Brian Keating traces humanity’s cosmic shift from Galileo’s 20x telescope in 1610—debunking Aristotle’s geocentric dogma with lunar craters—to modern precision like the Simons Observatory’s 17,200-foot Chilean site. He critiques UAP claims, dismissing ‘Oumuamua as unproven and questioning why alleged alien tech avoids radar/infrared, while debating Mars colonization’s existential futility versus incremental progress. Skeptical of Nobel-driven obsession, Keating argues scientists must balance public outreach with rigorous research, like his CubeSat proposal to study interstellar objects. The conversation ends with Rogan’s April 8th tease and Keating’s gratitude for dissecting science’s limits and humanity’s relentless curiosity. [Automatically generated summary]
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 Ben Leonhoek 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.
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 would be like turning off the B2's ability to have stealth.
So he improved it so much, it was just inarguable this would change the world.
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.
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 2020.
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.
So a good telescope that you can get, I always joke, you know, I'm not a doctor, but 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 something.
I know you've been to the Keck Observatories, Montequet, 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.
So yeah, when Galileo 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 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 mountains.
He wasn't saying, my hypothesis is that it formed from the same planetary system as the Earth.
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 the 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, Jamie?
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 the, say, I got the biggest telescope, which is what now astronomers fight, but my telescope is bigger than yours.
He said, no, no, no, you want to stop it down, and that will actually 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.
Make a tiny little triangle with your fingers, with your two fingers and your thumb.
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.
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 like outdoor activities and stuff.
And there's such a difference when you get to the higher quality binoculars.
It's really fascinating because they both have the same, you know, they have different, you know, like it's 10X42.
But a telescope using mirrors, right now in space, we've got the six meter diameter webb telescope, which is 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.
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 the precursor observatory.
This is led by my friends Suzanne Staggs and Mark Devlin at Princeton, at Penn, irrespective, 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, 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 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 this is going to be the world's most sensitive and the world's highest operating observatory.
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.
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 Lee.
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 strikes and things going on in Chile.
And don't forget, Chile is in the southern hemisphere.
So when we had our first wave of COVID, they got their first wave six months later because it was out of 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's, 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 Nikolitsky, 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.
I've never been able to recreate my experience the first time I went to the Keck Observatory.
But it was, 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 chaos.
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.
So actually, if you go back, Jamie, 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.
But the Incas, they didn't use our constellations.
Obviously, they didn't like say the Big Dip or anything like that.
But they instead focused on those dark blanches.
Those dark blotches 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 see, you just had your birthday, right?
And 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.
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.
And when you go up there, if you probably weren't on oxygen because you're 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, you're a pressurized plane or whatever.
So you would wear a cannula if you're 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.
It's not me telling you to do this.
But if you do it, you will see you'll see apparitions of the stars.
Because you're oxygen deprived, the intensity of starlight and the intense 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.
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. I think there's something psychological.
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 not to have that robbed from a whole gym?
We're doing an experiment.
Nobody knows what will happen, as you just said.
What will happen?
It'll be like, will it be like sitting is the new smoking or sitting is the new crack?
I don't know what it is.
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 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 well, which doesn't sound so big a deal as an astronomer.
You're like, but most astronomers don't really care.
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.
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 it.
People can't in LA, 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.
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 potentially, we'll get to this maybe later.
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 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 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?
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 this 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.
Okay, 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 Medicis, who were the richest people in that part of northern Italy.
So he named, he was clever, right?
He was trying to curry favorite.
It would be like if we named the whatever, the Higgs boson, we named that after the European equivalent of the IRS, right?
He was kind of a kisshand, a kiss up, you know, it's always sycophant.
It had to save his life and he needed money and so forth.
But when he drew that, he realized, 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, 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.
I always make a provocative statement that we don't need English departments.
We should just teach 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, and I'm butchering a 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.
It's actually, you know, the atheist, 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 that I'm here, I think.
But to have the discussion about the influence of religion on science.
And he made the claim that without religion, we wouldn't have science on this show a couple weeks ago.
In other words, we wouldn't have the tradition that the world is intelligible.
It's not the capricious will of gods 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 Francis Collins or somebody, that they had, they were not only the scientists, the expert scientists say, but they also controlled 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 forth.
But the notion, it was a Catholic band of jurisdiction, and Catholic Church had sway over that part of Italy in 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's 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 and 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 a nomadic band of Bronze Age peasants, why does it begin with the creation of the world, of the universe?
Isn't that weird?
Like, shouldn't it be like, oh, there's something really delicious that you're going to want to eat?
It's called a pig.
Don't eat.
Like, why doesn't it start with that?
Why does it start with the origin of the universe?
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, 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.
Like, 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.
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 big Irish Catholic family.
They basically would call, they thought that we became their biological grandchildren, cousins, nephews, and so forth.
And in contradistinction to that, 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 bake.
It was all things you can't do and so forth, right?
So this was like Christmas, Easter, hanging out, like just boisterous 50 cousins at Christmas.
And so I became, at the traditional age that a Jewish boy starts learning for his bar mitzvah at age 12, 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.
There's no Google.
And I remember what it was like before the internet.
So I was like, 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.
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 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.
And like a lesser intellect like mine, you know, not intelligent at the time, looking at it, would have just said, oh, you know, Jupiter is next to some stars.
And it's going to move.
Tomorrow will be different.
But no, those were – Galileo realized he was looking at a mini solar system edge on.
He was looking – 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 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.
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, and 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 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 change.
It was constant.
And no matter what he would use for the pendulum, as long as it had 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 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, the Nobel laureate 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 ages of the world.
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, and 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.
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.
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 kind of shady remote.
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 6:30 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?
Because 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 do that now, but you have to make sure that it's completely rent, 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 could 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.
And I think for some of these guys, yeah, I mean, if it's sacrificing your lifespan, your health span, whatever Peter or Tia would talk about, what's it worth?
I mean, is that high worth it?
Like to be champion for a day?
Like, can you name like an Olympic sprinter from the 1980s, you know, besides like Flojo?
I mean, there are 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.
Like the Nobel Prize, like you can't probably name more than, you've had a couple of Nobel Prize winners on the show.
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 an like you can't drink pig's milk because it's made from a pig.
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 Barrish, he won the 2017 Nobel Prize for discovering gravitational waves.
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.
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 in 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 then a lot many seconds, and then 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.
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 Prizes on Thursday Miner, my 15th Nobel Prize winner.
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, which related to the name of the podcast, it's called Into the Impossible.
It's a quote from Sir 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.
That's how I say that 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 Barrish, he'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.
So, what the hell are you talking about?
You won the freaking Nobel Prize.
You're among, like, there's like, there's more people in the NBA right now, Joe, than are won the Nobel Prize in Physics that are alive.
Okay, 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 the 70s and 80s, so their life expenses isn't like 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've had?
You won it.
It was selected by 400 nerds in Sweden that said you were good enough to win the Nobel Prize.
How could you?
He said, No, Brian, when you win a Nobel Prize, you get the golden medal, like flavor-flavored, 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?
They make you sign a ledger.
They make you sign, like, 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, you know, 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, you know.
goes back to Einstein.
He won 1922.
When he saw Einstein, he said, I am not worthy.
I'm just some humble kid from Nebraska.
I don't belong here.
How could 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.
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 first person to understand universal gravitation, discovered laws of optics?
Do you know what his biggest accomplishment, according to him, was?
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 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.
Well, the unattainable 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.
But for me, as a young kid, this is what I aspire.
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, I don't know about you with your, 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 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 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.
And so for that, that was the main source of driving impetus for my personal quest to get this particular idol in my life.
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.
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 a time start where you began in the beginning.
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, as well as social value and being a common, part of a committed ideology, whether it's a religion or a cult or politics.
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 stream.
But you seem to defy that.
And it's always interesting to me if I talk to somebody, I talk to Noam Chomsky.
Personally, I hate his politics or whatever, but if I'm talking about linguistics and aliens and communication, you know, I'll talk to them.
But, you know, or I talk to Ben Shapiro, people just go, why could you possibly platform him?
Ben doesn't need Brian Keating's help to platform him.
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 real issue with people.
We need to give people the space to figure out things for themselves and decide how they view all these different subjects, not have this predetermined group of questions and answers that you, you know, these are part of the ideology.
You must subscribe to them wholeheartedly, wholesale.
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.
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, but it appears that what they're doing is punishing him for what he said by labeling him in a very maligning him in multiple different ways.
So there's nothing wrong with having a guy who's running for president on a podcast to discuss things.
Like, 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-term form podcasts, you can't do that.
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, right?
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.
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.
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?
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 other things.
I'm going to say there's a difference between complex and complicated.
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.
F that.
People don't know how to build a pencil.
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 complex.
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 backgrounds polarization.
Like there's just linear steps.
There's complexity.
Like if you try to make a sandpile 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.
And it may have commonalities, but like the butterfly effect, the flapping of the, 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?
So imagine your boss, the CFO of that company comes and says, Jay, Joe Rogan, what you've been working on?
What I've been working on is very complicated.
It's very sophisticated.
It's very complex.
It's very technical.
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 freaking 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 you.
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 was a lay person and now they're an expert.
And now they're teaching down the street from me, 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 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.
Basically, and 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, we don't look at what happened in 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 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?
60 years ago in Oppenheimer and you'll watch it.
They took the killers of socks and they were all in the desert in Los Alamos and they were squirreled away and they didn't tell anybody.
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.
So ever since the Webb Telescope, 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 the, 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 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, 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.
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 would get to microwaves, which is what I study.
Those are wavelengths of about a millimeter to three or four millimeters in wavelength.
Visible life is visible light, it's 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.
So they realize 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 point it 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 should have visible light, but they're mostly red.
Only the Webb 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, Alison Kirpatrick 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.
They give away 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.
So I did a podcast with Alison Kirpatrick, and she and I went through this guy's claims.
And then the next day, 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's Rajas 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.
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 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, 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 just 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 in 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 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.
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, 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 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 13 billion is a pretty big number.
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 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 does type 3 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.
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 as scientists, especially me as an experimentalist, in contrast to people like Brian Cox, NealeGrass-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'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 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.
I just came through a hurricane to see you, 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 a 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, Kirk Patrick, they definitely would be more thrilled than anybody to discover, well, we didn't understand there's something wrong with our model of how the universe formed, 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, more information, and would it change?
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's, 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.
It's strewn over several kilometers, and some of the pieces are even bigger than that one.
Wow.
So now the Argentinian government has banned export of it.
So actually, you can't get these.
So this is like a stockpile of atoms.
I gave 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 the question, could new technology reveal properties, not about the age 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's 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.
A 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.
Or 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 300,000.
It's 1,000 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's 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, and 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, detectors and telescopes, brains, you know, to 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.
What, if anything, can be done other than what we're doing right now to try to detect whether or not there is either signals from an intelligent species out there somewhere or some sort of evidence of them in terms of some manipulation of their atmosphere or something like that.
And I really wouldn't have gotten so interested in it.
I used to really dismiss it.
And I still am probably, you'd call me an alien minimalist because I think there's almost no chance that there are aliens.
Certainly, 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 and Tai B, but we never know about it because they don't have thumbs and technology, right?
But I even think that that might be impossible or as close to impossible.
As a good scientist, I never say zero chance they're 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, they could send objects, trash.
Avi Lubb 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 them back on.
That was a phenomenal episode with him.
He and I had a conversation, very technical, but 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 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.
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 could 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 us for them to exist.
And they have to exist in the first place.
So how many of such objects are?
That's what the Drake equation is 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 reducio 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 intelligent 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 age, 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?
And I said to you, Joe, what do you think the odds are that those two neighboring planets, there's no reason physically they shouldn't both be identical.
What are the odds that the other one should not have life?
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.
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 surface, 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 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.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old.
So what are the odds?
So usually astronomers will say, we'll do calculations a following way.
Instead of asking what's the probability of that, for example, I've been to Antarctica twice.
I've been in the South Pole, which is, you would just be bored out of your mind probably, because all it is is 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 volcanoes there.
That's not for you, but that one I got to take back because that cost me $50,000.
That costs you, the taxpayer, $50,000.
But this you can keep.
This is from the South Pole's gift shop, Joe.
That's a patch in the United States.
We have such cool freaking scientists, man.
Our country in the world.
I heard something.
I was like, I wonder if Joe knows this.
Totally random, but just look, how cool is freaking science?
I definitely understand how you can look at all of the variables that are possible in terms of the composition of planets, in terms of temperature, 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.
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'll get a number.
I'm not saying I know that number, but you should be using that as information to sort of say 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 Antarctica.
Okay.
And there are these giant seagulls called skuas that will 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.
So wouldn't you then say, again, if you knew that life is so incredible, there's these extremophiles that live in volcanic events 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 Enceladus?
And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying there is no other way.
But look at all the other factors that go into the 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.
But 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.
Any one of those could have exterminated.
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 that 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?
That the continental shelf is moving over these things.
They think that that's a precursor, a requisite for life, okay?
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 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, has a Jupiter nearby.
It eventually gets hit by a Chicxalub meteor that kills off the big dinosaurs.
It has 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 one thousand.
Now, if you take that problem, I think it's zero, it's like one over 10 trillion for some of these things, right?
Now take each one of those.
So take one over a thousand, raise it to the eighth power.
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 or the 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.
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?
Talking about an infinite number of variables when 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.
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 in something 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.
He said that there's no, that there was at least one civilization, you know, with a probability greater than zero 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 magenta on the 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 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 100 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, 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?
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.
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.
This person's making a mistake.
Has that ever happened to you?
And if so, how do you deal with that as a podcaster?
I mean, I always do or try to do my very best to let someone express himself fully before I interject.
But there are some times where you 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 say, like from UFC, for example, somebody wants to say, if you wanted to fight in the UFC, all you need to do is learn kung fu.
If someone said that, and I would be like, you're out of your mind.
But I mean, anybody who watches the fights, they know they're real.
But seeing, if someone had 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 wingwoman, I guess you'd say, of Commander David Fraver, who you've had on.
I've talked to them and I've talked to them.
Okay, look, I'm a pilot.
I fly a little sestiness around.
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 ability to perceive things is going to get you killed?
And he wasn't like some military pilot.
I don't know who 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.
Like 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 layperson.
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.
And I like Ryan a lot and I like Dietrich and Fraver sounds really great.
When you hear them say things and then they will say things like you and Eric talked about, okay?
They're defying the laws of physics or these things cannot occur within what we now 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 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, okay?
Recently upgraded.
It doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Fraver 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 relatively great.
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.
And in Ryan's case, I find it unpersuasive.
I don't mean to say that it's not important.
It's very important.
It's very significant 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.
Claiming non-human biologics, which is like a non-cow animal.
I did puke, and I was so embarrassed because I had gotten through seven and a half Gs and I made it, you know, from hooking, you know, the thing you do with your 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 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.
Okay, so then the argument becomes, well, maybe they have advanced metamaterials that we don't have access to.
Okay, 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 go.
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.
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 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 that 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 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.
Okay, 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?
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 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.
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've said it multiple times on the show.
There's something about this that doesn't feel real.
And I also gave myself the possibility that 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 impossible.
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.
When I'm watching all this, I'm like, man, I feel like someone's lying to me.
Yeah, they're fucking with him, saying he saw UFOs.
But a lot of those guys had seen them.
And they 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 they would.
Is it weird that it's happening off the coast of Virginia and also off the coast of San Diego where there's massive 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 doesn't make sense.
That's not how it works.
But the concept of exposing other...
Like, wasn't there some...
Let me find.
There's something I saved that I wanted to bring up with you.
Some, God, was it like a new I'll find it.
Okay.
But the point being that there was some new discovery that could lead to the possibility of travel to other dimensions.
Or at least detecting other dimensions in a manner where you could conceivably prove that there is something else outside of what we're physically capable of experiencing.
But in a higher dimensional space than three spatial dimensions plus one time dimension that we enjoy, 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 Spergl, 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 when we talk about forces of nature, so there's four main forces of nature, gravity that we're familiar with, right?
And then there's the electric force, and then there's the magnetic force, and then there's two types of nuclear force.
One is called the weak nuclear force, that's like radioactive decay, and then there's a strong nuclear force that's responsible for 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 this.
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 adrenal, 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 how the thing is not only spinning on its axis, but the axis is moving around, Joe?
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.
But to the ordinary eye, if I just showed you this object, it stops, it 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 one 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.
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.
Well, this is the argument I had with Avi Loeb when he came on my show.
He talked about this object, Umuomua, which was this interstellar object that he claims is either junk debris or maybe it's a tourist scout or a spy driver.
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 my Simon R. Simons 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.
So it's horrible.
So last year, then the Padres got into the division series, and 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've made every, I try to get tickets.
I scalped.
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 Breakthrough Starshot.
They're going to send billions of little cell phone cameras to Proxima Centauri B. He's not supposed to laugh.
He's 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 it's four light years away.
Instead of having him spend $100 million on that, why don't you get him to get a little CubeSat and shoot it off and go catch up to Umuamu while it's still in your freaking neighborhood?
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.
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?
Mementomori 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 mortally 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 unlikely as life, you know, having iPhones on Proxima Incentory B, 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, the raw material.
There's a tremendous number of reasons that it's not going to be a good idea.
Sure, but if technology progresses the way it has since 1800, the way, I mean, 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.
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 supremacism, 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, 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-carbon 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 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 – do you care about the speed of your computers?
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 slow because there's so many other people that want to take advantage and use that same resource.
It's a very highly in-demand 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?
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?
But the question is, these different things have to overlap.
And actually, I just, you know, because I kind of was interested to go back just the UAP thing for one minute, which was think about the human factors involved in someone like what Grush Grush is describing.
Imagine that you have this ability to go back and start like something happened in 1947 in Roswell.
We'll just say something happened.
It definitely happened, right?
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 biologic.
So the biologics had to be processed by a biologist, not by the same coreman who collected it.
And guess what?
All these guys have wives or husbands or bosses or friends and stuff.
So my friend James Altitcher is a very big influence in my podcasting career as well.
He talks about a 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 also overlap between that and their time scales, right?
Talking about a sustained conspiracy, if this is the, let's give him the benefit of the doubt, that this is true.
But this is now coming out now.
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.
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 climate change, right?
I always say this concept called the von Karman line, which is the boundary between the Earth and the space.
It's about 60, 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?
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.
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.
So if you were to look through this telescope, sorry, if you were to look through this telescope at the moon and there was a balloon on the telescope, you know, floating in front of the moon and you could see it and it was big and 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 jet liner, 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 warm.
Well, that's when I went back to the feeling of pity that, and again, he doesn't even meant 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?
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.
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.
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 and what they could be.
And certainly the simplest.
I don't think anyone would agree, 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.
We're trying to propose a mechanism by which that would motivate 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'm not, 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?
Because if this is true that they have mass, that there are creatures that mastered the interdimensional manipulation of space-time, that would shortcut me and my colleagues four or five centuries, right?
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.
I said my atomic clock.
So I get a great deal from Eric.
But, you know, when he says that, you know, these objects, you know, that we need, where are 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 like 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?
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 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 telescope.
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.
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 alien?
Would you say that makes them more likely to be aliens?
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, 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 mental health breakdowns where they actually believe that things happen that didn't really happen.
And some of those things could be a UFO abduction.
We know that people have wild, vivid dreams, and that we know that the fucking border to dreams and consciousness is why all these UFO abduction stories at night.
So when I brought this up, when I first got interested in this, it was really, I should say, you know, 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?
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, who's 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 layperson who's educated and well-meaning, perhaps, but has this deep distrust of science, scientists, the scientific method?
I don't think they necessarily have a deep trust of science or the scientific method or even that.
But 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.
But I'm also 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 they set up, 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.
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 going to have to stop talking and show me some shit.
Because right now, I'm like, I don't like the way this sounds.
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, our understanding of propulsion systems, technology, computing, everything.
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 as there was a lot of intertribal warfare where we would cause them 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, so that there was also a plausible deniability.
Well, you Indians were fighting against each other, too.
It wasn't like you guys had, you know.
So I'm wondering at this level, is there a possibility?
It's like, yeah, the simulation hypothesis, right?
There's another one that people just look to and they act as the explanation why we don't have free will because they don't want to be held to their accountability.
I always say to these people like Sam Harris, like who doesn't believe in free will?
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 you're not necessarily saying you're not responsible, but that you have no choice.
These factors all play a part of it.
That seems like 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 there's a part of us socially, collectively as a group that wants the right choices to be made because we know that people have the ability to make decisions.
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 someone was just really interested.
But it was what I'm getting at is, you know, running 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.
And I guess the last couple of podcast questions, if you'd indulge me on them.
So, you know, when I think about the kind of animating impulse for me to do what I'm doing and trying to do, you know, hardcore science and keep people interested and engaged and give the public some ROI and their money that supports my salary.
I'm a public, you know, university.
I went to public colleges, you know, schools.
I went to public, I teach at a public school.
You know, when I think about it, like, there's, it's difficult to get a sense of, 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 stop podcast.
I mean, I'm not going to stop being a scientist because it's who I am.
I guess, you know, it's like I could always be doing real science.
You know, 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 with, you know, in the laboratory.
And this famous quote of any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And then the name of my podcast comes from his 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 need life and you need a bunch of people that you interact with and you learn and you keep absorbing information and 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.
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 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.
That would be 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 for it.
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 want to, 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 that 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.
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?
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 the 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.
Have you ever looked into any of that younger dryest impact theory?
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 Gobekli Tepe, because back then they had thought that 11,000 plus years ago, it was just hunter-gatherers.
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 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 to with the 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.
That's when, and, 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.
unidentified
Like do some people say the lizards are like aliens?
Yeah, just humans that had reached a very advanced state and then got hit.
But it wasn't until like this Younger Dry System 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.