Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - 300K SUBSCRIBERS SPECIAL: Your Questions Answered + BIG Announcement [Ep. 476]

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Five years ago, I started this podcast from scratch.  My idea was simple: create a platform to interview the world’s most brilliant scientists and make their genius known to as many people as possible.  Since then, I’ve released nearly 500 episodes, interviewed some of the world’s brightest minds, and gained over 300K subscribers! I never thought it was possible, and I’m incredibly grateful to all of my guests and to every single one of you. Without you, this wouldn’t be possible.  To celebrate this incredible milestone, I’m answering all the questions you left for me across different platforms and reflecting on this journey and the lessons I’ve learned.  P.S. I also share a BIG announcement in this episode, so don’t miss out! — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 00:42 The beginning of my podcasting journey 04:55 Reflecting on community building and limited reach 09:26 Why you should join me on Web 3.0  11:00 Pleasing the algorithm 14:13 On theories of everything and publishing your ideas  20:20 The existence of higher dimensions  23:31 Thoughts on the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics  25:59 What happens when things overlap?  28:20 Big announcement!! 31:37 My biggest lesson on YouTube  35:43 My favorite topics to discuss  41:52 Appreciation comments  43:44 Biology and astrobiology  48:02 Roman Goddess of the CMB?  49:43 Balancing fatherhood with having a podcast 54:01 Outro — Additional resources:  ➡️ Check out the videos mentioned: 🪄 Felix Flicker: The Magic of Physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJJGv-5Rk4I  🧵 Brian Greene: The Truth About String Theory & TOEs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpsxH7mOopM  📚 What Is A Theory of Everything? Featuring Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, & Eric Weinstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saamEkrBZfM  🤯 Stephen Wolfram: My Discovery Changes Everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-RO3vM10Ok  🧬 The mRNA Breakthrough That Changed Medicine Forever with Nobel Laureate Katalin Karikó: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCq__JpieNQ  🔬 Life's Catalyst: RNA with Nobel Prize Winner Tom Cech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y2knbUnpN0  👽 Is Earth Unique? Mario Livio and Jack Szostak on the Odds of Alien Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPUS-V6XX8E  🛸 Aliens Existed (Now They’re Dead): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl8N_aK_q0Y ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everybody to an episode with my favorite guest of all time. Me. It's a wild ride, and I can't believe in just five years of doing Into the Impossible. I've actually accumulated close to 500 episodes and over 300,000 subscribers as of early January 2025. It's insane. Plus, I've got another 75,000 or so plus of you that follow on the audience. only formats. And this is just an incredible accomplishment. I never thought it was possible. I never thought I'd be staring at an audience of nearly 400,000 of the most

magnificent minds in the known multiverse. When I started this podcast, my first guest, in the real kind of incarnation of the podcast was Sean Carroll. We recorded live and in person. The audio was horrible in late 2019. We released it in 2020. And then some sort of something that rhymes with Rand Dremic. occurred, beloved, I think is what it was called. If you can remember back to those dark days of early 2020, and it really caused a title shift in my life because I realized that it was basically impossible for my fellow authors to go out on book tours. I had been advised to start a podcast, and I had been running the podcast for years before, but it was audio only, and it was kind of

catch as catch can with random brilliant people guests coming on, including my first guest, Freeman Dyson. Can't ask for a bigger, better guest than the late great Freeman Dyson. But at the time, it was sort of, you know, when these guests were available, when they're coming through San Diego as part of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, and I wanted to make their brilliance known to the wider world. I felt it wasn't fair to just listen to them live and whoever happened to be in San Diego at the time at the events that we would host and not share their brilliance.

with the wider world. And so we started to record these and I would invite people. And this goes back to 2016, actually. But it really didn't start in earnest, as I said, until 2020 when the event occurred that caused all the book tours to be canceled. And then I didn't need to wait for people to come through San Diego because, well, they weren't coming through at all unless they were heavily masked and vaxed and all sorts of other things that had to be done to them. And really liberation of movement didn't occur because lockdowns until much, much later, 2021, really. So this gave me an outlet and gave me an excuse to interview and get people on that I never would have really been able to get to. Let's be honest. Just a cosmology professor,

experimental astrophysicist. And I didn't really have much to go on other than the fact that I love reading and I've been inspired to become a scientist due to my love of reading and books and audiobooks. And now I believe the podcast is kind of supersedes. books. It's crazy to say as I'm finishing my fourth book in five or six years, and I'll have more information about that later in the show. But the other thing is thinking about how many more people listen to one of these episodes than read books by me or even much more famous authors like I've had on the show. It's incredible to think of all the guests I've had on. Some of the questions I'll be answering today, I'll be answering all your questions that I received. I put up

announcements on YouTube. You can click the link here for YouTube to subscribe. I hope you will. Also, I broadcast on X Twitter and Instagram calls for questions. And I always solicit your feedback because I want your, not only your feedback, I shouldn't just say your feedback. You're going to give me your feedback whether I want it or not. But actually your questions for my esteemed guest. This is something no other podcast to my knowledge actually does. you know, you can't solicit questions for Joe Rogan's guest, et cetera, but I usually, and I do my best to inform you of who's going to be on the show. If I think it's someone who's well enough known that will get attention, I have on a lot lesser-known people than, you know, the Neil DeGrasse

Tysons and Brian Greens and Stephen Wolfram that I've had on. But lesser-known people often, you know, provide the best entertainment, best education and engagement for me. So I've had on many, many, as I say, unknown on social media authors and thinkers and I'll continue to do so. So you can always find me on YouTube right here, Dr. Brian Keating, or if you're listening on audio, you can obviously subscribe and ask me questions, though. The only two-way street, you know, it's easily available is on YouTube or Twitter slash X at Dr. Brian Keating or Instagram, although, you know, I've tried using that, you know, blue sky app and I just don't have the energy. I don't have the energy to maintain, you know, three personas. It's hard enough

with just two that I have. So with that in mind, we'll have some news, breaking news throughout the episode of this podcast, wherever you're watching it, and stay tuned for that. But for now, I want to get into your comments and questions that received instantaneously after soliciting this just a week after I hit 300,000 on New Year's Day, 2025, I hit 302,000. So it just keeps growing and growing. I'm so gratified by that. Okay, first question comes from YouTube, Z-Fees, who says well-deserved. And obviously, it's a heartfelt congratulations. There's many of you who said congratulations.

It's really an honor to share the journey with such a supportive and curious community like you guys. I do think you're the most, you know, I'm not just saying this to inflate your egos. The questions I get, as you'll see and hear, as well as the questions I get for my guests, like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, et cetera. These are just incredibly erudite, well thought out, reason, questions that bespeak of how highly educated you are. And actually, I did a survey at the end of 2024, look for it, you know, maybe a repeat in 2025. I'll do it again. I give out $100 Amazon gift cards to three winners. But the podcast survey came back with over 250 respondents, and it was just phenomenal, the input and feedback that I got.

But I also got to know you guys. And it's mostly guys. There are 90% of you are male. Identify as male, as they might say. But at least identified yourself as male. And the question that I posed to you on that particular genetic demographic that you fall into or wish to be subscribed to. So many of you are men.

There are women and it's growing. And I do get plenty of questions and comments and feedback. I tend to have more, you know, female followers on Instagram and Twitter than I do on YouTube. But I think it's changing, and I'm going to, you know, I'll share the results of the survey at some point. But the other thing that was fascinating to me, besides the richness of your income levels, incredible, the percentage of you that have, you know, incomes that would qualify you, at least maybe outside of here in California, as wealthy, perhaps, is just incredible. The number of non-Americans that listen to it from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, all literally all over. I've got listeners as far as I got one from Kazakhstan, Uganda. It's really incredible to reach it.

And this is why I say it's, I think it's superseded. You know, the last election, they call it the podcast election. I don't think I played a big bro on that. But the role of podcasts is really not to be underestimated. And as I said, many more people can put on a podcast. They say one out of every two Americans listens to podcasts regularly, once a week, say. And I've got listeners going back years to when I started the podcast. podcast up until, you know, brand newbies that joined just this past year. I mean, we grew the

YouTube subscription by 100,000 people just in, in 2024 alone, which means, you know, a third of you are fresh in the last year, at least by demographics and hopefully continue growing. Daily Saga also says congratulations. You deserve it. Well, I really appreciate it, as I said. The podcast, I think, is so engaging because, as I say, I like to ask the questions that you would ask or sometimes that you do actually ask. And the community is really the thing that's most gratifying to grow. You know, YouTube views and even subscriptions have seemed to drop for some of the biggest and best YouTubers on the planet. As I said, much bigger and better than me. Look at view counts on, you know, channels like those that I've been on. They've dropped

dramatically. And I think that's a result of the pandemic coming to an end and more people going back to either listening to the audio version only, you know, and they're commuting now, which they weren't during the pandemic, or consuming it in other ways. But, you know, I had an interview with Jordan Peterson two years ago, got, you know, nearly a million views. And then I did one recently in December, just came out in January. And, you know, got 100,000 views, which is incredible. But, you know, it's dramatically less. And he has a subscription base of eight million plus people, whereas, you know, two years ago, it was much less. So YouTube demographics are changing algorithms change all the time YouTube can do with us what it will but

I think it's incredible to bring as many people into the conversation as possible I ask you for help along this you know you can do that in a variety of ways engaging with the conversations that I have leaving comments leaving likes I hate to do it I feel so debased I feel dirty at first I didn't think it was real I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place Pluto TV Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is ours.

It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. But the best way really is to not involve those platforms at all and get off of Web 2.0 and join me on Web 3.0. which is my mailing list, Briancateen.com slash list. And you can join. And as I always like to say, I love to give back.

I do give out meteorites just like this one if you're watching or if you're listening. Here you can hear it. Delivered by gravity some 6,000 years ago, I teach you all about how to find meteorites, how to watch meteor showers, what the meteors are made of, et cetera, when you join my Monday Magic mailing list where I share all the coolest stuff from around the world of science. It's totally free. Oftentimes it pays for itself. because I do get incredible discounts and all sorts of cool stuff on tools like AI apps and other,

you know, free trials and introduce you to cool ideas from around the world of science and also, you know, career-wise. I've gotten into, you know, since my appearance on Stephen Bartlett's diary of a CEO, I got thousands and thousands of new subscribers. And they are very curious about the nexus between science and business and being a leader, a CEO, a leader. a PI, something like that. And so I've been orienting some of the content that I produce each week around that and how to succeed in your career, how to level up, whether you're a scientist or not. And what are the parallels between a scientist and a business person? So that's really gratifying. And that's the best way you can engage with the community.

Because as I said, you know, LinkedIn can shut me off, you know, at any moment. YouTube could, you know, people suggest, oh, I should go to Rumble, et cetera. I'm not going to do that. I just, I don't have the end. You know, this is a side, not even a hustle. I don't know what you'd call it. It's a side sidel. I'm not doing this for, I don't make that much money. And so it's not like some humble brag that I don't do it for the money. And, you know, it's like, you know, like, you know, Dak Shepard or Smartless.

Oh, we don't do it for the money, you know, as they, you know, get paper cuts from counting their $100 million contracts. But no, I literally don't make that much money. And I don't do it for the money. I do it because it's very gratifying to talk to these most brilliant individuals. And I'm also branching out and doing much more solo content, doing episodes where I, you know, take a deep topic and go even deeper on it, like the search for aliens in the universe. I did a deep dive about that in reaction to my friend Lex Friedman and Adam Frank's conversation, where they were much, you know, more optimistic about alien life. And I know that rubs people the wrong way, but I don't really care. I do love to react to it.

then that's a benefit of not having to please the algorithm or please the audience, even, as my friend Eric Weinstein coined the term, audience capture. It makes you do stuff that you wouldn't do if you didn't have to appeal to advertisers or to the YouTube algorithm. And, you know, I find a lot of podcasters pander to it. They have people on that are reprehensible or, you know, beyond reproach. And they do it because of the algorithm. They want to make money and they need them money for ad sense. I would like the money. I'm not saying I'm better than that. But, you know, I'm happy. I'm a public

university professor and I can afford, you know, to keep the power on the lights on. The university doesn't support me. You know, they don't oppose me. But I think they're, you know, they're happy if I'm, you know, doing something useful. I think they like it when people come to UCSD and want to meet me or, you know, they put me in front of donors or whatever, not tuning my own horn. But, you know, having almost a half a million, I think we'll hit a half a million. at some point this year on, you know, combined platforms. And that allows you to have a certain level of influence to get, you know, in front of audiences and donors and stuff like that.

But again, they don't support it, you know, beyond paying for the power in the studio. Everything else, microphones are even I buy them myself. So this is what I do as an avocation. And the worst thing to do with an avocation is try to monetize it. I think that's awful. So anyway, it's all big plea to, only, you know, subscribe, share the channels, audio and video, but also join the mailing list. A lot of you are not, something like 97% of you. I know for sure.

I know a member of my 15,000 member strong email list because there's 300,000 of you just on YouTube and another 75K on audio only. So this is a reason just to implore you to allow me to communicate with you. I don't sell the email list. I treat it very carefully. You don't get spam. I just try to highlight stuff that you'll be interested in and hopefully share a unique perspective. I'm an experimental cosmologist.

There aren't any other people like that doing the kind of outreach that I'm doing and getting the amount of satisfaction that I'm doing. So with that, let's go on to another question, which actually has to do with the email list. This was not planned. This comes from a user on YouTube in plain view one. Congrats.

Also, I enjoyed your newsletter email today, which was yesterday on January 13th, 2025. I mean, could I post my gut? Will there ever be an actual TOE or at least one that is universally accepted if you want? So I think this person's asking if there'll ever be a unified theory of everything is that achievable? Will it be universally accepted? I've often made a joke that we're putting the toe theory of everything before the gut, a grand unified theory.

We actually don't have a grand unified theory, which would unify the stronger of the three of the four fundamental forces without the exclusion of gravity. A toe would then incorporate all of gravity as well as electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Now I answered this person, you know, that sounds fascinating. I love to hear about it. And then they wrote back, I can't believe you answered me and wrote back. And then in plain view writes back with a fascinating hypothesis that he or she has made about the role of black hole dynamics, entanglement, a quantum hall effect. dark matter, dark energy, and then embedding, and they're claiming to do this, I haven't seen any of it, and they're proposing that I can share latex with me. I don't like to get huge emails. I do get them.

I have this chain of emails from Jack Sarfati about alien warp drives, propulsion, et cetera, and he's always copying 80 people on the email chain. It doesn't have the courtesy to BCC, doesn't know how to perhaps. I don't know how, Jack, you're going to unify all of physics, not only with, you know, the four fundamental forces of nature, but you're going to do that with the incorporation of time and space, propulsion, warp drives, and also explain how alien and UAPs fit into all this, but you can't figure out how to use BCC. Now, about 80% of the people on the email have asked you to be removed, and yet they're still there, including me, and it's not, you know, it's not be speaking of a high level of technological awareness, Jack. you may be brilliant, I think you went to UCSD. But anyway, don't send me your emails with, you know, 50, 80 pages of latex in them. What you should do is proceed the normal route, publish, put them up somewhere, put them

on archive. And I say this to In Plain View too, which is, you know, he or she has a fascinating thing about any ionization, dark matter, singularities could turn, you know, entangled states into frozen states that could also incorporate and explain dark matter. I find a lot of these things are too good to be true. I mean, they're kind of selling beyond the sale. And that, you know, one of these things would be enough. To explain dark matter, it would be enough.

Dian, new. Dark energy would be enough. Dying new. Quantum interactions with black hole information particles. It's enough. It's enough. So start somewhere, break it down, make it logical, publish it, share it with others, get feedback, get criticism.

If you can't get it published, obviously you should seek other people. I'm an experimentalist. It's not something that I would deal with. I would understand once it has. had been accepted or at least as worthy of pursuing. Obviously, there's a lot of problems, a cosmological constant and Hubble tension and incorporation of grand unified theories using gravity brought into SU2 and then embedded in SU5. These are, you know, way beyond what I would study. But if there are downstream predictions, rather than just fanciful narratives about how this could

be accomplished, that sounds great. But to me, as a pragmatist, as an experimentalist, I want to understand what are the downstream consequences. How can these be used to further the research that I do in cosmic microwave background, in optical polarization of starlight, in infrared background fluctuations? So these are all interesting things. Now, I've done millions of podcasts about this literally. Not what I hate when people say literally, when they need figuratively, check out any of my conversations with Eric Weinstein and or Sabina Hosenfelder, done them with Juan Al Thesana.

It's supposed to have them back on. And this is, you know, not to be not to be trifled with those great intellects, including iconoclastic people like Sir Roger Penrose, who doesn't believe in the, you know, kind of inflationary origin of the universe and has an alternative cosmological model. So it's not that I only accept, you know, the Orthodox and the mainstream scientists. Certainly Eric Weinstein is not a mainstream physicist, and yet I'm interested in interpreting what he presents because it may have, experimental ramifications. And I've discussed those in the context of looking for modifications to primordial power spectrum and other things that could come downstream of it. And I'll continue to be interested in as long as people like Eric are. But I'm obviously not devoting too much attention to it because the quarry of what we're seeking with the Simon's Observatory, Simon's Array,

and my former bicep experiments, those are big enough quarries, you know, looking for the inflationary origin of the universe via potential gravitational. way of impact. And that is just so fascinating. And there's only so much time in the day. And I think people like in plain view, one, want to sort of, you know, have this, have this note, or they have this notion that somehow because I'm smart and I'm capable and I'm legitimate, that, you know, I can test anything or I can understand anything and I can get them to break through and get their ideas published and accepted by a scientific community. That's not how it works. You don't, You don't just have like, oh, well, you know, Einstein said I was right, and then therefore, you know, now I can get this published.

Einstein didn't get a lot of things published, including his initial thoughts on gravitational waves. And it was a good thing because he was wrong. So this is all a big way of saying, thanks for sharing the ideas. I think you can share it with others who are more expert, see if it gets traction. I would say, you know, sometimes its suspicion can be taken too far. You can try to do too much with an idea, and you should do it systematically and logically, rather than trying to do it all. at once, break it down into separate disparate parts, get feedback on those, maybe publish those, and move on from there. Next question comes from Allian's 3848, says, Professor, in my opinion,

some peculiar phenomena of living beings, such as the perception of colors, can be interpreted as higher dimensions. For example, if we have four variables in a space-time graph, 3D plus one time, I think three-spatial plus one time, it becomes natural to represent a fifth variable with colors assigned to each point in the graph. The same concept can be extended to other perceptions, such as smell, taste, et cetera. What do you think? I think that you're asking whether or not,

you know, sensory perceptions, which are uniquely human to the way that we understand them, famous essay, what is it like to be a bat? By Thomas Nagel, really comes up with, we don't know what it's like to be a bat. So we don't know if your perception of color is the same as mine. I've got this, you know, pink, hot pink sign in the background,

open the pod bay doors, reminiscent of Hal, reminiscent of 2001 of Space Odyssey, because that's where the name podcast comes from, people. Don't forget that. Open the Pod Bay Door, influenced engineering of Vin's something, Vinny, something. That Apple, they come up with the name iPod, because it looked like a pod, the white little thing with a circular disc like Hal's eye. And then they went with it, and the podcast were born. So the question is, could sensory perceptions like color or smell serve as metaphors for higher dimensions? I don't think that you can, you know, you're really saying that we can taste, you know, the town neutrino or something like that.

Yes, it's a very helpful analogy. And in fact, people have made such analogies in the past. You know, we have these different, you know, four, some say five different dimensions of taste as well as position on our tongue, you know, hot, sweet, salty, umami, which is like savory. I know I'm missing out on some of those. But anyway, those are developed evolutionarily, of course, to, you know, allow us to. to sense threats and seek pleasure, you know, and get carbohydrates and so forth as a means for enhancing our survival and probability and likelihood. But I don't think that they have any ability. So for a space-time graph, you're saying you could represent it as a color. Of course,

yeah, that is totally, that is totally valid idea. And so you can use that as a tangible way. And it reminds me of this book, Flatland, which I brought into UCSD. So I don't have my copy here, but you will get a copy of it when you join my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list. I send out copies of Edwin Abbott's Flatland where he uses metaphors of the second dimension in order to teach us, humans, about the fourth dimension. So using lower dimensional creatures,

in this case, squares, triangles, circles, which is also a metaphor for Victorian eros and mores and social mores in Victorian England. But this is an incredible metaphor that he uses, then it really teaches you to visualize what a low-dimensional creature would see if they encountered something of higher dimensions. So I think you're right on to something interesting. This could be done metaphorically, of course. And we don't believe squares exist, nor can they write amazing books that you can get for free in my mailing list. But I recommend that you see my interview

where I talked about the fabric of reality with Brian Green, where we explored these higher-dimensional theories and their implications. So I think that's great. Benjamin Gatti asks, Nobel Prize is 2022 is zero published data. Biggest height. I believe, Benjamin, I don't think you're criticizing the Peace Prize or whatever. You didn't say which prize, but I assume you mean physics if you're watching here. So what did the Nobel Prize in physics celebrate? Well, it was one of the most profound discoveries in science that the universe, so to speak, is not locally real. We're real in this context means that objects have definite properties, independent of whether or not they're observed. So an apple is quote-unquote red, whether or not someone is looking. And famously,

Einstein asked, you know, do you really believe that the moon isn't there when you're not looking? So locality means that objects are influenced only by their surroundings with no influence traveling faster than the speed of light. And this was verified experimentally by three scientists, John Klauser, Alain Aspect, Anton Zilinger, who showed that these assumptions can't all both be simultaneously true. So this, you know, really put a kind of, you know, wrench, a spanner in the works, as my UK audience would say, of how we understand reality. Do we really not believe that this can of, you know, sparkling hard cider? No, this isn't hard cider.

This is normally soft cider, soft seltzer from Trader Joe's. Do we really believe it's not there if I'm not enjoying the taste of it, to use the previous questionnaires metaphor? We did do an episode, many times, many episodes, actually. We did with my late great colleague Andy Friedman, who passed away in, 2020. It's quite sad to think about how long he's been gone for. And he was working on these types of measurements before the Nobel Prize was even announced. But he worked very close with Anton Zealinger, who unfortunately for me, kicked me off a paper that Andy had proposed IBM

along with David Kaiser at MIT. But that's okay. I didn't really deserve it. I did support Andy's work, but he did it all. I didn't really contribute that much. But this was looking at Quasarer, setting polarization states of optical bench top instruments coupled to telescopes, large telescopes in the Canary Islands, and then they would transmit and see if the telescopes could violate locality on timescales, basically, that would require them to exchange hidden variable information and violate Bell's inequality. And so that's what Andy used to do, and that's what Antom and Klauser, et cetera, and Aspect won their Nobel Prize. So I don't think it's illegitimate. I don't know why you'd say that. So now I want to turn to Darrell Hartley, SEP asks, again, this is on YouTube,

Dr. Brian Keating. My question is, if things never touch, speaking of atoms, then what happens when things overlap? For example, water, liquid gas. I think that you're asking, since it seems to be true that atoms never physically touch, I mean, what does that really mean? They have wave functions. They're not localized like billiard balls. How do overlapping states emerge, such as gas and liquid, which are not individual states. I mean, a very diffuse gas could be like little tiny isolated atoms. So atoms interact through primarily electromagnetic forces rather than direct contact. Overlapping states like those in fluids can arise from quantum interactions and emergent behaviors. And I discussed this when my episode with, on the magic of physics,

where magic is spelled with a K. That is a book by Felix. Flickr, and I did that interview, I believe, in late 2023. So have a look. Maybe we'll put a link to any one of these videos that I mentioned. Hopefully, we're putting a link to above in the YouTube version, and you can go back and listen to it or watch it. So we talk about, you know, what is a fluid? What is a liquid gas, etc.? How do they interact? And how is more different? This is what's called condensed matter physics or solid state physics, as it's known. and this is the branch of physics that really encapsulates most of physics. It actually has all to do with quantum mechanics, low temperature physics, super connectivity,

spin states and topological matter, et cetera, in relation to quantum hall effect, these are all things within solid state. I think that's an incredibly fascinating question. I'm glad that you did. And ultimately underneath everything, we do believe that quantum mechanics rules the day. So ultimately it's a quantum mechanical question, not just a, not just a classical mechanics or, you know, condensed matter physics question. Okay.

So now we're going to turn many, many questions or, you know, statements. Congratulations. I just love those. They truly do warm my cockles. They warm the cockles of my heart. It's just so gratifying to get so many, you know, brilliant people arranged in one place to do such good stuff. Now, I told you there'd be an important announcement in the middle. So now before we get into.

Twitter comments, X and Instagram, I want to announce that the sequel to my second book, yeah, my second book was called Into the Impossible, Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. The third, the second edition or a second volume of this book is coming out soon. This book was a book written and distilled from the wisdom of the masters, the men, only men were in this volume, but wait, there's more coming soon. And this was done to exactly as it says in the subtitle, Lessons from Lurids to Stoke Curiosity, to Spur Collaboration, and to Ignite Imagination in in Your Life and Your Career. And the foreword was written by Barry Barish and also my friend James Altit.

This book is, you know, this actually sells more books than my first book, losing a Nobel Prize. Even though I, you know, this book is a true solo work. It's really a memoir of what it feels like to do science at the highest levels. It's come up short sometimes. That's just life. That's just reality. I have links to those books on my website down below. But this book was written with the nine Nobel laureates that I had interviewed by 2021 on this podcast.

Now, as of 2025, actually last year, 2024, actually as of 2023, I had finished another nine laureates. So I had 18 by the end of 2023. And since then I've done three more, it's at 2021. But the latter three will have to wait until the third volume of this book comes out. So the second volume is called Into the Impossible. instead of think like a Nobel Prize winner. It's called Focus like a Nobel Prize winner. How do you follow one course until successful? Focus. How do you do research at a high level, but maintain your sanity? What do you look for in a research advisor or in a collaborator? This book was written not just for

scientists. The second book is more written for young scientists, engineers, et cetera, really as a tribe of mentors, you know, to use Tim Ferriss's lingo to ignite your career. But really, how do you, how do you birth the career. How do you get started in science? And that I think is a fascinating question. How do you actually do science? How do you choose an advisor? What do you do when that advisor acts like a jerk? What do you do when, you know, you can't seem to have a work-like balance? Should you have a work-life balance as a young scientist, engineer? So it's really meant to appeal mainly people in academia, but not only people in industry can benefit from it too. But it's from the second of the 21 second set of nine of the full set of 21 that I've interviewed today. So it's really a productivity

book, how to get things done, how to work and succeed as a scientist. So I think it's a fascinating entry into my uvra. And I hope you'll enjoy it. It comes out later in 2025. I'll have links to it. I'll be sending out sample chapters. I'll be getting feedback from you. There's still time to provide input to it rather. And so I hope that you'll join me on this. quest to really improve science and engineering and math, etc. As the last best hope of not just America, but of the world. I think we need more and more highly educated, highly committed, highly motivated, but highly capable people.

And that's my goal in this book, teach you how to be the best version of you so that we as a society as a civilization can truly thrive. Okay. Let's get on to questions from X, formerly known as Twitter. Normalia Kajuri is a professor and a good friend of mine. What has been your biggest learning in your YouTube journey? Well, I've learned a lot about myself in this journey most, you know, kind of prominently is that I really enjoyed doing it.

And I wouldn't have really known that about myself. I would have missed out on this whole new dimension of public facing, putting stuff out there, showing your work, being a little bit nervous to release stuff, speaking to a camera, speaking to brilliant Nobel laureates 21 so far, and hosting live events with Richard Dawkins, I wouldn't have gotten access to any of that if I didn't just start. And, you know, overcoming that activation energy is really the hardest thing to not be afraid of what people think about you when you start. I know that there are colleagues out there that dislike that I do it, that denigrate that I do this, as they have done for almost every scientist who chooses to

engage with the public. But I use that as a springboard, you know, for my claim that I think that scientists not only have a moral obligation to share what they do with the public, but also it's a personal obligation to themselves to their future descendants who will maybe not know what they sounded like even or looked like in some cases, unless they engage with the public. In this medium that we have, not just starting your own podcast, but producing a tiny little video, putting it out on here on X or on YouTube, it's liberating. It's such a wonderful experience that you may not know. Now, you may know.

maybe you're right. I'm not good at it. I don't deserve to do it. I don't belong to you. But you'll never know until you try. I wouldn't have known until I started doing it. And I found it's a whole new dimension of my personality. Maybe it's a narcissistic component, but it certainly is fun to do. I don't think it makes me any less serious. I think that people, you know, who say that you should just stay in the lab in my case or you stay at the blackboard. In your case, or writing papers, they miss the point of science. Science isn't made to segregate away from the people that pay you to do it. it's to share those amazing discoveries. I always say we scientists have the greatest script imaginable,

and we're like a C-rate actor in terms of how we engage or perform for the public and share what we do. And it's really a shame, the mismatch between what we are capable of doing based on the script that nature or God has provided to us and what we actually deliver on most of the time. And myself included, I think I'm great. A speaker, you know, a presenter, I think I enjoy it. I work hard at it, and that's the thing I fault people for not really engaging with. Because if you don't do that, A, you might not know that you have this latent ability,

which, you know, I think I do have. Obviously, I don't think I could have gotten to so many subscribers, followers, and email mailing list, subscribers. If I didn't, I'm not saying this to self-aggrandize myself. But at the same time, I know I'm good at it. Again, always room for improvement. I always like to listen to the comments, read them. I do read them.

I don't respond to everyone, but I do. read them. And that's the improve and how I share and engage with the, with the wider world, including those people, taxpayers here in America, or wherever you are. Science only gets done because we're not at war in some huge world conflagration. So we should take advantage of that. And you only know quantum electrodynamics or group theory or, you know, condensed matter physics, topological matter. You only know that because you worked hard at it. You weren't born knowing it. So of course it's hard to, you know, speak to a camera. You just see this little green. light, you know, looking at you, but it could be incredibly rewarding. And you'll never know

until you devote some of the effort. I'm not saying 100%, 50% should be making videos. I'm not saying that at all. A few percent, five, 10%, and I guarantee you it'll change your life. I can't say how. I can't say when. I can't promise it will make you any additional money. As I said, don't do this certainly for the money. But at the same time, learning about how I can improve and share back with the world is a is a true treat and it's an incredible you know glimpse into my wholeness of my personality next post from x berry straw which you know i i would love to have named one of my kids that well deserve my and congratulations my question is what is your favorite topic to discuss on the podcast while you're looking at it my favorite subject my favorite

guest is me. No, I do love these episodes. I, you know, would love to do more of these. I'll do another one at, you know, 350,000, assuming we get there. I'll do one when we hit 50,000, 50,000. I don't think I'll hit 50,000 episodes, but, you know, if I keep, if I keep, you know, following the Huberman Lab protocols, maybe I will. So what inspires me most on the podcast? I love talking, you know, just kind of letting you be a fly in the wall out there. there with some of the greatest minds in the multiverse to talk to people on every subject. You know, just this past year, I made a note of, you know, what have I talked about in this previous year?

I mean, if I look into the topics that we've talked about, fundamental physics and cosmology, obviously that's my main gig, my main hustle, not my side sidel, a side hustle, talking to Wendy Friedman, Dan Hooper, you know, just this past year, Matt Strassler on fundamental physics frameworks, Stephen Wilfrum twice in 2024. It's just incredible. Talk about different theories of everything, interpretations of laws of nature and physics, thermodynamics that we hold near and dear. And that really informs us about how these different methodological, experimental in my case, theoretical, in the case of most of my guest are theorists, Strassler, Stephen Wolfram, Dan Hooper, Wendy Freeman's an observer. But, you know, looking at these people,

I do love talking to instrument builders. It's sometimes hard. And I talked to my book agent recently about another book. I'm not going to talk about that book because sometimes you talk about stuff and you get a little taste of the glory that you think you're going to have when the book comes out. So I'm not going to tell you the title of that book. That'll be a hopefully traditionally published book with a big publisher like my first book was with Norton. And I won't tell you anything about it. Nope, you'll have to wait.

But I will tell you later on about it. if you join my mailing list, et cetera, because I do share what's going on with my life. I'm a human being. I love to share things, you know, lessons I learn from my kids and the science and life, et cetera. But I think it's as having, you know, this incredible access that makes it so appealing and enjoyable. And yes, it is true. I got derailed.

I derailed myself. Usually I derail my guests by accident. But in terms of what my agent was saying, Max Brockman, that, you know, these big ideas, like it doesn't even matter if the big ideas are not provable, like a, book like the elegant universe string theory or black hole wars with my friend Lenny Suskin. It doesn't even matter if you can verify these things. I mean, Stephen Hawking's books are awful in terms of actually predicting what the future would be.

I mean, all these books of his. And I didn't have him on. I had Leonard Blondon on who wrote many books with him. But, you know, a brief history of time basically, you know, claims that M theory is proven. it's the best description of nature, inflation is proven, and that time, you know, there's no boundary proposal is true. None of these things are fully verified, you know, 40 years hence, but the big ideas are what mattered. And oftentimes people write these books and they try to emulate hawking. And I think, you know, Brian does that an incredible way, had him on last year. But, you know,

the big ideas, it's almost like people don't have the patience to understand how these experimental projects work. And so they tend to really listen to these huge ideas, extra dimensions, you know, elegance, beauty, et cetera. And even though they have less of a chance of understanding that, the so-called trade book, popular science book, than I do of understanding it as an experimental physicist, understanding extra dimensions or truly grasping, you know, the implications of the Higgs field, or loop quantum gravity or whatever, or Stephen Wolfram's ideas. These are the big ideas, that's what people want. And so it's harder for experimentalists, you know, observers, etc., to make as similar an impact as these great minds can do when you only have the limits

and the constraints of your mind and the pen and paper in what you're writing with. And so I see that a lot with guests like Nick Bostrom and Donald Hoffman and guests like Max Tagmark as well. These are brilliant scientists, credible thinkers, but having the, you know, kind of wherewithal to explain a big idea, even if it's not even possibly, potentially, theoretically provable. That seems to be what people really like to listen to, watch on the podcast, but also read about. So dynamics are changing.

And, you know, I do, you know, as a long wind away of answering what I love to talk about, it would be, you know, it would be talking about instruments and the historical kind of foundations of how we know what we know about these grand theories, but, posed by my wonderful guests. Okay. Next question. Universe X, Y. Handel.

Universe sexy 69. I don't know why that number 69 keeps appearing, is it? It's for the constellation Pisces. Anyway, he, she, they, J, say? You should have more, I guess, more subscribers. Thank you. I agree. I think we're criminally undersubscribed.

All the effort that I put into it. I try to keep it to one day a week. Sometimes it sneaks into a second. big. But having these great guests and they're sharing their ideas is a true privilege. And yes, I do think I should have more and I hopefully will have. I mean, it's only going up, but, you know, the rate of change of that derivative could be higher by my taste, but we'll see. I'd rather have, you know, 21 Nobel Prize winners and so forth, you know, in the audience than, you know, 21 million, you know, Mr. Beast fans or Mr. Beast kind of audience member avatars. So I like that.

They say, I just love learning about the secrets of unlocking the mysteries of the universe. I actually got a wonderful quote. Let's see if I can find it here from Twitter a couple of days ago. X, as they call it now. And it was incredible. It said, actually, it came on YouTube from someone, Ozzy Crabbs. And Ozzy says, dude, I'm an ex-drug addict. And I love these videos.

They help me not thinking about relapsing. Thank you, sir, for your amazing videos. I mean, that's incredible. I never would have thought, like, in 2020, when the podcast really kicked off and heard it, I'm going to make videos. and it's going to help people overcome their addictions. That's incredibly gratifying. I actually got the kind of feedback, even from someone else on X,

Nikki Groves, who said, Prof, I'm in the same situation as this guy. Although I'm past the withdrawal stages, not better than he is, having said that, you are very fascinating. Physics, natural history, archaeology, consume me. Keep it going, please. So, I mean, these things really keep it go. I mean, and I put those in a folder, you know, where people talk, about how good, how bad comments are and how mean people are on the internet.

They've never say these things in person. I get comments, you know, please don't quit. I love your interviews. Thank you, Mithia. Paolo Velazquez says, amen. Micula says, you're a good man, Brian. It's important to keep going. It's funny that if I end that sentence with bro and put up a picture in a track suit,

you wouldn't imagine me having a degree in electronics engineering. Peace, bro. Matt Gray, you're awesome, dude. Keep up. Please don't quit. YouTube. You have one of my favorite podcasts and YouTube is a place to watch them. DJ Plains says you're more addicting than drugs. One of my favorite science channels except when you invite Eric to S. I'm a shit-dala physicist. I haven't had them on a while. Hopefully I have them on again.

Real soon saw him recently back up in L.A. before the horrible fires checked on him recently. He's doing well. Invite him down. See what happens. Okay, let's get back to the questions. Next one. Alex Buckley, are you interested in biology? How much of it do you know? I am interested in biology in a variety of different ways. First of all, one of my kids is really into it. And even though I barely, you know, passed, we didn't have AP. I went to a very small high school. We didn't have many AP subjects. We didn't have AP physics. We have AP biology. We had regular biology. And I loved it. It was very interesting. I loved it because you could do actual experiments. You could actually, you know, take a frog, dissect it and see what it looks like. Again, I was so bad at biology and the frog would come back to light. I was just horrible at it. I still am. And I don't actually know what they do over there.

Chemistry was my worst subject, even though I loved it so much. And I actually got exposure to science from Isaac Asimov through his books on chemistry. And that was what he was very interested in. And his popular science nonfiction books about chemistry inspired me to become a writer and a scientist. That's part of the mission on this podcast is to pay it back, not pay it forward only, but pay it back to these great luminaries who influenced me to be a scientist. scientist. I think Asimov wrote 400 books or something like that. Anyway, I can get to the logarithm of that, hopefully, beyond. I'm very interested in biology. I love it. I'm not good at it. I have talked to many people this past year, including two Nobel Prize winners, three Nobel Prize winners,

about RNA, in particular, MRNA, including Thomas Czech and Jack Shostak. And then lastly, of course, Catalina Carrico, co-inventor of the COVID vaccine. Now that's going to turn a lot of people I'm very interested in it. And then in terms of astrobiology, I did a recent video about, you know, how hard would it be to kind of like, you know, take a weed whacker full of microbes and spray it on Mars. Here's a piece of Mars. You won't get this if you join the mailing list. You'll get one of these.

For sure, if you have a dot edu email address and you live in the United States, here's the link. Brian Keating.com slash edu. If you have one of those bad baby email addresses, you'll get one of these beauties. But, you know, panspermy, if you launch a meteorite off of Mars like this, it comes to Earth. So, too, the Earth share bacteria, mold, tardigrades, whatever, with Mars in the past, even when Mars was habitable, perhaps, you know, three billion years ago, it's incredibly interesting. I come out with a pretty pessimistic line, not zero, but, you know, 8%, 5%, 2%, whatever, of that actually

occurring and question whether or not we can use that as a limit on how easily life can get kicked off via panspermia. We kind of have this laboratory in our solar system's past history. And I make the argument that it doesn't bode well for how. how easy it is to spread life throughout the universe. So check out that interview. I'll put a link to it up here. Or not interview. It's a solo episode based on Adam Frank's episode of Lex Friedman podcast. And I really enjoyed that podcast. I've had on Adam twice now. Hopefully I have him on even more times. Talk about his work. He's a fascinating individual. But, you know, I think a lot of

people kind of misunderstand when he talks about aliens and so forth that he's talking about their existence throughout the entire 14 billion year history of the universe over every single galaxy within the observable universe. And he gets this 10 billion trillion number that's been, you know, discussed in the podcast with Lex. And he discussed that with me as well as Lex. And I think the important thing to realize is that, well, that's not very interesting when you want to consider what the odds are. We're going to interact with life, you know, it's one thing if you had a potential for, you know, to be, you know, to have a girl. friend in the 1630s, but, you know, who cares? You would have been the richest person, the most,

you know, well-known person, perhaps, of that age, maybe, I don't know, but, you know, that's not really relevant. You know, what you care about is can we interact? Well, the odds that life exist in our galaxy. And then within the kind of the technological zone, I call it, you know, kind of the radio transmission region of the universe that we have access to and could have learned about us and we could respond to and plausibly come to visit us. Using known physics, people make up all these unknown physics of wormholes and time warps and plasma drives. I'm looking at you, Jack. But the point being, how do we know what the limits are and just the region of the universe we could actually plausibly have communicated with? And that's very, very small. I'm very

interested in biology. I hope to learn more about it. I probably will through my son and daughter's science fair projects. Last question. This comes from Agona Appel. Again, on X, Dr. Brian Keating on X, and we'll do one question from a friend of mine on Instagram, same handle. Congratulations, Brian. Question, was there a Roman god of the cosmic microwave background? If not, what name would you suggest? That is an incredibly cool question. I've never been asked about this, mythology and science.

Of course, we name constellations after Roman gods. We name days of the week, et cetera, after them in English, at least, or romance languages. So there wasn't obviously a Roman god or goddess of the cosmic microwave background. So there is a goddess that I think is quite appropriate. And the name of the goddess is Lucinia. I guess Luciana, we would kind of anglicize it. To this day, I have a cousin named Luciana. It doesn't only mean lucky, like Lucio, Luccio Piccherillo, my co-author and friend.

That does mean lucky or lucrative, fortunate, et cetera. But in this case, it means lux or light. And in the context of, I believe, she was the goddess, the mother of Juno and Diana. Juno is, of course, the mission that's going to Jupiter, which could discover life on one of its moons. But besides that, childbirth, you know, babies are brought from the darkness into light. And I think that that could be a beautiful name, a goddess of light.

It's considered a moon goddess, a birth goddess. And it was the birth of the universe, right? So the birth of the universe, the heat left over from that formation process is the CMB, cosmic my great background. So I think Lucina is a, or Lucina is an appropriate goddess name. Now, speaking of mothers, I am not a mother. I'm a father. And Rina Friedman wants, asked me, what's it like to balance being a father and fatherhood with a podcast? Well, first of all, it's a great treat because the kids don't really care so much nowadays about, you know, I'm a professor, a researcher. But you can see back here, there's a play button. Well, there's a big

silvery play button, actually aluminum. In the back. that I got from YouTube in 2023 for getting to 100,000 subscribers. So maybe they'll send me three more now, two more now. But below it, right there is a much more precious play button. And that was made by one of my kids out of clay with a red YouTube play button on it. I call it my clay button. And I was just so thrilled that he decided to make that. It's a such a cute thing.

It was a couple of years ago. Before I had 100,000 subscribers, I had one of those. And I'm hoping when I get to a million, YouTube will send me a meteorite. version, you know, made of nickel iron and cobalt, like these ones are that you can get, Briankeek.com slash list. But being a father is great. Having YouTube channel kind of gives the credibility. Their friends all know about it. They ask me about it. One of them who's a six year old wants to collaborate with me. You already figured out that you've got to collaborate to blow up. You got a niche down. Then you blow up. He already has his first 10.

Liyadh. I'm very proud of you, young man. We will do a co-lab someday. And I'm convinced you'll have an even bigger channel than me in the deep future because you have more time than me. So running out of time, speaking of time, as I said, these are my favorite episodes, not only because I'm a unrepentant narcissist, but I do love to talk about myself, but I do love to answer your questions. And this is the highest density of questions that I get. The other place I get great feedback again is when people email me, and that's again, through my mailing list. But I do hope that you enjoyed this little deep dive into kind of the life style of what it's been like to grow 300K It's in one sense taken forever to get here.

I remember the first thousand in the first year, and that was incredible. I got to 10,000 in the first year, first calendar year 2020, and I started the podcast off and then slow, fast, rapidly, suddenly, and then not at all, and then rapidly. So it kind of comes and goes, but you can help out by sharing the YouTube channel with your friends, making comments on each video, even if it's just a thumbs up, an emoji, a thumbs down, I don't care. rating the podcast also helps almost on a thousand ratings on both Apple podcast and on Spotify. So wherever you're listening to this, stop right now.

You owe me this. It's part of the agreement that you made to pay me back, pay it forward and pay it back. What I'd like you guys to do is to leave a review. Just a rating even, an asterism of five stars is great. It's not quite a constellation. It's just an asterism. But it really means a lot to me. and breaking through the 1,000 reviews is incredible, and I hope to do it.

I mean, less than 0.1% of podcast hit that milestone. We're growing there. Share the YouTube channel with your friends. Share the mailing list to Briankeen.com slash list. Don't forget you get a meteorite if you have a .edu email address in the United States. And I just really do want to express my heartfelt gratitude to all of you listening, watching, watching this on YouTube. I post them on Twitter and sometimes on Spotify, the video episodes. It's been an incredible journey to share together these ideas with great thinkers, to do some solo episodes, to explore completely different branches of science like astrobiology, you just heard.

I just want to keep asking these questions and continue to grow and build this community. That's the most important thing. Yes, I love having, you know, hundreds of thousands of subscribers on other people's platforms, but really having a community. And I'm looking forward to doing more live events. I did a live event. I was honored to host Richard Dawkins in Vancouver and October. That was a treat. Spelt two hours. Q&A. We hung out. I'm going to hopefully be on his podcast soon. He came on mine twice. So I'm thinking in-person interviews are really the future. And not only with me and other guests, rather than doing them purely by Zoom or Riverside, but also doing them in-person, a live audience.

So let me know what do you think about that. I naturally think, who's going to want to care about seeing me live and in-person? Would you want to do it? A lot of people, you know, have suggested it. some guest, who would you like to see me do a live episode with? And that's all. Love you guys. And it's been the greatest kind of thrill of my, I would say, semi-professional life. Again, it's not my job. It's not what I get paid to do, but I get paid in a valuable currency of meeting just incredible people and having in a wonderful, warm audience of, as I call them, magicians, because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic as a or Arthur C. Clark said, who also said that the only way to uncover the limits of the possible

is to go beyond it into the impossible. Together will make the impossible the inevitable. Thank you so much.