Lex Fridman Podcast - #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Brian Keating is an experimental physicist at the UCSD, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex and use code Lex25 to get 25% off - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil - Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Brian's Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Brian's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrianKeating Books and resources mentioned: Losing the Nobel Prize: https://amzn.to/3E6GSHI Into the Impossible: https://amzn.to/3Fb6F2E PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:46) - Telescope (12:10) - Beginning of the universe (32:23) - Science and the Soviet Union (37:49) - What it's like to be a scientist (56:45) - Age of the universe (59:37) - Expansion of the universe (1:07:37) - Gravitational waves (1:10:49) - BICEP (1:36:05) - Nobel prize (1:59:06) - Joe Rogan (2:06:21) - Recognition in science (2:14:30) - Curiosity (2:22:18) - Losing the Nobel Prize (2:35:13) - Galileo Galilei (2:54:00) - Eric Weinstein (3:12:21) - Scientific community (3:30:02) - James Webb telescope (3:35:01) - Panspermia (3:38:32) - Origin of life (3:43:59) - Aliens (3:49:41) - Death and purpose (3:53:53) - God (3:59:49) - Power

The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at USSD, and author of, Luzi the Nobel Prize, and, into the impossible. Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name, called, Into the Impossible. And now, I'll click few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast.

First is Inside Tracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Second is the thought of greens, the all-in-one nutrition drink I drink twice a day. Third is Magic Spoon, low carb, keto-friendly cereal. Fourth is Masterclass, online courses from world-class experts and fifth is on it, a nutrition, supplement and fitness company. So the choice is health or wisdom. Choose wise to my friends. And now onto the full ad reads.

As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. They have a bunch of plans, mostly which include blood tests that give you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have algorithms. They're using your data. They're using machine learning to come up with the

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This show is also brought to you by Magic Spoon, the OG sponsor of this podcast, the delicious, the incredible, the low carb keto-friendly cereal. It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein only four That grounds the carbs and 140 calories in yeast serving you can build your own box or get a variety pack with a bunch of flavors You can go to the website check out the flavors as cocoa, fruity, frosted peanut butter, blueberry cinema I think it goes on and they keep adding new ones. I don't know for me still Coco is the best flavor. It's the flavor of champions. It's the one I go to

In this life a man must choose and that is the choice I've made and he has brought to me much happiness without sacrificing the knee the nutritional Sort of fortitude Anyway, magic spoon have a 100% happiness guarantee, so if you don't like it, they refund it. Go to MagicSpoon.com slash Lex and use Code Lex. Check out to say $5 off your order. That's MagicSpoon.com slash Lex and use Code Lex. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass.

$180 a year gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world and their respective disciplines. Exploration Chris Hadfield, New Year's Grass Tyson, you all know when you're the Grass Tyson is will write the game design of the guitarist Carl Santana, Gare Kasparov, Daniel Nagrano, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese, Tony Hogg, Janeall, just keeps going. And they keep adding new ones. Like I'm doing one on a portrait photography currently. I'm been interested in understanding how a single photograph can capture an emotion, a deep, complicated emotion. That's so fascinating to me. The way you should learn, whether you're a beginner or you're an expert, is you should listen to the masters of those arts.

Anyway, get unlimited access to every masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership if you go to masterclass.com slash Lex. That's masterclass.com slash Lex for 15% off the annual membership at masterclass.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Onnet, nutrition, supplement, and fitness company. They make alpha brain, they make a ton of stuff. But alpha brain is probably my favorite. It's a Neutropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus long stretches of deep work. So deep focus, when I'm sitting there in the silence of my mind, focusing on a difficult

thinking task. Something that requires you think deeply and whatever thoughts that come into your mind and try to distract you, you slowly let them drift past. It's a kind of meditation. I use alpha brain to help me when I know that it's going to be especially difficult. So I don't use it every day, I use it when I need that extra super rocket boost. For a deep work session, it works. It helps me clear the mind to maintain focus. Anyway, go to lexfreedman.com slash on it to get up to 10% off alpha brain. That's lexfreedman.com slash on it. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Keating. As an experimental physicist, what do you think is the most amazing or maybe the coolest measurement device you've ever worked with or humans have ever built?

Maybe for now let's exclude the background imaging of cosmic extra galactic polarization instruments. Yeah, absolutely biased towards that particular instrument. But talk about that in a little bit. Yeah. But certainly the telescope to me as is a lever that has literally moved the earth throughout history. So the OG telescope, OG telescope. Yeah, the one invented not by Galileo is most people think, but by this guy Hans Lippershe and

in the Netherlands. And it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500s, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type. And so people for the first time in history had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight. So looking at a printed word, now we just take it for granted, 12 point font, whatever. And that's what the eye charts are based on. They're just fixed height. But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have, you know, perfect vision. And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible

and move, moveable type. And at that time, people realized, hey, wait, I can't read this. You know, my priest and my friend over here, he can read it. She can read it. I can't read it, my priest and my friend over here, he can read it, she can read it, I can't read it. What's going on? And that's when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece

of glass material and it would make it clearer. And what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device, two lenses and go like, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there until Galileo. So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing. He improved on it by a factor of 10. So he 10xed it, which is almost as good as going from 0 to 1 is going from, you know, 1 to 10. And when he did that, he really transformed both how we look at the universe and think

about it, but also who we are as a species, because we're using tools not to get food faster or to preserve our legacy for future generations, but actually to increase the benefit of the human mind. Some many mentions the idea that if humans weren't able to see the star, maybe there are some kind of make-up of the atmosphere, which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars that we would never develop human civilization, or at least raising the question of how important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there? It's supposed to, maybe this is an over romanticized notion,

but like looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival and not being eaten by a bear or a slash lion. If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder what is my place in the universe. You think that's modern humans from anti-science. I think it's a little romantic. Because they also took the shade.

I tried. They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right? They looked at bacteria, they looked at you know, my hairs and in other words, they made the microscope and we're still doing that. And so, you know, to have a telescope is, it serves a dual purpose. It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in, but it's also looking back in time. In other words, you can see a microscope. You don't think, oh, I'm seeing this thing as it was, you know, one nanosecond ago, light travels one foot per nanosecond. I'm seeing it. No, no, no, no, you don't think about it like that.

But when you see something that's happening, you know, on Jupiter, the moon, and drama and the galaxy, you're seeing things, you know, back when Lucy was walking around the Sarangetti planes. And for that, I think that took then the knowledge of, you know, relativity and time travel and so forth. It took that before we could really say, oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain. So I think that might be a little too much, but nevertheless, I mean, what's better than having a time machine? You know, it's like we can look back in time. We see things as they were, not as they are,

and that allows us to do many things, including speculate about that. But one of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar, but someone radio astronomer, I don't actually look through telescopes very often, except on rare occasions when I take one out to show the kids, but a radio telescope as even more sort of visceral, I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it and you're like,

all right, it looks cool, it's kind of weird shaped thing, looks like it belongs in sci-fi, it's to blast, you know, the death star or whatever. But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object, if that object fills up what's called the beam, which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope, it's called the beam. If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor, just a simple absorbing piece of material

at the focus of the radio telescope, that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object that's looking at, which is pretty amazing. It means you're actually remotely measuring, you're taking the temperature of Jupiter or whatever in effect. And so it's allowing you to basically teleport and there's no other science that you can really do that, right?

If you're an archaeologist, let me get into my, my time machine and go back and see what was Lucy really, you know, it's not possible. So the same thing happens, this is where I've learned about this from March of the Penguins, when the penguins huddle together, they, you know, the body temperature arrives to the same place.

So you're doing this remotely, like the March of the penguins, but remote. Let's do it from Antarctica too. So there are some penguins around when we do it. Okay, excellent. You mentioned time machine. I think in your book, losing the Nobel Prize, you talk about time machines.

So let me ask you the question of, take us back in time. What happened at the beginning of our universe? Yeah, okay. Usually people preface this by saying I have a simple question. So, you know, what happened before the universe began? I'm a high-keying teaching me about comedy. I have a simple question, Phil, let's take two. I have a simple question. What happened at the beginning of our universe? There you go. All right, good. So, when we think about what happened, it's more correct, it's more logical, it's more

practical to go back in time starting from today. So, if you go back, 13.874 billion years from today, that's some day, right? I mean, you could translate into some day, right? So, on that day, something happened earlier than, you know, then the moment exactly now, let's say we're talking around one o'clock. So at some point during that day, the universe started to become a fusion reactor

and started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements. After that period of time, you know, going forward back closer to today, less, you earlier, 10 minutes earlier, or later rather coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like. In fact, all the hydrogen to very good approximation in the water molecules in this bottle, almost all of them were produced during that first 20-minute period. So I would say, you know, the actual fusion

and production of the lightest elements on the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show, The Big Bang Theory. Well done, sir. You know, most of those light elements, it besides hydrogen, aren't really used in your encounter, right? We don't encounter helium that off

unless you go to a lot of birthday parties or pilot a blimp. You don't need lithium, hopefully. But other than that, those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment. The question became how did the heavier things like iron, carbon, nickel,

we can get to that later. And I brought some samples for us to discuss and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor and a different type of process explosion as well, I'm called a supernova. However, if you go back to the beyond those first three minutes, we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable. In other words, going backwards from the first three minutes as famous Stephen Weinberg

titled his book, we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over. In other words, we can't speculate on what happened three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen was formed in our universe. We just don't know enough about that epoch. There are many people, most people, most practicing carcaring cosmologists believe the universe began in what's called the singularity. And we can certainly talk about that. However, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe as evidence, and really only occurs in two instantiations, the Big Bang and the Corb Black Hole, neither of which is observable. And so for that reason, there are now flourishing

alternatives that say, you can actually, for the first time ask the question that day, you know, Tuesday, you know, in the first moments of the R universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that. 24 hours time, seven days before that. That has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology, promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today. When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no one really considered anything besides that big bang that there was a singularity and people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know. But they would say, some future incarnation of some experiment will tell us the answer.

But now there are people that are saying there is an alternative to the big bang. And it's not really French science as it once was 50, 80 years ago, when these models, by the way, the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe. The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra and the temples of Egypt and in the third millennium BC. And in that, they talked about cyclical universes. So I always joke, you know, that guy, Akanatans court, you know, he'd have a pretty high H index right about now because people have been using

that cyclical model from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Eges and right up until this very moment. Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives to the Big Bang theory? So there are many alternatives starting with the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding singularity origin of the universe. That stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning. Many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles, called by Sir Roger Penrose, and they all have things in common, these alternatives. As does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation, inflation is sort of can be

thought of as this spark that ignites the hot big bang that I said we understood. So it's an earlier condition, but it's still not an initial condition. In physics, imagine, I show you a grandfather clock or a pendulum swinging back and forth. You look away for a second, you know, you come into the room, pendulum swinging back and forth. Alex, tell me, where did it start? How many cycles is it gonna make before the,

you can't answer that question without knowing the initial conditions in a very simple system like a one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillate like a pendulum. Think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions. It's a tremendous lacuna gap that we have as scientists that we may not be able to in the inflationary cosmology determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch. So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch, we can't because you can infer things about the

pendulum before you shut up to the room in our current epoch. Correct. Yeah, so if you look at it right now, but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating? So that depends on how much energy it got initially, and you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance yet infrared camera, you can see it's getting hotter maybe, and you could do some calculations. But to know the two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.

Banner conditions were here on Earth as gravitational field. It's not gonna excursor, you know, make excursions, you know, wildly beyond the length of the pendulum. It's not, you know, it has simple properties. So, but this is like another, you can't tell me, you know, when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now? In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now? Now, that's a pretty pedestrian example.

But what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended, but it says nothing about how it itself took place. And that's really what you're asking me. I mean, you don't really look what you care about like Big Bang Nuclear synthesis and then elements got made in these fusion reactors and the whole universe was a fusion reaction, but like don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time,

and the problem is we can't really answer that in the context of the Big Bang. We can answer that in the context of these alternatives. So you asked me about some of the alternatives. So one is A on theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology of surrogid penrose. Another one that was really popular in the 60s and 70s until the discovery of the primary component of my research field the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB the three kelvin all pervasive

signal that astronomers detected in 1965 that kind of spelled the death now in some sense to the what was called the quasi steady state universe. And and then there was another model that kind of came out of that. You hear the word quasi. So it's not steady state. Steadiestame is always existed. That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe.

And most scientists believed in that for, you know, millennia, basically, the universe was eternal, static, unchanging. They couldn't believe that after Hubble, so they had a pen on to it, concatenate this new feature that it wasn't steady, it was quasi-steady. So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in a given volume of space, and that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant, but because it was producing more and more every century, the centuries pile up up and the volume piles up, the universe could expand. And so that's how they developed.

That's slowly. Very slowly. And it doesn't match observation level. And so that is an alternative. By the way, did I say I think the study state universe is infinite or finite? Do you know? I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really, you know, if something had a no beginning in time, then it would be very unlikely. We're in like the center of it or it's bounded or it has in that case a finite edge to it.

What he thought about infinity, because it's such a comfortable. Is this silly joke? I'm sure you're familiar with it. Is silly joke right? Is silly joke was that there are only two things that are infinite. The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe. Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke is a good example of the joke. It's very meta. Okay, so All right, so you were saying about quasi all the alternatives in the quasi-state state and the most kind of promising

Although I hate to say that you know people say like say like, what's your favorite, you know, alternative, right? This is not investment advice. Inflation is not transitory. It is quasi permanent. So a very prominent. Sorry to interrupt. We're talking about cosmic inflation. So calm down cryptocurrency folks.

That's right. Although the first Nobel Prize, and one of the first Nobel prizes in economics was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind. So most people don't know, the inflation is already won a Nobel Prize. It's a good topic to work on if you want a Nobel Prize. It doesn't matter the field. Exactly. It's time-translation in variant.

So when we look at the alternative that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies, these have serious virtues, according to some. One of the virtues to me, just as a human, I'm just speaking as a human, one of the founders of the new version of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt.

He's the Einstein professor of natural sciences at Princeton University, you may have heard of it. And he was one of the originators of what was called new inflation. In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation, who now not only has no belief or support for inflation, he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology, but to society. So here's a man who created a theory that's captivated the world or universe of cosmologists, such as it is not a huge universe, but there are more podcasters than cosmologists, some

do both. But this man created this theory with collaborators. And now I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity. You're like a dead-be-dead. Now you're saying like inflation is bogus. But he doesn't just attack. See, this is what's very important about approaching things as an experimentalist. You've got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful.

And I think that's a huge service. An experimentalist has to say no. He or she has to be confident to say like, I don't care if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever. We have to be like exterminators and nobody likes the exterminator until they need one, right? Or the garbage collectors, right? But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some idea. Like inflation is a beautiful idea, but it also has consequences and what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point, is that those consequences are dangerous

because they lead to things like the multiverse, which is outside the purview of science. And in that sense, I can see support for what he does, but none of that detracts from my respect for a man. Imagine Elon comes up with this really great idea, space, and then he's like, actually, it's not gonna work. But here's this better idea. And he's like, SpaceX is not gonna work, but he's now creating alternative to it.

It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done. Doesn't mean he's right. Doesn't mean I'm going to have more and more attention paid to it because he's my friend or because I respect the idea or I respect the man and his colleague, Anna Aegis, who works really hard with him. But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it. And what it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology. So it takes away 50% of the motivation for a theory of quantum gravity. You talked a lot about quantum gravity. You talked people, eminent people on the show. Always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there

is a theory of everything. there is a theory of everything, there is a theory of quantum gravity. But there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity. So that kind of implicit expectation has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory, so in cosmic inflation. So is that at the core? So okay. So is that at the core? So, okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts on society from believing in cosmic inflation?

So one of the more robust predictions of inflation, according to its other two patriarchs, considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Gooth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhart, was that the universe has to eventually get into the quantum state. It has to exist in this Hilbert space and the Hilbert space has certain features, and those features are quantum mechanical and doubted with quantum mechanical properties. And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off. So inflation can get started, but then it's like one of,

you know, SpaceX rockets. It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right? It continues the thrusting and you need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion, which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere, it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times, including now, spawning an ever-increasing set of universes. Some will die stillborn, some will continue in flourish, and this is known as the multiverse paradigm. It's a robust, seemingly robust

consequence, not only of inflationary cosmology, but more and more, we're seeing it in strength theory as well. So that, you know, sometimes two, you know, branches coming to the same conclusion is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality. So one of the negative consequences is it creates phenomena that we can't, that are outside the reach of experimental science. Yeah. Or is it that the multiverse somehow

has a philosophical negative effect on humanity? Like it makes us, um, maybe makes life seem more meaningless? Is that, is that, is that where he's getting at a little bit? Or is this not reaching that far? Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive. The answer is a little both, because in one sense, it's meant kind of to explain this fine-tuning problem that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly façade that has features consistent with our existence, and how could we be otherwise, you know, the sort of weak anthropic principle. On the other hand, it, a theory that predicts everything, literally everything, can be said

to predict nothing. Like if I say, Lexi, you've been working out. You look like, literally everything, can be said to predict nothing. Like if I say, Lexi, you've been working out. You look like, yeah, you have an ass, great. You look like you're about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms. You're like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's comparably in precise. So what good is that? That's meaningless.

I don't contribute any what's called surprise or reduction in entropy or reduction of your ignorance about the system or saying, you know exactly how much you weigh. So me telling you that tells you nothing. In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist. There has to be at least one place that we exist.

But the problem is it's a manifestation of infinity. So humans, and I'm sure you know this from your work with AI and ML and everything else, that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity, but we do so very imperfectly, right? So if I say to you, like, what's bigger than number, you know, water molecules, and this thing are the number of real numbers. Or if I say what's bigger the number of real numbers of rational numbers, they're all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be. Infinity to the infinity power, you know, we have kids someday, they'll tell you, I love you infinity, you have to come back, I love you infinity plus one, right. So, but the human brain can't really contemplate infinity. Let me illustrate that. and brain can't really contemplate infinity. Let me illustrate that.

They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature, right? So let me ask you a question. Is there anything that you can contemplate in the observed, yeah, Einstein's little quip aside, that's infinite, like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature, energy? That's infinite.

And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it. But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one? You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids. How does it go from like the half of infinity? Because that's the infinity. How did it cool down? How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied? So now it's only infinity over two in terms of Pascal's.

Less infinite, more infinite. Yeah, I mean, it's, that's one of the biggest troubling things to me about infinity is, you can't truly hold it inside our minds. It's a mathematical construct that doesn't, it feels like intuition fails. But nevertheless, we use it not shortly, and then use, like, physicists, they're incredible intuition machines, and then they'll play with this infinity as if they can play with it and the level of intuition is supposed on the level of math. Yeah, you know, maybe it's something cyclical.

You can imagine infinity just going around the same kind of like a mobius strip situation. But then the question then arises, how do you make it more or less infinite? Yeah, all that intuition fails completely. And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right? It's either some placeholder for infinity or it's one divided by a very, the smallest, you know, possible, you know, real number that you can represent in the memory.

Well, that's basically my undergraduate study in computer science is how to represent a floating point in a computer. I think I took 17 courses on this topic. It was very useful. I came to the right place, but you know, in terms of what a physicist will mean, you're right. I mean, physicists will blindly, not to longally subtract infinity, you know,

renormalization and do things to get finite answers. And it's miraculous, but you know, at a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world? So one of them, you ask, you know, what's miraculous. But, you know, at a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world? So one of them, you ask, you know, what's the problem? Does it make us more meaningless? They purport many of the people that support it,

like Andre Lindey. In fact, Andre Lindey says, you have a bias, you Lex, me, Brian. You have a bias that you believe in a universe. But shouldn't you believe in a multiverse? What evidence do you have that there's not a, so he turns it around. Whereas Paul Steinhart will say,

no, if anything can happen, then there's no predictive power within the theory. Because you can always say, well, this value of the inflationary field did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy for us to detect it with bicep or Simon's observatory or whatever. But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen.

And that's logically 100% correct. But it's like kind of chewing, you know, wonder, wonder bread, you know, hums up, apologizes if they're one of your sponsors. But, you know, wonder bread slash Lex. Typhon code, clip, right? It's my favorite Russian word. It's like, would you like a piece of clip? By the way, even that word,

clip, which means bread and Russian. As you say it, like you're jokingly saying it now, it made me hungry because it made me remember how much I love bread and I was in the Soviet Union. When you were like hungry, that was the sort, that was the things you dreamed about. I don't know. What's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists

contributed to so much of what we understand today, and they were completely in hiding, like there's no Google, they couldn't look up on Scholar, they had nothing, they had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved. And then, and then, and only then, if they weren't a member of some cloud, I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists,

you had a passport. And I said, if they weren't a member of some class, I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists, you had a passport. And I said, Jew on your passport. And Zeldovic, the famous Yakuoborzovich, Zeldovic, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnarev. And he had to only because he was like at a Nobel level and was one of the fathers of the Soviet and atomic bomb program. Could he even get his Jewish student, he was Jewish too, but only by virtue of his standing

of his intellectual accomplishments, would they give him the dispensation to let his student travel to Georgia or something? And it makes what we complain about, not complain about academia and it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about? We have no idea of how good it is and that they were able to create things

like inflation, completely isolated from the West. I mean, some of these people wouldn't didn't meet like people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead. And they just learned this thing through smuggled in, you know, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology. There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard,

probably because they were working, they could pass off as well, we're doing stuff for the Atomic bomb program as well, which they were. At the same time, there is interesting incentives in the Soviet system that maybe we can take this tangent for a brief moment, that because there's a dictatorship, authoritarian regime throughout the history of the 20th century for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized. And because the state prioritized it through the propaganda machines, or the news, and so on, it actually was really cool to be a scientist. Like, you were highly valued

in society. Maybe that's the better way to say it. And I would say you're saying, like, we have it easy now. In that sense, it was kind of beneficial to be a scientist in that society because you were seen as a hero as there's there's there's there's a hero of the Soviet republic. And that, you know, there's positives to that. I mean, I'm not saying I would take the negative to the positives, but it is interesting to see a world in which science was highly prized in a capital system or maybe not capitalists Let's just say it the American system the celebrities are the athletes the actors and actresses maybe business leaders musicians and

You know the people were elected, sort of lawyers and lawyers. Right. So, it's interesting to think of a world where science was highly prized, but they had to do that science within the constraints of always having big brother watching. It's, yeah. Same in Germany. Germany had highly prized, I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases is for it's Haber, who invented the, you know,

Haber Bosch process that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet? You look, he looks, I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast every day and you do that. You know, I said, Clav, and you got, it's a little drool, but he says, I'm lifting and I look slim. This is amazing.

I'm gonna clip this out and put it on Tinder. I think that's the website. You got, you got swipe left, oh right, for that. I don't know. this out and put it on timber. I think that's the website. You got a swipe left. Oh, right, for that. I don't know. But when you think about like, you know, what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day, he was a German nationalist first and foremost, even though he was a Jew. And he personally went to witness the application of ammonia, chlorine gas, applied during trench warfare in 1916, and battles and Brussels and whatever.

And he was, they had a whole con dream, Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. That would go and witness these atrocities. But that was also, they were, they were almost putting science above, I don't know, say, human dignity, but, but of like, the fact that he would later be suppressed. And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the fact that he would later be suppressed and actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called Zeichlann B. And so it's just unbelievable.

So I feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of science, and listen to science and follow the science, which is more like scientism. And there is still a danger. You know, I always say, just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you don't have a religion. Just because you, you know, in my case,

in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel Prize. It's kind of like a kosher idol. It's something that you can worship. It doesn't do any harm. And we want those people that are so significant in their intellectual accomplishments. Because there is a core of America and the Western world in general that does worship and really look at science predominantly because it gives us technology. But there's something really cool about that.

And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point between looking to science for wisdom, which I don't think it has. They're two different words. But but also recognizing how much good and transformative power maybe our only hope comes from science. You open so many doors because you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book. So there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science and to the Nobel Prize, it's fascinating to explore. And we will. And we still haven't finished the discussion of the beginning of the universe, which we'll return to. But now, since you opened the book, wow, pun on intended of losing the Nobel Prize, can you tell me the story of bicep, the background imaging of cosmic, extra galactic polarization experiment, bicep 1 and bicep 2, and then maybe you can talk about bicep 3.

But the thing that you cover in your book, the human story of it, what happened? Yeah, that book is in contradiction in the second book. That's like a memoir. It's really a description of what it's like to feel, what it feels like to be a scientist, and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty, imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book in more detail, but to really feel like you're doing something,

and it's all you think about, it is all consuming. And it's something I couldn't have done now, because I have too many other, you know, wonderful, delightful demands of my time. But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated by the night sky, who has a 12 year old, 13 year old, and really mixed together throughout my scientific story has always been wanting to approach the greatest mystery of all, which I think is the existence or non-existence of God. So I call myself a practicing agnostic.

There's, I do things that are, that religious people do, and I don't do things that atheists people do. And I once had this conversation, you know, with my first podcast, that actually I shouldn't say, oh, I was just having a conversation with Freeman Dyson. But he was actually my first guest. Yeah.

And I miss him. Name drop. name drop. Yes, I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of comments about how many of us. In case people don't know, Brian Keating is the host of Into the Impossible Podcast where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists in history of science, physicist,

especially in the history of science. So when I talk to Freeman, I said, you know, Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too, can you tell me something like what do you do on Sundays? Do you go to church? It's like, no, I don't go to church. And I'm like, well, imagine there was like an intelligent alien

and he was looking down or she would be it, I don't know, thing was looking down and it's off Freeman. And on Sundays, like a group of people go to church but Freeman doesn't go to church. And then there's another group of people that don't go to church. And those are called atheists, but Freeman calls himself an agnostic, but he does the things that the like Richard doc he doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. Right. So I said, how would you distinguish yourself if not practice? So I'm a behaviorist.

I believe you can change your mentality. You can you can influence your mind view your bodily physical actions. So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope. I was actually an alter-boy in a Catholic church It was kind of strange for a Jewish kid who grew up in New York. Maybe we'll get into that maybe not but I was just fascinated by these these what can we get into it for a second? What can we get into it for a second? Okay, yeah. Let's go. All right, let's go there.

All right, let's go to baby Brian or young, young Brian, the new sitcom on CBS. Young Brian born to two Jewish parents. My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook. He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician. And my mother was an eminent mom and brilliant, English major, et cetera. And they raised, they were secular.

And they think, you know, we'd go to Iowa's job. We'd go to, we'd go to synagogue, you know, two times a year on Christmas and Easter. Now, we would go, you know, Yom Kippur, Russia's shown, right? That's the typical two-day year Jews. And, you know, we'd have, we'd have Motses once a year on Pampass over. And that was about it. And for years, I was like that until my parents got divorced,

my mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man on the name of Ray Keating, my father's name is James Axe. So when she remarried Ray Keating, I was immediately adopted. I'm actually adopted into the Keating family. And he had nine brothers and sisters and just warm and gregarious.

They did Christmas Easter. It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had and I do things with great gusto. Whatever I do, I wanna take it all the way. So to me that meant really learning about Christianity in this case Catholicism. So I was baptized, confirmed. And I said, I wanna go all the way.

I became an altar boy in the Catholic church. It's going to be the best altar boy there ever was. I had like serious skills. You passed that collection basket. I could push people and get them to 2x their contributions. But in this case, I was 13. I don't know if you remember, you know, when you were 13, but if you extrapolate the next level up, you go graduate student, postdoc, professor, the next level up from confirmation, alter boy is priest.

And I don't know if you're aware of this, but priest are not entitled to have relations with women. And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future of casting what life's gonna be like for myself, if I continue in my path, I found it. Maybe I- The math. That's right. There was a serious gap in that future. And instead, when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah, you know, as most Jewish boys would be a 12-13-year-old boy,

I actually got a telescope and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it. It wasn't bigger than that one over there that your hedgehog's looking through. Is that hedgehog? It's a hedgehog and a fog. I should mention and we'll go one by one, these things. You've given me some incredible gifts. Maybe it's a good place to ask about the telescope that put some clamps on and let the hedgehog's look and using your official and experimental astrophysicist but why experimental is versus an engineer because you assemble this telescope

You give it a mount and you connected it to a very powerful. Yeah, but there's no experiment going on It's just engineering for show. Okay. It's very shallow So experiment is taking it to the next level and actually achieving something here I just built a thing for show Well, that's always a joke. People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist. I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes. Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things,

soldering things. It's not actually doing the stroking of my non-existent beard, contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological on. And just like most of robotics is just using velcro for things. Right. Yeah. It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever, rightcro for things. Right. Yeah. It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever, right?

So telescope. Yes, this telescope. What's the story of this little telescope? This telescope is a very precious thing in some ways, a symbol of what got me into, you know, what brought me all the blessings I have in my life came from a telescope. And I always advise parents or even people for themselves. You right here, wherever we are, it's the biggest city on Earth, Benham, where I was growing up as a 12-year-old

outside of Benham. You can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings of sound or the same moons of Jupiter, the same phases of Vient, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy, Lex 2.5 million light-years away from Earth. You can do that with that little thing over there. One that's a little more expensive, get one that has a mount, and you can attach now your smartphone with the hell of that. I wouldn't have known what that was in 1994.

And with that, you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate, maybe biology in some sense. But you can experience the physical sensation that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it, or that Saturn had ears as he called it, or that the moon was not crystalline polished smooth and made of this heavenly substance, the quintessence substance, right? So where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person to ever make that discovery? Try doing that with the Higgs boson.

Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity, call a parakeliff, and say, I wanna replicate, how did you feel? He didn't feel anything, none of them felt anything. It took years to go, you can't do it. But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions. That's fascinating. It's almost like maybe there's another one like that is fire.

Like when you build a bonfire, like can you actually get it? See if you use a lighter, I think if you actually by rubbing sticks together or however you do it without any of the modern tools, that's probably what that's like. And then you get to experience the magic of it of what like early humans can save you. Yeah, feel what Og felt when he did it that first time. By the way, is this a gift? This is a gift, of course. Yeah, you need a little bit of a swag upgrade.

So I got you. I will. Yeah, this is a, I'm pulling a putin' like, ask if this is a gift making it very uncomfortable for you. Oh, man. Not really. This is actually my childhood telescope. But now I'm keeping it.

All right. So looking through this telescope was when your love for size was first born. Change my life. Because not only was I doing that, I was replicating with Galileo did, but I was, and I'm 100% not comparing myself to Galileo Galileo, okay, if there's any confusion out there.

But I did replicate exactly what he did, and I was like, holy crap, this is weird. Let me write it down. So it had another effect, which all good scientists, butting scientists should do, and all parents should do. Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it. Write down what you see, what you hypothesize,

what you think it's gonna be, not like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis, thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel? Better yet, astronomy is a visual science. Sketch what you see, the Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades seven sisters. You can see them anywhere on earth. And when you do that, again, you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain, as I understand it, and you're connecting them through your fingertips. You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what you see, what you observe, and what you write down. Then you do research, right?

The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did is do something new. And that's what we call it research, and not just like studying Wikipedia. And in so doing, you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks. It's unbelievable. And now we can do even medics.

You got to share it on Instagram or whatever. And you can, by doing so, have an entree into the world of what does it really mean to be a scientist and do so viscerally. You know, I often say, I always taught this by my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins in ninth grade that the word educate it doesn't mean To pour into let me pour in some facts into Lexum, you know It's not like machine learning that you're showing like billions of cats or you know

You're not like forcing it in you're bringing it out. It means to pour out of in Latin edu caray and What more could a teacher want then to have something that the kid is just like gushing? No, you're not gonna see see like the inspired the kid. Yes, inspire. Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins. Mrs. Tompkins, she's watching. Yeah, she's a big fan. I mean, she doesn't care for but you.

Yeah, absolutely. We take those we love for granted. This is a Manhattan. This is in Westchester County, New York. Okay, got it. So, okay, so then that's where the dream is born. Yeah. But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.

So going to university, graduate school, postdoc, all the way to where you are today. What's that? What are some notable moments in that journey? So, I call that the academic hunger games, because it's like you're competing against like these people who are just getting smarter all the time, as you're getting smarter all the time, they wanna get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.

Like there's fewer slots to get into college than not in high school. There's fewer slots in graduate school. There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc. And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number, you know, we just did a faculty search at UC San Diego, 400 applicants for one position. It's almost getting impossible. Like I almost can't conceive of doing what these new brilliant young people applying to become a assistant professor at a state university that they're

doing. Like it takes so much courage to do that. So I went from, you know, this kid in New York, thinking I would never be a professional astron from, you know, this kid in New York, thinking I would never be a professional astronomer, A, because I didn't know any, I'd never seen any, I didn't even know that they existed. And I thought who the hell is gonna pay me to look at the stars, like, well, they pay me to be like an ice cream taster,

like, it's just not something I could conceive of getting paid to do, even if I had the brilliance to do it, which I didn't feel I did. And then I went to graduate school. And during graduate school, I had this kind of, on again, off again, relationship with my father. And I knew that he was a mathematician. He had left and gotten remarried himself,

and moved across the country. I didn't see him for 15 years. And in that time, I learned a lot about him. And I learned that he had gotten very interested, not in pure mathematics, which he had been a number theorist and contributed seven to work on the aphantine equations which you know play a role in Turing's work that you may have seen but anyway he had become interested turned completely away from that into the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity which is physics and by that time as a Brown University and I was a you know thinking Oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter of physicists

or experimentalists. I never thought I'd be a theorist, and I'm not a theorist, so I don't know, it was pretty prescient. And, but it always appealed to me, like, why not do what made me happy as a 12-year-old? Like, we often forget about, like, those primitive things about us

are probably the most sustainable, durable, and resilient attributes of our character. So with my own kids, like, what are they interested in now and they're young? And it doesn't mean that's what they're gonna do. I mean, some of them will not play Fortnite, you know, like professional Fortnite play, which there are, but you know, the odds of that

is less than the odds of being a professor. Can I ask you, is your father still with us? No. Just in a small tangent. Yeah. Do you miss him? Do you think about him? Does his mathematical journey reverberate through who you are?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it did in very many ways. And he's been gone for a long time now. Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only want to spend my time, which is a limited quantity. I don't think it's the most limited quantity. Maybe we'll talk about that later. But to go into the most challenging, interesting things with the limited time that we have

while we're alive. And for him, it was the foundation's quantum mechanics. For me, it was the foundations of the universe and how did it come to be? And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein. Really, I've made great progress in the foundations of the universe, and how did it come to be? And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein, really have made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics. But this is an exciting time. The Kobe satellite had just released its data that the universe had this antisontropy pattern. Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God. And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I'm going to do and what I'm

most interested in. But always throughout that, I wanted to understand, I didn't want to be a wrench monkey. No offense to people that just do experiment. And no offense to monkeys. No offense to monkeys, that's right. This little guy, sorry man. But thinking back to what animates me,

it's not doing the engineering as much as it is getting the data, but there's a lot of steps. I want to be the guy, understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw. So I always joke with my theorist friends, you know, call me a closeted theorist. You know, like, I want to be, you know, they call a guy hangs out with musicians, a drummer. So I want to be like, like that for physics, right? Like a for theoretical physics. I want to be like the guy doesn't do new theory, but understands the theory that the new theorist are doing. I love that formulation of a theorist is

understanding the source of the signal you're getting, like signal is primary, like the the thing you measure is primary and theory is just the search of explaining how that signal originated, but it's all about the signal. I mean, I see the same search for the human mind and like neuroscience in that same kind of way, is it's ultimately about the signal, but you kind of hope to understand how that signal originated. that's fascinating. That's such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics because it's ultimately at the end of the day is all about the signal.

Yeah, and maybe those two things, the neuroscience and like cosmos, not getting too romantic, but yeah, maybe they're linked in some fundamental way, maybe some fundamental conscious, cosmic consciousness, but we're gonna get to that. Yeah, yeah, no, we definitely have to. But getting back to, yeah, so it's so my origins, so I always say like, and I want to try this on you. You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions, but I'm gonna ask you some questions. What's the most important day on the calendar? Don't tell me the date, but what to you, what is your most, what's the most important day to you every year?

Do I have to answer or do I have to think about it? No, no, just answer. You don't have to tell me the exact date of the calendar could be your mistress's birthday or whatever, but. I have so many hellos track. Even though I'm single, how does that even make sense? I know. I'm sorry.

So a day, like a month and a day, yeah, I mean, for me would be December 31st. Yeah, so I was gonna say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. Some people say birthday, anniversary, kids birth. They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right? January means the portal between, the God was the portal between the beginning and the end. So you're looking back, maybe because you're Russian,

like the death side, the light side looking forward into January the beginning and the end. So you're looking back, maybe because you're Russian, the death side, the lights I'd looking for into January the beginning, right? So everybody's most important day is usually some beginning or something significant. For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all. It was like, what did the universe get born, as they said before? And I didn't think they're, again,

I didn't, I just, there was some mental obstruction that I didn't realize that I could get past, because I didn't think like anybody does it. Like, I knew astronomers knew these answers, like the universe at that time, between 10 and 20 billion years old. Now, we know it's 13.872 billion years old. It's incredible the five digit, you know, per se significant, five seconds. What is it again? 13 point 13 point eight seven two billion years. 872 million. So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?

Is it what what are the air bars on that? For me, I'm 50. So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old I am. Yeah. So half a percent percent level accuracy. There's a confidence behind that. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's this significance. Yeah. No, it's extremely well measured. I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have. In contrast to, again, 25 years ago, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or

20 billion years old, but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be as they are, it's about 12 billion years old, or in the universe that were 12 billion. So that would be like you being older than your father. It was embarrassing. Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent, on a tangent, on a tangent? How old is the universe? Can you dig in on to this number?

How do we know? Currently with those, I guess you said five, four, five, all the significant digits. So we can come about it from two different ways. One, basically they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is this weird number that it has the following units.

It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed. And what is the speed you're measuring? Well, you're measuring the speed of a distance galaxy at many mega-parsecs away. So a galaxy at one mega-parsec away,

this isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects. But if you go out, say, one mega-parsec away, I would say that that galaxy's moving 72 kilometers per second away from you. And every galaxy except for the local, very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half a dozen galaxies, at a 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies.

So 12 out of that number are moving towards us the rest are moving away from us. So that number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other, all those galaxies? Now they're really far apart. We know how fast they're moving away. It's a very simple algebra problem to solve when were they touching?

That's where you get that number from. So there's the local 12 and then the rest, you know where the 12 and then you can know that 12 and then look at the others and yeah, then solve the algebra problem. How does the, and stuff in the beginning, the mystery of that beginning epoch change this calculation of very little because actually we understand how there's some other ingredients that go into it. Namely, how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinos, etc. There are and how much ordinary matter like we're made up of neutrons, protons, croutons. Okay, so the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe. Naively, you would say that, yeah. So you're right, if the universe were static, if the universe came into existence and you can conceive of this, the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe.

So the universe just started off. Those galaxies were, you know, they could be moving towards us away from us, who knows? That you could say, I can see a galaxy that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light. That would be true.

But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe. So imagine there was some very distant past that we were near a galaxy. It's going to produce some light. And that galaxy is going to be moving away from us. The light's going to be getting more and more red shifted as it's called. It's going to be moving farther and farther away from us.

As time goes on, there'll be some acceleration as we get into the air of dark energy. The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance, if you will, from which which represents all the events that we could have received information from, we can't currently communicate with that galaxy. It sent us some light and now it's moving away and it's sent us some light. And because the space is also dragging the photons with it, if you like, the photons are being participating in the expansion of the universe. That's why they're red shifting, that we can see things out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began existing.

And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years with no sign of slowing down yet, which is a huge surprise, Sarah, and Dabit is just a surprise, that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us. So we can see, let's call the age of the universe 15 billion years just to make them out simple. We see things at 45 billion light years distance in

that direction. And we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction, just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away. So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each other. That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe. Is there another universe beyond that? We don't know. So I'll conject each other. That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe. Is there another universe beyond that? We don't know. So I'll conjecture it. There's not only one, there's an infinite number of them. How are you emotionally okay with the fact

that our universe is expanding? So like, it's gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvi Singer. I'll go up in the Soviet Union. We watched Propaganda. I realized that you did, yes. So there's a fake. Any haul is that some kind of what is the

yeah, it's funny. Again, this movie with Woody Allen certainly canceled. But yeah, but nevertheless, back when he was not canceled yet, I made a movie called Annie Hall in which as a yeah, it's a self depiction. He's like a Larry David before Larry David was a very David neurotic typical neurotic young Jew. He's in Brooklyn and he before Larry David was Larry David, neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew. He's in Brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother

he's not doing his homework anymore. He refuses to do his homework. The mother says why? Because the universe is expanding and it keeps on expanding. Everything will rip apart and no one will never have anything in contact and everything is meaningless. I assume these are some of the topics we're going to get to. And she goes, what are you talking about?

We're in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. I assume these are some of the topics we're going to get to. And she goes, what are you talking about? We're in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. And that's true. Brooklyn is not expanding. The solar system is not expanding. Well, oftentimes I get asked, what is the universe expanding into?

That's one of my favorite questions. What is it expanding into? And I say, it's actually an easy question, if you think about it. You've seen your friend, Elan, he goes out in space, he's got a rocket, right? What's outside of the rocket? If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle,

take the cap off it, go outside the rocket, you know, get some, set in some tang, screw on the cover of it, what's in there? Is it empty? That's just semantics, I guess. Yeah. No, it's definitely not empty. So you step outside the rocket.

Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space, the quote unquote vacuum upspin. And there's no more liquid in it. There's no more liquid in it. No, it's just just a container, one cubic centimeter. Let's just make it simple. One cubic centimeter of a box and you take it out into space outside of the Falcon, whatever, right? What's inside that box?

It's not empty. There's actually, I'm gonna say, this is gonna set your friends up. There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave background inside that box at any second. Okay, all right, hold on a second. What? 420, that's, I've heard of that number before.

All right, let's, it used to be 69 69 but then they changed. Wow physics works in mysterious ways. Okay, millimeter box at 69. What what are we talking about here? What what's in what's in the box? I'm gonna get that's right. Let's think outside the box. No, we're thinking inside the way. So if you have every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat left over from the big bang, dark matter particles, there's a little ordinary matter in the universe, and every cubic centimeter there's some probability to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.

There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter. Now, just imagine how many cubic centimeters are in the universe. It's enormous. That's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe. It's a very rich universe. But now let's zoom in on that box. So now inside that box, there might be, you know, one, let's say there might be one ordinary matter like a proton

or an electron, a barion, a lepton. There might be a couple hundred neutrinos and there'll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420. What's between those guys? What's between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons? Like just zoom into the cubic micron now. Like imagine 420 things inside a box this big.

It's actually pretty empty. Like there's a zip in around in there, right? So between them, there's a lot of empty space. And this is outside the kind of physics-based models of fields and all those kinds of things. Just like, just actually asking the question, like, what is this emptiness? What's the particle content in the universe

in every cubic centimeter of the universe? Outside of the 420. So you have the 420. 420. You know, they have some mass. Well, they have energy. They don't matter. Photons don't matter. And energy won't bring suitcase.

You know, that's true, right? Photons never bring suitcases with you, with them. Because they're traveling light. See, I don't even get a laugh at you. That's corny dad jokes. Okay, you'll appreciate something. No, this is pretty good. It's just, I'm laughing on the inside.

What's in the box? What's the 420? What's between the photons? That's what 420? What's between the photons? That's what spaces, that's what the universe is expanding into. Okay, that's not so that's that's the notebook. Yeah. On which the photons are written. That's beautiful. But still, thank you. Still, I understand this, but it's still uncomfortable that if the universe is expanding, this thing is expanding. The canvas is expanding.

It's very strange. Because if we were just sitting there still, I guess if we're in Brooklyn, nothing is expanding. So our cognition, our intuition about the world is based on this local fact that we don't get to experience this kind of expansion. Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray. But you know the gravity is the weakest of the so-called four fundamental forces. And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness. Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled towards the Andromeda galaxy at some enormous rate of speed because of its massive counter gravitational force to the force we exert on it.

So gravity is enormously long-range but incredibly weak. And because of that, we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between the, as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right? Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points, how far they are from each other, and those can change. Those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity. So it's weak and what we experience is gravity is the changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvilinear. That's what we experience as gravity is the changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvilinear, that's what we experience as gravity. You have this analogy when you talk to Barry Barish about bowling ball and a trampoline.

That's almost right because it's actually, you have to visualize that now in four dimensions like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object, including on the sides. It becomes very hard to visualize. So a lot of people use that. It's also fraught analogy because you're using gravity, like the notion of gravity pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity. So it's a little overburdening the analogy. But okay, so you mentioned Barry Barrish wrote the forward to your book.

How do gravitation waste then into all of this? How do they, on the emotional level? How do they make you feel that they're just moving space-time? Yeah, so gravitational waves were, the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time, you know, it was discovered twice, indirectly by two men named Halson Taylor, and that was given my first year of graduate school. The I entered graduate school almost they they announced these two guys want to and the guy who wanted did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age. Is this in the 40s? This was no, this is not.

That was a good night. Yeah, that was good. Thank you. I got it. I got it. You know, to a cosmologist age it means nothing and to a tennis player. Not on Tinder. That's right. Sorry. Gravitational waves do fit in because what we're trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel up the speed of light, that they go through everything, they can go through everything, and that they're directly detectable, we're using them to try to confirm if or if not inflation occurred. So did inflation the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part

of the universe and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe, did that take place? There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves, not these old newcomers that Barry studies, the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us, a billion years ago. But we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch. pop. However, those we cannot build a LIGO and put it at the big bang. So if you want to measure, let's say, the old time firecracker, let's say there's a firecracker, and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you. You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it. And what we're trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the big bang, not

by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used in his colleagues, but instead using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light in the universe, we're going to use that as a film, quote unquote, on to which gravitational waves get exposed. And hope you can know so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy to for the exposure. So the signal as I said is so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter and there's a lot of folk cubic centimeters in the universe. However, what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon. How intense it is. We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is, we're looking for what its polarization is.

And we'll go to, let me just ask, are you serious about the per cubic millimeter of 420 is the number? Santa meter. But cubic centimeter, 420 is the number. That's the number. I wonder if Elon knows this, and if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.

Okay. That's exactly. Yeah. That's true. Oh, okay. Funding security. Excellent. So, I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak, of triumph, of the you described in the losing and no-ball prize. So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.

Yeah. You can describe what bicep 1 and Bicep 2 are, Bicep 3, perhaps the instruments that can detect this kind of polarization, what are the challenges, the origin story, the whole thing. Yeah. So, well, the origin story goes back again to like a father son rivalry, it really does.

So my father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera, but he never won a Nobel Prize. And you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids, you know. Oh, I was a football player in high school, I'll show you, and then whatever, wrestling, whatever, and some of us could be healthy too. But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy.

Like, we would compete, and you know, he was much more of a pure mathematician, and I was with experimental physicists, so we had both different ideas and what was worth prioritizing our time. But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize. And I knew I could kind of outdo him. So I feel pretty venal and kind of, you know, menacequial kind of character wise saying, well, the only reason you could all do him is because the field's model is given every four years. And only if you're under 40, which he was.

So he's working under much more limited conditions. That's right. So even if I had, which, you know, spoiler alert, the book's called losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn't do it. But I wanted to do something big, and I wanted to do something that would really just unequivocally be realized as in a discovery for the ages. As in fact, it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful. So you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions. That's all I can do.

So as an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences. That's all I wanted to do. I felt like if it's not, you know, if it's if it's worth spending, you know, perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well, better be interesting to me, to carry me through to give me the, you know, perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well, better be interesting to me, to carry me through, to give me the, you know, I always say, passion is great when people say,

oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough. Passion's like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that's not enough to get the rocket into space. So then you swung to the fences with Bicep 1, what is this? So Bicep 1 was born out of a kind of interesting circumstances. So I had gone to a Stanford University for a postdoc. So an academic hunger games, Stanford University. Yeah, it's a small little school.

It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts that you're affiliated with. But as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor. She had gotten there only a year before I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor she had gotten there only a year before I got there. And she had her own priorities that things that she wanted to do. But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different. She was studying galaxies at high red shift

and I wanted to study the origin of the universe using this type of technology. And I realized courtesy of a good friend of mine who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Hemingowski, that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope. We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope. We needed a tiny refracting telescope, no bigger than my head, less than a foot across.

And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, size telescope could have, because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on the sky. They're enormously long, large areas signals on the sky. And if we could measure that, it would be proof effectively as close as you get to proof. There could be things that mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch. Inflation being the signal originally conceived of by Alan Gooth to explain why the universe had the large-scale features that it does, namely that it has so-called flat geometry.

So, there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees. You can do that with spacecraft, you can do that with stars, you can do that laser beams, you can do that with three different galaxies. All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry, it's remarkable. But it's also unstable, it's very unlikely, it's very seemingly finely tuned. And that was one of the motivations that Gooth had to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation, 1979, when he was a postdoc, also at Stanford, Slack.

And he was trying to get a permanent job, I was trying to like make my name for myself. And so I realized I could do this, but I was also being paid by this professor at Stanford to do a job for her. And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you. And then one day she couldn't take it anymore because I was like sketching notebooks and planning his experiments.

And I just, I wasn't, no, I actually- Yeah, big ideas in your mind. You were planning big experiments. And that was difficult to work with on a small scale for like a postdoc type of situation. We have to you know publish basic papers deliver on some basic deadlines for a project all those kinds of support your advisor is paying I should pay me and so one day I came in and it actually involved another friend of mine, an astronomer named Jill Tarder, one of the pioneers in the SETI, science, business of detecting extraterrestrials,

which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens, so I'm sure we won't get into aliens. But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like, I really want to meet her, can you introduce me? She said, no, in fact, you're fired. My boss. So I was like, this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me. I didn't know what would lead or what would happen to it, but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university

turned out to be the path, I mean, literally, it brings me here today, in that because of that, I ended up working for another person in Caltech, which is in Pasadena. And she, my original boss, Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor, a man by the name Andrew Lang. And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know, like, he is like a Steve Jobs or Elon, you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive, ideal man, not the guy always in the lab,

you know, doing everything, but understood the where things are going decades from now. And he had been involved in an experiment that actually measured the universe was flat, very close to flat, along with appreciating experiment done at Princeton by Lamin Page and other collaborators. It was shaped by the universe's flat.

The geometry of the universe is flat. How did he do that experiment? So he used the cosmic microwave background. And so what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe. So you can measure triangles on Earth. You can actually, it's hard to show that the Earth is curved, but you can show the Earth is curved using triangles, mountain tops, et cetera. If you haven't accurate enough protractor.

Allegedly, yeah. Yeah. God, you're like auto-canceling. This is great. My ratings are going to go up, man. This is going to be great. Take out the deal. If you want actual science, go listen to Brian. If you want all of these conspiracy theories or aka the truth of a flat earth, listen to. So what he used was the following triangle. There are proto-galaxy sized objects in the CMB. The cosmic microwave background has these patches. And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of a primordial plasma,

the soup that constitutes the early universe which is hydrogen, it's very simple material. Understand hydrogen electrons and radiation, very simple plasma, as it says, son, understand it. The diameter is, you know, one base of the triangle, and then the distance to the earth is the other two legs. So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech and then University of Rome, and that's other group at Princeton, measured the angle, interior angle

effectively, very, very accurately, and showed that it added up to 180 degrees. Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB? Can you know where they could trace them back location wise? You can know where they are, but more than that, there's so many of these patches. There are about one square degree on the sky. The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere. So there's literally 44,000 of these size patches over which he could do these kind of measurements to build up very good statistics. That's not exactly how they do it or how they did it

on this experiment called boomerang, but they did measure very accurately the, what was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma. That's fast. So the sphere has 44, approximately 44, thousand square degrees to cover a sphere. That's a very kind of important data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere and you're looking out into the observable universe. So there's a lot of patches to work with. Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the fast algorithmic decomposition of spheres and machine learning and the early 2000s still used today was created out of this field by data analysts using this thing called hierarchical, equal area,

triangles called heel picks is what it's called. And so you just stitch all the stuff together and that's, and stitch it together very accurately. Yeah. Get high statistical significance in order to reduce the statistical errors, very clean signal and measurement device to reduce the systematic errors, those are the two predominant sources of error and any measurement. Those that can be improved by more and more measurement, you know, you take more and more measurements at this table, you'll get slightly better each time,

but you only win as the number of, one over the square root of the number of measurements. But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big. So they were able to get a very accurate measurement. Again, it's not exactly how they did it. They also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration, windows. There's a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis, and then comparing that with cosmological parameters, very simple model, just six different numbers that go into a model that made a prediction, and one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out, and that is the universe has zero spatial curvature, and that was called boomerang. So he had just come off of this. Now, let me remind you, who is the first person to measure the curvature of the earth

It's a guy named Aristophanes and that you know whatever lived around Aristotle's time. His name is in history books So this guy Andrew Lang. I was like he's like the next Aristotle Aristotle And like I just want to work for this guy, you know, he was clearly had this brand He was about 40 at the time California scientists scientist of the year. I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that. And I knew that he, you know, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk and he said, you know, I love it. You've got a job. And before I could even, you know, before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take it, you know, like it was too good to be true. And I started working there at Caltech and slowly but surely because Caltech's

a rich private university, at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore, he just wrote us a check, Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started in this idea. And so we started coming with the idea for what I later named bicep by background imaging cosmic extra galactic polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization and get to that in a minute. But along the way, the idea was very simple. We're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope. Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head. Only way, you know, forward is more making things more complex, right? And when you make things complex in science, you introduce

the possibility for systematic errors. And so we want to build the cleanest instrument, turns out a cleanest instrument, you can build an astronomy's or refracting telescope. We also had to unlike that telescope or Galileo's, we had to use very sensitive detectors that were cooled less than 120th of the temperature of the cosmic background itself, which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe. So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. To do that, we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules and take it to a very very special place called the South Pole and Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch there it is over there.

So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets. Bright, oh yeah. Yeah. Somebody was born in Soviet Union. We obviously like to call it red. United States Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation. And the base is called the Amonson Scott South Poleer Station. So it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it.

Now there is a treaty and an article you can't use it for military purposes for mining, etc., etc. But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole. There's a land at the North Pole, right? So what did he do? He stuck it on the ocean Pole. There's a land at the North Pole, right? So what did he do? He stuck it on the ocean underneath. But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica, which was first reached about 110 years ago. The first time in human history, Antarctica means the opposite of the bear. It means like no bears there, basically opposite of where polar bears are, Arctic is polar bear. That's where the Greek did not know that.

Yeah, that's interesting. So Antarctic means the opposite place of that. So humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the middle of that continent. We went to take this telescope, somewhere extremely dry. It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego,

Texas, and there's no place like the South Pole or Chile. Those are the two premier places on Earth. Of course, you'd like to go into space, there's no place like the South Pole or Chile. Those are the two premier places on Earth. Of course, you'd like to go into space. There's no water in space. So it's not about cold, it's about dry. Exactly. So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka and you could put it in this cup, right?

And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up. After two minutes, the water's, three minutes, the water's boiling. You can't touch it. Take it from me. Don't touch it. But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to, right? Why? Because the mug is totally bone dry. But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules, because water molecules resonate exactly at these microwave frequencies. So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them, traveling per cubic centimeter from the big bang itself to get absorbent some water molecule in the earth's atmosphere.

So you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area, and that happens to be either Chile or my other project, the Simon Observatory is located, or you take it to the South Pole. We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there. And it's like being on Haath. It's like it's a completely otherworldly environment. Ice, planar, flat as a pancake. You like and the buildings are built up on stilt, they're built up up because the snow

will otherwise cover them over. The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away. If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there. If you have any issues with your appendix that cut it out of you before you go down there, the Russians at Vostok Base not too far away, about 600 miles away. The doctors there, there's a famous picture of one of them operating on himself taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself. It's a harsh condition, science in the harshest of conditions

on Earth at least. And we go to those great lengths because it's the pristine environment to observe these precious photons. And we built this telescope and it weighs tens of thousands of pounds. And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot. I mean, it's scanning the sky almost

unattended. It needed that we have a guy who spends a year of his life down there. A girl who spends a year of their life down there. They're called winter overs. They arrive in sometimes as early as November and they don't leave until the following December. And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000. You just have to work for one night of your life. That's all I'm gonna put in. It's a long night. And what Bicep is, and I couldn't bring my polarized sunglasses here, so I brought these actual polarizers here. So if you take this and put in front of your telescope there,

you have now made a polarimeter. You've made a polarization sensitive telescope. Now you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing, but one way to think about, now take this guy and look at a light, look at a light source, put one up to your eye, and now put the other one in front of it, anywhere, and now rotate them. What happens to the light source? It comes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer. Yeah, so as

it's called a quadrupolar pattern, right? So it's repeating. It goes bright, dim, bright, dim. It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation. And that's because of the property of the photon. The photon is a spin one field, but the polarization of light is, it's the axis at which its electric field is oscillating. Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down. And so therefore vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization.

And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation. It's just like a spin, a spin two object. So now if you put that in front of the telescope, you can do one of two things. Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because you have one of the polarizers. And then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one. You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization. Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here. There's a crystal, it's called calcite. This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman. This crystal put it on top of your printed notes there and tell me what does it look like?

There's Like I could see everything twice. It's a double image. That is a special crystal that has two different indices of Refraction. So light emerging, which is unpolarized from that black ink, comes out, and it splits into two different directions. And it could split even more if I made the crystal, give you my more expensive crystal, but that's all I have. What is the crystal? What is kind of property called? It's called calcite. This is crystal. It's called bi-refrangent crystal. Bi means to refringent means refracting. So this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.

Pretty clean by signal. Like it's cleanly to, I'm seeing two very cleanly. It's very crisp, right? So that's yours to keep with every time you host me. Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand. Yeah. Put it on top of the crystal and kind of move back and forth. Wow. This is incredible. You can switch as you rotate, you switch from one

signal to the other. So one of the refractions to the other. Whoa. So that is now you are analyzing the polarization. Your confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization, and effectively what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the microwave, so the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave regime in the electromagnetic spectrum, and we're coupling not to refracting telescope,

but your eyes are refracting telescopes. So you are a polarimeter right now. The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization, but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light and the color. That's what we call color and intensity, brightness. So you're devising an instrument that's very precisely measuring that polarity? Exactly. And doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human ice retina cells,

but of superconductors and things called balometers. And this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions, one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level. So why is it that this kind of device could win a Nobel Prize. So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously. There were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories. Now why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers? Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple

or is it like a think tank or Google? Let's say it was like Google, Google has like Google X as this thing and that thing right. So they were working there, but imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers, like they were actively recruiting, well, why would they do that? Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s was the first commercial satellite launch for communication. And so so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone, you know, part of 18 team,

the tele, early telephone company, later invent the become the telephone, you know, part of AT&T, the telephonic early telephone company, later invent the first cell phone, the year I was born, and they would take that 1946. And they would take that telescope technology that radio astronomers had developed, and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal to noise of the satellites that they were seeing. And they found they couldn't.

They found that they could not improve the signal noise ratio of the first telecommunication satellite. It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem. Because they were bouncing signals from the west coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing it in New Jersey of all places, in northern New Jersey, home-dale, New Jersey. And these radish-dromes couldn't get rid of the signal. So they Jersey, home to New Jersey. And these writers, how much couldn't get rid of the signal? So they said, well, New Jersey's not far from New York. Let's see if the signal's coming from New York.

Nope, not coming from New York. Let's see if it changes with the year. Maybe it's coming from the galaxy, which was also discovered there by Janski in 1930, something. So in the, not being able to reduce the signal or increase the signal to noise ratio, the noise was, it was, they knew the signal was right. They couldn't get rid of the noise. And there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy by the name of Edward Ome. He measured the same signal, found that there was this hiss of static,

of radio static that he could not get rid of, that had a value of about three Kelvin. So you can translate. Remember I said, if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that's hot, the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object. It's a principle of radio thermodynamics. So it's a really interesting thing. So thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter

from here on Earth. It's amazing. They were, and so we in a radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity, but by its temperature. So he found this guy Edward Omm, oh, there's this three Kelvin signal, I can't get rid of it. It must be I did my era analysis wrong, and I would give him an F if he was one of my, you know, first-year students.

But he just attributed to the lack of, of, of, understand, these other guys, Penzius and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said, no, let's build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope and do what's called calibration, put, inject a known source of signal every second that has a temperature of about four Kelvin, because the signal that they were trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin, and you want to have it as close as possible to the pernicious signal as possible. They did that once a second, so they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements over the course of several months, years, and even by the end of millions of measurements

for sure. And they found they couldn't get rid of it either, but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Calvin. So how does having a four Calvin source, how does the calibration work just that? It could be larger. Imagine you're trying to calibrate the microphone. You could do it with a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress.

There are amplifiers downstream from the detector and every experiment that I've ever worked on. They only have a linear region over a very small region. You want to keep it as linear as possible. That means if you're trying to get rid of it, you're trying to compare a voice, and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine. It's not as, it's not going to be as easy on the, on the amplifiers as getting, you know, a slightly lagging or something, you know, a violent. So the idea of the noise is present in both. There's noise

present in both and you get you measure what they did is they made a separate measurement just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well. Four Kelvin is the temperature of liquid helium. That's a temperature that's not going to change. It's certainly not going to change of a time scale, one second. So they could compare unknown signal, unknown signal, unknown signal, like a scale, like a balance. So another way to think about is like this, you've seen these Libro kind of balances, or you put two weights in a pan, right? What happens if you put like one ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight, you don't get any measurement, right? You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight.

That's why they use four kelvin. Got it, but just to linger on the fact that there's a romantic element to the fact that you're arriving at the same temperature. That's kind of fascinating. And you measuring stuff in terms of, you're measuring signal in terms of temperature at the source. Yeah. So you get to, I mean, there's something about temperature that's intimate. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah, especially since, you know, all life is basically, you know, conversion of energy and trying to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics, exactly in that way. And this is very crucial kind of thing to do in science because they weren't

looking for the signal. They found it accidentally. These two scientists, Penzius and Wilson. And I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science. Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said, like the most important reaction as a scientist is not Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it. No, he said, no, he said, like, that's weird, like, that's a much better reaction, or that's freaking cool. Like, that's a scientist, not like, oh, I found one, because... Surprise.

Yeah. Because if you find what you're going to find, that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias, which is deadly. And so, you know, it so close to deadly is possible. So how does that take us to something that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize? So Pennzie Sim Wilson weren't looking for a signal. They ended up discovering the heat left over

from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera. And that was a serendipitous discovery. They won the Nobel Prize in 1978. It was the first one ever awarding cosmology. My reasoning is what if you could explain not only how the elements got formed, but how the whole universe got formed and Kill off every other model of science. So if that weren't enough every scientist, you know worth his or her salt had told me and Andrew Lang and our colleagues This is a slam dunk Nobel Prize, if you could do it.

Because it was really explaining, again, the stakes of this science is different than like superfluidity, plasma physics. When you talk about the origin of the universe, it ties into everything. It ties into philosophy, theology. You realize if the Paul Steinhart is correct, that the Bible can't be correct.

In other words, the Bible is correct. Now, it isn't falsified if you like, if you believe it. I'm not, I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously. But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning. What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular? It was, it would be more like the cosmology of Acha-Natan and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative. So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.

And again, it's not an effect, because we need plasma physics, we need, we need every type of physics except maybe biophysics. Like we literally use every branch of physics, a thermodynamic superconductivity, quantum mechanic, all that goes into our understanding of the instrument. And even further, if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we report to measure.

So I rationalize that if Penn's using Wilson and the Nobel Prize for this, if Huls and Taylor won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before a LIGO, by me detecting gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe began, detecting the origin of the initial conditions for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which won the Nobel Prize in 1983. These are like five Nobel prizes, potentially. For that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk to outdo what my father did to do, you know, really this impossible. And at that time, Lacks, you know, again, I'm, you know, it sounds weird because people like,

oh, you wouldn't, you know, you don't really, you still want the Nobel Prize. You're still, like, greedy. And look, you wrote another book of it. And I always joke, I'm like, well, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature. And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite. Just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature. And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite. But, um, wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on. But so there's a submission. Let's say this device, this kind of signal could unlock many of the mysteries about the early universe. And so there's excitement there. So let's take it then further. I mean, there's a human story here

of a bit of heartbreak, not only was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize, if the Nobel Prize was given, you were excluded from the list of three that we get the Nobel Prize. So why were you excluded? Maybe that's a place to tell the story of Bicep 2. Yeah, so Bicep 2 like, you know, iPhones or I know you're an Android fanboy, but, you know, every year they get a little bit better. They get more megapixels, they get more optics,

triple X zoom, whatever. Okay, right. We upgraded our detectors as well. The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors. They have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale. And we want to make them into superconductors, which had a virtue that you could then mass-produce them. Why superconductors? Well, again, we're measuring heat. So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range. That means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer. And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case, JMEBOC, and nowadays Suzanne Stags at Princeton, they are just exquisitely making these sensors, tens of thousands of them.

The initial bicep one instrument, of course we just call the bicep, that only had 98 detectors. Simon's observatory is going to have 100 times more just in one of our four telescopes. We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating full-time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero in the out of common desert. We'll get there. But in the case of getting back to what Bicep did, we upgraded it made Bicep 2. In January 2010, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole in the same building, which is ominously called the dark sector laboratory DSL still operating to this very day. We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before. It has very similar identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum, everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors. So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade.

And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful, but then just a naive factor of five. And then we started observing with that. And we knew we'd have years to go and maybe we'd never see anything. Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of space-time produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to. So I was playing a role in that. Obviously, it had upgraded my a version of the original idea that I had had for Bicep along with Andrew Lang. And in January of 2010, we were, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley, and I got a call from Andrew

Lang's, or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor, Paul Richards at UC Berkeley. And he said that Andrew is dead He had taken his life by suicide and this is a man and I already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure to me. Andrew he would give me advice on marriage and like how I should be with my kids and and you know, what was the most important way to move through the academic ladder? Again, he was pretty naturally suited to win the Nobel Prize. Everyone always thought he would win it. He's still, if he were alive, he still could win it. In fact, his wife and his ex-wife won it. Francis Arnold in 2018.

And it was just a power couple. And it destroyed me for a long time because he was just this magical person. I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life, even like these aspects of raising kids and being married without him. And to do it in that way, it felt like, again, I'm not, he's got kids and I feel terrible for them, obviously. But it did feel like a betrayal.

I mean, I'm just being honest with you. It felt like, why didn't the F did you not reach out? You know, I thought we were close and I couldn't, you know, I told him everything and I felt like he had told me everything. And now he was gone. And then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument. I mean, there's millions of dollars invested, careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard. And then here we were. And like who's going to take over the lead? He was the lead of the project at Caltech. And then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well, they had decided to form a collaboration in which I was no longer the

principal investigator. I was no longer one of the co-principal investigators as I was on BISEP 1. So I continue on BISEP 1 as the co-leader of it, but not on BISEP 2. And, you know, obviously that was pretty painful. This is all happening at the same time as you lose this father figure. Now there's this kind of,

this one betrayal in a way, and there's another or something that feels like a betrayal. Yeah, and he had, you know, kind of been the one, the only one looking out for my interest in the new experiment. I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego, and there were other postdocs in the mix, all of whom would come there to work with him

to get the, you know, the approbation that would then lead to their careers taking off as it did for mine. And, you know, the approbation that would then lead to their careers taking off as it did for mine. And, you know, so there was a competition. I mean, science is not free from egos and competition and desires rightfully or wrongfully for credit and attribution. Was he the source of strength and confidence for you as a scientist as a man? I mean, we're kind of alone in this world. As when you take on difficult things,

we often kind of grasp, but a few folks that give us strength. We'll see you're basically your only source of strength in this whole journey, like primarily in terms of like this close knit. As a scientist, there were really two. There was one, this Russian cosmologist Alexander Polnarev, who thankfully is very much alive. He was at Queen Mary University. Now he's retired. He was kind of a theoretical cosmological father to me. And then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me. You need to have a brand as a scientist. Every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it, some of them

don't burnish it. But some of the skills about being a scientist, we don't teach our students, involve how do you cultivate a scientific persona. And he was the exemplar for that. In addition to being the avuncular, you know, father figure type character, that really, you know, was the person I would talk to. I had issues with, when I had issues with my own students and he would tell me how those were and he would tell me, you know, his misgivings about, about people that he worked with or things in this personal life.

And it was, it was devastating. But again, like, who the hell am I? I'm not as kid, you know, his kids lost father, you know, it's, so I feel guilty talking about it in that sense, but it's just a reality. Well, there is something that's not often talked about is people who collaborate on scientific efforts. I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't want to compare, but it's sometimes when the collaboration is truly great, it sounds similar as when veterans

talk about their time serving together. There's a bond that's formed. So comparing family and this kind of thing is not productive, but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real, because you're taking on something, you're taking on the impossible. You're trying to achieve something sort of like there's this darkness, this fog of mystery that we're all surrounded by, which is what the human condition is. And you are like grasping at hope through the tools of science. And you're doing that together with like a confidence you probably should not have. But you're boldly pushing through. And then for him to take his own life, I can't ask you about this kind of moment that combined,

I don't want to say betrayal, but perhaps the feeling of betrayal that by sub-two kind of goes on with all you even though you're part of it, you're not part of the leadership group. Can you describe those low points that, was there a depression, was there a crumbling of confidence. Yeah, I mean, it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person, you know, like, there's only a few different ways to have identity and, you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically. One of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist and that sometimes is their primary identity.

Now I've got other husband and father, but, you know, at that time, that was my identity. So to have that kind of taken away, it you know what, it reminded me of being kind of adopted in a sense like my like the one who created me or that I played, you know, played a role in my life that he abandoned me in the sense. It felt like these people are abandoning me. And the only thing I correct about the analogy that you use is like in is in the war, they're all working for common good. It's not like, I want to get the most kills,

I compare it more to a band, like think about the Beatles, and what they did. And then they ripped apart because of Egos, credit, they had solo careers, relations with their intimits, and so forth. It's not only for the common good, there is more of a zero sum aspect. Like I always say science is not, science is an infinite game. You can't win science. You never get to the out one science and even the novel part, they don't feel like, oh, we're done. They feel like a lot of times they're impostors even to that day. However, science is made up of a lot of, lot of, lot of finite games where there is only one winner for 10 year. There is only three winner, our

only three winners for the Nobel Prize. And because of that, I think it's heterodox. And it's very confusing, especially there's no guide. I never got a guide, had to be a professor, had to teach, had a leader research group, had to deal with the death of an advisor, had to deal with an unreally graduate student or two. So we're all reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane, if you think about it, because the academic system that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years old. It dates back to Bologna, Northern Italy, 1088 or so. First universities were established. And, you know, very little's changes. Some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece of rock

and, you know, lecturing in front of it. There's only one better aspect nowadays, is that back then, the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor, and then he or she wouldn't get paid, probably mostly it was he's back then. Nowadays, that barbaric process has been replaced by 10 years, so I'm okay.

But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath me, because you know, he was like my consigliori. He was a guy I saw a council and counseled me and he's dead and I felt like there is no one who's gonna honor the agreements that we had and he was a very soulful person. He was so much better at being a scientist than I could ever be. And just the loss for the cosmos, it's just really hurt. And, you know, I thought,

oh, like, you know, it's so sad because he could have won the Nobel Prize. I don't think like that anymore. First, I think about his kids. Felt at first, now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel Prize, and hence the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize. It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with. It's a double entendre. Like, we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science out. We can talk about that at different time. But in the context of like, now thinking back on it, that was such a minuscule part of it, because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize,

or I did win the, or any of us did, would that have changed anything, would that have brought anything back? It's so, you know, we say it's like vanity, it's futility. And I just, you know, for me, the Nobel Prize is like, it's, I don't want to say it's like insignificant because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence. And, you know, I went back, I hadn't even had the grass Tyson on my show.

I'm going to name drum, okay. And he prepares, he prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show. So you see him going on, call the airport, you think, ah, they just have a band there. He's just naturally gifted. No, he said, no, no, no. You say that you're you're undermining what he does. What he does, he goes back, he watches the last month of Colbert reports or whatever it's called. Late show. And he says, how long does Stephen pause between questions?

How long in the news cycle does he go back? What topics has he talked about with people similar to me? So I took Neil and I did that for you. And I look back. How many times does Lex mention the words Nobel and prize? And I put it into Google N-Gram and out came exactly the same number of times as show notes show episodes as of this moment. So you've said the words Nobel prize over 240 times. Yeah, I mean, it is so strange as a symbol 240 times. Yeah, I mean it's so strange as a symbol that kind of unites this whole scientific journey, right? I It's so it's both sad and beautiful that

A little prize of the little award a medal little plaque. They'll be most likely forgotten by history completely Some silly list. It's somehow a catalyst for greatness. It resulted in you doing your life's work, the dream of it. Would I have done it without the noble pro, you know, I can't necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened. So no, it definitely has a place. And for me, you know, it is valuable to think about it. But the level of obsession that academics

have about it is really, I think it is almost unbalanced becoming unhealthy. And again, I have no I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel Prize. Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show. And to think about, like, the one rule. So by the way, right after the day new month of the story, which I'll get to in a bit, how our dreams went down to dust and ashes. I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.

So, like, the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually, they asked me to nominate. Now imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say Brian, you know, instead of me inviting myself on a show, if you say Brian, would you like to come on the Lex Friedman podcast? I say, you know what, Lex, you know, like I broken, I think you might, can you introduce him to me? You know, like, you imagine how I think you might, can you introduce them to me? Like, you imagine how that would feel. Like you feel it after, you know, I'm even really,

so I was asked to nominate the winners. And the one rule that they say of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there's only one rule that they maintained. In other words, he said one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit to mankind made the world better, right? None of that was mentioned in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit to mankind, made the world better, right?

None of that was mentioned in the letter. It said, many people can win it for what worked on long ago. They didn't mention anything in the letter to me signed by the Secretary General. Nothing about benefiting mankind. They said, just one thing. Can't nominate yourself. So none of these guys nominated themselves. Actually, little known fact, they sent that exact letter just to you.

That rule was created just for the... That's called the Keating Coral. Yes, exactly. Just to like... Good for them. I'd rub it in. I mean, it's in this particular case, of course, that's like a some weird technicality, whatever.

But in this particular case, it's kind of a powerful reminder. Yeah. That's how the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind in their stories behind all of that. Yeah, I mean, here's a good example. And again, this is my friend Barry Barish. He's become like a mentor and a friend. He wrote the forward to this, my book,

and to the most. He won the Nobel Prize because of different guy died. And he admits it, and he said it. And actually, it's funny with him because I've heard you talk very rapsodically and leveling informantically about with Harry Cliff and a wonderful podcast with him, by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is,

and how in that, we were about to build the superconducting super collider right here in Texas Texas and it didn't get built and got canceled by Congress and I'd say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you. And he's like, what the hell are you talking about? I'm like, if that didn't get canceled. First of all, they, even though it did get canceled, the Europeans went on to build it themselves, saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars. And we didn't, we wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new as proven by the

fact that as you and Harry talked about nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out. And actually he's had a recent paper, but it's been an upper limit. And along with his collaborators and LHCB experiment that I'm going to be talking with him about. But, but the bottom line is it was really built to detect the Higgs. So the SSC for twice as much money would have sucked up Barry's career. He would have been working on that maybe not. And then he would never have worked on LIGO. And then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize. So you look at counterfactual history. That's not actually a big stretch. If the SSE had still gone on, he would

have worked at it because he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment. Second thing, if imagine the following thing had happened. They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015, they detected unequivocal evidence for the Inspiral Collision of two massive black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind. So one solar mass worth of matter got con-masked, got converted to pure gravitational energy, no light, seen by them. This particular date, September 14th, 2015.

That explosion because of the miracle of time travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away. They actually don't know which galaxy took place and still, and they never will. Okay. If that collision between these two things, we should probably be orbiting each other for maybe a million years or more. If that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize. Because it's hilarious to think that there's one human, the one that Nobel Prize because two giant things collided. A billion, 200 million years ago. And if it had happened eight, the 18 days, 20 day, 30, because that was the deadline for the

Nobel Prize to be announced, they announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the winners in January. So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn't announce anything, and they were just rumors. And so he didn't, but the reason that he wouldn't have won it, because there was another guy who was still alive, considered to be the founder and father, three of the three fathers, Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Doran, who did win it, and the third gentleman, a Caltech named Ron Dreever, who passed away, again, he was alive in 2016, he died in the middle of 2017, and then he wasn't awarded the NUMMA prize.

And here we are, several billion of hairless apes that strangely were clothing, celebrated three other clothed hairless apes with a metal, with one particular element and then they made speeches in a particular language that evolved in to get those metals in front of another guy who wears even fancier clothes who is the king of Sweden and then they got some free food afterwards. It's a reindeer meat, that's right. Okay, excellent. Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example, what happened to you in terms of

Bicep 2, I want to kind of speak at a high level about a particular thing I observed. So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast. I just listened to the podcast. I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general. And it also coincided with my entry into grad school and this whole journey of academia. So grad school get in my PhD, go into MIT, and then Google and then just looking at this whole world of research. and then Google and just looking at this whole world of research, what I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world is that he celebrates others, like he promotes them. He gets like genuinely, and I now know this from just being a friend privately,

he genuinely gets excited by the success of others. And the contrast of that to how folks in academia often behave was always really disappointing to me. Because the natural, just on a basic human level, there is an excitement, but the nature of that excitement is more like, I'm happy for my friend, but I'm really jealous, and I want to even I'll do them. I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better. So even that's even for friends.

So there's not a genuine pure excitement for others. And then a couple of that with just the you know as a as a host of a popular podcast know this feeling Which is like there's not even a willingness to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others you people in academia are often best equipped Technically in terms of language to celebrate others. They understand the beauty, like the full richness of why the cool idea is as cool as it is. And they're in the best position of celebrating. And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others, they might end up on the cover of nature, whatever. And not me. It's they turn it into zero some game. What I the reason why I think

Rogan has been an inspiration to me and many others is that it doesn't have to be that. Yeah. And forget money and all those kinds of things that I think there's a narrative told that academics are this way because there's a limited amount of money, so they're fighting for this. I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way. I think you can have a limited amount of money. The battle for money happens in the space of proposal, there's networking, there's private stuff, public celebration of others, and just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart is not have to do

anything with money. It has to do with you having a big ego not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey that we are all on. And there's folks like Joe Rogan who in the comedian circles is also rare. But he inspired all these other comedians to realize, you know what, it's great to celebrate each other, we're promoting each other and therefore the pie grows. Yeah. Because everybody else gets excited about this whole thing and the pie grows. Right now, the scientists by fighting, like, by not celebrating each other, I'm not growing the pie and now because of that sort of size becomes less and less possible.

It's a line wheel. Exactly. No, and I want to point out, do you think one is that I remember you went on Joe's show, because of that sort of size becomes less than the most possible. And that's exactly. No, and I want to point out, do you think one is that I remember you went on Joe show maybe a couple of years ago. And and then he gave you a watch and give you like a Rolex, right? And I tweeted to you and I think omega omega. Sorry.

Okay. Fine. The watch that went to the to the moon, which we will get to in a bit. Um, I don't think he could give you what I gave you, though, by the way. And we'll get to what that final gift package is for you. And by the way, I also wanted to mention because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset. And you should definitely go on Joe Rogan. And I we had this conversation with him. Yeah. Because I was like, what I was moving to Austin and had a conversation like,

don't you think it's weird like if we have the same guests at the same time or whatever, he's like, fuck that. I want you to be more successful than me. I want he truly wants everybody, like especially people close to him, be more successful. Like there's not even a thought like, but you know why he does.

And this is what I tweeted to you in one of the few things I think you have retweeted that I sent you. I said, someday you're gonna give that to somebody. And today I want it that to be me. No, no. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I think that's true. I mean, you do do something very rare. I don't turn this into too much of a love fest, but I do wanna say, even back to Andrew, who I've almost been, hey, hegeographic about,

just treating him like a saint. He said to me the same thing, and a moment of peak, said like, God damn it, like I have to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me, so that they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the F&M You know, that wasn't his that wasn't who he was

That was just an expression like I'm doing something which is fundamentally, but you know what? When you have kids, hopefully, you know, please god you will someday because I think and I hope we can get to talk about that later but part of Investment and part of doing something with when you have a I hope we can get to talk about that later, but part of investment and part of doing something with, when you have a kid, like you can get married, you can marry someone because she's rich, or he's rich, or you can marry someone because they're good looking, or he's good looking.

You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish. There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish. Nobody says, like, oh, you know what? I really want this thing that's three feet tall that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor. That wakes me up all hours of the night. The interferes my love life. Nobody says that because it doesn't benefit you. For months and months, a friend of mine who actually does the videos for me and does a lot of my

solo videos. He's having his first kid. He's like, what do I do? Because it always gets stupid if I catch up on sleep now. Like, yeah, I'm going to store sleep in my sleep bank. I don't think Hubertman and you talked about that, right? You can't do that. That's stupid. What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby, let the mother relax. Like, in other words, do the things,

and this really relates back to our subtle ones. Our subtle ones said, why do parents love kids more than kids love parents? As much as you love your down your mind, they still love you more. And because you love that what you sacrifice for, here's a proof. I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs, some with severe, my aunt, one of my uncles, my, the key inside had to have the severe,

what they called mental retardation. Now it's probably has a different name. That out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite. Cause they had a sacrifice so much for him. And I think of that, you know, in the small case, like Joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever, you're gonna mentor someone, you love that which you sacrifice for. Sacrifice is reduction of entropy, it's storing and investing,

and you want to protect that. And, you know, that, to me, really speaks to this. So, yeah, I don't hold it against, but it is true, like scientists are, you know, when they're described again, they're often said to be like children, right? You've heard this description, they're inquisitive, they're curious, they're passionate.

They love that. And I'm like, yeah, and they don't play well with others, they're jealous, they're petty, they're selfish, they won't share their ball in the go home. We, there's no such thing as a single-edged sword. I wish there were, you know, because we need some more of that, because you gotta dull it up.

But in this case, I think when you have this kind of investment in science, it's going to be natural. But that doesn't mean we have to feed the flames of competition. Really, if you go to the homepage of the NSF or the Department of Energy or the recently released National Academy of Sciences, Future of Science for the astronomical sciences. For the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel prizes

these different science things could win. Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB, B-Mode polarization, the nice thing. You know, that's figure two in this thing. And I'm like, what message has that sent to kids? Like, to young people, like, that's what you should be doing. So that you win this small, as you said, this prize given out by one hairless ape

to another wearing a fancier costume eating reindeer. In the case of Nobel Prize, it's only currently given to three people. That most, which was never one of his stipula. He actually said, one, you can only give it to one person. So they change it. Why do they change it? I talk about I speculate.

And by the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel Prize and it's a fact. But one of the things that's been so interesting, like I'm speaking, actually this coming up in December is that the Nobel Prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel's death. There's a lot of it and they bring in flowers, not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum, which is in San Romano, Romano, and Italy, it's a lot of like death fascination. The denial of death features heavily in the Nobel Prize

because it's like, what outlives a person? Well, science cannot live a person. My father has a theorem named after him. It's still engraved in many places around the world. You or I, we can go to different places around the world. People know who we are based on our publications. We engrave things. We want to store things, we want to compress things. And I think that's, there's something beautiful about that, but there is a notion of denial of death.

Like there is a notion of what will outlast me, especially if you're among the many, 90 something percent of members of national academy. Don't believe in an active faith, you know, and a creator and a God. And science can substitute for that, but it's not ultimately as fulfilling. I just don't believe it can fulfill a person the way, even practicing but not believing in a religion can fulfill a person. So which is interesting, because you do bring up Ernest Becker

and the denial of death in losing the Nobel Prize book. And there is a sense in which that's probably in part at the core of this especially later dream of the Nobel Prize or prize or recognition. I'm interacted with a few, you know, or large number of scientists that are getting up and age. And there is the feeling of real pride of happiness in them from winning awards and getting certain recognitions. And I probably the core of that is kind of immortality or a kind of desire for immortality. And that was always off-putting to me, as opposed to, I mean, I know, it sounds weird to say it's off-putting, but it just, rather than celebrating the pure joy of, now, solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us,

just the actual, the actual exploration of the mysterious. For its own sake. For its own sake. Well, that's what I said. It's like a scientist should, okay, you have to be careful and not have any physical, it has to be platonic, but you can think of scientists

and mentor, I have a chart in the book andonic, but you can think of scientists and mentor, I have a chart in the book and in my, a plaque made by one of my graduate students, former graduate since, she's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Baron. And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations. So here I am, 17 levels down, there's a guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz,

different Leibniz, 1596, he was born and I'm in this chain. And I don't know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist means someone who was taught. I'll say it very simply. One who was taught, right? Huchone. Huchone. So it probably means a guy was taught, right? No. Okay, just be up first. No, no, no, no, it's some it's literally someone who's taught. Right. So what does that mean? To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning. One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist, because you have to learn

from somebody else. Two, you have to be a teacher, you have to pay it forward. If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist in the churrosense. And I feel like with the work that I do and outrage and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale. I'm influencing more than the, you know, 24 kids I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class. And they're potentially could reach thousands of people around the world and make them

into scientists themselves because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial. There is no competition. There is no zero sum fixed, a fixed mindset versus growth mindset because it is an infinite game. Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or a pre-World War I Germany or Imperial Japan, science celebrated and we're just making a nation of scientists and we're not doing it to become multi-billionaires or necessarily for any military purpose whatsoever. But if we have that, sometimes I'm flying home at night. When you fly into LA, it's very very, you can see the number 10 million.

It's very hard to visualize things. You see a brick wall you ask, how many bricks are there? There might be 1,000, 2,000. 10 million lights, there's 10 million souls. You can see they're discreet. They're not like the Milky Way all blending together. Each lost in their own busy lives. Right.

Excited, fall in love, afraid of losing their job, all that. By the way, people should know that you're a pilot. So you literally mean fly. Yeah, sometimes I get to do it. You get to look at the eye of God perspective on these 10 million and these millions of and I don't say they're like constellations but upside down like the city is like a

Constellate hopefully I'll stay to keep the plane the right way up but when you think of like imagine they're all working together and imagine like you always talk about love and I but like you don't know you don't know that they're not where they love like so you're looking down on them and it's just amazing because you think like what amazing creation as man and humans? And what can we do? It's phenomenal. It's so exciting. And then I get to do it, you know, it's a job, I say, don't tell Gavin Newsom about it. I do it for free. I love what I do. But to think about like, oh, if my students succeeds, and I'm not, no, it's, it is unfortunate that you have experienced it. I've certainly

experienced it. And I think there are ways around it. I think it is, it is a vexing problem because people want to, you know, it's very tempting to keep your own kind of, you know, garden fertilized. You know, one thing that's interesting is like, I, you know, people like, why are you doing this thing and podcasts? And you're supposed to be a, you know, serious scientist, leading this huge project and collaborators and, and I'm like, well, most of what I do as I said before it's yeah, for you it's Velcro. For me it's like, you know, what is the deal with the safety standards on the truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that will allow the concrete truck to it? It has nothing to do with the big bang inflation,

the multiverse, the gods existence has nothing to do with that right bang inflation, the multiverse, the God's existence. Has nothing to do with that, right? So those are people I say I have to talk to. The people that come on the show, those are people I wanna talk to. And that's super fun. I mean, it's a real honor that I get to do it. I'm using, I have some unfair advantages, right, I'm at a top university.

We have people that's affiliated with the R3 Clark Foundation, brilliant scientists coming through. And, but I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn't, you know, allow them to teach that scale because they're better teachers than I am. Let me ask you a, interesting, maybe difficult question. Have you ever considered talking on your podcast with the people who would get the Nobel Prize for bicep, too 2 if it turned out to be detecting what it is.

Yeah, I mean, I'm still friends with them and they have still gone on too. So I should, we should say like why we didn't win the Nobel Prize and then what happened with the group that is now leading it completely, that I'm completely divorced from in the secular sense. We're friends, you know, we see each other, we send each other emails and stuff like that.

I would love to get their sense of what the natural heartbreak built into the whole process of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is. I would love to hear an honest, real conversation. I understand your friends. There's some hard truth that even friends will talk about it to put it right. I remember one of them was like, well, what's this I hear about a book? I mean, about it. They weren't happy I wrote the book. I mean, I remember one of them, you know, was like, well, what's this I hear about a book? And I mean, a lot of people told me not to write the book. They said it's gonna give, you know, too much attention to the Nobel Prize.

Gonna look like sour grapes. Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not. Give me the next prize. No, if I- So you would if you get a Nobel Prize for literature, you would turn it down? I don't know. It's funny, because Sabina Hassanfelder, who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation and

she's chewing for the Nobel Peace Prize. Right. She's so gracious and so good. She has that German, you know, just gentle and gentleness. She's a little too nice for my taste. I would say. I wish she could really say what she thinks and be snarky in the case. So she wrote a review of my book when it came out three or four years ago. And she said, well, you know, Brian Keating, like she said, well, it's, you know, it's good.

It's interesting. He talks about cosmology, but you know, they can do whatever the hell they want. And he, you know, presumably has this, you know, problems with it, but it's none of his business. Basically, it's a private and at the end, she said, but, you know, if you this, you know, problems with it, but it's none of his business, basically, it's a private, and at the end she said, but, you know, if you want one good thing, he's a really good writer, and you know, who knows, he could win the Nobel Prize in literature or something. I said, and then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal on her blog, which was kind of funny.

But anyway, no, so getting back to the guys that we were, you know, kind of collaborate in a means, or frenemies, and, well, look, you know, we don't wish each other active ill, I've visited them, they're welcome to visit me, a friend of me. And of course, look, we don't wish each other active ill. I've visited them, they're welcome to visit me, they have visited me. The thing I have to say is that I just wonder about introspection.

Like for me, literally, I don't care about the Nobel Prize other than what it can do to benefit science, but I no longer, I did, but by the way, I did seriously care about how benefit Brian Keating early on in my career. I'm just totally honest. Yeah, I don't I'm not proud of it. It's kind of embarrassing. But now I would hope that people would say, like, okay, the guy is like, you know, he's obsessed with it. My next book is not about this. Yeah, it's about something completely different. And, you know, I do feel like people lack introspection a lot of times in science.

Like we don't think about why we're doing what we're doing. And I think it comes down to curiosity. One thing about Joe, and again, I've only listened to like, I have to confess, you know, you're like my father now, I'm confessing my sins, it's you father, like father, and the freedman.

I haven't listened to like that many of your episodes start to finish, okay? I'm with our friend, a mutual friend, Eric, I've listened to like that many of your episodes start to finish okay with our friend a mutual friend Eric I've listened to a bunch of recent ones a Einstein Weinstein Weinstein that's what it is I get that get the

Reveal the brother the brothers car monster the brothers ones and a few others I haven't ever listened to a full to a Rogan episode But from what I've seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity. He doesn't have passion. There are a lot of podcasts that passion, like I've been on there, he has curiosity, like he's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it until he understands it until he gets it viscerally. And I respect that. Because as I say in this more recent book, passions like kind of like the dopamine hit that gets you started and like, oh, I'm gonna be great.

Maybe I can win a Nobel Prize. That's not gonna sustain you. The sustenance comes from the passion converting to curiosity. And what I wanna do is convert, as many things as possible to things that I can then, because actually I've had on people that discuss addiction. And there is an addictive quality to,

doing podcasts or whatever, but there's an addictive quality being a scientist. And you get to do things that are very specialized and specialized locations with special people. Paid for by other people have no freaking idea what you do. I mean, imagine you worked in some job and Feynman said, he said all these contradictory things. When he was one said, like he said, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand

it yourself. Then the day you won the Nobel Prize reporter asked him, what'd you win it for? He said, if I could explain it to you, bud, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So let's, let's leave aside his inherent contradictions. But, but in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it. But, but, you know, what is ultimately going to be the sustenance of it? So yeah, I do feel like We have to find a way to to nucleate that. I don't know actually. I don't know if it's like can you can you turn someone into a I used to ask this question all the time like can you make someone creative? Like can you teach someone to be creative? I don't know. Can you teach someone to be curious?

I don't know. I do know that kids are naturally curious. As they get older, they get less curious. Just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Altichor, he said, it wants he did a study, kid smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh, adults five or six, five or six.

No, I'm trying to get you a lap of an animal. But anyway, no, it's true. So some where you lose 30, you know, to 50%. I'm not entertained, but that's because I'm an adult. No, and then I do remember there's some distribution and those studies with a happier adult smile a little more, but still the kids grow out of the water. Which is our question.

So can you, is it, or should, in other words, should we invest our energy in getting the half-life decay, constant stretch down more for curiosity for kids, or should we try to reset the dopamine hit, and then, you know, I don't know, it's an open question. Well, I think it goes to the day of Troucester Wallace, the key to life is to be unborrable. I think you could train this kind of thing, which is in every single situation. So like, which I think is at the core, at least this correlated with curiosity, is in every situation, try to find the exciting, the fascinating, like in every situation, you sitting at the, I don't know, waiting for something at a DMV or something like that. Find something that excites you.

Like a thought, like a watch people or start to think about, well, I wonder how many people have to go to the DMV every day. And then it's tried to go into the pot head mode of thinking like, wow, isn't this weird that there's a bunch of people that are having to get a stamp of approval from the government to drive their cars and then there's millions of cars driving every day.

How could you do this better? Maybe do some blockchain and then could like, Vinn transfer? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. No, that is a good end. That is. And then every situation, I think if you rigorously like just practice that at a young age, I think you can learn to do that because like sometimes people like ask me for advice and like to do this thing or that thing is I think you at the core really have to have this muscle of finding the awesomeness and everything because if you're able to find the awesomeness and everything like whatever journey you take, whatever whatever weird me and for you. That you take through life is going to be productive. It's going to end up in a in a great place. So

like that muscles of the Corvette and I guess curiosity is central to that. But you didn't win the Nobel Prize. The team of bicep that led the bicep to didn't win the Nobel Prize, the team of Bicep that led the Bicep 2 didn't win the Nobel Prize because of some space dust. That's right. Oh, which one is the moon, which one is? That one's the dust.

The space dust, yeah. What are we looking at? So why is space dust the villain of this whole story? Well, it's funny. I wrote these books, and I don't know about you, but when you get all these books, I'm sure you get books, people send you books. They always come in these dust jackets, right? I was like, what the hell is a dust jacket? How much dust is raining down at any moment? I mean, this is immaculate. This room is Russian tidiness color, but in a normal house, how much dust is raining down? It's not really pretty until I wrote a book. And I realized, I'm writing a story

about the origin of the universe, the prologue to the cosmos, and dust is going to cover this story. It was actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology than dust. And this is the link between the cosmological and the astrophysical. So what does that mean? So astrophysics is broadly speaking, the study of physical phenomena,

manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena. Cosmology is concerned with the origin, evolution, composition of the universe as a whole, but it's not really concerned with stars, galaxies, and planets, per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant, the density of the universe, the neutrino content and so on. So we have a tendency to kind of look a little bit, you know, they're like not all astronomers or astrophysicists are equal. They're all equal, but some are more equal than others. So we have kind of a prejudice, a little swagger, right? And cosmologists are studying, you know, we're using Einstein, we're not using like, you

know, Boltzmann, we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures. And so doing, you can actually become blinded to otherwise obvious effects that people, you know, would have not overlooked. In our case, when we sought out the signal, we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe, luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately. We're using those as a type of film onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way, and then we can use our polarized sunglasses,

but in a microwave format, to detect the characteristic twofold symmetry pattern under rotation. That's the technical way that we undergo. I mean, there's a lot more to it. But there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that signal. First of all, when you look at the signal,

the signal, if inflation took place, big if, but if it took place, the signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature itself. So, a few nano-calvin, the CMB is a few-calvin, the signal from these B-mods would be a few nano-calvin, the CMB is a few kelvin, the signal from these B-mods would be a few nano-calvin. It's astonishing to think, Pennsie's and Wilson, 1965, measured something that's a billion times brighter. And that was what, 60 years ago, let's call it 60 years

ago, since they discovered it. More law, more experts, call it every two years. So you're talking about like this. Call it every two years. So you're talking about like two to the 30th power, doubling or something like that at that. So let's call it two to the 20th or something like that. So that's like only two to the 10th is a thousand, correct my math and wrong, two to the 20th is a million, right, two to the 30th is a billion. So we're outpacing Moors law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments

to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos. And they don't have to deal with, on the semiconductor factory in Santa Clara, California, they don't have to deal with meteorites and astringent things like coming into the laboratory. It's a clean room, it's pristine, they can control everything about it, right? We can't control the cosmos.

And the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz, of failed planets, asteroids, meteorites, things that didn't call us to make either the earth, the moon, the planet Jupiter, or its moons, or get sucked into them and make craters on them, et cetera, et cetera. The rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum. There's very few, thank God, chicks will upsized,

impact or progenitors that will take out all life on earth. But there's an extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains, and then there's a fair number of intermediate-sized particles. It turns out, this little guy here is the end product of a collapsing star that explodes in what's called a supernova, type 2 supernova. So stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei, protons, and neutrons into helium

nuclei. And then from there, it can make other things like brillium and briefly make brillium and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel. Iron and nickel are endothermic. It takes more energy than gets liberated to make an atom of iron. When that happens, there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier.

So the star form is going to go inside out. That's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the is going to go inside out. That's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the Sun. I don't know. Did you know? That's why it's called helium. Yeah, they went there at night and Oh well done. They went there at night. No. Helium means heliosus to God of the Sun. It was discovered in its spectrum from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago. It wasn't discovered like when oxygen and iron was discovered. So it's only a relatively recent comer to the pyroxygen. The helium came after oxygen.

Oh, and the first hydrogen forms into helium. So that's the first thing that formed. No, in terms of discoveries. Oh, yeah, after oxygen. Yeah, I think priestly and yeah, others, the Dalton discovered it in the 1700s. Now, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption and, uh, we call frownhofer lines in the 1700s. No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption and called frown-hofer lines in the solar spectrum. So, but when it tries to make iron, there's no longer any leftover heat.

In other words, there's heat left over from fusing, as you know, the sun of a plasma physicist. He fused to a hydrogen nuclei, you get excess energy, plus you get helium. So that's why fusion energy could be the energy source of the future and always will be No, no, hopefully it'll come much sooner than that and so doing trying to make iron It takes more energy doesn't give off enough energy star collapses explodes And what is it spray out into the you know cosmic interstellar medium?

It sprays out the last thing it made which is that stuff Luckily for us because some of that coalesced and made the core of the earth onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the dirt and the crust of the earth were formed. And some of that made its way to the crust, the iron, made its way of the crust, some of that your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin molecules. And hemoglobin has iron particles in it, so quite amazing substance without it. We wouldn't have our red blood, we wouldn't exist as we are. Is this a very long complicated mom joke? I've done enough dad jokes, my quote is up. So I'm taking this object, seriously, there's not all of it gets bound up in a planet. In fact,

forming planets is very inefficient. And so there's a lot of schmutz leftover, some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time. And some there's a lot of schmutz leftover, some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time. And some of those molecules like iron is used in compass needles, right? They're magnetized. And magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for. As if the compass needles get all aligned, that's like the polarization of the dust grain. It's like that filter, that polarizing filter. That means light polarized like this will get absorbed and light polarized like this

will go through. So it's absorbing, it's making a hundred percent polarized light out of an initially unpolarized light source. That's what happened. And what we ended up claiming we'd on March 17th. And I'm sure if you were there, you might remember this at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics There was an announcement there were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience and the bicep two team Which I was no longer leading. I was still a member of it

In fact in the announcement the first person they mentioned Besides you know, thank you all for being here as me and my team at UC San Diego Although I wasn't invited to go to the press conference, because that the... Are we complicated? Yes, exactly. It's a little school up there in the Cambridge area. And so they ended up making this announcement that we discovered the aftershocks of inflation. We detected the gravitational waves shaking up the CMB, and on that day, past Lex Friedman

podcast, back when it was called Artificial Intelligence, Max Tagmark said, goodbye universe, hello, multiverse, and hello, no ball prize. See, he saw that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation, not only gravitationally, but of the multiverse, goodbye universe, hello, multiverse. Multiverse is a natural consequence, consequence of inflation. Yes. According to its prominent supporters. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, leave the poetry to Max, which he does masterfully. Okay. So that, the excitement was there. I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for use there, that's some of the dark moments you're going through, but broadly for the space of science, there's excitement there.

And I often note that this is a problem in what I call the science media complex, because oftentimes you'll see things like past guest air seeger, venous life, you know, exists, and that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right? And what the work that she's doing or her colleagues are doing, Clara, who's on your show as well. And that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right? And what the work that she's doing or her colleagues are doing, or Clara, who's on your show as well. And that will be on front page, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego Union Tribune, it'll be above the fold, make headlines around the world,

and then six months, 12 months later, as in the case for us, retraction. Page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know, and underneath the personal, so we have a problem in science that the, you know, if it if it if it explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare. And this is not unique to my experiment. This happened with an earlier discovery of so-called Martian life of discovered in an article, which was announced after peer review.

We weren't peer reviewed at the point when we made the announcement. We had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee. It was unethical. We thought we had done everything right, but that's confirmation by it. So there's like levels to this.

Yeah, there was a bloody level. And there were people, you know, me warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out, including the maps, which we still haven't released. And so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical, but the audit, the public never knows this. I think it's, so I've made a rule that if I am ever in charge of, you know, dulling out large amounts of science funding, that when you, you should keep kind of an option. In other words, you should have money for publicity, it's fine, have money for your press conference,

but hold in reserve in a bond to be used, hopefully never, but if it's to be used, an equal fund for the retraction, if it should occur. So you would like to see, because that's a big part of transparency, is the, to me, in the space of science, at least, that's as beautiful because it reveals the, it's a, it's a, it does a great story. There's a, there's an excitement. There's a humanity. So there's a climax to the triumph,

but there's also a climax to the, like, there's also climax to the disappointment. Yes. Because that also eventually leads to triumph again. That sets up the drama that sets up the triumph. Like with Andrew Wiles, for me, for my last theorem, I think it's not last thing, whatever. The ups and downs of that, the roller coaster, the whole thing, she would be talking about. That is science. that is science. And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura that excludes other scientists.

Often from minorities or women, that you have to be like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with like curly, no, he wasn't. He was, he wasn't bad at math, that's all nonsense. But he said that, you know what he said, he attributed his success to Alex, he said, I never know, when he said he attributed his success to Alex, he said, I never asked my dad what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid.

And thank God I didn't because had I, he would have told me the best answer of the day, which by the way, you know, he would create 20 years later as a 26 year old in the patent office, obviously, in Switzerland. And in so doing by delaying when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist, not a little kid, and I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible, ineffitable, omniscient, you know, being, I think that really does a disturbance. Jim Gates said, you know, he's like Einstein wasn't always Einstein. And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans.

Until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist. You've launched the Assaire project where you hope to assess theories of everything with experiments. You have a YouTube video where you're announcing that. That's, it looks super cool. Can you describe this project? And you also mentioned kind of, you give a shout out to little known fellow by the name of Galileo Galilei, is an inspiration to this project. Yeah, so Galileo is kind of my avatar, my hero, the kind of all around scientists that I would love to approach the, you know, logarithm of Galileo. He was not only a phenomenal scientist, he was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, a philosopher. And back then, they didn't have distinctions between

you know, scientists. And, you know, I was like a physician, was like a physicist. And he would indulge, you know, kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy thinking about phenomena such as the Earth's tides or the composition of the Milky Way. And what's interesting about Galileo is that he was almost as wrong often as he was right. And Galileo was not alone like this. I always say Einstein had at least seven Nobel Prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true, but he also had seven huge, impossible to believe blunders in some sense.

It's too bad because he could have had a good career as I always say. And Galileo was like that too. In other words, he would fall victim to, I think this confirmation bias that all scientists have to guard their lives against their careers, their brands, their reputations against, which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform to what you're trying to prove for one reason or another, or the radical acceptance of things that do

comport with it in order to bolster your confidence. And both are equally intoxicating. It's a, you know, confirmation bias is a hell of a drug because it really, you know, reinforces this notion, which is partially sunk cost. You put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it. You don't want to be wrong and go back on it. And with Galileo, he would, he would be incredibly perceptive about things such as, the earth being not located at the center of the solar system and the sun being the centers, cause we'll call Copernican hypothesis.

And he would use as evidence very, very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong basically. And in fact, we weren't able to prove that the earth orbited around the sun. And I ask you, can you prove the earth is not flat? No, well, you're a flat earth or anyway. But I asked my questions. Crowd of flat earth society member, T-shirts coming out soon.

Next, Murch. Next, Murch. Next, Murch. But it's actually not trivial to do that. But most of my students, graduate students can prove that the earth is round or explain how the earth, it is actually not trivial to do that. But most of my students, graduate students can prove that the Earth is round or explain how the Earth, it is actually not trivial to do though. It's not. Yeah.

And much harder is to prove that the Earth goes around the Sun. In fact, that's extremely hard to prove. And almost none of my students, even after they get their PhD in the final exam, I kind of like to just give them a little bit of humility. Because I think to be a good scientist, you need to be humble, you need to have a little humility, and you need to have swagger. You need to feel like a little cocky, like I could do this. I can do this thing that Einstein by definition couldn't do.

I'm going to attempt it. I'm going to attempt to do what was impossible just a generation ago. How do you prove that the Earth goes around the sun? Do you have to, is it by the motion or other planets? So there are many ways to do it. I mean, obviously you could take a spaceship, park it at the north celestial pole of our solar system and just watch what happens, but obviously that wasn't how it was discovered in the late 1700s. So it's called aberration. So if you look at stars as the earth orbits around the sun, the position of the stars will shift

slightly because of the tilt of the earth and because the Earth is in motion around the Earth and Around the Sun and because the Earth has a non-tribule amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the Sun This stars will trace out little tiny ellipses and those will correspond to the fact that we're moving around if they're at infinite distance which we assume that they are they're not really but for all intents and purposes and the skill of the Solicis and they're infinitely far away. So that's called stellar aberration. And that was the first way it was discovered. And actually, we still use that.

We have to correct for that effect when we measure the cosmic microwave background. Because imagine your inside of an oven, it has some temperature, three Kelvin, and a thousand Kelvin, whenever. If you're moving towards you, the photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue shifted hotter. And the ones behind you will be red shifted.

I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter or energy where you are and the extension of the Doppler effect. So we actually make use of that and construct what's called like a local standard of rest. Anyway, so you can do it. But Galileo said, no, no, I'm not gonna wait for that. I have other proofs for it. One of which is that the earth has tides and the tides come in and out twice a day, high tide and low tide. And it's, he made the analogy because the earth is moving around the sun, say, this is the sun here, and it's moving around the sun, but it's also rotating on its axis. See how the water is sloshing up and down inside the, the rod, cabana?

As that happens, he said, that's what the tides are caused by. Totally wrong. Most people listen to this podcast. Just so you know, if you're listening to this, he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand. Afterunk. And we're both drunk and whatever else is possible.

So as it slashed around, he claimed that was what now, has nothing to do with that. The moon, over there, the moon pulls differentially on the Earth and the Earth's ocean. That causes the oceans to bulge slightly towards and away from where the moon is. And the moon is actually the source of the Earth's tides. Has nothing to do with Copernicus, the orbit of the Sun, so he was totally wrong about that. He also thought that the Milky Way was comprised only of stars when we know it's made of gas, dust,

nebulae and things like that. So he had a fair share of blunders. Now, one thing I always kind of make note of, and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates, Fabiola Gianati, Frank Wilcheck, and Carlo Revelli and my friend Lucia Picciurillo, the first ever audiobook of one of Galleo's dialogue, the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, but it was an error. So you're reading parts of this text. Yeah, it's just incredible.

A million book. So this book was written in 1632, it was written and it was the one that caused them to go into house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured. And that book laid out his arguments for what was called the Copernican or the non-parapetetic Aristotelian, etc. notion of the planetary dynamic. And eventually he forced to recant that he believed in it, and allegedly he said he still believes the Earth moves.

Anyway, so we're making, it's written in the form of a trilock. It's actually called the dialogue with three people. There's one named Salviati, who is espousing Galileo's notions about how the heavens were orchestrated. And Salviati means like the salvation, the savior. Then there's a middleman, Segredo. So Carlo Revelli is playing Salviati, the brilliant one. I am playing Segredo, who's like an intelligent

interlocutor. I'm kind of just, I can appreciate Aristotle, I can appreciate Copernicus. Then there's this guy, Simpliccio, the Simpleton, and he espouses the words of the Pope. So you can imagine like, you know, you're working in the Putin's government or you're working in whatever, and all of a sudden're you're kind of putting the words of of like the fool literally calling the fool but you're using the words of the all supreme powerful being on Earth at that time as a Vatican Church especially for an Italian like Galileo so he wasn't as brilliant you know politically as he was

astrophysically and otherwise who's's doing some Cleach-O? So, Plich-O is a friend of mine and a university manchester named Lich-O, Pich-O-Relo. He's an Irish guy, but he has an Italian, no, he sees a full blood at a time. But they all speak English and Italian, I only speak, and that forwards are written by,

so one forward and this place has three forwards, which is like a 12-word. Okay, the forwards are written, but yeah, that was a good one. The forward three forwards. One of them is written by Albert Einstein in which he says Galileo was not only one of the greatest scientists in history.

This is Einstein telling Galileo, but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history. That forward is read by Frank Wiltschek, who you've had. Jim Gates, he also had, he reads the translation, the translator, Stelman Drake, is a renowned scientific translator. And then Fabiola Gianati, she reads the introduction and dedication from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany and And some of the different introductions that Galileo himself had it's just it's it's such a thrill to be able to do it I only randomly found out because I had to I wanted to study it and it's like 500 pages long

And I was like let me get the audiobook because I'm an audio medium kind of guy didn't exist So I said let's do it ourselves and so we did it and hopefully it'll be out on Galileo's birthday, which is February 15th, 2022. There'll be a ripe 457. But that's not the only one of his books. Galileo wrote many books, one of which is called the Military Compass. And this is an interesting book from my blockchain and your blockchain of Fishing Autos. In this book, he talks about a compass, which is not a magnetic compass, but a actual slide roll. It's basically a slide roll. It's a manual.

It's like, imagine if your phone came with a manual nowadays, they don't, right? But this was a manual for how to use this slide roll, which is enormously important. And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples. It's brilliant book. One of the examples is, how do you convert money? So he does a money conversion, currency conversion, in between Ducati and Florentine Ducati and Scooty and whatever, you know, Lira, whatever. He does all these currency conversions. One copy of this book, or maybe two exist, first printings from 1600 still exist. If Galileo had just kept those in his family, there were $100 million. Nowadays,

you can't get a scooty. A scooty is worth nothing. Like a Ducati is worth not, I mean, maybe some collector wants a piece of paper, right? So it's a lesson. Like there are value in physical, you know, non-fungible tokens, this original non-fungible token. So, but then a third book is called the Assayer. So what is an Assayer? So assayers were kind of like these out-commessed, you know, physicists, chemists that would be around a court. And every so often for the treasurer, they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script or, you know, paper money.

And to do that, they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold that they knew to be gold and do some kind of semi-non-destructive evaluation of the purported object, the metal that was supposed to be gold. So they would take these pieces of gold, theoretically gold, and they would rub it on something called a touchstone. Touchstone was a special piece of rock, granite, whatever. It has no intrinsic value, it's just a piece of rock. But with that rock, you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth millions of lira or whatever, right? So it was an incredibly important job. And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable. What I want to do in the assay

project is take this plethora of physical theories of everything. I said recently, you know, we should give a Nobel Prize to someone who doesn't come up with a theory of everything. Because there's just, that's a good thing. There's just like, it's just rotten with them. And I think it's great. You know, I often say that theory is kind of like software and I'm not denigrating software at all, but like you can create a lot of software. You can make a quine and it'll make its own quine. And you can make infinite amounts of software. Look it up, kids.

That's one of my favorite videos. And you can see you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes it. And it was hard, was kind of like the non-fungible token that's ultimate-minted limited edition, the book, the compass book, like I tell you. And so it's very expensive. That means you have to be very careful before you invest decades, billions, and humans into pursuing one of these theories of everything. You have to have good intuition for it. And lately, what I've seen is not predictions, but retrodictions. So you see that the large Hadron Collider will come out with a measurement.

And then so and so we'll say, this is compatible with string theory, or G minus two of the Mi1. It has these bizarre properties, fifth-fourth string theory predicts this. String theory solves this. New Trinos, sterile neutrinos, large Hadron Collider, or B experiment.

They'll say that it's compatible after the fact. And it's not so bad, right? Because what did Einstein do with GR, general relativity? The first thing he did was not predict something new. He looked at the anomalous behavior of the planet Mercury. And he saw it was behaving strangely. And people had said, oh, that's because there's another planet hiding behind the Sun that we can't see that perturbs the orbit of the planet Mercury. It's always it's called Vulcan. That was one approach. That's kind of like the dark matter approach where it's like there's a comp of matter that we can't see that's influencing the planet that we can't see.

And we use that to divine and into it the existence of the other planet. That's actually how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior of the planet Uranus. So Neptune was dark, we couldn't see it. It was tugging on Uranus in a certain way, and that led to the very aid discovering the planet, predicting where this planet should be found. So it had a good heritage and physics, right, to predict this planet that you couldn't see that work. But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping

and bending of space time, due to the presence of matter, will later become known as the Einstein equations. So he explained why Mercury did that. He didn't, and it was known since the time of Newton that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way. So he didn't predict it, he retro-dicted it. That's fine.

But at some point, you should come up with something new. That's uniquely predictive of your theory, as it just said. The theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune is actually a valid theory. It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan. And so if he had kept doing that, maybe, maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with these other predictions that he would later reject.

He rejected the existence of gravitational waves. You and Barry talked about that. He didn't actually believe it. It was a one peer reviewed paper that he would later reject. Like, he rejected the existence of gravitational waves. You and Barry talked about that. He didn't actually believe it. It was a one peer reviewed paper that he had. He used to send back in those days, he sent a letter to nature, physical review, published this, you know, I don't know how much it cost. And they got it rejected

because he said you can't detect gravitational waves. And actually, or they're not real. And the guy showed that they're real because he corrected a math error and Einstein and Rosen's paper. So it's fascinating. Should the ass air do? He or she should look at these theories, look what things they explain that already exist, and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain if we can build experiments to test them.

So you have to kind of challenge yourself to think about what kind of predictions can they make such that we can construct experiments. So that's like ultimately back going to to the signal to the experimenter's theorist essentially. So like very experiment centric exploration of the fundamental theory of everything. That's right. And the best scientists, the best physicist, were both experimentalists and theorists, or at least that they, if they were experimentalists, they understood the theory well enough

to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions. They, or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo. Like Einstein has patents for things that he invented. And then, you know, some of his work led to the laser and the laser. So he had practically, it wasn't just pure aerie, fairy, you know, quantum reality and expanding universe. So in this case, what I want to do is look at, you know, there's 10 different theories of everything or cosmological models.

They make predictions, they have advantages and disadvantages. And I'm just asking the question, why aren't we applying Bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals? Why don't we have updates? Every time an experiment comes out, we can update our credulity in that experiment or that theory rather based on the results of the experiment. And we shouldn't do it after the fact, or as Michio Kaku has said, well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are. And that's not my job. You're supposed to tell me if strength theory is correct. What should it predict if it's true? There's one big problem, which I should say, that to be a good ass air, I think you have

to be worldly in the sense of worldly and curious, like we were talking about before with you and Joe. You can't only talk your own book. You can't only understand your own pet theory of everything. You can't only say, well, I only understand string theory, and I don't have time for these other theories, or as if it's beneath me to even go into Garrett Leacy or Eric Weinstein or Stephen Wolfram or aspects of M theory, etc. And there are some that say, why do we give strength theories so much advance pass when they're actually predictions that are made that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics.

Like the dark energy should be negative and We see it as positive. Like that's a huge strike. You know, if you told somebody, here's my tenure application and one day, you know, I mean, it's pretty, if it wasn't done by, you know, Maldisana and, you know, Whitten and folks like that, I don't know if it would have had the traction, the endurance, the resiliency that it's had. And that worries me because all these men and some women are making these fantastic, brilliant, beautiful ideas, and they're not even looking at what their neighbors doing. There's a thing that I really enjoyed seeing and that don't see often and often these

theories, which is others who are also experts, kind of studying them sufficiently well to steal man the theory, to show the beautiful aspects of the theory. You know, I see that with Stephen Wolfram. He has a very different sort of formulation of physics with his physics project. Now, I'm, it's, you know, physics is a foreign land to me, but his formulation, especially in the context of cellular time and our hypergraphs, just as objects, as mathematical objects, themselves are familiar. And so I'm able to see the real beauty there. And it saddens me that others in the physics community can't

also see the beauty. Like, give it a chance. Give it a chance to see the beauty. And that... You respect. So there is one person who does take time and is what I consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks.

He obviously has an interest in his own theory and it's Eric. Eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of physics. And he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving other, and I've witnessed this and I've had, look, first of all, I think debate is pointless. Like I don't know about you, but if you've ever voted like, oh, I saw this debate, you know, because Trump did so badly, and I'm going to vote for Biden. No, never have. You

almost never change anybody's mind unless you debate with love, unless you have almost like we're going to win together, like the red team approach in the military, they're trying to win a war. So they may disagree on the tactics day to day, but the strategy, we have to win this war. I love you, and I wanna protect you. I don't see that in very many of these physicists, from Kaku, I almost see it as embarrassing in some ways,

because they'll almost mock with the exception of Eric. Garrett's interesting, his theory is, people have a lot of issues, very technical, but Eric has taken the time to try to understand it. Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White's theory. Man, I don't see the same graciousness extended from them, I'm sorry.

Yeah, essentially, you're right. I mean, with Eric, he wants to, but he hasn't, he's been the same first season. Well, from because I think what he did, no, actually, no, he didn't. I had a debate with them live on my show. No, I did. I listen to it, but like, I just think it's outside of the toolkit of the Eric is comfortable with. So it's not, it's not that he's not, but you're the main thing that's often absent and Eric But the main thing that's often absent and Eric does have is like the willingness and like not just like dismissing or mocking though that he's he's reaching out But okay, I mean what if it's not you know, I made a joke when they were on I was like how many theories of everything can there be you know Highlander, you know, there can be only one you know, I don't know But he of course also like the other folks who propose a theory has in ego.

No. He rides a dragon, the dragon represents in the ego. Well, let me ask you about your friend Eric Weinstein. So he proposed initial sketches of geometric community, which is his theory of everything. Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it that you find interesting, but what do you think about the response he got from the scientific community? Well, you know, some of the response came from people, academicians, professors. Some came from a lay audience, and some came from trained scientists who are no longer, you know, maybe practicing in the universities.

I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol, which surprised me because I look at what he's trying to do and it was always, the vitriol would always come with some element of ad hominem. And maybe that's his personality, maybe that engenders this or whatever. Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency. You know, I always get these emails. Professor Keating, I have a new theory, Einstein was wrong, I'm gonna prove it.

I'm not gonna math, but if you help me, I will share my Nobel Prize with you. Oh, thank you. If you read my books, you know. In other words, it's always taking down, taking down the dragon. It's always taking down the Kung Fu master, right? That you get the hit points from D&D. You get their hit points. You take their cards. You get their wrist tokens from Kamchaka. And thinking about with Eric, it's like because what he's doing is so aspirational. It is grandiose

in a good sense. What he's trying to do is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of supersymmetry, et cetera, stuff embedded in it. He's trying to meld that. It has very unusual features and that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions, multiple time dimensions. It uses new mathematical objects that he's invented. In, look, I had, you know, had him on my show, I've talked with him, we've had consultations with other physicists,

where he'll come down and I have a visitor's office and he comes down to San Diego sometimes and spends time there. And we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists. Erick's been out of the academic world for a long time. And there is, as I said before, an aspect of persuasion that must take place in order to get anything through. And I think there was a slight amount of good nature, not ignorance,

naivete, but just the sense that if this is right, everyone will recognize it. If you build a better mouse trap, the world will be a path to your door as the expression goes. That's completely untrue. That almost never, that doesn't even have a mouse traps. I mean, you know how many freaking mouse traps types there are? It's like, no, they don't beat it, a path to your door. You have to sell that freaking thing. You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Elon. You, I have never, I've had one paper

and 200 papers I've published in peer-reviewed journals. I've only had one, half a percent published with no referees comments. In other words, published like dream. I submitted it, probably it happened to be in a person in his journal, that was pretty psyched about that. But you almost have to crave the response, getting it back from a journal.

And I think he doesn't see, firstly, he doesn't subscribe to the peer review process. He thinks that is anathema to the way science is, invest interest in public in journals, etc, etc. I think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive and valuable. I think you have to learn from your critics. One of my conversations with John Mathery talks about loving your critics in this book, but not being so open to their criticism, that their

criticism goes to your heart, and not being so open to their compliments, that their compliments go to your head. It's a very tough, Syla, and Carib to walk. Well, there's something, I mean, I want to be careful here because I'd like to talk to Eric about this directly, but I'll just, from a perspective, a friend, want to ask about the drug of fame. So there's also the public perception of the battles of physics. And so there's a very narrow community, but then there's the way that's perceived, the exploration of ideas is perceived by the public.

And so there is a certain drug to the excitement that the public can show when they sense that you have something big. And that in itself might become the thing that gives you pleasure. And I think that with theories of everything or with any kind of super, super ambitious projects, and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious about trying to understand the origins of the universe, if you convince yourself that you have an intuition about the origins of the universe And you have a platform like you do now where you start to communicate your intuition. It's it's hazy like all of science. You're still unsure,

but you have a sense, I mean, perhaps you don't have that as much as an experimentalist because you always kind of start going, okay, how do I kind of build a device that to see through the how to build a device to see through the fog. But if you're more like a theoretician who kind of works in the realm of ideas and the realm of intuitions, it's, you know, it is also a source of pleasure. You mentioned dopamine, a source of dopamine that you can communicate to others that you're really excited by the possibility of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe. So there's some aspect to which you want to be a Gregorian Gereisha Perlman and go into the hole and get the work done and shut the hell up about the, and speak about myself, about, you know, talking about the dream and planning and exploring,

how great it will be if my intuition turns out to be correct. If the sketches I have turn out to actually build the bridge that takes it to a whole new place. As a friend of Eric's, or a friend of or a friend of my friend, what kind of advice do you give? What is your role? Is it to be a supporter given that he has many critics? Or is it to be in private a critic? Like a lot of my friends will say, hey, shut the hell up, just get it done. Well, first of all, I want to ask you a question

I've asked him. And then it comes from animal farm. By the way, my problem is my favorite book, yeah. So you remember Benjamin the donkey? Yes. And he's talking to the pig. I forget the pigs name. And you pride him.

Anyway, the pig says to him, you got this long lustrous, beautiful tail. You're so lucky. I got this short curly, little squiggly thing that does jack squat. Tell me, how does the field have such a lustrous tail? And Benjamin says, well, the good lord, he gave me a tail to swat away the flies. But you know what?

And rather not have the tail if I didn't have the flies. It's what I ask you. As I've asked Eric, is it worth it? You've got these beautiful tail, but there are flies. I'm not saying in a negative way. I'm just saying, you get unwanted distractions, dopamine, it's kind of the highlight, the spotlight effect. It's obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone.

And I think, first of all, I'd love to know how you answer that because that's something I don't feel I can relate to myself. Well, this has to do with more like platform, platform stuff. Yeah, scale. Oh, I, um, that has no very little effect on me. I enjoy it. I enjoy meeting new people, but that has nothing to do with platform. Yeah, no, that has no effect on me. I enjoy meeting new people, but that has nothing to do with platform. Yeah, no, that has no effect on me. I want somebody that enjoys the act itself. So this conversation, the reason I'm doing this podcast

with you today is because that allows me to trick you into talking to me for a prolonged period of time. I don't care about platform. I assume nobody listens, it really doesn't matter. Yeah, and if I got it right, my whole test of it was a good podcast, and I'm like, how do you know? Like podcast has been around what, 12 years.

How do we know as podcasters were doing a good job? Like sometimes you get someone say, that was the best interview I ever had, but that doesn't happen that often, at least for me. But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card in that little guy and the Zoom didn't work, would you do it again? And I think if you say yes to that, that was a good podcast.

Yeah, exactly, that's exactly it. So in that space, yeah, all of it is worth it. But the dream, the more referring to the psychological effects, forget the platform, forget all of that. You know, I, maybe shouldn't even brought up the platform because it really has to do, even in your own private mind, which is what I'm struggling with. I enjoy the planning, the dreaming, the early stages, so much that I often don't take projects to completion.

This is a psychological effect that I'm sure basically everybody, every engineer, everybody that does anything goes through. I just, in this case, particular, I think it also applies. And I wonder as a friend, what is the role? Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented, everything from, you know, planning telescopes to dieting. So there's a, there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you're going to feel, you don't need to know this, but, you know, you don't deal.

But losing five pounds, I said, oh, I'm going to lose five pounds. And I'm going to be able to do run, you know, a minute faster. So there's a part of me when I'm planning the diet and the meals and the exercise that I get a little bit of that thrill and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually complete the task that will take me to that goal. So that's a documented effect. And that happens in project planning and project management. It's a very, very important thing to guard against as a manager of a big project.

With Eric, it's interesting, because with him, first of all, we relate extremely well on a friendship level. And very close, he does remind me a lot of my father. And I've told him that, just as a mathematician, as a big thinker, as in his case, as a father, the father kind of figure that out in an absence, but that he is a true lover of life. He knows he's

got a huge platform. He knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does. And you know, I jokingly say, well, it's one thing, like, how do you know, Lex, that someone's an expert? So experts say, there's a good rule, Ray Dalio writes about principles. He says, an expert is someone who's done something three times successfully. Like, you can do one correctly wants, you could do something correctly. It's very hard to pull off like three projects, three telescopes, three, whatever, right? So, look for an arbitrary, it could be four, it could be two, right? But the point is, look

at Eric. So how many things does he contributed to and made, you know, pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts for different people. I would say he's been right many times. Does that mean he's infallible, that he's ineffable? No, of course not. For me, so what I'm saying is I get a little bit of the joy of learning something purely as a scientist, something completely outside of what I do. Mathematics, gauge theory, the kind of very advanced geometry,

topology that he's interested in. But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want, you know, I've told him, I'm going to turn your son into an experimentalist despite you. You know, like he is not going to be a therapist. He's not going to be a therapist. He's working with me. He is learning from me. We're trying to get him into, he wants to bypass all of the, you know, kind of nonsense of undergraduate and go straight to graduate school. And I've tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it, maybe he can't, but there's no other way than to try. And so we've, I've prepared a whole curriculum for Zav to basically bypass all of undergraduate and to his credit, he's done all the credit. He's learned it to a level that matches many of my graduates. Okay, hold on a second.

I have to push back and this is me saying it. And I'll, I'm sure I'll talk to Eric about this. But to say, you said, Eric's done was right on multiple things. I think Eric has a great deep insight about human nature and how societies work. And he says a lot of wise words on that world. But I think if we're talking about experts, you kind of have to prove you, you know, it's like Michael Jordan playing baseball. Like he's proved that many times that he can play basketball, but he's also got to prove that he can play baseball. And I would say the whole point of, I mean, of radical ideas is you're not, I mean, it's very hard to be sitting on a track record of, I mean, when you're swinging for the fence

as always, you're, there's not a track record to sit on. And like Max Tagmöck as an example of somebody who has a huge track record of more like acceptable stuff, but he also keeps swinging for the fences in every other world. So he has that track record with Eric, if you look at just the number of publications, all this stuff, he really, he chose not to travel the academic class. So there's no proof of expertise except sort of an obvious linguistic demonstration of brilliance. But that's not how physics works. There's a polite way to dam somebody as a scientist and say, he or she, they really know the history of physics.

Right. Like, physics is always lovely. Like Sean Carolle is jokes about like, you know, like, physicists should never talk about history of a, but it's more than that. So Eric has certainly contributed in finance and finance specifically and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics and the non-controllable. But that's not a second. That's yet to be proven. He has a lot of power. It's very, it's a calculus, calculus proven. I mean proven. I mean, he has a gauge model for currency exchanges between different nations that is explanatory. Not, it's not, you know, is it something,

in other words, it's a model and it's used for pedagogical purpose. And it might be, okay. And it's like, I mean, to him and Pia. Yes, it might be a powerful model It might be a one that's actually deserves huge amount of applause Celebration, but this not yet received that and that's one of the things that Eric talks about it It's not received the attention it deserves. Yeah, but it has not yet received the attention it deserves

And so like the we'll prove an expertise thing. I mean, there's a lot of people that go to their grave without the recognition they deserve and it's a tragedy. But the fact is, like, you have to fight for that recognition, the tragedy happens for a reason. You can't just say this person is obviously brilliant and therefore they deserve the credit in every single domain. It doesn't like transfer immediately. There's nobody that's, well, at least I wouldn't argue,

Eric is one of the special minds in our generation. But you still have to fight the fight of physics and prove it within the community. And I think the same applies in economics. You can't, I mean, as somebody that, you know, I've gone through the academic journey, just like you said, the peer review, all those things, flawed as they are, that's the part of the process. You have to convince your peers, the people that are as obsessed for whatever the hell

reason about that particular thing that you're working on. Yes, there's egos, yes, there's politics, it's a giant mess, but I think it's a beautiful mess through which you have to go through, you know, to reveal the power of your idea to yourself and to the world. Well, let me use an example. So you know of James Clerk Maxwell, and he invented the laws of electromagnetism, which is a first example of a unification principle ever displayed by the human mind in history, purely mathematics, unifying completely disparate phenomena, in one case, electricity, charges, static electricity, lightning, and the other magnets, bar magnets, currents, etc., unify them. You know what he did? I like to do a thought experiment. Imagine Twitter exists 1864. Maxwell's

working away. And he goes, I have this wonderful idea with fluxians and inductive virtue and blah, blah, blah. And it revolves on this thing called an ether. And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears. And the gears have these planetary things and they suck up vortices and the vortices and gears, and the gears have these planetary things, and they suck up vortices, and the vortices determine the density of the electromagnetic potential. You feel like this guy's a freaking non-immoron. And what would you do? Come on, honestly, you would say everything this guy does

is wrong. I mean, he's got this idiotic idea. And it would be falsified a couple of decades later by Mark Wilson and Morley. And in so doing, you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bathwater. Or I mentioned Twitter, imagine a twit storm, clerk Maxwell at clerk Maxwell one would get.

It would be brutal, right? And to the detriment, and that might even set back history. Imagine Yang Mills doing the same thing. Chairman Simon's, all these things are very fantastic. But, but why Lex? Why does Ed Witten, why does Juan Nalde Sain, let me give a good, good example. Juan Gast, brilliant guy, I love him.

He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded his black hole information paradox loss issue. What did he concede it, conceded based upon Mow the same as calculation in ADS, CFT, and five dimensional wormholes, but, first of all, we don't live in ADS universe. Second of all, we don't know if wormholes are traversable, if they exist even.

You know, these are devices, they are kept thorns, popularized for movies. Like to say that this is something on which I will concede a bet. Now, I obviously, Hawking was doing that for publicity. Why does Mao the Sainte? Why does, and he's got a pretty high H index, pretty well respected guy, IAS, love talking to him, brilliant guy.

By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work on gauge theory and economics, originally and one, I believe the breakthrough, I can't remember exactly what, but partially credit some of the work that he did, which appears there's a footnote to Pia Milani's thesis and some conversations with Eric, I think in it. Anyway, getting back to that, why is there not the same skepticism? Is it because Malasano, who's an eminent physicist obviously, has published realistic work and done,

and what about Witten? Witten gets a pass. I mean, if you, Witten gets a pass on Wichest by the string theory. Yeah, that M theory is correct. I mean, here's what let me just say, Hawking gets the ultimate pass. Hawking would say things like M theory,

there's zero evidence for it. I mean, there's the famous meme that went around this weekend like what a string theory predicted and it's nothing. And by the way, that's actually wrong. I talked to a come run. No, you talked to come run. Carmen says that string theory does make predictions. It predicts the mass of the electron lies

between 10 to the minus one, plank mass and 10 to the minus 30 plank. Okay, whatever, you know, our electron. It predicts the mass of the electron lies between 10 to the minus one plank mass and 10 to the mass 30 plank. Okay, whatever, our electron. It's a big range. It's a huge range. Is that, imagine the cum run comes up and again, he's just some, nobody, but he actually, you know, he doesn't have a profile, he's not a Harvard, has zero H and X or whatever

Erics is. Why do we not like, in other words, why are we more harsh on people that are trying to come? You know the answer to that. So I get a million emails just like you said, you yourself where they provenized in my world this artificial intelligence, the equivalence of that. I figured out how to build consciousness, how to engineer intelligence, how to, and some sense. You should send your emails to me,

and I'll send my emails to you. And we'll reply, Dish. I mean, and I don't want to sort of mock this, because I think it's very possible that there is either kernels of interesting ideas or in whole, like, there is geniuses out there that are unheard, but the, because of this so much noise, you do have to weigh higher the Ed Wittens of the world

when they make statements. And that's why you build up a track record, as you said, with Radalio. You have to show that you can, like, if you're a Pollock and you show us a painting of a bunch of chaos, you have to, and this is a bad example probably because he probably never showed this book. I think he could do it. Yeah. It's much more comforting to see that they can paint a good, accurate picture of still life,

of an apple and a table. So there's media right at a time. Because then, I mean, because then there's something about the scientific community that they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit sensor to where they're not going to give the full effort of their attention if you don't have the track record. Now, you could say that's a kind of club that only you have to have 10, you have to have this.

Yes, that exists. But there's some aspect in which you have to play the game a little bit to get the machine of science going. Otherwise, if you're always saying, well, I have my ball and I don't want to play your game, your game sucks, then nobody's going to want to play with you. That's true. Look, inherent in all of this is an underlying grandiosity. Look, how could you talk about doing what Cox said on here and elsewhere?

You know, we're looking for the umbilical cord that connects our universe to another universe that will then reveal in a one inch equation that will surely win an up prize the mind of God. That's like a prerequisite, I guess, to tackle these questions. I think it's detrimental. I think doing that, first of all, I think there's an element of almost snarkiness, because none of these scientists are believing, you know, not sticks, they're not theists, right? So they're using it as kind of a stand-in, and they'll always talk about Einstein, and he was like a spinosan, and he

wasn't, you know, a the... God doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice. Yeah, Einstein's mentions of God, yeah. Yeah, and then Stephen Hawking says, if when we come, we get an M theory understood, we'll know the mind of God. That's the title of of Kaku's book, the God particle, the God equation. It, you know, do any of them really believe in God? No, is that a prerequisite? No, I'm not saying that. But, but the point being, you're talking about something that has to do with God, right? I mean, where else do you go from there?

I mean, I think God for now enjoys a little bit more, you know, kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right? So like, it's, you know, God's got a pretty good, you know, H index himself. He has a, by the way, a Twitter icon just so you know, it's pretty good. It's weeks of God. Yeah.

That's very good. So if you look at that, you have to go in there. Again, you have to go in with some swagger. You have to have a little bit of arrogance, but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of humility. So he's doing something, he comes from outside of academia. Now, if he rails against, I'm talking about America. If he's just railing, oh, the system,

and I'm not gonna publish because F that, and that's only created by greedy journals, I don't think he's doing himself any favors. On the other hand, if he's shopping it, if he's talking it, if he's willing to expose it to criticism and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions, perhaps, but in the sense of like they're not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital T, what they're trying to do is take down, hopefully those people aren't out there, but on the other hand,

looking at what Eric does for other people, looking at the fact that he has courtesy, he will look at Wolfram, he will look at Leacy, who's one of his closest friends, I mean, he calls him as, as, as, not as, an emissist, right? Right, yeah.

And I think that's interesting that they're loving friends. I really enjoyed that portal conversation which you can get at least see Eric. Eric is torn about that conversation because I guess, because of the nemesis of the beautiful dance of minds, playing these ideas of the years of everything. And some of these things, you know,

so fundamentally, now I may disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect, which is the only one I'm capable of, but let me say one thing, which is experimental. But, but let me say one thing. I understand probably a third of what Eric's talking about with G.U. I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics, I understand some group theory, fiber bone. I can get a little bit of age three, but I also understand what I don't understand. And I understand that there are people like Witt and Malda, saying, Nima, other people that can understand it.

And they're not trying to understand Sabina. She can understand it. She makes all these, oh, I don't understand it. I don't want to understand it. I don't have time. And then she makes a video, a music video, kind of mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett.

I'm like, oh, you have a time to do it. And I love Sabina and I've actually promoted my show on her. And I love her and she's doing a wonderful job. But you have a time to do, and I love Sabina, and I've actually promoted my show on her, and I love her, and she's doing a wonderful job. But you have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish, and you couldn't have spent, you know, 30 minutes, two hours. I, Brian Keating, have done it as an experimental cosmolegist, and I have enough to say, like, this is interesting.

It's part of the ass air project, and actually, I shouldn't say that there are no people. They're very silly. Louis, Alvaro's Gomez, it's Sony Stony Brook, Simon's Center for Geological Physics. So he and I are running this seminar. Hopefully this summer we're going to reenact the famous shelter island conferences in 1900s, where we know Feynman got together and they calculated a lamb shift and all. But what did that feature? The harmony, the resonant minds behind the best experimentalist in cosmology, particle physics,

condensed matter physics is now teaching us tremendous things about lower dimensional systems that can be applied. A theorist and experimentalist, observers, cosmologists, astronomers, we all get together and we're just gonna do it out of a spirit of love. But if it's just like, oh, this guy's like, oh, I don't have time for that.

I really don't. I don't think it's interesting way to spend my time. There's a aspect that I hope to see. And it goes back to our discussion about Joe Rogan. I do hope to see sort of love and humility in the presentation. Like, let go of this kind of fear of your ideas being stolen and the ego that's inherent to the scientific pursuit and not that everybody is established and known entities.

Let go of that a little bit so we can explore and celebrate ideas. I would love to see more of that just because you were saying, especially with these big ideas of theories of everything. And I talk, I mean, this isn't talking tales out of school, but I mean, he has made claims that I fundamentally disagree with, you know, in terms of like, you know, he's had this Twitter baiting, you know, loving trolling of Elon, you know, why are you spending all his money

to get the Mars, you know, we should be spending money on interdimensional travel and we can unlock it. If we, and I said to him, like, and he makes the point, you know, that, oh, the atomic theory the atomic theory, that unleashed the nuclear age and that could lead to planetary destruction. But I make the point pushing back with love on him and I say, look, nobody looked into the equations, like Fermi didn't like look into all these equations

of the unification, which still doesn't exist by the way. We spend all this time, Lex, and I don't know why it is, It's a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics. People are looking for the toe, and they're overlooking the gut. In other words, there's been only some in the theory of everything, the god and the quay, and there's this gut that unifies the three stronger forces. We don't have a single theory for that. And people like Glashound, they try and fail that. Yeah, for people who don't know, there's four forces, gut, they try and fail that. Yeah, for people to know there's four forces, grant unification theories that unifies the three forces, stuff, and

don't try to get a shortcut to the theory of everything, which unifies the four. And then there's this whole thing that may be quantum gravity is not even a thing. So, so we're trying to solve we're trying to solve the puzzle of everything at the physics level. And then already, before solving it, I already saying once we solve it, here's going to be all the beautiful... Levels jumping in. Yeah, going to level, yeah, 256.

Time X and everything. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I suppose you need that kind of ego that confidence That ambition, you know, I do even have a chance at some of these the only two people in this book of nine nobel laureates Who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome or two theorists Frank will check and sheldon glasshow And you know Frank is it pretty interesting? I know eventually we're gonna talk about the meaning of life But you talk about Frank Frank invented this theory along with his advisor and another third person in the early 1970s, which from 1974, three, when he was a Princeton all the way up until 2004, when he won the Nobel Bar every day of his life. Imagine this, Lex, you're going to have this start up. Actually,

sometimes you're going to win a lottery. You're're gonna win a lottery in 40 years. What becomes your singular focus in your life from now until the next 40 years? Well, I'm not sure. I mean, would it be winning a lottery or if I'm so confident? If I'm so confident. If you're guaranteed to win a lottery, here's this wallet Bitcoin wallet,

it's gonna guarantee to have this much money, the stable coin, whatever. You're gonna win it, 40, but you have to wait 40 years. To me, it would be surviving for the next 40 years. You wouldn't leave your house. You would cover it, go out in a bubble wrap hat. You wouldn't go out with that 20 masks on, right?

Your whole life would be consumed. Now imagine everyone's telling you you're gonna win the Nobel Prize, which is bigger than the lottery. I mean, many P prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize and every person who wins a prize that's worth three times the money, like Malda Saina, he would trade the breakthrough

prize for a Nobel Prize in a heartbeat. So, these guys had to wait 40 years, imagine the excruciating pain. What got them through it? He didn't feel like he didn't deserve it. He felt like, hell yeah, I earned it. He has that swagger. And what I'm looking for in this ass air is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now,

cause I don't know if I'm gonna be here in 40 years, I hope I am, but can we bypass, can we get shortcuts? What's called the low energy regime? And to me, that's what's interesting. Like what can we do now? I don't care, like Isaac Newton came up with color theory and he did something really interesting. Next time I come up, I'll bring you some prism.

So what did he do? He took a white light, he took a prism from the sun, actually, he put it through a slit, put it through a prism, and it made a beautiful rainbow, like you've seen. And then he took another prism, and he put it upside down, like, you know, dark side of the moon, whatever. And the light went through the first prism,

turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow went into a prism and came out of white light. That's pretty cool. Then he took a popsicle stick, or whatever, it's probably a pipe tobacco, took a popsicle stick or whatever, pipe tobacco and he put it in the beam, like blocked out the orange, and it didn't make white light come out. So he showed, like, colors of synthesis. It's a comedy. He didn't use like the large Hadron Collider to do that. You know, he used a very low energy experiment to prove a

unification in this color physics and different kind of color physics, didn't quen on chromodynamics. But nevertheless, can we find things like that? Are we spending way too much time and energy thinking about the future circular collider, which even if it gets built, will cost $30 billion just to build? By the way, anytime from now on, if I leave you with anything, anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number, always double it, maybe triple it. How much is going to cost to operate it? So like, do we build an aircraft carrier, to build an aircraft carrier, do we build a

nuclear reactor, a semiconductor facility, and the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is it costs about 10% per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity. And in this case, so in 10 years it will cost double the cost. So I would never believe a number, whether it's from our mutual friend Harry or whoever, don't believe the number, double it, from our mutual friend Harry or whoever, don't believe the number double it and then say is it worth it? And so building a solar system size accelerator, even if it were possible, do we have to do that? Or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the The number of large extra spatial dimensions. Can we do that? People are working on it. I think it's fascinating. So focus on building detectors,

that like where the cosmos is part of the experiment, as opposed to doing the hard work, because when you're saying low energy regime, because for some of these especially big questions, like theories of everything, you need some high energy events. And so somehow figure out how the high energy events there are already happening out there. There's some leverage them to understand here on Earth. So one of the alternative theories of cosmology that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring as the Big Bang and inflation are, is are these bouncing models. Some of them feature a similar kind of entity called the quantum field,

and that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current after the bounce, which is not a singularity, it compresses to a classical kind of rebound, and the universe starts expanding. During that process, the expansion is governed by what's called a scalar field, of which we only know one that exists, that's called the Higgs boson, Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field. That field then later does double duty, and it becomes dark energy. So it solves two problems, and I'm not saying it's correct, we don't know yet. But are there observations of, and so dark energy is manifest today.

It's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions, et cetera, et cetera. We see the effects of accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy. Is dark energy a constant or does it vary? That has to vary in order for this theory to be true because that eventually has to decay so that the universe can not support itself and collapse again, again classically. So we could use low energy phenomena. It's hard to think of supernovas being a low energy phenomenon, but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see, does it change or is it a constant?

That's an example of a low energy limit to prove a high energy phenomenon like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model. Speaking of things that cost a lot but are super exciting. Page two. No, we'll wrap it up. This is more than page two. What do you think this is? This is... Well, Louis the Broylie's thesis was three pages long, anyone that know about prize for the wave particle duality. So, you know, size, matters in different dimensions in life. I think the lessons I've learned about life

is the short of the paper or the short of the thesis. Actually, the short of the paper, some of the greatest papers ever written are short. I feel like some of the best ideas in this world, not the sound like a contradiction of fine, and a contradiction on top of a contradiction, but it could be written in a napkin, honestly. It's just kind of, but tells you something about ideas. What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope. Is this somebody who likes telescopes?

And this is one of the, I think it says, tick 20 years to build, $9.7 billion. Is that way too much, too little? Are you excited about this thing? It's sufficiently different from what I do in my field that it's incredibly interesting to me because I have no horse in that race. And so I'm not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever.

So I can purely be an advocate and an aficionado of science. It is in some sense the successor to Hubble. It will do things that Hubble can't do. It will also, may or may not have the impact on a visceral kind of artistic level at Hubble Han. What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did? The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the pillars of creation, storms and imaging of these twisted deep sky galaxies. Those resonated with the public.

Just visually, they're beautiful. Visually, yeah, when you look at these images, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you'll maybe put that in every speck of light, except for one, 4,000 blobs of light, there's one star in our galaxy, the rest of galaxies. Now, that image is less than one-tenth of your fingernail held at arm's length.

It contains 4,000 galaxies. Now you can figure out how many galaxies there are in the whole sky just by seeing how long it takes you to move your fingernail over the whole sky. So we have another couple hours. No, so it comes out to be, that's how we get 500 billion or more galaxies. Sounds not exact to the galaxy, but it's a good order of magnitude estimate, maybe even better. Hubble produced that, and it was basically serenipitous. They pointed at some dark blank piece of sky what they thought was blank and they saw it. Same thing that happened with the CMB.

They were looking, they were selling, they didn't find. Same thing they found when they were looking for the deceleration of the universe and found it was ex-celerating. So what I sometimes hear is that we don't know we're gonna discover. I never think that's a good idea to spend billions of dollars on something. Like, you should have some guaranteed low hanging fruit, and then there should be swinging for the fences.

And I think, in this case, it was really everything is swinging for the fences because it's either it's kind of a single point failure. If that telescope, which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth beyond the Earth's moon distance by a factor of four and still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth, get solar energy, keep it away from the sun. You don't want to look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye. You do that and you cover, it's going to be phenomenal for science, for sure, if it works.

There are a lot of people think, you know, it's so risky, it's such a NASA sunk so much of their budget, it ate up, you know, and what if it does fail? I mean, there's no guarantee. Yes, it's insured, but so what? You're not gonna get back those 20 years of people. Well, let's start building it again, like they didn't build two copies of it. And then if it fails, it kind of has a dampening effect on the prospects and the inspiration of the public for what science can do, what science engineering can do is out in space. It will make a huge impact scientific. Let's hope for the best. Let's assume it does succeed. It's launched in a couple of weeks. And when it does, it will transform our understanding

of, you know, we just discovered not only like extracellular planets that have moons on them and asteroid belt, we discovered an extracellular planet in another galaxy. This will be able to see crazy stuff like that, spectroscopy, imaging. But it will be able to go back farther in time such that we will be doing cosmology.

Like Hubble did some cosmology and measured the Hubble constant. That was its key project when it was designed and launched. But because it is optical telescope, it's sensitive to more close-in red shifts, so it's shorter distances. Now, James Webb is much, much higher red shift. It can probe the darker, deeper, distant universe.

Okay, let's talk about not the distant universe, but our knee-bring planets. First, I got to ask you about the moon. So there's a there's a piece of the moon on this table that you've given me that we didn't have to pick up that arrived here. So how did a piece of the moon arrive here on Earth? So this chunk of the moon, if we're delivered by the Apollo and NASA missions, you and I would be guilty of a felony right now, because illegal to own pieces of the moon collected by the Apollo astronauts.

So don't even joke about that when you go over to Houston. This piece of moon rock was delivered via the old fashioned way by gravity. So this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteorites. Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space. And it will then orbit the common moon Earth system. And it will then eventually enter our atmosphere. And if the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper, it can land intact. And this one landed with a few hundred grams worth and they sliced it up.

And then it was delivered via US Postal Service to my house. So you can buy these pieces. And actually you can buy a piece of Mars. You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route. Now what's so interesting about that? Well, if a piece of Mars can get here, a piece of Earth can get there. Some piece of Earth has some life forms on it. It could get there. And if that can happen in our solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy. So I'm actually not of the opinion that there is life elsewhere

in the universe, at least technological life that we can see. I see this look a horror on your face. I view it. I am personally extremely pessimistic, would be extremely surprised. I'm just, I'm curious by the transition, because you just said that life could have arrived from Mars or like from planet to planet by because of the meteorized striking it, so on.

Yeah. And then you went to, you don't think there might be life out there in the universe. Technological life. Technological life. Yeah. Yeah, advanced intelligence civilizations. Okay. Yeah, okay.

So go on. Yeah. So that's the generalization of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called, I know this is a PG-13 podcast called Pants Permia. Pants Permia. And beep that up. Yeah, please. And that's the exchange of genetic life form material from other reaches on Earth, which explains the origin of life on Earth, but not the origin of life itself, which I think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting.

How did life get here? And you've talked with many eminent people about that. I'm not gonna add that much, but just thinking about the reverse process. Let's say life started on the earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe. Is there enough time for the whatever material went from earth, be a pan-spiremic direction,

spraying the love gun out into the universe, did that then have enough time to incubate and go on to a planet that could support it, certainly not within our solar system, which traveling at the meteorite speeds would require hundreds of millions of years, then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to Bach, from rocks to rock them on and off.

I don't know, I can do this all day. Oh, that's pretty good. How do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to life? I just simply think there's not enough time. For earth to seed life, technological life throughout the galaxy. I don't think there's any evidence for that.

But so you really think that the origin of life on earth is a really special event. Yeah, if it did originate on earth. My question for those that search for life outside the earth is, what if you had a letter from God? And the letter said, life didn't originate on earth. Like, would you choose a different profession? Like, it would seem hopeless. Like in other words, we only have a sample of one.

In fact, we only know of one conscious life form let alone one planet that has life on it, right? What if you knew for sure it didn't start here? That means that like, there's almost nothing about Earth that is originated, it didn't originate the life process. So to study purely the origin of life, not life itself, I think that's still fascinating. But how could we learn about the origin of, remember,

you have to go from inanimate object to a living object, whatever that definition of life is, and I'm not an expert in many definitions, Max, Sarah, many different definitions. But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate? It's a huge question. Yeah, but then you don't have to be the place where life originated to replicate the origin or to... Yeah, that's one way to understand something is to build it. But another way is to just observe it. You don't have to truly re-engineer from scratch. So, you know, I, but then yes, if it didn't origin at an earth, then your intuition is about the basic prerequisites of life

are off. What's the governing principle? Right. What is, and then you could have just an almost an arbitrary number of possible. Like, if life didn't start on earth. So to me, that's exciting because it's like, we know even less than we thought. The thing is it can prosper on earth though. Yeah. So maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different from the maintenance of life. Right. And maybe maybe the existence of the Earth life symbiosis is critical. I think Sarah, you talked about Sarah Walker, that it's a planetary

phenomenon, etc. So it does not make it less like, in other words, like, not only do you need special life conditions to create life, but then sustenance of life, as you say, that also has to be maintained under very specific circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby, you need an Earth and a moon system so that you don't get bombarded too early And I always think like this like technological life nearby, you need an earth and a moon system so that you don't get bombarded too early. And I always think like this, like technological life, I haven't said this before, I really so much to speak. I usually like to write down before I say this different thing.

But one of the things I thought about is- Somebody hosts a podcast. You should probably accept the fact that you're going to say stupid things every once in a while. Not every once in a while, every while. I claim that, you know, to get to sending, get to sending people to the moon, our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right? You don't make a solar panel from another solar panel.

You made a solar panel from a factory that melted down glass, silica, aluminum, extruded that using fossil fuels. Where do those fossil fuels come from? Any civilization that's going gonna be a Dyson, you know, Kardashev's, to be, do they have dinosaurs? Like, do they have, like, prebiotic life? Do they have a great oxygenation event? Do they have a dimorphism between pro-cariotic eukary?

All those hurdles, let's say there's eight hurdles. And each one of those has a probability of one in the thousand to go from, you know, euk on it, pro carry on it, whatever. Let's say that's a one in a thousand chance. I think it's like one in 10 to the four day, if they're whatever, if you really do. But let's say first generous nature, one in 10 to the three. Let's say there's eight of those hurdles. That means you have, you know, 10 to the to the 24th power, different, uh, probability, and that's just with eight. Like the moon has to be there, Jupiter has to be there, dinosaurs had to be there, all the different things that we have to get to technological life. There's only 10 to the only. There's 10 to the 22nd we think Earth's not Earth planets in the observable universe, not the galaxy.

So that's 100 times fewer than the probability to get you know 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles of one and a thousand. That's fascinating. Now I really need to listen to your conversation with Lee Kroner and probably because he believes the opposite. Yes, I know. Yeah, I want to have a debate with him. He believes that the way biology evolved on Earth could have evolved almost an infinite number of other ways.

So like if you ran Earth over and over and over, you would keep getting life and it would be very different. So the fact that our particular life seems unique is just like, well, because every freaking life is going to seem unique, but it'll be very different. It's not like we shouldn't be asking the question of what's the likelihood of getting a human like thing? Because that seems to be super special. It's more like how easy is it to make anything that has the skills of a human, and I don't mean like something with thumbs, but achieving basically a technological civilization. And according to Lee, at least, it's like, it's trivial.

I know, we fought, I fought a little bit. I'd love to debate on it. I think it'd be a lot of fun. Cause we debate with love when I talk with Lee. I love him and he loves me, I think. I hope. But let me ask you a question. I asked this of him and Sarah on our clubhouse ones.

So what do you think would happen the next day? Let's say we discovered life, it's proximate centauri B, it's looks just like slime mold, like you got on your, you know, breed cheese or whatever, we discovered what would happen the next day. And they were like, oh, this would be transformative.

And I'm not trying to be like, you know, total Cassandra about this, but I say, I don't think anything would happen. And what are you talking about? It was transformational. I'm like, I stipulate that life exists. Go down to like the river, you know, I'm in San Diego, go down to the Pacific Ocean, scoop up a glass,

you know, you're gonna find life in there. And what are we doing? What are we doing to our earth? Or destroying it, callously. We're like find life in there. And what are we doing? What are we doing to our earth? Or destroying it callously. We're like pumping crap into there. Like we have this toxic waste spill a couple of months ago in San Diego. I couldn't go to the beach.

What, let me take it a step further. You know how many people I'm sorry that you do know, but how many people died in the 20th century? Killed. These are advanced civil. This is a slime mold. We kill. We name. We harm. we hurt, we hate.

I don't think anything would happen the next day. Then we go back to what we had. And I said, if that weren't proof enough, life has been discovered at least two or three times just in my professional career. Once in 1996, these Alan Land Hills meteorites and Antarctica, so like microbial respiration processes. Still, we don't know. It was a press conference held by Bill Clinton on the White House lawn that's featured in the movie Contact. We purpose for that movie. And then there's this phosphorus life,

this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake. Many extreme a file, we don't give a crap. We continue to, so why are we thinking that like our salvate from whence will our salvation come as the Bible says? Like, it's not gonna change how we are. It's not gonna magnify how I treat you or you treat me. And we're pretty knowledgeable people that you and I compare to, you know, lay people.

Okay, that's interesting. That's a really interesting argument. I wonder if you're right, but my intuition is, I can maybe present a different argument that you can think about in the realm of things you care about, even deeper, which is like, what happens once we figure out the origins of the universe, like how would that change your life? I would say there are certain discoveries that even in their very idea will change the fabric of society.

I tend to see if there's definitive proof that there's life in the more complex, the more powerful that the idea is elsewhere that I'm not exactly sure how it will change society because it's such a slap in the face. It's a such a humbling force. Or maybe not, or maybe it's a motivator to say, I don't know which force would take over. Maybe it would be governments with military start to think like, well, how do we kill it?

If there's a lot of life out there, how do we create the defenses? How do we extract it? Or yeah, or mine it for benefits? I mean, I just see like there's a hundred million literal counter examples about, I mean, right now there's like like seven, hundred million kids in poverty and like, we just, how do we go about our life and just not deal with that? I mean, I, look, I put it aside, I eat hamburgers and I, you know, in the hundred years I'll

be canceled for being, you for being a carnivore or whatever. But, obviously, to get through life, you have to make certain comp, you're not going to think about certain things. But I just think that is a sort of wish fulfillment. Every time there's a wall, why are we going to Mars and digging and flying this cool ass helicopter, I'm looking for water. Stipulate that water was there.

I believe there was water. I think we should invest again and see what the geology was like. But don't you think so? So you're saying, I don't think you're going to get meaning from it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's not worth doing. I'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning for life from science. Okay. But there's a there's a complicated line here. What if it's this but there's a complicated line here. What if it's this intelligence civilization living obviously probably not on Mars, but somewhere in neighboring galaxy

that we, sorry, in the neighboring star system that we discover, don't you think that it profound change in meaning? I mean, I guess again, I assume that because of this pan-summering process or whatever, that the probability is much, much greater than zero. I mean, it's not 100%, but it's much likelier than not. That least some living material from Earth has ejaculated itself into the solar system into the universe, right?

Into our gap. Beat that, please. As well. That's right. into the solar system, into the universe, right? Into our gap. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,

beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep? I don't know. So yeah, so I believe that there's, there could be remnants of Earth in this. So that means that could be evolution. I don't think there's any chance that there's like, you know, people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff

in, in projects and terms. There's so much, some chance though, right? So again, yes. I think the, well, the simple say, today I meant to say, it's much, much, much higher probability that life exists than technological life exists. Right, I don't think we can argue that. It doesn't mean it's forbidden.

Again, I'm not saying any of this is forbidden, not we're studying, not interesting. It's a likelihood thing. Yeah, and to answer your, I think you're wise to push back and like what does it matter what I'm doing? And I like to think about that, because it's like what is the value of what you're doing?

Like you have to answer that question or else at the end of your life, you'll have these existential, you know, kind of crises, right? So when I think about like who I am, part of my identity is answering and asking scientific questions. For me though, there is a religious kind of undercurrent that does undergird in some sense this quest. Again, I'm not like a practicing, I'm not like wearing a omelette, like I'm not like full on into my birth religion, Judaism. But at the same token, I think as, you know, I, one of the things Einstein

did say is that, you know, religion without science is blind or is lame and science without religion is lame, is blind and lame. Anyway, the point is that like you can't get meaning from just knowing facts. Like Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know, right? It has no wisdom. You know, wisdom means sapient. The word wisdom and Latin is sapient. We are wise.

And by the way, do you know what we're, what our real name is, homo sapient and sapient. So it's man who knows that he knows. Do you know what he knows? Do you know what the knowing is? It's that he's going to die. Where are the only creatures that know that we are going to die? We don't know when we're going to die.

But like, you know, I have a cat, a fierce attack cat. It's beautiful. She has no one just going to die. Doesn't mean I'm more valuable. The survival is, the survival is, think this much, it's fundamentally different from like the knowledge of death. And that's where there is. And this beckery comes in from the knowledge of death. And that's where the Ernest Becker comes in with the terror of death. And that's a creative force that seems to be more feature than bug.

Human condition is that, I mean, it's a gift of knowing our own mortality. It's a gift of knowing our own mortality. Yeah, to me, I mean, that's why, I agree with you in some sense in terms of the aliens not being a thing that solves all mysteries. That's why my love has always been the human mind. So understanding who we are, what the hell are we? And I think your love has been an echo of that which is what do we come from? Yeah, are basically as cheesy as the sounds you know

Mito Kakua is a way with words. I if you if you can just like enjoy the You know, he speaks in complete. he's like Sam Harris of Cosmology, he speaks in complete paragraphs. But like also unapologetically, he says, you know, we will know God or we will know the mind of God or whatever the quotes, those kinds of things. That's exciting that physics might be able to find equations that unlock our origins at the very core and like the fabric of it all too and not just our origins. You know, what's at the beginning? Something tells me we're too dumb to truly understand what's at the beginning, but I think we should be humble in that way. Again, another thing is, you know, you ever hear this saying, like, we share 99% of our DNA with chimps or banobos or whatever. I share, like, pie more than that. You know, sometimes I wish we shared like 100%. Like, that would be so much more interesting. Like, we, oh, is there

50% of a fruit fly or banana? Like, we, no, no, no, there's something, but that should make us feel more precious. And I almost feel like discovering life on another planet, whatever solar system would cause a diminution of humanity. Like the one thing I do hold fast here from religion, I don't know where I am with God. Like do I believe in God? I think that's an unanswerable question, but I have some thoughts about it. But by the same token, I think the one thing I do get from religion is that every human has infinite worth

because we are in a religious capacity considered to be equal to God. In other words, we are gods not to be like, but we can contemplate what God did. We have aspects of God, we have free will. God had free will if he exists. Again, I can't prove that God exists. Otherwise, you wouldn't have any credit

for believing in God. This is interesting. I mean, it's like prove that God exists. Otherwise, you wouldn't have any credit for believing in God. This is interesting. I mean, it's like, I'm talking to Einstein here, but let me ask anyway. Can you clip that for my clips, Sean? For somebody who's looking at the young universe, at the early universe, and are talking about God and are agnostic.

Who do you think is God? So I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts with Sam Harris this past summer. And one of the things I liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation. And he said something that's really resonated with me and I've been working on around and trying to work on my own way.

But he said, you can never be happy. You can only become happy. And I try to take a little bit further than that, because I think it's interesting. Meditation is like, you're not like, oh, I'm happy and now like, oh, my kid came in and now I'm not happy. And they're like, no, you can be satisfied. Kurt Vonnegut said, you ever catch this happy. And now like, oh, my kid came in. Now I'm not happy. They're like, no, like you can be satisfied.

Kurt Vonnegut said like, you ever catch this? Sometimes like, you're like walking around and you're like, life is freaking amazing. Like I'm happy. And Kurt Vonnegut said, you should say to yourself every time that happens, like a little mantra, like if this isn't goodness, if this isn't happiness, nothing is.

Just remind yourself how awesome it is every breath, everything that you do when you make an impact, even some of the bad stuff that happens. Good, it's good. So Sam said that and it made me think because I was like, well, what does it really mean to be happy? Because like I can think of,

I can think of about two or three ways that right now I could double my happiness. Now like when lottery or whatever, like I double my happiness. There's only a few ways. All right. Like, you know, I had this kind of thought like how many boats can you watersky behind? Like you had twice as many followers. Now you got two million followers, five million, whatever. It doesn't do anything. It's called the hedonic treadmill. Like once you get to a certain level, it takes a lot more, you know, change and followers, money, impact, women, whatever you want to make you have one more quanta of happiness,

right? On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy. I could make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways. In other words, there's more space to make your life unhappy than happy. And so I thought about that in the context of what Sam said about happiness. So it's sort of like, yeah, it's an expression of entropy. And that what you should be doing in life is doing that which will cause you devastation if it goes away.

Because those are the things that like are where you're reducing entropy, like a kid. Like anyone who's a parent knows instantly what I'm talking about, like how to make your life a billion times worse. But there's no way to make your life a billion times better. And so, thinking about that, now turning into the question of God's existence, I feel like there's no way that you can believe in God to quote, misquote Sam, but there's ways that you can become a believer in God. In other words, you could increase the Bayesian confidence level that there is some, and let's not call it God because it's a free to turn.

Let's just call it some infinite source of goodness or our beautiful power in the universe, right? Simple things can do that. You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life. And we have this biases humans towards negativity, negativity bias. Well, in fact, so what I want to do is, is, is, it, let's call God good, right? That's where it comes from. God good, say more, it's in German. And when we think about what is good, let's do those things that would devastate us. And a lot of that could be relationships. And there's a powerful concept from network theory,

which is that, you know, the number of connections in a network, you know, I'm just saying it for you. It grows as the square of the elements in the matrix in the number, right? So you think of a matrix with N people, you know, person one, two, three, four, and then there's four other people. There's 16 different pairs,

but half of them overlap. The diagonal is where you know each other, you know yourself. But that still grows as N squared. So those connections increase and decrease. You have two friends that are fighting, and you're kind of upset, even though you're not fighting with either one of them. So like a network grows like that. So

you want to increase your network as much as possible, but only the kind of high quality interstices between them. And I think in doing so, you make yourself fragile, not antifragile. And I think that is where purpose and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from. So that is a source of meaning, maximizing the goodness in life and the way you know is good, is if it's taken away, it would devastate you. That's one way. Think about it, your brand, your business, your spouse, your kids. I mean, parents can't count, I've known parents that have a lot. Jim Simon's, here's a perfect example. He's one of my oldest friends and mentors. He is one of the richest people on earth. Gulfstream, Megaya,

this is all documented books about him. He lost two sons as adults and I hear people say, I'm so jealous of Jim Simon's. Would you take everything? I don't know where he has that strength and his wife, Marilyn, and his first wife, Barbara. I'm not, I'm not like that. As some people are, there are angels that walk among us. And you know, there's this famous prayer. It's like, you know, God, you know, there's, there's, there's a don't say like one of the hardest tests there are in life is to be given a lot of money. And you see it like happens with like lawyer, like people that win a lottery or whatever, or NFL football players after their careers over, they get their broke, right. And I was like, God, please test me with money. You know, that'd be great. But, but in reality, you never say, I'm gonna, I want what X person has, unless you're willing to take everything,

and you'll find you won't wanna take everything. Yeah, I think a lot about the altering effects of fame, of money, of power, and people. It blinds people. And I wonder about that for myself because it seems like in themselves these are definitely not the goals. I'm pretty much afraid. I'm not desirous and I'm definitely afraid of each of those things.

Money, fame, and power, but it seems the dreams I have as consequences can often have these things. And I'm really afraid of becoming something that would disappoint me when I was younger. That would, that wouldn't recognize, you know, because change happens gradually. But are you using yourself as the as the touchstone to use the ass air amount? Like, what is your rubric to to a prize if you have lived up to that 12 year old, whatever year old Lex? Like how will you know or not know if you've let yourself down or like I always think live to impress yourself. Like I don't care if I have

followers. Like it's nice or whatever, but it's hedonic and it's just never ending because you'll always see the next level. But I think it's pretty damn cool that like I've gotten to go to these places, the South Pole and I've done these things and I've made a family and I'm able to teleport my values into the future through my children and I've had ideological children that I So by what meant you're you know, have you not already impressed yourself and be could you let yourself? I don't want to say the third I think some of it is psychology for me. I'm very much just never I'm highly self-criticals that I'm never happy never happy with what I've done But I'm always happy in the way that you describe,

which is that the vaunigate thing, where you just, often during the day, I will feel, I don't know, I just remember just eating beef jerky and being truly happy. That was just last night, and I have that all the time. And that, to me, me is why I mean that feels to me like a healthy way to live life and at least for me it's the one I really enjoy. A lot of people tell me that maybe being so self-critical, so hard on yourself is not a

good way to go but more and more as I get older I realize it's just who I am. I, you have to a certain point, except this is how I'm always going to be this self-critical. It's like the Oracle of Delphi, right? You know that I solve. But I wanna leave you with one last thing, which is to say, just on this topic, you know, it could be different, right? We could go down to the ocean and get some krill

instead of the 7-Eleven, you know, it could be that we have no other taste buds. And, you know, Eric's talked to the four dimensions of the, you know, the vibration of your tongue, right? It could be like, there's one, and it's just like not, you know, Memphis barbecue, whatever you like in your, in your, in your slim gym. It could be something, it could be very boring. Similarly, what if like, that's a clue. Similarly, what if that's a clue?

Like what if that's giving us evidence? Here's another clue. There are many animals, most animals have single monocolor vision. They only see in black and white intensity. They only have rods and no cones. We could be like that, but we're not. Why is that not a clue? Like if God's not gonna like hit you over the head

and say like, here I am, cause then everybody would believe in him. And there's very simplistic, I've had debates, even with like famous atheists like Lawrence Kraus, who's like self-declared militant atheists. And I was like, well, I don't believe in the same God, you don't believe in like some guy in a white beard and a chair, like that's infantile.

Like I gave that away a long time ago. But what if there are clues? What if Yang mills theory? And you know, Maxwell's equate, like what if, those are beautiful. If you've ever seen like, you know, express intense or notation, Einstein's equations or Maxwell's equations, or, and then Maxwell's equations

riding on Einstein's's it's unbelievably beautiful Doesn't have to be that way that we can comprehend it That's a crack. Maybe that's where the light gets in and the light is what reveals what's beautiful So I don't believe in God. I think that's a stupid notion like do I believe in God like sometimes I try I wonder if God believes in me You know like more than that five believe in like he needs Brian try to, I wonder if God believes in me, like more than that if I believe in it. He needs Brian Keating, like, you know, what would, you know, it's like one of my friends is a rabbi,

so like, what would I be doing if I were God? Exactly what God's doing right now, like, you think I know more than God? Give me a brief. We're leaving clues of beauty for these hairless apes. Yeah. And to see what they do with this. And then Marvel at both the tragedy

of what those apes do to each other and the rare moments of when they understand, understand deeply about how the world works. Ryan, you're an incredible human being. I'm a big fan and I'm really honored. He was, first of all, shower me with rocks from the moon, from space, from space dust,

space dust, and crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals. Yeah. You can use for good and tell me your story and spend your really valuable time with me today. This was amazing. It was a great pleasure for me, Lex. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Keating. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Galileo, Galilei. In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you