Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - What’s the Relationship Between Matter and Space-Time? w/ Tevin Naidu

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! What’s the relationship between matter and space-time? What’s the fundamental nature of reality? And how should we, as science communicators, push back against anti-scientific BS? These are just some of the topics I had the pleasure of discussing with Tevin Naidu. Tevin is a medical doctor, philosopher, and ethicist whose academic work spans theories of consciousness, computational psychiatry, phenomenological psychopathology, values-based practice, moral luck, addiction, and the philosophy and ethics of science, mind, and mental health. Tune in and join us for this thought-provoking conversation! Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 - Intro  00:00:36 - What are space, time, and matter?  00:07:11 - How I approach theoretical physics  00:12:43 - How my podcast changed my perspective 00:18:58 - How to "push back" against BS with respectful, open discourse 00:28:50 - Origin of the word podcast and inspiration for Into The Impossible  00:33:55 - Historic moments captured by humans  00:41:21 - Fundamental nature of reality 00:45:02 - Debunking Terrence Howard's JRE comments  00:57:25 - Religion & atheism  01:04:07 - My thoughts on the success of Into The Impossible 01:08:38 - Thoughts on trusting NASA, evidence for alien life, and extraterrestrial tech 01:14:54 - Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Tevin Naidu: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Truly exceptional minds balance the traits of confidence and humility. There are some that are purely egoic and they just really have a self-fulfillment that's unmatched, and some of them deserve it. But the surprising thing is I found very few of those types of people. Most people are extremely humble. They almost feel that serendipity, luck, played a huge role in it. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

Brian, your podcast into the impossible and your work in general, you focus on the origin of space, time, and matter. Well, I mean, the podcast branches off into various directions, but your work focuses on this primarily. And I think the best place to start would be, how do you define space, time, and matter? Space, time, matter are sort of, you know, psychological. crutches that we humans use to understand how the world around us appears and what it means to make sense of the world really first, you know, begins with giving things names. So we call space the region that we can access either by sight, by motion, the different points in the universe that are accessible to us. And space can be completely independent of matter.

or time, but in the last 100 years, we've discovered there are actually a deep interconnection between the properties of space and time and matter, and that at first it was realized by Einstein and Mankowski and many others that space and time were essentially unified together in what was later called space time. And that is now, instead of only addressing a point by its three-dimensional coordinates up, down, left, right, backwards and forwards, or north-south, east, west, and up and down, we have to also specify the time at which an event occurs. But the other thing about the discoveries the last 100 years is that neither space nor time are fundamental or independent or even independently definable in that they're malleable.

They change, and they depend on motion. So space, if you think about space and time separately, you can do so as long as there's no motion or matter. But once you bring in motion, what is motion? What is speed? It's how many miles or kilometers per hour per second per light years per hour? That's something is moving at. So you need a space and you need a time. So the thing that unifies them together is speed, velocity.

And that was realized that if you have speed, the sort of the interconnecting tissue between space and time. And you also have the fact that velocity is relative, that you in a car, or have you ever been on a subway or on a train? And right next to you is another train. And that train starts moving, or maybe you start moving.

And you cannot tell the difference. Yeah. Two uniform moving objects, neither one can say which one's moving and which one's stationary. Each one feels they're stationary, but neither one can. So therefore, if you link space and time together via velocity, and velocity is relative, that means space and time are both relative. And they can shift and change and warp.

And that's true in the absence of matter. And when you add in matter, all hell breaks loose. Because now matter affects how space time connections are related to one another. So to get to a point in the distant universe, you now have to take into account matter because matter warps and changes trajectories of beams of light, of rockets, of astronauts floating around. So it's insufficient to just have one or the other. You need to actually have all three of those together. And they're woven together in intimate and highly predictive fashion. You know, now lately there's been an incredible resurgence in the kind of, uh,

memosphere on X and Instagram of everything is is up for debate. The moon landing never happened. There's no such thing as an atom. Atoms are just vibrations of sound and sound has all these properties and all sorts of true, nutty, pseudoscientific. Periodic table can have bisexual tones. That's right, yes. So in that sense, we have to be very careful in that we need to be

precise as scientist and specify when something sounds weird, it's not the, you know, two things that sound weird are not the same. The fact that if you're in a, you know, car, you know, driving at a fraction of the speed of light, that actually you get, you get shorter and compressed relative to an external observer, that's a fact that's verifiable. There's evidence for it. It sounds crazy because it doesn't comport with our everyday knowledge. And if you say if Adam has a tone and everything's made of silicone, which is not even an atom. But if you say that, everything is just a harmonic of an atom called silicon or carbon. You also are speaking something that sounds weird.

And that's because it's to utter nonsense and BS. So we have to be careful. And these things sound weird. And you always have to ask, what is the foundational bedrock truth that can give us information that we can trust? Not rely on an expert or whatever, but relying on evidence. And that's where my branch of science comes in. It's experimental physics. I'm not a theorist.

I'm not coming up with multidimensional wormholes to teleport to planet Zorclan 16. I am measuring the universe, collecting data from the earliest photons that ever existed to be produced to travel to my telescopes. And use that to transfer knowledge about every single thing they encountered in their nearly 14 billion year-long life. I often think about when I was a child how badly I wanted to be an astrophysicist. And this stuff would be all my life. I've loved mathematics and physics so much. I mean, to a point where Brian literally on my chest, I have, I don't know if you remember Carl Sagan's Voyager 1, the Golden Record. It's got the dive.

How do I remember it? I talked to his widow, Andrewian. She recorded her brainwaves a week after she fell in love with him. and they put that on that disk that I'm guessing is somewhere attached to your body. I literally took the same image of the, you know, the Pulsar map? I've got a sun at the center of my chest tattooed. With the Pulsar map at the center, that's how much I loved that. It's like tattooing your address in case an alien comes by and fix you up,

which is also in the news lately, right? But it's pretty incredible story because, I mean, I did that. I remember at the time thinking, Born from stars fed by a star, the sun's literally our life force. This is such a cool story, but people don't talk about it with the awe and this sort of poetic nature that the story really has. And you sort of filling that void that seemed to be missing for a little bit felt like we had those people around the theorists. You know, you're Neil de Grasse-Tisens, all the people, the Lawrence Krausses, the guys who come out talk about these, make it pretty cool. call and an experimentalist suddenly shows up and now starting to dominate this public sphere.

As an experimentalist, how do you take certain theories and which theories do you give the most credence to when you're trying to approach certain topics? What is the criteria you're using to make this search more plausible for yourself? My hero is Galileo, Galai, who, you know, is really credited. quite rightly so, with the foundational application of the scientific method in history. There are others that came up with different ideas about it, but he was the first person to use evidence, in his case, evidence collected from a telescope to justify and prove hypotheses about the universe.

He also did experiments on gravity, famously dropping objects of different masses off of the leaning tower of Pisa and seeing which one hit the ground first. And those are revolutionary because it was just accepted that these experts from 2000 years ago were such geniuses about logic and geometry that of course they knew about physics too, even though it's not possible to really find something that Aristotle did that was actually literally factually correct. But anyway, he was a brilliant man and he was also canonized as a saint, which is quite interesting. but in terms of what Galileo did is he revolutionized the empiricism protocols. So how do you go about justifying, validating what is true?

He did that in a book, his second to last book called The Dialogue, the Dialogo, which was a comparison between the two different world systems, the Greek one and the Copernican system. But that was really based on his observations from 30 years earlier in the start. messenger where he saw that Jupiter had these four stars he called them that went around it, but he knew that they were moons. And so it was not possible anymore for the Earth to be the center of the solar system, which was the whole universe.

So he really revolutionized the entire cosmos at that time. He said, well, it may be that there are multiple centers, but there's no such thing as Earth being the center of the universe. And that gave credence. He also made mistakes because he said that the Earth goes around the the sun, and he could prove that by the tides on the earth, which is not true. But leaving that aside, he did the first scientific application of data collection to prove a hypothesis. His lesser-known book is called the Sagittory, which means the sagacious one, or it means we translate it now to be

called the asser. So what is an asser? An asser is an individual, a scientist who's tasked with falsifying the claims of alchemists. The alchemist would take something made of metal, and they would rub it on, he would rub it, the assay, would rub it on a piece of material called a touchstone, and the way that it rubbed off would illuminate if it was really gold or lead or was painted or what have you. So you could actually prove by using something that is intrinsically almost worthless, like a slab of rock has almost no value. By rubbing onto it, an object that purported to be gold, you could actually prove that it was gold. And therefore,

have a very high value of a piece of rock. It's just a different type of rock. And so that process is the one I try to apply. I don't have any special theoretical abilities, mathematical abilities. I can only do the following. I can only ascertain what is possible to measure. And then in using the knowledge of what's possible to measure about the early universe, use that fact and use those potential experiments, design in my mind and in reality with my colleagues. an experiment to test these theories of everything and the claims by theorists, which are easy to produce. It's easy to produce a theory. It doesn't mean that they're simpletons.

They're smarter than me in most cases. But it's easy to produce a theory, especially when they can't be tested. If you say I need a particle accelerator to the size of the solar system or the galaxy in order to prove that I'm right. And I get 10 emails a day from people that have solved the theory of everything, that, you know, pie is a rational number. and it's related to the electrons charge, and all you need is a particle accelerator, the size of the Earth's orbit.

So all these things are nonsensical, but they're worse than nonsensical because you can't test them. You can't prove them wrong because there's no experiment you could conceive of to do it. So I'd like to not waste my time, and we only have a finite time on Earth when our minds and our bodies are connected, right?

And so I want to apply those as much as possible to practical pragmatic exploration of what we can measure. So that's what I do. I try to prove people wrong, not prove people right. Since starting into the impossible, do you feel that certain views that you held very strongly have changed over time? Because for me, when I started this podcast, exploring different theories of consciousness, trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality, talking to all these experts, we've had many guests that are very similar, a lot of parallels. it really has changed my views, which is pretty crazy. Because coming in, I had such firm beliefs.

Do you feel this has impacted you in a similar way since starting yours? It has, but more so by sort of teaching me the kind of skills and motivations that I need to examine in myself, that, you know, it's impossible not to have preconceived notions or, ideas or theories, but to sort of be, you know, cognizant of them and beware that it's very tempting to follow a trend or, you know, want to be in on a phenomenon or get the early jump on something. It's also tempting to want to be a contrarian and a pessimist. There are people that only are pessimists.

And so for me, the hardest part has been learning from the greatest scientist alive, 19 Nobel Prize winners, you know, four Pulitzer Prize winner, author. to astronauts, billionaires, et cetera, that, you know, the truly exceptional minds balance the traits of confidence and humility. And there are some that are purely egoic and Hutzbittick, and, you know, they just really have a self-fulfillment that's unmatched, and some of them deserve it, you know, talking to someone who won the Nobel Prize, and, you know, he's pretty full of himself. You could sort of expect that.

It's the highest accolade on Earth. You know, bar none. There's nothing even close to it in terms of intellectual accomplishments. And so from that perspective, it's natural to expect that. But the surprising thing is I found very few of those types of people. Most people are extremely humble. They almost feel that serendipity, luck, played a huge role in it. And for doing that and looking at what these people want to tell their stories,

Mostly I have on authors. Occasionally I have on, you know, just just scientists, but they're also authors. Rarely will I have on just somebody who's neither, you know, hasn't written anything, hasn't published anything scientifically. You know, I have on, occasionally had people on that on. And they're interesting for other reasons. But the main thing is everyone has a story. Yeah. And the key thing I'm trying to do better is dig deeper into their stories and follow up in a deeper way, in a more meaningful way, engaging.

even more, almost, you know, kind of doing something that that great scientist named Oprah Winfrey does, you know, she treats every person as if they're the most important person on Earth. And it's hard over Zoom. I actually, I don't know where you are. Where are you located? South Africa, Cape Town. Oh, okay. I noticed the accent, but I never want to assume.

I know that you guys have the best names in the world. I have someone named Bird, I know South. You know, La Jolla where UCSD is based, is a second home for South Africans. I have friends from Durbin all the way down to the Cape and beyond. I was born in Johannesburg, but raised in Durban, but now I live in Cape Town. Yeah. So, and I've never been. I was invited in 2020 right before the pandemic and never made it.

But I'll get there. I need to check it off. I'll definitely give you the VIP treatment. And that will be good because. an in-person podcast is just so much different. You know, I've had the honor of being on with Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan and Tom Billioux and Jordan Peterson and those are all in person. And there's a reason of those people in Oprah Winfrey, I've been on Oprah Winfrey, but

Oprah, if you're listening to Tevin's podcast, please reach out to the both of us, but we'll make a dynamic duo. But the point is, you know, there's a connection element. It's very hard to do over an internet connection no matter how fast. So you do a good job of it and you make people feel at home in it. But the main thing is how do you demystify what scientists do and destigmatize? You know, I always joke that, you know, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? It's because he looks at your feet when he talks to you.

So how do you kind of avoid that in a Zoom session? Well, it might be easier in a Zoom because you're looking at a camera. But I'm trying to bring that sort of humanization of my subjects and of the guests on the podcast. to light. But the other thing to heaven that's really important to do, and I don't know how you feel about it, but maybe you'll let me know what you do. But quite frankly, have you ever been in a situation you're talking to somebody and they're just talking nonsense? Like, you just know they might be the most respected professor. And I know some of our guests are in common. I won't say who they are. I don't want you to say who they are. But have you ever had a guest that was talking? And it was either the most advanced thing ever and you just couldn't possibly comprehend it. or they were promoting something, they had some ulterior motive, or perhaps they were just full of, you know what? Have you had that experience? And if so, what did you do? Hello, students of the impossible. It's Professor Brian Keating here with just a tiny little homework assignment to interrupt your podcast. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast

or following us on your podcast app of choice. Get some research and actually only about 50% of you are actually following or subscribing to the Into the Impossible podcast. And it really mean a lot if you could subscribe and keep up to date with me with all the greatest content. I'm putting out tremendous amounts. Podcast has grown in popularity, but it can be better and bigger with your help. Do that. Please do it now. Don't wait.

You'll forget. If you're looking to really boost your position on the grade curve for some extra credit, make sure to leave a rating or review of the podcast. It really helps. Thanks a lot. Now back to the show. Look, you said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. So I just spoke about this last week to Kurt. I mean, shout out to Kurt, J. Mangle, for all of those watching Into the Impossible Mind-Body Solution, theories of everything, very similar podcasts. And we were talking about exactly this.

I mean, I just, I give them the platform, allow them to express themselves as openly as possible. Kurt actually called it a good interrogation technique. Which, I mean, it's true. I mean, you understand fundamentally. that, well, I personally believe that this person is fundamentally wrong, but I'm still open to listening. I want to hear more about it. And I think the giving, it's a tough one, because I find you're in this dilemma where we're in this postmodern world where relativism is a big problem.

I mean, you have to worry about where do we draw the line with what we're willing to accept. And as someone who's a physicalist who grew up fundamentally, I mean, I love astrophysic. wants it to be a cosmologist specifically it gets quite difficult when I hear theories of consciousness that go beyond this realm it the more listen to some of them I do give some more credence than others but there are times where I think this person is just talking a whole lot of shit but I think we have an obligation we talk to such people because um you know to push back and that's been the hardest challenge for me because I don't want to be a schmuck I don't want to be known as, well, you gotcha, you know, because, you know, I mean, for just obvious reasons, you

don't want to, you know, lose any kind of credibility or insight, you know, to ever be removed from the list of people that, you know, that reputation will get around, right? So, from my perspective, I've tried to do it in a, in a respectful way, but I'll push back by either asking questions. One thing that's really helped me a lot and may help you, too, is I always ask my audience on Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube or Twitter or my website, Briankeating.com, or Instagram. I always ask them to ask questions. And sometimes you'll get questions from the audience. I'm having an author on tomorrow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering properties

of RNA and ribosomes and stuff like that. And, you know, I might want to ask him, well, what do you think about this vaccine and, you know, how the messenger RNA went awry. some people and cases of injuries and stuff. But it might be uncomfortable for me to ask it. So instead, I might say, as is true, I have a lot of questions. You know, how could you still stand by this technology that's led to, you know, a million injuries attributed to vaccine? I can ask that in my audiences. Now, maybe that's a cop-out. But on the other hand, if they're interested in it, that's just the tip of the iceberg. You know, I've got 300,000 plus people

across audio and video that listen or watch, and I always try to engage them. And a lot of times they're not, it's not for the gotcha questions. If I have on, you know, a particle physicist, it's not like, oh, well, you guys, you know, you opened up a black hole that swallowed up, you know, all the all the briah, all the bull tongue in the county of, I don't know where you are, which county it is. But anyway, the point being, you know, astronomy, cosmology, fairly safe domains. Although I did have a situation once I talked to an author. I don't say who it is, but it was a woman.

And we're talking about life in the universe and the cosmos. And she was very, you know, really into finding life on other planets. And I said, just out of curiosity, if you found life on another planet and it was the form of like an embryo or fetus, a human fetus had been placed there. And that was the life that was there. You know, how would you feel about aborting that life? Oh, I'd be really against it. And I said, well, what do you think about abortion here on Earth? Oh, I'm really for it.

So I kind of regretted that conversation because I was just seeing how intellectually honest or self-consistent she was perhaps. But I kind of regretted it afterwards. So you have to be careful. You don't want to take liberties with it. But you also don't want to let BS slide because it's just there's this Brandelini's law that, you know, the amount of effort to refute bull, you know what, BS is a magnitude or more or harder. to generate to refute it than it is to generate it. And so the world is filled with unrefuted BS.

Yeah. I think it's such a slippery slope. It's difficult to sort of, it's a very, it's an, it's almost an art to kind of get into this conversation with someone who you fundamentally disagree with and still leave that conversation feeling great, feeling like you were not disrespected. And it's, it's something you have to sort of nurture over time. And it's, I think because I grew up, While I was studying medicine, I had a side job to help assist paying for med school fees, which was fortunate for me, which was television presenting. And I got to host a lot of people in South Africa on a television show, which made it easier to listen to certain people, talk a whole load of random stuff about things that I had no interest in.

And you still had to have this ability to engage the person, really make them feel like you're listening. And I do find it quite difficult. I don't know how you handle it, but sometimes when you want to push back, you really don't want to do it in a disrespectful way. By the way, I love the fact that you're wearing pink today and I'm wearing blue because our podcasts, the colors really go well with our podcast shows. That's right. Totally. Totally authentic. You sometimes record an episode with someone and then you leave that conversation just thinking, I mean, I wish I didn't really do this episode. But it's sort of a, it's one of those conversations, I'm contemplating not posting.

Yeah. I've never not posted something. I've had my conversations with other people not posting. But, and I don't really know why because it was a multiple, you know, I'd been on multiple times and then the last time he didn't post it. But I've never not posted anything. I've come away feeling like I took that interview because the guest at the time, you know, when my podcast was really small, I had, you know, a thousand subscribers to you. All this name guest,

he's got, you know, 180,000 followers on Twitter or Instagram and, you know, but I haven't necessarily felt that that was the greatest reason to have them on. It was sort of maybe it's tangentially related, like, I'll have someone on who's making synthetic cheese, you know, that doesn't use, it's vegan, but it tastes good, or, you know, let's say I had on somebody. I didn't But I did have something similar. But at the end, it was like, well, it's kind of like science. And maybe it's not. Or I had on this woman who wrote a great book about Instagram, you know, the story behind Instagram.

And I thought it would be kind of like the social network where she's going to go blow up, get all this attention. And I get all this attention for being, you know, the one who interviewed her. And, you know, it was fine. She was smart. But it had no appeal to my audience. And nobody watched it. But again, anything went during COVID, you know. You'd almost like, I was just so excited to talk to somebody other than, you know, the barista at Starbucks or something like that.

But yeah, oftentimes I wasted a lot of time because I do, the hardest thing for me to do in the podcast is read every book. I don't like to not read the books. And so a lot of times I might have on somebody that has written a huge book. They don't have an audio book, so I can't listen at, you know, three times speed. and then I'll only read the first and middle and last chapter or something like that. I've only done this three or four times. But, you know, I kind of felt a little bit low integrity for doing that. Until I listened to a podcast by this guy, Chris Williamson, who's become extremely popular.

I was on a show in 2018 before he had video. Now he's got 2 million subscribers, and then he had 200 or something. And, you know, it didn't even have video. And then, you know, later on, he, when he became super famous, popular, going on Rogan many times. And he gave good advice because he said, you know, my job is not to like be audible summary. You know, my job is not to be the, you know, book short form, which is the company that I use. But it's to, it's to create an atmosphere vibe, he called it, for the listener to enjoy and have a conversation not to, you know, make buying the book superfluous, which the authors, you know, will love. always love. I mean, I love to talk about my books. Last night, I talked to a Korean radio station

about my second book, called Into the Impossible. And it's been translated into Korean and has the weirdest name. It's called Physicists Don't Trust Their Brains. That's the translation. I don't know how they would get that. I wonder what to be in Afrikaans. Maybe you can help me out. But anyway, the point is that I want to talk about it. And it was very tight. You know, she asked me like to summarize it. And, you know, I didn't really summarize it. I summarized a themes of it. But it's always fun to talk. I just don't like to go into an interview where I haven't fully done the research. And to do that, you need two or three hours per. I mean, these people have spent thousands of hours, tens of thousands of hours, developing the skills and

tools to write a book or to become a Nobel Prize winner or what have you. So, you know, the least I feel I can do is two or three hours. So I can't just, like, show up the way that I'm convinced Joe Rogan doesn't read any books, even the ones he's like authored the forward to. So, you know, I just showed up. He didn't read it. He watched my podcast, but he didn't read the book. So that's a difference, you know, I think between this and what I try to do. I completely agree.

I think that's the most exhausting part. I was just chatting about it the other day thinking about how much time goes into preparing for each podcast. I mean, reading and losing the Nobel Prize, reading into the impossible, reading every book that goes into the making these podcasts, but then also trying not to do what you're talking about, just being this auto-generated question. because AI could easily do that. And that's not what I want for the listeners of mind-body solution. That's not what I want at all. I know Into the Impossible is premised on, well, it's based on your love for science fiction. And I'd love to explore that a little bit. Let's talk about that. I mean, the Inter the Impossible, Arthur C. Clark. Give us some insight into that. Yeah. So I actually became the associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human

imagination, which we host here at UC San Diego. And because of that, we had a great deal of incredible luminary intellects that would come through UCSD. And some of them were writers, some of them were scientists, some of them were artists, poets, what have you. But they all shared the same common trait, which is that they were passionately curious about the universe and were interested in exploring it. Many of them were interested in science fiction. I actually have more of a love for science nonfiction than science fiction, although I can indulge science fiction at times if it's done well. I did come to science via Isaac Asimov, not his science fiction, but his science nonfiction books on chemistry and so forth.

And you may know that Arthur C. Clark himself was also a great writer of nonfiction in science and popularize things like virtual reality, FaceTime, geosynchronous orbits of satellites. And without him, we wouldn't have at least the name of what we do podcast. So the podcast comes from the sign behind me, if you're watching, and it says, open the pod bay doors. And that's a quote from Dave, the astronaut scientist in 2001 of Space Odyssey, when he tries to get back into the ship that's going to Saturn,

because of this life form that's discovered there. And Hal won't let him in. And so there's this battle there. And the pod was this life support system that contained all of Dave's needs that allowed him to live for, you know, a while longer before he does this big maneuver and tries to get back in. I won't spoil it, although it's 55 years old. So can't really spoil it that. One of the greatest of all time. Yeah.

And so, and it's just, and so that Kubrick is accused of being the. person who staged the moon landings and the falsification of the moon landings that many people believe is the case, that we never went to the moon. It was just shot in a movie studio in Hollywood. And the reason that the flag is waving on the moon, according to Bart Sibrelle, who was on the Joe Rogan experience recently, and I made a video debunking it. But according to Bart, this conspiracy theorist, the flag is waving because there was wind in the studio. So Kubrick was this master, you know, creative genius, but he forgot to close the door. inside of the studio to replicate the moon landing along with these electrical lights that Bart

loves to talk about. So anyway, the point being when the Pod Bay Doors referenced then became synonymous with the life-saving, life-sustaining notion of the what was then called the iPod back in 2001, when the iPod was being developed, this guy, Vince, who's an engineer and product branding person, he suggested to Steve Jobs, that it would be called. the iPod based on the pod in 2001. So we have the podcast name only because of Arthur C. Clark. So that's one of the many reasons I do love him and the work that he did. Aside from Arthur C. Clark, Brian, what other science fiction, I mean, we'll focus on nonfiction

in a bit. What other science fiction do you enjoy? Do you, any specific authors or books in that? Yeah. I'm very blessed to have out on, you know, two or three of them, David Brin. and Stan Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson, who are both alumni of UCSD, that have written just incredible books and very different from the type of science that I do. But the one in particular that really resonates with me in recent science fiction history is a sort of fan fiction about Galileo called Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. And it's just the most phenomenal. It's got so much science fact in it.

And the audiobook is just phenomenal. And so I did an event with him and Mario Biagioli here at UCSD on what would have been Galileo's, you know, 500th birthday, I think it was. It was the 400th, no, it was the 400th anniversary of the telescope. So he couldn't have been 500. But anyway, the discussion of, you know, between the three of us, a historian of science of Galileo, a writer of Galileo's work. And then, you know, someone who builds telescopes based on Galileo's design. And that's really the one that ranks up most closely for me. You just mentioned a historian, right?

And the first thing I thought at the moment was people could look at you and think that he's a historian because you're literally studying history. When people think of history, they're thinking World War II. They're thinking about all these exciting moments in human history. And we didn't get that the universe has a history of its own. And we were firmly not a part of it for a very long time. second of the last day. I mean, I can't remember the exact amount.

But talk to me about the story of the universe, because it's an awe-inspiring story. There's two particular cosmology stories that I really loved. And I remember the one being the Hubble, Ultra Field, the Deep Field. I mean, that moment expanding this universe so much more. And the CMB. And, I mean, that's particularly focused on your work. Those two images are two of my favorite, possibly two of my favorites when he comes to thinking about the universe, the cosmos, just based on the historic significance they come with.

So tell me about this story. Yeah, so those two images I call each one in different occasions, I call each one kind of cosmic wallpaper or cosmic screensavers because in one case, all the processes that we know about in the universe are come from fossils. We cannot do an experiment as an astronomer. I cannot change the temperature of the sun and see, does that make make the sunspots more intense or less intense and so forth. I can't do an experiment. But there's literally a hundred billion other sunlike stars in our own galaxy. So statistically we can do an incredible job, maybe not doing an exact experiment, but God or Mother Nature, if you will, is kind of doing this experiment for us, having millions of variables under the control. And we can

look at that and see what is the effect of different phenomena. But in cosmology, there's only one universe for now. There are a lot of claims we could live in a multiverse. There's zero evidence that we live in a multiverse. So that has to be taken into account. But in a universe that only has a single instance of our universe, or what we can observe, we are observing effectively different kinds of what I call fusion processes. And the most familiar to you might be the fusion itself of the light elements on the periodic table, where they came from protons and neutrons fused together to make heavier elements. And then those proton neutron nuclei, it's called Deuterium, then they fuse to make helium. And we see the leftover remnants in the universe of hydrogen and

helium. And those can only have come from the Big Bang, what we see in the universe. In fact, we can scoop up some in the ocean here, there, and we will get some measurement of the abundance of tracing back to the original composition of the universe the first three minutes after the Big Bay. But there are other fusion events that took place as well. There's a fusion. So after the first nuclei form, it took 400,000 years for the universe to cool off enough to fuse the first atoms.

First atoms were hydrogen atoms. So hydrogen nuclei is just a proton. A hydrogen atom is a proton and an electron. But the universe was too hot until about 400,000 years after the Big Bex. bang for the electron to stay bound to or fused to the proton in an atom. So that took 400,000 years. When that happens, the CMB is produced. That leftover heat at the time of the fusion of the first atoms is called the cosmic

microwave background. That's what I study. And then if you like, 100 million years go by until the first stars in the universe start igniting, fusing together, their hydrogen into helium, providing heat. and they accumulate and fuse together into galaxies and clusters of galaxies. And that process is sort of the last major fusion of material in the universe, in that sense, you're fusing a galaxy made up of individual stars. And that is the Hubble Deep Field.

So that occurs in a much earlier, much later time in the universe's history, which is much closer to us today. And by using a telescope, a telescope is a time machine. So we may not be able to do an experiment like a biologist. can take a fruit fly and change a chromosome and see what happens to it because we only have one universe, but we can use a telescope to go back in time and see what were the physical conditions like at those extremely early times. And one of those times we can go back, the first one going back from Earth to the past, is the Hubble Deepfield, now been replaced by the

James Webb Ultra Deep Field, seeing very consistent things, but also bringing up new questions. Why are the galaxies so mature? Why are there so many of them? Why are they so hot, bright, luminous? This should be impossible, according to some, like some of my guests and some that I don't have a maestro, but this should be impossible according to the standard Big Bang theory because there's not enough time to form a giant galaxy to produce that luminosity at a redshift of 10, which is where we're seeing things just 400,000 years, 400 million years after the Big Bang, so 1,000 times later than the CMB. And then the CMB is a tracer of the processes at the time at which it was created 400,000

years after the Big Bang. So you have a factor of three orders of magnitude between these two events. And so they're going to reveal extremely different phenomena. And yes, you're right. They're iconic images. They really are the pinnacle of cosmological observations that human beings can measure in the sense that we can't really do any better. We literally can't do better than the CMB temperature maps. I have a beach ball in the side of my office here that has the depiction of what you'd see if you were God looking at our universe from the outside, so to speak.

And that is the oldest light in the universe. You can't look at light, find light earlier than that. We hope to, on my experiment that I'm building, with colleagues from 60 other universities, 300 other scientists called the Simon's Observatory, we hope to make another image, which would be an image of the gravitational radiation present, not in the first 400 million years, not in the first 400,000 years, but in the first trillions of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

That's called inflation. So that would be another iconic image. We claimed to make that 10 years ago with Bicep. We had to retract that claim. And that was the subject of my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, I have over here. So this book is the story of how we came to almost win the Nobel Prize,

and then we lost it because we mistook the Nobel Prize. signal that we saw for a cosmic signal when it was really a collection of essentially chunks of microscopic space dust similar to these meteorites, which I give away to all my beloved listeners and viewers who live in the United States that have a .edu email address. So put a link in the show notes, maybe to that. Brian Keating.com slash edu. You'll ship you one of these if you live in the U.S. If you don't, sorry, I'll have to ship one to Tevin.

He'll ship some to you. from South Africa at his cost. But I love to do that. And I also give my way to not to Normies that don't have that edu email addresses I pick one or two at random at Brian Keating.com. So yeah, I love to give these things away, even though this is the villain of my book, Tevin. This is a villain.

This is what caused me and my colleagues not to win a Nobel Prize. I love the fact that it with your recent conversation with Lawrence Krauss that someone asked if there's any radio activity in some of those. Yeah, that's right. Very little, very little, yeah. Very little. There's radio activity everywhere, but it's minute.

When I was speaking to Lawrence Krauss, I was thinking, we were discussing these alternate theories of reality and multiverses, dark energy, dark matter. What are your thoughts on these concepts? I mean, I've heard you talk about them. Where do you stand in terms of the fundamental nature of reality? How do you define this? In terms of the nature of reality, the understanding that I have is, again, a very pragmatic approach. I like to look for what is possible for me to measure. And again, not to prove, but to

disprove. So there's many hypotheses that contend that the universe didn't have an inflationary origin and therefore would not have a multiverse experience, you know, sort of a multiverse. But the fact is we can't rule out inflation. We can't disprove inflation because inflation could occur, but with so low an energy scale that it's undetectable for our instruments to view it, in which case we would perhaps say that there's no evidence for it, but it did truly happen. So you'd be ruling out the hypothesis making a type 2 error, it's called. But there are other theories that suggest the universe is not a part of the multiverse. The fact, there's three or four different theories like that. And they go by different names, like a steady state universe,

static universe, quasi-static universe, bouncing universe, conformal cyclic cosmology. And those all have a virtue that they can be falsified. We could prove them wrong with our instrument that would not necessarily prove inflation, but in science you can't prove a statement like one plus one equals two. You can do that in math, although not according to Terence Howard, but you can do it in mathematics for logical propositions, piano axioms, and go into deep mathematics of number theory and so forth. But you could prove it. It takes a long time to prove one plus one equals two, but you can prove it and just using the laws of predicate calculus and logic. But you can't prove a scientific statement. I can't prove the universe began with a big bank. I can have extreme evidence for it. I can rule out

every other model that one could think of. But tomorrow, somebody could come up with some other theory. You know, Isaac Newton thought that gravity was transmitted at the speed of light. And at his time, he couldn't falsify that. Later on, it was disproven by, it was faster than the speed of light. Infinitely fast, he didn't thought. And it took Einstein to show, no, gravity travels at the speed of light as well. So for these reasons, I think it's important to look at what real scientists do is we don't go out. We're not trying to prove Brian Green or Eric Weinstein or, or, you know, whoever, their personal theory. If they make a I try to press them all. What is a rigorous prediction that you can make from your theory?

Not just that it's elegant or it's beautiful as Brian Green told me or that you can get certain things out of it. That is the only theory that can produce things that we do see like gravity and general relativity. That's not proving. It's not able to be disproven. It's just a nice feature of a set of mathematically equation. So when people say these things, I always say, well, what's the actual concrete prediction that I can measure in a telescope or particle accelerator? They say there is none. It may be interesting mathematically, but it's not in the realm of physics. And so I can't necessarily waste my time with it. I've noticed you've also had, well, similar guests on your show in terms of discussing consciousness at this point. I know you don't find free will to be very intriguing in the sense that nobody acts like they don't have free will. So what is the point in actually talking about, especially as a pragmatist? I mean, there's no point in really discussing. this. I mean, if you're a determinist who doesn't believe in free will, it's not like you're

walking around naked on the streets, doing whatever you want. But those people you've spoken to who fundamentally believe that reality is consciousness. I know you've spoken to Bernardo Castro recently. You've had several similar guests who've got these views. You've got people like Donald Hoffman, et cetera. How does someone who's so pragmatic trying to figure out how we can use this physical universe as a tool to understand the nature of reality, then have these discussions with people who have such alternative views? Well, I mean, I think it's important to listen to voices that have earned credibility to have standing to communicate with. In other words, people say, oh, no, you should listen to everybody and you'll be surprised. Terence Howard will be right. He has zero

standing. He has zero training, zero knowledge. He has made, you know, provable errors in logic and scientific knowledge and mathematical reasoning and so forth. So, no, I don't think. Sometimes I debate, you know, should such people be ridiculed, not celebrated or entertained or humored, but should they be humiliated? And I don't like to do that. So I'm not going to humiliate them. Other people that, you know, propose the moon landing, you know, is a hoax and so forth. I will entertain those. I did tell Joe Rogan, I would come on a show and debate him, and I don't think it would be close, although they're all of his adherents that say, you know, because I am a scientist that I am suspect, I work for big NASA, that I just care about the narrative, and the government lied

to us about COVID, and therefore they can lie about everything. So maybe even the world and the earth is flat, and it's very nonsensical. But again, Brandenie's law, the BS asymmetry principle applies. You cannot refute everything because you'd be spending your life refuting 10 to 100,000 times more, you know, BS than there is actual real physics that we can attempt to entertain. So I have enough, you know, things to keep me busy and orthodox, you know, practicing scientists. But, you know, to say that we have to listen to these alternative models, theories, I think that's nonsensical. It's probably detrimental to listen to, you know, at at some point, everything could be regurgitated, right?

So we could still, we could go back and say, well, there's phlogiston. And so, you know, that's why things combust. And there's phrenology is a good tool to use for diagnosing mental disorders. And the lobotomy was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, was, we should, we should do that more and more often. You know, so at some point, you, you, you have to realize that that, that's a, it's, it's almost like a dark scientific age. It's not unique, fortunately or unfortunately, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

many times over, you know, it's not unique. So I think that this is, you know, something that we just have to get used to, that there's always going to be conspiracy theories and crackpots and people that say woo-woo things that to a lay person, you know, might sound appealing. But even at very first blush, I mean, we could say, well, heavy things fall faster than lighter things. Or, you know, well, since every atom has a resonant frequency, that means every, that means every note, you know, played in a Terrence Howard movie soundtrack is just creating atoms

because there's a duality between these two. And they would say, no, no, no, that's not what we mean. So they like to use science to kind of as a cudgel, as a battering ram to kind of attack science. And for that reason, I find it very abhorrent. I mean, basically all Terrans did was take Walter Russell's model and try to sort of just defended, I guess, in a sense. It's pretty crazy. I mean, I was watching Kurt and Lee Cronin, you've spoken to both of them at the same time before discussing it. And I find it intriguing that we're spending so much time discussing this man's view. You said, I mean, what has he really done to sort of justify or earn this spot to be an expert in that field? Because I agree with you.

I mean, I tend to have most of my guests to either professors, PhDs, I mean, people who have thoroughly studied this, being tested on it, and passed. Because, I mean, that's a fundamental difference between someone just sitting at home, reading a book and then figuring out a few things here and there, is that you're not really being tested afterwards. Did you have to really spend the hours putting in the work and the effort trying to fundamentally understand this concept? Do you think that's a big problem there in lacking from his side?

Yeah, I mean, I definitely do. I mean, these are things that are, you know, demonstrably. false. There's zero evidence for it. It's like, you know, looking at a picture of a, of, you know, the snake that eats its tail and then saying, well, that is, you know, an ouroboros, and that kind of looks like, you know, this cosmology. And so there's no evidence. I mean, I'm looking at this, you know, right now. And, and it's, it's so laughable. I mean, there's stuff on here. Okay, it's got like 17 different elements. It's got like between, just for hydrogen has like 20, beta non, all these things. Okay, so he's making a prediction. So every single one of these predictions, the second octave, there's something called, you know, between lithium and fluorine. He doesn't describe how they come about. He just puts numbers to them. There's luminaon. There's helium, there's helium, non, there's carbogen, beta, not. So he's made a thousand predictions here that can be falsified. And, and in fact have been falsified.

There's no mechanism for these things to form. He's not saying they don't exist. He's just saying that there's integrating light, octave within another. So it's very appealing to, you know, people that want to see ridiculous patterns or want to see, you know, sort of a joke about stuff. Whereas, you know, when you want to take your medicine, if you have a headache and you try to get some beta non to do it or your, you know, your, you know, pharmacist, you. uses alchemy or perhaps uses, you know, snake oil to do it, you wouldn't, you say, no, I don't want to

do that when you use actual proven medicine. Your child is going in for surgery. I don't know. Terrence Howard has, has a kid or something. And they're going to give them anesthesia. And the anesthesiologist says, I'm going to give you bait anon instead because your ideas are so good, Terence. I want your child. I want your child, your daughter, your beautiful, precious daughter, to have some baiton, breathe it in because that will cause her to resonate. He would stop the doctor. He would call, you know, child protective service. He would go nuts.

So it's just total nonsense. They don't believe any of this stuff. My girlfriend's an anesthesiologist. And I'm just thinking about how irritated we get when, you know, when a patient wakes up and then like, oh, thank God. I mean, we're just sitting there like, oh, yeah, we were just there just watching. I mean, it's nothing to do with it. We want some of that recognition. I mean, it's crazy.

It says there's no way I'm going to give you some sort of a music. note as medicine. I mean, I'll definitely go to something like that. Yeah. So, yeah, that is. It's a big problem. The problem comes in, I think, when someone has learned enough about a topic to know enough, but not enough to realize they don't know anything in that topic.

And that happens to me all the time. The more I learn about certain things in physics, for example, your work, the more I read about it, the more you realize. the more you realize, I mean, I know absolutely nothing to really go in depth and have a discussion with Brian Keating, regarding the CMB, for example. I mean, I know enough to have a fun, friendly conversation. And I think that's where possibly Joe Rogan goes a bit, Aray, where he's starting to feel like he is an expert because he's now spoken to enough experts. And I think that's where a blurry line stand tends to occur.

I mean, I've spoken to enough professors of mind at this point, but still, never really going to consider myself the expert in the field. And I think that humility that they lack tends to be the biggest problem. Yeah, I think that's true to say that you can do the work of a scientist like me or my colleagues or my students who work for half a decade. And then they still don't have, you know, the kind of judgment or wisdom. You know, science means knowledge in Latin. It doesn't mean wisdom. So how do you get wisdom from that?

Well, I think it's important to look at the fact that science can't produce wisdom. Just having a set of facts is not sufficient. Wikipedia has a lot of facts. If you were going to do that to consult with, and I'm just looking up Terrence Howard, and I looked up to see, does he have any children? He's been married four times to three women, and he has five children. Okay, well, you know, Neil Armstrong got divorced too. I think he married his wife twice.

I'm not going to judge him for that. But again, yeah, he's got a son. He's got multiple kids. He's got a granddaughter and a grandson. And, you know, for me to think about this person in terms of, like, yes, is this appropriate for somebody to say such things? Again, to me, if you don't put in the work, it's not only that you are doing something, you know, morally questionable, but you're also condemning people that have put in the work to do. do the real thing. It's like even this guy, you know, Russell and, and, you know, who Howard is quoting and trying to get a patent about, this person had at least at some point, you know,

learned about what a spectrum is and learned about, you know, spectroscopy and molecular, you know, dynamics and stuff like that. And then, you know, started to put a bunch of nonsense together. So my question is, you know, to what extent do we, as scientists, allow for the disparagement of what we do, that if this guy can do it, you know, between making films and getting married, you know, to what extent do we have, you know, earn the credibility as scientists to push back and to say, look, you have done no real rigorous research. You have, you know, come up with some interesting numerical facts. I mean, you know, it's like I'm saying, well, the number six is really important.

You know, carbon is number six in the PRRIC table. And did you know, Tevin, that if you go out to the 900 decimal place of pie, that the number six repeats six times, and that's a message to us, and that means a pie is not real. I mean, at what point do you say, well, actually, you know, we can discover how that came about and we can, you know, provide to an expansion that actually is used to get pie to a billion in decimal places. But no, no, you're not going to trust the people that came up with that so that you found this supposed serendipitous coincidence.

You're just going to use the fact that other real scientists have come up with to attack science or to undermine the credibility in science. I find it very... Never forget. Do not mistake correlation for causation. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the impossible tis I, your fearful host. Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment. before we get back to the episode.

And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it, depending on your podcast, catcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that only about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that. And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve,

please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it. Do it now. Before you forget, let's go back to the episode. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. I think one of what's the most disappointing part about this whole thing is, is that Mendelev, the way he figured out these things, I mean, each element and how certain things fit into place and how he set everything up, was such an awesome story. It was one of the coolest things that's been done. I mean, it was such an epic tale, the way he sort of figured these things out and how these patterns come together. And now for it to get sort of shut down and like pushed under the carpet, it's kind of irritated. Yeah, it definitely is. And, and, you know, kind of, again, it's, it's, and I'm, you know, I call myself a practicing Jew. I'm not necessarily, you know, a fully believing Jew, but I feel like belief is kind of presumptuous to say, oh, Brian Keating believes in God. So, you know, I keep kosher. You know, I can read Hebrew. I taught it to myself after age 30, which was very difficult. You know, so I put in the work to do, oops, to do practice in this field so that I can have some expertise, right? Rather than just be like, you know, again, past guest, I'm not going to poop on him too much.

But, you know, Sam Harris, who will condemn all religion, but he has a very superficial, almost, you know, childlike understanding of the principles of at least my religion of Judaism, which, you know, is the religion I think he's technically a part of or was a part of. Now he's obviously a prominent atheist. And that's fine. I'm not mandating that anyone should become, you know, faithful to any religion. But when I talked to him about some very basic concepts that have been adjudicated by, you know, thousands and thousands of people much more knowledgeable than me or him, certainly about Judaism, you know, to then have it pivot away from that and say, well, like, we can make a better Bible than God. And therefore, God is irrelevant and non-existent and the Bible is worthless because we wouldn't put slavery in there. And so I asked what, what did slavery mean? And we went into this whole discussion. and all of his fans and, oh, how could you even entertain?

This is after three and a half hours of talking about it. And then the conversation came to a more abrupt end. But, you know, I do feel like we have this tendency to have this incredible arrogance about what we know, but we neglect the fact that we stand on the shoulders of thousands of years of giants. And I don't think that should ever be taken for granted. And I think that's the biggest mistake is that we, singular, I think we're, we're, We're so much dumber than we are as a unit.

I mean, as a collective intelligence, we're much better. And what people tend to forget is that we're all working off each other's ideas. There's no singular Einstein's walking around here anymore. I mean, nowadays, it's very difficult to come up. Well, there's so many people working on so many different things that it becomes almost easier to fall into this relativist trap where because there's so many people doing so many different things and because experts will tend to have these views on science particularly well well brown as you know there's the realm of philosophy known as scientism and I

think that's where you get caught into this trap of course where people are calling you out and being like that's scientism you of you fall into this branch of people who who do not fundamentally who are not open to other sources of of knowledge and and I often get caught out in the same thing and yet we're still open to this discourse. I mean, you just spoke about the fact that you're not really, you're not, you're not technically a believer, but you are practicing in a specific way. I mean, I often say I'm ontologically agnostic regarding the nature of the universe and God, but I would say epistemologically and knowledge wise, I do consider myself to be certain

sort of atheists, but 99.9%. I still leave room for it. I don't close it off, but you can never be 100% certain on anything. That's right. No, I agree. And it's a form, again, of hubris, of, you know, hutsba, arrogance, however you want to say, that, you know, for thousands of years, people have debated this, the greatest minds in human history. And you or me, you know, Brian Keating has somehow found this obvious example for, even people like Lawrence Krause. I mean, again, I debated with him about it. You know, he has his own objections. He's another Jew who's atheist, militant atheist. And, you know, to, again, these people

oftentimes they do a very cursory examination when or maybe they're so precocious like Sam and Lawrence that by age 13 when they had their bar mitzvahs or whatever they realized this wasn't for them and yet and yet they're left then for the rest of their lives with their 13 year old interpretation of these various facts about their religion which may or may not have been provisional wrong misunderstood I mean if you went to a third If a 13-year-old came up to Lawrence Krause, I asked him this and said, you know, your book a universe from nothing is total garbage, and I know better, and I figured this out. And he'd be like, well, how old are you?

Oh, I'm 13. He wouldn't even entertain the guy. I mean, go to graduate school, get a PhD, understand quantum field theory, understand the Friedman Robertson-Walker metric and general relativity. And then we can have a discussion. But no, you don't have to do that when it comes to religion because religion's easy and it's just based on taste and you can't debate taste. So why even entertain such people?

I think there's a little bit of arrogance that goes with sort of those sorts of intellectual approaches or non-intellectual, anti-intellectual approaches to it, rather engaging with it because I think it's different for religion than even the multiverse, because they would have to, presumably, if I could prove God existed to you, Tevin, you might change your behavior. You might act differently. Nobody's acting perfectly flawlessly, right? So you might, and it might not be my religion. You know, what if it's, you know, some, you know, religion that we don't even contemplate,

that we reject because it's, I don't know, pantheistic or whatever. The point is, if you could find some logical refutation for it, then you'd be sort of a mental patient if you didn't follow the precepts of that religion. And so, therefore, you are encumbered, and there's a natural inclination for atheists I found, to not want to entertain, maybe even be openly hostile, as I found Sam and, and, and, and, and, to be building up over decades of resentment towards predominantly Christian fundamentals, you know, to give them their, you know, their perspective and their due. But nevertheless, to rule out every aspect of religion, say everything about it's false and not even entertain it as beneath

them, I think that that's not intellectual. Yeah, I think people have to have that sort of, that's where this open discourse comes into play. And I don't want people to feel like the, just you have to be professional. I'd say you have to have the PhD, you have to sort of be a professor, but you have to put in the work. That's right. I mean, you have to have some sort of a background foundation that's based in this realm. That's why starting the conversation with definitions, I know it was a tough one, just be like, what is space, time and matter? It's important because you and I could be talking about completely different things and just go around in circle.

It doesn't really matter. I mean, if you ask, I mean, Jordan Peterson, what is, who is God, what is God? God, what is God? I mean, you'll get like 20 different answers. Oh, yeah. But you're asked someone like Sam Harris, who has got? I mean, he'll say no one, nothing. Right. Simple. Yes or no question for them. Exactly. When you've started this podcast, Brian, did you feel that it would grow into this

phenomenal, phenomenal podcast that it is today? Did you ever feel that it would reach these heights? No, I don't think so. I mean, most podcasts. end after seven episodes or something like that. So I think I'm on 420 or something now. And that's not a coincidence. That number. I know Elon Musk likes that number, but I think that's literally what I'm on. So, yeah, I think nobody really, you know, can expect to have success because it's dependent on other people. And when you look at, you know, sort of how many people have subscribed and watched almost up to 50 million total downloads and views and listens. And, you know,

It's incredibly gratifying to see it. It is also very slow, and I still feel like it's undersubscribed and under, it gets too little attention, not because of my brilliance, although that's a part now. But because of the guess that I'm getting, I mean, like you said, I mean, nobody's had on 19 Nobel Prize winners and had deep discussions where they involved the audience in the questions. And don't shy away from it. I think we've got, you know, I hired a production team a year ago almost to really up the

audio, video, quality, shorts, clips, background. footage, you know, edits and quality of it and, you know, I spend a lot of money on it. I don't get paid for it. The university doesn't give me a dime. They don't even, you know, half the time want to know about it because I'll have on controversial people like Sam Harris or, you know, Ben Shapiro, God forbid I had on. So Jordan Peterson. So having, you know, those, the university might not be so positively disposed to it, but whatever. They give me some license and liberty to do it. But, you know, really, I feel like it's sort of just beginning. It's hoping to ramp up and grow, not just for growth's sake, because that is dependent on an external metric that you

can't control, whereas the quality, improving it, constantly running experiments to see what works and what doesn't. And also talking with other audiences like yours will, you know, kind of be the thing that supercharges the attention. But when I talk to people that are very successful, have millions of subscribers, you know, they'll always say, well,

what is your podcast competing against? And I'll say, you know, Tevins or, you know, Kurt, Gianmongal,

or Lex Friedman, they'll be like, no, you idiot, it's competing against like Mr. Beast, you know, I'll give $100,000,

if you can sit on top of the Birch Khalifa for, for three months. Yeah. You know, it's competing with, you know,

my daughters love to watch, you know, unboxing videos of like silly putty, you know, it's just whatever. Videos, like the baby show

online. royalty family, God, if I have to hear that theme song again, at least it's not like Nastya anymore. That was a phase. So, you know, my boys aren't, I just want to watch, you know, that cyber truck and, you know, this thing, and I think. So I guess the point is, you know, you can't really expect it. You can't also influence it.

You know, it's almost impossible to grow it. There's no other way to do it than word of mouth and kind of, every now and then they'll have some viral kind of semi-viral video. But even, you know, the thing I'm most worried about is kind of audience capture and, you know, I'm glad to see that our friend Kurt has kind of done less in the way of aliens and conversations with, you know, Lou Elizando and I'm sure he will continue to have such conversations, but for a while it was all he was doing. Yeah.

And even he and I did a joint episode together with Tom DeLong, you know, the Blink 182 fame and the to the Stars Academy. And I felt, you know, a little gross after that, but, but with Kurt's help, we made it through. So, um, we had a chat about that and um, oh yeah, what did he say? Yeah, but it's a he, he was, I mean, he has calmed down on it. But I think he, he, he, when he finds interest in it, he will go back into it. And I think, yeah, I think I'm a little bit. I mean, my girlfriend made this, this cup for me just with the logo of, um, my

but she, but she also added like just for to, to highlight my slough for space. She's got a, she added a little bit of that. But I mean, uh, yeah. I mean, R.V. Lobo is probably the only person I spoke to who's been on the podcast who fundamentally believes it. I know you've also spoken to him about it. His scientific search. At most, I think that if we do find something, it would be something akin to bacteria, some sort of a cellular basic life form, unless I'm completely wrong. Yeah, I guess that's, you know, you have to be open to that fact that you could be completely wrong. I don't believe that it's possible right now to say that there's any evidence for the existence of alien life, even bacteria. Simply there is no evidence for it.

But then there's even greater claims of the existence of extraterrestrial technology. So what do you do with those types of claims? I feel like as long as it's harmless, it's fine. I don't think that certain people can remain harmless. Like I think, you know, you could say, well, attacking the moon landing is harmless because, you know, who's going to hurt Nylon? Armstrong, he's dead. But it's something different. It's undermining the credibility of an institution like NASA that really rubs me the wrong way because we rely on that every time we get on a Yeah, we get on an airplane. It's been tested, you know, despite the Boeing's and so forth. But the

fundamental technology of how airplane skin is attached to rivets and stuff like that, that's not Boeing, that was NASA. High altitude research, supersonic research, space travel, and say, well, no, these things are impossible because of the Van Allen belts and, you know, just total not, like, this guy's a cinematographer. He's like, he's made conspiracy movies. It's listed as his Wikipedia entry. He's a conspiracy theorist. And, okay, well, that has a, you know, I believe in a conspiracy, you know, that the, you know, that the Soviet Union was going to invade, you know, Poland or, you know, whatever. Yes, okay, some conspiracies are true. So I'm not, that proves all the more so I'm not using it as a pejorative, but that's simply what he does. And then to trust him

some expert on lighting, you know, and studios and the history of 1960s, you know, and he's like less than 60 years old himself. So he's 10 years old, 12 years old, doing a, doing a, you know, documentary research to falsify it back then. So it's just sort of nonsense, but it does irritate me. It rubs me in the wrong way because it's undermining. There are very few things that people should agree upon. And I got a lot of pushback. Like people say, what's wrong with the Nobel Prize? It's, you know, it's just like harmless celebration. scientists and we need more of that, right? Keating, you're a scientist. Yes, it is, but you should also say that everything can be reformed for the better. But these people aren't saying that.

I'm not saying, like, let's get rid of the fact that only three people can win a Nobel prize so more people can win it and share in the credit and share the love of science. So I'm advocating for ensuring the legacy of Alfred Nobel in my book, my first book, in part. Mostly it's a memoir about being a cosmologist than anything else. But the fact is, if you say that, well, we shouldn't trust anything NASA says because it's the government and the government lied to us about 9-11 or COVID or JFK, then I think we're in deep, deep do-do because there's no thing that it should be more universally celebrated than something like NASA. It's contributing to the exploration of the universe, which is, you know, people like Elon Musk and everybody say, well, we have to get off this planet or where are you going to go? If you don't trust in NASA and space exploration, which Elon Musk believes we can go through the Van Allen belts. Are you saying that you, Bart, Sibral, are smarter than Neil Armstrong, but then Elon Musk?

I mean, it's ludicrous hubris. I sometimes forget Elon Musk is actually born in South Africa and raised you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, his father, Errol is from there, right? Yeah, it's pretty crazy because when we watch him, which I just think, I remember when he was first getting so popular, I was thinking like, wow, this guy's in South African. doing this some incredible stuff and then things started going really really intense i was like okay now where is he really headed at this point you you start off with so so much excitement and then you're like okay now this is getting a bit interesting what i still remember daniel den had rest in

peace to him someone i really wanted on this podcast and and i wish i could have him on the show um i'm sure you're familiar with daniel then at uh brian there's no need for me too oh i had him on i i He was my, I did the final interview he ever did. I see. I'm so jealous. I mean, I'm so sad to think that I'm, I'm thinking of having him on my podcast. No, I know. I mean, it's pretty sick.

But he really was the guy, he was the number one pick for like, if I could have someone on the show, as Daniel did it. And I think his last tweet was, goodbye. I'm leaving Twitter, I don't like what Musk is up to. I think that's one of his last tweets. Have you seen that? Yeah, yeah, I did see that. Yeah, we talked briefly about it, I think, in the interview.

But, yeah, I found him very charming, just delightful, not unafraid, very courageous. You know, it was an incredible, incredible intellect. And I think, you know, to think about what, you know, we could have had, you know, in the past 10 years with people like Hitchens and Hawkins and Dawkins. And, you know, it's just, it's been an amazing time for, you know, many, many different subjects. but especially exciting for things that are coming up with our field in the podcast as well. And I'm really grateful that you had me on. I've got to go to my own interview soon, so to have another guest on.

But it's been such a blast to have this conversation with you. It's great to have, you know, I hate it when they go on and the host just has not prepared anything and just has no. I know that people have done that. Larry King used to do that, but I really do salute everything you're doing. No, I mean, I'm a huge fan. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brian. My channel, when I look at it, whenever I look at my statistics,

you're always there. I always see that pink, bright, big logo right behind your face. And I think, like, everybody's watching our videos, mutual fans, mutual respect, love your show, love your podcast, and also love even more the work that you do as a cosmologist, as a physicist, and someone who experiments and proves theorists wrong. And I appreciate your work, man. Thank you so much. Kevin, thank you so much

and I hope you have a great day down there and hope maybe we can visit and do a podcast in person. That's the final frontier. It would be an absolute honor. Thank you, Brian. All pay off your home, travel for life,

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