FULL TRANSCRIPT: Professor Brian Keating on The Diary Of A CEO Podcast 

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 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The question of whether there’s a God or not and which God is most accurately represented by the science —

BRIAN KEATING: And the creation stories that those religions tell themselves or tell the world.

The $200 Million Project

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve raised a $200 million project. What does that mean? And what is the question you’re seeking to fundamentally answer with that $200 million project?

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah, let me take a step back. So for 2000 years, most scientists, people believed the universe was eternal, had been around forever. And then not far from here in north of Hollywood is a telescope, 100-inch diameter telescope, 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 100 billion suns, just like our sun, is expanding away from us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How could he see that through a telescope?

BRIAN KEATING: So he used what’s called the redshift. So the redshift is an effect that is related to a Christian Doppler discovery called the Doppler shift. You ever heard an ambulance coming towards you and it gets higher in frequency? That’s the Doppler shift. The waves of sound are piling up, their frequency is getting higher and higher, the wavelength is getting piled up in the direction it’s going, 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, 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 implications, even, 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.

In the Big Bang cosmology, the universe starts at a particular moment. Time comes into existence. The elements come into existence. All the elements in water, hydrogen in water, they all come into existence. Then over billions of years, those elements come together over the force of gravity. They will eventually fuse two hydrogens together to make helium and so forth. 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. Before they blow up, they create all sorts of other matter that we’re made of, calcium, oxygen, nitrogen, iron. In their death row, in their explosive, firework-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. Literally, as Carl Sagan said, we are star stuff.

I brought some star stuff here today. 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, Steven.

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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you know?

BRIAN KEATING: How do we know? We measure their velocity. We can track them on radar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How would you know that this is a meteorite?

BRIAN KEATING: 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…

STEVEN BARTLETT: So where does this come from then?

BRIAN KEATING: Well, this one was found in Argentina, in a place called the Field of the Stars.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this could have come from anywhere in the universe.

BRIAN KEATING: 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 4 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’ll turn into a diamond.

BRIAN KEATING: That’ll turn into a diamond. I like to say, you know, pressure is what turns dust into diamonds.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For anyone that can’t see this right now, it looks like a dice.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s almost identical to like a black dice.

BRIAN KEATING: Exactly. Yep. It’s very light. Now contrast that to, here’s a piece of rock. This is mostly volcanic rock. I collected that in 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, in Antarctica, not the South Pole.

And then here’s this one. This is found in Namibia. So this is a meteorite formed and 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 looks like a human foot.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I can’t explain how unbelievably heavy that is.

BRIAN KEATING: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t think I’ve held something that’s this size, but this heavy before.

BRIAN KEATING: It’s extremely dense. It’s a 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. So therefore the star can’t support its weight. It collapses, it explodes and rebounds.

Now, when your listeners or viewers go to my website, and if they win one, you’ll see how attractive these things are to magnets. It’s a very powerful, it’s called a rare earth magnet, neodymium magnet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Jesus.

BRIAN KEATING: So attach it to the meteorite. It’s fine to do that. You can do that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wow. That sound, I love that sound. A ping.

BRIAN KEATING: So this material is highly magnetic. And iron, which is primarily the constitution of this meteorite, has the exact same chemical structure as in your blood, there’s a molecule called hemoglobin. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this 200 million, what are you doing?

BRIAN KEATING: Okay, we’re going to get back to the money. Yep, exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what is the fundamental question you’re seeking to answer?

BRIAN KEATING: So let’s say you see someone shooting 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? 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 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 took that telescope there, we made an observation, we claim 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 that mimicked the signal of the Big Bang. And we were crushed because literally dust, we saw cosmic dust, the leftover byproducts of exploded stars.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I just want to be clear here. I don’t want to move on until I fully understand. So you went down to the South Pole. You looked up expecting to see these sort of waves that show that the universe is expanding. What you actually saw were lines of dust. Is that a simplified way of saying it? But you thought you’d seen these sort of microwaves of the universe expanding.

BRIAN KEATING: Yes, exactly. Simplifying it perfectly. We made this discovery and then immediately, effectively in scientific terms, six months later, this is in early 2015, we basically had to admit we were wrong.

And fortunately for me and for the universe as a whole, 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 I want to have a merger.” So he put together 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: BICEP being the telescope you built in the South Pole.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah, that lost the Nobel Prize in my first book, “The 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 seeing. I can’t show it to you as confidential as the 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you suspect is the origin of the universe? Well, 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.

BRIAN KEATING: 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. I mean, people are battling about, as I said, we thought we detected that signal, right?

So we already have 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 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 invalidated, literally, Steven, there were people publishing articles in major newspapers everywhere that proves God, proves nobody.

So it’s not like I’m going to think that I have the temerity 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, 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 talk about something very, you know, non-controversial. Let’s talk about abortion rights. Let’s talk about trans rights. 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. 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 definitive final word on it. But it’s sort of a privilege to play the game.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the most compelling evidence that you’ve ever encountered that there might be a God?

BRIAN KEATING: Hmm, that’s a long, long question. Well, I hope you’ll find it someday too. At least in my religion, in Judaism, God is the creator and he’s the organizer. He creates light and darkness. He creates day and night. He creates heaven and earth. He creates beasts 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 is a father, our father who art in heaven, right? And he’s a lord. 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 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 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.

I also think that 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If we came from a single cell organism, as some people say, 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 to go back far enough, it seems that giving birth, as we know it, which is this 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.

BRIAN KEATING: Does that make it more or less miraculous?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s so amazing, but 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, a 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?

BRIAN KEATING: And then you could ask the question, what if there was a creator? And this creator, not only 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 had the knowledge that that will eventually make a person and have consciousness and be able to conceptualize God.

Now, I’m not saying there’s evidence for it, but just 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 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 that’s why, you know, miracles…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Humans are pretty new, aren’t they? So…

BRIAN KEATING: Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How old is the conscious human?

BRIAN KEATING: The conscious, I mean, the first like homo sapiens that are of our species, probably 200,000 years old, maybe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s only been for 200,000 years that we’ve 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.

BRIAN KEATING: Right. Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. 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?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was going to say my birthday, yeah.

BRIAN KEATING: Okay. I always ask people that. I say, like, what’s your favorite day? Usually I’ll get 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 your 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 most kind of stringent, you know, or perhaps most challenging question is, you know, why does evil exist? Why would a good God create suffering, you know, 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 variability in life would necessitate a predetermined existence. And a lot of people believe that. I’ve talked to Sam Harris in my podcast. He’s been on here. He believes strict determinism.

Every single thing that’s happening to us right now, the words are coming out of my mouth, your ear twitching or whatever, that’s all determined. There’s no control. There’s free will is a complete and utter illusion. And because of that, then there doesn’t have to be an explanation of why there’s, you know, leukemia in children or whatever.

And yes, that is an unanswered question. And I think, 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 humans experience 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?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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 son or your daughter arrives in the world, because 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 generation. So I get that. And then with evil, I can also understand that pretty well. Because, you know, if we think of evil, maybe as a feeling or something that happens or a disease, I can understand that.

BRIAN KEATING: I would say evil is human. It’s human related. There’s no evil. Cancer is not evil.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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, even love comes with it. But, you know, if a woman dies, it’s probably her husband, statistically. You know, that’s evil, isn’t it?

But it’s love as well. So I understand the complexities of all of that. What I can’t understand is what active role God is playing in any of this stuff. And, yeah, 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 anywhere? 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 this 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 the single conscious 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, yes, 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. And I still don’t know, but I’m hoping science has some answers for me.

BRIAN KEATING: Well, yeah, sorry to disappoint right now, the connection that logical chain 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, it sounds like 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, sell observing mass or whatever you would do if you’re, but what do you do do?

And they — because if you’re an agnostic, there should be some behavior that’s similar to a theist.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

BRIAN KEATING: Because then you’re just atheist, right? I mean, in other words, how do you what practices? I’m a behaviorist in my life, you know, so I judge people on how they act and how they behave. And you know a lot about this. So how 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 this, you know, 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?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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.

BRIAN KEATING: Do you think of God? Let’s say you were Hindu, right? Let’s just say you’re not Hindu. Let’s say you are what you are, Presbyterian or the church.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if I had a practice, wouldn’t that make me religious?

BRIAN KEATING: Well, I’m saying, do you think if there is a God, we have to do this matrix, right? Let’s say God exists, God doesn’t exist, even behaves like he’s religious, even doesn’t behave like he’s religious, right? So right now, you’re in one of those quadrants, you’re not sure God exists. So you’re behaving, maybe as if he doesn’t exist.

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 going to say, “oh, God, Steven, you picked the wrong one. It’s not, it’s not, it’s Jainism, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s Latter-day Saints.”

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 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I, this is exactly the conclusion that stopped me being religious when I was 18.

BRIAN KEATING: Really?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, it’s exact conclusion. So we would go to 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 this assumption that I was going to go to hell and burn if I didn’t like obey this, this person in the sky. Then I read these books, Steve, 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, 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, that 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 put my flag in any particular religion. So he would let me in.

So my thesis then became, well, just be a good person. And you’re kind of hedging your bets, because any decent God that I think we’re supporting would go “that was a decent person, he couldn’t quite see it”, you know, whatever, but you wouldn’t see a little bit like that.

BRIAN KEATING: It’s hard to push back. But if you, let’s say, I say, “I want to get in shape.” 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, I’m sick.

Well, like, you know, whatever will understand, like, I, in other words, you, you would agree that if you knew God exists, you would do, you’d behave very radically differently. Right? If you had an encounter with God, well, Jesus or God himself, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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, that I probably would behave exactly how I do now. So the behavior of the practice, the Sabbath comes from one of those books or doctrine.

BRIAN KEATING: So, right, but, but even if you couldn’t choose, right, what if it’s like, what if it’s possible that all of them are right, and all of them are wrong? In other words, we are so frail, fragile, 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, you know, Jay Bhattacharya, I don’t fault him. I don’t, in fact, I think it’s beautiful that that’s his avenue for abortion. 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, as long as I don’t murder anybody, 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 the serious action and working hard, because you do it in the 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 that concept of God is that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in. I also don’t believe in that, like, he’s omniscient, he’s going to prevent, you know, babies from dying from cancer, he’s going to do this and that, like, that’s why they make fun of it, or they relegate it to a friend in the sky, you called it, right?

I don’t believe there’s a friend in the sky, I don’t think that even makes sense, but I believe that we are seeing something so heavily refracted, again, if it exists, it’s like showing a microwave telescope, you know, showing BICEP or the Simons Observatory to, you know, God 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 and an ultimate here.

For me, let me just say the final thing I want to say, because I don’t want to make too much about this. But 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 the point being, you obviously wrestle with it, and interestingly enough, the word Israel, which is the central, you know, country of Judaic faith, means fight with God, it means wrestle with God, El 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…

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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 kind of, yeah, it’s a recurring thought, and I actually think from doing this podcast, and just 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 certain that the God I believed in probably wasn’t real. And now I’ve kind of found 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 the sciences, 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, is it?

BRIAN KEATING: It’s interesting that you said that, it’s remnant, it reminds me of Einstein — Einstein said 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 the standard answer of the 1800s, which is, you know, you see 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 had asked these questions, and just accepted the belief that you had when you’re 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 the wisdom that you’ve accrued from your life experiences, from 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 just, I don’t, so I don’t have tolerance for scientists that dismiss it and say it’s stupid, but I also, 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 a kid’s 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”, and they’ll say “God made it.”

BRIAN KEATING: 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 the 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 from”, 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 wavelengths, of color, all that stuff, that takes you back to almost to the Big Bang, which then intersects with what I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said that you think of God as almost like a force, do you think it’s a conscious force, I, if you, if I sit down and pray to this God, will they hear me?

BRIAN KEATING: I honestly could say I don’t know, but I know you’ll change, I know that you’ll hear yourself. If you can go down to the ocean, 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, it’s just you alone, and not knowing is part of the point, I think.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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, or get me thinking about, you know, make me emotional, I can imagine, you know, even listening to certain music can make you feel that, what role is God playing in that moment?

BRIAN KEATING: 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, if he, 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 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, an email, and you just never respond to it, like people, remember the movie Interstellar, have you seen that movie? So, you know, the people on earth are communicating with the people, you know, Matthew McConaughey’s daughter, and she doesn’t know he’s listening, and he doesn’t, and he knows that she’s, but in that sense, he’s kind of like this God, 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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? There’s so much evidence in the world that he can’t hear you, and he’s not going to do anything about it.

BRIAN KEATING: But again, you say that, but like, what if, you know, who knows? If your parents, you know, like there 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 Rachel, all these women, they couldn’t conceive, they cried out, they prayed. And again, women are closer to God in many ways, because they contain life within them. Again, in what sense are you not already the recipient of the beneficence of something that we just don’t understand?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Potentially, yeah. But when I asked this question about, like, could I, if I pray, is it going to influence my outcomes in any way? You know,

BRIAN KEATING: I don’t believe it does. 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 Yankees.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s what I mean. If you think about the scientific methods, that’s why I said, I don’t think 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, it’s a natural disaster and think it has praying swayed the probabilities of bad things happening to people.

BRIAN KEATING: So I don’t believe that at all. But I do believe that fundamentally, a person who believes that their actions have some impact will feel at least a sense of gratitude. 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. But the point is, the more you express gratitude, you cannot be a happy person and be an ingrate. The more you’re grateful for, like the sound of a song that is just so meaningful to you, the sight of a painting or a sunset, and in Judaism, we say blessings for those things.

If we see a meteor shower, we say a blessing. It’s hard for me as an astronomer, you’ve got to say a blessing. A rainbow, another thing. Those are the kind of things we become desensitized to in life. And we just take for granted. When you taste a fine wine, or you taste, you know, some delicious food, again, it could just be chlorophyll. Here, Steven, here’s your plate of agar gum. Like, okay, great, I can live. Here’s a whey powder. That’s all you ever get to eat. You’d be like, sucks. I know what I had.

And if I could only go back to it after I get out, you know, 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. But when you do that, you know this, the more you’re disciplined, the happier your life is. You know, who’s more happy, the guy who eats everything he wants, or Jocko, you know, like, the person who just gives into all their temptations of alcohol, the person who abstains and elevates what they do.

And I think we want to elevate ourselves above the level of an animal, of the animals.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I can have all those behaviors of like a gratitude practice. I can have a meditation practice. I can 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. For sure. And I’ll get all the benefits of those things.

I’d get, when I express gratitude before I eat, or sometimes when I’m getting on a plane and I touch the plane to remind myself, and I can almost 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. But without the presence of needing to equate that to a God in any way.

So I’m trying to find, I guess I’m searching for where God fits in all of this. Why is God, why is it God required? Is it just because I have so many blessings, so I should be thankful to someone for these things? Which I do contend with. I go, “okay, let me think about how my life has changed in the last 10 years of, you know, from going from someone who’s shoplifting pizzas to sitting here and getting to do these.” It’s remarkable.

You start to think you’re a little bit of the Truman Show if you’re not, if you think about it too deeply. But, and you do feel, you think, “who do I thank for this?” So you think, do I thank my parents? Like, do I thank myself? So you, do I thank God? But I, but is that the reason? It just, just, 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 they, do they have, did God not like them? Did, and then if you go, “no, God likes both of you”, then I go to, “well, then God isn’t responsible for this.” It was something that I did or my parents did that are 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 solar eclipse and 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?

BRIAN KEATING: Well, I mean, it’s a perspective that you’re bringing is obviously you’ve thought about this a lot and obviously your attitude is healthy. And I think it’s, you have, you know, on balance, I think, yeah, obviously living as a good life, even if you’re, 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 I, if it wasn’t a commandment in my religion, but I don’t feel shame for that. I don’t feel like, “well, 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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, not the existence, but the origin of the universe, the origin of life. So you found out unequivocally that God isn’t real, pretty 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 in 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?

BRIAN KEATING: Uh, because I’m a behaviorist, I, 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 and I’m going to act like he doesn’t exist. Right. That’s the logical assumption.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

BRIAN KEATING: Right. So I’m going to stop giving charity. Like, is that going to make me happier 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 raw, you know, so you wouldn’t do anything differently.

BRIAN KEATING: Benefits to my life are so substantive that I would not change my behavior.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you, you’ve been guided then by your behavior and the rewards from behavior, which is pretty much my life.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah. Well, okay. So, right. The breathwork and the meditation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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?

BRIAN KEATING: So like, it could be dangerous to devolve into.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If we add God to my life, we 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.

BRIAN KEATING: But I don’t think so. You’re not like this, uh, hedonistic Instagram influencer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because that wouldn’t make me feel good. Like a donut. I’ve run the experiment and eating the donut makes you 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.

BRIAN KEATING: Well, I mean, I see this question. So if they found out that, uh, working out is, uh, eventually it’s, 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?

STEVEN BARTLETT: How much is it going to short my life by?

BRIAN KEATING: 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 of minutes off your life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, 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 if you told me I was going to live to a hundred, a hundred 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.

BRIAN KEATING: So 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, I don’t want to say spiritually, but for me to see the benefits, to see the things that I’ve seen that like, look, Steven, I’ve buried my father. Okay.

And 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 dragons, then whatever we’re going to get some kind, 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.

The Simulation Theory

STEVEN BARTLETT: You mentioned the word simulation a second ago. This is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. What is just people that don’t know, what is the simulation theory and are we living in a simulation?

BRIAN KEATING: Great question. So the simulation theory was really conjectured by a British philosopher, or he’s actually Swedish, 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 have proposed is that if this is extrapolated indefinitely into the future, whether or not that can happen is a question about planetary resources. Part of the reason Elon wants to go to Mars and I do want to talk to you about Mars in a bit.

And that extrapolation leads inexorably 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’ll be almost, as I said, too cheap to measure the expense of computing and it’ll be everywhere in just a short amount of time.

I mean, remember the phone that we have, the iPad that you’re using, these things would literally be a mythological witchcraft 80 years ago and now they’re commonplace. And so 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 let’s take a parallel detour for just a bit. You’re not seeing me necessarily. You’re seeing photons 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 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 a detector, just like a sensor in a camera, which has pixels, except it has trillions of pixels instead of millions of megapixels or a few megapixels.

And those are being transduced. The color gets transduced on cells that are called cone cells. The intensity is the rod cells. And those are getting transduced into electrical impulses that go from the 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. 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. 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 saw you with one. So that can kind of stimulate.

It could make very accurate representation of me, holographic, perhaps, and you would want to reach out and touch me. Now, imagine instead of just the physical electronics of a headset, Apple Vision Pro, you just inject the electrical signals into the brain. So that’s plausible. 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 inputs and you can have a digital retina, fake retina, and you just simulate it goes into your brain. They’re working on that. Same with sound. Sound is even easier to put a little speaker in your ear and you’d hear. So the notion is that we could physically just be disconnected brains in a vat, right? We could just be 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 you were alive in 1971, you could not have necessarily predicted the Apple Vision Pro. It was too far advanced 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 suggest this. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’re calling that God.

BRIAN KEATING: That’s what I was going to get to. 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 a final simulator. And if you did, it would kind of be like God. Like you’re talking about this brain in the jar that’s created out of silicon 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 have to choose between unplugging your refrigerator or unplugging the brain? Is that killing something? 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 implication of having infinite computing is that you can simulate everything in the universe, but can it simulate itself? So I want to digress into what’s called complexity theory. There are two different types of difficult things.

There’s 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 they keep you energized. Anybody can follow those instructions and make it. The Earth’s weather pattern state right now is complex. There’s no way that you can actually create that. You would need another planet-sized thing to create that. It’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, if you follow the recipe for the Simons Observatory, you’ll get the Simons Observatory. But if you try to simulate, and it may be to simulate the weather, you do need another planet. We need another planet, just like the Earth, and then we’d introduce carbon dioxide at a certain rate, and we’d see, is it really going to cause it? That’s totally impractical, right?

The question of these things is, is it really a simulation if it’s not 100%? You could make a very, very good weather simulation. We do have that, but famously, they’re only accurate for a few days, right? So how do you build up an accurate simulator? It has to be the same. So in other words, is there another universe where the simulators are that’s equally complex to the simulation creation that they made? And then did they stop?

Are they made of silica? Are they artificial? 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 on this binary code, zeros and ones, five volts, zero volts. 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, it’d be called voxels, volume elements. And so 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 temperature is continuous, like go from zero degrees to a hundred 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 zero degrees to one degree, let alone from zero to a hundred or every possible combination. So at some level, you’d see if you zoomed in really close on the thermometer, there’s a little jump. So you can 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 have properties that are seemingly incompatible with there 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’s basically a cop-out and there are ways around that fail-safe mechanism.

Aliens

STEVEN BARTLETT: Aliens. Do aliens exist?

BRIAN KEATING: Yes, aliens do exist. There’s an old joke. They’re called Hungarians. Hungarians are so many countries. So yes, there’s an old joke. There are aliens, there are Klingons, and they’re around Uranus.

But I wanted to give this to you, Steven, as one of the gifts I 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much.

BRIAN KEATING: In all seriousness, there’s no evidence for aliens. What 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 100 billion in our galaxy alone. There’s 100 billion galaxies in our universe. We’re talking one with 24 zeros after it. That’s how many planets there are in the observable universe.

Planets. People say that means that’s got to be life in the universe. No, it doesn’t mean anything. There could be 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. I’m not saying we are it, but I’m saying there’s been 0.000% evidence that life exists beyond the Earth.

I know you’ve had Lou Elizondo on. 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. If this was our solar system, the nearest star would be near in San Diego. There’s almost no way for us to comprehend how enormous our universe is, let alone how vast the cosmos is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How much of it can we see?

BRIAN KEATING: 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., at least unless we invent wormhole travel like Interstellar.

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. That means traveling at the speed of light, the fastest speed possible, which is how much miles an hour? 186,000 miles per second, 300,000 kilometers per second. It’s only gotten one light day away. The nearest star is 1,200 times farther away than that.

It’s four light years away. It’ll never get to that other star. It took 50 years to get one light day, so 1,200 times 50 years is called 100. You’re talking vast numbers of millennia to get to the nearest star. That star, we don’t even know if it has life on it or not. It’s not actually going to that star. The point is, the galaxy itself is so large. The types of environments in which life can take hold are so precarious.

We tell ourselves a story, like you said, with molecules, and then they start to evolve. 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 vast challenge in what’s called synthetic organic chemistry and the formation of origin of life.

Then to say that those entities then evolved into some kind of technologically predictable… If we found a dinosaur on Mars, that would be the discovery of the history of the planet of all time, or whatever, even a bacterium on Mars. That would be an incredible discovery. Some people try to defeat this notion and say, well, life didn’t have to necessarily get started in all these planets. It could have started once and then get brought to those other planets through meteorites. This theory is created by the same Fred Hoyle who came up with the Big Bang Theory. They called it panspermia. It sounds dirty, but it’s not.

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. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is much better than the butt soap you gave me.

BRIAN KEATING: 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, BrianKeating.com, to lucky winners each month. I give out the information. This was found in Africa. 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, it plowed into the Earth and landed in Africa. They found it. They said 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. We know 100% that’s from Mars. It’s incredible. Elon is desperately trying to get there. That’s your little piece. Please keep it safe. That’s one way that life could have gotten to Mars from the Earth. The same thing happens on the Earth that’s happened to Mars. It could have hit Earth, blasted off some amoebas, some orcas, some kangaroos, 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. Planets exchange DNA. It is possible, but we don’t see life on Mars.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If we think about this table, 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?

BRIAN KEATING: Incomprehensibly small.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not even a grain of sand?

BRIAN KEATING: No, not far, far. Even our galaxy wouldn’t be a grain of sand. If this were our galaxy, it wouldn’t be a grain of sand. No, no, no. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would be?

BRIAN KEATING: Of this solar system, out to the planet Neptune.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was that 10 planets?

BRIAN KEATING: There’s eight planets in our solar system, including the Earth. It used to be nine, but Pluto’s no longer a planet. We’re about one third of the way from the edge of the disk of the Milky Way. Traveling all across there, yes, we would be perhaps the entire solar system, actually smaller than maybe half a grain of sand.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can we travel to the end of the solar system?

BRIAN KEATING: Well, we sent this object. It’s gone well beyond it. The edge of the solar system is about four light hours. In 50 years, Steven, we’ve only gone, I’m not denigrating, this is a historic accomplishment. We actually put on these spacecraft 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 Disk. Carl Sagan was responsible for this.

They mounted it to it, and it’s now, as I said, 24 light hours away. The farthest edge of our solar system, the planet Neptune, is four light hours. Sorry, 24 light hours is the Voyager spacecraft. We’ve only gone only six times the diameter of our solar system.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Our entire solar system would be a grain of sand on this table.

BRIAN KEATING: Less even, yeah, about half a grain, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Half a grain of sand on this table. This table is about two and a half meters, roughly big. How many tables are there?

BRIAN KEATING: That’s a very good question. We think at least a hundred billion tables, each one with a hundred billion grains of sand. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s really wobbled my head. So there’s our entire solar system is half of grain of sand on this sort of two three meter table. And there are 100 billion tables.

So you know, when you hear that you go, “Okay, we really don’t matter. Like we’re really it’s so bizarre that we’ve fallen into the trap of believing that we’re like important in any way.” And then for me, that even throws another question market towards religion. But the other thing it makes me goes, surely, there’s got to be some other life on one of these grains of sands on the 100 billion tables.

BRIAN KEATING: Again, well, let me just address the first thing. So you’re about 10, maybe 15 trillion times bigger than a virus or bacteria. Um, can that bacteria affect you or virus hurt you? Of course it can.

So size doesn’t really make that big a difference in this context, right? Jupiter is 100 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. The sun is 100 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 not 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 literally like 70 different types of primates, right? Like monkeys you talked about before, bonobos, orangutans, none of them have what we have. None of them can have this.

Let me give you an example. 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 land mass of the earth. That’s a huge, enormous continent with extreme mountains, weather, extreme cold. But the one thing it doesn’t have as much life. But if you did that same thing, I said, “look, Steven, 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 it would be very challenging to do it.”

It’s enormous. It’s got all the support for life. It’s got hydrocarbons, it’s got heat, it’s got 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, Steven, there’s, it makes up 13% of the earth’s surface. There’s 8 billion people on earth. How many people do you think live there?

I mean, as a scientist, you don’t have to be a scientist. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because the thing with the South Pole is, okay, so there’s no one there. And if you put me there and said it’s their 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 person here.”

And then I’d have a positive meaning to myself, I’d say “I must be really important.” I might think that I’m a goddess. If I’m the only life there, I’d look around, it’s for miles, and I’d walk for days and days and days and send out pigeons and whatever. And I 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.

BRIAN KEATING: Right. 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 pilots, you know, in the world that claim to have witnessed these encounters. I’ve, 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 interstellar, you know, technology, perhaps, like a garbage barge floating throughout. 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. 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, that in the movie 2001, a space odyssey, you know, the by the way, I have to tell you this, if you don’t know, the word podcast, you know, that comes from the movie 2001, a space odyssey.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, yeah, I’ve read the article.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah, it was an engineer at, at, called it an iPod. And the iPod came from the pod in 2001. So we owe podcast to 2000. So in that movie, there are iPads, they’re guys communicating with iPad, but they thought it was like technology of like 20 centuries from now.

No, I’m talking about the technology that would take to make traversable distances out of this incomprehensible cosmos I’ve talked about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you apply that thinking to God it changes though, because earlier, you said, we just can’t fathom. We can’t fathom this yeah, creator. And the fact is that would go into the creator. So we almost have to, you know, some people just choose to believe, right?

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the same can be applied to this thinking of how they got here was like, listen, maybe we don’t know that technology, because it’s just unfathomable, like the iPod, or the iPad was 100 years ago.

BRIAN KEATING: You’re absolutely right. So they’re just 100 years ahead of us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Technologically, we think that they were doing witchcraft, we would we wouldn’t understand the basis of the technology that they used to travel here.

BRIAN KEATING: But people like Lou will talk about things that are exactly scientific claims. One of the things in his book, which I read, he hasn’t come on my podcast, I’d like to talk to him. But he talks about these, these craft 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, and how they affect and 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 general relativity of space time, we do know enough about these things, whereas, God, you’re right, I’m not, I’m not being 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, I’m saying I’m stipulating, you can’t test those with laws. And therefore, I can’t prove God exists, what is like how much I would like to or not like to.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you think the probability is that we are alone? Do you think we’re alone in the universe?

BRIAN KEATING: I think it’s very high.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think it’s high?

BRIAN KEATING: It’s very high that we’re alone. Let me make an analogy. For us to be here, we — Earth had to have the following circumstances happen. We had to have capacity alone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, yeah.

BRIAN KEATING: Actually, can you pass 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, these are almost an exact ratio of five, 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 Earth condensed out of a giant version of trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of these meteoritic materials, they sank to the bottom at 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, the super planet formed. And that planet, well, 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. A planet about this size, maybe a little bit smaller…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just for people that are watching.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah, so there’s a beach ball, it’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 and 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 high tide, and then right angles, low tide, low tide.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, so that’s how the tides work. Basically, wherever the moon is, it’s pulling the ocean up.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah, it’s actually pulling the Earth, and the Earth is surrounded by this, this, this sphere of water. And so it’s flash that moves the Earth within that water, and the water gets turned into like a lozenge shape. So the high tides will be twice a day, and the low tides will be twice a day, right angles. So that happens.

And we believe that that process is what was necessary to make the materials from the oceans where life started, and eventually get that on the land and fertilize and make people eventually. So remember, I’m trying to explain how we got here. So there had to be this enormous collision from 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 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 Mexico in the Yucatan Peninsula right here, created this enormous devastation, this crater that obliterated the atmosphere, filled the atmosphere of pollution and basically made like nuclear winter like you and Annie talked about, and that cut off light to plants and eventually the dinosaurs, most of the dinosaurs, almost 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 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, just 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 did they occur, three incredibly improbable things that you would never predict would occur in that order, happened to occur and they happened to occur in the right order.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The first two created life though, right?

BRIAN KEATING: Say again?

STEVEN BARTLETT: It was the first two of those that created life.

BRIAN KEATING: Allowed for life to exist. Yes, you’re right. But remember, I’m trying to explain how DOAC occurs, right? For us to be here, if there are 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 pattern. The small asteroid hit the Earth first, nothing happens, there’s no dinosaurs to kill. Then the comets come in, flood the Earth with ocean, but then this huge, you know, 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, Steven. 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. 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. 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 one in 10,000, multiply by one in 10,000, one in 10,000 six times.

Just to tell you 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 then the culture, whatever. All those things are formed to make us technological. I think the probability is extremely small, which is why I said, I think the probability is low that there are other life forms or another way to say it. I think it’s very high that we are alone.

That might be for a reason. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Star signs and horoscopes. Is there any possibility, in your view, from everything 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?

BRIAN KEATING: No. There’s no evidence for it in the sense that you can do randomized controlled trials or double-blind surveys. You can do exact simulations. As I said, 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 14,000 or whatever. You could do the math and figure it out. For them all to have, for no person to ever have a sort of duplication of luck or circumstance, the effect in terms of physical forces, the gravity of Jupiter, the pull of the sun, the position of the Earth on the day you were born.

Now, there are correlation effects, so you have to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. So someone, I’m actually born on the most frequent birthday on all the calendars, September 9th. Now, what is September 9th? September 9th is about nine months after the holiday season, right? So in a Western culture, women are partying. Maybe my mom and my dad had a nice New Year’s Eve or Christmas party or whatever, and that’s led to me being here, right? So there are correlations, and 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 at 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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,” because they almost consider it to be a religious belief. 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 is it different from religion, astrology?

BRIAN KEATING: There are elements of religion, yeah, certainly it came out of religion. I don’t think people now worship constellations, or I don’t think there’s many major religions that are based on astrological contemplation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Maybe without the worship part, but 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. Much of their morals and ethics and decisions and behaviors are being determined by it in the same way that it’s being determined by someone that believes in a god. Why do people need this?

BRIAN KEATING: People need answers to contemplate the universe. First of all, it’s a scary universe, right? We’re confronted by things that none of us can understand the entirety of. The brightest Nobel Prize winners, the greatest scientists, the greatest thinkers can’t really contemplate it.

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 and theory of mind that we can relate to other people and we want answers. I think that is in common. I think you’re right.

Did you ever wish that you were more religious? I wish I was too, and I’m not. Hopefully, my kids won’t hear it. 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. Crazy anxieties, fears, weird pathology, psychological deficiencies, because if every parent did that, the species is going to get better and better.”

But if you keep making everyone as anxious, as nervous, and there’s no progress in history, a lot of the zodiac religions that you talked about are astrological religions. They view time 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 that my ancestors did”, that’s very depressing.

It doesn’t lead to innovation, to find cures for diseases, to find explanations for fields and forces and technology that we have.

The Meaning of Life

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the meaning of life?

BRIAN KEATING: Glad you asked. 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 bonds, the hopefulness for the future. I never said this, Steven, but I don’t want to get too emotional. I think about death a lot more, especially in my case, since October 7th last year, a lot of my friends and family were impacted by that in Israel. I’ve never cried so many times than I have in the past year.

But thinking about all those tears and emotions and saying, “do I wish I never felt that? Do I wish I didn’t have the pain? If I 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. I mean, when I listened to that episode that you did with Annie Jacobs, terrifying, right? You were like visibly scared in that episode.

STEVEN BARTLETT: She’s amazing.

BRIAN KEATING: We don’t know. I mean, God forbid. I don’t think it’s super unlikely. Maybe it is. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe not. 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Before you had kids, what was the meaning of your life?

BRIAN KEATING: It was very easy. I wanted to win a Nobel Prize.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s changed now?

BRIAN KEATING: It has. It has. Partially because my father was a great scientist. I wanted to show him up. He never won a Nobel Prize. He won a lot of awards. I wanted to show him up.

Now he’s dead. There’s no one to prove stuff to. 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, that’s pretty unlikely. But let’s say it happened. It doesn’t mean what it once meant to me when I was your age. When I was your age, it wasn’t idle to me. It was a God. You win it, you’re as close to scientific royalty and God-like status as possible to imagine.

Much more than Oscar, gold medal in the Olympics. 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.

Imposter Syndrome

Actually, the forward to my second book, “Into the Impossible”, was written by Barry Barish. He won the 2017 Nobel Prize. He told me, “Brian, because I always ask my final question.” I know we’re getting to the end here.

I like your final question. I learned from you. I have my own final question. It’s, “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, yeah, you just tell me you won the Nobel Prize and he won’t.” “No, no, no. I have the imposter syndrome now.” He 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, Gustav’s there. Where’s my money? Where’s my prize?'”

“So they make you sign a ledger, not unlike the ledger in front of you. And it has your signature. ‘I, Barry Barris, 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? 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 the same book. How could they give the same prize to me they gave to him?” And I realized this was like an eifel 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, we’ll go one step deeper. Isaac Newton had the imposter syndrome.”

What the heck? How could he? He’s the greatest mind. He 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, Steven, 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 is to die a virgin, as Jesus did. And so he did.

So the lesson is imposter syndrome is normal. Don’t idolize something. Literally, you get a graven, golden image of a man. Who cares? He’s a man. I don’t care. I take time home with my family over that on the Shabbat, as I invite you down to come to me in San Diego anytime you want.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I didn’t realize that all of these great individuals felt like imposters themselves, which is, I think, will liberate a lot of people from the way that they feel. I mean, I feel this every day. People introduce me on stage as an interviewer or a podcaster. I’m like, “what the fuck?” This was never conceivable to me. And I know Jax talked about the same thing. It’s never conceivable to me that I’d be doing a podcast and it would be big and that people would think you’re good at it in some way for some bizarre reason.

BRIAN KEATING: No, you’re not just good, Steven. Come on. You’re an elite level. You’re a Nobel Prize elite level.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is that though? I mean, 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 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.

The Impact of Podcasting

BRIAN KEATING: Look, you have a unique angle that is not replicable, but I want to leave you with a mission that kind of has guided me. And again, I’ve learned a lot from you. It’s no secret. I have the high energy opening to the interview.

Can you imagine how hard it is to take like someone who’s studied like some chemical pathway and some thermodynamic system to make it like the hype show that you guys open? 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 like a Jewish mother, but your kids, your grandkids, they’re going to have access to this. It’s not going to be some, even a book, which is wonderful. It’s going to be visceral, audible, and it’s going to have an impact you can’t even imagine right now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Creep me out. I’m like, wow. 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, there’s books that turned into audio books and digital books and such.

BRIAN KEATING: Look at the last election. This was like the podcast election. Not going on a podcast, going on a podcast. And there are many people that attempt to imitate what you do.

I don’t do it for money. I don’t do it for 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. So I invited all my scientist friends to come on. I had some Nobel Prize winners come on. It just keeps amplifying.

But I view it as, for me, 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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 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, “fuck it, crack on.” Do you know what I mean? You carry on with what you’re doing, because 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?

BRIAN KEATING: I think you are. I think you’re doing it already. I mean, you’ve spoken again. I’ve tried to study the glimpses 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, it’s great, it’s top 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 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 put on my podcast or how to turn the microphone to you. There’s a scene in the book Animal Farm, where there’s this donkey named Benjamin, and he’s talking to the pig. And the pig says to the donkey, “you know, I love your tail. It’s so big. I got the short little curly tail. It’s good for nothing. You got this beautiful tail that could sweep away 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? Would you ever trade the attention, the fame, the lack of privacy, the intrusions, the, you know, everything for, for the alternative?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t know, would you? It’s funny, because when I go to answer that question, and I remove all the downsides from my life, they’re like glued to the upside. So it’s always a question of like, is the trade off worth it?

There’s a question that I ask myself all the time, every week, every month, and I remind myself, sometimes I said this to Trevor now, but he told me that it gets to a point where you can’t just reverse the decision, right? I tried 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 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 not peace, necessarily.

And then I play out the scenario. Okay, so I’ll move to Bali. I’ll chill out there. I’ve got the financial means to just live there for the rest of my life. I’ll chill. And then I’ll start. Okay, and then I’ll start writing.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then and then, you know, I might start making videos about what I’m writing about, because that’s what I’ll do.

BRIAN KEATING: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’ll just start painting, and you start creating again. And then if the creations are good, and then you go show it to someone, and then they’re going to buy it or whatever, and then you’re back here again.

BRIAN KEATING: Look, I think it’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. But you know, I have a mind of curiosity. This is what you’re good at. This is what you should lean in. 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 fact is, are you useful? Are you doing, you know, Freud said, there’s only two things in life, work and love. That’s all you got to do. You were doing your work, doing your love, take your vacation, and enjoy Bali for a while at last, and then come right back.

The Final Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: Brian, we have a closing tradition on this podcast, where the last guest leaves the question to 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?

BRIAN KEATING: Ah, that’s easy. I mean, it’s horrifying. But first of all, I’d call my friends at NASA and tell them to direct the giant space, 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 her from Stanford, she was actually an undergraduate there. And luckily we met because I’m eight and a half years older than her. And I would 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, 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. We didn’t meet at Stanford. We were literally a hundred feet away from each other at one point. We wouldn’t have met. She’s 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.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would you, what would you tell her?

BRIAN KEATING: 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. Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 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 get your website, if they want to be in with a chance of winning some of this space material, which is, I’m so 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, but I’ll keep the piece of Mars.

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 meaning that is derived irrespective of what the answer is.

And I, 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 the South Pole and I’m never going to point it at the sky and I’m never going to seek to answer these questions in my life, but your work expands my mind. It expands my thoughts of like possibilities. And as an entrepreneur, as a creator, I think that’s a net positive for everyone that receives the work that you do.

It’s so bizarre that we’re so curious 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, 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. 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, it would have been harder to hear your voice, but now everybody can go and listen to you. And I highly recommend they do. Your YouTube channel is exceptional. So thank you so much, Brian. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

BRIAN KEATING: Thank you.

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