Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Physicist ‪Explains UFOs, the Moon Landing, and the Case for God's Existence | Real Talk with Marissa Streit

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this episode of Real Talk, Brian Keating sits down with PragerU CEO, Marissa Streit, for a riveting conversation that explores some of the most intriguing—and controversial—questions about our universe. Key Takeaways: 00:00 Paid to Explore the Universe 06:36 Galileo's Awe Through Telescopes 13:29 "Discovering Big Bang's Cause" 16:38 "Stellar Origins of Iron" 24:23 "Life Lessons, Not Science" 31:11 "Predicting the Future: Coin Odds" 34:53 "UFOs and Cosmic Controversies" 36:56 "Life Across Endless Planets" 43:16 Giordano Bruno's Cosmic Beliefs 48:56 Government Suppression: COVID & UFOs 54:48 Moon Landing Denial vs UFO Belief 01:01:50 Measuring Moon's Position Precisely 01:06:29 Asteroid Detection and Earth Safety 01:11:36 "Two Pockets, Scientist's Humility" 01:13:23 "Hope for a Lasting World" - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So this is one of the most depressing encounters that I've had. There's probably less than five people that believe that we didn't go to the moon that have academic credentials. I've watched you debate Joe Rogan a couple of years ago. Your claim is that it is very unlikely that we've had visits from outside of our planet. There has been an awful lot of secrecy. There's been a lot of government experts suppression. Why? They have nothing to hide. What is the purpose of creating secrecy around it? Encounters with advanced civilizations and primitive civilizations would inevitably lead to mass devastation. I never say I believe in God.

I have evidence for it. If you asked before 1929 and you said, what's the scientific evidence that there was a Genesis event? There would have been none. Science's job is to change with time. My greatest hope is that what my students do is prove me wrong. So, Brian, I was going to ask you what is it like to work on the most zoomed out-versy. of our existence. But honestly, Brian, these days, when I think about what you do, given how zoomed out it is, I'm kind of jealous because this planet seems to be going bunkers.

And so maybe all of us can take a little bit of a break and think about the multi-universe and just the stuff that's outside of here. Maybe that's why Elon is so focused on the other planets. Yeah, I love that idea. I mean, for me, I always say, you know, the thing that's best about astronomy and being an astronomer. Nobody ever says, like, I hate that constellation over there or that asteroid really gives me a lot of politicization. So it's great because you need a relief. You need, I joke, a safe space, a true safe space where you can be intellectual and you can think about things, the things you thought about on the dorm couch when you were in college, but because of the daily demands in your life, you can't think about them anymore. So we start to acquire, you know,

spouses and kids and pets and everything, and we just don't have time to think about who we are and where we come from and where are we going? And my favorite question of all, perhaps, is there any intelligent life out there? You know, because sometimes on Earth, I'm not so sure there is any. Well, you're saying that this is kind of a safe space where people don't necessarily argue.

However, in the world of the Internet and the podcasting space, this has become another one of those things where people are arguing on whether the Earth is flat, whether there are UFOs, whether the moon landing ever really happened, And so we'll get into that in a little bit. But first, let's talk about the less controversial stuff. And just in general, I think people would love to hear your story.

So you almost got a Nobel Prize, which must be amazing in some ways and very challenging and difficult in other ways. And I know you wrote a book about your story. But for those who don't know your book and don't know your story, I'd love for you to share it. Yeah. So I study the universe. What I do is called cosmology. not to be confused with cosmetology, although they both have the same prefix, Cosmos, because that means beautiful in Greek, as I'm told. I don't speak Greek, but Cosm or Cosmos

means beautiful. And what else is the universe if it's not beautiful? And if you don't appreciate its glorious, you know, nature. So what I've done throughout my career is try to take on those big questions, as I said earlier, where do the universe come from? You know, does it have an end? Does it have an edge? Was there a beginning of time, or is it an endless cycle repeating throughout all of eternity. And these questions always connected to a bigger philosophical, maybe even theological streak that I had within me. And I just never knew you could get paid to do it. You know, I'm a state employee of the state of California as we are here. Gavin Newsom is ultimately my boss. And but, you know, we get paid, but not that much, but we get paid to do what I would do for

free. You know, that's the thing. Don't tell Gavin that. But I always thought it would be like being an ice cream taster, you know, like who's going to pay me to look through a telescope or you know, teach to students my favorite thing to do and educate, you know, people about what the glories of the universe are and how just amazing and how finite and how brief a time we have to appreciate it. So for me, I've studied this for, you know, 30 plus years now, building detectors to see the invisible light, things you cannot see with your eyes, but nevertheless leave an imprint for humans to study. And from that, learn about how the universe began if there was a single so-called Big Bang singularity,

or if there were perhaps multiple universes that died and collapsed and re-expanded and did all sorts of interesting things. And we study the properties of what we can see and we build detectors to see what we can't see. So it's really, for me, Tinker, I love working on cars and building rockets and stuff as a kid.

But when I got my first telescope, at age 12, this really changed my life. Because with a telescope, I realized that you can actually see other planets. It's like I literally thought as a 12-year-old you had to be in a spaceship. You had to go to Mars or Jupiter or whatever. And I was like, I'm never going to be an astronaut. You know, it's never going to happen.

So a telescope is really a portal. It's a time machine. It's a way of transversing and traversing space. And so we have these time machines that are given to us. And we can talk about how they work. But the bottom line is by seeing the past, I realize it would teach me not only about the present and the future, but really who I am and who we all are, because I think that's the base nature

of what a human being is. You know, the word homo sapien means man, homo, and then sapien is like knowledge. Sapienza means knowledge. And that's the word for science, sciencia, comes from that as well. But it doesn't mean wisdom. And so I've always had this side of me

where I wanted to understand as their knowledge, is their wisdom. I did a Prager You video about this once, which is more important. But for my goal is to really try to unify the two, knowledge with wisdom. I love that idea of buying a telescope as a gift because I haven't thought about that and I think

many of us think, oh, what can we buy our kids that actually is going to have a huge imprint on their lives? And I think many of us forget about the idea of buying them a telescope and really the gravitas of looking at the entire world and the perspective that you get when you understand that you're here, you're just a speckle, right? And even just appreciating it. I have my website, Brian Keating.com, I have a link to, but, you know, buyer's guide for telescope. Some of them are $50.

And I jokingly say I'm a doctor, you know, kind of like Jill Biden is a doctor. But my one prescription, you know, to be a good parent is get your kid a telescope. Because even here in the heart of Los Angeles, we can see the stars that matter, not on the walk of fame. Even with all the light pollution and all of that. You can see the exact same things that my hero Galileo Galilei, who I spoke about in my dialogue, a book club with Michael Knowles a few years back. He saw the same things. But the interesting things. about astronomy is that it's unique. You know, when you look through a microscope at a cell or something like that, it's kind of abstract. You really don't know what you're looking at. But when you

look at the moon, through a tiny telescope from the heart of Los Angeles, New York City, Dubai, anywhere on Earth, literally you can see the exact same craters, mountains, lava planes that Galileo saw for the very first time in human history, 41010 years ago or so in 1609, 1610. When he did that, he had an emotional reaction. It was awe, but it was also terror. It was fear. As I pointed out with Michael, he was with his eyes establishing that the moon was not different than the earth. It had mountains, it looked like rivers, all sorts of things on oceans. They called them Maori. And so therefore, it wasn't this ethereal orb that had been handed down in perfect crystalline sphere. He realized that that was not true. And that terrified him. But nowadays, we can look through the

telescope and not only see what Galileo saw, but feel what he felt. There's no way to do that. Any other branch of science, you can't have a large hand-dron collider in your backyard and then detect the Higgs bosons. Oh, well, that's how it felt to detect. Nobody could do that. But you can do exactly what Galileo did for $50, and you can do it for your kid and he or she may become a scientist. Or maybe they're not. They won't. But they'll experience the wonder, the beauty, and the fascination and awe of exploring the universe. Fun, fun idea. There's a story that you share, those of us who know you well know about your imposter syndrome story, which I can relate to in so many ways. I pinch myself. How am I here? Right? How do I get to sit with such interesting people and ask any question I want,

including the really hard questions with a smile? And so I'd love for you to share this story with with my audience because I just think it's so impactful. So I grew up in public schools. I teach in a public school now, public university. My whole life was, you know, kind of ordinary. It was not like seemingly that I'd be destined to work on projects with collaborators and teach at the highest astrolones of academia. But, you know, as a kid, I just kind of followed this, you know, desire this dream to, you know, just explore more about the universe. That's all I wanted to do.

That's all I was really good at. You know, I joke, I'm now in 49th grade or something like that. Like, I haven't left school since I was four years old. And, you know, and it's just been a complete joy to have this life of the mind. But throughout it, I've met, you know, the higher you go, the more people that you meet that are just in such excess of your brain capacity that they almost seem like they're on another, from another planet or another species. So I've talked to 22 Nobel

Prize winners on my podcast, into The Impossible. And some of them you can really relate to, but when you're in a room like that or you're at an Ivy League institution where I went for graduate school, it is extremely intimidating and to be there. But the wonderful thing that I've learned along the way is that not only, you know, is it normal, but if you don't have the imposter syndrome, you might be doing something wrong. I talked to a man named Barry Barish also lives here in Los Angeles.

He won the Nobel Prize for detecting shutters and ripples in the fabric of space and time via the collision of two black holes, two black holes, but imagine each one is 30 times more massive than our sun. Imagine something 30 times

the mass of our son and two of them, and they crashed, together a billion years ago, a billion light years away from Earth. We don't know exactly what galaxy it was. It was far, far away. And I shouldn't put these back. Yeah, that's not hygienic. And he detected them. He won the Nobel Prize in 2017. He goes to Stockholm. He meets the King of Sweden. He eats a reindeer buffet. He does all these things. And then at the end, he gets this giant gold metal and he gets a fraction of a million dollars. That's his share of winning the Nobel Prize. And he says,

they make you sign a book, a ledger that says, just like when I check in here. I receive what I was supposed to receive, and so I'm not going to come back and ask for more money or ask for my bigger gold medal. He said, I look through the book because I'm a curious man. I'm a scientist. So I look through the book. Who signed it last year? Who signed it?

And he saw Albert Einstein's name. He said, my heart sank. He said, I have no right to even be in the same universe as Albert Einstein, let alone have my name next to his in a book for all time. And I told him, Barry, because I had investigated. the imposter syndrome, having suffered from it for so long, I said, Barry, you're suffering the imposter syndrome. But here's the good news.

Einstein had the imposter syndrome. He said, you've got to be kidding me. I said, no. He wrote about Isaac Newton as being not only the greatest scientist of all time, but the greatest contributor to Western civilization of all time. And Barry Barrier said, wow, that's wonderful. And I said, but that's not all. Because guess what?

Newton had the imposter syndrome. Now, Newton was an arrogant. Some called him an SOB. He was a really tough character. And he said, I said, Barry, Newton had the imposter syndrome. He felt that he failed to live up to his hero, his idol, Jesus Christ. So much so that he tried to emulate Jesus. He couldn't, you know, turn loaves into fishes and water into wine.

But he could die a virgin. Apparently he did. And his personality probably helped out there too. But the bottom line was, all of us have it. It's natural. It's normal. And sometimes it's a guide to the fact that you're on the right track. Yeah, it's a good thing.

I mean, a healthy dose of humility is so. important. What was it like almost winning the prize and then not winning the Nobel Prize? How does it even work? Some of us are so removed from it that we hear about it, but maybe you could just explain this to us. Yeah. So the Nobel Prize, as I claim, it's the greatest accolade on planet Earth, because it's such a rare group of individuals that have won it. There's, there's only a few, maybe 100 people that are living today that have won it. And it's given out to the greatest accomplishment. It was brought about by Alfred Nobel, who is the inventor of dynamite. He wanted to rehabilitate his image because he was, you know, considered to be one of the greatest

arms, merchants, and dealers of death. He was called the merchant of death, actually, during his lifetime. And so he wanted to rehab his image. He didn't have kids. He wasn't married. And he endowed his entire fortune from inventing dynamite, billions of dollars in today's dollars, to this prize. And the object of the prize was to better mankind, to improve humanity. And so in five different fields at the time, it was physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for peace, of course. Sure. He endowed these prizes to better humanity. And one of those is physics.

So along the way, physics has come to incorporate astronomy, which I do. And in 2014, an experiment that I had created the predecessor of, called Bicep, announced that we had discovered not only the Big Bang, which had already won Nobel Prizes in the past, but what caused the Big Bang? And it was theorized that there was this hyperactive period of expansion in the extreme early universe, a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second long only at the very beginning of time, at which we would have detected the shrapnel thereof. If you could think about the Big Bang as an explosion, it's not really like that, but for, you know, for common laypeople, we can describe it that way. And we detected what ignited the spark that lit off the Big Bang.

And it turned out we didn't see that at all. And so, spoiler alert, my book is called Losing the Nubble. Prize not winning the Nobel Prize, my first book. And that discovery was really, you know, on the precipice. Immediately after we announced it, the greatest minds in the world were saying we deserved a Nobel prize, within, you know, a few months, maybe six months, it was discovered that we hadn't seen the beginning of time. What we had seen was an imposter, was basically a masquerading signal that looked like exactly what we wanted to see, which is always very dangerous. When you go to look for something, rather than discovering it serendipitously, you're prone to what.

what's called confirmation bias. You see what you want to see. And we basically, instead of detecting the Big Bang, we detected what I call cosmic schmutz. Basically, there's dust in our galaxy, not in the universe, but in the galaxy, that mimics and reproduce what the signal would have been if we did detect it.

So we didn't win the Nobel Prize. We detected this imposter signal, which is really like these meteorites here. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

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Pretty dense. It's very dense. It's very magnetic. It's made of cobalt, nickel, iron, all sorts of trace elements. Some people speculate that meteorites may have been the seed for life on Earth even. We'll talk about that later maybe. But if you imagine shrinking that down to like a little particle of dust, and there's trillions and trillions of tons of this dust in our galaxy alone.

And what happened was the magnetic field of our galaxy caused a signal. to be present, which was basically this imposter that tricked us into believing we saw what we wanted to see. Where's this from? So this one fell in Argentina. I should say I give them out on my website, as I mentioned before, to, you know, a couple lucky winners. I give them to every student, by the way, who has an EDU email address in the U.S. And these meteorites fell. They're older than the solar system itself.

They come from a previous solar system that existed here. The universe is, you know, here in L.A., right? You've got, like, what, six different recycling bins, you know, paper, plastic, you know, right? regular trash, compost, edible, whatever. In the stars in our galaxy are the ultimate recycling bins. They take material that was present from preexisting material. Usually it was hydrogen, just the most simple element in the periodic table. They turn that into helium.

Helium means sun, that's how we get the name Helios from the element helium. And stars take that. They make heavier and heavier things. They make carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Eventually they try to make iron, fusing it together. nuclear fusion reactor is what a star is. They can make iron, but it's so dense, it takes so much energy that there's not enough pressure to keep the star kind of inflated and it collapses.

Then it explodes and it sprays out into the universe everything that it just made, which is mostly iron, cobalt, nickel, and stuff like that. So the universe is polluted with that material. And then that material gets recycled again into planets, into the core of the earth is made of iron, exact same type of iron. And guess what? The blood in your body has hemelior. That hemoglobin, that hemoglobin has iron inside of it that came from the same star that produced this and died four and a half billion years ago.

Wow. So we are literally star stuff. We are made of the material of stars. Wow. And that's just one of the many ways that the universe is so fascinating and connected to us. And we never even realize it that the hydrogen in this water came from the Big Bang. And eventually made a star, which made a meteorite, which made the blood also in your body and that you pass on to your kids and you got from your parents. It's incredible.

I know that you are a God-fearing person that you. believe in God, which not many scientists, especially at the university system in California, are God-fearing. So I'm assuming that you're somewhat of a rare gem there. I'm curious, how do you reconcile that? You talk about the Big Bang, I think, about the Seven Days of Creation. How do you reconcile the biblical narrative of the Seven Days of Creation and the Big Bang from a scientific, not from a necessarily theological perspective? Yeah, so I want to just make one small correction. So I never say I believe in God.

Also, I never say I believe in gravity if I take another one of these things and I don't eat it. Like, I don't have to say I believe in gravity when I drop this delightful piece of dark matter. I don't have to believe in it. I have evidence for it. And there's evidence that could change if there was something called anti-gravity, right? So scientists should follow the evidence where evidence leads to. So saying I believe in God, first of all, I think it's a little bit of a chutzbo like God. needs me, Ryan Keating to believe in him and like, add-a-boy God. You know, I feel it's a little

too anthropomorphized. I don't like that conception. I believe the Jews ultimately, and I'm Jewish, should seek truth and should seek avenues to receive the permission to accept the possibility that evidence can't exist for God. So I actually call myself a strict orthodox agnostic. So not an atheist. I'm anti-athist, if anything. But to say that there's, you know, that the way that, you know, I act is what's most important to me. So I'm behaviorist. I like to, so we practice Judaism.

We practice the Samoth. I don't work. I don't tweet. I don't podcast. I don't do research. I observe it strictly. I don't, you know, we keep kosher. You know, we obey these.

I go to temple, et cetera, et cetera. But for me, the beauty of, you know, the existence, potential existence of God is the secret. You know, it's the search for the existence and evidence to prove his existence. And in my books and in my writings and teachings and on this frame, I do like to approach it scientifically and ask questions like, what is a scientific evidence for God? Is there a consonance between, say, the Torah Genesis 1-1 description of what the universe looked like? Is there? It's very unusual, right? Because it certainly seems like it does.

But did you know, for thousands of years, people had this cognitive dissonance. They believed even Einstein, probably the greatest mind who ever lived, despite what he said about noon, he believed that the universe is eternal. And in fact, he couldn't get away from it so much so that he ruined one of his biggest accomplishments called general relativity. He added in a fudge factor that would prevent the universe from changing in time. because if a change in time, well, then we wouldn't be here to observe it. So that's what he thought. He called it later his biggest blunder. And I always joke, it's too bad because he could have had a good career.

You know, he could have been famous. Poor Einstein. Poor Einstein. Yeah, he turned down the presidency of Israel, I think, too. So in Einstein's conception, because for thousands of years, people didn't understand how it was possible for the universe to have a beginning because it looks static. Everything in the universe looks static. You know, there's a name for the things that do move in the sky.

They're called planets. So here's another Greek lesson. I don't know much Greek, but I'm going to drop it all in you today, Marissa. Planet means wanderer. It means something that move. Planes. Planes wander, right? Planctin.

The same route. They wander through the sea. The word planet. So we gave names to the five things that you could see in antiquity, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Those are the only things you could see with the naked eye. They named days after them. etc. But there's, the reason I'm bringing this up is because there's so few of them that you

could give them names versus the stars seem innumerable. There's so many stars. They don't seem to move. So to the to the eye, it's kind of like, you know, obvious that the universe is static and eternal. That's what people thought. And so from, you know, literally all of time, people thought the smartest minds, the universe is eternal. And until Hubble, not far from here, discovered on Mount Wilson in Los Angeles, the expansion of the universe. Well, you mentioned that earlier. And that gave evidence for the first time, scientific evidence, that the universe was different yesterday than it is today and will be different tomorrow.

It's getting bigger. Separation between these galaxies are moving apart at an ever-increasing speed, it turns out. Space is not getting bigger. It's not like an explosion. But the space between these objects is increasing with time. And so if you play the movie backwards, it's a natural conclusion. Eventually, you'll get to a day when all these objects were touching each. other. And that became known as the Big Bang. It was really popularized by a Belgian Catholic priest

named LaMatra, George LaMetra. And he came up at this idea and Einstein said, basically, don't you dare, you're making an atrocious mistake. The universe is eternal. And LaMetra was like, nope, I have great evidence for this or we have a great belief in it. And then Hubble found the evidence. So why do I bring this up? Because they, if you asked before 1929, and you say, said, what's the scientific evidence that there was a genesis event? There would have been none. So science's job is to change with time and to be disproven. My greatest hope is that what my students do is prove me wrong. Because if I'm just the final word, like Einstein wasn't the final word, Newton was in the final word, Galileo was in. That's not what science is about. No room for discovery.

But Torah is, right? Or the Bible is, right? The Bible's ineffable and errant. God is infallible. You're not going to change, you know, what happened in the Torah and the Bible, whatever you want to call it. you're not going to change that. There's things that are permanently useful and applicable and true. And then there are things that were provisional because tomorrow we could discover that gravity when I drop this thing goes up. It literally could happen. But on a very high probability. You know, keep paying your taxes. Maybe in another place of the multi-universe. Another podcast, right? So this is all to say that they're very different things. So is there scientific evidence? Is there a way to prove the existence of God? I think from the Bible, if you look at the Bible as a science book, you're going to be disappointed

because that's not the point of that book. The Bible has 35,000 verses, what we call the Torah, Old Testament has 35,000 verses. 35 of them are about Genesis, Adam and Eve, something that you could plausibly say a science or maybe some predictions or evidence or hypotheses. And that's 0.1%. It's one out of 1,000. So if you pick up this book, you know, and this book is a, you know, and this book is a science, about my life lessons and study habits and tactics and tricks to become a better thinker and

collaborator and scientists. And you picked this up and it's called, you know, lessons from Nobel Prize winners. But you picked it up and there's one page and it's about Nobel Prize winners. And then there's 999 pages about the history of the National Basketball Association. I feel like, this book is not really about that. Like very similar to the Torah. The Torah is not a science book. It does things explicitly and it's brilliant in what it does. And if anything, only something supernatural could have written it if you look at it. I had a lot of debates with people like Sam Harris about this and arrogance of scientists and secular people. So what is your way of, what is your short way of clarifying your opinion that the Torah is from God or is a supernatural product?

Because the fruits of it and the evidence that it produces the lifestyle, the people, the house, the existence of Jews, the thriving of the state of Israel, despite all the attempts, the greatest gift, when I look at it, is my Jewish children. When you look at how improbable it is, like, think about all the mechanized attempts to exterminate Jewish children throughout thousands of years from Pharaoh before up until now, October 7th and beyond. It's nothing short of miraculous. And that's why the Jewish children are always targeted.

when I look at that, when I look at the, what the Torah tell, in my first book, I talk about the fifth commandment is the only commandment in the whole Torah, there's actually two commandments. There's two commandments in the whole Torah, we believe as Jews, there's 613 mitzvote, commandments, and there's only two that give a reward for what the action will lead to. Like, you eat kosher, it's not like, oh, you're going to, you know, grow big biceps or something like that. It doesn't say that. The fifth commandment says, honor your mind. mother and your parent and your father, so that your days may be long on this earth.

And what does that happen? Like, what does that mean? You're going to live long. If you honor your parents, you're going to die young, if you don't. So I talk about this in my first book. I had a very difficult relationship with my father who passed away, you know, 20 years ago, almost now. But in his last days, even though he had abandoned me as a child, I still honored him because

the Torah told me to. Like, that was the only reason I would do it. He was really a difficult person of my life growing up caused me a lot of pain. But because I was commanded to do this, I do believe that, A, my children would see this side of how their father acted with appropriate concern and attention honoring his father who wasn't really, you know, fully deserved of it. Maybe you could argue. So maybe I say in my book, it has, I don't know, hopefully I'll live a long life to 120, as I say. But it's given me more life in my days, even if not days of my life. And so it's a beautiful thing.

The Torah is more to me, it's more an instruction manual. You know, when you get a telescope or something, it comes with an instruction manual. How do you know how to use your new, you know, brand new camera, your new iPhone? You need some kind of instruction, whether somebody shows you or to have a life, like to live your life without any kind of guideline framework or whatsoever. It seems to me ludicrous. So the Torah to me in that sense. And the more that I practice it, and the more that I see my children raise with it, then I come to see the truth and how it can apply to my life. Not as a science book, though.

I never look to it as a science book. I think that's a mistake. And I think that's what causes controversy and people really get upset about it. But I don't look at it as a science book because I think God isn't telling us it's not a science book from the very outset of it. Well, I mean, I could see how you would explain that the Torah or the Old Testament is a manual for life, right? it explains human nature, it explains relationships, gives amazing advice on everything, right? But to say that people would say, I would imagine in the comments below, okay, fine, but there are many other books that can give you great advice that are not Torah and are not considered

divinely inspired or divinely written. And so, I mean, you're living by the laws of the Torah. You're taking these laws very seriously. Are you taking these laws very seriously because you believe the book? book has really good advice, or are you taking these laws very seriously because you believe that there is a creator? And as a scientist who studies the, in some ways, I think of cosmologists as the philosophers of the universe, right? You're not, you're not an astronomer where you're just talking about the planets, right? You're talking, I mean, you study the philosophy of the universe,

right? And so how do you reconcile the philosophy of the universe? And everything that you've studied and everything that you've learned with the philosophy of whether God is the creator, whether God not only is the creator of this universe or possibly even the multi-universe, right? And in the originator of this Big Bang, possibly, how do you reconcile that with the actual Old Testament, the actual manual for life? We can agree that the Torah or the Old Testament as a manual for life. But how do you reconcile that it is divinely given, divinely given by the creator

who possibly led to this big bank? That's the tough one, right? That's a very powerful question. And one I haven't really been asked before, but I have thought about it many times. So let me give you an analogy. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Let's say you hear there's a stock picker and he's so good at financial management and he's going to give you a tip, buy or sell Apple, stock or let's just say, you know, Apple stock, you're going to buy or sell it. He's just going to send you an email every week, you know, Monday morning, buy it or sell it. That's what he's going to do. And it either goes up or goes down. And he tells you this and you get this email and he says,

if I'm right, you keep paying me, you know, a dollar or whatever it is, $1,000, million, whatever it is. And you could make a lot of money if you knew it was going to go up or down. And for 10 weeks, he tells you the same thing. And it's correct. Buy, buy, buy, buy, sell, buy, sell, blah, blah, boy, I sell. He nails it every time. Every time nails it. And you're like, oh, my God, he did this 10 times in a row. Of course, I'm going to give him like a million, a billion.

I'm just going to keep following this guy, right? What you don't know is that he's told a thousand people this, right? And so it turns out you take the number two and you raise it to the 10th power, so 10 weeks in a row. And he's randomly sending out these things. Yes, buy or sell every, there'll be one person that had a continuous streak. It's like flipping 10 coin and knowing a pattern of 10 coins, right? So he didn't know the future.

But he's just, you were just one of a huge sample that happened to apply to. Okay. So now you know those odds and it's actually completely probable and expected even that that would happen to you. So he's not magically, he doesn't know the future. But what if he did that for everybody? And what if he was never wrong? Or what if like it was so convincingly all the different pieces of evidence? And what if like he had this notion and he had this understanding not just of like what you should do with your money, how you should be with your kids, your partner, how you should, you know, vote, how you should like and just had this notion.

not just of like what you should do with your money, how you should be with your kids, your partner, how you should, you know, vote, how you should, like, and just had this, this blueprint. And it was stunningly accurate, but it wasn't just you because you could tell your friend, like, oh, I got 10 picks in a row. And your friend would say, well, I only got seven in a row from the same guy. But you look at it and you see, well, there's a, there's a phrase in the Talmud, the signature of God is truth, right?

So you have to look for what's true. But that doesn't mean you read into things to find evidence to support the conclusion that you're trying to draw. What is that? That's confirmation bias. So I don't look to the Torah to say, like, well, today I kept Shabbas or the Sabbath and I didn't work and like my kids were nice to me or they didn't get bull, you know, whatever. I don't look at him as Dennis. You used to call it a celestial butler. I actually have a different relationship. I see that there's a global, you know, there's almost more power in the fact that it applies to so many people rather than it just applies to me. I feel like that can be a little bit narcissistic of me to think that way like, God, Not as real, again, does he care that I believe in him? I mean, add a boy, you know. And so the way that I approach it is to look for ways that are incontrovertible that could have been different. Let me give you an example.

You and I see the beautiful studio, these beautiful candies, the cover of my book. We see color vision. 99% of animals don't have color vision. Now, do we need color vision to live? Well, tigers get along pretty well without colored vision, right? And that's why zebras are black and white. They don't have red and green stripes because most animals only see in black and white. Why do we see in color?

It helps. It's another dimension. It gives us plet. Why do we have more than one type of taste like we just eat, you know, sugar water? Because there's a panoply of different, a spectrum of different experiences that were meant to have. Now, why is that? Evolutionary makes no sense. There's no, as I said, tigers do pretty well as a predator, much better than us.

Without color or vision, why don't we have black and white? There must be something different about human beings. the fact that there's so many different species of animals and apes and primates and whatever you want to say, there's only one type of human. These are beautiful things. Again, they're not proving. I can't, as a scientist, I can't prove the existence of God. So when I say, I believe in something and I can't prove it, right? If you could prove it, would you get credit, so not speak, for believing in?

I mean, word in Hebrew for faith is Amuna, right, which is where we get the word amen from. It is true. But it's not proof. That's a different word, I assume. So therefore, my approach is to look for the existence of God throughout the various ways that could be revealed that I, my tiny brain can comprehend and come to appreciate the blessings that we have, giving me gratitude for my existence. And then that leads to good, which is where we get the word good comes from God. So I think that's always going to be a question. I'm never going to, as I said, I'm sorry to disappoint.

I'm never going to say, here's proof of God. I think that's kind of crazy. Well, I guess as a scientist who studies the multi-universe, which is something that is so very deep. difficult to fully grapple with, right? You have to be okay with uncertainty. Right. By the way, you should read the book of Revelation now because when you talk about the Apple example of like another proof and another proof and another proof and another proof and another proof of your one who likes that, I mean, you might appreciate reading. I was an alter boy in my previous. Okay, so you're familiar with it. Let's talk about some more controversial stuff because as I mentioned at the beginning

of our little chat, one would have thought that sitting and talking about, astronomy and cosmology is an easy thing to chat about that people wouldn't get that emotional about or upset about or even religious about in some ways. It seems like there is a new dimension to conversations about the universe and the multi-universe and even just American accomplishments when it comes to moon landing or UFOs. And so let's start with the most controversial one, and that is UFOs. So you have studied this first. a very long time, I've watched you debate Joe Rogan a couple of years ago on his show, saying your claim is that it is very unlikely that we've had visits from outside of our planet.

It's been a couple of years. Do you still stand by that? You still believe that we have not had any visitors on planet Earth. Yes, I still subscribe to that. I'll never say as a scientist the probability is zero. aliens don't exist. The arguments are very compelling, right? There are, we know in our solar system there's eight planets. We know that in our galaxy, there's 200 billion stars, more or less like the sun. It's very, you know, sort of common star. Each one of those could have 10 to 100 planets around it.

And there might be a trillion or more galaxies, each with 200 billion. A trillion galaxies. Your brain just can't even like imagine how teeny we are. Think about this number. So the number 10 is one with a zero. Now imagine the number of planets in the observable universe is a one with 24 zeros. Okay. So million, million, million, million, or a trillion trillion.

Okay, it's literally these are astronomical numbers, right? So you got to say, oh, of course there's room for the, you know, there's got to be life out there somewhere. Well, let's just restrict ourselves to our galaxy, right? So there's 200 billion stars. Maybe there's a trillion planets, you know, that could harbor life maybe. that is a tiny number when you compare it to infinity. So what normally happens is people say they take a huge number, they multiply it by a small number, and that gets a big number, which is so the huge number is a number of planets.

The small number is the probability that each planet has, let's say it's one in a thousand. I think you still have, you know, 10 to the 8, 10 to the 21st, so a million, million, million, million individual planets with life on them in the universe. but the problem is that number could be as low as zero. It could actually be zero. The probability of life could be zero. We just don't know it. Or it could be as high as a very small number.

It's still a very small number. We know that we haven't. We've searched stars within 100 light years of Earth. In other words, stars, let me take one step back. Light travels at the fastest speed that information can propagate out. 186,000 miles per second so fast that the sun is 93,000. million miles away from Earth. That light takes eight minutes to get here.

For all we know, the sun could have disappeared, you know, seven minutes ago, and we won't find out for another minute, God forbid. But that could happen because nothing can travel faster in the speed of light. At that limit, the closest star traveling at the speed of light is four years travel time away. And there's no way the fastest Earthlings or Earth technology has ever gotten is one-one thousandth of that speed. So it would take four thousand years to get to the nearest. star traveling on a SpaceX rocket, okay?

The universe is enormous. That's the closest star. So that star is just finding out now that Joe Biden became president in 2020, okay? Or 20, yeah, end of 2020. So that stars four plus years away, Proxima Centurie. As you go out farther and farther, you come to the limit of where another star system could have received a radio broadcast from Earth because the very first radio broadcast from the 1930s, right?

It's called 100 light years. That means that the nearest stars within 100 light years of us could have found out that, you know, Prager University would exist someday and that there was Jesse Owens won the 1936 Olympic Gold Medal, 100 meter relay race. So they're just finding out about it now. We've searched every star within that region. There's a lot of them. No life. That doesn't prove anything. It doesn't prove that, you know, 101 light years away there's not a star that has a planet that has life.

I mean, or that one of these planets hasn't been searched thoroughly enough, right? Maybe we miss something. me, we landed in their Valley of the Dead Bones area. That's absolutely sure. Or they don't have technology or that they did exist. They had a powerful civilization with, you know, everything you could imagine, but they killed each other. Right. So there's something called the Drake equation, which parameterizes what's needed to have life in the universe that's technological.

Don't forget, if there was a slime microbe on Neptune, we wouldn't know about it right now because it has no technological way to communicate with us. So technology is advanced. Imagine there was like billions of dolphins swimming around Proximus and Tury's planet. You never know about it because they don't have technology. Right. So we typically use technology, but that's another form of confirmation bias, right? Who says they'll use the same, you know, maybe they use gravity to communicate instead of radio? But also maybe they will travel faster than how we have figured out to travel, right?

So we are saying that we can't, right? Really controversial subjects. Yes. You mentioned that. You wouldn't think these debates would get so. So what you're bringing up now is a concept related to how you could travel faster than the speed of light. And what typically people will say is, well, aliens, like you just said, Marissa, maybe they could. Maybe they have advanced technology.

So, okay. So now you're postulating like two levels, orders of magnitude beyond what we are capable. And that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But that's where it does kind of start to border on either, let's call it eschatology, where you know, like thinking about like how things end or or theology. Like aliens are almost in that sense. Now they're like gods. Because to like a chimpanzee or something, we're like a god. But we know we're not going.

Maybe they're not like gods. Maybe they're just scientifically more sophisticated and capable than we are for whatever reason. Right. But according to our laws of physics, as we understand them now, the fastest speed limit, the ultimate speed limit, is set by the speed of light. So to get here faster, to communicate faster, again, we have no evidence for that. We also have no evidence that they've been here. we, and that's fine. We don't have evidence even of life outside of Earth right now.

I mean, at the very existence of a hyper-advanced technology that would have the capability to come here, as people are testifying, they're testifying in Congress, eyewitness reports seen by pilots, by journalists, by all sorts of people. Even a friend of mine at Harvard, Avi Loeb, who is postulated that there's an object that's coming towards close to the earth in about a month. and that has some probability greater than zero to be extraterrestrial technology based on its direction that it's heading towards us, its composition, its brightness, its size, and he's done a lot of work on this, and he's an eminent Harvard scientist.

Does Avi know where it's possibly coming from? It's hard to tell where it's coming from. It's like, imagine like some bees are coming towards you. Like, you know the hive that they're coming from, but you don't know exactly like where, like, which honeycomb, salic. from. So, no, he doesn't exactly where it's coming from, but he knows exactly where it's going to. And he's worried and he's put out this clarion. I had a live debate with him and a very

prominent skeptic named Michael Shermer who doesn't believe. He thinks it's completely natural. Please tell me it's not landing in Jerusalem. No. That's right. Too soon to joke about that? It's right. No, it's not. Well, Iron Dome can take care of it. I think they're safe. So these are really fascinating questions. What happens, though, is people do become politicized, tribal. Like, you're suppressing this information. You're a gatekeeper. You're just a shill for NASA and you're grifting. You know, aliens exist and we're hiding in from. And it is to give these, you know, UFO, true believers, I call them, to give them credit, you know, there has been an awful lot of secrecy.

There's been a lot of government experts suppression as we know. Why? Why would the government suppress any sort of information about UFOs, whether they exist or not exist? What's the purpose? So we have many examples throughout history. Giodano Bruno. He was an astronomer. He was actually a Catholic priest. 1600, he was burned at the stake. He claimed that every star that you could see was another world like the Earth.

And it could be another planet. And there could be people there. The Catholic Church, I know it, again, you know, I haven't been an altar boy in 40 plus years. But they believe that it was impossible for Jesus to have had an opportunity to visit more than the Earth. And he obviously did his works and miracles on Earth. right? So he had no opportunity. So that was heretical. And Galileo, just a few decades later, he made a postulate that the sun was the center of the entire universe, which was our solar system, not the Earth, that went against the bottom. Now, why did they kill these people or in Galileo's case

imprison him for the remainder of his life? Because these notions were disruptive. They were potentially anarchic. They could have led to mass rebellion. And at the time, they believed in complete and utter censorship. Nowadays, we don't have censorship by an index in the Catholic Church, but what's the next most powerful entity? Probably more powerful than a church was at the time. And that's the U.S. government and other governments. How does the government keep control over Americans, let's say, if there's no information

about UFOs? What is the incentive? I understand the incentive with Galileo. They wanted the church to be the center of everything. and if you deny or challenge the church, that means lack of control. How does the United States keep Americans under control by not knowing about UFOs if they do exist? So how, I'll explain in a minute. Also, why is the truth insecure?

That's right. It should never be insecure. If they have nothing to hide, what is the purpose of creating secrecy around it? Okay. Own it all. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari.

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The despicable way America treated Native American populations, both intentionally and unintentionally the spread of disease. That wasn't intentional, but it didn't happen and killed many, many Native Americans. It happened in every culture on Earth. I'm not singling out of America, as it as being uniquely bad or something stupid like that. But encounters with advanced civil civilizations and primitive civilizations would inevitably lead to mass devastation. There's almost no way that it would turn out to be completely benevolent unless they're truly godlike, and in which case that's, you know, whole other podcasts we can talk about. But so the theory, the idea, the hypothesis that UFO believers postulate is that we are being

in contact. We have been in contact. We not only have spacecraft technology, but we have biological material they're called. They don't say pilots or bodies. They call it biologic material. This is a famous Air Force service member named David Grush testified and the existence of craft and biological specimens within it. So why would they suppress it? Because of mass hysteria that might be unleashed if we were encountering a new civilization that is likely to destroy, you know, Earth and not just Americans.

So this would be a threat, existential threat to human. The government seems to have no issue with creating mass hysteria on a regular basis. We just went through COVID. That was mass hysteria. So one of the things that is dangerous to do is to postulate that, you know, that from one thing we can extrapolate many different things. Like, for example, yes, COVID was a complete, not a disaster. Were there people that were, you know, threatened and their lives were ultimately taken by COVID? Of course they were.

Did the vaccine, the Trump vaccine Operation Warps? Did that save millions of lies? Yes, it did. did it also have complications? So the problem, and you and I talked about this off-camera, is when there's ambiguity. The human mind hates ambiguity. There's a Yiddish phrase that the guy who stands in the middle of the street gets hit from both sides. Right?

So when you try to do ambiguous. It feels like Prager U. We sit in the middle of the street. We get hit from all sides. Exactly. So the notion that you could say exclusively good or exclusively bad, now the problem that I see with their argument that the government is suppressing things to avoid. mass hysteria, is that it assumes incredible competency by the U.S. government, which I would say COVID revealed is not entirely true, right? So there were experts. There are people like my friend,

Dr. J. Baratariah, who's now the director of the National Institute of Health, who was clarion call suppressed, you know, and targeted by Fauci and Collins, you know, to make him seem, and they called him a fringe epidemiologist. They ruined his life and almost ruined his career. Thank God. He's appointed now and doing great work. But the point is, you can have have experts, and we shouldn't have experts, we should have consensus, because then if you don't have it and you abandon science, society's at risk. And so you have to trust, but you also verify. And a good scientist should always be skeptical. Richard Feynman, as I said in my second or third Prigreux video, follow the science that's called tongue in cheek, right? And that was made during the

COVID era. I got a lot of flack for it. Yeah, you were like, don't believe experts. Now we believe no experts. So Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate at Caltech, not far from here, he said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. If Einstein thought, well, Newton's smart guy, he's my hero, he's smart, he's an expert, I'm not going to doubt him, we never would have had relativity. If Einstein was the last word and he said the universe is eternal, we'd never have the big bag. So you have to trust, but you have to verify. And that's what a good scientist should do. Yeah, I mean, I think the example of what happened with the COVID lockdowns is a good one, because while the U.S. government and the entire world was trying to suppress information, we all knew plenty of

of really credible scientists who were speaking the truth about COVID. Dr. Scott Atlas, several ones. Do you feel like in the case of UFOs, there are people who are really credible who are able to prove that not only is there a highly technological existence somewhere in the multi-universe, not only do they exist, but they were able to actually make it to planet Earth.

Not only were they able to make it to planet Earth, to planet Earth, but the U.S. government and all the governments around the world have been able to suppress the information and hide it. So that would take, you know, an incredible conspiracy. Don't forget when you have a conspiracy like, you know, JFK or Epstein files or whatever, you have a conspiracy. Conspiracy means con together, breathing, spire, respiration, right? It means we're whispering, we're telling me, Marissa, we're going to get this, you know,

thing about, you know, the arrival, you know, I don't know, the young Turks or whatever. We're going to do something, right? It means that you have to do it. Now, it would also have to be like, I would have to cover it up and conceal it from my wife and my kids and my friends and my and my coworkers. The conspiracy network grows exponentially out from a single person. So some of the claims are that there was a craft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and that they still have bodies there and it's part of the theme in the movie Independence Day. You can see it. And these would be incredible conspiracies to be maintained over decades.

Now, because the human mind hates ambiguity, when ambiguity is present, it releases dopamine because it's curiosity. Curiosity feels really good. A friend of mine, been on the podcast. He's a psychotherapist at Brown University. He has a way of overcoming smoking. His name is Judd Brewer and overcoming eating disorders and all that. And it's always like when you're hungry, you're about to reach for the cigarette or

you're about to reach for the milk dud. Why am I hungry? Am I really hungry? Let's explore this. Because curiosity is that also. form of dopamine release. So when you're curious about things, because they're ambiguous, it gives you a dopamine hit. Well, let's say there are aliens. That would be amazing. But let's say they're not telling us about aliens. I'm even more curious. I'm being conspired against.

All these things wrapped together. Again, good scientists never say it almost has like this religious effect. It absolutely does. My friend Michael Shermer has, you know, Schumer's law, which is that any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God. Because they would have to do that. As you said, like, you were kind of casual about it. You're like, well, maybe they can go fast on this field. That's an enormous statement. Like, you would be like 100 Nobel prizes if you could prove that that was true. I mean, that's one of the most thoroughly tested things that we know as scientists on Earth is that the speed of light is the hardest limit that is known to humanity. And maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing,

but it is the way it is. We know them. No ways to violate this in the known universe. Again, a good scientist will say, but you have to now layer onto these different things. You have to say speed of light can be violated. The technology is. here it's being covered up. Their aliens exist, which means life exists on another planet. We haven't even gotten into how hard it is to make life, how hard it was to make conscious life on Earth,

from pure chemicals to then get to conscious people that can have a podcast conversation with Wi-Fi technology beaming it throughout the entire planet to get to that level. And then you just talked about something that supersedes us by 100 orders of magnitude. We have no evidence for any of that. It doesn't mean it's not possible,

but you have to assess the individual probabilities and then come up with some framework to assess the evidence, but always, always, update your confidence in your hypothesis. In other words, you get new evidence. It should cause you to reevaluate. You know, if we go to every single,

if we go to the moon and just go everywhere on the moon and we find no life there. That doesn't prove there are no aliens in the universe, but it proves there's no aliens on the moon at least. Now do that for every planet.

Now do that for every star. In principle, that's possible. There's no law of physics says you can't do that. But we just haven't done that yet, but there's also no evidence for the positive either. Okay, so Dr. Professor Keating.

Yes. The moon landing. Yes. Talk to me about the moon landing. This has become another very, very interesting conversation on the internet, mostly coming out of the United States, by the way. These are Americans who are saying that it's very likely. Those are most of the alien sightings, by the way. Americans make up 5% of the world's population, something like 45% of the sightings.

Most of the sightings are around military bases, which is not surprising if they're done by military or maybe they're a psychological operation. so-called sciops or black ops or skunk works was built right here the the uh the sr 71 was built here the f-17 nine hawk was built in burbank so maybe people are seeing actually military operations thinking that these are UFOs that is a hundred thousand times more likely than a UFO from another you know civilization or another dimension again that doesn't prove in one or the other but we know about that we also know about do people know that most of the sightings are around military bases i feel like that they don't know that pretty significant yeah people people are talking about that not only military base but nuclear sites, apparently.

My friend Jesse Michaels talks about this. Most of the sightings come from nuclear bases. But then also, if you just do control, scientific, you know, you have a variable and you have a control. If you say how often are UFOs claimed when the planet Venus is not visible from the Earth? And UFO sightings go way down. So that means a lot of people are confusing Venus for another UFO or something like that. And it is. It's beautiful.

And you look at Venus. It's a, you know, the goddess planet, right? And you're like, go back to fifth grade and under the universe. Understand the planets. That's right. Okay. Okay. The moon landing.

Explain to me, just summarize this for me. It's honestly too hard for me to even wrap my head around. What is the claim that America never made it to the moon? And why make that claim at all? So this is... Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

It's one of the most depressing kind of encounters that I've had in the public communication of science on my podcast. It's not something that's debated at all. Like, even in science and academia, there are professors of physics, legitimate professors of physics, who believe that there are UFO craft and so forth that have been here. There's probably, you know, less than five people that believe that we didn't go to the moon that have academic credentials. So it's like many, many times orders of magnitude lower. people that doubt the existence of the moon landing by expert scientists than believe that there are UFOs, okay? But this has become so popular with pundits, with podcasters, two or three in particular, that seem to want to deny not only the greatest accomplishment of America in the last hundred years, but probably the greatest technological, sociological, and cooperative endeavor of all humanity leading up to the late 1900s. Okay? So the moon landing required hundreds of thousands of people working across almost a decade of

time since Kennedy made the challenge to go to the moon. It revolved around three different branches of the government, you know, from the military to public science, private science, and then congressional approval and fun. It was incredible accomplishment. There's nothing, never been anything like it, you know, before or since. And I think it's that and since thing that gets people. They'll latch on to the fact that we went to the moon, 1969, landed there famously in July 20th, 1969. And then we haven't been back since.

I mean, they went until 1973 or four. And then they stopped. So 50 years have gone by, okay? My whole life, basically. We haven't been back to the moon. That's really weird. Don't things get easier with time? Don't computers get smaller, faster, cheaper?

So this is weird. Like, this is strange. So maybe they lied to us about COVID. So they lied to us about the moon. landing. And you see it from one podcaster in particular. You probably know her name, if I mentioned it. And she has on people routinely that attempt to denigrate along with other accomplishments like winning World War II and defeating Hitler. What is the purpose of denigrating this big achievement?

Well, one thing is that it gets a lot of engagement. It's that dopamine hit that they know people get addicted to. Oh, my God, I'm part of the conspiracy theory. And some of it seems just plausible enough to her and to her audience, for example, that, you know, okay, well, that is strange. We haven't been to the moon in 50 years. That is true. I mean, I'm not disputing that. That is true.

So why is that? Okay. So what is your answer? Why have we been back to the moon? So I've been to Antarctica twice. I've been to the South Pole twice. It's the very bottom of the world. It's almost inaccessible nine months of the year.

You can't even get in or out. there's only 45 people that are there right now as we're taping. It's still the winter coming up on spring there. But at that same time, it's a very remote place. So human beings first got to the South Pole in 1911. They reached the South Pole and then they never, and the Norwegian made it there first. His name was Amundsen. No Norwegian went back to the South Pole for 80 years.

Now, why is that? Well, the moon landing of the 1900s was getting to the South Pole. You know that no one had ever set foot on Antarctica until the early 1900s. And it became like the space race. Why did they do it for national pride, for looking for resources, for the discovery, the challenge of doing it? The same reasons. Why do we go to the moon? As Kennedy said, not because it's easy because it's hard.

When you do hard things, you develop capabilities you previously never had. So the same could have been said by South Pole landing deniers if this podcaster existed in a 1940 or something like. Why hasn't Norway been back? I'm just asking questions, Marissa. It's just not enough of a focus for somebody to do it because they're not the first anymore. Right. And there's not the, exactly. Imagine if Neil Armstrong stepped out of the eagle and he stepped onto a Soviet flag, a Russian flag, right?

It would have been the most humiliating, depressing thing in history, right? Because we spent so much money, so much times. And they were trying to get there. And we were in a battle for global supremacy in the 1960s. Same thing happened in the 1910s. It was England, Norway, America, to some extent. extent. So it was a national pride to do that, to conquer another continent. I mean, there's seven continents. So to get there in the moon, you know, some people think, well, it should be

another state or another continent. So exactly the same thing could have been said, but wasn't. So once you get there, it's, you know, the thrill is gone, so to speak, and the challenge. And you learn most of the interesting things by getting there the first. Now, the reason that she claims that we haven't been there back is because we never went there in the first place. That's very different. She's saying we haven't been back because we never went there the first time. You can't go back if you never went there, right? And she uses these idiotic, you know, pseudoscientist that, you know, has provided evidence to her that there's, that it would be a death trap to go into space. Now, this is complete nonsense because we've sent astronauts not only to the moon, but to the Earth's orbit, where the exact same things would come into play.

She's completely ignorant about that. I made a video about that, like this proving all the different myths that she and this other guy that she quotes has put forth. but ultimately to answer your question, why are they doing it? I think there's an urge to, you know, take on, you know, take on the myths and speak truth to power and just ask questions. But, you know, asking questions is sort of okay. But, you know, as I said, like, if I said to her, you know, how many times do you drink alcohol while you're pregnant with your third child? Like, you know, I'm just asking questions to her, you know, like, I mean, it's not appropriate in that sense. Now, it's fine to ask questions.

You're saying these questions are laced with an agenda. He was an agenda, right? If I was trying to take her down or say something like that, you know, I'm just asking question. Why are you so defensive? You know, but it's not done in good things. What about the claim that there, how is it possible to have footage from the moon? Yeah, they often say like, oh, the flag. The flag was like waving in the breeze, but there's no wind of the moon, right?

So how did that work? So NASA knew that. So they put inside the flag wires to keep it suspended, okay? But here's the greatest piece of proof. What was the country that we were in competition with to get to the moon first? We were in Russia, the USSR. So they were trying to get there before us. So they actually sent a probe to get to the moon to crash into the moon on the same day that we went there.

And a telescope on Earth in England happened to pick up the impact of that craft hitting the moon while Neil Armstrong was walking around. Okay, that was on that day, the very day that we landed there. So we knew exactly then. And subsequently to then, there have been people. completely disconnected, they're not related to NASA, scientists, friends of mine, we study the position of all the bodies in the universe, including the moon.

Because for one thing, the moon is connected to the Earth's gravity. It actually causes the tides, high tide, and low tide on the Earth. That's what causes not the sun, not the rotation of the Earth, but the moon's gravitational pull. It turns out you can measure properties of gravity and look for signs of what's called quantum gravity and you can measure the position of the moon extremely accurately. But how do you do that?

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon, they put mirrors on the moon that reflect light, shine from the earth, to bounce back to the earth, from the earth, back to the earth, and we know the speed of light, I told you before. So if you measure the time that it takes from you to shoot out a pulse of laser light until it comes back into your detector, you know the position of the moon to less than the fingernail on your pinky. So this is an incredible accomplishment. Why are they doing that? They're not doing that to prove the existence of the moon landing. They're doing that to study the effects of gravity. Every country on Earth that's technological has done the same thing. They use the exact landers.

Other probes have flown over all the lunar landing sites. They've not only seen the spacecraft there, which they also claim is impossible for even a spacecraft to go through. So they claim it would kill a human being to go through this radiation belt called the Van Allen belt. It was total nonsense. NASA has known about that for decades. In fact, NASA, the ultimate irony is that these podcasters, they say that it's too dangerous to get there. How do they know it's too dangerous? Because NASA did a study that showed that it potentially could be radiation exposure if you went there, if you did it the wrong way.

So isn't it ironic? They're using NASA's data to refute NASA. They like NASA when they like NASA when they don't like NASA when they don't like NASA. It's the theme today, confirmation bias. Yes. Okay. So I know that you work a lot with telescopes and you're just in love with, you're my telescope man, right? I'm curious if you're now studying how AI can supercharge the telescopes because so much of what you're.

studying is what you're able to see. That's right. Yeah. So that's a very good question. So AI and telescopes, that's kind of a, peanut butter and chocolate, you know, it's just champagne and caviar or whatever your analogy wants to be. It's such a perfect, you know, coupling and marriage of two different types of technology. One old and ancient, you know, 400 years ago, the telescope was invented. And the telescope, I said, is a time machine, but it's also kind of like a space machine because magentaa means distant scope means to view. It means a distance viewer, but you're, you things that happened in the past.

I see you, not instantaneously, light takes about two nanoseconds to travel the distance across this table. In that time, you could have disappeared or whatever. Something could have, it's not going to happen that much. But I'm seeing an earlier, younger version of you. If you keep going back farther and farther in the room, I'm seeing things earlier and earlier. So not only are you seeing things that are different and far away, you're seeing them as they were when they were younger.

So that allows you to time travel and space travel. So it's a magical thing. Now, there are so many objects. I already told you that there's a trillion trillion planets potentially in our entire universe. So to look at a trillion trillion, so let me put it this way. If you were to count just one, two, three, like count one every second. Yeah. A million seconds is about two weeks.

A billion seconds is about 31 years. And a trillion seconds is just an incredible number that we can't even comprehend, thousand times bigger than 31 years, 31,000 years, a trillion seconds. So imagine counting. Now, that's just one trillion. Now, a trillion, you just cannot comprehend that. Now, imagine you wanted to see all that data. The human mind couldn't comprehend it.

We can collect the data. We can see these images, and maybe you can put them on screen, like the James Webb Space Telescope, has seen incredible wonders and galaxies and distant things and stars that are so young. They just appeared right after the universe's birth. There's so many of them, we cannot process them. And so we use AI. We use computer algorithms to search for patterns and then surf. the ones that are most interesting to us.

And where those could really pay a lot of dividends is actually in the search for giant versions of this guy, this asteroid, this meteorite. So this meteor is a fragment of an asteroid that existed because the formation of our solar system happened four and a half billion years ago. This is just a tiny fragment of an asteroid.

Again, you can get these on our website. These objects, if you imagine them the size of Los Angeles or even of California, some of them are huge, right? if they impact the earth, again, another theme from the movie's Deep Impact and, and, what's the one with Bruce Willis? I just saw. I am so bad. Oh, yes.

Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, of course. So bad, but so good. They go up there and they blow it up with a nuclear bomb. It's like the worst thing you could do. But there's over, there's something like a trillion of these objects of this size and much, much bigger. So they can actually end life on Earth. There's no way human beings can search them all.

So the Vera Rubin Telescope is located in Chile, not a lot. far from where our telescope called the Simon's Observatory is in the Andes Mountains of South America. And they've been searching, they found in like a couple of hours, less than a day, they found 2,000 asteroids that could potentially have, they could have been headed on a collision course for Earth. They found out that they're not. And they're going to find literally billions of them over the next 10 years. And some of those that they'll find inevitably will have potential encounter with the Earth, not in, you know, the next few years. We know most of the asteroids that are on a collision course potentially for Earth, the nearest one that could pose a

danger to a city if it happened to hit in the middle of a city, you know, is not expected to come within the next 20 years or something like that. But what if they find something else that's far away or has some weird properties like this thing Avi Lob is talking about? They're going to find thousands of those and some of those could prevent, we could prevent them by discovering them early like a cancer tumor, God forbid. You can discover early only with AI. Discover and do what? You could potentially deflect them. with different technologies. In extreme cases, maybe you would blow them up or something like that, but that makes

millions of fragments of them. But some of the techniques of my friend Phil Lubin at UC Santa Barbara is working on a space telescope in reverse. So a telescope collects light, focuses it down. But if you put a light at the center of the telescope and shine it outwards, you get this blast or laser beam, basically. And if you encountered an asteroid that was going to hit the Earth in 20 years, you could actually nudge it out of an orbit that would be on a...

a totally harmless orbit that would never hit the earth. So he's working on technology like that. Wow. Crazy. All right. Final very big question. Yeah. If you could ask God a question, what would that question be?

I think, you know, it would be so hard. I couldn't ask just one. I'd have to ask a question within a question within a question as a podcaster. You know that, right? You have to ask multiple questions. But one more final question. This is one final question. for me, you know, I would, I think, you know, the question of Theodicy is, is ultimately the atheist best, you know, friend, right? To say, why do bad things happen to good people? You know, why does that happen? You know, we know how it happens. We know when it happens is a book. Cushner wrote that book, when, Beth. But we don't ultimately know why. And so, you know, if God exists, I have to treat it as a provisional statement subject to the scientific method and gathering of evidence, right?

that would be kind of the, you know, the ultimate thing to ask. Like, as in why bad things happen to good people? Yeah, why does cancer, you know, exist? Why does the mosquito, Dennis used to say what is? Although I answered that question for him once, I told him. The mosquito actually was very powerful deterrent for the British in 1776. It actually killed a lot of them, malaria, and the Americans at the time were more immune to it. So without the mosquito, we might not have won our independence, which is, you know, as many people have Victor David Hansen called it, the greatest things happened since the birth of Jesus.

So I think that this, the mosquito has a purpose. So I wouldn't ask like that. I wouldn't even ask something scientific because I think that's, you know, so limiting of what the fullness of the human experience is. There's so many things we can't understand. But to have this concrete understanding, if you could understand it, why do good thing? I mean, which is more annoying to you? I'll let me put on my podcast or how. Like when something good happens to someone who's evil or when something bad happens to someone who's good, what affects you more?

I mean, for me, it's not what affects me more. I think the true test of faith is to live with uncertainty. I believe that God wants us to be okay with uncertainty and expects us to be living in uncertainty because as you, grow through the human experience, you realize that we're constantly wrong as humans. And I think God wants us to maintain that humility. I think it's why we don't really understand the afterlife. You know, Jews don't focus so much on the afterlife, not because we don't believe in the afterlife, but because we're trained, we're trained to live with faith and uncertainty. So just like 20 years ago, if you would have asked me, could I call you on FaceTime with my cell phone? I would say,

what, are you crazy? Like, of course you can. I can't call, like I can't see you and at the same time. Of course, that cannot happen, right? 20 something years later, it suddenly happens, right? And so I think God is teaching us this lesson that these things will happen later on and we need to accept the fact that we just don't know everything right now. It keeps us humble. It keeps us graceful. And I think it keeps us believing. Yeah. And so why do bad things happen to really good people? I don't think we're able to answer that question. And I think we can't answer those questions because we're we're expected to live in faith, you know. And so that's my.

Yeah, I have a TED talk where I talked about this statement in the Talmud where it said that a man should have two pockets and a woman. And in each pocket, there should be a note. And in one pocket, you pull out the note and you read, you know, the whole world was created for me, for my benefit. And you pull out the other pocket and says, I am nothing but dust and ashes, right? And so those two things, which I think is endemic to what we need to be as a scientist, too. What you said exactly applies to my colleagues, my students, right?

Because if you're just arrogant, you know, there's an old joke where a scientist comes up to God and says, hey, God, you know, we can make a man at a dust just like you. And then God says to the scientist, oh, yeah, I'll prove it. So the scientist says, oh, here, give me some dust. And God says, get your own dust. Yeah. You know. So I think we have to be humble. NASA wants to say the same thing to those podcasters.

That's right. But Dust, you know, can also cause you to lose the overall prize. But you also have to be a little bit, you know, if you're, if you just said, look, it's unknowable, I'll never know what, what wireless communication is, and I'll never make a transistor, then we're stuck. And we're the only creatures that we know about that have consciousness and have technology. And therefore, we should exercise those, you know, you were given gifts, you know, that ordinary people might not have.

An athlete has gifts that or a scientist or a Nobel Prize winner. We should use those gifts not only to say like, oh, we're not perfect and let's be all humble and despondent. No, you should also have a little bit of chutzpah, swagger, that you can dare to do great things. Yeah, I love it. Well, what a great way to end this conversation. We could keep going on and on. But really grateful that you're here and thanks for a lot of the clarity and just a lot of food for thoughts. Absolutely, right.

You know, hopefully God really does love this world, as the Mishnah says. And while there may have been other worlds that have been destroyed, as they say in the, and as it said in the Talmud, hopefully this world is here to stay. I hope so. Thank you. Keep paying your taxes until we find out more. Sadly, I'm in California. I have to.

Thanks.