Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - “Going To Mars Is An Escapist FANTASY!” | Brian Keating On Triggernometry (#358)

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Usually, I’m the one interrogating guests, but every now and then, I find myself on the hot seat, too! Enjoy my conversation with Francis and Konstantin on their show, TRIGGERnometry. We discussed the idea of colonizing Mars, aliens, the origin of everything, the complex correlation between science and religion, everything wrong with the Nobel Prize, and much more!  TRIGGERnometry is a YouTube show and podcast in which comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster create honest conversations with fascinating people.  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Are we too pessimistic, and do we have a future in space? (03:27) Is there anything for us on Mars? (12:48) Storing consciousness & the survival of humanity (19:42) The discovery of extraterrestrial life (28:35) Humility in the field of science (46:24) Criticism of the Nobel Prize (52:49) Will we ever be able to travel space effectively? (58:33)  Are we alone in the Universe? (1:03:54) Where does everything come from? (1:11:17) What is the one thing we’re not talking about? (1:32:37) — Additional resources:  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! ➡️ Check out TRIGGERnometry on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=765eeKhO-Fk  ➡️ 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/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ 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 so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What the Nobel Prize does is it becomes a secular idol. You bow down in front of the King of Sweden, and you bow down and you accept a gilded, graven image with the visage of Alfred Nobel on it. So like every religion, it has an origin story, it has patron saints, and so it has become a secular religion. And sometimes the most zealous religious adherents are atheists. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the pod bay doors out. Our terrific guest today is a cosmologist, which as he just told us, is a branch of astrophysics. Professor Brian Keating, welcome to Tricorni. Wow, it's a great pleasure and honor to be here, guys. Thanks for hosting me. It's great to have you on the show. Before we get into everything to do with space and everything that's out there and not out there, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what's been in journey through life. Yeah, so I always like that.

that question that's become your trademark because it allows me to segue into what I always ask people, what's the most important day on the calendar? I say, what is it? Usually if you're smart and you're a guy, you'll say my anniversary, right, or my wife's birthday. But it's always some kind of origin story, right? Everyone's fascinated with an origin. And since I was a little kid, I was always fascinated with not just my own origin, which is the only story you come into that you will have to rely on other people to tell you the truth of what came before. but the universe and what is the ultimate, potentially the ultimate origin story of all, which is how did everything come to be?

And it's interesting because what I do is called cosmology, which a lot of people, you know, because of the way that I look and, you know, my handsome visage, they, no, I'm just kidding. They think it has cosmetology. So, you know, if I don't get that, I get, you know, you're an astrology,

you're an astrologer, whatever, can you tell me my horoscope? I used to say no, I used to say no, but now I take opportunity to actually answer it. I say, oh, you're a Gemini. oh, that's really terrible. You know, you should have that wart looked at on the back of your neck there.

But the similarities between both astrology and astronomy, cosmology and cosmology, you're very deep. Etymology is very important. Cosmos means beauty, our face. And what I study is the face that's presented by the universe to ordinary mortals to perceive.

And it is very beautiful. And so I've been fascinated by that on aesthetic level and never really thinking as a kid when I was interested, got my first telescope as a 10-year-old little boy, that I could do it as job. Who's going to pay me to be, you know, like essentially the equivalent for nerds of being an ice cream taster or, you know, a wizard, you know, or one of those guys who, you know, like, test a roller coaster at SeaWorld. So I didn't think you could do it as a job. So I was kind of

stymied because I loved it. I had this great passion for it all throughout high school, college, in graduate school, and even in graduate school, I didn't think I could do what I'm doing now, which is to be a professor of physics and astronomy at a top university in Southern California, at UC San Diego, where I get to teach young people and work with brilliant people that teach me things about how the universe came to be and what's going to happen in the deep future of our existence. And so in a real way, I get paid to ask and answer and just grapple with the most fascinating origin story of them all. And that's how did our universe come to be. Well, that's an awesome thing to spend your life doing.

And I can tell you love it and you're super excited by it. As you know, as we sit here recording this, we've just had your friend Derek Weinstein on the show. And one of the conversations, part of the conversation we were having was about, you know, pessimism and optimism and how we see the future of humanity. And also how we, you know, our relationship with the things that you study actually, our relationship with things beyond Earth. And I was saying that when I was growing up, and I imagine even more when you were growing up, you're 10 years older than I am. You know, this idea that our destiny was somehow beyond Earth was not just universally accepted. It was embedded in literature. It was embedded in culture.

That's what movies were about. That's what books were about. You know, science fiction really focused. It didn't even focus on, like, how are we going to get to the start? That was kind of like a done deal. It was like when we form a society on another planet, here's some of the challenges. Or when we have robots, here's some of the moral quandaries that we'll enter. And yet in my lifetime, and in yours too, I think that seems to have actually been rolled back.

And there isn't any more that sense of destiny and vision and optimism. Is that fair to say? I think there is and there isn't. There's certainly optimism more so than ever in terms of space and our future being in space. And ironically, I'm more pessimistic about our future being in space rather than people like Eric or people like Eli on Mosker and so forth. And we can get into that. But, you know, it's the old saying.

The optimist builds the airplane. The pessimist builds the parachute. And, you know, who's to say it was more important? I think there's a temptation because you sound smart if you're a pessimist. And you sound like just wild-eye naivete. If you say, oh, we're going to be building these, you know, like you had Zubrin on last year earlier. And, you know, we're going to be there in 20 years.

There's going to be a baby born on Mars. And I love his writing. I love what he said. But I think he's totally off base. I mean, I think from a practical statement, standpoint, he's off base. And yet, and yet, I think it's extremely important to contemplate these things. For example, people in my department, Shelley Wright, very famous astrophysicist, she's looking for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence using flashes of light emitted by potential lasers,

wielded by extraterrestrial, not in Star Wars, but communicating their presence, using it as some sort of vast internet, intergalactic, interstellar internet. I think that body, boggles the mind. And in fact, is one of the inspirations that may, you know, spark a young Brian or, you know, Brianna or somebody now to want to get into science, which I do think is the most important thing. I think there's no more important thing. And I get into fights to my colleagues in the literature department all the time, you know, that, you know, what is the most important thing to study? Do we need more scientists? Do we need more engineers? Do we need more people in the so-called STEM fields? Do we need more people in the humanities

to tell us about meaning and so forth? And so for that, I always look back. Who are the people that could do both? Who are the people like our friend Eric? Eric can do both. He's one of the most eloquent, well-read, historically intelligent intellectuals, public intellectuals, talking about Bengali, I don't know, he can speak in Russian to you. He can do all sorts of, you know, he can do basic, you know, he can play music. And it was funny because you guys were talking about all like, why do we shame people that

don't play an instrument? I was thinking like, I'm pretty good at playing Spotify. That's not where I end up. But do we need these two cultures, as C.P. Snow used to talk about. I claim, let's look back to the greatest intellects of history. Read Prencipia by Isaac Newton. Read Michael Faraday.

Read my hero, who is Galileo. And you'll read things in there that rival the deepest, most enriching poetry in written prose format. You think, well, what are they talking about equations with like pendulums? What does that have to? No, because they were speculating on things.

There was no science in the way that we have it today. There were no journals. There was no peer review, as Eric Rails about. And so you would do things either by live demonstration. So imagine you have this theory, as I'll be speaking tonight, I'm being honored by giving this discourse at the Royal Institution, which is the oldest continuing dialogue in humanity and civilization. That's never ended since the early 1800s,

where speakers come in, they're pushed onto stage, and they give a speech. And that's to evoke this notion that this science is an evolving source. It's never finished. You never reach the end of science. So when I look at that, and then I look at Faraday's writing, who is one of the founding members of the Royal Institution, I read his writing. It's poetic and it's humble and it's beautiful.

And I say, well, you could learn a lot about literature by reading Michael Faraday's works on electromagnetism, the invention of the motor, and thoughts about things that were speculative. At UC San Diego, I'm delighted to be the associate director of what's called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. nation, one of your great countrymen, right? And Arthur C. Clark, and many of his, I mean, it's incredible, rich language, brilliant ideas,

insights, a lot of technology we have today, was presaged, not invented by him, but presaged in many of his books, the iPad, geosynchronous satellites, bases on the moon, AI, and all sorts of other things that we talk about today. He was talking about those 50 or 60 years ago, writing almost as a poet. And so I feel like to be optimistic is to think and dream about these things, you know, and reach beyond what your grasp is, as Kennedy used to say. But at the same time, I think we can have a little bit of a devolvent into, well, let's escape this place. And that's what I'm worried about. So I think we have to balance of pessimism where you sound really smart because you can predict the sky is falling.

And no one really ever keeps the receipts. I actually went back and listened to this podcast by this guy Sam Harris. I don't know if you ever heard about it. But he had this other guy, Scott Galloway. And they were talking about it. And it was like from 2020 or early 2020. They were talking about how evil it would be if Trump got elected because, you know, God forbid there'd be a war in the Ukraine probably.

And I'm just like, wait, guys, do you ever look back and check your predictions? So it's easy to make predictions about things and come off as a pseudo-intellectually sound reasoning. But I think you have to balance that. And humans are awful at balancing things, right? We like polarization. We like going in one direction and the other one. Very uncomfortable being in the middle. There's an old Yiddish saying that if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit

by both sides of the traveling. Tell us about it. That being the case, do you sometimes get frustrated at the fact that we seem to becoming ever more pessimistic. Even America, the most optimistic nation in the world, is now kind of pessimistic. Yeah, it is and it isn't. When you look at things politically, I was, I was, you know, musing with Constantine earlier today, you know, that when I got into astronomy, part of it was because, you know, you know, when wakes up in the morning and says, I hate those damn Republican constellations over there and, oh, that Democratic comet is going to save. We don't think like that. It's a safe space from politics, so it's not polarized. It can be there overlays of that. We can get into that because everything at some level has some notion of politicization. but that's okay. It's manageable. I think in terms of optimism, there's kind of this wild-eyed thing or, you know, just take the most prominent ones that are going on right now, and you guys have

had conversations about this. You have some of Eric and you've had on others. You know, it's AI depopulation and then going to Mars, right? So those are three very, very interesting and unique conversations that you guys have had. And when I look at that, and I think, well, in all those cases, there's some element of escapism, which is a fundamental, expression of dissatisfaction with where you are now. But that's not a bad thing, right? If we weren't dissatisfied with our lot, we would have never invented at my home institution the polio vaccine by Jonas Salk, right? We would have said, okay, we have to live with this or die with this or not live with this, etc. So this satisfaction is a hallmark of a civilization, the discontent and sort of like

unwillingness to settle for the current dynamic. So I think that that is a good thing. On the other hand, being too wild-eyed and, you know, just take the Mars example, going to Mars is fundamentally, I believe, an escapist, you know, kind of fantasy. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the Impossible Tizai, your fearful host, Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it depending on your podcast.

hatcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that. And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it. Do it now. Before you forget, let's go back to the episode. Do you think it's pointless? I wouldn't say it's pointless. There are technological benefits that will redound to any society that endeavors to do something on such a grand scale? They're actually going to, like, yes, the project of making the thing that takes you to Mars will create new technology and whatever.

But is there anything for us on Mars, I guess is what I'm asking. Well, so there's something for us, right? The question is, is that worth the price you'll have to pay? So I always ask, you know, Elon, God bless him as 10 kids, that we know about. So far. Yeah, I mean, what time is it, right? And I love that. I love his, and he said that.

He's doing his part to forestall population collapse. And I do mean that. But on the other hand, talking about dying on Mars, my friend I've had on and you should interview at some point, Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of this great kingdom here, he used to joke with me that his job as Astronomer and Royal was to tell the queen her horoscope, but he doesn't do that anymore, sadly, she's deceased.

So the question is, you know, he said he wants to die on Mars. And Lord Reese would say, well, hopefully it's not on impact, right? So let's just say it's not on impact. And he's going to make it there, right? So he's going to get there. Elon, which of your 10 kids are coming with you? Which of the sort of pilots on this craft are not, is not at all possible, in my humble estimation, for it to be a return trip.

I mean, the minimum, you're talking about at least a better part of a decade, to go there, do something there, return voyage, you know, the way that the planetary orbit's workout, the minimum time duration round trip would be at least two years, maybe even more. All the way you're experiencing extreme microgravity, which destroys your mental capacity, it destroys brain function. Astronauts come back. Their bodies are literally as if they've been in a concentration camp wasting away, just there's no way to exercise, see actual natural sunlight. And then once you get there, it's not like Christopher Columbus had to bring civilization with, him to the new world or you know that he couldn't find things to sustain him there.

Now I know yes there's carbon dioxide on there as Zubrin talked about on this podcast. So carbon dioxide you can use that to make oxygen and carbon and oh hey life has a lot of carbon and oxygen in it. Yeah but it's not like Columbus had to bring with him like actual seeds so that when he got to the new world they could start to grow stuff. No, there were people living there watching him discover the new world, right? But moreover, when you look at the resources that a planetary environment can sustain, what is it actually made up of? If you took all life on Earth and all life that's ever existed, so all the biosphere, what we call the biosphere, and you took it and you made it into a creamy, vegemite-like paste, okay?

How thick do you think that would be? Like every dinosaur that ever lived, every amoeba that ever lived, every chlorophyll molecule that ever produced, every chlorophyll molecule that ever produced inside of these lovely, plants and bushes behind us, right? How thick do you think that layer of the Earth's surface would be? No idea. Kilometers, you know, microns. What would it be?

Any, Francis, any idea? I mean, I have never been more. I thought you guys were going to talk about trigonometry. My favorite was. Tell us. It's about four millimeters. Really? Yeah.

That's all. Yeah. And you've ever seen the Earth from space, like that blue marble picture, you know, some people above on your screensaver, right? You're looking at, you know, tens of kilometers, you know, millions of times bigger layer

of, you know, and even that is the so-called thin blue line. Without that we don't exist, right? So just imagine, like, taking that layer of biosphere, that shell of biology, and spreading it on Mars. Now, Mars is smaller, it's a little bigger than our moon, a little bit smaller than the Earth. So that would be a little bit thicker. But can you imagine it?

I mean, can you imagine transporting that much material or having unlocking or converting the carbon dioxide, the nitrogen, the phosphorus, and DNA and the RNA to make a living biosphere. So why is this important, though? Why am I not denying that we should do it? I question it, as I said, I question on a personal life. As a father myself, you're a father too, constantly right?

I don't think you're not yet. No, yeah. Ladies, I think you should be. So when you have a child, your world changes. And by the way, you don't have to have a biological child for your world to change. You can have an ideological child. You can be a father figure. I was an uncular figure for many years before me.

So the point is, what do you leave behind to go on this one-way journey? Let's stipulate it's possible you could get there. Maybe even you'd live, who are you going to bring with you? What kind of psychological damage is that going to do to you to leave people behind? So maybe you could say that just for Elon. Maybe he's comfortable with that or maybe he's not and he's just so detached from that sense of reality. But I think for most people, it would be very hard to do that. And then let alone to convince millions of people to do it.

to create a sustainable, you know, agriculture, you know, but then why are you going there? What is the reason? Nobody ever asked him why. He says, I want to go there. It's almost like he wants to make this arc. It's a very sort of almost eschatological, you know, like he's making this arc. Mars is the arc in order for us to be, and the way I've heard him describe it,

and I'd love to talk to him more about it from, I don't think he's talked to a real physicist, you know, as far as I can tell. I don't think Joe Rogan, you know, qualified as a physicist yet, although he's had on a lot of physicists. But the point being, what are the physical limitations? What is the purpose of this? Well, it's to store consciousness. Yes. Well, I say, well, there are other ways you can store consciousness. Just like there are other ways you can time travel. Do you guys know you can time travel? Right now we're time traveling. I don't mean it like that. But the problem comes in when people want to travel through time and they want to bring their bodies with them and they want to

bring their possessions with them like some pharaoh from, you know, from ancient Egypt. And so they're In other words, they want to have their afterlife and live it too. And I think that when you step back and realize you are capable right now or in the future, hopefully you live a long life, but you are capable of living a very long time. And it's not, you know, as Woody Allen said, I don't want to live on in the minds of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment in Brooklyn. In this case, it's through the impact and the connections that you make on Earth right now. by connecting to people by nurturing relationships

and establishing the geometrical explosion of connection and meaning that comes from relationships. That's all gone when you're on Mars. You're talking about three other people, four other people. If that, I mean, it might just be one person, right? And so the question is, what is the goal? Well, where is consciousness reside? Is consciousness universal?

Like, can you store it on a flash drive? You know, can we upload it? Our AI is conscious? I've been playing around a lot with these. We can talk about those and the potential, well, I know Eric's expressed some concerns about them and others, Elon as well. So what is the goal?

Nobody ever really gets into it. Well, no, I mean, if I was to steal man, what I perceive as Elon's argument is, yes, okay, you can download the sum of human knowledge onto a flash drive and launch it into space where it can be like, you know, a message in a bottle for the rest of eternity. And you could argue that's consciousness,

but it's not self-replicating, right? It's frozen in time, whereas what he's talking about is survival of humanity, whereby if we all have a nuclear war here on Earth, there'll be seven people on Mars who are able to reproduce and survive on Earth. Right. So there's two approaches, right? And I agree with you. Although it is possible to, you know, if there's an explanation for the origin of life is a very mysterious thing. We actually don't know about it. There are people that stipulate that life spontaneously originated, some of the work done.

by late professors at UC San Diego, Miller, and Yuri, established this primordial chemistry, primordial earth-like environment, and they put in some goop, and they shocked it with electrodes, and out came these little Neanderth. That would be pretty surprising. But it was some amino acids. It was a pre-pre-pre-pre-cursors to life.

Anyway, it turns out that experiment had a lot of incorrect assumptions about what the Earth was like. Anyway, the point being that the history of the Earth is intimately related to the life that's inhabited it. And actually the life that four millimeter layer is probably the most consequential of all the geographic strata that one would encounter going, you know, drilling down to the core of the earth, essentially. And it's a relic of what we call the Anthropocene,

you know, when the hominids have existed. So the question is, does that encode it? You know, does DNA encode it? What level of hierarchy of life? So is it for humanity. That, of course, again, it is a selfish thing, right? I mean, there's, what, what, What would happen if not a nuclear war, let's just say the Earth is hit by some massive extinction level event that wipes out humanity? Well, there will be other entities that will live. It's not like all life would be obliterated, nor did it happen during the Jurassic period when the giant extinction event took out all the dinosaurs.

What happened then? It allowed mammals to thrive and flourish, and then we descended from that. I'm not saying I want that to happen, by the way, don't get me wrong. But the point is, when you put so much into... I mean, it's not, I don't want to say it's a fantasy, but it is escapist. We are escaping, which is a good thing. Like, if you're on a plane's going out and you want that parachute that the pessimist pack for you, right?

On the other hand, what's the net goal? It should be to preserve humanity, right? So let's say it's going to cost trillions and whatever amount it is. What if you could put that into another thing that would alleviate the need for Noah's Ark number two? In other words, if Elon and put his time and attention into putting in safeguards against the main ways that a planet could rid itself of our presence, namely nuclear war and some biological war or biological entity like a virus that becomes a global pandemic, you know, not that that could ever happen. So what could you do to mitigate those? I think it's far more efficient.

Just take one thing. imagine you go down to the Pacific Ocean and you scoop up a bottle of water. You guys are invited, come visit me in my podcast in San Diego, and we'll go down to the beach and we'll scoop up some water from the Pacific. There's trillions of microorganisms in there. There's relics and fossils of coral

and all sorts of things in there. If you found that on Mars, it would be the greatest discovery of all time, potentially, right? But that means something very different. That means you can find life right now. It's in the ocean. And could we live in the ocean? Maybe, not like those guys, unfortunately,

and that's submersible recently. But you can live, and we already know how to live underwater. You know, there are people in the Navy in San Diego that do have six months at a time on a submarine, right? So the question is, where is the most efficient use of resources, intellectual capital, a human capital? Why is it that it's being focused in that direction towards, you know, one planet,

which is, you know, admittedly potentially supportable of, you know, It's more hospitable than Venus, but it's less so than the ocean. Do you know what you're reminding me of? Did you ever watch West Wing? No, I never got into that. There's a great scene in West Wing where somebody asks one of the staffers of the White House why it is that we have to go to Mars. I think they're actually talking about Mars.

And he launches into this long monologue about how it's what's next. As in human beings have always explored, they've always taken the next step, They left the cave and they walked out and then they went to the new world in inverted commas. And it's kind of like the idea is that we're an exploring species. And that's what's next? And what does that speak of though? I think it speaks of a restlessness and unhappiness and with your current system.

It's not like I want to, oh, I really can't wait until I can get away from my wife and kid. If you're happy and you have a network, a connections, a community, something that you have a deeper meaning for. You know, Victor Frankel spoke about, I'm sure you guys. have encountered this, you know, that, as opposed to Freud, who said that, you know, the sexual drive was the strongest innate drive in humanity, he said, no, the search for meaning is, and people do anything for meaning, including deprive other people of their meaning, right?

And so I think it is almost escapist, in a sense. And I don't say that necessarily in a judgmental way. I'm just saying, be cognizant of it. Why are you doing what you're doing? And I've encountered that a lot in science as well. But one thing I just want to come back to with Mars, and the search for alien life, which I'm very interested. Although there I'm very pessimistic about it as well. And I think some of it relates to these very same topics that would cause somebody like a Musk or anybody who's conscious and curious about what it would be like

to live on another planet, to think about what are the planetary, astrophysics-based limits to things like climate change? Like, is it possible that the climate could just run away forever and we could just keep pumping carbon dioxide into this atmosphere? No. it's not. And in fact, by studying other exos, so-called exoplanets, of which we know of thousands now, many of which are exactly like the Earth in terms of this host star that they are orbiting around

and their density and their average size. So there's plenty of places where life could exist. And so the question is, well, what would it take for them to get to the same stage that we had? And I always like to point out, like, I think, you know, the key thing is, the key question that I would want to ask an alien is, do you have whales on your planet? You're like, what the hell is he talking? Do they have whales on your planet? Why are you asking about that? Well, you know, to get here in this beautiful studio, to make these beautiful neon lights,

these computers that are driving the cameras that are filming us in glorious 4K, right? They weren't built by computers, right? There wasn't like some primordial computer that sprung into, no, no, no, no. They were built up for something more primitive. And in fact, a computer was built up with transistors. And if you look at what a transistor is,

the first one is this thing of, like, chicken wire and chewing guys. It was really, you wouldn't say, now there's 15 billion of them on my single iPhone 14. But it's true. But it wasn't built with an iPhone 14, right? So you keep going back and you come to light and you come to petroleum and so forth. So whale oil was replaced by petroleum. So that means that for a long time, humans had their lighting needs met instead of kerosene and petroleum products by whale oil. So like, well, how could they have gotten there from point A to point B.

Yeah, maybe they could have. Maybe they could have discovered it and they could have. But the question is, what are the contingent things? The things, you know, the sine qua non, without that, it makes the further justification of technology impossible. Right. So we look at things like plate tectomics. There are theories that suggest that the biosphere that existed on Earth

is provided a lubricant that then allowed the plates to move and adjust themselves from the Pangaea configuration into the more. modern configuration over a span of just a few millions of, hundreds of millions of years. Not a short amount of time, but not as long as the Earth, all this the Earth. And some people believe that's contingent, that we needed to have that in order to have life exist. So you start to putting together all these different sequences that had to occur and in the right order, right? If you discover, how do you discover, you know, the transistor before you had the vacuum tube, right? Is it possible? Maybe it is, but maybe it's not.

So by asking questions about these other planets, we can then learn about, well, what are the unique things about our own planet. And to just go back to this discovery of life thing, which I said, you know, you just go down to the lake and scoop up, or the Pacific Ocean, scoop up some water. We actually know what would happen the day after life has discovered.

I bet you guys think it would be pretty exciting if we discovered. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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Do you know that we discovered extraterrestrial life on Earth or it was claimed that we did? Didn't this happen during the pandemic? No, well, did. Yes. Yes, but also... Was it not like some dead bacteria on an asteroid? or something like that? So close.

Yeah, I did read about it. Yeah, yeah. So there's been about eight different recordings of acclaims of the discovery of extraterrestrial life or technology, technology via a signal received from another solar system potentially, or a byproduct of life in the case of what was discovered during the pandemic. As Francis just mentioned, the so-called byproduct of living creatures called phosphine, which discovered on Venus, it's been retracted. What I'm talking about is from this very, very famous movie called Contact with Jody Foster.

So that was written by Carl Sagan and his wife, Andrurion, who has been a guest on my podcast. And it was the only science fiction book he ever wrote. And that book is based loosely on an actual figure, who's another guest named Jill Tarter, who's a leader of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Well, in the 1990s, in Antarctica, where I've been twice, they discovered a meteorite, and that meteorite seemed to have on it fragments or portions of microorganisms, either that or their respiratory products. In other words, if you found like exhale carbon dioxide, you don't have to ask, how does it get there? Because it doesn't form so easily naturally.

Pure oxygen doesn't form so easily naturally. So the question, how did it get there? Well, so there was this huge press conference, and Bill Clinton, there's a scene in the movie contact. Maybe you guys will cut it in. you guys have such an enormous budget here. So lovely. Good afternoon. I'm glad to be joined by my science and technology advisor.

This is the product of years of exploration by some of the world's most distinguished scientists. Like all discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined, and scrutinized. It must be confirmed by other scientists. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental. We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue to search for answers and for knowledge that you will continue to listen closely to what it has to say, as we continue to search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself,

but essential to our people's future. So it wasn't confirmed, but it wasn't this confirmed either for decades. In other words, the general public was left. And that was a real scene. That, by the way, that was recorded and spliced into a movie about the discovery, you know, and the white albino guy, looks weird. It's the whole narrative of the book that's fictional. But that one scene is factual.

it goes to show you, in the mind of the general public, that never was recanted, right? You guys just both mentioned two separate claims. So did those change the world? I mean, did you guys wake up and say, oh, well, all is restored now I'm meaning in my life because they discovered some phosphine on Venus. For all you know, they didn't disconfirm it, right?

I just told you that it hasn't been confirmed. Most people don't believe it's valid. So it didn't change your lives. So why do we think discovering life on another planet or going to another planet is going to find this transcendent meaning? I find that it's not entirely self-consistent. But isn't it also about pushing the limits of what we think human beings can do? Isn't that it? Seeing a self-imposed limit, then going beyond that?

Isn't that consistent with the human spirit, the drive for more, the wanting to test yourself, push beyond the limits of society or what? people think human beings are capable of? So I want to give you one example from my country and one example from your country. So 112 years ago, there was a race. Every bit as viscerally competitive as the space race to land on the moon, which I'll get to next.

And that was the race to reach to South Pole Antarctica, which, as I said, I've been there twice. It's as close to the most boring, undeveloped, pure white hellscape of a frozen planet and any science fiction movie you ever seen. You go out there, here's how you picture it. Go in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, flash freeze it, solid,

and then look around you. What would you see? It's nothing for 700 miles. And yet, that was the goal of a generation of explorers dating back to Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. And they both approached it. Amundsen actually tried to reach the North Pole first,

failed, immediately did a 180, literal 180, and he beat Scott to the South Pole by three weeks. And that three-week period between December, when he reached it in January, when Scott reached it, meant the difference between life and death for the explorers in Scott's party.

And the reason they did that, there's many reasons why the Brits were doing it on a scientific journey, so they would encounter things for the Royal Geographical Society. They'd pick up a meteorite. They would find meteorites there too. They found petrified seals,

but mostly it was pretty much boring ski trip. The other thing is that the Norwegians were very comfortable using animals as their rockets, you know, as their exploration vehicles driving them, knowing full well that once you got to the top of the South Polar Plateau, it's about 9,000 feet above sea level, which most people don't realize, it's pretty high up. So they had to ski up over these dangerous things called crevasses, the people would die in and freeze to death. And so they'd ski, but the dogs would pull them up, and then the way home, they don't need the dogs. So what do you think they had, you know, for lunch at the top of the world, or bottom of the world, they would eat the dogs?

The Brits didn't want to do that. So they had to be their own conveyance animals, and they pulled their sleds, which meant they had to carry more food, more fuel, more, everything. So it ended up costing them between life and death, that technological decision that they made, which there are some parallels here.

So this was reached at great cost. It was a huge thing. People, you know probably about the Shackleton voyages. These captivated the world. I mean, these were some of the most interesting things. They have far horizon. Go, what's over it. Do you know that we didn't go back to Antarctica

for over 50 years? like in other words they reached this goal they got there and then they left and they didn't come back for 50 years and now there's about 100 people there in the middle we're talking in the middle of the northern hemisphere summer exactly it's the middle of winter at the South Pole

there's about 45 people that's it for 700 miles you could be like the richest person on the continent the fattest person on the guy you could be whatever you want on a continent the size of western United States it's huge then now let's fast forward another 50 year interval

which we haven't gone back to, at least we've gone back to the South Pole, that's the exploration of the moon, first reached 1969, July 20th. When we got there, we said, we came in peace for all mankind. Really, it was a battle of Cold War superiority. It was an intellect,

but in other words, people always talk about the need for human exploration, but really, when we point to it, we're really thinking about a psychological frontier, more than like a physical frontier. Otherwise, why wouldn't we have gone back to the moon? If it was so beneficial, you know, there's helium-3 there,

and there's a lot of minerals, aluminum, whatever. Maybe not enough to overcome that kind of what I call the Roger Bannister pro. So once Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, you know, it became past, nobody was really that interested. Oh, I'm going to be $3.50, who cares? The Bannister already did that. So there's this first kind of priority. And actually what Scott said resonates through to this day.

He said, great God, when he reached the South Pole, imagine you're coming out of the lunar lander and Neil Armstrong steps onto a Soviet Union flag it would have been the most disappointing thing these guys had that experience they were skiing and from the South Pole it's so flat and so barren they could see the Norwegian flag from

miles away so they got there they knew that they had lost and they still had to make it there to say that they had reached the South Pole at least as maybe check maybe he was off by a couple feet no he wasn't Simonson was quite awesome at navigation as well He got there, he saw it, and he said, great God, said Scott, this is an awful place.

All the more so for having reached it without the benefit of priority. That's the human drive. We want to get there first. It's not getting there. So if it was getting there, we would have set up a compound and thought all this cool stuff, same on the moon. We haven't gone back there. I predict the same on Mars. I think we can get to Mars.

I think a person can get there. I think establishing an output is almost as remote or impossible as, establishing one on the moon. Yes, I know Zuberin, you'll write in and say that, yeah, there's more raw materials there. There's a lot of raw materials than Antarctica. I don't see any civilizations popping up down there. And if you say, well, there's this fallacy that if there was a nuclear war, and God forbid there's ever a nuclear war, I'm not advocating. I'm kidding advocates for nuclear oligal. No, not at all. I treasure this planet. And in fact, I'm trying to say we should be dedicating our efforts towards the mitigation, the militation against the destruction of the planet.

But these idiots who have been given, so I always say the worst thing about physics is that it produces technology. The worst thing is that we save the world, right? We created the atomic bomb. We saved the world using physics, using the laws of physics, nuclear fission, creating an atomic device. That would not end even human life on Earth. It might not be so great. But if Musk or others, I don't want to single them out, by the way, because I think it's a very, you know, generous and interesting thing that he's trying to do. if misguided in terms of its ultimate aim.

Because we could establish a human outpost in Antarctica. That could happen. There's way more resources. It's incredible. To make one kilogram to take this coffee cup into space. He's reduced it from $10,000 to a few hundred dollars. It's still, you know, 80 to 100 times more expensive than doing the same thing, which I can get Frappuccino down at the South Pole anytime I want.

Soft serve on demand. It's incredible. So, you know, we have to question, is that the most efficient way to accomplish the goal of archiving and backing up into the cloud what human consciousness is? So your point is, it's a misallocation of resources. In my opinion. And what should we be focusing on? I think the most important thing is education. I think the more STEM-educated people we are with a balance of, as I said, the humanities in the kind of model of a Galileo, in the model of a Galileo, in the model of.

of Newton or any of the great, you know, champions of science, scientific tradition. If you can couple that with a sense of, I don't want to say divine, because I think it has a lot of religious overtones. I happen to be practicing a Jew in my case. But in the sense of that you have to recognize the limitations of the human ability. But that's like an enervating, a positive thing, that you should say, look, we are here for this brief, brief amount of time. It is a flash of the eye. How do we then inculcate our children, our civilization, with meaning? Science is great for producing technology, and so we come to expect technology from basic science. And that's fine. If you can have a steward of that

technology that is competent, capable, soulful, and disposable, and disposable, towards the same types of goals that someone like a musk or others are concerned with, the preservation of what is unique and treasured and beautiful about human beings, which I think is our soul or our consciousness, depending on how you phrase it. So I think education, in particular in the STEM fields, I think that will become more and more important, and harder and harder to replace by artificial intelligence as well. I think the pandemic showed us that.

I think the pandemic, what the pandemic showed is, And this rapidly became clear to me as well, is our own ignorance. And I include myself in this when it comes to science and medicine and all of these things. You just realize that people who were very intelligent, they have no idea how to analyze or how to talk about these subjects without becoming overly emotional and making choices that were, quite frankly, ridiculous in many cases. Even the most educated in some cases. I mean, there's a famous quote by one of my heroes, Richard Feynman. He said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. Not the wisdom, not the knowledge of experts, but the ignorance of it.

What the hell are you talking about? Feynman was a genius. Einstein was a genius. Yeah, they were genius because they doubted what came before them. Science has never settled. You never say, oh, well, this vaccine's 100% effective. It's going to prevent transmission. It's going to cure you.

No scientist was really, okay, I shouldn't say none, because a lot of good scientists did that. A lot of scientists were behind it. I got vaccinated. I didn't have my kids. I'm glad that they didn't. We still have a vaccine requirement in my university to attend it in 2023.

In the fall of 2023, we still have to be vaccinated. It's incredible to me. And I taught for a long time wearing a paper mask that I could take off if I had a sip of my trusty vodka that I kept with me at all time. So we became very highly leveraged on science as a replacement for God.

Yes. So it's so powerful. I mean, you were required to have faith. Exactly. In the science. The science. Follow the science. No, I don't trust that.

I don't have faith. You know, in Hebrew, the word amain, which we get in English as well, means faith or truth, belief. I believe. I always say, I don't believe in gravity. I don't believe in it.

I have evidence for gravity. I don't believe in evolution. We have evidence for evolution. Why ask me to believe and follow and trust and say, this person represents sign, no scientist says that, no valid scientist says that. It's doing something political. I would say the problem with political science is that it's not limited to just political scientists. I feel, and this is controversial, I don't think I've said this elsewhere,

but I think that oftentimes scientists realize we've been given this glorious script. The book of nature, as Galileo said, is written in the language of mathematics, right? It's this beautiful script, And yet we're so clumsy at communicating it because we're never taught those soft disciplines of the second culture that C.P. Snow spoke about. How do you communicate? Now I start doing this with my students. It's not enough that they're way beyond me, math, physics.

They understand so much. They're so quick. They're so impressive, my students. And that's the goal. You should always exceed, you know, Leonardo da Vinci said, poor is a student who doesn't exceed the master. And so the notion of,

of what is science in terms of the word science from Latin means knowledge. Doesn't mean wisdom. That's sapiens. That's where we get homo sapien. What does it mean? Homo sapiens means man who knows. Man who is wise. What is he wise about?

Do you ever think about this? Your dog doesn't know he's going to die? Your pet cat doesn't know she's going to die. Humans, the only species that know that our time is limited. That's what we know about. Now, where does that come from? That comes from the Bible. We ate from the tree of knowledge of life and death, of good and evil.

Okay, you can take it as an allegory. But the point being, we have put so much faith in science because it's so powerful, because it produces this glorious technology that allowed us to communicate and set this up at the speed of light across continents that are planetary and scale, that we then demand it and then we say, I don't understand this. Just like I don't understand God, you know, if you're religious. so you tend to correlate and associate a godliness with science. But there's nothing.

Science is amoral. It's not immoral. It's amoral. Look at the most advanced civilization scientifically of the past century. Where was it? Not far from here. It was in Germany. Germany, yeah.

I went to the Imperial War Museum the other day with my children. I couldn't believe the horrors that you see there. And the equivalent of what they had back then, technologically, it was so sophisticated. some of the greatest scientists in history worked, Frisch and others, worked on the, later become known as the Haber-Bosch process. And Fritz Haber was a German Jew in the early 1900s. And he was very patriotic. He wanted to be basically fully assimilated into German society.

He was known as the father chemical warfare. He invented chlorine gas, which then his factory then became the main production vehicle for Zyzer. Cyclone B, which was used in the concentration camps that killed his own family members years later. So never conflate knowledge with wisdom. But that's the heart that you need wisdom to see who is wise. And, you know, as Talmud says, who is a wise person, someone who learns from every person they meet? Okay, you don't want to be like, well, my three-year-old can teach me as much as, you know, Professor Keating. But at the same time, wisdom can only be acquired by experience.

And when you encounter something that's never happened before, like a pandemic or nuclear potential conflict, it's very dicey to put so much power in the hands of someone who may not be particularly wise. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Do you sometimes find that in your own industry that people think that they have the art? They think they're all-knowing and all-powerful, when the reality is you're a scientist. And you could be brilliant, but that doesn't stop you from being wrong. Oh, yeah. Some of those.

And I've had the benefit to interview 14 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast. It's kind of become one of my trademarks on The Into the Impossible Podcast. And I always like to end it, though, that you guys have your wonderful question, which we'll get to in a couple hours. And I always ask similar questions, but taken from more a perspective, of almost like a scrubbing meaning to a scientist. So most scientists don't, are uncomfortable talking about big picture things.

We're not particularly outgoing. There's an old joke, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? He looks at your shoes when he talks to you. You know, then that's how you can spot him. But the point being, we don't communicate these things to our students. So they're left with this notion that, like, well, Einstein was always Einstein.

No, he wasn't. He was very fallible. Feynman and I just gave you that quote, right? ignorance of experts, not the wisdom of experts. So the best scientists are aware of this. And in fact, I encountered this when I interviewed a man who's become a good friend of mine, a mentor.

His name's Barry Barish. He won the 2017 Nobel Prize for the discovery of gravitational waves. So two black holes, 1.2 billion light years away from the Earth, crashed together in this dance of death that happened 1.2 billion years ago. And these reverberations in space and time rippled throughout

the cosmos and percolated throughout the universe. We don't actually know which galaxy it was in. Eventually it hit the Milky Way galaxy, entered into our solar system, entered into our planet, and then hit two different detectors, one in Louisiana and one in Washington State within a few milliseconds of each other, consistent with Einstein's laws of relativity. And he detected this reverberation in space and time. And I asked him, after he won the Nobel Prize, he was on my podcast. And I said, my closing quote is about the name of the podcast, comes from Arthur C. Clarke. He said the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

So I always asked my analog of, you know, what are we not asking, is what would you tell your 20-year-old self, you know, what would you tell him or her to give you the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? And he would say, you have to overcome the imposter syndrome, especially, you know, after you win the Nobel Prize. I said, what the hell are you talking? Wait, you won the Nobel Prize and you have the imposter syndrome? He goes, oh, yeah. winning the Nobel Prize made it worse. It's like, Barry, come on. You're one of the most brilliant human beings

that ever lived. You're telling me you of the imposter syndrome. What hope is there for anybody else? He said, well, when you win a Nobel Prize, you go to Stockholm, you meet the king, you eat some reindeer, and you have this fetid celebration. And one of the things they do before they give you this giant flavor-flavre medallion

and they give you a check for your share of the $1 million purse is you sign a logbook. And logbook attests the fact that you received your medallion, your check, and your hand-painted plaque. So they want to make sure you don't come up. Where's that Nobel Prize? Because it's 24-carat gold-plated, right?

So they don't have many of them. So he said he's a curious sort. So he looked at the ledger, and they have the original ledger going back to shortly after Alfred Nobel died in 1896. And the first one was award in 1901. So he looks back through the pages, and he sees Richard Feynman, you know, pretty amazing. He sees Murray Curie. And he stops.

He sees Einstein. And he goes, my heart stopped. And I said, why? He said, you see Einstein and me a couple of pages apart and our signatures are there? I'm not worthy. I said, Barry, I've got good news and good news for you. I said, Barry, do you know that Einstein had the imposter syndrome? He goes, oh, really?

And I said, yeah, yeah, he had the imposter syndrome, really bad, in fact. And I said, well, and he asked me, who did he have the imposter syndrome about? And he said, I told him, Isaac Newton. He called Isaac Newton. not only the greatest mathematician and physicist of all time, but the greatest contributor to human civilization that ever lived. And I said, but wait, there's more. I said, Newton had the imposter syndrome as well.

You guys know who Newton worshipped the way that Einstein worshipped Newton? One of the Greeks, maybe? No. No. I was going to say something like Archimedes, but no. No. Jesus Christ. Do you know what he called his greatest accomplishment, possibly apocryphly, hard to verify this, he died a virgin.

Because that was the only way that he could emulate Christ. He was very religious, extremely devout, religious man. So he felt that he was inadequate an imposter before the likes of Jesus Christ. Okay, that's a pretty good company to feel that about. But that this is a human trait is a very good thing. And I want to bring this back, because you asked me that scientists have this notion of kind of superiority,

when maybe it's unearned. In other words, maybe they're spending kind of the credibility that the great titans like Feynman, like the Einstein's, who did grapple with, I mean, Einstein has way more written about his thoughts on being, you know, on politics, on nationalism, on Zionism.

You know, they asked him to be one of the first presidents of Israel. And he could have, he could have had a good career if he had, like, just imagine the fame he could have had if he be. So he is way more writing. I'd rather be a physicist. Less stressful.

So he has a way more written word about his thoughts on God and culture than he does about physics by far. Same with Feynman. But the point being, they married these two traits of humility with swagger. And that's very hard. Again, there's an ambiguity. It's like we said before. It's easy to follow the left or the right. It's hard to be in the middle.

So they could be humble to say, as much as I learn, the battle will be infinite, will never end science. You never win science. You can win a Nobel Prize, you can get tenure, you can get into a good college of graduate school.

You can't win science. There's no end to it. It's an infinite game, as I say. But on the other hand, you have to also have a little bit of confidence, swagger, that, look, you know, who is a man that they can take on the challenge of unraveling

the tapestry of nature, and the best scientists have that. Do you want to say? Yeah, go for it. I was going to say, because one thing that you've been very interesting about when I read your work, you've actually written a book about this,

is actually being very critical of the Nobel Prize. And you just brought the Nobel Prize up. Now, to an uneducated simpleton like me, I think, what, the Nobel Prize? That's the greatest achievement possibly a human being could ever have. What's wrong with the Nobel Prize? Right. Yeah, there's a lot wrong with it, and there's a lot right with it.

And like anything, again, we wrestle with ambiguities. there are people that believe that abortion should be completely illegal. You've had on Ben Shapiro. He said that right here. He said, no abortion. Then there have been people that you've had on talking about population, whatever, and they'll say, no, it's a woman's choice. You can do whatever she wants.

So those are two poles. People cleave to the two poles. Hard to be in the middle and say, well, you know, I want to have this. It's like Schrodinger's cat. Is it alive or is it dead? Well, I understand when it's alive. I understand when it's dead. What is this thing where it's alive and dead at the same time?

this mind-bending notion from quantum mechanics that we'll get into for the... The locals get the homework assignments. We give them the quantum mechanics homework. So is the Nobel Prize good or bad? Yes. It has good things. It has things that are worthy of retaining. It has things that distort

and in some case destroy how science is done by putting it into, again, this conflation between knowledge and wisdom every four years in America. The New York Times publishes an article which says, signed by 70 Nobel Prize winners, why you should vote for the Democrat who's running for president.

Never once have these 70 Nobel Prize winners ever endorsed a Republican. Maybe they're always right. But then they'll talk about genetically modified organisms. They talked about funding for Peter Dajik at the EcoHealth Alliance. They supported it. That when Trump tried to suspend

the 70 Nobel Prize winners come out and do that. So they're using this class. They're using what they've earned, rightfully so, by their grappling and wrestling with major ideas and science and solving unknown things and being smarter than I could ever aspire to be. But they're using that to opine in political space. That's a danger, right? Because you're now outside of your lane completely. They have a right to do it.

Not saying they shouldn't speak about it. But someone who studies the cosmos, what do they know about a treaty with Iran? What do they know about, you know, what the abortion policy should? They might. They're entitled to it. doesn't mean they know it. What the Nobel Prize does is it becomes a secular idol that literally, as Barry confirmed to me, you bow down in front of the king of Sweden wearing royal regalia that's required, and you bow down and you accept a gilded, graven image with the visage of Alfred

Nobel on it. So like every religion, it has an origin story, it has patron saints, it has apostates, And so it has become a secular religion. And sometimes the most zealous religious adherents are atheists. 93% of the American National Academy of Sciences do not actively affirm a belief in God. I'm not saying, you shouldn't, you shouldn't. I'm not a theocrat, right? But it's an interesting fact. And almost in every case, the Nobel Prize spans these divides between,

what, you know, Rabbi Salvatichik used to call the resume virtues versus the eulogy virtues. So the notion is that you should, you have things that you'll put on your gravestone or you have read about you, father, son, brother, you know, whatever, scientists. And then there'll be resume virtues. I went to Brown University, Case Western, I got my Ph.D. And I taught at UCS. Like, I'm not going to, no one's going to talk about that.

You know, hopefully when I'm 120 and pass away. But I don't know. I was going to care. Where was you an undergraduate? Like, let me put that on the tombstone. No, there's only so much space. So I think, you know, but the Nobel Prize will always be there. There's never been a eulogy or something where it's not mentioned for somebody, right? So the question becomes, you know, what is it doing to culture?

How does it distort the way that science is done? Funding for science, you're much more likely to get something if it's in a field where someone's won a Nobel Prize. If your advisor won a Nobel Prize, you're much more likely to win it. There's historic discrimination that was present. early on against Jews, later against women and other minorities. That's been demonstrably proven. It's good and bad.

Do I want it destroyed? No, that's why I wrote the book. People get this notion that I wrote the book called losing the Nobel Prize because I was jealous and spurned and sour grapes, that I didn't win the Nobel Prize for this discovery that I played a huge role in that was announced and later retracted in 2014, 2015. That would have been Nobel-worthy had we not been stymied by another galactic imposter that masqueraded as a signal we were trying to see,

which was the spark of the universe's first existing moments. But in reality, so they'll say, oh, you're just have sour grapes, Keating, you're just, you know, I say, well, look, here's the one way to prove it. Good news for you. You can prove if I'm a hypocrite or not, get them to offer me the Nobel Prize. If I accept it, I'm a hypocrite.

So far they haven't bitten. But the point being, I've seen it from the inside, I've been asked multiple times to nominate winners of the Nobel Prize. I've compared it to what Alfred Nobel, requested in his will and how it's been distorted for purposes of the vain glory of the Nobel Prize Committee and its own purposes and to the destruction of scientific colleagues of mine and distortion of the scientific method in fact. So it's good and bad. Right, come back to the science with me because this is the really fascinating thing. So we've talked a little bit about it,

but I think the two big questions that most people have about space, the universe, etc., is, are we alone? And the conversation that Eric is very much fond of, which is chemistry imposes very specific limitations on our ability to get any way in the universe, and physics potentially is able to transcend those. So are we ever going to be able to travel in a way that doesn't require us to essentially burn lots of fuel

and travel in a linear way? Right. First of all. Yeah, so, yeah, I agree with you. Those are too interesting. The other one I always get asked about is, you know, what happened before the universe came into existence, right? That would be the third one.

Yeah, so that's what I get paid, you know, big dollars from Gavin Newsom to answer. So to answer the second question that you answer, so can we transcend the limits, can we effectively, you know, create a portal to allow us to travel in finite time, essentially infinite distances? There's nothing that precludes that from happening.

But it's been so trumpeted in things like movies, Interstellar, you know, all these things. The notion of wormholes and black holes and physicists are associated with, the cells. Come on, guys. Get over yourselves. But the point being, if you could essentially visualize space time, we can't visualize actual space time as four-dimensional.

That means there's three dimensions, up, down, right, left, backwards, forwards. We can visualize that plus time. That's four dimensions. If I tell you, I want to meet you in Trafalgar, do you say Trafalgar? Trafalgar, Trafalgar Square, at exactly 4pm, you know where, when, and it's up to you how you get there. The question is, can I fold space time, you know, basically take it like a piece of paper so we can be out here at the Trigonometry podcast compound and fold it so that it would essentially take no time because those two places in space time in a higher dimensional space. So to do that, you have to fold it into another dimension, right? You have to fold it from the two-dimensional analogy into, in the third dimension, put them next to each other.

The question is, is that possible? All we can say is there's nothing that precludes that from happening. We have no evidence that that's even possible. So the theories that Eric and others have worked on rely on things of having multiple extra dimensions, more than four, less than 20. And that may seem like, well, who cares? It's less than enough. Those can be very well rationalized, why it's, say, 10 or 11 in Eric's theory versus, say, four that we observe. today. But I should say there's no evidence for it. So the first thing then what I like to talk about

when I'm with Eric is what are some of the ways that we could verify, not the actual existence of either strings at a subatomic, you know, microscobatomic level or extra dimensions on a grander scale in his model of geometric unity. But are there testable traces, vestigial relics of those models that can be tested at the relatively low energies that we have accessible on Earth or at the most powerful cosmic accelerator of all, which was the Big Bang, which is what I studied. So there will be relics, just like right now, in this glass of finest vodka, there are molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen in here came from the Big Bang. This is an artifact of the Big Bang that I'm holding right now. In your body, there are artifacts of the Big Bang. The oxygen came

much later from a generation of stars that very almost scatologically sacrificed themselves, blew up, and their byproducts became the oxygen in here. That's basically it, right? So there are relics that have traveled through time, and we can study the composition of this and ask, actually, in here, if we zoom in real tight, and I know your crack animation team, will do this to justice that I can only dream of, but if you zoom in, every so often, about one and a few million particles of water in here, molecules of water, have a hydrogen molecule

that has an extra neutron. So you guys know, because this is the second most erudite podcast in all of existence, after my podcast, that hydrogen has three isotopes. That means they have two different numbers of neutrons. So there's a hydrogen, which is a proton, then there's a proton plus a neutron. That's called Deuterium.

Then there's a proton plus two neutrons. Otherwise, they're chemically identical. You can drink it. I have videos on my channel where I make it into ice and I drink it. This glass has a ratio of tridium and deuterium and ordinary protonic water that is exactly predicted in the theory of cosmology known as the Big Bang nucleosynthesis. So that is a vestigial relationship by just in this glass of water. We could go in the laboratory next door and measure it.

That means we can prove the big bang. Can we do the same for string theory? Can we do the same for what's called loop quantum gravity? Can we do the same for Stephen Wilfrum's physics project? Eric Weinstein's geometric unity. Can we do that? Are there any? First, we have to answer those questions. So, yes, we're a long way off from motivating it.

It is nice to think about. The most concrete thing we can say is there's nothing that forbids it, but is there any evidence for it? That's not so clear. And it sounds like your answers so far there isn't. There isn't any. There's definitely no evidence for it, but there's also no evidence for string theory,

as Eric talked about, and that's garnered a lot more tension, time and money. All right. Are we alone in the universe? I've always been persuaded by the pure statistical argument that given the scale of it, there's bound to be, and you mentioned yourself, you talked about there's loads of planets

and the Goldilogs zone all around the universe. Surely there's intelligent life somewhere out there. Statistically speaking. Right. So I like to make the following analogy. So I believe that there's no intelligent life in the universe. Well, especially on this planet. That's right.

This planet's the worst except for all the others. Yeah. So I believe that we become very enamored of this notion. Again, there is some primordial beauty to the notion of escaping and thinking about things that transcend are limitations of time or space or existence. And one of those is the existence of other life forms that may exist in the universe. First of all, we can say there's zero evidence for such life forms, even a slime mold on Enceladus in our own solar system.

There's no evidence for it. And that's important because there is a concept, purported by the man who coined the term Big Bang. Actually, you guys are the perfect people to ask this. I've never gotten a straight answer. Is Big Bang a dirty word? Is it a dirty phrase? No.

No? Because supposedly Hoyle, Fred Hoyle, is one of the greatest astronomers in history. He coined the term Big Bang as a pejorative meaning orgasm. So that's never said in this country? We had a better sex life than we. I didn't know that.

No, I don't think it is. Nobody would. So he was a proponent of it. the steady state model. But in any case, he also came up with the notion of what's called panspermia. Can I say that on the show? Yeah, he's pan-spermia. Whatever you want.

It's a free speech show. It's a free speech show. Great. So the notion of what's called panspermia, it means that there will be exchange of material between planets and between other star systems in our galaxy. And that will potentially be an almost like a Noah's Ark for life to transport. It doesn't solve the origin of life. problem, but it could potentially solve the abundance of life problem in our solar system,

or how did it come here? He claimed it could have come from another planet, not too far away by cosmic standards. So it gets here. Now, I actually have some of this, and as we said, there's meteorites and so forth, there are found in Antarctica. It's well-known phenomenon. I actually have a tiny piece of Mars. It doesn't have any amino acids or DNA or a little green men on it, but it comes from Mars, and we can prove it comes from Mars. Just trust me, we have it. We have from many other bodies in our solar system. So why is that important? That means that things can come here.

Well, guess what? That means that things can go from the Earth out there, right? So you have to answer the question. What is the probability? And what does it say about life in the universe that we haven't found life, say, on Mars? Now, Mars is a big place, and yeah, if we went somewhere on Earth, but almost everywhere on Earth has life.

Almost everywhere. Even Antarctica, where I've been. Antarctica is one-seventh of the total number of continents on this planet. It's about the size of Australia. So it's pretty big. There's almost no life there, though. There's almost no, there is life. There's microbial life.

There are these giant birds called scuas that will like take a toddler away if the toddlers were allowed on the continents or not. And then there's sea lions, a couple penguins on the coast. That's about it. There's no polar bears or anything like that.

And then there's humans. So you're talking about, you know, this vast continent, the size of Australia, hundreds of times bigger, you know, tens of times bigger than the UK. No life. Almost no life. But if you make the argument that life should be abundant

based on statistical probability, as Fermi did, Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest physicists, he created what's called the Fermi paradox. There's so many planets, there's so many planets. They didn't know about the Goldilocks zone back then, but they said if the average lifetime of a technological civilization is even a million years, then just in the age of our galaxy,

which is maybe 8 billion years or more, that means we should have been visited by thousands, even going at a slow chemical rocket speed. So he asked the famous question. Where are they? So we have to ask, where are they, and come up with solutions to that Fermi paradox. And there are many purported solutions, but one of which is there are no aliens, right? I mean, the most simple thing based on evidence is that there are no, certainly technological civilizations that we're aware of.

There could be beyond what we're aware. Now, the best calculations do the following. They don't say, and as I don't say, I don't say there's no life. I say the probability is very small. and certainly even smaller for technological life. It has to be even smaller, right? If there's a dolphin swimming on a pool and Enceladus, we're never going to know about it because it doesn't have an iPhone

to let us know that we live there unless we stumble upon it. So it has to be technological. How do we get to that technology? It comes back to what we said before. We started with primitive of things. Maybe our hydrocarbons is necessary. Is global warming a trademark, a hallmark of civilization? Some say it is.

In other words, we should look not for transmissions of, you know, I love Lucy, but we should look for, global warming on another planet. So far we haven't seen it. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but that would mean terraforming and modifying that particular planet. Then did they have a biosphere? Did they have chlorophyll? Do they have a great oxidation event? Did they have a Jupiter that sucks up deadly asteroids from impacting the Earth or whatever the analog Earth is in the Goldilocks zone? That's not in the Goldilocks zone? Do they have a moon that's at the exact right distance to create tides that can cause chemical intubation almost between life, land, and sea?

Do they have plate tectonics that we talked about? Are those plate tectonics lubricated by these microorganisms? So there's many different hurdles. And the way I like to say it is, so you can phrase it like this. Imagine that there were eight things that had to happen for us to have this conversation under these lights and camera, right? There had to be a big bang. There had to be the formation of matter from no matter. So people think that matter is conserved.

It's not energy is conserved, but matters not. Then there had to be primitive elements that could support life. then life had to come about and be conscious, then that life that was conscious how to create technology and so forth. So you just go through and you say like this, and then there had to be things that prevented it, asteroids or had to be dinosaurs that were there

but got killed off and fossils and so. You just say there's eight of them and each one has a probability of one in a thousand. That's it. Just say one in a thousand that there's a big bang, whatever that means. One of a thousand that there's a Jupiter. One in a thousand, and we know the probabilities

are much, much, much, much lower. Let's just say for the sake of the argument, one divided by 1,000. Eight of those, you take one over 1,000, you raise it to the 8th power, you get 1 in 10 to the 24th. That same number is the inverse of the number of planets we think there are in the observable universe's history.

So over 13.8 billion years, we think there have been 10 to the 24th, which is a trillion trillion planets that could be life inhabiting. But the probability, I just said, is one in 10 to the 24. So the problem comes about, the human mind is incapable of multiplying a zero by an infinity.

And that's why the statistical argument, I think, is a very crude but often overestimate of the probability, a possibility of technology. The emergence of life on Earth is so ridiculously unlikely that for that to be replicated anywhere in the universe, even with the number of planets that exist, is still extraordinarily unlikely because it was so unlikely that it was formed here. Yeah, and there's so many contingent things that have to occur. It's just a Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari.

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Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this motion. Right order. Which brings us inexorably to the final question of the three that you always get asked. Yeah. Which is about where life comes from. Yeah. So I think that...

Where everything comes from. Where everything comes from. Yeah. So right now is an interesting time. Because throughout history, you know, if you took a ping pong ball and you put it in a bag for each year that human civilization has existed, say going back 5,000 years. The very first cosmological models in the Bible. in ancient Egypt and Sumeria. And you wrote on it, what's your model of the universe? Like, is it eternal?

Is it cyclical? Is there a turtle on top of a turtle? Is there a Uroboros eating its tail? What is it? Just put it in there. The overwhelming number of ping pong balls would have a static eternal universe. Einstein believed in it.

Newton believed in it. It's interesting, the Bible does not believe in it. The Bible has a creation event, right? There are Egyptian myths that have a creation of it. But most models, most people, for all time, believed that the universe was static. And in fact, the name that we get... Static meaning it exists has always existed and will always exist as it is.

Exactly. Right. 100% right. So, and why do we know that? Well, we're sitting on this thing called a planet. I don't know if you know any Greek. My Greek's not that strong. But planet means wanderer. Well, why do we have the name?

It's like Jews. We talk about people that aren't Jewish. We call them Goiam or we, you know, which just means nation. It's not like a put-down or anything. But that's interesting because, like, we're only 0.2% of the population of the world. So we're just like, we have a name for the 99. Just call them people and we're the weird ones, right? But anyway, so we have a name for these things that moved.

They're called planets. Well, why were they special? Because they were the only things that moved. Everything else is static. It looks like it's unchanging. We know the stars move a little bit, but you couldn't perceive them over human lifetime. But the five planets that they could see back then, after which our days are named and so forth, there's deep inculcation of astronomy in our daily lives that we just take for granted.

But anyway, those things move. And so it was natural to suspect, as Newton did, as Einstein did, that the universe was static and eternal. And that prevailed for an extremely long period, the preponderance of human history. And so we asked the question of what could overthrow that. Well, before, I would say, the last decade, it was impossible to speculate any more than just purely qualitatively. But now, with telescopes and tools like that of my team, that my team and I are working on called the Simon's Observatory, and other competitor teams.

We're looking potentially at a relic, just like these water molecules reveal the fiery fusion conditions that are present in the first second after the Big Bang. We're able to go 30 orders of magnitude farther back in time. And we will reveal the presence

via what are called gravitational waves. Those gravitational waves would originate from a quantum, a purely quantum phase of the universe's history called inflation. Okay. What does any of that mean? Okay.

So the universe, the question is, did the universe come from what's called the singularity or not? Was there a point of infinite temperature, infinite density, infinite energy from which all the matter and energy that we're experiencing today

came from, including the molecules in here, including every cell in our body, the matter of that. So forgive me, I'm just trying to make it simple enough that it is like me can understand. Hopefully other people watching

can understand as well. So the idea of the Big Bang is you have this matter that is, I'm using very stupid language, I'm aware, but it's super condensed. Absolutely, that's great. And then it explodes and cools over time and that's how you get the universe. Exactly. So it's either that or... Or a static universe.

There are actually other, more than one possible, other alternative. It could be that there was a preceding universe that had a big bang in reverse called a big crunch. It could be that there are multiple universes that exist parallel to ours, of which, We're just one that has properties, features, and phenomena consistent with the existence of cosmologists and podcast and people. So we want to know, is our universe an accident? Is it a fluctuation, a fluke? And using technology for the first time, we can confirm that. We could potentially reveal that our universe did, in fact, begin not only with a singularity,

with a point of incomprehensible, a hellscape, like energy, density, pressure, everything you could imagine. But it would also reveal the presence of what's called a multiverse. Just as Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth is just a planet, it's not the center of the universe as people have thought for thousands of years, back to Aristotle and beyond, that the universe was centered on the earth because that was a natural place for it to be. No, they disproved that. They conjectured in the case of Copernicus and proved in the sense of Galileo and eventually Isaac Newton. No. But there's more than one planet. There's more than one star.

There's more than one galaxy. There's more than one cluster. There's more than one super cluster of galaxies. Why not? More than one universe. And in fact, in Comitant, with the singular origin of the universe, comes to multiverse. So in other words, you almost cannot have a singularity, a big bang, without having a multiverse. They're almost wedded at the hip.

So the stakes are very high because it's very incompatible with, say, biblical narratives or it's incompatible with a lot of philosophical speculation, that you could have parallel multiple universes. In fact, they may not be even distant from us, just like they may be very closely related to us, or they may be us in the sense of what's called many worlds' multiverse interpretation. So the stakes are very high. It's the most primitive thing. This is why I'm so interested in. This is why I do what I do. Because to study where everything came from, where potentially, as Stephen Hawking said, asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless

as asking what's north of the North Pole. He may have been wrong, surprisingly. He may have been wrong. No, it would be very interesting, I would say, to ask God if God exists, to say what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang? That may have an answer for the first time in history by technology that my colleagues, who are far smarter than I am,

are helping to build via what's called the Simon's Observatories. It's located, it's actually one of the, if not the highest altitude construction project in the world, building a massive telescope array, a $130 million project funded primarily by the Simons Foundation in Manhattan, New York, and this is to unravel what caused the bang. Was there a big banger? Or was it all a spontaneous fluke?

And if it was a big bang, are there other universes parallel to ours in a sense? I think, for me, it's one of the most exciting things to grapple with. When are we going to find out? Well, if you join my webinar. So the challenging thing is that these things take time. We're almost done with construction. We have colleagues that are there right now in Chile.

This is in the Outercoma desert. 5,200 meters above sea level, 17,000 feet above sea level. As I said, highest observatory in the world, highest construction project in the world, higher than the base station, permanent base station of Mount Everest. Very challenging conditions. Very low oxygen. stream ultraviolet damage from the sun.

But it does make, you know, it's compared to going to Mars. It's like a cakewalk. So Elon is welcome to spend some time. They're active volcanoes next door to us. And it's a very inhospitable place. We're delayed by the pandemic, a year and a half, two, three years, which costs money because you can't just say, well, I know you're going to get your PhD working in the Keating laboratory.

Come back in two and a half years when things are, you know, no, we couldn't do that. So we kept it going, cost more money. And luckily, you've been able to see it through. So yes, we're about to get what's called first light, when we'll get the first astronomical data later this calendar year, 2023, and then we should have results a year later. But what I always cautioned people

is that we won't be able to say definitively. We won't be able to say, yes, there was definitely a singularity. You could, however, say that there was no singularity. In other words, in science, you have to be careful. Most people think it's like math. You can prove one plus one equals two. You can prove, you guys know this, that sign is opposite over hypotenuse, right? Trigonometry, isn't that right?

You guys know any truth. Okay, you can prove those things mathematically. He's such an optimist. Yeah, I know. It goes back to Euclid, right? So you can prove those, you can't prove something in physics. You can't prove that the Big Bang has, but you can rule out the other alternatives. And so therefore you can falsify things about alternative models.

So by discovering the pattern that we're searching for, we would not prove the singularity, but we'd falsify the alternatives, including some purported by Nobel laureate and friend of mine and your countryman Sir Roger Penrose, who has a model that's a cyclical universe that cycles into and out of existence. So I always say my job is to not prove theories, it's to kill theories, prove them wrong.

And I think that's where it's nice to kind of marry the theoretical with the experimental, and hopefully we unveil new knowledge about the origin of the only story that had no precedent, perhaps. That is absolutely fascinating, Brian. And the one question that I want to ask, before we finish up, is this, when you see people whose knowledge of science is so completely awry, let's take, for instance, something like a flat earther, do you think it's the fault of the individual, or do you think it's the fault of science?

That's a good question. I first would say it's the fault of education, because it's very difficult, although I should say, you guys are very good at, you know, self-mocking behavior, but I know that's, I know because I'm a big fan of yours, that you guys are highly intelligent. It's a British thing. You can't pretend to be smart here.

Otherwise people will beat it out. That's right, yeah. Okay, let's stipulate that. I want you to be honest. And now we're getting all diary of a CEO and you guys, which, you know, you guys are going to support. Who's that? I never heard of it.

I don't mention all comparison. Okay, so I'm going to make you guys. I don't know that is. You guys got to be real. London real. No, no. I don't say that guy either. Could you guys prove the earth is a sphere?

No. You couldn't, right? No. So imagine proving that the earth is not the center of the solar system, right? Right. And imagine proving the solar system is not the center of the galaxy. Anyway, so why is that? You guys are educated people.

Can you imagine saying, you know, I never read Shakespeare. I can't spell. You know, I mean, my spell checkers gets a lot of work, but you would never be comfortable with that. So it's a little bit on you guys, right? An educated man or woman in the 21st century should know some of the classics. It's like, you know,

yes, we can cancel anyone you want. But to not know it, it's canceling yourself, right? If you don't know these things, if this doesn't bother you, like how do you know that the earth is going around a giant, ball fusion reactor called the sun? So part of it's education

because it's hard, right? People, so the teachers don't learn it, they're not forced to do it, and so they don't teach us as students, but also the curiosity of the individual has to be important. And one thing I have, I'm not great at math,

I'm not the greatest at building, I have rapacious curiosity. And I think that's the trait that has allowed me to achieve the modest success that I've had because I keep wanting to answer these questions because I keep realizing how finite in my life is. So I would say, you know, flat earthers just, you know, is a byproduct of this. Unless it's people that, you know, much more passionately believe that aliens not only exist, but are actually visiting, you know, parts of California and parts of Virginia. And I've had a lot of conversations about that in my podcast.

And we'll continue to because I think it's interesting. potentially because it would open a portal to learn about physics of a different century. But be that as a me. So to answer your question, Francis, I do think it's partially on the individual, partially on the society that's producing the individual that giving us so much potential technology, byproduct of basic science that nobody understands. Well, I think that's kind of it, isn't it? Because I think the world has come to a point where it's so complex and so complicated.

I don't know if you could, you may be able to, my grandfather could make maintain his own vehicle. Right. Very few people can do that now, and it's not because necessarily people have got dumber, it's because the vehicle has got more complicated. That's right, yeah. And I think the same is true of, there are so many things you now have to know to survive, or to thrive particularly, that the amount of time you can spend learning certain things,

most people simply aren't going to be able to dedicate that much time to that particular thing. On the other hand, technology takes away with one hand, as you're saying, the ability to change a battery in your phone, yeah, good look with that. let alone, you know, service the CPU on your car. But it gives, too, right? Now with chat, GPT, with artificial intelligence, which we'll talk about some other time, that, and you guys come on my podcast, hopefully in Southern California.

Yeah, we can tell you all about physics, man. Yeah, exactly. I saw you out. Can't wait. Tell him about the multiverse. Right, sit down, Brian, right? I'll get it, because we're going to be a wily. I'll win the Nobel Prize next thing.

So, as an example, like, I'm kind of glad that I wrote my, first three books without the help of AI. Because I know I did it myself. It's provable I could do it. Because it didn't exist. But now that also has become a lever and a force multiplier for me. Because now I can do stuff where I can actually take, say, the written works of Galileo, who is one of my heroes. I was able to get his written words and create the first ever audiobook by Galileo. It's kind of weird. You think, oh, there's audio. No, no one had ever done that. I did it. I read it with Carlo Rovelli is a famous physicist.

and Lucia Picciarillo and a couple of Nobel Prize. It was an amazing thing. Well, now I can say, hmm, I can take that text. I have the document file. Put it into a large language model. Then I can start to say, well, what would Galileo say about the multiverse? And I've made a Galileo chat bot. I've made a Feat bot.

I made an Einstein bot. And so I'm doing this exploring because the question is, can they then derive new laws of physics? So the people who will win in the AI age are not the people are like gifted with this in a inability, who has an inability to program in Python, you know, with a, you know, JavaScript's wrapper, nobody knows how to do that. But you might not need to. Like, I'm not a great programmer, but now I can tell Bard or chatche, write a Python wrapper around this model that I get, and it will start to add. I can ask Galileo, what do you

think about quantum mechanics? I can do mine, and then I can say, well, here's all these data points from the spectrum of an exoplanet, and here's 10,000 of those. Here's a thousand simulations of what life could be like, compare those. And I could never have done that, you know, 20 years, 10 years, 5 years ago. So technology is giving us abilities that we never had. But what's the key thing? You have to be curious about it. I can't teach curiosity.

I can stimulate it. I can avoid it. And then it's Barry Barish, the same Nobel laureate I told you about it. He said, we have almost a negative association. When I say curiosity killed the cat. That's a bat. Like, I don't want to kill a cat. Like you murderous, you know, Pita Violator.

Right. So it's almost a negative thing. Curiosity is the most beautiful, unique human advantage. So when you have a child or you have your ideological children that you support and you mentor, inculcating curiosity, that's a superpower. That's all we have. That's our claws. That's our teeth as human beings.

So that's what I would want to inculcate most of all. Well, I agree with you. But then we come into conflict with, I suppose, what we were talking about at the beginning, which is the curiosity to explore, right? I suppose it's different when it costs you trillions of dollars, right? And come back with me, because I want to finish that conversation, actually, or at least do more on it, which is, you mentioned education, but STEM education will only produce more scientists and more engineers and so on,

who will want to go to Mars, right? So my sense from what you're saying is that you think that a lot of the way we think, we want to use science to fill a void that actually gets to be filled by other things while we're here, down here on Earth. A lot of that is, I would agree with. I would say that there's a meaning gap that can't be filled by technology. Yes. And it can only be filled ironically by reverence for the past. So, in other words, when you think about, you know, like the worship of the young that we have nowadays, the TikTok, the Instagram, this, Snapchat, and even with these AIs and just like every single,

second on Twitter. It's like some new get rich I can't keep up with it or like follow these 10 tips and you'll get AI rich. And before that was Web 3 Bitcoin. It goes on and on. And so there's this future shock that older people feel. And yet we are the only repositories of WISI. I say we, you know, I'm

older than you guys, right? But the point being that you have to have a reverence. And in the age where you kill God there's no reverence for, who cares about some book that was written 3,200 years ago, had to say, even if it was written by God, whatever, it's out of day. But certainly it was written by, man, like, it's totally irrelevant.

I have the scene in my book where I kind of, you know, take down the Nobel Prize through most of the book and try to build it up towards the very end. Because I think if it doesn't get reformed, if we have more joke Nobel Prizes or things that are, it's going to collapse under its own weight. You know, the Pulitzer Prize used to be way more prestigious. Yeah. You talked about this with Michael Malice and, like, the Pulitzer Prize used to be really prestigious. Now, most kids don't know what a Pulitzer Prize is.

But the Nobel Prize people still, the same day. can befall the Nobel Prize if it's not reformed in the way that I hope in my college. And the reforms I present are not the... But anyway, so I decried this. I write that in 2016, 2017, I finished the first draft of the book, and it was the publisher, and a Nobel laureate came to UCSD to give a talk. Duncan Haldane, who's a Brit, and he was at Princeton. He actually did the work that won a Nobel Prize at UC San Diego, where I am.

And he brought his Nobel Prize with him. I was like, this is weird. And after his talk, people went up to it. and were kissing it. People were taking selfies of it. Somehow it ends up in my hand. I took us, like, I just written a book. And I remembered back to the scene from Exodus

in the Old Testament. And the Jews get led out of Egypt by Moses through a split sea after 10 deadly plays. It's all super ridiculous, miraculous. And then they get to the other side, and they don't have water for a couple days. And they start to complain, they're like, oh, why did you take us out of Egypt

Were there not enough graves in Egypt? It's like classic Jewish humor. And then they start complaining about the food. In Egypt, we had garlic and cucumbers. I'm just like, what the hell? We just think of them as like idiots. And then 40 days later after that, they build a golden calf, worship it,

and they say, this is the God that led you out of Egypt. They were just let out. It was 40 days ago. In other words, the attraction to idolatry is very, very strong in human beings. We can't comprehend what it was like. I mean, a rabbi once told me it was like the sexual urge and a man, you know, straight or gay, right? It's like it's almost overpower.

We have to control that as good men in society, right? And that was what it was like to worship. But we still worship idols. Wealth, education, prestige, followers, ratings, all these things. We're just as idolatrous as ever. How would we know that? Well, we have to go back and read and have some connection and reverence for wisdom. I'm not saying, let's look at the technology of the 32nd century.

No, I'm way, I'm in love with technology. But it's addictive. And it's worshipful. It's dangerous because it becomes a false idol. And that's the Second Commandment. We're warned against that. And one of the things I'm hearing in that, which I find very interesting, is we confuse knowledge with wisdom.

And we think, because we live in the world where all the knowledge of the universe is at our fingertips, that means they're all the wisdom of the universe. That's right. That's right. When maybe it's not. That's absolutely not, right. And even going back and reading great literature, not only reading the Bible, reading, you know, the great literature of civilization and asking, yes, what can we do with

that and the conflation of that? You know, the old joke that, you know, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. You know, there's some truth to that. But never more so when we think that, you know, I happen to think, again, we keep talking about I think he's very smart. I don't, you know, he may be wise. I haven't met him.

I haven't talked to him. But just as I said that one thing, the one question, the first question I would ask him is, who are you going to leave behind? I don't think, I think he is a good father. I see him in pictures with his little X and whatever. As a man, as a father, is that what you're willing to give up? Like, why? How?

How will you explain it to him? Because you're not going to take him. So those are the, those are kind of the, questions, you know, that I'm most curious about. And so that's where I want to get. Knowledge is cheap. Knowledge can be found anywhere. Wikipedia knows way more than any of us will ever know, but wisdom is extremely precious. And it's a highly, highly undervalued asset, unique to human beings. Now that is a good point to finish on. Professor Brian Keating. As always, the last question we ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be as a society?

I think the preciousness, the the fact that we're likely alone, I think it inspires terror. And I think things that terrify people, there's a book by Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. We don't like to think about it. We build monuments.

We build pharaohs and sarcophagi and pyramids. We build Nobel Prizes. We do all these things to mark this little speck of a dot that we inhabit. When intermeaning is available to everyone, no matter how wealthy or poorer you might be.

And I think developing those connections to me and putting at risk the potential consequences of personal devastation. And it seems ironic. I'm advocating that you should be vulnerable to devastation. No, no, no, no. Because any of us that are parents can contemplate in a nanosecond,

the most devastating thing that we can imagine. I won't even say it. It brings me into tears to think about it. But every parent has it. your parent has it. You and I are just beaming this back. We know what we're talking about.

I don't have to say a damn thing. And you know what we're talking about too. But that's a very powerful guidepost. It's telling you, lean into those things. What's important? That if taken away, would devastate you. I don't think we like to talk about that.

And I think that, and thinking in that way, of bridging gaps, and maybe, you know, not to make this, you know, too Lex Friedman-ish, but to bring this interpersonal connectedness, that we are part of this vast network

of humanity, that will bring love, this nature of distribution of love, because every person you add to a network, it increases geometrically and exponentially, make those connections, make the deepest connections, such that if they're taken away, you can't envision what life would be like. Lean into those.

That's what we should be talking about. That's really valuable. I appreciate that, Brian. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnyshade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion.

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