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

This is the shrapnel of an exploded star, and this is a meteorite schem from over 4 billion years ago, and this is what Elon will kill for. Wow! And all of this is to understand that fundamental question people want to know: how did we get here, and how does the question of God tie into all of this?

Well, for the first time in history, we might be able to answer that question with scientific hard data. Brian Keting is an astrophysicist and professor whose groundbreaking research and digestible explanations uncover everything we want to know about the universe and what lies beyond.

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

But we still don't know how the universe began. So, one experiment took me to the South Pole, to the bottom of the planet, and we thought we discovered the creation of time and space itself. It took me to the brink of a Nobel Prize. We were on the front page of every newspaper. But it turned out we didn't see that at all! What we saw was—[Music playing]—and we were crushed.

I don't get too emotional, but we had to retract these discoveries, and it was the most crushing experience a scientist can have. But you cannot stop doing experiments to answer these questions.

Now you've launched this $2 million project. Yeah, and the data that this experiment is seeing is exquisite because now we know 100% that—[Music playing]. This has always blown my mind a little bit: 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show, and you like what we do here, and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button.

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Dr. Brian Kaing, what is the mission that you are on? I think I’m the luckiest man on Earth. I get to get paid—not that much—but I get to get paid to study the questions that I was most interested in as a 12-year-old pimple-faced kid in Upstate New York, which is: how did we get here? I think it's the question that people just want to know—it's the only question you can't know, right?

What happened before you were born? You have to rely on other people's word for it, right? You have to ask questions and be curious. What is the only event that ever happened for which there was nobody around to ask? That's the origin of our universe.

The universe contains everything—contains life, minds, consciousness—everything down to, you know, podcasters and—uh—daily life. What are some of the most sort of controversial existential questions that you seek to answer with all the research that you do?

So you've talked about this before on the show—the question of, you know, finite versus infinite games and what we do in science. Science is an infinite game, right? You can't win science! But along the way, there are many finite games—in other words, fixed competitions for which there’s only one victor.

Right? I got offered a professorship at UC San Diego; that means 399 other people didn’t get that job. I got tenure; a lot of people don’t get tenure. I got this; I got that. And then eventually, I didn’t get—spoiler alert—my first book's called Losing the Nobel Prize. But there are only, you know, at most three people that can win a Nobel Prize every year in my field.

The infinite game is comprised of many finite games, and the most important questions that generate the most controversy, the most heat, the most passion have to do with the nature of the origin of our universe. It’s actually not settled science! It’s not actually known for a fact whether our universe once existed in a certain way, eternally in a way I can describe, went through cycles of creation and destruction, or if it follows sort of a Biblical creation narrative. These are all kind of open questions in a certain sense, and because they're not yet resolved, and because the only way to resolve them is through data, we cannot actually answer these.

So the human mind is in a hybrid, it’s in a super position. We kind of have a lot of knowledge, but we have a lot of questions. We have a lot of solutions, but we don’t have a lot of answers. We're trying to understand that fundamental question. And I always say, I want to know what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang. Imagine this— a day before when there was no yesterday. You couldn't even speak about it if you were there.

Obviously, nobody was there to witness it! But even conceptually speaking, how does time progress if time starts? Right? We think about time and time is very mercurial. It's very hard to describe and define what time is. Is time what a watch measures? Is time how my hair gets gray over the years? Is it how we perceive it—sitting on a hot stove versus being with a pretty girlfriend? Are those methods unequal? Are they equally valid?

But at its base layer, if the universe began—if it truly had a singular origin—then time came into existence at that as well. And how does the question of God tie into all of this? What are the most controversial questions: is there a God or is there not a God? Right? And then a sub-question to that would be what form does this God take?

Are these questions that you seek to answer? Me personally, yes. My colleagues tend to shy away from it. It’s considered somewhat anathema or distasteful for a real honest-to-goodness work-a-day scientist to talk about, to even contemplate the possibility of God. For me, I call myself a practicing, very devout agnostic, in the sense that I take my Judaism—in my case, I’m a practicing Jew—but the question of what to take on faith, which by the way, in Hebrew, the word "Amen" comes from the Hebrew word "Emunah," which means faith. It means to believe in something.

I always say, I don’t believe in gravity! You know, if I take this rock and I, I don’t have to believe in it. I have evidence for it. Science—the word science means knowledge! It doesn’t mean faith; it doesn’t mean religion or theology. But for me, thinking about God provides a certain, the most luxurious spice to the research, to the hard work that I’m doing, knowing that the team and I that are trying to answer these questions can possibly resolve the question of whether or not the universe began as, for example, it begins in the Torah, the Old Testament, the biblical narrative that underpins Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well—for half the world’s population.

What if we could substantiate that narrative? What if we could refute it? A good scientist has to be open to both. For me personally, I’ve always been interested in those existential questions. I don’t put myself out there as a rabbi or as some exemplar of perfection in religion, but I’m trying. I’m trying to improve. I’m trying to dedicate my life to answering questions that others have posed and stand on their shoulders to hopefully get a closer glimpse of truth.

But it’s absolutely 100% in my mind inexorably linked—the question of a Creator and the question of its creation, or his creation, if you will! But as I say, for the first time in history, myself, my colleagues, and I, we might be able to start to answer that question with scientific hard data—the question of whether there’s a God or not, and which God is most accurately represented by the science.

Yeah, and the creation stories that those religions tell themselves, or tell the world. You’ve raised the $200 million project. What does that mean? And what is the question you’re seeking to fundamentally answer with that $200 million project? Yeah, let me take a step back.

So for 2,000 years, most scientists believed the universe was eternal, had been around forever. Not far from here, north of Hollywood, is a telescope—a 100-inch diameter telescope, you know, five meters across. That telescope was used by Edwin Hubble who observed that every single galaxy that he could see is moving away from the Milky Way galaxy! So every galaxy—which are collections of a 100 billion suns just like our sun—is expanding away from us.

How could he see that through a telescope? So he used what’s called the redshift. The redshift is an effect that is related to what Christian Doppler discovered, called the Doppler shift. You ever heard an ambulance when it’s coming towards you, and it gets higher in frequency? It goes away, and 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; 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 blue light. He saw everything is moving away from us in the Milky Way.

That 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 implication, Stephen, if you go back another day before today, yesterday, things were closer! Keep playing that movie backwards, you come to a point—the singularity—where all the matter, all the energy, everything that is, was, or ever will be was concentrated effectively at a single point. That’s the Big Bang!

And so in the Big Bang cosmology, the universe starts at a particular moment; time comes into existence; the elements come into existence—all the elements you know—in water, rather, they come into existence. Over billions of years, those elements come together under the force of gravity; they will eventually fuse two hydrogens together to make helium and so forth, and you get heavier and heavier elements. Eventually, those objects are 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—and in their death throes, in their explosive fireworks-like ending of their lives, they give life to us, because they blast out into the cosmos, into the galaxy, the material that we’re made of. So literally, as Carl Sagan said, we are star stuff.

I brought some star stuff here today. So 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: briankking.com. Diary! This is a meteorite.

Stephen, you ever seen a meteor in the atmosphere? That’s a rock like that—a mineral coursing through our atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour! How do we know? We measure their velocity; we can track them on radar! How do you know that this is a meteor? Oh, this has all the characteristics of a meteorite—it’s composition, its density, its structure; it has that weird pattern on it. If you’re really curious, what we could do—

So where’s this come from then? Oh, this one was found in Argentina, in a place called the Field of the Stars. This could have come from anywhere in the universe. Exactly! This came from—this is basically a fragment of an asteroid that existed before the Earth. Stephen, this is a fragment, a fossil relic of our solar system from over four billion years ago, older than our Earth!

Because our Earth formed at its core; our Earth has iron inside of it; it has an iron core just like that. That’s pretty heavy, right? That’s not— And it also made this here: this—if you give this to your sweetheart, if you compress this by 100,000 times and give it to your sweetheart, she’ll be really happy about that. That’s pure carbon, so that'll turn into a diamond!

That'll turn into a diamond! I like to say, you know, pressure is what turns dust into diamonds. For anyone that can't see this right now, it looks like a dice—it's almost identical to like a black dice. Exact! Yep, it’s very light!

Now, contrast that to—and here’s a piece of rock. This is mostly volcanic rock. I collected that in 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 are volcanoes down at the— the South—at the—in Antarctica—not the South Pole!

And here’s this one—this was found—oh gosh! Namibia! So this is a meteorite formed in—found in Namibia—also from the same process that formed our solar system. This was found by the natives that lived there several hundred or maybe even a thousand years ago. This one’s particularly nice. If you’re not watching, it looks like a human foot! And I can’t explain how unbelievably heavy that is!

Yes! I didn’t think I’d held something that’s this size but this heavy before! It’s extremely dense! It’s one of the densest! So what happens when a star tries to make the iron in that? It takes more energy to make that fuse that nuclei of iron than is given off in the fusion process! Therefore, the star can’t support its weight; it collapses, explodes, and rebounds.

Now when your listeners or viewers, you know, go to my website, and if they win one, um, uh— you’ll see how attractive these things are to magnets! It’s very—a very powerful— it’s called a rare earth magnet: neodymium magnet. Jesus! So attach it to the meteorite—it's fine to do that—you can do that!

Wow! That sound! I love that sound! A ping! So this material is highly magnetic, and iron, which is primarily the constitution of this meteorite, has the exact same chemical structure as in your blood! There’s a molecule called hemoglobin—hm! 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—and the food that you eat has some iron in it and your body starts to produce blood, and that blood has the same chemical composition as the stars! So this $200 million—what are you doing?

Okay, we’re going to give back to the money—y, exactly! So what is the fundamental question you’re seeking to answer? So let’s say you see someone shooting a gun, right? You want to see the—but you see the smoke from the gun, you see the bullet moving at great speed, but you’d like to see who actually shot it—was it God? You know, was it Mother Nature? Was it some quantum fluctuation in the multiverse?

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 spacetime 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! 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, it mimicked the signal of the Big Bang!

And we were crushed! It literally, dust! We saw cosmic dust—the leftover byproducts of exploded stars! Just want to be clear here! So I don’t want to move on until I fully understand. So you— you went down to the South Pole—yeah—you looked up expecting to see these sort of—these waves that show that the universe is expanding—yes—but what you actually saw—like lines of dust, right? Is that a simplified way of saying—but you thought you’d seen these microwaves of the universe expanding?

Exactly! Simplifying it perfectly! We made this discovery, and then immediately, effectively—in scientific terms—6 months later—this is 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, a mathematician without peer effectively! He said, “Brian, I’ve been thinking about this experiment, and I want to…

I want to have a larger—” 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! BICEP being the telescope you built in the South Pole that lost the Nobel Prize in my first book's title! We’re just now getting data; it got first light a month before Jim Simons passed away!

So we were able to show him the data that this experiment is seeing! I can’t show it to you; it’s as confidential as a diary is! You hope nobody's looking, but you don’t know if anybody is! I can’t show it to you, but the data is exquisite!

So what do you—what do you suspect is the origin of the universe? Well, uh—is it God? Is it some kind of strange cosmic reaction that took place for no reason at all? I know you must have a suspicion—you know, if the universe began with a singular Big Bang, if it began on a certain day or it didn’t? I just want to know the truth; the interpretation of it is going to be, going to be going on for—I mean, people are battling about—as I said, we thought we detected that signal, right?

So we already have a simulation of what will happen when this is discovered for good—finally—and no dust, right? We know exactly what the media will say at that time! On one side of the equation were the greatest, you know, religious thinkers and theologians of the time saying this proves the existence of God that God created the universe in a singular moment! “Let there be light”—Fiat Lux! That's exactly what the Torah, the Old Testament, the Bible says! So they said it agrees with our hypothesis!

On the other side, there were militant atheists—Richard Dawkins, you know, other people—saying this proves there’s no need for a God! The universe came into existence, like you said—meaningless Quantum field—the fluctuation out of nothingness! It proves nothing about God! In fact, it invalidates—literally! Stephen, there were people publishing articles in major newspapers everywhere that proves God! Proves no God!

So it’s not like I’m going to think that I have the finality 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, the—you know, anals 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 can talk about something very, you know, non-controversial! Let’s talk about abortion rights! Let’s talk about trans rights! Uh, no! These are incredibly controversial things, right? So what does the human mind do? It selects a side! It says no abortions, abortion for everybody, no trans rights, yes trans rights! Uh, immigration? No immigration, yes immigration! The human mind hates that! And for good reason!

There’s an old Yiddish expression: “He who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by both sides of the traffic!” So the human mind cleaves to one side or the other! I don’t think, you know, in terms of, you know, religion or whatever, that we’ll be the definitive final word on it, but it’s sort of a privilege to play the game!

What is the most compelling evidence that you've ever encountered that there might be a God? This is a long 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 um, and earth, and fishes, and so forth!

And then He creates man! And we can’t really emulate God! Even if you don’t believe in God, you can imagine what a God would be like, right? You can conceptualize, imagine— you know, King Charles, you know, times a trillion, or whatever! Like, the all-powerful force! But at the same time, we’re told God 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 are some clues, but again, it’s not proof! You cannot prove God exists; you cannot prove God doesn’t exist! You have to be comfortable with that ambiguity, and very few people are!

If we came from a single-cell organism, as some people say, then 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 you know, Darwinism’s theory that it was the environment that defined how we give birth—and different animals give birth or replicate in different ways!

So if you go back far enough, it seems that giving birth as we know it—the process where the baby comes out and they cut the cord—is actually quite recent in the history of consciousness! But also, just like living organisms, does that make it more or less miraculous?

Or—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 gazillion years ago split because of some mutation which caused more single-cell organisms to split—I mean, I guess it’s still creation, isn’t it?

And then you could ask the question: what if there was a Creator? This Creator not only, um, you know, created that first cell, but created within that cell the possibility, the propensity, and had the knowledge—you know, we can’t comprehend it—but had the knowledge that that will eventually make a person and have consciousness!

And now, I’m not saying that’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 Stephen Bartlett or a Brian Keting—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—humans are pretty new, aren’t they? So, oh yeah! Mammals—like how old is the conscious human—the conscious? I mean, the first, like Homo sapiens that are of our species—probably 200,000 years old! Maybe 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—you could say God has only existed for 200,000 years, right? Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it! And in fact, many people—I like to say this—in you, like, what’s your favorite day of the year, like on the calendar? I was going to say day! Okay!

I always ask people that! I say, like, what’s your favorite day? And usually I’ll get, um, Christmas, uh, my anniversary, my birthday, my first kid’s birthday, whatever! But those are all origins! We’re fascinated by origins, ‘cause you weren’t like—you can’t witness, like, the whole process of your birth!

You have to rely on mother and your father—and maybe there are 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 are many, many questions!

The most kind of stringent, you know, are the 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 on my podcast! He’s been on here! He believes strict determinism! Every single thing that’s happening to us right now—the words that are coming out of my mouth, your ear twitching, or whatever—that's all determined! There’s no control! There’s free will! It’s a complete and utter illusion!

And, uh, because of that, then there doesn't have to be an explanation of why there's, you know, leukemia in children or whatever! And and yes! That is—that is an unanswered question! And I think that, but I don’t think it’s a sufficient question not to do stuff!

People would ask, why does a child get leukemia? But they won’t ask, why do um hum begin 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 this connection is?

That’s what makes life living! Now, we can’t answer why it is that! Like, do we deserve that? So for me, the evil and good and like pleasure and pain make lots of sense from an evolutionary perspective! It makes a lot of sense as to why you would feel this overwhelming sense of like love and protection when you gave birth—when your 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 generations!

So I get that! And then with the evil, I also—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 evil is human! Is human-related! There’s no evil cancer! Cancer is not evil!

And even that, I can understand! Because I can understand the brain is so fragile! And I can understand all these human instincts and chemicals and jealousy and, you know, all of—even love comes with it! You know, if some—if a woman dies, it’s probably a husband! Statistically! So like, I understand! You know, that’s evil, isn’t it?

But, but it’s love as well! So I understand that the complexities of all of that! What I can't understand is what role God is playing in any of this stuff! And yeah, I was—I was religious until I was 18! And then, I think I, I fell down a rabbit hole, listening to like Richard Dawkins and some of the others, and it left me in a position where I would probably define myself as being agnostic!

But there’s still this big question mark that hangs above my life, which is like, where did human life come from? And is there—is it possible that it just didn’t come from anyone? Is it possible that there was a Big Bang, you know, at the very start of all of this? That 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 to the sort of evolutionary process and now here I am, and my brain was just bigger 200,000 years ago than the other monkeys! So now that I’ve developed this thing called 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, you know, evolution—is that the game?

And it’s—and you know, when people hear me say that, they probably think, oh, you know, the natural reaction to that is because it threatens your sense of like purpose and belonging! And it threatens your natural reaction to that is no, I hope it’s not! And so let me think of ways that can’t possibly be true!

But I’m not tempted by that! I'm tempted by figuring out what’s true irrespective of how warm and fuzzy it is! Hm! And um, I still don’t know! But I’m hoping science has some answers for me!

Well, yeah! Sorry to disappoint! Right now, the 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 observing mass or whatever you would do if you’re—but what do you do? Do you—because if you’re an agnostic, there should be some behavior that’s similar to a theist! Why? Because then you’re just an atheist!

Right? I mean, in other words, how do you—what practices? I’m a behaviorist in, in my life, you know! So I judge people on how they act and how they behave! And you know a lot about this, so how do you—do you behave as if there could be a God? Do you—you said maybe you want science to explain it!

You didn’t say like I would like to have a personal revelation from Jesus! I would like to encounter him, or whatever it is, I don’t care what religion is! But how do you—in practice, live your life such that if God does exist, that it would make a difference in the way that you’re perceived or judged, if you will?

Yeah, well, I, I don’t! Because I guess I don’t know what—I don’t know what practice—because I don’t know what God exists or what story is true! I don’t know what practice is true! Do you think of God—let’s say you were um, Hindu!

Right? Yeah, let’s say you’re not Hindu! Let’s say you are, what you are, Presbyterian or the Church of…If I had a practice, wouldn’t that make me religious? Well, I’m saying do you think if there is a God, we have to do this matrix, right?

We have to say God exists, God doesn’t exist, and behaves like he’s religious? Stephen 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, and I’m asking you—and now he could exist, or he could not exist.

So imagine you move into another quadrant—you say, I’m going to behave like I’m Hindu—or come down to my temple in San Diego! Whatever, you’re going to behave in some religion! Do you think if God exists he’s going to say, oh God, Stephen, you picked the wrong one! It’s not, it’s not, uh, it’s—it’s um, uh, it’s um, uh, Latter-Day Saint!

I don’t think I think a revolutionary statement! I think God has common sense! If he exists! If he doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter what you do! Right? But if God exists, he must have common sense, meaning that if you make an earnest attempt to understand or at least engage yourself religiously—not believe, and force yourself to believe—not make excuses for evil that happen in the world, or cancer for kids—but if you behave in a certain way, I don’t think if God exists big if you’ll be judged harshly!

I—this is exactly the conclusion that stopped me being religious when I was 18! Really? Yes! Exact conclusion! Because we’d go to church every week, we grew up going to church, read the Bible, all of those things! And then, when I was younger, I was operating under the assumption that I was going to go to hell and burn if I didn’t like obey this, this person in the sky!

Then I read these books! I read Richard Dawkins’ books, and a bunch of other books on the subject matter, and I heard that God was omnipotent and omniscient, which makes a lot of sense because if you create this world and you can, you know, you’re active in it, you must be pretty powerful and pretty knowing!

And then I concluded: if I—basically concluded God would have common sense! And I thought he would understand that I’m struggling! And he would understand that as long as I live a good life and I’m not murdering people, and I’m not mean to people, and I’m kind, and I’m respectful to people, and I’m a net positive on the earth, then if heaven does exist, any God that I would want to support anyway would let me in!

And he would understand that I didn’t have enough information to put my flag in any particular religion! So my thesis then became: well, just be a good person, and you’re kind of hedging your bets! Because any decent God that's worth supporting would go, that was a decent person! He couldn’t quite see it! You know, whatever! But, but you wouldn’t see it a little, I’m sorry to push back, but if you, if you, let’s say, I say, I want to get in shape, Stephen, and yeah, I deserve it! I've got kids, you know, I want to be healthy, live a long life! But you see me eating, you know—I wouldn’t eat cheeseburgers, kosher, but hamburgers, French fries!

You know, just—just—and I’m saying, well, like, you know, whatever! We'll understand! Like I—I—in other words, you would agree that if you knew God exists, you would do—you would behave very radically different!

If I—if I knew for sure that he existed and a particular book and doctrine was correct, I would 100% behave in line with that book and doctrine! But if I knew he existed but I didn’t know which book was correct, then I probably would behave exactly how I do now!

So because the behavior, the practice, the Sabbath comes from one of those books or doctrines! So right, 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, you—I, as a Jew, don’t believe in Jesus’s divinity, right?

But I don’t follow my friends! Friends, you know, I don’t fault them! In fact, I think it’s beautiful that that’s his avenue for worship! He believes that Jesus died for his personal sins! Now, you would admit that you would have—Jesus would 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, you know, it’s like me saying, well, you know, if I’m destined to get into shape, I’ll get in shape!

I’ll get shape! You know, my metabolism will work it out without me taking this—the serious action and working hard! Because you do it in your rest of your life, right? And I’m not, by the way, I’m not pro... it’s actually forbidden in my religion—I’m not pro- but the—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 or that! Like, that’s where 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 Simon’s Observatory to, you know, Gog who lived in a cave 200,000 years ago!

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, 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—but the point being, you obviously wrestle with it, and, and, um, interestingly enough, the word Israel, which is the central, you know, country of the Judaic faith, means “fight with God”!

It means “wrestle with God”! L is God! Israel means “fight”! So how do you wrestle with it? Do you wrestle with it? Do you think about it? Or do you say, "You know, I’m not going to read these books that I read before I was 18 because it seems so childish to me now"?

And so I—I do! I certainly wrestle with it! So when I say wrestle with it—not in a way that is causing me any pain or agony or deep frustration—but it’s—yeah, it’s a recurring thought. And I actually think from doing this podcast and just like maybe growing up and the journey I’ve been on, I have more questions now than I ever have since I became agnostic at 18!

So I have more questions now. It’s funny! I’ve been on this bit of an arc where I was certain when I was younger that God was real, and then I was really certain that the God I believed in probably wasn’t real, and now I kind of find myself going back to a position where I’m like almost like I’m starting the research project again to figure out what actually is.

What actually is real! I sometimes wonder if I’m looking for the wrong thing, ‘cause I think because we’ve been so sort of indoctrinated into this idea that it is a man in the sky and all this 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…? It’s interesting that you said that; 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 this standard answer of the 1800s, which was, you know, you see a reflect 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 were 12, you would not be approaching them with the maturity of a Stephen Bartlett at age 32, right?

And now you have this perspective; you have a wisdom that you’ve accrued from your life experiences, from the 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 don’t have tolerance for scientists that dismiss it and say, “It’s stupid!” And I’m like, “But I also, I find that religious people are too comfortable saying everything is described by God! Everything happens because of God!”

I see this a lot with religious children. Sometimes I’ll go into kids’ schools and teach them, you know, about science! I’ll bring these, you know, props and stuff! But when I talk to them, sometimes I’ll say, like, “Oh, look! There’s a rainbow over there! Oh, that’s great! Where did it come from?” They’ll say, “God made it!”

I think that’s—I joke that’s a form of child abuse! You know, if you just say that God made it, you’re completely ignorant about the science! But B, you’re also diminishing God’s power! Right? If you say, “No, actually that’s an effect of water droplets which are formed, hydrogen, oxygen, and here’s their chemistry, and here’s how they form—uh, different states of matter when they’re in collective!

And here’s how that causes light to refract at different wavelengths? And here’s wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation?” Where does that come from? And you keep asking the question: why? Why? Why? Why? Only when you get to 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—that takes you back until almost to the Big Bang! Which then intersects with what I do!

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? I honestly can’t say! I don’t know! But I know that you’ll change! I know that you’ll hear yourself!

Okay, if you can go down to the ocean—to the Pacific Ocean—and just be isolated and just pour yourself out for an hour, I guarantee it will change your life! You will be in tears, but no one will see you! That’s the thing! That’s why you have to be alone—you cannot do it with any other person! You must do it on your own because there’s no Sam Harris meditation waking up app!

It’s not going to do the same for you as just you alone! And not knowing is part of the point, I think! But what’s that got to do with God? What’s me going down to the beach and pouring my heart out, which would get me into my amygdala? It’ll get me thinking about, you know, it’ll make me emotional!

I can imagine, you know, even listening to certain music can make you feel that! What role is God playing in any of this stuff? 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 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? Like, is that killing something? You know, like, it starts to enter into the realm of ethics!

And maybe even these concepts of a deity! What I’ve heard, and I find quite plausible— remember I said the implication of having infinite compute is that you can simulate everything in the universe? Yeah! But can it simulate itself?

So I want to digress into what’s called complexity theory! There are two different types of difficult things! There’s like a complex thing, like building an Airbus 320; it's very complicated, right? You can do it if I give you all the parts, all the instructions, and give you the right order!

And I keep you energized! Like anybody can follow the instructions and make it! The Earth's weather patterns, right? Now, is complex! There’s no way that you can actually create that! Like you would need another plane-sized thing to create that! That’s called irreducibly complex—you cannot make it simpler and then build it up from simpler and simpler things!

Unlike an Airbus, you can build it up from smaller and smaller parts as long as you follow the recipe! You know, if you follow the recipe for the Simon Observatory, you’ll get the Simon’s Observatory! But if you try to simulate—you make several attempts, you need a planet! Like we need another planet just like the earth, and then we’d introduce carbon dioxide at a certain rate!

And we see is it really going to cause it? Like, that’s totally impractical, right? So the question of these things is: is it really a simulation if it’s not 100%? Like you could make a very, very good weather simulation! We do have that!

But famously, they’re only accurate for a few days, right? So, so how do you build up, you know, an accurate simulator? It would have to be the same! So in other words, do we need like another—is there another universe where the simulators are that’s equally complex to the simulation creation that they made? And then did they stop?

Like, did they get—you know, 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!

But that means that the world is fundamentally discretized! It’s broken into little chunks! Like the screen on your computer or your iPad, it’s pixelated! In space, we call it called voxels—volume elements! And so you can, um, 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 0 degrees to 100 degrees, and there’s every step in between! But in the simulated world, because you couldn’t have—you need an infinite number of computer power to simulate just from 0 degrees to one degree! Not let alone from 0 to 100 or every possible combination!

So at some level, you’d see! If you zoomed in really close on the thermometer, you’d see there’s a little jump! So you could detect the presence of the simulator! It’s more complicated, actually—it’s done using astrophysical sources called gamma bursts and other things that are, um, that have properties that are seemingly incompatible with their being a simulation!

At the most distant and therefore earliest moments in the universe! So right now there’s zero evidence for it! Nick Bost will tell you—and you should have them on—that, you know, that’s basically a copout! And there are ways around that—that fail-safe mechanism!

Aliens do exist! Yes, aliens do exist! Uh, there’s an old joke—they're called Hungarians! Hungarians are—there's so many countries! So, I—I yes, there's— there's a joke: there are aliens, they’re Klingons, and they’re around Uranus! But I wanted to give this to you, Stephen, as one of the gifts I’ve brought for you today!

This is some soap for you! This is soap! Uranus soap! It’s Uranus soap! So you want to keep Uranus clean! Um, thank you so much! In all seriousness, there’s no evidence for aliens! There’s no—what I call possibility doesn’t equal probability!

The existence of so many stars in the universe means there’s so many planets! Which is true; we found almost every single star has maybe 10 planets around it, and we have a 100 billion in our galaxy alone! There’s a 100 billion galaxies in our universe!

We’re talking a one with 24 zeros after it—that’s how many planets there are in the observable universe! And people say that means that there’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’s—the universe is so enormous, and 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, and then they get—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 organic—synthetic organic chemistry and the formation origin of life! And then to say that those entities then evolved into some kind of technologically produced—no!

If we found a dinosaur on Mars, that would be the discovery of the century! The discovery of the history of the planet—of all time, right? Or whatever—even a bacterium on Mars! There would be an incredible discovery!

So some people try to defeat this notion and say, well, life didn’t have to necessarily, uh, get started in all these planets, it could have started once and then got brought to those other planets through meteorites! Yeah!

This was actually created—this theory was created by the same Fred Hoyle who came up with the Big Bang theory! They called it panspermia! Sounds dirty, but it’s not! So these meteorites could carry genetic material, and they could land on another planet! They could have landed on Earth!

That’s one theory that life on Earth originated from another planet that had life on it! 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 1.52—wait, 4 grams—from another planet! I want you to touch it! You can see it’s a little bit reddish, like the planet Mars! This is much better than the butt soap you gave me! I gave you a piece of Uranus and a piece of Mars!

Here’s some information about it! I give out, as I said, these meteorites on my website, BrianKing.com, to lucky winners each month! I give out the information! This was found in Africa! And how did it get here? Well, a meteorite hit the planet Mars!

Shattered off debris! That debris orbited around Mars for millions of years, perhaps eventually had plowed into the Earth and landed in Africa! They found it; they said this—they knew it came from space! They analyzed it! It has the same chemical composition molecular structure as the landers that are on Mars right now! Measure for Mars! So we know 100% that’s for Mars!

It’s incredible! So Elon is desperately trying to get there! That’s your little piece! Please then keep it! Keep it safe! And that’s one way that life could have gotten to Mars from the Earth! Right? The same thing happens on the Earth as happened to Mars! So it could have hit Earth, blasted off, um, some amoebas, some orcas, some kangaroo, whatever!

And whatever was on the Earth at the time, and then eventually landed on Mars with the DNA of it! But it didn’t take hold, right? So planets exchange DNA! It is possible, but we don’t see life on Mars!

If we think about this table, yeah? Um, give to put in context how big the universe is—if the universe was the size of this table, how big would Earth be on this table? Incomprehensibly small! Not even a grain of sand!

No, no! Far, far smaller! Even in our galaxy, it wouldn’t be a grain of sand! Even if this were our galaxy, it wouldn’t be a grain of sand! No, no! Our solar—our whole solar system would be perhaps—yes—a grain of sand! If this were a Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light years across, it would be like one tiny little grain of sand!

What would be of the solar system out to the planet Neptune? So the—what’s that? 10 planets? What’s something? Well, we have—there’s eight planets in our solar system, including the Earth! Used to be nine, but Pluto is no longer a planet!

Um, so—and we’re about one-third of the way from the edge of the disc of the Milky Way! So traveling all across there, yes, we would be perhaps—the entire solar system actually smaller than maybe half a grain of sand!

And can we travel to the end of the solar system? Well, we sent this object! It’s gone well beyond it! So the edge of the solar system is about four light hours! So we—in 50 years, Stephen, we’ve only gone quote! And I’m not D—that’s a historic accomplishment!

We actually put on these spacecrafts 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 a golden disc! Carl Sagan was responsible for this, and they mounted it to it!

And it’s now—well, as I said, 24 light hours away! And the farthest edge of our solar system—the planet Neptune is, is four light hours! Sorry, 24 light hours, is the Voyager spacecraft! So we’ve only gone one-sixth of—we’ve gone only six times the diameter of our solar system!

So our entire solar system would be a grain of sand on this table! Less even? Yeah, about half a grain? Yeah, half a grain of sand on this sort of two, three-meter table!

And how many tables are there? That’s a very good question! We think at least 100 billion tables! Each one with 100 billion grains of sand! There are more—there are more grains, uh, sorry! There are more stars in the entire universe that we can observe than every grain of sand on every beach on every continent on our planet!

That’s really wobbling in my head! So there’s our entire solar system is half a grain of sand on this sort of two, three-meter table! There are a hundred billion tables! So you know when you hear that, you go, okay, we really don’t matter!

Like we're really—it's so bizarre that we’ve fallen into the trap of believing that we’re like important in any way, and then that, for me, that even throws another market towards religion! But the other thing it makes me go is surely there’s got to be some other life on one of these grains of sands on the hundred billion tables!

Again, the—well, let me just address the first thing! So, um, you’re about 10, maybe 15 trillion times bigger than a virus or bacteria! Can that bacteria affect you, or a virus hurt you? Of course, it can! So size doesn’t really make that big a difference in this context, right?

Jupiter is a 100 times bigger in diameter than the Earth! Does it make it more important? I think the Earth is much more important! I like the Earth a lot better! Um, the sun is 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 are 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 70 different types of primates, right? Like monkeys we talked about before—a bonobo’s a root! None of them have what we have! None of them can have this probabilistically!

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! It’s a huge, enormous continent with extreme mountains, weather, extreme cold!

But one thing—it doesn’t have as much life! But if you did that same thing I said, look Stephen, there’s this continent! You could hardly walk across it in, you know, five or six years, even if you’re a great athlete! You know, people do it! But 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, um, rocks! You can build shelter! You can have water—which is the most important thing! How much life do you think is there?

Let me just tell you, Stephen! There’s—it makes up 13% of the Earth's surface! There’s 8 billion people on Earth! How many people do you think live there?

I mean, as a scientist, you don’t have to be a scientist—you say, I think there’s probably, you know, maybe 800 million people there? There’s zero people there, basically!

So just the probability—I’m not saying it’s impossible. Probability is not determined by possibility! Because the thing with the South Pole is, okay, so there’s no one there! And if you put me there and said, is there life?

And I got a telescope out, and I looked around, I’d go, there’s no life here! I can’t see anything! I think I’d say I’m the only— the only person here! And then I oppositely to myself, I’d say I must be really important!

I might think that I’m a God! If I’m the only life there, I’d look around for miles, and I’d walk for days and days and days! And send out pigeons and whatever! And I’d go, there’s no one! It’s just me!

But then, little do I know that although this little space is inhabitable, if you go get on a plane and go a little bit further, you get to the land of the free! 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 pilot, um, you know, in the world that claims to have witnessed these encounters! Um, I’ve— you know, interviewed the top people that claim these things exist!

I’ve interviewed Ilan Musk! He’s a good friend at Harvard who runs a project! He claims he’s discovered material from, uh, interstellar technology! Perhaps like a garbage barge that was floating around! He’s a very eminent scientist! At no point do I ever understand the fundamental answer to the question: how did they get here? What properties—what physics properties do they use?

You know, they always say, oh, well, they defy the laws of physics! Well I’m a physicist! You know, I can understand some of the most deep physics you want! Um, and by the way, there are many times in history where if I showed you something that was made by the US government, you would say, that is witchcraft, magic!

Like the iPad thing you said! iPad is just one thing! You know, that in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey! Do you know the—by the way, I have to tell you this! If you don’t know the word podcast, do you know that comes from the movie 2001?

A Space Odyssey? Oh yeah, I read the article for it! It was a—yeah! It was an engineer at—who called it an iPod and the iPod came from the pod in 2001! So we owe podcasts to 2001!

So in that movie, there are iPads! There’re guys communicating with iPads! But they thought it was like a 20-century mythical tech! You know, the point of 2001: The Space Odyssey—I have to say it’s still so deep, right?

So I’m not saying that it’s wrong! But what if I went to an alien world—well, it’s possible! It’s weird! It’s bizarre, because there’s more to explore, and then dive in! Then you enrage and explode! Right?

Deeply—do whatever you will! It could, eventually, be boring! Like the mind’s abilities are practically fractal! So all we need to do is be open to new things! When you apply that thinking to God, it changes, though!

Because earlier you said we just can’t fathom! We can’t fathom this Creator and the factors that would go into this Creator! So we almost have to—you know, some people just choose to believe, right?

Yeah, and the same can be applied to this thinking of how they got here, which is like, listen, maybe we don’t know their technology—because it’s just unfathomable! Like the iPod or the iPad was 100 years ago! You’re absolutely right! So if they’re just 100 years ahead of us technologically, we would think that they were doing witchcraft!

We wouldn’t understand the basis of the technology that they used to travel here! Sure! But if they’re an alien from another realm—what if they’re from another time? But for now, we might feel like some strange things exist!

I’m acknowledging that life is complex. Because I want to be, but I think we can share God concept! I want to engage, I want to understand! I think it’s great! You’ve been engaging! You’ve been playing along with me!

We are trying to come together to explore the world of the unknown! You know, a little interplay—it could bring your cognitive atuition! You know that moment is the key! But I could level this up using science—of life!

Deep in my heart, I stand committed to my quest! But again, we are aware of a greater consequence in all of this! We stand here together, and I mean, you’re so pumped! You’re actually really engaging! We’re really getting somewhere—that’s awesome!

So, to elevate our experience together, let’s finally transcend the conversation into why! Why do we even bother with all this! What’s the final question? And like I said, in some ways, our minds are really impeding this view!

So I’m kicking with those frequencies! You put a cool spin on my understanding! But the truth is, the truth is out there! You know, it’s always chirping! Let’s go!

Let’s go deeper, when you look at the facts of our reality! And when you share that—does that resonate across lifetimes as we define it through speaking! Let’s understand what it means, and for all of us, there’s some resonance!

Let’s play this deeper! What do you think? Because contradictions eventually arise—life’s filled with contradictions! We may never truly understand the totality of existence!

And that’s okay! We don’t have to try to combat it! Just dive in to learn! Explore the ideas that stand out! And feel the confidence to press on, so we can sort our way through!

So stoked! Let’s keep the dialogue flowing!

There’s a place for everybody to appreciate each other! Well, you know, it’s funny that you said that! I do believe that! And we were having this beautiful layered conversation! But there’s a wealth of insight!

What do I have for new revelations? I still think the essence is here! And ah, it's an interesting approach—having playful banter! Exploring our creativity!

Okay, keep that coming as we’re breezing ahead with curiosity! It’s fascinating!

Let’s merge intellect with our personality—the way we engage! And answer these questions, but with an energetic bounce!

What about that fusion of seriousness with complete levity, where we bridge the two? That can bring out thoughts!

Right? That’s incredible! Because leveling the dialogue—that’s our groove! And I think it sets us in the right light!

I mean—look at Tesla! Nothing’s holding us back from interacting! The building of future understanding is all around us!

Each generation builds the next tower of thought! I believe we’re offering a big picture! So let’s get back to it!

And when more people dive in and unwrap those layers together! I’d say that’s amazing at its core!

And we can unify through this understanding, which never fails entreated! Bridging lives, emotions, and spirit in ways we cannot imagine!

Validating all these hearts—just like stars in the sky—there’s so much potential! What we must continue to do is keep setting rows with pride!

Alright! Let’s dance through exploring how we embrace experiences! Remember that fun of pioneering means overcoming fears! So let’s focus on what we’ll build next!

We can always remain dedicated as we discover together! All journeys, though they branch in directions, place our unique human center! Thinking through is where we can grow, and revealing junctions in warming light helps us appreciate it all!

So we’re meant to unpack and unite each thought in its authenticity!

And as we engage through this conversation, we ought to appreciate how each person’s light dances in this construct we muster up!