The Shawn Ryan Show
#316 Brian Keating - Brian Keating - The First Object Ever Found From Another Solar System
25 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Brian Keating, welcome to the show, man.
It's a great pleasure to be here, Sean. Been a while. I've been hoping to come on.
A couple years in the making, right? I don't know. But yeah, we were talking out there. I think I've been tracking you for like two or three years and you finally made it.
Yeah, it's kind of scary to hear that Sean Ryan's been tracking you, but I'll take that, my friend.
Oh, man. But yeah, lots of shit going on right now. Lot of stuff going on right now. What do you think about all this alien stuff?
You know, it's either the most exciting time to be alive or it's going to be the most depressing time to be alive. You know, it's like, imagine you keep asking a girl out. She'll say, yeah, soon, soon, I'll disclose my intentions to you. And, you know, you're just kind of waiting in the wings and... I keep hearing things are going to happen. It's going to come out.
Finally, we're going to know the truth. And the whole community is thinking about things and is excited about things. And then, I'm sorry to say, I've just been completely underwhelmed. This last release by President Trump and Department of War Pete Hegsa, I tore through that like a kid on Christmas morning or as soon as it came out. What did you find?
I found, you know, really it's a nice round number. I found like zero. I found zero that really interested me. And worse than that, I found things that were, you know, your background, you're used to dealing with kind of like psyops and a good friend, my friend Chad Hosh, he was in the psyops. He was in US Army, served in the Army. you know, they have exposure to things, right?
They're gonna prime you for certain things. I call these PSYOPs, S-C-I-OPs, because it sounds so outlandish, so outrageous. It titillates the mind, especially if you're a nerd like me. I want to know about extra-dimensional beings.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of recent alien disclosures?
I want to know about non-humanoid biologics. And all I get to hear from people I respect, some people I've talked to, you know, I like to say I've got the square root of your podcast kind of size, But I talk to a lot of the same people that you've had the opportunity and honor to talk to. And it's always, you know, comes down to like, trust me, bro.
Or I heard or somebody said this and I can't say that. And in the military, I completely understand it. I understand. You've seen things. You've done things. You're not going to be able to talk about things. You're a scientist and you go on a show.
like my friend, you know, Stephen Bartlett's show, and you get 10 million views, and one night you say, well, I heard from somebody who heard from somebody, and you're a physicist, like the people that have come on recently on his show. It frustrates me, because that's not the way science works. Do you think this is all a distraction?
I mean, every time there's a big release or hearing, it just, to me... It just winds up being a big, another fucking nothing burger. Yeah.
I mean, have you heard anything that would make you, I mean, these are supposed to be some of the most consequential discoveries of all time, right? Things that could question and have caused people, literally, Sean, to be burned at the stake. 1600, Giordano Bruno, who was a priest in the Catholic Church in Italy, he proclaimed that every star you see in the heavens has a planet around it.
They said, very nice. What temperature do you want to be cooked to? They burned them at the stake. Because it was so threatening, which meant it was threatening to the most powerful authority on earth at the time, which was the Catholic Church, the Vatican. And that was like the United States on steroids. Like literally, just kill it. No other power was comparable. And he went against them. Why?
Because it was threatening to them. Why is this something threatening to you? Do you care when your kid says, oh, daddy, you look ugly today, or some hater on the internet says something? You don't give a crap about it. But when somebody says something important and it challenges your worldview... Like, that's significant.
So allegedly these things could have the most consequential impact on humanity. Has your life changed? Have you questioned your belief in God? Have you thought maybe, you know, there's something to these aliens and maybe it could be incompatible with my religion, my faith in Jesus Christ or whatever? No.
I mean, I assume no. I used to think there was something to this alien shit. I really did. Now I don't. You know, people say... I just don't. You know, I've interviewed... so many people about this and I'm not talking about, uh, Avi Loeb or, but, um, you know, the, the thing is, is one thing that one red flag to me is you got all these, all these people out there that are screaming disclosure.
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Chapter 3: How does Brian Keating relate personal experiences to scientific discovery?
So, you know, in the ancient Roman times you had on, Jeremy Ryan Slate is a friend of mine not too long ago. You know, he talked about ancient Rome and what they used to do and how they keep the masses entertained when there's no Netflix. They had bread and circus. I call this bread and saucers. This is what they're doing. There's a lot of distraction. Why is it distracting, though?
That's what interests me. It's a metacognitive thing. To me, it's interesting because it taps into something primal in the human spirit, which is beautiful, by the way, that people care about the possibility of extra-dimensional, extraterrestrial, not only life, like...
If I told you tomorrow we discovered some slime mold on, you know, the moon of Saturn, Titan, you'd be like, holy crap, that's cool. But if I told you there's dolphins swimming around on the ocean, you'd say that's even cooler, right? And then if I said there's freaking dolphins with opposable thumbs and they're using iPhones, you'd be like, holy freaking crap. You know, right?
So it's this hierarchy of insane, interesting, most fascinating stuff. And it is child abuse or, you know, humanity's curiosity abuse. When you start saying something is so weighty, so important, so significant, not just to like, you know, your worldview, your religion, your belief in God, all these things. And you start like rug pulling it. Yeah.
I think that's, I think it's not only, you know, kind of not nice to do to people, I think it's morally objectionable. If you keep teasing this and just wait till you see it, and by the way, it's not just scientists, it's not just the military, it's people in Congress, it's people in power.
It's frustrating to me because they'll often be something, you know, they'll say things like, you know, we want someone, you know, these things that we see defy the laws of physics, okay? Well, like, I'm a physicist, Avi Loeb's a physicist, you know, show us the data. Avi doesn't believe that we're being visited right now.
He does believe that there have been extraterrestrial technology potential for them to have visited us via this Oumuamua, this recent, you know, 3i Atlas, and we can debate the scientific methods all you want. And there's a lot of objections in science, because guess what? That's what scientists do. Scientists don't say, oh, you found a good discovery? Oh, that's great, Sean. Good for you.
We're not like, you know, in the teams or whatever, like, oh, you take somebody, this, I'll take somebody. We don't have roles like that. We're all kind of doing battle against an enemy that has infinite resources called Mother Nature. And she doesn't give up her secret. The only thing that we have on our side, Sean, is that she's always in retreat.
We're making incredible progress, exciting progress, despite what doomsayers say, despite what people may say about it. And we almost don't need the aliens. Like, we almost don't need it for the sense that science is so incredibly interesting, so provocative, so helpful, so useful. But we've come to believe that with science, you get technology. And I kind of say, that's the problem.
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Chapter 4: How does Brian Keating relate his religious background to his scientific journey?
I served in the Catholic church. I loved it. And, you know, for me, I came from this, from a tradition that's older than Christianity, right? Jesus Christ was a Jew. And I felt like, well, Christianity came along after Judaism. It came along after Judea, right? And Jesus was a Jew.
So if Christianity has these challenges, like they're not gonna accept scientific wisdom or they didn't forgive Galileo. And so then I could say, well, Judaism has gotta be wrong because if something is based on, if calculus is based on algebra and calculus, you can say, well, calculus or algebra is wrong, then certainly calculus will be wrong.
That's not true, but that's kind of the analogy I'm making here. So I just felt like all of religion has these things where you have to listen to these authorities, you have to do what they say, you have to think what they do, and you can't think for yourself. Again, I'm a 13-year-old at this point.
I'm not a sophisticated 50-year-old professor who has investigated religions and compared things and had much more experience than I do now, okay, that I did that. So at that time, I became a scientist in terms of curiosity because I wasn't only looking at things and, oh, cool. I started taking notes.
Chapter 5: What challenges does Keating identify in traditional religious beliefs?
I started doing research. And again, this is before Google. And sometimes the more you struggle to get information, like nowadays I feel bad for my kids in some sense because they want to know how many golf balls fit inside the Goodyear blimp. Literally, I would have to calculate. There was no tool to do that. I'm not saying that's some important thing, but you get the point.
No, you literally look it up. In one second, you get instant gratification. you don't do any of the muscular work. You don't damage the muscle to break it down in your brain. And so I feel like they're losing out on that. For me, I was doing all that. And I felt like the more I learned about science, the less room there was for God. Look, I'm not the first person to say that, right?
Nowadays, I'm practicing religious.
Chapter 6: How does Keating's pursuit of a Nobel Prize connect to his personal life and family history?
I practice Judaism. So obviously I came back to it. We can get to that later on. But in the sense of knowing a little enough to be dangerous, that's kind of where I was at age 13. And I devoted my life to science. I taught myself calculus. I didn't have calculus when I was... I grew up in rural upstate New York, northern Westchester County. I had to do it myself.
I had to teach myself autodidactically, learning all these different things, trigonometry. And then I was doing research in my telescope at night. And I just loved it. I was addicted to it. It was getting to that flow state, and that's all you want to do in life. And then slowly but surely, I started to reproduce the step that my father...
you know, who I hadn't seen in 16 years or 15, you know, whatever it was at that point, 12 years. And I started to reproduce, and I was like, hmm, let me look up in scientific journals, like, whatever happened to him, Jim Axe, James Axe, whatever happened to him, what did he do?
And I saw these papers about science, and it was like the most high-level science, the origin of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement, theory of relativity, origin of the universe. And I'm like... This guy has my DNA, or I have his DNA, but there's something different. I wasn't raised with him, but I'm doing the same thing as him. It's weird. It felt creepy to be influenced by a ghost.
I didn't know anything else. I didn't even know if he was alive. Wow. And I hit 22. I was in grad school, 21 at Brown. So your mom, I mean, she would never... Oh, they fought so bad. And they did kind of use us between as intermediaries. That sucks, man. That was a challenge. The 1970s happened a lot. And also, you know, to really, you know...
give him the kind of negative judgment that he deserved. Um, when you get divorced, you know, hopefully, you know, this will never happen, but, um, you have child support, you have alimony.
And he was given the opportunity to choose between paying the back child support that he owed for myself and my brother, or giving us up to adoption to my stepfather, Ray Keating, who was only a 30-year-old guy at the time. And he said, I don't want to pay the money. So he gave us up for adoption. So my name got changed. Brother's name got changed. I didn't see him. I hated him.
I never... I was like, how could you abandon my older brother? Like, I was protecting my older brother. A 10-year-old? Who you were close to. It wasn't like, you know, they weren't close. They were very close. Gave him up because he hated my mother so much. And she hated him just as much, okay? It was a very nasty divorce.
Um, and so, by the time I hit graduate school, getting my PhD at Brown University, I started, again, the internet was pretty young, you know, mid-1990s. I started research, like, what did he do? Like, who was he? Is he alive? I didn't know. I didn't remember what he looked like. The last time I saw him was in a court in Long Island, New York.
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Chapter 7: What arguments are presented against the moon landing skepticism?
And he was like, well, maybe they're going now, but they couldn't have gone then. I'll get back to that in a second. Now, that's a totally fallacious and ridiculous argument that I refuted on air with him, and peers actually piled on and called him full of shit, to his credit. But the very day that Artemis launched and then went around the Moon this last month, in April,
It's supposed to land on the moon though. Not this one. This one was supposed to go around the moon.
I thought they were supposed to land and then it changed.
No, no, no. It was always planned to do this. First one went around the moon, no one was in it. Second one went around the moon with people in it. Third one's going to be people in it. Sorry, unmanned landing on the moon. Fourth one's going to be people landing on the moon. Well, let me just interrupt this one thing. All right, all right, all right.
I just want to know, why don't we just land on the fucking moon? We did it in the 60s. Okay, would you get... All right, why are we doing all this crazy, wild shit?
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Chapter 8: How does the discussion shift to the significance of the Nobel Prize?
Let's just... Go back.
Would you get on with your kids and being here and your wife and your empire that is so impressive? Would you get on like the second flight of any kind of military hardware built by the lowest paying contractor?
Hey, in case you haven't noticed, I'm a risk taker.
I know you are. But would you do it now? I asked Elon Musk on my podcast. Would I do it right now? Yeah. Would you take it right now? Right. So you do things in steps.
Right.
four or five years ago. Kitty Hawk, was that the first time the Wright Flyer had ever flown? No, they didn't put themselves on it the first time. They did test flights, prototype flights. That's all they're doing. There's nothing nefarious there. But let me just get to the closure of this one argument, a thought experiment I want you to consider.
April 5th, 6th, when they went around the moon, can you imagine Ayatollah Khomeini Jr.? Oh, hello. Hi, mashallah, mashallah, President Trump. Congratulations. Every country on Earth, including China, which had stolen a lot of our nuclear and space secrets in the 1970s, China, Soviet Union, all these countries called up and congratulated the United States. Now, they were our enemy.
It's hard to think of it now because we kind of like, whatever, whatever, right? But can you imagine, like, the Ayatollahs right now calling us up to congratulate us? In other words, they would be the most... and happy people on Earth to have us not get there and prove that we didn't get there. Because that would leave glory for them. So, that's a psychological kind of component evidence for it.
There's overwhelming scientific evidence for it. The evidence against it is minimal. You already mentioned one of them. Which is, well, how come they did it, you know, in the 60s, but we can't do it now? I mean, you said that. Gentile said that. Totally fallacious argument. I love you. I love Gentile. I'm going to tell you that's a fallacious argument. And I'm living proof of it, okay?
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