Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Universe Didn’t Come From Nothing | The Peter McCormack Show

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

I joined Peter McCormack to dig into one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only seem to move in one direction? My answer might surprise you. Time may not be a fundamental feature of reality at all, and understanding space, matter, and energy still doesn't mean we understand the universe itself. We cover: - What may have existed before the Big Bang - Why something can't truly come from nothing - How my work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves from the universe's earliest moments - What dark matter actually means - Why even a film as detail-obsessed as Interstellar still gets the physics wrong. The conversation then turns from cosmic time to human time: mortality, family, meaning, and attention. We get into UFO disclosure, the collapse of institutional trust, and whether AI can ever reproduce the embodied human insight that let Einstein transform physics. My take: AI remains a tool built to serve humanity, and it's time we stop apologizing for humanity's greatness. ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. We understand space, we understand matter, we understand energy, we don't understand why time works the way it does. Actually, the reason is because there is no time.

Time doesn't exist. The essence of my research is to ask that question, what happened on the Sunday before the Big Bang? Something can't truly come from nothing. We're the only creatures that know we're going to die. That means we're only creatures that know how precious life is. We're really wasting an opportunity now to just improve humanity. It feels a little bit civilizational. Dude, we have to stop apologizing for humanity's greatness.

AI is a tool. It is not a human. Its job is to serve humanity. The computer doesn't know what it means to be human. It only knows what humans have already done. If our lives had a forward button, we'd all be dead. It's not time that's limited. It's attention.

All right, Brian. Good see you, man. Peter, thanks for making the short jaunt across the pond, as they say. Actually, two ponds. Two bars. Yeah, happy to do it. And I was originally, like, so excited to talk to you because I'm, I look up at the sky and I wonder how we're here and why we're here. And I was all prepared to come to you and ask you about my, like, biggest questions about the universe and how it works.

And then I watched your show with Sean Ryan. And I was like, huh. And I then listened to Sean with Tucker. And I was like, this has hit me at a time where I'm thinking about life and whatever. And I saw you're quite introspective. And so what I was really thinking, I think where I'm one of the time. who asked you first, it's like, obviously you built a career looking up at the sky and wandering. And now it seems like you're looking internal a lot. What's the connection?

I think since I was a kid, I always cared about only the biggest topics. You know, I couldn't get interested in sports or, you know, stocks or, you know, Bitcoin. I was a late adopter, but thanks to you, I came to it. But the fact for me is, yeah, I do recognize maybe more than most because I study something that's 14 billion years old. But I also, constantly recognize how fast time is changing for me right now with family with, you know, my work, with my research, sometimes with the podcast. And, you know, for me, the ultimate goal and the thing that fascinates me the most is time. We understand space. We understand matter. We understand energy. We don't understand why time works the way it does. You know, for example,

if I take a pendulum, you know, I don't bring a pendulum, but I have a telescope. Here's a pendulum swinging back and forth like a grandfather clock, right? If I turn away for one second and you look back at it, you can't tell the way it started. Like, did you remember where I started it? That I start like this? That I start like that? You don't remember. But the fact is the laws of nature are invariant. They don't care about which direction you started it, which direction you're looking at it from. They're invariant. They're constant. So that means the laws of this pendulum don't care about time. They can't tell time. Yes, you use it in a grandfather clock. That's a separate thing. There's a ratchet. There's a mechanism. Whatever. I don't get into that. But the actual

laws of physics are invariant. They don't care about time. So do for, you know, a bowling ball. So two for an electron going around an atom. They don't recognize why time has an arrow. We don't understand that. And we talk about the Higgs boson or we'll talk about, you know, extra dimensions or we'll talk about, you know, the big bang, right? But we don't understand time. I mean, it's sort of embarrassing to me. And so I look for the embarrassment. I look for like, what do we claim that we understand beyond the level that we actually do? And I like to poke and prod and annoy my colleagues by saying, we don't really know what we claim to know. And I think a lot of times we're selling people on a bill. of goods that these extra dimensions and all these fantastical things, maybe even, you know, intelligent aliens. It's pretty much founded on a foundation that's relatively weak. And I'm just hoping the public doesn't find out about it. My job is to expose it to it. I'm an experimental scientist.

Let me have a first step back. I'm an experimental physicist. I'm not a theorist, Brian Green, Erguinestein, you know, Michiocaku. I don't talk about airy-fairy things, you know, multiple dimensions and curled up, you know, things like that. But I do talk about what can we actually. measure? What can we interrogate about Mother Nature or God, if you like? And what can we know while we have this limited capacity to know things? So I'm desperately aware of this clock ticking in my

heads. You know, if I wasn't aware of it from looking at my kids growing up or wrinkles going on my face or gray hairs coming in, I would otherwise be obsessed. This is my one obsession, time. Why does it go the way it does when no law physics mandates that it be so? Well, what is time, though? So this is another very frustrating topic. When you ask a physicist, what is time? The most cogent definition that I've ever heard comes from a Nobel laureate, Frank Wilczek, and he said, time is what a clock measures. Okay, thanks very much.

That's like a totology. It's like, you know, San Diego weather forecast. It's pretty much a constant throughout. That doesn't help you. It doesn't really do anything. It's a totology. So I said, well, you know, that's very fine and good. but actually the reason is because there is no time. Time doesn't exist. Multiple things that are

proxies for time exist. One of them is, like I said, the hair color on your chin, the size of your toddler and then, you know, a couple of years later, the sensation of being with a beautiful girl and how that, you know, for me, my wife, you know, time passes by until one of the kids comes in and interrupts, right? These are all different notions of time. Some say time has more than one dimension. our friend Eric Weinstein claims that time actually has multiple dimensions, and then that might not preclude time travel as ordinary conceptions and physics seem to do. Now, that's one extreme, but the fact is we, you know, time is essentially a quantity that we don't understand how it came to be, and yet everything is predicated on it. My job is predicated on the universe coming into existence. There was some day, right? Peter, we sit here today. It's a Monday, you know, a good. God help us. We'll get through it with enough coffee and good conversation. But we sit there on a Monday. We go back 24 hours. It was Sunday. Keep going back, back, back, back weeks, months, years, billions of years. There was some day 13.826 billion years ago that you could say in terms of

24 hours. There was no sun. There was no earth. There was no human. But the universe began on that day, right? What does that mean? The universe began at a moment? Well, how does something initiate a moment when there's no moments before that moment to initiate. What is it pushing back on, right? There's no action without reaction, right? So if you're pushing on this table, I move backwards, right? It's basic law of your countryman, Isaac Newton. But if there's no time, how does time come into existence?

These are very, like, mysterious concepts, right? So the essence of my research is to ask that question, what happened on the Sunday before the Big Bay? Like, what was that? There's a notion you can conceive of it, but you can't actually say for sure that there wasn't a universe for which time to emerge out of or out of which time has emerged. So is time emergent? Does it only kind of correspond to the mutual agreement of all other particles, matter, conscious beings in the universe? Or is it

completely independent? Is it a dimension? Like space has, you know, three dimensions of space, at least according to non-strength theorists who believe that there's 10 dimensions, right? But for us, we have this notion that time sort of is this inexorable thing that just keeps proceeding, but we have no idea why. So my research is sort of focused on those questions. Why does time have a direction? Can we slow down time? Can we modulate time?

We can go back and forth in space, right? You can go left. You didn't have to come here, right? So you can go wherever you like in space, you can remember the past. Why can't you remember the future? And if anything, does that have to do with the connection to the origin of the universe itself? These are the questions That's like a rival, isn't it?

Remembering in the future? Oh, yeah? Yeah, well, that was the concept. You've seen that film, right? A while ago, I actually, I feel like it's very, it's very painful for me to watch science fiction movies, even though I like them. I get into them. But, you know, for example, watching contact or watching interstellar, one of your favorite

movies, I understand. And I brought you this book, which I wrote, but with an interview with Kip Thorne, who is the scientific director, who not only advised. Christopher Nolan on the film, but he also wrote papers about the simulation and the detailed, accurate, and precise simulations that he did for the first. I mentioned writing a paper in a movie, you know, with your director

production, whatever. He wrote a scientific paper published in a physics journal about how they rendered the physics so exquisitely accurately. However, yes, the physics is sort of accurate, but there's so many problems with it, you know, from an experimentalist point of it. You just hear. I see, I see just nonsense. Like, contact. We're going to generate a wormhole like this, like, interstate. dollar uses, right? We're going to, and we have the spinning contraption that like involves, like a 1974 Chevrolet bucket seat, you know, from an old car and that you have to wear your seatbelt.

And then if you don't, you'll get, and I'm just like, what does that have to do? Like, what does a spinning, you know, gyroscope have to do with opening up a wormhole, which, by the way, Peter, has to already been pre-established the exit point. Let's say you could even make a wormhole, which is completely not, there's a zero evidence that wormholes exist. Okay. It's a theoretical concept, like, you know, anything, I mean, we can make a theoretical concept that there's a purple unicorn on Neptune's North Pole, and it's theoretically, you can envision it. Is it completely forbidden by the laws of physics?

No, but does that mean it's probable? Absolutely not. In this case, you know, they make a wormhole fine. Let's say you could make a wormhole. Where did you establish the other end of the wormhole we're going to come out? Like, did you violate, you know, time. You have to time travel to that point

where the wormhole emerges on Cooper's, you know, planet, whatever, and interstellar. I'm sorry to burst your bubble if this. I know it's one of your favorite movies. but in reality, it's completely implausible. So actually, you know, tweeted out a couple months ago when Project Hail Mary came out, I said, actually, Project Hail Mary, which involves a bacteria that eats the sun, is actually more scientifically plausible than interstellar.

And people are like, what are you talking about? You fucking idiot. But, you know, there's far more things that are unimaginable and improbable, if not impossible, in interstellar than even in Project Hell Mary. But even with time, like the concept of time for us, for day to day. It's like a human construct that we need, because it's a tool. Time is a tool. Sure. And we base it around like a 24-hour day, and that's how we plan our life. But time itself is just forward motion? Well, not necessarily. So motion and time are connected

because through velocity, and there's an ultimate velocity, and there's an ultimate degree of motion, which will stop at zero Kelvin after great scientists from Glasgow. The notion of zero Kelvin, where motion stops is a definition that could involve time if time is driven by the laws of thermodynamics. So people express the unit directionality of time according to them because of the second law of thermodynamics that says the entropy only increases. And they say, well, time only increases. You can't go backwards in time. So therefore time only increases. There's some correlation between entropy. But you can actually locally reduce entropy all the time. Like we just had coffee, we had milk poured into it.

It's become completely disordered now. You can't separate the coffee and the milk. So on one level, the entropy is very high now. And beginning, it was very low. You had pure coffee, pure milk, and they were highly separated. That's low entropy. Now, if you look at an atomic level, you can't tell a difference between a cream molecule or a milk molecule and a water molecule. They're mostly hydrogen, you know, two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen amount.

So it depends really on the scale at what you look at it. So to say that because entropy always increases, it's not sufficient. It might be a component of it. It might be necessary, but it's not sufficient to explain why time has a direction. And that's why I think people and maybe even yourself just now might mistake motion for time. Sorry, I mean, I mean it's just like we're always moving forward in time. When I say motion, like... We seem to move always forward in motion. But again, the molecules in here, there's nothing that prevents them from unmixing, right? We don't observe that happening and there are explanations for that that are probabilistic, but they're not physical. In other words, there's no like equivalent of the law of a electromagnetism, you know, the inverse square law, Kulom's law, there's nothing that says that these things could not separate. In fact, they will separate, given, you know, the observable age of the universe times a trillion or something like that. There is some probably, we express them probabilistically. So there's, there's no absolute notion that time always has to go in this direction. And that's why I think it's so interesting. My research currently is concerned with whether or not there's a

cosmological arrow of time that is separate from, say, the microphysics of coffee or your beard or whatever, there's something, a cosmological time field that would cause time to progress only in one direction. It would have the rate of times flowing encoded in it. And best of all, it's potentially observable and maybe even better. It's been claimed to be detected at a low level of confidence. But we with our colleagues and observers on the Simon's Observatory, we're aiming to make the definitive measurement of what could provide for the first time a mechanism for the reason that time only goes in one direction. You're right. We seem to see time only going in one direction, but why perhaps is connected to this cosmological force field effectively that is generating

what we consider to be, or is correlated to what we consider to be the flow of time. This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron, the AI cloud for the next big thing. Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable, GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is iren.com. What are you trying to discover with this? So there's two major aspects of my research. One is concerned with the origin of the universe, which in some theories has the origin of time built into it. That's the Big Bang. So your countryman, Fred Hoyle.

So now I've got a Brit here. And I'm so excited. I'm so excited. So I'm going to turn the podcast on you. Good God. So Fred Hoyle was a proponent of what's called the steady state, which for 2,000 plus years had prevailed over all the best scientists, you know, the, the, you know, the Einstein's, the Aristotle's, you know, the Tony Fauci, no, no, the go back in time, the best scientists. Have you ever had an experience you couldn't explain, but also couldn't ignore? I'm a professional skeptic and I build telescopes for a living.

And even I run into questions that just sit past the edge of what science can actually touch. That's why I want to tell you about my friend Mayambiolix's breakdown. It's a podcast where science and spirituality stop competing and start talking to one another. It's hosted by neuroscientist and actress Dr. Mayam Biolic and spiritual explorer Jonathan Cohen. Every week, they sit down with scientists, experts, and experiencers, covering everything from the mind's ability to heal the body, to telepathy, to government alien disclosure. And when I joined them, we went straight for the biggest picture topics imaginable. God, the Big Bang, consciousness, simulation theory. Mayam grilled me and wondered whether physics leaves room for the divine.

I gave her the most honest answer a cosmologist can give. So if you spent your life wondering what's really out there, you're not alone. And knowing you, my brilliant audience, I know you're going to love to add Miami-Biolix breakdown's breakdown to your rotation. Listen to new episodes every week, all the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this. Watch full episodes of Miami-Biolage breakdown on YouTube.com slash Miami-Biolic. Where's he from? What era is he from? Yeah, I don't know this guy.

Is Hoyle from? Yeah. Oh, Hoyle's from the 1900s. coined the term the Big Bang. Okay. So that is before we realized that the galaxies were spreading apart. Well, so he coined that term as an insult. And the reason I'm asking the Brit is that allegedly Big Bang, if I say you and the misses had a big bang, that means something indelicate, right? Yeah. Okay. So I'm right. I've heard it said by other people that that isn't true, but I'm glad to have it validated by direct first-hand source.

We wouldn't say Big Bang. You wouldn't say, oh, I'm going to go upstairs and give you a Big bang. But, but there is a way and it sounds derogatory. Just like, just to say, I wouldn't say this to my wife. No, of course. No gentleman would say this. But, but like, like if a, you know, a couple of young lads and one guy met a girl and he took her home, the lads would say, did you bang her? Yeah. Right. That's the term. Okay. So he did it. It's obviously not like a pleasant connotation, right? It's something derogatory or impolite, right? So he hated the big bang. What we call the Big Bang. I should encapsulate what that is. That's the observed expansion of the universe, which if you run the movie of the universe back, everything starts at a single

point. In fact, everything would be located inside a very tiny region of space, which then after a very extremely slow, small moment of time, it basically exploded and created the universe that we observed today, which is expanding. I understand it wasn't a bang, though, an explosion. That's right. It wasn't like a firework going off in this room because it happened at every point in space and time. We can't visualize what that's like. For every point, to be effectively the center of the universe, the center of its own Big Bang, was essentially what's mandated in the Big Bang theory.

In other words, the entire universe has been stretching. Like, at this table we're made of rubber, we could stretch it out. And if you didn't know when you were looking at it, we put little dots on it, those dots will be moving away from each one, would be moving away from each one.

And if you were sitting on one of them, you would see another one, it would be moving away from you. You'd say, oh, I'm the center of the universe. Every other dots moving away from me. But no, no, no. If you can move over to that universe, to the next dot over,

he sees the exact same thing as you see. So the universe expanding. So that means there's no true center of it. It's like there's no center of the surface of the earth, right? There's no center of the surface of the earth and the center of the three-dimensional earth there is, right? But forget about that. The center of the surface, where is that?

There's no center of the ball, right? It's just we have a convention because the earth spins on its axis that we define the north and south poles and Greenwich meantime and so forth. But there's no privilege point on a sphere in mathematics. Every point is equally good as any other point. So if you blow up the sphere, every point moves away from every other point, right? So if you put dots on a balloon and blow it up, they'll also move away. But there's a center to the sphere.

There's a center to the sphere, but that's because you've embedded it in a higher dimensional space. Look, there's a center of this table because it's sitting in a three-dimensional room. But again, if you have an infinite sheet and you're sitting on the infinite sheet, you can't tell where you are with respect to the rest of the sheet. And moreover, every other point on that sheet feels that it too is the center of the universe, and they have an equal claim to that. right? They see the, this sheet expanding. This is, you know, it's a very mind-blowing concept. I don't expect, you know, it to be, you know, to be immediately grasped. But this is why it was so resisted for 2,000 plus years and why people like Hoyle thought it as a pejorative. This is silly. This is stupid. There's some big explosion, some big orgasm in the beginning of time. And it's ludicrous, right? But no, in fact, the most parsimonious, the simplest explanation from an experimental standpoint is that actually, no, the universe was once extremely hot, extremely dense, compactified. and after that moment has been expanding ever since

for the past 13.8 to 6 billion years, I said. But hold on that. Yeah. If it is extremely dense, extremely hot, that means that there was something existed. So right. So there's some energy field that came. You're exactly grasping what my primary research goal is. Whoops.

So the, the, so something can't truly come from nothing. I know there are people like my friend Lawrence Krauss who will say, Oh, a universe can come from nothing. That's actually nonsense. There's no agency to nature's laws, right? If I give you E equals MC squared, that's a description of something, but that's not the thing itself, right? It is true. It explains how two massive particles, a positron, an electron can come together and create pure photons, or the reverse.

Two photons, no mass come together and make two massive particles, a positron, positron, and an electron. That's true, but the equations describe something. They don't instantiate it. They're not the reason why it happens. are a description to us, right? So just as like Newton's law of gravity, like they say, Newton discovered gravity. Okay, Newton discovered gravity the same way that, um, that Christopher Columbus discovered America.

Like it existed beforehand, right? No, he described it. He described how gravity works. He didn't discover how gravity works. Okay. Mathematizes huge accomplishment. Uh, in the same way. You're absolutely right.

Where does this expansion come from? Well, it must come from either a preexisting universe. Okay. It could be that there was a universe for all time. one day it decided to collapse and condense and compress, and there are mechanisms that can explain that, and it compressed to near infinitesimal density, you know, infinite density, infinitesimal size, and then that process caused an unstable reaction, which then causes it to bounce, expand, and re-kind of homogenize, repopulate exactly what our universe looks like today.

Now, for that to happen, you needed something that existed before the moment, let's call time equals zero, the beginning of our observable universe. So our observable universe is 13.826 billion years, but we don't have no idea what happened, again, the day before that. Where did that come from? So my primary goal on my research with my first experiments, bicep, Bicep 2, and now with the Simon's Array and the Simon's Observatory with my colleagues and my coworkers and my students and my colleagues and friends, is to essentially ask what did it bang out of? Was it a pre-existing universe? Was it a state of pure energy that existed for all time? Energy can exist for all time. It could be static for all time, the energy, and then it can fluctuate into existence, but that's not nothing. Empty space is not empty in the classical sense that we think about a vacuum.

We think about it devoid of anything. But in quantum mechanics, that's not the way it is. Quantum mechanics, the vacuum is unstable. Things can pop into and out of existence, you know, in infinitesimal time scales. But when we're talking about timescales like what's called the plank length and the plank time, extremely small units of time and measurement, those quantities can become significant. And if there is a field that existed, an energy field, like you said, it had to come from something.

Physicists believe that energy field is called the inflaton, that there's a field that pervades all of space and time called inflation that exists now and exists before, you know, now, and it exists for all time. And it exists in what's called the multiverse. So you've encountered the multiverse and a concept of your simulation. theory talks, my friend Reiswan Burke that you spoke with, and many other people have talked about that. Can I ask a question on the multiverse before that? Because I've heard the version of the multiverse whereby every version of every possibility exists. There's a version where in this

interview you just get up and storm out. There's like every possibility. But I have another question, which I don't know if you can even answer. It's like, where does the universe exist? Which is probably something you can't really answer. But if this universe exists in wherever it does, can other universes exist completely isolated from this universe? Part of the challenge is that the human vocabulary is insufficient to describe almost anything, as I said, we can't even describe time. And yet we're talking about the beginning of time, like make that make sense. Okay.

But really what we do is sort of an inverse thing. We say, like, how did I get here? Like, I don't know how this building was built. Did you know how it was built? No, no, no. But you know what you were doing 10 minutes before I arrived. an hour ago, you came from London a couple, you know, 12 hours ago. You're looking pretty refreshed.

You know, thanks to British Airways. And if you go back in time, you can start to go back and piece together your local light cone. Like your local past history makes sense to you and maybe to you alone. That's okay. So what we do is physicists, we piece back in time. Everything that we understand about the laws of nature today, we extrapolate them back. And then we see when does our understanding break down? Currently, we understand things exquisitely well with tools that are mind-numbingly precise.

Some built by my colleagues, in fact. Some study purely computationally, theoretically, or with AI and things like that. But we understand things in the universe's history going back to about 10 to the minus 12 seconds. Is that 380,000 years? That's when the C&B is produced. No, that's much, much later, right? So I'm talking about 38,000 years are like trillions of seconds. No, I'm talking about, I'm talking about the earliest branch of known physics that we understand.

Sort of like how far back you could go on the timeline that got you to hear. Imagine you could go back and like maybe could ask a couple people that built the building and new, you know, rented it and whatever. But, you know, to go back when like the earth formed, like eventually it's going to break down. But for physics, we can go back from today. We can go back 13.8 to 6 billion years to one trillionth of a second after the big bang. Now, okay. We don't know what the big bang was. but we know exactly what happened after that moment.

Okay. So like even though like you look away and you see something exploding, you can then look back and say, well, I saw it at this moment and I see it now and there's heat coming to me now and there's a sound wave coming to me now. So maybe I don't know exactly what it was like because nobody could witness a nuclear detonation

right at the place in which it occurs, right? But you can extrapolate back from observations, from evidence, from data, everything you can observe currently and extrapolate the laws of physics back to some finite period of time when your ignorance then begins. So that's what we do with this. So you extrapolate back based on, but it's not what, what's observable? What's observable is a tremendous amount of

up until what period of time. So I'm saying a trillionth of a second after the beginning about that epoch when the laws of electricity and magnetism sort of cleaved apart. And now we see electricity and magnetism as two separate things. But you know from Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, that they're actually two sides of the same coin. Like one man's magnetic field is another man's electric field. And they're actually beautifully intertwined. That was the first example, well, actually, Newton was the first unification, grand unified theory, if you like. So physics has this goal of unifying as many forces into one single force as possible. The so-called theory of everything or tow is an attempt to subsume all four laws of nature,

gravity, electricity and magnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces into one rubric, one line equation that describes all of physics. By the way, I have to thank Paul Sutter for this. He introduced me to this. Yes, yes, that was a great interview you guys did. the spaceman. And so you can go back to when very many things were unified, but not everything. And for us, that's sort of when the electromagnetic theory breaks away from what's called the weak force,

and we understand that because those are energies we can probe at the LHC. The large Hadron Collider can probe things that are about seven trillion electron volts, whatever that means. It's many billions of times the mass energy of a proton. And if you look at it, then you can start to extrapolate, well, imagine this Peter every point in all of the universe had the same energy as those extreme collisions that make Higgs bosons. There was some period in the universe's history when like it wasn't just like San Diego and it's like sunny here in London and it's clas. No, no, no.

Every part of the universe had an average energy density equivalent to the combined energy of the protons and antiprotons that collide to make Higgs bosons. that takes 28 kilometer track to smash them together that has particles that have the energy of a freight train. But every single cubic plank length of the universe had that much energy. It's incomprehensible. And then a minute later, it's literally a minute later, it cooled off by thousands of times. And it kept cooling and kept cooling, such that today it went from that trillions of Kelvin degrees above absolute zero to now it's just 2.726 degrees above absolute zero.

is a minuscule whisper of temperature, that's the average temperature of the universe. You take a thermometer anywhere in the universe, except for on Earth or near the sun, an intercellar intergalactic space, you get the same reading everywhere in the universe. That means the average energy of the universe has that temperature.

But if you go back to the very last time when we lose consciousness and cannot remember what happened beforehand is trillions of a second after the Big Bang, every part of the universe had this enormous energy. Every thermometer would have the same temperature as the center of mass collision energy of the large Hadron Collider.

It's mind-blowing. I mean, you don't look too impressed by this. No, I am. I'm just taking it all in. Yeah, I mean, it is a lot to take in. And your goal is to find out you're trying to look behind the trillions of a second.

So physicists are greedy. That's not enough for us. Like, you could say, you know, well, I mean, 100 years ago, I should say, even when I was in graduate school in the 90s, we didn't know if the age of the universe was 10 billion years or 20 billion years. In other words, 100% uncertainty.

Now we know it, 13.826 billion years with an uncertainty of about one in the last decimal place. So one part and 10 to the fifth. It's incredible. Before, we knew that there were objects. Peter, there were objects called, there are objects called globular clusters. These are like, you know, kind of failed states. These are like mini galaxies that never really kind of got their act together, moved out of their parents' basement. So they orbit around the, the, they orbit around the Milky Way and every other galaxy that's massive like ours. And they have the energy of about, they have the number, like a million stars, compared to the Milky Way, which has 100 billion stars and Andromeda, which has 400 billion or trillions.

So they're minuscule little things, but they're very useful. They trace out the properties of where our galaxy's center of masses. So they were very useful for proving that our galaxy is actually not the entire universe, as most people thought it was up until 100 years ago. But even in grad school, in the early mid-1990s, we couldn't tell if the universe was younger than some of those objects called globular clusters. that'll be like you, you know, being older than your dad. It was very strange.

There were objects in the universe that were older than the acclaimed age of the universe to some cosmologists. Now we know it much different. Now we know what I could say like looking at you, you're born in what, 1977? 78. Close. Okay.

So I can say what day, what month, October, whatever. But I can say to the day. It used to be, I couldn't tell you within it was 1977 or it was 2007. Or it was two thousand and seven. Like it was insane. But now we have this incredible precision. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to always push that back because we're greedy.

Scientists should be greedy. Because if we're not, who's going to be greedy to asking these questions that have no financial benefit? They have no like kind of, you know, we don't get famous from asking these questions. We're driven by this insatiable curiosity to what push back the veil of ignorance and lift it up as high as Mother Nature will allow us to do. So you're looking beyond that trinth of a second? Yes. What is it? How do you even know what to look for?

Ah, so in these models, in science, we never prove anything. I can't prove to you this table's flat. You know, actually, it's not flat, right? There's little, if you zoomed in with a microscope, it's in, but it looks flat. So it depends on what question you ask the scale of. Like, how flat is this table? Very flat compared to, you know, compared to a beach ball, but very, very much more rough compared to a perfect idealized Euclidean plane, right?

And it's just, you know, or a glass or diamond sheet. I mean, it's much, much rougher, right? Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matter. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.

So we are trying to look back basically to a point in time, at which time, if this theory was correct, we could disprove, again, we can't prove that anything in science. I can't prove the earth is flat or curved or whatever. I can prove it's not flat. I can't prove it is curved or it is perfectly spherical, right? So what we are trying to do is falsify the claim that there was no big bang. That's one thing that scientists need to do, right? We need to show that people claim there was no big bang, just as they claim the earth is flat. People around the world, around the globe believe that the earth is flat. In this case, we, we, we know, we need to be, we We are trying to disprove many, many theorems, many, predictions.

And then we can't prove something in science. But we can disprove all the competing alternatives. And like your fellow countryman, Sherlock Holmes said, when you've eliminated everything but what you might think is impossible, that is the best explanation. It's sort of simplifying things, eliminating everything. And the things that we want to eliminate are the equivalent of the flat Earth or the moon landing never happened. Or, you know, we're trying to eliminate as many things with scientific hard data that we collect from telescopes. Not too different from this, you know, kind of a little simple telescope here, but connected to much more advanced technological detectors, taking massive amounts of data, petabytes per year, thousands of terabytes, you know, a terabyte per day. Imagine filling up your whole, you know, 10 iPhones a day with data with really high quality data.

That's what my colleagues and I are doing on the Simon's Observatory. And the goal is to push back as far as possible such that what's left is the most plausible explanation. But it may not be the quote unquote perfect explanation, but that's okay. And someone might be spending time then trying to disprove that. Well, people spend time disproving it. They hardly spend any money disproving it. There are people that complain about it. It's never happened.

They cherry pick data from my colleagues research or my research and they'll say, look, they don't even know. Like, I'm open enough to say, we don't know what time really is. Okay. That's a big admission. Now, if you were persniquity, you might say, well, then how can you do anything? Or my favorite one is, we don't know what 95% of the universe is made of. You got you, Boffens claim it's dark matter. You say it's dark energy, 95% of it.

But you don't know what dark energy is true. We don't know what it is. We don't know what dark matter is true. We don't know what dark matter is. And the rest is 5% that we do know about. Does that mean we've made no progress? Yeah, I have a question on dark energy and dark matter. Is that just a made-up thesis to solve an equation?

So dark energy, so what's beautiful about science is when we're wrong in that we see these flaws in our previously cherished ideals. For example, I told you for most of human history, if you wrote the year on a ping pong ball of, you know, starting from the dawn of human time, like going back to ancient Egypt, okay, 5,000 BC, right? And you put the year, negative 5,000 BC, right? And you put that into a bag every single year in the 7,000 years. since then, right? You put that in a bag and you pulled out that year and you said,

what was the prevailing wisdom on cosmology, on the universe? Ninety-nine percent of those balls would say the universe has existed forever in one form or another. Either it cycled into and out of existence or it was eternal. There was only one document, in fact, that ever claimed that it wasn't, and that was the Old Testament. The Old Testament very clearly asserts that there's a beginning to time, beginning to space, beginning of the creation of the universe, and that's what we call Genesis. That's a first sentence in the beginning, the beginning of what, the beginning of the universe?

So that was the only document. But if you believe that, you were standing against Aristotle, what are you an idiot? Newton, what are you a moron? You know, like Einstein, come on, you're a complete fool, right? No. So they turned out all of them to be wrong. There was a beginning period to what we call the observable universe.

So when we look at it, we have to say that we're wrong. I have a phrase that I've, you know, trademark, which is that the flaws, create the laws. So you start off with something that doesn't seem to be completely perfect, but it's pretty good. Like the steady state universe, if you look up at the night sky, you see stars. You see the Milky Way if you're in a dark place. You might see the moon and you might see some planets. Okay. The Greeks had a work. There's so few things that move. In other words, the preponderance of what we see is static. The stars are static. They don't move. The moon, the sun, and the five planets move. That's why we

have the days of the week. All the days of the week are named up for things that move to the ancients back up to Saturn. They didn't know about Uranus, right? So they only named the things that moved. So that tells you that 90, like most of those things aren't days, right? How many more things are static? There's 6,000, you know, stars that you can see. They never moved. They never change, at least on a human lifetime. And so when you have something like that, the theory that prevails how to comport with that. There had to be some explanation why there's the only things that move our planets in our solar system, everything else is fixed. Oh, I know, the universe doesn't change. It's eternal. It's been here forever. That was what drove cosmology for 7,000 years almost until

1929 when Hubble observed the expansion of the universe by looking at galaxies and inferring that their motion was such that every moment of time they're getting farther and farther away. There is no center of the universe. Each one of those is a center of the universe, therefore there is no true center. And if you go back yesterday, they were closer. back a day before that. The closer closer. Eventually, you reach a time when they were actually touching, connected, one part of one amalgam, whatever that was.

And that's where their ignorance left off in the 1920s. That's the beginning of the Big Bang theory was 1929. Other people thought that was ridiculous. Like I said, Hoyle and made fun of it and called it the Big Bang. It's so ridiculous. But now every cosmologist, and there's a couple of non-standard, non-professionals or maybe amateurs or whatever I'm saying. I'm saying they're battered doing things unprofessionally.

But they have an agenda just like, you know, people believe the Moonland. never happened. You know, they have an agenda. And you can refute them with data, but they'll always kind of have these kind of concerns. Because it's true. A good scientist will say, yes, I cannot explain everything. But the fact that I can't is actually good news. Because if I could explain everything, we wouldn't have the static, you know, we would still have the static universe.

Look, if Einstein were never wrong, let me put it this way. Einstein called Isaac Newton, not only the greatest scientist who ever lived, but the greatest contributor to civilization, whoever lived. So Einstein, he had almost no imposter syndrome, as we say, but he had the imposter syndrome about Newton. If Newton was the last word, we wouldn't have Einstein's relativity, right? We wouldn't have GPS. We wouldn't have any of the time travel.

We wouldn't have particles accelerators. We wouldn't have anything, right? We wouldn't have quantum mechanics at some level. So there's a danger in saying that, oh, it's lasted for so long and we don't understand something. wrong. Like, no, no, no. If you said that Newton, you're wrong. You're actually, you're right. He is wrong. He's not, but

what comes after Newton has to subsume what Newton did and get that right. You can't overthrow Newton completely, but Newton didn't have the extendability to explore extreme gravity, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars. So, yes, we don't understand everything about dark energy. It is a term. It is

sort of a proxy for our ignorance about what is driving the expansion of the current accelerated expansion of the universe, but that the universe is accelerating, is expanding is indisputable. The mechanism behind which it is, is currently unknown. But dark matter is,

it's a weaker argument to say, we don't understand dark matter, so it's, you scientists are stupid or whatever. Like a lot of scientists will say, you don't understand it. It's actually not true. We do understand dark matter. We've detected dark matter. There's things called neutrinos. Neutrinos are subatomic particles, elementary

particles, meaning they can't be cut up into chopped up into smaller pieces. They cannot be divided. They seem to be eternal. They forever as far as we know. And they have mass. They just don't interact with matter like we're made of. So if trillions right now. They're hidden us constantly.

Yeah, there's a hundred trillion neutrinos that are going to go through this room in the time that we're doing this podcast. We're not going to feel any of them, hopefully, you know, once in a while to interact with your DNA and maybe change something, but cosmic rays are doing a lot more damage and coffee, you know, has probably a lot more radio in it than we like to admit. But the fact is, we have detected actual honest to goodness, dark matter. massive particles that do not interact with light, therefore they are dark and matter.

And it is true, the dark matter that they comprise in the universe is not sufficient to explain all the phenomena that we see. But that's, you know, it's like saying, oh, you've discovered four elements. What makes you think there's 114 more? That's kind of a ridiculous, specious argument. And a lot of people make it. So your hunt for this, the time before the trinth of a second. Yeah.

Is it a hunt that you may never actually complete? Is it a... Oh, definitely, yeah. How do you feel about that? It's, it's like saying, you know, how will you feel that you never meet your great, great grandchild? Like, I hope that I establish something with my colleagues. Again, no scientist works by themselves nowadays, and I have a great team that works with me. And we have great funding, great agencies that support us.

But our job is not to complete the task, you know? I think it's that we are given this great opportunity. Some of us, unfortunately, it's not evenly distributed and science is having a lot of cutbacks. So your countries are doing the same. We collaborate very closely with the UK, by the way. There's a huge component of the Simon's Observatory led by Manchester and other institutions, Queen Mary. And we have collaborators throughout the world, but in particular, a huge chunk of our new observatories led out of the UK, which is incredible.

It's allowing us to do things we couldn't do with just the U.S. component. So, no, I don't see it like that. Is it a baton race? Like, you, scientists are just always building and then you depart and then somebody else carries on. Yeah, I'm kind of ashamed to admit it. But it was, but then this project, which I, you know, conceived of with my colleague, David Spurgel and pitched to my mentor and kind of father figure Jim Simons and funded it in 2016, it's poised to be, because of the recent cancellation of our number one competitor, which is to be low. located at the South Pole in Ardica where I've been a couple times. That was canceled by the government recently. First of the Biden administration, the last year, finally killed off by the Trump administration. So we're kind of the last experiment of its kind. And so there will be a space-based experiment potentially from Japan called Lightbird, which may do much more than we can do. And that would be great. But for now, we're the only really funded operational. We're taking data. Like I said, we're getting a terabyte of date. Imagine filling up a hard drive. You're four or five of your iPhones every single day with high quality data that you need to reduce.

And so we have 450 of the smartest scientists on Earth working on this problem now, working on the data, working on the instrument. And by the way, this is at 18,000 feet above sea level, 5,200 meters above sea level where you're wearing oxygen masks and sun protection and hard hats. And it's a construction site on like a mining field at 17,000 plus feet. It's an incredible place to work. But it's dangerous. It's harsh.

Things break. And you can't get Amazon. You can't get FedEx up there. You know, so it's not as bad as the South Pole. South Pole's worse in terms of getting stuff too. But so we're, we really have the lead right now. I mean, I don't like to rest on our laurels, but we have, we just finished up a week long meeting in Toronto.

And I just heard like the most incredible stories and, and reduction and analysis and novel use of AI. And now we've got like this huge solar panel array, the very first, you know, kind of the time we've had a solar array powering a cosmology instrument. it's just so exciting. I feel like a kid, and it's a hundred plus million dollar project. It's not like you can go down to the store and pick one up

or buy one on my website, I wish. But the fact is we kind of in this wonderful opportunity, but we like to think there are other experiments that could possibly detect this signal. In fact, we in an experiment I started, helped the start called Bicep, claim we did detect this signal that I'm looking for now, and then we had to retract it.

So how do you know, how do you know, the signal looks like. How do you know what you're looking for? Yeah. So right now, if a plane were to fly at a, you know, San Diego airport, you couldn't see it. You know, it's a nice, beautiful studio. It has no windows, though, unfortunately. So we couldn't see it, but we could hear it, right? And that tells you that there's more than one way to detect something. Yes, you'd like to be able to see it, but, and there are many other ways, radar, you know, you could look for the neutrinos from the coffee cup, you know, whatever. You could be very creative to detect that plane, every single plane taking off. You don't need to see it to detect it. So, too, with the signal that we're trying to see, we're actually not trying to

see the light that was produced 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That's called the CMB, cosmic microwave background radiation. It's a pervasive temperature field, a radiation bath, very cold radiation, 2.7 Kelvin, coming in all directions, all times of day or night, everywhere in the entire universe, right? We're not actually looking at that and saying, oh, we're going to see the origin of time. We're to see something that occurred before that, right? Because that was produced 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We want to see, say, a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. So how do you do that? When you want to look back in time, you have to look further back in space, right? I don't see you instantaneously as you are right now, right? You know, the sun is 93 million miles away from Earth,

right? So that means it takes 8.3 minutes for light to get from the sun to the Earth. In this past 8.2 minute say the sun could have blown up disappeared, right? We wouldn't know about it for eight, you know, for another point one, you know, I have 10 seconds or whatever, right? Let's hope that doesn't happen, right? As nice it would be to spend the last moments of, you know, existence with you, Peter, but nevertheless, there are other people I'd like to be with. But the point is, there's a finite travel time for all information, whether it's light, heat, sound. I mean, certainly is much slower. For us, we're not looking for light. We're looking for waves of gravity called gravitational radiation, which is kind of like a sound wave, but it's a sound wave that vibrates space time itself.

So if a gravitational wave were to pass through this room right now, we would get a little closer to each other a little farther apart, and this would travel at the speed of light. And so in the beginning of time, when gravitational waves were produced, this inflation field that I mentioned earlier would have made the sort of background boiling sea of gravitational waves. they live forever like neutrinos and light. They travel at the speed of light like light. And so they could exist from say a trillionth of a second or a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang to then shake up the universe when the CMB was produced, 380,000 years after the Big Bang. So they endure. They're coming through this room right now. But the point is that in the early universe, when things were denser and closer together, it's a better opportunity to detect them.

So we actually use the light as a film. Remember film from the old days, right? So we're using the light beams themselves as film onto which gets exposed, not light, but waves of gravity. And if we see that, there'd be a strong circumstantial evidence that this inflation field existed to provide the energy that you asked about earlier to nucleate the universe from which we emerged. And it doesn't prove that.

But it does disprove the theory that the universe came from nothing. The universe has been here for all time. The universe is cycled into and out of existence for all time. The universe is stretching and will eventually evaporate and will be at the center of a black hole. None of those produce the waves of gravity. Therefore, if we see the waves of gravity, it's strong, A, circumstantial evidence for inflation, but B, it kills off every other contender. Now, is that proof?

No, but was Newton's law? Did it prove that, you know, that space time? is curved near a black hole. No, it didn't prove that, but it showed us how to get to the moon and every other place in the universe is very powerful. It showed the unification of gravity, the same apple that hit him on the head was the same force that was pulling the moon towards the earth. The moon is falling like the apple is falling. That was a unification of the laws on earth to the laws in the heavens. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. Dirac and others unified together what we call the weak force with the strong, with the electromagnetic force. These are

kind of the goal for us. For us, this would unify gravity, and it would be the first sort of framework that unifies the highest laws of physics with some of the lower ones. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.com. Okay, so you guys know that I'm not just an equities guy. I'm a Bitcoin guy too, and for people like me, just holding Bitcoin has been the winning strategy.

But for others, they like a little diversification. Whatever the strategy, each cycle, I'm always like, I wish I knew how to trade this. I just never try, because I'm not a trader and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. So this is where Archpublic comes in. They can help you implement a custom strategy that works for you, because if you've held Bitcoin or Salesforce stock over the last year, man, you have taken every drawdown on the chin, but you can make that volatility work for you. They built a platform that automates layer trading strategies across stocks, ETFs, Bitcoin and commodities, handling buying, selling, profit taking and accumulation, all directly in your own exchange account. So when they asked to sponsor the pod, I said, I have to see this first.

and they introduce me to their market way product, where you can customize buyers and sales based on the triggers, risk profile and timescales are worth for you, and that is what I've done. Now, listen, I'm not telling you to go and blindly ape in, but if you're looking to protect your downside and make volatility work for you, give them a call.

Ask to see every trade and make them prove the math. So if you're trying to accumulate smarter, take profits, use volatility or tax lost harvest alongside your CPA, take a look at Arch Public by heading over to archpublic.com 4 slash peter that's archpublic.com for slash peter so i want to go back to what i asked you at the very start then because uh again when i watch you with uh sean ryan you seem very introspective and i i want to go back to the point is like you obviously started looking up at the skies this became your career this became your life yeah but you seem to be looking very internal and you did

at a time where i'm thinking about it um and i said as i was driving down to get the flight to come out and see I was listening to Sean Wutaka and he was like, I'm off social media. I don't care about this shit. I don't care about that shit. And I was sat there thinking, one thing I really hate about the job I do is that I have to create titles that hopefully the algorithm puts in front enough people to watch it. And I feel dirty and I hate it. And then I listen to yours.

And it seems we're in a period of time when a lot of people are being introspective. And I really just want to find a little bit more about that because has there been, is this just like what every guy goes for us. I assume we're a similar age. Yeah, I'm a lot of way, but yeah. Or is the, is the looking up in the sky looking for the meaning? Is it the same as looking internal for meaning? I don't think. I don't think it's a, it's a, I mean, I had this feeling. I, you know, kind of produced the, the ideas behind this first experiment, you know, when I was 29 or something like that. So no, it, and it was done for the exact same reason I'm doing things today. So not in that sense. I do think, you're right. There is a zeitgeist

component spirit of the times that is precipitated by things like AI that we should get into and disclosure, aliens. There's a lot of that. There are many, many similarities between things like AI and UAPs

that have a religious overlay on top of them. I'm convinced of that, and I'm convinced that the reason that people's feelings are so durable are the same as when a Jehovah's Witness comes to, I assume you're not a Jehovah's Witness are assigned.

I don't think you're a Scientologist. They come in and they want to convert you, right? So have you ever been tempted, Peter, to switch your religions change team? You want to come over to Judaism and, you know, get a little snip, snip and then you're one of us, right? You know, you're not tempted to do that, right? I'm not tempted to, I was Catholic, now I'm Jewish, you know, whatever. We can get into it. But the point is, there isn't, you know, Victor Frankel said that man has no greater need outside of biological survival than to search for meaning, to have meaning in his life, or her life, obviously. And, You know, for me, the reason that I do this is very clear. I'm not afraid of the most ridiculous outlandish questions, but they have to be grounded in something empirical that I can test. Otherwise, it's just, you know, kind of like whatever, intellectual masturbation with a telescope. Like, if it's not really grounded to something beyond just the science, like most of my colleagues are very uncomfortable talking about God, religion.

They're also uncomfortable. The same ones talking about aliens, talking about, you know, AI destroying careers and stuff like that. Most professors are very comfortable in the lives that they have. You know, I always call it the hardest three hour a week job in the world. You know, we have to show up for three hours a week. That's about it. Once you get tenure, you know, that's basically the end of your ambitions for many people.

Not all, but many. And I feel like we have this sense of meaning. Like, if you look at recently Fauci's documents, his internal emails were released, and if you didn't think it was kind of a slimy character, before now, regardless of him being a good scientist at one point in his career, when you see the like hunger for credit for winning awards for attribution and then simultaneously what he did to friends of mine like J. Badacharya and others trying to smear them, discredit them, even Nobel prize winners, destroy their careers, destroy their life. It was, it's very kind of clear and

patently obvious to me and to other scientists that most scientists do something that's important, but it's not significant. Like, you can do something, you can try to do something that's, you know, like, it's very important to build a type of superconducting, you know, type of fusion reactor. You know, it's important to do that. Is it significant? Well, it could be, you know, if you solve all energy problems and transport problems. But most scientists aren't doing that, right?

They're making incremental, very small. And it's important to do that, but it's not, it's not like going to fill that checkbox for meaning, right? Is it important for you to do something? Oh, so clearly so. Yeah. So that has always been important for me because I feel, you know, a keen awareness about death and always have been. And I don't think that there's, you know, another one of my favorite books is Ernest Becker's denial of death who in his book suggests that everything that man does from like pursuing mates to, you know, building pyramids to launching rockets to Mars and whatnot is all done in a desperate attempt to stave off the incessant horrors of. of your own mortality and your knowledge of imminent death that only human beings have. You know we're called homo sapiens, right?

What do we sapient about, Peter? What does it mean? We're the only creatures that know we're going to die. Yeah, some elephant knows it's going to die, kind of like wanders or, you know, that's different. Like when you were four, you knew what death was, right? Yeah, of course. Right?

So we're the only creatures that know that. What does that mean? That means we're only creatures that know how precious life is and how little life is and how short a period of time when your 22-year-old, you know, was bouncing on your knee, you know, was yesterday, wasn't it? Wasn't it yesterday?

You know, I remember it viscerity. You remember going on the plane yesterday and you're fine? And you're sitting up and you weren't in, you know, you weren't in premier class this time, thanks to BAs, you know, policy filling up too fast. But I remember this feeling of sitting out. I was in premier economy, which gives you, you know, an extra three millimeters of space. It's like a good amount. It is, it is. So I was in a pre, and you're near the front of the plane.

You're not in first class. But everyone's walking past me. And I remember thinking every single. one's younger than me. Like it was for recently. I was flying with my family. I was just like every person going past me, you know, and I'm like a little bit vain or whatever, but like every single one's younger than me. And I'm like, damn, like, I remember being like, look at an old guy sitting, you know, the guy sitting in, you know, 9A. Like, he's so old. And I got all this time ahead of me. And like, it was yesterday. And now I've got kids that, you know, much, much, you know,

younger. And then they're looking at me like, you know, I'm the old man. Like, what does that happen? Like, I'm keenly aware of that. I always have been. But now I'm on the other side. Now I'm on the you know, the back nine or whatever you want to say. And so it's become urgent for me to figure these things out as much as I can. But like I said, it's not up to me to finish it, but I can't stop doing it. So I want to poke on that because it was something you said that sat with me all last night. And I kept thinking of over and over. And you said to Sean, like, you know when you're happiest is when you're with your kids and with your family.

And you could do it tomorrow. I could afford to just, I could stop tomorrow. Yeah. I could go and spend the rest of my time. So could he, by the way, but he's not stopping. And like most of us could, right? Most of us could even scale back our house or where we live or what we do. And I love spending time with my kids.

And my son said something to me recently. It's like, I wish you were more present because I'm not. My brain's here. They're everywhere. Phones. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm searching for like my own purpose.

What am I going to do is significant? I want to have a big podcast and yeah, you get a pat on the back. And I'm not. I'm like this C grade podcast. And I'm like, so then I was saying I lost night and go, why am I even here? And then I was thinking, why have Brian even given up two hours of his time to come and talk to me? He could have that two hours with his kids.

I could be, and I'm like, and then I was thinking of this Naval quote that Sam Altman mentioned. He said, if our lives had a forward button, we'd all be dead. And I was like, you're so right. I didn't think about it like that. And so I was really interested to just ask you about that kind of introspection because it seems like you've now, you've got this recognition of like death is coming. It may be in 40 years, it may be tomorrow. And yet you're still chasing this, but is this the most important thing in your life? It's the nexus of things within my control, things I have capacity for,

things that give me what we call life force or energy, and things I have agency of. So it's this is a quadrinium of things that position me at this apex thing. I like to say, you know, I'm writing my fifth book now. I think it's my fifth book. You lost one? It's probably, it's my last of that kind of book. I can keep writing these books because God bless them, these Nobel laureates. They have to move their own books, so they come on my podcast.

And I love talking to them. So every nine number laureates, I give the privilege and honor to interview, I make one of these copies and kind of distill their wisdom. You know, like kept the horn. Like, what was it like to, you know, win the Nobel Prize, you know, for basically an artistic sketch that, that he's doing in a theory that he helped a popularized. it's just incredible. And I get them in a very vulnerable, you know, situation.

You know, people on a podcast, it didn't exist, you know, 20 years ago. And so now it's just this incredible thing and opportunity for me to talk to people I want to talk to. There's a lot of people I have to talk to. There's some border problem with one of my graduate students bringing in this type of isotope of helium and the Chilean authorities don't like that, whatever. You know, like I have to talk. Oh, God, do I really have to talk to HR about this? I have to, but I want to talk to you. I want to talk to the people that come on.

So will it be my last book? Maybe not, but it'll be last of these kind of narrative-driven memoir. What it's like to be a scientist, not to like, you know, collect the gold medal and after you hit the century and cricket or whatever, right? But for me, yes, to be able to do something, I always say, I'm not only going to write a book if I'm the only human being on earth. No one else could write that book. I was never where I told people the title.

No one was going to copy that. No one could scoop me to it. No one could beat me to it. my next book is the same thing. It's a personal story about how these things mesh together. And yes, it's always going to involve God. It's always going to involve spirituality. It's not going to argue. It's not going to proselytize. I'm not going to beat your brow beat you over the head. And I'll be honest with my people that believe in religion and God. I've talked to everyone, John Lennox to Stephen Meyer and the greatest the theologians on the planet. I've talked to Sam Harris. Richard Dawkins is

hosting him for my second time at Carnegie Hall in New York in October. And he's, you know, He knows my views and religion. I'm going to be in New York in October. Oh, well, you'll have to get you a ticket, man. It's, you know, now that guy, you look like, why is he doing this? Does he need more attention? And it's 50 years since he published the salvage genes. Does he need to go on tour for the second time in two years?

No, there's something that energizes him about it because he can do it. You know, and he's had like a stroke and he's older than President Biden. You know, I mean, he's an incredible guy. I hope I can keep doing that when I'm his age. So, yes, there is a lot of time. We waste, and there's very little time. And that's why time is so beguiling to me and how I want to understand and the reason that I dedicate the effort to it because I may not be the only person on earth who can

put these things together. I'm not saying I'm the best scientist, far from it. I'm actually not one of the best for sure. But I think I have an insatiable curiosity. I have an ability to lead and motivate people and recruit things, funding agencies, and influence people to kind of question what we understand because of the greater good of doing what only human beings can do. Again, I only want to write books that only I can write. I only want to do things that are interesting to human beings who have the capability

to appreciate it. Yes, if we save the world from global warming, that's great. You know, benefits animals and whatnot. You make some vaccine and whatever. That's great. I'm not, I can't do that. Like, that's not in my wheelhouse, my skill set. I can make podcasts. You know, it's not beyond my ability to do it. I don't think it's the greatest thing that I could possibly do, which is why it's, you know, kind of a. side hobby for me, but it gives me great enjoyment. And I think that's important. Like, you need, you need some time to yourself. Like, if you were just, look, you feel this way about your kids. You love your son. And you're working on. That's incredible. Like, you know, my son's like taking

college classes now. And he's 15 year old. And it's just wonderful. And he's interested in science. He doesn't want to do exactly what I want to do, but that's fine. And, um, and I want him to find his own way. do you wish that like I assume your parents, um, you know, loved you the same way you love your son. Uh, and so therefore they want to be with you all.

Did you want to be with your parents all the time? I'm sorry. I don't want to be with my mom. I'm still kicking around and I love her. I don't want to be with her all day long all the time. It's not, it's not your path to do. Yeah.

So we waste time. We have time. I actually don't think when I hear like, oh, Ryan Holiday and, you know, other bro podcasters are, uh, like time is the only non-renewable resource.

I actually think that's bullocks is, I think that's total nonsense. We have so much time. We waste so much time. We scroll. We're not present. Even when we're there, we're multitasking.

We think we're not, no, no, it's not time that's limited. It's attention. But I think it's something else. There's a quality, which for lack of a better word, I call innocence,

which you know when your kids have it. And there's some period of time when you stop being innocent. Like before we got the tattoos, I know you had problems with addiction. You went through a lot of struggles. I know you've been incredibly courageous with your,

you've had legal battles that you've won. You won a mighty passion. I think, right? That was incredible. They could buy like another stir for our coffee. But you have courage, right? But there was some period of time when you were innocent, you were pure, like when your son was pure. I think that's the rarest quantity. I want to maximize that. But the innocence of the human race. Like we're at this precipice now. We don't understand things like aliens or the deepest laws of physics. I can contribute a little tiny bit to maybe both, maybe one. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer.

Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. I think there's like a demand now for understanding and a demand for like the weird things that are being discussed on podcast things that is outstripping the actual real supply. Oh, for sure. No, it's a great way to put it. Yeah, because it is so, it is so mysterious. It's such a low information environment. Like I said, we started this experiment 10 years ago and we're first got first data like a year and a half, two years ago and we're going to be analyzing it for the next eight. nine years, right? There's a tremendous thirst for this. Like, if you had told me in the first day,

pay an extra million dollars, you know, get a million dollars more from the UK or the US funding agencies, you'll get it to my, like, I would have done anything I can because then they can get on to the next problem. But, but no, I don't, I think that there's, um, there's two things at work. One is that, yes, there's, there's supply demand issue that you've correctly identified, but there's also, um, a really misbalanced incentive structure that's causing what I call a sciop SCI operate, not PSY, but scientific operate. In other words, these things are, you know, sometimes I wish it was like, you know, looking for Yeties or Lack, you know, Nessie or whatever like, like, because it's so

ridiculous, but mixed in with the ridiculous claim. And believe me, they're replete with ridiculous characters, charlatans, grifters, frauds, liars in the UAP side and the government side as well. But there's there's also tremendous amounts of scientific interest, military interests, public safety interest, security, national security, global geopolitics. I mean, it's incredible. There's nothing else really like this where everything is mixed together. AI and, you know, power and fusion and all sorts of other things that are mixed in all together with this. And like I said, a couple of, you know, I don't know, tens of minutes ago, it's, it, there are many, many aspects of science that are so.

uncomfortable the scientists because they are effectively religious in nature. And my favorite, you know, kind of litmus test, as chemist would say, for what is science or what is not science? It's like, what is religious and what is not religious? And that comes down to this notion of belief. When someone says, I believe that UAPs are this and that. Like, I think you talk with Pines about this. And he was saying, like, all these phenomena are real. And I was like, I don't know if all of them are real. I mean, some of them are like, did they happen? Like, there's some obvious things where there's a flare and it's coming down underneath a parachute. And they identified like the manufacturer of it, the intensity of the flare.

Like, is that real? Like, yes, it happened. Is that like anomalous? And this was one of the first things that were released by the, by the Trump administration. And then you'll have people believe, you know, that, okay, so that that, like, it happened, you know, to answer Pines as, you know, say, yes, it did happen. But was that, does that have any relevance to either aliens, you know, propulsion, you, Is it even a UAP? No, no, it's identified, right?

We know exactly what made that particular signal. No, I'm saying that's just one example. There are many, many other unexplained examples. What's so interesting to me is that even according to like diehard UFO maximalist, right, they will say things like 95% of what we're seeing has some ordinary explanation. Okay, good. I agree with that. 95%, but not 100%.

Okay, well, there's always some residue of anomalies that will never be explained, right? We will never be able to explain every single particle track that's made at the LHC. We will never be able to explain every phenomenon that happens in 1947 over this remote military outpost in near north of Las Vegas and Grum Lake. We're not going to be able to do it. Does the immediate Sherlock Holmes reaction to that go to something fanciful and very intriguing to me as a scientist, interdimensional beings, non-human biologic? bipedal organisms, you know, these crafts that are TARDIS-like, that they're bigger inside than outside, that create local warp drives, zero point energy. Oh, it's fantastic things.

Very, very, very. There's zero evidence. And it's not even that people are claiming that they're, like, my favorite piece of counter example to kind of explain why I'm not, no longer, I'll never get excited about disclosure. and I'll always say, I think Sean titled my episode, The Nothing Burger,

is Congresswoman Luna in our country, Anna Polina Luna. She's a very powerful, I mean, she's wonderful people on Earth. She knows the whistleblowers. She's talked to them. And she knows their stories. She knows what they've been told from other people.

Many of, almost none of them say that they've seen it, by the way. They say that other people have seen it and told them in confidence and they can't disclose it for fear of being docks and David Grush had horrible things done to him. And I think it's a tragedy that someone brave in our military would have that done. However, there's nothing that prevents Anna Paulina Luna from saying here is the body. Here is the biologic.

Here, like she knows about it. She says it exists. She talks about interdimensional beings. Okay, so you can do it. I don't have to see it. Brian Keating, you know, who am I, some nobody, right? But you have to do it. If you're claiming that these things exist and you have unlimited power, immunity from

whistleblower status, like she's not going to get arrested and thrown into jail. She's on these committees. She works with, you know, the highest levels of course. She's a chairwoman of the committee that's studying these things. And recently, they, they've agreed to, you know, increased protection for whistleblowers and allow government contractors to blow the whistle, not just military. I mean, have you noticed any bodies show up on the White House lawn? I mean, again, I want, I don't have to see it.

I don't, I'm not that like a person nakedy as a scientist. Oh, I have to sue it in my laboratory. I mean, I know the laws of physics. So I can know what breaks the laws of physics. but I trust people. I can trust Anna, you know, Congresswoman Luna. Please do it. Do it. I'm out there. If you're watching Anna, just do it. What are you worried about? I would like to know. If there's something that you're threatened by, then there's a much deeper crisis. This is why it's a low information environment. People, minds fill in the blanks. And oftentimes it goes in a negative way.

So where do you think we're wasting time in the moment? Where do you think we should be spending more time on? I think people focusing on events from the 50s, the 40s, yes, it is true. And even like, the 2020s, right? So people say the following. Fouchy lied. He just admitted, according to Rand Paul, again, this is all allegedly. I'm a physicist. I'm not a virologist, right? But that he knew the wet market, you know, idea that COVID kind of originated from a wet market was not actually true. It was an amplifier, he said, in the email, if I'm reading it correctly. Again, billion disclaimers, not financial advice, not virality. It's not the UK. We went through you in jail. It's the UK, yeah. That's what I'm worried about. And you can say, well, look, scientists lie all the time. The problem is he's not a scientist. Okay, Fauci is not a scientist. When he's operating in that mode, he was not acting as a scientist. He even talks about in this most recent data dump, you know, how he was angling for certain awards,

and he was asking people to nominate him for awards and maybe he'll nominate that. And this is the same time he was besmirching my friend Jay Bartachari, saying he's a fringe epidemiologist for saying we should all use the vaccine for the most vulnerable. Well, that's so radical, right? But so science can get caught up in this. But when you do that, you automatically are removing yourself from what it means to be a scientist. Scientists doesn't say things like, trust me, follow me, believe in me. There's no belief. That's religion.

Fine. If you want to believe in things, that's fine. I don't have any problem with you believing in things. I don't believe in gravity. I have evidence for gravity, right? And so in this case, yeah, we're wasting a lot of time because of the fact that once legitimate entities, government entities, universities, and other organizations and the military and civilian contractors,

there is a vast amount of undisclosed and unknown information that will never be disclosed to a proper level of satisfaction because the human mind wants complete certainty. You want complete certainty. You take this vaccine. You're not only going to get better. You won't get the virus and you won't spread it on to any others. Remember what Joe Biden said in 2020?

You take it. You're not going to spread it. You're not going to get it. It's total nonsense. Everybody, I took it. I got it, right? I took the vaccine. I got it, right?

And so, you know, from this perspective, but that then undermines public faith in science. Public faith in science, public faith in government, these are critical things that we've just totally gone off the deep end for. And I don't know. Can we get them back? And so operating within that system, if Luna comes out and says, I'm going to, here's the body, here's the biological, that goes a long way to restoring credibility in the government. But then there's going to be scientists. and she's a tax scientist that have led these programs that have said, no, none of these phenomena weren't, you know,

kind of the level of claims that are being made by these so-called whistleblowers, actual whistleblowers, all right? So I think that we're so beyond trust because everybody not only has their own theories, ideas, conjectures, conspiracies, maybe, but they have their own epistemology, which is very dangerous. If you say, I have my own ways of getting at the truth, And one of those ways is if, like, if Keating says something, I don't believe it or Fauci says something, I don't, that's one of my ways. Okay, you could say that, right?

Or if the government says it, I don't believe it. I mean, these are things I hear all the time. Now it's, you know, saturated with complete skepticism. And, you know, I have to say, it's like, you know, this disclosure is coming and everything's coming and it's going on a decade now since the first kind of major stories broke. And I've talked to almost everybody in the field that's, you know, kind of made claims. I haven't talked to Grush yet. I'd like to talk to him. But, but, you know, the fact is, I don't know how much information I'll get from him, right? And so we're going to operate in this scenario where the people that could tell us aren't telling us, but there's no, it seems to be

there's no incentive. Again, I know why Grush isn't telling me. He's scared. He has reason to be scared. I don't want anything to happen to him. I can't say the same of an elected congresswoman whose job is to do this, to chair this committee. Now, they'll say, oh, it's about to happen. If you knew what I knew, you know, you know how many times I've heard that in the last couple years. And as a physicist, it's the most cruel thing of all, right? Because what would I get to do? I could say, well, like, stop building this experiment. And, like, I know how the Big Bang began because, you know, all these aliens are going to tell me from the physics of the 27th century that they had to get to come here and walk on two legs, which is incredibly astounding, if true, right? And to be

non-human and interdimensional travelers, we're going to learn so much. This is going to look like, you know, playing with a spinning top as a kid. It's going to be. pathetic, this $100 million instrument that my colleagues and I are built, oh, forget to stop it. No. No, that would then allow me to start asking questions of the aliens, right? So it wouldn't stop me from asking. It would just amplify the level of questions I get to ask. We seem to be living this really strange time, Brian.

It's, um, we have so much opportunity. There's so much happening right now. There's like the acceleration with technology and the things we can discover and learn. And I'm so excited by A and we're going to talk about that now. Also at a time when there's, there's this deep distrust of everything, which is an institution. Yeah. And it seems like we're really wasting an opportunity now to just improve humanity.

It feels a little bit civilizational. Like, I mean, I'm from the UK. I'm naturally worried about our civilization. But, like, how do you get away from that deep distrust of the state and how, even deep distrust of science and scientists at the moment to focus? How do you deal with that? Well, I mean, you kind of just sparked something in my mind, as you said it. Like, I'm from the UK.

Like, you in the UK, I'm not saying you personally, but you played a role in it. But, but, but I mean, the United Kingdom did more for human, like planet Earth than any other entity I can think of right now. And yet the Brits that I know, and I know quite a few, um, have they left. Most of them have left. A lot of them have left. Very few people are moving to it. It's like California. Like there's a lot more people moving out of California lately.

But, but, but then, I mean, I'm sure, yeah, maybe it's not a bad place. San Diego happens to be there. best place in the world to live. I'm going to convince to that. And California, for all its flaws, I'm never going to leave it. I'm going to fight. I'm going to try to make it better and enjoy it. But what you just said, I think Harkins, like, there's almost a little

bit of shame and, like, I've never heard, like, I heard Chris Williamson was talking on a podcast recently with a man from India, a huge pot, like 20 million subscribers, just brilliant young guy. And they were just going on about how bad, you know, the UK was for India and harmful. I'm like,

the UK, yeah, is anybody perfect? I mean, has any civilization ever been perfect? Like, we here in America have land acknowledgments. Like, you right now are on Kumae land and we have to acknowledge that. Do you think that they, like, nucleated from nowhere, like a perfect society with, with, with no challenges and they didn't subjugate or do battles? Like, we're living next to Mexico. Mexico, you can see from the top of the hill that we're on now? You can see Mexico, do you think the Mexican, the indigenous Mexicans that they didn't also have their own challenges, say, civilizational? and they didn't also create incredible technology.

Like, Aztecs are phenomenal, you know, just brilliant. And they also were horrific in other ways. Like, if you judge everybody by the standards of today and he's, oh, Winston Churchill, yeah, he stopped the, you know, he stopped the tyranny, fascism, nazism. But he also was bad to, I don't know. Bangladesh. Bangladesh's India. Yeah, it's true. It's totally true.

Guess what, you know, Isaac Newton was a real prick, okay? But he also gave us, you know, a jumpstart in our knowledge of human. and the laws of the universe. Now, it doesn't excuse anything that he did that was wrong. I mean, George Washington is a hero, money. He had slaves, right? Do you look at someone and judge them purely by the standards of today, the shifting morals, I guise, or the, you know, kind of ever-changing moral landscape?

I don't know. I'm not saying either way. But the fact that you have to say that leads me to just answer your question, what do we have to do? We have to stop apologizing for humanity's greatness. Because I think we, if we do, like these AI. are already kind of getting built into it. Like, I ask some questions of AI, just like moderate things. And you'll get answers that are just completely preponder. I can't,

it violates our trust in safety. And like, does it violate the laws of physics? Like, I want to know the answer to this particular physics problem. Like, like, you can't trust me with, oh, who can you trust? Like, and this is where I do worry about people like Sam Altman. I mean, I'm fascinated by him, but, but I'm worried about him too, because he says things that are like just outright, you know, kind of extremely, extremely problematic. Recently, he said, don't ask questions about, like, how much energy it costs to train the models and, you know, data centers, because, like, if you look at how much energy it costs to train your 18-year-old, it's far higher.

I'm like, that's completely backwards. Like, AI is a tool. It is not a human. Its job is to serve humanity. I actually don't think we're going to get to AGI and, and, well, we're going to get to what they call superintelligence. I think that there are fundamental barriers with the current way that we're approaching

with LMs and GPUs and Nvidia and OpenAI, I think that there's fundamental no-go challenges that won't allow us to supersede that. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high-regular interest rates

that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit Scotia Bank. dot com slash hisa to learn more scotia bank you're richer than you think um but can you explain that though okay so what what are what is chat gvt based on it's a large language model it's based on a certain um type of mathematical embedding uh it's called matrix manipulation it's linear algebra it's not like super advanced you know group theory topology quantum mechanics and not theory no it has nothing to do with that. It's basically sophisticated

ways of multiplying matrices. Matrices are tables or grids of numbers, like a spreadsheet. And they have to be operated on in a very special way. And the fastest you can do these operations to find local maxima and global minima and things like that, the better the AI will perform. So in this

case, the AI is based on this large language model. And because the matrices are kind of like these two dimensional tables, they're like grids, they work best on computers that are also like that. And it turns out that the first types of computers that were optimized to do these types of rapid, tabular matrix multiplication operations were graphics processing units, GPUs. And the number one company that makes them is Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, I think still.

And they were very well optimized for this. Okay. But the very first thing to be optimized is not always the best thing to be optimized. It was optimized such that when you played, do you ever play Doom or, or, you know, any of those games are Minecraft or World of Warcraft or whatever? Anything those good. Those are made that if you had a better GPU from Nvidia, you would beat your friend, you know, to the first player shooter, you know,

a millisecond before him and you would kill him and you would win the game, right? So they're optimized for that. They're not optimized for super intelligence. They're optimized for making better, faster, quicker, cheaper, more massive matrix multiplications. Now, is that the way our brain works? No, our brain is nothing like that. Yes, we do use language, and they're very good at figuring out language because you can

embed a language network and a system once you've trained it on all of human knowledge and the entire internet and trillions of parameters that have already been accomplished, that have already been produced by humans, right? So my favorite example is like chess. Like humans have not been able to beat chess computers since 1993, like deep blue, which then morphed in IBM and then later on Alpha AlphaGo and all those beat Go and so forth. So, but we still play chess is more popular than ever now. You can actually play online.

It's incredible like chess celebrities, ranking systems, tournaments, everything. Why is that? Because chess itself was not made by the LLM. The LM solved it. It's like a Rubik's cube. People buy Rubik's cubes all the time, even though a computer they made a robot that can solve in 0.1 seconds, any combination. But the computer didn't invent the Rubik's Cube. The computer didn't invent chess.

The computer doesn't know what it means to be human. It only knows what humans have already done. To make progress now, we're kind of saturating the curve. This is the thing called Jevins paradox. The far the more successful something is, the more widely used it is. Costs start to come down, but then usage of it starts to go up. So you start to saturate the amount of intelligence, not just tokens per second, or tokens or intelligence per dollar.

intelligence per jewel, whatever you want to use. And we're sort of saturating there. And the only one to break through there is to train it with something new. Like, so you need new information to be trained on. When they train it themselves, it's like your country suffered mad cow disease. Why was that? Because the cows are eating other cows, right? They were digesting these and go preons on the brain of other cows and they would get it and

they would go crazy. And it was a horrible problem in Britain, right? So these LLMs can't train themselves. They need human data and train it. So what are they waiting for? Well, they're waiting for, you know, Harry Potter 12 to come out. They're waiting for, you know, the Odyssey to come out. All these things that humans have created that then go into the next level of training data to get better and better.

Now, they'll be, they've already surpassed people and a lot of math things, not all things, but in terms of creativity, in terms of like, where is the theory of the Big Bang? Where is the theory of everything? Where is the unification of gravity and quantum economy? I do not hear the argument that the best architecture for this is a GPU plus an LLM. because they're only able to build what they've done based on previous. And it's not the way that Einstein, say Einstein came up the theory general relativity. He didn't say, hmm, let me just do these math problems like linear algebra really fast. In fact, if he had tried to do, we tried to replicate, we took an LLM, we lobotomized it.

We said, you don't know anything after 1900. Now, tell me LLM, you have the same computing power, the same Nvidia chips, the same density, number of parameters, same training weights, but not the same training data. We cut it off in 1900. Can you then derive quantum mechanics, general relativity, the cosmic microarray background? Can you derive these? No, I can't. It tried to break it up into discrete little intervals and cubes and square. It basically did this brute Ford.

It was very clever, but it couldn't reproduce curved space time. Rumanian manifolds. It couldn't derive what these essential thing that Einstein had, which is this feeling in the pit of his stomach, that we've all felt. We go on a roller coaster, we go over a bump, or turbulence in the world. a plane, you have the sensation, oh, my pit in my stomach when you go over these bumps or turbulence or whatever, that feeling is zero gravity. Einstein realized that a path, when observers in a zero gravity environment, it feels no force. And therefore, it takes a path through that space or through that time, which is equivalent to the most effective

means of traversing that space, called a geodesic. It minimizes these certain properties of energy and whatnot. And that's what things do naturally. And he called that feeling, in the pit of his stomach, the realization that he made, he said that was the happiest moment of my life. Now, what is your Nvidia Bracewell, you know, 1,200? What's the happiest day of your, you know, your LLM's life? It's a nonsensical question. That inspired him.

That made him feel alive, like you said. He could have stopped Einstein in 1904 and said, you know, why are you doing this? Like, you know, what's the point of this? You're going to be dead soon. You're going to die in 1955, you know, 50 years from now. You're going to be dead. Why are you doing this now? Go spend time with your kids that you never see.

and he would have said, no, I can't stop doing it because he was the only person that could do it. And the insight that gave him was an intrinsically humanistic thing, that he felt in his stomach what it's like to be in zero gravity, long before astronauts, you know, two years after the Wright brothers even. And he was able to connect that to a law of physics that survives to this day called the Einstein equivalence principle. And that's the underpinnings of his theory of gravity. Without that, without that essential human now, how are you going to do that? You're going to take it an Nvidia computer and drop it off a tower and so, and that's what it feels like. Or painful experience. You're going to blow out a capacitor in it and make it feel pain?

No, these things don't make sense for a non-embodied system. They can say, robot will do things. But also these things, I mean, have you had this experience, Peter? You're like playing around with Claude or whatever. And it says, like, update to a version 1.4, 6,7, 3,005, 7. And then I'll see update. And then, like, oh, you have to update again. And every day, there's like 1,200 different updates, security things.

They call them something else. My friend Annie Jacobson, who is a new book out called Biological War, she found that one of these chat GPT things had a location for the stockpile of vaccines in her city. And like she told Sam Haltman about it and they had a like deep, like they're always going to be patching all these bugs and, you know, trying to prevent the genie from escaping the bottle. It's very good at doing language. But life is not language. Life is not interesting. Life is described by language. Like I said before, you know, you can, you can describe something, but that's not what it is.

E equals MC squared is a description, it's not the phenomenon. It's very important to make that distinction. I don't think most people do. So do you think we're having all the wrong conversations about AI? Ooh. Do you think AGI is just... Here's my, I have two concerns. One is that we don't really understand how it works.

That is strange. Another, as a... And let's getting further away, right? Because it's the more... Like, I was with somebody recently there saying, you can't look inside the box and understand how it works. We just know it works. Right.

It's so enormous. Well, I think it's surpassed that many years ago. And so like the Turing test, Alan Turing, that wasn't actually like his greatest invention. He created something that's far more important, but much less appreciated. And that's called the halting problem. So there's a theory of computer science that you couldn't make a program that would continue forever unless you had certain provisions within it. And he came up with this solution that said, you can't make a program. that will cause something always to stop.

Like you can't say stop when you get to, you know, like 10, you know, print, Peter's awesome, 20, go to 10 and go forever. Like that loop will go forever, but you, there were certain conditions that you had to install to prove that something could be halted. And you could say an exception after 100 iterations stop, right? Or the computer runs out of energy and gets unplugged or whatever, it will stop. But he proved that in general you couldn't like prove whether or not something would halt or not without having like additional knowledge that wasn't available.

Okay, I'm mangling it a little bit. But a modern version of that is you cannot, because you cannot predict what these things are going to do, you cannot control what they're going to do. So we basically made all these uncontrollable AIs. And so a lot of people like Roman Yampolsky and Kentucky and Nate Soros and Berkeley and others have looked at this and said basically we needed to stop already. Like the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. the second best time is now. No, no, no, we need to stop now, according to them.

Again, I have kind of, you know, doubts about how, how, because we passed the Turing test, because the imitation game has been passed. And like, you can chat with any of the LMs now. You cannot tell that they're not a human being, right? They're too good. Maybe that gives it away, but you can even put in things like, I used to use M dashes in my writing, like my books 10 years ago. I used M dashes. I used, you know. You had to stop. Yeah, I had to stop.

But now I'm like, no, that's the flex now. I'm writing with my own mind. I use M-Dashes, so, you know, that proves this to me. I don't care if you believe it or no. So you can look up this book from 2018. But the point is, I'm not convinced that these things are able to achieve something that, yes, we might not be able to predict them, but like, do you know exactly what your teenager is doing right now? Like, is there complete unpredictable? Like, could he be jumping around on the moon right now?

No. So there's, yes, you don't know exactly what your son is doing or, you know, my kids are doing. I have teenagers, right? But, and so, yes, I can't control them. I can attempt to. But, but, but there are also these limitations built in that subsume that these things will have what is called general, you know, intelligence or super intelligence. I think we can get the general intelligence that they can do everything that a computer terminal could do, just like the turning test. But super intelligence that they can do things that we cannot predict control, modify, and the unlimited knowledge.

To me, it's, it's sort of a little bit of the Cassandra symptom, like, just really, really. you know, nowadays, if you say that, if you say like, we're going to be okay, you're either a shill for open a. You know, like, the ones that are saying you're okay are those people. I actually think the worst scenario could be the following. We end up with extremely powerful general intelligence that can put to shame everything that we're doing now. Like, it can do anything that a human being can do in, in, it's called knowledge work, you know, like, could make this podcast. Like, but who will listen to it, fine. But, but we'll listen to it. fine. But will it, you know, ultimately will become so addicted to it that then when it does go away, because these valuations collapse and crater, like opening eyes losing $10 billion a month or something like that, I think I rent. So are they sustainable? Like SpaceX, you know, had the stock offering a month ago, went up, almost doubled. Now it's like way below. Yeah, it's half from there. Like, who's to say? What's true valuation is? And if it crashes and the market crashes, and then there's just be. less money available to, you know, there was a, recently there was a round for the employees of Open AI to sell some of their private shares. And people were touting, oh, this is a great opportunity to get in at this $800 billion valuation. I'm like, how is this thing going to double from here? Like if it's losing this much money, yes, it's growing at some rate, but it's losing this money.

So what happens when we get addicted to it? The LMs are sort of training us to be dependent on them, right? Like, could you get along without your smartphone? Yeah, it'd be uncomfortable in a 12-hour flight home, but you could probably do it, right? But when it's like controlling everything, your health, your relationships, your business, everything is dumped in. It's so good at doing those things, we've become completely dependent upon it, therefore will be crippled by its absence, which could very easily happen, as happened with the dot-com bubble in 1999, 2000.

There could be an AI bubble. After that, the strongest ones will emerge, but who to say those are the best? You know, like, is Facebook, like really the best thing for humanity? Instagram. Is it really the best thing? don't know. You can make arguments against it. So I'm worried about that scenario more than I'm worried about these machines are going to turn us all into paperclips. Yeah, well, you know, I've, interviewed Nate recently and I've interviewed Roman. And look, it's a fascinating podcast I'm

especially if you're the first one to make the robot. The AI is going to kill us all. No, Stephen Bartley gets there first. Yeah, I'm worried about a powerful AI in the hands of dangerous people. Mm-hmm. You know, enabling people to do. It certainly is true. But I became less concerned about that in my conversation with Annie Jacobson because she basically said like all these things are completely sandboxed and nerfed when it comes to biology. So you can do biology. In fact, Claude has a new product called Claude Science. I was like, oh, Claude Science.

I'm going to have the power of Anthropic. It's going to help me solve the theory of everything. It's going to help me do these calculations about inflation, the Big Bang and alien. Maybe they'll have some discovery in there and be great. No. Now configure your cloud science. You can have PubMed. You can have alpha fold. You can have pharma.net. You can have all these things for biology, biochemistry, pharmacology, zero. There was not one tool optimized for cosmology, for astrophysics, for exoplanets, for alien disclosure. Nothing. It was all biology because these things are very good, you know, like if you want something

to understand the neural network in your brain, a neural network's pretty damn good at that. It's a very good simulations. Like the best simulation for the planet Earth is planet Earth. Like you want to know what the weather is going to be like. The best computer to predict it is the planet itself. It's just you can't run forward simulations, right? But you're going to run backward simulations because these are complex systems. These neural nodes are insanely complicated. And like you said, we don't really fully understand how they work. It kind of emerged from nowhere. Like you dumped in a lot of attention, a lot of nodes and intern and networks. It's just like social media. We didn't really understand like there was sort of social media

my space and and whatever and hot or not and all these things I remember from the 2000s they all went away but they weren't that much they weren't like the difference between Newton's mechanics and direct quantum mechanics I mean they were similar and but there's something about the network when you get things

together things grow Grisham's law they grow exponentially sometimes double exponentially and that's when things yes they become unpredictable but to say that they're definitely extinction level events, you have to make a stronger argument. And for me to see that in the physics environment

that I play in, I don't see anything that's threatening like what I'm going to do as an experimental physicist. Can you support it, though? Do I support... No, does it support what you're doing? Oh, yeah, I use it all the time. But what I use it for...

So I'm maybe a non-standard user of it. I started to play around with it recently to ask the following question, which brings me to one of the gifts. Oh, here we go. So these are meteorites. Now, unfortunately, I'm going to give you all these, okay, Peter, but you have to give me a, you have to promise me that you're going to have a lot of fans in the UK.

I can't mail these from the U.S. to the UK because they're controlled subs. They're not controlled stuff. They're just like, they want to know what they are. They're meteorites. These are meteorites from collected in Argentina. And these meteorites are older than the Earth. These are about 4.3 billion years old. What?

What? What? What? And they're made of very, very interesting components. They're made of iron, nickel, cobalt. And you'll get this information. And you go to my website, Brian Keating.com. And I'll make a, when this episode comes out, you'll let me know.

I'll make a special link, Peter slash Peter. Okay. And you go to Brian Keating.com slash Peter. And if you're in the UK only, Peter will send you one of these. Yeah. They cost, you know, they cost nothing to mail. But they're very interesting. And you've got all the information about them.

And then if you're in the U.S., you can always get them, bryankeen.com slash x. I like to use X. So these are actual fragments of the early solar system before the Earth was formed. 4.5 billion years old. And I have other fragments of different bodies in the solar system, including one of the planet Mars.

So I have a meteorite that was once on Mars. It was a rock on Mars. It got slammed into by an asteroid. It ejected from the surface of Mars. and orbited around Mars and the Earth for about 20 million years, we think, based on planetary formation and so forth. And then it crashed into northwest Africa.

These are very expensive. So I can't give them to you, Peter. But in essence, they're very similar to these meteorites here. So they have this property that they trace the early solar systems formation, but they also trace the conditions of Mars. So we can look at the conditions, the chemistry, the geography. There's certain things in there.

If there are microbes in there, you can see microbes. But my theory is, is, well, we know, at least as far as we've looked, there's no life on Mars. But Mars also has meteorites from the Earth. In fact, this is mine. There's probably like a dinosaur fossil on Mars, like fragments of a dinosaur on Mars, okay?

Because Mars is as the Earth, basically. And so there must have been a meteor that hit the Earth with some, you know, it could be, it's not like a full T-Rex or whatever, but it's, you know, some, I don't know, some plankton or whatever, a little tiny fish fragment. And it hit where that was on Earth, because there's a huge biosphere, blasted off the earth,

then orbit it around the earth and then eventually landed on Mars. And the moon, the moon has a fossil like this too, I'm sure. So where would these have come from? These came from... Deep space. They came from deep space.

So there was a star that existed in our galaxy around the neighborhood of where the earth would eventually form. It was one of the first stars ever to form. It was made primarily, almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium. Those are the only two elements

made after the Big Bang and sufficient quantity that could form a star. When you take enough hydrogen and helium, and you give it enough time, it makes a star. That star is incredibly massive and incredibly hot, and it lives like a rock star, incredibly short. So it blew up after about 50 or 60 million years.

But after it was formed, there were two great British astronomers, Margaret and Jeffrey Burbage, who worked at UCSD for most of their careers. And they and their colleagues, Willie Fowler and Fred Hoyle, the Big Ben guy we talked about earlier, they showed that hydrogen helium alone

can eventually make every element on the periodic table, essentially, including iron. And when it makes iron, the star stops making enough heat to keep it from collapsing. So it started to gravitationally implode. And when it implodes, it explodes, eventually, and it becomes

a supernova. And it sprays out into the galaxy, the last thing that it was producing, which is this iron. So more than this iron just being from the star, here's a big one. That's for a very lucky one of your listeners. I might keep that one. Yeah. Give it to your son. This is a cooler thing.

And when it was created, it's views that out into the galaxy. And eventually it became part of our Earth. Our Earth's core is made of the same iron. But that's not all. Your blood has iron in the hemoglobin molecule. That hemoglobin molecule is the same isotope of iron in this meteor right here. So we're all connected, the Seneca said.

We're all connected like the blood in our veins. This connects us to the cosmos. And it's fully part of the Big Bang plus Earth formation history. This is so cool. Yeah. So I will distribute this. Yeah, I will distribute it. I may keep a couple myself.

Do you know what I'll do? Please do. I'll keep this in the studio. Yeah, distribute from the studio. Well, here's the last thing I want to give you. One more gift for you. Give me one of the meteorites. Give me a small one.

Okay, so this is Arthur C. Clark. Yeah. Another one of your great countrymen. Again, not a perfect individual. But he came up with the following statement. He came up with many statements. But one of them was any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yes.

He wrote the book that became the movie 2001 of Space Odyssey. And he also said, that the only way of knowing the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible, which is the title of my book series and my podcast. So in the movie 2001 in Space Office, which is the best science fiction movie,

but it also has all these contraptions and crazy things in it and just implausible things and it makes it a little hard for a physicist to watch. But anyway, I suspend disbelief. The monoliths that appear, we don't know what they are, but they're these permanent sentinels that seem to exist for all time.

Maybe they're talism, maybe there are time capsules. But this one is magnetic. So we made you this medal. This is the Keating Prize, not the Nobel Prize, the Keating Prize for Impossible Imagination. I want to give it to you. And if you look at this monolith on the back,

it's magnetic. There we go. So this is for all your great work. Oh, my God. Encouraging curiosity, imagination. And really, those are the things that make us human, Peter. This is going to have to go up in my studio, man.

This is so cool. I'll be checking when I see you next. Brian, I'm so glad to have the opportunity to talk to you. and I'm a little bit blown away that you actually listen to my podcast, which is very cool. It's very good. Congratulations on your success.

Thank you. You're actually doing incredible to you. Don't give up. No, I'm not going to give up. And I hope we get to do this again in London. We'll do it in London. We'll do it in London. I will become a meteorite distributor.

Please, anyone. It looks like we have about a hundred or so bits in here. So I will keep one for me and may give one to my kids. Yeah, you should. And then I'm going to handling this up. And thank you so much. This is incredible. This is,

this is the coolest. When I tell my kids or my wife that this, they're going to go, no way. Just tell the customs that it's just vitamins. Yeah, okay, but I make it stopped. Thank you so much, Matt. Thank you. I love this. Thank you, everyone for listening.

We'll be back in the UK soon. Peace out. Thank you. Love you all. When you buy furniture from Wayfair, you're not just getting furniture. You're setting your home up for a lifetime of memories. Visit Wayfair.ca.com. or download the Wayfair app.

Furniture made for all of life's moments. That's Wayfair. Wayfair, every style, every home.