The Joe Rogan Experience - #2023 - Brian Keating

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Brian Keating is a cosmologist, professor of physics at UC San Diego, host of the podcast "Into the Impossible with Brian Keating," and author of several books, including "Losing the Nobel Prize" and "Into the Impossible: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner." https://briankeating.com/

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Thank you very much for coming, man, and thank you for bringing all this cool stuff. What is this old-timey telescope? Is that one of the ones the sailors used to use? That's my spyglass, yeah, this is exactly a spyglass. This thing is actually one of the most important inventions ever made. And it really is the reason I'm probably sitting here with you.

It's the actual tool. Not this one, but the telescope was really the machine that changed the world the most. And what's so cool about it, it acted like a lever that moved the Earth from being the center of the universe back in Galileo's time. What year did they invent it? The telescope was invented around the early 1600s. And there's a popular misconception that Galileo invented it, but he didn't. He actually perfected it. So he took it from like, you know, zero to one, basically. He took this spyglass, which was really never, it's amazing. People are using eyeglasses for many years,

and nobody ever thought to go take one lens, take another lens, and go like this. No one had ever done that. There was a guy, Van Leeuwenhoek, and this guy, Hans Lippershey, they had been making glass, and they were experts at making glass in the Netherlands. But Galileo heard about that and the original devices that they were making could magnify things two or three times at most. But Galileo realized, hey, I can improve this and then do what mankind has always dreamt of doing, use it to make money and use it for military purposes. of doing, use it to make money and use it for military purposes. Because with a telescope, you could see a ship in the Venetian lagoon a day or two out before it would come on shore and you could see it from the ground. So the distance back then was stealth technology. This took away the

stealth. It'd be like turning off the B-2's ability to have stealth. So he improved it so much. It was just inarguable this would change the world. So when was the eyeglass invented? Eyeglass was invented, you know, it's kind of cool. The eyeglass was invented in probably the late 1500s, these lenses. Glass used to be total crap. It would be like looking through a piece of ice today. These lenses are super clear and super clean, you know, modern lenses.

This isn't a great telescope, but it's illustrative, and we can use it to do things. piece of ice today. These lenses are super clear and super clean, you know, modern lenses. This isn't a great telescope, but it's illustrative and we can use it to do things. But what was so interesting to me, it's just like a quirk of history, is when these lenses were invented, before then, you didn't, I don't know what your vision is, but mine's about 20-20. It's getting worse as I get older, obviously. But before then, there were no standards for how good a person's eyesight was until they had, say, the Gutenberg Bible was published. So in the 1400s and 1500s, the first movable fixed type, we had a calibrated standard where you knew how big the type font was. And you could say, well, Joe can only see something at five feet away that Brian can see at 10 feet away or something like that. So then they realized, hey, I can't see what Brian can see or I can't see what Joe can see.

I need some kind of augmentation. And they would put lenses on. So that was in the original direction from directly from the Gutenberg Bible to glasses. And then what's so funny is the glasses then led to making a telescope. And then the telescope led to the Earth being moved away from being the center of the universe, which the Gutenberg Bible, you know, in some connotation suggested that we were. So there's a direct line from the Gutenberg Bible to the glasses to the telescope to then now religion is not so centralized in the age of scientific reason.

Wow. So when they first started using telescopes, what kind of power are we talking about? Like when Galileo improved upon it, you said it was like zero to one. Yeah. Like how many levels of magnification? So a good telescope that you can get, I always joke, you know, I'm not a doctor, but I'm not a real doctor. But the only prescription Dr. Keating makes is that you should buy your kid a telescope. And actually, the reason I said this is the reason I'm probably sitting here with you is because I became a scientist thanks to getting a telescope at about age 12. And you can actually see some. I know you've been to like the Keck Observatories, and you've seen the night sky

from there. And that is wonderful. But every single thing that Galileo saw with his 20 power telescope, which is not that much. Not much at all. You can get one of those, you know, on my website. No, I'm just kidding. But that was a big improvement. That was a huge improvement. Because now you could see there were craters on the moon. Now you could see there were mountains on the moon. The moon wasn't this perfect crystalline sphere that the Bible and the ancients had talked about. It had flaws, imperfections. It looked like it had oceans. That's why they're called mare, mare seas, the sea of tranquility. You know what really bummed me out? What was that? When Samsung, when they got exposed for their digital zoom for the moon, that bummed me out. I thought I was taking a real picture of the moon.

That's right. I was like, this is amazing. There's the flag. What can my phone do? There's the flag. It looks so clear. Like, how do they do that? And then someone took a photo of a blurry photo of a moon on a screen.

And it did it to that. Yeah, exactly. So it cleared up the image. It ruined the illusion. It's using fuckery. They should not do that. No, they should not do that. So, yeah, when Galileo, like, boosted the magnification from just a few times, that was sufficient.

With just a two-power thing, like a spyglass, like a toy thing, you really can't see craters on the moon. You can't see that there's other, like, mountains and so forth. But Galileo really, because of the telescope, invented the scientific method, you know, of hypothesization, of observation, collecting data, refining things. And then a lot of people forget the scientific method is predicated a lot of times on serendipity. Like, just holy crap, something happens. He didn't expect to see mountain.

He wasn't saying, my hypothesis is that it formed from the same planetary system as the Earth. He just saw it. Holy crap. And what was the very best telescope that he created as he made them better? It only went up to about 20 times because the ability to grind glass was always the limiting factor. He understood the mathematics of it, which was also part, like, how is what's called lens equation, how does that work? How does light get refracted and focused and, in so doing, bend and magnify light?

And so he understood it mathematically and could prove it. But he also did something really cool, which people don't appreciate. The lens in this telescope, I don't know, should I show it? Jimmy, tell me if it's okay. The lens in the telescope is actually bigger than this brass piece that surrounds it, okay? And that owes to Galileo's activity. So what Galileo realized is sometimes you don't want to use everything that you have. Sometimes you want to do what's called stopping down. So you have, for aperture stops in photography, So when you stop down something,

it does something really important. It reduces what are called systematic effects, aberrations, unwanted effects. So instead of maximizing, say, oh, I got the biggest telescope, which is, well, now astronomers fight about my telescope is bigger than yours. He said, no, no, no, you want to stop it down and now I'll actually improve the quality. And you can actually see this with your own fingers. So take your fingers out, Joe. Look at improve the quality. And you can actually see this with your own fingers. So take your fingers out, Joe. Look at some light source. Look at these stars above us.

Okay. Make a tiny little triangle with your fingers, with your two fingers and your thumb. Okay. And then go around like one of the stars up there, and you can actually see it. Pinch it down to almost a point, and you can almost see that it will magnify a tiny, tiny bit. Do you get that effect? It's very subtle. But you're actually reducing some of the rays outside of your peripheral vision, essentially, that would otherwise come in if you have any cataracts or anything like that. So what Galileo said is, no, don't use everything you have. Actually stop it down, make it smaller,

make it seem less efficient, but actually improve the quality, not the quantity, tremendously. And when did they first start getting them to the point where you get telescopes like the Keck Observatory? Oh, yeah. So the Keck Observatory and the modern telescopes that we use today are not this type of telescope. This is called a refracting telescope. It uses lenses. The lenses change the speed of light inside of the medium, and that causes light waves at different angles to travel through different thicknesses and travel slower, and that causes them to converge or diverge as necessary. Nowadays, that, so this telescope was invented by this guy Hans Lippershey

and perfected by Galileo. Isaac Newton came along almost 100 years later. Actually, he was born when Galileo died in 1642. And he invented not a refracting telescope, but a reflecting telescope of the type that the Keck telescopes you've seen are. These are telescopes that use mirrors to focus the light. They can be made much bigger. They can be made much more clearer because you don't need glass. You just need highly reflective media. And crucially, they can be supported behind them. So imagine if you made the biggest telescope of this kind.

I'm kind of cheap, right? So I only brought a small phone I could put on. Actually, TSA almost confiscated this today. They were like, what the hell is this thing? They don't know what a telescope is? They were like, what is this? Are you going to use it as a weapon? But they can only be made 30 times the diameter of this telescope, of this little tiny thing.

Really? The biggest refracting telescope. So those ones that look like a garbage can in people's backyards. Those are reflecting telescopes. The biggest refracting telescope is in Yerkes Observatory outside of Chicago or southern Wisconsin. And it is only 39 inches across. So what happens

is, imagine you have a piece of glass over time, the glass will start to... Is that it right there? That's it, perfect. Wow. Powerful, Jamie. I heard Jamie's good. He's the best. That's puny compared to what you've seen in the Keck Observatories, which are 10 meters across, 10 times that diameter. Interesting.

And what kind of power does that one have? So you can get a telescope that has arbitrary power. The power is not the important thing. What's important is how clear and high quality the image can be. You can have like the digital zoom. What's important is how clear and high quality the image can be. You can have like the digital zoom. It could be when they zoom in on your phone, say, you know, if you zoom in, the image quality gets crappy.

But even though it says, oh, you've magnified it 300 times. So you can magnify arbitrarily just by choosing the right ratio of the curvature of the lens and the distance between these two lenses. But to get higher quality, that Yerkes observatory lens started to sag, and it has other problems. Light acts, no matter what, gets distorted when it goes through a medium. It's actually getting distorted right now as it goes through the air. And you've seen this effect. Here's my second prop of the day. This is a prism. This is a prism made of just, like, ordinary glass, plexiglass,

and that refracts light depending on its wavelength. This is like the kind of stuff a hippie girl would keep on her desk, right? That's right. You can make it into a pendant for your wife. So that is changing the color. The speed of light is getting modified depending on its color as it goes through that medium. The lesson is glass affects the color of light's propagation speed, and it affects the quality of it.

It's called chromatic aberration. So there's aberration because of the defects like a crack in the glass. There's also a defect that different wavelengths or colors of light will focus at different points on your eye or on a detector, and that's bad because you want everything to come to a point focus. You want everything to be perfectly sharp in focus. And so these lenses, once they get above a certain size, they cannot be corrected for this effect.

I've actually done quite a lot of work with binoculars because I was trying to figure out what's the difference in binoculars for outdoor activities, hunting and stuff. And there's such a difference when you get to the higher quality binoculars for outdoor activities, hunting and stuff. Yeah. And there's such a difference when you get to the higher quality binoculars. Yeah. It's really fascinating because they both have the same, you know, they have different, you know, like it's 10x42. So I guess 42 would be?

42 is usually the eyepiece relief. It's basically the field, related to the field of view. Field of view, right. And how much light it takes in. Yeah. And the 10 is the magnification. The superior ones, when you get to like Swarovski is probably the best. Their glass is so clear.

Exactly. Like if you look through a 10X binocular that's fairly cheap and inexpensive, you look at it like, yeah, it looks good. I can see it. And then you put the Swarovski's on, you're like, oh, my God. It's like headphones, right? Yeah. You can get like a piece of the stock know, the stock headphones from your iPhone.

And you can get really high quality ones. And so these headphones do not distort because they're premium headphones. They don't distort the different wavelengths of sound. Just like the wavelengths of light or its colors, wavelengths of sound should not be distorted. And it's harder to amplify a signal of higher frequency or a shorter wavelength. and it's harder to amplify a signal of higher frequency or a shorter wavelength. So the net effect was they realized you could only build a telescope using glass that was that big. Wow.

But a telescope using mirrors, right now in space, we've got, you know, the six-meter diameter Webb telescope, which is, you know, six times bigger than the Yerkes Observatory, and that's in space. That's a million miles away from the Earth. But that's built with reflecting technology. So when you see a mirror, mirrors reflect colors independently. It doesn't change the color. You don't see, oh, I look different if I'm in a red light versus a blue light.

They have no chromatic aberration. They also can be supported from behind. With our Simons Observatory, which I'm working with some amazing scientists around the world. This is a sticker for you. So this is in Chile. This is currently the world's highest operating astronomical observatory. It's at 5,200 meters, 17,200 feet above sea level. And the telescope that's pictured there is the six meter diameter. We call it the Large Aperture Telescope that my friend Mark Devlin. Is this the VLT one that I keep hearing about? No, this is the Simons.

This is just called the Simons Observatory. So when our mutual friend Eric Weinstein was on last time, he talked a lot about this man, James Simons, who organized and ran the math department at the State University of New York in Santa Barbara. But he's become a, he's one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world. So this is a precursor observatory. This is led by my friends, Suzanne Staggs and Mark Devlin at Princeton, Penn, not respectively, but the other way around. And then the Simons Observatory on the left, if you go over just a tiny bit, Jamie, yeah, there it is. So if you click on the Wikipedia there, there it is. Those are two reflecting enormous six meter diameter mirrors. What happens is light comes in from above,

from the cosmos, reflects off the one that's tilted at a 45 degree angle here, bounces up to the other one on the left, then that shoots across here. Actually, let me try this. I'm a professor, Joe Joe so this won't show up on the screen but then it goes across and it goes into that white little chamber over there that white chamber like I could sit on your back and we would have plenty of room inside there that's six that's over six and a half feet across this is also built by Mark Devlin and his group and detectors by my friend Suzanne Staggs at Princeton and they. And this is going to be the world's most sensitive

and the world's highest operating observatory when we start taking data with it next year. But you see it's reflected. It's supported from the bottom. You could not do this with lenses. And a project like this, this magnitude, how many years does it take to construct something like this? With or without COVID is the question.

Oh, okay, yeah. So we started in 2016. My friend David Spergel, who's now the president of the Simons Foundation and is leading NASA's UAP task force. So I hope we can talk about that at some point. Oh, yeah. So David's like one of the greatest mentors I've ever had. He and I and others, Adrian Lee at Berkeley, we decided, oh, we want to build the world's most capable astronomical observatory. And I happened to be very close and connected to James Simons. His original job was math professor at the State University of New York called Stony Brook.

And he hired my father, my late father, which maybe we'll talk about later. And they were best friends for a long time. And then Jim Simons went on to become one of the most successful hedge fund managers. He quit being a math professor and said, I'm going to start trading futures and commodities back in the early 70s. Nobody did this. And he developed algorithms that to this day still return over 30% a year on investments. So Jim is, I think, the 26th richest man in the world. He's dedicated his fortune to two things. One, fighting autism because it's extremely close to his heart.

And two, to solving basic physics problems in science and math and chemistry and computer science. So he's not doing applied stuff. He's not trying to make technology. He's not trying to make a better iPhone or something like that. He's dedicated purely to making the advances in pure science with no application. So this experiment was started. We pitched it to him, David Spergel and I and Mark Devlin and Suzanne Staggs and Adrian Leigh.

We pitched it to him in 2016. And we got funding for it around that time. And since then, we've had COVID, we've had tremendous numbers of, you know, strikes and things going on in Chile. And don't forget, Chile is in the southern hemisphere. So we had like our first wave of COVID, like they got their first wave six months later, because it was at a phase of our seasons. It was a nightmare. And we can't just say to my graduate student, hey, come back in two years when the pandemic or come back when there's a vaccine or do whatever you want. We instead said, no, we kept it going.

And the foundation kept paying us and we kept it going. So now we just yesterday, my colleague Adrian Lee deployed the first receiver along with Nick Litsky, who's a professor right up the street here at UT Austin. They deployed this telescope camera and we're about to start taking data for the first time in our project history. Wow. That's very exciting. It is. It's insane. And how much more capable is it? Is it more capable, but is it also the position that it's in in terms of the altitude that it's at? It's a lot of those things. So the altitude is 17,200 feet. Whoa. So when you're up there, you need oxygen. Like when you were up at Mauna Kea, I've been there a few times.

Like I get out of breath if I walk up a flight of stairs at Mauna Kea. When I'm at the site in Chile, I get out of breath walking down a flight of stairs. I'm not in good shape. 17,200. 17,200, yeah. Wow. It's like being on the surface of Mars. You would love it because, first of all, the people there are incredible. They've been doing astronomy since, you know, a thousand years before our country was even founded.

There were people in the Inca societies, the ancient Incas. They were studying their interpretation of the cosmos. That flows through all to today where they have prioritized astronomy as central to Chile's GDP. Oh, wow. It's such an amazing place to be. That's incredible. And so what we do there is it's such a high altitude site. You're above half the oxygen content that we fill here near sea level in Austin.

Up there, you're wearing nasal cannulas. You have to breathe pure oxygen almost all the time. Wow. And if you don't, you'll pass out and we won't let you up there. Nobody could just hang around, not even like Wim Hof, the Iceman? He probably could. Yeah, yeah. He'd have to sign a waiver before I'd let him up there.

Yeah, he'd do it. I'd be happy to do that. I'd fucking do it. Be up there deep breathing on the moon. It's got like insane ultraviolet exposure up there. You can basically, when you're up there and you look straight up here, when you're at that altitude, it's like you're looking into space because when you're above that altitude there's not enough water in the atmosphere to really precipitate out remember in but you grew

up in Boston remember some days in the past we used to get I grew up in New York's in outside of Long Island when some days you get this thing on the on the news channel on the radio you'd hear it you'd be so happy it's it's snowing today or whatever right oh like you got a snow day. This is awesome, right? But some days, they'd say, unfortunately, whatever. We were saved. It's too cold to snow.

You remember? Sometimes it would be like, it's just too cold to snow. And you're like, what the hell? Why is it too cold to snow? So we wouldn't get a snow day in those cases. Sometimes the air temperature can be so low that the water vapor can't crystallize, nucleate, and form snow. And that's what happens there a lot of the time.

So it's so clear. It's incredible. Wow. It's the second most incredible place I've ever been. I've never been able to recreate my experience the first time I went to the Keck Observatory. But we just caught lightning in a bottle. And I remember when we were driving up there, we had been staying on the Big Island and we stayed on the Big Island specifically because I wanted to go to the observatory I was like I just want

to see it I keep hearing that it's insane and as we were driving up the mountain it was cloudy I was like oh this sucks we got a cloudy day oh well you know we'll go up there anyway and we'll see what it's like and look at their telescopes and all that jazz. But then you drove through the clouds. So it was so high up there that you passed through the clouds and then it was just crystal clear. And I swear it changed my life. Like just looking at it that way, I don't think I knew. Everyone knows that we're in space, but you don't see it that way all the time because I just don't think it's possible unless you live in some very rural area.

Well, you mentioned this. You said, like, it's a tragedy that we suffer from light pollution. So much so, you said, that we don't even know what we don't see. Yeah, we don't. We have no understanding of what's above us and that the ancients used to see every single day. Absolutely. That's what they saw every night. So much so that this is a beautiful picture that Jamie's showing.

This is the Alma. This stands for Atacama, which is the desert that we're in. It's the driest desert on Earth. It's the highest desert on Earth because it's 5,000 meters, 17,000 feet in the Andes Mountains. And this picture is showing this band that's arcing overhead. That's the Milky Way galaxy. I'm a professional astronomer, Joe. When I go down there, I can't recognize the constellations that I know and I've known since I was 12 years old.

Because there's no contrast. Like every star just is like blowing you away. And it's just magnified so much by the clarity and the distance and the remove from light pollution. It is a toxic, you know, it is preventing our children from really understanding what the ancients knew. But the great thing about that shot, Jamie, if we could keep it up for just a second longer. So you see on the left there are these two smudges there. Those you can barely see from Hawaii. I don't know if you saw them.

Those are called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Those are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way galaxy. We're in the Milky Way galaxy. We're in this disk. And what I brought here, this is a representation of the cosmic microwave background. This was made by one of my friends, Lemon Page, and David Spergel, and others on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. This is God's view of the cosmos, if you will. So this is what you'd see if you were sensitive to microwave vision instead of optical light. So microwaves are longer than infrared light. They're longer wavelength.

They're shorter than radio waves, and they're longer than infrared light, much longer than visible light. This would be your microwave constellations. In other words, if you could see, these are unchanging fixed patterns on the sky that are only visible to microwave instruments. This satellite made this image. Running across here, this orange band around it is the Milky Way, but as seen in microwaves. So you just saw it as seen in optical. So the Milky Way emits at all frequencies. You can't get rid of it because we're inside the galaxy. So this, as I say, this is as if God is like looking down.

We're actually at the center of this ball here, and we're looking out of that galaxy, out towards the galaxy. But we're on one of the arms of the spiral galaxy. Yeah, there's one of the globes, and there's a little telescope. Someone's horning into my racket there. Little Planet Factory, watch yourself. Watch yourself. I got the little telescopes in the microwave but beach ball um so that's what the galaxy looks like and what is all that schmutz what is all that blue stuff

like i don't see that when you're in monica right you that that is dust that's dust in the milkyway galaxy yeah so actually if you if you go back jam, to the Alma picture that you showed just a second ago, the Incas were really fascinating culture and astronomically speaking. We look at the stars. Like, I don't know how many constellations you can recognize. There it is. But the Incas, they didn't use our constellations. Obviously, they didn't like say. The Big Dipper.

Yeah, the Big Dipper. But they instead focused on those dark blanches. Those dark blanches are not regions representing the absence of stars. Those dark blanches are obscured. There are billions of stars there. But they're obscured by clouds of dust, basically like smoke, particles of carbon, of silicon, metals. I'm going to show you in just a bit. They pollute and they obscure and make opaque the stars behind them.

So the Incas could see this much more clearly. We can't see these from where we are in the northern hemisphere, but the Incas could see it. So they made their constellations shapes that they saw in those dark, dusty globules. So if you were born back then, let's say you just had your birthday, right? So you were born back then, August 11? 11, yeah. So you're born in August. I forget, what's your sign?

Libra? Leo. Leo, okay. So instead of being a Leo, they would represent you by what constellation, what dust blob there was. And they had names for it. There was a toad. There was a llama. My favorite one, Joe, there was a constellation called the umbilical cord of the llama.

Whoa. Can you imagine going to a bar, to the mothership? Hey, baby. What's your sign? I'm an umbilicus of the llama. It's just ridiculous, right? But that's what they saw. Wow. And that we can't see that today, not because of light pollution, but we can't see all the other things because of light pollution. But yeah, those two little

smudges on the left, those are galaxies or dwarf galaxies that are bound to the dark matter and the gravitational pull of the Milky Way, they're actually satellite galaxies. They're separate from the Milky Way. And how many stars are in those galaxies? A couple billion. We have 100 billion at least. You know what's insane is the density of stars. That was one of the things that was so overwhelming

because I always knew there was a lot of stars, but just the density that it's as much star as it is black when you look at the sky. It's like you're seeing a different perspective, completely different perspective. It felt like I was in the cockpit of a massive spaceship. Yeah. Like looking at it through glass. And when you go up there, you probably weren't on oxygen because you were on a tour or something like that. If you go up a little bit higher. So I'm a pilot.

I fly little planes around Southern California. But if you go above the altitude that you were at, it's legally required that you wear oxygen or you have an oxygen provider, a pressurized plane or whatever. So you would wear a cannula if you were in like a little Cessna or something like that and they can get up to that altitude easily. But if you don't have oxygen on and you go up there, next time you go up there, you look up, you close your eyes for a second, you hold your breath. I'm not suggesting this, you know, it's not me telling you to do this. But if you do it, you will see apparitions of

the stars. It will make you feel like you're tripping. So I'm told I've never tripped. So because you're holding your breath? Because you're oxygen deprived, the intensity of starlight and the contrast, as you just said, between the blackness and the lightness and the points of light, it will be essentially like you're basically out of your senses. You won't be able to process it. We won't be able to process it. I wonder if we're going to get to a point with technology that we figure out how to use some sort of diffuse lighting everywhere where we minimize light pollution, at least minimize it to the point where you do see stars. Yeah. I think it really is a bad thing for us.

I think it's akin to people not getting sunlight in the winter. They kind of they don't do well because they don't get vitamin D. Yeah. I think there's something psychological, like there's a medicine to the awe-inspiring cosmos. It's so funny you say that. I haven't met Andrew Huberman. He used to be a professor at UC San Diego where I am now. He's the best. Love that guy. Yeah. You'd love him.

He's such an amazing contributor. His whole shtick is get out in the morning, see the morning sunlight. What I want to talk to His whole shtick is get out in the morning, see the morning sunlight. What I want to talk to him about, because he's an expert in the eye and the physiology of the eye as well as all the other stuff that he does for his laboratory, right? But I want to ask him about astronomical things. Like we see that night sky. What will it mean to our physiology and to our psychology to have that robbed from a whole – we're doing an experiment. Nobody knows what will happen, as you just said. What will it mean to our physiology and to our psychology to not to have that robbed from a whole. We don't we're doing an experiment. Nobody knows what will happen.

I just said what will happen. It'll be like will it be like sitting is the new smoking or sitting is the new crack or I don't know what it is. Yeah. But that's the point. What will it mean. There's something deeply into the human mind. The reasons the constellations have names right is, is because there was no Netflix, right? There was no Netflix 2,000 years ago.

So people identified things and they could navigate. I can sort of navigate by star. I know the constellation is incredibly, which doesn't sound so big a deal as an astronomer. You're like, but most astronomers don't really care. They don't know the constellations. Really? One of the jokes is like, don't ask me what constellation that is. I'm an astronomer.

I always give them crap. I'm always like, yeah, if you were a geography professor, I'd say, like, where's Mexico? He's like, don't ask me what constellation that is. I'm an astronomer. I always give them crap. I'm always like, yeah, if you were a geography professor, I'd say, like, where's Mexico? He said, don't ask me. You know, it's like kind of ridiculous. But not having that experience and just like you and I remember what it was like to have it at some level. Or we can go and travel to. Yeah. People can't in L.A.

But they can do something, which is quite phenomenal. With the same telescope that you can get an actual version of this. You can connect it to your smartphone. You can have a tripod. It's $50. I made a video once. I said, this is the best Christmas gift you could possibly get a kid. Because with it, you can see the same craters on the moon that Galileo saw. Light pollution does not obscure the planets. Light pollution does not make impossible. I'm not advocating for light pollution, but I'm just saying right here in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San Diego, I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is the center of

the solar system using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation. How good are the telescopes? Like say if you wanted to look at Jupiter, how much can you see? You can see a lot. What you can see— You can see the shape? You can see the shape that it's a planet. Do you know what the word planet means or where it derives from? No.

So I love etymology, and stop me if I'm nerding out too much. But planet means wanderer in Greek. Wanderer. What is it wandering against? The fixed stars. So the fact that you have names for things—you know, I always think it's funny. Like, I'm Jewish, and we have a name for people that aren't Jewish, goyim. It's not an insult.

It just means non-Jewish. It means nation. Actually, Israel is a goyim, which is a nation. But we're 0.2% of the world's population. Like, what the hell? Why are you making up names? They should make names for you, right? Right.

But we have names as astronomers. There were only five things they could see that would move in space. And those were the planets from Mercury, Venus. Obviously, they could see Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, but they couldn't see anything else. So they named those things the Wanderers and they wandered against the fixed stars. Now we know the stars do move and actually the whole galaxy moves and, we'll get to this maybe later, and maybe the universe in some sense could be said to be moving in a vaster landscape called the multiverse, which we can get to at a certain point. But the planets, you can see them. But what's so important is what Galileo saw.

Jamie, if you could show this, it would be amazing. Galileo, in the winter of 1610 in northern Italy where he was living, he used a telescope not any better than this. In fact, this might be better because the glass is better, even though it's a Chinese piece of junk, you know, that I bought on eBay. But he mapped, he was able to measure Jupiter and see it, and hopefully we can see it on the screen, and he saw it as a disk. So if you want to see planets, you can differentiate them right now by the fact that they do not scintillate. They do not sparkle.

They do not twinkle-twinkle like stars do because they're extended objects that we can actually see through the same and different parts of the atmospheric column. That's what causes scintillation. You know, like a sniper rifle? They correct for it. They use what's called adaptive optics. That's to avoid like the thermal radiation from the earth. Like you're shooting something or elk or whatever at great distance,

there's thermal radiation close to the ground and then the air is much cooler. And so you get these boundary layers of the atmosphere that causes differential refraction, which changes the color and the position of where the deer is, and that's not good, right? So they have to correct for that using what's called adaptive optics. Anyway, but the same phenomenon happens for the planets. They're so big. They're so close to us. They're not bigger than the stars.

Stars are massively bigger than any of our planets, including Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system. But because they're close to us, they don't appear to be points. And only points will twinkle. So if you want to identify a star versus a plane versus a planet, the planet will be the thing that doesn't move and doesn't twinkle. That's called scintillation. They do not scintillate the same way that stars do. So what Galileo did in January of 1610

is he made a series of observations of the planet Jupiter. He knew exactly where it was. He also invented the tripod. He was the first person. These things that we just take for granted, like, Joe, do you know that they didn't have clocks back then? There was no clock. They couldn't measure time. They had sundials, right?

They had sundials, but what are you going to do at night? What was the first clock? So Galileo tried to invent the first clock. It was actually part of a precursor to the Nobel Prize. It was something called the Longitude Prize. They offered a prize. I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out on the ocean,

it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is. It's easy to find your latitude. You just look for Polaris, the North Star. You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally on the axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the Earth. But it was impossible to tell where you are latitudinally on the axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the Earth. But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west from the prime meridian unless you had an accurate way of measuring time. So Galileo was one of the first people to try to compete to win

this prize, which was worth, you know, like a million dollars back then in those days. And he tried a couple different ways to invent time pieces. But the one that he's tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's moons. Jupiter has four moons. I came for that look, Joe. I came for that. I was just, I finally, I can die happy. I got the look.

Jupiter has four moons. And you can see them with this telescope. And I'm going to give this as a gift to you for your birthday. That little tiny one? You can see it, yeah. If Jupiter's out and you know where to look and you kind of use a little bit of creative... How much power is that one? This one's about 12, 15 power. So you could do it with 15

binoculars? Yeah. You'll see what you'll see. These four moons. But I wonder if, Jamie, if you could find... I'm trying to find something that wasn't great. If you look up Starry Messenger, Starry Messenger, Galileo, Sketch, Jupiter. So what Galileo did is he turned the telescope to the moon in 1609,

and then in 1610, there they are, Jamie, on the right with those stars. Look at that illustration of Galileo. That's his handwritten. I've seen a friend of mine owns this copy, a first edition of these books, and you're looking at it, and actually it's... A first edition, the actual copy that he wrote on it? Not only that, yeah, the first edition,

but it has his handwriting on it in pencil. Whoa. It's insane. Oh, my God, that's got to be worth a billion dollars. Oh, it's... Jamie, could you please go back my god, that's got to be worth a billion dollars. Jamie, could you please go back to that, those illustrations? I had that, this thing. That's the handwritten stuff?

I couldn't tell what this was, that's why I didn't want to bring it up. Imagine having a piece of paper that that guy wrote on. Can you imagine it? So this is a depiction of him showing, so Galileo's the guy with the beard looking down like Andrew Huberman at the guy with the white beard. Yeah.

Look at that beautiful chiseled beard. That's right. Muscular. So he's showing these Venetian senators in Doge because they were in charge of the military budget. So even back then there was a scientific military connection that he realized because he, because Galileo was kind of a cad. He had a bunch of mistresses. he had some illegitimate children how dare you Galileo he had to support how dare you

not be pure he had to support his uh his brother who's kind of a no good nick but anyway the sketches in the uh in the lower right show the planet as you will see it with this telescope and I'll let you know when it comes out and And those four little dots, there was an image a couple of pages back, Jamie, that showed the planet as a disk. And then there are four stars. And if you go back one, I'll point it out to you. Yeah. See that thing in the lower right, Jamie?

It's a Pinterest thing. I don't know if that's a... Yeah. Click on that. So here's a couple of... See, it says January... It's hard to see. It's January 1610.

That's Galileo's handwriting. Wow. And Ionis is like Jupiter, okay? He had shit handwriting. Oh, I know, yeah. I always thought people back then just wrote perfectly with feathers. Who knew how to read it? That's right.

That's a good point. That's a very good point. He's got like a doctor's handwriting. Exactly. So this is his first major book. In the upper left, you see the sketch of the moon with these giant craters on it. That crater. Yeah.

So if you go back. So click on that, James. That's his sketch? That's his sketch of the moon through this telescope, essentially. Okay. Now, the interesting thing is, see that big crater? That doesn't exist. Really?

It does not exist. The one on the top? No, the one on the bottom. That one. Doesn't exist. Doesn't exist. Now, now why is it there he was a smart guy he wasn't like he he was an artist too by the way his father vincenzo was a beautiful musician a well-known musician he was a sketch i mean it's hand-drawn why uh did he put that through because joe he wanted to convey not only what it looked like but but how it felt.

He was conveying. And when you see it, you'll feel like it's like that big. But if you actually measure it, it's about 10 times smaller than that. Oh, so he just made it larger than it really is. To emphasize it. And what's so cool about that, if you want to know, you've had on like my friend Sean Carroll, he talked about the Higgs boson when he was on the first time. If you want to feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson, you need 10 to 20 billion euros and you need a large hadron collider. OK, good luck.

I don't know if Spotify is going to hook you up there. But the feeling that Galileo had, you can have that tonight. You can feel what it's like to see things for the first time in human history because it's your own history. You're experiencing it for the first time. There's no other scientific tool, nothing, even the microscope. It's not the same viscerally. You will be connected to Galileo 400 years ago feeling he was terrified. When he saw those pictures of those dots, he realized what he was looking at was not just like some stars that happened to be next to Jupiter. He realized he discovered another solar system, a system in which there was a massive gravitating object, Jupiter, and around it were orbiting satellites, were orbiting moons around it.

Today, they're called the Galilean satellites. He actually named them after his benefactor, those patrons, the Medici's, who were the richest people in that part of northern Italy. So he was clever, right? He was trying to curry favor with them. It would be like if we named the Higgs boson, we named that after the European equivalent of the IRS, right? He was kind of a kiss-up. It's always sycophant. But it had to save

his life and he needed money and so right but when he drew that he realized the wait a second the bible and all teaching heretofore said there is only one center to the solar system and it's the earth not the sun this is called geocentrism everybody believed that aristotle uh plato everybody had believed that for a long time because it said it was natural that heavy things should fall towards a center, and the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the Earth or the Earth itself. Therefore, the Earth must be the center of the universe.

Remember, the solar system was the universe for a long time. Then for an equally long time almost, the galaxy was the whole universe, and now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about. So this was just incredible realization to him. Imagine like you come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person in human history ever to feel that. Is there any documentation of his struggle with trying to convey these ideas to people that had very strong religious beliefs. Yeah. Because obviously it turned out to be a catastrophe for him. That's right. But what did he, did he convey in his writing the frustration that he had? He was, he's such a fascinating

person. I always make a provocative statement that like, we don't need English departments. We should just teach like physics and astronomy because some of the great scientists of history men and women were tremendous orators they were tremendous writers and they could convey things through the written word that was pure artistry and mastery and Galileo would say things like I do not believe that the same God who has given us senses to understand the world would require that we not use that, I'm butchering the quote, not use them in order to better understand it. He would write things that he had discovered things, you know, only as a way to open a portal into the universe such that minds more astute than mine may be able to walk through this portal. And he was being a little falsely humble.

But Newton was the same way. Newton would write as a great orator. So you can learn a lot from scientific writing. So therefore, if you only had to choose one thing, I would take the books of Galileo. And this geocentric version of the universe that they've – how is it written in the Bible? Like how do they describe? So how is it written in the Bible? Like, how do they describe?

It's actually, you know, the atheists. So I call myself a practicing agnostic, which I can define later if you like. But you had on my friend Stephen C. Meyer, which is partially the reason I'm here, I think. But to have the discussion about, you know, the influence of religion on science. And he made the claim that without religion, we wouldn't have science on the show a couple of weeks ago. In other words, we wouldn't have the tradition that the world is intelligible. It's not the capricious will of God's playing with human beings as Greeks and others had identified. So the notion of how religious a scientist could be or how religion impacted him was very clear. He would say he was a very religious person. In fact, two of his daughters were nuns. And because of his, you

know, I always say, like, imagine we're living in a time where someone like Anthony Fauci or, you know, Francis Collins or somebody that they had, they were not only the scientists, the expert scientists, say, but they also control the government. In other words, the most powerful force on earth at that time, at least where Galileo was, was the Vatican. He never left Italy. He never left... Italy didn't exist back then, by the way. They were only city-states, right?

Tuscany and Venice and Rome and so on. But the notion... It was a Catholic band of jurisdiction and Catholic church had sway over that part of Italy and Tuscany where he was. He was very religious, but he thought that he could say things like if he proved that something scientifically was true, he didn't understand why that couldn't be part of the religious canon. So he was surprised.

In other words, he felt that the signature of God is truth. So if he discovered truth, it wouldn't be a problem for the – it wouldn't be threatening. But I argue back then it was kind of threatening. Like if you started having a bunch of people say, oh, the Bible is wrong. We've been misled. And they're the government, not just scientific authority. They're the government. It could lead – I'm not saying it's good, but it could lead them to want to suppress that, right?

Because it could lead to insurrections. It could lead to whatever and rebellions. And that could be perceived as very threatening to the state. But to answer your question, the Bible doesn't say anything about geocentrism. There are passages in the Bible. There's two famous ones. The most famous one is that Joshua, in the Battle of Jericho, he caused the sun to stand still. And that, to many people, implies that the sun was orbiting around the earth.

It certainly could be construed that way. But to answer your question, there is no real cosmology. I would say, like, let me ask you, I don't know how much, I know you've had some exposure in Christianity, but I don't know how much you've ever read of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, but the beginning of Genesis, right? So I know that you're interested in origin stories, right? So why is it that a book about, you know, a nomadic band of Bronze Age, you know, peasants, why does it begin with the creation of the world of the universe isn't that weird like shouldn't it be like uh there's something really delicious that you're going

to want to eat it's called a pig um you know don't eat like why doesn't it start with that why does it start with the origin of the universe well isn't that the ultimate question that man would have um i i think you're right i think another way to interpret it is if God created the universe, then it's kind of like he has title to everything, right? He then could make a claim that, look, there's no God above me. And think about the milieu he was – the Hebrew Bible came about in. It was pantheistic. It was in direct contradistinction to the other great religion of the time, which was necropolism, which was basically Egypt. Egypt was a culture fixated on death. The pyramids, giant tombs,

they had mummifications preserved into the afterlife. They named everything after themselves. They had statues. Their Bible was called the Book of the Dead. In other words, in contradistinction to the Jewish Bible, the Torah is like the Book of Life, we call it. So, Judaism is operating under that where there were gods and the gods were within nature and they controlled man. The Hebrew Bible was meant to show that, no, God is above nature and controls nature. Therefore, the sun, everything was weird that the sun is created on the fourth day. In the Genesis description, the sun doesn't come about until the fourth day. What's the day? What's first?

Right. Let there be light. Let there be light from what? From creation ex nihilo. Right? You know? The multiverse. If it's not from the sun, there is no light. That's right. So what planets are we talking about? Exactly, right. So, but are we talking about? Exactly right. So but getting back to the original question, Galileo was very religious.

But where does it say in the Bible that the earth is the center of everything? It's very interesting. What ended up happening was the reason it was dangerous for him and he was accused of apostasy was because he was claiming against the doctrine of effectively of Aristotle. And actually, Stephen Meyer taught this to me in a conference that I went to with him last year, just a conversation. I always wondered, why is it that the Catholic Church, Catholicism branches Christianity, which came from Judaism, right? I mean, the origin of they accept the Hebrew Bible, right?

So why is it that a sect of the, or say the scientific and technological elite of the Catholic Church, why did they want to support a doctrine which really traced itself back to Aristotle, right? The Aristotelian notion was that everything was centered on the earth. There's nothing in the Bible that says the earth is the center of the solar system or doesn't say that, but Aristotle made such logical sense to the Christians, to the early Christians and later to the Catholic Church, that they basically sanctified and made Aristotle effectively into a saint. Wow.

And so, therefore, it was blasphemy for Galileo to contradict Aristotle. Wow. That's incredible. It's really strange because, you know, Aristotle was a pagan, right? He was pantheistic, which is the number one law of the Ten Commandments, right, is I and the Lord your Godav, no other gods before me, meaning that Judaism came to destroy pantheism and to accept monotheism and establish it throughout the world. And now three billion people are affiliated with it in some way, right? So that

was its key enemy. And so if you, we didn't have a sun god. That's why if God creates the sun, God Hashem or, you know, the God of Allah or whatever, that is more powerful than the sun. So it supersedes it. God controls the sun to do things for us and the moon to do things for us, for our benefit, not for us to worship. That is crazy. Questioning Aristotle became blasphemy. And that's the idea of the geocentric universe. That's right. Wow. That's amazing.

That's really amazing. It was very surprising. Because didn't they recognize that in Galileo, they had essentially someone like Aristotle? Yeah. A very unique mind that shapes its generation and many generations to come right in front of them. And they're like, no, you're committing blasphemy for being brilliant. And you know what's amazing? Galileo has never been pardoned formally

by the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul, who I learned. We really don't want to get into that. So, well. The Catholic Church is. But that's part of the reason I became an astronomer. Interesting. Yeah, Galileo was my hero.

I got a telescope, So I was born Jewish. Both my parents are Jewish, were Jewish. My father passed away. But they're both biologically Jewish. When I was seven, my father abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin, and he started a new life. And my mother remarried an Irish Catholic man by the name of Ray Keating. And he was very devout Catholic. He's still alive, thankfully, and he lives on the East Coast. And his family was 10 brothers and sisters. And they welcomed me into their home and my older brother Kevin with such love and graciousness and just touching humility and this big Irish Catholic family.

They basically would call, they thought that we became their, their biological grandchildren, cousins, nephews, and so forth. Okay. I'm still close.

That's amazing. And I became so overawed by it. And in contradistinction to that, I, anything I remember about Judaism from age zero to seven was just like, okay, well, like you have to not eat,

you know, once you can't eat that tasty bacon, it was all things you can't do and so forth. Right. Um, so this was like Christmas, Easter hanging out, like just boisterous 50 cousins at, at, at Christmas. It was, and so I became at the traditional age that a Jewish boy starts learning for his bar mitzvah at age 12. Uh, I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church in Chappaqua, New York. And at the exact same time, I was saving up money to buy my first telescope. Because one night I had fallen asleep and I woke up in the middle of the night. And outside the window, I saw this huge bright light.

And I didn't think there was a street light out there in the middle of summer looking at it and i was like wait that's the moon and there was something next to the moon that was like it looked like a little fragment of the moon had broken off and it was just like to the left of it it was as bright as the moon but much much smaller and i was like what the hell and this is in 1986 like there's no google there's no and i remember like what it was like before the internet um so uh so i was, what the hell is that thing? And I had to wait until Sunday. The New York Times used to print a section called Cosmos.

And in Cosmos, it would say, like, what's happening in the skies. There's going to be this. There's that. You know, it's the first phase of the moon. And it showed a picture of the moon and some stars and, like, a map like this but for stars. And there was a thing next to it that said jupiter i was like what the hell like i saw a planet like i didn't know you could see a planet without a like hubble space you know whatever or without a satellite and so i just got really

interested and i kept watching them night after night and i was i was unknowingly and i always joke i have a pretty big ego but i'm not going to compare myself to Galileo. But indirectly, I kept doing the things that Galileo had done, like seeing, oh, wait, the moon has craters on it. Oh, wait, the moon has mountains on it. And maybe I could measure the height of those mountains from the size of the shadow and knowing the distance to the moon. And the planet Jupiter has these four little dots around it, and they would change their position night to night. four little dots around it and they would change their position night to night and like a lesser intellect like mine you know not intelligent at the time looking at it would have just said oh the you know jupiter's just next to some stars and it's going to move tomorrow be different but no

those were galileo realized he was looking at a mini solar system edge on he was looking like if you looked at above he'd see these four moons going around like this but he was looking at it like this so they were kind of going like this back and forth and it was periodic. And he kept doing it for night after night after night. And it kind of got boring in his book, The Sidereus Nuncius, which is otherwise an amazing book. But when you look at it, he realized, hey, it's so periodic, I could use it as a clock. So he tried to win this prize to invent the first stable, accurate clock that could be used by mariners on the ocean's surface far from land to determine the time difference between them and Greenwich, therefore determining their longitude. And what's the mechanism that he proposed to try to measure these planets going around? Yeah, so if you just plotted their distance over enough time, it was periodic, so you could just calculate it, just like the moon.

Right, but I mean in terms of like the actual mechanical clock itself what was he so his is it just a calculated clock on paper it was you'd look up in a table like a database he would have it printed forever but then but you'd still need to see the planets and moon surrounding it so he had he built like basically it was the first virtual reality helmet. It was called, like, a cellophone or something. So it was actually a helmet that you'd put on, and then it had these two short versions of his telescopes on his eyes. Whoa.

And then, like, you'd go on the ship, and they'd be moving around like this, and you'd try to do it. It failed. He didn't win it. And it would probably make you, like, totally nauseous. Yeah. So you were wearing a helmet with telescopes in the front. And then you're supposed to stare up at Jupiter and count? Like I don't understand.

You just look at the positions. That's the thing? Is that what it looks like? Wow. Set alone. Thank you, Jamie. That looks so crazy. If I saw that in the battlefield, I'd run.

Like they have evil weapons. They have satanic weapons. And then first of all, you can't see Jupiter for part of the year when it's in the battlefield. I'd run. They have evil weapons. They have satanic weapons. And then, first of all, you can't see Jupiter for part of the year when it's behind the sun. So that's useless. It's got a candle on it. It's got a candle. Yes.

Oh, my God. That's hilarious. They didn't have clocks. Right. Forget about lights. They didn't have clocks. So when was the first mechanical clock? So the first mechanical clocks were developed, I think, in Switzerland and in northern Europe, Germany and Switzerland. There were wind-ups and springs and so forth.

First pendulum clocks. And what year was that around? This was in the early 1700s. So it was finally won, I believe, the Longitude Prize won in the mid-1700s. Wow. But actually Galileo tried to do this from his youth. He would be in church, and I remember even though I was an altar boy and I loved it, I had good experiences in the Catholic Church,

even though I abandoned it later on, as I'll describe. But one day Galileo was in church and the priest was giving some boring sermon. And Galileo was just sitting there like this. And he looked up and there was a lantern and like some horse cart had gone through or whatever and the lantern was going back and forth like a pendulum and Galileo put his fingers on his pulse and he timed the period of the pendulum and he realized it didn't it didn't change it was constant and no matter what he would use for the for the pendulum as long as they have the same length, it would have the same period.

So all the clocks of the same – all the lanterns with the same length chain, all the chandeliers, they were all having the same periods. But those of a shorter one would go back and forth faster. So he discovered the law of pendulums. And he was like five years old. Like those old grandfather clocks. Yeah. My grandpa parents used to have one of those. Exactly, yeah.

It would swing. It had this brass thing. There it is. And it would swing. Yep. My grandpa parents used to have one of those. Exactly, yeah. It would swing. It had this brass thing. There it is. And it would swing. Yep. So they have all these things. He invented the first thermometers. Jamie, if you want to look up a Galileo thermometer.

How did they discern the amount of minutes in an hour, the amount of hours in a day? So to get to a level of precision now or then to a few minutes or a fraction of a day, that was easily significant enough to make measurements of longitude. So the actual kind of level of precision, that didn't occur until the 1800s to get really good clocks. And now I talk to people, Bill Phillips on my podcast and Nobel Laureate at NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland. at NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, and they are making clocks that are accurate to one part in a thousand trillionth of a second. This thing will not lose time over the age of the universe. And this is a mechanical clock? This is what's called an atomic clock.

Atomic clock. It's optical lattices, and they cool things down to almost absolute zero. But the reason is the Earth used to be, the Earth was the first clock, right? The Earth turns around once per day, right? And the Babylonians decided that they'd like to do it in units of 60, even though we have 10 fingers and toes. They did it in fractions of 60, 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 3,600 seconds in an hour. Right. But why did they do that?

That's your game. I mean, I don't know why they think about these things. I mean, 60 has a lot of divisors, and so it's convenient. It's divisible by 15, 12, 10, 5, 6. I mean, when they first decided, okay, right now it's 1 o'clock. It starts right now. How do you start the day? It's fascinating that the whole world has adopted this system, essentially,

other than military, which uses a 24-hour system. That's right, yeah. When you think about that the whole world has adopted this system, essentially, other than military, which uses a 24-hour system. That's right, yeah. When you think about that the whole world just decides, you know, okay, we're all going to agree. Yeah. And then some places are like, fuck you, daylight savings. Exactly. We're not playing that game.

It's like Arizona. Yeah. There's a few places like that, right? Like Arizona doesn't do anything all year. They don't play that game. That's right. They're like, fuck off with your fucking pretend clocks. We do things our way up here.

But, I mean, and then, you know, obviously there's time zones. And, you know, with traveling, the way we do now, it's so fascinating because you could literally fly somewhere and it's a 10-hour difference in time zone. Or like Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island, it's half hours. Got half-hour time zones in there. Right, right, yeah. So all this is bringing up a notion of what's called calibration. So I'm an experimental physicist. The hardest thing about doing a measurement for me is not like knowing what I measure.

It's knowing how I screwed up the measurement. It's like what went wrong? How do I know? Like you said, how do I know what the base level zero point is of this measurement? What's the calibration? When you buy this cup of coffee, when you buy the black rifle or the on it or whatever, how do you know you're getting exactly what they say? It's just printed on there, right? So I'll ask you. You're one of the owners, right? So whatever how do you know you're getting exactly what they say just printed on there right so i mean i'll ask you you're one of the owners right so like how do you ensure that like how do you have you ever thought about that like do you go in and count all the no we had

issues with that in the past when we first started the company well we we were getting stuff made in these uh places that do supplements and so we were third-party testing our stuff and finding things in our supplements that weren't supposed to be in there, like different vitamins. Like, why is that in there? And then trace amounts. And it turns out it's contamination. That's right. And that's a lot of athletes actually get popped from small levels of steroids that are in like protein powders and creatines and things that they buy from, you know, kind of shady organizations. Yeah, my man Fernando Tatis, he got nailed for that last year, right? What does he do?

He's a San Diego Padres. He's the right fielder now. Well, there's a lot of claims that people get popped for that. Like Canelo said, he had tainted meat from tacos. Oh, they just happen to have steroids in them? And you look jacked as fuck? Right, exactly. Okay, bro.

Settle down, sir. The thing is, do steroids work if you're not going to the gym? No. No, they do not. But for athletes, they have a significant advantage and they allow you to recover much quicker. There's certain sports, well, if you call bodybuilding a sport, it's impossible. It's impossible without steroids.

Some of these guys are just insane. You cannot get to that size. You don't get to Ronnie Coleman's size. You don't get to Dorian Yates' size. You don't's impossible without steroids. Some of these guys are just insane. You cannot get to that size. You don't get to Ronnie Coleman size. You don't get to like Dorian Yates size. You don't get there without steroids. My mother-in-law size. My mother-in-law, tragically, she lost her, what would have been my oldest brother-in-law when he was about 16 years old. My wife sold his brother.

And she dedicated her life to just like just being the best person she could be. And she entered, she built her life to just like just being the best person she could be. And she entered. She built her body up. My mother-in-law Allison. I'm like emotional thinking about her because I love her so much. And she built her body. And she did this as like a Jewish grandmother, you know, basically. Wow.

And she's totally ripped. I mean, she's still in great shape. But this is like 10 or 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago. And I used to joke when I was dating my wife Sarah. I was like, you know, normally I take a girl out, you know, scared of her father. Like, I'm terrified of your mother. She'll kick my ass.

But like, she never used steroids. I mean, she's, you know, it's not her way anyway. But you can get cut, I think. You can get like low body fat without taking illegal stuff probably, but you probably can't get the musculature is what you're saying. Oh, you can get very big without taking steroids. There's a lot of people that are massive without taking steroids. There's a lot of people that have fantastic genetics.

There's a lot of people that have just thick, heavy builds. You know, it's natural. There's many, many people like that. But to get to the size of a bodybuilder is superhuman. It's not possible without steroids. That is a science project. When you look at these people that have just traps that start at the top of their ears and boulders for sure, bowling ball shoulders, that's not possible.

I've met many people that are really fit and look fucking huge and they don't do steroids. There's a lot in the UFC. The UFC USADA tests everybody. So they'll show up at your house at 630 in the morning. Wake up, sir. We need a urine test and we need a blood sample. And they do that all the time. And these jacked people don't get caught.

Either they're doing it so sophisticated that even with USADA, which is the most sophisticated anti-doping program that we have available and very invasive, right? Cause it does, it's a real problem. Like it wakes guys up on weigh-in days and shit like that. It's not good. And they're trying to not to do that now, but you have to make sure that it's completely right. Like you can catch them. So there's some short-acting testosterone supplements that you can take that, particularly now, apparently there's some new ones, that they leave the body in like two and a half hours. So you can take them and get an elevated level of testosterone. You can take them multiple times a day, and it doesn't affect your natural testosterone production, and it also doesn't show up if you get past that two and a half hour window. So there could be a lot of people who are just rolling the dice.

I see. I see. And how do the weigh-ins work? Because one of the things I was going to mention is, you know, when you weigh something, what are you comparing it against? The weigh-ins are sanctioned cheating. That's what it is. It is 100% sanctioned legal cheating. It's more than fasting. They use very sophisticated methods. This guy, Sugar Sean O'Malley, who just won the Bantamweight title. Dan Gardner is his nutritionist. And I was actually just going back and forth with him on Instagram because I watched one of the videos that he did. And I was like, that is really impressive stuff.

Dan Garner is – what is his profile here? I think it's Dan Garner Nutrition. And, yeah, G-A-R-N-E-R. So he's – they're detailing how they cut weight. And one of the things they do is they eliminate carbs very close out. And they do all these different things to water load. So your body gets used to dumping water out a lot. It's very sophisticated.

So when a guy weighs in, in this case, Sugar Sean weighted at 135 pounds. He's 135 pounds for all of like an hour or so. And then he weighs in. And when he fights, he'll be in the 150s. He'll be pounds for all of like an hour or so. And then he weighs in and when he fights, he'll be in the one fifties. He'll be somewhere in the one fifties. And that's mild. His opponent, Aljamain Sterling is absolutely massive for the weight class. So Aljamain, even though he weighs in at 135 pounds, he's walking around. I've seen him walking around in the one seventies. Wow. 135 is my birth weight. He's a big, well, he's not that small.

When you stand next to him, like there's, show an image of me standing next to him when I was interviewing him. He's fucking shredded. There's no way that guy's 135 pounds. I mean, 135 pound person is a fairly small man. Yeah. This guy's fucking jacked. And so it's a magic trick.

The best at it is this guy alex pejeda alex pejeda who was the middleweight champion he weighs in at 185 pounds he fights at 220 plus he's so massive like you cannot believe i'm trying to get okay so that's that's that's him on the weigh-in day. Okay, it's not him weighing in, though. So he's significantly rehydrated by that point. Is there an image of me interviewing him at the post-fight? Is there a technique to put on weight, health, like safely before a fight? Like, is it drinking, electrolyzing? It's not safe.

Are you saying these guys are compromising their lifespan? Yes, 100%. It's very bad for your organs. It's very bad for your body. okay so that's him so look at that that's 135 pounds how the fuck I weigh 200 yeah so look at me next to him he's fucking gigantic and I think he's if not the best weight cutter in the sport him and Paeda they're in the running for it because Paeda now show Alex Paeda this fucking guy This is this guy you can't you can't um when he weighs in

I don't see the actual weigh-in I go there for the ceremonial weigh-ins and he's already put on probably 10 pounds of water by Time so he'll weigh in first thing in the morning and then by the time that's him right there click on that link right there Would me me standing next to him? The one that you just had with his flexing upper right-hand corner of the, yeah, that one. So that's him weighing in. And his cheeks are sucked in. And he'll gain literally 40 pounds almost between them and fight night. It's fucking bananas.

They did a study, I think, in the 80s with Olympic helpfuls. And they said, they made the following test of sprinters. They said, would you trade the following, a gold medal, guaranteed gold medal at the next Games, if it meant you'd die at age 35? They all say yes. They all say – it's like half of them said yes. The other ones are losers. But I thought about it in the context of the Nobel Prize. You know, it's like how many scientists, you know, have these things?

Because what are these, Joe? These are, we call them, like, we don't think about idol worship. Like, have you ever been tempted to bow down to an idol, Joe? Not recently. No. We have different idols, right? There's different things that we aspire to. But even people that aren't, like, in the religious sect, that think of themselves as atheists, let alone agnostic.

But are atheists. They all have religions. Right. And I think for some of these guys. Yeah. I mean, if it's sacrificing your lifespan, your health span, whatever Peter would talk about, what what is what's it worth? I mean, is that high worth it? Like to be champion for a day. Right. Like, can you name like Olympic sprinter from the 1980s, you know, besides like Flojo? I mean, there were a couple, but I don't think she said that she would trade it. But I mean, it's so transitory and it's so applicable only to the small cadre of people within your technical network. Right.

Like the Nobel, like you can't probably name more than, you've had a couple Nobel Prize winners on the show, but can you name more? No, because you're not, I can name every one of them. I could name Ben Rose. That's what I'm saying, yeah.

You know one, but you're also one of the very few people that get to interview people like him on a daily basis. Yeah, it's a god to them. Yeah. It's this thing

that very few people achieve. So when you get this, when you win, I mean, I haven't won a Nobel Prize. I mean, my book is called Losing the Nobel Prize, my first book. And spoiler alert, you know, I didn't win the Nobel Prize. Is this what it looks like? That's a chocolate replica. Yeah, I know you won't eat that, and I hope you don't. I'll eat it.

It's 15 years old, Joe. Be careful. Why? You think it's bad? What happens to chocolate? Would you eat it? Try it. It would be a shame if I ate it because it's old.

Isn't that interesting? Like if you found old candy and it's still edible, like why'd you eat it? It's from the 1800s. Who wants this fucking candy? Honey lasts forever, right? You can study honey in the Egyptian pharaoh's tombs. Isn't that bizarre? It's wild.

That's the only substance that's made by an insect, which is you're not allowed to eat insects in kosher. Jewish people aren't allowed to eat it. But it's something made by a non-kosher animal that you're allowed to eat. So it's kosher. We can eat honey, even though it's made from it. Like you can't drink pig's milk, like because it's made from a pig. Right. But look at this thing. So the second commandment talks about not making graven images, or maybe it's the third. When you win a Nobel Prize. So my very close friend and mentor, Barry Barish, he won the 2017 Nobel Prize for discovering gravitational wave. He'd be an amazing guest for you, by the way. If I can have the temerity to even make such suggestions. But he invented or co-invented the LIGO experiment, which was this experiment.

One branch of it's in Louisiana and one's in Washington State. 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy we have no idea where it is to this day. Two black holes were orbiting around each other, just like Roger Penrose had predicted. And they came together and each one was about 30 times. One was 30 times the mass of the sun. One was 32 times the mass of the sun, almost 32 times the mass of the sun. They combined. They made a giant black hole, even bigger, but it only had the mass of, say, 60 times the mass of the sun. So like two masses worth of the sun vanished. And it didn't produce light because they're black holes. And the energy supplied by them did not go anywhere else except into making what are called gravitational waves.

Waves in the fabric of space time, such that if one were coming through this room right now, I mean, you couldn't notice it, but technically it would make your weight go up and down like these guys on the way in would love it. It would make it go up and down, except it would take, you know, a couple hundred days for it to even change by a billionth of a percent. But it changes your physical manifestation of gravity. It gives you anti-gravity for a second and of a percent. But it changes your physical manifestation of gravity. It gives you anti-gravity for a second and then a lot, many seconds and longer. It makes you heavier, lighter. That's what a wave of gravity is.

It's distorting the feel and force of gravity. Well, these two black holes coalesced and one or two sun's masses of these black holes was converted into shaking up space-time itself. Wow. Then these waves of gravity propagated from somewhere. We don't know exactly where in the universe it was. They came to the Earth. It took 1.2 billion years to get to the Earth. One instrument in Hanford, Washington State, and one instrument in Louisiana. They registered the same event, the same exact

signal, but separated by the speed of light divided into the distance. In other words, these waves of gravity were traveling at the speed of light, shaking up and exactly consistent with the merger of two smaller black holes into one enormous black hole. Okay, so when Barry and his team, Ray Weiss and Kip Thorne, they won the Nobel Prize for this. I interviewed 15 Nobel on Thursday, my 15th Nobel Prize winner. And but I've interviewed 14 of them so far on my podcast. And we all at the end of each podcast, I always ask them the same question. It's related to the name of the podcast called Into the Impossible.

It's a quote from Arthur C. Clarke. Arthur C. Clarke said the only way of determining the limits of what's possible is to go beyond it into the Impossible. It's a quote from Arthur C. Clarke. Arthur C. Clarke said, the only way of determining the limits of what's possible is to go beyond it into the impossible. So I always say to each guest, I say at the end, it's kind of like my wrap up, you know, what advice would you give yourself as a 20-year-old to give you the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? And I asked Barry Barrett, she's 80 years old. I said, Barry, what would you do? He said, I would make sure to tell my 20-year-old self to get over the imposter syndrome because I still haven't gotten over it. I said, what the hell are you talking about? You won the freaking Nobel Prize.

There's more people in the NBA right now, Joe, than have won the Nobel Prize in physics that are alive. It's a very small group of people. Most three people can win it every year. won the Nobel Prize in physics that are alive. It's a very small group of people. At most, three people can win it every year. They typically win it when they're in their 70s and 80s, so their life expectancy isn't super long. Sir Roger's 92 now. But when you win it, I said, how could you possibly have the imposter syndrome, this fear of inadequacy, that you don't belong where you're at, that you don't deserve the accolades that you had? You won it. It was selected by 400 nerds in Sweden that said, you were good enough to win the Nobel Prize. He said, no, Brian, when you win a Nobel Prize, you get the golden medal, like Flavor Flav, you know, you put it on.

And you get the million dollars or your portion of the million dollar purse. But they also want to make sure that you receive it. You're not going to come back later and say, where's my Nobel Prize? So they make you sign a ledger. They make you sign, remember those old-fashioned autograph books? And they make you sign it. And he said, Barry told me, he said, I'm a curious guy. So what do I do?

I look, who won it last year? I saw some of my friends and advisors maybe. Richard Feynman, wow, that's pretty cool. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. His actual signature in this book, because it's only been around for 116 years or something like that. So there, you know, goes back to Einstein and he won in 1922. When he saw Einstein, he said, I am not worthy. I'm just some humble kid from, you know, Nebraska. I don't belong here. How can I possibly be in the same book as Albert Einstein?

And I said, Barry, I've got good news and I've got good news. I said, did you know that Albert Einstein felt the imposter syndrome? He's like, you're kidding me. How could that possibly be? I said, no, Barry, he did. And I looked up this quote and I showed it to him. I said, Albert Einstein called Isaac Newton not only the greatest scientist in history, but the man who single-handedly changed Western civilization more than any other person

through the Principia and the study of natural determinism and laws. And I said, but wait, there's more. I said, Newton had the imposter syndrome. He said, you're kidding me. Newton, he was like, because Newton was kind of a prick. Newton had a huge ego. He was not kind to his friends. He tortured people as the master of the mint, or he had them tortured.

Tortured people? Yeah, he was like. Physically tortured people? Yeah. I mean, not him. Can you push that microphone so it's like in your face? Okay, yeah, yeah. There you go, like that.

Yeah, you'd think a podcaster. He tortured people he was responsible he was like the execute he was responsible for the equivalent of the irs in in england so people would cheat they would scrape down pennies oh that's right he was the master of the mint it was yeah that's right he was also an alchemist he was an amazing guy but he was kind of a prick and he had imposter syndrome as well so he had imposter syndrome now who could he have imposter syndrome about you might wonder and if you read his writings do you know what isaac newton the creator of calculus the uh first person to understand universal gravitation discovered laws of optics do you know what

his biggest accomplishment according to him was what was? What? He died a virgin. Yeah, that was a weird one, right? Yeah, I was going to bring that up. He was celibate. You know why? Why? Because there's only one way that he could emulate his hero. His, the person before whom he felt the imposter syndrome.

And who was that? That was Jesus Christ. Oh, boy. So he wanted to be Christ-like. He wanted to emulate Christ. And the only way he could do it, he couldn't, like, fast or, I don't know, he couldn't walk on water. He couldn't turn water into wine. He couldn't turn loaves into fishes or whatever Jesus also did.

But he could die celibate. And that's who he had imposter syndrome. But the lesson is— Wait, is this from his writing that he spoke of this? Yeah. Are you sure he just didn't—it was like an excuse for he didn't like sex? I don't know. I mean, it sounds nutty. Because, like, how do you figure that out when he's, like, 14, 15 years old?

You know, you're young and full of hormones, and you've made this decision to be like Jesus? Yeah. Yeah, no, it's—he was a strange guy. He sounds insane. He definitely was. He was not like Galileo. You would want to hang out with Galileo. I would want to hang out with him, too. Yeah, I know. For a strange guy. He sounds insane. He definitely was. He was not like Galileo. You would want to hang out with Galileo. I would want to hang out with him, too.

Yeah, I know. For a little bit, just to see what it's like. So when you win the Nobel Prize, you go there. And what is the commandment about idol worship? It's that you shall make no gilded, golden, graven, like engraved images. So who is that? Do you know who that is? Albert Noble?

Yeah, it's Alfred Nobel. That's right. And you know, he invented dynamite. And he also died. He died never having been married. I don't know if he was celibate. Holla. So he was never married.

But he established his pride. When you win it, you literally, the king of Sweden comes up to you and you must bow down to him. And he puts the gilded graven image on your head so for all the you know trappings and all the 90 of national academy members who do not believe actively profess a belief in god this can become at some level a religion and it's a kosher one it's okay to worship that's right well the unattainable for that that's maybe perhaps attainable to a very select few is always the thing that people are chasing after,

especially like high achievers. That's right. But many, many that I know that get there do have imposter syndrome, including MMA world champions. Like some of them, they get there like, this isn't real. This can't be real.

I can't be the man. Because they've set this up their whole life. And also, look, you can get to the promised land, but you can't stay in it. How many baseball teams have won the World Series year after year forever? I mean, even the Yankees haven't done that. Even your Bo Sox haven't done that, right? They're not mine. Okay, fine. But for me as a young kid, this is what I aspired. And actually, as an adult, I wanted to win this basically at all costs this became my but it was acceptable because people

told me you know like if you discover these waves of gravity manifest in the cosmic background radiation that i study you're guaranteed to win the nobel prize and for me it was uh i don't know about you with your uh you know relations with your father but i had a very difficult relationship with my father and in it it was really predicated the way that some kids would like get into fights or, you know, with their father, or maybe they would try to be a better football player than their dad or whatever. My father was a great scientist and mathematician. And the one thing, the one prize he never won was the Nobel prize. And so after he abandoned us, this became kind of the way that I could supersede him. And it became an obsession to me, as well as being scientifically interesting

to be a part of. There are very few projects that are eligible to win a Nobel Prize, let alone that I can win it. But for me, it was kind of an added dimension that came with it. And that was, you know, the normal kid might have it with sports and their dad or, or, or maybe the other way around with your, when you're a dad, you might treat your kids like that. Like, Oh, you think you could take me on or whatever? Like, um, and so for that, that was the main source of driving impetus for my personal quest to get this particular idol in my life. That's wild. Are you aware of Ronald Mallett? Do you know who he is? No.

He is, I believe he's out of the University of Connecticut. He studies time travel, and he became obsessed with time travel after his father died when he was a young boy because he felt like if he worked hard enough, he could develop a time machine and go back and save his father. Wow. It's literally a Spider-Man origin story.

Exactly. This guy has been dedicated his life to finding a working model of a time machine. And I think, was it Kurt Godell? Like how do you say his name? Godell, yeah. Godell. It's that weird umlaut. Umlaut.

Yeah. How do you say it? Godell. Godell. Godell. Godell. It's like people that say Van. Umlaut. Yeah. How do you say it? Girdle. Girdle. Girdle. It's like people that say Van Gogh, and now it's really Van Gogh. I'm like, excuse you. But he developed a working model, but it just required something like the size of the solar system.

No, you're right. I know that. But yeah, he had a spiraling, he had a rotating cosmos where you could have what are called world lines. You could have your, just like you could walk around the surface of the earth and if you go in the same direction, eventually you'll come back to where you started. If the universe was somehow rotating in the way that he envisioned it, you could have it end up on the time start where you began from the beginning. Yeah, see that traveler's life, time-like curve. Wild. life like time like curve wild girdle is interesting because he he and einstein were buddies um back at the institute for advanced study like up and i don't know if you saw up and i haven't seen it

yeah you should see it i don't go to the movies i do go to the movies i saw barbie yeah did your girls my girls are not old enough to drive you there it's fun i want to say my friend ben shapiro and your your former guest yeah he hated it. I don't understand Ben. He needs to fucking have a sit down with me about this. He needs to chill out about that. Maybe I'll come back. Everything's a goddamn culture war. I know.

That's what I love about astronomy. No one ever freaking wakes up and says, see that comet over there? That's a Republican. There's a Democrat asteroid. No, screw that. It's safe. Well, it also makes you're studying things that are so immense and so spectacular that it makes all this stuff seem like nonsense. This stuff that people fill their days up with complaining about. But fucking Barbie movie.

Jesus Christ. I mean, that would be like someone who's a pacifist reviewing the ultimate fighting championship. Exactly. Saying they hit each other too much. Like, that's what it's for. There's a joke about Einstein goes to heaven and somebody comes up to him and says, Oh, you're Albert Einstein, you know, you're great. I can't wait to talk to you.

And Einstein says, First, you must tell me your IQ. And the guy goes, I have 140 IQ. Oh, we could talk about the math and string theory and this and that. And then another guy comes up, what's your IQ? It's 130. Oh, we could talk about the stock market and we can talk about all these financial – and then someone comes up, I have 100 IQ. We could talk about culture wars.

I think it's more of a tribal thing than anything with us. I think what's going on is just something that's like written into the human reward system. That there's a lot of social value in being part of a tribe. There's a lot of social value in being part of a committed ideology, whether it's a religion or a cult or politics. That's what's impressive. I mean, not to be too religion or a cult or politics. Well, that's what's impressive. I mean, not to be too overbearingly praiseworthy, but there's a Yiddish saying, if you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit from both sides of the street. But you seem to defy that. And it's always interesting to me.

If I talk to somebody, I talk to Noam Chomsky, I personally hate his politics or whatever, but if I'm talking about linguistics and aliens and communication, I'll talk to them. Or I'll talk to Ben Shapiro. People will just go, why could you possibly platform him? Ben doesn't need Brian Keating's help to platform him. 05.00 Ben Shapiro That talk is nonsense. There's only one way to find the holes in someone. I mean, how many revealing interviews have you seen where people were supposedly platformed? And in those conversations, you reveal like the way that they look at the world is very flawed.

Yeah. It's very easily pick apartable. You could just like go through it and say, well, this is illogical. This doesn't fit in with your whole philosophy of freedom. Like there's so many things that are inconsistent with the way you view this one thing. Like why do you view this one thing this way? I think the human mind hates ambiguity, right? I mean like no one would say like you can abort a five-year-old.

I mean I hope so. There are people. Anyway, I don't want to get into it. I'm sure there's a few persons out there. My dad used to say when I was 30, he's like, I believe in abortion up until the 33rd trimester. But on the other hand, you know, no one say like,

you know, before the parents meet, like you can't have it, like it doesn't make sense, right? So there's clear cut benefits to being polarized because it simplifies it, gives you a hack, an algorithm. Say like, I can easily say, well, you should not have an abortion.

So therefore I must be in the people that say you should never have an abortion or like gun control. Like, should you have like, you know, an AK-47? Maybe should you have a tow, a tank operator? Probably not. Should you have a little boy? Well, you have a little boy and fat man. It's not of that kind, right? They're not that explosive. So I think that but it's because human beings hate these Schrodinger kind of ambiguities. They just hate them. And so they must cleave to the direction that they understand. Yeah. It's a very unfortunate thing that doesn't get taught out of people.

Instead of that, we teach them to subscribe to whatever ideology the teacher is promoting. And I think that's a part of the ideology. You must subscribe to them wholeheartedly, wholesale. And even by you, like apparently, so Lex mentioned that Andrew Huberman's Wikipedia page, because you platformed RF. I'm like, the guy's a Kennedy. Okay. First of all, he's a Democrat. Well, this is all that happened.

If you don't, Andrew Huberman commented on a post that I made about Robert Kennedy Jr. He said, I think this is great. I hope more presidential candidates do long form podcasts. That's it. So Wikipedia removed the research section of his page. He's got 70 published papers. It's highly cited. He's very well-respected.

And they removed that because they had decided that they were going to – I don't know what their thought process was, what their motivation was. decided that they were going to, I don't know what their thought process was, what their motivation was, but it appears that what they're doing is punishing him for what he said by labeling him in a very, they're maligning him in multiple different ways. I thought about saying like, well, you know who else Joe Rogan had on this guy named Peter Hotez. Yeah. Well, I try to have a lot of people on, but it's not, there's nothing wrong with having a guy who's running for president on a podcast to discuss things. What are you talking about? It's nonsense.

And the way they did that to Huberman when he was just saying that he hopes more presidential candidates do long-form podcasts. You can't do that. That's like – that's tyrants do shit like that. That's horrible. You can't do that. That's like – that's tyrants do shit like that. That's horrible. If I could indulge your forbearance because how often do I – it's the first time I ever met you.

But trying to study how to be a better podcaster, to be better at my microscopic emulation, right? So I have on all different types of people. But sometimes I have on people and look, I'm a scientist. I'm not a podcaster. I'm a tenured professor of physics at a major university. So it's not my data. But nevertheless, I feel like I owe it to people to translate what my fellow scientists are doing into layman's terms that they can understand because they pay our freaking salary. It's very valuable what you do. It's very valuable.

It means it's so important to have people do exactly what you just described. Translate it to people that are not going to study it in any other way. And it's a very consumable way. Very digestible. I said, like, yesterday, a couple of days, I said on Twitter, I said, why is it that science, that there are science popularizers? Like, we don't have, like, UFC popularizers. We don't have movie popularizers. We don't have TikTok popularizers.

But we have this whole class of people called science popularizers. And I've talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson, Mitch Yoakoff. I've talked to these people. It's fine. And I do it at some level. Brian Cox, Brian Green. I'm the third Brian to come on the podcast, as far as I know. But the thing is, we as scientists have been given this incredible script, the script of nature or of God, if you will. We have this incredible present and we are so bad at communicating what we do. And worse than that, we don't feel like it's our obligation. I always joke, and maybe it's not even a joke, scientists have a moral obligation to communicate what they do to the people that fund them.

But they also have, you know, just common sense. If the public gets turned off to science because the scientists say, ah, I am too specialized for you, Joe. I can't break it down for an everyman to understand. What I do is very, I should stay in the lab because we need people that just stay in the lab and don't get, you know, I always joke like, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? Have you ever heard this one? No. They look at your shoes when they talk to you. That's very funny. But if I don't teach my students these things, if I don't teach them, look, part of the soft skills that will get you farther in life and all the Nobel laureates that I've talked to, they all have that in common.

They're not just awesome and the top elite killers of science, Joe. They're incredible communicators, persuaders, salesmen, saleswomen. Because you don't just make a great idea and everyone accepts it. You have to convince people, editors, peer reviewers, funding agencies. And you're in a complex battle against the world's other killers. And what if you're just a little bit better than them? And what if you're just a little bit better than them? Because you have learned that it's important for you to communicate to your bosses, to your funding agents, such that we don't have this elite that the general public can't understand. So they just defer to whoever's, you know, whichever way the wind's blowing.

And we have what we've had for the last few years. Well, don't you think that, I mean, the reason why you have so many science influencers or science educators is because science is way more complicated than all these other things. I don't know. Is it? Yeah. Of course it is. It is and it isn't. It is and isn't?

Do you know the difference? I don't want to say it like that. I'm going to say there's a difference between complex and complicated. Okay. So a complicated thing is building a 787 Dreamliner. That's freaking complicated. There's over 700 million parts to it. There's a supply chain.

Like, F that. People don't know how to build a pencil. Like, there's no one person, have you heard, that knows how to get the graphite and the wood and the eraser and the metal and the paint. There's no one person that has something as simple as a pencil could be considered. But complicated means if you follow it, my PhD thesis, if you follow it, you will build a polarimeter that's capable of measuring the cosmic microwave background's polarization. Like there's just linear steps. There's complexity. pile and have exactly the same number of grains of sand, or if you want to have this particular thunderstorm that's brewing in the plains of Austin, Texas tonight, that is a complex system. That is a system that is not capable of being described by a finite number of steps. It may

have properties. It may have phases. It may have building phase, dissipating phase, hail, whatever. But it may have commonalities, but like the butterfly effect, the flapping of the wind, you cannot replicate the sensitivity to the initial conditions that then lead to a complex event. Science can be both complicated and complex, but there's no way around this. If you can't explain it to somebody who is not an expert, you've failed at a certain level. Because just imagine if you were working like, do you think it's complicated to be an accountant at a top 10 accounting firm? Is that correct? Yeah.

So imagine your boss, the CFO of that company comes and says, hey, Joe Rogan, what you been working on? You say, what I've been working on is very complicated. It's very sophisticated. It's very complex. It's very tough. You won't understand it. That's the implication. You're insulting the person. I'm insulting the general public. If I say I can't explain to you why this is the frickin absolute coolest thing in the world

to do. And if you didn't pay me or Gavin Newsom, my boss, your former governor, if he didn't pay me to do it, Joe, I would do it for free. In other words, we are so animated by it. But why don't we do it? Because actually it's the converse of what you said. Communicating to the public is hard to scientists. It's not the science that's hard to do. It's to learn how to distill it and teach it to. I've had over 2,000 students in my career.

I don't think I'm the best teacher, but I think I can do a good job enough to take somebody who wasn't a layperson and now they're an expert. And now they're teaching down the street from me and down the street from you here. And they're much better and smarter than I am. How did that happen if I didn't dedicate some time to it? But what scientists will say is, no, I want to study wormholes. And it's not really that important. That's the subtext. What Neil deGrasse Tyson, it's not that important.

What he's doing, he can't do real. This is this. This is around. NotGrasse Tyson, it's not that important. What he's doing, he can't do real... This is the rap. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the rap. He is not a real scientist. He won't say he is not doing research. He doesn't have students. But he's not really a scientist the way that I, Brian Keating, am a scientist because he's not actively in the trenches. Because if he were, he wouldn't have time to go out that's bs i'm sorry that's bs well what i meant is that it's complicated to do um in terms of expressing that to people and there's so many things to cover there's so many things and you also have to captivate people's attentions yeah i mean i don't i don't think it's and there's also various

fields of science that you let me try explaining string theory to regular people. You can do it. You can. You can do it. But I mean it's very complicated, right? You can do it. Eric Weinstein can do that. He can talk to people.

Oh, he'll put you in a coma. He will put you in a coma. I'll say keep it simple for me. Help me out and he'll – on purpose. Well, that's a bias called the expert effect. Like you're so smart. You just don't realize what it was like. You can do things in the gym, I'm sure. You don't even know that you're doing them, but to teach it to me would be impossible, right? Because it's just encoded viscerally into

your DNA by this point. I think I can teach you. You could teach? Yeah. If your body moves normal, I could teach you. I guess the thing is people say, well, no, that's really not my skill set to teach in that sense. By the way, I mean, well, no, that's really not my skill set to teach in that sense. By the way, I mean, half of our jobs as professors is supposed to be to teach, not just to raise money and do research. So like you'd think, well, you're a professor. You are a science communicator, at least to a small class. Basically. And if you're not, if you take your job seriously and you're not a schmuck and you think that I have integrity, I'm going to learn how to do that beyond. Because what would happen if the public cut off science? If they said, look what happened

the last couple of years, we don't know who to believe. We don't know where is the ground truth. Who do we believe? I hear RFK. So we're going to defund science. Yeah. We're going to defund science. So you're unemployed. By the way, I only have the job I have now and not like building some weapon because we're not at war. Right. I think it's 60 years ago in Oppenheimer You let you watch it You know like they took it up the killers of songs and they were all in the desert Los Alamos and they were squirreled Away, and they didn't tell anybody right and the same thing was going on in London and England

Working on radar and the same thing was going on in MIT And it's just we serve at the pleasure of the public as scientists. And too few of us realize this and too few of us view it as a moral obligation to communicate back to the public. And so, therefore, we have this industry of science popularizers and some people make quite a good living at it. Yeah. And more power to them. It's great that people are interested in it now. And it's one of the things that I think podcasts like Lex Friedman's and many other ones that platform these people and have these discussions. It's like makes things digestible.

Absolutely. It's very important because it's very fascinating. I wanted to bring this thing up before I forget. Because we kind of skipped over it earlier. We talked about the web. Yeah. The web telescope. How old is the universe?

Okay. So you had this tweet that took over the internet and Instagram posted. It was actually something that I had heard before that. Someone was saying there was something like a quasar that they had discovered that seemed to be far older than it was supposed to be. So ever since the Webb Telescope, the Webb Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021. And it's been traveling out to a million miles past the Earth-Moon system. It's about a million miles from the Earth. And there it orbits. It's about a million miles from the Earth. And there it orbits.

It's cool. It orbits around a blank piece of space that orbits around the Earth and the sun. So it's a wild thing that was figured out a couple hundred years ago and is only possible to be used now. But anyway, this orbit allows James Webb and its cameras to see things

in what's called the infrared portion of the radio, infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. So if you take care of another gift for Joe, so these are called a diffraction grating. So this is like a billion mini prisms. I got one for Jamie too. After the show, I'll give it to you, Jamie. So now if you hold this up to a source of white light,

look at the source of white light above us. You see these beautiful rainbow halos, right? And it's almost a continuum. In other words, you can't tell where the red leaves off, the orange begins. You know, it's fuzzy, right? You can't really tell. But now look behind you at the Joe Rogan Experience neon light, okay? You'll basically just see the yellow.

You'll see the orange. And that's because that's made of gases that only emit light at very, very narrow wavelengths, very, very small wavelengths. What am I not supposed to see? So you don't see the halo of a pure rainbow around, say, the O. You see a couple of colors, but you don't see the continuous. See how it kind of breaks apart? Yeah. Here's another example, Joe. I'll put this on the wall.

This is a laser spot. Okay? Okay. So now look at this through there. What do you I can't see it oh so there you go oh yeah I see a bunch of them you just see a bunch of green dots yeah but now if I do this here's a but here's a white light I'll do it I'll point it right at close I don't blind you but here look at me okay look at that right isn't that cool? That's beautiful. That's cool, right? That's really pretty.

So this diffraction grating separates light out into all of its different wavelengths. It's called the spectrometer. It's dispersing it according to its color. Now, Isaac Newton and William Herschel figured out something really cool. They said, I believe if I look at a light source, like the sun or something like that, and I block off all the light. Here's the red lights on this, it's going to be on this side. If I put a thermometer, imagine you put a thermometer like right here, the thermometer

would register 70 degrees or whatever it is in this room. If you go outside and the sun's out, and the sunlight's not directly hitting the thermometer, and you put it where the red comes out over here, it starts to heat up. The thermometer gets warmer and they realize there's light that you cannot see beyond the red that's responsible for the perception of heat.

That's heat. That's called infrared radiation. If you keep going in this direction, if such a thing were possible, you eventually get to microwaves, which is what I study. Those are wavelengths of about a millimeter to three or four millimeters in wavelength. Visible light is 500 millionths of a meter.

It's incredibly small. Then there's infrared, et cetera, et cetera. And then finally there's radio waves way off over there that you can't see with something like this. Obviously you can't even see infrared light with this. with something like this, obviously. You can't even see infrared light with this. So they realized there's invisible light beyond the red, invisible to the eye, but visible to sensors and detectors.

So what Webb has are a series of detectors like these things. These are like chips. These are actually superconductors, which I want to talk to you about this recent claim of detectors that can conduct electricity with no resistance. But these are superconductors. But nevertheless, these are like computer chips like Dell makes around the corner here, right? So if you put that, but they detect heat, those detectors don't detect light. They don't care about light. They care about heat.

So if you put them at the focus of a telescope and you spread out the light using something like this to disperse the light such that only infrared light falls on that telescope, then you'll be detecting infrared radiation from whatever objects you look at. Now, if you pointed at a galaxy that's far off in the distance or a quasar, that light has been red shifted. It's been moved all the way from where it started in the visible light because those galaxies are made of suns and stars just like ours. So they have visible light but they're mostly red only the web telescope can see those with the kind of clarity and distinction that they're able to perceive it what was claimed by a paper and actually i've been communicating with the author so one of the cool things about having a podcast is that when someone puts out a claim oh like a superconductor that works at room temperature, which would revolutionize, or there's fusion, not fission, but fusion that exists now for the first

time, I can call them up and say, hey, I have this fun podcast. Would you like to come on? I've had Nobel Prize winners and billionaires and whatever. And they come on and I can nerd out about science with it. It's super fun. So I did an interview with this woman, this poor friend of mine, So I did an interview with this woman, this poor friend of mine, Allison Kirkpatrick in Kansas. She was quoted as saying, like, I can't sleep. Like, the universe is not the way it's supposed to be. Webb has revealed and just shattered all my dreams about what the universe is really like. And this guy, I don't want to use their names, but this guy pulled that quote and said, this proves the Big Bang never happened. That was the first thing that happened after Webb came out last year. This gentleman is claiming that the

universe is infinitely old and that the reason that you see red galaxies is not because they're red shifted by the expansion of this. If I kept blowing up this beach ball, these things would be moving apart from each other, red shifting their wavelengths away from one another. He's saying, no, that's not what's happening. Instead, astronomers are foolish. They've been overwhelmed by this notion of the Big Bang. The Big Bang never happened, but light is losing energy and getting more and more red as it travels to us in an infinite universe that's infinitely old.

Is this person qualified to make this statement? This person has marginal qualifications. The giveaway, the tell and poker language of this guy's non-seriousness is that he wrote the same thing 30 years ago when the Hubble telescope was launched. He's had the same thing. And he has a book. But the second thing that you tweeted relative to was not that the universe was infinitely old, that it was twice as old as we thought. Yeah, it's like 26 billion years old. So we so I did a podcast with Alison

Kirkpatrick and she and I went through this guy's claims. And and then the next day and we showed what he was saying is slightly different. He's saying the universe has a finite age, that a Big Bang like event happened. But because of these properties of galaxies that I'll explain in just one minute, because of the properties of the galaxies, the universe has to be much, much older than astronomers claimed. He doesn't say you guys are fools and idiots. And he's a legitimate professor in Ottawa. His name is Rajesh Gupta. The day after, so we went through it, took it apart. I thought it was pretty convincing.

And he even agreed that there are problems with it. And worse or better, he has integrity. Let me just say that. He told me that his media office was kind of responsible for eventually leading to the tweet that you produced. Because what happens in academia. Oh, so they were trying to get attention. Well, so i call this the academia media hype complex so ordinarily you're working on something and let's say you discover

oh there's this new material and it has a breaking point of 10 000 kilograms per millimeter or something like okay it's cool it's interesting it's important it's incremental no one's saying it's going to revolutionize spirituality theology and, and have our meanings restored. But it's important, okay? But sometimes there'll be something that will be enough of a surprise that the professor, like me, will then go and say to their dean, hey, this is a cool result. I'm kind of sitting on it. I think it could be kind of big. Then the press office, we have a press office at UCSD. I've done this before. There's going to be some big news coming out about our result. It's very interesting. The university starts to promote it. Then a local newspaper, in my case, San Diego Union Tribune, in his case, the Ottawa Times or whatever, they'll start to kind of promote it. And then if it's really provocative, it might make national news or in the physics news.

And then if it's incredibly provocative, you know, one of the world's foremost influencers might say something about it. And then Elon Musk might retweet and say that actually he thinks dark matter is even more sketchy than the age of the universe. So this in like the astronomer community sent people into apoplexy. They were going, no, these guys should not be talking about, like I have friends, like Elon Musk shouldn't even talk about this because he launched a satellite and SpaceX whose main job is to detect dark. I'm like, what are you guys talking about? Like when lay people, and Elon's a technically minded person, he has a physics background as an undergraduate. He's not a physicist. He's not a scientist working to discover new laws of nature and employ the scientific method.

He's good at engineering and he's an incredible businessman and a visionary person. But he's not. So he's kind of a proxy for a smart layman, right, in this sense. There's nothing wrong with that. But people then perceive this as like now these influencers are now overturning the work of literally thousands of astronomers and physicists working right now on legitimate scientific topics. Let's get back to the actual claim itself. Yeah. So this claim, this is where we're getting away from this a little bit. So this claim of 26 billion years, is that, does it make any sense?

So it can make sense in the following context. Imagine you see a planet, and on that planet there are people, and they're playing around with, like, these electrified pieces of silicon. And you'd be like, wait a second, like, that's really weird. Like, that planet's only 4 billion years old.

How is it possible that they're not only able to talk on electrified silicon, but they're also like having an internet and space flight? No, no, no. It takes longer. In my model of how civilizations form, it must have taken 8 billion years for that to happen. So therefore, it's impossible to reconcile with the earth being 4.3 billion years old. Therefore the earth must be 8 billion years old. What he said, this guy Gupta said, there are properties of galaxies.

They're rotating. They're, they're, they're two, they're appearing too early on the universe's early history to have developed into the spiral characteristics and the population distribution of them is too numerous to have occurred in a universe that's only, quote unquote, 13 billion years. And you actually said that. You said, like,

I always thought, you know, 13 billion is a pretty big number. You know, now they're saying 27. So what's the difference? But there's a big difference because implicit in that criticism is that there are flaws and imperfections in how we understand the Big Bang, okay? When in reality, at best, he could be correct about the formation of galaxies. But you see, those are two separate things, right? The formation and the structure of a galaxy has no bearing on how old the universe is necessarily. It tells you something about your models of computer simulations is what he's effectively criticizing, not criticizing the evidence that something like a Big Bang

occurred at a very definite point in the universe's past, that we believe to about one, to the, we have equivalent precision for me to say, I know how old you are exactly. But, but if you looked at a 50 year old person, you could say, you know, the day they were born, plus or minus a week, like that's the precision with which modern astronomers know the age of the universe and one guy is coming up with this idea that because there's certain galaxies within it that have formed this again imagine if we found like a hyper advanced civilization that has warp drives and you know does every type three dyson civilizations or whatever they would not cast doubt on the evolution and the history

of the universe itself. That would not cause me to question that. It would cause me to question my models of how people form and aliens form and stuff like that. But it wouldn't cause me to question the age of the universe. There's nothing related to it. When we are studying the age of the universe and the vastness of space. Is there potentially new technology that would expose more than we currently can view that would change your model?

In the sense that we are – Jobs is a scientist, especially me as an experimentalist. In contrast to people like Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eric Weinstein, et cetera, my job is not to prove theories right. My job is actually to prove them wrong. That's really what I get paid to do, is to narrow and winnow out so much so that what is left is the truth. There's a quote by Isaac Asimov. He said, if you think the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you think it's a perfect sphere, you'reov. He said, if you think the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you think it's a perfect sphere, you're also wrong because it's not a perfect sphere. It actually bulges at the equator. It has properties, you know, because the earth is spinning and the way it formed, it's a little bit like a pear. Okay. So it's also not, but it's much less wrong to say it's a sphere than to say it's flat. Our job is to continually find the flaws, the cracks that, as it's said, the cracks let the light in.

Our job is to find the flaws in the existing paradigms, shatter those, and refine those. And there's countless examples of that throughout scientific history. So there are ways that I would be caused to doubt the formation story of galaxies. Absolutely. I mean, that's almost like predicting hurricanes. You know, I just came through a hurricane to see, right? There's a big hurricane in San Diego this week, and it's like an inch of rain, okay? You know how we drive in Southern California, right? So even a slick of a trace of rain causes us to go into total terror. But we didn't know where it was going to make exact landfall because climate is an example, as I said earlier, not of something that's merely complicated. It's complex.

The best way to simulate the Earth's climate is with another Earth. In other words, there's no irreducible way to reduce the amount of complexity to describe a physical system than the system itself. That's a notion of complexity. That's a definition of complexity. So in the context of what you said, absolutely. And people like Allison and others, they definitely would be more thrilled than anybody to discover, well, we don't understand. There's something wrong with our model of how the universe, not how the universe formed, but how galaxies formed. So what I'm asking is with the levels of detection that we have available, how significant is the change in what the web is able to do?

And is it possible that like when we're looking, is it whatever levels of detection, whatever methods of detection we have now, is it absolute that if you go do 13 point whatever billion years, we couldn't have better methods of detection? There's no way we would get more data and more information. And would it change? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. No, no, no.

I misinterpreted what you said. What I'm saying is like, is it possible that with new technology, we would get more information, we'd be able to see more, and then you would remap this idea? Yes. Let me explain. Sorry, I misinterpreted what you said earlier, but now I can correct it. Yes. And the good news is that's what the Simons Observatory is trying to do. The Webb Telescope was never built for, nor can it say anything about the Big Bang or what caused the Big Bang. It's just galaxy formations. Not just, by the way. That's a pretty big deal.

Galaxy formation, properties of stars, exoplanets, the atmospheres, the chemistry, civilizations on exoplanets. It can do so much cool stuff. Now, that's not my scientific area of expertise. What I study is this, the cosmic microwave background. There are only three long-range messengers that can be used in astronomy. Astronomy is really hard. Unlike, say, biology. Remember in high school you had like a frog or a cow's eyeball or whatever?

You know, you could dissect it. There's another frog. Like your buddy could do it better than you, and you should get the same results, right? There's multiple examples. You can do a control, right? You can leave that frog alone and then dissect this frog and then put formaldehyde and whatever.

I don't know what these biologists do, to be honest with you, but when I dissected the frog, it came back to life. I was terrible at biology, and that's what became my instrument. It came back to life? It came back to life. No, I'm just kidding. So you can do a variable and a control. How do you do a control when there's only one thing?

Universe. There's only one cosmos, right? We can't do experiments, but what we can do is we can make use of everything that comes to us in various forms. There's only really three or four different types of things that come to us from great distances. I brought some of those here with me today to give to you and to Jamie. So some of them are meteorites, right? There's a meteorite. So there's a meteorite. That's going to be Jamie,

so be careful with it. Now you, your birthday is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. It's one of the best meteor showers of the year typically. So next year on your birthday, I'll remind you, go out, go to a dark spot and just look up. You don't need binoculars. You don't need a telescope. You don't need nothing. And you'll see an average a couple of meteors per hour burning up in the atmosphere. Those came from parts of our solar system or Avi Loeb, our mutual friend, has discovered what he claims and seems to be pretty likely is fragments of a meteorite from another solar system that could potentially contain alloy. In other words, not metal. This is pure metal. So this is your birthday gift.

This is one of your birthday gifts. Oh, thank you. So that's pretty heavy, right? That's a real meteorite. That's a real meteorite. Now, how do you know it's a meteorite? So check it out. That is a fragment of the early

solar system. It's actually older than the earth. It's about 4.3 billion years old. How do I know with a magnet? Well, so these materials are very, very unusual in terms of their composition of relative to things on earth. Here's a more powerful magnet. That's more powerful than this big one? Yeah, look at it. Yeah, That's some cheap Chinese piece of junk. Wow, that's crazy, the difference. Yeah, check this out. They just have pull force. This is a robbery.

That was like... So that big meteorite crashed in Argentina about 7,000 years ago. It was found by tribesmen and tribeswomen in the 1500s, I believe. And they started to take it. And what would you do with a chunk of metal back in the 1500s, I believe. And they started to take it.

And what would you do with a chunk of metal back in the 1500s, Joe? Make swords out of it. They made arrowheads, which you would do too, probably, right? So they just made it into weapons of war and whatnot. And then finally it was realized in the 1800s, 1900s, it was a meteorite. How big was it? It was huge, thousands and thousands of pounds, tens of thousands of pounds. Wow.

I have one big sample even bigger than that one. Wow. So here's big sample even bigger than that one. Wow. So here's some information for you. Now, these little guys, I give these away on my website. These are much, much tinier little fragments. Those would be some very exclusive arrowheads if you could get a hold of those. Yeah. So my dream is to make these things into rings.

You know how like Ryan Holiday has these like Memento Mori coins or whatever? Yeah. So my merch someday, my dream is to make these into rings. Because they look super cool. Have you ever seen the Rolex meteorite watch? Yeah, the meteorite surface. That's the stone? That's it. That's the rock. That's the metal chunk. And how many years ago did this slam into the earth?

About 7,000 years ago. That must have done a fuckload of damage. Yeah, it was a big crater. And that's just one fragment of it. It's strewn over several kilometers, and some of the pieces are even bigger than that one. Wow. This is a relative... So now the Argentinian government has banned export of it. So actually, you can't

get these. So this is like a stockpile that I have. I give them away, but these are fun. So we did an isotopic test on it. We found out what's the ratio of it. So these can only form in space. They have certain properties that can only form in space. So this is one of the four long-range messengers that come throughout the cosmos.

The other one is gravitational waves. We talked about those earlier. Those travel at the speed of light. These travel 20,000 miles per hour, but it's pretty fast, but it's not speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. The other type of thing that travels near the speed of light, possibly at the speed of light, are called neutrinos. Neutrinos are these ghost particles that are basically almost massless. They interact with almost nothing except for other types of weakly interacting material. And then the third thing are photons. So you asked a question, could new technology

reveal properties, not about the age of of galaxies but the age of the universe that would cause me to question things? And that's exactly what I do. So our telescope, the Simons Observatory, the one that I talked about earlier, it's a $110 million project, which will last over a decade. And that project is aimed at not just measuring the light. The earliest light in the universe is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's the leftover heat that was left over after the first atoms formed. The smallest, most simple atom, hydrogen, when it formed, there was still heat in the universe at that time. That was about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

So you can't see further back than that light because that's when the first light is produced. You can't see light earlier than that. The galaxies that Webb is seeing is 300 million years old. In other words, that's from the universe is 300, so it's a thousand times older than what we can see just with microwaves. But that's not good enough, right? We don't want to just see the 380,000-year-old universe. We want to see it at time equals zero or as close as we can get. Because there are some people that say there wasn't just one Big Bang. There have been multiple Big Bangs, but there are other Big Bangs going on right now. Some say there was a single Big Bang that just emerged from pure energy. Some say that there was a universe that existed before our universe and it collapsed. And the material that would later become our universe

emerged from what's called a big crunch or a bouncing, collapsing universe. And these are different models. My job is not to prove them right. It's to eliminate whatever ones of those I can with my team, obviously. And in so doing, our new technology, which is the most cutting-edge technology ever made, it might be the last of its kind, operating in Chile, which is turning on later this year, is going to start revealing the answer to those questions. And the way that it will do that is really a combination of three different tools. The only three tools astronomers have, telescopes and detectors and telescopes, brains, you know, that do theoretical work and make models, and then computers to simulate and to assess

the data. We synthesize those three tools. We hope that we'll find new information. Will it change the age of the universe from 13.8 billion years to 26 billion? I don't want to say absolutely not, but there's almost no chance of that. Because it's fundamentally almost like a different type of science. It's like saying, I'm going to tell you about the age of Homo sapiens on Earth based on planetary geological forces. Like, okay, you can't have a person before there was a planet. So there's some relationship, but it's very tenuous.

Interesting. Very tenuous. intelligent species out there somewhere or some sort of evidence of them in terms of some manipulation of their atmosphere or something like that yeah yeah and this is obviously a big big topic um and i really wouldn't have gotten so interested in it i used to really dismiss it and i i still am probably you'd call me an alien minimalist because i think there's almost no chance that that there are aliens certainly uh there's almost i i think there's almost no chance that that there are aliens certainly uh there's almost i would say there's almost no chance that there's intelligent technological aliens in other words it could be slime mold on some exoplanet proximus interi b

but we never know about it because they don't have thumbs and technology right uh but i even think that that might be impossible or as close to impossible as a good scientific i should never say zero chance they're aliens or zero um but as chance or aliens or zero but as you go down the logical chain as you go down the evolutionary chain of say alien technology as you said could they be communicating with us well we only know of these three different ways that they can communicate with us the three things I brought here you know the meteorites that could send objects mm-hmm trash Avi love thinks these are trash you know, he went to Papua New Guinea.

He scooped up some of these little fragments of a meteorite. You should definitely have him back on. It was a phenomenal episode with him. He and I had a conversation, very technical. But, you know, I like to think I can complement some of the cool stuff that you do by going deep into the astronomy so that my colleagues actually get, you know, some interest out of it too. that my colleagues actually get some interest out of it too. But when we think about craft, now you're not sending things other than sending neutrino beams to us or sending gravitational waves to us or sending light.

Those are all things that propagate near the speed of light. This is very slow. This is very, very slow. To get this here, that took thousands and thousands of years just orbiting around our Earth. But even if it came from another solar system, we have no idea where it came from. Well, I'm going to stop you because you went way off track a little bit. You said, I want to be clear on what you're saying. Do you think there's no possibility for alien life in the universe? I think it's, I didn't say it's no probability. I think the probability is very low and I can explain why.

Yeah, please. So have you ever heard of the Drake equation? Yes. Yeah. So the Drake equation is essentially a parameterization of our ignorance about certain things in the universe. And we've kind of checked off seven of the terms and the eight terms of the Drake equation thanks to new technology, thanks to new telescopes. How many stars have planets around them, how many total... But there's a couple terms in there,

the lifetime of a civilization and a certain fraction of how much that civilization can dedicate its energy or what have you towards broadcasting its presence, right? So for us to know that they exist, they have to have made technology for them to exist. And they have to exist in the first place. So how many of such objects are there?

That's what the Drake equations are really parameterizing. Now, I propose that you should be able to do the following thing. If there's life in the universe, just life, slime mold, I don't care what it is, you should be able to set limits on it in the following sense. And what I'm going to do is do a reductio ad absurdium. I'm going to prove, I'm going to motivate, hopefully I can't prove, but I'm going to motivate the illogic of suspecting that there are extraterrestrial intelligence civilizations. Okay, here it goes.

Let me just tell you, my colleagues discovered that there's a planet, and it's around a star that's just like our sun. And it's next to another planet, and that planet's full of life. And the other planet's almost identical to that planet. It's almost the same size. It has a day the same length as the day of the planet that has just rotten with life. It's crawling with Kardashians and slime molds and whatever, right? Okay. So it's out there.

Just like us. Yeah. And I said to you, Joe, what do you think the odds are that those two neighboring planets that are, there's no reason physically they shouldn't both be identical. What are the odds that the other one should not have life? What would you say? With the same environment? The same solar system environment

same properties rocky planet had liquid water it has an atmosphere it has a magnetic field you know has all sorts of things i would think it would be more likely that it would have life very likely it would be extremely likely okay now let me tell you that that planet exists it's called mars and i brought you a piece of it here. This is a fragment. So this goes in order of expense. So these things I give away. That big meteorite is a present for you. Thank you.

This is a piece of Mars. This I only give to you. I don't have one for Jamie. That's an actual piece of Mars. That's an actual piece of Mars. So from an asteroid? So what happened was the Earth gets hit by meteors, right, all the time. But so do all the other planets.

Sometimes some of that material from Mars gets impacted. Imagine something that big that Jamie showed before slamming into it. It's going to eject it from the surface of Mars. That's going to orbit in the clouds of Mars. It's eventually going to get outside the atmosphere of Mars if the impact is great enough, carrying some of the debris, the surfaceaced the crust of Mars, et cetera. And that will then percolate throughout the solar system for tens of millions of years, perhaps, until the Earth smashes into it

and it lands, in this case, it landed in Africa. That was recovered from Africa. That little third of a gram is a slice off a bigger chunk, okay? And not only does that piece of Mars doesn't have any signature of life on it. And we've been to Mars. We've stuck probes into Mars. We have a helicopter, freaking helicopter flying around on Mars right now. It's insane. We don't see anything. Now, that doesn't mean that life didn't exist there before. It doesn't mean that if we don't fly into a lava cave, there won't be. But does it not say something? This is called panspermia something

that sounds dirty but it's not another term yeah so so we exchange material and actually sir fred hoyle the guy who came up with the idea for the name the big bang uh he actually believed in the steady state model he believed that's how life was seeded on earth the fact is that we've been exchanging material for literally billions of years from when the earth was you know Just bacteria and Mars was flowing with water We know Mars was rich with now the fact that we don't see any is that proof it never had absolute and not But I'm just saying it's a piece of evidence and that evidence is very hard to come by right? It's hard to prove a negative Right. It's hard to say that like Mars definitely never had life. Can I stop you there?

Yeah, how much detection do we have? I mean, how much technology is currently on Mars that's looking at signs of life? There have been probes since, you know, Viking and so forth. How many of them are capable of detecting signs of life other than, like, physical things? All of them have had some capability for precursors to life. In other words, some have been able to detect water. Some have had spectrometers that could detect gases. Right. So, like, how many of them have had some capability for precursors to life. In other words, some have been able to detect water. Some have had spectrometers that could detect gases. Right.

So how many of them have landed? Probably 15 or 20. And Mars is, what is it? How much smaller than Earth? It's about, it's a little, yeah, it's a little bigger than the moon, but a lot smaller than Earth. So it seems like a lot of space that we didn't detect things on or didn't even visit. But isn't that the converse of the usual argument that I hear? There's 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.

Many of them are like the sun. There's 100 billion galaxies or more like the Milky Way. So it's 100 billion squared. Right. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. So what are the odds? So usually astronomers will say, will do calculations a following way. Instead of like asking what's the probability of that.

You know, for example, I've been to Antarctica twice. I've been to the South Pole, which is, you would just be bored out of your mind probably. Because all it is is like going out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and freezing it. There's nothing to do there. The coast of Antarctica is really cool. So this is a rock from there. They have like volcanoes there. That's not for you, but that one I got to take back because it cost me $50,000.

It cost you, the taxpayer, $50,000. But this you can keep. This is from the South Pole's gift shop, Joe. That's a patch from the United States. We have such cool freaking scientists, man. Our country and the world. I just heard something something i was like i wonder if joe knows this um it's totally random but just like how cool is freaking science it's

pretty cool do you know they can measure i'll get back to your question in just a second they measure like the stress levels of whales and they can use the stress of whales to determine if like the soviets or russians Russians are testing bombs under the ocean floor. Like what the hell? I heard this talk recently. A woman studying whale earwax. So whales don't have ears like ours that stick out. They don't want to be good for like swimming around.

There's a lot of friction. But they have like these vestigial things because they like evolve from wolves. I always thought like stuff came out of the water and that whales evolved into wolves. No, no, they think that wolves turned into whales. Really? Yes. Wolves? Yes, I don't know.

Jamie Hatsfield, because I am a total ignoramus, but this is a going theory, that whales evolved from wolves. So like most mammals, they have ears. Those ears have been covered over. And what happens to a whale is that it retains earwax. And there's earwax in the whale. The whale doesn't hear with its ears.

It hears through its jawbone. And that reverberates. And that's how it senses sound. And it still has vestigial earwax. They sample the earwax of dead whales. And they can measure how much cortisol, the stress hormone, is in the whale. And they know the migratory patterns of the whale. And they do some of this research in Antarctica article so anyway that's really fascinating we're kind of getting off topic i know i want to understand how you can look at all of the variables

that are possible in terms of the composition of planets in terms of temperature and in terms of also different kinds of environments for life that we haven't encountered yet but could be real, different kinds of life, things that are very, very alien to what we perceive of as carbon-based life forms. I just don't understand how you're looking at one planet that has a very different environment than Earth, even though Earth has life and it doesn't, and using that one example to sort of dismiss the possibility that in the insanely vast universe that there couldn't be something that's very similar to the conditions of Earth. Yeah. No.

100% right. You're 100% right. And I'm not saying that. I'm not saying there's – I'm ruling it out. I'm saying there's what's called evidence, prior information. Right. And you should be able to say that how likely it is. You should be able to run a simulation, say for every time there's a planet that's rotten with life, like the Earth, there's some odds in the overlapping communal history of those two planets in a binary planet system that they should share life.

And then you get a number. I'm not saying I know that number, but you should be using that as information to sort of say how, what is the fecundity? How likely is it for life to get started? And once it starts going, I believe evolution can take over. But you just keep, you know, kept this notion that because the universe is so vast. But the reason I brought up Antarctica and these whales, and I know it sounds totally irrelevant, but I've been there twice. Okay. There's four different animals that I've seen in an archive.

And there are these giant seagulls called skuas. They'll freaking rip your face off if you leave it out. They're just nasty birds. There's penguins on the continent itself. And there's seals and then there's people. So this is one-seventh of the continents of Earth. There's almost no other life on Earth. But imagine you could make the same argument.

The Earth is so big, and, like, wherever there's a continent, there should be life. But you don't see cities in Antarctica. You don't see other, not even, like, other people. You don't see, like, well, there's still Neanderthals down there. There were dinosaurs there at one point, but I'm saying right now. So just by saying that there's the large number hypothesis is that there's so much possibility that that leads to probability. That's a logical fallacy.

Just because there's a large number, there's a potential. If Earth didn't exist. But Earth does exist and humans do exist and Earth is rich with life forms. We know that it's possible. That's true. We know that it's possible given the parameters that Earth enjoys. That's what I say. And we know that there's an insane amount of planets out there that could replicate this environment.

Right. So wouldn't you then say, again, if you knew that life is so incredible, there's these extremophiles that live in volcanic vents 3,000 meters under the ocean. So, again, you have to say, like, what are the odds that we would not see life on Mars or on Enceladon? And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying there is no life. But it's just Mars. It's one example. And it could be that life requires a very narrow window that we enjoy. Sure.

That may be. But look at all the other factors that go into life existence on Earth. We talked about Jupiter before. There are scientists that believe that without Jupiter, we wouldn't be here, because Jupiter is like a big vacuum cleaner. There are scientists that believe that if the moon wasn't as close as it is,

you know that the moon is exactly the same angular diameter as the sun from the Earth. Do you know what that implies for you? And next April 8th, when I come and visit you again, there's a total eclipse of the sun. So I'm gonna take you, if you're willing, I'm gonna again. There's a total eclipse of the sun. Oh, wow. So I'm going to take you, if you're willing. Yeah, sure. I'm going to take you and show you the eclipse of the sun.

That sounds like a lot of fun. It'll change your life. Where would we go? We're going to go to San Antonio. Oh, nice. We're going to drive. It's easy. Or we'll fly.

It's only a 90-minute drive. It's not even 90 minutes, right? Have you ever experienced a total solar eclipse? I didn't experience it because I remember, was it Donald Trump that was staring at the sun? Wasn't it? It was him. Yeah, it was.

It was him. I was like, I'm not going to be that guy. I think I did try to look at it. Yeah, now that I'm remembering it. But it didn't come through here. So anyway. No, it was in California. If you were to see it, the experience that you had on Mauna Kea will seem like you're know, like you're just going down to the bar or something.

Really? This will change your life. Okay, I'm in. This will change your life. Damn it, we told everybody we were going to San Antonio on April 8th. It's going to be a real problem. Well, we'll find a secret place. A lot of freaks.

Yeah, exactly. Freaks are going to show up. So the reason I bring that up is because it happens to have the exact, have you ever seen the far side? There's no dark side of the moon. There's a far side of the moon. It's riddled with craters. Guess what? Each one of those is a target, is a Secret Service agent that took the bullet for us.

Okay? Any one of those could have exterminated. Yes. The fact that we did have a huge impact 65 million years ago that led to the advent of the mammals to replace the dinosaurs. The fact that we have internal terrestrial magnetism that then allows cosmic radiation to avoid impacting the earth where the population is the largest of all species, the auroras are in the north. They're not in the equator. We don't see them here. The existence of plate tectonics, which is lubricated. The going theory about plate tectonics, I don't know if you've heard this,

but that it's actually a lubricant. You ever heard of dry graphite as a lubricant that you put in guns or whatever? But that the continental shelf is moving over these things. They think that that's a precursor, a requisite for life. Let's do the following very simple calculation. Imagine there's eight things. You're God.

You say, to have an iPhone, you're going to need eight things. I think there's trillions and there's eight things. You're God. You say, to have an iPhone, you're going to need eight things. I think there's like trillions and trillions of things. But imagine there's eight of them, okay? And imagine each one, that the Earth has a moon that's just the right distance to have tides to slosh biological material back and forth from the earlier, and that has plate tectonics, that's two. It has a Jupiter nearby. It eventually gets hit by a Chicxulub meteor that kills off the big dinosaurs. It has a diurnal period that's compatible. It has a magnetic. Let's just say there's eight of them.

Let's say each one has a probability in your godlike cosmic roulette wheel of one in a thousand for each one of those eight things to occur. One over 1,000. Now, if you take that, and I think it's like one over 10 trillion for some of these things, right? Now, take each one of those. So take one over 1,000, raise it to the eighth power. You get one, 10 to the 24th.

Guess what that number is? What? It's the same as the number of stars in the whole universe throughout history. So in other words, one thing, only eight different things that had to occur to make life in my simplified God computer that Joe Rogan is controlling.

And the probability of those eight things only is only one part in 10 to the 24th. Then the problem is you're multiplying a large number by a number that's completely unknown. The probability that all these events could line up to make life. And you're saying anything times infinity is finite. Right.

I don't agree with that. Can I stop you? But we're not necessarily saying that. First of all, is it conceivable that there would be solar systems that don't have the sort of asteroid and meteor activity that we do? Of course, yeah.

So wouldn't they maybe not get as pelted by asteroids and meteors and have more time to develop? Isn't that conceivable that there could be a different kind of life? If we find so much variety of life, like we talked about the volcanic vents, isn't it possible that there could be other ways that life could form in different environments that may be hostile to biological life on Earth, but not to whatever evolves there. We're talking about an infinite number of variables. We're talking about so many different planets. But why is it that the large number—see, again, that's the Carl Sagan, you know,

if there's no life in the universe, it's a big, awful waste of space. But that implies— I don't think that's true. That's what he said the universe, it's a big, awful waste of space. But that implies- I don't think that's true. I think that's- That's what he said. Well, I believe that he said that. I'm not saying he didn't say that, but I don't think that way at all. I think we're so silly to think that this finite thing that we call biological life

is the most significant thing and something that we know is at least 13, whatever, billion years old. that we know is at least 13 whatever billion years old. That's so insane that human life, which is just like this never-ending cycle of birth and death with this one particular organism, that that thing is the most important thing that's going on in the fucking universe. That's so crazy. As much as I love people. I know, but you don't have any evidence for that, right?

What do you mean, evidence for what? I i mean you can't say that we are not alone right you can't say we're not alone and but i mean it's just the idea that that's the most important thing that biological life is the most important thing i mean i'm coming from a religious perspective right so i'm going to say that we believe that that humans have infinite worth and that we're made in the image of God, right? That we have God-like abilities. So how many other God-like things could there be in the universe? Maybe, and again, I don't want to say that Brian Keating, astrophysicist, believes that there's definitely no, I believe that there could be life. In fact, I believe

that there is life outside of the earth, but I think it came from the earth. Interesting. Through Pantspermy, exactly. Yeah, interesting. You mean in the whole universe itself that it's come from the earth but I think it came from the earth interesting through pants yeah interesting you mean in the whole universe itself that it's come from the earth even the most and I think you had Adam Frank professor at University of Rochester on about five or ten years ago he taught he does the following calculation he basically proves that it's likely that we're not the only technological civilization in the universe over the universe's history and

I love Adam I like who gives who gives a, you know what? You know what he's saying, Joe? Who gives a, everybody. No, no, no. Listen, Joe. Listen to what he says. I'm listening. He said that there's no,

that there was at least one civilization, you know, with a probability greater than zero, in, out of the one, 10 to the 24th power, you know, a trillion, trillion planets and stars in the universe, that there's been one civilization throughout 13.8 billion years. That doesn't mean in our solar system. It doesn't mean in our galaxy. It doesn't mean in Andromeda, the small Magellanic clouds. It doesn't even mean right now. It could be that life could have formed 100 million years after

the Big Bang and is gone. So is it relevant to you? Like, it's unknowable. I'm saying, what he's saying is at best, it's unknowable. I'm saying it's, what he's saying is at best it's unknowable because we can't contact the species that's extinct. We'll never travel to a place that's beyond a few light years from earth. And so then you can say, of course, well, why don't we think that there are more laws of physics than we even know about? Of course, if we lived a hundred years ago, we'd think there are two laws of physics, right? So I don't want to be arrogant. I don't want to say I know for sure. That's why I will never say that. But I'm saying right now, if you had a bet, if you had a bet and there's some kind of,

you would make that bet, yes, there is life. And maybe you even bet there's technological life because maybe you believe that there's, you know, that there are extraterrestrial beings that are visiting us or perhaps there could be the possibility. You would say yes. I would say no. And I would say, based on what evidence can you say that there's life outside of the earth? I'd say right now there's zero evidence.

You would have to admit that, right? There's no evidence. There's no evidence. But a lack of evidence is not evidence that it doesn't exist. That's absolutely true. So when you are seeing all this UAP disclosure talk and all this stuff, what is your take on this stuff? So I've talked to people, Ryan Graves, who you've had on. I've talked to, I actually did a podcast with his wingman, one of his former Navy pilot wingmen.

I listened to it. Yeah. Oh, good. Thanks. It was very good. Yeah. I shouldn't have said thanks before you said it was good. It was very good.

Thank you. It was very, very interesting. I appreciate it. I'll put that on my resume. So we talked and remember earlier, like two hours ago, I was going to ask you for advice. And I'm such a blabbermouth. I didn't get to ask you for advice as a podcaster. Yes.

The advice I want to ask you is when you're talking to somebody, and for one reason or another, maybe it's your past history. Maybe it's research that you've done independently that even an expert hasn't done. And you're thinking this person's wrong. Yeah. Or this person's making a mistake has that ever happened to you and if so how do you deal with that as a podcaster it's complicated i mean i always do uh or try to do my very best to let someone express himself fully before i interject um and but there are some times we have to say that's not true

that this is not what you're saying has been disproven. And this is like, we should show how it's been disproven. Or, you know, you could be talking about something that I'm an expert in. Like if someone wants to bring, someone wants to, like from UFC, for example, somebody wants to say, there's only, if you wanted to fight in the UFC,

all you need to do is learn Kung Fu. If someone said that, and I'd be like, you're out of your mind. Or it's as fake as wrestling. Right. You could say you're totally full of it. Well, that's someone that's delusional. But I mean, anybody who watches the fights, they know they're real.

But seeing, if someone had like this very distorted perspective on something that I know a lot about, yeah, maybe I would be like, you shouldn't say that because this is why that's not accurate. So I'm talking to Ryan Graves and I've talked to Lieutenant Ann Dietrich, who is the wing woman, I guess you'd say, of Commander David Fravor. I've talked to them and I've talked to them. OK, look, I'm a pilot. I fly little Cessna. It's not going to be like, you know, I'm talking to Super Hornet pilots. I'm like a schmuck. Right. But, you know, when you see things like I'm told, like, I can't question that because I didn't serve in the tournament. It's not going to be like, you know, I'm talking to super Hornet pilots. I'm like a schmuck. Right. But you know, when you see things like I'm told, like, I can't question them because I didn't serve in the military or they have great hand eye coordination or they're

trained observers. I actually know my flight instructor told me a couple of things. He said to me, he said, you relying on hand eye coordination, are you relying on your innate abilities as a pilot or your, uh as a pilot or your ability to perceive things is going to get you killed? And he wasn't like some military pilot. I don't know what my stepfather was. But the point being, you're trained to ignore your senses and pay attention to your instruments. Therefore, the human factor is irrelevant. The fact that he can land on an F-18 on a carrier at night in the middle of a typhoon doesn't have anything to do with the fact that like he is not necessarily better at judging evidence versus me as a

scientist or even as a lay person. Okay. Okay. So we're talking and then I hear things like, well, he witnessed this or he saw this or he has data about this. And by the way, he's been to my house. I've had him for Shabbat dinner, you know, Ryan a lot. And I like Anne Dietrich. And Fravor sounds really great. When you hear them say things, and then they will say things like you and Eric talked about, they're defying the laws of physics, or these things cannot occur within what we understand about physics. They're not physicists, and I'm not a pilot. But we can use our various skills. When I see things like he saw this. No, he didn't see it. He didn't claim to see it.

And even in your interview. Ryan Graves did. Ryan Graves did not see anything with his eyes. He saw things on radar with a system that was newly upgraded in the Super Hornet Mark D that he was flying. Recently upgraded. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. Fravor and Dietrich, when they were flying, they saw things and they tried to perceive them from great altitude, something the size of a school bus, and how fast it was moving relative to the ground. Okay, then there's data.

Then there's things from the Princeton. So I've looked into these things. I know the limitations. I know an awful lot about radio technology, radar sensing. So I don't think that being a military pilot, as much as I don't have the balls to do what any of them do, and I never had the guts to sign up to the military, though I might have liked to, doesn't mean that we accept what they say uncritically. at what he's doing because I think at best, at worst rather, it could save the lives of pilots. If it's some Chinese spy balloon, it could be American PSYOP. It could be doing all sorts of things. Or Grush. I don't know if you've talked to him. I haven't talked to him. You know, claiming non-human biologics, which is like, you know, non-cow animal. Okay. What is that? What

does that mean? Is it slime mold? You know, my favorite thing. What did you think of the Fravor video evidence? So this is the Tic Tac or the – Yeah. Yeah. So this is going back to 2004. And by the way, all these things occur in military – preponderance of them occur in military areas. Very important point. What's happening with Ryan – and I've flown through that area. You can fly through it.

If I take up my little Cessna, I will fly you through this warning area. It's not something like secret thing where Area 51 is blowing up stuff or nuking alien artifacts. Is there restricted airspace out there, though, that you're not allowed to travel in? It's a warning area, which means that if you go into it, you could be intercepted, but for fun. Not for fun, for training. So what an F-18 will do—

Oh, Jesus Christ, they're going to practice on you? Oh, my God. That's how they train their radar systems. Oh, my God, they're going to practice on you if you fly your little fucking propeller plane. Do you know how horrifying that would be? If those dudes just buzzed up on you in a fighter

jet? Serious killers. Oh my god, and those things are so fucking fast. They're fast. I flew with the Blue Angels once. You did? Yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing. Did you puke? Yeah, I did. I did puke. I did puke and I was so. That's awesome. It was amazing. Did you puke? Yeah, I did. I did puke.

I did puke and I was so embarrassed because I'd gotten through seven and a half Gs and I made it, you know, from hooking, you know the thing you do when you hook, hook, hook. You're forcing blood into your brain and I did that at seven and a half Gs and then I failed to do it on a lesser turn and I blacked out.

You blacked out. Yeah, I just fucked up. No, it wasn't like, his was crazy. He was in one of those. Centrifuges. Yeah, that thing's insane. What I did was,

I could have survived that one easier. It was not as bad, but I didn't do it in time. Yeah. And it was like, it came upon me so quick and then when I came out of it, I threw up. This guy, Hazard Lee,

he's a great, he's got a good. It's wild because it's like an elevator door. You see the black closing on the sides, Hazard Lee is a great guy. It's wild because it's like an elevator door. You see the black closing on the sides, literally like an elevator door. And it's almost like you're forcing the door open,

like hoot, hoot, hoot. When you're doing that, you're forcing that blood into your head and it keeps you conscious. Have you ever been knocked out? No, never been unconscious. That's wild. Yeah, I haven't either, thankfully. But my kids are getting bigger.

Everybody can be. I just haven't been hit the right way by the right person that's right but i god i've seen a lot of them yeah um but the the point is that like that if you're dealing with like that kind of speed is fucking insane oh yeah but the thing that they're describing that ryan graves is describing something that's able to stay stationary at 120 knots of wind. The thing that the Commander Fravor and what their radar detected was that this thing had gone from 50,000 feet to 50 feet in a second. So what would happen if that happened? You're actually holding right over there. What would happen if that happened?

You had any kind of material traveling through the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed would be at least illuminated and at least probably be incinerated. But OK, so then the argument becomes, well, maybe they have advanced metamaterials that we don't have access to. OK, so you can keep adding things onto it, which is exactly, by the way, what this guy Gupta and the galaxy thing did. He keeps adding, if you keep adding parameters to your theory in order to make it fit observations that otherwise don't.

Yeah, but observations backed by data. And this data is from these very advanced military detection systems that did detect this physical object that was witnessed by two fighter jets. Isn't another possibility that there's some method of propulsion that doesn't, it's not propulsion at all. Instead, it's manipulating gravity, manipulating whatever the fuck it's doing to go from one point in space to another point in space almost instantaneously, but not biological, not like a physical thing inside of it. I'm talking about like a drone. Okay. So the reason you've heard, or I mentioned this Chicxulub, which is the meteor crater off the Yucatan Peninsula, that was the theory in which that was kind of unveiled was a physicist, nuclear physicist, Nobel Prize winner named Louis Alvarez, who plays a small role in Oppenheimer that you'll see.

And that he was responsible for radar in the World War II as part of one of his jobs. And he realized something that they could do. So radar works by interrogating an object with radio frequency waves that travel at the speed of light and bounce off an object. And you can get timing between when they get bounced off and when it comes back. And you can measure the distance to them and you can measure the speed if you get a couple of those measurements. That's how radar works. And it's totally similar in concept to what you described with the advanced military instrument. Louis Alvarez was a creative, incredibly brilliant scientist. When he was working on that plan, he knew that the Germans and the Japanese could have similar technology. And in fact, they were starting to develop it. It turns out the Allies were good at not only the Manhattan Project, but they were good at developing radar, and both were the technologies that were crucial. But the Germans were developing it too. He realized there's something called the inverse square law,

which is that the signal gets weaker not as the distance away from it, but it gets diminished by the distance to the second power, meaning that if, as you go away from something, the gravitational force that you feel if I double the distance is four times lower. That's Newton's law of gravity. The gravity force decreases as inverse square. It also holds for radar reflections. So Alvarez said, I could spoof the Germans by intentionally, when they send me a signal, I'm going to send them a signal when I'm coming closer to them.

I'm going to take their signal. I'm going to diminish it. I'm going to shoot it back exactly as the inverse square, because he knew how far away they were too. So he spoofed them. And he transmitted the signal. So even though he was getting closer, they were, too. So he spoofed them and he transmitted the signal. So even though he was getting closer, they thought, oh, nothing to worry about. He's getting farther away. And then the planes would blow up the radar sites and then they'd be blind. OK, and now that's just one example. Now, what would the German radar operator have said? That object defied the laws of physics.

It was getting closer, but my radar showed it getting farther away. I'm not saying that's what happened, Joe, but haven't I provoked a little bit of a doubt that maybe there could be other explanations other than alien technology? In other words, you combined... I don't necessarily think it's alien. What do you think it is?

I think it's... No. I think there's a real issue with it being in these areas of heavy military activity. And I don't think it's a real issue with it being in these areas of heavy military activity. And I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that the United States has developed some black ops secret project where they've figured out a way to do something with drones that's unprecedented. Right. I think when they're talking about it openly, as soon as they start talking about it openly, crafts out of this world, I smell bullshit. Like I said, I've said it multiple times on the show.

There's something about this that doesn't feel real. maybe if disclosure did happen, it would be so preposterous and so strange and alien just in the idea that there's life outside this planet and that it's more advanced than us and that it's been visiting us forever. Maybe that would feel so fake because it's so crazy that it's almost there would be no context other than fiction movies. So like I wouldn't be able to fit it in anywhere and it would seem fake. But that's not what I'm getting out of this. So I wouldn't be able to fit it in anywhere, and it would seem fake. But that's not what I'm getting out of this. When I'm watching all this, I'm like, man, I feel like someone's lying to me.

I feel like I'm being duped. And I don't know why. You know what really spoke to me? And I felt sorry because, again, I haven't met Fravor, and he seems like a patriot. And again, he's got bigger balls than I do. When he got back to the carrier, do you know what they kept doing? Yeah, they're fucking with him saying he saw UFOs.

But a lot of those guys had seen them. And they had not just seen them like one time. They'd seen many of them. And I just have this idea that if they were going to do something with some really advanced shit, wouldn't they do it in restricted airspace where the fucking military operates all the time? Of course. Is it weird that it's happening off the coast of Virginia and also off the coast of San Diego? These morning areas, yeah.

I mean, this is like, it seems to me that that's more likely. But then again, then there's these instances of people encountering these things. And the concept of interdimensional travel whatever that means whatever interdimensional travel i know grush tried to sort of explain that in some sort of a strange way and physicists pulled it apart and said this is doesn't make sense that's not how it works but the concept of exposing other like wasn't there some what was this this? Let me find. There's something I saved that I wanted to bring up with you. There's some, God, was it like a new, I'll find it. possibility of travel to other dimensions or at least detecting other dimensions in a method where you could conceivably prove that there is something else outside of what we're physically capable of experiencing yeah no you're absolutely right and that beings could come from there okay that's

that's where it gets that's next that's a wormhole too far yeah But it is true. In fact, when I said the inverse square law, that is a very, very accurate way. I want to find that. Yeah, sure. I'll just talk about this. Please do. In a higher dimensional space than three spatial dimensions plus one time dimension that we enjoy. I found it. The light or gravity would decrease with an exponent greater than two.

And so these black holes that crash together and release gravitational wave energy, again, my friend David Spergel, they've been able to set limits on the dimensionality of space-time. And it's very, very close to three dimensions of space and from an object that's a billion light years away, Joe. So yes, beyond that, anything goes.

But go ahead with your research. I sent it to Jamie. This is the thing. It's definitely not my research. New force of nature. Scientists close in on a fifth force. So what is this? They discover mysterious subatomic particles disobeying the laws of physics.

I just want to look at your face when you get incredibly let down. Okay, here we go. Yes, let me down. So when we talk about forces of nature, so there are four main forces of nature. Gravity that we're familiar with, right? Let me down. things like fusion and so forth. When we look at these particles, we say for each type of force, there's a corresponding object that responds to that force, say it could be mass, like matter, like we're made up of, and there's a boson. And the boson communicates the force to that massive object. So the Higgs boson is what gives particles mass, and that's the mechanism by which we acquire mass and inertia, resistance

to motion. Electricity and magnetism, they're communicated by a boson called the photon. The photon is the gauge carrying force that propagates the interaction between magnetic fields, electric fields, charges. And then there's strong and weak nuclear forces. We don't have to get into those. This is saying that there seems to be a new calculation, a new data that's been discovered in what are called muons.

And these muons have a relationship between their charge and their spin. And that charge-spin relationship, for one reason or another, should be exactly in a ratio of two. So their spin versus their magnetic type of property to their spin. And so this little dreidel, your last one of your last pieces of gifts here. So there it goes there. Not a dreidel.

It's a top. See how long you can get that to spin for. Okay, so what they're showing is that, so see that thing is not only spinning on its axis, but the axis is moving around, Joe? Yes. That's called precession. That precession for a muon,

you can think of as a little tiny spinning top also, and that will have a special relationship between its magnetic properties as it's spinning to its physical angular momentum, which is what this thing is doing. It's like the precession of the equinoxes. Exactly wrong. No, no, yes, I think you're right.

It's still going. No, it's true, yeah. Okay, and now I'm going to do something else for you. Okay, so you got that to spin for like, I will give you $100,000 if you can get this thing to spin in both directions over 20 times. This thing? This thing. That's all I want you to do. So each direction.

What is this thing? It doesn't matter what it is, Joe. I found it in a crashed UFO. 20 times. No. No, that didn't count. You can keep Joe. I found it in a crashed UFO. 22. Ah. No. No, that didn't count. You can keep trying. I'll give you as many tries as you want.

Okay, that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Now do the other way. Try it again. What's the best way to do it? I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to give you 100 grand. I'm just trying to... I don't have Spotify money.

That was the original way you did it. Now do it the other way. Okay. Do it counterclockwise. I'm getting trying to... I don't have Spotify money. That was the original way you did it. Now do it the other way. Okay. Do it counterclockwise. I'm getting better at it. Can't do it. Why is that? Look at it.

It's symmetrical. Isn't that cool? It's just a simple... There's nothing crazy about it. It's called a rattleback. That thing has symmetry about one... More than one axis, such that when you spin it in the direction clockwise

it'll spin forever like the dreidel but if you try to spin it the other way it stops and goes back because there's torque that is the other way wait that's the first way now do it that's counter clockwise okay i think we do it the other way see ah interesting yeah isn't that cool but to the ordinary eye if i just showed you this, it stops and goes the other direction. So muons will have this property that they don't have this exact relationship that's predicted by theory. Again, this is what scientists do. They have a model for how nature should behave. We make observations.

Now those observations disagree at a very significant level such that the odds of it occurring by fluke chance is about 1 in 30 million or something like that. that the odds of it occurring by fluke chance is about 1 in 30 million or something like that. And so now they're saying the one way to explain it is if there's another type of boson, which would mean another type of force, which would be the fifth force for those caping score at home. So that's all that means. It doesn't mean that there's like a wormhole and that they're communicating through it. There are theories like that, but not for the muon experiment. Okay. What do you – bring it back to the UAB thing, what do you think is going on?

Well, you know, the Occam's razor approach is to think about it as, you know, maybe it's a variety of sources. First of all, Grush, where is he from? Grush. Grush, sorry. And I'd love to talk to him. He seems like an interesting patriotic guy. Well, he doesn't have physical experience with anything.

He doesn't even have direct eyewitnesses. Right, that's what I'm saying. But he's not claiming he does. What he's claiming is that he uncovered these programs that he thinks, as a patriotic American and as a citizen of the world, that people should know that there's crash retrieval programs and that they are in possession of biological entities that they keep in freezers. Again, I don't want to condemn him. I don't want to have any smattering of an ad hominem attack, but I'll say one thing. And just you tell me if I'm being an a-hole, okay? He was given the opportunity on perhaps the greatest stage he'll ever have to name names and to say different things. And he didn't name

them. And I've heard things from like Lou Elizondo indirectly uh my friend kurt jamungo has talked to him many times but but i've never i've never talked to him but um but they'll say things like i don't i can't do that it'll ruin my life and and look john i'm i'm a coward compared to both of these gentlemen right but at a certain level in front of senators, congressmen, women, to say, like, I can't disclose that. But you're a whistleblower. Like, you're blowing a whistle. You have protection. We will protect you. We will defend the frick out of you. But he's not done. What he's trying to do is get permission to discuss more things. So he has permission to say what he said so far. This is according to him.

Right. things. So he has permission to say what he said so far. This is according to him. He is attempting to get permission to discuss more. These are the things that he could have discussed with them in the skiff. That's why he brought it up this way. He's trying to do this all by the book. And it appears that there's both resistance and support for this. Well, this is the argument I had with Avi Loeb when he came on my show. He talked about this object Oumuamua, which is this interstellar object that he claims is either a junk debris or maybe it's a tourist scout or a spy drone. It's much more reflective rather, right? It has properties that can't be explained by the typical astronomical pedantic ways of explaining things. And I told him when he came on my podcast, and I love Avi.

I've had him on many times. I said, Avi, you know, you happen to also be friendly. Because I said, would you go, why don't you go after this thing and go track it down? Oh, no, no, no, no. He said, in a couple of years, one of the most ambitious and important observatories is coming online. And I'm happy to recommend people that work on it to you when it comes out called the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, not too far from where our Simon's Observatory is. And that observatory, he said, is going to capture thousands of these things if I'm right. And I said, Avi, what if you're wrong? You know, what if this is one time only event?

I said, Avi, I live in San Diego. And San Diego has the following properties. It's the absolute best and easiest place to be a meteorologist on the planet, except for yesterday, a freaking hurricane and a tornado and an earthquake. But it's the absolute worst place to be a sportscaster because we, of all the major cities in the United States, we have never won a world championship in any sport. Okay. So it's horrible. So last year, then the Padres got into the division series. I'm a huge Padres fan.

I should not have said, well, the Padres are in the division series even though it's the first time since Tony Gwynn was playing and they've been around for 55 years. I'll just wait till next year.

No, no, no, no, no. I made every... I tried to get tickets. I scalped them. I couldn't get tickets because you don't know if your calculations are correct but if you believe in what you're saying track this thing down and oh by the way avi you happen to know a guy named yuri milner who's already paying your team and funding you not personally he's funding a team called the break

breakthrough star shot have you heard about this no No. They're going to send billions of little cell phone cameras to Proxima Centauri B. You're not supposed to laugh. That sounds insane. You're not supposed to laugh. Anyway, they're spending $100 million on it. And they're going to shoot these things there, and they'll get there in 20 years, and they'll transmit at the speed of light. It'll take another four years to get back to the Earth, because four light years away.

Instead of having him spend $100 million on that that why don't you get him to you know get a little cubesat and shoot it off and go catch up to umu while it's still in your freaking neighborhood so that's totally possible totally possible it's not so you think he's resisting that because it doesn't like he doesn't want it to be disproven because he's getting a lot of attention off of this idea that this interstellar object is something from an alien civilization. I think that's too venal. I don't think he's doing it for attention. I just think he's too in love with his numbers. He's too in love with his calculation.

Too in love with the idea of it. There's so many of them. There has to be a temptation to getting recognition because I had never heard of him until a few years ago. And now I hear about him constantly. He's in all these interviews and this is not disparaging. No, no, no. It's just that there's a, there's an impulse that people have to continue to do something that gets them a lot of recognition. Oh, sure. I mean, this is, this is the number one. If he's, if he, if it's possible to go take a look at that thing, how much would it cost to go take a look at that thing? I would probably cost less than a billion dollars, say.

And this guy that he's friends with is... Far be it for me to tell a billionaire how it's been his or her money, but I'm just saying... I don't think you're going to talk Elon Musk into going and looking at it. Right, well, Elon's another kid. So I know you've... So you have this piece of Mars, right?

So he's trying to get to Mars now, right? He wants to die on Mars. And hopefully, God willing, it won't be on impact, okay? That would be horrible if he dies on impact yeah but um but joe i've ever thought like uh which one of his 10 kids i mean kanai nahara he's got 10 kids who's gonna leave behind like who like to do that goes to mars i think he's like he wants to go to mars he said he wants to die on mars by the time he is able to do this i'll probably be fully grown adults. Maybe they can go visit him. They can come with him.

Apparently, the idea is to be able to come back, which is just like, okay. I saw The Martian. Did you like that? Yeah, I love The Martian. Andy Weir is a UCSD, he didn't graduate from UCSD, but he wrote it. But, yeah. But, I mean,

it is possible that one day we will have the technology to colonize other planets right do we have the do we have the reason to do it joe what is the reason like this is what i isn't sometimes the reason just to be able to do it or maybe to ensure that human race survives and if there's some sort of a natural disaster on Earth. Do you know what Nixon wrote on the plaque that went to the moon on Apollo 11? No, what? He said, we came in peace for all mankind. That's bullshit, right?

It was a war against the Soviets. It was part of the Cold War. It was a war of propaganda. And it was important. It did a lot for science. Guess what? We haven't been back to the moon in 50 years, right? So if it was so important for peace and for technology, why haven't we been back, okay?

So to say what we did, it's the Edmund Hillary thing, you know, climb Everest because it's there, right? But Elon has said the following. He has said, I want to go to Mars so that humankind becomes interplanetary. Then you ask, I love to keep asking why questions, right? Because they're so annoying. Like your kids keep asking you why.

You know what the ultimate answer is because I freaking said so, go to sleep, right? So they're so annoying. Like your kids keep asking you why. You know what the ultimate answer is. Because I freaking said so. Go to sleep. Right? So with him, I keep asking why. Why do you want to send people to Mars? Why should humankind be interplanetary?

So that the flame of consciousness never gets extinguished. Why? Why can't you go into the ocean? Why can't you build bubble cities? Why can't you build floating cloud cities? Well, if the Earth gets destroyed. Okay, but why? Why can't you go into the ocean? Why can't you build bubble cities? Why can't you build floating cloud cities? Well, if the earth gets destroyed. Okay, but why? Why what?

Why continue with humanity? Not just humans. He's talking about human consciousness, which could also mean like AI stuff or whatever. But here's my bigger point. You had Ryan Holiday on recently. He's got these memento mori coins, right? Memento mori means remember you're going to die. Allegedly, Roman emperors would have some courtesan walking next to them so they wouldn't have too much hubris. They would say, remember, you're mortal. You're going to die. That was done to motivate them to suck the marrow out of life while you're alive, right? So my question at some level is, well, is that true only of individuals or like could it be true of a civilization as a whole?

Could it be true that like, hey, wait, we shouldn't be dedicating all this effort. And I think it's I wouldn't say it's as as unlikely as life, you know, having iPhones on Proxima Centauri B. But but I'd say it's pretty unlikely that we're going to do that in the next hundred years to have colonized Mars. But I'd say it's pretty unlikely that we're going to do that in the next hundred years, to have colonized Mars. It's incredibly difficult from a technological standpoint, from a biological standpoint, a psychological standpoint. There's a tremendous number of reasons. Sure, but if technology progresses the way it has since 1800, the world's unrecognizable. You could conceivably say that if it continues in the same direction and we don't blow ourselves up, we may very well have the ability

to do something like that. And if you say why, well, why not? Well, why not is always a good answer. Because it's fascinating. Right. Because it's interesting. Because people want to do it because it would be significant

to have human life living on a terraformed Mars. To put it on our resume. Maybe we could use Mars as like a test to like how to recharge an atmosphere if we fuck it up. Right. But isn't it better just not to fuck it up? Yeah, it is better not to fuck it up. But it's also interesting. Like why go to the moon?

Why send satellites up there? Why look at stars? Why all those things? It's part of this human desire to constantly innovate and move forward. But I question the Moore's Law kind of compatibility. And actually you talked about this with Michio Kaku. And he was in his new book about quantum supremacy, which is this kind of faith in these exponential curves. And exponential curves are really tricky, Mofos, because they sneak up on you for a long time like this.

And they go like this, right? Well, one of the things that they do after they do this is they do this. They come down, right? You've heard of peak oil and stuff like that. There's only a finite amount of oil because there's only a finite amount of pre-carbonous fossil fuels, et cetera. But it's worse than that. As we get more and more kind of technologically capable, we get better and better at keeping the Ponzi scheme going in a sense.

Like the ore grade of gold used to be like in California, 1849, right? They would stumble upon a huge brick rock of gold. That never happens anymore. The amount of gold per ton is like a gram per ton. It's incredibly small. And it's going down. All these things are going down. All these diminishing S-curves, they call them. They start off really high, and so you get the go-go 90,

you know, and then it goes, drops off to zero. There's no saying that that might not also happen for both extraction of resources that you need to build a colony on Mars, fuel, rocket parts, et cetera, but also for the, you know, the coming AI and computing revolution. In other words, Moore's Law is saturating for a very interesting reason. It's not that the speed of the computers is still doubling, but the amount of... Do you care about the speed of your computer?

No, you care about what I can do with it, right? How fast does the web page load up, right? Well, so you can have the fastest computer, but it's loading really slowly because there's so many other people that want to take advantage and use that same resource. It's a very highly in- resource. That will happen with quantum computing too. It's already happening with classical supercomputers. In other words, their speed is

going up, but the number of floating point operations they do is saturating because so many people want to use them because they're so good. They're a victim of their own success in a certain sense. Same thing could happen with mineral. So the question is, do we get there? And if not, well, what would that mean? Would we have like a civilization existential crisis? I don't know. I really don't know. But even all the things you just stated, isn't that just within our technological limitations as of today and our understanding of how to put together computers, our understanding of what technology can consist of in terms of minerals, in terms of stable materials?

Yes and no. I mean, but like I said, there's only so much carbon in the earth. There's only so many prebiologic fossils. But can it be recycled? Can we find new ways to use it? Can't we figure out a way to? Sure. Yeah, we can.

But the question is, these different things have to overlap. And actually, I just, because I kind of was was interested to go back just the uap thing for one minute which was um think about the human factors involved in someone like what would grush grush is is describing imagine that um that you have this ability to go back and start with like something happened in 1947 in roswell we'll just say something happened definitely happened right um so there were some people there that witnessed something. They might have been military. They might have been research scientists. People had to go there, identify it, notify people. Then people had to go there and pick it up, clean it up, bring it in a flatbed truck, transport it, store it, keep it processed. Then there's biologics, right? He's saying there's biologics. So the biologics

had to be processed by a biologist, not by the same corpsman who collected it. And guess what? All these guys have wives or husbands or bosses or friends and stuff. So my friend James Altucher is a very big influence in my podcasting career as well. He talks about conspiracy number, like what's the maximum number of people that can possibly be part of a conspiracy before it gets out right before it's exposed and there's there's also overlap between that and their time skills right you're talking about a sustained conspiracy if this is let's give him the benefit of the doubt that this is true and that's not so but this is now coming out now and and you tweeted about this or you mentioned this a couple of weeks ago on a podcast. I forget with whom. But you said the atomic age coincided with the age of Roswell. Yeah.

You mentioned that. And that's true. And there was another thing that happened during that age, the quantum age. So quantum mechanics, which is discovery of forces, fields, maybe fifth forces and unseen things, spooky action at a distance, aliens, and then the notion of atomic holocaust, et cetera, right? So all these things are in the zeitgeist at that moment. And you're right. They nucleate at that same time. What if right now is also that time?

But how is it? Because now we're also talking about UAPs, Fifth Forces, all these other things. And now instead of the Cold War, we have a hot war, right? And all these things are united. And we have global hot war, right? And all these things are united, and we have global climate change, right? I always say there's a concept called the von Karman line, which is the boundary between the Earth and the space. It's about 60 miles, 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface. And basically, almost everything that we're dealing with existentially happens below that line, right?

Pandemics, COVID, respiratory, atmospheric transmission, a nuclear war and the effects of such a thing on the Earth and things in the UAP space that are happening and the boundary between Earth and space. These are all kind of happening. And I'm wondering if it's not sort of related at some level to this kind of being in the cultural consciousness. And that's why it's all coming to date, because to think about a conspiracy of seven decades maintained with probably a minimum of a thousand people kept secret, there's a probability of that happening, but we should be precise about it. And we should do calculate that, not dismiss it, but also be precise about it. Well, it also depends upon what kind of people you're talking about. You know, if you're talking about only high level military people that have a long history of being able to keep secrets, that it's a part of the culture, and these are the only people that have access to these vehicles or this thing, I could conceivably see how someone could keep something quiet for a very long time.

And then you have people that have claimed to have seen these things and worked on these things. And it's always hard when you're dealing with anecdotal evidence and people discussing things and you don't know what's true and what's not true. What is fascinating to me is when – have you seen the GoFast video? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about those videos where there's no heat signature, no visible means of propulsion, and these things are whipping through the sky. I mean, you've talked to Mick West and other people, and I'm not saying he's not a scientist in the sense that someone like I am.

But some of these things are, you know, it always comes down to, like, well, whose data is it? Right. So these are fighter jet pilots that are seeing these things, and they're discussing it. Play that video so you could listen to their discussion of it while they're seeing this thing. What do you think it is? So when I look at those things, there's a couple of different things that you have to look at from

an optical perspective, from a sensor perspective, from a... Let me hear them talk. Yeah. So right now we're looking at this video Where this thing seems to be trying to tracking it Their systems are trying to track it So they're locked onto it now Oh my gosh So obviously they're freaking out. Yeah. They locked onto it with their weapon system. Yeah. So there's something called scale invariance, which is where you can't really tell in certain phenomena. Fractals are like, have you ever seen like the Mandelbrot set? So no matter how much you zoom into it or zoom out of it, it looks the same. And there are lots of features like that. One of the manifestations of that is the ocean surface. There are waves on top of waves. Have you ever seen the beautiful Japanese woodcutter? It's like wave on top. It's incredible.

Incredible. So there you're seeing a lot of waves, but it's impossible to have any depth perception, right? Because we're only getting a single view of it. And there's a gyroscopic stabilization tool that they're using in the FLIR system that's measuring it, right? So there is a heat signature. That's how I can see it on FLIR, the forward-looking infrared. I mean, propulsion. It's universal. It's not like there's something coming out the back, like a jet engine where you could see it clearly? So there have been mock-ups and simulations done for this where it's like you could have a balloon, you could have something spherical, or something that's actually going with the wind. Can't they detect how fast it's moving? No. So not from that video, you can't necessarily. From their systems?

From their weapon systems, they can't detect how fast? Clearly they're having a hard time locking onto it. So I asked Ariel Kleinerman and Ryan about this, and they said it's classic. Like they wouldn't tell me what their radar is capable of saying, only that they can use it to determine certain properties of things. But it seemed very evident in that video that they were having a hard time catching it because it was moving at a very high rate of speed. This is what, 2004, I think, this video?

Was that one? Yeah. So they're trying to lock onto this thing, and it's moving too fast. And you see the crosshairs try to keep up with it. And then finally it locks onto it. And that's when they cheer that we got it. And they say, look at that thing go. Right. Don't you think they would have an understanding of the speed that something's moving and not think of it as a balloon that's just floating around? Well, remember, this is stabilized. So they're locking on. So they're moving in a perspective where it's...

Right, but don't you think their equipment has the ability to detect speed? Do you know how big the field of view of that thing was? I don't. Yeah, so we don't either. I don't know if they released how large they estimate it is. I mean, this is all leaked video, right? Right. So if you were to look through this telescope at the moon,

and there was a balloon floating the telescope, you know, floating in front of the moon and you could see it and it was big and like a Chinese spy balloon or something like that. And it's moving and you're moving and you don't know the relative field of view compared to the size of this object. It may appear that it's going. If that thing is the size of an Ember Air jetliner. Yeah, that's freaking fast. Right. If it's the size of a balloon being carried by the wind that you are stabilized in a parcel of wind, it might not be that impressive. We're assuming that there's wind. We're assuming it's being carried by the wind. But we're assuming it's being carried by the wind in the same direction.

We don't know which way the wind was blowing. But my point is that they seem to think that that was very unusual. And these aren't guys that are just like, oh, my God, a balloon, shoot it. Well, that's when I went back to the feeling of pity that, again, he doesn't even have pity. But let's say your life, you were seeing these things. And let's just say, let's forget it. It's a Chinese war drone, military drone that's coming to blow up the Nimitz, okay, or whatever they were on, okay? Coming to blow up the Nimitz, okay, or whatever they were on, okay?

And so you then, your compatriot, your comrade comes back to the deck and you put like Independence Day posters on his rug and you've seen it too. It doesn't, that's not what I would do. If my kid comes to me and says, I saw, you know, the boogeyman or something, she's like really nervous. I don't say like, well, you know, like let me tease her about it. Like, no, not her. I wouldn't do that to my kid, but I would definitely do that to my friends. If one of my friends said they saw an alien, 100%. Joe, you would do it. I would take a rubber alien.

I'd put it in their bed, have it tucked in. Yeah, but just for fun. And that's what those guys were doing to him. You're making it seem like they like horribly insulted him. They were just busting balls. Let me say this. You're a pilot. Let's say you charter a private jet sometime.

Okay. You're out with Lex and you're going to Vegas. And you charter a private jet, right? You're on the jet. The guy who's in there is flying the plane. And you found out that he actually was an ex-military pilot and he did see one of these things. And so you get one of your friends friends your buddies dresses up as an alien bust into the cockpit and starts i'm the alien that you find you wouldn't do i mean that's like

a silly comparison i'm just making a comparison their life is threatened though but if he comes back from a flight claiming to have seen ufos and his friends bust his balls this happened many times but that's in the military that's normal military shit but ryan's saying the opposite now ryan's saying the unknown these people are scared for their safety now now he's doing the military. That's normal military shit. But Ryan's saying the opposite now. Ryan's saying the opposite now. These people are scared for their safety now. Now he's doing the Americans for Safe Aerospace. And part of their mission is to protect pilots and destigmatize them. This is because of close encounters with these things, right? And destigmatize.

This is the square in a circle. The cube around a sphere. Is it a cube around a sphere? It could be. Which way is it? Is it a black cube that's in a sphere? I made a very around a sphere? It could be. Which way is it? Is it a black cube? It's on my video. I made a very expensive thumbnail for my video with Ryan Graves.

A sphere inside a cube? Yeah. So this sphere inside a cube is a repeating theme, right? They see a lot of these. On the east coast. On the east coast. Yeah, on the west coast. So do you think these things are drones? What do you think these things are? Well, do you remember the Chinese spy balloon that came about recently?

And do you remember how we didn't shoot it down? Do you remember when that came about? It was like right before this disclosure was about to get kicked off. I mean, there's some weird things that are going on. There's certainly things. Do you connect those two things together? One thing that moves in a very bizarre way that they can't seem to replicate. They don't know how these things stay stable at 120 knots. According to all of his equipment,

unless their equipment totally sucks. And this is like the equipment that got upgraded in 2014. Right. But then they say, I can't tell you about the equipment. Right. But they can tell you that when the equipment was upgraded, that's when they started detecting these things. So if the equipment is accurate and the equipment is upgraded and then they put it on these jets and these guys are detecting these things, and then there's visual confirmation of these things by multiple pilots, and it's a reoccurring thing. They see them in the same areas all the time.

Well, then why wouldn't the government go out? Why wouldn't they be sending out? I asked Ryan that. I said, why don't they send out sorties every day? If they're doing it at nothing less, they could do it for training. Because maybe it's theirs. Right. It could be.

Maybe it's theirs. The U.S. shoots down another flying object over Canada. This is six months ago. What'd they shoot down? They didn't say. This is the- I'm sure that, well, I had Mike Baker on who used to be with the CIA. Yeah, that's right.

And he was explaining all these Chinese balloons. Oh, this is from, Eric Weinstein shared this yesterday. He said there's these three different, on the screen, there's a map of three different NORAD shots that happened from time. And like, he just says like,

I don't remember these happening. Do you know how much each one of those missiles cost, by the way? No. It's over a million dollars. Didn't they miss once? Yep. Ha ha.

Because you're not like shooting. Where'd that fucking missile go? These balloons, people don't realize it. When you're at altitude, it's not like this. So like the pressure outside is almost equal to the pressure inside.

So if you shoot it with bullets and pepper it with a bullet, it does nothing. It's just like opening a door in a warehouse. You have to detach it from the payload. That's why they shot it with a missile. Those are a million bucks a pop. But I wanted to just get back to the— The possibility of what they are. The possibility of what they are.

So I always have to look for the simplest explanation of what they could be. And certainly the simplest – I don't think anyone would disagree. The simplest explanation is certainly not – these are interdimensional beings that have traveled across the literal equivalent of trillions upon trillions of miles or if you like thousands of light years or billions of light years as objects only to navigate that whole way and end up being sighted off of Catalina Island and Newport News or Virginia. Maybe they don't care if they get sighted. Maybe that's part of their fun. Yeah, right. So then there's a teleological explanation. We're trying to propose a mechanism by which that motivates some species or something to do that, right?

Now, Avi, to get back and give him his credit because I don't want to be perceived as I'm denigrating him in any way, but he has built this Galileo project. And I should say, I never got interested in any of this stuff, Joe. Although, I do think, if it were true, you know who should be the most interested in it are physics professors and physics researchers, right? physics professors and physics researchers, right? Because if this is true, that they have mastered, that there are creatures that have mastered the interdimensional manipulation of space-time, that would shortcut me and my colleagues four or five centuries, right?

And it would be just a revolution. Think of the Nobel Prizes you could win, right? Think of tenure. If you were allowed to have access to it. Right. If they do have some sort of a back engineering program, who could conceivably be qualified to do that? This is where I disagree with Eric.

I always say Eric, you know, Eric is my atomic clock. You know, they say like a broken clock's right twice a day. Like Eric's almost always right. He's my atomic clock. So I get a great deal from Eric. But, you know, but when he says that, you know, these objects, you these objects that we need, we're the theoretical physicists studying this. I claim you don't really need theoretical physicists to study it yet. You might instead want experimental physicists such as myself, my colleagues, people that are used to dealing with data, with sensors, with actually building technology, observing things, again, observing the skies. We've been watching the skies in all wavelengths. By the way, you only see it with visible light.

How come these aren't showing up only in the radar, microwave region of the spectrum, infrared? Why would they choose the narrow band of wavelengths that some marginal species of primitive apes, evolved apes, have sensitivity to, namely this narrow window? This is infinitesimal. You're saying why wouldn't they hide themselves? Why wouldn't there be other modalities in which they're observed other than visible sightings, eyewitness sightings? Which, in other words, why couldn't they manipulate the signatures that they travel in? Maybe they'd be neutrinos.

Maybe they could be using gravitational waves. Who knows? But that you don't need Edward Witten to help you with, right? You don't need a theoretical physicist. You need an experimental physicist, an observational astronomer who's used to looking through telescopes. My whole job, Joe, is staring up at the sky with things like this in all different dimensions and looking for objects

that don't seem to make sense or looking for phenomena that have never been observed before. Why would you assume that they would want to hide? I'm not saying they would want to hide. I'm just saying they seem to be evasive, right? So in other words, they're- Maybe just the way they travel is so insane that you can't really detect them. They only go on Catalina Island and Newport News.

In other words, how come they're not over the observatory that's in western Texas that the University of Texas operates? How come they get spotted over military bases? Well, that's what I'm saying. So does that lead to – so the fact – if I just told you nothing, but they happen to appear in restricted warning areas, military areas, would you say that they're – would you say that makes them more likely to be aliens? I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say more likely. I would say if I was an alien and I came here to observe a territorial ape with nuclear weapons, I would probably check

out where the nuclear weapons are. I'd be like, what are these fucking crazy assholes up to? They're blowing themselves up by dropping bombs out of planes and they have enough missiles pointed at each other all over the world to essentially eliminate all life. Well, that's the opposite. I think I would look. Yeah. I think that's where I would look. I think I would look over those military bases and I think I'd look. Yeah. I think that's where I would look. I think I would look over those military bases. And I think I'd maybe let myself be known. Only in America? Shut them all down.

Yeah. We're the best. We're number one. We are number one. We know it. I mean, there have been multiple sightings. I'm sure you know about this. Yeah.

But there's been many. If you look at the map of sightings. It's far more America. It's a very American themed idea, particularly because of Roswell. And you know that when Venus, the planet Venus, is not visible, that UFO sightings go down by over 40%. Oh, I'm sure. Well, I mean, you can explain away the vast majority of them. And then you can also have, there's people that hallucinate.

There's people that have, they have mental health breakdowns where they actually actually believe that things happen that didn't really happen and some of those things could be a ufo abduction there's not we know that people have wild vivid dreams and then we know that the fucking the border to dreams and consciousness is why are they all these ufo abduction stories at night? Were you dreaming, Bob? Mostly men. Yeah, Bob, were you dreaming? Did they really touch your butt and take your sperm?

Here's an... You know what I mean? They've reached the limits of rectal probing. It's not like they happen while you're at work. It's not like they abduct you when you go to the restroom and all of a sudden something hovers outside the window and pulls you through. You know what I mean?

It's like always in the middle of the night. But let me ask you this. So when I brought this up, when I first got interested in this, I was really – I should say I have this disposition, as you've already uncovered, that I don't believe that there's extraterrestrial technology in the whole universe with high confidence or even with moderate degree of confidence. So therefore, I certainly don't believe that there are, you know, I'm not predisposed to believe that there are alien technology crafts visiting the earth, right? Right. So, but when I talk about that and I say, look, there are these astronomers and there are these people like me who study things and NASA. And part of the reason I got interested to take this

seriously is my friend David Spergel is one of my mentors. And he is leading NASA's UAP investigation for NASA, which didn't report last month. And so on Twitter, this whole thing is like, well, how come you're not at the reporting thing and we don't have any reason to trust NASA? There's a whole subculture, which I think is like almost like denialism, whatever form you want to employ for that, but that won't accept any explanation unless it's aliens.

And there's a huge subculture, right? So how should I, as a scientist, interact with a lay person who's educated, well-meaning perhaps, but has this deep distrust of science, scientists,

the scientific method? I mean, how do I... I don't think they necessarily have a deep trust of science or the scientific method. Or NASA, how do I... I don't think they necessarily have a deep trust of science or the scientific method. I think there's a large number of people that have a vested interest in believing that aliens are amongst us and that UFOs

are real and that disclosure is about to happen, partially because it's fun. It's very fun. The idea of thinking that there's aliens out there is so exciting. I love it i mean obviously really i have fucking aliens everywhere um but i'm also uh skeptical of things that just seem fake there's something about this whole thing that seems like a show and it really kind of

brings me back to i mean i'm not accusing people of mind control experiments, but it has been done in this country many, many times. And one of the big ones was MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax, where the CIA literally set up brothels and gave these Johns LSD and monitored them through two-way mirrors. We know that there's been psyops before. two-way mirrors that we know that there's been psyops before and when there's all this discussion about like out of world crafts and not of this world and we have alien bodies i'm like yeah fucking stop talking show me some shit you know at a certain point in time you're gonna have to stop talking and show me some shit because right now i'm like i don't like the way this sounds no it sounds funky. Let's take it one more time.

And this is someone who thinks that aliens are real. No, I know you do. Yeah. I just think there's something about this. Like, I believe Commander David Fravor. I believe him. I believe that he knows what he saw. I believe he saw something extraordinary.

I'm just not, I don't know where it came from. Right. But the idea that we had something like that in 2004 is even weirder. Yeah, you're right that's even weirder because it's like now we're talking about there's a giant difference between 19 years ago the physics of 19 years ago that our understanding of propulsion technology computing everything iphone plethora we didn't have the iphone we didn't have anything back then we had shitty little fucking flip phones. It's just such a different world. Well, let me run this by you. So what the United States government did to Native Americans, tremendous atrocities, right? But there was almost as much done.

I don't want to say almost. There was a lot of intertribal warfare where we would cause them to fight with each other. to fight with each other. And that was part of our strategy to atomize them and to reduce their capability to mount some kind of a force against the United States government, which is truly awful part of our history. But nevertheless, they, you know, so that there was also a plausible deniability. Well, you Indians were fighting against each other too. It wasn't like you guys had to, you know.

So I'm wondering at this level, is there a possibility? I don't, I'm'm not gonna set up alien wars and fake alien wars to blame or just anything that polarizes us right because that's good for them it allows them to sell you know viagra right i mean something that attracts attention that's almost impossible to to disregard i mean anybody who's curious and knows what an alien is or seen an alien we've seen so much uh but um i don't know i mean i don't know either i just i feel like if they kept it a secret for 80 years that's very fascinating and if it is real also very fascinating but there's just something about the way this is all being discussed that just

feels fake and i don't know why and maybe it's real maybe again maybe it is just my natural reaction to something that is so outside of the norm that I don't have a context for it I don't have a place for it might also be there's a religious component to it there's a really just space daddy it's like yeah the simulation hypothesis right there's another one that people just like look to and they they act as an explanation why we don't have free will because they don't want to be held to their accountability i always say these people like sam harris like who doesn't believe in free will i'm like have you ever met someone i don't know let's get have you ever met someone who acts as if they don't have free will i'm not talking about someone who's insane like something like imagine sam harris like totally rational reasonable

brilliant you know intellectual person but like him but he's like i don't believe in free will therefore i'm going to act in accordance with that belief. I've never met somebody like that. Like, right. It's like, I'm determined to do this because of the big bang. Well, I think it's a complex or complicated scenario where you're trying to say that determinism is the only thing that causes people to do things and that you're not responsible or not. You're not necessarily saying you're not responsible but that there's you have no choice that there's these factors all play a part of it and that's what it seems like you have a lot of choice it seems like we encourage choice in the right direction we discourage choice that we feel like is in the wrong direction it seems like

it's uh there's a part of us uh socially collectively as a group that wants the right choices to be made because we know that people have the ability to make decisions. Can I ask you a podcast question? Sure. So you've done 2040, 30 something. Yeah.

More than that. When you count fight companions and MMA shows. So, um, have you ever gone back and listened to like, no. Okay. So this kind of dovet and listened to like. No. Okay. So this kind of dovetails with what something Carl Sagan said.

He said a book is magic because it allows the voice of a person who may have died many, many centuries earlier to communicate with you and literally with audio books, like literally in your ear as you are with millions of people around the world. And I've just wondered, you know, like, because i never go back and listen to my pocket i've listened to it i should not lie i've listened to a couple because if like it was a graham hancock one and i wanted to reabsorb some of the stuff that he said or or um you know someone was just really interested yeah sure but but what i'm getting at is you know writing a book and like encapsulating that.

I mean, surely you've thought about it. And I'm just wondering, you know, a book is something different. You know, it's really the operating system of humankind. Whereas audio is incredible. But like what are the odds your great grandkids are going to listen to, you know, a preponderance of it versus the distilled wisdom of Joe Rogan, you know, put into a book form for posterity. I've definitely thought about doing that. I'm just very busy.

You know, it's hard to take the time to write a fucking book. There are people that help. I'm not going to get any help. No, no. I don't mean a ghostwriter. I just mean people to like research and like, well, this thing thematically, it would all be you, but it would be. Yeah.

I don't know. Maybe I've banded it about just uh i'm trying not to overload you know i think uh people get a little too ambitious and i've been guilty of it myself how so like just doing too many things like i do enough things like slow down what concentrate on the things i do more you know what gives you the most life or most like energy force as far as occupations no no all these things that keep you busy but what's your what thing causes time to pass the such that you're in a flow state the most oh i don't know if there's any one thing that does you know um i think it's just all the different things i i'm very fortunate that I have a lot of different things that I like to do in terms of occupation.

And I have a lot of great people in my life in terms of family and friends. So I'm just very fortunate in that way. But they're all interesting in their own different way. I think they all complement each other. And that's one of the things that I like about doing podcasts and doing stand-up and even doing UFC commentary. I think somehow or another they complement each other. Do you ever, when you do stand-up,

I was able to do a TEDx talk a long time ago. And before I did it, I wanted to get the experience of bombing on stage in front of an audience of possible hostile people. So I went to the comedy store in La Jolla and I did a set and I only wanted to do it clean because my wife and my rabbi was there. So I did it clean. I had some good jokes, I think,

that I could work on the audience. But it was after like, you know, seven women talking about how they menstruated and I was the only one who didn't. Was it an open mic night? It was an open mic, yeah. It was just a two-minute set. I was the last one who didn't use Cursor. Was it an open mic night? It was open mic, yeah. It was just a two-minute set. I was the last person to go. I used my A material.

But anyway, we came out, and afterwards I was like, you know what? It was enjoyable. I'm glad I did it. I could say I did two minutes of stand-up. But actually, I didn't like the people in the audience. I mean, they were drunk and like whatever. I mean, I think my wife was there, but my cousin. Well, it's open mic night, first of all.

A lot of maniacs are in the audience. Like, who's going to watch some amateurs do stand up? Oh, I know. If you have a certain amount of time with your day, how many people are going to go watch amateurs do stand up? I guess I just felt like this. Like, I never felt like I didn't like my students. Like, I never felt, and I'm sure you don't feel like you don't like your audience of podcasts.

But do you ever, when you're doing stand-up, it just seems like there's people in there. First of all, there are people in there that want to see you like mess up or heckle. Not you, but I'm saying one. Sure, at a comedy club, for sure. And especially at an open mic night. Yeah, it's the dregs of humanity. Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, a lot of people that are there are there because they want to do comedy.

So you're doing stand-up to other wannabe comedians. Some of them are out of their fucking minds. Right. Well, not some of them. Like a good chunk. Right. Yeah. And I guess the last couple of podcast questions, if you'd indulge me on them.

the kind of animating impulse for me to do what I'm doing and trying to do hardcore science and keep people interested, engaged, and give the public some ROI and their money that supports my salary. I went to public schools. I teach at a public school. When I think about it, it's difficult to get a sense of pleasing you know, pleasing your audience and then also, you know, doing legit science. And I think, you know, finding that balance for me, that is hard for me. And I don't know like – I mean obviously one solution is to stop podcasting. I mean I'm not going to stop being a scientist because it's who I am. It's physically written into my DNA almost. Why would they be incompatible?

I guess, you know, it's like I could always be doing real science. I could always be, for every hour I'm reading a book of a guest that's coming up, I could be doing an hour in the laboratory. Right, but we've already talked about that what you're doing is very beneficial and that you think that that's actually part of what scientists should be doing. I think they look down on it. Right. Some of them look down on that.

Yeah. Yeah, don't listen to them. Fuck those people. There's always going to be people that are purists and there's always going to be people that have negative comments. You should only read so many things that people have said about your work. Yeah. And I think you get to a certain point in time when you're oversaturated and then you

get overwhelmed. And I see that happen with a lot of people. I see that happen with a lot of people that get into that come from academia and then they get into podcasting and they get overwhelmed and it's very disheartening. Yeah. But you're not, you're, you're just dealing with insane numbers. So of course you're going to have a lot of negativity. There's no ways around that. It doesn't matter what you talk about. I've seen some of the most fucking insane takes on some of the nicest people ever It's just you can't you can't do anything about that. There's certain people that have their and that's fine

That's part of the way the world works. I don't know why certain people like certain kinds of music or certain kinds of art forms it's just like people like different things and When you're talking about, whether it's science or comedy or what, you're going to have people that don't like what you do. That's just how it goes. And if I could do my last question, because I'd love to have you on my podcast, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen. So we're going to talk about aliens the entire time. I would love it. That would be my bread and butter, man. I would kill. I'd be number 10 on Spotify.

Yeah. So I always ask the following question, which is related to the name of the podcast I mentioned earlier. So Arthur C. Clarke had all these quips. And some of them are really funny. One of them is like, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. That's true. And he would say things. Especially paid experts. And this famous quote of any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And then the name of my podcast comes from a statement that the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And I always phrase that in terms of your 20-year-old self-advice. So, like, you were going back to Joe and, you know, back then, you're 20 years old. You know, you had 30 seconds with him. What are you going to tell him? I ain't going to tell him i ain't gonna tell him shit i wouldn't tell me shit why i wouldn't tell me nothing because he figured out on your own there's nothing i could have told him yeah you need life and you need a bunch of people

that you interact with and you learn and you keep absorbing information you keep trying to do a better job at being a human being and you get better, but you're going to have to go through it. There's not a goddamn thing I can say to my 20 year old self, like, wow, this is the magic thing. Like it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It's a grind. It's not like a Willy Wonka golden ticket. The life is a grind. It's a great grind. It's a lot of fun. And if you have a lot of fun friends, you can really enjoy it. But progress comes incrementally with a lot of fucking work. And you're going to have a lot of heartache. And there's going to be a lot of heartbreak.

And there's going to be a lot of disappointment. And then there's going to be a lot of great moments. And the great moments don't dwell on them too much. You've got to figure out how to not be a lot of great moments and the great moments don't dwell on them too much. You got to figure out how to not get intoxicated by great moments and just enjoy it as part of the process and then just keep trying to do whatever you're doing. Whatever it is you're trying to do it,

whether you're trying to do science or whether you're trying to do art, whatever you're trying to do, that would be, if I give any advice, it's just like, don't expect this. Don't expect to hit the lottery. That shit is not coming. And don't expect the fucking golden age of retirement either.

Don't think you're going to get to 65 and one day I'm going to quit. And then it's going to be amazing. I'm going to sit on my porch. No, you're going to die. That's what happens to people when they do that. Then they have nothing to do. They get sad. They get sad and they get bummed out.

Just enjoy it. Just enjoy this fucking thing But you want to live forever? That would be the the scariest thing would be doing it all over again not living alive forever Because if you just were like if I had like look I love life I have a great time if someone said you have to do this forever I wouldn't be terrified to do it. Like, why not? It's fun.

So you're saying I keep doing fun things forever. Do I keep getting better at stuff? Because if I can keep getting better at stuff, as long as I don't physically deteriorate too much and I can keep getting better at stuff, that would be fun. I wouldn't hate it. Just like I don't want to die now. Like, why would I not want to live forever? Like, it's a kind of weird sort of way of looking at it because both of them are equally terrifying. The idea of living forever is terrifying. And the idea of dying tonight is terrifying. Yeah. I mean, I always see these guys, you know, Brian Johnson, you know, these guys are

trying to extend their lives. I'm like, you can extend, you can live forever. And actually it's possible that anybody, anybody can live forever. Um, but you can't be a greedy SOB. You can't be greedy and want your body to come with you and your money and your, you know, the denial of death is why they built these pyramids, right? So- Is that real though? We don't really know why they built those pyramids. Well, yeah, I don't know. You know that each pyramid has a base, the base of each pyramid, Joe, is a multiple, an exact integer multiple of pi. Did you know this? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I did know that.

Do you know why? Why? Because what they would do is they would measure back then, like a surveyor, they'd measure the distance with a wheel that would roll. And a wheel has a circumference equal to pi times its diameter. So they would get some number of wheel rolls. And that's the way the circle was their measuring tape, basically. So they would just count off how many complete revolutions of the circles. Is this theoretical?

That's what they believe, yeah. No, this is the best evidence. There's a lot of weirdness to the pyramid, just the mass alone. There's 3 million or 2,300,000 stones. It was the biggest thing until then. Some of them from hundreds of miles away. I know, it's nuts. It was the biggest thing until the Eiffel Tower.

Have you ever looked into any of that Younger Dryas impact theory? Help me with that. This is the theory that coincides with the end of the Ice Age, and it's also backed up by core samples where they believe that Earth was hit somewhere around 11,800 years ago and that all over Earth was hit with a comet storm, you know, that we went through a barrage of large objects and it destroyed civilization and that there was an advanced civilization in Egypt and in many other places where there's actual physical evidence now Mexico yeah

well physical evidence now Turkey and go Beckley Tepe because back then they thought that 11,000 plus years ago was just hunter-gatheratherers. But then they found this Gobekli Tepe. Did you know about that? No, I never heard of that. It's fascinating because it's like very complex stone structures that are immense. And they have 3D carvings on them, which is very unique. And they have lizards. But the lizards are 3D on the outside.

It's not like they carved into the stone. They carved the stone around the lizards. And these fucking immense like structures. And then they've only uncovered 5% of them with LIDAR. They found so many more of them. That's what the 3D carved structures look like. So they carbon dated all this stuff too because it was purposely covered somehow or another. And they don't know who or why.

But it was purposely covered somewhere around 11,000 plus years ago. And they think it was a comet? I mean, that would seem to have astronomical evidence for it. No, the comet thing is 11,800 years ago. Okay. That's when, and they think again somewhere around 10,000 years ago as well, but it coincides with the end of the ice age. And it also coincides with, there's a lot of evidence of iridium when they do the core samples,

you know, in that element. Yeah. And then also nanodiamonds from impacts. Yeah. So it's very fascinating because it just speaks to like maybe civilization. Maybe this isn't just this emergence from Genghis Khan to us today. Maybe there was like a reset and maybe many thousand years ago, like these people that built these structures. Do some people say the lizards are like aliens?

No, there's no alien lore in this. This is just humans that had reached a very advanced state and then got hit. But it wasn't until like this Younger Dryas Impact Theory that they had all the physical evidence that goes with this. And when Randall Carlson discusses this, it's very crazy because he talks about just the immense amount of water that moved through North America in a very short amount of time. It just carved massive trails and canyons through the earth. And he thinks it happened because of an instantaneous meltdown from asteroid impact. Oh, wow. Because we know that the U.S. alone was half of it was covered in more than a mile-high sheet of ice up until that point.

And he thinks that's what caused it. So it coincides with physical evidence through these core samples. And there's a bunch of, like, legitimate scientists that are working on this. It's really interesting. I always say astronomers are kind of like space archaeologists you know we travel things travel through time and space and we have to analyze them and it's really fascinating stuff we don't they don't have to deal with the multiverse and uh with uh archaeology well listen man april 8th april 8th we're gonna go check out and you say it's gonna be more insane than that

it'll blow your mind i i'm i'm sure'm sure it will. And I really appreciate you. And thank you very much for the meteor and the shitty magnet and the good magnet and the stickers and the prism. This is dope. Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me. And then tell everybody how to get your podcast as well. Oh, well, so the best place is a Brian Keating.com. That's my website. And I have links to Spotify. There it's called.

There it is. Look at you, handsome devil. Thank you have links to Spotify there. It's called – There it is. Look at you, handsome devil. Thank you, my brother. Then, yeah, there's our friend Eric. We didn't talk too much about him. Yeah. He sends his best. I talked to him today.

And I've done – yeah, I've done it. 14 Nobel Prize winners, 15 by Friday. Beautiful. Beautiful. And BrianKeating.com. And they're very good. Thank you very much for being here. Appreciate you.

All right. Bye, everybody.