Brian Keating

00:03Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. TRAIN BY DAY, JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY THANK YOU VERY MUCH for coming, man. And um thank you for bringing all this cool stuff. What is this old-timey telescope? Is that one of the ones the sailors used to use? That's That's my spyglass. Yeah, this is exactly a spyglass. This thing is actually one of the most important inventions ever made. And it really is the reason I'm probably sitting here with you. Uh it's it's the actual tool, not this one, but the telescope is really the machine that changed the world the most. And what's so cool about it? It It acted like a lever that moved the Earth from being the center of the universe back in Galileo's time. What year did they invent it? The telescope was invented around the early 1600s. And there's a popular misconception that Galileo invented it,

00:58but he he didn't. He actually perfected it. So, he took it from like, you know, zero to one, basically. He took the this spyglass, which was really never It's It's amazing. People are using eyeglasses for many years. And nobody ever thought to go take one lens, take another lens, and go like this. No one had ever done that. There was a guy Van Leeuwenhoek and um and uh 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, you know, 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

01:52two out before it would come on shore, and you could see it from the ground. Mhm. So, the distance back then was stealth technology. This took away the stealth that would be like turning off the B-2's you know ability to have stealth. So he improved it so much, it was just inarguable this would change the world. So when was the eyeglass invented? Eyeglass was invented, you know, it's kind of it's kind of cool. The eyeglass was invented in um probably the late 1500s. These lens 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's so interesting to me, it's just like a quirk of history, is when um when these lenses were invented, before then, you didn't I

02:38don't know what your vision is, but mine's about 20/20. It's getting worse with 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 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 5 ft away that Brian can see at 10 ft 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 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

03:27being moved away from being the center of the universe, which the Gutenberg Bible, you know, in some connotations suggested that we were. So there's a direct line from the Gutenberg Bible to the glasses to the telescope to then now religion is not so centralized in the age of scientific reason. Wow. So when they first started using telescopes, what kind of power are we talking about? Like when Galileo improved upon it, you said it was like zero to one. Like how many at of magnification? So a good telescope that you can get I was joking I'm not a doctor, but not a real doctor. But 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 and thanks to getting a telescope at about

04:09age 12. And you can actually see some I know you've been to like the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea 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 is not that much. Not much at all. get one of those, you know, on my website. No, I'm just kidding. But that was a big improvement. improvement cuz now you could see there were craters on the moon. Now you could see there were mountains on the moon. The moon wasn't this perfect crystalline sphere that the Bible and the ancients had talked about. It had flaws, imperfections. It looked like it had oceans. That's why they're called mare, mer, seas, the sea of tranquility. You know what really bummed me out? What was that? When Samsung when they got exposed for their digital zoom for the moon. They bummed me out. I thought I was taking a

04:52real picture of the moon. That's right. I was like, this is amazing. Look what my phone can do. There's the flag. so clear. Like, how do they do that? And then someone took a photo of a blurry photo of a moon on a screen and it did it to that. Yeah. Exactly. So, it it cleared up the image it's It ruined the illusion, [ __ ] They should not do that. No, they should not do that. So, yeah, when Galileo like boosted the magnification from just a few times that was sufficient. With just a two power thing like a spyglass, like a toy thing, you really can't see craters on the moon. You can't see that there's other like mountains and so forth. But Galileo really because of the telescope invented the scientific method, you know, of hypothesization, observation, collecting data, refining things. And then a lot of people forget the scientific method is predicated a

05:43lot times on serendipity. Like just holy crap, something happens. You didn't You didn't expect to see a He wasn't saying, "My hypothesis is that it formed from the same planetary system as the Earth." He just saw it. Holy crap. And what was the very best telescope that he created as he made them better? It it only went up to about 20 times because that that um the ability to grind glass was always the limiting factor. He understood the mathematics of it, which was also part like well, how is what's called lens equation? How does that work? How does light get refracted and focused and in so doing bend and magnify light? And so he understood it mathematically and could prove it, but he also did something really cool, which people don't appreciate. Uh the lens in this telescope, I don't know, should I show it? Jamie, tell me if it's okay. Um

06:26the lens in the telescope is actually bigger than this brass piece that surrounds it, okay? Um what gal And that owes to Galileo's um 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 Have you heard aperture stops in photography? Mhm. 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 well, I got the biggest telescope, which is what now astronomers fight about. My telescope is bigger than yours. He said, "No, no, no, you want to stop it down, and that'll actually improve the quality." And you can actually see this with your own fingers. So take take your fingers out, Joe. Look at some light source. Look at these stars above

07:09us. Okay. Make a tiny little triangle with your fingers. Um if you have two fingers and your thumb. Okay. And 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. And do you get that effect? It's very subtle. Uh but you're actually reducing some of the rays outside of your peripheral vision essentially um that would otherwise come in if you have any like 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 it actually improve the quality, not the quantity, tremendously. And when did they first start getting them to the point where you get telescopes like the Keck Observatory? Oh, yeah, that was um so the so the the

07:59Keck Observatory and the modern telescopes that we use today are not this type of telescope. This is called a refracting telescope. It uses lenses. The lenses change the speed of light inside of the medium, and that causes light waves at different angles to travel through different thicknesses and travel slower, and that causes them to converge or diverge as necessary. Nowadays, that So, this telescope was invented by this guy, Hans Lippershey, uh and perfected by Galileo. Isaac Newton came along almost 100 years later. Actually, he was born when Galileo died uh in in 1642, and he invented not a refracting telescope, but a reflecting telescope of the type that the Keck telescopes you've seen are. These are telescopes that use mirrors like to focus the light. They can be made much bigger. They can be made much more clearer because you don't

08:49need glass. You just need highly reflective media, and crucially, they can be supported behind them. So, the the limit Imagine if you made the biggest telescope of this kind, you know, I'm kind of cheap, right? So, I only brought, you know, a small phone I could put on Actually, TSA almost confiscated this today. They were like, "What the hell is this thing?" They don't know what a telescope is? They They were like, "What is this? Are you going to use it as a weapon?" Um but they can only be made 30 times the diameter of this telescope of this little tiny thing. The biggest refracting telescope So, those ones that look like a garbage can in people's backyards. Uh those are reflecting telescopes. The biggest refracting telescope is in Yerkes Observatory outside of Chicago or Wisconsin Southern Wisconsin, and it is only 39 in across. Mhm.

09:32So, what happens is imagine you have a piece of glass, uh over time, the glass will start to That it right That's it. Perfect. Oh, that's pretty good. Wow. Powerful James. James is good. Wow, that is amazing. best. Um so that's Yerkes. So that's puny compared to what you've seen in the Keck Observatory which are 10 m across, 10 times that diameter. Interesting. Then what kind of power does that one have? So you can get a telescope that has arbitrary power. The power is not the important thing. That the what what's important is how clear and high quality the image can be. You can have like the digital zoom you can be When they zoom in on your phone say you know if you zoom in the image quality gets crappy but even though it says oh you've magnified it 300 times. So you can magnify arbitrarily just by having choosing the right ratio of the

10:18curvature of the lens and the distance between these two lenses. But to get higher quality that Yerkes Observatory lens started to sag and it has other problems. Light acts no matter what gets distorted when it goes through a medium. It's actually getting distorted right now as it goes through the air and you've seen this So in fact here's my second prop of the day. This is a prism. This is a prism made of just like ordinary glass, plexiglass and that refracts light depending on its wavelength. So this is like the kind of stuff a hippie girl would keep on her her desk, right? That's right. I can you can make it into a pendant for your wife. Um so that is changing the color the speed of light is getting modified depending on its color as it goes through that medium. The lesson is glass affects the color of light's propagation speed and it affects

11:10the quality of it. It's called chromatic aberration. So there's aberration cuz of the defects like a crack in the glass. There's also a defect that different wavelengths or colors of light will focus at different points on your eye or on a on a detector and that's bad because you want everything to come to a point focus. You want everything to be perfectly sharp and focus and so these lenses once they get above a certain size they cannot be corrected for this effect. Mhm. I've actually done quite a lot of work with binoculars cuz I was trying to figure out what's the difference in binoculars for like outdoor activities hunting 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 do have different, you know, like it's 10 x 42. So, I guess 42 would be

11:59Uh 42 is usually the the eyepiece relief. It's basically the field of view. right. And how much light it takes. Yeah. And the 10 is the magnification. The really the superior ones, when you get to like the Swarovski is probably the best. Their glass is so clear. Like if you look through a 10 x binocular that's fairly cheap and inexpensive, you look at it like, "Yeah, it looks good. I can see it." And then you put the Swarovskis on and you're like, "Oh my god." right? You can get like a piece, you know, the stock headphones from your iPhone and you can get really high quality ones. Yeah. And so, these headphones do not distort because they're premium headphones. They don't distort distort the different wavelengths of sound just like the wavelengths of light or its colors. Wavelengths of sound should not be distorted and it's it's harder to

12:43amplify a signal of higher frequency or a shorter wavelength. So, the net effect was they realized you could only build a telescope using glass that was that big. Wow. But a telescope using mirrors right now in space, we've got, you know, the the 6-m diameter web telescope which is, you know, six times bigger than the Yerkes Observatory. And that's in space. That's a million miles away from the earth. But that's built with reflecting technology. So, when you see a mirror, mirrors reflect colors without 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 which working with some amazing scientists around the world. This is a sticker for you. Uh so, this is in Chile. This is

13:29currently the world's highest operating astronomical observatory. It's at 5,200 m, 17,200 ft above sea level. And the telescope that's pictured there is the 6-m diameter. We call it the large aperture telescope that my friend Mark Devlin Is this the VLT one that I keep hearing about? No, this is the Simons. This is just it's called the Simons Observatory. So when our mutual friend Eric Weinstein was on last time, he talked a lot about this man James Simons uh, who uh, organized and ran the math department at at the State University of New York in Santa Barbara, but he's become a He was one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world. So this is the a precursor observatory. This is led by my friends Suzanne Staggs and Mark Devlin uh, at Princeton at Penn irrespective of not not respectively, but the other way around. Uh, and then the Simons

14:19Observatory 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 6-m diameter mirrors. What happens is light comes in from above from the cosmos reflects off the one that's tilted at a 45° angle here bounces up to the other one on the left then that shoots across here. Actually let me try this. I'm I'm a professor, Joe, so uh, this won't show up on the screen. But then it goes across and it goes into that white little chamber over there. That white chamber like I could sit on your back and we would have plenty of room inside there. That's six that's over 6 and 1/2 ft across. This is also built by Mark Devlin and his group and detectors by my friend Suzanne Staggs at Princeton. And they are going This is going to be the world's most sensitive and the world's

15:09highest operating observatory when we start taking data with it next year. This is but you see it's reflected. It's supported from the bottom. You could not do this with lenses. And a project like this of this magnitude, how many years does it take to construct something like this? With or without COVID is the question. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, we started in 2016. Um my friend uh David Spergel, who's now the president of Simons Foundation, and is leading NASA's UAP task force. So, I hope we can talk about that at some point. Oh, yeah. Uh so, David's like one of the greatest mentors I've ever had. Uh but he and I and and 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 um original job was math professor at

15:56the State University of New York called Stony Brook. And he hired my father, my late father, which maybe we'll talk about later. Uh and they were best friends for a long time. And then uh uh James 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 their investments. So, Jim is I think the 26th richest man in the in the world. He's dedicated his fortune to two things. One, fighting autism, cuz it's uh extremely close to his heart. And two, to um 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

16:46better 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 and Mark Devlin and Suzanne Staggs and Adrian Lee. We pitched it to him in 20 2016. And we got funding for it around that time. And since then, we've had COVID, we've had tremendous numbers of of, you know, strikes and things going on in Chile. And don't forget Chile is in the southern hemisphere. So, we had like our first wave of COVID like they got their first wave 6 months later cuz it was out of phase with our seasons. It was a nightmare. And we can't just say to my graduate student, "Hey, come back in 2 years when the pandemic's or come back when there's a vaccine or do whatever you want." Um we instead said, "No, you we kept we kept it going." And the

17:31foundation kept paying us, and we kept it going. So, now we just yesterday my colleague Adrian Lee uh deployed the first receiver along with Nikolic who's a professor right up the street here at UT Austin. They deployed this telescope camera, and then we're about to start taking data for the first time in in our project history. Wow, that's very exciting. It's it's insane. And how much more capable is the Is it more capable, but is it also the position that it's in in terms of the altitude that it's at? It's it's a lot of those things. So, the altitude is 17,200 ft. Woah. So, when you're up there, you need oxygen. Like when you were up at Mauna Kea, I've been there a few times. Like I get out of breath if I walk up a flight of stairs at Mauna Kea. Um when I'm at the at the site in Chile, I get out of breath walking down a flight of stairs.

18:15Like I'm not on the level. 17,000 17,200, yeah. Wow. It's it's it's like being on the surface of Mars. You would love it because the the the first of all, the people there are incredible. They've been doing astronomy since, you know, 1,000 year before our country was even founded. There were people in the Inca societies, the ancient Incas. They were studying their interpretation of the cosmos. That flows through all to today where they have prioritized astronomy as central to Chile's GDP. Oh, wow. It's such an amazing place to be. That's incredible. Um and so, what we do with there is it's such a high altitude site. You're above half the oxygen content of the that we feel here near sea level in Austin. Up there, you're wearing nasal cannulas. You have to breathe pure oxygen almost all the time. Wow. And if you don't, you'll pass out, and we won't let you up there.

19:04Nobody can just hang around and get Not even like Wim Hof, the Iceman? He probably could, yeah, yeah. He'd have to sign a waiver before I'd let him up there, but I'd be happy to do that. That [ __ ] dude be up there deep breathing on the moon. Uh it's got like insane ultraviolet exposure up there. You can basically when you're up there and you look straight up here uh when you're when you're at that altitude, it's like you're looking into space. Mhm. Because when you're above that altitude, there's not enough water in the atmosphere to really precipitate out. Remember in You grew up in Boston? Remember some days in the past we used to get I grew up in New York in outside of Long Island. When uh some days you'd get this thing on the on the news channel on the radio you'd hear it you'd be so happy it's it's snowing today or

19:45whatever, right? Oh, like you got a snow day. This is awesome, right? But some days they'd say it's unfortunately whatever we were saved it's too cold to snow. You ever You remember like sometimes it'd be like just it's just too cold to snow and then you're like what the hell? Why is it too cold to snow? So we wouldn't get a snow day in those Sometimes the water can be the air temperature can be so low that the water vapor can't crystallize nucleate and form snow. And that's what happens there a lot of the time. So it's so clear. It's incredible. Wow. It's the second most incredible place I've ever been. I've never been able to recreate my experience the first time I went to the Keck Observatory. Um but it was we just caught lightning in a bottle. And I remember when we were driving up there we we had been staying on on the Big Island and we we stayed on

20:28the Big Island specifically because I wanted to go to the observatory. I was like I I just want to see it. I keep hearing that it's insane. And as we were driving up the mountain it was cloudy. I was like oh this sucks. We got a cloudy day. Oh well. You know, we'll go up there anyway and we'll see what it's like and look at their telescopes and all that jazz. But then you drove through the clouds. So it was so high up there that you pass 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 I don't think I know everyone knows that we're in space. But you don't see it that way all the time because I just don't think it's possible unless you live in some very rural area. Well, you mentioned this. You said like it's a tragedy that we suffer from light pollution. So much so you said that we

21:18don't even know what we don't see. Yeah, we don't we have no understanding of what's above us and that the ancients used to see every single day. That's what they saw every night. So much so that this is a beautiful picture that Jamie is showing. This is the Alma. This is stands for Atacama, which is the desert that we're in and it's the driest desert on Earth. It's the highest desert on Earth cuz it's, you know, 5,000 m, 17,000 ft in the Andes Mountains. Um and this picture is showing these this band that's arcing overhead. That's the Milky Way galaxy. I'm a professional astronomer, Joe. When I go down there, I can't recognize the constellations that I know and I've known since I was 12 years old because there's no contra like every star just is like blowing you away and it's just magnified so much by the clarity and the distance and the remove from light

22:08pollution. It is a toxic, you know, it's it is preventing our children from understanding what the ancients knew. But the the great thing about that shot, Jamie, if we could keep it up for just a second longer. So you see on the left there are these two the smudges there? Mhm. Those you can barely see from from Hawaii. I don't know if you saw them. Those are called the large and small Magellanic Clouds. Those are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way galaxy. Whoa. We're in the Milky Way galaxy. We're in this disc. And what what I brought here, this is a representation of the cosmic microwave background. This is made by my friends Lyman Page and and David Spergel and others on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. This is God's view of the cosmos, if you will. So this is what you'd see if you were sensitive to microwave vision instead of optical

22:53light. So microwaves are longer than infrared light. They're longer wavelength than they're shorter than what radio waves and they're longer than infrared light, much longer than visible light. These This would be your microwave constellations. In other words, if you could see These are unchanging fixed patterns on the sky that are only visible to microwave instruments. This satellite made this image. Running across here, this orange band around it is the Milky Way, but as seen in microwaves. So, you just saw it in as seen in optical. So, the Milky Way emits at all frequencies. You can't get rid of it because we're inside the galaxy. So, this as I say, this is as if God is like looking down. We're actually at the center of this ball here and we're looking out of that galaxy out towards the galaxy. But, we're on one of the arms of the spiral galaxy. Yeah,

23:37there's one of the globes and there's a little telescope. Someone's horning into my racket there. Little planet factory, watch yourself. Watch yourself. I got the little telescopes in the microwave but beach ball. Um so, that's what the galaxy looks like. And what is all that schmutz? What is all that blue stuff? Like, I don't see that when you're in Mauna Kea, right? You That That is dust. That's dust in the Milky Way galaxy. Yeah. So, actually if you 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. Uh we look at the stars. Like, I don't know how many constellations you can recognize. Uh but but the Incas they didn't use our constellations obviously. They didn't like say the Big Dipper or anything like that. But, they instead focused on those dark

24:31blanches. Those dark blanches are not regions representing the absence of stars. Those dark blanches are obscured. There are billions of stars there, but they're obscured by clouds of dust, basically like smoke, particles of carbon, of silicon, metals. I'm going to show you in just a bit. They pollute and they obscure and make opaque the stars behind them. So, the Incas could see this much more clearly. We can't see these from where we are in the northern hemisphere, but the Incas could see it. So, they made their constellations shapes that they saw in those dark, dusty globules. So, if you were born back then, let's say you just had your birthday, right? So, you were born back then August 11th. 11th, yeah. So, you're born in August. Um I forget what What's your What's your sign? Libra. Leo. Leo, okay. So, instead of being a Leo, they would represent you by what

25:28constellation, what dust blob there was, and they had names for it. There was a toad, there was a llama. My favorite one, Joe, there was a constellation called the umbilical cord of the llama. Whoa. Can you imagine going to a bar, to the mothership, Hey baby, what's your sign? I'm an umbilicus of the llama. It's ridiculous, right? But that's what they saw. Wow. And that we 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 little smudges on the left, those are galaxies that are dwarf galaxies that are bound to the dark matter and the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. They're actually satellite galaxies. They're separate from the Milky Way. And how many stars are in those galaxies? A couple billion. We have 100 billion at least. You know what's insane is the density of

26:17stars. 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 a different perspective, completely different perspective. It felt like I was in the the cockpit of a massive spaceship, like looking at it through glass. And when you go up there, if you're You probably weren't on oxygen because you were on a tour or something like that. If you go up a little bit higher, so I I'm a pilot. I fly little planes around cuz I'm in 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 or a pressurized plane or whatever. Uh so you would wear a cannula if you're in like a little Cessna or something like that and you're flying

27:00and they can get up to that altitude easily. Um but if you don't have a 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 to you know, depri- I'm not suggesting this, you know, I'm not this is not me telling you to do this, but if you do it, you will see you'll see apparitions of the stars. It will make you feel like you're tripping. Uh so I'm told, I've never tripped, so. So because you're holding your breath? Cuz you're oxygen deprived, the intensity of starlight and the intense and the and the contrast as you just said between the blackness and the lightness and the points of light, it will be essentially like you're basically out of your senses. You won't be able to process it. I wonder if we're going to get to a point with technology that we figure out

27:48how 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. 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 they kind of they don't do well because they don't get vitamin D. I think there's something psychological that gets it there's a medicine to the awe-inspiring cosmos. It's so funny you said it like that. I I haven't met Andrew Huberman. He used to be a professor at UC San Diego where I am now. He's the best. Love that guy. I I yeah, he's just He's such an an amazing contributor. His whole stick is is get out in the morning, see the morning sunlight. What I want to talk to him about cuz he's an expert in the eye and the physiology of the eye as well as all the other stuff

28:32that he does on his on his for his laboratory, right? Um but I want to ask him about astronomical things. Like we see those those that night sky, what will it mean to our physiology and to our psychology to not to have that robbed from a whole We don't We're doing an experiment. Nobody knows what will happen as you just said. What will happen? It will be like will it be like sitting is the new smoking or sitting is the new crack or I don't know what it is but but that's the point. What will it mean there's something deeply into the human mind the reason the constellations have names right is because there was no Netflix right there was no Netflix 2,000 years ago. So people identify things and they can navigate. I can sort of navigate by star I know the constellations incredibly which doesn't sound so big deal as an astronomer

29:17you're like but most astronomers don't really care they don't they don't know the constellations like one of the jokes is like don't ask me what constellation that is I'm an astronomer I always get 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 but not having that experience and just like you and I remember what it was like to have have it at some level or we can go and travel to people can't in LA but they can do something which is 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

29:59that Galileo saw. Light pollution does not obscure the you know the planets light pollution does not make impossible. I'm not advocating for light pollution but I'm just saying right here in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San Diego I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is the center of the solar system using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation. How good are the telescopes like say if you wanted to look at Jupiter how much can you see? You can you can see a lot what you can see You can see the shape that it's a that it's a planet. Do you know what the word planet means or where it derives from? So I love etymology and stop me from nerding out too much but planet means wanderer in Greek. Wanderer what is it wandering against the fixed stars? So the thing the fact that you have

30:43names for thing you know I always I always think it's funny like I'm Jewish and we have a name for people that aren't Jewish [ __ ] It's not an insult it just means non-Jewish it means nation actually Israel is a [ __ ] which is a nation. But we like but we're 0.2% of the world's population like what the hell why are you making up names for they should make names for you right? But we we have names as astronomers there's only there only five things they could see that would move in the in space and those were the 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 and actually the whole galaxy moves and potentially we'll get to this maybe

31:25later and maybe the universe in some sense could be said to have be moving and and and a vaster landscape called the multiverse which we can get to at at a certain point. But but the planets you can see them but what's so important is what Galileo saw Jamie if you could show this would be amazing. Galileo in the in the winter of 1610 in northern Italy where he was living he used a telescope not not any better than this. In fact this might be better because the glass is better even though it's a Chinese piece of junk you know I bought on on eBay. But he mapped he was able to measure Jupiter and see it and and hopefully we can see it on the screen and he saw it as a disc. So if you 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

32:17extended 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 it it's called adaptive optics. That's to avoid like the thermal radiation from the earth like you're shooting something or elk or whatever at great distance there's thermal radiation close to the ground and then the air is as 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. Mhm. Anyway, um but the 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

32:56massively bigger than any of our planets, including Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system. But because uh 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 uh 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 that These things that we just take for granted, like, Joe, do you know that they didn't have clocks back then? There was no clock. They had sundials, right? They had sundials, but what are you going to do at night? Well, what was the first clock?

33:40So, Galileo tried to invent the first clock. It was actually part of what they a precursor to the Nobel Prize. It was something called the longitude prize. Oh. They offered a prize. I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out on the ocean, it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is. It's easy to find your latitude. You just look for Polaris, the North Star. You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally on the on the um axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the earth. But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west from the prime meridian unless you had a accurate way of measuring time. So, Galileo um was was one of the first people to try to compete to win this prize, which was worth, you know, like a million dollars back then in those dark days.

34:24And he uh tried a couple different ways to invent timepieces, but the one that he tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's moons. Jupiter has four moons. I came for that look, Joe. I came for that I just I finally I can die happy. I got the look. Jupiter has four moons and you can see them with this telescope. And I'm going to give this as a gift to you for your That little tiny one? You can see it, yeah. If you know if Jupiter's out, you know where to look and you kind of use a little bit of creativity. How many much power is that one? This one This one's about 12, 15 power. So you could do it with 15 binoculars? Yeah. Yeah, easily. Yeah, you'll see what you'll see uh these four moons, but I wonder if um if Jamie if you could find something that wasn't great. If you look up um uh Starry Messenger So what Galileo did is he turned the

35:21telescope to the moon for the in 1609 and then 1610 There they are, Jamie, on the right with those stars. Look at that illustration of Galileo. That's his handwritten. I've seen a friend of mine owns this copy of first edition of these books and you're looking at it and actually A first edition, the actual copy that he wrote on? Not only that, yeah, the first edition, but it has his handwriting on it in pencil. Whoa. It's insane. Oh my god, that's got to be worth a billion dollars. Oh, it's it's it's Jamie, could you please go back to that those illustrations? I had that this thing. I think that's the written stuff. Oh, wow. That's why I just I couldn't tell what this was. That's why I didn't want to bring Imagine having a piece of paper that that guy wrote on. Can you imagine? So this is yeah, so this is a depiction of him showing So

36:02Galileo is the guy with the beard looking down like Andrew Huberman at the guy with the white beard. It's a beautiful chiseled beard. That's right. Muscular. Uh so he's showing these Venetian senators and do these cuz they were in charge of the military budget. So even back then there was a scientific military connection that he realized cuz he cuz Galileo was a kind of a cad. He had a bunch of mistresses. He had some illegitimate children. How dare you, Galileo? He had to support How dare you not be pure? He had to support his his brother, who's kind of a no-goodnik. But anyway, the sketches in the in the lower right show the planet as you will see it with his telescope. I'll let you know when it comes out. And those four little dots there was an image a couple of pages back, Jamie, that showed the planet as a disc and then there were

36:53four stars and it's if you go back one I'll I'll I'll point it out to you. Yeah, see that thing in the lower right, Jamie? Uh It's a Pinterest thing. I don't know if that's a bad Yeah, click on that. So here's a couple of See it says Janu- it's hard to see. It's January 1610. That's Galileo's handwriting. Wow. And Iones is like Jupiter, okay? So He had [ __ ] handwriting. Oh, I know. Yeah, he I always thought people back then just wrote perfectly with feathers. Who knew how to read it? That's a good point. That's a very good point. So he's got like a doctor's handwriting. Exactly. So this is his first major book. In the upper left you see the sketch of the moon with these giant craters on it. That crater Yeah, so if you go back So click on that, Jamie. That's his sketch of the moon through this telescope essentially, okay? Now,

37:39the interesting thing is See that big crater? That doesn't exist. Really? not exist. on the top? No, the one on the bottom. That one. Doesn't exist. exist. Now, why is it there? He was a smart guy. He wasn't like he he was an artist, too, by the way. His father Vincenzo was a beautiful musician, a well-known musician. He was a sketch I mean That's hand-drawn sketches and why did he put that there? Because, Joe. He wanted to convey not only what it looked like, but how it felt. Hmm. He was conveying and when you see it, you'll feel like it's like that big, but if you actually measure it, it's about 10 times smaller than that. Oh, so he just made it larger than it really is. He to emphasize it. And what's so cool about that? If you want to know you've had on like my friend Sean Carroll on he about the Higgs boson when he was on the

38:25first time. Um, 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. Um, I don't know if Spotify's going to, you know, hook you hook you up there. But, uh, but the, uh, 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, cuz 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 that 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

39:12system 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, you know, people in in that part of northern Italy. So, he named he was clever, right? He was trying to curry favor there. Maybe this it'd be like if we named the, uh, the, you know, whatever the Higgs boson, we named that after, you know, the European, uh, you know, tax equivalent of the IRS, right? He was kind of a kiss-ass, a kiss-up, you know, a social sycophant. But, it had to save his life, and he needed money, and so forth. Right. But, when he drew that, he realized the Wait a second, the Bible and all teaching heretofore said there is only one center to the solar system, and it's

39:57and it's and it's the Earth, not the Sun. This is called geocentrism. Everybody believed that. Aristotle, uh, uh, Plato, everybody had believed that for a long time, because it said it was natural that heavy things should fall towards a center, and the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the Earth, or the Earth itself. Therefore, the Earth must be the center of the universe. Remember, the solar system was the universe for a long time. Then for an equally long time almost, the galaxy was the whole universe. And now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about. So, this was just incredible realization to him. Imagine like you come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person in human history ever to feel that. Is there any uh documentation of his struggle with trying to convey these

40:45ideas to people that had very strong religious beliefs? Yeah. Because obviously it it turned out to be a catastrophe for him. That's right. But what did he did he convey in his writing the frustration that he had? He was he's such a fascinating person. I always make a provocative statement that like we don't need English departments. We should just teach like physics and astronomy because some of the great scientists of history, men and women, were tremendous orators, they were tremendous uh 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 the quote, not use them in order to better understand it." He would write things that he had discovered

41:35things um 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 hum- um humble. But uh Newton was the same way. Newton would write as a great or 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. In this geocentric version of the universe that they've How How is it written in the Bible? Like how do they describe It's actually, you know, the atheist so I I I I don't 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, you know, partially the reason that I'm here, I think um but uh but to have the discussion about uh you know, the influence of religion on science. And he made the claim that

42:23without religion, we wouldn't have science on this show a couple weeks ago. In other words, we wouldn't have the the tradition that we can that the world is intelligible. It's not the capricious will of gods, you know, uh playing with human beings as Greeks and and others had had identified. Um so, the uh the notion of, you know, 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 um because of his um you know, I would say like imagine we're living in a time where someone like Anthony Fauci or, you know, Francis Collins or somebody that they had they were not only the scientist, the expert scientist, 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

43:10Vatican. 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 and Rome and so forth. But the the notion it was a Catholic, you know, band of jurisdiction and Catholic Church had sway over that part of Italy in Tuscany where he was. He was very religious. Um but he 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 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 argued 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

43:59just scientific authority, they're the government. Um 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 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, um he caused the sun to stand still. And uh and and that mean it's to many people implies that the sun was orbiting around the earth. Uh it's you know, certainly could be construed that way. But to answer your question, there is no real cosmology. You know, I always say like Let me ask you. I I don't know how much I know you you've had some exposure to

44:44in Christianity, but I don't know how much you've ever read of the of the Old Testament and the the Hebrew Bible, but the beginning of the of of Genesis, right? So, I know that you're interested in origin stories, right? Mhm. So, why is it that a book about, you know, a nomadic band of Bronze Age, you know, peasants, why does it begin with the creation of the world of the universe? Isn't that weird? Like, shouldn't it be like, "Oh, there's something really delicious that you're going to want to eat. It's called a pig. Um you know, don't eat like Why doesn't it start with that? Why does it start with the origin of the universe? Well, isn't that the ultimate question that man would have? Um I I I think you're right. I think another way to interpret it is if God created the universe, then it's kind of like he has title to everything.

45:31Right? He then could make a claim that, "Look, there's no god above me." And think about the milieu he was he was like the the Hebrew Bible came about in. Um it was pantheistic. It was in direct contradistinction to the other great religion of the time, which was, you know, necropolism, which was basically Egypt Egypt was was a culture fixated on death. The pyramids, giant tombs, they had mummification to preserve you into the afterlife. They named everything after themselves. They had statues. Their their Bible was called the Book of the Dead. Uh in other words, the the you know, in contradistinction to the Jewish, you know, Bible, the Torah is like the Book of Life, we call it. So, um so, Judaism is operating under that where there were gods and the gods were within nature and they controlled man. The Hebrew Bible was meant to set show that no, God is

46:22above nature and controls nature. Therefore, the sun, the everything is weird that the sun is created on the fourth day. In the in the Genesis description, the sun doesn't come about until the fourth day. Mhm. What's the day? Right. Let there be Let there be light. Let there be light from what? From it's just creation ex nihilo, right? Right. Right, you know. I mean, if it's not from the sun, there is no light. That's right. So, what planets are we talking about? Exactly, right. So, but getting back to your the the original question, Galileo was very religious. But where does it say in the Bible that the Earth is the center of everything? It's It's very interesting. Um what 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 eff- effectively

47:09of Aristotle. And actually, Stephen Meyer taught this to me in a conference that I went to with him last year. Uh and just a conversation. I was wondered, why is it that the um Catholic Church, Cath- Catholicism branches Christianity which came from Ju- Judaism, right? I mean, the the origin of They accept the Hebrew Bible, right? So, um why is it that um a sect of of the or say the scientific and and technological elite of the Catholic Church, why did they want to support a doctrine which really traced itself back to Aristotle? Right? The Aristot- 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

48:01sanctified and made Aristotle effectively into a saint. Wow. And so, therefore, it was blasphemy for Galileo to contradict Aristotle. Wow. That's incredible. It's really strange because, you know, um Aristotle was a was a pagan, right? He was a pantheistic, which is the the number one law of the Ten Commandments, right? Is I am the Lord you shall have no other gods before me. Meaning, that Judaism came to destroy pantheism and to accept monotheism and establish it throughout the world. And now 3 billion people are affiliated with it in some way, right? So, that was its key enemy. And so, if you we didn't have a sun god. That's why if God creates the sun, God Hashem or, you know, the God of Allah or whatever, that is more powerful than the sun. So, it supersedes it. God controls the sun to do things for us and the moon to do things for us

48:56for our benefit, not for us to worship. That is crazy. Questioning Aristotle became blasphemy and that's that's the idea of the geocentric universe. That's right. Wow. That's amazing. That's really amazing. It was a very strange they recognize that in in Galileo, they had essentially someone like Aristotle. Yeah. A very unique mind that shapes its generation and many generations to come right in front of them. And they're like, "No, you're committing blasphemy for being brilliant." And you know what's amazing? Galileo has never been pardoned formally by the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul, who was I love We really don't want to get into that. So, I love The Catholic Church is But that's part of the reason I became an astronomer. Interesting. Yeah. Galileo was my hero. I got a telescope. So, I was born Jewish, both my parents are Jewish, we're Jewish, my

49:48father passed away. Um but my they're both biologically Jewish. Um when I was seven, um 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 and he lives on the East Coast. Uh, and he 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 and just touching humility and this big Irish Catholic family. They basically would call they thought that we became their their biological grandchildren, cousins, nephews, and so forth. Okay, I'm still close with them. That's amazing. And I became so overawed by it and in contradistinction to that, I anything I remember about Judaism from age zero to

50:42seven was just like, okay, well, like you have to not eat, you know, once you can't eat that tasty bacon. It was all things you can't do and so forth, right? So this was like Christmas, Easter, hanging out, like just boisterous, 50 cousins at at at Christmas. It was a 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. Oh. And and I 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

51:32looked like a little fragment of the moon had broken off and it was just like to the left of it. It was as bright as the moon but much much smaller. And I was like, what the hell? And this is in 1986. Like there's no Google, there's no and remember like what it was like before the internet? So Uh, so like, what the hell's that thing? And I had to wait until Sunday, the New York Times used to print uh the section called Cosmos. And in Cosmos, it would say like what's happening in the skies, there's going to be this, there's that, you know, it's the first phase of the moon. And it showed a picture of the moon and some stars and like a map like this but for stars. And there was a thing next to it, it 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 tele you know, whatever." Or is it

52:17not a satellite? And so I just got really interested and I kept watching them night after night. And I was I was unknowingly and I'm 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 can measure the the height of those mountains from the size of the shadow and knowing the distance to the moon." Um and 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, the you know, Jupiter's just next to some stars and then it's going to move tomorrow, it'll be different."

52:55But no, those were Galileo realized he was looking at a mini solar system edge on. Mhm. He was looking like if you looked at above, he'd see these four moons going around like this, but he was looking at it like this, so they were kind of going like this back and forth and it was periodic. And he kept doing it for night after night after night. Um and it kind of got boring in his book, the Sidereus Nuncius, which is otherwise an amazing book. Uh 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 surface far from land to determine the time difference between them and Greenwich, therefore determining their longitude. And what's the mechanism that he proposed to try to measure these planets going around?

53:40Yeah, so if you just plotted their distance over enough time, there it was periodic, so you could just calculate it just like the moon like Right, but I mean in terms of like the actual mechanical clock itself. What was he was he is it just a calculated clock on paper? It was it would you look up in a in a table like a database he would have it printed forever but then but you'd still need to see the planets and moon surrounding it so he he built like basically it was the first virtual reality helmet. It's called like a cephalo some cell cellophane or something so it was actually a helmet that you'd put on and then it had these two short versions of his telescopes on his eyes Whoa. and then like you'd go out on the ship and they'll be moving around like this and you try to do it failed he didn't win it and it probably make you like totally nauseous to

54:26Yeah, so you were wearing a helmet with telescopes in front and then you're supposed to stare off at Jupiter and count? Like how I don't understand what look at the positions and then and then that's the awesome yeah. Wow, settle on thank you Jerry. That looks so crazy if I saw that in the battlefield I'd run like they have evil weapons they have satanic weapons. And then first of all you can't see the moon you can't see Jupiter for part of the year when it's behind the sun so that's useless. Okay, candle on. It's got a candle. Yes, that's how you can look up. hilarious. They didn't have clocks. Right. Forget about lights and So when was the first mechanical clock? So the first mechanical clocks were I developed I think in Switzerland and in northern Europe Germany and Switzerland they were wind-ups and springs and stuff weren't they not not

55:10so first pendulum clocks. And what year was that around? This was in the early 1700s so it was finally won I believe the longitude prize was won in the mid-1700s. Wow. But but actually Galileo tried to do this from his youth he he would be in church and I remember even though I was an altar boy and I loved it and I I had good experiences in the Catholic Church even though I abandoned it later on as I'll describe but but the but the one day he Galileo was in was in church and the and the priest was you know giving some boring sermon and Galileo was just sitting there like this and he looked up and there was a lantern and like some horse cart had gone through or whatever and the lantern was going back and forth like a pendulum. And Galileo put his fingers on his pulse and he timed the period of the pendulum and he realized it didn't it didn't

56:00change. It was constant. And no matter what he would use for the for the pendulum as long as they had the same length they would have the same period. So all the clocks of of the same are all the all the lanterns with the same length chain all the chandeliers they were all having the same periods but those with a shorter one would go back and forth faster. So he discovered the law of pendulums and he was like 5 years old. Like those old grandfather clocks. My grandparents used to have one of those. It would swing it had this brass thing. is. And it would swing. Yep. So they have all these things. He invented the first thermometers. Jamie if you want to look up a Galileo thermometer. when did they how did they discern the amount of minutes in an hour, the amount of hours in a day? Uh so to get to a level of precision now or then to a to a few minutes or

56:46fraction of a day that was easily significant enough to make measurements of longitude. So that actual kind of level of precision that didn't occur until the 1800s to get really good clocks. And now I talked to you know people Bill Phillips on my podcast and 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 age of the universe. clock? is what's called an atomic clock. Atomic lattices and they cool things down to almost absolute zero. But 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.

57:35They didn't fractions of 60, 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 3600 seconds in an hour. Right, but why did they do that? That's that's your that's your game. I mean, I I don't know why they think about these things. I mean, 60 has a lot of divisors and so it's convenient, you know, it's divisible by 15, 12, 10, 5, 6. I mean, when when they first decided, okay, it's right now it's 1:00. You know, it starts right now. Like what how do you start the day how do you decide like it's very it's fascinating that the whole world has adopted the system actually other than military which uses the 24-hour system. When you're you think about that the whole world just decides you know, okay, we're all going to agree, you know, and then some places are like, [ __ ] you with daylight savings. We're not playing that game. There's a few places like that, right?

58:19Like Arizona doesn't do anything all year. They don't play that game. [ __ ] off with your [ __ ] pretend clocks. our way up here. But I mean, and then, you know, obviously there's time zones and you know, from with traveling the way we do now it's so fascinating cuz you could literally fly somewhere and it's 10-hour difference in time zone. Or like Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island, it's half hours. Got half hour time zones up there. So all this is bringing up a notion what's called calibration. So I'm an experimental physicist. The hardest thing about doing a measurement for me is not like knowing what I measure, it's knowing how I screwed up the measurement. It's like what went wrong. How do I know like you said, how do I know what the base level zero point is of this measurement? What's the calibration? When you buy this cup of

59:00coffee, when you buy the black rifle or the onnit or whatever, how do you know you're getting exactly what they say? Just printed on there, right? So I'm I'll ask you, you're one of the owners, right? So like how do you ensure that? Like how do you have you ever thought about that? Like do you go in and count all the items? No, we had a issues with that in the past when we first started the company. Well, we we were getting stuff made in these uh places that do supplements. And so we were third-party testing our stuff and finding things in our supplements that weren't supposed to be in there like different vitamins. Like why is that in there?" And in trace amounts, and it turns out it's contamination. That's right. And that's a lot of uh athletes actually get popped from um small levels of steroids that are in you like protein

59:40powders and creatines and things that they buy from, you know, kind of shady organizations. Tatis, he got he got nailed for that last year, right? What does he do? Well, he's a San Diego Padres. He's a right fielder now. He's there Well, there's a lot of claims that people get popped for that. And they So, they got like Canelo said he had tainted meat from tacos. Oh, and they just happen to have steroids in them? And you look jacked as [ __ ] Okay, bro. Settle down, sir. I think it does Do steroids work if you're not like going to the gym? I mean, could you could you get that big, or for athletes, they have a significant advantage, and they allow you to recover much quicker. You know, it's um there's certain sports, well, if you call bodybuilding a sport. It's impossible. It's impossible without steroids. insane. Yeah, you cannot get to that size. You

60:26don't get to Ronnie Coleman size. You don't get to like Dorian Yates size. You don't get there without steroids. My mother-in-law size. My mother-in-law um tragically she lost her um what would have been my my oldest brother-in-law when he was about 16 years old, my wife's oldest brother. And uh she dedicated her life to just like just being the best person she could be, and she entered she built her body up. My mother-in-law, Alice. I'm like emotional thinking about her cuz I love her so much. Uh and she she built her body, and she did this as like a Jewish grandmother. You know, basically. Wow. And she's totally ripped. I mean, she's still in great shape, but this is like 10 or 15 years ago. Mhm. Maybe 20 years ago. And I used to joke when I was dating my wife, Sarah. I was like, you know, normally when I take a girl out, you know, scared of her

61:09father. Like, I'm terrified of your mom. She'll kick my ass. But like she never used to I mean, she's you know, it's not her way, anyway. But you you can get cut, I think. You can get like low body fat without taking illegal stuff, probably. But you probably can't get the musculature, is what you're saying. Oh, you can get very big without taking steroids. There's a lot of people that are massive without taking steroids. There's a lot of people that have fantastic genetics. There's a lot of people that have just thick, heavy builds, you know, it's natural. There's many, many people like that. Um but to get to the size of a bodybuilder is superhuman. It's not possible without steroids. That that is a science project. When you 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

61:58is as that's not possible. I've met many people that are really fit and look [ __ ] huge and they're 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. Mhm. They're 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? Cuz it does it's a real problem. Like it wakes guys up on weigh-in days and [ __ ] like that. It's not good. And they're trying to not to do that now, but you have to make sure that it's completely right like you can catch them. So there's some short-acting testosterone

62:45supplements that you can take that particularly now, apparently there's some new ones that they the 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. I see. I see. And how how the weigh-ins work? Cuz one of the things I was going to mention is, you know, to to when you weigh something, like how what are you comparing it to? The weigh-ins are sanctioned cheating. That's what it is. It is 100% sanctioned legal cheating. It's more than fasting. They they don't eat anything. They use very sophisticated methods. This guy, Sugar Sean O'Malley, who just won the

63:32bantamweight title, Dan Gardner is his nutritionist, and I was actually just going back and forth with him on Instagram because I watched one of the videos that he did, and I was like, that is really impressive stuff. Um Dan Gardner is What is his profile here? It's I think it's Dan Gardner Nutrition. And um Yeah, g a r n e r. So, he's They're detailing how they cut weight. And one of the things they do is they eliminate carbs like very close out, and they they do all these different things to water load, so your body gets used to like dumping water out a lot. There's like it's very sophisticated. So, when a guy weighs in, in this case, Sugar Sean weighed in at 135 lb. He's 135 lb for all of like a an hour or so. And then he weighs in, and when he fights, he'll be in the 150s. He'll be something in the 150s, and that's mild. His opponent,

64:33Aljamain Sterling, is absolutely massive for the weight class. So, Aljamain, even though he weighs in at 135 lb, he's walking around I've seen him walking around in the 170s. Wow, 135 lb was my birth weight. He's a big Well, he's not that small. When you stand next to him, like there's Show um an image of me standing next to him when I was interviewing him. He's [ __ ] shredded. There's no way that guy's 135 lb. I mean, a 135-lb person is fairly small man. This guy's [ __ ] jacked. And so, it's a magic trick. The best at it is this guy, Alex Pereira. Alex Pereira, who was the middleweight champion, he weighs in at 185 lb. He fights at 220 plus. He's so massive. Like you cannot believe. That's I can't I'm trying to get Okay, so that's that's that's him on the weigh-in day. Okay, it's not him weighing in though. So he significantly

65:30rehydrated by that point. Is there an image of me interviewing him at the post fight? Is there a technique to put on weight health like safely before a fight and like there's drinking and electrolytes? safe. It's not It's not safe. It's very bad compromising their life aren't they? Yes, 100%. It's very bad for your organs. It's very bad for your body. But okay, so that's him. So look at that. That's 135 lb. How the [ __ ] I weigh 200. So look at me next to him. He's [ __ ] gigantic. And I think he's if not the best weight cutter in the sport, him and Pereira they're in the running for it because Pereira Now show Alex Pereira. This [ __ ] guy. This This guy you can't you can't when he weighs in, um I don't see the actual weigh-in. I go there for the ceremonial weigh-ins and he's already put on probably 10 lb of

66:16water by the time. So he'll weigh in first thing in the morning and then by the time That's him right there. Click on that link right there with me me standing next to him. The one that you just had with his flexing upper right hand corner of the Yeah, that that one. So that's him weighing in and his his cheeks are sucked in and he'll gain literally 40 lb almost between them and fight night. It's [ __ ] bananas. I think in the '80s with Olympic hopefuls and they said they made the following test of sprinters. They said, "Would you Would you trade the following a gold medal, guaranteed gold medal at the next games, if it meant you'd die at age 35?" They all say yes. They all say It's like half of them say yeah. I thought about it in the context of the Nobel Prize, you know, it's like how many scientists, you know, have have

67:10these things? Cuz what are these, Joe? These are We call them like we we don't think about idol worship. Like, have you ever been tempted to bow down to a idol, Joe? I mean, I actually Not recently. No, and we have different idols, right? There's different things that we aspire to. Uh but but even people that aren't like in the religious sect that think of themselves as atheists, let alone agnostics or what, but are atheists, they they all have religions. Right. And and I think for some of these guys, yeah, I mean, if it's sacrificing your lifespan, your healthspan, whatever Peter Attia would talk about, what what is you know, what's it worth? I mean, is that high worth it? Like, to be champion for a day? Right. Like, do you can you name like a Olympic sprinter from the 1980s, you know, besides like Flo-Jo? And I mean, there were a couple, but I don't think she

67:54said that she would trade it, but I mean, it's so transitory and it's so it's so applicable only to the small cadre of people within your technical network. Right. Like the Nobel like you can't probably name more than you've had a couple Nobel Prize winners on the show that Sir Roger Penrose. But can you name more than No, because you're not I can name everyone of them just like I could name this. Penrose. That's what I'm saying, yeah. You know one. But you're also amongst the very few people that get to interview people Right. like him on a daily basis. Yeah, it's a it's a god to them. Yeah. It's uh it's this Look at this. thing that very few people achieve. Well, So, when you get this, when you win a I mean, I didn't win a Nobel Prize. I mean, my book is called Losing the Nobel Prize, my first book. And uh spoiler alert, you know, I didn't win the Nobel

68:33Prize. But um That's what it looks like. That's that's a chocolate replica. Yeah, I know you won't eat that, and I hope you don't. It's 15 Well, it's 15 years old, Joe. Be careful. Why? Do you think it's bad? What happens to chocolate? Would you eat it? Try it. It'd be a shame if I ate it because it's old. Isn't that interesting? Like, if you found old candy and it's still edible, like, why'd you eat it? It's from the 1800s. Honey [ __ ] candy. Honey lasts forever, right? You can store it. Honey in the Egyptian pharaohs' tombs, it's wild. Well, Yeah. It's the only substance that's uh that's made by an insect, which is You're not allowed to eat insects and kosher Jewish people aren't allowed to eat it, but it's something made by 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

69:14pig's milk like because it's made from a pig that's But but look at this thing. So, so the the second commandment talks about not making graven images or maybe it's the third. When you win a Nobel Prize So, my my very close friend and mentor Barry Barish, he won the 2017 Nobel Prize for discovering gravitational wave. He'd be an amazing guest for you, by the way. If I can have the temerity to even make such suggestions. But he invented or co-invented the LIGO experiment, which was this experiment. One branch of it's in Louisiana and one's in Washington state. 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy we have no idea where it is to this day. Two black holes were orbiting around each other. Just like Roger Penrose had predicted and they came together and each one was about 30 times One was 30 times the mass of the sun. One was 32 times the mass of the sun. They combined.

70:06They 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 cuz 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 you go up and down except it would take, you know, a couple 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 longer it makes you heavier, lighter. That's

70:52what a wave of gravity is. It's distorting the feel and force of gravity. Well, these two star holes coalesced and one or two sun's masses of these black holes was converted into shaking up space time itself. Wow. Then these waves of gravity propagated from somewhere, we don't know exactly where in the universe it was. They came to the earth. It took 1.2 billion years to get to the earth. One instrument in in Hanford, Washington state and one instrument in Louisiana, they registered their the same event, the same exact signal, but separated by the speed of light divided into that 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.

71:48I interviewed 15 Nobel Thursday morning in my 15th Nobel Prize winner. And but I've interviewed 14 of them so far on my podcast. And we all at the end of each podcast, I always ask them the same question which is 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." So I say to each guest, I say at the end it's kind of like my wrap up, you know, what 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 Barish, 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 to get over the imposter syndrome." Um because I still haven't gotten over

72:31it. Mhm. 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 it's a very small group of people. At at most three people can win it every year. They typically win it when they're in the 70s and 80s, so their life expectancy isn't like super long. You know, Sir Roger's 92 now. But but when you win it, I said I said what 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,

73:15like Flavor Flav, you know, you put it on. And and you get the million dollars or your your portion of the million-dollar purse. Uh but they also want to make sure that you that you receive You're not going to come back later and say, "Uh where's my Nobel Prize?" So, they make you sign a ledger. They make you sign uh like a Remember those old-fashioned autograph books? Um 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 Wow. in this book. Cuz it's only been around for 116 years or something like that. Um so, there are a lot there you know, goes back to Einstein. He won 1922. When he saw Einstein, he said, "I am not

74:01worthy. I'm just some humble kid from, you know, Nebraska. I don't belong here. How 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 um 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 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 cuz Newton was kind of a prick.

74:50Newton 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. Uh and Tortured people? Yeah, he was a real He was like Physically tortured people? Yeah, I mean, he was He not him. that microphone like so it's like in your face? There you go, like that. Yeah, you'd think a podcaster or something. He tortured people? He was responsible. He was like the execu- He was responsible for the equivalent of the IRS in in England. So, people would cheat, they would scrape down pennies, they would Yeah, he was the master of the mint, it was called. Yeah, that's right. I forgot about this. He He was an amazing guy, but he was kind of a prick. And he had imposter syndrome as well. So, he had imposter syndrome. Now, who could he have imposter syndrome about, you might wonder. And if you read his writings, do you

75:33know what Isaac Newton, the creator of calculus, the uh first person to understand universal gravitation, discovered laws of optics, do you know what his biggest accomplishment, according to him, was? What? He died a virgin. Yeah, that was a weird one, right? Yeah, I was going to bring that up. He was celibate. You know why? Why? Because there's only one way that he could emulate his hero. His the person before whom he felt the imposter syndrome. And who was that? That was Jesus Christ. Oh, boy. So, he wanted to be Christ-like. He wanted to emulate Christ. And the only way he could do it, he couldn't like fast or I don't know, he couldn't bapti- walk on water, he couldn't turn water into wine, he couldn't turn loaves into fishes or whatever Jesus also did, but he could die celibate. And that's who he had imposter syndrome. And but the lesson is

76:22But is it Does this from his writing that he spoke of this? Are you sure he just didn't was like an excuse for he didn't like sex? I don't know. I mean, it sounds nutty. Because like how do you figure that out when he's like 14, 15 years old? You know, you're young and full of hormones and you've made this decision to be like Jesus. Yeah. Yeah, I know, it's He He He was a strange guy. He sounds insane. He definitely was. He was not like you would want to hang out with Galileo. I don't know if I'd want to hang out with him, too. Yeah, I know. For a little bit. Just to see what it's like. So, when you win the Nobel Prize, you go there, and what is what is the commandment about idol worship? It's that you shall make no gilded, golden, graven, like engraved, images. So, who is that? Do you know who that is? Uh Alfred Nobel? Yeah, it's Alfred Nobel, that's right. Alfred.

77:08And you know he invented dynamite, and he he also died he died never having been married. I don't know if he was celibate or not. Hala. So, he was never married. Um but he he establishes when you win it, you literally the king of Sweden comes up to you, and you must bow down to him. And he puts the gilded graven image on your head. So, for all the, you know, trappings and all the 90% of National Academy members who do not believe actively profess a belief in God, this can become at some level a religion. And it's a kosher one. It's okay to worship, right? Well, the unattainable for that that's maybe perhaps attainable to a very select few is always the thing that people are chasing after, especially like high achievers. 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

77:58this isn't real this can't be real I can't be the man. Cuz they've set this up their whole life. And also it's they Look, you can get to the promised land, but you can't stay in it. How many baseball teams have won the World Series year after year forever? I mean, only the Yankees haven't done that. Even your BoSox haven't done that, right? They're not mine. Okay, fine. But for me as a young kid, this is this is what I aspired and actually as an adult, I wanted to win this basically at all costs. This became my but it was acceptable because people told me, you know, like if you discover these waves of gravity manifest in the cosmic background radiation that I study, you're guaranteed to win the Nobel Prize. And for me it was a I don't know about you with your uh you know relations with your father but I had a very difficult relationship with my father.

78:47And in it it was a 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 a 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 like can win it but but for me it was kind of an added dimension that came with it. And that was you know like normal kid might have it with sports and their dad or or or maybe the other way around with your when you're a dad you might treat your kids like that

79:30like you think you could take me on or whatever like Um and so for that that was the main source of driving impetus for my personal quest to get this particular idol in my life. That's wild. Are you aware of Ronald Mallett? Do you know who he is? No. He is uh I believe he's out of the University of Connecticut. Um he he studies time travel. And he became obsessed with time travel after his father died when he was a young boy. Cuz he felt like if he worked hard enough he could develop a time machine and go back and save his father. No. It's wild. It's like literally Spider-Man origin story. But this guy has been dedicated his life to finding a working model of a time machine. And I think was it Kurt Gödel? Like how do you say his name? Gödel? It's that weird Umlaut. Yeah. Yeah. How do you say it? What's the name? Gödel. Gödel. Gödel.

80:28It's like people that say Van Gogh and then they know it's really Van Gogh and Um but he developed a working model, but it it just required something like the size of the of the solar system. No, you're out of I know that. But yeah, he had a spiraling he had a rotating cosmos where you could have what are called world lines. You could have your just like you could walk around the surface of the earth and if you go in the same direction eventually you'll come back to where you started. In the if the universe was somehow rotating in the way that he envisioned it, you could have it end up on a on a time start where you began. From the beginning, yeah. So that travel is life like light time light curve. Wild. Kurtle is interesting because he he and Einstein were buddies back at the Institute for Advanced Study like Oppenheimer. I don't I haven't seen it yet.

81:12You should see it. I don't go to the movies. But I I do go to the movies. I saw Barbie. You did it? Your girls dragged you there? My my girls are not old enough to drag me there. It's fun. I want to say my friend Ben Shapiro and your your former guest he hated it. I don't understand Ben. He he needs to [ __ ] have a sit down with me about this. He needs to about that. Maybe he'll come I just everything's a goddamn culture war. I know. I mean I love about astronomy. No one ever freaking wakes up and says see that comet over there? I [ __ ] that's a Republican. There's a there's a there's a Democrat astronaut. Well, it it also it makes you're studying things that are so immense and so spectacular that it makes all this stuff seem like nonsense. This stuff that people fill their days up with complaining about a

81:58[ __ ] Barbie movie. Jesus Christ. I mean that would be it would be like someone who's a pacifist reviewing the ultimate fighting championship. Exactly. There's a And saying they hit each other too much. Like that's what it's for. There's a joke about Einstein goes to heaven and somebody comes up to him and says oh, you're Albert Einstein, you know, you're great. I can't wait to talk to you and Einstein says oh, first you must tell me IQ. And he goes the guy goes I have a 140 IQ. Oh, we could talk about the math and string theory and this and that. And then another guy comes out and says, "Oh, what's your IQ?" It's it's a 130. Oh, we can talk about uh the stock market and we can talk about all these uh you know, financial distri- you know, and then someone comes out and says, "I have a 100 IQ. I think it's uh more of a tribal thing

82:49than anything with us. I think um what's going on is it's just something that's like written into the human reward system. That there's a there's a lot of social value in being a part of a tribe. There's a lot of social value in being part of part of a committed ideology, whether it's a religion or a cult or politics or politics. Well, that's what's impressive. I mean, you know, not to be too overbearingly praiseworthy, but you know, there's a Yiddish saying, "If you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit from both sides of the street." But you seem to like defy that. Um you know, and it's always interesting to me if I talk to somebody, I I talk to Noam Chomsky. I I personally hate his politics or whatever, but I'm talking about linguistics and aliens and communication. You know, I'll talk to them. But you know, or I'll talk to Ben Shapiro.

83:31People just go, "How How could you possibly platform him?" Ben doesn't need Brian Keating's help to platform him. That talk is nonsense. The only There's only one way to find the holes in someone. I mean, how many revealing interviews have you seen where people were supposedly platformed? And in those conversations, you reveal like the the way that they look at the world is very flawed. It's very easily pick-apartable. You could just like go through it and say, "Well, this is illogical. This doesn't This doesn't fit in with the the your whole philosophy of freedom." Like there's so many things that are inconsistent with the way you view this one thing. Like why do you view this one thing this way? I think the human mind hates ambiguity, right? I mean, like no one would say like uh you can abort a 5-year-old. Like I mean, I hope so. There There are

84:14people There's a guy in pri- Anyway, I don't want to get I'm sure there's a few persons out there. Um you know, my my dad used to say when I was 30, he's like, "I believe in abortion up until the 33rd trimester, you know. But but but uh you know, but on the other hand, you know, no one say like exact you know, before the parents meet like you can't have an like doesn't make sense, right? So there's there's clear-cut benefits to being polarized cuz it simplifies it gives you a hack an algorithm say I like I can easily say well you should not have an abortion and so therefore I must be in the people that say you should never have an or like gun control like should you have a like you know, an AK-47? Maybe you should you have a tow a tank operator what probably not. have a little boy or you have a little boy and fat man or something. It's not of that kind, right?

84:55They're not that explosive. So I think that but it's because human beings hate these Schrodinger kind of ambiguities. They just hate them and so they must cleave to the direction that they understand. Yeah, it's a very unfortunate thing that doesn't get taught out of people. Instead of that we teach them to subscribe to whatever ideology the teacher is promoting, you know, and I think that's a real issue with with people. We need we need to give people the space to figure out things for themselves and and decide how they view all these different subjects. Not have this predetermined group of questions and answers that you you know, that these are these are a that they're a part of the ideology. You must subscribe to them wholeheartedly wholesale. And and even by you like apparently so Lex mentioned that Andrew Huberman's Wikipedia page cuz you platformed RF.

85:51I'm like the guy's a Kennedy, okay? First of all, he's democratic. Well, this is all that happened. If you don't Andrew Huberman commented on a post that I made about Robert Kennedy Jr. He said I think this is great. I hope more presidential candidates do long-form podcasts. That's it. And so Wikipedia removed the research research section of his page. He's got 70 public published papers. He's 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 um they're maligning him in multiple different ways. about saying like, well, you know who else Joe Rogan had on? This guy named Peter Hotez. Yeah, well, I I kind of have a lot of people on.

86:41But, it's it's not There's nothing wrong with having a guy who's running for president on a podcast to discuss things. Like, you What are you talking about? It's nonsense. And the way they did that to Huberman when he was just saying that he hopes more presidential candidates do long-form form podcast. That's You can't do that. That's That's like That's tyrants do [ __ ] like that. That's horrible. If I could, you know, indulge your, you know, forbearance, you know, because of how often do I first time I ever met you, but trying to study, you know, how to be a better podcaster, to be better at my my, you know, microscopic emulation, right? So, I have on all different types of people, but but sometimes I have on people, and look, I'm a scientist. I'm not a podcaster. Like, I'm a tenured professor of physics at a major

87:28university, right? So, it's not my day job. 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 salaries. It's very valuable what you do. It's very valuable. It means it's it's so important to have people do exactly what you just described, translate it to people who are not going to study it in any other way, and it's a very consumable way. I get pushed back. I said like yesterday a couple days I said on Twitter, I said, um why is it that scientist that there are science popularizers? Like, we don't have like UFC popularizers. We don't have movie popularizers. We don't have TikTok popularizers, but we have this whole class of people called science popularizers. And I'm all for I've had talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio

88:09Kaku. I've talked to these people. It's fine. Maybe I I do it at some level. Brian Brian Cox, Brian Greene. I'm I'm the third Brian to come on the podcast as far as I know. The But the thing is we as scientists have been given this incredible script, the script of nature or of God if you will. We have this incredible present and we are so bad at communicating what we do and worse than that we don't feel like it's our obligation. I I always joke and maybe it's not even a joke. Scientists have a moral obligation to communicate what they do to the people that fund them but they also have, you know, just common sense. If the public gets turned off to science because the scientists say, "Ah, I am too specialized for you, Joe. I can't break it down for an everyman to understand. What I do is very I should stay in the lab because we

88:59need people that just stay in the lab and don't get I know I always joke like how do you know a scientist is outgoing? Have you ever heard this one? They look at your That's very funny. But if I don't teach my students these things, if I don't teach them, look, part of the soft skills that will get you farther in life and all the Nobel laureates that I've talked to, they all have that in common. They're not just awesome and the top elite killers of science, Joe. They're incredible communicators, persuaders, salesmen, saleswomen because you don't just make a great idea and everyone accepts it. You have to convince people, editors, peer reviewers, funding agencies and you're in a complex battle against the world's other killers and what if you're just a little bit better than them because you have learned that it's important for you

89:48to communicate to your bosses, to your funding agents such that we don't have this elite that the general public can't understand so they just defer to whoever's, you know, whichever way the wind's blowing and we have what we've had for the last few years. Well, don't you think that I mean the reason why you have so many science influencers or science educators is because science is way more complicated than all these other things. I don't know, is it? Yeah, of course it is. It is and it isn't. It's It is and it isn't? Do you know the difference I don't want to say it like that. I'm going to say there's a difference between complex and complicated. Okay. So a complicated thing is building a 787 Dreamliner. That's freaking complicated. There's over 700 million, you know, parts to it. There's a supply chain. There's, you know, like F that. People don't know how

90:35to build a pencil. Like there's no one person. Have you heard of that like that knows how to get the graphite and the wood and the eraser and the metal and the paint? There's There's no one person that has a so something as simple as a pencil could be considered com- But complicated means if you follow it, my PhD thesis, if you follow it, you will build a polarimeter that's capable of measuring the cosmic microwave background's polarization. Like there's just it's just linear steps. There's complexity. Like if you try to make a sand pile and have exactly the same number of grains of sand or if you want to have this particular thunderstorm that's brewing in the plains of Austin, Texas tonight, um 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

91:20have building phase, dissipating phase, hail, whatever. But then 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 just no There's no way around this. If you can't explain it to somebody who is not an expert, you failed at a certain level. Because just imagine if you were working like Do you think it's complicated to be to be an accountant at a top 10 accounting firm? Is that course? Yeah. So imagine your boss, this the CFO of that company comes and says, "Hey, Joe Rogan, what you've been working on?" You say, "What I've been working on is very complicated. It's very sophisticated. It's very complex. It's very You won't understand it. That's the implication.

92:08You'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 I done it I've had over 2,000 students in my career. I don't think I'm the best teacher, but I think I can do a good job enough to take somebody who wasn't a layperson and now they're an expert and now they're teaching down the street from me down the street from you here and they're much better and smarter than

92:53I am. How did that happen? If I didn't dedicate some time to it. But what scientists will say is, "No, I want to study wormholes and it's not really that important." That's the subtext. What Neil deGrasse Tyson it's not that important. What he's doing he can't do real This is This is the rap. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the rap. You know, he he is not a real scientist. And he won't say he's not doing research. He doesn't have students. But but he's not really a scientist the way that I, Brian Keating, am a scientist because he's not actively in the trenches cuz if he were, he wouldn't have time to go out That's BS. I'm sorry. That's BS. Well, what I meant is that it's complicated to do in terms of expressing that to people and there's so many things to cover. There's so many things and you also have to captivate people's attentions.

93:40I mean, I don't I don't think it's And there's also various fields of science that you I mean, try explaining string theory to regular people. You can do it. You can, but I mean, it's very complicated, right? do it. Eric Weinstein can do that. He can talk to people. Oh, he'll put you in a coma. He will put you in a coma. He I'll say keep it simple for me help me out and he'll on purpose just Well, that's called the that's a bias called the expert effect. Like you're so smart. You just don't realize what it was like now. Like you can do things in the gym I'm sure like you don't even know that you're doing them but to teach it to me would be impossible, right? Cuz it's just like encoded and viscerally into your DNA by this point. I think I can teach you. You can teach? Yeah, you if your body moves normal I can teach you. I guess the thing is people say well no

94:25that's really not my skill set to teach in that sense. By the way, I mean half of our jobs as professors is supposed to be to teach not just to raise money and do research, right? So so like you think well, you're a professor. You are a science communicator at least to a small class. Basically and if you're not if you if you take your job seriously and you're not a schmuck and you and you think that I have integrity, I'm going to learn how to do that beyond because what what would happen if the public cut cut off science? If they said, we don't trust Look what happened the last couple of years. Like we don't know who to believe. We don't know where is the ground truth. Who do we believe? I hear RFK science. Yeah, I 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

95:04at war. Right? And 60 years ago in Oppenheimer and you like you watch it, you know, like they took it the the killers of science and they were all in the desert in Los Alamos and they were squirreled away and they didn't tell anybody and and the same thing was going on in London and in England and uh working on radar and the same thing was going on in MIT. And it's it's just we serve at the pleasure of the public as scientists and when 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 out of it. Yeah. Well, it's All right, go more power to them. It's great that people are interested in it now and it's one of the things that I think podcasts like Lex Fridman's and many

95:44other ones that platform these people and have these discussions and it's like makes things uh digestible. Absolutely. It's very important cuz it's very fascinating. I'm going to bring this thing up before I forget. Cuz we we kind of skipped over it all. We talked about the web. Yeah. The web telescope. How old is the universe? Okay. So, you had this this this tweet that took over the internet and Instagram post. it was actually something that I'd heard before that. Someone was saying there was something like a quasar that they had discovered that seemed to be far older than was supposed to be. So, ever since the web telescope that web telescope has been 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 a It's cool. It

96:28orbits around a blank piece of space that orbits around the Earth and the Sun. It's a It's a wild thing that was figured out a couple hundred years ago and is only possible to be used now. But anyway, this orbit allows James Webb and its cameras to see things in what's called the infrared portion of the radio infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. So, if you take care about 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, we'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,

97:15right? Um you can't really tell. But now look look behind you at the Joe Rogan Experience neon light. Okay? You basically You basically just see the yellow, you'll see the orange. And that's because of that's made of gases that only emit light at very very narrow wavelengths, very very small wavelengths. I not supposed to see? So, you don't see the halo of a pure rainbow around the say the O. You see You see You see a couple of colors, but you don't see the continuous See how it kind of breaks apart? Yeah. Or here's another example, Joe. I'll put this on the wall. This is a laser spot. Okay? So, now look at this through there. What do you see? see it. Turn Yeah, there you go. Oh, yeah, I see a bunch of them. You just see a bunch of green dots. Yeah, they're everywhere. If but now if I do this, here's a here's I'll do it I'll point it right at close

98:01I don't want to blind you but here look at me. Okay. And look at that light. Now you see them, right? Isn't that cool? That's beautiful. That's cool, right? That's really pretty. So this diffraction grating separates light out into all of its different wavelengths. It's called the spectrometer. It's dispersing it according to its color. Now Isaac Newton and William Herschel figured out something really cool. They said if 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 the red lights on this going to be on this side. If I put a thermometer Imagine you put a thermometer like right here. The thermometer would register 70° or whatever it is in this room. If you go outside and and the sun's out um it will and and the sunlight's not directly hitting the thermometer and you put it

98:47where the red comes out over here, it starts to heat up. The thermometer gets warmer. And they realized there's light that you cannot see beyond the red that's responsible for the perception of heat. That's heat that's called infrared radiation. If you keep going in this direction if such a thing were possible, you eventually get to microwaves which is what I study. Those are wavelengths of about a millimeter to three or four millimeters in wavelength. Visible light is is visible light is 500 millions of a meter. It's incredibly small. And there's infrared etc. etc. 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 realized there's invisible light beyond the red, invisible to the eye but visible to sensors and detectors.

99:32So what Webb has are series of detectors like these things. These are like chips of 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 the 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're 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 so that only infrared light falls on that telescope, then you will 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

100:17light has been red-shifted. It's been moved all the way from where it started in the visible light cuz 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 um 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 this fun podcast. Would you like to come on? I've had on Nobel Prize winners and billionaires and whatever." And they come on and I can nerd out about science

101:00with that. It's super fun. Um so, I had the So, I did an interview with this woman, this poor, you know, friend of mine, Allison Kirkpatrick in in Kansas. She um was quoted as saying like, "I can't sleep like the uh the universe is not the way it it's supposed to be. Webb has revealed and just shattered all my dreams about what the universe uh was is really like." And this guy, I don't want to use their names but uh 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

101:47away from one another. He's saying no, that's not what's happening. Instead astronomers are foolish. They've been overwhelmed by this notion of the Big Bang. The Big Bang never happened, but light is losing energy and getting more and more red as it travels to us in an infinite universe. That's infinitely old. Is this person qualified to make this statement? This person has marginal qualifications. They give away the tell in poker language of this guy's non-seriousness is that he wrote the same thing 30 years ago when the Hubble telescope was launched. So he's had the same thing. And he has a book but 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. like 26 something billion years old. So we So I did a podcast with Allison Kirkpatrick and she and I went through

102:36this guy's claims. And and then the next day we we showed what what he was saying is slightly different. He's saying the universe is has a finite age. That a Big Bang-like event happened, but because of these properties of galaxies that I'll explain in just 1 minute, because of the properties of the galaxies, the universe has to be much much older than astronomers claimed. He doesn't say you guys are fools and idiots and he's a legitimate professor in Ottawa. His name is Rajeev 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 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 the tweet that you produced because what happens in academia trying to get attention.

103:27Well, 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 kg 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, you know, meanings restored. But it's important, okay? It's some some amount. Um 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 cool result, I'm kind of sitting on it. I think it could be kind of big." Then the then the press office, we have a press office at UCSD. I've done this before. Uh there's going to be some big news coming out about our result. It's very interesting.

104:16The university starts to promote it. Then a local newspaper, in my case San Diego Union-Tribune, uh in his case, you know, the Ottawa Times or whatever, um they'll start to, you know, 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, I, you know, one of the world's foremost influencers might say something about it. And then Elon Musk might retweet and say that actually he thinks dark matter is even more sketchy than the age of the universe. So this in like the astronomer community has sent people into apoplexy. And they're going, "No, these guys should not be talking about like I have friend like Elon Musk shouldn't even talk about this because he launched a satellite in SpaceX whose whose main job is to detect dark matter." I'm like, "What are you guys

105:00talking about? Like when laypeople, and Elon's a technically minded person, he has a physics background as an undergraduate, but he's not 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. Let's get back to the actual claim itself. Yeah. So So this claim itself This is where we're getting away from this a little bit. So this claim of 26 billion years Yeah. is that Does it make any sense? So it it It can make sense in the in the

105:50following context. Imagine you see a planet and on that planet there are people and they're they're playing around with like these electrified pieces of silicon. And you'd be like, "Wait a second. Like that's really weird. Like that planet's only 4 billion years old. How is it possible that they're not only able to 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, they're It's impossible to reconcile with the Earth being 4.3 billion years old. Therefore, the Earth must be 8 billion years old. What he said, this guy Gupta said, "There are properties of galaxies. They're rotating. They're They're They're too They're appearing too early on the universe's early

106:38history um to have developed into the spiral characteristics and the population distribution of them is too numerous to have occurred in a universe that's only, quote unquote, 13 billion years." And you actually said that. You said like, "I always thought, you know, 13 billion's a pretty big number. You know, now they're saying 27, so what's the difference?" But there's a big difference because implicit in that criticism is that there are flaws and 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 effectively criticizing, not criticizing the

107:26evidence 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 the equivalent precision for me to say I know how old you are exactly, but but if you looked at a 50-year-old person, you could say you know the day they were born plus or minus a week. Like that's the precision with which modern astronomers know the age of the universe. And one guy is coming up with this idea that because there's certain galaxies within it that have formed this. I mean, again, imagine if we found like a hyper-advanced civilization that has warp drives and you know, does every type three Dyson civilizations or whatever, they would not cast doubt on the evolution and the history of the universe itself. That would not cause me to question that. It would cause me to question my

108:14models of how people form and aliens form and stuff like that, but it wouldn't cause me to question the age of the universe. There's nothing related to it. When we are studying the age of the universe and the vastness of space, is it Is there potentially new technology that would expose more than we currently can view that would change your model? Uh In the sense that we are job as a scientist, especially me as an experimentalist, in contrast to people like Brian Cox, um Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eric Weinstein, et cetera, my job is not to prove theories right. My job is actually to prove them wrong. That's really what I get paid to do, is to narrow and winnow out so much so that what is left is the truth. There's a quote by Isaac Asimov. He said, "If you think the Earth is flat, you're wrong. If you think it's a perfect sphere, you're also wrong

109:10cuz it's not a perfect sphere. It actually bulges at the equator. It has properties, you know, cuz the Earth is spinning, and the way it formed it's a little bit like a pear, okay? Um 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 um you know, it said you know, 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 you know, examples of that throughout scientific history. So, there are ways that I would could be caused to doubt the formation story of galaxies, absolutely. I mean, that's almost like predicting hurricanes. You know, I just came through a hurricane to see you, right? There's a big hurricane in San Diego this week and like it's like an

109:56inch of rain, okay? You know how we drive in Southern California, right? Um so even the slick of a trace of rain causes us to go into into total terror. Um but uh but we didn't know where it was going to make exact landfall cuz uh 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. Uh so, in the context of what you said, absolutely. And people like Allison and others, Kirkpatrick, they definitely are would be more thrilled than anybody to discover, well, we do not understand, there's something wrong with our model of how the universe formed. Well, not

110:46how 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 is it whatever levels of detection, whatever methods of detection we have now, is it absolute that if you go to 13.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? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. No, no, I misinterpreted what you said. What I'm saying is like, is it possible that with new technology we would get more information, we'd be able to see more, for and then you would remap this idea? me explain. Sorry, I misinterpreted what you said earlier, but now I can correct it. Yes, and the good news is that's

111:39what the Simons Observatory is trying to do. The Webb telescope has was never built for nor can it say anything about the Big Bang or what caused the Big Bang or formations. It's It's not just, by the way. It's It's That's a pretty big deal, but it's Galaxy formation, properties of stars, exoplanets, the atmospheres, the chemistry, uh civilizations on exo It can do so much cool stuff. Now, now I'm not That's not my scientific, you know, area of expertise. What I study is this, the cosmic microwave background. The There are only three long-range messengers that can be used in astronomy. Astronomy is really hard. Uh unlike, say, biology. Remember in high school you had a like a frog or a cow's eyeball or whatever like, you know, you could dissect it. There's another frog, like your buddy could do it better than you and you should get the same results,

112:27right? There's There's multiple examples, you can do a control, right? You can leave that frog alone and then dissect this frog and then put formaldehyde or whatever. I I don't know what these biologists do, to be honest with you, but when I dissected the frog it came back to life. I was terrible at biology and that's what became an astronomer. It came back to life? What happened? back to No, I'm just kidding. So, um so you can do a variable and a control. How do you do a control when there's only one thing, universe? Ca- 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

113:11them are meteorites, right? This is a meteorite. So, this is a meteorite. That's That's going to be Jamie's, so be careful with it. Nice. 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 of a couple of meteors per hour burning up in the atmosphere. Those came from parts of our solar system or Avi Loeb, our mutual friend, has discovered what he claims, and seems to be pretty likely, is fragments of a meteorite from another solar system that could potentially contain alloy. In other words, not metal. This is pure metal. So, this is your birthday gift. This is one of your birthday gifts.

113:57Oh, thank you. So, that's pretty heavy, right? That's a real meteorite. Now, how do you know it's a meteorite? So, check it out. That is a fragment of the early solar system. It's actually older than the Earth. It's about 4.3 billion years old. I know with a magnet? Well, so these materials are very, very unusual in terms of their composition of relative to things on Earth. Here's a more powerful magnet. That's more powerful than this big one? Yeah, look at it. Yeah, that's a that's some cheap Chinese piece of junk. Wow, that's crazy the difference. this out. These have pull force. This is a robbery. That was like, yeah. Um so, that big meteorite crashed in Argentina in about 7,000 years ago. It was found by tribesmen and tribeswomen in the 1500s, I believe. And they started to take it. And what would you do with a chunk of metal back in the 1500s, Joe?

114:49Make swords out of it. They made arrowheads, which you would do, too, probably, right? So, they just made it into weapons of war and whatnot. And then finally, it was realized in the 18, 1900s it was a meteorite. How big was it? Uh it was huge. Thousands and thousands of pounds, tens of thousands of pounds. Wow. I have one big sample even bigger than that one. Um so, here's an some information for you. Now, these little guys, I give these away on my website. Uh these are because these are much, much tinier little fragments. Those would be some very exclusive arrowheads if you get a hold of those. Yeah. Uh so, my dream is to make these things into rings. You know how like Ryan Holiday has these like a Memento Mori uh coins or whatever? Like So, my merch someday, my dream is to make them into rings or something cuz they look super cool. Have you ever seen a uh

115:32Rolex meteorite watch? Yeah, the meteorite surface. That's the That's the stone. That's it. That's the rock. That's a That's the metal chunk. And how many years ago did this land in the earth? That's 7,000 years ago. Wow. And so, we've I That must have done a fuckload of damage. Yeah, it was a big crater. And that's just one fragment of it. It's strewn over several kilometers, and some of the pieces are even bigger than that one. Wow. a relative So, now the Argentinian government has banned export of it. So, actually, you can't get these. So, this is like a stockpile that I have. Yeah, I give them away, but these are these are fun. So, we did an isotope 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

116:14throughout the cosmos. The other one is gravitational waves. We talked about those earlier. Those travel at the speed of light. These travel 20,000 mph, but that's it's pretty fast, but it's not speed of light, which is 186,000 mph. The 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 weak early interacting um 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 telescopes at Simons Observatory, the one that I talked about earlier, it's a $110 million

116:58project uh which will last over a decade. And that project is aimed at not just measuring the light, the earliest light in the universe. It's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's the leftover heat that was 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 a 400,000 years after the Big Bang. So, you can't see further back than that light, cuz 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 So, that's a thousand times older than what we can see just with microwaves. But that's not good enough, right? We don't want to just see the 380,000 year-old universe. We want to see it at

117:50time 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, that 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 the 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

118:37revealing the answer to those questions. And the way that it will do that is is really a combination of three different tools. The only three tools astronomers have: telescopes, and detectors and telescopes, brains, you know, that do theoretical work and make models, and then computers to simulate and to assess the data. We synthesize those three tools, we hope that we'll find new information. Will it change the age of the universe from 3.13.8 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. Mhm. Like, okay, you can't have a person before there was a planet, so there's some relationship, but it's very tenuous.

119:27Interesting. 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, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, and this is obviously a big big topic. And I really wouldn't have gotten so interested in it. I used to really dismiss it, and I I still am probably you'd call me an alien minimalist because I think there's almost no chance that that there are aliens. Certainly 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 Proxima Centauri B, but we never know about it cuz they don't have thumbs and technology, right? Uh but I even think

120:21that that might be impossible or as close to impossible as a good scientist I shouldn't even say zero chance there are aliens or zero. Um but as you go down the logical chain, as you go down the evolutionary chain of 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, Mhm. trash. Avi Loeb thinks these are trash, you know, or he he went to Papua New Guinea, he scooped up some of these little fragments of a meteorite. You should definitely have him back on. You're It was a phenomenal episode with him. Um he and I had a conversation, very technical, but you know, I like to think I can complement some of the cool stuff that you do by going deep into the

121:01astronomy so that my colleagues uh actually get, you know, some interest out of it, too. But when when we think about craft, now you're not sending things other than sending neutrino beams to us or sending uh 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, you know, took thousands and thousands of years or just orbiting around the Earth. But even if it came from another solar system, we have no idea where it came from. Mhm. Well, I'm going to stop you because you you went way off track a little bit. Um you said uh I want to be clear on what you're saying. Do you think there's no possibility for alien life in the universe? I think it's I didn't say it's no probability. I think the probability is very low, and I can explain why.

121:49So, um have you ever heard of the Drake equation? Yes. Yeah. So, the Drake equation is essentially a parameterization of our of our ignorance about certain things in that 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 uh 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 they have to have made technology for us for them to exist. And we they have to exist in the first place. So, how many of such objects are That's what the Drake equation's really parameterizing. Um

122:36now 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 the And I'm going to What I'm going to do is do a reductio ad absurdum. I'm going to prove I'm going to motivate hopefully I can't prove but I'm going to motivate the illogic or of suspecting that there extraterrestrial intelligence civilizations. Okay, here it goes. I told Let me just tell you um 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 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

123:27Kardashians and slime molds and whatever, right? So it's It's out there. Just like us. Yeah. And I said to you, Joe, what do you think the odds are that those two neighboring planets that are There's no reason physically they shouldn't both be identical? What are the odds that the other one should not have life? What would you say? With the same environment? Um the same uh 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 that think it would be more likely that it would have life. Very likely. It would be extremely likely. Okay, now let me tell you that that planet exists. It's called Mars and I brought you a piece of it here, okay? This is a fragment. Okay, so this goes in order of expense, okay? So this um this I give These things I give away.

124:13That big meteorite is a present for you. Thank you. Um this is a piece of Mars. This I only give to you. I don't have one for Jamie. So That's an actual piece of Mars. So from an asteroid? So what happened was uh the Earth gets hit by meteors, right? All the time. And uh but so do all the other planets. Sometimes some of that material from Mars gets impact. Imagine something that big that Jamie showed before slamming into It's going to eject it from the surface of Mars. That's going to orbit in the clouds of Mars, 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, etc. 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.

124:56That was recovered from Africa. Um that little third of a gram is a slice off a bigger chunk, okay? Um 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. Um 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 it does it not say something? This is called panspermia. Something that sounds dirty, but it's not. I know the term. Yeah. So so we exchange material. And actually Sir Fred Hoyle, the guy who came up with the idea for the name of the Big Bang, uh he actually believed in the steady state model. He believed that's how life was seeded on Earth. The fact is that we've been exchanging

125:44material for literally billions of years. From when the Earth was, you know, just bacteria and Mars was flowing with water. We know Mars was was rich with water. Now, the fact that we don't see any Is that proof it never ha- Absolutely not. But I'm just saying it's a piece of evidence. And that evidence is very hard to come by, right? It's hard to prove a negative, right? It's hard to say that like Mars definitely never had life. stop you there? Yeah. How much detection do we have I mean how much technology is currently on Mars that's looking at signs of life? There've been probes since, you know, Viking and and so forth. of them are capable of detecting signs of life other than like physical All of them have had some capability for precursors to life. In other words, some have been able to detect water, some have had spectrometers that could detect

126:28gases. The car- Right. How many of them have landed? Uh probably 15 or 20. And Mars is what is it? How much smaller than Earth? It's about It's a little Yeah, it's a little bigger than the moon, but So, it seems like a lot of space that we didn't detect things on or didn't even Right. visit. But isn't that the converse of the usual argument that I hear? There's There's a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Mhm. Um, many of them are like the sun. There's a hundred billion galaxies or more like the Milky Way. So, it's a hundred billion squared. Right. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. So, what are the odds? So, usually astronomers will say will do calculations uh a following way. Instead of like asking what's the probability of of that. Um, you know, for example, I've I've been to Antarctica twice. I've been to South Pole, which is you would just

127:19be bored out of your mind probably cuz all it is is like going out to the middle of the Pacific Ocean and freezing it's There's nothing to do there. The coast of Antarctica's really cool. So, this is a rock from there. They have like volcanoes there. That's not for you, but That one I got take back cuz that cost me 50,000. It cost you, the taxpayer, 50,000. But this you can keep. This is from the South Pole's gift shop, Joe. That's a patch from the United States. We have such cool freaking scientists, man. Our country in the world. I just I I learned something I was like, I wonder if Joe knows this. Um, I totally random but just like how cool is freaking science? It's pretty cool. Do you know that I can measure I'll get back to your question in just a sec. They measure like the stress levels of whales. And they can use the stress of

128:04whales to determine if like the Soviets or Russians are testing bombs under under the ocean floor. I'm like, what the hell? I heard this talk recently. Woman studying whale earwax. So, whales don't have ears like ours that stick out. You know, that wouldn't be good for like swimming around, right? There's a lot of friction. But they have like these vestigial things cuz they like evolved from wolves. Like, I always thought like stuff came out of the water and that whales evolved into one. No, no, no, that wolves turned into whales. Really? Yes. Wolves? Yes, I don't know. This Jamie has cuz I am a total ignoramus, but this is a going theory that whales evolved from wolves. So, like most mammals, they have ears. Those ears have been covered over. And what happens to a whale is that it retains earwax. And there's earwax in the whale. The whale doesn't hear with

128:48its ears, it hears it through its jawbone. Uh and that reverberates and that's how it senses sound. And still has vestigial earwax. They sample the earwax of dead whales and they can measure how much cortisol, the stress hormone, Mhm. is in the whale. And they know the migratory patterns of the whales. Wow. And they do some of this research in Antarctica. So, anyway, That's really fascinating. But we're kind of getting off topic. I want to understand how you can look at all of the variables that are possible in terms of the composition of planets, in terms of temperature, in in terms of also different kinds of environments for life that we haven't encountered yet, but could be real. Different kinds of life. Did 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

129:38planet that has a very different environment than Earth, even though Earth has life and it doesn't, and using that one example to sort of dismiss the possibility that in the insanely vast universe that there couldn't be something that's very similar to the conditions of Earth. Yeah. No, That percent right. You're 100% right and I'm not saying that. I'm not saying there's there's I'm ruling it out as a I'm saying there's what's called evidence, prior information. Right. And you should be able to say that how likely it is you should be able to run a simulation. Say, for every time there's a planet that's rotten with life like the Earth, there's some odds in the overlapping communal history of those two planets in a binary planet system that they should share life. And then you'll get a number. I'm not saying I know that number, but you should be

130:23using that as information to sort of say how how what is the fecundity, how likely is it for life to get started. And once it starts going, I believe evolution can take over. But, you just keep, you know, kind kept this this this notion that because the universe is so vast, Mhm. but I'm 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 I either these giant seagulls called skuas that will freaking rip your face off if you leave it out, you know. They're just nasty birds, okay? There's penguins, um and on the continent itself. And uh there's seals, and then there's people, okay? So, this is 1/7 of the continents of Earth. There's almost no other life on Earth. But, imagine you could make the same argument. The Earth

131:10is so big then like wherever there's a continent, there should be life. But, you don't see cities in Antarctica, you don't see Right. other uh 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 there's a potential. If Earth didn't exist, but Earth does exist, and humans do exist, and and Earth is rich with life forms. We know that it's possible. That's true. We know that it's possible given the parameters that Earth enjoys, right? That's That's why I say, if And we know that there's an insane amount of planets out there that could replicate this environment.

131:56Right. So, wouldn't you then say, again, if you knew that life is so incredible, there's these extremophiles that live in volcanic vents 3,000 m under the ocean. Um so, again, you have to say like, what are the odds that we would not see life on Mars or Enceladus? And I'm not saying again, I'm not saying there's no life there. it's just Mars. It's one example, and it could be that life requires a very narrow window that we enjoy. Sure. Now, maybe, but but look at all the other factors that go into the life existence on Earth. We talked about Jupiter before. Mhm. There are scientists that believe that without Jupiter we wouldn't be here cuz Jupiter's like a big vacuum cleaner. There are scientists that believe that if the moon wasn't as close it is it is, you know that the moon is exactly the same angular diameter as the sun from the Earth. Do you know what that

132:41implies for you and and next April 8th when I come and visit you again? There's a total eclipse of the sun. Oh, wow. So I'm going to take you if you're willing. I'm going to take you to show you the sounds like a lot of fun. Uh it'll change your life. we go? Uh we're going to go up to San Antonio. Oh, nice. We're going to drive. It's easy. Or fly. We'll get I'll get a flight. It's only a 90-minute drive. It's not even 90 minutes, right? you ever experienced a total solar eclipse? Um I I didn't experience it cuz I I I remember was it Donald Trump that was staring at the sun? Wasn't it Was him? Yeah, it was. It was him. And I was like, I'm not going to be that guy. I think I did try to look at it. Yeah, now that I'm remembering it. come through here. So anyway No, it was in California. If you were to see it, you would the the experience that you had on Mauna Kea

133:23will seem like, you know, like you're just going down to the to the bar or something. Really? This is change your life. Okay, I'm in. This will change your life. Damn it, we told everybody we're going to San Antonio on April 8th. It's going to be a real problem. Well, we'll find a secret place. Maybe Yeah, exactly. going to show up. Um so so but the reason I bring that up is because it happens to have the exact Have you ever seen the the 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 is is a secret service agent that took the bullet for us, okay? Right. Any one of those could have exterminated Yes. the the the fact that we did have a huge impact 65 million years ago that led to the advent of the mammals to replicate to replace the dinosaurs. The fact that we

134:05have internal terrestrial magnetism that then allows cosmic radiation to avoid impacting the Earth where the population is the largest of all species. The Aurora's are in the north, they're not in the in the equator. We don't see them here. The the existence of plate tectonics, which is lubricated going theory about plate tectonics. I don't know if you've heard this, but that there it's actually there lubricant. You ever heard of like dry graphite as a lubricant that like you put in guns or whatever that the continental shelf is moving over these things. They think that that's a precursor or 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

134:51there'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 slush biological material back and forth in the earlier and that has plate tectonics that's two has a Jupiter nearby. It eventually hits gets hit by a chick to love meteor that kills off the big dinosaurs. It it has diurnal period that's compatible. It has a magnetic Okay, let's just say there's eight of them. Right. Let's say each one has a probability in your God-like cosmic roulette wheel of one in a thousand for each one of those eight things to occur. One over 1,000. Now, if you take that pro 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 raised to the eighth power. You get one 10 to the 24th. Guess what that number is? What?

135:40It's the same as the number of stars in the whole universe throughout history. So, in other words, one thing only eight different things that had to occur to make life in my simplified God computer that Joe Rogan is controlling. And we the probability of those eight things only is only one part in 10 to the 24th. Then the problem is you're you're multiplying a large number by a number that's completely unknown. The probability that all these events can line up to make life. And you're saying anything times infinity is is finite." And I don't agree with that. Is that But we're not necessarily saying that. For For First of all, is it conceivable that there would be solar systems that don't have the sort of asteroid and meteor activity that we do? Uh Of course, yeah. They might. So, wouldn't they maybe not get as pelted by asteroids and meteors and have

136:30more 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 and 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. We're talking about so many different planets. But But why is it that the large number See, again, that's that's the Carl Sagan, you know, "If there's no life in the universe, that's a big awful waste of space." But I don't think that's true. I think that's what he said. I I Well, I believe that he said that. I'm not saying that 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

137:18call biological life is the most significant thing and 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 [ __ ] universe? That's so crazy. As much as I love people, but you don't have any evidence for that, right? I mean, there's What do you mean, evidence for what? You don't I mean, you can't say that that we are not alone. Right. You can't say we're not alone. But I mean, it's just the idea that that's the most important thing. That biological life is the most important I mean, I'm coming from a religious perspective, right? So, I'm going going that we believe Uh-huh. that that humans have infinite worth and

138:05that we're made in the image of God, right? That we have God-like abilities. So, how many other God-like things could there be in the universe? Maybe that And again, I don't want this said that Brian Keating astrophysicist believes that there's definitely no I believe that there there could be life. In fact, I believe that there is life outside of the Earth, but I think it came from the Earth. Interesting. Through panspermia, exactly. Yeah, interesting. You mean in the whole universe itself that it's come from the Earth that Earth is the the most And I think you had Adam Frank, professor at University of Rochester on about 5 or 10 years ago. He talked He does the following calculation. He basically proves that it's likely that we're not the only technological civilization in in the universe over the universe's history. And I love Adam. I'm like, who gives a

138:46you know what? You know what he's saying, Joe? a everybody? no. Listen, Joe. Listen to what he says. I'm listening. He said that there's no there there was at least one civilization, you know, with the probability greater than zero in out of the one 10 to the 24th power, you know, a trillion trillion planets and stars in the universe. That there's been one civilization throughout 13.8 billion years. That doesn't mean in our solar system, it doesn't mean in our galaxy, it doesn't mean in Andromeda, the Small Magellanic Clouds, it doesn't even mean right now. It could be that life could have formed 100 million years after the Big Bang and is gone. So, is it relevant to you? Like it's unknowable. I'm saying it's an What he's saying is at best it's unknowable cuz we can't contact the species that's extinct. We'll never travel to a place that's beyond a few

139:34light-years from Earth. Uh 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'd even bet there's technological life cuz 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 do you can you say that there's life outside of the Earth?" I'd say, "Right now there's zero evidence." You you

140:09would have to admit that, right? There's no evidence. There's no evidence, but a lack of evidence is not evidence that it doesn't exist. absolutely true. So, when you are seeing all this UAP disclosure talk and all this stuff, what is your take on this stuff? So, I've talked to people Ryan Graves who you've had on. I've I've talked to you. I actually did a podcast with his wingman, one of his former Navy pilot wingman. I listened to it. Yeah, thanks. It's very good. Yeah, I shouldn't have said thanks It was very good. It's very very interesting. I appreciate I'll put that put that on my resume. So, they So, we talked and and Remember earlier like 2 hours ago I was going to ask you for advice and I just 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

140:56and for one reason or another, maybe it's your past history, maybe it's researches you've done independently that even an expert hasn't done and you're thinking this person's wrong or this person's making a mistake. Has that ever happened to you and if so, how do you deal with that as a podcaster? Well, it's complicated. I mean, I always do or try to do my very best to let someone express himself fully before I interject. And but there are sometimes we have to say that's not true. That this is not what you're saying is been disproven and this is like we should show how it's been disproven or you know, you could be talking about something that I'm an expert in. Like if someone wants to bring someone wants to like from UFC for example, if someone wants to say "Oh, there's only if you wanted to fight in the UFC, all you need to do is learn

141:44kung fu." If someone said that and I'd be like, "You're out of your mind." Or it's as fake as wrestling. Right. You could say you're totally full of it. Well, that's someone that's delusional. But I mean, you mean anybody watches the fights know that they're real. But but seeing But if someone had like this very distorted perspective on something that I know a lot about, yeah, maybe I would be like that you shouldn't say that because that's this is why that's not accurate. So I'm talking to Ryan Graves, and I've talked to Lieutenant Andy Tric who was the wing woman, I guess you'd say, of Commander David Fravor who you had on. Um I've talked to them and I've talked to them Okay, look, I'm a pilot. I fly little Cessnas. It's not going to be like, you know, I'm talking to super hornet pilots and I'm like a schmuck, right? But, you know, when you see

142:27things like I'm told like I can't question that 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 he said to me, he said, "You relying on hand-eye coordination or you relying on your innate abilities as a pilot or your you know, your ability to perceive things is going to get you killed." Because and he wasn't like some military pilot. I don't know if my stuff father was, but but the point being, you're trained not 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

143:10evidence versus me as a scientist or even as a layperson. Okay. Okay. Okay. Um so we're talking and then I hear things like, "Well, he witnessed this or he saw this or he has data about that." And by the way, been to my house. I've had him for Shabbat dinner. You know, and I like Ryan a lot and I like Andy Tric and Fravor sounds really good. Um 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 understand about physics. Right. They're not physicists and I'm not a pilot, okay? 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

143:56Super Hornet Mark D that he was flying, okay? Recently upgraded. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. Fraver and Dietrich, when they were flying, they you know, saw things and they tried to perceive them from great altitude, something the size of a school bus, you know, and how fast it was moving relative to ground. Okay, then there's data, then there's things from the Princeton. So, I've looked into these things. I know limitations, I know a 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 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

144:40important, very significant what he's doing. Because I think at best, at worst rather, it could preserve the lives of pilots. If it's some Chinese spying balloon, it could be American psyop, it could be doing all sorts of things. Or Grush, I don't know if you talked to him, I haven't talked to him. You know, claiming but non-human biologics, which is like, you know, non-cow animal, okay? What is that? What does that mean? Is it is it a slime mold, you know, my favorite thing? What did you think of the Fraver video of evidence? So, this is the Tic Tac or the Yeah. So, this is going back to 2004. And by the way, all these things occur in military predo- preponderance of occur in military areas. Very important point. What's happening with Ryan, and I've flown through that area. You know, you can fly through it. If I take you up my

145:22little Cessna, I will fly you through this warning area. It's not some like secret thing where Area 51 is blowing up stuff or nuking alien artifacts. restricted airspace out there though that you're not allowed to area, which means that if you go into it, you could be in you could be intercepted, but for fun. Not for fun, for training. So, what an F-18 will do Christ, they're going to practice on you? Oh my god. That's how they train their radar systems. god, they're going to practice on you if you fly your little [ __ ] propeller plane. Do you know how horrifying that would be? If those Jews just buzzed up on you in a fighter jet. killers. Oh my god, and those things are so [ __ ] fast. They're fast. with the Blue Angels once. You did? Yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing. puke? Yeah, I did. I did puke. I did puke and

146:07I was so embarrassed because I had gotten through seven and a half G's and I made it. You know, from hooking, you know, the thing you do where you go hook hook. You're you're forcing blood into your brain and I did that at seven and a half G's and then I failed to do it on a lesser turn and I blacked out. out. I did what Tito Ortiz [ __ ] up. No, it wasn't like his was crazy. He was in one of those uh Centrifuge? Yeah, that that thing's insane. What I did was I I could have survived that one easier. It was not as bad, but I didn't do it in time. And it was like it came upon me so quick and then when I came out of it I threw up. I had Hazard Lee is he's a great he's got a good It's wild because it's like an elevator door. You're you you see the black closing on the sides, like literally like an elevator door. And it's almost

146:54like you're forcing the door open like when you're doing that, you're forcing that blood into your head and it keeps you conscious. ever been knocked out? No, never been unconscious. That's wild. I haven't either thankfully, but my my kids are getting bigger. Everybody can be. I just haven't been hit the right way by the right person. That's right. Thank god. God, I've seen a lot of them. Yeah. Um but the the point is that like that if you're dealing with like that kind of speed is [ __ ] insane. Oh, yeah. But the thing that they're describing, that Ryan Graves is describing, is something that's able to stay stationary at 120 knots of wind. The thing that the Commander Fravor and what their radar detected was that this thing had gone from 50,000 feet to 50 feet in a second. Okay. So What would happen if that happened? You're actually holding right over

147:37there. What would happen if that happened, yet any kind of material Right. traveling through the Earth's atmosphere at such a speed would be at least illuminated and at least probably be incinerated. But, okay. So, then the argument becomes, well, maybe they have advanced meta-materials 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 Goop done in the Galaxy thing did. He keeps adding If you keep adding parameters to your theory in order to make it fit observations Okay. Yeah, but observations backed by data. And this data is from these very advanced military detection systems that did detect this physical object that was witnessed by two fighter jets. Isn't another possibility that there's some method of propulsion that doesn't It's not propulsion at all. Instead,

148:25it's manipulating gravity, manipulating whatever the [ __ ] it's doing to go from one point in space to another point in space almost instantaneously. But, not biological. Not like a physical thing inside of it. I'm talking about like a drone. Okay. So, the reason you've heard it or I mentioned this Chicxulub, which is the meteor crater off the Yucatán Peninsula. That was the theory in which that was kind of unveiled was a physicist, nuclear physicist, Nobel Prize winner named Luis Alvarez, who plays a small role in Oppenheimer. Um that you'll see. And that uh he was responsible for radar in the uh World War II as part of one of his jobs. And he realized something that they could do. So, radar works by uh um interrogating an object with radio frequency waves that travel at the speed of light and bounce off an object and

149:14you can get uh timing between when they uh 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. Um and it's totally similar in concept to what I just what you described with the the advanced military instrument. Luis Alvarez was a creative uh incredibly brilliant scientist. When he was working on that planet, he knew that the Germans and the Japanese could have similar technology. And in fact, they were starting to develop it. It It turns out the allies were good at not only the Manhattan Project, but they were good at developing radar, and both were the technologies that were crucial. But, the Germans were developing it, too. He realized there's something called the inverse square law, which is that the

149:50signal gets weaker, not as the distance away from it, but it gets 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." Cuz 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 plane to

150:31blow up the 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? In other words, you combine necessarily think it's alien. What do you think it is? Um Sia. I think it's No, I think there's a 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. That I think But, when and why is it

151:23I'm sorry. Uh when when they're talking about it openly, as soon as they start talking about it openly, Uh crafts out of this world. I smell [ __ ] Like I I said I've said it multiple times in the show. I There's something about this that doesn't feel real. And I 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 impo- There was There would be no context other than fiction movies. So like I wouldn't be able to fit it in anywhere but 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.

152:13I feel like I'm being duped. You know what really spoke to me and You know what really spoke to me and I felt sorry because um again, I haven't met Fraver and he seems like a patriot and again, he's got more bigger balls than I do. When he got back to the carrier, do you know what they kept doing? Yeah, they're [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] wouldn't they do it in restricted airspace where the [ __ ] military operates all the time? Of course they would like Is it 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. Yeah, I mean this is like It seems

152:55to me that that's more likely. But then again, then there's these instances of people encountering these things. And the the concept of interdimensional travel, whatever that means. Whatever interdimensional travel. I know Grusch tried to sort of explain that in some sort of a strange way and physicists pulled it apart and said this is doesn't make sense. That's not how it works. But the concept of exposing other Like wasn't there some What was this Let me find there's there's something I saved that I wanted to bring up with you. There's some some God, was it a like a new I'll I'll find it. 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 matter where you could conceivably prove that there is something else outside of what we're physically capable

153:55of experiencing. no, you're absolutely right. In fact could come from there. Okay, that's That's where it gets That's next level. That's a wormhole too far. Yeah. Uh but but but it is true. In fact, when I said the inverse square law, that is a very very accurate way it. Yeah, sure. I'll just I'll just talk about this. But in the in a higher dimensional space than three spatial dimensions plus one time dimension that we enjoy. I found it. The light and or gravity would decrease with an exponent greater than two. And so, these black holes that crash together and release gravitational wave energy, again, my friend David Spergel, they've been able to set limits on the dimensionality of space-time. And it's very very close to to three dimensions of space. And from an object that's a billion light years away, Joe. So, yes, beyond that, anything goes. And but but

154:41go ahead with your I sent it to Jamie. This is the thing. It's It's definitely not my research. New four [ __ ] pop-ups. New force of nature scientists close to discovering a fifth force. So, what is this? They discover mysterious subatomic particles disobeying the laws of physics. want to look at your face when you get incredibly let down. Okay, here we go. Yes, let me down. So, um when we talk about forces of nature, so there are 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. Um, when we look at these particles, we say

155:26for 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 that boson communicates the force to that massive object. So, the Higgs boson is what gives particles mass, and that's the that's the mechanism by which we acquire mass and inertia, resistance to motion. Uh, electricity and magnetism, they're communicated by a boson called the photon. The photon is the gauge carrying force that that propagates the interaction between magnetic fields, electric fields, charges. And then there's strong and weak nuclear forces. We don't have to get into those. Um, this is saying that there seems to be a new calculation, a new new data that's been discovered in what are called muons. And these muons have a relationship between their charge and their spin.

156:17And that charge spin relationship for one reason or another should be exactly in a ratio of two. So, their spin versus their their charge their magnetic type of property to their spin. And so, this uh, little dreidel, your last one of your last pieces of gifts here. So, there it goes there. Uh, dreidel. And then it's a 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's called precession. That precession for a muon, you can think of as a little tiny spinning top also, and that will have a special relationship between its magnetic properties as it's spinning to its physical angular momentum, which is what this thing is doing. It's like the precession of the equinoxes. Uh, exactly wrong. No, no, it it's yes,

157:02I think you're right. Yeah. Still going. No, it's true. Yeah. Okay, and now I'm going to do something else for you, okay? So, you got that to spin for like uh, I will give you a hundred thousand dollars if you can get this thing to spin in both directions over 20 times. This thing? This thing. That's all I want you to do. So, what is this What is this thing? It doesn't matter what it is, Joe. I found it in a crashed UFO. No. No, no, that didn't count. You can keep trying. I'll give you as many tries as you want. Okay, that's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Now, do the Try it again. What's the best way to do it? Just I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to give you 100 grand. I'm just trying to s- I don't have Spotify money. That was the original way you did it. Now, do it the other way. Okay. Do it counterclockwise. better at it. Can't do it. Why is that?

157:54Look at it. Is it symmetrical? Isn't that cool? This is a simple There's nothing crazy about it. It's called a rattleback. That thing has symmetry about one more than one axis and such that when you spin it in the direction clockwise, it'll spin forever like the dreidel. But, if you try to spin it the other way, it stops and goes back cuz there's torque being is the other way. Wait. That's the first way. Now, do it the other That's counterclockwise. Okay, stop. Do it the other way. See? Ah, interesting. Yeah. Isn't that cool? But, it To the ordinary eye, if I just showed you this stops and goes the other direction. So, muons will have this property that they don't have this exact relationship that's predicted by theory. Again, this is what scientists do. They have a model for how nature should behave. We make observations. Now, those observations

158:39disagree at a very significant level such that the odds of that occurring by fluke chance is about 1 in 30 million or something like that. And so, now they're saying the one way to explain it is if there's another type of boson, which would mean another type of force, which would be the fifth force for those keeping 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 There are theories like that, but not for the muon experiment. Okay. Um what do you could bring it back to the UAP thing. What do you think is going on? Um, well, you know, the Occam's razor approach is is to think about it as, you know, maybe it's a it's a it's a variety of sources. First of all, Grusch, where is he from? What is his Grusch, sorry. What is he? And I'd love to talk to him.

159:24He seems like an interesting patriotic guy. Well, he doesn't have physical experience with anything. He doesn't even have I direct eyewitness what I'm saying. He wasn't He wasn't but he's not claiming he does. What he's claiming is that he uncovered these programs that he thinks as a a patriotic American the world and as a citizen of the world that people should know that there's crash retrieval programs and that they are in possession of biological entities that they keep in freezers. Again, I I don't want to I don't want to condemn him. I don't want to have any smattering of an ad hominem attack, but I'll say one thing. And and just you tell me if I'm being an A-hole, okay? He was given the opportunity on perhaps the greatest stage he'll ever have to name names and to say different things. And he didn't name them. And I've heard things from like Lou Elizondo

160:08indirectly. My friend Curt Jaimungal has talked to me many times. But but I've never I've never talked to him. But but they'll say things like I don't I can't do that. It'll ruin my life. And And look, y'all, I'm I'm a coward compared to both of these gentlemen, right? But at a certain level in front of senators, congressmen, women to say like I can't disclose that. But you're you're a whistleblower. Like like you're blowing a whistle. You have protection. We will protect you. We will defend the freak out of you. but he's not done. What he's trying to do is get permission to discuss more things. So, he has permission to say what he said so far. This is according to him. Right. He is attempting to get permission to discuss more. These are the things that he could have discussed with them in the SCIF. That's why he brought it up this

160:54way. He's trying to do this all by the book. And it it appears that there's both resistance and support for this. Well, this is the argument I have with Avi Loeb. When when he came on my show. He he talked about this object Oumuamua, which is this interstellar object that he claims is either a junk debris or maybe it's a tourist scout or a spy drone. much more reflective rather, right? It has 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, I love Avi, I've had him on many times. I said, "Avi, you know, you happen to also be friendly cuz 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

161:40and I'm happy to recommend people that that work on it to you when it comes out called the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, far not too far from our my Simon our Simon's observatories. 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 what if this is one-time-only event? I said, "Avi, I'm 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, freaking hurricane and a tornado and an earthquake, but it's the absolute worst place to be a sportscaster because we of all the major cities in the United States, we have never won a world championship in any sport, okay? So, it's horrible. So, last year then the Padres got into the

162:27division series and I'm a huge Padres fan. I I should not have said, "Well, the Padres are in the division series even though it's first time, you know, in since 19 since Tony Gwynn was playing and and they've been around for 55 years, I'll just wait till next year." No, no, no, no, no. I I made every I tried 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 Breakthrough Starshot. Have you heard about this? No. They're going to send uh billions of little cell phone cameras That sounds insane. to laugh. Anyway, they're spending a hundred million dollars on it. Um and uh

163:18they're going to shoot these things there and they'll get there in four uh 20 years and they'll transmit at the speed of light. It'll take another four years to get back to the Earth cuz it's four light-years away. Um instead of having him spend a hundred million on that, why don't you get him to, you know, uh get a little CubeSat and shoot it off and go catch up to 'Oumuamua while it's still in your freaking neighborhood? totally possible to do? Totally possible. It's not It's not So you think he's resisting that because it doesn't like he doesn't want it to be disproven because he's getting a lot of attention off of this idea that this is this interstellar object is something from an alien civilization. I think that's too venal. I I don't think I don't think he's doing it out for attention. I just think he's he's he's too in love with his numbers. He's

163:55too in love with his calculations. with the idea of it. But he's certainly there is a tempta- there has to be a temptation to getting recognition because I had never heard of him until a few years ago and now I hear about him constantly. He's in all these interviews and and this is not disparaging. No, no, I know. It's just that there's a there's an impulse that people have to continue to do something that gets them a lot of recognition. I mean, this is this is the number one number if he if it's possible to go take a look at that thing, how much would it cost to go take a look at that thing? It would probably cost less than a billion dollars, I'd say. And this guy that he's friends with is I'm far be it for me to tell a billionaire how to spend his or her money, but I'm just saying think you're going to talk Elon Musk into going looking at it.

164:36All right. Well, Elon's another kid. So, I know you've you So, you have this piece of Mars, right? So, he's trying to get to Mars now, right? He wants to die on Mars. And hopefully, God willing, it won't be on impact, okay? That would be horrible if he dies on impact. But um but Joe, have you ever thought like uh which one one his 10 kids, I mean, Can I have a [ __ ] He's got 10 kids. Who's he going to leave behind? Like, who Like, to do that to Mars I think he's like, he wants to go to Mars. He said he wants to die on Mars. By the time he is able to do this, they'll probably be fully grown adults. Maybe they can go visit him. They can go come with him. Apparently, the idea is to be able to come back. Just just like, okay. I saw The Martian. Did you like that? Yeah, I love The Martian. Andy Weir is a UCSD uh he didn't graduate from UCSD, but he wrote it.

165:20Um Yeah. But I mean It It is possible that one day we will have the technology to colonize other planets, right? Do we have the Do we have the reason to do it, Joe? What is the reason? Like, this is what I do. Isn't sometimes the reason just to be able to do it? Or maybe to ensure the human race survives and if there's some sort of a natural disaster on Earth. Do you know what Nixon wrote on the plaque that went to the moon on Apollo 11? No, what? Said that we came in peace for all mankind. Hm. That's political [ __ ] right? It was a war against the Soviets. It was part of the Cold War. It was a war of propaganda. And it was important. It did a lot for science. Guess what? We haven't been back to the moon in 50 years, right? So, if it was so important for peace and for technology, why haven't we been back? Okay? So, it's to say what we did it's the Edmund

166:09Hillary thing, you know, climb Everest cuz it's there, right? But um but Elon has said the following. He has said, "I want to go to Mars so that humankind becomes interplanetary." Then you ask, I love to keep asking why questions, right? Those are so annoying. Like, your kids keep asking you why, you know what the ultimate answer is? Because I freaking said so. Go to sleep, right? So, with with With him, I would keep asking why. Why do you want to send people to Mars? Why should humankind be interplanetary? So that the flame of consciousness never gets extinguished. Why? Um Why can't you go into the ocean? Why can't you build bubble cities? Why can't you build floating cloud cities? Earth gets destroyed? Okay, but why? Why what? Why Why Why continue with humanity? Not just humans. No, he's talking about human consciousness, which could also

166:57mean like AI stuff or whatever. But But here's my Here's my bigger point. You've heard You had Ryan Holiday on recently. He's got these memento mori coins, right? Memento mori means remember you're going to die. Allegedly, Roman emperors would have some courtesan walking next to them so they wouldn't have too much hubris. They would say, "Remember you're mortal, you're going to die." Um that was done to motivate them to suck the marrow out of life while you're alive, right? So, my question at some level is, well, is that true only of individuals? Or like could it be true of a civilization as a whole? Could it be true that like, "Hey, wait. We shouldn't be dedicating all this effort." And I think it's I wouldn't say it's as as unlikely as life, you know, having iPhones on Proxima Centauri b, but but I'd say it's pretty unlikely that we're going to do

167:43that in the next 100 years, have colonized Mars. It's It's incredibly difficult from a technological standpoint, from a biological standpoint, a psychological standpoint, uh the raw material There's tremendous number of reasons that it Sure, but if technology progresses the way it has since 1800, the way I mean, it's World 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. So, there's And if you say, "Why?" Well, why not? Well, why not is a legitimate It's fascinating. Because it's interesting. Because people want to do it. Because it would be significant to have human life living on a terraformed Mars. Put it on our resume. Maybe we could use Mars as like a test like how to recharge an atmosphere if we [ __ ] it up.

168:30Right, but isn't it better just not to [ __ ] it up? Yeah, it is not It is better not to [ __ ] it up, but it's also interesting. Like if Why go to the moon? Why Why send satellites up there? Why Why look at stars? Why all those things? It's part of this human desire to constantly innovate and move forward. But I I question the Moore's law kind of compatibility. And actually you talked about this with Michio Kaku and and he was in his new book about quantum supremacy. Mhm. Uh which is which is this this kind of faith in these exponential curves. And exponential curves are really tricky ammo mofos because you know, they sneak up on you for a long time like and then 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. Right.

169:13a finite amount of oil because there's only a finite amount of free carbon in this file of fossil fuels, etc. But it's it's it's worse than that. As we get more and more um kind of technologically capable, we get better and better at keeping the Ponzi scheme going in the sense like the ore grade of of gold used to be like in California 1849, right? They would stumble upon a huge brick rock of gold. Then 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. They're 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,

170:00fuel, rocket parts, etc. But also for the you know, the coming AI and computing revolution. In other words, Moore's law is saturating for a very interesting reason. It's not that it's not that the the speed of the computers is still doubling, but the amount Do you care about the speed of your computer? No, you care about what I can do with it, right? How fast is the web page load up, right? Well, so you can have the fastest computer, but it's it's loading really slowly cuz there's so many other people that want to take advantage and use that same resource. It's a very highly in demand resource. Well, that will happen with quantum computing, too. It'll 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

170:37want to use them cuz they're so good. They're victim of their own success in a certain sense. Same thing can happen with mineral. So, the question is do we get there? And if not, well, what what would that mean? Would would we have like a civilization existential crisis? I don't know. I I really don't know. But even all those 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 like stable materials? Yes and no. I mean, there's but like I said, there's only so much carbon in the earth. There's only so many pre-biologic fossils. it be recycled? Can't Can't we find new ways to use it? Can't we figure out a way to Sure. Yeah, we can. But the question is

171:20these different things have to overlap. And actually, I just, you know, cuz I kind of was was interested to go back just the UAP thing for 1 minute, which was um think about the human factors involved in some of like what what Grusch Grusch Grusch Grusch is is describing. Imagine that 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? Um so, there were some people there that witnessed something. They might have been military, they might have been research scientists. People had to go there, identify it, notify people. Then people had to go there, pick it up, clean it up, bring it on a flatbed truck, transport it, store it, um keep it processed. Then there's biologics, right? He's saying there's biologics. So, the biologics had to be

172:04processed by a biologist, not by the same a corpsman who collected it. Then and guess what? All these guys have wives or husbands or bosses or friends and stuff. So, my friend James Altucher is a very big influence in my podcasting career as well. He He talks about a conspiracy number. Like, what's the what's the maximum number of people that can possibly be part of a conspiracy before it gets out, right? Before it's exposed. And there's there's also overlap between that and their time scales, right? Did you talk about a sustained conspiracy? If this is the Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that this is true and this is So, but this is now coming out now and and you tweeted about this or you mentioned this a couple of weeks ago on a podcast. I forget with whom. But you said the the atomic age coincided with the age of Roswell. Yeah.

172:51You mentioned that and that's true. And there was another thing that happened during that age, the quantum age. So, quantum mechanics, which is the discovery of forces, fields, maybe fifth forces, and unseen things, spooky action at a distance, aliens, and and then the notion of atomic holocaust, etc., 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 but how is it because now we're also talking about like UAPs, fifth forces, all these other things. And now instead of 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 km above the Earth's surface.

173:37And 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 that are happening on 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 not dismiss it, but also be precise about it. Well, it also depends upon what kind of people you're talking about. You know,

174:24if 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 why 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 and you don't know what's true what's not true. Um the the what what is fascinating to me is when Have you seen the Go Fast video? Yeah. Yeah, what do you think about those videos where you there's no heat signature, no visible means of propulsion, and these things are whipping through the sky? I mean, you've talked to Mick West and

175:09and other people. Now I'm not saying he's a scientist in the sense that he's not somebody I am. But some of these things are, you know, that it always comes down to like, well, whose data is it? You know? Right. See, these are fighter jet pilots that are seeing these things. And they're discussing it. Play that video so you could listen to their their discussion of it while you're they're seeing this thing. Mhm. What do you think it is? So, when I look at those things, there's a couple of different things that you have to look at from an optical perspective, from a sensor perspective, from a them talk. So, right now we're looking at this video where this thing seems to be trying to tracking it. Their their SO, OBVIOUSLY they're freaking out. Yeah, so onto it with their weapon system. Yeah. So, so there's something called scale and variance, which is where you

176:25can't really tell in certain phenomena. Fractals are like Have you ever seen like the Mandelbrot set? So, no matter how much you zoom into it or zoom out of it, it looks the same. And there are lots of features like that. One of the manifestations of that is the ocean surface. There are waves on top of Have you ever seen the beautiful Japanese woodcut where it's like wave on top of wave? Incredible. Um so, there you're seeing a lot of waves, but it's impossible to have any depth perception, right? Cuz we're only getting a single view of it. Mhm. Uh and there's a gyroscopic stabilization tool that they're using in the FLIR system. That's measuring it, right? So, there is a heat signature. That's how they can see it on FLIR, the forward-looking infrared. I mean, propulsion. Uh It's like it's universal. It's not like there's something coming out the back

177:02like a jet engine where you could see it clearly. So, 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 that's actually going with the wind. Can't they detect how fast it's moving? Uh no. So, when not not from that video, you can't necessarily their systems, from their weapon systems, they can't detect how fast Like they clearly they are having a hard time locking onto it. So, I asked Ariel Kleinerman and and and Ryan about this and they said it's class Like they wouldn't tell me what their radar is capable of saying, only that they can use it to determine certain properties of things. very evident in that video that they were having a hard time catching it because it was moving at a very high rate of speed. This is what 2004? I think this this video one? Yeah.

177:43So, they they're trying to lock onto this thing and it's moving too fast and you see the crosshairs try to keep up with it and then finally it locks onto it and that's when they cheer. That we got it and then they say, "Look at that thing go." Right. Don't you think they would have an understanding of the speed that something's moving and and not think of it as a balloon that's just floating around? Well, remember, this is stabilized. So, they're locking on So, they're moving in a perspective where Right, but don't Don't you think their equipment has the ability to detect speed? Do you know how big the field of view of that thing was? I don't. Yeah, so we don't either. don't know if they I don't know if they released how large they estimate it is. I mean this is all leaked video, right? Right. So, if you were to look through this tele- sorry, if you were to look

178:24through this telescope at the moon and there was a balloon on the tele- uh you know, floating in front of the moon and you could see it and it was big enough like 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 a as a size of an Embraer jetliner, yeah, that's freaking fast, right? If it's a size of a balloon being carried by the wind that you are stabilized as in a parcel of wind, it might not be that Well, we're assuming that there's wind. We're assuming it's being carried by the wind. But we're assuming it's being carried by the wind in the same direction. We don't know which way the wind was blowing. We don't but what my point is that they seem to think that that was very unusual. And these aren't

179:05guys that are just like, "Oh my god, a balloon, shoot it." Well, that's why I went back to the feeling of pity that and again, he doesn't need my pity, but 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? Um and so, you then your your compatriot, your comrade comes back to the deck and you put like Independence Day posters on his rug and you've seen it too. It doesn't That's not what I would do. If my kid comes to me and says, "I saw, you know, the boogeyman." or something she's like really nervous. I don't say like, "Well, you know, like let me tease her about it." Like no, no, no. Okay, I wouldn't do that to my kid, but I would definitely do that to my friends. If one of my friends said they

179:52saw an alien, 100%. I would take a rubber alien, I'd put it in their bed, have it tucked in. Yeah, but just for fun and that's what those guys were doing to him. You're making it seem like they they they're like horribly insulting him. They're just busting balls. say this. Your pilot, let's say you charter a private jet sometime, okay? You're out with Lex and then you're going to Vegas, right? And and you charter a private jet, right? Um you're on the jet. The guy who's in there um is is flying the plane and he you found out that he actually was an ex-military pilot and he did see one of these things. And so you get um uh one of your friends, your buddies dresses up as an alien. Bust into the cockpit and start I'm the alien that you find out You wouldn't do I mean That seems like a silly comparison. I'm just making a comparison their life is threatened though.

180:36He comes back from a flight claiming to have seen UFOs and his friends bust his balls. This happened many times. But that's in the military. That's normal military [ __ ] But Ryan's saying the opposite now. Ryan's saying the op- no, these people are scared for their safety now. Now he's doing the Americans for Safe Aerospace that he has to be and and part of their mission is to protect pilots and destigmatize This is the uh the square and a circle. The the cube around a a sphere Is it a cube around a sphere? It's either or. It could be. I'm on my website. a black cube inside a sphere? I made a I made a very expensive thumbnail for my video with Ryan Graves. sphere in a cube a sphere inside a cube? Yeah. So this sphere inside a cube is a repeating theme, right? They see a lot of these. East Coast. On the East Coast. Yeah, on the West Coast too.

181:22So do you think these things are drones? What do you think these things are? Well, do you remember the Chinese spy balloon? You know, that came about recently. And do you remember how we didn't shoot it down? Yeah. Do you remember when that came about? It was like right before this disclosure was about to get get kicked off. I mean, there's some weird things that are going on. There's certainly things those two things together, one thing that moves in a very bizarre way that they can't seem to replicate. They don't know how these things like stay stable at 120 knots according to all of his equipment unless their equipment totally sucks. And this is like the equipment that got upgraded in 2014. Right, but then they say I can't tell you about the equipment. And so so what But they can tell you that when the equipment was upgraded, that's when they

182:03started detecting these things. So if the equipment is accurate and the equipment is upgraded and then they put it on these jets and these guys are detecting these things and then there's visual confirmation of these things by multiple pilots and it's a reoccurring thing. They see them in the same areas all the time. Well, then why wouldn't the government go out? Why wouldn't they be sending out I asked Ryan that I said why don't they send out sorties every day if they're if they're doing it at nothing last because they could do it for years. Right? It could be. Maybe it's theirs. The US shoots down another flying object over Canada. What did they shoot down? What did they shoot down? They didn't say. The I'm sure that well, I had Mike Baker on who used to be the CIA and he was explaining all these Chinese balloons and all that. is from Eric Weinstein shared this

182:44yesterday. He said there was these three different ones on the screen. There's a map of three different NORAD shots that happened. This is from time and like He just says like I don't remember these happening. Do you? Do you know how much each one of those missiles cost by the way? No. It's over a million dollars. Didn't they miss once? Yep. Haha. Cuz you're not like shooting at that [ __ ] missile go? These balloons that people don't realize that when you're at altitude it's not like this. So like the pressure outside is almost equal to the pressure inside. So if you shoot it with like with bullets and pepper it with that you know bullet it does nothing. It's just like opening a door in a warehouse. You have to like blow detach it from the payload. That's why they shot it with a missile. Oh, wow. are a million bucks a pop but but I

183:20wanted to to just get get back to the The possibility of what they are. The possibility of what they are. So so I always have to look for the simplest explanation of what they could be and certainly the simplest I I don't think anyone agree would disagree. The simplest explanation is certainly not these are interdimensional beings that have traveled across the literally equivalent of you know, 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 of Virginia. You know. Maybe they don't care if they get sighted. Maybe that's part of their fun. But yeah, right. So so then then there's a teleological explanation. We're trying to propose a mechanism by which that motivates some species or something to

184:04do that, right? Now, Avi, to get back and give him his credit cuz I don't want to be perceived as I'm I'm 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 mastered that there are creatures that mastered the interdimensional manipulation of space-time, that would shortcut me and my colleagues four or five centuries, right? And it would be just a revolution. Think of the Nobel Prizes you could win, right? Getting a tenure. You could get tenure. If you were allowed to have access to it. Right. If they do have some sort of a back engineering program, who could

184:48conceivably be qualified to do that? This is where I disagree with Eric. I always say Eric, you know, um Eric is my atomic clock, you know, they say like a broken clock's right twice a day. Like Eric's almost always right. He says my atomic clock. So, I get a great deal of from Eric. But, um but but you know, but when he says that, you know, these objects, you know, that we need where are the theoretical physicist studying this? I claim don't really need theoretical physicist to study it yet. You might instead want experimental physicist such as myself and my colleagues. That people that are used to dealing with data, with uh sensors, with uh 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 these aren't uh showing up

185:33only in the radar microwave region of the spectrum, infrared. Why would they choose the narrow band of wavelengths that some marginal species of, you know, primitive apes, you know, evolved apes have sensitivity to, namely this narrow window? This is infinitesimal You're saying why wouldn't they hide themselves? Why wouldn't there be other modalities in which they're observed other than uh visible sightings, eyewitness sightings, which in other words, why couldn't they they the the uh signatures that they travel and 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. We My whole job, Joe, is staring up at the sky with

186:17things like this in all different dimensions and looking for objects that don't seem to make sense or looking for phenomena that have never been observed before. Why would you assume that they would want to hide? I'm not saying they would want to hide, I'm just saying they seem to be evasive, right? So in other words, they're Maybe just the way they travel is so insane that you can't really detect them. They only go on Catalina Island and Newport News. In other words, how come they're not over the um the observatory that's in Western Texas that the University of Texas operates? get spotted over military bases? Well, that's what I'm saying. So does that lead to you So the fact if I just told you nothing but they happen to appear in restricted warning areas, military areas, uh would you say that they're Would you say that makes them more

186:56likely to be aliens? I wouldn't say that. say more likely. I would say if I was an alien and I came here to observe a territorial ape with nuclear weapons, I would probably check out where the nuclear weapons are. I'd be like, "What are these [ __ ] crazy [ __ ] up to? They're blowing themselves up by dropping bombs out of planes and they have enough missiles pointed each other all over the world to essentially eliminate all life." Well, that's the opposite of that. I would look. I think that's where I would look. I think I would look over those military bases and I think I'd maybe let myself be known. Shot them all down. Yeah, Marist we're the best. We're number one. The aliens know it. I mean, there have been multiple sightings. I'm sure you know about this. Yeah, but the the if you look at the map of sightings that

187:41Yeah, it's it's That's far more America. It's It's a very American-themed idea, particularly because of Roswell and Correct. And you know that that when Venus, the planet Venus, is not visible, that UFO sightings go down by over 40%. I'm sure. Um well, I mean, you can explain away the vast majority of them. And then you can also have There's people that hallucinate. There's people that have They have mental health breakdowns where they actually actually believe that things happen that didn't really happen. And some of those things could be a UFO abduction. There's not We know that people have wild vivid dreams. And then we know that the [ __ ] the border to dreams and consciousness is Why are all these UFO abduction stories at night? Is it Were you dreaming, Bob? Bob, are you dreaming? Did they really take touch your butt and take your sperm?

188:32Here here's a You know what I mean? It's like just but it's not like they happen while you're at work. It's not like they abduct you when you go to the restroom. And you know, and all of a sudden, something hovers outside the window and pulls you through and You know what I mean? It's like always in the middle of the night. But let me ask you this. Um so, when I brought this up, when I when I first got interested in this, I was really I should say, you know, I I have this disposition as you've already uncovered that I don't believe that there's extraterrestrial um technology in the whole universe with with high confidence or even with moderate degree of confidence. Um so, therefore, I certainly don't believe that there are, you know, I'm not predisposed to believe that there are alien technology crafts visiting the Earth, right? Right.

189:17So, 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 and part of the reason I got interested to take this seriously is my friend David Spergel. He's in my 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, well-meaning perhaps, but has this deep distrust of science,

190:02scientists, the scientific method? I mean, how do I 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. I love it. I mean, obviously I have [ __ ] aliens everywhere. Um, but I'm also uh skeptical of things that just seem fake. There's something about this whole thing that seems like a show and it 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 MK Ultra and Operation Midnight Climax

190:53where they set up little CIA literally set up brothels and gave these Johns uh LSD and monitored them through two-way mirrors. The 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, [ __ ] stop talking. Show me some shit." You know, at a certain point in time you got to have to stop talking and show me some [ __ ] because right now I'm like, "I don't like the way this sounds." No. It sounds funky. Let's take it one more last step. is someone who thinks that aliens are real. No, I know you do, yeah. I just think there's something about this. Like, I believe Commander David Fravor. I believe him. I believe that he knows what he saw. I believe he saw something extraordinary. I'm just not I don't know where it came from.

191:41Right. But the idea that we had something like that in 2004 is even weirder. Yeah, you're right. That's even weirder because it's like now we're talking about there's a giant difference between 19 years ago, the physics of 19 years ago, the our understanding of propulsion systems, technology, computing, everything. iPhone, a plethora. We didn't have an iPhone back then. have anything back then. We had shitty little [ __ ] flip phones. It's just such a different world. Well, let me let me uh run this by you. So, what the United States government did to Native Americans, tremendous atrocities, right? They were But, there was almost as much done I don't want to say almost there 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

192:28mount some kind of a force against the United States government, which is truly awful part of our history. But, nevertheless, they, you know, so that there was also a plausible deniability. Well, you Indians were fighting against each other, too. you know. So, I'm wondering at this level, is there a possibility I don't I'm not let to set up alien wars, fake alien wars to blame Or just anything that polarizes us, right? Cuz that's good for them. It allows them to sell, you know, the Viagra, right? I mean, something that attracts attention that's almost impossible to to disregard. I mean, anybody who's curious and knows what an alien is or seen an alien, we've seen so much. Uh but, um I don't know. I mean, I don't know, either. I just I feel like if they kept it a secret for 80 years, that's very fascinating. And if it is real, also very fascinating. But,

193:16there's just something about the way this is all being discussed that just feels fake, mhm, and I don't know why. And maybe it's real. Maybe again, maybe it is just my natural um reaction to something that is so outside of the norm that I don't have a context for it. I don't have a place for it. also be there's a religious component to it. There's a religious component to it. It's space daddy. It's like, yeah the simulation hypothesis right there's another one that people just like look to and they they act as if it's as 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 and like who doesn't believe in free will I'm like have you ever met someone I don't know I always give you ever met someone who acts as if they don't have free will. I'm not talking about someone who's

193:57insane like someone like imagine Sam Harris like totally rational reasonable brilliant you know intellectual person. But like him but he's like I don't believe in free will therefore I'm going to act in accordance with that belief. I've never met somebody like that like actually like I'm determined to do this because of the Big Bang. Well, I think it's a complex or complicated scenario where you're trying to say that determinism is the only thing that causes people to do things and that you're not responsible or not you're not necessarily saying you're not responsible but that there's you have no choice. But there's these factors all play a part of it. That's what it seems like I have a lot of choice. It seems like we encourage choice in the right direction and we discourage choice that we feel like is in the wrong direction. It seems like

194:42it's 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. Can I ask you a podcast question? Sure. So you've done 2000 40 30 something James? Yeah more than that when you count fight companions and MMA shows yeah. So have you ever gone back and listened to like No. Okay. So this kind of dovetails with with what something Carl Sagan said. He said a book is magic because it allows the voice of a person who may have died many many centuries earlier to communicate with you and literally with audio books like literally in your ears you are with millions of people around the world. And I've just wondered you know like cuz I never go back and listen to my podcast. I've listened to it I should not lie. I've listened to a couple because it was

195:33like it was a Graham Hancock one and I wanted to reabsorb some of the stuff that he said or or um you know, some of it was just really interesting. Yeah, sure. But but it's rare. What I'm getting at is, you know, running a book and and like encapsulating that. I mean, surely you've thought about it. And I'm just wondering, you know, a book is is something different, you know, it's 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 book preponderance of it versus the distilled wisdom of Joe Rogan, you know, put into a book form for for posterity. definitely thought about doing that. I'm just very busy. You know, it's hard to take the time to write a [ __ ] book. I have I'm not I'm not going to get any help. No, no, I don't mean a ghost writer. I

196:18just mean people to like research and like well, this thing thematically. It would all be you, but it would be Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I've I've bandied it about. I just uh I'm trying not to overload, you know, I think uh people get a little too ambitious and I've been guilty of it myself. How so? Like it's just doing too many things. Like uh I do enough things. Like slow down. What what would you on the things I do more, you know? What gives you the most life or most like energy force? As far as occupations? Mhm. No, no, all these things that keep you busy, but what's your like what thing causes time to pass that such that you're in a flow state the most? Oh, I don't know if there's any one thing that does. You know, um I think it's just all the different things. I I I'm very fortunate that I have a lot of different things that I like to do. Mhm.

197:10You know, in terms of um occupation and I have a lot of great people in my life in terms of uh family and friends. So, I've just I'm very fortunate in that way. But um they're all interesting in their own different way. I think they all complement each other and that's that's one of the things that I like about doing podcast and doing stand-up and even doing UFC commentary. I think they somehow or another they compliment each other. That's something Do you ever when you do stand-up I did I was able to do a TEDx Talk a long time ago. And before I did it, I wanted to get the experience of bombing on stage in front of an audience of possibly hostile people. So, I went to the Comedy Store in La Jolla. And I did a set, and I only wanted to do it clean cuz my wife and my rabbi was there, yeah. So, I tried to I did a clean I had some good jokes. I think uh

197:56uh that I could uh the work on the audience. But, it was after like, you know, seven women talking about that how they menstruate this and I was like I was the only dude who was going Was it an open mic night? It was open mic, yeah. It was just 2-minute set. I was the last person to go. Um well, I used my A material. Uh but anyway, we came out and um and afterwards I was like, "You know what? Uh you know, it was enjoyable. I'm glad I did it. I could say I did 2 minutes of stand-up. But, um I actually I didn't like the people in the audience. You know, they were I mean, they were drunk and and like whatever. I mean, I like my wife was there, but um my cousin What's open mic night first of all? A lot of maniacs are in the audience. Like, who's going to watch some amateurs do stand-up? Oh, I know. If you have a certain amount of time

198:36with your day, how many people are going to go watch amateurs do stand-up? I just felt like this. Like, I never felt like I didn't like my students. Like, I never felt and I'm sure you you don't feel like you don't like your audience of podcast. But, do you ever when you're doing stand-up, it just seems like there's people in there. First of all, there are people in there that want to see you like mess up or heckle or not you, but I'm saying one a comic Sure, the comedy club for sure. And especially at an open mic night. Yeah, it's the the dregs of humanity. Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, a lot of people that are there are there because they want to do comedy. Exactly. So, you're doing stand-up to other wannabe comedians. Some of them are they're out of their [ __ ] minds. Well, not some of them. Like, a good chunk. Right. Yeah.

199:14And I guess the last couple of podcast questions if you'd indulge me on them. Um so, you know, when I when I think about um you know, the the kind of animating impulse for for me to do what I'm doing and trying to do, you know, hardcore science and keep people interested, engaged, and give the public some ROI in their money that supports my salary. I'm a public, you know, university I'm at the public college you know, schools I went to uh public uh I teach at a public school. Um you know, when I think about it like there's it's it's difficult to get a a sense of of of, you know, pleasing your audience and and then also, you know, doing legit science. And and I think you know, finding that balance for me, that's that is hard for me and I and I don't know like I mean, obviously one solution is to stop podcasting. I mean, I'm not going to stop being a scientist

199:59cuz that's who I am. It's physically written into my DNA almost. Why are they Why would they be incompatible? 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 uh you know, in the laboratory and so Right, but don't you We've already talked about the what you're doing is very beneficial and you think that that's actually part of what scientists should be doing. I think they look down on it. Right. I Some of them look down on that. Yeah. Yeah, don't listen to them. Mhm. [ __ ] those people. There's always going to be people that are you know, purists and there's always going to be people that have negative comments. You you should only read so many things that people have said about your work and I think

200:40you get to a certain point in time when you're oversaturated and then you get overwhelmed and I see that happen with a lot of people. I see that happen with a lot of people that get into that come from academia and then they get into podcasting and they get overwhelmed and it's very disheartening. Yeah. But you're not you're you're just dealing with insane numbers. So, of course you're going to have a lot of negativity. There's no ways around that. It doesn't matter what you talk about. I've seen some of the most [ __ ] insane takes on some of the nicest people ever. It just you can't you can't do anything about that. There's certain people that are there and that's fine. That's part of the way the world works. I don't know why certain people like certain kinds of music or certain kinds of art forms. It's just like people like

201:24different things. And when you're talking about whether it's science or comedy or what you're going to have people that don't like what you do. That's just how it goes. And if I could play do my last question cuz I don't I'd love to have you on my podcast, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen. So I got We're going to talk about aliens the entire time. I would love it. That would be my bread and butter, man. I would kill. I'd be number number 10 on Spotify if I could. Yeah. So I always ask the the following question which is related to the name of the podcast I mentioned earlier. So Arthur C. Clarke had all these quips and some of them are really funny. One of them is like for every expert there's an equal and opposite expert. That's true. And he would say things Especially paid experts. And this famous quote of any sufficiently advanced technology is

202:07indistinguishable 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. Mhm. So like you were going back to Joe and you know, back then you're 20 years old, you know, you had 30 seconds with him. What are you going to tell him? I ain't going to tell him [ __ ] I wouldn't tell me [ __ ] Why? I wouldn't tell me nothing. Why? Cuz he figured it out on your own. Mhm. There's nothing I could have told him. Yeah, you need life and you need a 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 not you're going to have to go

202:49through it. There's not a goddamn thing I can say to my 20-year-old self like, "Wow, this is the magic thing." Like it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It's a grind. It's not like a Willy Wonka golden ticket. The life is a grind. It's a great grind. It's a lot of fun. And if you have a lot of fun friends, you can really enjoy it. But but progress comes incrementally with a lot of [ __ ] 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 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. Like you got to you got to figure out how to not get intoxicated by great moments and just enjoy it as part of the process and then just keep trying to do whatever you're doing. Whatever it is you're

203:35trying to do it. Whether you're trying to do science whether you're trying to do art whatever you're trying to do. That would be if I'd give any advice it's just like don't expect this don't expect to hit the lottery. Don't This [ __ ] is not coming and don't expect the [ __ ] golden age of retirement either. Don't think you're going to get to 65 and one day I'm going to quit and then it's going to be amazing. I'm going to sit on my porch. No, you're going to die. That's what's That's what happens to people when they do that. Then they have nothing to do. They they get sad. They get sad and they get bummed out. Just enjoy it. Just enjoy this [ __ ] thing. But this is what you want to live That would be the the scariest thing would be doing it all over again. Not living alive forever cuz if you just

204:20were like if I like look I love life. I have a great time. If 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? Cuz if I can keep getting better at stuff as long as I don't physically deteriorate too much and I can keep better 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 that it's a kind of weird sort of way of looking at it cuz 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 Bryan Johnson you know all these guys that are trying to extend their lives. I'm like you can extend you can live

204:56forever. And I actually it's possible any anybody can live forever. Um but you can't be a greedy SOB. You can't be greedy and want your body to come with you and your and your money and your you know the denial of death is why they built these pyramids, right? So Is that real though? We don't really know why they built those pyramids. Well, yeah, I don't know. You know that each pyramid has a base, the base of each pyramid, Joe, Mhm. is a multiple, an exact integer multiple of pi. Did you know this? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I did know that. Do you know why? Why? Cuz 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 that's the wheel has a circumference equal to pi times its diameter. So they would get some number of wheel rolls and that's where the circle the circle was their measuring

205:41tape basically. So they would just count off how many complete revolutions of a circle. Is this theoretical? That's what they believe, yeah. No, that's the best evidence they have. There's a lot of like weirdness to the the pyramids. Just the mass alone, just the 3 million or 2 million 300,000 stones. Some of them are from hundreds of miles away. I know, it's nuts. It was the biggest thing until the iPhone came out. into the any of that Younger Dryas impact theory? Oh help me out. 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 went through a a barrage of large objects and it destroyed civilization and that there was an advanced civilization in Egypt

206:33and in many other places where there's actual physical evidence now. Mexico. Yeah. Well, physical evidence now Turkey and Göbekli Tepe because back then they thought that 11,000 plus years ago was just hunter-gatherers. But then they found this Göbekli Tepe Did you know about that? No, I never heard of that. It's fascinating because it's like very complex stone structures that are immense and they have 3D carvings on them which is very unique and they're like 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 [ __ ] immense like structures. And then they they they've only uncovered 5% of them with lidar. They've 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

207:18cuz they were it was purposely covered somehow or another. They don't know who or why, but it was purposely covered somewhere around 11,000 plus years ago. And they think it was a common name? I mean, that would seem to have astronomical evidence for it. No, the the comet thing is 11,800 years ago. The 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 um there's a lot of uh evidence of iridium when they do the core samples, you know, in that area. Yeah, and then also nano diamonds 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 like

208:09Do some people say the lizards are like aliens? No, that's there's no alien lore in this. This is just humans that had reached Yeah, just humans that had reached a very advanced state and then got hit. But it wasn't until like this Younger Dryas impact theory that they had all the physical evidence that goes with this. And when Randall Carlson discusses this, it's very crazy because he talks about just the immense amount of water that moved through North America in a very short amount of time. It just carved massive trails and canyons through through through the earth. And he think it it he thinks it happened because of an instantaneous meltdown from asteroid impact. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because we know that the US alone was half of it was covered in more than a mile high sheet of ice up until that point. He thinks that's what caused it. Ah, I see.

208:59it coincides with physical evidence with these core samples. And there's a bunch of like legitimate scientists that are working on this. It's really interesting. No, it sound I I I always say astronomers are kind of like space archaeologists, you know, we travel things travel through time and space and we have to analyze them and It's really fascinating stuff. they don't have to deal with the multiverse in the with archaeology. Well, listen, man, April 8th. April 8th. we're going to go check out and you say it's going to be more insane than that. It'll blow your mind. I I'm I'm sure it will. And I really appreciate you. And thank you very much for the meteor and the shitty magnet and the good magnet and the stickers and and the prism. This is dope. Happy birthday, man. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it and appreciate your time. Thank you. having me.

209:38And then tell everybody how to get your podcast as well. Oh, well, so the best place is briankeating.com. That's my website and I have links to Spotify there. It's called There it is. Look at you, handsome devil. Thank you, my brother. Then yeah, there's our friend Eric. We didn't talk too much about. Yeah, he says he sends his best. I talked to him today. And I've done yeah, I've done 14 Nobel Prize winners, 15 by far. Beautiful. Beautiful. briankeating.com. And they're very good. Thank you very much for being here. Appreciate you. All