Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Is the White House's New UAP Council a Game Changer for Disclosure?
Episode Date: June 17, 2026Recently, Professor Avi Loeb was tasked by the White House, AARO, ODNI, and the FBI with assembling and leading a new UAP Science Advisory Council — comprising astrophysicists, AI experts, and psych...ologists — to advise the intelligence community on unidentified anomalous phenomena. It was announced the same week the government released its third batch of declassified UAP files. Now he joins us live to talk about what that actually means — and what it doesn't. This is not a "the aliens are here" stream. It's the harder conversation. I study the cosmic microwave background, and when we find an anomaly, we exhaust every instrument artifact and foreground before anyone whispers "new physics." I want to know why UAP science should run on a different evidentiary standard — and Loeb is exactly the right person to push on it, because he's already attributing much of the released footage to cosmic rays, balloons, and possibly Chinese drones, while holding the door open for the small fraction that stays unexplained. WHAT WE GET INTO: - The council, its mandate, and the question nobody's asking: does "advisory" mean anyone has to listen? - The orbs — Chinese surveillance drones, classified US tech, or something else — and the prior you'd need before you say "non-human" - Whether "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" gets applied selectively - AI in the Galileo Project's detection pipeline, and the false-positive problem: what's the training comparison class for "non-human technology"? - The critique that a council built to study the object ignores where the data actually comes from — human witnesses GUEST: Professor Avi Loeb — Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, former chair of the Astronomy department, head of the Galileo Project, author of "Extraterrestrial" and "Interstellar." Avi on X: https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb Avi's Medium: https://avi-loeb.medium.com Galileo Project: https://galileoproject.org HOST: Brian Keating — experimental cosmologist, UC San Diego. Brian on X: https://x.com/briankeating Brian's Medium: https://drbriankeating.medium.com/ Loeb's essay "Keeping Our Eyes on the Orbs, Not the Audience": https://avi-loeb.medium.com CHAPTERS: 00:00 — "Chinese drones, or the biggest discovery in history?" 00:10 — Avi Loeb, live 00:40 — The White House just put him in charge of UAPs 10:00 — Legitimacy, or a gilded cage? 13:00 — The orbs: Chinese drones or something else? 24:00 — The prior: what's your base rate for "non-human"? 28:00 — The CMB standard: how a cosmologist kills an anomaly 33:00 — AI, SETI, and the false-positive problem 44:00 — Two cosmologists, one Nobel, one council 47:00 — Lightning round 50:00 — The Impossible Question #uap #AviLoeb #UFO #Astrophysics #GalileoProject #SETI #IntoTheImpossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Farn and Domestic with my, I think, my most frequent guest.
I'm not even sure.
You could be my most frequent guest, and that's an honor, I'm sure.
All right, let me see if this is working here.
We'll cut this out of the final video, of course.
Let's see if this works.
My videos, your channel.
Let's see here.
Could be, you could be my most.
We're working.
All right.
Avi Loeb.
Welcome back to the Into the Impossible podcast.
It's great to join you, Brian.
And as I said before, I really appreciate the dialogue with natural intelligence rather
than artificial intelligence.
That's right.
You were talking about my brain and how you're glad to talk to a real brain instead of a
silicon one.
We're going to have a lot of fun today talking about all these exciting things that you've
been up to, including a new White House position, because I know you don't have enough jobs,
Avi, you must have been lonely.
Well, this one is particularly important.
And what I often tell my team members,
we should keep our eyes on the orbs, not on the audience.
Meaning, just like in basketball, you know,
I'm sure that the New York Knicks managed to win
because they were focusing on the ball, not on the audience.
And in the context of what I'm doing,
there is a great opportunity now that
President Trump came with the directive of declassifying videos, imagery, documents, as much as possible,
within the constraints of national security, there is an opportunity for us to look into the question
of whether there are unusual objects near Earth that are not human-made.
And, you know, you might think that I'm approaching it from a perspective of an astrophysicist,
But that's not true. Actually, you know, I draw my lesson from going to the kitchen.
If I find an ant, a single ant on the kitchen cabinet, then I know that there should be thousands of them under the sink.
And I'm very worried about it.
So when we shut down the Chinese spy balloon, you know, a few years ago, probably the Chinese intelligence agencies were laughing because we used a missile to shoot down.
one balloon but they have many more that we are not aware of and so the question you know the down-to-earth
assumption would be to say all these orbs and unusual objects being identified being noticed by
military personnel near strategic assets of the u.s are actually human-made and as a result if the
intelligence agencies are telling us that they cannot figure those out if the pentagon cannot
not really identify the senders of these gadgets.
And by the way, they could be launched from within the U.S.
by people who cooperate with adversarial nations.
It doesn't need to arrive from outside the border.
That's right, yeah.
And so I think it's a serious matter.
We're not dealing with necessarily exactly the same objects that we dealt with 50 years ago.
And so why?
Yeah, yeah.
I just wanted to ask you, because we,
a limited amount of time. Why go to a Harvard professor, as esteemed as you are, as, as, as, as
renowned as you are. I mean, my main concern is a lot of things are coming out now. Disclosure
Day just came out, a popular movie, you just reviewed it, and I think it's, I'm going to
direct everyone to the medium article about it. But amidst that, there was also a disclosure,
you know, kind of revelation by your friend David Grush and your friend, Congresswoman Anna
Polina Luna. And I want to get right to the point, because I've been frustrated with
both of them. I have, as you know, I've wanted to talk to both of them, and I'm hoping you'll make an
introduction, a Shiddh, as we say. But Avi, why can't, I understand why David can't come forward.
He could go to jail, and I don't want him to lose his livelihood, or God forbid, Hasfos Shalom,
get injured in any way. I have great respect for him. He's a great patriot. However, he's talking
about things he's never seen with his own eyes. He's talking about things he's been told,
and he's saying he can't come forward with what he's been told in more detail than sentient plasmoids
and non-biologic, non-human biologics.
Now, that may be true.
I don't know anything about disclosure in terms of the government crackdown on an individual.
I don't want any harm to come to him.
But Anna Luna, your friend who went to your observatory, who took a tour with you, who's on tour with you,
she could do this in a heartbeat.
And the fact that she's not releasing everything that she knows and she's hiding behind this,
suggests to me as just an independent skeptic, but someone who wants to believe that we're not alone
and wants to know that we're not.
I don't want to believe anything.
I want to know.
So Avi, why can't she come forward and just tell us everything that she knows?
She's not going to be put in jail.
Come on.
Well, Representative Luna actually argues that we're not,
and she is not being privy to all the information that is relevant to this matter.
And what they are shown under secrecy in SCIF setups,
which are basically far-day cages where no electromagnetic information can penetrate.
Secure compartmental as information.
Yeah, secure.
I mean, what they saw is intriguing, but I don't think it's the actual things that Grasch was talking about.
So there is here, there is a gap between the access that Congress people have and what Grush is talking about.
There is a gap.
And the question is, is it real?
Is the fundamental question is, does the, the fundamental question is, does the government have materials or even?
even videos of clearly non-human-made objects and perhaps even biologics, which is the claim
that is being repeated by a lot of people.
But for me, it's unclear whether the government has it, because obviously there should be
a retrieval and reverse engineering program within government for things that are found
in crash sites of battlefields or elsewhere where I'm.
adversarial nations are using technologies
that we want to be aware of.
So we collect those materials.
We see pilots there as well.
So if you wanted to not to make adversarial nations
aware of what we know,
you might label those documents with aliens.
And then if someone looks at these documents,
they might think, oh, the US has in its possession
extraterrestrial artifacts.
And it's not obvious to me that it's not just a labeling system,
that someone gave it a name,
then the rumor was spread by a bunch of people. He talks about interdimensional beings. She talks
about interdimensional beings with the confidence that your colleague, Kamran Bafa, talks about
11 dimensional strings. And I don't know what that means. And I'm, you know, they always say
they defy the laws of physics, but you and I are physicists, Avi, they don't defy things that we can
understand. So when are we going to get the actual hands on data? I think it's... So part of the
reason that I'm very happy to help government is the first reason, of course, as a citizen of the
I feel that my duty is to help them develop better sensors so that we can protect the nation.
Okay, so it's really important not to have holes in our defense system, especially in strategic
sites.
And perhaps some of my own sites as a physicist would help them.
And I'm happy to do that.
I would not feel that my time is wasted if we don't find anything other than human-made
technologies.
But at the same time, there is a possibility that there is something beyond that.
And of course, even if it's one object out of a million, it would.
will constitute the biggest discovery ever made in science.
Now, the government is not a scientific organization,
so they may be baffled, they may be uncertain,
they may not know what they are dealing with.
And in that context, I'm happy to help.
If it exists, I have not seen it.
So, you know, I respond to evidence.
I didn't have a lot of fun in Steven Spielberg's movie
because, you know, the artistic freedom
that scriptwriters in Hollywood take is not to my taste.
They violate the laws of physics.
What we have to understand is, you know, the laws of physics apply everywhere in the universe as far as we know, you know, and they apply to every atom.
It's not as if there could be free will of atoms that one atom will deviate from quantum mechanics because then whoever finds that atom will get a Nobel Prize.
So the point is the laws of physics are based on a huge amount of data that we collected so far.
You can't just say, oh, I will violate it, the speed of light.
I would violate, I mean, the speed of light being the limit of travel.
I would introduce additional dimensions.
You know, you can imagine those things, but unless you have evidence to support these ideas,
they should not be regarded as real possibilities, because there are many more possibilities
than the reality that we all share.
So what we need is better evidence.
You can't look at fuzzy images and say, oh, this is an object that lives in extra dimensions.
That's not a good enough reason.
You can imagine Xero dimension mathematically, but it's not supported by data.
So I respond to evidence like a detective.
A detective goes to a crime scene and there are various possibilities as to who is responsible for the outcome.
And a good detective would not listen to what the people say, but would look for evidence that would clench the case.
And that's exactly the work of a scientist.
So in that sense, if we don't have good enough data,
if the images are too fuzzy,
if we don't know the distances to objects,
what we need to do is not philosophize about it,
argue about it, you know, have forums online and Twitter
and X and all these social media about it.
What we should do is develop better sensors,
get better data, and then assess the situation.
And I'm happy to have to have it.
help the government go in that direction rather than repress back in time because we cannot go back in time
and check all these places where the reports indicated something unusual.
I'm showing this from the Hollywood reporter that David Grush is consulting on a new movie that's going to be about a...
Have you been asked to be on these films as well as David?
What do you make of it?
I mean, do you think it's Jerry Bruchheimer movie?
A couple of months ago, I was on a movie set in New York City.
it's called the Sol Hershowitz and the guide to extraterrestrial life.
And they asked me to appear there for one day on a camera role playing myself
because the main character has an encounter with aliens
and wants to speak with Professor Avilov and they bring me to the set
and he asks me questions.
So I played myself basically, but that was my only overlap.
And in that case, I basically said what I say to you.
I spoke like myself.
But I assume that David Grush is in the spirit of Stephen Spielberg talking about, you know, alien bodies and other things that we have not seen yet.
Yeah, we have not seen.
And that, yeah.
Do you find that that contaminates the waters?
I mean, I heard another interview.
Again, I have great respect for these military guys.
I was just on Sean Ryan's show.
You helped me out preparing for that.
Thank you very much.
Should be out soon.
But I told him, you know, I get uneasy criticizing the military because I have so much respect for my stepfather was a fighter pilot and a refueled attacker in Vietnam War and combat many, you know, 50 combat missions.
I have great respect for the military. I wasn't fit enough to get into them. I would love to be.
And I support them. And I've had many of the military pilots that have witnessed, you know, encounters, shall we say, like Ryan Graves and others, who haven't witnessed them themselves, I should say, that they've reported from their own squadron mates what they've heard.
David Fravor is now reportedly yesterday was talking about Roswell and that the government should just come clean with Roswell.
What do you make of the military?
I mean, you and I didn't.
I mean, you served, but I didn't serve.
So what do you make of, are we as civilians allowed to criticize people of a hundred times bigger Cajonis than we ever have?
I mean, again, I'm speaking for myself.
You serve, I know.
But tell me, obviously.
Yeah, my impression is these reports are very sincere.
I mean, I very much trust the integrity and the honesty of these military people.
And obviously, they serve the nation and they are very honorable.
The fundamental question, as far as I'm concerned, is whether the objects they saw,
and these must be real objects, right, whether they had a good assessment of the distance to these objects,
the motion of these objects.
And in those cases, also whether these objects are,
produced by adversarial nations that they are not aware of. And, you know, that's a matter of
national security. So I think we should clean the uncertainty by simply getting better data,
by checking what is flying around strategic assets of the US. And once we have better data,
most likely it will indicate that we are dealing with some human-made technologies. And that by itself,
would be extremely important, just like the discovery of the Chinese pie balloon.
And if it turns out there is something else, that's just the icing on the cake, as far as the
Pentagon or the intelligence agencies are concerned. So I feel that it's worth doing, that this
should be a matter that is, you know, within the mainstream of science and within the mainstream
of the intelligence agencies. And it should not be ridiculed the way it was in past decades,
because now we have much better sensors.
point out they also ridicule themselves. I told this to Sean and I told this to Lex Friedman when I was
on his show. The pilots who were most, are the people that were most likely to haze, to tease, to make fun of
to mock, were Fravor's squadron mates and Dietrich's squadron mates. In other words, when they get back
to the ship, they got mercilessly teased. I asked Sean Wright, did you ever tease your friend who was
worried about IEDs, you know, and them being planted or drones 20 years ago? Drones were very new.
They looked like alien technology. He said, no, we would never do that.
because I know people whose legs have been blown off by actual.
I should say that in the latest release on Friday, which was the most intriguing,
there were several pieces of information that were quite noteworthy.
One is a letter written by the brilliant Dr. John Kozlowski.
He is the director of the All Domain Anomily Resolution Office.
And this letter was written on the 5th of June.
So just a week and a half ago.
Yeah. And this letter talks about an event lasting two days in October 2023.
Very recently were a combination of orbs and kites and objects that were not fully identified that were noticed.
And the orbs, for example, they had the ability to generate smaller orbs, which is really strange.
mother orb creates a baby orb, smaller.
Yeah, I saw that, but people said it was a flare, Avi.
This is the problem.
We have people that, yeah, they say.
I wouldn't discount it as flares because they actually look specifically at flares
and other possible explanations.
They claim that 40% of the phenomena that were discussed by very reliable law enforcement
officials, 40% are not easily explained in terms of,
in terms of what the U.S. currently possesses and adversarial nations, as far as we know, have.
So I would not discount it. I would just say, let's get better data.
And that's serious.
What do you make about the...
Sorry. Yeah, yeah.
The other thing related closely to what you previously said is that is a report from the CIA in 1992,
which says that in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, in the 1960s,
60s, half of the reports on UFOs were associated with U-2 airplanes.
This was a new technology, exactly as you are saying.
Now, if in the late 50s, it was already operational.
And the U.S. government denied that it has any such equipment, you know.
And so it was ridiculing the reports, whereas we know that they were related to these U-2 airplanes.
So if in the late 1950s, these were definitely operational, it must mean that in the early 1950s, they must have tested them.
And probably the Soviets also had, before Sputnik, they must have tried to lift objects out of the Earth gravitational potential wells.
So what I'm saying is there are lots of people saying, oh, there was UFO activity before the Sputnik era.
We see it in photographic plates and so forth.
But it wouldn't surprise me if these were glints from, you know, U-2 airplanes, which are very high and can reflect sunlight, or the early versions of Sputnik before Sputnik itself.
Right. Yeah. And I am talking with Beatrice Vera O'L this week, and I know that you guys have had some, you know, back and forth about her claims about this has to be outside of the atmosphere, not a U-2 as high as they fly or SR-71, because they're showing glints.
that go into shadow on the earth's.
We'll get to that in a minute if we have time, Avi.
But I want to get into the headline news.
I mean, we buried the lead for 20 minutes.
And my audience is dying to ask you questions.
And you have to be a member to ask questions.
There's so many people that want to ask questions.
You do have to be a channel member.
It's 70 cents or something to be a channel member.
But that's just to keep the volume to a reasonable minimum.
Avi, the big question.
When did you get the call?
When did Trump call you up and say,
Avi, I got a mission for you.
I've got the best hair next to mine.
Avi, I need you to help.
about when are you going to start this UFO council?
That's why you Trump infusionation.
But it was a messenger that I hosted at my home.
It was an in-person meeting followed by additional conversations that lasted about a week
before I started to assemble the council just a few days ago.
And I was aiming to collect brilliant members, people who I know personally that have a very high
level of intellect and also knowledge of the subject.
That's why I didn't get the call.
I don't think I got the call, but maybe I was on a break.
No, I'm just kidding.
We'll talk about the team members in a bit.
I should say one thing that I selected one member to be a skeptic.
Michael Sherman.
Because it's very important in every committee to have someone who is the devil advocate
that that prevents the committee from losing sight of biases.
So it's really important.
In these days where people's opinions are very polarized
and the two sides of the map always hate each other.
They don't want to speak with each other,
and they say nasty things on each other online, on both sides.
People have to realize that in order to have an effective committee,
you really need at least one person from the other side in order to...
that's right.
That's right.
Introduce a sanity check that we are not just biased in the way we discuss it.
But in addition, I should also say that, you know, the quality of the work that we do really
depends on the data that we get access to because, you know, we will make the best lemonade
out of the lemons that we get.
I mean, if we get the very bad lemons, the lemonade will not be so great.
And so I'm, I'm, it all depends on the data and that's the way I look at it.
but I assume the group of people that can give sound scientific advice that has all aspects of the phenomena.
It includes, you know, the nerds that will analyze data with AI, machine learning.
It includes also people who deal with psychology, anthropology, philosophy of anomalies and theology as well.
Because these subjects are interconnected with respect to the impact on humanity for such a fine.
of something that is not human comes forward.
You know, we really need to know how to deal with it.
Will there be an official announcement from the White House or from the Office of Science,
Technology, Pollard?
Like, when people online are curious if it's going to be officially sanctioned by some
official White House channel?
Well, my sense right now is that the White House stands behind President Trump's directive,
and that includes all agencies, of the United States.
the intelligence and the Pentagon and in terms of declassifying whatever is not risking national
security. And so everyone is on board on that. And the question is, what does the government really
have? I mean, we hear all these stories, as we discussed before, are they real? And of course,
a lot of people wish to believe that they are real. I mean, Stephen Spielberg definitely
is confident that the US government has bodies of
aliens in its possession from crash sites.
I'm not that sure.
I mean, he, as an artist, he's allowed to think whatever he wants.
But as a scientist, I respond to evidence.
And of course, if I have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, you know, I would do so just
because I think it's a very important type of evidence for the future of humanity.
And I don't need to broadcast it to the public at large if there are reasons, not
to do it immediately. Will there be a budget that you are author? You have to tell me what it is,
but will there be a budget, will it be transparency, oversight, governance, etc.? No, at this time,
we are an advisory council. So my guess based on service in similar committees, is that the budget
includes travel expenses when we meet in person. That's basically no personal compensation or
any financial interest. But I think it's really very encouraging that the government comes forward
to a scientist like myself and asks for assistance because in the past it was more of an approach
of keeping a distance from the public, from the scientific community. So just the change in
attitude I think is a great blessing. And I really appreciate the opportunity that they give us to
to have a conversation with whoever has the data and help them.
Are you worried about backlash?
I mean, this is not a field where the light of heart fear to tread.
And I said, when you go to Washington, if you want a friend, you know, bring an alien with you.
But, you know, for example, I've also been disappointed.
Again, I'd love to talk to Representative Luna because she's so involved and so energetic and enthusiastic.
But sometimes she says things that, quite frankly, I think, are.
are harmful to her own cause. For example, she called Kirk Patrick, you know, basically accused him
of not being forthright when he was leading Aero because he doesn't agree with the Lou Elizondo
kind of Jeremy Corbell and that sort of faction. So she, and he called into doubt basically
Grush's, you know, testimony, and he was the one that was empowered. Now, he gets the most hate
of any guest I've ever had on the podcast. I mean, it's unbelievable how much vitriol he gets.
And so at one level, we want to trust ARO, but AARO, but the other hand, what if you get attacked by Luna in six months?
Because she says you're not to towing whatever line she wants you to tow.
Oh, no, no.
I'm not worried about that because I will basically follow whatever the data suggests.
I mean, you know, I'm not the kind of person that would, I mean, of course I can suggest interpretations that are not confirmed.
And I did that in the context of astrophysics because that's the way you operate.
you just use your imagination.
As Einstein said, the imagination is more important than knowledge.
So given the data that we have,
you can come up with possibilities,
and then you decide which one is the correct one
based on additional data.
That's the way I will operate,
but it's not as if I will bend my statements to political will,
because whether we have a neighbor or not is not a matter of discussion.
Either we have a neighbor or not.
Right.
For the same reason that either the,
the earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around here.
Now, so it's really all about the data and the quality of the data and or getting new data
that will help us figure it out. And so I don't think it's a political process. In fact,
members of Congress on both aisles, you know, of the political spectrum, they work together.
And that's one of the unifying themes, actually, that everyone engaged with politics seems to be excited,
about discussing this subject.
So I think it will bring actually people together
rather than separate them if we...
Yeah.
Where these things are.
And not in the context of watching a plot on the movie screen,
but in reality, which is, by the way,
it could be much more inspiring.
Because there may be ways by which aliens visit us
that were never envisioned in Hollywood,
because the training data set that encompasses all the real estate beyond Earth is far greater than what you find here on Earth.
And our imagination is dictated by our experiences so far.
So we're very limited and we might be very surprised once we have the first encounter.
Just to give you an example, we might think of biological creatures,
but it could also be biology that is synthetic, that is something that waits for our in our future.
Right now we are producing,
computer chips out of silicon.
That's the source of artificial intelligence.
But imagine us getting to a point where we can use biology to create artificial intelligence.
That obviously would be far better because the human brain is consuming only 20 watts compared
to the GEO.
My point is that it could be very surprising for us to encounter something that is synthetic biology
from an exoplanet.
or a robot that is purely technological.
I'm saying until we have that experience,
we will not know who our dating partner is.
Yeah, and that seems to be consonant with what Grush said,
apparently that there's a continuum from corporeal-type life,
which is a very shocking statement to me.
I'm actually more kind of perplexed or astonished
by the fact that he mentioned,
assuming it's true, a corporeal biped,
Now, you know as well as anybody that bipedal life existed and evolved on Earth over very,
very specific conditions.
It's almost inconceivable that you could have bipedal life that's extraterrestrial, right?
But that's more shocking than sentient plasmoid life and synthetic life, right?
I mean, isn't it?
Yeah.
So yesterday I wrote an essay on the question that I was asked by a fledgling biophysicist.
And he asked me, you know, if we find the.
extraterrestrial life, you know, visiting us or in another place.
And how would we be able to tell whether we have common ancestry,
whether, you know, we both have the same origin?
And I said, I answered it very simply, you know,
the life on Earth, the double helix is twisted, the right-handed,
you know, both the RNA and the DNA have a twist in the right-handed direction.
could have been left-handed, but the symmetry was broken.
We don't know why.
That's a mystery.
Now, if we meet life that came from a completely separate source, it has 50%, even if it has
the same building blocks of the DNA RNA that we have, the amino acids, it could have 50%
the opposite chirality.
And therefore, if we find that multiple life forms, extraterrestrial life forms, have the
same chirality as life on Earth and the same building blocks.
it might argue for a common ancestry.
It's sort of like meeting siblings of our family.
And the question is then, who is the parent,
where we introduced here on Earth by some interstellar gardener?
So finding extraterrestrial life or technology, you know, in a way,
also brings us closer to understanding our origins.
Now, there's one thing that I think is most likely,
knowing, you know, for example, my military relatives who are in special operations, I mean,
these are the most elite people on earth as far as I know, and that they've been waterboarded,
they've been tortured, they've been for our country, by our country, by the Pentagon, by the,
you know, all these three-letter, five-letter agencies that you can imagine that they've been
fed and they've been tested to the limits psychologically, physically, you know, to every level
that you could imagine. And they're the ones that are very skeptical of a lot of these claims.
For example, Bavi, if you're dealing with, you have to know that there is a shadow government
that has what Eisenhower called.
In addition to the military industrial complex, his very last speech that he gave in public life,
he said that he's most worried about a scientific technological elite that would gang together
and then exert their control by their excess wisdom.
And he were, there was a shadow scientific academic front that was operating within hedge funds
and operating within spy agencies and then Pentagon.
So how will you be able to differentiate between.
evidence that's manufactured so-called sciops by the government that you're
alleged that you are earnestly working for shall I say but how do you know that
they're not going to work against you they must be as smart as you right well
that's an excellent question and I have my ways first of all I'm using my
intelligence and they cannot easily fool me okay I'm not just a robot that
will you know given the evidence that we follow but I will just look for
patterns in the evidence and whether they're trying to
manipulate me. I mean, I can tell if someone tries to manipulate me. The second, of course,
is that I selected some members of my committee that have inside information. And so...
Or maybe that's psychology, right? You have a psychologist on the team too, right?
I also have a psychologist. But I'm saying even, you know, I have people who would be able to
alert me to a manipulative scheme. And, you know, I have people who would be able to alert me. And,
You know, some people are worried it will be a repetition of Blue Project Blue Book.
I don't, you know, frankly, my approach is that I don't care what happened before.
You know, I'm looking at the future and it could be better than the past.
And I, you know, and the way I see it here is that we have better sensors, better scientific tools
that we can apply to this problem and resolve it.
You know, the goal is to resolve it, not to listen to the people who jump up and down on social media.
I don't, you know, there are lots of people who have opinions.
There are lots of filmmakers that have ideas.
But my duty as a scientist is to promote a better understanding of the reality.
And it may well be that the government has nothing,
or it may well be that the government has really something that Spielberg doesn't know about.
I want to get to it.
And at the very least, I'm saying, even if you are down to earth and you say there is nothing beyond human-made objects,
I say, well, I'm not wasting my time because I help national security in that context.
That's right. Now, another question that has come up, maybe it's just me who's interested in it,
there was a survey done by Vickers at all in nature astronomy in 2024. I just learned a bit recently talking to some people that believe in things like intelligent design, which, you know, I will consult with them and I'll talk to them.
But I say the same thing to them as I say to you and anybody else in the CMB cosmology continuum as well.
I want to see evidence, not believe. But this is what my.
bothered me. They did a survey and they found that over, you know, 80% of astrobiologists believe,
they use the word belief, you know, in the abstract that alien life exists outside of the earth.
And I said, that didn't bother me the number. What bothered me is that they answered the question
at all. Because, Avi, if I say to you, do you believe in astrology? You don't say, no, I don't
believe in it. You say, I have evidence that it is false, that it is as good as chance at predicting
whether Mercury is in the seventh house if you're going to get a parking ticket that day. What do you
make up. 87% of astrobiologists said that they believe on it. They didn't say, oh, I'm waiting for it to be,
there's no evidence yet, which is what I think you should say. And how does that pertain to what you're
doing at? I should also mention that many of them said that they started, they went into astrophysics
because they were inspired by science fiction stories. What I would say on that is make an analogy
with a congressman that five years ago,
you know, before he retired,
he advocated for legislation against gay rights.
Okay.
And then when he retired from Congress,
he admitted that he's gay.
And so then you wonder,
how is that possible?
Well, he said that he wanted to satisfy his constituency
and try to be popular,
but it went against his person.
personal beliefs.
Right.
He could not have believed what he is trying to advocate for, right?
And so you find people in situations, and that happens a lot in society.
They are following the herd.
They don't want to be in constant friction with their environment.
So they follow the environment.
They follow the herd.
They advocate for the same things.
And just because right now, the popular view within the astronomy community is to talk about
microbes and investing more than $10 billion in the,
Habitable World Observatory, they would say, yeah, let's zero out any federal funding
towards searching for technological signatures because we are very focused on searching for microbes.
Now, what I say is this is not a good approach because we don't know if it will be easier
to find microbes than it is to find technological signatures because we don't know how many
objects might be within the inner solar system that are technological.
We try to look for radio signals, but we ourselves are,
stopping to use radio communication.
In fact, Artemis II started to use laser communication.
So who knows, in a thousand years,
we might not use radio communication.
It's an ancient technology.
So to invest 70 years and then say,
okay, there is nothing there,
that's not the right approach,
because looking for a package in our mailbox
is a completely different approach
than waiting for a phone call.
So my point is, you know,
the main source,
stream is at risk by basically trying to reach a consensus.
When you try to argue that we need as a community of scientists reach a consensus as how to
invest all of our funds and we must go in the same direction of looking for microbes,
this is actually damaging innovation because you want to encourage at least two approaches
or maybe multiple approaches so that if one of them fails, like for example the large
Hadron Collider, failed to find supersymmetry,
failed to find dark matter.
Okay, so if we get to a situation
where we build the Habitable World Observatory
and we have a hard time detecting oxygen methane
in the atmospheres of exoplanets
because of some technical problem,
because the signatures are not clear.
I don't know what the reason might be.
We need to have a diversification of our portfolio
so that at the same time,
we invest billions of dollars in searching for,
technological artifacts within the interstellar comets or rocks that arrive into the
inner solar system for example we can explore them so my point is we need to
diversify the portfolio of the way we invest in science not it's not about
consensus and by the way right now the Decadal Survey is considered to be a
consensus document and the astronomers are all aligned behind a single mission I
don't think that's the right approach I think
we should have multiple missions, especially in the search for life, because when I was dating
early on before I met my wife, I was aiming high. I always wanted to meet someone more intelligent
than I am. And currently, the astronomy community is aiming low. They are looking for the most
mediocre dating partner, more, you know, microbes rather than intelligent beings. Well, yeah, I always tell
the young, you know, women that I get to advise or when they ask for, you know, advice for my wife,
and how to meet the perfect man.
She says, don't bother looking.
I'm already married to him.
Okay, Avi, we got questions from the audience here.
So many questions.
You have to be a channel member,
but we've got literally hundreds of members.
Swain Main, 6969.
I don't know what that code stands for.
Avi, many say we're on the verge of government Trump
announcing alien life and craft and bodies.
Yet it sounds like this board of yours, your counsel,
to collect data, analyze it.
Is disclosure imminent?
Well, that would be wonderful if it is, because, you know, frankly, my life will be worth living if I realize that, you know, we have a lost sibling out there as someone else.
You know, right now the universe appears to be, and Brian, you know that, in all the textbooks it's described as a mix of radiation and matter and the dark energy.
this makes the universe feel lonely and cold.
However, if we realize there are intelligent beings out there,
we will have an emotional connection to the universe.
We will have a reason to go interstellar.
I'm not talking about going to Mars.
That's just another rock that happens to be near us.
I'm talking about when we realize that someone is visiting our backyard,
we might want to visit their backyard.
And then it changes everything for us,
because, you know, not only philosophically or
theologically about our place in the universe,
you know, we are not at the top of the food chain,
cosmologically speaking,
but also in terms of our ambitions and our aspirations and priorities
instead of killing each other on this rock for territories,
you know, like this is ridiculous.
It's a piece of rock that is, you know, a few times 10 to the minus six
of the mass of the sun that happened to be left over.
And we fight over it when there is so much more,
state out there. And so we would realize that we have to change our perspective. And sort of like
it's a transition bigger than the Copernican revolution, you know, that Galileo helped pioneer.
Because it's not just that we are not at the physical center of the universe. It's just,
it also means that, you know, for us to be remembered in the history books of the Milky Way galaxy,
we have to become interstellar, not Martians, interstellar.
No, that's right. And that reminds me one of my favorite books. See, this tells me that Avi is a close friend because he sent me an early, early copy of that book, as well as the first book. Okay, next one comes from Sigel Strategic Research. I'll add it to the conversation. Reports of strange things before the 18th century are not influenced by Pentagon U.S. security restrictions. The Roman Legion saw flaming shields in the sky, and we can go back to, you know, Yoshua and the Torah and other things. For example, or this 1933
Magenta Italy citing.
And I've heard a lot about that.
I mean, I think Grush brought up stuff from the 1930s.
I mean, is any of that relevant?
I mean, we can't even agree on what happened yesterday.
It's definitely interesting and intriguing.
The problem is that the data is very sparse.
It's not comprehensive.
It's not scientific quality.
So we can't do much with it except for saying, look, these things happen over the past century.
They should also happen now.
Okay.
So for example, there were claims that the Apollo astronauts noticed UFOs around the moon.
Well, if that's the case, then why didn't the Artemis two astronauts notice anything unusual on the, you know, they had much better cameras.
There are claims that there were, you know, transients from glints on satellites around the Earth in the early 1950s.
Well, surely right now, you know, the director of national intelligence would have been alarmed.
if they noticed satellites that do not belong to specific nations that we know about.
If they saw a fleet of a thousand satellites moving around the earth,
they would immediately, this would be a red alert.
They would have to figure it out.
They would get as much data as possible.
So I don't think right now it's possible to hide things as much as 50, 100 years ago,
when the technologies of sensors were much worse.
And therefore, if we don't see right now things that people claim to
have seen, let's say, 50 years ago, then I would not buy those stories because, you know,
verification, validation is a very important aspect of science.
And of course, if we had excellent data from long ago, for example, if we had a piece of
material that I can examine in the laboratory, I can tell you whether it's extra solar,
whether it came from outside the solar system, because even if it has more than one gram
of material, I can examine the isotope ratios and take it.
tell you that it's not from the solar system.
And so we need good data, scientific quality data, in order to assess it.
And the problem is many of these reports from the past do not have that high quality data.
And they could be just, you know, misidentification of things that are common, you know, on Earth.
Now, you mentioned the, you know, kind of the technological aspects of things.
One thing that came out recently from the James Webb Space Telescope is that 3-I Atlas appeared to have some methane
emitted from it. And I tweeted that that's kind of like having a chemistry stockroom, you know, sent
from another solar system. I noticed you also lowered the value on the lobe scale. Can you talk about
the recent findings from James Webb and the methane found from...
That's really intriguing because the methane appeared after the 3i Atlas came close to the sun
when it was warmed up. But methane is far more volatile than CO2, carbon dioxide.
which was detected already in July when the object was first found.
And so the question is, how is it possible that we detected carbon dioxide, but not methane,
when the object was far, because methane is much more likely to be sublimated,
evaporate from the object. And of course, the authors of the paper argue that,
well, perhaps it was removed from the outer layer of three-eye Atlas and very deep in.
So only when it's sort of like onion shells,
only when you clip off the outer shells by warming from sunlight,
you end up reaching the depth where methane is buried.
That was the argument.
But then carbon monoxide CO was also detected back in August 2025
before perihelion, before the object got closed without methane.
And carbon monoxide has roughly the same volatility as methane.
So I think it's a bit puzzling why methane was produced close to the sun.
And I just said, it's a biosignature.
You know, there are papers in the literature saying methane would be the first molecule to be a biosignature if we find it in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.
So I asked, is it possible that there are some microbes that were revived as a result of three atlas coming close to the sun and perhaps they emitted the methane?
So I actually am finishing a paper this week with my student estimating how much mass in microbes do you need in order to produce the level of methane that was observed.
Now, you wrote recently about the Palomar Transient that some of them, most of them perhaps could be cosmic ray hits.
I mean, 60,000 impacts on a plate that are all aligned.
And they have three-dimensional trajectories, right?
Now, Beatriz, Villa Royal, who again, I'm having on in a couple of days this week.
And I'd like to understand what, you know, she's saying that it's highly unlikely,
according to the Busco and other analyses.
So they say that it's not likely at all.
So where do you come down now?
Do you find her or this other reanalysis?
I mean, the reason I brought this up is first because of the Apollo astronaut images
that showed these blue lights, but they appeared also outside.
of the lens of the camera.
So it was clear that these were triggered by something
that has nothing to do with objects in the sky.
Now, with respect to the photographic plates,
I was intrigued by the fact that there was a paper,
you know, analyzing the Palomar plates
and stating that there is an anti-correlation
between the UFOs, these transients,
that appear only in one plate, but not in other plates.
There is an anti-correlation between their appearance rate and the geomagnetic storm activity on Earth.
So when the sun emits a coronal plume of high-temperature gas and it impacts the Earth, that triggers a geomagnetic storm.
Then the number of transients went down, went down.
So it was anti-correlated.
So then they said, well, maybe the UFOs somehow avoid geomagnetic storms.
I just Googled it.
I checked and it turns out that cosmic rays have exactly this anticorrelation
because plumes of plasma that carry magnetic fields,
they push away the cosmic rays from the earth.
And so there are fewer cosmic ray hits.
So I'm saying, look, you identify an anti-correlation.
This is a natural consequence for cosmic rays.
We know that.
We also know that cosmic rays introduce a background, you cannot avoid that.
So let's just not confuse cosmic rays with UFOs.
Okay, that was the only point I made.
And they said, oh, we are confident it's not cosmic rays.
But why is there this anti-correlation?
It must mean that at least some of the sources are cosmic rays,
because otherwise you wouldn't get,
why would the UFOs care about geomagnetic storms this way?
You know, and the other thing is that now that the CIA report came out, I'm still wondering if there could be human-made objects that are part of the other transients that they saw.
And they saw transients near nuclear test sites.
And obviously that's a very good location for- And military bases.
Yeah, the Tic Taclasine right off the coast here.
All the U.S. military trying to monitor the conditions.
before the explosion takes place.
Well, if you had to go back and revise your feelings about the first interstellar object,
how would you rank it on the lobe scale today, knowing everything you know?
Well, I think we suffer once again from lack of information.
So there were the anomalies of the object being most likely flat and changing its brightness
by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours.
That is a very extreme shape for an asteroid or a comet.
And then there was no cometary tail around it, no gas or dust detected,
and yet it was pushed away from the sun by some non-gravitational force.
So given these anomalies, I ranked it at four.
I mean, most likely it's natural.
But, and I should say right now, the comet experts define it as a dark comet,
meaning a comet that doesn't show cometary activity.
And they listed additional dark comets within the solar system.
There is one of them that we wrote a paper about with my colleagues and Adam Hebert and others,
where we show that one of those is actually following the same path as the Phobos One mission that was failed,
that failed. This was a mission by the Russians, and they sent the wrong prompt, the technicians,
send an extra semicolum that triggered the loss of power in that spacecraft.
And we show that it could be the dark comet that they're talking about.
Now, the Japanese Space Agency wants to, they said,
oh, let's first take some data on it.
So there was a paper last year of data.
And it became clear the object is about 10 meters in size.
And moreover, it's very shiny.
It reflects 50% of the light, the sunlight impinging,
on it. So it's shiny and it's spinning really fast every five minutes. So it must be very sturdy
and they want to land Hayabusa 2. That's a spacecraft. They want to land it on top of this dark
comet so that we can understand how the outgassing takes place. And I'm saying, go ahead,
make my day because they will do it in July, 231 and imagine them landing on this object,
the dark comet, trying to figure out how the outgassing
comes from it and seeing a label made in the Soviet USSR.
Imagine them doing that.
That we can test in July 2013.
It's the beauty of science that you can actually check.
And I wonder if the lesson learned from this experience by the Japanese,
if they land on it and it looks like it's a human-made object,
whether people would say, oh, wait a minute, maybe Omoa also was technological.
So Stephen asks if there have been several non-human species visiting our planet for decades, as Eric Davis and David Grush claim, could humans coexist peacefully with them if the truth cuts out that they're here?
Oh, definitely. I mean, I think they had a lot of opportunities to kill us. And, you know, a very, if they are here, a very reasonable scenario is that they coexist in a way that we can't easily notice them. And they are sort of,
they regard the experiences
an experiment where they look at us
and see what we are doing, but they do not intervene.
We don't pose a threat to them.
They can easily do whatever they want
if they have much more sophisticated technologies.
They might have accidents every now and then,
like any endeavor.
So, yeah, an interesting question is whether
the life or intelligent life on Earth
was planted by some interstellar gardener.
That's something I really want to know
whether what we regard as a natural sequence of events
from a primordial soup of chemicals on Earth,
to human intelligence,
whether that had the milestone along the way,
milestones that led to human intelligence
that were artificial in origin,
that they introduced things,
and we are not aware of them.
that, of course, because documented human history is very limited.
So it would be really revealing if it turns out that we think that we live in a brave new
world that we created.
But in reality, it's just a world that was created by someone else.
Now, last couple of questions, Swain asks, it's very weird.
Why are these objects so interested in U.S. military bases?
They must have far advanced technology than our military do.
Well, that goes back to my zero, you know, the null hypothesis that I have, that there are human-made objects and they are used for espionage.
And then my final question to you is if we do, you know, sort of get definitive contact, whatever that might mean, are you going to change anything about yourself? Would that cause you to reevaluate, you know, the fact that they would send something biological perhaps? And actually, before I ask you that, Avi, why would they send something biological when they could send AI? I mean, what do you think is more likely? Because maybe for us, AI is made of silicon chips.
because we are not advanced enough.
So actually, just a few days ago,
every day I get very interesting things
that I haven't anticipated,
I got a question.
And the question was,
why haven't we seen self-replicating probes,
for Neumann probes?
Because even if one civilization in the Milky Way galaxy
had that ability to create self-replicating probes,
we would see it because it would grow exponentially,
this population and would reach,
us okay and we don't see it right the question is is that evidence again say
self-replicating probes and I replied what are you talking about we see I speak
every day we self-replicating probes these are biological entities you know the
human DNA is self-replicating right and so an interesting question is perhaps
the highest level of technology is one that uses chemistry and and uses the
raw materials on the surface of a rocky planet
to self-replicate, which is exactly what we are doing.
Biology does. So maybe we are self-replicating probes that came from another place.
Very good. Now, if we do get contact and you do get this private information and Trump brings
you back into the office, takes you up to the Oval Office, Avi, it makes you an offer.
What are you going to do? What happens the day after? It just seems like disclosure day,
everyone's building up. What happens disclosure day plus one for you personally?
Well, okay. So for me, it's like a kid that enters a candy store and just gets a huge candy.
And I would just enjoy that candy as much as I can. Now, there are, of course, implications because it would affect policy.
It would affect the stock market. It would affect, you know, our aspirations.
There would be huge implications for our future. But at first, just this knowledge by itself would take me a while to fully.
digest. I don't need to speak with anyone. I will just think about the implications. You know,
every morning I jog at sunrise in the company of ducks, wild turkeys, birds and, you know,
bunnies. And I just think. You know, I don't need to speak. When people approach me on
the road, you know, they say good morning and that that bothers me because it cuts off my stream
of thought, you know. So I would just think for a while about what it means, what we should do next,
and how can we promote a better future for all of us. And I think it will be a better future.
So a lot of us are frustrated by what we read every day in the news. And I think it's an
opportunity for us to change everything in a better way. Avilaub, thank you so much for joining
today. You've got to go talk to the big shots at Time Magazine. But I do appreciate you. And I'm
really excited to see what you guys come up with. Because I think you guys are doing the most rigorous
and most important kind of scientific analysis. And you're doing it as a scientist. The fact
is people ascribe a lot of stuff nonsense to you that you don't believe in that you've never
postulated. And to have a real scientist on of your caliber and stature and interest,
curiosity level. And let's just see where it goes. Right. Avi. So thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
Happy disclosure day.
All I can say is that I will try not to disappoint all of you.
I will do my best.
And then, you know, it's not about the messenger.
It's about the message.
Wonderful.
Avi Lobb, thank you so much, my friend.
Talk to you next time.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Well, you heard the inimitable Avi Loeb and he's always such a fascinating guest to have on.
I've had him on many times.
But I want to talk to you now because he's left the building.
He's dropped his briefcase. He's no longer here. But I have a lot of thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts. I have a lot of feels from this interview that I just did. Thinking about the preparation I did for it involving multiple guests that are coming up this week, including Beatriz Villarrel is coming on Wednesday, Michael Shermer, who's coming on Thursday, all involved in some form or another, what Obie's doing. So I really, you know, it's hard. When I do these podcasts, when I do these interviews, especially live, there's a million things I want to have.
ask. I want you guys to ask. I want you guys to be engaged. I don't think any other podcast
from, you know, the competitors do these kind of live streams. Kurt Jemungle, a friend of mine,
you know, past guest. I've been on his show. Sean Carroll, certainly. I don't think David
Kipping, my friend and respected colleague. And so I really do feel like this is a unique opportunity
that I give in the comments, but also for you guys to ask questions. And there were literally
hundreds of comments. So I did my best. And I always get criticized. Why are you looking away?
So I bought a teleprompter, you know, and now I can put the questions here.
So it looks like I am indeed doing as I'm doing paying attention.
But I need to be candid with you because, I mean, I think if I lose my trust with you, I think I lose everything.
And I want to be honest, you know, I've pushed back on Avi since the wee days of when he first came on the podcast in 2020 to talk about his first book, which is mentioned here, extraterrestrial.
And I said, Avi, you know, you believe that this object, and Mu, Mu, it comes from an alien.
civilization potentially.
Maybe it's not technology itself, but it's
left over from technology. It could be a garbage barge.
It could be a solar sale.
Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.
Ever order furniture online and wonder what if?
Like, what if it doesn't hold up?
That sofa was four days old.
You should have ordered from Wayfair.
With Wayfair, there's no what if.
Just style you love and quality you can trust.
Visit Wayfair.com.
Wayfair, every style, every home.
I said, Avi, wouldn't it be great if you knew some
billionaires that could spend money to fly a probe and catch up to
Muamua. And of course, that was tongue in cheek, but I was pushing back on him because he did
know people like that. Yuri Milner, and he still does. The breakthrough Star Shot enterprise is funded
by Avi's friends and colleagues, Yuri Milner and others. And he's at Harvard, arguably this hedge fund
with a $50 billion endowment that still charges tuition, that outpaces inflation. I always forget
to criticize Avi for that and rejects more people than I got rejected when I was on a
dating market. They serve of 1,500 people in the freshman class. It's pretty small. It's like a
Chipotle does every day on a decent day. So it's exclusive. He's in this multi-billion dollar
orbit. He brags about billionaires coming on his to his doorstep. And I don't fault them
because he is incredible of what he does. And he's rigorous and he is a real scientist. I just
had a video about criticizing Michi Okaku's most recent appearance on Diary of a CEO, which got
four or five million views, and I'm trying to debunk all these claims.
And I ran out of, like, patients after 15 claims in a 40-minute video.
Avi's not like Micho.
Avi's, you know, working in the trenches, writing papers.
I don't know when the last paper Michio Caco wrote was.
I bet it wasn't recently.
And there are a lot of great, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't written a paper, you know,
since the Reagan administration, as far as I can tell.
But, you know, they do something important and they have a role.
And they also have their own, you know, kind of financial incentives.
incentives because they're all writing books.
And so, look, I write books.
I don't do it for the money.
The amount of money I get for my books is near below minimum wage, I think, even here in
California.
So, believe me, I'm not doing it for the money.
You know, maybe these other folks are maybe obvious.
I don't know.
Maybe David Grush is.
Who knows?
I'm not even speculating.
They're involved in movies that's never interested in me whatsoever.
I'm interested in finding out information while I still can, while I still have influence
and ability to influence young minds and get into the passion of science.
I wouldn't become a public university professor if I was really interested in the money.
So let's put that to rest.
But I told Avi Backman when Oumu was in the news, it's not that far outside of our solar system.
It's their last chance to catch up to it.
And he said, well, there'll be many more coming through.
Now, there's been two more that have come through.
And one of them was known to be a comet, Borisov.
And the third one now seems very likely, even according to its greatest champion,
Avi Loeb to be also more likely to be extraterrestrial natural material than extraterrestrial
technological material.
He just said he lowered the confidence on his coined Loeb skill.
I wouldn't have called it the Loeb scale.
Although I do have the Keating Medal.
I do give the Keating Medal to people that came in.
And just recently I gave my first Keating medal for impossible imagination to a man who won
the Nobel Prize.
So we're kind of squaring off which one is bigger.
And my Keating Medal is bigger than the Nobel Prize.
Anyway, you'll see that interview soon.
But here's where I live. Avi is doing rigorous version, the most rigorous version, I think that you could do. He wants the instruments. He doesn't want the fields. He doesn't want the testimony, the interdimensional beings. I think Luna is really, really doing something that I think is self-destructive for her cause. She's criticized Kirkpatrick. Again, I had him on. I know most of you hate Kirkpatrick. I think that's nonsense. Don't you want to see me ask these people question? I didn't let him get away with stuff either. I'm going to push these people and I'm going to ask questions because this is the most important.
thing I think that humanity may ever discover, including what I do, you know, which I think
is pretty damn important, studying galaxy, studying the cosmos, studying the Big Bang, Dark Matter,
dark energy, Lorentz, invariants, all these things. These are incredibly important things.
But if we found extraterrestrial intelligence, sentient plasmoins and interdimensional beings, come
on, that would be, you know, I'd stop doing what I'm doing and join up with Avi. So why haven't
I done that? Because I haven't seen the sensors. I haven't seen the instruments. I haven't seen
the date. I've talked to the people that have talked
to the people, and that includes
people like Ryan Graves, who
have claimed to witness things
to talk to people. He hasn't claimed to talk to the people.
He's talked to people. They work in a squadron.
But he is often
claimed that he saw these things directly, but he
said candidly on my interview with him, maybe
things have changed, but that he
didn't witness it, but his colleagues and squadron
mates did. And that was fine.
Because you can report on it.
Grush is doing the same thing. He hasn't seen
these things, he's saying that people that he knows
has seen these things. Okay, so where does
sit in the evidentiary scale of science?
It's very low, right? It's very low.
Whereas data, hard evidence,
people joke about, well, you believe in
dark matter. Yeah, I believe in dark matter
because we've already detected dark matter.
We've captured dark matter. We interact
with dark matter. We know how to build
sensors that do it, and we know how to measure
it throughout cosmic history. They're called neutrinos.
Okay? So people say, oh,
dark matter, you're just an idiot, you're a fantasy,
you believe things too. No, I don't believe in it. We have
evidence for dark matter. Neutrinos fit every definition of dark matter. They're massive. They interact
weekly. It just happens to be not enough of them to make the universe flat in terms of its
curvature. And so there must be other non-nutrino forms of dark matter. But neutrinos make up
every bit of dark matter that any theorist would ever want. They just don't make up enough to do,
well, that's like saying, well, hydrogen, you know, only makes up 74% of the universe's
barionic mass density. So does that mean that,
Variants don't exist? This is a stupid argument. So we've detected dark matter. We have evidence for dark matter. Now, we haven't detected dark energy in the same way we've detected dark matter because we don't have ability to bottle it up. But when we hear these things, this is what drives me crazy. I'm an experimentalist. Avi's a theorist. Most of the people he's talking to are theorist. Gary Nolan is not an experimental astrophysicist. He's not dealing with the same types of sensors. He's dealing with experiences that he had that he talked about on my show when we did a co-live stream together with Avi Loeb a couple years back. So you can look
that up. Now, what's important to me? I pushed him on Luna because he has access to her. She
is obviously a fan girl of Avi, as are many people. He's very charming. But we need a whistleblower
who has the power and is not afraid to use it, not to go after people like Kirkpatrick, who
was serving his country as best as he could. And he got a ton of crap for it. I think after having
spoken to him, he would never do it again. You know, he got death threats and all sorts of things
going after his family. It's horrible what happens to people like that. And that's why I
caution Navi, are you sure you want to do this? Because it's inevitable, you're going to piss people
off. And you're going to go up against the Pentagon that has Saoop information, disinformation,
malinformation campaigns against everybody. You think that we don't spy on the Chinese or the Israelis
or, you know, we spy on everybody. And thank God, you know, for that, as Jack Nicholson said,
you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Now, I don't like the fact that my relatives
were tortured. You know, I feel like that's bad, but they're not babies. They're some of the
strongest men, you know, women that I know, and they do things for volunteer. They didn't get
recruited with a bag of their head and get waterboarded, you know, for grins and giggles. That wasn't
what happened. No, it was part of their search of aid and rescue training that they had in the
military, and thank God that they did. And I hope that they never have to use that, but they're
hardened against it, should they ever have to use that. Okay, so let's look at this. Where is Luna
coming down? She has the power to subpoena people. She has full immunity. I've also wondered, and maybe
I'm just foolish about how the government works. Again, I don't want anything bad to happen to
anybody. I don't want grush to be attacked. I don't want him to go to jail for revealing classified
information. But we have freedom of the press. There could be leaks to the media and so forth in the
press. Now, if this is stuff that's happening, you know, it's hard to imagine how, you know,
how sentient plasmoids telling us that there are sentient plasmoids and bipedal, you know,
organisms, which is very shocking to me. I mean, that's sort of the most shocking thing I've ever
heard in this. The sentient plasmines
and the interdimensional beings, that doesn't
really kind of rankle me
as much as the bipedal, because
bipedalism is almost the least
likely. I mean, look around your house. You
might see one or two bipedal
objects. You might see an equal number of, we
have an equal number of bipedal objects
around the Keating household, right? They're called pets.
Or, sorry, quadrupedal as bipedal.
You know, and so this is a
shocking revelation, if true, and
again, I just pulled up the quote,
from the article from the testimony in July on June 9th. So we have to say that this is,
that this is, is among the most important things. So why isn't their protection? Why,
why isn't Luna saying, here's what I found out, go to the people, skip Grush altogether
and Grush and go straight to the source. He can tell them who to talk to, what he saw,
when he saw these objects and she can talk to Lou Al-Alazando. He's already revealed all this
stuff. He's on tour. He talks about this stuff with Jeremy Carbill. Why can she talk to
them, get the names, and then she's not going to be
arrested. She's leading the damn
committee. She's one of the most powerful people
on the planet. I don't understand it. And again,
I'd love to talk to her. I've asked Avi
to introduce me to her. I think maybe
one Jewish astrophysicist is enough for her
to kind of make her sick
of talking to me and scientists like me.
But, you know, I'm happy to host her.
I'm happy to host Lou Elizondo, David Grush, all these people.
I'd love to get them on. And I'd love
to stop the petty backbiting ad hominem attacks that they do and have done to them. Okay, so that's
number one. Table stakes are they have to be safe. They have to be, have immunity, but I don't buy
this whole thing that they have to get, you know, some whistleblower law. We already have
whistleblower laws passed. And again, David doesn't have to be the one. David can hand off the
information to Birchett and Burkart or whatever and to Luna. And he can be safe. And he can know
that he, he doesn't even have to hand them up. They know who the sources are and they know where the,
where the facilities are. They can go into the skiffs themselves, and they can find out the information.
The other thing I pushed Amiens, as you notice, is on his criticism of Beatriz Villa Royal.
Now, I have my problems with Beatrice that we'll talk about on Wednesday. Of course, cordially.
I have great respect for her. She's an incredible intellect. And she has so much passion,
charisma. She also gets a ton of hate. I hate the fact that she gets threats and hatred and
people attacking ad hominem attacks, imputing her character.
as a scientist, I think it's total, but everything scientific that she says is fair game.
I'm going to ask her, you know, Avi said this about the solar coronal mass ejections on my show
on Monday afternoon, Monday morning, and what do you have to say about that?
You have to explain that in order to at least have a comprehensive explanation.
You claim that these defect.
Now, I'm an observational astronomer.
I know all about these plates.
I have some of these plates from Palomar that Beatrice is analyzed, not the ones that show glints
and alleged, according to her and others, evidence of extraterrestrial, I mean, off of the Earth
technology that reflects sunlight prior to the Sputnik person. In other words, prior to low Earth orbit
satellites. Now, we don't know for sure what was up there, right? I mean, there's always that.
It could be, as obvious said, it could have been Chinese or Russian. I kind of doubt that
because the Chinese and Russians stole a lot of information about our nuclear program and our
space program from the U.S. Not the Soviet since steel as much.
much about the space program. They stole a lot more from the nuclear program, as you all know,
from Fuchs and other people. And then they ended up building the hydrogen and the fusion devices
shortly thereafter getting the spy information from spies on the U.S. So two scientists are going
to come to different conclusions. That's fine. But we have to hold them both of the same standard.
That's what I'm going to do. And I'm going to get you to decide. I'm going to present the evidence.
there's another thing that I want to challenge Beatrice about, which is that her contention that
there were scientists killed in these massive string of deaths allegedly, which is not actually
the case, that's massive or aberrant or somehow unusual, suicides, homicides, potential accidents,
and so forth. And then accusing or suggesting, alleging as she did on Twitter, that some of them
were killed because they had special information or access to the type of science that she does
with these glints, orphotometry, and these specular reflections. And I want to talk to her
about one scientist in particular who died where I do my work in the out-of-coma desert, where I've
been half a dozen times I can't remember. But this is a really important thing for us to discuss.
And that's why I'm going to push these people. And I'm going to push Michael Shermer. I'm going to
talk to Michael Shermer this coming week. I know a lot of you don't find him to be your favorite.
your favorite flavor of Karsba. But you saw Avi has integrity. Avi put him specifically on the
White House counsel, authorized counsel that he's in charge of because he wanted someone not just
a skeptic. I mean, Michael's not just like, oh, you're just, he's just speculating. He's trying to be
Debbie Downer, you know, Cassandra want to be, you know, pessimists, you know, get to be right,
but optimists get to be rich. No, no, Michael's not like that. He will talk candidly as
he does in his new book, which is the main reason he's on. But I'm going to talk to him about
the Galileo project and this new White House counsel because he's on it with Pascarry, Nolan
and others, and I want to have them all on. A lot of them say stuff and I have to hold their feet
to the fire. Now, one thing about this council really rub me the wrong way, and I wonder if you
can tell what it is. I mean, maybe put in the comments if you can suggest what you think really
kind of bug me about what Avi's was saying. And the power of
his committee, I was very concerned about it. And maybe you can guess in the broad. So first of all,
put a thumbs up and put a subscribe, you know, please on this channel, because I am doing really,
really interesting interviews this week. I like to think I do a lot of education. Most of it's for free.
Again, I teach at a public university, right? I don't have any book to sell or, you know, course to sell
or whatever. I do a lot just to get it out there. And I'm doing a lot more of, you know,
kind of debunking style stuff, but not ad hominem.
I didn't, you know, I didn't go after Mityo Okaku in some of the ways that people were saying
really awful things about him when I posted on X.
I guess I kind of knew that.
It's sort of my fault, that they would say things like, you know, we don't have the
science communicators that we deserve.
I'm trying to be one of them, you know, I'm not the best.
I'm not the last.
But I'm doing my best, and I'm doing it all, like I said, you're watching YouTube
for free, right?
You watch some ads maybe.
Maybe not.
if you have YouTube premium, I don't get a penny from that.
But tell me, what do you think was the most concerning thing, if you could guess it?
Maybe put in the comments after the video.
I'll give you guys, you know, five seconds to think about.
This episode is brought to you by Activya.
You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are created equal.
Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive.
When it comes to gut health, Activia is the number one family doctor-recommended probiotic yogurt brand.
Choose Activia, feel good from the inside out.
Visitactivia.ca for more details.
I wish I had my clickers.
I use my students.
They love these clickers.
They come in.
I give them 10 points extra credit on their final exam
if they brought clickers to class, every class,
and answered the questions.
Then I've got them right, just if they answer it.
Anyway, builds engagement.
You guys are engaging.
You're attractive and engaging.
Okay, what was it?
Is that he has no money?
You got no money from the government, right?
So what is this? If you get no money in a government that, you know, spends what, seven trillion a year, and this could be the most important thing in human history, i.e. American history. And even if it's not, even if it fails, you know, as people say, oh, it's just going to discover, you know, Chinese Bible. That's freaking huge. And even if we discover there's a huge style, isn't that incredibly important to the stated goals of the Trump administration? And I share those goals. Right. So having no money is,
0%? Not even like, oh, we need a, you know, a hundredth of a percent, a thousand,
zero point zero, zero dollars, right? I think that's a fatal mistake. I think, you know,
the first thing that I want to know is, am I going to have a budget? Is there a governance structure?
What is the transparency of this organization? Like, how are we going to communicate? What are we going
going to have access to? Now, I'm be smart. He said that he's smart. So he has to be smart.
right now. That kind of bothered me too
that he said, well, I'm smart, so I'll know that they're not
going to, that they're not trying
to trick me at the sigh up. Really, Avi?
I mean, I couldn't push, you know, I can't push back
on everything because Avi charms me.
You know, he is one of my
my, I just like him.
I hate to say, you know, I have
weaknesses. I'm only human. That's one of my biases.
But I did push back during the interview, but
mostly I feel like to say that you
are not, even to say like, I can say,
well, I'm going to take advice from my wife or my husband or my colleagues at Harvard.
I mean, say something, right?
Say something.
There's someone else besides you.
If you are your own arbiter of what is being truthful, if someone is being truthful or not,
I feel like this is another kind of, it's just putting a stumbling block in front of the blind.
I think it's, you know, if I had a bet right now that this council is led by my esteemed friend,
Avi Loeb, the foremost educational institution on Earth, which has his own separate budget,
and he has his own budget, and he's also leading Galileo project. These are all separate, you know,
kind of orbs, so to speak. I would say right now I give it a, you know, a 60, 40 chance of not succeeding
just because it doesn't have government backing. I also pressed him on a question that I got a lot
offline, ask him, you know, if it's going to be recognized by the White House. So far it's not. And he said that,
you know, it's authorized and it's consonant with the president's goals and the administration's
goals and all these national security goals. Well, sorry, Avi, there's all these agencies that are
in constant conflict with each other. Part of what I heard from an Air Force, a very, very high
fighter pilot in the Air Force, is that there's infighting between the Air Force and Space Force and the Navy.
You notice that many of these sightings from Graves reporting,
by squadron mates and others.
And Fravor, Dietrich are in the Navy side.
Grush was in the Air Force.
Now we have the Space Force as of 2018, 2019, whenever that was started.
And there's a huge amount of interagency, you know, hate, quite frankly, there's hatred.
I mean, unless they're in war, they're a huge territorial pissing contest that you would not believe.
I've heard some of the most
staggeringly inefficient uses of our tax dollars
come from the fact that these agencies
all want to have their own control.
And then you add in the CIA,
which is a separate,
has his own separate military,
paramilitary,
intelligence gathering wings,
the FBI,
you know,
even things like Homeland Security
when the drones are flying over airport.
These are all so entangled.
And to say like,
Avi's going to be their Harvard professor
with zero dollars
and they're just going to listen to him.
They're not listening to Luna.
I mean,
they're not really, where's this data dump? I mean, like I said, most of the stuff I've seen
can be identified either by, has been identified by the NASA, you know, blue ribbon panel
led by my friend and colleague David Spurgel and code, co-advised by our member Shelley Wright,
who studies optical transient events from extraterrestrial civilizations, potentially extraterrestrial
civilizations using optical photoavalanche detectors. And the most not
novel way she's invented these tell us. She would be probably the most thrilled person on
earth if these things were found to be extraterrestrial, but they haven't. They found 95% in the
NASA panel could be explained. Now, what it bothers me is that people, and so 5% can't be
explained, but as Michael Schumer puts it, just because you can't explain it, it doesn't mean
that the antithesis is the correct one, right? You can't just say, oh, because we can't explain it,
it means that it's unexplained aerial phenomena means that they're alien phenomenon. No, that's
not the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis still is unexplained. We just don't understand what it is.
More data is needed or if it occurred in the past. I mean, if you had asked somebody, you know,
two years ago, can we get data from the 1950s that could shed light, maybe not prove,
but could shed light on the existence of, on the existence of alien artifacts in our, in our local,
low-earth environment. You would say, what are you crazy? We don't even get good video quality today.
Like, how are you going to get, like, what are people going to be, mediums, you know, seeing back in time?
No, no, no.
But she went back, Beatrice went back and found these plates from the Palomar SkySers.
She didn't look at them for the galaxies and the quasar surveys, you know, first quasar surveys, really done here.
Discovered Martin Schmidt here by Palomar up the road in San Diego County, a six, seven thousand feet up.
With a 200-inch telescope, that wasn't the biggest telescope in the world anymore, but it was at the time.
She did the hard work.
And now we're going back in time and getting evidence from now.
So there could be other things.
In the oceans, on the moon, there could be artifacts.
And that always reminds me, you know, because I'm speaking so much.
But I do want you to get meteorites, especially those of you who are students in the United States.
If you have a .edu email address, you'll win a meteorite.
So I want to send these to you.
These are true, honest and good extraterrestrial.
It came from beyond our solar system, potentially.
And it came from the pre-solar system.
But I'm going to send those to you if you have a .edu email address and live in the United States.
If you don't, I do give away 10 a month to be.
that don't have it. Again, you have to live in the U.S. because the U.S. Post Service charged an awful
lot of money for this poor State University professor to send you. Okay, now next, here's what's coming
up. So when Beatrice comes in, she's going to talk me, hopefully, about the Vasco Project.
She's very, very, very, I would say, exercised about these critiques that she's had that
these photographs did not come from the telescope itself.
that came from artifacts like cosmic rays smashing that penetrate through the telescope completely
and just make an image and an artifact on the photographic plate.
No, she says they went through the optics and that could be proven.
So then we have to press her on this issue of solar activity and coronal mass ejections.
These are completely things opposite, you know, kind of conclusions.
Now, I want to understand what questions you want me to sort of ask her about things like
disclosure day, about maybe confirmation bias.
put those in the comments after, you know, when the videos up, it'll, anyone not just channel members can give comments just on the live stream.
So, and what do you guys think about this fact that, you know, Grush and others are now involved in the Hollywood, you know, kind of dramatization.
Disclosure Day is that just going to be, you know, the first of many things?
And as Spielberg said to the Avi didn't agree with and I don't agree with, you know, that he believes that these things are here.
And he keeps using that word belief, belief, belief.
And a lot of people kind of took issue with the video I made with Hugh Ross, again, an intelligent design proponent.
But I'll talk to anybody.
I talk to Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute.
I don't care.
You know, I like to be challenged intellectually.
I like to challenge other people intellectually, but I do it always for the sake of truth, trying to understand what's true.
I'm not selling anything.
They might be selling things.
I'm happy to promote them.
It's very hard to make your living and stuff like that.
But what do you believe about these, you know, people that are in the disclosure forefront tip of the speech?
for disclosure like David.
But they haven't seen the craft.
They haven't seen the body.
They've never touched the technology.
They're not, you know, they're not hardcore engineers.
I think David does have a background, maybe in engineering.
People can correct me.
But he was a major or major, maybe even a general, I don't know, in the Air Force.
It wasn't a pilot, but I believe he operated drones.
But anyway, to me, it does.
And it kind of, you know, I sort of brought this up with Avi.
You know, he was asked to be in this movie.
but he's playing himself, I guess.
I don't think David's an actor,
and that's not really what he wants to do.
Or maybe he does. I don't know.
He's a handsome guy. He could be a great actor.
I don't know. But if he's an actor, that makes things even worse, right?
Because he's, I mean, the actors are the ones that are most likely to be trained
in human psychology and manipulation, right?
So I don't believe he's going to do that.
But he is, you know, kind of held up at this level on a Bruckheimer, you know,
kind of consulting role.
So I don't know.
Would you do that?
Do you find that suspicious in any way?
Do you find suspicious in any way the frayver revelation three days ago, four days ago I put on from Reddit and other places.
Actually, he was on Twitter.
I first heard it that he believes Roswell was, you know, evidence of non-human bodies, technology.
Let me see what he actually said over here.
I know I must quote him.
But yeah, I mean, I think this was kind of an interesting, an interesting, you know, kind of twist that, you know, he was essentially speculating or saying,
I don't know how he would have evidence of them. I mean, he was a fighter pilot commander of a squadron, right?
So why would he have knowledge about something from the 1940s, right? Like, why would that be what he had special access to? I mean, maybe he does. I mean, he might be just getting informed from people. But then that raises the question, again, does he not do these people have protection? Are they really in danger? I believe David Grush could be in danger. So if that's true, you know, then when,
when he states something that goes in contradistinction to something that's going on the record by Sean Kirkpatrick,
why don't we wait that? Like, Sean could be, you know, could be committing some classified information
faux pa reveal that he shouldn't be, but he doesn't, right? So he's gone on the record and he said he
disagrees with it. So I guess, you know, from my perspective, it is, it's hard to know what to believe.
So yes, retired commander David Fravor, famous for his Tick-Tac encounter, has stated the government has recovered
materials from Roswell and has known about a non-human presence on earth for over 80 years.
And then Fravor advocates for official transparency, like we all do, suggesting the world honestly
deserves, deserves honesty regarding these issues. So he's known for the Nimitz encounter.
Fravor has called, they have to be honest about the, just to be honest, we've known for 80 years
that we're not alone. Now, why would a fighter pilot have special knowledge? Maybe he does,
but as far as I know, he's retired. I don't know when he retired, but, but in, you know, 2004,
I can do the math. It was 22 years ago when he had the Nimitz and Count. Why would that then
give him official information? Now, he may get information because whistleblowers may come to him
hoping that he can get their story out, but he doesn't have, as far as I know, he maybe never had.
I mean, just because you're in the military. I mean, I've had friends that are fighter pilots,
my flight instructors are fighter pilot, F-18 pilot, just like him, even maybe at the same rank as him.
He doesn't have special information just because he's a fighter pilot. And Schumer points out in his
new book that actually pilots in general, including me, I'm a commercially rated pilot,
that we're some of the least reliable people. And of the least reliable pilots in the world
are military pilots. Why is that? Well, you're telling me they're not brave? F no. They're
freaking much more brave than I'll ever be. And they're badass as physically, mentally. They can
kick the crap out of people like me. They could hold their own with Navy SEALs. These pilots are
insane. They're jacked. They're incredible. Ryan Graves is a beast, right?
But they make mistakes at a higher rate.
What explains that?
Are they stupid?
Absolutely not.
One of my best friends is a Princeton graduate.
He's an F-18 commander, combat veteran.
Okay, so these are not stupid people.
Okay?
So what happens, and this is what's been borne out,
they are extremely good, hand-eye coordination.
They are good at training for reactions to threats.
Is a Cessna 172 that I fly around California?
Is that a threat to the F-18s at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, right?
here. No, they're not a threat at all. So they'll ignore those types of threats. So they're looking
for anomalies. You have a filter as a pilot. You filter out things that are nominal and you look for
things that are anomalous, right? So they're trained and heightened on the state of awareness to look
for things that are anomalous. So this is what psychologists studying the military for other reasons,
this is to avoid crashes and sort of other hazards to flight. Another topic, Ryan is quite
bravely investing his time and energy in. And this is, and this is, and, and this is,
is all, again, for good purposes, but when the first, you know, statement to go to is, well,
Fravor is a fighter pilot. He's braver than Brian Keating, and he's a better pilot than Brian Keating,
none of which I dispute, then we must trust him on everything, including information about Roswell.
No, no, sorry. You know, just like if they, if I go out and say, well, look, this is how a CCD
or CMO's camera operates, this is dark noise, a flat field, these are the cosmic ray impacts.
These are dark current sensitivity or CMB camera works.
And then someone says, well, what do you think about aliens?
I should say, I know nothing about that, right?
I'm not an expert in it.
But when they say, like, this object emits black body radiation,
well, quite frankly, I am an expert in that.
And the U.S. government, under the Trump administration,
just forced the Argentinian government to cancel a high altitude site
near the Simon's Observatory in the Andes Mountains,
not that near us, but very similar to us that the Chinese were developing.
Why do the Chinese need an observatory in a,
in Argentina. Well, that's weird. No, so they can have
hemispherical synoptic
observations of black body radiation.
That's what I'm guessing. That's why they
probably did it. So if they'd come to me and
said, well, Keating, why are they doing this?
I would say, well, let's look at it.
But I'm not going to talk about politics.
But my expertise is in that field.
Now, if it was to look for aliens, I could also say, yes,
we could detect planets and we can detect
objects like a muamu.
Anything that gives off heat and everything in the universe
gives off heat, even the universe
itself, right?
and I'm an expert in detectors that operate at 100th or even a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero.
So these are things where you want experts in that field.
Fravor, I'm sorry, he's not an expert in the dynamics of the UFOs just because he may have seen one that's unidentified, unidentified, anomalous phenomena, area of phenomena.
He may have seen one.
He may not have, and it may have been an actual extraterrestrial object or it could have been a terrestrial object.
That's what obvious seems to be leaning towards it.
But again, that we should listen to him about Roswell and believe him because he is more brave than Keating.
And he's a better pilot.
Maybe he's smarter than me.
I don't know.
But to say that that's called the halo effect, right?
When you ascribe information and powers to people because their domain expertise lies in one field.
It's like, you know, the World Cup's going on now.
Would you like the, you know, this guy's really good.
I heard of this new soccer player.
His name is Ronald O.
I think he's, I think he's Irish? I'm not sure. Anyway, Ronald, oh, Ronaldo, right? So would you want
Ronaldo to be your dentist? I just got a cavity filled, right? No, freaking way, right? So you don't,
but he's so great, you know, he's, he's incredible. Yeah, he is, but he's not a dentist.
So we have to be careful like that. And that's why when Anna, Luna, Congresswoman,
Representative Luna, she talks about interdimensional beings, it does a disservice. I'm sorry,
it just does. It sounds completely ridiculous. There's no sense in which that sentence
can be uttered without the follow-up question is, what do you mean? And then she has to say,
I don't know, because there's no notion of interdimensionality. There's no evidence for interdimensionality,
multiple dimensions, time traveling. When I talked to Tom DeLong on this podcast with a CIA agent,
Jim Semi Van, you know, we heard, oh, they, to the Stars Academy has, has objects. And I said,
okay, well, what's their history? How do you trace them back? And he said, oh, we don't have a
traceable provenance of the, oh, that's as good as nothing. That's like me showing up with this and
saying, this has biological material. I licked it. You know, you don't know. You don't know what's
happened to this. You haven't had the data, the bodies that craft. So I think that these are,
these are big challenges. And the final kind of sawhorse and hobby horse that I've been on
lately involves, you know, this question of belief. Like, what does it mean to believe something?
These, that you believe in extraterrestrial life.
Like, okay, you believe in it.
And these are scientists.
These are my colleagues all around the world.
And I'm hoping to have David Kipping back on, maybe Adam Frank, back on the podcast,
maybe all three of us, maybe have a big, you know, kind of debate between, not an argument,
but I think we're all respecting each other.
But when you hear things about non-human biologics, when you hear things about the continuum of life,
Not even like a continuum, you know, in the Earth's, I don't even know what a continuum is.
Like, there's not a continuum we think of sexes, right? Okay, I'm going to get really controversial right now.
There's not a continuum. It's not like the electromagnetic spectrum where there's an infinite number of
real numbers and there's an infinite number of wavelengths. No, no, there's not a continuum.
So how can it be the aliens have a continue? Maybe they have this incredible diversity of light.
Now, why would we have collected all of these, right? So maybe, maybe like in,
in the movie Project Hail Mary by my friend and a former UCSD attendee, but he didn't graduate.
Andy Weir, you know, the rocky character is this, you know, kind of a giant spider with a carapace and everything else.
Maybe that's life in some place.
Maybe there's astrophage and some other star, right?
I always say it's more plausible.
The deep scientific plausibility of Project Hell Mary far exceeds that of Interstellar.
Sorry to break that to you.
And now there's a new one, Iron Lung.
Has anyone ever seen that movie?
Well, that could be even more plausible than either Project Helmarry or Interstellar.
So that's my hottest hot takes.
But anyway, you have a continuum, right?
From corporeal bipedal life, which means it's like us.
Okay, I'm sorry to say, that means it's as a body corporeal.
Bipedal has two legs.
We evolved to walk upright under very specific gravitational, optical, and also from
emerging from fish-like creatures is the way we believe it, and having eyes on the side of
our heads to having eyes on top of our heads.
And the index of refraction difference
gave us a predatory advantage
when we came on land. So the first objects
were fish that came on land,
we believe, evolutionarily. And
then they had eyes on top of their heads, right?
And then they wanted to see even further, so then they
needed to get more on land, and then maybe the
evolutionary process started from there. We don't know.
I mean, that's just pure speculation.
But at least the bipedalism,
if we track bipedalism throughout the
fossil record, throughout
evolutionary biology, it's an
incredibly specific, highly appropriate.
I don't even want to say intelligently designed because I don't want you to think I just buy
into everything my intelligent design.
No, far from it.
Although I did have another hot take, which is that string theory has fewer experimentally verified
predictions than does intelligent design.
Because string theory has zero.
And according to even the best string theor, Joseph Conlin has been on the podcast, his book
on string theory, CRC Press, has a chapter, experimental evidence for.
string theory, and the entire chapter is, there is none. But according to Steven C. Meyer and other
evolutionary biologists that work on this field, that there was a prediction that the human DNA sequence
would have so-called junk DNA that would turn out to be functional. And for a long time,
they called it junk DNA, and then it was found to be functional. Now, that's very, very low what's
called base factor. I'm not being serious, really, but I do like to tease, you know, kind of my
my colleagues on both sides. I'll tease the intelligent designers, as you'll hear in my pushback
on Stephen C. Meyer, because it talks about fine-tuning, and I said, no, the universe is extremely
poorly tuned. It's as if I'm playing the violin. I'm a horrible musician. The only instrument I can play
is Spotify. But the universe has dark energy, which dominates all over forms of matter and energy,
and we could change the amount by a factor of 10, and you wouldn't notice it at all. We'd still be
here. Life would still be here. So to say that it's exquisitely fine.
to and it's just false.
And then they can cherry pick and go back to some other time.
I also push back on Jewish apologetics.
Gerald Schroeder claims the universe seven days of creation in Torah
corresponds to the astrophysical and physical epochs of quark hadron separation,
electric week phase transition.
Total nonsense.
Okay.
And I push back on that very strongly.
So you're never going to get me.
Maybe I'm explaining why I'm not invited to many parties.
But anyway, I find it fascinating to talk to all these people on different legs of the
stool and hopefully come to some conclusion that gets this a little bit closer to truth.
Now, you know, I've talked about, you know, people that like Avi, who would talk about
things with a straight face, like sentient, plasmoid life versus a hypothesis that gets smuggled
in in terms of belief.
I mentioned that to Avi.
This Vicker study kind of shook me that people would state that they believe, not like
I believe in God, you know, I believe in astrology.
No, I don't say any of that.
I say, I don't believe in that.
I say, I actually don't say I believe in God ever.
Never say it.
I am looking for evidence that God is plausible as a scientific hypothesis.
And people like Sean Carroll, who are very simplistic in their knowledge of Judaism or Christianity or any type of religion, will say, oh, well, God wouldn't have created a universe that has so many galaxies, right?
Why did he waste so much space?
And I'm like, oh, yeah, well, you know, God wouldn't have created an atom that has 99.9% empty space, right?
It's an idiotic argument to say, like, what God should or should not do.
I mean, I know Sean has an ego, but really, Sean, I mean, this is like in his most-sided work, you know, God is not a good theory to appeal to that.
It's like saying, well, you know, why are there so many elements, you know, would God create so many elements?
How do you know how many elements?
I mean, 190 years ago, we thought there was about 10 elements.
Now we know there's 10 times that number plus.
So I think these are awesome.
I think we need to hold the scientists' feet to the fire.
We need to hold the alien kind of maximalist to the feet to the fire.
We need to hold the religious adherence feet to the fire.
And I don't think anyone else is doing this.
And that's why I think this channel is criminally undersubscribed, not unsubscribed.
I don't want you to hear that.
But we cross 400,000 subscribers, but I really feel like we're doing, we're getting these
incredible interviews.
I just interviewed my 26 Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are asking him to come on my show.
It's a great flattery to me, but really do you?
I mean, a lot of these people see the power of the audience, and a lot of people won't or will.
I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson to come on.
He said he would.
Then he backed out.
He said he didn't have time.
And then I saw him on Pierce Morgan.
You know, like, okay, Pierce Morgan's got 10 times more subscribers than me.
I'll give him a pass.
You know, I've been on Pierce Morgan twice now.
But, you know, if I had 10 times more subscribers, who knows?
Maybe he'd say no to Pierce Morgan and not to Brian Keating.
Now, I know a lot of you don't like Neil McGrath-Tyson anyway.
But he's an important person, right?
I mean, I also pushed his feet to the fire.
He said a lot of nonsensical stuff too.
I mean, everything that he said about, you know, spectrums and things like that,
I can push back on him like nobody else because we have a respect.
I've been on his show in person, you know, I've been on a show twice.
He's been on my show two or three times.
And he'll be back.
I want you guys to ask me the questions that I should be asking on your behalf. I view myself
as your ambassador, but I'm also an independent person with my own curiosities, right?
Okay, so the last question, you know, I kind of want to leave you guys with is, you know,
where do you want to see things in the channel go? I'm not, like, going to be captured by the
audience in the sense of, I'll do whatever you say, and, you know, I'll do the, the 100 days
in the yacht challenge, and if I spend 100 days in the yacht, I get to keep, I'm not going to do
that, sorry, but no matter how much the audience wants it, right? I miss my home cooking, right?
But in terms of like the disposition, I find a lot of people, you know, either love or hate
the kind of content that I do. They either love that I'm talking about religion or hate that I'm
talking about religion. They either love that I'm talking, you know, someone who's interested
and investigating alien life and then people that hate it, or people that love that I'm talking
to a skeptic like Shermer or hate that I'm talking to Shermer. People that think, oh, you're just, you know,
licking the boots of Eric Weinstein.
I haven't had Eric on it over a year.
I mean, I talked to him all the time,
but I haven't found that what he has to say lately
is a mandatory content for my channel.
And a lot of people, I did a poll on the channel.
Who do you want to see on?
And he got the more votes than most people,
as he usually does.
But it wasn't by the same margin.
It used to be like 80, you know, 80, 20 kind of thing.
80 for Eric and 20 for everybody else.
But maybe I need to do more surveys like that.
But I'm really enjoying it,
But I need to know, you know, kind of where, where, you know, you're going to be,
you're going to be intellectually honest with yourself and have integrity to listen to people
you don't agree with.
Because what YouTube really rewards, and, you know, I'm not a master of it at all,
but I find it fascinating because you get instant feedback, you get real-time data.
You get to talk to, I mean, I have, you know, half a million followers across the video
and audio, you know, feeds of this podcast.
It's a huge, I just looked up that in, in the, you know, in the, you know,
the last six months of this year, like a million hours. People have watched a million hours
of my content. It's insane. Like, I can't believe that. I can't listen to myself for a million.
You know, I talked to, you know, my mother, and she's like, people pay to listen to you?
Like, I wouldn't listen to you for free. No, she doesn't say. That would be horrible.
But what YouTube really rewards is, is, first of all, looking at the video, deciding you want to
watch it, sharing it with somebody else.
leaving a thumbs up, leaving a comment.
Those are huge engagement signals.
But the best engagement signal is how long you watch the show for.
How long do you tune in for?
And I think a lot of people will either tune in, not at all, or they watch the whole thing.
So I find a lot of people do that.
A lot of people are watching.
60% of you are not subscribed that are watching.
I don't know why.
It doesn't cost you anything to click that little subscribe button.
And again, we'd have over a million subscribers on YouTube alone, plus even more on audio feeds as well.
So I need to know that you're going to be kind of the ride or die audience that I feel like I've cultivated.
Again, 26 Nobel Prize winners.
I talk to more Nobel Prize winners than anyone on Earth as far as I know.
And I don't just do, like even with my most recent guest, I push back on the Nobel Prize winner.
It's fun.
They like it.
You can't believe how many podcasts I've been on.
I've been on all the big podcasts, right?
I can't think of one.
Maybe put one in the comments that you think I should be on.
I don't know.
What's the guy's name?
I always get him. He always pops up
Lewis Howe. He's like a really big name
podcaster that I'm often, you know, people tell me I should go on
and tell my human story. Anyway, put it on there, but I think I've been on
Rogan. I've been a diary of a CEO. I've been on
Jordan Peterson multiple times, StarTalk multiple times.
I've been on Chris Williamson way back when
before he had a video even.
And who am I missing?
I've been a Ben Shapiro's Sunday special.
I've been on, you know, again, I'm blank, Andrew Huberman I was on.
Sean Ryan, I was on.
My ambiolic I was just on.
He's incredibly, you know, these are tens of millions of views, right?
But are there people that I haven't been on?
Because I think that that's sort of a way to get a new audience into the pipeline,
but to also know that to be exposed to the fact that I do something I think that's unique.
that people really need nowadays.
And the types of content that I'm doing right now are very different from Lex Fried.
I've been a Lex Friedman, actually, a 10th most popular episode on his show.
I don't know why I forgot that.
So I don't feel like I need to go back on these people's podcast.
It's like I leave, you know, Jordan said, you know, leave the best on the floor.
Like, you don't have to come back.
I don't care if I ever go back on Rogan or whatever.
The one episode I'm mad about is the Portal podcast with Eric Weinstein.
I went on the portal podcast in 2020, recorded it, this huge studio, multiple cameras.
I brought them all these things, and it never aired.
Eric canceled the podcast, shut it down.
So leave a comment if you think the portal should come back on.
Or at least him, at least let me broadcast the episode, Eric.
I mean, come on.
This is six years now.
It's ridiculous.
But I thought it was one of our best, and we get along.
We argue like brothers, but we get along like brothers.
It's a lot of fun to know, Eric.
But let me know.
where do you think the type of Keating approach is most valuable?
Because I am doing explainers.
I also should say, and I should have said this before,
I have another channel where I'm moving my hard physics explanations to
based on advice that I've been given.
You shouldn't put that type of content on the same content as mainly the podcast
or clips from the podcast.
So this channel, Dr. Brian Keating, from now on, really,
the last few months has been like this,
is going to be all about interviews, conversations,
sometimes explainers of not the physics, but of reactions to other people's interviews.
Like I said, I just did an episode about reacting to Michi Okaku's appearance on Diary of his CEO
where he made so many flaws.
I like to believe that it was a mistake and he's just getting older.
He's 80 years old, I think now.
But some of them are just so bad and so pernicious to the human understanding of things like
string theory and dark matter.
And I felt like it was my responsibility to hold.
his feet to the fire. As a friend, as a, as a
someone who really looks up to him, I think I was respectful.
I'm not going to ever attack people at Homonym.
There's enough of that on the internet.
The next one's going to be about
this guy, Kevin Canuth, who also is a
physicist. He was on
Mayambialics podcast before I was.
And he said a lot of, you know, kind of
speculative things about
cattle mutilations and
UFO sightings.
And he's done actual hard work in physics
research on the unidentified
aerial phenomena, physics, which I think is interesting. I'd like to talk to him. Maybe he won't
come on after I do my reaction to him, although, again, it's very respectful. But I just take the
claims and I hold it up against evidence. I identify where the human biases like belief and confirmation
bias and all these things apply to me, Brian Keating, as much, if not more than anybody else.
The next one after that is about Graham Hancock, also appeared on Stephen Bartlett's show.
and it's already got 6 million views in like two or three days,
talking about megastructures underneath the pyramids,
how the ancient world discovered Antarctica 300 years before the Western world did,
and the younger Dryas impact theory of civilizational collapse.
So there's three huge whoppers that he brought up,
a little bit reluctant to attack him anyway.
I never attack him personally or any of these people personally.
at Hominent, but he is suffering some medical condition. Apparently he's having a heart surgery
soon. I wish him well. I wish him long life. But at the same level, again, he's getting all this
influence. He came on the show, right? So he had the two and a half hours or three hours that
Stephen requires. And that does bring me back. I didn't close the loop. I have an explainer
channel Keating Experiments. Please do subscribe to that. Almost 10,000 subscribers over there. That's
where it's going to be, you know, how does the muon spin tell us about string theory?
or some extra dimensions.
The explainer videos like that are going to appear over there exclusively.
And then where Brian Keating is either talking to somebody or talking about somebody,
but again, respectfully, reacting to somebody, that's going to be over here in Dr. Brian Keating.
So bifurcation is worrisome thing, but whatever.
It's fun for me.
I have a small team in various countries around the world.
Shout out to the team.
And they're keeping me sane.
And then I have my day job where I'm publishing incredible video, incredible videos.
I am going to make a video about some of the science that's coming out of Simon's Observatory as soon as it's unembarkoed.
But I'm just, I am just so excited to share with you guys.
I mean, I'm an actual working scientist.
I'm an experimentalist.
I'm not like Brian Green, Michi Okaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jim Gates, Eric Weinstein.
He's brainiac theorists.
No, we need them.
And some of my best friends are theorists, but I'm an experimentalist.
I want the evidence. I want the hard data. I want to collect the data. I want to build
the instrument that collects the data. I want to analyze data that comes out of it. I want to
understand how things like AI and these massive revolutions that were undergoing for the first time
in human history are going to impact me intellectually and you intellectually. So I'm going to
have dedicated videos. Those will be on Keating experiments where I go into the experimental
nitty-gritty, but why it's important to you? Why should care about that? Why do you care if a
neutrino has negative mass? What does that even mean? That's going to be on Keating and
experiments. Please do subscribe down there for that. I'll put a link down below. The last thing I want to say is,
what makes me unique, I have to say this, as I said, the thread that gets lost because I am a professor
and I do get absent-minded is I've been on all these huge podcasts from Rogan to Stephen Bartlett,
to Lex Friedman, to Mayambiolic now, to Sean Ryan. I love all those guys and girls, okay? I want to
say that. I'm grateful that they gave me their platform. That said,
They do things differently than I do.
And that is, the main thing for me is that I will never have somebody on who has a book
that I haven't read their book.
And I'm not going to name names, but there are some people on that list who is obvious to me
within 10 seconds of sitting down with them putting on the headphones that they never open
any of my books.
Now I put my blood, sweat, and tears into these four books that I've written.
Soon will be five.
maybe I have six in me before I die, but these books, my self-help guide for the stem curious
into the impossible, think like a Nobel Prize winner, into the impossible focus like a Nobel Prize
winner, distilled wisdom from the greatest geniuses on Earth that I've ever lived, I'm almost
at the point where I can write a third volume, I don't know the title, give me a title for that
down below. And then my magnum opus, you know, my first, my memoir, losing the Nobel Prize,
is about what it means to be a cosmologist, but a father, a son, someone who loses a mentor
to suicide, someone who loses his father, and trying to operate at the highest levels because
I was told I couldn't get tenure if I didn't win the Nobel Prize prospectively.
So what does it feel like to be a young scientist with everything to lose and curious
about something that has no practical value whatsoever, like inflationary cosmology?
How did the universe begin?
I write those books, and it takes a lot out of me.
It takes a lot of time, opportunity cost, time value of money, all these things.
Incredible. Plus, it costs money. I had a higher art. The publisher doesn't give you money
to get illustrations, but I felt those were mandatory to explain the science in inflationary
cosmology in my first place. I paid for it out of my own pocket. Again, I made almost
a tenth of minimum wage. Probably a tenth of minimum wage, given my advance was what it was,
and the amount of hours put into it, surely far below minimum wage. Now,
I put a lot of time and effort into it.
You can distill the wisdom of at that time, a 40-year-old, 45-year-old guy, right?
And the knowledge.
And that's so pertinent nowadays.
We're swimming in knowledge.
We have almost no wisdom.
We're dying of thirst for wisdom, and we're drowning in knowledge, AI, the Internet.
We have abundant information.
We have no distillation of that.
And that's what I'm trying to do on this podcast.
But that's certainly what I do in my books.
And to have a host, you know, fly me out, a great expense.
to them and time expense to me away from my wife, my kids, my teaching. I have to get people
to cover for me. Shout out to my colleagues that cover my classes and my postdocs. And
supervision, it's a lot. I have a lot of things on my plate. And I'm going out there. The least
you could do is read my book. Please. I mean, some of these books take almost I have audio books
for every single book I've ever written, including Galileo's dialogue. No, okay, I don't expect
anyone who's having me on to listen to a 21-hour long audiobook. But that was with Carlo Rovelli.
And that's an acted version for the first time in human history of a book by Galileo, the greatest mind and science I think that ever lived.
You know, maybe with the possible exception of Einstein or my father-in-law.
No, I'm just kidding.
But the point is, how else, you know, why are you having me on?
You know, and, you know, I know you're having me on because you're partially, you have a much bigger platform than me, you know, say, I don't know, someone's podcast.
have a bit on, or maybe I have been on.
You have a much bigger podcast, and so I appreciate you, and I'm grateful. I have gratitude to you.
It's the most important thing, first of all. But take the time. And so I do that for everyone
on my guest. I've read 500 books. And you know what? I had a brain scan done for some other
reasons. You know, everything's fine. Turns out, but they did brain scan on me, and then they did
it again a year later, and then at the five-year mark. My brain is actually increasing in density
and gray matter and vascularity and all the good things about brain and i think it's 100% due to
this podcast you know i do have a selfish reason to do it it's not monetary now i bear i don't
i lose money on this podcast because i pay my editors um i never get somebody to read i don't have
anyone doing my booking i don't have anybody who does um you know kind of research for me
except for my AI tools which i have handcrafted over the last two or three years to make them
incredibly pertinent to the things that interest me the most, you know, callouts to
to things that matter to you the most, and to edit it tightly to get rid of all the
verbal yappage that I'm known for, right? I want to cut down on that. I know this is kind
of self-indulgent, but you'll excuse me, if you've lasted this far, I assume that you
can handle a little bit of yapping. Let's see, how many people are still listening at this point?
Oh, my God. There's more people listening now than was listening before. Okay, there's over a
thousand people listening right now. I just really appreciate you guys. I mean, I can't tell you. I mean,
it's funny. Sometimes I got recognized. I went to Hawaii last year. I was getting on the plane. I'm
about to get the guy staring at me. I'm like, I passed TSA. You know, why are you looking? He's
like, you're Brian Keating, right? I'm like, yeah, it depends. Do I owe you money? Like, oh, what's going on,
brother? And he's like, no, I love your podcast. I get these things all the time. I'm like,
it makes me so gratified.
This thing didn't exist, you know, six years ago.
I started this thing six years ago when COVID was raging and I could.
I knew I was smart enough to know that authors like Avi or other people would answer my email if I asked them to come on the show because they weren't doing book tours.
I did, you know, a book tour in 2018, 2019.
2020 was gone.
Couldn't go on book tours.
So I could get any of the dream guests that I ever want.
I've never had a guest really.
I can't think of anyone.
I mean, I've talked to Elon Musk.
I would like to talk to him probably again at some point, but, but, you know, kind of been there,
talk to 26 now.
The people that I miss talking to are the people that are no longer with us.
So best of luck with that.
Maybe Anna Luna can get me some interdimensional beings and I can do some interviews.
But I did interview Freeman Dyson.
That's one of my most treasured interviews, him, Jim Simons, these people aren't alive anymore.
And that is my treasure.
I have that for all time.
And the Nobel Prize winners are just going to keep growing.
And like I said, some of them are asking me.
I mean, 10 of them have asked to come on my podcast.
I don't think they're asking to come on some of these other podcasts, right?
I mean, they might appear on them.
But I think that they know they get something special.
And I'm always going to read their books.
I mean, that's the least I can do.
And so you'll never have me unprepared.
I will cancel an interview.
If I haven't had time to read it or I don't want to read it.
And it really helps when I have on people that have audio books, just in case you want to know,
because I listen to things.
I can listen at 2X speed and I can do things with audio that I can't do with printed.
But I am reading printed books now.
I'm kind of getting back into it.
Some fiction.
I've had on four Pulitzer Prize winners.
These are the things that really make it so enjoyable.
And I always say at work I have to talk to people.
There are people I have to talk to.
The telescope azimuthal encoder drive is broken.
and I need to get somebody out at 18,000 feet in Chile,
and it's a Chilean holiday, and it's a German company,
and they can't get an import for an American part that comes from China.
Anyway, you don't want to know.
Those are people I have to talk to.
Some of them I like a lot.
You know, I love my graduate students.
I have to talk to them or else they'll go off in crazy directions, right?
My undergraduates, I have to talk to.
I get paid to talk to them.
And just the other day, I finished up class for the quarter,
and they all did great.
and they gave me a standing ovation.
It was like emotional for me.
I have to be honest with you.
A couple of them came up and took a selfie with me.
They were like, do you mind of, can I take a selfie with you?
Like they were so, and I was like, yeah, you guys rock.
Like everything I do, I owe to you guys.
And so this is what I do.
This is what I love.
I'm always going to read the books.
I'm always going to go deep.
I'm never going to stop talking to people that I disagree with.
You know, I've had people not want to come on the show.
I can name names, right?
It's too bad.
You know, it's too bad for them.
I think that they are scared of a little bit of pushback.
I think you all know the Malibu Meditator that I'm talking about.
Just didn't want to come back on the show ever again
because I pushed back on him on his utterly simplistic,
ignorant kind of view of, again, some biblical topic that he feels capable of talking about.
Fine.
I'm not going to say he can't talk about it.
But the fact that he never got pushed back once.
Everyone just tells him what a brilliant genius he is and everything he says is just so, so wonderful, intellectually deep.
I'd love to talk to him.
I offered him to stay at my house during the Malibu fires.
He politely, you know, turned that down.
But that's, again, I feel like it's his loss.
I can talk to Richard Dawkins, who hosted me, who flew me up to Vancouver to host him for two days at this wonderful live show and from a thousand people.
And it was incredible.
And he knows I don't disagree.
I don't agree with him about a lot of stuff.
I push back on Richard Daw.
Who has the Hutzpah to do that besides me?
I mean, I don't want these interviews or people are just like, oh, you're so amazing.
Let me just lick your boots.
And this is incredible.
Now, do I talk to people like Avi or my friends?
And I cut them maybe a little bit more.
Okay, I'm a human being.
I have friends.
Sorry to say.
I have friends.
But you notice even in with the friends like Eric, Eric, I think he gets annoyed with me.
He'll tell me, you know, like, that he doesn't want to talk about a subject because I'm pushing him on something that's uncomfortable for him.
I'll push him on things like publication.
I'm the very person who, you know, really forced him to publish on April Fool's Day, 2021, his theory of geometric unity.
Now, he didn't do it to the level that people want him to, and he said he's an entertainer so that he wouldn't be liable for people cutting his stuff and he could have legal recourse against them.
This is his excuse.
But without me and one of my best friends in the world, Stefan Alexander, we pushed him to put it in writing.
And he did.
And it wasn't all because of me and Stefan.
But I think we played a big role in it.
So I'm going to push back even on my good friends.
So that's what you're going to get.
You're going to get depth.
You're going to get someone who's prepared.
I always come prepared.
I've heard people like Chris Williamson, who I think also sort of blocked me because I criticized him for hosting rabbit and anti-Semmit.
and people, you know, that are just, just horrific human beings, you know, because they're
of interest to his audience.
Fine, I don't think he'll ever have me back on, but I was there for him before he had,
you know, a thousand subscribers.
Now he's got four and a half million, so good for him.
I'm really happy for him.
But to hear that, you know, when he told his audience that, you know, he doesn't read the
books effectively because he doesn't want to be like a short form or, you know, blinkist for
his audience to skip the book. And I don't want that either. I want you to buy the books. I
want you to, you know, I've kept these books for years, right? These are, you know, my libraries,
that's like one-tenth of my library behind me. I've got ten times that in my studio, in my in-person
studio. So my books are my treasure. We're people of the book, right? This is the most important
thing to me. So that means I'm going to take it seriously. I'm going to read the books. I'm not
going to summarize it so you don't have to buy it, but I'm going to read that. I'm going to pull
out the things that are most pertinent, most, just fire me up.
My obsidian, my apple notes, my second brain is brimming with connections between these 550 now books between them.
So I can ask, you know, upcoming guest Annie Jacobson, who's coming on for a new book that she's written called Biological War.
That should be fun, right?
Ah, biological war.
A scenario.
She's coming on in July.
It's embargoed.
They're sending me that.
That's incredible that they have trusted me, and I've earned the trust.
I've never broken embargo, never will.
even with my own experiments, right? I've been under embargoes many times for books and for research
and I'll always respect that. That's the duty of a scholar. So, in summary, if you want deep dives
people are going to go be pushed, respectfully, friendly. I think I bring more humor to it than
most podcasters do. Even I had one producer of a podcast that shall remain nameless, but I went on
his podcast and it was right after Joe Rogan was on the podcast with the same host and the
producer said he laughed more when I was on the show. I think Joe is a lot funnier than me. But
on the same token, I do believe that there's a role for seriousness and for humility and quite
frankly to be to be kind of respectfully antagonistic, I have to say. To have the chutzpah to back it up
with intellect and back it up with preparation.
I'm always going to maintain the preparatory standards, preparation H.
I'm always going to maintain it because if I don't, I feel like a fraud.
I feel like people, if I were to have on a guest like Michael Shermer or, you know,
so sometimes I like to be a guest on other people's podcast because I have to do no preparation.
Although I even do that, I actually have a self-trained L.M specifically for when I'm on a guest on Sean Ryan's podcast.
I do deep research on him.
He doesn't have books, but he has 500 episodes.
And what are the themes?
What are the things that he goes deep on?
What are the things that he doesn't care about?
What are the things that he's so passionate about?
He'll interrupt something even more important to discuss this subject.
Does he talk about the news?
Does he talk about his kids?
Does he talk about his upbringing?
He changed his name.
What does he do?
So I go deep into them when I'm a guest.
But it's a little bit easier to be a guest.
to be a guest and to be a host.
So it is hard to be a host,
especially this week.
We have four guests on this week,
including Avi Loeb, Beatrice Val O'R.
Michael Shermer,
and then Nate Sores, who wrote,
co-wrote,
if anybody builds it,
everybody dies with Eliezer Yudowski.
It's an AI safety researcher.
I just released my episode
with Roman Yampolsky.
Please check that out.
I went deep,
and that was not an easy book to read.
A lot of math proofs
and deep excursions
into the formal logic behind the assertion that AI is either safe or unsafe.
And that has huge implications for governance, for regulations, for our own safety, and the
flourishing of the human species.
And he's very pessimistic.
He made me sort of death.
But I pushed back on him.
I said, you know, you say that AI is unpredictable, therefore it's uncontrollable.
It was sort of a version of the halting problem that Turing popularized in his Turing machine paper.
That was the name of it, actually.
It was a halting problem.
and sort of like the girdle's incompleteness theorem.
I said you have a version of those two massive theorems,
girdle's theorem and Turing's theorem.
And you're saying it's predictable
that it's going to be unpredictable,
but isn't a totology.
So I want you to watch that episode,
hour and a half.
I think I went deeper with him than any other interview.
Certainly then, Mike, I love Stephen Parlett,
but he can't get as deep technically
because by his own admission.
He didn't go to college.
He didn't finish college.
I think he went for two days.
And I love those guys.
I really appreciate them for hosting me.
I just wish that they would maybe spend a little bit more time.
If you like me enough this far to go on a first date, you're going to love me once you get to know me.
And that's the way I feel about my guests.
I really love each.
I haven't had anyone on, even Sam Harris.
I love Sam Harris.
There's nothing that he could do.
I pay for his apps and his podcast because he has a fine mind.
And we disagree on a ton of stuff.
But, you know, so be it.
He'll never come on again.
Maybe I'll see him in some secret cabal meeting somewhere where he kind of runs for president to take over, you know, Trump on his eighth term.
You know, Sam will be there standing at the vanguard.
But until then, Sam, you're always welcome back on.
And everybody else, I don't want to say, you're welcome.
I want to say thank you.
I don't say thank you so much.
So maybe this is my 400,000 subscriber celebration.
Maybe I'll clip this and make that into that because I want Avi to have his segment,
alone from this. But I really can't resist talking about my favorite subject, which is me. And
no, it's just a great thrill. You guys mean so much to me. And so share it with a friend.
Try to get some more people involved. Again, I don't care about the numbers. You know, like I hit
$400,000. My kids were really excited about it. But at the same time, like, how is it really
different than $399,99? You know, so I posted, you know, I got to $399,000, 975,000 subscribers.
You know, like, okay, that's what I always wanted.
I mean, I know if I go to a million or whatever, half a million, I'm just going to say, well, you know, there's another number that's bigger.
That's the property of natural numbers.
So, love you guys.
Please stay with it, even if you don't like it, even if you don't like the content, I promise you, you're going to grow your pink gray matter, especially when you don't agree with me or my guest or both or neither.
You're going to grow your mind.
And we have so little time in just a few years, according to Roman, we won't even have these things anymore.
There'll be no point in having a podcast.
Brian Keating will be irrelevant.
You'll just like click on something optimized for Stephen Dedalus from born in 1974.
And it's going to look him up and it's going to say, oh, these are all the things in a social graph.
I love, and we'll just dial it in and they'll get pumped like Selma into his brain.
And he won't need me anymore.
So until that happens.
Until that happens.
stay tuned always be curious and thank you so much please do share it subscribe don't forget to do
those basic things okay love you all talk to you next time
