Ep. 518 – The Great Double Standard dissects left-wing hypocrisy—Ben Rhodes’ tears over Clinton’s loss, media bias in The Post, and Samantha Bee’s double standard on Ivanka Trump—while astrophysicist Brian Keating exposes the Nobel Prize’s "nobilism," where flawed data (like Bicep’s retracted cosmic inflation claim) stems from prestige obsession. He critiques the multiverse theory as speculative atheist dogma, then contrasts feminist "empowerment" with an eight-year-old’s quiet heroism, exposing how progressive values cherry-pick virtue. The episode ends with a jab at Kanye West’s wedding, framing it as another symptom of cultural decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Kim Kardashian met with President Trump at the White House yesterday, causing many people to make a joke about a Trump and Kim summit.
Many, many people making the same joke again and again.
So many.
The joke erupted after several headline writers, broadcasters, and alcoholic homeless people noticed that Kim's first name is the same as Kim Jong-un's first name, which is also Kim Jong-un's last name, because that's just how crazy he is.
There were, of course, other similarities between the murderous dictator and the reality TV star.
For instance, Kim Kardashian has an enormous ass, and Kim Jong-un is an enormous ass.
Also, it is very difficult to know what Kim Kardashian actually does for a living, and Kim Jong-un is an enormous ass.
Kardashian was at the White House to discuss prison reform, but while she was there, she decided to launch a nuclear missile over Hawaii because she said she's named Kim, and so is Kim Jong-un.
So she thought it would be funny if she did something he would do since they had the same name.
Hilarity ensued.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, here I am in beautiful New York.
You can see it behind me.
Well, you can't see anything behind me, but I'm here all the same for Michael Knowles and Alyssa's wedding.
It's also, it occurs to me, my 38th wedding anniversary, but I'll be celebrating that when I get back.
My wife and I have been together for 42 years, and it's gone by like a flash for me.
For her, it's been kind of a slog.
We also have astrophysicist Brian Keating here to talk about the Big Bang God and his new book, Losing the Nobel Prize.
And I have to send my quick congratulations to our pal Dinesh D'Souza, who has been pardoned by President Trump for the absolutely outlandish and ridiculous charge that was leveled against him, which was really a charge for making a movie that insulted His Highness King Barack Obama.
You know, I already pardoned Dinesh, but it means a little bit more when Trump does it.
And I think, you know, he did exactly the right thing.
I'm really happy to hear that.
While I'm traveling, of course, I still have to brush my teeth or else I just become like this kind of decayed, hideous creature.
Magic Outside Process00:06:46
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The left.
I know we talk a lot about the left, but we have to talk about the double standard.
I mean, if the left did not have a double standard, it would not have any standard at all.
I mean, the problem they have is that they've told themselves a big lie.
It's not the lie that leftism works or socialism works.
It's the lie that their way is not just right or useful or helpful.
We could have arguments about that.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's that their way is morality, and anything that is not their way must therefore be immoral.
And you and I must be evildoers for opposing their way.
They are good and we are evil.
They are healing history, and we're mired in racism and sexism and all the various made-up phobias like Islamophobia and homophobia and all this stuff.
But how, you know, if everybody else is evil, then how can you engage in debate?
How can you compromise?
How can you change your mind or say, like, oh, yeah, maybe they have a good idea?
You can't.
You just can't do it.
And the problem is a lot of their solutions make things worse.
When you look at their cities, their cities are worse.
When you look at the eight years of Barack Obama, our country got worse.
But they have no way of dealing with it, right?
They have no way of dealing with it.
So it's either them doing it or it's a catastrophe.
It's racism.
It's everything is falling apart.
Which brings me to what was, I have to say, my favorite thing on the internet all week, possibly all month, possibly for the last 15 years, was Ben Rhodes.
I don't know if you saw this.
You have got to see this.
Ben Rhodes, obviously, the close Obama aide who lied, openly lied to the press, laughed at the press at how he befuddled them when they were selling the Iran deal, said, you guys don't know anything, so we got to sell you this crappy deal.
And there's a movie, a special out from HBO, I think it's called The Final Year, and it follows Rhodes at the moment when he finds out that, in fact, Hillary Clinton has lost the election.
This is Ben Rhodes suffering at the moment after the election.
I just came outside to try to process all this.
It's a lot to process.
I mean, I can't even.
I can't, I mean, I can't, I can't put it into words.
I don't know what the words are.
If you're a subscriber and you should be a subscriber to the dailywire.com and you've spent your lousy hundred bucks to get a year-long subscription, you already have your leftist tears tumbled.
You will notice when you play that clip, it automatically fills up to overflowing.
You will have to wipe the table down as the leftist tears overflow because he had no way to deal with it because everybody else is evil.
Everybody believes the New York Times.
Rhodes has now written his book, his memoir about this, which apparently doesn't have very much inside information, but it has this moment of Barack Obama's reacting to his loss, right?
So the New York Times writes about it.
Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump's victory.
What if we were wrong?
He asks aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.
Now, I know, I read that and I thought, what?
Did Barack Obama actually question whether a junior senator who had never held a high office, never run anything his life, might have been wrong in what he did?
No, no, no, my friend.
That's not what he's wrong about.
Obama had read a column asserting that liberals hadn't forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many people left behind.
Maybe we pushed too far, Mr. Obama said.
Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.
So, in other words, when Obama says maybe I was wrong, what he means was maybe I was so right and you were so wrong that you just didn't get it.
His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump.
In other words, they're telling him that it was Hillary Clinton who screwed the pooch, right?
It wasn't him.
He would have won.
Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced.
He said, Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early.
See, when he was making the transition from his planet to ours, to Earth, he lost those 10, 20 years.
He got here just a little early, and we didn't really understand what it was.
It couldn't have been the fact that he did a bad job.
It couldn't have been the fact that he let the Middle East catch fire when it was actually calming down when he took office.
It couldn't have been the fact that he sat on our recovery so that we had like 1% growth and it took Trump 10 seconds to bring it up to 3% growth.
It couldn't have been any of that thing, or that he was corrupt and that he bugged people and he used the IRS to solve.
It couldn't have been any of those things.
He got here from his planet just a little too early.
You know, if he'd slowed down the rocket ship, does he even use a rocket ship?
He may just transport himself through the power of his holy will.
You know what?
We have to watch the Rhodes thing again.
I'm sorry.
We just have to play it one more time.
Get your Tumblr ready, your leftist tears Tumblr ready.
Here it comes.
A Story of Journalistic Failure00:15:28
Watch it.
You can watch it.
magically fill up hello darkness my I just came outside to try to process its seeds while I was sleeping.
And the vision that was planted in my mind still remains within the sound of silence.
In restless dreams, I walked along narrow streets of cobblestone.
I mean, I.
I turned my collar to the corner.
I can't hear the words.
I don't know what the words are.
When my eyes were stepped by the flesh of a neon.
All right.
It's not right to drink leftist tears, but they're just so good.
Hey, I don't know if you like true crime, but I'm a big true crime fan, and I'm listening to a true crime book on my Audible subscription right now.
And I listen to those true crime podcasts.
You know the ones I'm talking about.
There's now a parody of this called This Sounds Serious from the people at Cast Box.
It's a fictional murder series that involves twins, cults, and a Florida weatherman.
And if you like the true crime, I've listened to some of this and it imitates it so perfectly.
And then, of course, it turns it on its head.
It's really, really funny.
You know, and I just loved it.
Even the voice that got this woman to do this voice, if you listen to these things, she is so precise.
She gets it exactly right.
The whole tone is there, and it really is funny.
This sound series is out now.
You can listen to it wherever you get your podcast.
It's from Cast Box.
And it really, it just nails the, you know, when you do parody, the whole thing is you have to get it just exactly right.
And it nails it exactly right.
This sounds serious from Cast Box wherever you listen to your podcasts.
So because they have no way of dealing with defeat, they have no way of dealing with debate.
They can only have a double standard, right?
Because what they do is for the good.
What we do is for evil.
If they didn't have a double standard, they'd have no standard at all.
And This is why Donald Trump drives them so crazy is because he won't buy into that narrative.
It's one of the many reasons he drives them crazy.
So just watching his reaction to the Roseanne thing, right?
Roseanne gets fired for this nasty tweet.
It was a nasty tweet, no question about it.
She gets fired, but of course, you know, nobody else gets fired for anything, but if they're on the left, but she gets fired.
And Trump tweets, Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that ABC does not tolerate comments like those made by Roseanne Barr.
And then he says, gee, gee, he never called President Donald Trump to apologize for the horrible statements Maiden said about me on ABC.
Maybe I just didn't get the call.
So I read that and I cracked up.
But that's not the narrative.
See, the narrative is the racism.
We were talking about this yesterday.
It's not just Roseanne Barr is racist.
It's Roseanne Barr is racist because Donald Trump is racist, because you're racist for voting for him because America is racist, right?
That's the narrative.
And that's their narrative.
What they do is right and what you do is racist.
And so they can't compromise with you.
They can't have the same standards for you as they have for them because they're the good guys and you're the bad guys.
So that's why.
So it's hilarious.
The fact that he didn't buy into the narrative.
He didn't talk about her racism at all.
He just talked about the fact that there's a double standard.
So a reporter goes to Sarah Sanders, right, the White House spokeswoman.
She goes to him and says, where's our narrative?
Where's our narrative?
Give us our narrative.
So here's the exchange with Sarah Sanders.
Has the president spoken to Roseanne Barr, who we know has been a longtime friend of his, and why did he choose to address the ABC apology instead of the underlying issue of concerns about a racist comment that she tweeted out?
I'm not aware of any conversations that have taken place.
The president simply calling out the media bias.
No one's defending what she said.
The president is the president of all Americans, and he's focused on doing what is best for our country.
And you can see that in the actions that he's taken.
You can see where he's focused on unemployment being at the lowest since 2000, opportunity investment zones to encourage investment in underserved communities, an opioid initiative to combat a crisis that impacts all Americans.
And today the president signed legislation to give patients the right to try a medication that could actually save their lives.
And I'd point out that while the president signed that legislation and actually addressed America, two networks chose not to cover it and instead covered something totally different in Palace Intrigue, a massive piece of legislation that had bipartisan support that was life-changing, literally life-changing for millions of Americans.
Two networks chose not to cover the president's remarks on that.
He's simply pointing out the bias.
No, no, no, Sarah.
Sarah, sorry, I'm sorry.
The press sets the narrative.
The press sets the narrative.
The narrative is that they are good and you are evil, right?
And so you're not supposed to talk about the bias.
You're supposed to talk about the racism.
I mean, what Donald Trump has to do with Roseanne Barr's racism, no idea, no clue.
There's no connection.
But that's the narrative.
And she's supposed to address it.
And so is Donald Trump.
And he didn't.
And that makes him crazy.
They want to talk about the bias.
Let's talk about the bias for a minute.
Also, just as a side note, I got to say that law, that right to try law is a great law.
The idea that terminally ill people shouldn't be able to try experimental medicine.
What's it going to do?
You know, what's the worst thing that can happen?
They're terminally ill.
I don't know if you saw it, but there was a moment when the president signed the bill and gave the pen to this little boy who I think was suffering from muscular dystrophy.
And the kid went up to hug him and Trump didn't notice it.
And the kid kept coming up to try and hug him.
Finally, Trump noticed him, gave him a big hug.
Great picture, great piece of video.
I would bet anything that thing never shows up on any network except for Fox.
But the bias, let's talk about this bias because we have to mention our friend Samantha B, right?
The least funny person on television.
Ivanka Trump has a picture.
Did I send in that picture of Ivanka Trump had a tweet of her and her little son?
And Twitter, a beautiful picture, right?
Twitter goes nuts and they start this completely fake narrative about illegal immigrant children being lost.
What is happening with them is they're given to guardians.
They're taken away from law-breaking parents and given to guardians, but the guardians are sometimes also here illegally, so they don't want to tell ICE where they are so that they don't answer the phone so that nobody knows where they are.
This has been in place for many, many years.
There were 5,000 kids like this under Obama.
It is an Obama policy.
It's absolutely true.
It has nothing to do with Trump.
It has nothing to do with the kids aren't lost.
It's just that people don't want to answer the phone.
So, and why they're taking it out on Ivanka Trump, who knows?
Here's Samantha B's reaction.
You got, I mean, hold on to your hats because it really is disgusting.
Ivanka Trump, who works at the White House, chose to post the second most oblivious tweet we've seen this week.
You know, Ivanka, that's a beautiful photo of you and your child.
But let me just say, one mother to another: do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless c.
He'll listen to you.
Put on something tight and low-cut and tell your father to stop it.
Tell him it was an Obama thing and see how it goes, okay?
It was an Obama thing, by the way.
So not only is she a feckless C-word, unbelievable that you can say that on television to a woman who's tweeted a picture of her child, and probation, a slap on the wrist, a remonstrance, a hey, Samantha, tone it down a little.
As far as I know, absolutely nothing.
Roseanne Barr is out of work.
Samantha B will be on tomorrow insulting women all over all across America.
If they had no double standards, they'd have no standards at all.
You know, I have got to show you something.
This is a thought it's going to take me a couple minutes to work out.
So stick with me because it really brings this home in an historical perspective, right?
It's not because it's not just today.
It's not just every day.
It's all through their telling and their viewpoint of history.
On the plane coming out here, I watched The Post, Steven Spielberg's movie about The Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers with Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, so many lefties, you know, so many lefties, I was surprised the camera could actually pan to the right.
Everybody was so left.
I thought the camera should just have to pan continually to the left.
All right, so this is about the Pentagon Papers.
If you don't remember, during the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg stole some classified papers that was a study of the Vietnam War and how it had gone.
And what it revealed, right, was that basically, basically, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had continually expanded the war while lying about it to the public.
And they knew it was a quagmire, but they thought, you know, it would stop the Chinese from taking over more and more countries.
The fact is, that actually worked.
It actually worked.
The Chinese kind of looked at us and thought, if these guys are crazy enough to spend all that money and blood and treasure in Vietnam, maybe we're not going to be so expansive.
They did not expand after that.
So actually, you could actually look and say the Vietnam War was a success.
But at the time, it was a quagmire.
Boys were going over there and getting shot and killed.
Nobody wanted to go.
People were protesting.
And out comes this amazing piece of illegal, classified, illegally released, classified information saying the government lied.
So first the Times got it, then the Washington Post got it.
There was a court case.
The Supreme Court said, you know what?
The press is not there to serve the government.
It's there to serve the governed.
They let the papers go.
So a big success story for the press.
The movie's not fair.
I thought the movie was okay.
It was old-fashioned, kind of second-rate.
All the president's men.
You don't even have to watch the movie.
Seth Meyers, who is usually just doing Trump jokes, actually did a funny parody of all newspaper movies.
And this is the movie.
Watch this because this is the Post.
From the people who brought you all the president's men, The Post, Spotlight, and the fifth season of The Wire.
Comes a movie about a brave team of journalists risking it all to break the biggest news story in history.
I think this goes straight to the top.
Newspaper movie.
Featuring men in bad ties and short-sleeved colored shirts.
Gross styrofoam coffee cups.
And a tense scene where two people sit on a park bench staring straight ahead, trying not to seem suspicious while they exchange a manila folder, even though that's literally the most suspicious way to do it.
Hey, what the hell are you two cooking up?
Is it in the folder?
What's in that folder?
Come back here.
Hey, you, what's in that briefcase?
Yeah, you're not off the hook.
Tell us what's in the briefcase.
Is it more folders?
Featuring an early morning shot of a stack of newspapers wrapped in twine being tossed out the back of a delivery truck.
The coffee editor, who thinks that because this story could bring down the president, it's important to get the grammar right.
Um, it's actually whom?
And taking place in a world where everyone in the country seems to read this specific newspaper that literally is the post.
I mean, that actually is the movie of the post.
Once you see the Seth Meyers parody, you can't even look at the movie without seeing that.
However, however, what's the story of the Pentagon Papers?
All through the movie, we hear about what a bad guy Richard Nixon was.
And Richard Nixon was a dark character, had a lot of real flaws that finally did him in as president.
But all through the thing, we hear about what a horrible guy Richard Nixon is because Nixon is trying to stop them from releasing these papers.
But, but, what is the real story?
The real story is that Democrats, JFK and Lyndon Johnson, lied to the public and to Congress while expanding the war effort that they knew was a quagmire.
That's the story.
It's the JFK and Lyndon Johnson did that.
And why didn't it get reported?
Because the reporters were Democrats pallying around with the Democrats, right?
The story of the Pentagon Papers is not a story of triumphant journalism.
It's a story of journalistic failure.
It's a story of something coming out years and years later because they were pallying around with the Democrats.
Now, to be absolutely fair, to be absolutely fair, they have this in the movie.
They have a lot of stuff about how evil Richard Nixon is, and Nixon isn't doing anything bad at that point.
Later on, he's doing Watergate, but still, he's not doing anything bad at that point.
A lot of stuff about what a mean guy he is.
But the story is the journalistic failure.
So they actually have scenes of this, of the journalists, where they talk about the journalistic failure because they were pallying around with Democrats.
So, Meryl Streep goes on Jimmy Kimmel to promote the show.
And they show the scene, this honest scene, which really startled me, I got to say, they show this honest scene where they talk about the fact that the Democrats and the journalists were friends, so they were allowed.
So that's how the Vietnam War expanded without anybody knowing it was going on.
It was a journalistic failure.
Here's the scene that they played on Jimmy Kimmel.
Let me ask you something.
Was that how you felt when you were palling around with Jack Kennedy?
Where was your sense of duty then?
I don't recall you pushing him particularly hard on anything.
I pushed Jack when I had to.
I never pulled any punches.
Is that right?
Because you used to dine at the White House once a week.
All the trips to Camp David.
Oh, and that drunken birthday cruise on the Sequoia you told me about.
Hard to believe you would have gotten all those invitations if you didn't pull a few punches.
And she says, yes, you did.
You pulled punches because you were partying with him.
You were on the boat with him.
You pulled the punches.
And he admits it.
That's the editor of the Post.
And she's Kay Graham, Catherine Graham, the owner of the Post.
And they talk about the fact that because these people were their friends, they missed the story.
It's a story.
The Pentagon Papers is a story of journalistic failure, okay?
Now, now Jimmy Kimmel does the interview.
Here's the interview.
It's funny because I feel like if this movie had come out two years ago, our reaction would be, oh, it's unthinkable that a newspaper wouldn't print this information because the president told them not to.
But now it doesn't seem so unthinkable anymore.
And is that a total coincidence that this movie came out now and was made during this administration?
Well, I think it, you know, the assault on the press and freedom of the press and the attempt to by powerful by government to shut down a story is something that's risen over and over again since you know Brave New World.
Since this weekend.
Since this weekend, yeah.
But I think Steven Spielberg felt the impetus to really get this out right away.
So if he'd made it two years ago, it would have been unthinkable because then we were in the heaven of Barack Obama.
But it's exactly the same story.
It is the same story.
Discovery In The Multiverse00:15:41
It's the failure of the press to cover Obama and then their hatred pouring out against Donald Trump.
It's exactly the same.
They failed to cover Kennedy.
They failed to cover LBJ because they were his friends.
They believed the same things.
And then they went after Nixon with a vengeance.
It's exactly the same, but they can't see it because they think they're the good guys and we are evil.
You know, we had Nadine Strassen, the former ACLU president on here talking about her book about free speech.
And she says, I still think a lot of liberals aren't aware of what a terrible president Obama was, alluding to the fact that the former president used the Espionage Act to pursue whistleblowers more times than all previous presidents had combined.
Not just what he did to Dinesh D'Souza, basically convicting him because he made a movie he didn't like, the time they took the guy who made the Muslim video and they wanted to blame him for Benghazi and he got arrested, the time they tapped phones at the AP.
You know, I mean, this was the Obama administration.
They just didn't cover it.
That was the threat.
Not Trump criticizing them all the time.
They're being criticized because they're failures.
This movie, The Pentagon Papers, is about what's happening now: the failure to cover Democrats and then too much hatred against Republicans.
If they had no, didn't have double standards, they would have no standards at all.
All right.
Brian Keaton Keating is an astrophysicist with UC San Diego's Department of Physics, where he and his team developed telescopes to study the Big Bang.
He's written a new book called Losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science's highest honor.
He just made a Prager U video.
So before we go to the interview, let's just play just a little bit of that.
How did we get here?
I mean, literally, not just you and me, but the whole shebang.
How is any kind of life possible?
The universe is a hostile place.
Solar flares, cosmic rays, asteroids flying about.
The odds against our existence are truly astronomical.
Take it from me.
I'm an astrophysicist.
My job is to look out into space at stars and galaxies, trying to answer these basic, how did the universe come to be questions?
Well, those who have a religious faith have an answer: God.
The Earth's distance from the sun, the size of the atom, and a thousand other things, large and small, that allow us to live and to breathe and to think, all seem perfectly tuned for our existence.
To many, this design suggests a designer.
But from our purely scientific point of view, the faithful have a big problem.
They can offer no indisputable proof for this belief.
Because of the lack of hard evidence, it's probably not surprising that over 70% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences declare themselves to be atheists.
But they have a big problem too.
Absent a creator, how do they account for the existence of the universe, of planet Earth, of human consciousness?
How do they account for the existence of anything?
Really good video for PragerU.
Here is my interview with Brian Keating on his book, Losing the Nobel Prize.
Brian Keating, thank you very much for coming on, author of Losing the Nobel Prize.
Good to see you.
Yeah, it's great to be with you, Andrew.
Now, this book is very critical of the Nobel Prize book.
Before we get to that, I would like to hear more about your work, because I found the actual work you were doing fascinating.
You were actually looking to see the Big Bang.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, yeah.
Most people don't realize it, but a telescope is actually a pretty cheap form of a time-traveling machine.
It allows you to go back in time, not directly, not physically, of course, but it allows you to see things that occurred deep in the distant past.
And as long as you look back where there's nothing in your way, no stars, no planets, no galaxies, you can look back to the origin of light itself, which occurred shortly after the Big Bang.
And so what we were trying to do with my telescope at the literal bottom of the world in Antarctica was to discover the very first light that ever existed in the universe and whether or not it gave any evidence for the actual creation event itself.
So to me, it's just the most fascinating thing that you could possibly do.
And it's always been incredibly intriguing to me that human technology and human brains can comprehend, you know, which was only the purview of the philosopher for so many millennia.
Now, if you do this, is there information that you would glean?
Would you now know something about this start of the world that you didn't know before?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So what we do when we look out into space, we see that the universe is very different deep in the past.
In fact, it looks almost nothing like the way our current universe looks, the deeper you look in the past.
In particular, we see that the universe is expanding.
It's evolving with time and getting bigger all the time, like my waistline.
And when that happens, the universe separation between all the galaxies and not the stars within the galaxies, but the galaxies themselves getting larger every day.
So the implication was things were closer together in the past.
And the only way that we can really understand that was in the context of the Big Bang, which is sort of suggestive of an explosion that took place about 13.82 billion years ago.
The question is, what sparked that explosion to take place?
That was what my telescope was attempting to seek.
And did you see, I should ask, did you succeed?
Well, yeah, it's funny that you put it that way.
So sometimes, you know, when you go out looking for something, you do end up finding it.
It shouldn't be so surprising that that happens, unlike my keys.
But when you look for stuff, you can often find it in the most surprising places.
But sometimes you find it exactly where you were looking.
And in our case, we did.
We did believe and we claimed, in fact, that we uncovered evidence for the universe's first moments, a period of time we cosmologists call inflation.
And it came with it, a kind of concomitant expectation that the universe might not be the only universe that exists.
In other words, there might be something called the multiverse, which came into play courtesy of our data.
Alas, the discovery was not really all that permanent.
It didn't last nearly as long as the universe itself.
And quickly thereafter, we actually had to retract our discovery in a very embarrassing episode that I recount in the book.
And that process of kind of seeking something and putting so much mental energy, physical energy, effort, time, money, et cetera, to go to the bottom of the world, only to have to retract this discovery is something I think can only be enabled by people that are looking to find something.
And the reasons that motivate people to look for something, of course, are very varied.
But I think in our case, partially it was the allure of winning the Nobel Prize played a big role.
Yeah, you talk about now, the book is called Losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science's highest honor.
Why did the Nobel Prize wrongfoot you?
What was it about winning the Nobel Prize that made it difficult for you to do the job that you were trying to do?
Well, it's interesting.
You know, we scientists pride ourselves in being very rational, very, most of us are very secular.
Something like 70% of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious scientific entity in America, maybe in the world, declares themselves to be atheists, not agnostic, but atheist.
But I think it's rather ironic that many of the most secular members of society, physicists in particular, actually do practice a religion.
But the religion they practice is one I call nobilism, which is this pursuit of a literal, you know, gilded graven image that's pursued with all the avarice that people must have pursued their neighbors' wives and their neighbors' oxen 3,000 years ago.
And we're no different.
And in fact, so part of the allure of this gilded graven image is the worldwide fame and notoriety.
We're never going to have your number of followers.
We're never going to be the Kim Kardashian of the Daily Wire like you are.
But we do seek attention.
And some of that attention, it's hard to match in terms of prestige of what the Nobel Prize could afford us.
I only compare myself to Kim Kardashian in terms of my cultural relevance, I think.
And the depth of my thought as well.
That's right.
Your fondness for Kanye.
Exhaustion.
Exactly.
But what was it specifically about?
I mean, obviously, that becomes a passion.
You want to win this prize.
What was it specifically that made it difficult for you to do the job that you were supposed to do?
So when we went out looking to find this signal, I mean, part of it was the allure of understanding what happened in the beginning of time, a big part of it.
In fact, I was the person that, you know, is most largely credited with creating the experimental idea and building the first version of the experiment at the South Pole.
But part of my motivation, you know, sad to admit, was to win a Nobel Prize, to kind of have this prestige and this honor that affords a person, a scientist, almost godlike status.
I mean, there are fewer living Nobel laureates in physics, and the ones that people know from Einstein and Marie Curie and people like that, the number of them that are still alive is, you could count on a couple of hands and have a couple of fingers left over.
So the rarity, the supremacy of it, and the way that we teach science is actually in large part as to which ideas, which theories, which experiments won the Nobel Prize.
So it's really the surest way to assure oneself of immortality, especially so if one is a secular person, doesn't believe in other forms of immortality.
So in other words, it made you jump the gun.
It made you think that you had seen things that you hadn't.
That's right.
So one of the problems with the Nobel Prize, only three people can win it, which is a little bit of a step up from what Alfred Nobel required, which is that only one person could win it.
But they abandoned that a couple of years after his death.
And as I describe in the book, how he must be rolling over in his grave if he could.
Well, actually, he wasn't.
He was cremated.
So his ashes are turning over somewhere.
But in any event, the many stipulations that have been changed seem to be done in a way to enhance the prestige and allure of the Nobel Prize itself rather than reflect the way that science is done nowadays.
I mean, my experiment had 49 collaborators.
The current project I lead in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile has 254 members.
And the scientific team that won the Nobel Prize last year had 1,050 people on it.
And yet only three people could win the Nobel Prize.
So there's immense pressure to not get scooped by your competition, to put that stake in the ground and declare, I got here first.
And partially it comes down to this honor of the Nobel Prize being so rare and only being able to be allowed to be awarded to up to three people at most.
You know, in the other aspects of the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, they frequently just make fools of themselves through their politics.
So for instance, Philip Roth just died, who was probably one of the best novelists of this generation, he never won.
Tolstoy never won, which just makes the entire thing.
And he never won.
It just makes the whole thing.
And, you know, some terrible people have won the Peace Prize.
But obviously, to a non-scientist, it seems that that would not be a problem with science.
It would seem that science would be so measurable that it would, in fact, be going to the best people.
Is that true?
That's part of the kind of public relations coup that the Nobel Prize committees have a four.
You have to realize it's basically 500 mostly white men in Sweden that decide on this award.
Sometimes they invite people from abroad, like myself, a white scientist, for those that are listening, but an ML scientist, I have to identify.
The issue is that it's really very much an old boys network wherein rewards will be done to people.
And all of the winners, more or less, all of the winners have earned it and deserve it.
There have been some foibles and flops and blunders in this, but it's pretty rare that the actual winners are bad.
But what it does to the scientists, to the process, to the universities, to the funding agencies that are clamoring for attention and the dwindling share of federal resources, these attributes of the Nobel Prize encourage the worst parts of scientific enterprise, namely the really fierce competition, because the Nobel Prize is sort of a monopoly.
It is a monopoly, and it's the only one of its kind.
And in fact, it's the most powerful one that in some sense has ever been around.
It hasn't really changed much in 122 years.
And they are very reluctant, as all monopolies are, to change it.
So in the process of awarding the Nobel Prize, not who won it, it's who didn't win it.
It's who was overlooked and who was discriminated against that really is telling of how science is not being reflected for the meritocratic aspects that it should be.
Okay.
I really want to talk to you about your Prager U video, which I really enjoyed.
And you make a point, which I have made before, actually, non-scientist that I am, that the multiverse, you're talking about the multiverse.
And the multiverse has really been adopted, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that it has been adopted largely as a way of erasing the idea of God.
In other words, some of the things in our world are so finely balanced, so finely tuned, and it seems so unlikely that a universe could blindly create a mind that could understand it that they had to invent a multiverse basically to convince us that, well, this is one of an infinite number of, we just happen to be living in the one that looks like God made it.
Is there any, this always seemed to me like science of the gaps.
They always laugh about God of the gaps where we plug God into places that we don't know.
But this seemed to me like science of the gaps.
Is that right or wrong?
It's very funny that you should mention that because I was actually having a conversation with a secular colleague of mine, the biological sciences, who kind of took issue with some of the points I made in the Prager U video, good naturedly, but that's exactly what I thought.
I mean, I felt like the multiverse is the ultimate gap.
I mean, there is no gap broader than infinity.
So for your listeners that might not be familiar with it, the multiverse is a natural outgrowth of this period of time in cosmic history called inflation that my experiment called Bicep at the South Pole set out to detect.
So in other words, we were looking for it.
We didn't just stumble upon it.
We went out intensely looking for this phenomenon.
And then we found it.
And then later we had to retract that discovery.
But in the brief period of time when we did discover it, there were atheists, the likes of Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, very prominent self-declared militant atheists that said this essentially our discovery, while it lasted, took away any notion of any supernatural intervention that would be required in a model without the multiverse, because a multiverse says there's not only a large number of events and planets and stars and people in the universe, there's an infinite number.
So in other words, there's a universe where you're a cosmologist and I'm interviewing you on the Ryan Keating show for The Wire Daily.
And so the notion of how this actually can take place and scientists take it with a straight face that literally anything is possible in a multiverse.
How is that reconcilable?
And again, I think it's very hard to get people to give up their religions, even if they're atheists.
I think they hold it just as tightly as you might hold Christianity or I might hold Judaism.
And the question of whether or not somebody's willing to give that up when faced with the prospect of having no evidence and maybe never having evidence for a scientific theory, I think it's somewhat questionable for what that could do to the integrity of science itself.
My last question is, is there, I recently read this book, The Consciousness Instinct, by Michael Gazzania and Niga.
And he talks about, he says, I'm committed to finding basically a physical explanation for everything, a material explanation for everything.
Material Explanation Quest00:04:09
And I feel that that is in some ways the definition of science.
That is what scientists have to do.
They can't understand anything but the material world.
But is that inherently, does that inherently make them blind to truths that are not physical?
In other words, can you not do science and believe at the same time?
No, I think you certainly can.
Some of my greatest heroes throughout history and contemporary heroes like Freeman Dyson and others have had a relationship with, if not a personal God, like you or I might have a relationship with, but that they can be able to give themselves and by force of that as well, give people like me and your listeners and you permission to believe.
In other words, it's not irrational.
It's not silly.
Don't ever forget that the word science itself means knowledge.
It doesn't mean wisdom.
And just as the late, great, you know, Stephen Hawking's book, A Great A Brief History of Time, that's a great book, but it has nothing to say about wisdom.
It has nothing to say about how I should raise my five kids or how I should treat my fellow human being because there's no ultimate authority.
It's sort of divorced.
It's a wisdom.
It's not necessarily related to wisdom.
So just in the same way, I think people necessarily shouldn't look to the Torah, the New Testament, the Old Testament, however you want to refer to, as a book of scientific facts.
That's not what it's for.
It's for the greatest source of wisdom.
And I think all people that seek after truth can pursue it.
And what could be a bigger mystery than looking to understand how and or what or who caused the universe to come into existence?
To me, it's just the most fascinating question I could possibly examine.
Brian Keating, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, really honest, straightforward answers.
I really appreciate it.
It's great talking to you.
I hope we can talk again.
Thank you, Andrew.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks a lot, Brian.
All right.
Stuff I like.
Stuff I like.
David Shorten, he's a well-named person.
Shorten.
It was very short.
So yesterday, along with the Ben Rhodes video, which did make me laugh uproariously in an unkind and almost inhuman way, almost demonic, if you think about it, there was another video of a boy, an eight-year-old boy named Maurice Adams Jr. down in Georgia who was passing by and saw an elderly lady trying to get up a flight of stairs with her walker.
Couldn't you play it and leave my mic on?
Just play the vid and leave my mic on.
Playing music, but he basically helps her get up the stairs with this video.
And he doesn't know he's being filmed, which is kind of a beautiful thing about it.
And I'm watching this thing and I'm thinking, there is a man.
Obviously, he's a little man.
One day he'll be a big man, but he is a man inside, and he has the makings of a really good man.
And the thing that gets me about this is that when you see feminists praising people like Amy Schumer and Samantha B, for the kind of filth that comes out of their mouths, I've heard feminists say this again and again, where they say, oh, they're empowered because they're doing what men do.
They're talking the kind of filth that men do.
And now it's very empowering because now men have the power.
So men are talking filth.
And so now these women have the power.
But men who talk like that are thugs.
They're, you know, they're oafs.
They're not men.
This is what a man is.
So if a feminist wants to be like a man, maybe she should run into a burning building and carry someone out of it or help an old lady across the street.
Then, then you're empowered.
Then you're being like the best of men.
And I think this is what the left does all the time.
They adapt the principles of their enemies.
And so they oftentimes achieve their enemies' goals.
I mean, they'll say, oh, well, the racists have all the power.
So now we're going to be against white people.
So we'll be the racists and we'll be powerful like the racists before.
But of course, all you do is you extend the crime of racism and extend all the bad things that come with it.
Clavenless Weekend Power Play00:02:06
I'm off to Knowles' wedding by the time I see you next.
This is a true Clavenless weekend because by the time this weekend is over, if I can't figure out a way to stop it, Knowles will be married.
I hope this doesn't mean he's going to reproduce.
Oh my, oh my Lord.
The mind boggles.
I'll do what I can, folks, but it's the Clavenless weekend.
I can only do so much.
Survivors gather back here on Monday.
Here is Billie Holiday with my message to the troops.
I'll be back then.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll be in all familiar places that this heart of mine embraces all day.
small cafe, a park across the way, The children carousel, the chestnut trees, the wishing well.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.