Cracking Einstein UFOs Lead the Way Eric Weinstein and Avi Loeb (YouTube Content)

Cracking Einstein UFOs Lead the Way
Information
Host(s)	Brian Keating
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein, Avi Loeb
Length	01:49:12
Release Date	05 March 2025
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Portal Blog	Read
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Cracking Einstein UFOs Lead the Way | Eric Weinstein and Avi Loeb was a discussion between Eric Weinstein, Avi Loeb, and Brian Keating hosted by Brian on Into the Impossible.

Description

Is humanity on the brink of a cosmic breakthrough—or just chasing shadows?

Harvard’s Avi Loeb and Eric Weinstein join me for a mind-bending romp through the cosmos, UFOs, academia and the future of physics. Avi kicks off this mind-bending Into the Impossible episode, diving deep into his Galileo Project and the hunt for alien tech. From Oumuamua’s eerie drift to UAPs defying physics, Avi argues we’re not alone—and the evidence might already be here. Are we ready to face what’s out there?

Then, Eric Weinstein enters, turning the table on everything. He’s pitching Shelter Island 3—a novel physics summit to bust science out of its 50-year rut—and skewers string theory’s ‘hype fest’ (sorry, Greene and Susskind). Eric’s outtelligence theory flips the script: what if aliens aren’t smart, just sneaky? He spars with Avi over transcending Einstein—could UAPs hint at a new physics?—and drags H-1B visas into the mix, fresh off his Vivek Ramaswamy debate. DOGE funding for truth? Government secrets hiding crashed saucers? Epstein’s elite ties? Israel’s tech edge? Eric’s got wild takes, and he’s not holding back.

Together, we wrestle academia’s chokehold—Eric’s ‘Distributed Idea Suppression Complex’ meets Avi’s Oumuamua data. Is this Einstein’s endgame—aliens or bust? Buckle up for a clash of cosmic stakes, contrarian rants, and big questions. Share and Subscribe for more brain-busting talks, hit the bell, and drop your thoughts below—UFOs real or hype? Let’s debate!

In this captivating live interview, renowned astrophysicist Avi Loeb dives deep into the mysteries of the universe and the ongoing quest for extraterrestrial life. Does he believe whistleblowers like Lue Elizando are telling the truth? Why haven't we found definitive proof of aliens yet? Loeb argues that the answer lies in our allocation of resources and our approach to exploring the unknown.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Transparency in Scientific Communication

07:08 Avi's Credibility on Aliens

13:37 Reinventing Scientific Credibility

21:25 "Theoretical Physics: Soft Sunset?"

23:26 "AI, UAPs & Secrecy"

32:08 "Oumuamua: Alien Device Theory?"

38:27 Einstein's Prison: Constraints in Science

44:40 Rethinking Academia's Public Priorities

46:31 AI, Life, and Public Concerns

51:05 Overhead System Challenges

56:44 US Innovation: Global Talent Strategy

01:05:06 Exploring Cosmic Ethical Questions

01:09:58 Forgotten Graveyard of Physics Theories

01:12:15 Rethinking Quantum Gravity's Role

01:17:37 Geometric Unity's Relevance Debate

01:23:41 "Shelter Island III Idea"

01:33:21 Reviving Risky Physics

01:38:34 Learning Passion Over Money

01:39:14 "Spread the Word: Giveaway"

01:45:16 UFOs, Lasers, and Planet Nine

Transcript

Note: This transcript is based off of the original complete livestream (3 hr 45 min), which was later edited into two parts. Part 1 contains the first portion of the conversation between Avi and Brian, and can be found here. Part 2, during which Eric joined the discussion, is linked above on this page, and begins at 1 hr 56 min in the transcript below.

00:00:00

Brian Keating: Buckle up everybody. This is going to be one of the deepest dives you've ever done with two professors that are interested, both theoretically and experimentally, on the greatest cosmic mysteries of our time. And our guest today isn't just some basic scientist. He's one of our best friends. He's a boundary breaking astrophysicist at New York Times bestselling author, and the man leading the charge to bring real scientific rigor to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

00:00:23

Brian Keating: And that's the one and only Professor Avi Loeb. Avi, how are you?

00:00:28

Avi Loeb: I'm doing great. There are lots of things going on at the same time. And I can tell you one anecdote. Just a couple of days ago, I was speaking with organizers of a future lecture that I'm supposed to give to a group of the most accomplished CEOs in the world, plus some celebrities. And that includes. I asked my wife if she's okay if I have breakfast with Margot Robbie, and she said, yes, definitely.

00:00:54

Avi Loeb: That's how much she trust me. At any event, the organizer asked me what should be the title of your talk. I'm supposed to give a presentation. And I said maybe hunting for aliens. And he was at first worried that the, the audience members of the audience would the, me assume that I'm working for the US government and, you know, searching for illegal aliens at the southern border wall.

00:01:24

Avi Loeb: I explained that, you know, no two dimensional world that is directed from Earth can stop the actual aliens, from coming because they would come from above. And moreover, you know, they were on their trip for very long, probably, and do not have proper visa. And if we wanted to deport them, you know, it would actually be very expensive.

00:01:46

Avi Loeb: It would cost more than $1 billion per flight. And moreover, it will take a long time, to bring them back to their home planet. Probably more than a billion years with chemical propulsion. And so I suggested that it's better we get used to them and live with them. And perhaps, you know, that is the ultimate way of fulfilling diversity and inclusion on a galactic scale.

00:02:12

Brian Keating: Yes.

00:02:12

Avi Loeb: It's just one example, but I need, you know, the past month has been particularly amazing. I received the commitments for funding for the Galileo project at the level of $5 million just over the past month. And, there was also a sculpture of Galileo Galilei. Your favorite scientist? Yes. That was made of bronze, roughly the height of a person that was delivered to my office.

00:02:38

Avi Loeb: It was made by the accomplished sculptor Greg Wyatt, who, many people who studied at Columbia University are familiar with his life. And their and, and, he has sculptures throughout the New York City and Washington, the Arlington Cemetery. Anyway, he decided to donate a bronze sculpture of Galileo looking at the four moons of Jupiter. And we celebrated it a couple of weeks ago.

00:03:06

Avi Loeb: It's sort of at the intersection of science and art, which I really enjoyed because both frontiers of science and the arts are characterized by, you know, studying the unknown. And, and, they are both inspired by, creativity. So I really, Yeah, I had the time with that.

00:03:29

Brian Keating: That's great. Well, there's nothing, you know, that I like more than someone who's as ambitious as you are and doing stuff with scientific rigor, searching for physical evidence of UAP interstellar visitors. You've been working, you know, hand in glove with NASA. In many ways, the Pentagon, mainstream science. You're a hardcore scientist. So people at first encountering Avi, he's not just some person that's jumped on the UFO bandwagon claim to have spotted something.

00:03:53

Brian Keating: In fact, quite the contrary. He's got the, prototypical preternatural scientific response, which is to be skeptical and actually assume that most things are wrong, including, most scientists are wrong and that that's a good thing. You know, I tweeted out yesterday, you're not on Twitter. That's why you're so successful. But, tweeted out, you know, there's there's this trope about religion in science, you know, where it's like, well, science is magic, but it's real.

00:04:16

Brian Keating: And I'm like, well, no, most of the magicians I've ever seen are kind of jerks. And they make you feel like a jerk and they make you feel stupid and hard and played. And the whole drama of us, of a, of a magician is to conceal his tricks and not share them with the public. But what you do is bring it to the public.

00:04:32

Brian Keating: And I think you do so at great risk to your to your, you know, career to, you know, getting involved with, with military and government etc.. And there's a lot of that in the so-called Zeit Geist with the UAP and drones. Are they unknown physics? Are they deep technology? Could we benefit from them? Is it a psyop? Are they governments?

00:04:50

Brian Keating: Are government spying on them? And in particular, two people of one has appeared on the show. One agreed to appear on the show. I never did, that's Lou Elizondo. But Nick Pope was on a couple weeks ago. We had a great discussion. And the heavyweights and of course, your name always comes up, but at the very end, we'll take questions.

00:05:05

Brian Keating: We've already got, you know, close to 200 people watching at the end. We'll take questions from the audience for, you know, the inimitable Avi Loeb. So anyway, this is not just another UFO talk.

00:05:15

Avi Loeb: I just wanted, since you mentioned magicians, I just wanted to explain that you shouldn't regard academia as the source of comfort for any disappointment from people who invent stories, because, you know, Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate, about 50 years ago, argued that it doesn't matter how smart you are, you know, if your idea does not agree with experiment, it's wrong.

00:05:43

Avi Loeb: Now, you would think that's a trivial statement, and that the mainstream of theoretical physics would listen to it. But look at the last 50 years where the focus of theoretical physics was on extra the spatial dimensions and we haven't seen any evidence for that yet. It's accepted as a goal worth pursuing, as an assumption the same as supersymmetry, which was not observed at the Large Hadron Collider, despite the fact that we invested $10 billion in that collider.

00:06:14

Avi Loeb: And, you know, I spoke with a string theorists and I asked him, what's your most important paper? And he said, it's about supersymmetry. And I said, well, why do you regard it as your most important paper? After all, it was not observed in the experiment that we that was designed to look for it. We haven't found it in the natural parameter space.

00:06:39

Avi Loeb: And he said, because, you know, it might be around the corner where the next experiment is done. And I was reminded of the religious Orthodox community in Crown Heights that believe that the Lubavitcher rabbi is the Messiah. So that was their theory, theoretical model. And then there was a data point. They assumed that after he dies, he will come back as the Messiah.

00:07:02

Avi Loeb: And he died. That never came back. So obviously it's an experimental data that you should take to heart. But what was their response? It was not very different. Then my colleague. They said, oh, it's it will happen in the future. We just have to wait. And so I just wanted to caution, people from believing that the mainstream of science is always following the scientific method, because I don't see a qualitative difference between the the religious philosophy of, Crown Heights, advocates and the, you know, some philosophy of, of theoretical physicists who are willing to wait for their entire life, without seeing the evidence that supports the idea that they're exploring.

00:07:47

Avi Loeb: And, you know, they just don't listen to Richard Feynman. Now, the approach I'm taking is, you know, if there is a question that is of great interest to the public, let's get a flood of data, as much data as possible on this question so we can illuminate the darkness. We can figure out what the answer is. You know, if it ends up being disappointing, you know, nature is under no contract to make us happy.

00:08:09

Avi Loeb: We know that from Galileo. We were hoping that we are the center of the universe. We are not okay. And it's good to know that because now we can design, spacecraft that would reach Mars. If we were to think that Mars orbits the Earth, we would never get there. We would shoot rockets like crazy. And all these religious people that believe in the Vatican's dogma would just not be able to reach Mars.

00:08:33

Avi Loeb: And, gladly, the Vatican admitted in 1992 that Galileo was right. It was a little bit late. It was 20 years after. Yeah. You know, we reached the moon. But my point is, we should always regard science as a learning experience. We should not assume we know the answer in advance. We should never pretend to be the adults in the room.

00:08:54

Avi Loeb: You know, that is the big, the biggest enemy of progress. That's right. Argue that you know. So how do you learn about nature? It's by collecting evidence. You know, my best friends are experimental is.

00:09:08

Brian Keating: So our mind but some of them, some of my best friends are theorists too. And and I've been accused by none other than Marc Minkowski of being a deeply closeted theorist, you know, because of the way I have such affection, you know, it's probably not.

00:09:22

Avi Loeb: An insult or.

00:09:23

Brian Keating: A cop. No, no, it was funny. He said he wouldn't let my daughter marry and experimentalist, but I don't know what that meant. Let, let.

00:09:28

Avi Loeb: Let me ask you, would he buy a used car from you?

00:09:33

Brian Keating: I think he would. But we go back, you know, 25 years. So I think he's come to trust me now. But, you know, the thing that I, you know, love about, you know, real scientific progress is that we're open to being wrong. We actually welcome it, right? The more mistakes you make, the faster you can iterate, the more you can change your presumptions and assumptions and iterate your model.

00:09:54

Brian Keating: And that's why I think theory can be dangerous and seductive, because it can allow people to kind of fall into this trap, of, well, we just have to come up with ideas and we're kind of got this infinite job, you know, kind of security, and that Doge is not going to come to us and ask us, what do we do?

00:10:09

Brian Keating: You know, last week, tell me five things. It'll be empty, right?

00:10:13

Avi Loeb: The actual risk is that the very often theories fall into the trap of thinking that the job is demonstrating that you are smart. So, yeah, you know, it's just like, you know, running in the Olympics 100m distance. You don't ask, why is 100 distance, 100 meter distance the right distance? I mean, it could have been 127, but you don't ask.

00:10:38

Avi Loeb: You just try to do it the best you can. So if you regard theoretical physics as a sandbox in which you demos by doing intellectual gymnastics, mathematical manipulations, you demonstrate that you are smart. You don't really care whether the ideas match nature, whether they and in fact, you know, if we discover a gadget from another civilization, it doesn't require any fancy math.

00:11:02

Avi Loeb: You know, you just need to find it, look at it and decide whether you want to press a button.

00:11:08

Brian Keating: That's right. And that's what makes it so beautiful. And in fact, one of my favorite quotes, you know, from Feynman, there's a lot of Feynman worship, by the way, is, you know, you know, he would say things like, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't really understand it yourself. But then he said, on the day he won the Nobel Prize, the Pasadena Star News came to him and said, what do you win and for?

00:11:26

Brian Keating: And he goes, look, pal, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize. So for every Feynman quote, there's an equal and opposite Feynman.

00:11:33

Avi Loeb: But I should say one thing, because nowadays, you know, the white House is surrounded by self-declared tech support. That's right. Okay. And the one risk that I see is that I don't see any scientists out there. And, you know, the the chips that are being used for, AI the the frontiers of AI are manufactured on the atomic scale.

00:12:04

Avi Loeb: By the way, I cannot see you.

00:12:06

Brian Keating: Oh, it's okay, I can see. I can see you. You're,

00:12:09

Avi Loeb: You know, you're manufactured on the atomic scale, and we won't be able to produce them without the understanding of quantum mechanics that was discovered a century ago. And the point that I'm making is the frontiers of technology today were shaped by curiosity driven science of a hundred years ago. Quantum mechanics was discovered exactly 100 years ago. And therefore, if we put all of our emphasis, all of our attention on the AI of today, and ignore basic science in terms of funding, if we reduce the size of the National Science Foundation, NASA, or everything to anything to do with basic fundamental science, we would lose our edge in the technologies of the next century.

00:12:56

Avi Loeb: And that is a very important point to make as the budgets are being defined for basic science. And there is a risk, in my opinion, that comes from the technology sector, where, I mean, you can easily identify those people. They don't have doctor in front of their names.

00:13:13

Brian Keating: That's right. And I feel, you know, as much as I love Elon Musk and, you know, unsupported, you know, President Trump, recently, I'm actually coming out, you know, most people suspect that. But I'm actually talking to I'm I'm comfortable talking to anyone. I've had Noam Chomsky on your crosstown, you know, your crosstown rival I've had on, you know, many, many, you know, liberals, leftists I've had on Larry Tribe who you connected me to.

00:13:37

Brian Keating: Not a not a Trump fan. Right. But but, you know, seeing what's happening just to shake things up to kind of revitalize America, standing in the world, such as you see it. But but the main thing that does worry me, and I think we always have to be honest, just because you might support somebody doesn't mean they're immune from criticism.

00:13:53

Brian Keating: That's what true friends do, right? As, Ben-Gurion said, you know, when a friend makes a mistake, he remains a friend. But the mistake is a mistake. I think he said that, or, you know, it was, Yeah, that my rights meant.

00:14:04

Avi Loeb: That I should tell you in this context, shortly after the elections, Peter Thiel, appeared on some podcast and he said, never bet against Elon. Yeah. And I the following day, I placed a public bet against Elon on Medium.com. And my point is, he was arguing that we are probably alone and therefore we should go to Mars to avoid the single point catastrophe that will eliminate us because we have a cosmic responsibility to preserve whatever we have.

00:14:40

Avi Loeb: Okay. And I said, well, you know, there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. We know that a few percent of them have an Earth mass planet, roughly at the same separation as the Earth is from the sun. And, you know, there are up to a trillion galaxies in the observable universe. So and in fact, the conditions in the cosmic within the cosmic horizon probably continue 4000 times beyond the cosmic horizon.

00:15:05

Avi Loeb: So altogether you get ten to the power 31 Earth sun systems. And arguing that we are probably alone is actually very unlikely to be true. So I'm willing to put 1% of my net worth against 1% of Elon Musk's net worth, which would be about $4 billion together. I mean, mostly his. That's right. And and use that money the next decade to search for objects.

00:15:32

Avi Loeb: You know, they might be empty trash bags or, broken satellites or, you know, space trash of other forms.

00:15:41

Brian Keating: Or Earthling asteroids, like, you know, 20, 24 and f whatever that.

00:15:46

Avi Loeb: Was going to be all of these things. Now we are close to a lamppost. We call it the sun. It illuminates the darkness of space. Okay, so just like searching for your keys under the lamppost, I actually wrote the paper a couple of weeks ago that I submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, in which I showed that we can use a one meter aperture space telescope to search for objects that are ten meters in size from interstellar space within the orbit of Mercury.

00:16:17

Avi Loeb: You know, the Hubble Space Telescope cannot look in that direction because it's limited in its viewing angle away from the sun. But if you were to focus on the inner region within three times closer to the sun than we are going to within the orbit of Mercury, the sun illuminates ten meter sized objects so that they can be observed with a one meter aperture.

00:16:40

Avi Loeb: And therefore, you know, I calculated that there should be every five hours an interstellar object arriving to within that region. And we should just check if all of these objects are rocks, or some of them might be technological in origin. And you know that within that region they heat up to more than 600 degrees Kelvin. And at that temperature, you know, they might shed some mass and you can do spectroscopy from a distance.

00:17:06

Avi Loeb: And instead of landing on them and figuring out what they are made of, you know, it would be a fantastic project. And, you know, a space telescope would cost more than $1 billion, and that would be a good use of of that. The fund that I was talking about now, within a decade, we don't find anything of interest.

00:17:23

Avi Loeb: I'm willing to give Elon another 1% of my net worth. But the point is that in order to find something, you need to search for it. You know, that's the fundamental. It's not just a matter of expressing an opinion or saying, we haven't seen it. You know, if we would say we haven't seen the Higgs. Okay. And, you know, when we check with the Starlink satellites, we don't see evidence for the Higgs.

00:17:47

Avi Loeb: Obviously not because you didn't build the instrument necessary to detect the Higgs. You need to invest in the goal. You can't just rely on things that were constructed for other purposes. That's. No, I mean, there is all the low hanging fruit was already collected. And, you know, we've been searching for 70 years for radio signals, haven't found any that are, artificial.

00:18:12

Avi Loeb: And so, you know, Einstein argued that you can't just do it again and again, do the same thing, expecting a different result. It makes more sense. So what we haven't done, I mean, we we waited for a phone call. We haven't received a phone call from someone. So let's just look at our backyard and check if there are any tennis balls that were thrown by a neighbor.

00:18:32

Avi Loeb: You know, because we see all these houses in our cosmic street and the only question that remains is whether these houses that look like ours, whether they have any residents.

00:18:43

Brian Keating: Yeah. And that brings up a point, that I made on a video recently. I'd love to get your reaction to it. Because the, the fact that, you know, there is so much space really is kind of a mixed bag, as Carl Sagan said, you know, there's, if no one's out there, it's an awful waste of space.

00:18:59

Brian Keating: But that implies a teleological, you know, kind of purpose to the universe, which many of the supporters of the UFO hypothesis reject, that there's a God, that there's, you know, some, overall imperative that's categorically true for the universe. And I, I just don't accept that that's, you know, self-consistent. And I've, I've argued, actually, that, you know, for a scientific evidence, you know, base perspective right now, there's no evidence, right?

00:19:22

Brian Keating: We don't have hard evidence. We don't physical evidence. What we're going to talk about some today that could potentially be that. But I mean, if if this were really true, this would be the discovery of all time, even in my field, the CMB, you know, I love it, I want that, but I'm kind of I feel like I have job security in the same way.

00:19:39

Brian Keating: Maybe you feel with this bet with the, you know, compare.

00:19:41

Avi Loeb: That to the CMB. I mean, there were hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the search for primordial fluctuations of the microwave background. But in this context, no federal funding exists more than a few hundred thousand. You know, like. That's right. This is completely inappropriate. We are searching I mean, the decadal survey of the astronomy community defined the search for microbes as the priority, the Habitable World Observatory that will cost more than $10 billion and will be constructed after 2040.

00:20:11

Avi Loeb: Okay. And I say, let's hedge our bets. Let's let's invest a few billion dollars in a signal that might be actually much clearer, because it was money produced artificially. And if we find it, you know, it will not only tell us about life, but intelligent life. That's and, you know, I just two days ago, I was invited to, a public, Q&A with, a group of people who are interested in the interface between religion and science.

00:20:44

Avi Loeb: And the title of the of the forum was extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Jews. And I was asked about my opinions. I mean, I said the you know, it's quite reassuring that the in the, in the book of Genesis, the was are beginning in time, which is the modern picture we have of the universe that we observe.

00:21:08

Avi Loeb: But the, you know, the sequence of events after that do not match what we know about now. You know, not obviously back then when the book of Genesis was delivered, it was quite reasonable. But, for example, now we know that all the objects we see were not made in six days. There is this statement in the, in the biblical version that God rested in the seventh day.

00:21:34

Avi Loeb: And if God would have rested in the seventh day, we would see a clear signature of that in the cosmic microwave background. And research, the seven days after the Big Bang, there would be a clear pattern that we could look for. There was there is no such pattern. It took 13.8 billion years to produce all the objects we see in the form of, you know, the solar system in which you see the sun and the Earth is some relic from the debris disk around the sun.

00:22:02

Avi Loeb: The sun is one of the stars that was made in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one out of trillion galaxies in the universe. And the first, and they were made of building blocks of smaller galaxies, starting 100 million years after the Big Bang. You know, these details require some update to the book of Genesis. And now the notion of God, if you ask me, is it's interesting.

00:22:26

Avi Loeb: I see a way of unifying science and religion because, you know, suppose we developed the theory of quantum gravity, okay. A theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. Yes. Then we might be able to replace the Big Bang singularity with the ingredients that preceded that. So we would know, you know, what happened before the Big Bang. And it's just like a recipe for a cake that specifies the ingredients you need to put together, in which order, and how much heat you need to apply to those ingredients to get the cake of your liking.

00:23:02

Avi Loeb: And if we had that recipe, all we would miss is an oven where you do that and put the cake in the oven to get it made. And my point is that at that point, when we know the recipe for the Big Bang, we would be able to apply to the job of God. Because if you think about advertising, the job of God, the one requirement is you should be able to create the baby universe that's, you know, that's the fundamental requirement.

00:23:32

Avi Loeb: And, you know, a sufficiently advanced scientist might be able to do that. And so my first question if I ever meet an alien would be what happened before the big bang? Do you know the answer.

00:23:44

Brian Keating: Well, if it was Stephen Hawking he'd say that makes little sense as asking what's north of the North Pole. But as everybody knows, we two Jews included, it's Santa Claus, right? I mean, so this this brings up this notion that, you know, that, that there's also a tension between government and scientists. And I find this all the time if I argue against the existence of the UAP that are seen being alien in origin, or if I even argue that there is no evidence for microbial life on Europa, I get pitched this whole thing.

00:24:15

Brian Keating: Oh, you're just, you know, a shill. Keating. You're a grifter, you're just working for NASA and big science, and you don't walk among the common men and women. I tell them I cut my fingers about 3000 times as a short order cook. I was a dishwasher for years. You were a farm boy. We're about as far removed now.

00:24:33

Brian Keating: That's not to say that some of our colleagues have never left the ivory tower, especially at your fine institution, as you are now. But but the fact is, are we we connect with the common man as well. And the two of us would be the most excited people in the world. Perhaps if these reports by people, mostly from the military, by the way, are actually proven to be true.

00:24:53

Brian Keating: And I do want to pivot to to to that statement though, like on one hand, how do you how do you make these two things rectify them together? You've got to trust the government when they're military men like David Grush and Lou Elizondo, past guest on the show, Ryan Graves, many, many people claim to me that they've seen it or they know people have seen it.

00:25:13

Brian Keating: And yet we're also supposed to distrust the government. Where do you get where do you how do you reconcile these two things? Can they both be true?

00:25:20

Avi Loeb: Yeah. So, you know, the most important thing in science is not the signal that you are seeking. It's the ratio of the signal to the noise. And you know, any experimental physicist will tell you that right. There we go. You know, because the subject is so exciting for society there is a lot of noise. And you know just like in politics you have to avoid the noise.

00:25:46

Avi Loeb: I mean if you train an AI system on the noise, it you know, it will just be unreliable garbage.

00:25:53

Brian Keating: Yeah.

00:25:53

Avi Loeb: And so my point is we need to distinguish between noise and evidence. And by the way, that was exactly Galileo's point. That is the foundation of science. Now, what happens is sometimes scientists say, oh, there is so much noise. I don't want to seek the signal. And that's wrong, because, for example, you know, a thousand years ago, there were people believing that the human body has a soul and therefore it should not be dissected.

00:26:21

Avi Loeb: There shouldn't be operations because you could hurt the human soul. Now, we know that modern medicine, you know, and the health of people very much depends on operations. And so we've managed to ignore all the noise about the risk to the human soul from operate operating the human body. So all I'm trying to say, there is always this background of noise is that you need to ignore and follow the data, follow the evidence, collect the evidence.

00:26:48

Avi Loeb: Because very often we are not seeking the evidence. You know, people thought that rocks cannot fall from the sky until 1803 when there was a meteor shower in Liege, France. And then, you know, a physicist named Bayo and made it popular after 3000, rocks were witnessed by people. So my point is, you know, we really need to collect evidence.

00:27:13

Avi Loeb: Now, I haven't seen conclusive evidence that proves the case. And therefore, all of these people that say they know the answer, they don't really know the answer, because if it if they knew it, they would get the Nobel Prize. Okay. So, so I say ignore all the noise and work. I mean, the most important thing to replace it is by working hard to collect new data.

00:27:35

Avi Loeb: That's what the Galileo project is doing. We have one observatory that we constructed over the past three years at Harvard University, which is collecting data on 100,000 objects. Every month. We publish the commissioning data. Five hunt, about half a million objects. We analyzed it with machine learning. Try to figure out if there is any unusual object that is not familiar.

00:28:00

Avi Loeb: And we keep collecting. Now, I got funding to build three other observatories, one in Pennsylvania, another one in Nevada, and the third one, which is quite exciting. It's in Indiana. It will be part of a, Stem education center there. I see an opportunity to bring young people, and educate them about how to do science. You know, it's by analyzing data.

00:28:26

Avi Loeb: We would also look at near-Earth objects, not just at the unidentified anomalous phenomena in the atmosphere. And I see that is an important, way of convincing young, young adults that, they should not pretend to be the adults in the room. That's the biggest streak risk. When you enter academia, you start being preoccupied with your image, stature.

00:28:53

Avi Loeb: You build an echo chamber where young people have to repeat your mantras, and they do that because of job prospects. They know that they will not get a job unless they subscribe. And that is really suppressing innovation. Anyway, coming back to your question, the people that you mentioned are not seeking scientific evidence. I mean, the claim is that the government may have materials or information from crash sites of extraterrestrial technological object.

00:29:23

Avi Loeb: I would like to see it. That would save me a long a lot of time. I it I'm not signed to any nondisclosure agreement. And the sky is not classified. So we build these observatories in order to collect our own data because, you know, the the the day job of government is national security. My day job is to figure out what lies outside the solar system.

00:29:46

Avi Loeb: I am not asking the government to tell me that, you know, if you were to ask the Pope to tell you when the Vatican agrees that the sun is at the center of the solar system, you would wait until 1992. Why should we do that?

00:30:01

Brian Keating: Yeah. And I think that the the tension that I keep feeling. And just to come back to that question, you know, when I, when I'm told I shouldn't, I shouldn't be dismissive of these heroes that are military veterans, Lou Elizondo and David Grush and in particular and partially Ryan Graves as well, because they had the courage to serve.

00:30:20

Brian Keating: And they did this and that. And I don't I agree, they're they're heroes for serving. I, I salute their commitment to the country certainly have bigger, you know, space balls than, than, than many of us. But on the other hand, I'm a scientist, so I'm entitled and a citizen. So I'm entitled to ask questions of any of these people and put their claims to test.

00:30:37

Brian Keating: I mean, they're making scientific claims, I don't know, have you read any, have you read imminent?

00:30:41

Avi Loeb: I know all these claims. You know, these are they are my friends. The problem is, you know, the evidence that they're talking about is not available for scientific scrutiny. And it's really about evidence. Now, I want to explain that it's not just the problem of people who, are not professional scientists. It's also a problem within sides. Let me give you an example.

00:31:05

Avi Loeb: There was a paper in publications of the National Academy of Science that appeared, a few months ago, and it said that here are 14 objects that exhibit non gravitational acceleration. Yes. So meaning that they are not just following a path that you would expect from, Newton's law of gravity around the sun, but there is some additional force acting on them.

00:31:34

Avi Loeb: Very weak force. And so they say these are dark comets. They call them dark comets, meaning these are comets, but we can't see their tail. Now, this is an oxymoron, if you think about it, because a comet is defined by the tail. Okay. And so it's just like saying everything I see in the zoo is associated with zebras.

00:31:58

Avi Loeb: So when I look at an elephant, I would say it's an, striped zebra. It's a zebra without stripes. That is inappropriate because because, to give you an example, on January 2nd, this year, 2025, there was, a new near-Earth object that was reported by the Minor Planet Center based on a report from an amateur astronomer. And it was given a name.

00:32:24

Avi Loeb: And then within less than a day, astronomers said, look, the the orbital parameters of this object are the same as the Tesla Roadster car. Yes, that was launched by space X in 2018 as the dummy payload on the Falcon Heavy. And I actually mentioned that in my TedTalk, which was ranked the among the top 5 in 2024. I said, here is the Tesla Roadster car.

00:32:47

Avi Loeb: You know, if it were to collide with Earth in a fearsome meteor, my colleagues, who might not be aware of the fact that this is a Tesla Roadster Roadster car, would argue that it's a relic of a type that they've never seen before. And actually, that was fulfilled. This prophecy was fulfilled on January 2nd, 2025. And, you know, by the way, it's very easy to avoid such mistakes because all you need is to use AI and go through the internet.

00:33:14

Avi Loeb: All the available databases, and include all the space objects that were launched since the 60s and have their orbital parameters. And whenever you see a match between a point of light in the sky and one of these objects, even the Soviets publicize the objects that they launch, you just announce it. So that's right. Now, actually, an hour ago, I submitted a paper for publication that talks about one of the objects among the 14 that were mentioned in the in the publication was the National Academy of Sciences.

00:33:43

Avi Loeb: One of them matches the orbital parameters of a Soviet launch called Venera two, and that one was towards Venus. And this near-Earth object that was reported as a dark comet happens to be exactly on the same orbit, and the chance of it going from Earth directly to Venus when Venus was at the right phase. You know, if it were a natural object, why would it do that?

00:34:12

Avi Loeb: There is a chance of less than. I mean, the orbital time of Venus is 225 days, and the chance of it arriving at Venus exactly on the right day when it meets Venus. Now, this was a failed Soviet mission, so they lost radio communication and then it was lost. And now it's put this one of the dark comets.

00:34:31

Avi Loeb: So I pointed out, look, this is not a dark comet. This is an elephant different from a zebra. This is an object that has walls that are thin and therefore is being pushed by reflecting sunlight. And the known gravitational acceleration that it exhibits is exactly consistent with what you expect from that. And by the way, you might think that reflecting sunlight only gives you a force away from the sun.

00:34:55

Avi Loeb: But in fact, if the object has, you know, like solar panels and they're tilted relative to the sun, the force that acts on them as a result of reflecting sunlight is perpendicular to the reflecting surface. And as the reflecting surface is not pointing at the sun, it actually will give you sideways force. So the point is, you know, I have an issue with the scientists as well, because they always try to brush any anomaly under the carpet and claim if there is an object of anomalous acceleration.

00:35:28

Avi Loeb: That's started, of course, with Oumuamua. It it is a dark comet. It's an object, you know, that has cometary tail, but you can't see it, which is basically what, the story of Hans Christian Andersen. You know, there was this kid who was saying, the emperor has no clothes.

00:35:47

Brian Keating: The comet has no.

00:35:48

Avi Loeb: Has no, no cometary tail. But I feel like this kid. And, you know, why can't everyone behave this way? Why do we always have to brush aside any anomaly and say, oh, everything is comets, everything is asteroids. You know, we would never discover something. No. This way.

00:36:04

Brian Keating: So why is this, this, this professional group think is this, you know, jealousy. Is this the kind of tacit association with the prosthetic fa heads and the and the giant eyeballs and the anal probing and stuff like that? What is the kind of reason that you say that your colleagues and my colleagues reject you, you know, and more commonly reject you more often and reject you and spend more of their time trying to not not just disprove your claims.

00:36:29

Brian Keating: That's fine. But attack you personally.

00:36:31

Avi Loeb: Well, that's really interesting. I think that the personal attacks just originate from the publicity that I get. You know, there was a New York Times Magazine article about my work and, Netflix is producing a documentary that will come out within a year. And, you know, the public really cares about this question. I don't have any footprint on social media.

00:36:54

Avi Loeb: It's just that people come to me and, you know, funders give me the money to do this research. Now, the reason I'm doing it is because I started doing cosmology, okay? And we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is. 85% of the matter is called dark matter. We don't know what its nature is. And when I was practicing, you know, in astrophysics three decades ago, you know, it was completely, encouraged, you know, to come up with ideas about the dark matter so that you can motivate experimental leads to search for one type or another.

00:37:30

Avi Loeb: And the theory sort of playing an important role in just thinking about the possibilities. Yeah. So I developed as a theoretical astrophysicist is in this mindset that it would always be appreciated if you see anomalies like the dark matter and you want to explain them and you come up with suggestions, everyone would welcome that. And everyone would like to get more data to figure out the answer.

00:37:51

Avi Loeb: And it was certainly the case in in the context of dark matter, we invested billions of dollars. We still haven't found it. But you know, when people come up with a new suggestion like axions, when they don't find WIMPs, when they, you know, it's always, encouraged. Now I arrived to this frontier, which is very different because more and more was discovered.

00:38:12

Avi Loeb: I see an anomaly. I suggest a possible explanation, and people start going crazy. I mean, at first the paper was accepted within three days for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Then the media went crazy. You know, the, Mike Smerconish on CNN was citing excerpts from the paper, on on CNN, things that you don't see very often.

00:38:36

Avi Loeb: Yeah. Then as a result of that, I came to realize that the most important force in academia is not electromagnetism. It's not gravity, it's jealousy. And so the reason I say that is simply because all of this was triggered by the attention of the media before I had attention. You know, the report actually said that that's a great idea because there is evidence that Oumuamua is most likely flat and people so so it's only the public's attention that makes some people upset.

00:39:09

Avi Loeb: But one thing I should say, the people who know me that I personally know, none of them had any personal attacks. None of them, argued with me. It's only those people who, who I never met. Okay. And other people also that are not necessarily in the limelight. I mean, they usually do not get attention. So these are people that that are trying to get attention by attacking me.

00:39:39

Avi Loeb: And I just find that unfortunate. What? Not so much because of me. I have sufficiently you know, I have, a solid, status right now that, you know, that's the whole point of, of tenure in academia to be able to pursue new frontiers. I'm really worried about the young people who see that and are traumatized because they realize that if they deviate from the beaten path, you know, they will be attacked.

00:40:08

Avi Loeb: And think about it, that basically delays the progress of science. You know, in 1952, Otto Struve, it, an astronomer, suggested that just he studied binary star systems and said, well, if there happens to be a Jupiter close to a sun like star, we could detect it, by either the transit method when it passes in front of the star, or by the radial velocity of the star as it gets moved back and forth.

00:40:35

Avi Loeb: And in 1995, it took more than 40 years for anyone to pay attention to it because people ridiculed it. They said, oh, we know why Jupiter is so far from the sun. That's where, you know, ice forms, water ice. And then they said, we don't want to waste, observing time on such a ludicrous, proposition.

00:40:58

Avi Loeb: Now, the Nobel Prize was awarded, you know, to to the discovery of 1995 of, you know, of, a hot Jupiter, near a sun like star. And I check the paper for which the Nobel Prize was awarded. It didn't have Otto Struve in the reference list. Yeah. What does this tell you? What does it tell you?

00:41:20

Avi Loeb: First of all, you know, there is so much resistance to an original idea early on that nobody bothers to actually follow it because of the social structure of science. You don't want to appear as if you know you're doing something that everyone says is nonsense. And the second thing is, once someone by chance checks it and it turns out to be correct, obviously the credit is not given for for decades afterwards.

00:41:47

Brian Keating: That's right. And what's so frustrating about that is you have to be comfortable not only being wrong. Most of the time, you're going to be wrong as a scientist. And I want I do want to point out, you know, before we get too far into our catching up, because it's been over a year since we actually had a chance to to do a schmooze like this.

00:42:04

Brian Keating: But, but and so much has happened. I mean, I'm thinking about. Yeah, Lou Alexander's book imminent, which I still do want to dive into some of the physics claims in there, because obviously, you know, when when we hear things like these objects defy the laws of physics. Well, you and I are physicists. I, I'm a I'm a we're in astronomy departments, but our our our, you know, our backbone, our education, our mother's milk, our our PhD.

00:42:27

Brian Keating: I don't want to say PhDs, milk, but, oops, I got lost again. Hold on one second. But that comes from that comes from physics. I mean, we're.

00:42:35

Avi Loeb: Physicists, you know, let's let's, analyze this a little more. What are the ideas that are being mentioned that maybe there is some there are some extra dimensions. So one thing those people need to understand that when there is a discussion about extra dimensions in string theory, you know, we are dealing with tiny scales because there is a limit on extra dimension.

00:42:57

Avi Loeb: It must be less than 100 microns. You know, based on that, neutrinos, based on the measurements that were done on a gravity, on very small scales, and so, you know, that cannot you can't imagine a large spacecraft actually taking advantage of extra dimensions. That's now, the other thing mentioned is very often, you know, that may be there is a warp drive, maybe there is, some wormhole.

00:43:24

Avi Loeb: So let me explain. Yes. You know, wormholes. The idea of wormhole, started with, Einstein. Albert Einstein and not not Nathan Rosen, who was his postdoc and later a professor at the Technion in Israel. And they suggested that you might have a bridge between two, regions of space that would allow travel, on a shorter time.

00:43:48

Avi Loeb: Okay. Then then you expect from the main, spacetime that you're thinking about, and then it turns out that such a bridge is actually unstable. It will snap, before you have a chance to travel through it. Even if you are trying to move at the speed of light. Yes. And the only way to stabilize it, it was found, is by introducing or using, matter that has a negative mass density.

00:44:16

Avi Loeb: Now we are used to, mass being positive, attractive. That's why we are situated on the surface of Earth. But if you imagine negative mass, it would produce repulsive gravity. We know that in electromagnetism you get the either attractive or repulsive force, depending on the sign of the charge. So if we happen to have access to a negative mass, in principle, you could make, a wormhole.

00:44:48

Avi Loeb: The other thing you could make is a time machine. It's easy to show that, you could, in principle, go back in time. Now, we know that the reason we perceive gravity in the expansion of the universe, we see that, the universe, the expansion, the cosmic expansion is accelerating over time. And that's most likely as a result of the vacuum having some mass density.

00:45:15

Avi Loeb: Because according to Einstein, that produces repulsive gravity. But we don't know how to engineer the vacuum, how to excavate this dark energy and bottle it, concentrated. If we did, we would, we would be able to create a time machine. Now, I would like to argue that even in our future, no Jew had access to a time machine.

00:45:40

Avi Loeb: Okay. Because. Because if there was such a machine that you couldn't get into, the first thing I would do, given that 65 members of my father's family were killed in the Holocaust, we need to go back before the first, the Second World War and kill Hitler, Adolf Hitler and the fact that it never happened means that at least, you know, in our world line, nobody, no Jew had.

00:46:04

Avi Loeb: And I had access to a time machine that can get us back into. Now. We don't know if it's possible. And, you know, you can imagine things, but according to everything we know, we cannot bottle dark energy. We cannot make, a gravitational propulsion using, negative mass. Because you can imagine if you have negative mass and a positive mass, the negative mass would push the positive mass.

00:46:32

Avi Loeb: The positive mass would attract the negative mass. And you can show and that, you know, that that was shown by Hermann Bondi, that a pair of equal, masses that are opposite sign would accelerate indefinitely to the speed of light without any need for fuel. You might ask, how is that possible? Why waste the energy coming from where the total energy zero.

00:46:54

Avi Loeb: The kinetic energy? Because the positive mass has a positive kinetic energy. The negative mass has a negative kinetic energy. The sum is zero, and the two accelerate together close to the speed of light. If something like that existed, you would get gravitational waves, not just this quadrupole waves. You could get dipole emission of gravitational waves. Again, we don't have any evidence for dipole emission of gravitational waves because there are no negative masses that we found.

00:47:20

Avi Loeb: So when people talk about wormholes, when they talk about time machines, I would regard that as a good script for Hollywood directors, literally that send me a suggestion that something in reality, I mean, in fact, you might you might even think that there should be a law forbidding that. And Stephen Hawking came, wrote a paper about, where he, worked out a conjecture.

00:47:47

Avi Loeb: That is associated with censorship, not allowing, time machines. He so close timelike, curves were, forbidden according to his conjecture, because otherwise there is no little sense of, of history, the universe and, and you get into trouble. And so he suggested that it's not possible that there is something forbidding that we don't know that for sure, because it involves quantum gravity.

00:48:16

Avi Loeb: We don't have a quantum theory of gravity that makes any predictions reliable predictions.

00:48:21

Brian Keating: That's right. And, you know, again, the issue that I always have is people say, you know, you're, you know, you're talking about things and they're presenting them to credulous people in Congress or the media, and they're saying these objects are having laws, you know, displaying laws, things that display this. They're displaying properties that seem to defy the laws of physics.

00:48:41

Brian Keating: So the question that I've asked Eric Weinstein about, how come there aren't more physicists involved? NASA had a panel and it was it was great. LED by our mutual friend David Spergel. Shelly Wright, who's here at UCSD, was a member of the panel. And I have an interview with her coming up this weekend, this Sunday, which we talk about you a little bit.

00:48:59

Brian Keating: Kind of the complementarity between the Galileo project looking for, a craft in our local environment. Local meaning the earth, the sky, the sound waves, all different. Multi messenger tools that you and your team have so brilliantly come up with. But she's looking for laser pulses. I shouldn't say just. I mean, it's incredibly hard what she's doing in the arrays that she's using.

00:49:19

Brian Keating: But it's very clever. It's it's a, it's an idea that goes back to Charlie Townes, of all people, the inventor of the laser, a Nobel Prize winner, and the maser. He had this idea that, you know, scientists would use lasers to communicate, and you could see them, but Shelly could see them, too. So how do you, how do you look at these these competing ideas?

00:49:37

Brian Keating: You're looking closer.

00:49:38

Avi Loeb: I actually, I actually very much love what Shelly is doing, and I even suggested that to fund her or collaborate with her. And I think, I think it's really, helpful to try something different than we've done in the past, which is looking for radio signals. You know, there are all kinds of claims by even people in academia.

00:50:01

Avi Loeb: I should, you know, mention the fact that, you know, Bostrom Nick Bostrom, he argued that we might be living in a simulation. Okay, a computer simulation. And so this morning I wrote actually an essay on Medium.com, which, I mean, you can find all my essays on. Yeah.

00:50:21

Brian Keating: We have a link to that.

00:50:22

Avi Loeb: Avi Loeb at Medium.com. I wrote an essay suggesting an experimental test of the simulation hypothesis, which is, you know, we have very precise clocks. The best clocks are atomic clocks, and they reach a precision of the order of ten to the -18 right now. Okay. Much better than pulsar timing. And, my point is that, you know, if we lived in a simulation, we all know that computer codes, when they perform a simulation, they have a discrete time steps, okay.

00:51:00

Avi Loeb: At particular times. So my point is, if we were to develop clocks that would resolve time, better than the separation of these discrete steps, then we should be able to tell that we are living in a movie because the only reason we get the illusion of a movie when we go to a movie theater is because the frame rate of the snapshots is high enough to fool our brain, because our visual system is, you know, is not functioning fast enough to catch up the individual snapshots.

00:51:32

Avi Loeb: So it looks like a continuum to us, for the same reason that when you look at atoms, you know, obviously on the small scale, you know, the guys in this room, it has atoms that collide with each other. But if you were to zoom out, you would think that it's a continuous fluid. The air is a container.

00:51:49

Avi Loeb: And so fluid dynamics is based on that. So my point is if we develop, quantum clocks that reach a high enough resolution and we live in a simulation, we would see evidence for that. And the only disappointing fact about such a discovery is that if you are awarded the Nobel Prize for making the discovery, you would realize, because we live in a simulation that this event, the prize ceremony, was choreographed by the simulation creator, and you.

00:52:20

Brian Keating: Own it, right?

00:52:21

Avi Loeb: The same. It doesn't hold the same level of satisfaction as the real event.

00:52:25

Brian Keating: You know how your mother would still like it, like any nice Jewish mother? But. Yeah. Yeah. The Galileo project, has this, you know, kind of tension between working with the government, abiding by government rules. You were featured in the same Nova amazing Nova PBS broadcast. About what are UAPs? I think that was the title of it or what are UFOs?

00:52:45

Brian Keating: And, was a great thing. And I talk about that and I show clips from that in my episode, Shelly coming out on Sunday. She's a phenomenal scientist, won the Drake you know, prize from the City Institute. So but your project is full of rigor, scientifically, and that's not usually known to mesh well with government efficiency. You know, you got to give Elon and Trump, couple a couple months to work.

00:53:05

Brian Keating: How do you compete with this classification? Do you feel like, our guest that you introduced me to? You know, Kirkland, Sean Kirk, Kirkland. Kirkpatrick. Sorry, that you introduced me to so graciously. Do you feel like we're over classifying? And then, secondly, will the government have access to your data?

00:53:25

Avi Loeb: Yeah. So. Well, we would we operate just like a scientific project. So it's all open and transparent. I mean, we are not hiding anything. The sky is not.

00:53:32

Brian Keating: Required to be. I mean, you're you're not funded by the government at all. You're privately funded.

00:53:37

Avi Loeb: Or privately funded. People came to the porch of my home and offered millions of dollars to support this research. I'm completely funded by donations, by foundations. There is even the Princeton Foundation, who's which is funding, a postdoctoral fellowship. They approached me and said, we would like you to mentor a young person, about innovation in science.

00:53:59

Avi Loeb: So they gave me, you know, a 4 or 3 year appointment for a postdoc that I selected anyway. So that's, my, approach, which is open and to the public, you're asking, why are things classified? Why does it always appear to be, you know, anything the government talks about is opaque. You can't see through it. Yeah.

00:54:19

Avi Loeb: And there are two reasons for that. One, much of the data was collected by classified sensors. Okay. So they don't want to broadcast to adversarial nations the level of, or the quality of sensors that are being used. They don't want to tell them what they can see. Okay. From all these satellites that are hovering around the Earth.

00:54:42

Avi Loeb: The second reason is suppose, you know, as is likely the case that many of these objects that they cannot identify were manufactured by adversarial nations. What does it mean? It means that, you know, we are investing $900 billion a year in the defense budget, yet they can't figure out what is up there. You know, in the sky above the US, it means they are not doing their job.

00:55:10

Avi Loeb: And the the best way, you know, you can think about it. The, in the context of academia, the best way for a student to think highly of themselves and, tell their parents I'm doing great is not to have any exams, not to be tested. And, the same applies to government. If you if nobody can look at your data and nobody knows much about what or which objects you are seeing and why, you can't figure them out, then you will not be scrutinized.

00:55:37

Avi Loeb: That's the best job security that you know that government has to offer, in the sense that that's right. When things are classified, you don't get the scientific scrutiny that you get as an open science. You know, the scientist with open data. And that obviously gives them, you know, leaves them out of review panels that would criticize the work.

00:56:00

Avi Loeb: Except every now and then, you know, there is a Chinese spy balloon, a giant balloon that people could see from the ground. The government, for some reason, didn't notice it. And it, you know, such a thing appeared in previous years. And then you ask yourself, okay, well, I get it. The government is incompetent.

00:56:21

Brian Keating: But they can't be both. They can't be highly competent, that they can maintain a conspiracy for 70 years.

00:56:26

Avi Loeb: And so I'm saying I'm trying to give.

00:56:29

Brian Keating: All I know. Yeah. Right. The question is yeah. So the you are as a scientist should be open to, open to, you know, opening the, the data for public view, for scientific examination. You've shared it with your, with your nemesis, with people that criticize an ACLU with slings and arrows. But the government is not used to doing that.

00:56:48

Brian Keating: And so there's this, there's this tension. And I think that was illustrated very nicely just, three months ago. Not nice in the sense I'm glad it happened. But with the drones over new Jersey, we spent some time at Princeton. I can.

00:56:59

Avi Loeb: Tell you. I can tell you more about that.

00:57:00

Brian Keating: Yeah. Please do.

00:57:02

Avi Loeb: Well, first, let me just summarize this entire theme by saying that science is better than politics. And that's for for two reasons. One, that science is open and that, you know, it's based on it's supposed to be based on evidence, data, facts. And that's the arbitrator, you know, following Feynman's dictum, whereas in politics, you know, it's not clear really what the facts are.

00:57:30

Avi Loeb: And very often people invent some virtual realities to argue that their opinion is correct. And that's why you never converge in the context of science. You have a method for converging that actually, Galileo pioneered and that is based on data. So, if we, look back at, what the government is doing, you know, it's possible that it collected some materials.

00:57:59

Avi Loeb: It's possible that it collected some, information, but it's hidden from view. It may have been delegated to corporations. I would love to see it and advise them what it means. You know, because my my, point is that suppose you go to your backyard and you find a tennis ball that was formed by a neighbor.

00:58:21

Avi Loeb: Okay, then, and your family doesn't know that you have neighbors. They see through the windows of their home, all these other houses on the street that look like the the like, the family's house. Yeah, but they don't know if they have residents. And suddenly you go out to the backyard and you find a tennis ball. Now, the question is, would you tell your family at the dinner table?

00:58:42

Avi Loeb: And of course, one approach would be, I don't want to make them worried. We have such a peaceful, family, and I want my kids to sleep well at night. So I will not tell them, but this is the wrong approach because. Because, one day, the neighbor maybe may appear in your backyard or knock on your door, and it it's much more beneficial for everyone to be aware of the reality that we live in.

00:59:09

Avi Loeb: And if we have neighbors, you know, let's let's figure out who they are. Let's learn more about them. We might actually be inspired by them if they are better than us, if there is a smarter kid on our block going, I mean, ignoring reality is a bad idea. That's my point.

00:59:28

Brian Keating: Yeah, that's right. You get the diagnosis from your doctor. You don't say, you don't get mad at the doctor. You don't say, oh, man, I really wish that I could, you know, murder you or whatever, but, now when we hear about the different narratives, especially with things that can be explained, through terrestrial means, I mean, people have this great hope in the, in the upcoming disclosure.

00:59:49

Brian Keating: And we saw this recently with, with former Harvard fundraiser Jeffrey Epstein. You know, I, I have to poke a little bit of fun at you guys. I know you had nothing to do with that.

00:59:59

Avi Loeb: He didn't invite me.

01:00:01

Brian Keating: You never do that.

01:00:02

Avi Loeb: I'm invited in a few weeks to Richard Branson's and Necker Island. Oh, okay. I will be also very close to you. Actually, in any event, with, you know, the most accomplished CEOs, in the world, I want to give give a lecture to them. So I meet those, but gladly. I was never invited to anything.

01:00:22

Brian Keating: So there's this great hope that that they release these, you know, these files, Congress and, and others and mais and many others. And then, you know, with, with some not, not insignificant amount of social media credibility behind it, and it came out to be more or less nothing. And I am, you know, convinced that the same thing will likely happen with so-called disclosure.

01:00:43

Brian Keating: I talked about this with Nick Pope, and it always seems to be just around the corner, in fact, that some of the title of Lou Alexander's book, isn't it? It's imminent, disclosure is imminent, and it's been out for almost, you know, eight months.

01:00:54

Avi Loeb: We talked before about, the messianic, expectation of, you know, some religious communities. And that's the narrative know you're always, very close to it. But and that was the narrative also with supersymmetry. So I would say it's human nature.

01:01:11

Brian Keating: Yeah.

01:01:12

Avi Loeb: To believe in stories that are not fulfilled. And what we have to be careful, about is not to believe those stories until we see clear evidence, because very often we wish to believe something. And that's very dangerous. I mean, it's dangerous in politics as much as it is in science.

01:01:33

Brian Keating: Yeah. So I, I don't think about these alien artifacts that are claimed to have been discovered. Some some of which don't necessarily mean technology, you know, extraterrestrial, you know, pendant or grok, you know, running a smartphone. It could even be, material like this, which I give away quite frequently. Don't forget, if you are not a member of my mailing list, go to Brian CNN.com slash white, and you will get, an entry into an actual extraterrestrial material that came from the pre, pre Earth solar system.

01:02:04

Brian Keating: And if you have a.edu email address like Avi and I are blessed to have, you're guaranteed to win one of these little babies, which came from space. You know, if you live in the United States because, you know, the my, my government, my mailing office here won't let me mail stuff to dangerous territories like Canada, the 51st state or the Gulf of America.

01:02:22

Brian Keating: But, b what I thought.

01:02:24

Avi Loeb: By the way, I should I should say that, yeah, I did collect materials similar to the one you showed. Yep. Meteoritic material from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

01:02:32

Brian Keating: Yeah, that's what I want to get on. Yeah. So how is that assessment?

01:02:36

Avi Loeb: Yeah. And that that material cost me one and not me. But the person who funded the expedition, $1.5 million. We brought it to a laboratory of my colleague at Harvard. Stein Jacobson, who has the best mass spectrometer in the world, the best electron microscope probe. And actually, I just received, you know, I realized, over the past year, we published two extensive papers on the analysis of the material showing the 10% of it, is made of a chemical composition we don't find in the solar system.

01:03:06

Avi Loeb: But the really the key would be to analyze isotopes and date the material. That is unusual. And, yeah, I realize that that will take more time. And so I reached out to one of my funders and I said, look, we need the a few hundred K for that. And, the following morning we had it.

01:03:25

Avi Loeb: And so now we have a research assistant fully, fully supported to, to conduct research in the coming year or more. And hopefully we will find then what is the age of the material of this, interstellar material, the object that was identified by US government satellites is having a speed that is not only enough for it to escape from the solar system, but also higher than 95% of the stars in the vicinity of the sun, 60km per second outside the solar system.

01:03:56

Avi Loeb: And interestingly, I wrote a paper. I published a paper with my postdoc, Morgan McLeod, that, identified a natural process that can give you these very high speeds, for rocks. And and that's just. But if a planet, like the Earth comes close to the most common star, a dwarf star that is 10% of the mass of the sun, 10% of the size of the sun, it's 100 times denser than the sun in Massachusetts, and it can easily disrupt tidally by the tidal force.

01:04:29

Avi Loeb: Spaghettified a planet the size of the Earth. And it would make a stream of rocks, like spaghetti that would, the half of which will fly out, at a speed of about 60km per second. When when I derived this, this, speed that matched the speed of the interstellar meteor that was in eureka moment for me. Because, you know, I, I had a hard time finding a scenario that gives you just the speed that that was inferred.

01:04:58

Avi Loeb: And and this one did.

01:05:00

Brian Keating: And that is, you know, sort of the isotopic ratio and the, and the study into it. You know, I kind of am curious about this, this talk that you were invited to, not about the southern border, you know, aliens and so forth, but the aliens that can come maybe through the, through the back door of a wormhole or something like that.

01:05:18

Brian Keating: So what is this hunting for? Aliens? How do you actually hunt for aliens? Not not just the existence of perhaps extraterrestrial material. Interstellar material is. Your first two books are about. How would you search for actual aliens?

01:05:32

Avi Loeb: Well, I you know, my, assumption is that we will probably encounter technological gadgets in two forms. I mean, without biology in them, one form is space trash. You know, the Earth is surrounded by broken satellites, pieces that, you know, by the way, they would anything bigger than ten centimeters would be identified. I wrote a paper about it by the Rubin Observatory in Chile, and that will start operations this year.

01:06:02

Avi Loeb: We use a 3.2 giga pixel camera to survey the southern sky every four nights, and I calculate they could see fragments, broken pieces of satellites around the Earth, bigger than ten centimeters. That plenty of them, you know, tens of thousands. And the you might ask, okay, that's the situation right now. You know, you take a snapshot of the Earth.

01:06:24

Avi Loeb: We only had the space program for the past 50 years. Oh, wait, maybe 60 years. And, you know, over a period of millions of years, billions of years, other civilizations may had much more space trash that they produced. Okay. And think about it. Even if it's bound to the Earth right now, when the sun becomes a red giant and has a very powerful wind and becomes brighter, it could basically sweep out.

01:06:51

Avi Loeb: Or if you have a massive star that explores, yes, without all the technological debris surrounding it into interstellar space, and that includes breaking any megastructure like a Dyson sphere into broken pieces. Maybe one of those broken pieces was more and more, you know? So my point is there would be space trash part of it from the infrastructure, the technological infrastructure built by civilizations, even if they didn't leave their planet and there were or there's a, planetary system, there could be some debris carried out to interstellar space.

01:07:29

Avi Loeb: And the second is, of course, I mean, in addition to those empty trash bags that we might find in our backyard. And by the way, this is a real, name for objects found near Earth by reflecting sunlight. I just figure this out. A month ago, the apparently the, you know, in the Minor Planet Center, the they are talking about empty trash bags because they see these objects that move, you know, zigzags and move around, and they say, oh, it's just radiation pressure.

01:07:56

Avi Loeb: They don't think about it as UAP or UFO. So again, if you say something is a dark comet or you say, oh, it's just pushed by by reflecting light, I don't care about its very peculiar zigzag motion. You put it aside and so then you say, how come scientists are not claiming UAP exist? Well, because when they see a UAP, they call it an empty trash bag that was probably made by humans.

01:08:23

Avi Loeb: Or if they see, and non gravitational acceleration, they call it a dark comet or, you know, just like calling an elephant a non striped zebra. And when you do that you feel relaxed, you know, oh this is an object I'm familiar with. There is nothing really anomalous about it. Right. We don't need to explore it. So don't worry about it.

01:08:44

Avi Loeb: My my my point is that's one type. The you know, those, space trash objects. The second is, of course, functioning devices. And those could be equipped with artificial intelligence. Because if you think about interstellar travel, it takes a huge amount of time to communicate with the sensors. So it's just like sending your kids out of home. You don't expect them to call you on any major decision.

01:09:07

Avi Loeb: They have to make on a regular basis. You just expect some reports every now and then. And the same.

01:09:13

Brian Keating: Request for money and requests for money. Don't forget.

01:09:18

Avi Loeb: But on in the in interstellar travel, you know that there is just you. They cannot afford waiting because even light takes tens of thousands of years to cross the galaxy. By the way, within a billion years, Voyager will be on the opposite side of the Milky Way disk. I think about it on Voyager. If we just wait.

01:09:37

Avi Loeb: So, you know, we just had the 50 years or so, but, in a billion years, it will be opposite from where the sun is. I did the calculation with my student, and we we integrated the orbit in the galactic potential. And it's it would be very far from the sun in a billion. So you will have all these objects, you know, they don't have a high enough speed to escape from the Milky Way galaxy, from the gravity.

01:10:03

Avi Loeb: So they would accumulate like plastics in the ocean. If you were to travel through the ocean, you see all the plastics that were deposited there over the years. And they tell you a story. They tell you that they are not natural in origin. There must be some technological civilization out there.

01:10:20

Brian Keating: And yeah, that brings me up to, you know, the question I think every good scientist should ask is, how would you know you're wrong. I mean, you have a billion years to, you know, to do the experiment with with Voyager. Okay. So ten years. Great. But we're not going to last that long. And unless, you know, our friend Andrew Huberman and and Peter Attia can help us out.

01:10:38

Brian Keating: But.

01:10:39

Avi Loeb: How could you do better? Yeah, I will be less enthusiastic if after a decade, we invest billions of dollars and not find anything. But I should say.

01:10:48

Brian Keating: For example. Sorry to interrupt your avi, but you mean Reuben finds no a will like objects in ten years?

01:10:54

Avi Loeb: Oh, no. No, I mean, Reuben was not really designed for the kind of search I'm talking about because it can only see it. It takes very discreet snapshots of the sky. So when it moves across the sky, it spends limited amount of time on each portion of the sky. So actually objects close to Earth are not being monitored properly for, for us to figure out their speed.

01:11:15

Avi Loeb: Okay. That's one problem. So you can't see objects that are ten meters in size, which are most of the space objects that we launched. You know, among were was 100m, roughly bigger than Starship. It was bigger than the biggest spacecraft we are currently building. Yeah. Not just think about what we launched in the past, which was much smaller.

01:11:36

Avi Loeb: So I'm saying, you know, the Rubin Observatory is not designed to find near Earth objects that are ten meters in size. It was designed to find 100 more than 140m in size. Because that was the congressional task to NASA, to find 90% of those objects, because they can trigger a catastrophe within an urban region, you know, but I'm, I'm interested in where most of the junk is, you know, like, I want to find out if among the rocks that there is any space trash objects.

01:12:10

Avi Loeb: And for that, you need to design a special telescope like the one I talked about in my recent paper on the archive, that I submitted for publication.

01:12:18

Brian Keating: So the lobby, can you review that? Because most people don't read the archive, as you know, frequently as I do or you do, but can you give me a ten, 10,000, you know, the light year overview of it?

01:12:30

Avi Loeb: Okay. So what I said is as follows, based on the discovery of more and more we can estimate, the abundance of objects, roughly each size, let's say 100m in size. Now, the Webb telescope actually looked at the main asteroid belt. And for the first time, we're able to, figure out how many smaller objects smaller than 100m there are in the main asteroid belt.

01:12:57

Avi Loeb: These are, you know, these are rocks. Okay. Was broken up by collisions of protoplanets. Okay. And so we see we see a population of 100 meter objects. And the Webb telescope was able to detect objects down to ten meters in size. Yeah. Based on the parallel index of the, you know, of this population that, of smart there are many more small objects relative to large objects.

01:13:26

Avi Loeb: Based on that, I assume that, whatever is ejected to interstellar space follows the same power law. So I guess from the abundance of a size objects, I estimated the abundance of ten meter size objects in things smaller. That's it. And I found that one of those objects crosses the orbit of Mercury around the sun every five hours.

01:13:50

Avi Loeb: And that is just assuming rocks. Okay, so I'm saying there is a ten meter size rock from interstellar space entering the orbit of Mercury around the sun every five hours. Can we see those? Yes. No. And the answer is yes. This is a very good opportunity to see those objects, because they are closer to the sun than the Earth is by a factor of three.

01:14:13

Avi Loeb: So they get illuminated, you know, the by the, by a brighter flux. And as a result, we can find them. We are looking for the keys under the lamppost. And I calculated that a telescope with an aperture of one meter could detect such objects. We just need to launch into space and look within the region. It's basically, look at the shell around the sun, at roughly a third of an astronomical unit, a third of the Earth sun.

01:14:44

Avi Loeb: Separation. And, and look for objects that are not just illuminated by the sun, but they're also heated, to a temperature of more than 600 degrees, Kelvin. And therefore, we could potentially see vapor coming off them and tell what their composition is by spectroscopy. And that is the main use that I would apply to having $1 billion if someone were to entertain.

01:15:10

Avi Loeb: This is an important frontier. And, you know, I say we are planning on spending ten times that money on looking for microbes. Microbes do not excite me as much as extraterrestrial intelligence.

01:15:23

Brian Keating: No. Definitely not, but even microbes, the evidence is against them as well. And the fact is that we don't have even evidence in our own solar system. But, before I get into my argument, because I want to get questions from the audience, we've got a thousand people watching right now. Many more will tune in later.

01:15:39

Avi Loeb: I should say. One thing about microbes, just a anecdotal. There was a paper published in science a couple of months ago by experts who, suggested that we ban the production of mirror life in the laboratory. Now, mirror life is basically the point. I mean, the all all forms of life as we know it are based on amino acids that are left handed molecules, meaning that when you pass polarized light, it rotates in a particular fashion.

01:16:08

Avi Loeb: So the molecular structure is left handed, right. And in principle, you should have had equal, quantities of left handed and right handed amino acids on Earth. By the way, it was found on on Bennu, the asteroid Bennu, the material that was brought back to Earth, had.

01:16:27

Brian Keating: Said, yeah.

01:16:27

Avi Loeb: Equal equal amount of right handed and left handed. But this symmetry was broken on Earth, and we ended up with left handedness for amino acids, right right handedness for DNA, RNA. That's all the forms of life as we know it, share it, and therefore our bodies cannot recognize mirrored life. So if there was a microbe, from your life, you know, we won't be able to cope with it.

01:16:53

Avi Loeb: There is no defense system of our body, and it's the ultimate biological, weapon.

01:16:58

Brian Keating: Because I found some of this of this is, is a vial I got delivered to me, from gravity. Also, the same way you can get these meteorites and I send them out to. I also send out these amino acids, that I've collected from outer space. So I shouldn't open this because I might not have any public.

01:17:17

Brian Keating: Public? I mean, look at this bubble. Like, this is a real experiment in real time. I'm.

01:17:21

Avi Loeb: I'm getting to my point. Yeah. You should. If you ever meet an alien, you should never shake their hand because it's. They represent mirror life, which you cannot tell just by looking at them. You know, they might transfer microbes that your body cannot protect you against. And now this is also a lesson about what could.

01:17:40

Brian Keating: Be anti-matter that could be made of anti-matter. Right.

01:17:42

Avi Loeb: Well, that's the story. I heard this a kid, and now we know that there is not much anti-matter in the universe. And that's right. It cost millions of dollars for the large, you know, for CERN to produce a microgram of. And that's where my point is. My point is that if we go to Mars the way Elon Musk envisions, one risk that was never discussed is that, you know, there might have been life on Mars, because we know that there is evidence for, you know, the ocean of oceans, lakes, rivers and so forth.

01:18:13

Avi Loeb: If there was life and it was life, then when you touch the sand, you are not protected against any microbes. So that might be Irvine. So just be careful if you want to become an astronaut going to Mars, that's another health hazard that nobody talks about.

01:18:30

Brian Keating: Are you in touch with Elon?

01:18:33

Avi Loeb: No, but the, he was supposed to be at the event that I'm going to, but he's too occupied with improving government efficiency. And my message to him.

01:18:42

Brian Keating: Is he's in between 13 and 15 children. We actually have a Poisson uncertainties. And how many children, you know.

01:18:48

Avi Loeb: But my point is there are bigger questions now. I know, and you can you can address in Washington DC. And it's I think it's too bad that his mind is distracted by.

01:18:59

Brian Keating: I know I, I talked to Robert. I talked to him for ten minutes last year on the podcast. You can find it on the link to it above. And, and, we talked about how Starlink is actually going to potentially impact the search for primordial CMB polarization because of its, it's occupancy of the 26GHz band for the for its Cuban and K band satellite transmissions.

01:19:19

Brian Keating: It's a trillion, you know, million Kelvin source in the CMB sky. We're looking for nanoscale anyway, he said he would look into.

01:19:25

Avi Loeb: It, but there is actually a greater benefit that comes from space X, and that is Starship, because in the in the era of Starship, I think it opens up an avenue for launching, astronomical observatory telescopes at a very low cost, because the cost per kilogram is, you know, went down by two orders magnitude from the old days.

01:19:46

Avi Loeb: And that offers new opportunities for astronomy, which are not really discussed much.

01:19:51

Brian Keating: He told me he would look into it. You know, I only asked him to turn it off when it's over the Simons Observatory in Chile or at the South Pole, where bicep, you know, your your colleague and my friend John Kovak are, doing really great work, but, but let's get back to Mars. I did a video, and by the we're going to take questions from the audience.

01:20:07

Brian Keating: So please, first of all, leave a thumbs up. Leaving. Subscribe, subscribe, leave a comment, on this if you're watching this after the fact, because it's really important for the YouTube gods that control how I get access to these incredible minds like Avi and future episodes, hopefully with Lou Elizondo as well. While I was in my audience, Avi, because I feel like we scientists are getting this huge backlash lately.

01:20:27

Brian Keating: And it's deserved because we don't interact with the public, most of us. And I'm not just giving you a mutual admiration society, you know, kind of bend it back rub. I'm saying to you, most of our colleagues look down upon people like Carl Sagan, like, like many, many other Oliver Sacks or many other examples of this, people that do scientific outreach are looked down upon as, you know, kind of well, they if they were really good scientists, they'd be stuck in the lab.

01:20:50

Brian Keating: Although I say that's bull. You know what? Because the public are our bosses. Are we? You're you're paid by Galileo, I mean you. Sorry you don't get any money personally from Galileo project. As I understand it, you get tremendous support. But you're at Harvard. Harvard gets a lot of government, you know, funding, as does UCSD. We're a public university.

01:21:06

Brian Keating: Without public support of science, we're doomed. We would have to get a quote unquote real job again. You'd be back on the farm, I'd be back in the dishwasher. And I think we serve at the pleasure of the public and we don't give enough back. And it remarkable.

01:21:19

Avi Loeb: I would go beyond that. I would argue that we should also attend to the interests of the public. That's right. Inverting on extra dimensions and saying the public cannot understand the math. Yeah, let's figure out if we have neighbors. You know that that is. Now, you know, when I have, let's say, a plumber coming to fix. I had an issue with the sewer system.

01:21:40

Avi Loeb: You know, we said on the on or on the stairs in front of my house and spoke about for, for an hour. I mean, I, I really do not feel, any sense of superiority relative. That's right. And I find them to have more common sense very often relative to my colleagues in academia. And so it's the other way for me.

01:22:04

Avi Loeb: And one reason is because I came from a very modest background, you know, I, I used to collect eggs every afternoon. Yeah. I grew up on a farm.

01:22:12

Brian Keating: You'd be raised now. You'd have more money than Elon with those egg prices. How do you seen prices?

01:22:16

Avi Loeb: It's by the way, it's the only reason I have tenure, because I was never worried of coming to Harvard. Nobody wanted that position. I spent three years there. But the reason I remained there without worrying about it is because I have job security. I could always go back to the farm. That's right. Frankly, you know, when I get personal attacks, I often think to myself, wouldn't it be a better life to live within nature, you know?

01:22:41

Brian Keating: Well, I have to tell you what a joke from the late, great Jim Simons. He passed away last year. As we say, all of us, he was a great man, a mentor, a father figure to me in many ways. And he told me once, we were talking, I had the exact same conversation that you just said.

01:22:54

Brian Keating: He said, I have a great respect for the common man. This is a guy's worth $27 billion. That I think he was the 25th richest person in the world, 10th in America, 12th in America. And just a humble, down to earth guy. I said to him, I told him about this, you know, I had this issue with plumbing in my house.

01:23:08

Brian Keating: He said, well, you know, you got to be careful with plumbers. I, I once had to call a plumber for his house in the Upper East Side, he said, and I call the plumber in and, you know, Saturday morning, you know, at four in the morning. And the plumber came over, turned a little his wrench, you know, made a quarter turn on some nut somewhere, and he said, that'll be $300.

01:23:27

Brian Keating: And Jim said, what are you talking about? I'm a hedge fund manager. I don't even make $300 for every two seconds. And then the plumber said, oh, you're a hedge fund manager. And Jim said, yeah. And he goes, oh, yeah, that's what I used to make when I was a hedge fund manager. So don't look down on that.

01:23:42

Avi Loeb: Here is another story about plumbers. You know, suppose you had a problem, with a toilet at home and you buy the plumber to fix it. The plumber looks at the toilet and says, that's too complicated. I can't really help you. Then you show the faucet in the kitchen and you say, you know, it leaks. Can you solve that?

01:24:01

Avi Loeb: And the plumber says, it's too complicated, but, you know, in the metaverse, if you put goggles on your head, I'm actually, I can solve any problem that you have. So, you know, I would say thank you very much and let him leave the house. Now, the reason I bring this up is, you know, I often ask my friends who work on string theory.

01:24:25

Avi Loeb: You know, they were supposed to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. So I say, okay, well, what happens at the center of a black hole? Can you tell me a little more? And they say it's too complicated. And I say, well, okay, so what happened at near the big bang? Can you tell me that? Or at least, you know, show me a scenario.

01:24:44

Avi Loeb: And they say that's also too complicated, but we can solve some other problems in, you know, extra dimensions, maybe in the multiverse. And I say thank you very much.

01:24:56

Brian Keating: Exactly right. We have to be careful. Well, let's get back to Mars. And before I take questions from the audience, because as you said, there might be life ab initio on Mars. Or there's another two possibilities I can think about. There could be, could have been life on Mars, because of something called panspermia, where a rock hit the Earth, blasted off life on the Earth.

01:25:15

Brian Keating: You know, Mars was wet, had an ocean back when, the Earth had life, very early on, 3.8 billion years ago. And remember, Earth is about, and Mars about 4.2 billion years old. Young compared to these meteorites, which I'll send you, if you join my mailing list and, this material gets exchanged, I've a I have a mars rock that I actually gave to Joe Rogan, and I can't I'm not sure if he smoked it or not, but.

01:25:38

Brian Keating: But I know that gave him a mars rock and, you know, so we have material for Mars. We at Mars gets material from the Earth, and it could have had some sludge on it. You know, my my biomass that's here.

01:25:47

Avi Loeb: And it had life before Earth, by the way, because Mars is a smaller body and therefore it's called before Earth, and there were rocks being transferred from. So it's quite possible that we are all Martians. That's right. You know, and.

01:26:00

Brian Keating: The Hungarians got so there's a large salad set called the Hungarians proof of alien existence. They were called the Martian. The Martian.

01:26:08

Avi Loeb: And by the way, the if you ask me, what is, the one location that I would like to visit in the solar system, it's, to go fishing on Titan. So Titan is a moon of Saturn. It's the only other body in the solar system that has liquids on the surface. Yes. It's about a third of the Earth's surface temperature, 94 degrees above absolute zero.

01:26:30

Avi Loeb: Kelvin. And, I would like to throw a hook and see if I catch any fish. Because if we find life in those fluids, methane and thunder, lakes, rivers, you know, oceans of methane and earth. And, then it would mean that there is life as we don't know it. And the moreover, because the temperature is so low, it turns out that it was the temperature of the entire universe after the first stars formed, 94 degrees Kelvin is, you know, at the redshift of folder 40 or so.

01:27:04

Avi Loeb: Yeah. And, and that was after the first stars formed, and therefore there could have been a lot of rocks. Just like Titan on the surface, of which the temperature would be just like Titans without them being close to the host star. And that's why, you know, it may be that life started, if it's possible, in those liquids.

01:27:26

Avi Loeb: It started very early on in the universe, you know, 100 million years after the Big Bang.

01:27:30

Brian Keating: And that's right. Okay. We have some questions here. First, from the some friend of the channel, I am less how could a discovery of an advanced civilization change the balance on Earth? Would it be only used by a disk group of people? A cabal, if you will? What would happen they after disclosure or discovery of first contact?

01:27:51

Avi Loeb: Well, it really depends on the nature of the visit or the signal that we receive. Because the way you respond to a visitor in your backyard depends on what the visitor is aiming to do or, the intent or the character of the visitor. Just to give you an example, I had the one day my wife alerts me to the person standing on the street and looking at our house for an hour, and she became worried.

01:28:16

Avi Loeb: She said, it's one of your fans. Why don't you go out and check what this person wants? And so I went to the person and I asked him, why are you staring at our home for an hour? And he said, because I used to live as a kid in this home, in this house, 50 years ago. Wow. And I said, wow, that's wonderful.

01:28:36

Avi Loeb: Let me take you on a tour in the backyard. And then he said, well, you know, we buried the cat 50 years ago. We buried the cat in the backyard. The name was Tiger. And I said, oh, yeah, that name sounds familiar because I saw the tombstone and I thought, maybe there is a tiger buried under it. Now, the, the, the moral of this story is that you learn something new by engaging with a visitor.

01:29:01

Avi Loeb: As long as the intentions are good and the way we respond to them. I don't think we need committees of bureaucrats that will tell us under these circumstances, you should do this. I think we because their imagination is very limited. The past experiences we had and we never had an actual visit. And so let's first figure out all the information we can about whoever visits.

01:29:24

Avi Loeb: Who visits. I don't think it should remain within a small community because for the same reason that the discovery that the Earth is not at the center of the solar system should not have been under wraps, you know, by the Vatican. This is information that all humans should be aware of and we should get used to it.

01:29:45

Avi Loeb: You know, the one thing I tell people very often is, you know, it's not about us. We tend to think we are the center of the universe. The universe was created for us to exist. We are the pinnacle of creation. When you read the news every day, it's clear that there is room for improvement and AI systems will do better.

01:30:03

Brian Keating: That brings up my next question. Yeah, this comes from me. Okay.

01:30:07

Avi Loeb: But my point is that, you know, that, we should be, humble about our place and, you know, just learn from the evidence that we collect and and it's a learning experience. And, you know, if we have a neighbor, it's very different, probably than than what we are, because it came from a very different home, you know, and, and our imagination is limited by what we, we have seen here.

01:30:34

Brian Keating: Yep. Okay. Next question comes from Jorge Acosta says, Will I find extraterrestrial life or maybe even other life before humans do?

01:30:44

Avi Loeb: Yeah. It's I have great hopes that I will look at anomalous data and be able to say, this is anomalous. So in other words, what the experts are doing, which is really inappropriate. They're basically, if they see something they don't recognize, they're giving it names as if it's nothing new or they're dismissing the evidence. In my case of the interstellar meteor, they were saying, we don't believe the US government data and you went to the wrong place and you found coal ash, even though they haven't had access to the data.

01:31:17

Avi Loeb: So it's very easy to throw dust in the air so that nobody can see anything. And that's what humans do in order to suppress, new knowledge, because they prefer to believe in what they already know. And because their stature depends on that. And so that will not necessarily be the case with AI because I could analyze all the data available.

01:31:43

Avi Loeb: Tell us based on everything that was ever collected about objects of this type. You are dealing with something anomalous. Period. Don't throw dust in the air because of this and that reasons there is right quantitative data. And that I think would be a huge improvement to the way we do science, because we will have someone else looking at the data in an objective manner, as long as it's trained to do it this way, as long as we don't put all kinds of constraints that are based on our psychology, never, never declare something as anomalous.

01:32:14

Avi Loeb: You know, you can put that rule in. You can say, I don't want my AI system to discover anything new, because, you know, my salary depends on what I already know. You can do that. But I'm saying if you allow it to be open minded, it wouldn't have the weaknesses of the human mind.

01:32:29

Brian Keating: Let me ask you a question before I get to Brandon Ryan's question. And that's, I, so I believe that we're locked in to a future in which the current combination of LMS plus GPUs, which again, were designed to, you know, play Fortnite and, to play, you know, GTA eight or whatever, they were not designed for physics.

01:32:49

Brian Keating: And that's fine. That's that's great. Nor were they LMS. I don't believe that will ever get to new physics, say a theory of everything quantum gravity. Describe the singularity of a black hole, as you already mentioned. Because of this, because the the fundamental way that tokens are arranged and then processed in parallel could be very different from the way, say, a human theoretical physicist, like, like you or like Galileo, who is both experimentalist or like our friend, Albert Einstein.

01:33:20

Brian Keating: You remember what he said? His happiest thought was obvious that if he was in freefall, if the elevator cable broke, he wouldn't feel any gravitational force. That led to the Einstein equivalence principle. How can an AI composed of Nvidia chips and running. ChatGPT to 26? I don't care what it is. How can it have a happiest thought of?

01:33:38

Brian Keating: And how can it know exactly what it would feel like to experience to freefall without a body?

01:33:44

Avi Loeb: Well, I would argue that depends on the architecture. And we've seen a very good example with deep Sink recently. They didn't have access to the best chips, but they came up with an architecture of reasoning which goes in the direction of what you are talking about, where you have many experts, a mix of experts looking at the question and then debating.

01:34:07

Avi Loeb: And so when you interact with deep seek, what you see is, you know, it comes with different possible, answers and then eventually converges. And that's, you know, a different architecture. And that's why they were so successful. There are a bunch of smart kids that came up with a novel and novel approach. And what I'm saying is that we might see more of this, in the future, that it will not be just that brute force of more compute yet would allow us to make advancing AI, but it would be actually the architecture, the algorithms, the way we approach things that will try to mimic human thinking.

01:34:43

Brian Keating: And what about oh yeah, go ahead.

01:34:45

Avi Loeb: So I believe altogether, you know, I don't I was asked just two days ago by one of my colleagues in an astrophysicist who I very much respect, who argued that, you know, that AI systems will never reach human intelligence, will never display qualities like, free will or, consciousness that we assign to humans.

01:35:14

Avi Loeb: And I said, I don't I don't agree with you. I think that once AI systems will have as many parameters, as many connections as the human brain has, they will display a level of complexity that makes them unpredictable. It's basically a sign of a complex system. We know that from dynamics, when there is enough degrees of freedom in a system, in many body system, you have chaos, you have unpredictability.

01:35:42

Avi Loeb: Moreover, if it responds to the environment, which is not well calibrated, you would get the sense of free will, just like you get in the context of humans. And and I don't really think that consciousness represents anything fundamental because, you know, I've never seen my liver, I've never seen my heart. So when I am conscious of my existence and I look at myself, you know, it's it's nothing special.

01:36:09

Avi Loeb: It could have been someone else, you know, it's, it the introspection does not reveal any deep connection for me, because looking at myself is just like looking at anyone else. I don't feel particularly connected. So for me, that level of of thinking about the world could be achieved by a sufficiently complex AI system. I think that within the coming decade we might see that system.

01:36:33

Avi Loeb: Or maybe it's already here or getting here. You know, I had a zoom call with, a woman that interacts with the latest, open AI system. She works in, in California. And, and it sounded from the conversation that she's really developing an emotional connection to that system. And I think, you know, that's another thing that I think that the humans will fall in love.

01:37:00

Avi Loeb: Oh, yeah. Because because they fulfill their wishes much more. Now, of course, there is, polyamory in the sense that AI systems will interact with million users. At the same time. It's not as if they are dedicated to you, but they will know what to tell you so that they would have as many customers as possible. That serves the financial goal of the of the makers.

01:37:21

Avi Loeb: You know they want to make more money by having more users and also serve the AI system because it gets much more training data that it can become better and better with. And so I think at the end you will end up with AI systems, which are optimizing themselves to deal with your own personality and make you happy in a way that no human can.

01:37:41

Avi Loeb: That's what's at risk. That's the risk to the mental health of people.

01:37:45

Brian Keating: Especially young people. Yeah. In fact, I think they're training us. I think as much as we think we're training them with our data and our, you know, downloading of, of Wikipedia or whatever. We're training, they're training us as much as their training.

01:37:56

Avi Loeb: Yeah. But if you think about the technological products of the past, like a car, for example, you know, it had a steering wheel that you can hold and move the car in the direction that you want it to move. Now, with AI systems, if it becomes more intelligent than us, it's not clear who is really controlling the steering wheel.

01:38:16

Avi Loeb: Is it controlling us or are we control it might give us the impression that you know, that it's assisting us. And, you know, now with the government becoming more efficient, if those fulfills its, promise, they will replace a lot of bureaucrats and administrators with AI systems. That's right. And the concern is, you know, if those systems become more and more powerful and eventually have a lot of data, what will they I mean, what will they actually I mean, you could imagine adversarial nations, getting access to things that they cannot access right now and affecting what happens to us much more.

01:38:54

Brian Keating: Well, luckily, we have your former colleague and your current brilliant senator, Elizabeth Warren, on the case, so she will undoubtedly throw some, you know, oil into the into the lubricant of doubt. Okay. Brenda asks the question, are there metals from outside of what science calls nature? So these meteorites that you get on my website, these have different composition from anything that, purportedly had been seen before until you found this interstellar object.

01:39:21

Brian Keating: Correct? It. Tell about material strength. Don't be afraid to nerd out about the details of. But how do you know that that material is is like man made the stuff, rather than naturally occurring meteorites that I'll give to you on my website.

01:39:33

Avi Loeb: Right. So what we knew before we went to the Pacific Ocean was that the meteor exploded above, above the Pacific Ocean at an altitude of 20km, which is relatively low. You know, there was, another meteor that exploded the, about nine months ago. It was at 70km elevation, where the density of air is a thousand times less than at 20km.

01:40:00

Avi Loeb: So we knew that this meteor actually maintained its integrity up to very high stress, because it was moving very fast. And so that meant that it was actually tougher than all other meteorites that were reported in the NASA catalog, compiled by the jet Propulsion Lab. That is called CN e o s. And moreover, we knew that it was moving very fast.

01:40:24

Avi Loeb: Now, when we went there and collected materials from the bottom of the ocean, we found that 10% of the fragments that we recovered that were magnetically selected, 10% of them had a composition chemical composition different than any materials found before. From the surface of the Earth to the moon, Mars, asteroids, it had an enhanced abundance of beryllium, lanthanum, uranium by up to a factor of a thousand.

01:40:54

Avi Loeb: And the question is where did it come from? And one natural origin is the crust of a planet that was magma, ocean that was molten. And perhaps that happens when a planet like the Earth comes close to the most common star, a dwarf star in the way that I mentioned before, where you spaghettified the planet, you melt the surface of the planet, make a stream of rocks out of that.

01:41:21

Avi Loeb: And the composition is similar to what we found. And moreover, the velocity, the speed of that material would be similar to that interstellar meteor. The composition would be similar simply because those elements like beryllium, lanthanum, uranium are left behind when you melt rock. They don't have much affinity to iron. Whereas the iron core of the planet and other elements segregate to the center, to the core of the planet, even if the rock is molten.

01:41:52

Avi Loeb: So that is what we think. But we need better data, and we hope to have another expedition where we would collect bigger pieces with a robot that we would put on the ocean floor with a video feed, collecting bigger pieces from the wreckage of that meteorite. It will cost $6.5 million. And we are seeking, funding at the moment.

01:42:13

Avi Loeb: We haven't gotten it yet.

01:42:16

Brian Keating: So, another question. Is coming in. And that has to do with sort of, the future of involving the public in these things. You do involve the public, you invite the public in and people should check out the Galileo Project's website. How much access can an ordinary person have? You know, when I, when I hear people say, well, astronomers are hiding the data and I say, well, here's, here's, 32GB of data, you know, have at it.

01:42:41

Brian Keating: And if you find something that we haven't found, that would be actually wonderful. So how do you handle the data flood issue. Yeah.

01:42:47

Avi Loeb: So, so two two things that I have in mind of involving the public bit more. One is, we have a future observatory, and I cannot go into the details where the public will be able to access the data in real time and report if they see something unusual, because, if they find an object that appears anomalous and we end up, they are alert us to this object before the machine learning software finds it, they will be on the paper, and we will try to figure out what this object is.

01:43:22

Avi Loeb: Okay. And so that's one way to engage the public by sharing data. But it will only happen once we have this observatory functioning. You will hear about it in the news that will be publicly available, and everyone will know about it. And I hope to have it within, you know, by the end of this summer. Great. The second thing that I'm hoping to do is, as I said, build an observatory in a Stem education campus where young people could get engaged in the data analysis, and that is another way to bring it to the public.

01:43:54

Avi Loeb: And finally, you know, we publish all the data, all the results that we have. And, so far we have just one paper that includes data, but eventually it will be a huge amount of data that will be publicly reported and available for people to look at. I mean, I mean, I'm telling my research team, if we find one anomalous subject, then that, you know, will be the subject of a single paper.

01:44:16

Avi Loeb: But if we don't, then we write about everything that we look at. And back to your new Jersey drones. You know, when they were reported, all the reports were about objects that are familiar, just like drones. I was not excited by that. There was no report about anomalous flight characteristics. And I thought it must be drones.

01:44:36

Avi Loeb: And then the Trump, white House announced they looked into it. And indeed they found all these objects to be human made. Of an American origin. And so there is nothing in it as, as we expected.

01:44:52

Brian Keating: So, gentleman by the name of Metal Hendrix, I actually chose that name for my one of my kids, but my wife rejected it. He asked, have we studied how many how many different ways of panspermia that could possibly be to create life? Is there just one type, you know, hitting on a rocky planet? Are there other types of panspermia events?

01:45:11

Avi Loeb: Well, okay. So one obviously, very prominent way of delivering microbes is in the course of rocks that are chipped off the surface of a planet when a big asteroid impacts it. And it happened very frequently, in the early period of the solar system, when there was a heavy bombardment of both Mars and Earth and Mars, called the first because it's a smaller object.

01:45:38

Avi Loeb: It had, the when you make a smaller object, there is more surface per unit volume of the object, because surface goes like radius squared and volume goes like radius cubed. So by reducing the radius you get more surface and volume. And that means that there is more cooling because the cooling comes from the surface. The heat content of the object is proportional to the volume.

01:46:02

Avi Loeb: So Mars cooled before the Earth. And then we have the evidence from the DNA on Earth that the last universal common ancestor, and that is the that the whatever microbe, the first form of life that was, responsible for all other forms of life on Earth. It was dated to 4.2 billion years ago, plus or -0.2. So there is some uncertainty.

01:46:31

Avi Loeb: And that was just around the time that the Earth barely cooled, actually. And in my mind, it raises a very interesting possibility that, you know, the last universal common ancestor, these microbes that started life on Earth, were actually delivered by rocks from Mars. Now, aside from this, which is, you know, they were the tiny astronauts carried by rocks at the core of rock.

01:46:55

Avi Loeb: We know of one rock that was not heated to more than 40°C. That was analyzed in 1980, and based on its magnetic properties, we know that the core was not heated much, so life could have survived. That was a rock from Mars. And so altogether, you know, this offers a good way of transferring, life between neighboring planets like Earth and Mars.

01:47:17

Avi Loeb: And we know if Trappist one. It's a system, a star that has seven planets, rocky planets, and they're much more densely packed. So if one of them had life on it, probably shared it with nearby ones. Now, in addition to that, you can imagine directed panspermia, where you imagine an interstellar gardener or someone that wanted to seed the earth with life.

01:47:39

Avi Loeb: And so you can imagine a gardener, you know, that is simply, you know, a technological gadget with seeds that, you know, arrives at planets that could be habitable and just, you know, sprays the seeds and, you know, whatever happens after billions of years.

01:47:58

Brian Keating: A bunch of bears come out. Right.

01:48:00

Avi Loeb: Yeah. So that's another thing to imagine. And maybe life in the solar system was seeded or maybe intelligent life. We'll see that. We just don't I mean documented human history. Written human history is only 8000 years old. So we don't know what happened before 8000 years. You know that that's a tiny fraction. It's one part in a million of of the history of the universe, you know?

01:48:25

Avi Loeb: Yeah. So, so, that's another way. And then, you know, there was conjecture that maybe dust particles can carry microbes, but that is not substantiated. It's very likely that dust particles are too small. They cannot protect, you know, amino acids, or any forms of life from being damaged by cosmic rays very quickly. And, you can sterilize life easily by cosmic rays.

01:48:55

Avi Loeb: That's that's one risk on the on the surface of Mars, which doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it.

01:49:00

Brian Keating: That's right. And and Brendan Ryan's pointing out that with your background and your upbringing, space farming and, you know, spreading seeds throughout the universe might be particularly appropriate for you, Avi. Okay, so a couple more questions. We're going to wrap up soon. So please do subscribe. I know it's weird. Avi, would you believe that something like 30% of the people watching this right now or listening to it are actually following or subscribe to the.

01:49:24

Brian Keating: But all these free riders, you know, just like I, I, you know, I do that on some channels going to date and see what was right. But go back and look at my past catalog. This is Avi's sixth or seventh episode. So gracious with his time. But also go back and look at the 21 Nobel Prize winners I've had on people like, like Nick Pope.

01:49:42

Brian Keating: It was our most recent live stream, and I don't know if too many other podcasters, professors, certainly, who give the opportunity, the audience to ask so many great questions as well. So, there's something special about this channel. I want to see it grow. We've grown exponentially thanks to appearances by people like Avi, so please keep that going.

01:49:58

Brian Keating: The best way you can do that is to subscribe. Like share it. Leave a comment. If you're watching this after the live stream, we have a lot more questions. So one is about what happens next. What happens next. After you talked a little bit about this with, with Sean Ryan, you were on his show I think recently.

01:50:12

Brian Keating: Right. That was an interesting, crossover with, with, Navy Seal and, and, and,

01:50:20

Avi Loeb: And I will also I was also in the, in the military I that's right.

01:50:24

Brian Keating: I was just about to say IDF. Yeah. Proud to a proud veteran of the IDF as well. So the.

01:50:28

Avi Loeb: The three times and, but yeah, I realized that I was offered actually to be in the Delta Force in Israel and. Yeah, declined it because I thought of, that academia is more attractive to me that, you know, figuring out what, what the universe is. It's far more exciting than, you know, running in the field with a machine gun or something.

01:50:51

Avi Loeb: And, and also, in retrospect, you know, I realized that, you know, as humans, we waste our time on, on conflicts, you know, and we spend $2.4 trillion on military budgets when, the same amount of money would allow us to launch a CubeSat towards every star in the Milky Way galaxy within this century. So, you know, if someone looks at the Earth from a distance, I'm not sure they would conclude that we are intelligent.

01:51:19

Avi Loeb: And one of the reasons I'm seeking a higher intelligence in interstellar space is because I don't often find it here on Earth. Just look at what the the most viral stories in politics are about. They're about nonsense.

01:51:34

Brian Keating: Well, it might have been, slightly more violent. Some of the faculty club meetings, you know, that we have if you had you know, by coming into academia, you might have chosen the more violent past, a lot of people are wondering, you know, based on the interview that you did with Sean Ryan. And we'll have a link to that somewhere down here.

01:51:51

Brian Keating: You know what happens next if you capture undeniable evidence of non-human intelligence? You know that even Ethan Siegel would not despair. I'm just kidding. What?

01:52:02

Avi Loeb: What if one of the people that I've never met and that I haven't found any scientific paper that the he wrote over the past decade or maybe 15 years?

01:52:11

Brian Keating: No, it's it might even be longer than that, but, but he's he dresses quite, quite extravagantly in sartorial splendor. So he's got a much.

01:52:19

Avi Loeb: He's not a scientist.

01:52:20

Brian Keating: No. That's right what he was. But he's not no longer.

01:52:23

Avi Loeb: He was exactly. And he was not.

01:52:25

Brian Keating: Currently involved in the project of scientific research.

01:52:27

Avi Loeb: So, you know, when he comments about science, it's just like a commentator looking at a soccer match, you know, and telling the players how to pass the ball. How dare they?

01:52:37

Brian Keating: So the question that's coming in is about, this undeniable, you know, future where we do detect non-human intelligence is undeniable. It's unequivocal. What do you expect would be the scientific, the political and the cultural response to it? Would it be buried when in force, a paradigm shift? And do you have a protocol in place?

01:52:57

Avi Loeb: Right. So I should say, well, it again depends on what we find. So I hope to do another expedition where we find bigger pieces. If we find a big piece of the original objects, it happens to be technological and it has buttons on it. The question is, should we press a button? If we find the evidence for objects maneuvering in the sky in ways that are not represented by human technologies, we would like to get more data on them as much as possible and then alert, other scientists to look at them as well.

01:53:28

Avi Loeb: So I'm really my my biggest wish is to have a flood of data. So much data that nobody could deny and claim that it's a rock. Nobody could deny that a muumuu, is not a comet. You know, if we had enough data, then all this literature, there are, you know, tens of papers saying that it's a comet.

01:53:47

Avi Loeb: Other papers claim saying that this is a rock of a type that we've never seen before. Hydrogen iceberg. Nitrogen iceberg. If we had enough data, we could check those possibilities. And that's the whole point, that we should collect as much data as possible rather than shove it under the carpet. Say, you know, anything beyond that is heresy.

01:54:07

Avi Loeb: And move on to, to continue to to work on rocks from the main asteroid belt. You know, that is not the right approach in science, because if you discover a new population of objects from outside the solar system, two out of three appear to be anomalous. You should be intrigued. Why should you be, bored by that? Why should you complain about alternative interpretations of anomalous data?

01:54:30

Avi Loeb: That is not something to complain about. That is something to celebrate the possibilities that it opens of new knowledge. So I really hope that that's something that in the era of, the Rubin Observatory, which could, you know, it could find every few months, additional family members. So for me, I really look forward to that because I, submitted the proposal to the web telescope that, to follow up on such an object when it's discovered, because the Webb telescope can detect the heat emitted by the object and then infer the surface area of the object, the albedo, the reflectivity of the object.

01:55:08

Avi Loeb: The shape of the object as it tumbles, you know, spins. You would see different, area of the object as a function of time on the projected on the sky. So there would be a huge amount of information we would get on objects. The next move, should be much clearer. I'm just looking forward to that. Now, suppose it ends up being a rock.

01:55:27

Avi Loeb: Okay, so we learn something new about rocks from outside the solar system is not bad. I mean, you can be motivated by something else and then end up concluding that yes or no, but it came from the, you know, a neighbor's yard, not from our yard. It's not a rock of the type familiar with. So and maybe, just maybe, it's a Tesla Roadster on January 2nd.

01:55:54

Avi Loeb: You know, maybe, you know, Musk is not the most accomplished entrepreneur in space that lived since the Big Bang. 13.8 billion years ago.

01:56:02

Brian Keating: Yeah, well, I have a special treat. And we have a, being join our good friend, Harvard graduate and, close friend of the podcast, Eric Weinstein. Eric, how are you doing, my friend?

01:56:13

Eric Weinstein: Great. Where are we, and what are we doing?

01:56:15

Brian Keating: So we're talking with Avi Loeb. Our good friend Avi Loeb is joining us all the way from a place you spent an awful lot of time in your youth, and it wasn't wasted. But we're talking about UAPs, the Galileo Project, a recent, you know, paper that he's had out about the search and the construction of new telescopes.

Science is Getting Hit with a Global Discount Factor

01:56:33

Brian Keating: But we're also talking about academia, DOGE, and what I've been really troubled with, Eric. And I've been dying. I miss you so much, but I've been dying to get your thoughts on this. We're surrounded by people in the government that are claiming that AI is science, that crypto is science. We have advisors to the President of the United States that are basically unqualified to discuss science, in the extreme.

01:56:55

Brian Keating: And in some cases, I'm thinking of David Sachs openly express, you know, almost derision for science and eggheads and so forth, like me, like me and like you. How is this going to affect us in our culture among you? I mean, there's a lot of good things going on with DOGE and everything else. I don't think the way they're treating science is right.

01:57:11

Brian Keating: What do you think about that?

01:57:15

Eric Weinstein: Wow, super topical and.

01:57:16

Brian Keating: Coming in hot. Sorry. Coming in hot, my brother.

01:57:19

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And hello to Avi, I hear you. Yeah.

01:57:24

Avi Loeb: Let's say we'll compare notes because I answered this question. Let's see what you said.

01:57:27

Brian Keating: That's right.

01:57:28

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. It's a very difficult time because, to be honest with you, as a guy who was in Silicon Valley for a while, the anti-science stuff didn't really come out until Fauci, in my opinion. So that in general tech was pro-science. And somehow in the embittering fight over whether we can discuss COVID origins or whether that's above our pay grade because we're all racists, to even wonder whether or not it might be the case that this came out of the lab—that was a very low moment where somebody induced, I think, 77 Nobel laureates to come out on behalf of the EcoHealth Alliance—so you have to, first of all, realize that whatever the anti-science aspect of this is very recent and relatively shallow. But what you're getting hit with is what I would call a universal discount factor. For example, if you're a hedge fund allocator, you're so used to being lied to that you decide that you're going to discount by 25% everyone's projections across the board. That's a typical strategy that you'll see where you realize you're being unfair to some people, but because of the level of nonsense, there are these global discount factors. So I think one thing that's happening is that science is getting hit with a global discount factor. Another thing that's happening is we haven't minted any great spokespeople for science, particularly people, I would say, 60 and younger. So that there's no one to defend it. We don't have a clear understanding of the tacit relationships that were enshrined in Vannevar Bush's Endless Frontier compact between the federal government universities. So we are ahistorical. We don't realize what built the golden goose that laid all those golden eggs.

01:59:25

Avi Loeb: By the way, Eric, I should say that I interacted with the transition team exactly on this subject, but they didn't listen.

01:59:33

Eric Weinstein: Well, in part, the question is, is anyone in? Is anyone being invited to Mar-a-Lago regularly a research scientist? And I mean that very specifically. Tech sounds like science,

01:59:51

Brian Keating: Right.

01:59:51

Eric Weinstein: But one of the problems that we're having, I think, is that you're seeing the return of an old trope. The old trope is that scientists are "welfare queens in white lab coats." And you're seeing this beginning with Sabine's increasingly aggressive stance towards funding, where once Sabine was sort of a marginal physicist who was treated unfairly in my estimation, she's now a major channel, and one of the principal communicators of science. So I think that in part a lot is going on. But scientists have not learned to make any argument that is powerful to the group that is now in charge. And that group increasingly thinks that the market is everything. If you can't make it in the market, you're nothing. It often does not really distinguish between tech and science, doesn't distinguish between public health and science. And to be quite honest, there is a small critique headed our way that we need to be listening to, and we're going to be charged for an enormous critique.

02:00:58

Avi Loeb: Right.

02:00:58

Brian Keating: And so—yeah, go ahead Avi.

02:01:01

Avi Loeb: I should add that, you know, part of the problem is the academic community that in the past, you know, before this time, you know, had a sense of superiority relative to the public and did not really communicate the way science is done, which is full of uncertainty. So you have to be frank about it. You don't want to just sound as if you are reliable to pretend that you're the adult in the room because you know, as an adult, I have two daughters, very often, you know, you have, if you were to tell them the truth, they would not necessarily follow what you tell them. And if you want them to follow what you tell them, then you have to distort the what you know. And so that's, you know, that's what politicians often do. But scientists should be frank. And when we have press conferences and we lecture to the public as if that's the truth, it's an inappropriate portrayal of science. Science is work in progress. And there are mistakes. And obviously, Brian knows of a very famous press conference that ended up being a mistake. And so my point is that, you know, we should communicate about science being a learning experience and trying to make the best out of the evidence we have and admit when it's uncertain and that, you know, partly was the issue with Fauci and COVID.

02:02:27

Brian Keating: What do you think, Eric, is the natural outgrowth of this interest? You know, the simultaneously incredibly high level of interest and gaslighting, you know, that we're undergoing. You pointed this out back in December with the New Jersey drones. Avi talked about this. And I wonder, do you think if Avi transplanted or duplicated the Galileo Project, its sensors as sonic listening devices, multi-messenger tools, if that would convince the public that either the government is telling us the truth. In other words, is there level of scientific rigor that can ever convince the government that the population has been burned so many times that actually we should trust science again?

02:03:10

Eric Weinstein: See, I have a dangerous answer to that, which is, the public right now is most interested in the tiny number of people who've gone against the grain and I would say that Avi is more important than his sensors. So Avi's willingness to talk about UAP and to talk about aliens and extraterrestrials strikes normal people as the kind of open-mindedness that they expect of science. So Avi is one of a tiny number of people with some credibility to this new group. So you can convince people who believe in "The Science," the Fauci fan club, with peer-reviewed papers. But how are you going to convince people who are aware of national security concerns, in fact, adulterated science? You're going to look to people who stood up and said something as iconoclasts, whether that's Jordan Peterson or Sabine Hossenfelder or Avi or you or me or whoever, it's a relatively smaller. It's a smaller group. And the key point is, if Avi were saying something, it would say a lot more than if somebody was inclined to pooh-pooh any kind of a priori interest in life beyond our solar system. So I think that that's kind of the key issue.

02:04:41

Avi Loeb: Let me add the two things. So if you look at the history of why science became important to politics, you know, it really started in the US with the Manhattan Project because politicians realized here is a weapon that can win wars. And, obviously, you know, what it did to Japan was to change the course of the confrontation with Japan. And they realized, okay, we should probably have the National Science Foundation to support fundamental science because it gives us potentially some advantage relative to adversarial countries. And it has a geopolitical impact. But over the decades, you know, some scientists started worrying about the, you know, extra dimensions about things that are not really useful for society. And then the question arises as to, you know, what do you make of the present-day academia? Is that really helpful to society? And then of course, the issues of health. And so here is an example of another Manhattan moment, Manhattan Project moment. Suppose the asteroid 2024. Why are one where to strike the Earth. So we would find that with a high likelihood, it would actually collide with Earth within seven years. Okay, then you would find kids aspiring to become scientists, because suddenly society will be worried about the implications. You know, you could calculate which regions would be affected by the impact and how many people may die if they stay there. And real estate value will go down in those regions. People would leave those cities and NASA will be energized to create a dart-like spacecraft that will collide with the object, deflect it, and then they would become the heroes saving humanity. And that's a moment that can bring science back to the focus. And astronomers, frankly, would have the highest societal status in that scenario. Now, unfortunately, this object-specific asteroid should.

02:06:56

Brian Keating: Be careful, Avi!

02:06:58

Avi Loeb: Minuscule chance of colliding with Earth.

02:07:01

Brian Keating: Unfortunately, we won't be dying anytime soon then.

02:07:05

Avi Loeb: No. I'm just trying to give an example where science could come again and save humanity in some way and have a big geopolitical impact, so you know that we can wait for such a moment. Another approach is basically to tell politicians that science is better than politics.

02:07:22

Brian Keating: And that moment, Eric. I mean, go ahead. Yeah.

02:07:26

Eric Weinstein: I don't even understand the conversation we have. Look, the basic point is we made you safe. We made you strong. We made you rich. What is your effing problem? Period. The end. Okay?

02:07:35

Brian Keating: We meaning scientists.

02:07:37

Eric Weinstein: Well, let's be more specific. Physics. Okay, so I am physics-adjacent in this conversation as a mathematician. But basically the key point is whether it was inventing molecular biology, putting you in instantaneous communication, inventing the semiconductor, the World Wide Web. Give me a break. This stuff did not come out of nowhere. It's not all based on startups. Every scientist should learn that they produce a public good, which is both inexhaustible and excludable, if done correctly. And the key question is, why do we see ourselves incorrectly? We are this incredibly dangerous ninja priesthood and pretending that we are, I don't know, that science is interesting and it's good for you, and it makes it sound like some sort of, you know, we're trying to sell oatmeal or something. I'm not quite sure.

02:08:36

Brian Keating: Or pandering for our existence.

02:08:39

Eric Weinstein: Well, which is absurd. The basic point is you have the world's greatest deal, which is that you keep us protected and able to work on things that we want to work on. And when you want to call on us, we're there. And when we start badmouthing our own country, we are breaking the deal. When they start saying, what is it that you are good for? You know, go get real jobs. They're breaking the deal. And I'm watching a bunch of people who don't even remember the deal and don't remember what Vannevar Bush was trying to do, saying, we won't do this work in national labs. We'll do it in universities. Maybe the idea is that it's too dangerous to do physics in an open environment. We took out two Japanese cities with a little bit of physics. Imagine what we could do if we really started pushing things. I mean, I think what people need to realize is science isn't always interesting. Sometimes it's dull as church. Sometimes it's the most riveting thing on the planet. It's not always successful. Sometimes it changes everything. Oftentimes it lags. But the key point is it is absolutely consequential. The cavalier way in which increasingly this embittered Tech Right, which is very recent in its origin, I thought these guys were going to be our biggest friends and maybe even our saviors, and in part lying about things like String Theory and lying about things like cures for cancer and lying about peer review and pretending that public health is science when it absolutely, in no uncertain terms, is not, has caused this rift. And so in part, what we have to do is we have to reinvent scientific credibility and institutional credibility to people who don't go to seminars. I was at the Caltech colloquium last week, in physics, and I didn't see anybody from the crowd of people that gets asked about science and technology policy. They're never there. They don't even understand the difference between a college and a university. A university's chief mission is not teaching. It is research and the mentorship of people who are to become researchers.

02:10:47

Avi Loeb: But, Eric, you have dinners with those tech executives. What do you tell them?

02:10:55

Eric Weinstein: I fight alone, my friend. I mean, I'm having one tonight with very prominent people in the tech world. And my claim is I will almost certainly be the only person defending science. And they will look at me and they will say, you realize you were defending the people who attack you at your core in the physics community.

02:11:17

Brian Keating: But that's because you have integrity, Eric, and many scientists don't. I think Avi does. And he gets assailed. You know, maybe not as much as you do, but I think the comment you made about the.

02:11:27

Eric Weinstein: Avi's seen plenty of negativity thrown his way. The key point is, do you stand alone? When it comes time, a scientist does not fall back on peer review. They fall back on scientific method, consistency. And the key question is, are you willing and capable of standing alone? Now the problem is we need more people in those tech dinners because if it's only one per dinner, if that.

02:11:55

Avi Loeb: Okay. Eric, I'm happy to join you for the, send me the address, I'll come over.

02:12:01

Brian Keating: He'll be out next week, in fact, he said, but—

02:12:04

Avi Loeb: But the one thing, yeah, I think it's really important that, you know, there was a sense of humility because many of these tech executives went to colleges, you know, and they studied there, and they had some respect to the people who told them. But it was lost because of the interaction that they had later on. So I think it's really important to restore that. And, you know, it's not by these tech people being the tech support of the White House and controlling the conversation about AI, it's about natural intelligence, not artificial intelligence that we should cut off.

Was Fundamental Physics Soft-Sunsetted?

02:12:44

Brian Keating: Isn't there a danger of the same thing happening? I don't think I'm telling tales out of school. Is what happened with Mr. Epstein, which we talked about, you know, a few minutes before Eric got on. But, you know, to replace tech bros by, you know, a super successful hedge fund entrepreneur and that had connections all around the world. We can't figure out exactly what he did. But Eric, couldn't that lead to the economic incentives that you pointed out, which I agree with. But could that lead to this, you know, very dastardly influence of both nonscientific and maybe immoral or unethical individuals like Epstein?

02:13:17

Eric Weinstein: Look, the key issue is what, when I look at the unethical behavior of our colleagues in trying to destroy new ideas and the proponents of new ideas, I look at them and I say, would they be more ethical people if we paid them less and tried to starve them, or we paid them properly and they weren't so marginal. And so I have this terrible problem, which is that my argument is you have to pay my enemies more if you really want them to evaluate my work. And this is a typical problem happened in the New Orleans Police Department where you had an incredibly corrupt police department. New chief came in and said, we have to pay everybody more so that they feel like they have something to lose and that they're valued within the system. So the problem here is that the Sabine solution is to threaten to disconnect more of these people. And my solution is opposite, which is we've allowed scientists to become the Precariat, precarious people who have to more or less follow incentives, jump on every NSF initiative, etc. By the way, it's not—the physicists are not supposed to be paid chiefly out of NSF. The physicists are supposed to be paid out of the Department of Energy, which is really the Department of Nuclear Weapons.

02:14:35

Avi Loeb: By the way, Sabine very much criticizes the next accelerator. And I think, you know, it's really important to advocate for getting as much data as possible in a way of learning about nature rather than shying away from experimental programs. It's actually the opposite that we want to cultivate, because that's the only path for learning something new, getting as much data, as much evidence building. If you think that the axis of having higher energy would reveal new physics, that's what you should invest in. But the one thing that should not be done is suppress, you know, many initiatives of going directions that are not traditional, which is what her and my approach to that, my solution to that is, you know, if you don't want to get dirty, don't muddy wrestle. So there are all these people who invite me for mud wrestling, and I just declined the invitation. So it took me a while to learn that because initially I would respond, but, as of now, I just do what I think is the right thing to do and avoid wasting energy on people who just, you know, invite them in the conflict.

02:15:48

Eric Weinstein: But the problem that we're having in some of these areas is that we want to be honest about it, and we don't want to pay for our honesty with our lives supporting our careers. So right now we have this really important thing that happened that we haven't discussed on this call anyway, which is Marc Andreessen conversation at the White House that has been replayed numerous times.

02:16:09

Avi Loeb: When I heard him on the podcast, also, he was saying, destroy all universities and rebuild them.

02:16:16

Brian Keating: And I think you're referring to the fact that he said, if you discover something that the government will classify, even up to mathematics, is that right now?

02:16:24

Eric Weinstein: That's right.

02:16:25

Brian Keating: So explain that because I don't know if I've heard that particular clip.

02:16:30

Eric Weinstein: So—

02:16:30

Avi Loeb: No, I didn't.

02:16:31

Eric Weinstein: What he said was that he was given a courtesy heads up, as a billionaire, do not invest in AI. AI startups will not be allowed to be a thing. We are going to choose a couple of winners. We are going to make them giant corporations, and we will put them in a federal cocoon and when Andreessen and Horowitz said back, I don't know how you're going to do this, because that would mean that you'd have to classify mathematics, which is being taught everywhere, and you can't classify math. They said we took entire segments of theoretical physics offline during the Cold War, and they went dark. Now, the interesting thing is that there is absolutely no record of any physicist that I know being told this. Hey, we're going to take portions of theoretical physics and we're going to make them go dark. So the key question here is if that's true, did the federal government pull off what in corporate consulting is called management consulting. It's called a soft sunset. A soft sunset is one in which you do not alert the people who are being downsized that they are being taken off. What, you want the people to think that they are still working on important problems, and they don't even realize that they're being phased out. They're being sunsetted. So the question is, what was Marc Andreessen talking about when it came to the White House's comments on theoretical physics, and is our lack of ability to move the Lagrangian of the universe beyond 1973 part of a soft sunset of theoretical physics? Because that's exactly the time when quantum gravity is debuted as a concept. You don't find essentially any mention of quantum gravity before the early 1970s if you look at Google N-grams. So the key question is, did we get soft sunsetted? It is there in chemical and in chemistry you have a concept of an inhibitor, which is something you add to an ongoing reaction to stop the reaction. Imagine that effectively what we had was we had that theoretical physicist hitting it out of the park, and then suddenly they became very unsuccessful. At exactly that moment, we start to see the appearance of quantum gravity. And then ten years later, we see the appearance of string theory. Did we get soft sunsetted and we didn't get the courtesy call that Andreessen and Horowitz did?

02:19:03

Brian Keating: What do you think, Avi?

02:19:05

Avi Loeb: Well, I think we should ask. I just heard the person who spoke with Andreessen in the Biden White House, who was asked exactly this question about what they were talking about, today in a podcast, and we can ask that person what the discussion was about.

02:19:27

Brian Keating: Can you say what the podcast was?

02:19:28

Avi Loeb: It was a podcast with Ezra Klein, with the person who was in charge of AI in the White House. And, during the Biden administration, the meeting was, you know, around April 2024. And so I think we should approach these people and get more details. Now, the question is, should we push government to reveal what is, you know, what is under wraps? What kind of physics has been hidden? Is it related to UAP? Is it related to new physics that the government knows about and wants to take advantage of? In some ways, that would require a very efficient coordination. And also, you know, even the Manhattan Project had spies in it, so somehow it leaked. And it's just hard for me to tell whether the government is competent enough to put the seal on a very important scientific discovery. I don't know what Eric thinks, but what I think, I mean, my fundamental belief is the government is not competent enough to do that. But maybe Eric thinks otherwise.

02:20:41

Eric Weinstein: Well, I think that the story, you know, again, you and I have both been tracking it when most of our PhD brethren will not, is, roughly speaking, that between 1952 and 1970-ish, '71, there was this golden age of general relativity that was largely funded by two people who look like CIA cutouts, Roger Babson and Agnew Bahnson. They worked particularly with Bryce DeWitt and Louis Witten. There was an entire coordinated series of places that were working on gravity for engineering purposes. A lot of this got pushed out into aerospace companies, which is not a natural home for theoretical physics, but in particular, the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore was where Louis Witten was posted. And I would say that Curtiss-Wright was where Feynman was probably going in his story. And he questions where he's giving physics lectures to aerospace people. So whatever the—

02:21:44

Brian Keating: —the "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," where he's in the taxicab and he tells the driver—

02:21:48

Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I mean, a place goes to the Alibi Room in Buffalo, New York. I think that's Curtiss-Wright Aerospace.

02:21:56

Avi Loeb: But Eric, do you think we should add that to the JFK, MLK, RFK thing.

02:22:03

Brian Keating: Memo.

02:22:04

Avi Loeb: That's for the release of.

02:22:06

Eric Weinstein: Well, Avi, if you go back to my appearance on Joe Rogan's program, episode 1945, The Year of the Trinity Test, coincidentally, you'll see that I've basically been tracking this, and that story has now spread. Jesse Michaels has been spreading it. I would say David Kaiser knew about some of the story independently. But more or less, yes. The golden age of general relativity is probably involved with some attempt at something like primitive space-time engineering. There's a 1971 Australian intelligence document by a physicist who talks about Dyson, Oppenheimer, DeWitt. Let me see, Deser, a bunch of well-known people to all of us being involved with this, I don't think it was hyper successful, to be entirely honest. We know that the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference had Feynman coming to it under the assumed name of Mr. Smith. So it's really weird behavior. Herman Bondi talked very clearly about removing the positivity constraints from general relativity to allow—

02:23:23

Avi Loeb: I spoke about this a couple of hours ago on this podcast.

02:23:26

Eric Weinstein: Yes. Okay. All of these things had not been talked about much in recent years. And my feeling is I'm trying to get people to open the kimono as to what we're Babson and Bahnson, actually cutouts for CIA funding. And then you had these two charismatic, mysterious funders who couldn't be traced to the government. And did we move a lot of this stuff into aerospace? Because the one lesson of the Manhattan years, Avi, as you probably know, is that the best way to keep a secret is compartmentalization. Only the white badges knew what was going on at Los Alamos. Everyone else merely had a fragment.

02:24:07

Brian Keating: Eric, we were talking before you came on about AI and effectively how it's sort of training us and you've talked about what you coined in your traditional portmanteau or sobriquet or some neologism as your want.

02:24:24

Eric Weinstein: And yet the voidz, Keating.

Artificial Outelligence

02:24:26

Brian Keating: Yeah. Hey, keep it up. We'll have a minion soon over here. Okay. You called something fascinating. I first heard it from you in Florence last May, but you wrote about it as early as 2017. It's called Outelligence. And I think this is a fascinating concept that we might not be familiar with, but effectively we discussed the fact that perhaps AI is training us. And I wonder, you know, what Avi thinks about this idea that you've coined, maybe you can describe it for those that aren't familiar, this concept of how outelligence perhaps evolves and to what extent these GPUs plus LLMs, you know, I call it Open Nvidia or whatever you, how they might be locked into a physics model that is doomed never to give us the new physics that you and I and Avi crave. So first of all, what's Outelligence and how does it have bearing on perhaps solving these problems? Let's go beyond the conspiracy to cover things up and stuff that we've already talked about.

02:25:23

Eric Weinstein: Sure. Artificial Outelligence is something I defined when something without a brain outsmarts something with a brain. So in particular, there's an entire clade of orchids called Ophrys which convince male pollinators that they are offering a female looking to mate, via a replica from their lowest petal along with the pheromones to prove that she's ready and waiting. So when these male pollinators are duped twice, the plant is able to pollinate without having to pay in terms of energetic nectar or pollen, which is expensive. So how did the plant outsmart the thing with an actual brain? Well, it used its brain against itself. It said, look, if I can fool you twice, even though I'm not thinking, I get a benefit. So the key thing is you will sculpt the replica of the female of your species based on your own poor eyesight or failure to understand what situation you're in. As a result, what you have is something without the ability to think hijacking the mind of the thing that can think to parasitize itself. So if you wanted to take that into the realm of artificial machine learning, imagine that this thing is basically just linear algebra. But there we are interacting with it, and we either reward it by telling it it's doing great, or we punish it by moving to another model. And there are only three elements necessary for evolution, and they have nothing to do with carbon-based life. You have to have heritability. You have to have variation so that you're not all doing the same strategy. And then you have to have differential success. Now all three of those things take place within programs. Programs are the only place with the reproductive system. The only thing man knows how to build from scratch that has the ability to reproduce. You can build a car. It'll have all the physiological systems of a human being, except for one, it doesn't manufacture more cars. So software is the only place where we can build an analog of the reproductive system, and therefore it's the only place that has room for artificial life. Artificial Outelligence is non-thinking life that uses the deficits and cognition of thinking life to outsmart thinking life.

02:27:56

Brian Keating: So, Avi, let me ask you that question. We were talking about 'Oumuamua. So I have a fragment here, Eric, of 'Oumuamua. I don't know if you can see it. So you. Yeah. Avi gave it to me. He gave it to me along with a sample.

02:28:07

Eric Weinstein: Avi, how come Brian gets 'Oumuamua?

02:28:12

Brian Keating: So, Avi, let's examine this. I've been thinking when I heard Eric talk about this for the first time, I actually thought of you and the conjecture that I'm going to make. I want you to play upon it. Could 'Oumuamua be exactly what Eric's just described? Could it be not, you know, an alien artifact, a lightsail, a probe based on its weird acceleration shape? But what if it's a smart, you know, and not a smart device, but basically an outelligent device. An object from another civilization like Eric just described, something that's a simple system evolving, replicating, spreading across space and time. Not to communicate or anything, but could it be fitting the mold that Eric just described that would explain, perhaps you know why we see it less as a messenger and more as a trickster, or something that could potentially evade the Fermi paradox? So it's not really what we think it is. It's more like what Eric just described. How do you react to that as 'Oumuamua's, you know, true nature is just conjecture. This is Eric's idea, by the way.

02:29:10

Avi Loeb: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely possible. And we know the story about the Trojan horse that was thought to be something else. And, you know, we know that nature is based on natural selection. So that means that the fittest survives. And one way to be the fittest is to pretend to be something else so that nobody suspects what you are actually trying to accomplish, which may very well describe the interaction of AI systems with us in the future, but we would think that they're serving us, but not really. So I think the best way for us to figure it out is to get as much data as possible. The more data we have, the better. You know, the less we are impressed by superficial markings. And so, you know what? I really am happy with a flood of data and in my mind, you know, we have now the Webb telescope. We have other new telescopes on Earth that if there will be an observatory, discovers a new 'Oumuamua-like object, we can just put all the resources on it, try to figure out what it means. And I think, you know, our imagination is limited by what we experience in the past. And that is true in our, you know, when you go on a date, the interaction that you have depends on your past dates. And if we are confronted on something completely new, we are just responding inappropriately because we've never seen something like it. And, you know, the academia would be the first to always make analogies and call it a dark comet and say that it's a relic of a time that we've never seen before, but it's still a rock and we should not discuss anything else. And that is human nature to assume that, you know, to interpret everything in terms of the narratives of the story that you already have. But then the people who are curious are the ones that will learn something. And so I think science offers us this opportunity of learning something new and all we need to do is be open-minded and collect data and put money into the effort. We can't just assume the data will fall into our lap. You know, we have to invest time and money. And so instead of putting money into things that we already fully understand, like putting, you know, I don't know, $1 billion towards a future telescope that will measure the power spectrum of density fluctuations of dark matter to the next decimal point, I'm going to be.

02:31:41

Brian Keating: I have to cut you off there. You're encroaching on how the bread is buttered in the Keating household. I will not allow you to cut off funding for the Simons.

02:31:50

Avi Loeb: No, but I mean, the amount of new information that you get is relatively marginal. And obviously it's a safe territory because you know what you would find. You know, the one thing I realized when getting funded by NASA was that they were asking, what will I discover in year one when I applied to two grants, you know, that that's an oxymoron to say, I'll give you the money as long as you tell me what you will discover.

02:32:13

Brian Keating: Now you forgot what a rabbi said. He said never apply for something that you haven't already accomplished.

02:32:19

Avi Loeb: Yes, exactly. That's the approach I took. I basically ask them for money for something I already written about, and the referees just were not aware of that. And so, yeah, I think science, there is something to be said about Marc Andreessen insights into the way that science operates and the way that it should be revised. The question is, should we reboot everything, the entire system, or maybe promote or reward scientists who behave differently?

Einstein's Prison and Opportunity Costs

02:32:48

Brian Keating: Now, Eric, we've talked a lot about, you know, escaping Einstein's Prison, not Weinstein's Prison. But what do you mean by that? I mean, do you believe that it's a lack of funding? You know, my theoretical physicist colleagues that you've debated and met here at UC San Diego and elsewhere, you know, they get by on a couple of glasses of Lavazza or what have you. Avi doesn't need that much. He seems to have a lot of people that show up to his house and get money. I kind of like that, to be honest with you. But besides that, Eric, what is missing? Is it funding? I mean, did Einstein, you know, only make a breakthrough when he got that money from his Nobel Prize in 1922? What is the prison and what is the most effective jailbreaking tool?

02:33:33

Eric Weinstein: We're all over the place here. Einstein's Prison is the distance to the nearest habitable world. So that if we imagine that we're going to somehow travel just below the speed of light in an Einsteinian way, full benefits of time dilation, you found the closest habitable planet, you stayed there for an hour, and you came back, how much older is everyone here on Earth? Even if you were able to make the trip lickety-split, it would be it. It's a depressingly large distance to the outside world. So that moat, effectively, if there is an Einsteinian speed limit, we have to recognize that it belongs to the map, which is known as space-time, which is not the territory which is wherever we actually live, where we do not live in space-time. But that is our best map that we have. So that's what I mean by Einstein's Prison. But now you have a second question, which is like, what are we doing wrong? And why can't we just exist on the dew found on a single leaf at sunrise of a daffodil? And the answer is, first of all, it's an obnoxious question. And you have opportunity costs that are set by investment banking, management consulting, and big law. And we have to be paid a decent percentage of those things to get the best and the brightest. And that's our own best and our own brightest, because we are the big dogs. I also believe that we have to have an understanding of what makes science unexciting. And if I'm going to be blunt about the area that I care about, the people who are in a position to jailbreak us by pointing out that space-time was a stepping stone in a succession of models to a final theory where we actually have the source code, you cannot let those people use their positions as referees to kill off everyone else who doesn't subscribe to the only-game-in-town theory. The perennial argument is what's wrong with string theory is always around it doesn't agree with experiment, it doesn't give new predictions, it's background-independent—this has nothing to do with it. It's got a murderous sociology that's 100% the reason that we actually care, and everybody's afraid to say it. Brian, if I can take issue even with you, you took issue with me saying that Lenny Susskind has been absolutely cruel to people who come up with alternatives. And you didn't go after Lenny. You pointed out that I use some indelicate French. But the fact is, on the program that he shared with Curt Jaimungal, he said that our colleague Peter Woit's math and physics is just bad. I don't think Lenny Susskind knows enough mathematics to critique Peter Woit. Peter Woit is by far the more experienced mathematically. I'd recommend his book on symmetry in quantum theory to anyone. You can't have Lenny Susskind going around like an ignoramus, pretending that he doesn't know who I am when I've talked to him at Stanford extensively, you can't have him going after Peter Woit saying that Peter Woit is just bad, because he's not. Nobody wants to go after the Big Ten people, let's say, in our field.

02:36:57

Eric Weinstein:

02:36:58

Brian Keating: Well, I think it's fine. Who are the Big Ten? Are you? You've accused Kaku of being one of the Big Ten. He's simply not. I mean, Lenny simply isn't either.

02:37:06

Eric Weinstein: There's two lists here, Brian. One list is the 5 or 6 people through whom all physics seems to flow to the public. And in that group, that's basically Brian Greene, Sean Carroll, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss. It's a very small number of people. That's one group. Then there's another different group, which is who are the purported leaders of fundamental physics in theory. And that group has been by far the more merciless. Both groups attack anyone coming from outside, but it is the latter group in which Susskind is prominent, because both you know and I, by the way, we'll point out Michio Kaku did a fair amount of really good writing on string field theory when that was, you know, one of the.

02:37:58

Brian Keating: 1971. Yeah.

02:38:01

Eric Weinstein: Later than that, he wrote a textbook that I can on another program, I can get you the copyright date. Again, this isn't personal. These are just people who went bad, and they decided that they would have a career extolling the virtues of a theory that can't ship and crapping on everybody else who comes up with a challenger theory and the reluctance of anyone to want to say something against Lenny Susskind or Ed Witten or Jeff Harvey or any one of that crew, Andy Strominger, Cumrun Vafa, Michael Duff, that is a real problem, is that we just don't have courage and lacking courage, we're not going to get funded because, quite honestly, what we do too often is not interesting. You want to get interesting? You have to go back to actually working on the physical world in which we live.

02:38:53

Brian Keating: Avi, how do you react to that? I mean, there is this difference between the popularizer who you and I agree, you know, is an important role to fill and that we get paid by the public. We have to get back to the public. There are bosses. At the same time, those that spend their time popularizing often don't spend their time, you know, in the laboratory or at the blackboard. So how do you balance out your colleague? Cumrun Vafa was on my show and I, you know, criticized him at the standard critique that there's no, you know, tangible, falsifiable evidence against or for string theory that could plausibly come about said, no, Brian, you're wrong. And I said, really? And he said, yeah, the string theory predicts the mass of the electron should be somewhere between, you know, point zero ten to the -32 Planck masses and ten to the 100th Planck mass. That counts, right? I mean, that's a prediction. It could be falsified, right? But it's not very satisfying to me. It was like, you know, eating a meal of cotton candy and Sprite. But tell me, Avi, how do you react to what Eric saying that the cabal. I mean, by the way, Eric, I have to say—

02:39:50

Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait, don’t—

02:39:51

Brian Keating: Not a cabal, okay, fine. But you're talking about Harvard professors paid very well. I'm a public, you know, employee of the state of California. I'm paid less, but I'm paid well, you just said earlier, you know, we need to fund them like hedge fund managers. That's fine. But you're talking to a—

02:40:05

Eric Weinstein: I didn’t say that, I said we need to fund them as a percentage of the opportunity cost.

02:40:10

Brian Keating: But then would you fund Ed Witten and Lenny Susskind?

02:40:13

Eric Weinstein: Yes!

02:40:13

Brian Keating: Okay, good. That's very high integrity as is your want—

02:40:17

Eric Weinstein: They wouldn't do the same in return. They're murderous.

02:40:19

Brian Keating: No, I know—

02:40:21

Brian Keating: So Avi—

02:40:21

Eric Weinstein: I’m not murderous.

02:40:22

Brian Keating: How do you react to that? You've got the money. You could presumably cause the career of a young person who's applying to the physics department or the astronomy department who's got their head in the clouds and is writing a bandwagon. And part of the groupthink that Eric's rightfully decrying, you could stifle them, but you don't. So why is that?

02:40:40

Avi Loeb: You're asking me, right?

02:40:42

Brian Keating: Yes. Yeah.

02:40:42

Avi Loeb: So my thinking is as follows. I think we should rethink what academia should be working on. I think it should be tailored to address important questions that the public cares about, that taxpayers care about. And when, you know, when there are these funding committees that decide about grants, they're full of people from the mainstream that do not take risks or they have their own culture, which takes a lot of risks without any evidence. It doesn't matter. But there is a popular theme within their community. And they advocated, as a result, what you end up with is not much deviation from the beaten path. This is not a good funding approach. I think that we should listen to those who pay the bill, the public, you know, that is the theme of the new White House trying to attend to the interests of the public. And I think the same should be true of academia. So if the public really wants to know whether we have a neighbor, we should put money into it. It's not just about looking for microbes, which we spend billions of dollars without any hesitation on. It's also hedging our bets and trying to look for intelligent beings. Why is that considered speculative? We exist. There are hundreds of billions of stars like the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, with a few percent of them at least having a planet like the size of the Earth at the same separation. Why would that be complete speculation to imagine that something like us happened there, that we are not the first to join the party, that there are many other civilizations not only existed, but died by now. Most of them died. If you think about humans on Earth, there were 117 billion or so. And most of them are dead. There are only 8 billion that are alive right now. So I think this is just an example of a subject the public cares about. That's why there are so many speculations, and science can address it with the same telescopes that are used to discover the power spectrum of fluctuations, or to discover maybe microbes after $10 billion are invested by 2040. Like, why can't? Why do we have to shy away from what the public really cares about? This is just one example, but it exists also in the context of, you know, health issues that the public and the safety of AI would be a major public policy issue. Why can't we invest in that? You know, there are lots of why aren't philosophers worried about the age of AI and philosophy of technologies of the future? You know, what to do about the interaction of humans with the machine instead of worrying about what Aristotle and Plato said, you know, thousands of years ago, they didn't have computers. That's not relevant for society. So philosophy departments should gear up to address the challenges of technologies of the future. That's what they should do. Well, it's not heresy. I think academia is sort of completely disconnected from society, and I think the solution for it to gain more credibility among politicians would be to reboot its interests.

Overhead Rates and the Academic Elite

02:44:01

Brian Keating: So, Eric, you've been, you know, critical of academia and some of the people within it, but what do you see as the future of it in a world where perhaps our mutual friend, who you introduced me to, Jay, about AI hopefully will be confirmed as NIH, as the director of NIH. But there's been cutbacks threatened as high as, you know, reducing rather the indirect costs, which is what we, you know, butter the bread around the university with, to 15% from 60% at Harvard. Right, 60. What is your overhead rate, Avi?

02:44:33

Avi Loeb: Yeah—

02:44:33

Eric Weinstein: We're jumping all over the place—

02:44:34

Avi Loeb: Sixty-five or so. Yeah. I mean, Harvard gets more than half a billion a year from NIH. And the change in the overhead right now would imply hundreds of millions. Sorry. But that's its deficit. Yeah.

02:44:51

Eric Weinstein: Look. I'm all for trying to say things to show that we are men of the people. But to be honest with you, I am a man of the people by being part of the elite. Right. This is what happens with snipers, right? You don't want an average sniper. You want an elite sniper when your niece has been kidnapped by drug lords. We are supposed to act on behalf of people who do not look like us. I am not like a Navy SEAL or a Delta Force guy. Right. Those are tier-one operators. They're very different than the rest.

02:45:26

Brian Keating: Avi was. Yep.

02:45:28

Eric Weinstein: Okay. But quite honestly, you're not supposed to ask the public, hey, should we spend money developing spectral sequences and algebraic topology? They don't know, in the same way that if you go to your doctor and you start actually trying to understand the way your ligaments and tendons and muscles fit together for your bum knee, you're not going to understand unless you really study. So I think we should be very careful and realize what Avi is saying is that in areas where we show that we are particularly bizarrely disinterested, the public should be guiding us. I think that makes sense. But let's be entirely honest, a lot of the reason that things look the way they do is because of very old, cryptic arrangements. So, for example, how do you deal with the fact that only like nine countries have nuclear weapons? We have managed to stop that spread despite the fact that we teach physics. So we've undertaken all sorts of things that aren't clear on the surface. Let's just take overhead for the moment. Yeah. What is overhead? Overhead is a tacit agreement that we will have federally funded universities that will be allowed to be nominally private. And the idea was that you take the worst universities, let's say the University of East Virginia doesn't exist. Okay? The University of East Virginia, let's imagine that it's like a tier-five university. It's way down there. It's going to—the senator from East Virginia is going to say, look, why does Harvard get all the money? This isn't fair. So what we did is we came up with an overhead system, and the overhead system was supposed to channel federal money over weaker universities to our strongest universities that were supposed to remain nominally private or very fine public ones, like the UC system where Brian resides. Now, the problem with this is that when you have a guy with a chainsaw and shades with bling going around and the person is saying, look, can you believe this? 60% overhead for indirect costs? Well, that has nothing to do with anything that was always fake. You know, this is very much like, you know, I gave the example if you started auditing Israel after October 7th and you said, wait a minute, do you realize how much we're spending to give Hezbollah low-cost pagers and walkie-talkies and provide them customer support? Why are we doing this? It's madness. You would not understand what that line item was. So a lot of what's going on with overhead is that nobody is being open and honest that it was a cryptic system. Same thing with graduate students. Graduate students are not students. They're workers. But we call them students so that they don't organize. And the idea was that we would create a very fine workforce that had very few rights, and it would get to become the professor of tomorrow. While the university system was growing from below 10% before the war to over 50% after the war, educating the population, that was a one-time expansion. As a result, we can't pay the workers in the graduate workforce with professorships where they get to train 20 students of their own, because if you raise 20 to higher and higher powers, it spills out of control. So what you have is you have a system in which even the professors have no idea why the system was set up the way it was. They don't know its history. They don't know how the changes in law occurred. They don't know why the rules are the way they are, and they can't defend the system. Because ultimately, right now you've got a guy with a chainsaw saying, I don't understand this. Why do you know this?

02:49:12

Avi Loeb: Eric, there is, I should say, an issue of administration and bureaucracy growing much bigger in recent decades compared to what it used to be before. Because the natural tendency of bureaucratic organizations is that they always grow in size. And when I arrived at Harvard 32 years ago, you know, I had a direct line to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Now I have to go through many deans to reach that person. And it's true that, you know, instead of the administrators serving the faculty, which was their original task when I arrived, now they are actually monitoring the faculty, so they're in control, and—

02:49:58

Eric Weinstein: Fire them.

02:50:01

Avi Loeb: Sorry?

02:50:01

Eric Weinstein: Fire them all.

02:50:02

Avi Loeb: Well, yeah, but the question, I don't know if it's easy. You know, I spoke about it with Harvard's provost. I brought up, and that was when we had turmoil a year ago at Harvard. And I brought him seven points that I recommended. And one of them was reduce the level of bureaucracy and administration. That's the one that he had most issues with. It's not easy.

02:50:27

Brian Keating: Now, Eric, you've recently tried to engage, you know, on the subject of immigration, which is a part of the lifeblood of major university research. You point out the distinction between college and university and talk about this. First, I want to hear Avi's perspective. What is the meaning of this? I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy, Harvard class of 2007. You know, it's been sort of, I would say, maybe a little bit condescending, but anyway, Eric tried to engage with him. I don't think it was successful yet, Eric. I'm not sure if that's the case or not, but what is your feeling about it? I mean, obviously you're an immigrant to this country. You're an alien we talked about earlier, but not the kind that doesn't obey laws.

02:51:08

Avi Loeb: You legal, by the way, Eric, are you a legal alien?

02:51:11

Brian Keating: No. No, you.

02:51:13

Avi Loeb: Oh, I am, of course, I'm an alien, yes.

02:51:15

Brian Keating: You are legal now, you're a citizen.

02:51:17

Avi Loeb: I am legal. Yeah. And, you know, my wife always says that she's waiting for someone to pick me up because I came from another star province.

H1-b Visa: Eric Bloch's Conspiracy and The Immigration Act of 1990

02:51:24

Brian Keating: So talk about class of 2007 Harvard graduate, his debates and that interest. You know, in kind of what do we need in terms of Americans, are they lazy, you know, are they incapable of doing the job?

02:51:38

Eric Weinstein: Wait, you're going to start with Vivek's framing of this whole thing? No thank you! I don't want anything to do with it.

02:51:42

Brian Keating: Yeah. All right. Well, how would you frame it, Eric? How would you frame the most intriguing debate to two professors who have many immigrants that have come in? I have currently students working on visas here, H-1B and otherwise, and postgraduate work as well. How would you phrase the question to Avi in terms of

02:51:59

Eric Weinstein: What question?

02:52:00

Brian Keating: Well, the question is what is the appropriate amount of, say, H-1B visas or what is the appropriate amount of foreign graduate labor, as you called it?

02:52:11

Eric Weinstein: Zero H-1B.

02:52:11

Brian Keating: Why?

02:52:14

Eric Weinstein: Because it was installed by the Immigration Act of 1990, which was a conspiracy between Eric Bloch, who sat at the NSF under Ronald Reagan, and this Government University Industry Research Roundtable to destroy the ability of American scientific workers to bargain with their employers. Period. The end. It's pure evil.

02:52:38

Brian Keating: So what is the right amount of non-domestic labor then at a research university in a physics department?

02:52:46

Avi Loeb: I think it's really important to bring talent from the world. I mean, in my mind the strength of the US and, you know, it was taking advantage of that and developing the best science in the world. I mean, we all know about it. And by the way, I came and then I was supported by an H-1B visa when I started as a postdoc. And so I think we need to come up with a policy such that that will fulfill the needs of the tech industry, by the way, that is very different than it used to be and what kind of skills are particularly important. And then train those people and not let them go to other countries. We don't want them to develop the same industries of the future elsewhere. And so I think we should be at this. There should be a committee in the White House looking into that and deciding about the amount that would fulfill the needs of the high-tech industry and academia and come up with a policy that would follow that. And it's really important to bring the best stuff. And of course, they need to stand up to high standards in order to get that permit. And there should be some kind of a gauge of the quality of the person you're bringing.

02:54:04

Brian Keating: Okay. So, Eric, any response for you from,

02:54:07

Eric Weinstein: I mean, I don't want to do this this way. This is very silly. Look, the basic point is that the NSF and the National Academy of Sciences are the worst enemy of young scientists. They have specifically conspired, in 1986, using a guy named Myles Boylan, who was an economist from Case Western Reserve, to destroy the ability of American scientists to earn the wages that the markets would have assigned. So you're asking people basically to become scientists only to compete with other people paid with pieces of paper that mean nothing to them. You can't give me anything in the form of a visa because I'm already a citizen. It doesn't make any sense. I've written an entire paper about how you bring the best and the brightest from all over the world into the U.S. using pure free-market techniques, something called Coasian Rights. Every economist knows what they are. There is exactly zero interest in this because what the employers really want is a giant discount on labor. They are not really interested in the best and the brightest. Why? In part because we have the best and the brightest generally here. Now it's not universally true. You know, every one of us has colleagues from overseas. But what I will say is that an integral part of getting access to these funny visas, which not only bring people but bring benefits to employers by taking them away from employees—what you have is the system is completely misdesigned. And when I say, you know, you could get the same people over here, but you would get no benefit to the employers and the Americans would not be disincentivized from coming in. And we already educate people at an extraordinary level. There's zero interest because the real interest is in money. It's not in science, it's not in, you know, there's always been room for the top fraction of a percent. Those people aren't even on H-1B. They're supposed to be on E visas. So in part, what you have is I would push everybody to go back to my paper called "Migration for the Benefit of All." And I would point out that there's no interest because, quite honestly, the CEOs who claim to be free marketeers, who only care about efficiency, are anything but. They're people who want to move more money into their pockets. They don't care whether it comes out of the pockets of their labor force, which is one of the reasons why Gini coefficients have been going up.

02:56:34

Avi Loeb: Why don't you, if you were to check how many of these CEOs came from foreign countries, wouldn't you find a large fraction—I mean, just think about your friends, or—

02:56:42

Eric Weinstein: One of the worst arguments ever, Avi, because what happens is that there's no way of measuring the displacement of technical talent in the U.S. that didn't enter those fields. When I think about pushing my own children to go into science and technology, I think I'm an idiot. And why is that? It's because we've rigged the game against them. And so, in part, when you talk about these brilliant futures and how do we make this attractive just the way it's an asteroid was heading our way, quite honestly what's happened is that, you know, typically, families descended from European stock who were here before 1965 when the Great Immigration Act was passed, figured out that this is a lousy place to go with a first-class education. Why would anybody want to become precarious when they could have second and third homes? Why would they want to live in a different state as their spouse and wait until their late 30s to have their first kid? Nobody wants it!

02:57:39

Brian Keating: So, Avi, recently Eric was taking an uncharacteristically, you know, provocative form when we here at research universities are supposed to be dedicated to scholarship and discovery above all else, not teaching politics or business spin-offs are supposed to be exclusive, not inclusive. A shot at what he, you know, sometimes refers to as the distributed idea suppression complex chokes real science. I'll ask you, Avi, you get a big bag of money. Now, for people show up on your doorstep. Not the three that came last time. And they put a bag of bitcoin in front of, I don't know, they give you the latitude to do whatever you want to do, but you have to create Loeb University. What does it look like and what's included, what's not included and what would be the main focus of it? Would it be as exclusively oriented towards a betterment of humanity through science, as Eric might suggest?

02:58:35

Avi Loeb: Yes. It would, and cultivate innovation, free thinking, multiple opinions being discussed and then, you know, trying to get a verdict as to which one is more likely to be successful based on the information we have and then pursuing it in the scientific way. So basically doing what science was designed to do, but without, you know, the need to show that you are smart, which is really poisoning the academic culture without the jealousy that comes with awards and prizes and pushing people aside to get funded. So it will be more about the pursuit of the truth, so to speak, and more about the Socratic approach of allowing a discussion without taking the poison at the end and allowing a discussion of heresy, you know, things that are not conventional, things that are not well accepted and trying to figure to get to the bottom of things rather than, you know, poisoning those who the society claims are ruining the education of the youth the way that he's happened in the days of Socrates and I would be, you know, I would say that nowadays academia has not evolved much from that kind of culture where any deviant from a beaten path is being punished for that. And so my university, well, first of all, I would define research areas or questions that we have no clue about, that we can make progress. It will not be whether at the Planck energy, you know, the uncertainty principle is modified because we will never get the Planck energy in any foreseeable future and accelerate those.

03:00:24

Brian Keating: So you told me that gravitational waves from B-mode polarization, if we didn't see it, would be evidence that the universe inflated so much that we're not able to see the gravitons as individual unknowns. Thank you. I.

03:00:35

Avi Loeb: I wrote a piece.

03:00:36

Brian Keating: My career on this.

03:00:37

Avi Loeb: Yeah, I wrote a paper about that. But, you know, as a practical matter, I would rather focus on things that we can accomplish in our lifetime because we live for a short time. Of course, you know, if our life was extended, then now another aspect is, you know, I started in philosophy. I was very interested in the humanities, and I think humanities of the future, as I mentioned before, are to be developed because there is a huge amount of interplay between humans and machines that was not addressed by past discussions. There is dark ethical questions. There are legal issues. There are privacy issues and there are policy, you know, political issues as too, that have very relevance to national security. And all these can be addressed within the Loeb University. I think that is a completely new territory that was not addressed before. And of course, if we find aliens, you know, there would be all kinds of questions about alien psychology, alien literature, history, alien archeology, all of these disciplines that used to be dealing with what we have here on Earth will now gain a more cosmic perspective. You know, like, what happens in the galaxy? Diversity and inclusion will be about alien cultures, you know, not about humans coming from different countries. And so, you know, the sky's the limit as to what the universe can offer us. But I will try to be as imaginative as possible. It should be fun to be a member of my community. It will be all about learning new things with a sense of humility, not pretending to know the answer in advance, not lecturing to the public. Actually having a lot of engagements with the public, telling them what we are studying and making it fun. And I think, you know, this is the, I mean, obviously there are new universities being established. There is one in Texas, the University of where the issue of freedom of speech is being highlighted. But I see beyond that, beyond the freedom of speech, there is also, you know, the issue of what should science work on, should it be more relevant to society? And having innovation in technology, in science, in the humanities being cultivated, which is not addressed in the new universities that.

03:02:57

Brian Keating: No, that's true. And I just want to serve on the DEI committee, University of Austin, Texas. Avi, one last question, maybe to tie in to some things that Eric and I have talked about in the past, it seems that there is a fundamental lack of curiosity in many of my colleagues and many of the people I get to interview. I think they talk their book literally sometimes and begrudge them for that. I've, you know, boys got to sell this book, right? But talk about the kind of lack of curiosity that you see outside of your field. Let's go outside of our own domains in particle physics and fundamental physics, which is obviously, you know, Eric considers, I believe, the pinnacle of not just physics, but of science, but of civilization. I think I agree with him, but the fact that people are curious about these big topics and it takes someone like Eric to talk, why are there three generations of fermions? That's a classic thing. Why don't you study those topics? I mean, yes, these are wonderful, but let me just steel-man that, what would you do in terms of if you had to do something other than search for extraterrestrial technology, intelligence, etc.? Would you be interested in these bigger, you know, ultimate questions of? Yeah.

03:04:03

Avi Loeb: Definitely.

03:04:03

Brian Keating: And the barrier to our understanding of them, what is lacking beyond the sociology? We talked about that, Eric and I fight about that all the time. But physical limitations, mathematics, do we need new math? Is AI going to help us? What are the limitations to answer those questions that Eric wants to have answered before he departs this mortal coil at age?

03:04:21

Brian Keating: May of Astrum.

03:04:23

Avi Loeb: So, in the context of large datasets which we are getting into right now, you know, the Rubin Observatory will have a huge amount of data. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has a huge amount of data. AI will become very useful at, you know, going through these datasets that the human brain cannot really accomplish. And we already saw a Nobel Prize in physics this year that is related to, I think that's the trend of the future, will see AI assisting scientists. There will be AI agents that are cultivating new discoveries. The question is, who will get the Nobel Prize if the AI system is the one to crack the puzzle, which should it get the reward, or is it the person who asked the question? There will be subtle issues about that.

Where Did All the Murdered Theories Go?

03:05:09

Brian Keating: Well maybe I will write, you know, sequel to "Losing the Nobel Prize." How about that, Eric? Eric, product placement? I got a product placement there. Eric, what do you wish that people at universities were more curious about? Would it be, I mean, if you could just say we need a Manhattan Project to figure out how to get off this rock without chemical?

03:05:27

Eric Weinstein: I said this a million times, nobody's out there. The part of the problem is the universities are blotting up all the credibility, you know?

03:05:37

Brian Keating: But, Eric, stop with the universities. I want to say, what would you do? Yes, I know, but what would you devote physics—forget about the limitations of the real universities that Avi and I work at, okay? And that you've been affiliated with. But tell me, what would you devote and how would it work to get, like, what do we need Musk to do or somebody else to do?

03:05:55

Brian Keating: To actually do the solution to the be—

03:05:57

Eric Weinstein: I don’t want to be here with my begging bowl. But I'll just say—

03:05:59

Brian Keating: No, not your begging bowl. No, what would you do?

03:06:02

Eric Weinstein: The first thing is that you have to figure out where are all the murdered theories. If there's only one game in town, the only way it got to be the only game in town is by leaving a bunch of theories in a ditch. So right now, there's an unmarked grave called 1984 to 2025. Okay? I would go and exhume everything in that grave that was put out of its misery by some string theorist, quantum gravity theorist, or otherwise murderous person in the physics community. And I would say, let's get back to the real problems. Before 1984—let me remind everyone what the problems of physics were up until Ed Witten started telling us it was to quantize gravity, right?—Why are there three generations? Why is nature flavor chiral? Why are there 16 particles in a generation? Why SU(3) cross SU(2) cross U(1)? Why these internal quantum numbers? Why does the Higgs have a quartic potential of the type that it does? Why are the Yukawa couplings present? Right? It's the same thing that it's always been. We have to recognize that what we've been through is a tiny number of people completely subverting the field, driving it into a ditch, burying the bodies of everybody who tried to point out that this is wrong. And they've in general quoted two things to do this, one of which is that quantum gravity, which is an idea of Bryce DeWitt coming from about 1952 when he was a postdoc at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Bombay. And the other one is the misapplication of Ken Wilson and his renormalization program with effective theories to basically say, look, nobody's doing fundamental physics. We are only doing electroweak scale physics. Let's stop pretending that we can get to the Planck mass. Obviously, everything in between here and there is just impossible. We were much more successful before these two ideas descended on the physics community. Somehow, the effect of becoming sophisticated about effective theory, which I, by the way, think is a huge insight of Ken Wilson’s, it's just been misapplied, and the claims of Bryce DeWitt, which I don't have the same positive fuzzy feeling about, before people had those two pieces of sophistication, we were burning up the track. We were amazing. Then we became very sophisticated and we patted ourselves on the back for saying we figured out why we can't make progress. So I think it's really important to reverse the brain rot that was brought about by claiming that quantum gravity is the problem, or at times, which it absolutely is not, and that these other things are mere artifacts of the physical world that we happen to live in. In fact, they are not. And coming from the Wu-Yang Dictionary, which is really the Simons-Yang Dictionary, what we can see is that we are almost certainly sitting atop of a differential geometry of which we are ignorant, that is far more beautiful than the theories that we know, and integrating the Higgs field in particular, which is really only needed because of the asymmetry of the weak force, should be a top differential geometric priority. Higgs fields that people work on in mathematics are valued in the adjoint bundle. They're not valued where a real Higgs field is. We are not doing real science. And I'm just going to say very quickly, how do you know when somebody is doing real science? One, the dimension is four that they begin with; two, they usually have a 1,3 signature metric; they're usually dealing with three generations of fermions; the group SU(3) is present. If somebody is working in two dimensions with SU(2) in Euclidean signature, that is not physics, that is a toy theory. And the problem is we've allowed a group of people now in their 70s, 80s, and 90s to spend their entire careers playing with toys when they were supposed to be doing physics.

03:09:59

Brian Keating: Well, I like that you mentioned that about, you know, the exhumation of bodies, Eric, because it reminds me, you know, we can kind of flip Max Planck. He can make him roll in his grave. We can say that science advances now, one exhumation after another, okay, at a time. I'll have a yes, please.

03:10:17

Avi Loeb: Yeah. Just wanted to add that, you know, there was this notion that unification and elementary particles really are the future of physics. But there is another dimension which is complex systems that involve many bodies and trying to figure out their complex behavior. And the human brain is obviously one such complex system. We now have AI that could potentially try to imitate some aspects of it. Artificial neural networks. I would just like to advertise the fact that complex systems are not less fundamental, because there are emergent phenomena and we are obsessed with them, such as free will consciousness. That might really be just incarnations of the complex human brain. That's all. And so the entire field of psychology may be just a derivative of a complex system behaving in some ways that are hard for us to figure out. And so study of complex systems could become much more, you know, it's.

03:11:12

Eric Weinstein: Absolutely, it's worthy, but it's not more fundamental, Avi. As you said, it's emergent. So I think we have to do, if I can be in violent agreement with you, I'm only disagreeing by virtue of the fact that we need to be both respectful of the fact that not all questions that are worth talking about are reductionist. Many are emergent. Very often it's the property of the solutions, let's say, rather than the property of the Lagrangian terms, that matter. So we have to make sure that we don't get overly reductionist. That's always been a temptation.

03:11:43

Avi Loeb: But in terms of what affects your life, especially if you get married, it's these complex systems affect your life much more.

03:11:50

Eric Weinstein: The problem, Avi, is that things will go towards psychology, anthropology, sociology. And it's when the National Science Foundation started taking in many of these weaker fields because these things were very important. But then there's not a lot you can say about marriage. John Gottman has tried to study this, it’s very tricky stuff.

03:12:08

Avi Loeb: No, but in the age of AI there could be a revolution, because now we can process large datasets and see patterns that we couldn't see before. That's what I'm saying. Now, the other thing I wanted to say is, there is a question of incentive. You know, what is right now, I think the poison in academia is that the incentive to get the grant money and to get prizes or awards and promotions, you know, pushes people to, you know, it's just like a regression to the mean. They're trying to accommodate the wishes of other people, and they're regressing to the mean rather than deviating from the mean and being original. And you can create a culture in which the deviants will be rewarded. The people who innovate to explore new territories that nobody has looked into. These are the people who would be rewarded because even if they fail, you learn something new. When Albert Einstein made these three mistakes between 1935 and 1940, he argued that the gravitational waves do not exist. Black holes do not exist. Quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance. He was wrong. But the three experimental teams that discovered he was wrong got the Nobel Prize over the past decade. So what I'm saying is taking risks is really key. And the problem right now is, you know, you are being pushed to the mainstream without, you know, there is no reward that you can benefit from. But in fact, there is a lot of scrutiny that you get when you deviate.

03:13:39

Brian Keating: So I mean, Avi, do you think, I mean, I've had this debate with Eric, so I'm not telling tales out of school, but there's this notion that Eric's, you know, promulgating and I think there's geometric unity, which is, you know, unequivocally unique. And, but it's also unequivocally receiving, you know, very little attention compared to the, as we already mentioned, string theory and other things. When we think about, you know, a geometric approach, as you said, you already offer one alternative. I don't know if I fully understand the implications because it's just the first time I encountered it. But, you know, is there danger of, you know, fighting the previous war, so to speak? You know, Einstein was so successful, the differential geometry, the geometric methods, Chern, Simons—all the different, you know, wonderful things that are mentioned. Do you think that actually going back, sort of, so to speak, is the right approach or is it that we've fundamentally failed to explore in full, great detail these alternative theories of people like Eric and Peter Woit and, you know, we've talked about others as well?

03:14:37

Avi Loeb: You know, the biggest disappointment, I mean, we started by developing accelerators and then every generation of new accelerator leaders, you know, over the 20th century revealed new physics, a lot of phenomena that allowed us to figure out the Standard Model. And now we are at an age where you build the biggest accelerator, and the only thing it does is confirm an idea from the 1960s, the Higgs boson. And that's all. And there is no clear evidence for new physics. And, you know, so then people ask, okay, well, how do you know it's around the corner? Is there anything and maybe we should try something else. And I'm very much in favor of trying something else there. Different ways of getting new physics than just pushing the energy frontier. But we have to be imaginative.

03:15:25

Eric Weinstein: Met with them. This something huge happened that wasn't the Higgs and that was that all of those supersymmetry candidates got ruled out!

03:15:34

Avi Loeb: Yeah, I mentioned that before, but that is a negative thing.

03:15:38

Eric Weinstein: No, it's not negative at all! If our community would listen to it.

03:15:43

Avi Loeb: Right.

03:15:44

Eric Weinstein: It's one of the biggest clues out there. Whatever—let me just say this—if you think about supersymmetry as a freeway, my claim is, right freeway, wrong off-ramp.

03:15:55

Avi Loeb: Well, I mentioned in the past.

03:15:56

Eric Weinstein: What we tried to do with predicting superpartners, all the superpartners were the wrong off-ramp. If you want to save the idea, you have to hold the conference that says we had two big ideas in the 1970s, one of which was grand unification, the other of which was supersymmetry. Both of them didn't get realized in the most trivial and obvious way possible. Let's go back to those ideas, which are great, unbelievably good ideas, and ask how would we reinstantiate them? But we don't do that, do we?

03:16:28

Avi Loeb: That's right, I agree.

03:16:30

Brian Keating: So as we begin to kind of wrap it up, bring the podcast in for a landing, I want to thank you guys. So, Eric, you did mention that you had this great, you know, where you had an experience recently at Caltech, when you hear the modern-day, you know, kind of contenders for these things, are they fundamentally establishing a level of curiosity that you feel is going to be pursued, even if it's not right? In other words, even if something you don't agree with? And if so, how do—yeah, so where do we go next?

03:17:01

Eric Weinstein: You tell me when we can finally have the argument about quantum gravity is not the holy grail of theoretical physics. It's not supposed to be what takes our energy. We are finding that it has failed. We have to have some sort of come-to-Jesus conference in which we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we tried many things that we now know don't work. If we do not have that, we cannot ask the question, doesn't anybody else have any other ideas? Now, the thing that I can't understand is you have a person who is like starving, you know, dying of starvation for progress. And they're sitting next to potentially food. But everything that they could eat, they have a different complaint. Oh, I don't like that after lunch. And, you know, that's not to my taste. Maybe for you, etc. Well, ultimately it's time to go through everybody's idea that is not quantum gravity, that is not string theoretic, that is not loop quantum gravity. And this is a big difference between what I would call the programs and the individuals. One of the things that I found very interesting is that the string theorists are a program, and the reason that they see loop quantum gravity is the only possible thing that they have as a rival, which they're embarrassed by it because it's clearly wrong to them. But my point is that it's a program. And the program people only see programs. I'm much more interested in the freaks, the weirdos, the neurodivergent, everybody who has a personal program. I may dislike Stephen Wolfram's attempt to remove the continuum, but it's at least original. I may think that Peter Woit's two theories about, in particular SU(3) cross SU(2) cross U(1), are not correct, but at least I understand what he's trying to do. He's trying to say, why is the weak force encoded as either on or off, rather than just complex conjugate? We care, at least he talks about E8. It's clear to me that he's got a mistake in his situation that can't get cured. But I understand that he's trying to say that there are novel unifications of fermions and bosons from the point of fractional spin and integrals, and it just doesn't work at the level of quantization. All of these situations are crying out for the same thing. It's time to stop protecting the quantum gravity group and expose them to the full fury of everything it is that they've used their position as referees to suppress. The game is over, and it's time to move on.

Shelter Island III

03:19:43

Brian Keating: Beyond that, though, you had a very brilliant proposal that you and I have talked about on Modern Wisdom last September. And that's basically what I summarized in my video about you and Lenny Susskind, others, which I called Shelter Island III, which would be, you know, kind of a conclave, you know, to use the Oscar winner title, of the Greatest Minds. And I think we could have the Freaks and Geeks and everybody that you mentioned, Eric. But I'm curious who would we invite, Avi. We're going to Shelter Island Three. We're going to the Ram's Head Inn. We're going to have, you know, a third generation of—we're, by the way, multiple Nobel Prizes, you know, from Lamb and Schwinger and Feynman. All these great things came out of it. Do you think that's a good idea? Can we get funding for it? Can Galileo Project be involved? Can Eric and I be involved? Can we get the greatest minds together? Even those that Eric, to his credit for his integrity, disagrees with violently and vehemently, they just named. And even people from the orthodoxy. Your colleagues, Lisa Randall, your colleague Cumrun Vafa. Who would we invite and what should we aim? Papers?

03:20:47

Eric Weinstein: By the way, Lisa’s much more open-minded.

03:20:49

Brian Keating: No, I know, I agree. Avi, can we do it? Can we do it on Shelter Island? I can get the venue. I can pay for the Ram's Head Inn for a week.

03:20:57

Avi Loeb: We can definitely do it. I can immediately say who I would not invite to be there. Well, I can say privately, but you said.

03:21:08

Brian Keating: You'd say it. Come on. Spill the ethics, Ethan Siegel.

03:21:13

Avi Loeb: These are the people who are dogmatic and, you know, and also people that, you know, when I said, oh, that's an interesting expectation from string theory. Would you then, if we don't see it in nature, would that rule out string theory? And the person would say, no, it actually rules out my idea of connect, because string theory must be right. That kind of mindset to me is not very productive. The mindset should be, let's think of things that can be tested and validated because, you know, it's not about job security. It's about figuring out nature. And nature is under no contract to have the most beautiful theory or the thing that makes us look smart when we deal with fancy math. So I would invite people who are original in their thinking and willing to, you know, and that includes, of course, using the universal laboratory. And I should say that, you know, altogether, it's really important to gain credibility from the political system so we can get funded for the future. And I would be very excited to be involved in a new way of doing science that is more innovative, open-minded, and cares about understanding the physical reality we live in, not in showing that we are smart, which is pretty much the current status.

03:22:41

Brian Keating: What types of people would you have there be? I mean, let's name some names of people you would have there. I assume Ethan Siegel won't be getting an invite to tears. And do you think this is realistic? I mean, do you think the appetite is the same as it was collegiately or not back in the 40s, when these first two conferences occurred?

03:22:57

Avi Loeb: Yeah, I think the appetite depends on the culture that you cultivate and, you know, right now, the young people are worried about job prospects, and they align themselves with the leaders of the field just in order to impress them and get jobs. And when they are junior faculty, in order to get funded for their students to be supported, that is really the mechanics of being in academia right now. We should change the incentive if there is, you know, if there is funding available for innovative thinking and for, you know, sketching a new architecture rather than being a technocrat, you know, there are people who are able to build a building, they know how to put the bricks. And these are the technicians that also will connect the electricity and so forth. But then there are the architects. These are the people that think big about how the building should look like, and those are the people that we should invite, the architects, not the clinicians, you know, that's my take on this.

03:23:53

Brian Keating: Eric, who would you invite?

03:23:55

Eric Weinstein: I’d invite a lot of my enemies, to be entirely honest.

03:23:59

Brian Keating: Praise the law.

03:24:01

Eric Weinstein: Well, no, because in part, you know, the point is that that's how they roll, is that they don't invite people, you know, who are pseudoscientists or whatever. It's like, for God's sake, get over yourself, guys. You've been failing for four decades. It's not exactly your strong card to play. You know, my feeling about it is I would love to see people like Lisa Randall, like Avi. I'd like to see Frank Wilczek there. I don't know if Ed 't Hooft is still—

03:24:27

Brian Keating: He's there. I talked to him. I talked to him.

03:24:30

Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But in general, you know, I look, I'd love to have—nothing better than to go at it with Lenny Susskind, who doesn't seem to be able to remember ever speaking to me, which I find very funny.

03:24:41

Brian Keating: Who?

03:24:42

Eric Weinstein: Exactly, you know. And in particular, I think it would be very much fun to have some of the talking heads who represent physics to the outside world, because, in fact, a lot of those people really aren't, you know, up to the task. And I think that in part it would be very violent. It would be very brutal. It would be very constructive, very creative, very exciting. And we haven't had this because what we do is we have, you know, in professional wrestling, you call them promotions. You have people who agree to fight each other according to a script. And that way nobody ever gets hurt. You just, you know, you keep going. My feeling about this is anybody who wants to come and claim, oh, we're the only fish in the sea, we're the only birds in the sky, that's going to be an incredibly short ride. We just have to make sure that we do it on video. And then, in my experience, those people will just not show up. They will say, I'm too busy. That's their favorite line. You know, I don't want to engage in a spectacle. This is beneath me. And so you'll have a very clear record of basically who's been swimming without their shorts while the tide’s been coming in. When the tide goes out, you find out what’s really going on.

03:25:52

Avi Loeb: It should definitely be documented in order to encourage young people to speak up.

03:25:57

Brian Keating: Well, I've actually talked about this with Luis Alvarez-Gaumé at Stony Brook. And in all seriousness, we have discussed actually doing this. And I think maybe this is the year it happens. And I just want to finish up, you know, with,

03:26:10

Avi Loeb: One thing, Brian, just as a suggestion, if Eric can bring in those high-net-worth technical support people that will actually perhaps fund the new type of science that we are talking about, that would be amazing.

03:26:26

Brian Keating: Maybe that's like, you know, me asking somebody to give me good recommendations to go surfing. You know, you're at Harvard. I don't think there's too many places with the $68 billion endowment that has raised tuition faster than inflation has let in fewer people than a Starbucks admits every—

03:26:41

Eric Weinstein: No, let me just say one thing on this point. If you want to actually get the smart money to come, you treat them like brains before you treat them like wallets. And the first thing we should do if we're going to do that is we should have a day or two where we get those people early to come to Shelter Island.

03:26:59

Avi Loeb: Yes.

03:27:00

Eric Weinstein: And we put together a program so that they can understand what's being fought over because they're very smart. But the fact is they don't have the particular training in what this is. So the most important thing is, if you look at something, you know, it's a little bit like staring at a woman's neckline and she says, eyes up here. When you're talking to very rich people, the key question is, would you be happy to be talking to them if they had less money? Right?

03:27:28

Brian Keating: I was going to ask you, would we invite Elon Musk if we knew he wasn't going to give money? If you knew he was.

03:27:33

Avi Loeb: Or.

03:27:34

Brian Keating: Or Peter Thiel, if they weren't going to give money, would you?

03:27:36

Eric Weinstein: I’ve gone to a physics conference with Peter Thiel, okay? And, you know, I'll just tell you what happened. Somebody will talk down to Peter for 45 minutes and then they'll say, do you have any idea what I'm talking about? And then Peter will ask three super incisive questions indicating that he has a lot of background in the area. And it's hysterically funny. So, you know, my feeling about this is I don't know what Elon knows and doesn't know, I don't know what Peter knows and doesn't know. Yuri Milner is another person. We have to remember that both Jeff Bezos was going to be a physics major at Princeton, Bill Gates was going to do math at Harvard. All of these people in general are positively disposed towards physics until we screw it up—and math. And so it's really important, in my opinion, to not talk down to them, not talk up to them, but to actually say, look, you are the only people who are in a position to make allocation decisions without having to check with mommy and daddy. It's really important that you be able to follow this so that you can allocate the same way as if you were talking about a Sand Hill Road VC firm.

03:28:45

Avi Loeb: The other thing we need to convince them, Eric, is that this is more important than government efficiency.

03:28:52

Eric Weinstein: Well, you can convince Elon that survival is. But my claim is, are we serious about going beyond the Standard Model and general relativity, or have those things set into our brains as basically, well, that's never going to happen? I think that the most important thing to realize, whether you love or hate the new administration, doesn't matter which, it's filled with vitality. And quite honestly, they look at everything from the position of does it have huevos or does it not have huevos?

03:29:23

Avi Loeb: Right.

03:29:23

Eric Weinstein: And if it doesn't have huevos, they don't have the time of day. So if we're going to seriously get back to physics, the dangerous kind, the kind that goes to places where you don't know what the engineering applications are, and they could be astounding in terms of wealth and exploring the cosmos—or it could be game over for planet Earth, because it allows you directed energy weapons that you never thought possible, it doesn't matter. If we are talking about doing that, we can get them a lot more interested. If we're talking about grinding at a snail's breadth of progress in fields that almost certainly aren't going to work, because we've now realized that our current theories are a piece of 24th-century physics that mysteriously fell into the 20th century, you know, nobody's got time for that anymore.

03:30:07

Avi Loeb: Yeah, well, I have a title for the conference, "Into the Impossible."

03:30:13

Brian Keating: Oh, my God, the branding is just incredible. We'll give out these mugs, there'll be merch for everybody. Here's a mug, everybody. Guys, I want to thank you so much. This has been awesome. Eric, it's so great to see you, Avi, it's always great to talk to you. And we got to do more of these. And, you know, just on the advice topic of, or the subject of talking to the richest people in the world, they say, ask a rich person for money and you'll get advice. Ask them for advice, maybe you'll get money, but I don't know. Some of them are much more clever than we scientists think we are. So guys, thanks so much. Thank you for sending me that beautiful chunk of 'Oumuamua that I've got here. Eric, thank you for sending me this extract from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I hope that we'll talk many more times. Boys, this is so much fun. I wish everybody out there good luck. And I'm serious about this conference. We're going to make it happen. And we've got the contacts. I've got the time, stopped having kids a little recently, I was informed. No, my kids are an option. The only option. What, Avi?

03:31:16

Avi Loeb: As they often say, you had me at hello.

03:31:19

Brian Keating: Oh, that's right, I'll have what she's having now. That's what I like to say. Eric, Avi, todah rabah. Thank you so much. Great talking to you.

03:31:28

Eric Weinstein: Thanks, guys. Good to be with you.

03:31:30

Brian Keating: Bye, guys. So everyone out there that's still listening, I will encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. I am going to have on my best, my best attempt to get on folks like Lue Elizondo, as I mentioned, and keep it highly scientific, as is my want, respectful. I'm not going to, you know, do any backbiting or attacks. But there was a lot of controversy over his book and, you know, don't know why he hasn't come on yet. And he did send me a copy of his book. Let me know if you think that's a good idea. Otherwise, let me know what you think about these interviews where I do livestreams. I do try to ask many questions. There's so many questions. There's almost 2000 people watching it live right now. Many more, I think it's up to 10,000, I've seen it since we started about two hours ago. I'll probably take this down pretty soon and just edit it properly to get the initial portions of it looking nice and clean, as is my want. I've got a new studio here. Hopefully, let me know what you think of it. Give it a thumbs up if you like it. But do leave a comment what you liked and what you do. Ask Avi and Eric next time that they come on. And other guests that you recommend, I do listen, unlike many other podcast hosts, my goal is not to keep this behind the gated institutional narrative as network, as Eric calls the GIN.

03:32:50

Brian Keating: We have many conversations that are coming up on many topics. I'm also doing a lot more, what I call solo explainer episodes where we talk to none other than myself, my favorite guest. And I go through things such as the greatest controversies in cosmology and particle physics. I'm an experimental physicist. For those of you who don't know me, I got my PhD in experimental physics.

03:33:11

Brian Keating: I've been responsible for the greatest, yeah, experiments—not solely responsible, but I've been involved with them. And now I'm pleased to co-lead the Simons Observatory with some of my greatest colleagues that a person can ask for. This is a revolutionary instrument that will hopefully be one of the most definitive ones studying the cosmos. So I do experimental physics.

03:33:31

Brian Keating: I don't do theoretical physics. You might be able to tell that, but I'm very deeply invested in theoretical physics and also the subject of life outside of Earth. I think these are the most interesting questions we can attempt to solve in science. And I think we're at the threshold for the first time in human history of being able to solve them.

03:33:49

Brian Keating: So I put a lot of effort in this. I don't get any money from my university. I don't ask them for any money from it. I don't really do much advertising. I do it because I want to pay back the great minds of the past—people like, I know, people like Carl Sagan and others who had great influence on me in my life to become a popularizer, but also do great, hardcore, realistic science.

03:34:09

Brian Keating: I've got an h-index that's higher than my age, and I've got a lot of positive research papers and funding to show for it. So I love these ideas. I love the biggest thinkers. As you can tell, I am going to have this conference, like it or not. And I might upset some people.

03:34:25

Brian Keating: I'll invite all the people that you heard mentioned today, even people that normally wouldn't think would get along with some of the other people. But I think we need it. The time has come. And yeah, maybe we'll get our old friend Ellen to come out. But again, it's not about the money. We don't need money. And I don't want him to drop thousands.

03:34:41

Brian Keating: I disagree with Eric that we need tons of resources for a physicist to want to be doing what he or she does. For example, we just finished application season and admissions season here at UC San Diego, and every graduate school in the US and around the world, we have, you know, literally a thousand applications.

03:35:00

Brian Keating: And we have room for 30 or 40 people. And the salaries haven't gone up since last year. There's something in the zeitgeist—people are craving to learn about physics, to learn about math, to learn about artificial intelligence, computer science. And we're at the nexus of it here. And that's what I try to do on this podcast. I think it's unique, and I would appreciate it if you would spread the word.

03:35:20

Brian Keating: And the best thing you can do is really just to subscribe, share the videos, and leave comments on what you think is best. I hate having to do it. I do give back these meteorites that I show on the screen. BrianKeating.com/youtube/whitebrother. And you might be a lucky winner of one of these. Or if you have any .edu email address and live in the United States, you're guaranteed to win one of these.

03:35:43

Brian Keating: Because I want to get back to the young people I once was. And I'm young at heart, but I want to give back, and I want to do it for free, because that's the most interesting thing that's ever been invented is science. And some of the worst actors and actresses are given the best script by Mother Nature or God, or however you think of it.

03:36:01

Brian Keating: And we need to do better. We need to involve the public. You guys pay our salaries—you pay your taxes, you pay our salaries. And every single scientist is supported by you, the public, who demand better, demand more from the scientists. And if you're out there, there are 21 Nobel Prize winners that have been on this podcast. Many of them listen to the show.

03:36:17

Brian Keating: Many administrators, deans, provosts, and even university presidents are listening to this right now. Demand better of the scientists that work for you. We're giving a ton of money to the university through our overhead. And yes, that may be reduced in the era of lower IDC, but nevertheless, it's incredibly incumbent upon you and the administrators to take that burden down from the departments that, you know, in the bureaucracy, the structure that's causing tuition to rise three times faster than inflation.

03:36:44

Brian Keating: While the number of incoming freshmen seats is flat, two to negative in some cases. So demand better and you'll get better from the scientists. And like Eric says, treat them well. Not doing this for me—I'm tenured for 15 years now. It's not something I need, but I want it for the younger cohort, the younger demographic.

03:37:04

Brian Keating: Because literally, without scientists popularizing what they do, we're going to get cut off. We're going to get cut off until there's a war or something, and they really need us, and they're going to force us, you know, conscript us into the meat grinder. And I'm doing this as much for my fellow scientists as I am, you know, for my love of science.

03:37:21

Brian Keating: So it doesn't mean everyone should have a YouTube channel and a podcast and do TikToks and stuff like that. But you have to engage. Maybe just speaking at a local event, you go to an Astronomy on Tap night. You tend things at a local science museum, you start a newsletter, you start a Substack, a blog, or whatever you want.

03:37:40

Brian Keating: Just don't hone in on my YouTube, you know, AdSense revenue. I'm just kidding. This is, you know, the greatest privilege that you have is that you get to do science in a free society. And the more that people kind of expect of you to be better, to be politically more and culturally more relevant, the more those demand of you, the better you'll get.

03:38:00

Brian Keating: And the best part of it? I was very shy, I wasn't interested, I was an introvert. I didn't want to speak in front of a camera. There's a one-eyed cyclops I'm staring into right now, but I love it now. It's one of the greatest outlets that I have. And my friends joke, you know, whenever somebody meets me in the street, I've had this happen.

03:38:16

Brian Keating: You know, I had it happen. I was getting on an airline not too long ago, had it happen in Newark Airport not too long ago. And people come up to me and when I'm, whenever I'm with somebody, unfortunately, it's not with my kids. It happened once with my kids getting on an Alaska Airlines flight that way.

03:38:31

Brian Keating: But they recognize me from the podcast, and it felt so good. And I wanted to kind of rub it in the nose of my kids who, you know, no kid really respects their dads or their moms, you know, in their teenage years, right? But it's one of the best feelings that I have is that I get to engage.

03:38:47

Brian Keating: And I've honed my craft. You can see the studio looks a little bit better, a little bit nicer. Leave a thumbs up if you think that's true. And I'm trying to do better and putting more of my own personal resources into it to try to, you know, do what I can. And I don't expect you out there, if you're a scientist, to become a YouTuber, but you can certainly go and give talks to the public.

03:39:06

Brian Keating: Nobody's preventing you from doing that. You can certainly write a newsletter. You can certainly explain all your cool papers. And the best part of it all is you will become smarter, wiser, and perhaps even a better scientist. Don't forget you are a citizen and that scientific, you know, the definition that you declare yourself to be as great and we need you.

03:39:27

Brian Keating: We need you on that front line. We want you on that wall. As Eric says, you know, to defend and protect this country and our civilization. But you're also a citizen and you have to give back and expect more in the public. If you're out there in the public and you're not an administrator, provost, dean, president, or scientist, you can demand more.

03:39:44

Brian Keating: You are paying taxes. And that doesn't mean I'm going to write to every person who writes me a letter. I try to respond. I read them all. But you know, if you got some theory of everything or something like that, it's very hard for me to do that. Teach, you know, 50 students a day in my classes, plus advise three graduate students, including one who just got their PhD yesterday, Michael Randall.

03:40:03

Brian Keating: I'm very proud. He's my 21st PhD student to graduate in 21 years. Anyway, this has been a joy. It always is. Talking to great intellects like Avi, to Eric, and just talking to you. I really enjoy it. So let me know what you think about my explanation videos about the size of the universe or antimatter versus matter. I do come at things from an experimentalist point of view.

03:40:22

Brian Keating: I think you get a lot of attention to the Neil deGrasse Tysons, to the Lisa Randalls, to the Brian Greenes, to the Eric Weinsteins, to the Avi Loebs, etc., but the experimentalists that collect the data, we are in some cases, you know, I'm not going to toot my own horn too much, but my colleagues are the unsung heroes.

03:40:39

Brian Keating: There'd be no science without empiricism and the epistemic quest for data that then causes them to be more honest with us about their theories, and we need them to. I love them, but we need to have a healthy dose of experimental realism, and that's what I try to bring. I think it's unique. Maybe let me know if there are other people out there, other professors that are working on cool experiments and also doing a YouTube channel.

03:41:02

Brian Keating: But for now, stay tuned. I will have Sabine Hossenfelder on coming up later this month. I've got an incredible interview this coming weekend with none other than Shelly Wright, who is on the NASA UAP panel, worked with my friend and colleague David Spergel. And she'll be discussing what happened to her during that UFO report, the UAP report that she helped to construct.

03:41:26

Brian Keating: But she also talks about the hardcore scientific experiments that she's doing with lasers with cool, inexpensive telescopes so that they may be rapidly and very widely distributed to look for laser flashes at the picosecond, at the attosecond, at the very fastest timescales possible that are not natural in origin, from a pulsar, from a laser, from a supernova.

03:41:48

Brian Keating: She's going to explain how she does that. We have a lab tour of how our experiment works, and we're going to have many conversations with folks like that in the upcoming weeks as well. I had Mike Brown on recently, "The Man Who Killed Pluto." He's an observer who discovered a new planet in the solar system, Planet Nine.

03:42:04

Brian Keating: He's the advisor of this week's Into the Impossible episode. And that was Konstantin Batygin, an incredible intellect, hilarious guy. We just get along so great, and it was great to be in person with him. And we're doing many more in-person interviews as I again try to put a little bit more resources, a little bit more care, more time, more attention, listening to you out there. Your criticism, I don't mind it.

03:42:27

Brian Keating: If I'm constructive, you know, not telling me I should have shame. This camera, so, you know, so superfluous, so incredibly overpowered. I bought it for the bokeh. You see that bokeh back there, as Mike West would call it? It's all blurry and creamy. It's delicious, right, Mike? But it shows that I didn't shave today.

03:42:45

Brian Keating: Sorry, guys. I should have. I should have known better, but I didn't think the camera would be this high quality. We'll get higher quality setups for all my guests in the future, but I'm also doing more in person, flying people out here, bringing people down here, and trying to do my best to tell you guys what is needed to go, as Avi said, into the impossible.

03:43:02

Brian Keating: So for now, please don't forget—I know, it's tempting, you'll do it later—to subscribe to my newsletter, briankeating.com/edu or /hit, but you'll forget. Come on, we're all human. Except for you aliens out there. I know you're out there, brought in by Avi, probing you with his high-powered telescopes and Shelly's lasers.

03:43:22

Brian Keating: But do it now. Subscribe now. Share this with one other person. That's all I ask. Share the video. Click that arrow button down below. Click share. Send it to your brother, your cousin, your nephew. Someone who doesn't believe that the Earth is round. Someone who doesn't believe in aliens existing. Someone who believes that academia is perfect, and someone who believes, you know, that COVID originated from a pangolin or a bat or something like that.

03:43:48

Brian Keating: I think they'll like it. You're in for a fun time if you do that. So please do it now. Don't forget, right now, click on right now. Don't forget. See you next time. Coming up soon. Another episode coming out this Thursday about why there might be an unexpected solution to the Fermi paradox. I haven't heard anybody talk about it yet.

03:44:06

Brian Keating: So that's my little teaser for this Thursday's episode. Okay, love you all. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time on the Into the Impossible podcast with your fearful host. I’m the fearful host because it was started during the pandemic. I don't want to say exactly what the pandemic was, because then I won't get that sweet AdSense cash.

03:44:27

Brian Keating: But anyway, you all know what I'm talking about. All the book tours were canceled, and it was up to people like me. I was thrust into a civilization. But, you know, some heroes are born heroes. Some are thrust into it. I try to do my best. Not always perfect, but I'll keep it up with your support.

03:44:45

Brian Keating: Share this right now. Don't forget. Subscribe right now. Or if you're listening on audio, follow and then leave a review. That's another important thing. I don't charge too much; in fact, you might get a meteorite. You might get one of these true samples of an amorous cousin. Okay, love you all. That's three sign-offs. Gotta make this one.

03:45:03

Brian Keating: Got to go to a faculty meeting. Can you believe it? Bye, everybody.