TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: The Fantastic Failure of Science You Never Heard Of
Date: 01/17/2026 Length: 00:33:22
Daniel Lapin 0:04
Greetings, Happy Warriors, and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where I your rabbi, reveal how the world really works. Thanks for being part of the show, and thank you, as always, for telling people about the show, subscribing if you're not ready, already a subscriber, and all in all, being part of our happy warrior community. And as usual, of course, there's always a special bonus podcast that is not available publicly that is exclusively for you members of the happy warrior community. So round about Christmas time, just recently, Secretary Peter Hegseth went public with an announcement, and it was unprecedented, and it sort of slipped by. It was the end of 2025, and there was, there was a lot going on, so there wasn't a lot of attention paid to it. But here's, what he said. He said in an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains in the US military chaplaincy corps have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of as ministers, faith and virtue were traded for self help and self care, said defense secretary, I suppose he's really Secretary of War, Peter Hegseth, here's what he said, and I'm reading His words. If you need proof, just look at the current army spiritual fitness guide in well over 100 pages. It mentions God one time. It mentions feelings 11 times it mentions playfulness nine times, but there is absolutely no mention of faith or virtue or religion. This guide relies on New Age notions, said Secretary hexseth, he said, I have a directive right here that I will sign today to eliminate the use of the army spiritual fitness guide effective immediately. These types of training materials have no place in the War Department. Our chaplains are chaplains, not emotional support officers, and we're going to treat them as such. He added, using the Trump administration's preferred name, of course, for a Department of Defense. So there we've got it. The idea is, and this is a point I want to make as clear as I possibly can, that there is in our culture. And I'm not talking only about the United States of America. This is all over, all over, certainly the Western world, certainly over Europe, the United Kingdom, but it even shows up in parts of Africa, particularly in governmental zones and in areas in which NGOs, nonprofit non governmental entities are active, there is a an incredibly strong and and almost Violent antipathy towards God and towards faith. And this is a very, very powerful tendency. It played a role, and continues to play a role in American politics and in American in education, public education geeks, particularly government indoctrination centers. You remember those? They used to be called public schools and universities, obviously, and and so here's the thing, everybody, everybody needs some kind of guide, as long as you make the central feature of human life, feelings, therapy, express yourself. The notion is that everything that you need for your life comes from within. It rejects the notion entirely that wisdom can be found outside of yourself. Search into yourself and. You will know what you should do, search into yourself, and you will know the answer. And I'm saying exactly the opposite, search outside of yourself, escaping the ego, getting outside of yourself. That has always been one of the biggest challenges in human development, and this is true for you as you follow your five F's, your family, your finance, your fitness, your faith and your friendships, as you work on developing all these five critical fundamental functions of your life, you have to do it by being able to get started get outside of yourself. You've got to almost be able to look down on yourself dispassionately, and you've got to be able to say, you know, this is where I'm making a mistake here. This is where I'm making a mistake there. But as long as we buy into that prevalent cultural message that it's all within your feelings are what really matter. There is no possibility of ever improving. And this is one of the reasons that in ancient Jewish wisdom, there is an expression, seek for yourself a rabbi. Because unless there's somebody outside of yourself, helping you overcome yourself, your ego, it's very difficult to make progress. And this, by the way, is is one of the, the main reasons I'm such a big believer in coaching. I have a coach. I think everybody should have a coach. And I coach people with exactly this purpose. The idea is that you've got to have everybody. We all need somebody outside of ourselves to help us climb outside of ourselves and look at ourselves and at our lives completely dispassionately. And this is almost self evident, right? I mean, how is it possible if you are so focused on your feelings, and you're so focused on talking and talking and talking and expressing yourself instead of listening. How can you possibly grow and develop well, where does all this stuff come from? And where does it derive its own sense of self importance. Where does it even get its sense of authenticity from? And the answer is a phrase that you heard from Fauci during the covid crisis, follow the science. Oh, we must follow the science. Well, the the Great Seal of the United States, originally during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, was designed by Franklin and by Jefferson and by one other person as well, and they came up with the children of Israel, a depiction of the children of Israel following the pillar of fire by which God led them through the desert. That's something to follow. You want to follow the pillar of fire. That's good. You want to follow God. That's good. You want to follow your commander in battle. That's good follow the science. That's a real problem, because none of us possess the ability to follow the science. Science is a field. It's a vast field in which scientists have to translate it for us, in a sense, you could see them as kind of being the equivalent of clergymen in religion, rabbis in Judaism, priests in Catholicism, not exactly the same, because we can follow God. We do get a sense of what following God means. It's not absolutely essential. I can't I'm not completely lost without my clergyman, but I am lost without my friendly local scientist, because I mean truth be told, fission, nuclear fission, the process by means of which, today, about 10% of the world's power needs are generated by nuclear reactors operating on the fission principle. What is the fission principle? The fission principle is that,
Daniel Lapin 9:40
essentially, you take uranium and you bombard it with neutrons, and what happens then is that it breaks up into two separate components. They might be Krypton, and, yeah, krypton is actually a real element, and barium. And that process releases huge amounts of energy. Now, look, I know the words, I know what I've just said, I understand what I've just said in somewhat abstract terms, but do I have a deep, innate, intuitive understanding of just what it means when we speak about the process of radioactive decay and how it is over. Given enough time, a block of uranium will turn into a block of lead, because it's going to go from uranium to something else, to something else, to something else, an event each time, releasing energy, until finally, it reaches its most inert state, which happens to be lead, not an accident, that lead can be used as a shield for nuclear radiation and for all forms of radiation. All forms of radiation are different points on the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light is a part of that gamma radiation, the X rays you get at a hospital. All of those are radiations on the now look all of this stuff i i talk about, and I understand enough to be able to talk about, and I understand it in abstract, almost mathematical terms. But do I really get it? No, when I get to talk to a friend of mine who's a nuclear engineer, he actually gets it. And so I love hearing his explanations, because every time he explains something to me, even if I've heard it before, but the second or third time I hear it, I get a slightly deeper and more complete understanding of this process. Only about 10% of the world's energy is produced by nuclear reactors. It should be about 80 or 90% it should be an awful lot, but because of the destructive fear of nuclear power, which is exactly the same as the fear that used to exist in the 1800s When coal power began to be so powerful, they hadn't yet converted to electricity, but Steam was generated by coal. There's a fear, but let's not, let's not go into the area at the moment of solving our problems with nuclear power, because that process, which is called fission, by means of which, uranium degrades and decays and releases energy. It does have problems. It produces radioactive waste, and there are various problems associated with it, although there's a lot of progress, nuclear reactors now really, really work very well indeed. But the Holy Grail is something called Fusion. Fusion, if you like, is almost the opposite fission is where a big, heavy, dense nucleus, like uranium, 235 is broken apart into smaller parts. And if you do that in a very strong, big container, and you let the reaction run in a chain reaction, you get something called a nuclear bomb. And the the full power of that was exhibited, of course, in August 1945 over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, actions which ended World War Two in the Pacific. But the Sun providing, directly or indirectly, almost all the energy we we enjoy on earth. You know, wind caused by the heat of the sun, solar heat, warmth, light, everything that process in the sun is not is a nuclear process, but it's not the fission process. It's the fusion process, and it's pretty remarkable, the fusion process. What it tells us is that the mechanism going on, and you'll pardon that's just the fusion process, is not what like fission. Is taking a heavy nucleus, like uranium, and breaking it into lighter ones, releasing energy, fusion is taking two hydrogen atoms and combining them into the next heavier element, which is helium, and that releases even more energy, much, much more energy than fission does. And there's no radioactive waste. And the fuel you know uranium is hard. In fact, you know, you'll remember reading about Iran getting closer and closer they were refining uranium, getting it to the level at which it can start a reaction. You don't need that with with Fusion, hydrogen is is so plentiful, every single molecule of water contains two atoms of. Hydrogen. There's lots of hydrogen around, and we put it into a fusion reactor, and we turn it into helium, and out comes huge amounts of it would really solve the problem. I mean, they are your electricity bill should go down to about 20 cents a month, just the administrative cost and delivery cost. There should be no cost associated with it. So why hasn't it happened? Because we haven't found a way to create fusion, the kind of pressures and the kind of heat needed to begin that reaction. It's huge, huge amounts of energy and huge equipment, monumentally large equipment. You've heard of various underground installations, mostly in Europe, great big donuts, miles and miles in diameter, where they whirl subatomic particles at huge speeds. All of that is part of the dream of attaining fusion. That is, I mean, we could have fusion energy problems are solved. So I tell you all of that in order to I want you to see that science is it's like any other belief system. It's got its devotees and its believers. It's got its cynics. It's got its ridiculers. It's it's a belief system, and it's a belief system with all the frailties of many, many belief systems, particularly because we have people between science and us, we call them scientists. And scientists are human beings, and all human beings are flawed. That's just a reality. So let me take you back to the date of March, the 23rd 1989 University of Utah, and two researchers in the chemistry department, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley pons, and in conjunction with the president of the University, Dr Peterson, they announced that they hold A press conference on that date, march 23 89 they have found the secret to cold fusion, meaning they don't need monumental quantities of heat and energy. They don't need vast sums of money to create great pieces of equipment. And they have done cold fusion with about $100 worth of equipment. You know what? They used a glass beaker, and in it they put a palladium electrode, and here they put a platinum electrode, and this, this liquid was, I think, a mix of heavy water. I think there was some lithium in it, again, where we're outside the range of my intuitive understanding of what's going on here. As I said, I can tell you the words do I really get? I don't, but enough information is that that's a thermometer. This is what they did, literally $100 worth or less of equipment, and they measured the appearance of certain elements that would ordinarily be the product of a fusion process. And they discovered neutrons which would be released. And this thermometer showed that heat was being produced beyond that, which was being supplied by the electrical power being supplied to the palladium and the platinum electrodes and the inter and all this was being done in in the basement of the chemistry department the University of Utah. And they issue a press conference. It's it's online. You can see it in the light of history, it's kind of interesting to watch, and it's almost sad, because you are watching in front of your very eyes. You're watching The collapse of human dreams. But at any rate, on March 23 this announcement took the world by storm. Newspapers ran wild with us.
Daniel Lapin 19:25
Companies started looking to buy the patents that these two guys had filed at the University of Utah, and the price of palladium suddenly skyrocketed because everyone's oh, we're going to need lots of palladium to produce, and this, literally, this ends the the worry about human energy and so obviously, everybody was eager to believe it. And ordinary, ordinarily, scientific caution was thrown to the winds. Everyone was so excited about this in. Addition, there's one other fact, which I don't think most people realize. But one day later, on, March the 24th 1989 a big oil carrier called the Exxon Valdez ran onto rocks in Alaska, spilled vast amounts of crude oil, creating an absolute crisis of anyway this made everybody feel, here's the solution. It's almost poetic. The One Day on March 23 we discover there's a way to no longer need oil. And in back in those days, people still believed that oil was the worst possible thing imaginable. And now the next day, Exxon Valdez strikes, and you see what a calamity we got. To stop using oil. Well, guess what we can we can start using cold fusion. It's so easy, anybody can do it. And April 15, University of Washington announces they've replicated the expert. That's the key thing in science, right? Replicability. If you do an experiment that has fantastic results, when I do it, I should get the same results. It would have been nice if the covid vaccine would have been subjected to some of these kinds of tests. But of course, it wasn't with the results. As you know, as well as I do, excitement is building. It's, it's, it's, it's irrepressible. You Massachusetts Institute of Technology, within a week, is busy working on replicating the experiments. And May 18, Nature magazine, this was March, April, May, less than two months later, Nature magazine announces that MIT has been unable to replicate the experiments. First dark moment. And most people, you know what they just did now to do it. You know what Fleischmann and Pons and the University of Utah were busy filing patents, and so obviously, there was a limit to how much they could share publicly. And obviously University of Washington, University of Massachusetts for technology, didn't have all the information of exactly how to set this up, so obviously it didn't work. The believers still outnumbered the skeptics. University of Washington may 25 less than a month after they announced that they got it working. University of Washington retracted and said, No, we're not getting the results. We're not getting any evidence of more energy coming out of this glass beaker than was going into it. June 15, Harwell labs. It's the British government's labs in Harwell and the United Kingdom announced they unable to replicate. It didn't happen. So by, you know, by the August 7, University of of Utah is beginning to pull back. And by October the 23rd Pons has put his house on the market, and he's left the country, and shortly thereafter, the University of Utah, which had started to great fanfare soon after this press conference, they'd started A University of Utah cold fusion Institute, the CFI and and that got closed and it blew apart today. Cold Fusion is known as a huge hoax. It wasn't intentional. Fleishman and ponds were not trying to fool anybody. They were true believers. They thought they had it. And this is the important point, and it's very, very valuable for you, and it's very valuable for me to know that when there is something we deeply, deeply want, it will impact our way of thinking. Any man who has fallen in love has become infatuated with a woman that would be very unsuitable for him to marry. Knows exactly what I'm talking about, because every ounce of logic in your head tells you Yes, she's just right for me, she's gonna this is what happens, is our minds become slaves to our desires. That's why we need a coach. That's why we need a rabbi. That's why everybody needs a rabbi, and that's why rabbis need rabbis. One of the most important questions to ask a rabbi is, who's your rabbi? There's there's got to be somebody, because otherwise you've got no. Outside of yourself to help make sure that you are able to escape your own ego and all the difficulties that it brings. And so this, this is a most remarkable story today. You mentioned cold fusion, and everybody burst out laughing, because everybody knows it's ridiculous. It's not how the world really works. If there is a process that can produce huge amounts of energy solve the world's energy problems, it's not going to be done with a glass beaker in somebody's basement. That's just not reality. Going back to every major breakthrough, it doesn't work. Steam power, you know, be nice if we could say that steam power was invented by some young girl in the basement of her family's house. It's not how it works. Each major breakthrough requires huge amounts of collaborative human energy. It just It just happened. And so a lot of people knew from the outset, this doesn't make sense, but there was so much desire to make ourselves independent of oil and make ourselves give ourselves access to limitless energy, and to never have the Exxon Valdez happen again, and desire trumped mind, and that happens so easily with all of us. And so got to understand that, to take science as the ultimate be all and end all that somehow and again. I, I'm I am very enthusiastic about science and technology, but the idea that it can't lie, or the idea that science can answer all questions, that's ridiculous. Science can only answer questions with respect to things that can be measured in a laboratory, that's what science is good for, but things that cannot be measured in a laboratory, things you know, should I should I marry this woman you know? Does she love me and do I love her? These are not questions that science can answer, and there's so many more of them that form the fabric of our entire lives. Our lives are governed far more by things that cannot be measured than by things that can how many of the financial decisions that we make are made on the basis of Immeasurables? You know, the type of clothing you buy, it's not because it's more durable. It's not because it's less expensive. We make decisions for clothing on non measurable characteristics, or in other words, spiritual and that's it. Physical characteristics can be measured, and we use science as the tool. Spiritual characteristics cannot be measured, and we use spiritual understanding, educated and guided by the Bible, in order to get a complete handle. These are two completely separate areas of the world. Of course, they interact. Of course, they come together in us. We human beings. We are ultimately the connection between the world of the physics and the world of the spirits, the world of science and the world of faith. It's not found in radishes. It's not found in camels or crocodiles or cows or cats. No animals do not have a synthesis of the physical and the spiritual. Angels also don't have the synthes. Angels are only spirit animals. Vegetables and minerals are only physical. Can be measured entirely by sites and should be
Daniel Lapin 29:06
only human beings stand between heaven and earth, stand between the spiritual and the physical, and so when we try and convert the deepest recesses of the human soul into science by means of psychotherapy and by means of psychiatry and by means of psychology, all of these are attempts to translate the spiritual Mysteries of the human soul onto graph paper, so as that it can be calculated, and so certain medications can be prescribed. And you'll notice that that's the direction that things are going, even in medicine, you know, if you're of a certain age, I suppose you might even remember, or if you live in certain parts of the world. You might have a doctor who is a remarkable diagnostician, talks to you, examines you, palpitates you, and comes up with what's wrong with you. Physically today, in medicine, you find that the tendency is going towards tests and computers, in other words, to make the field of medicine independent of the human being, that it's all science. And so we'll administer tests. Machines will read the tests. Machines will tell you what to do. Artificial Intelligence will prescribe. That's the trend we're going and I look long and hard to find a doctor who is an old fashioned diagnostician. That's what I want, a human being there because I'm a human being. I'm not a scientific object. I'm a complicated person only because I'm a mix of the physical the spiritual. Physical only is not complex. Spiritual angels are not complicated. I don't know a whole lot about angels, but again, I know the words and But human beings are and to ignore the spiritual dimension in human is a huge mistake. And so Secretary hexaf is quite right that chaplains should move away from God, away from faith, and start talking about feelings and therapy? No, that that's not the way that helps with human beings and and I think it's one of the main differences between a rabbi or a coach and a therapist, a therapist wants to hear your feelings. A good coach is not listening to your feelings. They're not important. The facts are important. What is happening in your life looked at objectively and dispassionately from the outside looking in, not from the inside looking out, and And that, my dear Happy Warriors, is kind of where we're up to. I think, as far as today's podcast is concerned, make sure you become a member of the happy warrior community, and do make sure that that way you're able to stay in touch. I'd love to hear from you and know what you think about this discussion. Just be aware, science is as vulnerable as any other belief system because of the human beings involved feelings. If Fleischmann and Pons were machines, this never would have happened. It only happened because they were human beings, and human beings have desires. Desires are spiritual. You can't measure my desires. You can't tell me whether my desires are valid or not. They're only between me and me, and if I am a person of faith, they're between me and God. But that's how these things work and and that is indeed how the world really works. So wishing you a wonderful week of progress with your family and your finances, your faith, your friendships and your fitness. God bless you.
