Brian Keating: I’m Spending $200 Million To Explore Existence! How God Fits Into Science Explained!

This is the shrapnel of an exploded star, and this is a meteorite. Schem from over 4 billion years ago. And this is what Elon will kill for. Wow.

And all of this is to understand that fundamental question: people want to know, how did we get here? And how does the question of God tie into all of this? Well, for the first time in history, we might be able to answer that question with scientific hard data. Brian Keating is an astrophysicist and professor whose groundbreaking research and digestible explanations uncover everything we want to know about the universe and what lies beyond.

Let me go way back. 400 years ago, a genius named Galileo looked through a telescope, and he realized that we are not the center of the universe. And now we know the universe is vaster than you or I can comprehend. How big would Earth be on this table? Small. Not even a grain of sand. Even in our galaxy, it wouldn't be a grain of sand. But we still don't know how the universe began.

And so, one experiment took me to the South Pole, to the bottom of the planet. And we thought we discovered the creation of time and space itself. Took me to the brink of a Nobel Prize. We were on the front page of every newspaper. But it turned out we didn't see that at all. What we saw was... and we were... [Music] crushed. I don't get too emotional, but we had to retract these discoveries, and it was the most crushing experience a scientist can have. But you cannot stop doing experiments to answer these questions.

Now, you've launched this $2 million project. Yeah. And the data that this experiment is seeing is exquisite. Because now we know 100% that... [Music] This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor? Before we start, if you like the show, and you like what we do here, and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is, if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to. And we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

Dr. Brian Keating, what is the mission that you're on? I think I'm the luckiest man on Earth. I get to get paid, not that much, but I get to get paid to study the questions that I was most interested in as a 12-year-old, pimple-faced kid in Upstate New York, which is, how did we get here? And I think it's the question that people just want to know. It's the only question you can't know, right? What happened before you were born? You, you have to rely on other people's word for it, right? You have to ask questions and be curious. And what is the only event that ever happened for which there was nobody around to ask? And that's the origin of our universe. And the universe contains everything: contains life, minds, consciousness, everything down to, you know, podcasters and, and, uh, and daily life.

What are some of the most sort of controversial, existential questions that you seek to answer with all the research that you do? So, you've talked about this before on the show, uh, the question of, of, you know, finite versus infinite games. And what we do in science. Science is an infinite game, right? You can't win science. But along the way, there's many, many finite games. In other words, fixed competitions for which there's only one victor, right? I got, you know, uh, offered a professorship at UC San Diego. That means 399 other people didn't get that job. I got tenure. A lot of people don't get tenure. I got this, I got that. And then eventually, I didn't get, you know, spoiler alert, my first book's called "Losing the Nobel Prize." But there's only, you know, at most three people that can win a Nobel Prize every year in my field. The, the infinite game is comprised of many, many finite games. And the most important questions that generate the most controversy, the most heat, the most passion, have to do with the nature of the origin of our universe. It's actually not a settled science. It's, it's not actually known for a fact whether our universe came once, existed in a certain way eternally, in a way I can describe, went through cycles of creation and destruction, or it follows sort of a biblical creation narrative. These are all kind of open questions in a certain sense. And because they're not yet resolved, and because the only way to resolve them is through data, we cannot actually answer these.

So, the human mind is in a hybrid. It's in a superposition. We kind of have a lot of knowledge, but we have a lot of questions. We have a lot of solutions, but we have don't have a lot of answers. We're trying to understand that fundamental question. And I always say, I want to know what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang. Imagine this: a day before which there was no yesterday. You couldn't even speak about it. If you were there, obviously nobody was there to witness it. But even conceptually speaking, how does time progress if time starts? We think about time, and time is very mercurial. It's very hard to describe and define what time is. Is time what a watch measures? Is time how your, my hair gets gray over the years? Is, is time how, you know, we perceive it sitting on a hot stove versus being with a pretty girlfriend? Are, are those methods unequal? Are they equally valid? But at, at its base layer, if the universe began, if it truly had a singular origin, then time came into existence at that as well.

And how does the question of God tie into all of this? And what are the sort of, I guess, the most controversial question is, is there a God or is there not a God? Right? And then a sub-question to that would be, what form does this God take? Are these questions that you seek to answer? Me personally, yes. My colleagues tend to shy away from it. It's considered somewhat anathema or distasteful for a real, honest-to-goodness, you know, work-a-day scientist to talk about, to even contemplate the possibility of God. And for me, I, I call myself a practicing, very devout agnostic. In the sense that, uh, I, I take my Judaism. In my case, I'm, I'm a, I'm a practicing Jew. But the question of what to take on faith, which, uh, which in Hebrew, by the way, the word "Amen" comes from the Hebrew word "emunah," which means faith. It means to believe in something. I always say, I don't believe in gravity. You know, if I take this rock, and I, I, I don't have to believe in it. I have evidence for it. Science, the word science means knowledge. It doesn't mean, you know, uh, faith. It doesn't mean, you know, religion or theology. But for me, thinking about God provides a certain, the most, um, the most luxurious or the most delightful sort of spice to the research to the hard work that I'm doing. Knowing that the, the team and I that are trying to answer these questions, we can possibly resolve the question of whether or not the universe began as, for example, it begins in the Torah, the Old Testament, the biblical narrative that underpins the Judaism and Christianity and Islam as well, of, you know, half the world's population. What if we could substantiate that narrative? What if we could refute it? A good scientist has to be open to both. So, for me personally, I've always been interested in those existential questions. I, I, I, I don't put myself out there as a, you know, as a rabbi or as some exemplar of perfect, as religion. But I'm trying, I'm trying to improve. I'm trying to dedicate my life to answering questions that others have posed and stand on their shoulders to hopefully get a closer glimpse of truth. But it's absolutely 100% in my mind, inexorably linked, the question of a Creator and the question of the, its creation, or his creation, if you will. But as I say, for the first time in history, myself, my colleagues, and I, we might be able to start to answer that question with scientific hard data. The question of whether there's a God or not, and which God is most accurately represented by the science, yeah. And the creation stories that those religions tell themselves or tell the world.

You've raised the $200 million project. What does that mean? And what, what is the question you're seeking to fundamentally answer with that $200 million project? Yeah, let me take a step back. So, for 2,000 years, most scientists, people believed the universe was eternal, had been around forever. And then, not, not far from here, in, uh, north of, north of Hollywood, is a telescope, a 100-inch diameter telescope, you know, five meters across. And that telescope was used by Edwin Hubble. Hubble observed that every single galaxy that he could see is moving away from the Milky Way galaxy. So, every galaxy, which are collections of a hundred billion suns, just like our sun, is expanding away from us. How could he see that through a telescope? Uh, so he used what's called the redshift. So, the redshift is an effect that is related to what Christian Doppler discovered called the Doppler shift. You ever heard an ambulance, and it's coming towards you, and it gets higher in frequency? It goes away. That's the Doppler shift. The waves of sound are piling up, their frequency is getting short, uh, getting higher and higher. The wavelength is getting piled up in the direction it's going, the, the, the source, and it's getting lower in the opposite direction. The same exact thing happens with light. Instead of getting higher pitch and lower pitch, lower frequency means redder colors. So, red is a longer wavelength of light than is blue light. He saw everything is moving away from it, us in the Milky Way. It was a very puzzling discovery. It went against 2,500 years of received wisdom. He observed it with data. It was incontrovertible. Every single galaxy is moving away from the Milky Way galaxy, our galaxy. He said, either, you know, we didn't put on our cosmic deodorant, and no one wants to be around us, or the universe is getting bigger. Tomorrow, it will be bigger than it was today. The separation between galaxies will be larger than it is today. The implication, Stephen, if you go back another day before today, yesterday, things were closer. Keep playing that movie backwards. You come to a point, perhaps a singularity, where all the matter, all the energy, everything that is, was, or ever will be, was concentrated effectively at a single point. That's the Big Bang.

And so, in the Big Bang cosmology, the universe starts at a particular moment. Time comes into existence. The elements come into existence. All the elements, you know, in, in water, you know, instead of hydrogen in water, rather, they all come into existence. And then over billions of years, those elements come together over the force of gravity. They, uh, will eventually fuse two hydrogens together to make helium, and so forth, and you get the heavier and heavier elements. Eventually, those objects called stars, they eventually burn up and blow up in what's called a supernova. And before they blow up, they create all sorts of other matter that we're made of: calcium, oxygen, nitrogen, iron. And in their death throes, in their explosive fireworks-like ending of their lives, they give life to us because they blast out into the cosmos, into the galaxy, the material that we're made of. So, literally, as Carl Sagan said, we are star stuff. And I brought some star stuff here today. So, this is these are different byproducts. This is the shrapnel of an exploded star. This is mostly made of iron here. I brought these, and I give these away on my website. I made a special website for your listeners: briankeating.com. Diary. This is a meteorite. Stephen, have you ever seen a meteor in the atmosphere? That's a rock like that, a mineral coursing through our atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour. How do you know? How do we know? We measure their velocity. We can track them on radar. How do you know that this is a meteorite? Oh, this has all the characteristics of a meteorite: its composition, its density, its structure. It has that weird pattern on it. But if you're really curious, what we could do... So, where's this come from then? Or this one was found in, uh, in, uh, in Argentina, in a place called the Field of the Stars. And this could have come from anywhere in the universe. Exactly. This came from, this is basically a fragment of an asteroid that existed before the Earth. Steven, this is a fragment, a fossil relic of our solar system from over four billion years ago, older than our Earth. Because our Earth formed at its core, our Earth has iron inside of it. It has an iron core, just like that. That's pretty heavy, right? That's not. And it also made this here. This, if you give this to your sweetheart, if you compress this by 100,000 times and give it to your sweetheart, she'll be really happy about that. That's pure carbon. So that'll turn into a diamond. That'll turn into a diamond. I like to say, you know, pressure is what turns dust into diamonds. For anyone that can't see this right now, it looks like a, a dice. It's, it's almost identical to like a black dice. Exact. Yep. It's very light. Now, contrast that to, and here's a piece of rock. This is mostly volcanic rock. I collected that in, uh, in, uh, Antarctica. I've been to Antarctica twice, to the South Pole. I collected that specimen there. It has holes in it. See the holes? Those come from bubbling, escaping volcanic gases. So, there's volcanoes down at the South, uh, at the, in Antarctica, not the South Pole. And then here's this one. This is found, oh gosh, Namibia. So, this is a meteorite formed in, found in Namibia, also from the same process that formed our solar system. This was found by the natives that lived there, several hundred or maybe even a thousand years ago. This one's particularly nice. If you're not watching it, it looks like a human foot. And I can't explain how unbelievably heavy that is. Yes. I didn't think I've held something this size but this heavy before. It's extremely dense. It's one, it's the dense. So, what happens when a star tries to make the iron in that? It takes more energy to make that fuse that nuclei of iron than is given off in the fusion process. Therefore, the star can't support its weight. It collapses, it explodes, and rebounds. Now, when your listeners or viewers, you know, go to my website, and if they win one, um, uh, you'll see how attractive these things are to magnets. It's a very, uh, powerful, it's called a rare earth magnet, neodymium magnet. Jesus. So, attach it to the meteorite. It's fine to do that. You can do that. Wow. That sound. I love that sound. A ping. So, this material is highly magnetic. And iron, which is primarily the constitution of this meteorite, is has the exact same chemical structure as in your blood. There's a molecule called hemoglobin. Mhm. It's almost identical to the chlorophyll molecule that plants have, except chlorophyll has a magnesium atom at the center of its chemical matrix. But in hemoglobin, that's going through your veins right now, is iron. That iron came from that supernova. Eventually, your mother, you know, and the food that you eat has some iron in it, and your body starts to produce blood, and that blood has the same chemical composition as the stars.

So, this $200 million, what are you doing? Okay, we're gonna give back. Back to the money. Y- Exactly. So, what is the fundamental question you're seeking to answer? So, let's say you see someone shooting a f- a gun, right? You want to see the, but you see the smoke from the gun, you see the bullet moving at great speed, but you'd like to see who actually shot it. Was it God? You know, was it, was it Mother Nature? Was it some quantum fluctuation in the multiverse? And so, we're trying to capture that, to take a picture of the infant universe, to take the earliest baby picture possible, using sensors that are sensitive to in, to, uh, microwave light that we cannot see, that's invisible to us. We could capture a pattern which would only be present if the universe had a singularity, if it went through this incredible rupture of space-time called the Big Bang. The details of the experiment were worked out over several years. We realized we had to go down to the South Pole, to the bottom of the planet, a place that was only reached 112 years ago. And the enemy of what I'm trying to detect is water. Water absorbs microwaves. That's how your microwave oven works to heat up coffee. So, we, we took that telescope there. We made an observation. We claimed we detected that baby picture, that snapshot, that reverberations of the creation of time and space itself, called inflation. We were heralded around the world that this is the greatest discovery of all time in science, literally. There was just one problem. When we made this measurement, we were aware that we could fool ourselves into seeing what we wanted to see, because we knew how important this discovery would be. But we kind of convinced ourselves that we had seen the true birth pangs of the Big Bang. But it turned out we didn't see that at all. Instead, what we saw were trillions and trillions of tons of dust in our galaxy. For technical reasons, it mimicked the signal of the Big Bang. And we were crushed. It literally dust. We saw cosmic dust, the leftover byproducts of exploded stars.

Just want to be clear here. So, I'm, um, I don't want to move on until I fully understand. So, you, you went down to the South Pole. Yeah. You looked up expecting to see these sort of, these waves that show that the universe is expanding. Yes. What you actually saw, like lines of dust, right? Is that a simplified way of saying? But you thought you'd s- seen these sort of microwaves of the universe expanding. Exactly. Simplifying it perfectly. We made this discovery, and then immediately, effectively, in scientific terms, six months later, this is an early 2015, we basically had to admit we were wrong. And fortunately for me, and for the universe as a whole, um, I was very close with a man named Jim Simons. He was a monumental scientist, mathematician without peer, effectively. And he said, Brian, I've been thinking about this experiment, and, um, I want to, I want to have a larger. So, he put together this, this dream team, and we're still together to this day. We're building an observatory in Chile, not the South Pole, in Chile, to do what BICEP couldn't do. BICEP being the telescope you built in the South, South Pole. Yep. That lost the Nobel Prize in my first book's language. And we're just now getting data. It got first light a month before Jim Simons passed away. And so, we were able to show him the data that this experiment is, is, is seeing. I can't show it to you. It's as confidential as a diary is. You hope nobody's looking, but you don't know if anybody is. I can't show it to you, but the data is exquisite.

So, what do you, um, what do you suspect is the origin of the universe? Well, uh, is it God? Is it some kind of strange cosmic reaction that took place for no reason at all? I know you must have a suspicion. You know, if the universe began with a singular Big Bang, if it began on a certain day, or it didn't. I just want to know the truth. The interpretation of it. That's going to be going on for, I mean, people are battling about. As I said, we thought we detected that signal, right? So, we already have, um, a simulation of what will happen when this is discovered for good, finally, and no dust. Right. We know exactly what the media will say at that time. On one side of the equation were the greatest, you know, religious thinkers and theologians of the time, saying, "This proves the existence of God. That God created the universe in a singular moment. Let there be light. Fiat Lux." That's exactly what the Torah, the Old Testament, the Bible says. So, they said, it agrees with our hypothesis. On the other side, there were militant atheists, Richard Dawkins, you know, other people saying, "This proves there's no need for a God. The universe came into existence, like you said, meaningless quantum field, the fluctuation out of nothingness. It proves nothing about God. In fact, it invalidates." Literally, Stephen, there were people publishing articles in major newspapers everywhere that proves God, proves no God. So, it's not like I'm going to think that I have the clarity to say I'm going to be the final word, or we're going to be the final word. I know this is going to resonate and echo through the, through the, you know, annals of history. But at the same time, we could also see nothing. And that's the hardest thing. When you see nothing, the human mind doesn't like ambiguity. You know, like, you can talk about, um, something very, uh, you know, non-controversial. Let's talk about abortion rights. Let's talk about trans rights. Let's, no, these are incredibly controversial things, right? So, what does the human mind do? It selects a side. It says, "No abortions." "Abortion for everybody." "No trans rights." "Yes, trans rights." "Immigration." "No immigration." "Yes, immigration." The human mind hates that. And for good reason. There's an old Yiddish expression: "He who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by both sides of the traffic." So, the human mind cleaves to one side or the other. I don't think, you know, in terms of, you know, religion or whatever, that we'll be the determinant of final word on it. But it's sort of a privilege to play the game.

What is the most compelling evidence that you've ever encountered that there might be a God? This is a long, uh, long question. Well, I, I hope you'll find it someday too. Um, at least in my religion, in Judaism, God is the Creator, and he's the organizer. He creates, um, light and darkness. He creates day and night. He creates heaven and Earth. He creates beasts and, um, and Earth and fishes and so forth. And then he creates man. And we can't really emulate God. Even if you don't believe in God, you can imagine what a God would be like, right? You can conceptualize, imagine, you know, King Charles, you know, times a trillion, or whatever, like the all-powerful force. But at the same time, we're told God as a father, "Our Father, who art in heaven," right? Um, and he's a Lord. He's, he's like a politician. He's a king. He's their father. In this Judeo-Christian concept, it's hard to kind of reconcile what that means because we don't really have analogies to it. But the one analogy we do get is the one thing that we can create, which is a, which is a human. Now, I think for that reason, men and women have a stake in what it means to feel a connection to God. Women much more so. It's almost impossible to, for a man to comprehend what it's like to have the ability to be a vessel for life's creation. I think that's part of the evidence for it. Um, I also think that there's some, there's some clues, but again, it's not proof. You cannot prove God exists. You cannot prove God doesn't exist. You have to be comfortable with that ambiguity. And very few people are. If we came from a single-cell organism, as some people say, then there was, then giving birth seems to be quite a new concept. Because, you know, if you think about some of the evolutionary stories of, you know, the single-cell organism that then divided, and then, you know, Darwinism's theory that it was the environment that defined how we give birth, and different animals give birth or replicate in different ways. So, if you go back far enough, it seems that like giving birth as we know it, which is this like process where the baby comes out and they cut the cord, is actually quite recent in the history of consciousness. But also just like living organisms. Does that make it more or less miraculous? It's so amazing, but it, it doesn't feel like it gives me, I don't know. There's something in my mind that thinks if a single-cell organism, I don't know, gazillion years ago, split because of some mutation which caused more single-cell organisms to split, I mean, I guess it's still creation, isn't it? And then you could ask the question, what if there was a Creator, and this Creator not only, you know, created that first cell, but created within that cell the possibility, the propensity, and had the knowledge, you know, we can't comprehend it, but but had the knowledge that that will eventually make a person and have consciousness and be able to conceptualize God? Now, I'm not saying that's evidence for it, but just, you can, you can, you can see which would be a greater miracle: that like God encrypted in the DNA code that eventually there'll be a Steven Bartlett or Brian Keating, or, you know, that those are natural processes that are the inevitable conclusion of, of creation of life and evolution, as you say, in Darwinian theory, for which we have abundant evidence. Right? I don't know which is more miraculous. And, and that's why, you know, miracles. Humans are pretty new, aren't they? Oh, yeah. Mammals. Like, how old is the conscious human? The conscious, I mean, the first like Homo sapiens that are of our species, probably 200,000 years old, maybe. So, it's only been for 200,000 years that we've been even been able to think about the possibility of God. Which is almost a weird way, it almost, you could say God has only existed for 200,000 years, right? Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. And, and in fact, many people, I like to say this, you know, to you, like, what's your favorite day of the year? Like, on the calendar? I was going to say day. Okay. I always ask people that. I say, like, what's your favorite day? And usually, I'll get, um, Christmas, my anniversary, my birthday, my first kid's birthday, whatever. But those are all origins. We're fascinated by origins because you weren't, like, you can't witness, like, the whole process of your birth. You have to rely on mother and your father and maybe there's some pictures and a nurse. But now go back to the beginning of the universe. Well, maybe there was only one entity. You know, maybe it was only God. And why did God make the universe? And then, of course, there's many, many questions. The, the most kind of stringent, you know, are, or perhaps most challenging question is, you know, why does evil exist? Why would a good God create suffering? Childhood leukemia, like, it doesn't make any sense. So, the standard answer for that question is that to not have randomness, to not have chaos, to not have, um, variability in life, would would necessitate a predetermined existence. And a lot of people believe that. I've talked to Sam Harris on my podcast, he's been on here. Um, he believes strict determinism. Every single thing, what's happening to us right now, the words that are coming out of my mouth, your, uh, ear twitching, or whatever, it's to, that's all determined. There's no control. There's free will is a complete and utter illusion. And, uh, because of that, then there doesn't have to be an explanation of why there's, you know, leukemia in children or whatever. And, and yes, that is, that is an unanswered question. And I think, but, but I don't think it's a sufficient question not to do stuff. People would ask, why does a child get leukemia? But they won't ask, why do, um, humans experience, uh, the highest, the highest pleasures, the highest sensations, both physically, viscerally, but also emotionally and spiritually? That we, unique among all the creations on Earth, have this ability to appreciate our finite existence, to have love, to have, you know, whatever these connections are. That's what makes life living. Now, we can't answer, why is that? Like, do we deserve that? So, for me, the evil and good, and like pleasure and pain, make lots of sense from an evolutionary perspective. It makes a lot of sense as to why you would feel this overwhelming sense of like love and protection when you gave birth, when your, your son or your daughter arrives in the world, because that, that feeling is passed down from your ancestors, and your ancestors had that feeling, so they survived, and their offspring survived. And that feeling gets stronger as it's passed down because those that have it are more likely to pass on their DNA. So, the DNA of that feeling keeps passing through the, through the generation. So, I get that. And then with the, with evil, I also, I can also understand that pretty well. Um, because, you know, if we think of evil, maybe as a feeling or something that happens or a disease, I can understand that evil is human, is, is human-related. There's no evil cancer. Cancer is not evil. And even that, I can understand because I can understand the brain is so fragile, and I can understand all these human instincts and chemicals and jealousy and, you know, all of, even love comes with it, you know, if some, if a woman dies, it's probably a husband, statistically. So, like, I understand, you know, that's evil, isn't it? But, but it's love as well. So, I understand the complexities of all of that. What I can't understand is what role God is playing in any of this stuff. And, yeah, I was, I was religious until I was 18, and then I think I, I fell down a rabbit hole listening to like Richard Dawkins and some of the others and Sam Harris, and it left me in a position where I would probably define myself as being agnostic. But there's still this big question mark which hangs above my life, which is like, where did, where did human life come from? And is there, is it possible that it just didn't come from anyone? Is it possible that there was a Big Bang, you know, at the very start of all of this? It caused lots of reactions. One such reaction was fusing some chemicals which fused in the right order over millions and millions of years, and it started to move in a way that like plants can't move, and that then led rise to the sort of evolutionary process. And now here I am, and my brain was just bigger 200,000 years ago than the other monkeys. So, now that I've developed this thing called consciousness, where I can think about things, and here I am trying to figure it all out. Now that I have this bigger brain, thanks to Darwinian evolution, is that, is that the game? And it's, and, you know, when people hear me say that, they probably think, oh, you know, the, the natural reaction to that is because it threatens your sense of like purpose and belonging, and it threatens justice. Your natural reaction to that is, no, I hope it's not. And so, let me think of ways that that can't possibly be true. But I'm, I'm not tempted by that. I'm tempted by figuring out what's true, irrespective of how warm and fuzzy it is. Mhm. And, um, I still don't know. But I'm hoping science has some answers for me.

Well, yeah, sorry to disappoint right now. The, the, the connection, the logical chain that you, that you produced has a lot of so-called missing links. But you said something that's very interesting to me. You said you consider yourself an agnostic. In other words, it sounds to me like you're more, you're doing things that an atheist does, like you're not going to church, you're not, you know, observing mass or whatever you would do if you're. But what do you do? Do, do you, and they, because if you're an agnostic, there should be some behavior that's similar to a theist. Why? Because then you're just an atheist, right? I mean, in other words, how do you, what practices? I'm a behaviorist in, in my life, you know, so I judge people on how they act and how they behave. And, and you know a lot about this. So, how do you, do you behave as if there could be a God? Do you, you said maybe you want science to explain it. You didn't say, like, I would like to have a personal revelation from Jesus. I would like to encounter him or whatever. V, I don't care what religion is. But how do you, in practice, live your life such that if God does exist, that that it would make a difference in the way that you're perceived or judged, if you will? Yeah, well, I, I don't, because I guess I don't know what, I don't know what practice, because I don't know what God exists or what story is true. I don't know what practice is true. Do you think of God? Let's say you were, um, Hindu, right? Yeah. Let's say, let's say you're not Hindu. Let's say you are what you are, Presbyterian or the Church of. If I had a practice, wouldn't that make me religious? Well, I'm saying, do you think if there is a God, we have to do this matrix, right? We have to say, God exists, God doesn't exist, even behaves like he's religious. Steph doesn't behave like he's religious, right? So, right now, you're in one of those quadrants. You're not sure God exists. Um, so you're behaving maybe as if he doesn't exist. And I'm asking you, and now he could exist or he could not exist. So, imagine you move into another quadrant. You say, "I'm going to behave like I'm Hindu." Or "Come down to my temple in San Diego," whatever. You're going to behave in some religion. Do you think if God exists, he's gonna say, "Oh, God, Stephen, you picked the wrong one. It's not, it's not, uh, it's, uh, Judaism. It's, um, it's, uh, Latter-day Saint." I don't think. I think a revolutionary statement. I think God has common sense. If he exists. If he doesn't exist, it doesn't matter what you do, right? But if God exists, he must have common sense. Meaning that if you make, make an earnest attempt to understand, or at least engage yourself religiously, not believe and force yourself to believe, not make excuses for evil that happens in the world or cancer for kids, but if you behave in a certain way, I don't think if God exists, big if, you'll be judged harshly.

I, this is exactly the conclusion that stopped me being religious when I was 18. Really? Yes. Exact conclusion. Because we'd go to, um, church every week. We grew up going to church, read the Bible, all of those things. And then I, when I was younger, I was operating under the assumption that I was going to go to hell and burn if I didn't, like, obey this person in the sky. Then I read these books, I saw Richard Dawkins' books and a bunch of other books on the subject matter, and I heard that God was omnipotent and omniscient, which makes a lot of sense because if you create this world and you can, you know, you're active in it, you must be pretty powerful and pretty knowing. And then I concluded that if I, basically concluded God would have common sense. And I thought he would understand that I'm struggling. And he would understand that as long as I live a good life, and I'm not murdering people, and I'm not mean to people, and I'm kind, and I'm respectful to people, and I'm a net positive on the Earth, then if heaven does exist, any God that I would want to support anyway would let me in. And he would understand that I didn't have enough information to to put my flag in any particular religion. So he would let me in. So my, my thesis then became, well, just be a good person. And you're kind of hedging your bets because any decent God that's, I think, worth supporting would go, "That was a decent person. He couldn't quite see it, you know, whatever." But, but you wouldn't see it. A little. I, sorry to push back, but if you, let's say I say, "I want to get in shape." Stephen, and, and, yeah, I deserve it. Got kids, you know, I want to be healthy, live a long life. But you see me eating, you know, I wouldn't eat cheeseburgers, kosher, but hamburgers, french fries, you know, just, just. And I'm saying, well, like, you know, whatever, we'll understand. Like, I, in other words, you would agree that if you knew God exists, you would do, you would behave very radically differently. Right? If, if I, if you had an encounter with God, well, Jesus, or, or God himself, right? It depends. If I knew for sure that he existed and a particular book and doctrine was correct, I would 100% behave in line with that book and doctrine. But if I knew he existed, but I didn't know which book was correct, then I probably would behave exactly how I do now. So, because the behavior, the practice, the Sabbath comes from one of those books or doctrines. Right. But, but even if you couldn't choose, right? What if it's like, um, what if it's possible that all of them are right and all of them are wrong? In other words, you, um, we are so frail, fragile, and and inadequate to the task of understanding what the true nature of God is, that he made it such that, again, I'm not saying this is true, but but it made it possible that there would be ways of interpretation for how he existed, right? Like, I, as a Jew, don't believe in Jesus's divinity. Right? But I don't, I don't fault my friends, friends, you know, Joe Botta, a Christian. I don't fault him. I don't, in fact, I think it's beautiful that that's his avenue for worship. He believes that Jesus died for his personal sins. Now, you would admit that you would have, Jesus will still die for your sin, or, you know, he did die for your sins if you're an axe murderer, you know? So, I just think that level of saying it's, um, as long as I don't murder anybody, you know, it's like me saying, well, you know, if I'm destined to get into shape, I'll get in shape. You know, my metabolism will work it out without me taking this the serious action and working hard because you do it in your rest of your life, right? And I'm not, by the way, I'm not proselytizing. It's actually forbidden in my religion. I'm not proselytizing. But the, but the, that concept of God is, uh, that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in. I also don't believe in that. Like, he's omniscient, he's gonna prevent, you know, babies from dying from cancer, he's gonna do this or that. Like, that's where they make fun of it. Or they, they, they relegate it to the, a friend in the sky, you called it, right? I, I don't believe there's a friend in the sky. I don't think that even makes sense. Um, but I believe that we are seeing something so heavily refracted. Again, if it exists, it's, it's like, uh, showing a microwave telescope, you know, showing BICEP or the Simon's Observatory, uh, to, you know, Gog, who lived in a cave 200,000 years ago. Like, there's no way to get from there to here. But that doesn't mean, like, there isn't an ultimate there, an ultimate here. For me, I, let me just say the final thing I want to say, because I don't want to make too much about this, but, but, um, there's a value in practicing even if you don't believe. Just like I say sometimes, like, even if you got divorced, like, you should still get married because it changes you, and it opens you up to the full panoply of human experience that a lot of people don't get to experience. And when people have the capacity, the capability to do it, they should, in my opinion. By the way, I'm not advocating to get divorced either. But, but the point being, uh, you obviously wrestle with it. And, um, interestingly enough, the word Israel, which is the central, you know, country of, of Judaic faith, means fight with God. It means wrestle with God. L is God. Israel means fight. So, how do you wrestle with it? Do you wrestle with it? Do you think about it? Or do you say, you know, I'm not going to read these books that I read before I was 18, because it seems so childish to me now? And so, I, I do, I certainly wrestle with it. So, when I say wrestle with it, not in a way that is causing me any pain or agony or deep frustration, but it's, it's, yeah, it's a recurring thought. And I actually think from doing this podcast and just, like, maybe growing up and the journey I've been on, I have more questions now than I ever have since I became agnostic at 18. So, I have more questions now. It's funny. I've been on this bit of an arc where I was certain when I was younger that God was real, and then I was really, um, certain that the God I believed in probably wasn't real. And now I kind of find myself going back to a position where I'm like, almost like I'm starting the research project again to figure out what actually is, what actually is real. I sometimes wonder if I'm looking for the wrong thing. Because I think, because we've been so sort of indoctrinated into this idea that it is a man in the sky and all these, the white beard and stuff, so we're like looking for evidence of that. But maybe I should be searching for evidence of something else. Is it like a feeling I'm searching for? It's interesting that you said that. It reminds me of Einstein. Einstein said, um, he never asked his father, "What would happen, Daddy, if I was traveling at the speed of light and I looked at myself in a mirror?" And he said, "It was good I didn't ask those questions when I was five, because my dad would have given me this standard answer of the 1800s, which was, you know, you see a reflection or whatever." And then Einstein said, "I would have just accepted that, and then I would never have gone on to create the theory of relativity." What you said echoes what he said, because if you, if you had asked these questions and just accepted the belief that you had when you were 12, you would not be approaching them with the maturity of a Steven Bartlett at age 32, right? And now you have this perspective. You have a wisdom that you've accrued from your life experiences, from the, the millions of people that you've helped around the world to expose them to different things, and you're on a journey yourself. So, anyway, I, I, I just, I don't, so I don't have tolerance for scientists that dismiss it and say it's stupid. And I'm like, but I also, I, I find that religious people are too comfortable saying, "Everything is described by God. Everything happens because of God." And I see this a lot with religious children. Sometimes I'll go into kids' school and teach them, you know, about science. I'll bring these, you know, props and stuff. But when I talk to them, sometimes I'll say, like, "Oh, look, there's a rainbow over there." "Oh, that's great. Where did it come from?" They'll say, "God made it." I think that's, I joke, that's a form of child abuse, you know? If you just say that God made it, you're a completely ignorant about the science. But B, you're also diminishing God's power, right? If you say, "No, actually, that's an effect of water droplets, which are formed hydrogen, oxygen, and here's their chemistry, and here's how they form, uh, different state of matter when they're in collective, and here's how that causes light to diffract at different wavelengths, and here's wavelength, electromagnetic radiation, where does that come?" And you keep asking the question, "Why? Why? Why? Why?" Only when you get to the question, the answer, the final answer, "I don't know," that's the only time I would say, "Okay, God could come in there." But that takes you back, you know, that whole chain of refraction of light, of dielectric material, of, of wavelengths, of, of color, all that, that takes you back till almost to the Big Bang, which then intersects with what I do.

You said, um, that you think of God as almost like a force. Do you think it's a conscious force? If, if I sit down and pray to this God, will they hear me? I honestly, kid, say, I don't know. But I know that you'll change. I know that you'll hear yourself. Okay. If you can go down to the ocean, student. If you can go down to the Pacific Ocean and just be isolated and just pour yourself out for an...

hour, I guarantee it will change your life. You will be in tears, but no one will see you. That's the thing. That's why you have to be alone. You cannot do it with any other person. You must do it on your own because there's no Sam Harris meditation waking up app. It's not going to do the same for you as as just you alone. And not knowing is part of the point, I think.

But what's that got to do with God? What's me going down to the beach and pouring my heart out, which would get me into my amygdala? It'll get me thinking about, you know, it'll make me emotional. I can imagine, you know, even listening to certain music can make you feel that. What role is God playing in in that moment? Because if God exists, I do believe that he's inside of you and that you can connect with him again. You can't detect him with an MRI machine or you can't detect him with a laser. But you know, can, again, it's a big if. I'm not guaranteeing, you know, I'm sorry to disappoint. I'm not that kind of doctor. You know, I I can't give you a prescription that'll make you believe.

But to have access to it, you have to be open to a communication, right? Imagine you got, you know, a a you know, an email and you just never respond to it. Like people remember the movie Interstellar. You've seen that movie? So, uh, there, you know, the the people on Earth are communicating with the people, you know, Matthew McConaughey's daughter, and she, she doesn't know if he's listening. He doesn't. And he knows that she's. But in that sense, he's kind of like this, like he has knowledge that she doesn't have. But if she doesn't try, maybe she wouldn't. Maybe just the aspect of trying, the attribute of trying, is what opened her up to that return signal, the communication that she eventually received.

So interesting, because when I asked the question about, can God hear me? And if he can hear me, I guess the second question is, can he do anything about what he's hearing? Um, there's so much evidence in the world that he can't hear you and he's not going to do anything about it. But again, you say that, but like, what if, you know, who knows if if you're if your parents, you know, like they were a lot of the stories in the early Testament are about sterile, barren women that couldn't conceive, you know, from Sarah, Rebecca, to to Rachel, all these women, they couldn't conceive. They cried out, they they prayed. And again, women are closer to God in many ways because they contain life within them. Um, again, in what sense are you not already the recipient of the beneficence of something that we just don't understand? Like, potentially.

Yeah, but but but when I ask this question about like, could I, if I pray, is it going to influence my outcomes in any way? You know, there's a, I don't believe it does. I I I don't believe it does for the reason I said before. Like, people were praying here for the Dodgers. I'm sure there were equally virtuous people praying for the Angels. That's what I mean. If you think about the scientific method, that's why I said I don't, we could, we could apply that and say, does prayer work, right? And you could get, I don't know, look through history at the Holocaust or look at some other world natural disaster and think, has praying swayed the probabilities of bad things happening to people? So I don't believe that at all.

But I do believe that fundamentally, a a person who believes that their, um, that their actions have some impact will feel at least a sense of gratitude. Let me, let me give you an example. You're familiar in Christianity, you know, people say a blessing before the meal, like grace before a meal. So in Judaism, you do that before the meal, after the meal, sometimes during the meal. Uh, but the point is, the more you express gratitude, you you cannot be a happy person and be being an ingrate. Yeah. The more you're grateful for, like the sound of, you know, of, you know, a song that is just so meaningful to you, the sight of a painting or a sunset, the more that you're s. And in Judaism, we say blessings for those things. Like we say, if we see a meteor shower, we say a blessing. It's hard for me as an astronomer. You got to say a blessing. A rainbow. Another thing. Those are like, kind of things we become desensitized to in life, and we just take for granted. When you taste a a fine wine or you taste, you know, some delicious food. Again, it could just be chlorophyll. Here's Stephen. Have here's your plate of agar gum. Like, okay, great. I could live. Here's whey powder. That's all you ever get to eat. And you'd be like, this sucks. I know what I'm a head. And if I could only go back to it after I get out, you know, of the situation, I'm going to be so grateful. To me, that grateful gratitude connects to the ultimate source of that provided that we can't understand. It's true.

I cannot give you, and I told you, I have problems with prayer because I don't like to be told what to do. I don't like to be told I have to say this in this order, stand up, sit down, fast on this day, do this thing, not eat that delicious pink guy with the curly tail. Like, but when you do that, you know, this, the more you're disciplined, the happier your life is. You know, who's, who's more happy? The guy who eats everything he wants or, you know, like the, the person who just gives into all their temptations of alcohol, the person who abstains and and elevates what they do. And I think we want to elevate ourselves above the level of an animal, of the animals. But I can have all those behaviors of like a gratitude practice. I can have a meditation practice. I go down to the beach. I can do all of those things. And I still, I can still do all of those things without the need of a God. Oh, sure. And I'll get all the benefits of those things. I'd get when I when I express gratitude before I eat or sometimes when I'm getting on a plane and I I touch the plane to remind myself. And I can always make myself emotional just thinking about how remarkable it is that I get to do some of the things I've been able to do in my life, to the point of like physical emotion. Yeah. Um, but without the presence of of needing to equate that to a God in any way.

So I'm, I'm trying to find, I guess, I'm searching for where God fits in all of this. Why, why is, why is God, why is a God required? Is it just because I have so many blessings that I should be thankful to someone for these things, which I do contemplate with. I go, okay, and let me think about how my life has changed in the last 10 years of, you know, from going from some of those shoplifting pizzas to sitting here and getting to do these. It's, it's remarkable. You, you start to think you're a little bit in the Truman Show if you're not, if you think about it too deeply. But, um, and you do feel, you think, who do I thank for this? So you think, do I thank my parents? Like, right? Do I thank myself? So do I thank a God? Um, but I, but is that the reason? Just to just to be thankful? But then I go, there's a bias there because there's kids in the town in Botswana that I was born in that are still in the town in Botswana that I was born in, and they're not doing so good. So do they, did God not like them? Did, and then if you go, no, God likes both of you, then I go, okay, well, then God isn't responsible for this. It was something that I did or my parents did that's responsible for this. So I should thank them. So where does God fit again? And I just go around in these loops and I go, I don't know. What are we trying to create a God to make sense of the things we feel and the experiences we have? And the baby that grabs our finger and the gratitude and the, the, the solar eclipse and the, the sunset? Are we trying to, trying to give that to someone because it's just so, the awe is just so much? Or did God give that to us?

Well, I mean, the perspective that you're bringing is obviously, you've thought about this a lot. And obviously, your attitude is healthy. And I think that you have, you know, unbalanced. I think, yeah, obviously living as a a good life, even if you, I'd never say that an atheist can't be a good person or can't be happy or any of these things. The question is, what, where does it augment and affect your life? Like, for example, I don't know if I would give 10% of my income to charity before tax income to charity if it wasn't a commandment in my religion. But I don't shame for that. I don't feel like, oh, you needed religion to tell you this because again, I'm still searching just as much as I think that you are. I don't feel like, uh, as untroubled by the answers of it, right? I don't feel like that not knowing for sure that God exists, which I don't believe is possible anyway, that that should be an impediment to me practicing giving charity, being in a community, um, uh, raising my kids with an appreciation of their history and their culture, um, and and just the contributions of their religion, of your religion, whatever, to to the world.

So if you found out from this new project that you've, you've launched this $2 million, $200 million project that you've launched to figure out the existence of, I guess, where the, not the existence, but the origin of the universe, the origin of life, if you found out unequivocally that God isn't real, convinces you to the point that you now believe that God is not the creator of the universe, and that, I don't know, you figure out some other way we can create universes in little labs, maybe a thousand years from now, we can create our own little universes from nothing, somehow, or we find out we're in a simulation. Yeah, whatever. Yes, exactly. How does that change you? Because I'm a behaviorist. I, I don't, I really don't feel like my life would be better to act as if God doesn't exist. In other words, if I know God doesn't exist, then I'm gonna act like he doesn't exist, right? That's a logical assumption. Yeah, right. So I'm going to stop giving charity. Like, is that going to make me happy in life? Is that going to benefit society? Or my, or, you know, Zeus, or whatever doesn't exist? Like, I already know that's not true, right? So I've kind of done this experiment. Like all these other gods, I know I don't believe in Ra, you know, a. So you wouldn't do anything differently? Benefits to my life are so substantive that I would not change my behavior.

But you, you're being guided then by your be your behavior and the rewards from behavior, which is pretty much my life. Yeah. Well, okay, so right. The breathwork and the meditation, I'm being guided by, like, if gratitude feels good, I do it. If going down to the beach feels good, I do it. If having a baby feels good, I'll do it. You know, so like, it could be dangerous to add God to my life or take it away. My behaviors are going to be the same because I'm, I'm being guided by the things that are making me feel good. But I don't think so. You're not like those hedonistic Instagram influencers? No, because that would make me feel good like a donut. I've run the experiment, and eating the donut makes me feel okay for the time it's touching my tongue, but then bad for 12 hours when my gut starts reacting badly. So I don't do that anymore.

Well, let me ask you this question. So if they found out that, uh, working out is, uh, eventually, it's actually going to shorten your life or it's going to do the opposite of what you're intending it to do, necessarily, would you keep working out? How much is it going to shorten my life by? Um, every, uh, every, uh, you know, ab crunch you do, every bench press takes an hour off your life or something, or a couple minutes off your life. Ooh. This, it's an interesting one. Um, I would probably live 10 years less to live like 10 years better, like to have a better health span. So I'd probably, if you told me I was going to live to 100 with without working out, or I could live to 90, but I'm going to be strong and fit for those 90 years, I'll take the 90 years. So in my analogy, that's exactly right. So I feel like that level of of perfecting or enjoyment and the ancillary benefits of gratitude, uh, and and happiness that I've received tangibly, you cannot convince me. As I can't convince you that working out feels, I couldn't convince you working out is bad. It feels bad for you. It does something to you physically, mentally, emotionally, um, spiritually. But for me to see the benefits, to see the things that I've seen, like, like look, Stephen, I've buried my father. Okay? And in in Judaism, one of the core tenants is that it's the highest, it's sort of the highest Mitzvah, it's the highest commandment to take care of someone who's died. Why? Because they can't reciprocate. Most of what we do in life, we have some kind of contract. You know, we play by the rules, we do things nicely, we have contractors, we invest in Dragon's Den, whatever, we're going to get some, there's nothing good, there's nothing that will come out of it that will benefit you. I've seen things. I've seen people that are saints that I can't aspire to even be in their presence of. But it's made my life better. I wouldn't change the things that I've done or seen. And you couldn't convince me it wasn't good for me. And as I said before, maybe you think I'm weak, but I wouldn't have done it if I didn't feel it was commanded to me.

You, you mentioned the word simulation, yeah, a second ago. This is something that I've been thinking a lot about. What is, just for people that don't know, what is the simulation theory? And are we living in a simulation? Great question. So the simulation theory was really conjectured by a British philosopher, or he's actually Swedish, or I believe, Nick Bostrom. He conjectured the following. He said, compute is getting so phenomenally powerful in just our recent time horizon. So the notion that Nick and others had proposed is that if this is extrapolated indefinitely into the future, whether or not that can happen is a question about planetary resources. You know, part of the reason Elon wants to go to Mars, and I do want to talk to you about Mars in a bit. Um, and that, uh, that extrapolation leads, in an extraordinary way, to the to the conclusion that compute will be effectively free, and it'll be infinite. It'll be completely democratized. It'll be completely demonetized. It will be almost, you know, as I said, too cheap to to to measure the expense of computing. And it'll be everywhere. Uh, in just a short amount of time. I mean, remember the phone that we have, the iPad that you're using? These are like, these things would literally be mythological witchcraft, you know, 80 years ago, and now they're they're in common place. And so the the notion that Nick proposed, Bostrom proposed, is that that trend continues into the future, that basically the capability of those computers would be to be able to model entire planets, entire ecosystems, even cultures, communities, maybe even people themselves. So we, let's take a parallel, um, uh, detour for just a bit. You're not seeing me necessarily. You're seeing photons that are coming into your retinas, right? Photons are packets of energy, form of light. They travel at the speed of light. They have different wavelengths. The wavelengths we call color. They're going into your, uh, cornea, getting bent a little bit, then they're going to your lens, getting bent more, then they're going to your retina, and they're getting detected on this basically, uh, detector, just like a sensor in a camera, which has pixels, except it has trillions of pixels instead of millions of megapixels or few megapixels. And those are being transduced. The color gets transduced on on cells that are called cone cells. The intensity is rod cells. Um, and and those are getting transduced into electrical impulses that go from the, uh, optic nerve, right, into your brain. And remember Andrew Huberman told you on the show, the retina is the only part of the human brain that's outside of the cranium. It's outside of the skull. Um, and so it's a part of your brain that's outside. So it transduces it, makes electrical impulses. Those electrical impulses then get conducted like wires conducting electricity, uh, and then those go into your brain and synapses in your brain, and the neural pathways in your brain can reproduce those. Now, you have an Apple Vision Pro, I think I, I saw you with once. So that can, you know, kind of simulate. It could make a very accurate representation of me, holographic, perhaps, and you would want to reach out and touch me. Now, imagine instead of just, uh, instead of just the, um, just the raw chemical, the physical electronics of a of a headset, Apple Vision Pro, you just inject the electrical signals into the brain. So that's plausible. It's, it's just purely physical material processes. Photons converted to electrons, get converted to neuron signals, get processed in the brain. And so all you have to do is get that input, sensory input. You can have a digital retina, a fake retina, and you stimulate it, it goes into your brain. They're working on that. Same with sound. Sound is even easier. You put a little speaker in your ear, and you'd hear. Um, but, uh, so the notion is that we could physically just be disconnected brains in a vat, right? We could just be, uh, in in this vast system, just bunches of brains. Don't ask how they got there, but we're all just receiving stimuli, and we're just being fed. I'm being fed an image of you over there. You're being fed an image of me over here. I don't know why. Nobody knows why this would occur. But the computing power is there. If you think that the Apple Vision Pro, if if you were alive in 1971, uh, you could not have necessarily predicted the Apple Vision Pro. It was too far advanced from, from what we have, from what we had at that point in time. But imagine it just keeps increasing at any rate you like. Eventually, there'll be a point where every bit of information, every atom in the universe, every photon in the universe, could theoretically be simulated. Again, I don't know why this is, but it would be indistinguishable from our reality, according to people like Nick Bostrom and others. That suggests this is so, that our existence is, we are essentially in a simulation. So the notion is that we're all these characters in this literal simulation run on some computing device, some hardware device that we don't necessarily understand at this point, and we're calling that God.

Well, that was, I was going to get to, uh, so eventually you get to a point where if you could simulate everything, then you would have to ask, there must be some simulator, right? There must be some master simulator. So let's say I'm a simulation. Well, who simulated me? And then, oh, who simulated them? And then who simulated them? So that's the recursion, that's infinite regress. You can't actually get to a base level of, um, you know, a final simulator. And if you did, it would kind of be like God, like you're talking about this brain in a jar that's created out of silicon and and and oxygen and whatever we're made of, but it's physically created by human beings. What if you can't pay the power bill that week? And, you know, you have to choose between unplugging your refrigerator or unplugging the brain? Like, is that killing something? You know, like it starts to enter into the realm of ethics and maybe even these concepts of a deity.

What I've heard, and I find quite plausible, is, remember I said the, the implication of having infinite compute is that you can simulate everything in the universe? Yeah. But can it simulate itself? So I want to digress into what's called complexity theory. There are two different types of of difficult things. There's like a complex thing, like building an Airbus 320. It's very complicated, right? You can do it. If I give you all the parts, all the instructions, give you the right order, and I keep you energized, like anybody can follow the instructions and make it. The Earth's weather pattern state right now is complex. There's there's no way that you can actually create that. Like you would need another plane-sized thing to create that. That's called irreducibly complex. You cannot make it simpler and then build it up from simpler and simpler things, unlike an Airbus. You can build it up from smaller and smaller parts, and as long as you follow the recipe, you know, if you follow the recipe for the Simon Observatory, you'll get the Simon's Observatory. But if you try to simulate and it may be the simulate the weather, you do need another planet. Like we'd need another planet just like the Earth, and then we'd introduce carbon dioxide at a certain rate and see, is it really going to cause it? Like, that's totally impractical, right? So the question of these things is, is it really a simulation if it's not 100%? Like, you could make a very, very good weather simulation. We do have that. But but famously, they're only accurate for a few days, right? So so how do you build up, you know, an accurate simulator? It has to be the same. So in other words, do we need like another, is there another universe where the simulators are? That's equally complex to the simulation creation that they made? And then did they stop? Did they get, are they made of silica? Are they artificial? Are they? So there are proposals that you could detect the presence. It's kind of like you mentioned the Truman Show, where how all computers work right now is is on this binary code, zeros and ones, five volts, zero volts. Um, but, and that means that the world is fundamentally discretized. It's broken into little chunks, like the screen on your computer or your iPad. It's pixelated in space. We call them voxels, volume elements. Um, and so you can, you can have a large number of them, but it's a big difference between a large number and infinity. To really have a continuous, like, like, um, temperature is continuous, like go from 0 degrees to 100 degrees, and there's every step in between. But in the simulated world, because you couldn't have, you need an infinite number of computer power to simulate just from 0 degrees to one degree, not let alone from 0 to 100, or every possible combination. So at some level, you'd see if you zoomed in really close on the on the thermometer, you'd see there's a little jump. So you could detect the presence of the simulator. It's more complicated, actually. It's done using astrophysical sources called gamma-ray bursts and other things that are, um, that have properties that are seemingly incompatible with their being a simulation at the most distant and therefore earliest moments in the universe. So right now, there's zero evidence for it. Nick Bostrom will tell you, and you should have him on, that that, you know, that that's basically a cop-out. And and there are ways around that. That, uh, that fail-safe mechanism.

Aliens do aliens exist? Yes, aliens do exist. Uh, there's an old joke, they're called Hungarians. Hungarians are there's so many countries. Um, so I, I, yes, there's an old joke. There are aliens. They're Klingons, and they're around Uranus. But I wanted to give this to you, Stephen, as one of the gifts I've brought for you today. This is some soap for you. This is soap. Uranus soap. It's Uranus soap. So you want to keep Uranus clean. Um, thank you so much. In all seriousness, there's no evidence for aliens. There's no, what's I call, possibility does not equal probability. The existence of so many stars in the universe means there's so many planets, which is true. We found almost every single star has maybe 10 planets around it, and we have a hundred billion in our galaxy alone. There's a hundred billion galaxies in our universe. We're talking a one with 24 zeros after it. That's how many planets there are in the observable universe. Planets, planets. People say that means that it's got to be life in the universe. No, it doesn't mean anything. There could be, uh, so many hurdles for life to get started, let alone to create complex technology producing life like us, that we're essentially, we're it. And I'm not saying we are it, but I'm saying there's been 0.00% evidence that life exists beyond the Earth. I know you've had Lou Elizondo on. Uh, the claims that he's making are controversial. They're not scientific. They're government. I'm not dismissing his experiences of people he talks about. They're not persuasive. They're not addressing fundamental characteristics. The universe is vaster than you or I can comprehend. You know, if this was our solar system, the nearest star would be like near in San Diego. There's almost no way for us to comprehend how enormous our solar, our universe is, let alone how vast the cosmos is. How much of it can we see? We can see technically, we can see a lot of the universe, but most of that is way before even molecules formed. In other words, there's no possibility of life. Let's restrict ourselves to the Milky Way galaxy, which is the only galaxy we'll ever be able to explore, etc., unless we invent wormhole travel like Interstellar. Um, but, but for now, we have sent probes. The farthest probe we've ever sent was launched in 1977. It's one light-day away from the Earth. Okay? So that means traveling at the speed of light, the fastest speed possible, which is how much miles per hour? 186,000 miles per second, 300,000 kilometers per second. It's only, quote, it's only gone one light-day away. The nearest star is 1,200 times farther away than that. It's four light-years away. So it'll never get to that other star. I mean, it took, and it took 50 years to get one light-day. So it'd need 1,200 times 50 years, call it 100. So you're talking like vast numbers of of millennia to get to the nearest star. And that star, we don't even know if it has life on it or not. And it's not actually going to that star. But the point is, the universe, the galaxy itself is so large, and the types of environments in which life can take hold are so, so precarious. It's, it's actually, we, we tell ourselves a story, like you said, with molecules, and then they start to evolve, and then they get, it's, it's really not known how life got created. It's not known how life came from non-living material, from hydrogen, helium, oxygen, how that turned into a cell. It's a, it's a vast challenge in what's called organic, uh, synthetic organic chemistry and the formation, origin of life. And then to say that those entities then evolved into some kind of technologically produced. You know, if we found a dinosaur on Mars, that would be the discovery of the, of the, of the history of the planet, of of all time, right? A or whatever, even a bacterium on Mars, there would be an incredible discovery. So some people try to defeat this notion and say, well, life didn't have to necessarily, uh, get started on all these planets. It could have started once and then get brought to those other planets through meteorites. Yeah, this was actually created, this theory was created by the same Fred Hoyle who came up with the Big Bang Theory. They called it panspermia. Sounds dirty, but it's not. So these meteorites could carry genetic material, and they could land on another planet. They could have landed on Earth. That's one theory that life on Earth originated from another planet that had life on it. And in fact, this is one of your lovely pardon gifts. This is what Elon will kill for. I'm going to give you something that Elon doesn't have. This is a piece of Mars. This is a real piece of Mars. It's 1.524 grams of another planet. I want you to touch it. You can see it's a little bit reddish, like the planet Mars. This is much better than the butt soap you gave me. I gave you a piece of Uranus and a piece of Mars. Here's some information about it. I give out, as I said, these meteorites on my website, Brian King dot com, to lucky winners each month. And I give out the information. This was found in Africa. And how did it get here? Well, a meteorite hit the planet Mars, shattered off debris. That debris orbited around Mars for millions of years, perhaps eventually had plowed into the Earth and landed in Africa. They found it. They said this, they knew it came from space. They analyzed it. It has the same chemical composition, molecular structure as the Landers that are on Mars right now. Measure for Mars. So we know 100% that's from Mars. It's incredible. So Elon is desperately trying to get there. That's your little piece. Please, thank you. Keep it. Keep it safe. And that's one way that life could have gotten to Mars from the Earth, right? The same thing happens on the Earth as happened to Mars. So it could have hit, uh, Earth, blasted off, um, some amoebas, some orcas, some kangaroos, whatever, and whatever was on the Earth at the time, and then eventually landed on Mars with the DNA of it. But it didn't take hold, right? So planets exchange DNA. It is possible, but we don't see life on Mars.

If we think about this table, yeah, um, give to put in context how big the universe is. If the universe was the size of this table, how big would Earth be on this table? Incomprehensibly small. Not even a grain of sand. No, no, no. Far, far smaller fraction. Even in our galaxy, it wouldn't be a grain of sand. Even if this were our galaxy, wouldn't be a grain of sand. No, no, no. Our solar, our whole solar system would be perhaps, yes, one grain of sand. If this were a Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across, it would be like one tiny little grain of sand. What would be of the solar system out to the planet Neptune? So the, what's that? 10 planets? Something? Well, we have, uh, there's eight planets in our solar system, including the Earth. Used to be nine, but Pluto is no longer a planet. Um, so, and we're about one-third of the way from the edge of the disc of the Milky Way. So traveling all across there, yes, we would be perhaps the entire solar system, actually smaller than maybe half a grain of sand. And can we travel to the end of the solar system? Well, we sent, uh, this object. It's gone well beyond it. So the edge of the solar system is about four light-hours. So we, in 50 years, Stephen, we've only gone, quote, and I'm not downplaying this, this is a historic accomplishment. We actually put on these on these spacecrafts, uh, digitized pictures of human life, of voices, of songs from every continent, of culture, of recipes, of laughter, of children crying, of babies. They put this called the Golden Record. Carl Sagan was responsible for this. And they mounted it to it. And it's now, well, as I said, 24 light-hours away. And the farthest edge of our solar system, the planet Neptune, is four light-hours. Sorry, 24 light-hours is the Voyager spacecraft. So we've only gone one-sixth of, we've gone only six times the diameter of our solar system. So our entire solar system would be a grain of sand on this table, less even. Yeah, about half a grain, yeah. Half a grain of sand on this, this table. This table is about two and a half meters, roughly big. And how many tables are there? That's a very good question. We think at least 100 billion tables, each one with 100 billion grains of sand. There are more, there are more grains, sorry, there are more stars in the entire universe that we can observe than every grain of sand on every beach on every continent on our planet. That's really wobbled in my head. So there's our entire solar system is half of a grain of sand on this sort of two, three meter table, and there are a hundred billion tables. So, you know, when you hear that, you go, okay, we really don't matter. Like, we're really, it's, it's so bizarre that we've fallen into the trap of believing that we're like important in any way. And then that, for me, that even throws another marker towards religion. But the other thing it makes me go is, surely there's got to be some other life on one of these grains of sand on the hundred billion tables.

Again, the, well, let me just address the first thing. So, um, you're, uh, about 10, maybe 15 trillion times bigger than a virus or bacteria. Um, can that bacteria affect you or a virus hurt you? Of course, it can. So size doesn't really make that big a difference in this context, right? Jupiter is a hundred times, you know, bigger in diameter than the Earth. Does it make it more important? I think the Earth is much more important. I like the Earth a lot better. Um, the sun is a hundred times bigger than Jupiter. Like, would you like to live there? So the point I'm trying to make is size isn't really that important. Numbers aren't really that important. And remember, don't ever forget, we're the only conscious, you know, entity that we know about in the universe. Right? There's, there's literally 70 different types of of primates, right? Like monkeys, you talked about before, bonobos, orangutans. None of them have what we have. None of them can have this. Probabilistically, let me give you an example. Uh, I've been to Antarctica twice for bicep experiments. When I go there, Antarctica is the seventh continent to be discovered on Earth. It's approximately 12% of the landmass of the Earth. It's a huge, enormous continent with extreme mountains, weather, uh, extreme cold. But one thing it doesn't have is much life. But if you did that same thing, I said, look, Stephen, there's this continent. You could hardly walk across it in, you know, five or six years, even if you're a great athlete. You know, people do it, but you, it would be very challenging to do it. Um, it's enormous. It's got all the support for life. It's got, um, hydrocarbons. It's got heat. It's got, um, rocks. You can build shelter. You can have water, which is the most important thing. How much life do you think is there? Let me just tell you, Stephen, there's, it makes up 13% of the Earth's surface. There's 8 billion people on Earth. How many, how many people do you think live there? I mean, as a scientist, you don't have to be a scientist. You say, I think there's probably, you know, maybe 800 million people there. There's zero people there, basically. So just the probability. I'm not saying it's impossible. Probability is not determined by possibility. Because the, the thing with the South Pole is, okay, so there's no one there. And if you put me there and said, is there life? And I got a telescope out and I looked around, I'd go, there's no life here. I can't see anything. I think I'd say, I'm the only, the only person here. And then I'd, oppositely, meaning to myself, I'd say, I must be really important. I might think that I'm a God. If, if I'm the only life there, I'd look around for miles and I'd walk for days and days and days and send out pigeons and whatever, and I'd go, there's no one. It's just me. But then, little do I know that although this little space is inhabitable, if you go get on a plane and go a little bit further, you get to the land of the free. But what if we can't do that? What if there's no plane? What if there's nothing? What if this is all we have?

I think that a lot of the sightings and stuff, I've interviewed the top fighter pilot, um, you know, in the world that claim to have witnessed these encounters. I've, um, you know, interviewed the top, you know, people that claim these things exist. I've interviewed Avi Loeb, he's a good friend at Harvard, who runs a project. He claims he's discovered material from, uh, interstellar, you know, technology, perhaps like a garbage barge that was floating throughout. Friend, he's a very eminent scientist. At no point do I ever understand the fundamental answer to the question, how did they get here? What properties, what physics properties do they use? You know, they always say, oh, well, they defy the laws of physics. Well, I'm a physicist. You know, I can understand some of the most deep physics you want. Um, and by the way, there are many times in history where if I showed you something that was made by the US government, you would say that is witchcraft, magic. Like the iPad thing, you said, iPad is just one thing. You know, in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, do you know, by the way, I have to tell you this, if you don't know the word podcast, do you know that comes from the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey? Oh, yeah. I read the article for it. It was a, yeah, it was an engineer at, uh, at, uh, who called it an iPod, and the iPod came from the pod in 2001. So we owe podcasts to 200. So in that movie, there are iPads. They're guys communicating with iPads, but they thought it was like technology of like 20 centuries from now. No, I'm talking about the technology it would take to make traversable distances out of this incomprehensible cosmos that talked about. When you apply that thinking to God, it changes, though. Because earlier you said, we just can't fathom. Mhm. We can't fathom this creator and the factors that would go into this creator. So we almost have to, you know, some people just choose to believe, right? Yeah. And the same can be applied to this thinking of how they got here was like, listen, maybe we don't know their technology because it's just unfathomable. Like the iPod or the iPad was 100 years ago. You're absolutely right. So if they're just a hundred years ahead of us technologically, we would think that they were doing witchcraft. We would, we wouldn't understand the basis of the technology that they used to travel here. Sure. But, uh, people like Lou will talk about things that are exactly, um, scientific claims. One of the things in his book, which I read, he, he hasn't come on my podcast. I'd like to talk to him. But, uh, he talks about these these craft and and the properties of them and how when you're inside of them, they're bigger than they are when you're outside of them. Um, and how they affect and they they interact with human biology and cause burns and and so forth. And the technology he's talking about, it's not like some fifth force that I don't know about. It's using the properties of of general relativity, of spacetime. We do know enough about these things. Whereas God, you're right. I'm not, I'm not being, um, so, so critical, maybe when it comes to this notion of God. But remember, I said I don't, I don't have to say I believe in gravity or in string theory or whatever. We can have evidence for it. So when they make claims that have to do with physics, they should be tested by the laws of physics. When you talk about God, saying I'm stipulating, you can't test those with laws, and therefore I can't prove God exists, despite how much I would like to or not like to.

So what do you think the probability is that we are alone? Do you think we're alone in the universe? I think it's very high. You think it's high? I think it's very high that we're alone. Let me make an analogy. For us to be here, Earth had to have the following circumstances happen. We had to have, can you pass me the moon? The moon, yeah. And actually, can you pass me the, there's a globe behind you. Love to have that perfect. Okay. So I put here a globe, and I put here the moon. And these are almost an exact ratio of size. This is about how big the moon is compared to the Earth. Now, originally, before the moon didn't exist, when the Earth was was first formed, the the Earth condensed out of a giant version of trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of these meteoritic materials. They sank to the bottom, made the core of the Earth. The Earth's core is made of iron, heavier, lighter elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. They kind of accreted onto it, and eventually this super planet formed. And that planet, or the the early Earth, was called Theia, and it was called that because eventually there was a planet the size of that. Give me that beach ball, please. Stephen. A planet about this size, maybe a little bit smaller, just for people that are not watching. Yeah. So there's a beach ball that's a little bit smaller than the globe that we're looking at. It impacted this early Earth, Theia, blasted out material into the solar system, and over millions and millions of years, some of that material condensed and formed the moon. The moon, and then the Earth formed as we know it today. Now, the moon is 250,000 miles away from the Earth. It's exactly at the right place in size that we have tides on the Earth. We have ocean tides four times a day. So right now, I'm showing where high tide would be, say, where this part of the moon's gravity is pulling on the ocean here, so it rises it up. That means that some of the tides on the other side are also also high tide, and then right angles, low tide, low tide. Oh, so that's how the tides work. Basically, wherever the moon is, it's pulling the ocean up. Yeah, it's actually pulling the Earth, and the Earth is surrounded by this, this, this sphere of water, and so it slashes, that moves the Earth within that water, and the water gets turned into like a lazy shape. So the high tides will be twice a day, and the low tides will be twice a day, right angles to them. So that happens, and we believe that that process is what was necessary to make the materials from the ocean is where life started and eventually get that on land and fertilize and make people eventually. Okay. So remember, I'm trying to explain how we got here. So there had to be this enormous collision from an a pre-existing object in our solar system to create the moon and the Earth as we know them now. But that wasn't enough. Then there had to be these giant icebergs called comets. Comets bombard the Earth over periods of millions of years. The comets brought the ocean-bearing material that brought water to the Earth's surface and minerals and so forth to the Earth's surface. Eventually, the Earth cooled down, and those oceans covered about 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean, as shown here. So that comet had to occur, that bombardment, and the, and the, uh, the fertilization of water, or providing of water, hydration of the Earth came courtesy of comets. Then, lastly, for us to be here, these guys, these are dinosaurs here. I brought an actual representation of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were roaming the Earth, we know that, right? 65 million years ago, an asteroid about this size, which is about an inch across, hit the Earth traveling 250,000 miles per hour, something like that, hit it near, uh, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, right here, created this enormous devastation, this crater that obliterated the atmosphere, filled the atmosphere with pollution, and and basically made like nuclear winter, like you and Annie talked about. And that cut off light to, uh, plants, and eventually the dinosaurs, most of the dinosaurs, all the dinosaurs died. Now, that allowed mammals, the first mammals were little tiny rodents, rats, right? And I believe all evolution is true, right? So those little rats then eventually evolved and made whales and people and and bats and all sorts of cool stuff, and eventually we came from that. So I've described to you three very important bombardments of the Earth. One, Earth's moon formed from a huge collision. Two, comets bombard the Earth, flooding it with water, just the right amount, not too much, not too little, is perfect. And three, a meteor kills off the dinosaurs. If any of those came in a different.

Order, we would likely not be here. So, not only do they occur, three incredibly improbable things that she would never predict would occur in that order happen to occur, and they happen to occur in the right order. The first two created life. Though, right? Say again, it was the first two of those three that created life. Potent allowed for life to exist. Yes, you're right. But remember, I'm trying to explain how D.O.A.C. occurs, right? For us to be here. If there were dinosaurs here, if the dinosaurs had a space program, you know, where they could zap away with a laser and they could deflect the asteroid, they would have done it, and we wouldn't be here, likely. Okay, so you're right. But let's say those events occurred in a different, in a different, uh, pattern. The small asteroid hit the Earth first. Nothing happens. There's no dinosaurs to kill. Uh, then the comets come in, flood the Earth with ocean. But then this huge, uh, you know, uh, this Thea hits the, the Earth forms into its moon. That would have boiled off all the ocean as well. So we wouldn't have any water there for life to exist on. And then the dinosaurs wouldn't even need to exist. So those are just three things. Stephen, by the way, we have also the planet Jupiter. I talked about before, Galileo discovered its moons. Jupiter is like a bodyguard. It protects the Earth from almost every major deadly impact. The moon is also like a bodyguard. See all the craters on this moon that my son 3D printed? He's proud to show it to you. Yeah, these are death strikes that could have taken out the Earth. Look how big some of them are. They're as big as the Earth, as the dinosaur-killing meteorite in some cases. So we have all these conditions. Now, I've only named five or six. Imagine each one of the five or six only occurs with a probability of one in 10,000, one part in 10 to the fourth. Well, guess what happens? You take 10, one in 10,000, multiply by one in 10,000, one in 10,000, six times to say that you get a number that's smaller than the number of planets in the universe. In other words, the probability of all just those six things. I think there's trillions of things. How life formed, the cell formed, the chemistry, the biology, and, and the culture, whatever, all those things that form to make us technological. I think the probability is, is extremely small, which is why I said, I think the probability is low that we are, that there are other life forms, or in another way to say it, I think it's very high that we are alone. And that might be for a reason. You know, there might be some reason. Maybe we're meant to really take care of Earth. Maybe we're meant to really appreciate the blessings of what we have on Earth.

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Star signs and horoscopes. Yeah, is there any possibility, in your view, from everything you've, you've done in your research and your studies of the universe, is there any possibility that anything up there in the stars is determining our outcomes and our personality, and whether he's going to dump me or I'm going to do well on Bitcoin? Is there anything? Uh, no. There, there's, there's no evidence for it in the sense that you can do randomized control trials or double-blind surveys. You can do exact simulations. As I said, it, the theory that the position of Jupiter at the moment that you were born can literally be replicated. There's something like a million people born every day, and then at the exact same time, there's probably, you know, 14,000 or what, you know, you could do the math and figure it out. Um, for them all to have, for no person to ever have, you know, sort of duplication of luck or circumstance. The, the effect in terms of physical forces, the gravity of Jupiter, the, the pull of of the sun, the position of the Earth in the day you were born. Now, there are correlation effects, right? So you have to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation, right? So some, I'm actually born on the most, um, frequently frequent birthday on all the calendar, September 9th. Now, what is Septe, September 9th is about nine months after the holiday season, right? So in a Western culture, you know, women party, maybe my mom and my dad had a nice, you know, New Year's Eve or Christmas party or whatever, and that's led to me being here, right? So there are correlations. And then that, so that means that there's a lot of people that are Virgos born on September 9th, none of which are like me. Or in the Southern Hemisphere versus the Northern Hemisphere, a woman who has gestation during the summer might feel differently than if she's gestating during the winter, even though the babies are born on the same day. Right? They're just born on opposite sides of the Earth. So they will have very different personalities, whereas astrology says they should be the same. It's interesting because people will, especially people that are precious about horoscopes and astrology and those kinds of things, will say, I have just as much evidence for my thing as you do for your thing. Like they, because they, they almost consider it to be a religious belief. The people that I know, literally, some people have designed their entire lives and the meaning of their life around meaning that they're finding out by looking up at the stars. How's it different from religion? Astrology. Um, there are elements of religion, yeah, certainly. It came, it came out of religion. I don't think people now worship, you know, constellations, or I don't think there's many major religions that are based on astrological, you know, contemplation. But maybe without the worship part, but they, they're seeking guidance in their lives. They're getting answers from the stars. They're making decisions based on it. Much of their moral compass is being determined, like much of their, um, yeah, much of their morals and ethics and decisions and behaviors are being determined by by it, in the same way that it's being determined by someone that believes in a God. Yeah, it's hard to, you know, it's, I'm the wrong person to ask. Some, why, why do people need this? People need answers to, to contemplate the universe. First of all, it's a scary universe, right? We, we are confronted by things that none, none of us can understand entirely. Uh, no brightest Nobel Prize winners, the, the greatest scientists, the greatest thinkers can't really contemplate it. So we, we go through life, we try to make the best of it, but we also have this sense of self and this theory of self, this theory of mind, that, you know, we can relate to other people, and we want answers. We want, and I think that is in common. I think you're right, religion is very. I almost wish I did. You ever wish that you were more religious? I mean, yeah, I wish I was too, and I'm not. And I, hopefully, my kids won't hear. No, I heard from a psychologist once, he said, you should endeavor in your life that you pass on only half of your neuroses to your kids. Neuroses, um, crazy anxieties, fears, weird pathology, you know, psychological deficiencies. Because if every parent did that, you know, the species is going to get better and better. But if you keep making everyone as anxious and as nervous, and there's no progress in history. A lot of the zodiac religions that you talked about, or astrological religions, they view time as a, as a circle. In other words, a flat circle. A spiral goes into the future. That's Western civilization. That's progress in science. That's forward moving to the stars, to wherever we're going to go, and more and more human knowledge and flourishing. But if you just say, I'm committed to, I'm going to be repeating every year on the birthday, I'm going to be repeating what all my ancestors did. That's very depressing. And it doesn't lead to innovation, to find cures for diseases, to find explanations for fields and forces and technology that we have.

So what is the, what is the meaning of life? Ah, glad you asked. Um, to me, the meaning of life is to do as many things that if taken away from you would be devastating to you. That which you do should be so consequential that to not have done it or not have it would literally destroy you to your core. For me, it's my kids. Those connections, the, the bonds, the, the hopefulness for the future. I never said this, Stephen, but I don't get too emotional. But I think about death a lot more, you know, especially in my case, since October 7th last year, a lot of my friends and family were impacted by that in Israel. And it's, I've never cried so many times than I have in the past year. But thinking about all those, you know, kind of tears and and emotions and saying, do I wish I never felt that? Do I wish I didn't have the pain if it meant I didn't have the joy of having those people in my life? And I'm not ready to die. I'm hopefully, you know, maybe middle-aged, I don't know. I don't know if I'll live to 104, but hopefully, you know, maybe I will. But I've done a lot in my life. I've done things that, you know, I didn't think I could do when I was a kid. I've married the love of my life. I've brought incredible souls into the world. If I did die, I'm not scared. I don't want to. I'm working on my body. I'm working on my diet. I'm trying to do what's right for me and so I can be here as long as possible. But the meaning of life is making connections. It's making these bonds such that, you know, you hope that people will be sad, devastated, even when you're gone. So, too, the connections that I've made, I can't see my life without them. I don't want to. I don't think about it. It's morbid to me. It's make those connections while you can. Not, I mean, when I listen to that episode that you did with Annie Jacobs, it's terrifying, right? And you were like visibly scared in that episode. She's amazing. We don't know. I mean, God forbid, I don't think it's super as likely, maybe as she, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm naive. But the point is, we don't know. The point is, we're here now. The point is, we might be alone. But that should fill us with meaning to do what we can do uniquely. So, before you had kids, what was the meaning of your life? Uh, it was very easy. I wanted to win a Nobel Prize. And that has changed now. It has. It has. Uh, partially because my father was a great scientist. I want to show him up. He never won a Nobel Prize. He won a lot of awards. I want to show him up. Now he's dead. You know, there's no one to prove stuff to. You know, you should live life to impress yourself. And I feel like, yeah, if they gave me the Nobel Prize, if someday I would merit it with my team of these brilliant scientists, just, that's pretty unlikely. But let's say it happened. It doesn't, it doesn't mean what it once meant to me when I was your age. When I was your age, it wasn't an idol to me. It was a god. Like, you win it, you're as close to scientific royalty and godlike status as possible to imagine, much more than an Oscar, gold medal in the Olympics. It is every, there's only 200 or so I've ever won it. It's like a small book. And actually, I've talked to people that have won it. Actually, the forward to the, my second book, Into the Apostles, was written by Barry Barish. He won the 2017 Nobel Prize. He told me, Brian, um, because I always ask my final question, I know we're getting to the end here, like your final question. I learned from you. I have my own final question. It's, um, if you could go back in the past and meet your 20-year-old self, what would you say to him to give him the courage to do as you've done, to go into the impossible? And he said to me, Brian, I would say to stop having the imposter syndrome. And I said, well, you know, yeah, you just tell me you won the Nobel Prize. And he won't. No, no, no. I have the imposter syndrome now. Said Barry, you're kidding me. You won the Nobel Prize. How could you possibly have imposter syndrome? He said, Brian, let me tell you something. When you win a Nobel Prize, you go to Stockholm, you meet the King of Sweden, they give you this buffet dinner, you're dressed in white tie, not black tie, white tie. You get this huge gold medal, solid gold. You get a million dollars, possibly. And they want to make sure you're not going to come back and say, hey, uh, Gustav, there, uh, where's my money? Where's my? So they make you sign a ledger, not unlike the ledger in front of you, and it has your signature. I, Barry Barish, received the Nobel Prize. And Barry said, I took that book. The first thing I did is I turned the page. Who won it last year? Who won it the year before? Who won it? I saw Richard Feynman. I saw Marie Curie. I saw Albert Einstein. He said, I don't deserve to be in the same universe as Albert Einstein, let alone in the same book. How could they give the same prize to me they gave to him? And I realized this was like an idol to him too. I said, Barry, I've got good news for you. Albert Einstein had the imposter syndrome. He's like, you're kidding me. I said, no, no, no, Barry. He had the imposter syndrome. And his hero was Isaac Newton. Einstein said, Isaac Newton did more for science and Western civilization than any human being before or since. That's a pretty tall order. How could Einstein live up to that? But I said, Barry, go one step deeper. Isaac Newton had the imposter syndrome. What the heck? How could he? He's the greatest. Might have invented calculus, discovered the laws of universal gravitation, the principles of optics, invented this telescope. No, no, no. He felt wholly, entirely unworthy of his hero, Jesus Christ. So much so, Stephen, that he attempted to do the same thing that Jesus Christ did. He knew he couldn't work miracles. He knew he couldn't walk on water and turn loaves into fishes. But he could do, what was in some sense, a greater struggle, which was to die a virgin, as Jesus did. And so he did. So the lesson is, imposter syndrome is normal. Don't, don't idolize something. Literally get a graven golden image of a man. Who, who cares? He's a man. I don't care. I, I take time home with my family over that. On a Shabbat, as I invite you down to come to me in San Diego anytime you want. I didn't realize that all of these great individuals felt like imposters themselves, which is, um, I think will liberate a lot of people from the way that they feel. I mean, we, I feel this every day. Like people introduce me on stage as like an interviewer or a podcast. I'm like, what? Just was never conceivable to me. And I know Jack's talked about the same thing. Like, it's never conceivable to me that I'd be doing a podcast and it'd be big and that people would think you're good at it in some way. For some bizarre reason, no, you're not just good. Stephen, come on. You're an elite level. You're a no PR. What is that? What is that though? I mean, and how did that happen? I didn't go to school for that. I just sat here and started asking people questions in my kitchen. And then more people tuned in. And they said, you're good at it. I'm like, what? What does good mean? I don't do it the same as Rogan. And Rogan's good at it. And Huberman's good at it. I've been with them all. Look, you have a unique angle that is not replicable. But I want to leave you with the mission that kind of has guided me. And again, I've learned a lot from you. For, you know, it's no secret. I have the high energy opening to the, into the. Can you imagine how hard it is to take like someone who studied like some chemical pathway and some thermodynamic system to make it like the hype show that you guys open each episode with? I learned that from you. But Carl Sagan said, what an amazing thing. A book is in it, you have the words of a long-dead author, and you're reading it to yourself, and he or she is communicating with you across the ages. Nowadays, people, millions of people have you in their ears, and you're communicating potentially across the generations. And you're, again, I don't want to keep being, you know, like a Jewish mother, but your kids, your, your grandkids, they're going to have access to this. It's not going to be some, even a book, which is wonderful, but it's going to be visceral, audible, and it's going to have an impact you can't even imagine right now. Creep me out. I'm like, wow. The meteors didn't do it. Crazy to think about the impact and the lasting impact that this medium might have because of the internet. But just even, I mean, even books now, the books are turned into audiobooks, into digital books, and such. Um, look at this, the last election, this was like the podcast election, right? Not going on a podcast, going on a podcast. Um, and, and there are many people that attempt to imitate what you do. And, and, you know, it's, it's, I, I don't do it for money. I don't do it. It's not my career. I do it for fun because I want to give back to young people the way that I learned from Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov. I read their books. It inspired me to be a scientist. When COVID hit in 2020, they couldn't do book tours. And so I invited all my scientist friends to come on. I had some Nobel Prize winners come on. And it just keeps amplifying. But I view it as, you know, for me, it's a, it's a passion project, but it's a way of giving back, returning to the community from whom I've taken so much. I've learned so much. With that in mind, with this knowledge that what we're creating, what all of us are creating, whether you have a podcast or not, or you're just writing on the internet, whatever it might be, with the knowledge that it's going to sustain and it's going to be here potentially in many generations to come, how does that, how is that supposed to change how someone creates? Because I'm thinking, you just said that to me, I was like, Jesus Christ, that's quite profound. But then seconds later, I was like, almost like the simulation theory, I just thought, crack on, do you know what I mean? Just carry on with what you're doing. Because if you, you can get too deep into it that you can either distract yourself or ruin yourself from the essence of what makes the thing special. So, am I meant to change in any way with that knowledge? I think you, I think you are. I think you're doing it already. I mean, you've spoken again, I've, you know, tried to study the, the glimpses of, of morsels that I can comprehend. The experimentation process is a process of fundamentally being dissatisfied with the current product, even though it's wonderful and it's great, it's top, top, you know, leading in its category, but still just not being satisfied. You always want to make it a little bit better. See what works, see what doesn't work. That's pleasurable because you, even when you get a failed, there's no such thing as a failed experiment. I tell my students, you always learn something, and that brings you closer to truth. And that's what is so meaningful. What I was wondering, what I thought you were going to say is like, when you're out in public and people see you, and I asked this of Lex and Joe, I want to ask you to, has put on my podcast or how turn the microphone to you. Um, there's a, there's a scene in the book, Animal Farm, um, where there's this donkey named Benjamin. And he's talking to the pig. And the pig says to the donkey, um, you know, I love your tail, it's so big. I got this short little curly tail, it's good for nothing. You got this beautiful tail, it could sweep away the, the flies. And the donkey says, yeah, but you know what? I wish I didn't have the flies, so I wouldn't need the tail. I want to ask you, do you ever worry about the attention, the fame, the lack of privacy, the intrusions, the, you know, everything for, for the alternative? I don't know. Would you? It's funny because when I go towards that question, and I remove the, all the downsides from my life, they're like glued to the upsides. So I'm like, so it's always a question of like, is the trade-off worth it? Is the question that I ask myself all the time, every week, every month. And I remind myself sometimes. I said this to Trevor Noah, but he told me that it gets to a point where you can't just reverse the decision, right? I try to remind myself that there's, I could delete this podcast, I could quit Dragon's Den, I could delete all my social media channels, and I could right now go to Bali. And I was playing this out the other day in my head. I was thinking, you know, if, if I say to myself that I'm optimizing for peace in this season of my life, then why the hell am I doing all this stuff? This is peace necessarily. Um, and then I play out the scenario. Okay, so I'll move to Bali. I'll, I'll chill out there. I've got the, the financial means to just live there for the rest of my life. I'll chill. And then I'll start. I know you're, this is where it goes. It's okay. And then I'll start writing. Yeah. And then, and then you know, I might start making videos about what I'm writing about because that's what I'll behind the diary. Yeah. And I'll start painting. And you start creating again. And then if the creations are good, you want to show it. And then you're going to share it to someone. And then they're going to buy it. And whatever. And then you're back here again. Look, I think that's what you're meant to do. I think, you know, people have a mission in life. You know, I don't have a body, you know, to be an Olympic athlete, you know, but you know, I have a mind, a curiosity. This is what you're good at. This is what you should lean into. I always feel like, do I teach my students to like overcome their deficiencies, or do I teach them to lean into their successes? I always feel like progress feels good, no matter what. I'm trying to lose weight. I lose a pound. It feels so much better to lose a pound than gaining. You know, it feels awful to gain an ounce. You know? So the, the fact is, are you useful? Are you doing? You know, Freud said, there's only two things in life: work and love. It's all you got to do. You were doing your work, doing your love. Take your vacation and, uh, enjoy Bali for a while. It lasts. And then come right back.

Brian, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is: If you found out that the world was ending in 10 minutes, who would you want to speak to and what would you tell them? A, it's easy. I mean, it's horrifying, but it's, but it's easy. Well, first of all, I, you know, call my friends at NASA and tell them to direct the giant space La. No, it would be my wife. My wife. You know, it's funny to think about how improbable life is. But when I got fired, I told you from Stanford, she was actually an undergraduate there. And luckily, we missed because I'm eight and a half years older than her, and I'd be some lecherous 28-year-old when she was 20. I got fired. I felt it was horrible. Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. It got me a job. That job led to this experiment called BICEP. That experiment called BICEP took me to the South Pole, took me to the brink of a Nobel Prize. But it also brought me to San Diego, which is her hometown. We would not have met. There's no, we didn't meet at Stanford. We were literally 100 feet away from each other at one point. We wouldn't have met. She was meant to be. If I hadn't gotten fired, if I hadn't been dreaming and fantasizing about experiments that I wanted to do, not to be someone else's employee, but to be my own CEO, my own world, my own laboratory, my own brand, I wouldn't have met her. I wouldn't have my precious, precious kids. There's no doubt it would be to call her. What would you, what would you tell her? I would just reminisce about how we met and what we brought into the world and, you know, kind of, uh, sure, we'd laugh and cry. Brian, thank you. Really appreciate it. It's been such a wonderful conversation. And I highly implore everybody that's listening to go and check out your show, to go and read your books, all of which I'll link below. Super fascinating. And also to go to your website if they want to be in with a chance of winning some of this space material, which is, I'm so, it's amazing that I have this. I'm such a big fan of space and SpaceX and everything that's going on out there in the universe. So thank you so much for this present. You can keep the Uranus soap, um, but I'll keep the piece of Mars. Um, the work you're doing is so important because it's helping to demystify and helping us to understand the nature of some of these really profound questions, not ever because, you know, we're seeking to figure it all out so that we can change how we live, but just because there's so much beauty and joy and, um, meaning that is derived irrespective of what the answer is. And I, and I, it's people like you that blow our minds open in a way that helps me, even though I'm never going to build a telescope, and I'm never going to go to this, the South Pole, and I'm never going to point it at the sky, and I'm not never going to seek to answer these questions in my life, but your work expands my mind. It expands my, like, thoughts of like possibilities. And as an entrepreneur, as a creator, I think that's a net positive for for everyone that receives the work that you do. Um, it's so wonder, it's so bizarre that we're so, we're so curious about about the stars, but it's such a beautiful thing. And long may you continue. There's very few people like you. And I was thinking the minute we got going today, I was thinking, there's very few people in the world that are both smart, which is I think pretty common, but then able to communicate. And that is really, I've met you and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who have this remarkable ability to communicate science in a way that inspires, galvanizes, and sort of cultivates curiosity. It's a really wonderful thing. I appreciate that. And it's exceptionally rare that combination of forces, like you said, about the probability of the comet hitting the universe and that bouncing off and creating a moon, the probability of those two things happening in the same place is so exceptionally rare. But it's wonderful that we have people like you in this world of podcasting because, you know, maybe once upon a time, the, um, it would have been harder to hear your voice, but now everybody can go and listen to you. Um, and I highly recommend they do. Your YouTube channel is exceptional. So thank you so much, Brian. Thank you. It's been, it's been an absolute pleasure. It's been an honor for me. Thank you, Stephen.

This diary won't change your life, but the habit it teaches you definitely will. The most unhelpful advice that I ever received: "Don't sweat the small stuff." You have to sweat the small stuff. I sweat the small stuff. I always have, and I always proudly will. Because small things that are easy to do are also easy not to do. It is easy to save a dollar, so it's also easy not to. It is easy to brush your teeth, so it's also easy not to. It is easy to make a 1% improvement, so it's also easy not to. Understanding the power of compounding 1%, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It is not about drastic transformations or quick wins. It's about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change on your outcomes. So, two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary. And it's truly beautiful inside. There's lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation, as well as some interactive developments. And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life. We're only going to do a limited run of these diaries. So if you want one for yourself, or for a friend, or for a colleague, or for your team, then head to the diary.com right now. I'll link it below.

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