating?

  Our jobs depend on you. I wanna give back to you for free. If you wanna get closer, more intimate, I offer things like these office hours that you can be a member of and that, that's a very intimate, small club and Patreon and on, um, YouTube and membership, which is different than subscribing. There's a difference. And on Substack, I have a, a Substack that I also do these things on, but it's an incredible ride and I keep, I'll keep going. I have no reason to stop. I really enjoy what I do and get to, who, the people I get to talk to. And again, the more of you there are, it does carry some weight, you know? I think to get, you know, maybe Alan Guth is waiting for the 500K, I don't know, but, uh, uh, who knows? Maybe he is, maybe he's not.

• 48:01Brian Keating?

  The point is, the more people that get to experience these once in a lifetime conversations, I mean, literally for Daniel Dennett, it was the last podcast he ever did, and I think I did a great job with it. He certainly was extremely warm and expressed a lot of gratitude for that conversation. He was very say, he had this huge bandage on his head, it wasn't related to his, the cause of his death, but, you know, he took the time, and it was the last, it was in the last hours of his life, and those are some of the million hours that you guys have gotten to watch and spend time with me and with him and with others. And I hope that you'll continue to do so and spread the channel love. I do think we are, you know, as some say criminally under subscribed. A 69% of you, I'm told, do not subscribe.

• 48:45Brian Keating?

  I don't know why. You watch regularly, and YouTube has this amazing engine for tracking the metrics, and we know you're watching, but you're not subscribing. I don't know why. Subscriptions are the only way publicly that you can sort of gauge relative channel, you know, it's kind of like the H-index of a channel in some ways, although views are more important. If somebody said, you know, I'll watch every single video, or I'll subscribe and watch no videos, obviously I'm going to take the non-subscriber over the subscriber. But it does carry some weight, so please do consider it, and please accept my deepest gratitude for being on this mission, this multiverse of minds, that is just in this consonant and resonant phenomenon. And I don't think we have any real, you know, plans to

• 49:29Brian Keating?

  change anything. I'm not going to, you know, move into AI, you know, slop and content, and I'm not going to keep reading books, talking to geniuses, poking back, pushing back when necessary, being respectful, having live conversations, getting the biggest names in science and some of the smaller names too. People that you may have never heard of. I did a conversation not too long ago with a professor at Princeton, Tom Griffiths. Who studies AI and wrote a book about um about computational science and the the math behind uh you know computational um you know cognitive science, a cognitive scientist and a computer scientist, the laws of thought. And it's one of my most popular, it's almost got 200,000 views in a couple of months. You know, I didn't know about Tom. I mean,

• 50:14Brian Keating?

  yes, he's a famous, you know, Princeton professor, brilliant guy, but until I read his book, I didn't know about him. And now I do. And now you do. And you know, just having people like that, or you know, smaller or bigger guests, um, you know, this huge roster of of uh episodes that are recorded but not yet released, and you're gonna be blown away by them. Um, and I just have so much fun being with it. Now, I also am going to now segue into the second half of the live stream I just did this week with Avi Loeb. And that had kind of a Q and A session about my thoughts on aliens and UFOs and and people like David Grush and Congresswoman Luna and other things, has a little bit of that, also has a little bit of kind of reflections on 400,000 viewers, and a little bit of inside baseball on podcasting.

• 50:59Brian Keating?

  I I, you know, encourage you to listen to it if you're interested in getting to know kind of what makes me tick. Um, it's a little self indulgent, like all these things are. But you know, if you don't celebrate the small things and the and the big things, you know, what else is there, you know, in life but, you know, compounding misery. So for me, I hope you'll enjoy this uh the second half of this show, or kind of just talk to the camera after Avi left. And I talk about my philosophy. I'm not afraid to push back, even on Friends. I know you guys, you know, some of you are, don't want to see Avi Loeb, some of you don't want to see Eric Weinstein. Fine. I mean, you don't have to listen to those episodes. You know, we live in a, in a free internet. You can listen or not. So choose your own adventure. I hope you'll uh forgive the indulgence, self indulgence

• 51:42Brian Keating?

  of the second part of this episode, but it was fun, kind of stream of consciousness. You get to see what a scientist thinks about when they're not thinking about science. And now I'm gonna go back to science. I'm gonna finish up those papers before I get scooped again. And again, just um 400,000, you know, shining points of light. May there be many more, and uh and an infinite amount of gratitude. Okay, now into part two. Stay tuned.

• 52:12Brian Keating?

  All right, well, you heard inimitable Avi Loeb, and he's always such a fascinating guest to have on, I've had him on many times, but I want to talk to you now because he's left the building, you know, he's dropped his briefcase, he's no longer here, but I have a lot of thoughts, I have a lot of thoughts, I have a lot of feels from this interview that I just did, you know, thinking about the preparation I did for it involving multiple guests that are coming up this week, including Beatrice Villarreal, who's coming on Wednesday, Michael Shermer, who's coming on Thursday, all involved in some form or another what Avi's doing. So, I really, you know, it's hard, because when I do these podcasts, when I do these interviews, especially live, there's a million things I want to ask, I want you

• 52:54Brian Keating?

  guys to ask, I want you guys to be engaged, I don't think any other podcast from, you know, the competitors do these kind of live streams, Kurt J. Mungel, a friend of mine, you know, past guest, I've been on his show, Sean Carroll, certainly, I don't think David Kipping, my friend and respected colleague, and so I really do feel like this is a unique opportunity that I give in the comments, but also for you guys to ask questions, and there were literally hundreds of comments, so I did my best, and I always get criticized, "Why are you looking away?" you know, like, so I bought a teleprompter, you know, and now I can put the questions here, so it looks like I'm, I am indeed doing as I'm doing, paying attention, but I need to be candid with you, because, I mean, I think if I lose

• 53:35Brian Keating?

  my, my, my trust with you, I think I lose everything, and I want to be honest, you know, I've pushed back on Avi since the "we" days of when he first came on the podcast in 2020 to talk about his first book, which is mentioned here, Extraterrestrial, and I said, "Avi, you know, you believe that this object, Mu Mu, it comes from an alien civilization, potentially, maybe it's not technology itself, but it's leftover from technology, it could be a garbage barge, it could be a solar cell." I said, Avi, wouldn't it be great if you knew some billionaires that could spend money to fly a probe and catch up to Omuamua? And of course, that was tongue in cheek, but I was pushing back on him because he did know people like that, Yuri Milner, and he still does.

• 54:15Brian Keating?

  The breakthrough star shot enterprise is funded by Avi's friends and colleagues, Yuri Milner and others. And he's at Harvard, arguably this hedge fund with a $50 billion endowment that still charges tuition that outpaces inflation. I always forget to criticize Avi for that and rejects more people than I got rejected when I was on the dating market. They serve 1,500 people in the freshman class, so it's pretty small. It's like a Chipotle does every day on a decent day. So it's exclusive. He's in this multi-billion dollar orbit. He brags about billionaires coming to his doorstep, and I don't fault them because he is incredible at what he does. And he's rigorous, and he's a real scientist.

• 55:00Brian Keating?

  I just had a video criticizing Michio Kaku's most recent appearance on Diary of a CEO. It's got four or five million views, and I'm trying to debunk all these claims. And I ran out of patience after 15 claims in a 40-minute video. Avi's not like Michio. Avi's working in the trenches, writing papers. I don't know when the last paper Michio Kaku wrote was. I bet it wasn't recently. And there are a lot of great... Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't written a paper since the Reagan administration, as far as I can tell. But they do something important, and they have a role. And they also have their own kind of financial incentives because they're all writing books. Look, I write books. I don't do it for the money. The amount of money I get from my books is near or below minimum wage, I think, even

• 55:45Brian Keating?

  here in California. So, believe me, I'm not doing it for the money. Maybe these other folks are... Maybe Avi is. I don't know. Maybe David Grush is. Who knows? I'm not even speculating. They're involved in movies that's never interested me whatsoever. I'm interested in finding out information while I still can, while I still have influence and ability to influence young minds and get into the passion of science. I wouldn't become a public university professor if I was really interested in the money. Okay? So let's put that to rest. But I told Avi Backman when Omuamua was in the news, "It's not that far outside of our solar system. It's your last chance to catch up to it." And he said, "Well, there'll be many more coming through." Now, there's been two more that have come through. And one of them was known to be a comet, Borisov, and the second one now, a third one now,

• 56:30Brian Keating?

  seems very likely, even according to its greatest champion, Avi Loeb, to be, uh, to be also more likely to be extraterrestrial, uh, uh, you know, natural material than extraterrestrial technological materials. He just said he lowered the confidence on his coined Loeb scale. I wouldn't have called it the Loeb scale. Although I do have the Keating Medal. I do give the Keating Medal, uh, to people that came in. And just recently, I gave my first Keating Medal for impossible imagination to a man who won the Nobel Prize. So, we're kind of squaring off which one is bigger. My, my Keating Medal is bigger than the Nobel Prize. Anyway, you'll see that interview soon. But here's where I land. Avi is doing rigorous version, the most rigorous version I think that you could do. He wants the instruments. He doesn't want the fields. He doesn't want the testimony, the interdimensional beings.

• 57:12Brian Keating?

  I think Luna is really, really doing something that I, I think is, is self-destructive, uh, for her cause. She's criticized Kirkpatrick. Again, I had him on. I know most of you hate Kirkpatrick. I think that's nonsense. Don't you want to see me ask these people questions? I didn't let him get away with stuff either. I'm gonna push these people and I'm gonna ask questions because this is the most important thing I think that humanity may ever discover, including what I do, you know, which I think is pretty damn important. Studying galaxies, studying the cosmos, studying the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, Lorentz in variation, invariance, all these things. These are incredibly important things, but if we found extraterrestrial intelligent sentient plasmoids and interdimensional beings, come on, that would be, you know, I'd stop doing what I'm doing and join up with Avi. But so why haven't I done that?

• 57:56Brian Keating?

  Because I haven't seen the sensors. I haven't seen the instruments. I haven't seen the data. I've talked to the people that have talked to the people, and that includes people like Ryan Graves, uh, who have, you know, claimed to witness things, uh, to see, to talk to people that have, he has, no, he hasn't claimed to talk to the people. He's talked to people. They work in a squadron and, but he, he has, has often claimed that he saw these things directly, but he said candidly on my interview with him, maybe, maybe things have changed, but, but that he didn't witness it, but his colleagues and squadron mates did. Uh, and that was fine. Because you can report on it. Grush is doing the same thing. He hasn't seen these things. He's saying that people that he knows has seen these things. Okay, so where does this sit in the evidentiary scale of science? It's very low, right?

• 58:38Brian Keating?

  It's very low. Whereas data, hard evidence, you know, people joke about, "Well, you believe in dark matter." Yeah, I believe in dark matter because we've already detected dark matter. We've captured dark matter. We interact with dark matter. We know how to build sensors that do it, and we know how to measure it throughout cosmic history. They're called neutrinos. Okay? So people say, "Oh, dark matter, you're just an idiot. You're a fantasy. You believe things too." No, I don't believe in it. We have evidence for dark matter. Neutrinos fit every definition of dark matter. They're massive. They interact weakly. There's just happens to be not enough of them to make the universe flat in terms of its curvature. And so there must be non-neutrinos, there must be other non-neutrino forms of dark matter. But neutrinos make up every bit of dark matter that any theorist would ever

• 59:20Brian Keating?

  want. They just don't make up enough to do... Well, that's like saying, "Well, hydrogen, you know, only makes up 74% of the universe's baryonic mass density. So does that mean that baryons don't exist?" It's a stupid argument, okay? So we've detected dark matter. We have evidence for dark matter. Now, we haven't detected dark energy in the same way we've detected dark matter because we don't have the ability to bottle it up. But when we hear these things, this is what drives me crazy. I'm an experimentalist. Avi's a theorist. Most of the people he's talking to are theorists. Gary Nolan is not an experimental astrophysicist. He's not dealing with the same types of sensors. He's dealing with experiences that he had that he talked about on my show when we did a co-live stream together with Avi Loeb a couple of years back. So you can look that up. Now, what's important to me? I pushed him on Luna because he has access to her. She

• 1:00:05Brian Keating?

  is, you know, is obviously a fangirl of Avi, as are many people. He's very charming. But we need a whistleblower who has, you know, the power and is not afraid to use it, not to go after people like Kirkpatrick, who was serving his country as best as he could. And he got a ton of crap for it. You know, I think after having spoken to him, he would never do it again. You know, he got death threats and all sorts of things going after his family. It's horrible what happens to people like that. And that's why I caution Avi, "Are you sure you want to do this?" Because it's inevitable you're going to piss people off, and you're going to go up against the Pentagon that has Psyop info. Disinformation, malinformation campaigns against everybody that you think that we don't spy on the Chinese or or or the Israelis or you know, we spy on everybody and and

• 1:00:47Brian Keating?

  thank God, you know, for that, as Jack Nicholson said, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. Now, I don't like the fact that my relatives were tortured, you know, I feel like that's bad, but they're not babies. They're the some of the strongest men, you know, women that I know, and they do things for volunteer. They didn't get recruited with a bag over their head and get waterboarded, you know, uh, for for for grins and giggles. That wasn't what happened. No, that was part of their search of aid and rescue, uh, uh, training that they had in the military, and thank God that they did. Uh, and I hope that they never have to use that, but they're they're hardened against it should they ever have to use it. Okay, so let's let's look at this. Where is Luna coming down? She has the power to subpoena people. She has full immunity. Uh, I've also wondered, and maybe I'm just a, you know, foolish about how the government works. Again, I don't want anything bad to

• 1:01:31Brian Keating?

  happen to anybody. I don't want Grush to be attacked. I don't want him to, uh, you know, go to jail for revealing classified information. But we have freedom of the press. We, you know, there could be leaks to the media and so forth in the press. Now, if this is stuff that's happening, you know, it's hard to imagine how, uh, you know, how sentient plasmoids telling us that there are sentient plasmoids and bipedal, you know, organisms, which is very shocking to me. I mean, that's sort of the most shocking thing I've ever heard in this. Not the sentient plasmoids and the interdimensional beings, that doesn't really kind of, um, rattle me as much as the bipedal, because bipedalism is almost the least likely. I mean, look around your house. You you might see one or two bipedal objects. You might see an equal number of, we have an equal number of

• 1:02:14Brian Keating?

  bipedal objects around the Keating household, right? They're called pets. Um, a quadri, uh, sorry, but quadrupedal is bipedal. Um, you know, and and so this is a shocking revelation, if true. And and again, I just pulled up the quote and and from the article from the testimony in July on June 9. Um, so we have to say that this is that this is is is among the most important things. So why isn't there protection? Why? Why isn't Luna saying, here's what I found out. Go to the people, skip Grush altogether, and Grush and go straight to the source. He can tell them who to talk. To what he saw, when he saw these objects and she can talk to Lou Elizondo, he's already revealed all this stuff. He's on tour. He talks about this stuff with Jeremy Carville. Why can't she talk to them, get the names, and then she's not going to be subpoenaed,

• 1:02:59Brian Keating?

  she's not going to be arrested. She's leading the damn committee. She's one of the most powerful people in the, on the planet. I don't understand it. And again, I, you know, I'd love to talk to her. I've asked Avi to introduce me to her. I think maybe one Jewish astrophysicist is enough for her, you know, to kind of make, make her sick of talking to me and scientists like me. But, but, you know, I'm happy to host her. I'm happy to host Lou Elizondo, David Gruish, all these people. I'd love to get them on. And I'd love to stop the petty, backbiting, ad hominem attacks that they do and have done to them. Okay, so that's number one. Table stakes are, they have to be safe. They have to be, have immunity. But I don't buy this whole thing that they have to get, you know, some whistleblower law. We already have whistleblower laws passed. And again, David doesn't have

• 1:03:43Brian Keating?

  to be the one. David can hand off the information to Burchett and, and Burkhart or whatever, and to Luna, and, and he can be safe. And he can know that he, and he doesn't even have to hand them off. They know who the, the sources are, and they know where the, where the facilities are. They can go into the SKIFs themselves, and they can find out the information. The other thing I pushed Ami on, as you noticed, is on his criticism of Beatrice Villarreal. Now, I have my problems with Beatrice, that we'll talk about on, on Wednesday, of course cordially. I have great respect for her. She's, she's an incredible intellect. And, and, and she has so much passion, charisma. She also gets a ton of hate. I hate the fact that she's gets threats and hatred and, and, and people attacking, ad hominem attacks, again, imputing her character as a scientist. I think it's total.

• 1:04:26Brian Keating?

  But everything scientific that she says is fair game. I'm going to ask her, you know, Avi said this about the, about the solar coronal mass ejections on my show on Monday afternoon, Monday morning. And what do you have to say about that? You, you have to explain that in order to at least have a comprehensive explanation. You claim that these, that these defect. Now, I'm an observational astronomer. I know all about these plates. I have some of these plates from Palomar that Beatrice is analyzing. Not the ones that show glints and, and, and alleged, according to her and others. Evidence of extrasolar, sorry, extraterrestrial, I mean, off of the Earth technology that reflects sunlight prior to the Sputnik program, so in other words, prior to low Earth orbit satellites. Now, we don't know for sure what was up there, right? I mean, there's always that.

• 1:05:11Brian Keating?

  It could be, as Avi said, it could have been Chinese or Russian. I kind of doubt that because the Chinese and Russians stole a lot of information about our nuclear program and our space program from the US. Not that the Soviets didn't steal as much from, about the space program. They stole a lot more from the nuclear program, as you all know, from Fuchs and other people. And then they ended up building the hydrogen and the fusion devices shortly thereafter, the getting the spy, information from spy, spies on the US. So, two scientists are going to come to different conclusions, that's fine, but we have to hold them both to the same standard. That's what I'm going to do, and I'm going to get you to decide. I'm going to present the evidence. There's another thing that I want to challenge, you know, Beatrice about, which is that her

• 1:05:54Brian Keating?

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

• 1:06:38Brian Keating?

  going to push these people, and I'm going to push Michael Shermer. I'm going to talk to Michael Shermer this coming, this coming week. I know a lot of you don't find him to be your favorite, your favorite flavor of, of Carlsberg, but you saw, Avi has integrity. Avi put him specifically on the White House Counsel, authorized counsel, that he's in charge of. Um, because he wanted someone, not just a skeptic. I mean, Michael's not just like, oh, you're just, you know, he's just speculating. He's trying to be, you know, Debbie Downer, you know, Cassandra wannabe, you know, pessimists, you know, get to be right, but optimists get to be rich. No, no, I don't, Michael's not like that. He, he, he will talk candidly as he does in his new book, which is the main reason he's on, but I'm going to talk to him about

• 1:07:20Brian Keating?

  the Galileo Project and this new White House Counsel, because he's on it with, uh, with past guests, Gary Nolan and, and others, and, and I'm, I want to have them all on. A lot of them say stuff and I have to hold their feet to the fire. Now, one thing about this council really rubbed me the wrong way, and I wonder if you can tell what it is. I mean, maybe put in the comments if you can suggest what, what do you think really kind of bugged me about what Avi's, um, what Avi's was saying, uh, and the power of his committee. Uh, I was very concerned about it, and maybe you can guess in the, in the broad. So first of all, put a thumbs up and, and put a subscribe, uh, you know, uh, please on this, on this channel, because I am doing really, really interesting interviews this week.

• 1:08:02Brian Keating?

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

• 1:08:46Brian Keating?

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

• 1:08:56Brian Keating?

  I wish I had my clickers. I use my students. They love these clickers. They come in, I give them ten points, extra credit on their final exam if they brought clickers to class, every class, and answered the questions. Then I'm gonna really got them right, just if they answer. Anyway, builds engagement. You guys are engaging. You're attractive and engaging. Okay, what was it? Is that he has no money? He got no money from the government, right? So what is this? If you get no money in, in a government that, you know, spends what? Seven trillion a year? And, and this could be the most important thing in human history, i.e. American history. And even if it's not, even if it fails, you know, as people say, oh, it's just gonna discover, you know, Chinese Bible. That's fricking huge.

• 1:09:36Brian Keating?

  And even if we discover there's a huge psyop, isn't that incredibly important to the stated goals of the Trump administration? And I, and I share those goals, right? So having no money, zero percent, not even like, oh, we need a, a, you know, a hundredth of a percent, a thousand. Zero point zero zero zero dollars, right? I, I, I think that's a fatal mistake. I think, you know, the first thing that I wanna know is, am I gonna have a budget? Is there a governance structure? What is the transparency of this organization? Like, how are we gonna communicate? What are we gonna have access to? Now, Avi's smart. He said that he's smart, so he has to be smart right now. Uh, that kinda bothered me too, that he said, well, I'm smart, so I'll know that they're not gonna, that they're not, uh, trying to trick me with the psyop.

• 1:10:18Brian Keating?

  Really, Avi? I mean, I couldn't push, you know, I can't push back on everything, cause Avi charms me. Uh, you know, he, he is one of my, my, uh, I just like him. I, I hate, I hate to say it, you know? I have weaknesses, I'm only human, that's one of my biases. Um, but I did push back during the interview, but, but mostly, I feel like to say that you are not, even to say like, I could say, well, I'm gonna take advice from my wife, or my, my, my husband, or my, my colleagues at Harvard. I mean, say something, right? Say something. There's someone else besides you. If you are your own arbiter of what is being truthful, or if someone is being truthful or not, I, I feel like this is another kind of, it's just putting a stumbling block in front of the blind.

• 1:11:02Brian Keating?

  I, I think it's, you know, if I had to bet right now that this, this, this council is led by my esteemed friend, Avi Loeb, yeah, the, you know, foremost educational institution on earth, you know, which has his own separate budget, and he has his own budget, and he's also leading Galileo Project. These are all separate, you know, kinda orbs, so to speak.

• 1:11:21Brian Keating?

  I would say right now, I'd give it a, you know, a 60/40, you know, chance of not succeeding. Um, just because it doesn't have government backing. I, I also pressed him on a question that I got a lot offline, ask him, you know, if it's going to be recognized by the White House. So far, it's not. And, and he said that, you know, it's, uh, you know, it's, it's authorized and it's consonant with the president's goals and the administration's goals and, and all these national security goals. Well, sorry, Avi, there's, all these agencies are in constant conflict with each other. Now, part of what I heard from, uh, an air force, a, a, a very, very high up fighter pilot in the air force, is that, um, that there's infighting between the air force and space force and the Navy. You notice

• 1:12:04Brian Keating?

  that many of these sightings from Graves, uh, reporting sightings by squadron mates and others, um, and Fravor, Dietrich, um, are on the, in the Navy side. Uh, Grush was in the air force. Um, uh, now we have the space force as of, you know, 2018, 2019, whenever that was started. Um, and, and there's huge amount of inter-agency, you know, hate, I mean, quite frankly, there's hatred. I mean, unless they're in war, there are a huge territorial pissing contest that you would not believe. I, I've heard some of the most staggeringly inefficient uses of our tax dollars come from the fact that these agencies all want to have their own control. And then you add in the CIA, which is a separate, has its own separate military, paramilitary, intelligence gathering wings,

• 1:12:46Brian Keating?

  the FBI, um, you know, even things like homeland security when the drones are flying over airports. These are all so entangled. And to say like, Avi's going to be their Harvard professor with zero dollars, uh, and they're just going to listen to him. Uh, they're not listening to Luna. I mean, they're not, where's this data dump? I mean, like I said, most of the stuff I've seen, uh, can be identified either by, uh, has been identified by the NASA, you know, blue ribbon panel led by my, uh, my friend and colleague David Spiegel and, and, and code, co-advised by, or a member, uh, Shelley Wright, who studies optical transient events from extraterrestrial civilizations, potentially extraterrestrial civilizations, using optical, um, photo avalanche detectors.

• 1:13:30Brian Keating?

  Uh, in the most novel way, she's invented these telescopes. She's looking, she would be probably the most thrilled person on earth if these things were, were found to be extraterrestrial, but they haven't. They, they found ninety-five percent in the NASA panel could be explained. Now, what bothers me is that people, and, and so five percent can't be explained, but as Michael Shermer puts it, uh, just because you can't explain it, doesn't mean that the, the antithesis is the correct one, right? You can't just say, oh, because we can't explain it, it means that it's unexplained aerial phenomena, means that they're alien phenomena. No, that's not the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis, still, it's unexplained. We just don't understand what it is. More data's needed, or if it occurred in the past. Uh, I mean, if you had asked somebody, you know, two years ago, can we get data from

• 1:14:11Brian Keating?

  the nineteen fifties that, uh, could shed light, maybe not prove, but could shed light on the existence of, on the existence of alien artifacts in our, in our local low Earth environment? You would say, what are you crazy? There's not, we don't even get good video quality today. Like, how are you gonna get, like, what are people gonna be mediums, you know, seeing back in time? No, no. But she went back, Beatrice went back and found these plates from the Palomar Sky Service. She didn't look at them for the galaxies and the quasar surveys, you know, first quasar surveys, really done here, discovered Martin Schmidt here by Pal, Palomar, um, up the road in San Diego County, uh, uh, uh, six, seven thousand feet up, with a two-hundred-inch telescope. It wasn't the biggest telescope in the world anymore, but it was at the time.

• 1:14:53Brian Keating?

  She did the hard work, and now we're going back in time and getting evidence from now. So there could be other things in the oceans, you know, on the moon, there could be artifacts. Uh, and, and that always reminds me, you know, because I'm speaking so much, but, but I do want you to get meteorites, uh, especially those of you who are, uh, students in the United States. If you have a dot edu email address, you'll win a meteorite. So I want to send these to you. These are true, honest-to-good, extraterrestrial, came from beyond our solar system, potentially, you know, it came from the pre-solar system. But I'm gonna send those to you if you have a dot edu email address and live in the United States. If you don't, I give, I do give away ten a month to people that don't have it. Again, you have to live in the US because the US Post Service, uh, charged an awful lot of money, uh, for this poor state university professor to send you. Okay, now, next, here's what's, here's what's coming up.

• 1:15:38Brian Keating?

  So, when Beatrice comes in, she's gonna talk to me, hopefully, about the Vasco Project. Um, she's very, very, um, uh, very, very-

• 1:15:48Brian Keating?

  I would say exercised about these critiques that she's had that these photo photographs did not come from the telescope itself, that came from artifacts like cosmic rays smashing that penetrate through the telescope completely and just make an image and an artifact on the photographic plate. No, she says they went through the optics and that can be proven. So then we have to press her on this issue of solar activity and coronal mass ejection. These are completely things opposite, you know, kind of conclusions. Now, I want to understand what questions you want me to sort of ask her about things like Disclosure Day, about maybe confirmation bias. Put those in the comments after, you know, when the video's up, it'll, anyone, not just

• 1:16:31Brian Keating?

  channel members, can give comments just on the livestream. So, and what do you guys think about this fact that, you know, Grush and others are now involved in the Hollywood, you know, kind of dramatization? Disclosure Day, is that just gonna be, you know, the first of many things? And as Spielberg said, that Avi didn't agree with, and I don't agree with, you know, that he believes that these things are here, and he keeps using that word, belief, belief, belief. And a lot of people kind of took issue with the video I made with Hugh Ross, again, an intelligent design proponent, but I'll talk to anybody. I talked to Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute. I don't care. You know, I like to be challenged intellectually. I like to challenge other people intellectually, but I do it always for the sake of truth, trying to understand what's right. I'm not selling anything.

• 1:17:16Brian Keating?

  They might be selling things, I'm happy to promote them. It's very hard to make your living and stuff like that. But what do you believe about these, you know, people that are in the disclosure forefront, tip of the spear for disclosure, like David? But they haven't seen the craft, they haven't seen the body, they've never touched the technology, they're not, you know, they're not hardcore engineers. I think David does have a background, maybe in engineering, people can correct me, but he was a major, maybe even a general, I don't know, in the Air Force. Wasn't a pilot, but I believe he operated drones. But anyway, to me, it does, and it kind of, you know, I sort of brought this up with Avi, you know, he was asked to be in this movie, but he's playing himself, I guess. I don't think David's an actor, and that's not really what he wants to do.

• 1:18:01Brian Keating?

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

• 1:18:43Brian Keating?

  But, but yeah, I mean, I think this was a, a kind of a, an interesting, an interesting, you know, kind of twist that, that, you know, he was, he was essentially speculating or saying, I don't know how he would have evidence of that. I mean, he was a fighter pilot commander of a squadron, right? So, why, why would he have knowledge about something from the 1940s, right? Like, why, why would that be what he had special access to? I mean, it, maybe he does, I mean, he might be just getting informed from people. But then that raises the, the question again. Does he not, do these people have protection? Are they really in danger? I believe David Grush could be in danger. So, if that's true, you know, then when, when he states something that goes in contradistinction

• 1:19:27Brian Keating?

  to something that's going on the record by Sean Kirkpatrick. Why don't we wait that? Like Sean could be, you know, could be committing some classified information faux pas reveal that he shouldn't be. But he doesn't, right? So he's gone on the record and he said he disagrees with it. So, I guess, you know, from my perspective, it is, it's hard to know what to believe. So yes, retired commander David Fravor, famous for his Tic Tac encounter, has stated the government has recovered materials from Roswell and has known about a non-human presence on Earth for over 80 years. And then Fravor advocates for official transparency, like we all do, suggesting the world honestly deserves, deserves honesty regarding these issues. So he's known for the Nimitz encounter. Fravor has called...

• 1:20:10Brian Keating?

  Have to be honest about the, uh, just to be honest, we've known for 80 years that we're not alone. Now, why would a fighter pilot have special knowledge? Now, maybe he does, but, but as far as I know, he's retired. Uh, I don't know when he retired, but, but I'm, you know, 2004, I can do the math. Uh, it was 22 years ago when he had the Nimitz account. Why would that then give him official information? Now, he may get information because whistleblowers may come to him, hoping that he can get their story out, but he doesn't have, as far as I know, he maybe never had. I mean, just because you're in the military, I mean, I've had, I have friends that are fighter pilots, my flight instructor's a fighter pilot, F-18 pilot, just like him, even maybe at the same rank as him. Uh, he doesn't have special information just because he's a fighter pilot. And, and Shermer points out in his new book that actually, uh, pilots in general, including

• 1:20:55Brian Keating?

  me, uh, I'm a commercially rated pilot, um, that there were some of the least reliable people and of the least reliable pilots in the world are military pilots. Why is that? Well, you're telling me they're not brave? F no, they're fricking much more brave than I'll ever be. Uh, and they're badasses physically, mentally, they can kick the crap out of people like me. They could hold their own Navy SEALs, these pilots are insane, they're jacked, they're incredible. Ryan Graves is a beast, right? But they make mistakes at a higher rate. What explains that? Are they stupid? Absolutely not. One of my best friends is a Princeton graduate. He's an F-18 commander, uh, combat veteran. Okay, so these are not stupid people.

• 1:22:07Brian Keating?

  Okay, so what happens, and this is what's been borne out. They are extremely good hand-eye coordination. They're good at training for reactions to threats. Is a Cessna 172 that I fly around California, is that a threat to the F-18s at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, right here? No, they're not a threat at all. So they'll ignore those types of threats. So they're looking for anomalies. You have a filter as a pilot. You filter out things that are nominal, and you look for things that are anomalous, right? So they're trained and heightened on a state of awareness to look for things that are anomalous. So this is what psychologists, studying the military for other reasons, this is to avoid crashes and sort of other hazards to flight. Another topic Ryan is quite bravely investing his time and energy in.

• 1:22:51Brian Keating?

  And this is all, again, for good purposes. But when the first statement to go to is, "Well, Fravor's a fighter pilot. He's braver than Brian Keating, and he's a better pilot than Brian Keating," none of which I dispute, then we must trust him on everything, including information about Roswell. No, no, sorry. You know, just like if I go out and say, "Well, look, this is how a CCD or CMOS camera operates. This is dark noise, a flat field. These are the cosmic ray impacts. These are dark current sensitivity, or a CMB camera works." And then someone says, "Well, what do you think about aliens?" I should say, "I know nothing about that, right? I'm not an expert in it." But when they say, "Like, this object emits blackbody radiation," well, quite frankly, I am an expert in that.

• 1:23:36Brian Keating?

  And the US government, under the Trump administration, just forced the Argentinian government to cancel a high-altitude site near the Simons Observatory in the Andes Mountains. Not that near us, but very similar to us. The Chinese were developing. Why do the Chinese need an observatory in Argentina? Well, that's weird. No, so they can have hemispherical synoptic observations of blackbody radiation. That's what I'm guessing. That's why they probably did it. So if they'd come to me and said, "Well, Keating, why are they doing this?" I would say, "Well, let's look at it." You know, I'm not going to talk about politics, but my expertise is in that field. Now, if it was to look for aliens, I could also say, "Yes, we can detect planets, and we can detect objects like a Muamua, anything that gives off heat, and everything in the universe gives off heat, even the universe itself, right?"

• 1:24:22Brian Keating?

  And I'm an expert in detectors that operate at one hundredth or even a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. So these are things where you want experts in that field. Fravor, I'm sorry, he's not an expert in the dynamics of UFOs, just because he may have seen one as unidentified anomalous phenomenon, aerial phenomenon. He may have seen one, he may not have. And it may have been an actual extraterrestrial object, or it could have been a terrestrial object. That's what Avi seems to be leaning towards. But again, that we should listen to him about Roswell and believe him because he is more brave than Keating and he's a better pilot. Maybe smarter than, I don't know. But to say that, that's called the halo effect, right? When you ascribe information to and

• 1:25:05Brian Keating?

  powers to people because their domain expertise lies in one field. It's like, you know, the World Cup's going on now. Would you like the, you know, this guy's really good. I heard of this new soccer player. His name is Ronald O. I think he's, I think he's Irish? I'm not sure. Anyway, Ronaldo, Ronaldo, right? So would you want Ronaldo to be your dentist? You know, I just got a cavity filled, right? No freaking way, right? So you don't ask, but he's so great, you know, he's incredible. Yeah, he is, but he's not a dentist. So we have to be careful like that. And that's why when Anna Luna, Congresswoman Representative Luna, she talks about interdimensional beings, it does a disservice. I'm sorry, it just does. It sounds completely ridiculous. There's no sense in which that sentence can be uttered

• 1:25:48Brian Keating?

  without the follow-up question is, what do you mean? And then she has to say, I don't know. Because there's no notion of interdimensionality. There's no evidence for interdimensionality, multiple dimensions, time traveling. When I talked to Tom DeLonge on this podcast with a CIA agent, Jim Semivan, you know, we heard, oh, the To The Stars Academy has objects. And I said, okay, well, what's their history? How do you trace them back? And he said, oh, we don't have a full traceable provenance of the, oh, that's as good as nothing. That's like me showing up with this and saying, this has biological material on it. I licked it, you know, you don't know, you don't know what's happened to this. You haven't had the data, the bodies, the craft. So I think that these are, these are big challenges. And the final kind of sawhorse and hobby horse that I've been on.

• 1:26:33Brian Keating?

  Lately involves, you know, this question of belief, like, what does it mean to believe something? That you believe in extraterrestrial life? Like, okay, you believe in it, and these are scientists, these are my colleagues all around the world, and I'm hoping to have David Kipping back on, maybe Adam Frank back on the podcast, maybe all three of us, maybe have a big, you know, kind of debate between, not an argument, but I think we're all respecting each other. But when you hear things about non-human biologics, when you hear things about the continuum of life, not even like a continuum, you know, in the Earth's, I don't even know what a continuum is. Like, there's not a continuum, we think, of sexes, right? Okay, I'm gonna get really controversial right now.

• 1:27:17Brian Keating?

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

• 1:27:59Brian Keating?

  that of Interstellar, sorry to break that to you. And now there's a new one, Iron Lung, has anyone ever seen that movie? Well, that could be even more plausible than either Project Hail Mary or Interstellar. So, that's my hottest, hot takes. But, anyway, you have a continuum, right? From corporeal bipedal life, which means it's like us, okay? I'm sorry to say, that means it's, as a body, corporeal, bipedal, has two legs. We evolved to walk upright under very specific gravitational, optical, and also from emerging from fish-like creatures, is the way we believe it, and having eyes on the side of our heads to having eyes on top of our heads, and the index of refraction difference gave us a predatory advantage when we came on land.

• 1:28:41Brian Keating?

  So, the first objects had, were fish that came on land, we believe, evolutionarily. And then they had eyes on top of their heads, right? And then they wanted to see even further, so then they needed to get more on land and then maybe the evolutionary process started from there. We don't know. I mean, that's just pure speculation. But at least the bipedalism, if we track bipedalism throughout the fossil record, throughout evolutionary biology, it's an incredibly specific, highly, highly appropriated, I don't even want to say intelligently designed, because I don't want you to think, like, I just buy into everything my, my intelligent design. No, far from it. Although I did have another hot take, which is that string theory has fewer experimentally verified predictions than does intelligent design.

• 1:29:23Brian Keating?

  Because string theory has zero, and according to even the best string theorists, Joseph Conlin, who's been on the podcast, his book on string theory, CRC Press, has a chapter, "Experimental Evidence for String Theory," and the entire chapter is, "There is None." But, but according to Stephen C. Meyer and other evolutionary biologists that, that work on this field, that there was a prediction that the human DNA sequence would have so-called junk DNA that would turn out to be functional. And for a long time, they called it junk DNA, and then it was found to be functional. Now, that's very, very low, what's called base factor. I'm not being serious, really, but I do like to tease, you know, kind of my, my colleagues on both sides. I'll tease the intelligent designers, as you'll hear in my pushback on Stephen C. Meyer,

• 1:30:07Brian Keating?

  because he talks about fine tuning. And I said, "No, the universe is extremely poorly tuned. It's as if I'm playing the violin. You know, I'm a horrible musician. The only instrument I can play is Spotify." But, the universe has dark energy, which dominates all over forms of matter and energy, and we could change the amount by a factor of 10, and you wouldn't notice it at all. We'd still be here, life would still be here, so to say that it's exquisitely finely tuned is just false. And then they can cherry pick and go back to some other time. I also push back on Jewish apologetics. Gerald Schroeder claims the universe, seven days of creation in the Torah corresponds to the astrophysical and physical epochs of quark hadron separation, electroweak phase transition. Total nonsense, okay?

• 1:30:51Brian Keating?

  And I push back on that, very strongly. So, you're never gonna get me. Maybe I'm... Explaining why I'm not invited to many parties, but but anyway, I find it fascinating to talk to all these people on different legs of the stool. And hopefully come to some conclusion that gets us a little bit closer to truth now. You know, I I I've I've talked about, you know, people that uh that like Avi, who would would talk about things. And it's with a straight face like sentient plasmoid life uh versus a hypothesis that gets smuggled in in terms of belief that I mentioned that to Avi. This Vickers study kinda shook me that people would state that they believe, not like I believe in God, you know, I believe in astrology. No, I don't say any of that. I say I don't believe in that. I say I'm I actually don't say I believe in God ever.

• 1:31:35Brian Keating?

  Never say it. I say I am looking for evidence that God is plausible as a scientific hypothesis. And and and people like Sean Carroll, who are very simplistic in their knowledge of Judaism or Christianity. Or any type of religion will say, oh, well, God wouldn't have created a universe that has um so many galaxies, right? Why did he waste so much space? And I'm like, oh, yeah, well, you know, God wouldn't have created an atom that has ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine percent empty space, right? It's an idiotic argument to say like what God should or should not do. I mean, I know Sean has an ego, but but but really, Sean, I mean, this is like. In in his in his most cited work, you know, God is not a good theory to to appeal to that. It's like saying, well, you know, why are there so many elements, you know?

• 1:32:18Brian Keating?

  Would God create so many elements, you know, how do you know how many elements? I mean, a hundred and ninety years ago, we thought there was about ten elements, right? Now we know there's there's ten times that number plus. So I think these are awesome. I think we need to hold the scientists' feet to the fire. We need to hold the alien, you know, kind of maximalist to the feet to the fire. We need to hold the religious adherence feet to the fire. And I don't think anyone else is doing this, and and that's why I think this channel is criminally unsubscribed, undersubscribed. Not unsubscribed, I don't want you to hear that, but but we crossed four hundred thousand subscribers, but but I I really feel like we're doing, we're getting these incredible interviews. I just interviewed my twenty six Nobel Prize winner. And and Nobel Prize winners are asking to come on my show. It's it's a great flattery to me.

• 1:33:03Brian Keating?

  But really, do you? I mean, a lot of these people see this.

• 1:33:05Brian Keating?

  Power of the audience and and you know a lot of people won't or will you know I I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson to come on he said he would then he backed out he said he didn't have time and then I saw him on Piers Morgan you know like okay Piers Morgan's got 10 times more subscribers than me I'll give him a pass you know I've been on Piers Morgan twice now um uh but but you know if I had 10 times more subscribers who knows maybe he'd say no to Piers Morgan and and not to Brian Keating now I know a lot of you don't like Neil deGrasse Tyson anyway but he's an important person right I mean I also pushed his feet to the fire he said a lot of nonsensical stuff too I mean everything that he said about you know spectrums and and things like that we could I can push back on him like nobody else because we have a respect I've been on his show in person you know I've been on his show twice he's been on my show two or three times and he'll be back uh but I want you guys to ask me the questions that I should be asking on your behalf I view myself as your ambassador but I'm also an independent person with my own curiosities right okay so the last question you know I kind of want to leave you guys with is you know where where do you want to see things in the channel go I'm not I'm not like gonna be captured by the audience in the sense of I'll do whatever you say and you know I'll do the uh the uh 100 days in the in the yacht challenge and if I spend 100 days in the yacht uh I get to keep I'm not gonna do that sorry but um no matter how much the audience wants it right I I miss my my home cooking right um but in terms of like the the disposition I find a lot of people you know either love or hate the kind of content that I do they either love that I'm talking about religion or hate that I'm talking about religion they either love that I'm talking you know someone who's uh interested in investigating alien life and then people that hate it or people that love that I'm talking to skeptic like Shermer or hate that I'm talking to Shermer people that think oh you're just you know licking the boots of Eric Weinstein I I haven't had Eric on in over a year I mean I talk to him all the time but you know I haven't found that what he has to say lately is a mandatory you know content for my channel and and a lot of people like did a poll on the channel who do you want to see on and he got the more votes than most people as he usually does but but it wasn't by the same margin it used to be like 80 you know 80 20 kind of thing 80 for Eric and 20 for everybody else

• 1:35:15Brian Keating?

  Uh, but maybe I need to do more surveys like that, but uh, I'm really enjoying it, but I need to know, you know, kind of where, where, you know, you're gonna be, you're gonna be intellectually honest with yourself and have integrity to listen to people you don't agree with. Because what YouTube really rewards and, you know, I'm not a master of it at all, but, but I find it fascinating because you get instant feedback, you get the real time data, you get to talk to, I mean, I have, you know, half a million followers across the, the video and audio, you know, feeds of this podcast. It's a huge, I just looked up that in, in the last six months of this year, like a million hours, people have watched a million hours of my content, it's insane, like, I can't believe that,

• 1:35:59Brian Keating?

  I can't listen to myself for a million, you know, I talked to, you know, my, my, my mother and she's like, people pay to listen to you, like, I wouldn't listen to you for free, no, she doesn't say, that'd be horrible. Um, but, but what YouTube really rewards is, um, is, uh, first of all, looking at the video, deciding you want to watch it, sharing it with somebody else, leaving a thumbs up, leaving a comment, those are huge engagement signals, but the best engagement signal is how long you watch the show for, like, how long do you tune in for? And I think, you know, a lot of people will either tune in, not at all, or they watch the whole thing. So I find a lot of people do that, a lot of people are watching, sixty percent of you are not subscribed that are watching, I don't know why, it doesn't cost you anything to click that little subscribe button.

• 1:36:43Brian Keating?

  And again, we'd have over a million subscribers on YouTube alone, plus even more on audio feeds as well. So I need to know that you're gonna be, you know, kind of the ride or die audience that, that I feel like I've cultivated. Again, twenty-six Nobel Prize winners, talked to more Nobel Prize winners than anyone on earth as far as I know. And, and I don't just do, like, even with my most recent guest, I, I push back on the Nobel Prize winner. It's fun, they like it, you, you- You can't believe how many podcasts I've been on. I've been on all the big podcasts, right? I can't think of one. Maybe put one in the comments that you think I should be on. I don't know. Uh, what's the guy's name? Uh, not, not, um, oh, I always get him. He always pops up. Uh, uh, how Louis, how is it Louis Howe? And anyway, he, he's like a really big name podcaster that I'm,

• 1:37:29Brian Keating?

  that I'm often, you know, people tell me I should go on and tell my, my human story. Anyway, put it on there, but I think I've been on Rogan. I've been on Diary of a CEO. I've been on, uh, Jordan Peterson multiple times, StarTalk multiple times. I've been on Chris Williamson way back when, uh, before he had a video even. Um, and, uh, who am I missing? I've been in Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special. Uh, I've been on, uh, you know, again, I can't, I'm blank. Uh, Andrew Huberman I was on. Uh, Sean Ryan, uh, I was on. Myan Bialik I was just on. He's incredibly, you know, these are tens of millions of views, right? But, um, but are there people that I haven't been on? Because I think that that's sort of a way to get

• 1:38:11Brian Keating?

  a new audience into the pipeline, but, but to also know that, uh, to be exposed to the fact that I do something I think that's unique and that people, uh, really need nowadays. And, and the types of content that I'm doing right now are very different from Lex Fried. I've been on Lex Friedman. I should have, um, the 10th most popular, uh, episode on his show. I don't know why I forgot that. Um, so I don't feel like I need to go back on these people's, like, it's like, I, I leave, you know, the, Jordan said, you know, leave the, the best on the floor. Like, you don't have to come back. I don't care if I ever go back on Rogan or, or whatever. Uh, the one episode I'm mad about is the Portal Podcast with Eric Weinstein. I went on the Portal Podcast in 2020, recorded it, this huge studio, multiple cameras. I brought him all these things and it never aired. Eric canceled the podcast, shut it down.

• 1:38:56Brian Keating?

  Um, so, uh, leave a comment if you think the Portal should come back on. Uh, or at least, at least let me broadcast the episode, Eric. I mean, come on. This is six years now. It's ridiculous. But I thought it was one of our best and we, you know, we get along. We, we argue like brothers, but we get along like brothers. It's a lot of fun to know Eric. Um, but, uh, but let me know, where, where do you think, uh, the type of keating approach is? Most valuable because I am doing explainers. I also should say, and I should have said this before, I have another channel where I'm moving my hard physics explanations to, based on advice that I've been given. You shouldn't put that type of content on the same content as a mainly the podcast or clips from the podcast. So this channel, Dr. Brian Keating, from now on, really, the last few months has been like this,

• 1:39:41Brian Keating?

  is going to be all about interviews, conversations, sometimes explainers of not the physics, but of reactions to other people's interviews. Like I said, I just did an episode about reacting to Michio Kaku's appearance on Diary of a CEO where he made so many flaws. I'm like to believe that it was a mistake and he's just getting older. He's 80 years old, I think now. But, but some of them are just so bad and so pernicious to the human understanding of things like string theory and dark matter. And, and, you know, I felt like it was my responsibility to hold his feet to the fire. As a friend, as a, as a, someone who really looks up to him, I think I was respectful. I'm not going to ever attack people ad hominem. There's enough of that on the internet.

• 1:40:22Brian Keating?

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

• 1:41:05Brian Keating?

  The next one after that is about Graham Hancock, also appeared on Stephen Bartlett's show. And it's already got six million views in like two or three days, talking about mega-structures underneath the pyramids, how the ancient world discovered Antarctica 300 years before the Western world did, and the younger Dreyfus impact theory.

• 1:41:28Brian Keating?

  Of a civilizational collapse. And so there's three huge whoppers that he brought up. I'm a little bit reluctant to attack him anyway. I never attack him personally, or any of these people personally. At hominid, but he is suffering some medical condition. Apparently he's having a heart surgery soon. I wish him well, wish him long life. Um, but at the same level, again, he's getting all this influence. He came on the show, right? So he had the two and a half hours or three hours that Stephen requires. Um, and, and that does bring me back. I didn't close the loop. I have an explainer channel, Keating Experiments. Please do subscribe to that. It's almost 10,000 subscribers over there. That's where it's going to be, you know? How do, how, how does the muon spin tell us about, uh, string theory? Or some extra dimensions?

• 1:42:12Brian Keating?

  Uh, the explainer videos like that are going to appear over there exclusively. And then where Brian Keating is either talking to somebody or talking about somebody. But again, respectfully reacting to somebody. That's going to be over here in Dr. Brian Keating. So bifurcation is a worrisome thing, but whatever. It's fun for me. I have a small team in various countries around the world. Shout out to, to the team. Um, and they're keeping me sane. And then I have my day job where I'm publishing incredible video, incredible videos. Incredible, I am going to make a video about some of the science that's coming out of the Simons Observatory. As soon as it's unembargoed. Uh, but I'm just, I am just so excited to share with you guys. I mean, I'm an actual working scientist. I'm an experimentalist.

• 1:42:54Brian Keating?

  I'm not like Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, uh, Jim Gates, Eric Weinstein. These brainiac theorists. Um, no, we need them, but, and some of my best friends are theorists, but I'm an experimentalist. I want the evidence. I want the hard data. I want to collect the data. I want to build the instrument that collects the data. I want to analyze data that comes out of it. I want to understand how things like AI and, and these massive revolutions that we're undergoing for the first time in human history are going to impact me intellectually and you intellectually. Um, so I'm going to have dedicated videos. Those will be on Keating Experiments, um, where I go into the experimental, you know, nitty gritty, but why it's important to you, why should you care about that? Why do you care if a neutrino has negative mass? What does that even mean? Uh, that's going to be on Keating Experiments. Please do subscribe down there for that.

• 1:43:39Brian Keating?

  Um, I'll put a link down below. The last thing I want to say is what makes me unique? I have to say this, as I said, the thread that gets lost because I am a professor and I do get absent minded is I've been on all these huge podcasts from Rogan to Stephen Bartlett, to Lex Friedman, to Mayim Bialik now, uh, to Sean Ryan.

• 1:43:58Brian Keating?

  I love all those guys and girls, okay? I want to say that. I'm grateful that they gave me their platform. Uh, that said, they do things differently than I do. And that is, the main thing for me is that I will never have somebody on who has a book that I haven't read their book. And I'm not going to name names, but there are some people on that list who was obvious to me within 10 seconds of sitting down with them, putting on the headphones, that they never opened any of my books. And I put my blood, sweat and tears into these four books that I've written. Soon will be five. Maybe I have six in me before I die, but um, these books, my, my self-help guide

• 1:44:40Brian Keating?

  for the STEM curious into the impossible, think like a Nobel Prize winner, into the impossible, focus like a Nobel Prize winner, distilled wisdom from the greatest geniuses on earth that have ever lived. I'm almost at the point where I can write a third volume. I don't know the title, give me a title for that down below. And then my magnum opus, you know, my first, my memoir, Losing the Nobel Prize, is about what it means to be a cosmologist, but a father, a son, uh, someone who loses a mentor to suicide, someone who loses his father, and, and trying to operate at the highest levels because I was told I couldn't get tenure if I didn't win the Nobel Prize, perspectively, okay? So what does it feel like to be a, a, a young scientist with everything to lose? And, and curious about something that has no practical value whatsoever? Like inflationary cosmology, how did the universe begin?

• 1:45:26Brian Keating?

  I write those books and it takes a lot out of me. Takes a lot of time, opportunity cost, um, time value of money. All these things, incredible. Plus it costs money, I had a higher, you know, the publisher doesn't give you money to, to get illustrations, but I, I felt those are mandatory to explain the science and, you know, inflationary cosmology in my first book. I paid for it out of my own pocket. Again, I made almost lower, a tenth of minimum wage, probably a tenth of minimum wage, given my advance was, was what it was, um, and the amount of hours put into it, surely far below minimum wage. Now, I put a lot of time and effort into it. You can distill the wisdom of at that time, a forty year old, forty five year old guy, right? And the knowledge, and that's so pertinent nowadays. We are swimming in knowledge. We

• 1:46:09Brian Keating?

  have almost no wisdom. We're dying of thirst for wisdom and we're drowning in knowledge, AI, the internet. We have abundant information. We have no distillation of that. And that's what I'm trying to do on this podcast. But that's certainly what I do in my books. And to have a host, you know, fly me out at great expense to them and time expense to me away from my wife, my kids, my teaching, I have to get people to cover for me, you know, shout out to my colleagues that cover my classes and my postdocs, um, and supervision. It's a lot, you know? I have a lot of things on my plate and I'm going out there. The least you could do is read my book. Please. It takes, I mean, some of these books take almost, I have audiobooks for every single book I've ever written, including Galileo's Dialogue. Now, okay, I don't expect anyone, you know, who's having me on to listen to a twenty one

• 1:46:54Brian Keating?

  hour long audiobook, but that was with Carlo Rovelli and that's an acted version for the first time in human history of a book by Galileo, the greatest mind in science, I think, that ever lived, you know, maybe with the possible exception of Einstein or, um, or, or my father-in-law. No, I'm just kidding. But, but the point is, how, how else, you know, why are you having me on, you know? Uh, a- and, you know, I know you're having me on because you're partially, you have a much bigger platform than me, you know, say, uh, I don't know, someone's podcast I haven't been on, or, or maybe I have been on. Um, you have a much bigger podcast and so I appreciate you and, and I'm grateful. I have gratitude to you. It's the most important thing, first of all. But, take the time. And

• 1:47:38Brian Keating?

  so I do that for every one of my guests. I've read five hundred books. And you know what? I had a brain scan done for some other reasons, you know, everything's fine, turns out, but they did brain scan on me and then they did it again a year later and then at the five year mark, my brain is actually increasing in density and gray matter and vascularity and all the good things about brain. And I think it's a hundred percent due to this podcast, you know? I do have a selfish reason to do it. It's not monetary. Now, I bear, I, I don't, I lose money on this podcast because I pay my editors. Um, I never get somebody to read. I don't have anyone doing my booking. I don't have anybody who does, um, you know, kind of research for me, except for my AI tools,

• 1:48:18Brian Keating?

  which I have handcrafted over the last two or three years to make them incredibly pertinent to the things that interest me the most. You know, callouts to the things that matter to you the most and to edit it tightly to get rid of all the verbal yapage that I'm known for, right? You know, I wanna cut down on that. I know this is kind of self indulgent, but but you'll excuse me if you've lasted this far. Um, I, I, I assume that you can handle a little bit of yapping. Um, let's see, how many people are still listening at this point? Oh, my God, there's more people listening now than was listening before. Okay, there's over a thousand people listening right now. Um, I just really appreciate you guys. I can't, I can't tell you. I mean, um, it's, it's funny. My, my,

• 1:49:00Brian Keating?

  sometimes I got recognized. I went to Hawaii last year and I was getting on the plane. I'm like, uh, about to get in the guy staring at me. I'm like, I passed TSA, you know, why are you looking? He's like, you're Brian Keating, right? I'm like, uh, yeah, it depends. Do I owe you money? Like, oh, what's going on, brother? And he, and he's like, no, I love your podcast. I get these things all the time. I'm like, uh, it, it makes me so gratified. Like, this thing didn't exist, you know, six years ago. I started this thing six years ago when COVID was raging and I could, I knew I was smart enough to know that authors like Avi or other people would answer my email if I asked them to come on the show because they weren't doing book tours. I did, you know, a book tour in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty twenty was gone, couldn't go on book tour. So I could get any of the dream guests that I ever want.

• 1:49:45Brian Keating?

  I've never had a guest really, I can't think of anyone. I mean, I've talked to Elon Musk. Um, you know, I, I'd like to talk to him probably again at some point, but, but, um, but, you know, kind of been there. Talked to twenty six noble, the people that I miss talking to are the people that are, um, no longer with us. So best of luck with that. Maybe Anna Luna can get me some interdimensional beings and I can do some interviews. But I did interview Freeman Dyson. That's one of my most treasured interviews, him, uh, Jim Simons, um, uh, the, these people aren't alive anymore and that.

• 1:50:18Brian Keating?

  That is my treasure, you know, I have that for all time and the Nobel Prize winners are just, you know, gonna keep growing. And like I said, they keep, some of them are asking me, I mean, ten, ten, ten of them have asked to come on my podcast. I don't think they're asking to come on, you know, some of these other podcasts, right? I mean, they might appear on them, but, but I think that they know they get something special and I'm always gonna read their books. I mean, that's the least I can do. And so you'll never have me unprepared. I will cancel an interview if I haven't had time to read it, or I don't wanna read it. And it really helps when I have on people that have audiobooks, just in case you wanna know. Because I listen to things, I can listen at two X speed. And I can do things, you know, with audio that I can't do with printed, but I am reading printed books now, I'm kinda getting back into it. Some fiction I've had on four Pulitzer Prize winners.

• 1:51:04Brian Keating?

  These are the things that really make it so enjoyable. And I always say at work, I have to talk to people, there are people I have to talk to. The, you know, telescope, uh, azimuthal encoder drive is broken and I need to get somebody out at eighteen thousand feet in Chile. And it's a Chilean holiday and it's a German company and they can't get an import for an American part that comes from China. Anyway, you wanna know, those are people I have to talk to. Some of them I like a lot. You know, I love my graduate students, I have to talk to them or else they'll go off in crazy directions, right? My undergraduates I have to talk to, I get paid to talk to them. And just the other day, I finished up, uh, class for the quarter and they all did great. And they gave me a standing ovation. It was like emotional for me, I have to be honest with you.

• 1:51:50Brian Keating?

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

• 1:52:14Brian Keating?

  Too bad, you know, it's too bad for them. I think that they are scared of a little bit of pushback. I think you all know the Malibu meditator that I'm talking about. Just didn't wanna come back on the show ever again because I push back on him and his. Utterly simplistic, ignorant, you know, kind of view of, uh, again, some biblical topic that he feels capable of talking about, uh, fine, I'm not gonna say he can't talk about it, but the fact that he never got, got pushed back once, everyone just tells him what a brilliant genius he is and, and everything he says is just so, so, um, it's so wonderful, intellectually, uh, deep, um, I, I'd love to talk to him, I offered him to stay at

• 1:52:54Brian Keating?

  my house during the Malibu fires, um, he politely, you know, turned it down, um, but that's, again, I feel like it's his loss, I can talk to Richard Dawkins, who hosted me, flew me up to Vancouver to host him for two days, um, at this wonderful live show in front of a thousand people, uh, and it was incredible, and, uh, and he knows I don't disagree, I don't agree with him about a lot of stuff, I push back on Richard Dawkins, who is the chutzpah to do that besides me, I mean, I, I don't care, I don't want these interviews where people are just like, oh, you're so amazing, let me just lick your boots, and this is incredible, now, do I talk to people like Avi or my friends, and I cut them maybe a little bit more, so, okay, I'm a human being, I, I have friends, sorry to say, I have friends, but you notice, even with the friends like Eric, Eric, I think

• 1:53:39Brian Keating?

  he gets annoyed with me, you know, he'll tell me, you know, like, uh, that he doesn't wanna talk about a subject because I'm pushing him on something that's uncomfortable for him, I'll push him on things like publication, I'm the very person who, you know, really forced him to publish on April Fool's Day 2021, his theory of geometric unity, now, he didn't do it to the level that people want him to, and, and he said he's an entertainer so that he wouldn't, uh, be liable for people cutting his stuff, and he could have legal recourse against them, this is his excuse, but without me and my, uh, one of my best friends in the world, Stefan Alexander, we pushed him to put it in writing, and, and he did, and it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't all because of me and Stefan, but I think we played a big role in it, and, so I'm gonna push back even on my good friends, okay? So that's what you're gonna get. You're gonna get depth. You're gonna get someone who's prepared.

• 1:54:24Brian Keating?

  I always come prepared. I've heard people like Chris Williamson, you know, who I think also is sort of blocked me because I criticized him for, you know, hosting rabid anti Semites and people, you know, that are just horrific human beings, you know, because they're of interest to his audience. Fine. I don't think he'll ever have me back on, but I was there for him before he had, you know, a thousand subscribers. Now he's got four and a half million. So good for him. I'm really happy for him. But, um, but to hear that, you know, when he told his audience that, you know, he doesn't read the books effectively, um, because he doesn't want to be like a short form or, you know, blinkist for his audience to skip the book. And I don't want that either.

• 1:55:07Brian Keating?

  I want you to buy the books. I want you to, you know, I've kept these books for years, right? These are, you know, my libraries. That's like one tenth of my library behind me. I've got 10 times that in my studio, um, uh, in my, in my in-person studio. So, uh, my books are my treasure. We're people of the book, right? This is the most important thing to me. So that means I'm gonna take it seriously. I'm gonna read the books. I'm not gonna summarize it so you don't have to buy it, but I'm gonna read that. I'm gonna pull out the things that are most pertinent, most, just fire me up. My obsidian, my Apple notes, my, my second brain is brimming with connections between these 550 now books, uh, between them. So I can ask, you know, upcoming guest, um, Annie Jacobson, who's coming on for a new book that she's written called Biological War. That should

• 1:55:50Brian Keating?

  be fun, right? You know, ah, Biological War, a scenario. She's coming on in July. It's embargoed. Uh, they, they're sending me that. That's incredible, uh, that they have trust in me and I've earned the trust. I've, I've never broken embargo, never will, even with my own experiments, right? Um, I've been under embargoes many times and, uh, for books and for research and I'll always respect that. That's, that's the duty of a scholar.

• 1:56:13Brian Keating?

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

• 1:56:57Brian Keating?

  To have the chutzpah to back it up with intellect and back it up with preparation. Always going to maintain the preparatory standards, Preparation H, always gonna maintain it, because if I don't, I feel like a fraud. I feel like people, if I were to have on a guest like Michael Shermer, or, you know, so sometimes I like to be a guest on other people's podcasts, I have to do no preparation. Although I even do that, I actually have a self-trained LM specifically for when I'm gonna guest on Sean Ryan's podcast, I do deep research on him. You know, he doesn't have books, but he has 500 episodes, and what are the themes? What are the things that he goes deep on? What are the things that he doesn't care about?

• 1:57:40Brian Keating?

  What are the things that he's so passionate about he'll interrupt something even more important to discuss this subject? Does he talk about the news? Does he talk about his kids? Does he talk about his upbringing? He changed his name, you know, what does he do? So I go deep into them when I'm a guest, but it's a little bit easier to be a guest than to be a host. So it is hard to be a host, especially this week. I have four guests on this week, including Avi Loeb, Beatrice Vallero. Michael Shermer and then Nate Suarez, who wrote, co-wrote, "If Anybody Builds It, Everybody Dies," with Eliezer Yudowsky as an AI safety researcher. I just released my episode with Roman Yampolsky, please check that out. I went deep and that was not an

• 1:58:21Brian Keating?

  easy book to read. A lot of math proofs and deep excursions into the formal logic behind the assertion that AI is either safe or unsafe. And that has huge implications for governance, for regulations, for our own safety and the flourishing of the human species. And he's very pessimistic. He made me sort of dead. But I pushed back on him. I said, you know, you say that AI is unpredictable, therefore it's uncontrollable. It was sort of a version of the halting problem that Turing popularized in his Turing Machine paper. That was the name of it, actually. It was the halting problem. And it's sort of like the Gödel's incompleteness theorem. And I said, you have a version of those two massive theorems, Gödel's theorem

• 1:59:02Brian Keating?

  and Turing's theorem. And you're saying it's predictable that it's going to be unpredictable, but isn't it a tautology? So I want you to watch that episode. Hour and a half. I think I went deeper with him than any other interview, certainly than Mike. I love Steven Parlet, but he can't get as deep technically because by his own admission, he didn't go to college, he didn't finish college. I think he went for two days. But, and I love those guys and I really appreciate them for hosting me. I just wish that they would maybe spend a little bit more time. If you, if you like me enough this far, you know, to go on a first date, you're gonna love me once you get to know me. And that's the way I feel about my guests. I really love each, I haven't had anyone on, even Sam Harris. I love Sam

• 1:59:42Brian Keating?

  Harris. There's nothing that he could do. I pay for his apps and his podcasts because he has, he has a fine mind and we disagree on a ton of stuff. But, you know, so be it. He'll never come on again. Maybe I'll see him in some, you know, some secret cabal meeting somewhere where he, you know, kind of runs for president to take over, you know, Trump on his eighth term. You know, Sam will be there, standing at the vanguard. But until then, Sam, you're always welcome back on. And everybody else, I don't want to say you're welcome. I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you so much. So maybe this is my 400, 400,000 subscriber celebration. Maybe I'll clip this and make that into that because I want Avi to have his segment standalone from this. But I really can't resist talking

• 2:00:27Brian Keating?

  about my favorite subject. Which is me and uh, no, it is uh, it's just a great thrill. You guys uh, mean so much to me and so share it with a friend. Try to get some more people involved. Um, yeah, I don't care about the numbers, you know, like I hit 400,000. My kids were really excited about it, but at the same time, I'm like, well, it's how is it really different than 399,999? You know, so I posted, you know, here's, oh, I got to 399, 974,000 subscribers. You know, like, okay, that's what I always wanted. I mean, I know if I go to a million or whatever, half a million, I'm just gonna say, well, you know, there's another number that's bigger, that's the property of natural numbers. So, love you guys, uh, please stay with it, even if you don't like it, even if you don't like the content.

• 2:01:12Brian Keating?

  I promise you, you're gonna grow your pink gray matter. Especially when you don't agree with me or my guest or both or neither. You're gonna grow your mind and we have so little time. In just a few years, according to Roman, we won't even have these things anymore. There'll be no point in having a podcast, Brian Keating will be irrelevant. You'll just like click on something optimized for Steven Dedalus from nineteen, born in 1974. And it's gonna look him up and it's gonna say, oh, these are all the things in a social graph. I love, uh, and we'll just, we'll just dial it in and it'll get pumped like soma into his brain. And he won't need me anymore, so until that happens.

• 2:01:52Brian Keating?

  Until that happens. Stay tuned, always be curious and thank you so much. Please do share it, subscribe, don't forget to do those basic things. Okay, love you all, talk to you next time.