Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - They’re Going to Destroy Science! Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating Part 1 of 2 (#302a)

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Starting point is 00:00:52 of DNA, we became godlike within that nucleus. And then less than six months earlier in 1952 with the explosion, the test of Ivy Mike. We came to know, and a physicist brought sin and came to know the power of the sun in the form of thermonuclear reactions mediated by the Teller Ulam design. And my feeling is, we cannot afford to have these borders oscillate as they have always oscillated. In fact, they didn't oscillate. If you look at a time lapse, much after World War II up until the fall of the Berlin Wall because of the specter of nuclear annihilation.

Starting point is 00:01:27 And I will point out that I'm not supposed to say I called it, but we're insane. I mean, just the twin-nuclei problem within the space of the time that I was talking about it, we're facing potential absolute cataclysms. And, you know, we're now, we're trying to figure out if we should be sending planes after sending tanks into Ukraine. We're not supposed to discuss it. Nobody knows what's going on. I don't know what we're doing, but I do know that we're playing Russian roulette, and we're not going to be surviving this if we keep playing this every time somebody wants to change a border in central and eastern Europe.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Welcome everyone to part one of this two-part episode of Into the Impossible, featuring Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating. In a frank discussion, diving deep into philosophical and existential questions of faith, belief, global conflict, anti-Semitism, the state of lead academia, geopolitical threats, including American leadership in STEM, nuclear annihilation, and so much more. These are controversial topics addressed with an intellectual rigor you are unlikely to hear anywhere else. Agree or not, if you appreciate civil dialogue and honest debate, pay it forward with a five-star

Starting point is 00:02:46 rating. And please, keep in touch with Professor Keating by joining his email list at briankeeding.com slash list. And if you have a dot-edu domain, we'll send you a bit of space dust in the form of an authentic of meteorite fragment. Please let us know what you think of some of the many topics covered in this episode in the form of a review, like this one, from Grady Wheels. Great podcast, great host.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Brian is really great at bringing on and talking with people with opposing viewpoints. This is how science should be done. Unlike many podcast hosts, Brian actually has the background to back his talk up. He isn't just a random dude or TikTok teenager philosophizing about life. More people should pay attention to this dude. And now, from our studio at the University of California, San Diego, brace yourself for a roller coaster of controversial topics as we go into part one of this two-part episode of Into the Impossible

Starting point is 00:03:46 with Brian Keating and Eric Weinstein. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please, help. Welcome everybody to another episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. It's approximately our 300th episode. And who better to share that with then? Our friend. Our most frequent guest, raconteur, mathematician, dad. Eric Weinstein. How are you, my friend? Great to be with you, Brian. We were together last in person, well, earlier today with Professor Daniel Green, and you can find that episode here or there or somewhere in an episode called

Starting point is 00:04:30 what's going on with physics, what's wrong with physics. We're not going to talk about physics. Now we're going to talk about the really important stuff, the clickbait, the reason everybody came here. And that's really to debrief from our last encounter in person, which was in a very disgusting place to spend some time in the middle of fall. And that was Florence, Italy. I mean, that was horrible. I don't know how we both survive Florence, Italy. Cut through.

Starting point is 00:04:56 And it was arranged in honor of the magnanimous and melanchol. David Berlinski. You've known for quite some time. I've not known him for as long, but I've come to enjoy him and like him and regard his intellect with great respect and somewhat trepidation. But there we encountered many, many new people, at least from my perspective,

Starting point is 00:05:19 and I use that to mine for guests on the Into the Impossible Podcast. And three of those guests have appeared so far, and that is Dr. J. Badacharya of Stanford University. We spoke about disease, which is in a third year, as we're speaking, almost exactly three years to the day. It's Valentine's Day. By the way, happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. Yeah, it's great to see.

Starting point is 00:05:41 I got you a gift. I got you a gift. Stuart, zoom in on this. We have our producer here. This is for you, Eric, my sweet friend. It's called foam, sweet foam, and it is soap from Uranus and for Uranus. Uranus. Okay.

Starting point is 00:05:58 Nailed a grass Tyson. He was not there. We had these esteemed professors, including Dr. Jay, not the basketball player, but Dr. J. Bonachari. It was become a great friend and really an intellectual hero and an incredible intellect who stood up against the courage with courage against the forces arrayed against him as he described at that meeting. I also had on two interesting Christian space scientists, you know, pause scientists who have been on. Scientists who happen to be believing Christians. who are believing Christians, one of whom,

Starting point is 00:06:30 Dr. James Taur, started off life as a Jew, and he is what's known as a Messianic Jew or a Jew for Jesus. And he, I would say, was one of my most

Starting point is 00:06:39 controversial episodes to date. How so? Well, I received a quite significant amount of vitriol from about his appearance and how could I platform him. How could I have a zealot and a science denier?

Starting point is 00:06:56 Even though this person has published over 700 articles and he is a named chair professor at a top research university, Rice University. And most of the, that's a crazy perspective. Yeah, that's, that's, that's really heterodox. And a lot of the comment came from, uh, in particular, a very well-known YouTuber who's going to be on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:07:17 His name is Professor Dave Farina. He is, calls himself a professor. He's not an official professor the way that Jim Torres or, or, uh, Luke Barnes, who is the other guest I had on or Jay. Nevertheless, he makes incredible content for his channel, but he's taken quite a strong approach to dealing with the Christian space scientist that we were encountering there, including past guest Stephen C. Meyer and people of that same stature, Discovery Institute folks that were there.

Starting point is 00:07:47 And it wasn't only about that. I'm getting the idea that I don't have enough controversy in my life. We need to have more. First thing I want to ask you is regarding these gentlemen. When we were there, there was, you were the token atheist there, I would say. You described yourself as an atheist. I described myself as a practicing agnostic, which we can get into the distinction there. But these gentlemen.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Two Jews who pray who aren't convinced that it's to anyone up there. And not even convinced there's two of us. I forgot about your solipsism. But we talked about while you were there, you brought up as a voice of reason, I would say. You brought up this notion that I've described in the following kind of logical progression. I was asked to write, you know, an encomium for Stephen C. Myers' thousand page long book. He gave me a 10 day deadline to do that. Thank you, Stephen.

Starting point is 00:08:43 So I wasn't able to get it on the back cover, right? And this kind of logic that he and I discuss is often phrased by me, in the following way. If there is a cause to the universe, if the universe came into being, there is a first cause. And that first cause then translates into a purpose, a meaning, a reason perhaps for which the universe was created.

Starting point is 00:09:04 Perhaps there was a subjugation of such an entity's free will. And there's no information in the universe that doesn't trace itself back to some source. And therefore, Jesus. And the line of progression is a short one. And you- I don't associate that with, Stephen C. Meyer. He associated it. I mean, he agreed with me.

Starting point is 00:09:25 I don't think he's a there for Jesus guy. Well, there's a personal God, right? So there's two properties that God must have, right? God must have created the universe. We're going to have a disagreement. This is awesome. Right. This is good. This makes for good television. The notion that you can have a universe without a cause is sort of goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas and many other thinkers, unmoved movers and so forth. But eventually that cause has to have a reason and that reason is ultimately the genesis of man and then their theology Jesus is the reason for the for not only

Starting point is 00:09:59 the season but for the for the creation itself in other words there has to be a personal god and we jews practicing and you you observe judaism you're not practicing at the level i am maybe or our mutual friend ben shabirah might be but you you still have shabbat you in the shabbat prayers on a friday evening we say two two things we say we attest to the fact by standing up holding a glass of wine that god created the universe. And not only that, that's a universal, literally universal God, but also personally, he let us out of Egypt. Those are the two functions.

Starting point is 00:10:29 You're talking about the Kiddush, where the first part before the wine is taken from Genesis or Breshit. And then the wine is drunk, and it's the separation between the first birth and the second birth of the Jewish people from the escape from Mitzraim or Egypt, the narrow place. That's right. So if you were. designing a religion, would you include physical laws or physical forces? And would there be, is it necessary and sufficient to have a creation of the universe as part of your religion and a creation of a personal relationship with God?

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Starting point is 00:11:30 Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. If you were God, how would you write the Torah, according to Eric Weinstein? Well, I'm not quite sure. We have to figure out what it is that we're asking and discussing. I think that these are very interesting things because I think that the first issue is effectively, should religious scientists live under a cloud of suspicion? And if their religion informs their science, what are we to make of that? Is it contaminated? And I think it's very

Starting point is 00:12:08 important to recognize that there are multiple ways of being a scientist who happens to be religious. And I've learned this over time. So I've been wrong on this topic. And I've, in coming to contact with higher quality scientists motivated by religion, I've come to understand that there's a subpopulation that is very special and interesting. And it's effectively a population of people who agree to the rules of science. They're not going to cheat on the rules of science because Jesus. But they are going to use the idea of purpose and a personal relationship with God to give them courage to question things that are essentially unquestionable within the union of scientists that will get you thrown out of the union of scientists very quickly as to your point.

Starting point is 00:13:01 So what we're talking about is we're talking about relatively self-destructive scientists, focused on science, who get their courage from religion and some of their bearings and their focus. So for example, many of these people do not believe that there's a persuasive case for random mutation as being the major engine of selection. They believe that it is simply improbable, and they point to very often the Wistar conference held at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wistar Institute. And they try to say this is a live issue where the books got closed premature. surely, and in fact it's the atheists, according to them, who were led into error because they were trying to close the books desperately so as not to leave any gap large enough for a God to be smuggled into the canon of science. I am persuaded that the Richard Dawkins of the world, who have contributed, in my estimation, hugely to modern evolutionary theory, are so afraid of dealing with religious colleagues that they were eager to shut the books and not give many of these people their due. And what's more, the concept of intelligent design is a really interesting one.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Now, my brother, who I think has just brilliant turns of phrase and insights into evolutionary theory, one of his, Richard Dawkins, I think, wants to be remembered for the meme, not as the gif, the gif that gets sent over Twitter, that the meme and the extended phenotype is his greatest contributions. And I think one of Brett's better ideas is understanding perception-mediated selectors. It is very clear that when you have various breeds of dog, they are intelligently designed. When you produce a mule from a donkey and a horse that is not a natural animal, you are producing an intelligently designed animal when you create orchid varieties. So in all of these cases, you have to admit that Darwinian theory has perception-mediated selection, the display of Bowerbirds, where they, They build these structures and adorn them with blue in some cases.

Starting point is 00:15:32 Perception mediated selection is a form of endogenous design, which is intelligent because it is mediated through perception. Right. It's a good place to study it because the words intelligent design have been made radioactive. Right. Right. Right. And so what we're arguing about is should the books have been closed with the Neo-Darwinian

Starting point is 00:15:54 synthesis or should they have been left open? And I have to say, I really think that without the religious scientists who are willing to destroy themselves in their careers, but who still do not wish their love of a benevolent God or a fearsome Old Testament God or a personal Jesus Christ, I believe that many of those people are responsible for prying the books open when Dawkins and Company wished to close them prematurely. And I'm honestly sympathetic with the Dawkins perspective. I cannot stand what I've called Jesus smuggling, where you're in some very careful argument and, you know, you've set everything up and then somebody sort of says, well, I just believe that God's love pervades everything. You're like, oh, brother, do I really have to listen to this?

Starting point is 00:16:45 On the other hand, going toe to toe with some of these religious scientists is an eye-opening experience because they are highly motivated not to, got they know that they're heretics and if you think about let's say um galileo's heresy they are in some sense the heretics of today and their reputations are burned at the stake they're not they're not bruno in uh 1600 in the square but i think that what we have to say is that many of these people are making points that atheists wish would go away what is the strongest or some give me a couple of arguments from design that appeal intellectually?

Starting point is 00:17:29 Well, I'm particularly motivated by two systems in perception-mediated selection, one of which has to do with the Lampacillus muscle, which produces a meaty lip that extends outside of its shell in clearly the form of a baitfish for bass and clear streams. And when a bass swims by, the muscle wiggles this little piece of meat that is outside, and it looks exactly like a fish in the stream. And the bass sometimes fall for it, sometimes see the ruse. But if they fall for it, the bass clamps down on the lip, and all of the young of the muscle, of the lampicillus muscle, diffuse into the gills of the bass, clamp on to get a blood meal, and are taken away by the bass to distribute them in the stream, where the muscle doesn't

Starting point is 00:18:23 doesn't have the ability to spread its young. There is no way you can tell me that that isn't an intelligently designed system, and it's the bass that is the intelligence. And the bass is specifically designing its own fooling, its own, it's self-deception because dumber bass fell for this trick before, and smarter bass didn't fall for it, and that pushes the selective pressures in order to produce this. Now, there's a closely related system that is not,

Starting point is 00:18:53 not based on predation, which is the bass system, but is based on sexual reproduction. And that has to do with the Ophreys system in orchids. So there's this one sort of clade of orchids where, you know, I talk about this a lot. Darwin, I asked the question one day, what did Darwin do after origin of species? Like, how do you follow yourself at Encore?

Starting point is 00:19:15 And he wrote this book, which I couldn't believe the title, which was on the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilized by insects. And I thought, that is the dumbest thing I can possibly imagine. But Darwin being Darwin was incredibly smart. Orchids are incredibly speciated. And therefore, they're a great system in which to study various mechanisms. Now, if you read that, Darwin does not understand why the Ophreys Orchid makes a replica of the species that pollinated, particularly the females, with using its lowest of five petals, I believe, and producing incredible pheromones that are almost in desecerect.

Starting point is 00:19:51 distinguishable from the pheromones produced by a female who is receptive to mating. And you watch Darwin trying to figure out why this would be. And he can't figure out that this is actually a consequence of his own theory because the theory is too new. And it's just like one of the most beautiful vignettes and nobody talks about it. And so what I would say is in that situation, a male tries to copulate with the flower, not realizing that it's not a female. And if it's fooled twice, then the flowers don't have to give up an energetically expensive nectar meal.

Starting point is 00:20:27 And they can be very cheap about it. All they have to do is to offer an Erzot's sexual experience. And this is called pseudocopulation. So in both of these systems, if you look at the mirror orchid, for example, it's a stunning replica with hair and the shininess on the back. And the whole thing, you can tell what is fooling. the pollinator. Now both of these are systems in which that which is dumber is fooling that which is smarter using the intelligence, the bounded intelligence of the thing being fooled to intelligently design a trap. And both of these are effectively parasites because

Starting point is 00:21:07 they're stealing energy from the dupe and that energy is used to further the species in an antagonistic fashion. If I make that, point and I say actually intelligent design is all through the animal kingdom. It's just not what you think. It's not a question of an initial creator who's deciding, you know, the unmoved moot or saying you're an art vark, you're a eucalyptus tree. So indogynous intelligent design is essential to Darwinian theory within Brett's context of perception-mediated selection. And then what do you get from the atheistic science community is like, we will have no such discussion because what they want is a very clean bright line.

Starting point is 00:21:51 You know, show me the card carrying members of the church. And we will dispatch them. And my feeling is that's not how the games play. I love that you worked in sexual selection on Valentine's Day. It is... Don't try this at home. So, I mean, I guess, yeah, pivoting to where the information comes into play has been my challenge.

Starting point is 00:22:14 it's not altogether more impressive to me if you invoke a deity, you know, at the last second or if you have to invoke it at the beginning of time, whatever that means. But I think that there is, you know, kind of an almost, you know, difficult to engage in a rapprochement between these two different fields. And I wonder why it is. And from my perspective, as somebody who's agnostic, which, and I do make a distinction, I asked this. The first podcast guest on The Into the Impossible podcast was not Eric.

Starting point is 00:22:49 It was Freeman Dyson. And Freeman. I'm honored to have been bumped. That's not what you said at the time. No. The claim that Freeman would make is that he was agnostic. I said, Freeman, that's very interesting, you know. Just out of curiosity, what church do you go to?

Starting point is 00:23:05 Oh, I don't go to church. Okay. Well, how would a very intelligent alien looking down at the earth and seeing you and your, you know, fellow countryman, Richard Dawkins, how would this intelligent alien distinguish between the two of you if your practices are identical? In other words, you don't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. So by what means do you distinguish yourself as agnostic from just atheist and just a lazy atheist or just maybe a, I don't mean dishonest. I'm not going to besmirch him. Sure. I loved him. But the point being that you're not being fully honest with you, you're really

Starting point is 00:23:39 an atheist, but you don't want to say it. For whatever reason, you don't want to say it. So, want to come out with it. And I think the thing that distinguishes the believers that we met there, that I met there, Badacharya, Luke Barnes, and to a very... Are they all out? Are they all? All these episodes are out, yes. No, no, no. All these episodes. Out of the closet? Yeah. You mean as believers? I'm telling you, there's a huge stigma against being a believer in... Oh, no, no. James Tour not only has... Well, no, James Tour, I believe, but I don't know, I didn't know Jay's status. Oh, yes, yes. No, Jay is,

Starting point is 00:24:10 we talked about it extensively in our interview, and... And actually, we'll pivot to that towards the end. We talk about, you know, the current status of COVID and the prospects for what we call Teshuvra of repentance. Is it possible for the proponents of lockdowns and masking and all sorts of. We should also just say that given that Jay's last name is evidently Bengali, he is a Christian-believing. Yes. Very, very devout.

Starting point is 00:24:36 And we spoke about the role the church played not only in his life, you know, for a very long time, in his guiding principle and morality, and also in the role that he played with the COVID-19 proclamation. Yeah, standing up at his church and engaging his church and fellow church members to engage them to provide some of the first samples for the study that led to eventual

Starting point is 00:24:58 the Great Barrington Declaration. Anyway, I'm not talking about him. I really want to talk about people like James Tours. So I feel like as a believer or as an agnostic, you can doubt your belief at any time, Theodicy. It's a classic question. Why do good things happen to that?

Starting point is 00:25:14 By the way, which is more annoying to you when something good happens to a bad person or when something bad happens to a good person? It's not even a context. If some good thing happens to a bad person, I always hope that it might give them pause and that gives them an opportunity to course correct. Okay, fine. So Theodicy is a classic thing that believers have to struggle with. And, you know, some will say, well, you know, that's our only thing that we've, I'm not going to comment either way. But I asked James Tour. Let me just speak to James and it's on camera.

Starting point is 00:25:42 I said, look, James, I have doubts. Do you ever doubt your theism? Do you ever have this notion? And I found it very striking because he said absolutely not. He said he never downs for one nanosecond. I don't believe that. I found it hard to believe it. But I also found it in concert with his conversion to Christianity.

Starting point is 00:26:03 In Judaism, as you know, our catechism is the shaman, which means you are commanded to love God. And what does it mean? Do you have to be commanded to love your children? I don't I don't feel like you have to be it's natural to love your kids, right? You only command something that's unnatural, right? Don't eat pork. It's pretty delicious. I used to eat it in my youth. It's pretty good. So don't eat it. You know, don't shoot a with melon that really gets you, right? Oh, that was tough. I had to skip over the lobster, lungosta. But you don't command something that's easy to do. In other words, God is not lovable in Judaism. God is not considered lovable. He's actually considered fearful and awesome and in a squableness. quasi mixed hybrid things. That's the New Testament. No, I did read the sequel. So now, tell me, do you ever doubt your atheism?

Starting point is 00:26:50 All the time. Right, okay. So it would be crazy. What makes you doubt, yeah. So what makes you doubt? Oh, just imagine just believing all the time with 100% confidence that the world has to no purpose. It's a giant.

Starting point is 00:27:06 Pointless. Yeah, pointless exercise sounded furious, significant. nothing. It's really bleak. And I don't think we're meant to be atheists. I think we're meant to be religious. And I think that there's a chomsky and pre-grammer of religion. And so if you don't honor that, you're going to end up oscillating your whole life because you're going to believe in nothing. And then you're going to find out that life can't be supported so easily by believing in nothing. And then you're going to overdo it. And so rather than being a spring, a wait on a spring engaging in simple harmonic oscillation between atheism and belief,

Starting point is 00:27:44 I thought I'd skip the round trip and try both camping and decamping so that there's less oscillation. And that's, you know, I think prayer is incredibly important. And if you try to chisel on prayer by saying, I know this is not true, but I'm going to do it anyway, I don't think it's very effective. Yeah. So, you know, I go to movies that I don't believe actually happened. I don't think Star Wars is a documentary, although The Matrix is. And I think that in the same way, you have to be immersed in part in religion so that it doesn't come and bite you. And by the way, Jim is a very special case. And I hope that I'm not saying anything out of turn. Jim's introduction to Christianity was that they just seemed happier. He found a group of

Starting point is 00:28:37 Christians who immediately put him in a good mood, made him feel wanted, loved, cared about. It was an experience that he hadn't had. And that's a very different issue than nanomachines providing a puzzle to him that he can't solve. And so if you ask the question of why does he not doubt himself, I believe that what he came into Christianity for is different than what gives him confidence, because I believe that he has a scientist's confidence, whether he's accurate or not, is a different question. Well, I think I might disagree because in the conversation that we had on the podcast,

Starting point is 00:29:15 he was expressing it as a result of direct revelation that he had encountered Jesus Christ, whether through prayer, meditation. We had different conversations, and I'll leave it to Jim to sort that out. But I do know that one of his points is true. You want to have a bad, you know, like join a religion where everyone's unhappy and miserable, or stay in the religion and from birth as he was. Judaism is a tough religion. It's a lot harder than some others.

Starting point is 00:29:43 Yeah. And I believe in a certain sense, Christianity softens the strictures and difficulties of Judaism, some of the abstractions. You make certain things very concrete. Yeah. But I think, you know, I want to get back to the science. I think Jim's basic point is that nanomachines that we find

Starting point is 00:30:06 in nature. Like cell. Like ATP synthase, for example, you know, inside of mitochondria. It's one of, I think, only two wheels that we know about in nature, the other being flagellular. Or rotors, yeah. Yeah. And I think his point of view is you have no idea how difficult these machines are to make. That if you took the best chemists, you give them the largest budgets and you let them run for tens of thousands of years, there's nothing we're doing now.

Starting point is 00:30:36 souped up that would get you to these machines. Yeah, and that's where he gets a lot of pushback from others and not out of the gap's perspective. I'm just saying that I believe that some of his confidence isn't from the fact that that is true or isn't true, but he has looked at the situation and he has come to that determination. And his feeling about this is if you want to talk about minimal explanations, his belief is it's easier to deal with a conscious designer. Now, I don't share that, but I understand it.

Starting point is 00:31:06 perspective. So pivoting to something that's still in the news. Wait a second. I want to get back to Jay Betichari. Oh, yeah. Okay. We all benefited from Jay's devotion to Christianity because it gave him the stupid courage to do the right thing, even though we now understand that Fauci and Collins were having this little back channel about swift and devastating takedowns of the reasoning, of fringe epidemiologists. And, you know, my feeling is, is that we just need to get rid of the Collins and Fauci's because we can't afford them inside of the Temple of Science. If you're going to be reasonable and reasoned and you're going to be in charge of this, you cannot engage in anti-collegial behavior like that. It's more than just anti-collegial.

Starting point is 00:31:55 I mean, it's almost borderline, you know, of suppression. Pathological. Right. So that actually, I did want to continue talking about God and therefore Tony Fauci. Sorry. I joked. I said, Tony Fauci's God. You missed that. Completely. So when I was thinking about this episode and what we could call it, you know, I want to call it,

Starting point is 00:32:15 what happens below the Von Karmine line stays below the Van Kerman Line. So the Vary Kahneman Line is 100 kilometers or so. It's a fictitious surface over which we consider space to begin, the atmosphere to sort of end. And there are three main, actually four events that are taking place right now in the sub von Karmine zone region of our atmosphere. One of those is global warming. Another one is COVID-19, which is respiratory past, as we know. And the other one is nuclear annihilation.

Starting point is 00:32:51 And actually, there's a fourth one, which has come to light very recently, which are UFOs and unidentified flying objects operating in the troposphere and possibly being and being shot down all the time lately, as of the this recording on February 14th. So there's four phenomena. These are really, you know, highlighting. And actually, another thing that happened on Valentine's Day in 1990 was the famous pale blue dot image. Taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft at the command of Finger Puppet extraordinaire somewhere over there is Carl Sagan.

Starting point is 00:33:26 So he commanded it, turn around, take a picture. And he called it famously a mode of dust suspended on a sunbeam. And how many people he waxed and poetically. have fought over their fraction of that one pixel in that famous image suspended on a sunbeam. I'm going to ask you, of these different phenomena, UFOs, COVID, global warming, and nuclear annihilation, which one is keeping you up at night the most?

Starting point is 00:33:52 All of them, the most. No, I mean, look. They're equal. Well, as you know, some in years ago, I started speaking about the twin nuclei problem, which is that when we, In 1953, entered the nucleus of the eukaryotic cell and extracted the three-dimensional structure of DNA. We became godlike within that nucleus.

Starting point is 00:34:21 And then less than six months earlier in 1952 with the explosion, the test of Ivy Mike, a physicist brought sin and came to know the power of the sun in the form of thermonuclear reactions mediated by the Teller-Ulam design. And my feeling is, it's interesting when you tell people you need to worry about the twin-nuclear problem. And then COVID happens coming, you know, next door to a lab with a very active charity called the Eco Health Alliance, led by Peter Dajek, defended by, is it 66 or 69 Nobel laureates in the Lancet? I mean, just complete corruption of scientific norms. So let's assume for the moment that this is some sort of biological weapons convention workaround that may have spilled over through a wet market or something like that. And then we're in Ukraine and we're not allowed to question why we are going to higher and higher levels of escalation.

Starting point is 00:35:27 Now, I don't know about you, but almost all of my ancestors came from Ukraine. If you ask Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, about where they came from in that region, they usually say something like the following. Well, it's a little region that sometimes was Poland, sometimes it was Lithuanian, sometimes it was Ukraine, and sometimes it was Russian, sometimes it was Belarusian. We cannot afford to have these borders oscillate as they have always oscillated. In fact, they didn't oscillate. If you look at a time lapse much after World War II up until the fall of the Berlin Wall because of the specter of nuclear annihilation. And I will point out that Teller famously came from the, I think the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest with Leslo Ratz as his high school math teacher. And Cilar and with Zillers and von Neumann and like the world's greatest secondary.

Starting point is 00:36:20 High school. The world's greatest high school. JV.T. Give it up for the Lutheran Gymnasium. And then Stan Ulam came from a town which I'm now forced to call Leviv. which I think I always grew up saying something closer to Levov. And that is a Polish town in eastern, like northeastern Ukraine, where we're fighting,

Starting point is 00:36:44 Ukrainians are fighting like eight seconds by hypersonic missile to the border in Poland. So I'm not supposed to say I called it, but we're insane. I mean, just the twin nuclei problem within the space of the time that I was talking about it, we're facing potential absolute cataclysms. And, you know, we're now funding more EcoHealth Alliance. We're trying to figure out if we should be sending planes after sending tanks into Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:37:16 We're not supposed to discuss it. Nobody knows what's going on. I don't know what we're doing, but I do know that we're playing Russian roulette, and we're not going to be surviving this if we keep playing this every time somebody wants to change a border in Central and East. in Europe. And just, you know, lingering on that one moment longer, thinking about in our community, in the Jewish community, every single Jewish community, San Diego, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., there is some tribute to the Holocaust or, you know, there's some memorial to the Holocaust, bigger ones, smaller ones, Washington, D.C., in L.A. or two notable ones, and then, of course,

Starting point is 00:37:52 in Israel, at Yad Vashem. I was thinking, you know, kind of getting your take on it. We don't have, we have one Hiroshima. And there's a lot of it. We have one, Hiroshima. And the There's one Nagasaki, and those are the two places. I mean, here in San Diego, we actually have a peace garden and in Japanese, but there's nothing as visceral as if you've been to any of these Holocaust memorial. I've only been to Yad Vashem, actually. I should come to see it. The Yad Vashem is powerful, but it's not, I wouldn't put it in my top five.

Starting point is 00:38:17 Yeah. So that's a lacuna in my Jewish journey. But at any rate, why aren't, why don't we kind of stigmatize? And not about the morality. I think it was ultimately moral and it was a good decision by Truman. But ultimately, if we had more awareness, you've called for with deadly seriousness, the resumption of tests. Nobody listened. The resumptions of above ground, rare and controlled and moderate, but to bring to a visceral sense, the notion of what we're playing with literal atomic fire.

Starting point is 00:38:53 What about stepping back from that with the inherent difficulties of a, you know, teller device and the result in radioactivity? that might accompany it, would have come in it, but what about this notion of, well, we are not doing enough in the never forget realm when it comes to nuclear annihilation or just devastation. I don't think the world, the world will go on just fine. I mean, there'll be a planet here, but life and-

Starting point is 00:39:15 Sorry, when you say that, there will be a sphere here. It will be life-form. There will be life-worms and tar-grades. See, I know where you're going, because we were in the same time. Hashtad tarshage, yeah. But tell me, what, cool. What could we do to?

Starting point is 00:39:31 And then obviously, my follow-up question is going to be, was there an analog for COVID? Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. I've changed my mind about this. I called it about as cleanly as somebody can call it. And then it happened. And then we denied that it was coming out of the Wuhan.

Starting point is 00:40:01 of virology. And we're also denying that we are trying to corner a conventional enemy who also possesses unconventional weapons, which, pardon my French, but this is just the dumbest thing I can imagine. All the same people who said that Putin would never invade Ukraine are right here telling us exactly why this is safe, which it isn't. We are, this is the end. We're on borrowed time, and we're not going to avoid this. We don't have the right. leaders, you know, this just doesn't make any sense. And the reason it doesn't make any sense is because people need to be so proximate to the problem that it plays on their mind and they can't think about anything else.

Starting point is 00:40:46 And the two monuments that I would recommend above all others to those lost in the Holocaust are maybe three. Okay. So the Berlin Memorial, I can't even explain it. You know, it's basically these stones, these pillars. And they start off very shallow. You could have a picnic on one. And you wander into this thing.

Starting point is 00:41:13 And the height just gets higher and higher and higher. And it's mind-numbing. And you lose all perspective as to where you are. And you start to realize what happens when life is devalued and degraded. And all you see is the cold austere stones. It is, who thought, it reminds me of Bohemian Rhapsody. It made sense to Freddie Mercury to write this thing. But if you describe it, let's write a really long song that mimics several operas that makes no sense.

Starting point is 00:41:41 I would never have greenlit this project because I'm an idiot. The next one is Babi Yar. Go to Kiev and try to keep yourself from feeling the sickness of standing near this ditch where people were just machine gunned and execute. It's a visceral thing that will cause you to lose your shit. And I guess the last one that really matters to me, which isn't even about Jews, is there's an amazing sculpture of a boxing ring on an angle.

Starting point is 00:42:17 And it's to the Sinti, which is sort of a Roma community, boxing legend named Johannes Trollman. who was very popular in German circles as a great boxing legend. He sort of was using the Muhammad Ali technique of being highly athletic rather than just large and powerful. And he was very good looking, swarthy complexion. And he fought in Germany. And the Nazis took his, you know, there was a decision against him.

Starting point is 00:42:51 And the crowd was having none of it because they knew boxing. So the Germans, the Nazis were faced with the idea that this was not going down. And so they said, okay, we're going to change the rules to neutralize this guy's style. So he divorces his wife to save her life. I mean, it's hard not to get emotional about this. He covers himself his dark skin with flour to mock the Aryan preoccupation with purity. And he loses. and this guy gets sent to a camp

Starting point is 00:43:28 and they're using him to train other people and put on exhibitions and finally they can't take it anymore and I think that they just forget whether he got a hoe in the back of his head or a single bullet but it took us until recently to reinstate his boxing championship that was taken away from it.

Starting point is 00:43:45 I'd go to those three memorials. See how you do. Well, that was unexpected but extremely meaningful. I think... But my point, It won't last. It'll wear off.

Starting point is 00:44:00 The human, the treadmill of heat on it. If you never had a near-death experience for like two weeks. Yeah, you're a change. Every cup of water is it, you know, when Warren Zivon was dying, I think David Letterman asked him, you know, is there any message in this? You know that you're about to die. You've had this incredible canon of songs that you've written and performed. Is there any lesson?

Starting point is 00:44:23 And Warren Zivon said, enjoy every sandwich. And, you know, sandwich is a funny word. And it's a deadly serious point, which is you don't appreciate just the sheer joy being alive because you can't. There's no way to keep these lessons in mind. We're not going to explode it about, I mean, it's the smart thing to do. But everyone's going to say, well, you're going to contaminate the atmosphere. It's like, you know what you're going to do? You're going to say Slava Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:44:50 And you're going to post it. And then you're going to get onto the next thing. And you're not going to think about it. And you're going to, and then one day, maybe it had nothing to do with this incident, but eventually a much more deadly virus is going to come through the atmosphere. And eventually there's going to be a nuclear exchange, which you can't handle. And you're going to say, why, why didn't we listen to the, you know, it reminds me of in New Orleans when Katrina hit and the levee broke.

Starting point is 00:45:20 And I remember somebody on TV saying, who could possibly imagine that the levy would break. And I thought, didn't Led Zeppelin sing a song called The Levee Break? It's what they do. I mean, it's just, I don't understand it, but I've come to accept that most humans cannot live with abstract knowledge. If something hasn't happened in 20 years, it's not going to happen. If it's never happened, then you never need to worry about anything that's a low probability doesn't need to be thought about in the context of expecting value. I think you're exactly right. And I think I've seen this in Turkey, by the way. We've had a huge devastating earthquake. And Eric, Erdogan was celebrating the fact that by relaxing building standards, he got much more housing.

Starting point is 00:46:00 Right. And we're aping. Colo Kovu. Right. And I think that's actually pertinent to, we're not going to talk much about UFOs and physics, but just UFOs and phenomena. I kind of feel like that's what's going on right now. I think we have these balloons. We have these unmanned air.

Starting point is 00:46:16 And I called it, you know, bread and saucers. And it's something that you can kind of like appreciate. Like this song by Miley Cyrus is going around now. It's called Flowers. And she's an amazing voice and she has incredible characteristics. But it's a song that I could sing. By the way, I've got to become a huge Ariana Grande. Oh, really?

Starting point is 00:46:34 That gal. She's by pipes. She has. Oh, my God, is she a great singer? So. I did not, I did not get that the first. Yeah. So, but and with Miley, trust me, she's got incredible range and she's musical.

Starting point is 00:46:46 She understood. Now, Eric, you know me. You were playing piano earlier today. You know my only instrument is Spotify, right? That's about all I can play. and I don't play it well. I can sing the song Flowers by Miley Cyrus. It's got, you know, a one-hertz, you know, kind of bandwidth.

Starting point is 00:47:02 It's a very small kind of range or, you know, how does it go? It goes, I can buy myself flowers. I can hold my own hand. It's written like about her ex-husband. Now they just got the war. It's all in People magazine, which I know you subscribe to a physical review letters. People on these tunes near you. I was actually in People magazine last year.

Starting point is 00:47:23 Most eligible? Quoted as handsome as sexiest man. No, no, no, in this office. No, for a solar phenomenon, solar physics phenomenon. Miley. Now, Miley, when she sings that song, it's, you know, like I said, it's one millah hertz fraction of her octave range, right? But I can sing it.

Starting point is 00:47:41 So it's something I can appreciate it. I can do a TikTok of it and so forth. I'd like to see that. It's easy. Dr. Brian Keating on all platforms. But these saucers, it's something people can explore, are these balloons? People can understand a balloon. Maybe they're all this. Maybe everything that's happened so far has been this. And maybe now we can dismiss it or maybe we could say it's a military

Starting point is 00:48:03 thing. And so is in other words, it's sort of the same thing in that it's approachable, it's relatable. It's, you don't require advanced quantum physics to understand it. First of all, what do you make of these things? And is it potentially at its core a giant sciop designed to distract us like the bread and circus? We don't know. Except bread and saucers. Look, the thing is there are two basic doors into this phenomenon. One is indirect evidence and the other is direct evidence. If you ask me, if you go by direct evidence with everybody owning a camera in their pocket,

Starting point is 00:48:43 you have to say that this is nonsense. Because there is no direct evidence that's high quality. There's no high quality data in the public domain. That's right. So let's just say that from the direct evidence perspective, this is nonsense. It doesn't exist. It's very silly. Okay.

Starting point is 00:48:59 Now you switch your lens. You say there seems to be an overwhelming amount of indirect evidence, like psychotically overwhelming. And I was unprepared for this until I started looking at it. I have no idea how we would. I mean, you can get rid of people who see ghosts and people who have a need for attention. And you're left with people who don't want to talk about it whose lives have been destroyed. And, you know, particularly some very kind of modest and modest cognitive gift folks who seem to be able to act at the level of Brando, which I don't believe. I believe that these people have been hurt.

Starting point is 00:49:38 Some of them with. By who? With necrosis? We don't know. But according to Gary Nolan, he's seen damage paths through tissue that correspond to crazy stories where the story actually has a physical trace. I would say from the indirect perspective, I don't think that we're capable of faking this at this level. Even if we wanted to, even if we wanted to fly, you know, SR71 blackbirds and their successors. And we wanted a story.

Starting point is 00:50:10 So in case anybody sees one, you know, the jig isn't up. So I've never seen a subject that has that profile. Zero direct evidence, overwhelming indirect evidence. somebody smarter than me has to call it. And in terms of probability, in a Bayesian sense, between getting hearings on the EcoHealth Alliance versus getting public access.

Starting point is 00:50:35 We're not getting anything. No. Why do we have a government? Like, I mean, I think a lot of this flows down from government, not all, but a lot of it does. Sources and methods has become the bane of our democratic existence. I am convinced that there is an issue of privilege around many of the things we cannot resolve.

Starting point is 00:50:53 You cannot have this many things shoved into sources and methods so that the public can never figure out what's going on. And classified and put into a garage. Sources and methods. And we have an incredible structure for avoiding the Freedom of Information Act where we have private companies

Starting point is 00:51:12 and the private companies are entrusted with secrets that you can't afford to hold in government. So in the same way that a rich person will set up an irrevocable trust, and said, what, assets? I don't have the assets. Penetrate this. Right.

Starting point is 00:51:25 You know, and the answer is the person doesn't have the assets. A container has the assets and that somebody is in control of the container, directing the container to make loans, which are, you know, taxed under different structures. And so the person is. And limited liability for living an incredible, lavish lifestyle with no assets. And so my feeling is that the government has figured out the FOIA issue, which is like, what information? We don't have any information. But it seems to me if, you know, if there were hyper-intelligent aliens or something huge, you know, kind of malevolent entity on Earth, that they couldn't find a better way to destroy Earth than sort of undermining our faith in science. And I feel like we're doing that ourselves.

Starting point is 00:52:08 No. Okay. The cowards in science are doing that. And in particular, you know, a short time ago, I was against public health. And people thought, like, how can you have? What is that? Explain what you mean public health? Not just funding for, you know, single-day? No, we have a culture of non-scientific behavior that involves manipulating massive numbers of people because both war and pandemic are two places where you cannot make a libertarian argument.

Starting point is 00:52:45 You can say, well, whoever wants to go can go. You know, good luck with that. Then you, it's going to be a self-executive. distinguishing argument. So there is a sort of sacred obligation when invoking public health, saying you all have to do the following thing. Right. And unfortunately, this this appeals to people who are willing to forego income for the privilege of telling other people how to live their lives. So it selects for the wrong element. Ideally, what you would want is people who are loath to tell other people how to live their lives who only invoke this when it is absolutely necessary. But good luck convincing people who are, you know, two clicks away from pure libertarianism to go into this public health field.

Starting point is 00:53:29 So we absolutely need public health, but we can't afford Fauci-style, Colin-style public health. And, you know, what that is, and Dajik's, you know, and it's the manipulation of people invoking science to tell people to do things that you claim are in the best interest, the social welfare function of your nation. It is destroyed our credibility because people do not distinguish between science and public health, like medicine and public health. Physicians and, okay, so it's time to recognize that we need a divorce. We've been separated for a long time, and we forgot to cancel the credit card. Public Health has been running around, charging. everything to the Amex that belongs to science.

Starting point is 00:54:22 And now we have this huge bill. It's like, well, what about science? What about all those Nobel Prize winners? Like, you know what? You're absolutely right. Public health needs to pay for itself out of its own budget, its own credibility budget, and needs to leave science alone. And we need to cut Tony Fauci and Francis Collins loose.

Starting point is 00:54:42 And, you know, Jay obviously had, you know, utmost respect for the scientific accomplishments of Collins and he even said he studied from a textbook written by Fauci back in the 80s when he was a med student. Wait, wait a second. Jay says, if I understand him correctly, I worked for 35 years in the belly of the beast having no idea how a university actually operates. That's a much more important statement in my estimation. The few point is he, first of all, he's not only a physician. He's also an economist. Right. MD, PhD and right. And, and, right. And, at Stanford for Bow? Right.

Starting point is 00:55:19 He lived his entire life in Stanford, not realizing that there's a secret book that you pull out in a panic room where the bookcase swings open. It's like, here's how the actual stuff goes down. And this is what I discovered at Harvard. And it's shocking because you don't realize the way power and science interact in these institutions. Thanks for listening to Part 1 of this existential episode of Into the Imposteen. possible. Check out some other episodes with Eric Weinstein, one of our most popular and always thought-provoking guests. Return on Friday for Part 2 for revelations regarding the crisis in academia and provocative thoughts on geopolitics. Keep in touch by signing up for Professor Keating's

Starting point is 00:56:17 email list at briankeating.com slash list, and if you have a dot-ed-d-u domain, we'll send you a particle from the belly of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Remember, always be curious. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - They’re Going to Destroy Science! Eric Weinstein and Brian Keating Part 1 of 2 (#302a)

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