An Astronomer and a Philosopher Search for Truth in the Infinite | Jordan B. Peterson

Jordan Peterson sits down with experimental cosmologist Dr. Brian Keating. They discuss the importance of awe for the human spirit, the fundamental ethos behind all true science, the idea of the useless genius, and the necessity of sacrifice for improvement of the self and the broader community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Brian Keating?

  Who am I to say "I believe in God"? Like, what is a man to say such a thing? I mean, it's so ridiculous. And I've turned that around and I say, "I don't believe in gravity." And he's like, "What are you talking about, Stephen?" "You're a physicist, you have to believe in gravity." And I said, "No, if I take this meteorite and I drop it, I don't believe it's gonna... I have evidence for it."

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:18Brian Keating?

  Those things you don't have to take on faith. You have evidence for them. So, science and religion... Science should not be used... It's not one of its tool, its best purposes. You know, you have a hammer, you don't use it to screw in a screw. You have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed, or perhaps best...

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Hey, everybody. Some announcements today before my description of the podcast with Dr. Brian Keating. So, the first is, I just published this book, "We Who Wrestle With God", and it hit number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. So, I'm kind of happy for five different reasons about that. There's a tour associated with it. Some of it in December. I'm gonna be in Texas with my wife, our accompanying musician. And then, from January through April, running through the United States. If you want more information about that, go to jordanbpetersen.com. The content of the tour, or the approach of the tour, will be similar to my previous tours in that I'm taking abstract concepts, in this case, concepts associated with the realm of story,

• 1:33Speaker 01

  particularly the stories of the Old Testament. I'm explaining their conceptual significance, but I'm also extracting out the practical implications of that understanding for attention and for behavior. And so, it's always my goal to make what I'm discussing applicable immediately in the real world. And that continues in this lecture series. We've released a new...

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Seminar series for Daily Wire Plus, featuring the same players with a few substitutions as partook in the Exodus Seminar, which was very popular, this time devoted to explication of the Gospels. And so that released on the first, in that series, 10-part series, released on December 1st. So you could go check that out as well. We're pretty excited about it. It seems to be performing a little better than the Exodus Seminar did, which is saying quite something because I think that was the most popular offering that the Daily Wire produced, apart from Matt Walsh's movies, which is pretty good, given that it's so, you know, they're actually intellectually complex and somewhat arcane in the fact that they have this public appeal

• 2:44Speaker 01

  is really something terrific. So that's the announcements for the time being. I had the privilege today of speaking with Dr. Brian Keating, one of the world's leading cosmologists. Dr. Keating has been a guest on my podcast before, and that was plenty of fun. And we had an opportunity to continue our ongoing conversations. We talked a fair bit about his lecturing for Peterson Academy. He has a couple of courses on astronomy and cosmology there. We discussed the utility of the opportunity to bring high-quality mass education everywhere at very low cost, very well-produced and at low cost.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  And so, you know, that was gratifying as far as I was concerned because that project has been quite a stellar success. We have about 40,000 students. And Dr. Keating's offerings are very popular and deservedly so. So you can follow us on the scientific side more intensely there. We talked about...

• 3:51Speaker 01

  The relationship between science and ethics is a very tricky thing to tease out, because the empirical presumption is that we build our representations of the world as a consequence of our experience of the facts of the world. And that doesn't appear to be correct, precisely. That doesn't mean there are no facts. It means that the issue of what the relevant facts are is an important issue, and the determination of what facts are relevant and why is actually part of the enterprise that we describe as ethical. That's the definition of the ethical enterprise.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  And so, we tried to bandy back and forth various concepts of the relationship between the ethical and the scientific, or maybe even more particularly, the fact that for science to exist, it has to not only be embedded in an a priori ethical framework, but that the scientists who are practicing science have to be oriented by that ethic. To be scientists, you have to put your pursuit of the truth and beauty, which is another topic we touched on. You have to put your pursuit of truth and beauty in the service of humanity, ahead of all other considerations.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  And that's an ethical decision, not a scientific decision. And it's the ethical decision upon which all science that's genuine in its most abstract and glorious formulations and in its most practical elements is predicated. And so, that constituted the bulk of our conversation. And there were many more things that we could have and would have liked to discuss, but you know, that was plenty of crisp for the mill. So, join us for that. So it's gotta be more than a year since we talked, eh?

• 5:49Brian Keating?

  Yeah, you were, you came in January twenty-three to the house and we had

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Right, so almost two years.

• 5:55Brian Keating?

  Kosher ribeyes, yeah, that's right, exactly two years, yeah. Yeah, your tour for last time in San Diego, yeah, that was the last time we were together. And then we did a remote podcast together a couple of months after.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, yeah, well, it's always, it's always good to have a chance to talk to somebody from the scientific community. I can plague you with my preposterous questions about cosmology. I have a preposterous question for you to do.

• 6:20Brian Keating?

  I can't wait, that's what I'm here for.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll get to that. I want to ask you first about the course you did for Peterson Academy.

• 6:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah, I've done, I've recorded two, one's out currently, which is called Cosmology. Very simple. And then I've recorded a second one, Introduction to Astronomy, which you might think would come before cosmology, but actually cosmology encompasses most of astronomy anyway. And in some sense, cosmology is one of the oldest sciences, if not the oldest science. It's the science that you can do with the two telescopes that you're born with in your, in your skull. And for that reason, it's accessible to everybody. You know, I was thinking on my way over here, you talk so much about freedom and how important that is. There are very few things that are literally free, right?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:03Brian Keating?

  I could only think of two, and you'll probably correct me, but freedom of thought is not, not necessarily a guarantee around the world, right? Every human being doesn't have access to freedom of speech, certainly not.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Right, definitely not.

• 7:14Brian Keating?

  Your home country, especially nowadays. But, but air, so far as I know, is free. And the only other thing I could think about, Jordan, was the night sky. We all can look at the night sky, we can all enjoy it. And we're, in both those ways, you know this, I'm sure, we breathe in every breath has millions of molecules that Jesus Himself breathed in. That's the nature of our atmosphere and the mixing of molecules, et cetera. It's guaranteed that that is the case. But the only other thing that we may share with Jesus is that we see the same night sky. We see in the same cosmos as He did. There haven't been any new planets, you know, coming in.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Well, we're also surrounded by Pharisees and scribes and lawyers, and so that's also.

• 7:55Brian Keating?

  They're free. Yeah, that's a free toothache, I suppose. So I find it also quite a respite. You know, I'm a pretty tough person, but I do believe the human spirit needs safe spaces, in a sense, not the kind of places we had on campus on November 6th with, you know, Play-Doh and finger painting kits for the students who are traumatized.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  That's Play-Doh, not Plato.

• 8:20Brian Keating?

  That's right. But instead, we need safe spaces that the human mind can expand within. You know, if you just go to the gym and work out and you never recover, you can't fully grow to your potential. To me, cosmology uniquely and science, you know, but less so generally science, certainly not virology, right? But science in its purest sense, the pure sciences, not political science, but pure science, not applied, like I'd get to do, I have the privilege of doing, which is studying that the the universe offers a space for the human mind, the intellect to relax, to enjoy, to appreciate. And there's no secret, you've heard cosmetology, I make this joke in my Peterson Academy course. I say, you know, this course is not about hair and makeup, you know,

• 9:03Brian Keating?

  despite my wonderful appearance, but it's actually related cosmology and cosmetology by the prefix cosmos, which in Greek means beautiful or appearance. So it's literally telling us that the night sky is beautiful and it's something to behold and it's a sensual pleasure. People don't think of that with cosmology.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a weird fact, really, isn't it? I mean, you wonder about it biologically because they that exposure to the night sky, day sky too, for that matter, is also an at-hand experience of awe. And I've wondered often, from the psychological perspective, what it has meant for people and their existential positioning to have less access to the night sky than they once did, because there's a lot of people who never see the full cosmic landscape because of light, light pollution. It's not a good way of conceptualizing it, but because the light interferes with the night sky, right? And it is something I remember growing up in Northern Alberta. I

• 10:05Speaker 01

  mean, we were a long way from any major urban center and the night sky there was very impressive. You could see the Milky Way fully and and very frequently we had aurora borealis and pretty spectacular displays and. When it's forty below and the air is dry, there's very little humidity. And so the night sky is very stark. And you know, it was dark by six o'clock at night. So even when I used to do my paper route, my friends, we spent a lot of time looking up at the night sky, watching for falling stars, watching for satellites. But that, it's interesting, eh, that observing the sky is a primary pleasure. That's strange biologically. It's like, what the hell's going on there?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  That it produces that experience of awe. And awe is a weird emotion too, because it's a very sophisticated emotion, but it's also very primal. One of the concomitants of awe is pile of erection, right? That feeling of your hair standing on end. And that's actually the same reflex that manifests itself when a cat, for example, puffs itself up at the sight of a predator, like a dog. But it's trying to make itself more impressive. So it's, it's that, that sense of awe we have is associated biologically with our response to predation. But it's also, as you pointed out, see, I've thought about it.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  It's like when the, when the cat's hair stands on end, it's becoming more than it is, right? It's trying to display itself in the most impressive manner possible. And there's a call to higher being that's part and parcel of the experience of awe that seems like, like the psychological equivalent of that, right? You look up at the night sky and it, it fills you with a sense of wonder and a sense of your remoteness and, and finiteness. But at the same time, it also kind of compels you to be more than you are. Evokes curiosity. That's right. Very, it's very complex, eh, to see that happen.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  "In the beginning was the Word.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Christ is a master at using short, mysterious stories. They change the listener who takes them seriously."

• 12:25Speaker 02

  "My experience with biblical texts is that they're inexhaustible sources of wisdom. If I find something in them that is an obstacle, it's because there's something in me that has yet to be transformed. I just don't get it."

• 12:38Speaker 03

  "The person that you do not think could ever be virtuous. Oh, let me show you. This is the person who is fulfilling the law and the prophets."

• 12:44Speaker 02

  "But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you as well."

• 12:50Speaker 04

  "I don't believe in that promise. I'll just be honest at this point. That has not been part of my experience."

• 12:54Speaker 05

  "This parable, I've been trying to understand forever. While we were talking and while we were sitting there, then it hit me. I saw it."

• 13:01Speaker 06

  "Name me one ideology that has supplanted Christianity that has done good for humanity. This June is very frightened of the post-Christian society."

• 13:11Speaker 07

  "He was the God-man, the model, the example of what we ought to become and what we can become." "It's okay. It's safe for you and all of your doubts and apprehensions to open up and to let these stories in. He is the temple. He is the Torah. He is the covenant. He is prophecy fulfilled."

• 13:28Speaker 04

  "If you're doing this and it isn't also the love of wisdom, it's also an attempt at wisdom without love, in both ways you're going radically wrong."

• 13:36Speaker 05

  "Power of love. It sounds so cliche when you say it."

• 13:38Speaker 04

  "The 60, man." "I don't want to be in a Hallmark card, I tell you."

• 13:42Speaker 02

  "We've got our work cut out for us, gentlemen. This is one peculiar time and one peculiar text, and I sure hope we're up to the task."

• 13:58Brian Keating?

  "Yeah, and the dirty secret, the shameful secret of what I do with my colleagues is that most of us, myself may be an exception, are completely inured to it. We're so used to seeing, we're so used to thinking of incomprehensible, literally astronomical numbers that we sometimes don't even bother to look up at the sky. There's an eclipse happening of the moon? Oh, so what? I'll see it some other time. Big deal. We know what that is. I know what that is. I know what causes it." It doesn't portend evil, doom, disaster, catastrophe. Those words have the word star, astro, within them, right? Evocative of the power that was once thought to be held within the night sky's domain. Now, the scientists know, we've extirpated the sort of, you know, mysterious gods and demons and so forth.

• 14:42Brian Keating?

  But at the same time, we've also, as I say, inured ourself to the wonder that a normal person feels when they encounter the mysterious. And I think it's quite amazing when you see, you know, in my religion, you know, I'm Jewish and I'm practicing, I take it very seriously. You know, we are commanded, one of the many things we're commanded to do, in addition to the Sabbath and honoring our parents and so forth, is when you come upon a miracle, you bless it. So we actually have blessings for seeing a meteorite, for seeing a meteor shower, for seeing a rainbow, for these phenomena, for seeing the ocean when you haven't seen it.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  It's good. It calls it, it marks it and makes you note it.

• 15:21Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 15:22Speaker 04

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• 15:53Speaker 01

  I suspect if your eyes were open, as they should be, possibly, you'd see that all the time.

• 16:02Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And you suggested something that's very interesting. We know neurophysiologically that knowledge and memory inhibit perception. Because what happens when you learn to perceive something, when you're familiar with it, is you replace your presumption with the perception.

• 16:20Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Right? You replace the perception with your presumption. That makes you super efficient because you see what you know, but it distances you from the phenomenon.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Nomina means to shine forth, right? It distances you from that. And so then you you gain efficiency at the cost of wonder. That's part of the reason it's so nice to be around little kids.

• 16:42Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Because they're not efficient.

• 16:44Brian Keating?

  No.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  That's for sure, but.

• 16:46Brian Keating?

  And everything is new.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  But everything's new, exactly.

• 16:49Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:50Brian Keating?

  Are you familiar with the poem by Walt Whitman?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:52Brian Keating?

  It's called When I Heard the Learned Astronomer.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 16:55Brian Keating?

  This is a different one.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Oh, OK.

• 16:57Brian Keating?

  And it's really, they believe it was sort of written around the, you know, mid to late 1800s. And he had heard a lecture about the recently discovered planet Neptune. And so Neptune was discovered in a most remarkable way. It was the first object that we would call dark matter. We saw its unseen gravitational pull, afflicting and affecting the orbit of an inner planet Uranus, which is closer to the sun. We didn't know why the anomalous behavior of the inner planet was being affected. It was predicted to exist, truly dark matter discovered. And Whitman, you know, was kind of reacting to that. And the poem starts off, it says, "When I heard the learned astronomer arranging with facts and tables and figures, etc.,

• 17:39Brian Keating?

  how quickly I became depressed and despondent by the night sky brought to numbers." And then, and then, he says, "I walked outside under the silent canopy of stars to be alone and marveled at their great beauty." Now, Richard Feynman, another, you know, Whitman and Feynman, I always put them opposed. And I do this in the course at Peterson Academy. I contrast them. He says, Feynman, the great, one of the greatest physicists of all time.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And a very cool and interesting person.

• 18:05Brian Keating?

  Fascinating individual, complex and incredibly brilliant. And often, you know.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Provocative.

• 18:12Brian Keating?

  Yes, and often evoking Whitman's other famous phrase, "I contain multitudes," right? So, but in Feynman's case, he said, "What, what is it about about scientists that you presume I see less than the poets? Poets will speak of Jupiter as if he is a god. But why do I see less when I speak of him as a ball of methane surrounded by a retinue of planets? In other words, can you see more or can you see less? My wife makes fun of me when I see a circuit.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Great to see both.

• 18:44Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so that's the goal. And in fact, I say that in the course. I say, you don't, at the end, I say, who do you side with? And, and, and half the students say Whitman, and half the students say Feynman. And I say, you're both right, in a sense. You should, you should embody both characteristics.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've had the same experience in some ways, teaching my students about, let's say, analysis of, of dreams and, and stories. Now, if you're a naive movie attender, movie core, you don't, you don't really think about the movie, right? You certainly don't think about it as an artifact. You don't think about the direction. You don't think about the cinematography. You're just in the story. And, you know, in a, in a way, that's where the most enjoyable capture takes place. And then, when you become critically minded, and you start to see the subtexts, and to see the technology, and to see the skill or lack thereof, then it distances you from that.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And that is a gain, in that you're a more sophisticated observer, and probably less susceptible to manipulation. But it's a loss, in that you lose that embeddedness in the story. But my experience has been that, with enough concentration on both, then you can unite them. And you can have the embeddedness in the experience, and the deeper understanding at the same time. And that's actually better.

• 20:07Brian Keating?

  That's the goal. That's what I, so often, and, and this is why I was drawn to Peterson Academy. I've been a professor for 21 years. You know, it's part of my identity as a human being, one of many. And, and I think, for me, the opportunity to do something completely new, novel, and, and really interact with the type of intellect, the curiosity, that hasn't been beaten out, because they had, they don't have to learn partial differential equations, and they don't have to learn how to solder together a data acquisition system, and all sorts of other things that are very important for professional physicists that aspire to do that. Maybe some of them will. And I've in fact been encountered by people that do wanna take that course further than what I present in Peterson Academy.

• 20:49Brian Keating?

  But the point being, you know, if, if you can maintain that wonder. If you can maintain that curiosity and you are undeterred by failure. You know, I always tell my students, when you solve a problem, guess what you win? You win a ticket to an even harder problem.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:07Brian Keating?

  And that's a good thing because.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  That's like success in life.

• 21:10Brian Keating?

  A success, exactly. It's deferring gratification. And but the thing about science, Jordan, as you know, you can't win science. You know, science is an infinite game, as Duak would call it, right? There's no such thing as completing. You've come to the end of science, you know, and no one will ever do that. No one will ever complete science. You may have the most knowledge, you may have the stack of Nobel prizes, et cetera. But you can't complete science because Mother Nature is undefeatable. Because she's an infinite array of ever retreating forces. I think Wigner called it. And the point being, it's confusing because there's an ambiguity. The human mind hates ambiguity because we know to get a tenured position is a finite game. There's only so many professors that can get it.

• 21:53Brian Keating?

  To get, you know, the highest score on a test, to get into graduate school, to get a post, all these things. So science is comprised, it's an infinite game comprised of all these finite games. Nobel Prize, it only goes to three people. So how do you navigate in those realms? And I think that people cleave towards the, well, if I just do the hard things, the differential equations and the circuits and the.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  By master the finite games.

• 22:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah, those finite games, then I will win the infinite game. And along the way, they beat out of themselves, unfortunately, sort of the suicide of that curiosity that got them interested in science.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  They subordinate their search for beauty and truth to victory in one of the finite games.

• 22:33Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Right, and that's, that's like the equivalent of propaganda in the arts is you put in the cart before the horse. And that's a very big mistake. You know, one of the things I learned in graduate school, I wouldn't say that I'm particularly mathematically minded. You know, it's not something that comes with great ease to me. I had some students who had that proclivity and I could certainly see how different they were from me in that regard. Although I could learn it if I put my mind to it. I probably had more trouble with statistics in my career as a psychological researcher, learning it as a graduate student than anything else. Until I started doing my own studies.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And then statistics became, it became as much fun as gambling, like slot machine gambling. Because.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  If you were doing a study you're interested in, there was a moment in the statistical analysis where you pulled the lever, so to speak, and you could see if you discovered something or not, or if all your work was for naught, if it was going to move you forward. And so, the thing that's interesting about the infinite game element of that is that it's like a bricklayer who's laying one of fifty thousand bricks when he's building a cathedral. If you just think of the next brick, that's a pretty damn dismal occupation. But if you understand that each of the incremental steps you're taking forward is in relationship to this infinite whole, then the significance of the whole imbues the part. And if you're

• 24:04Speaker 01

  pursuing science properly, that is exactly, you have to do it that way. So it's interesting, you know, in the conception of the divine that's laid forth in the story of Jacob's ladder is an infinite game in the same regard, because Jacob has a vision of a ladder ascending upward with no pinnacle, right? And God is at the top of the spiraling ladder with no pinnacle. Sure, but, but it is, it is a vision of finite and infinite games, I think, but in relationship to the moral domain rather than the scientific. Those probably overlap, though, and that overlap, I think, is what we're talking about, right, is that it's the call of beauty and truth as the fundamental motivation, not only the fundamental motivation

• 24:48Speaker 01

  of the scientific inquiry, in that it's the pursuit that saturates all these sub-elements with meaning, but it's also the ethical pursuit that makes science possible. Because unless you're very strongly aligned in your belief with your belief in the truth, you can't be a scientist, because you'll put your career first, and then the whole bloody thing collapses. Because, you know, another thing you win as a scientist is evidence that you're an idiot and you were wrong, right? Because every time you discover anything that's actually a discovery.

• 25:20Brian Keating?

  Right. Another Feynman quote, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not their knowledge, not their wisdom." And look-

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Or the ignorance of you.

• 25:28Brian Keating?

  Well, that's right, exactly. And you look at the- Word, look, you know how more than anybody, you know, what the meaning of words are, you know, and you know in Hebrew, the word for thing is the same as the word for word suggesting an intermit, you know, entanglement that's inextricable. But, um, but, but in the sense, science, let's look at the word science. What does science mean? It doesn't mean wisdom, no, that's sapiens, that's sapiens. We are homo sapien, we are man who is wise. What are we wise about, Jordan? That we're gonna die. That's the only thing that we know, that we know for sure, is that we're going to die. And it's interesting, that also comes up in the first chapters of Genesis, right? Uh, as you've spoken about at many, uh, many, um, many occasions. But the word science means knowledge.

• 26:12Brian Keating?

  And what is the word knowledge in Hebrew connote? Well, what, Adam knew his wife. So it's very different. The, the notion in sort of the Greek, the Roman, the, the tradition of Asa, et cetera, that is coming down through us and it's very crucial to life. I mean, technology, science and, and knowledge acquisition in general. That's sort of one tradition. And the, the Hebrew tradition is a tradition where knowledge, as I say, means something radically different. And the aspiration for wisdom, Torah, wisdom, knowledge, um, truth, emuna, as you say, all these things have elements of illumination, but it's

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Also of relationship.

• 26:49Brian Keating?

  Yes, a purpose, purpose, yes, exactly. Yeah, so the, so these things, you know, and you should never confuse it. I mean, there's no one as dumb as, you know, someone who's brilliant. You know, there's no one who will believe some of the dumbest things, dumbest propositions, that you couldn't convince that bricklayer you spoke about to believe than an intellectual, than an academic, you know? Uh, they spoke of, uh, Lenin spoke of, of useful idiots. Sometimes I think of, of useless geniuses, you know, that some of my colleagues are useless geniuses, they're so bright and then they'll lead their credibility to the domain of wisdom, of which they have none.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:25Brian Keating?

  And so

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the correlation between, there is no correlation between what you might describe as ethical orientation as psychometrically measured and IQ. There's no correlation between IQ and work ethic, for example. That just shocked me when I first discovered it. It's like, what do you mean, there's no correlation? You mean zero? Really? Like zero?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  You'd expect just maybe on the basis of something like neurological integrity, that people with higher IQs might be able to dedicate themselves to tasks over the long run more assiduously. No, no correlation whatsoever. Yeah. So that's, and it's also the case, you know, and this has been laid forward in the mythological representations forever, mythological characterizations, that there's nothing, there's no sin greater than the prideful sin of the intellect. Right. Because it's extremely powerful and very, very inclined to worship itself and its own creations. Right. Very bad.

• 28:27Brian Keating?

  That is the serpent. Right. Exactly. It is within all of us. And the smarter you get, look, I've interviewed 21 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast, and never once, I mean, they've all been brilliant, they've all been incredibly, you know, accomplished in their field, obviously, to get to that level. And I've criticized the Nobel Prize, but not the people that win it. They, you can't, I mean, the one rule I learned when I was asked to nominate winners on the two occasions I've been asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize, is that you can't nominate yourself, right? That's the one rule that they adhere to, that Alfred Nobel stipulated in 1896. But most other things they've disavowed, unfortunately. Which is a grave sin, by the way, because you know, in Judaism, the greatest, the greatest mitzvah, which means commandment, they, people think it means good deed. It doesn't mean good deed, it means commandment. You're commanded

• 29:11Brian Keating?

  to do certain things. And one of the things you're commanded to do that has greatest, utmost importance is to bury the dead, and to not leave a dead body unescorted. Why is that? Well, it's the one thing they can't reciprocate, right? They can't, you bury the dead, they're not going to bury you, right? By definition. And so it's the ultimate altruistic, you know, beneficence in the sense. And when Alfred Nobel wrote his will, he specified exactly what he wanted. He wanted to go to one man who did the greatest accomplishments for the greatest benefit of mankind, and in the preceding year. So it was one person, preceding year, and had a benefit all of humanity. So it was what we call, in Hebrew, zavaan, ethical will. So it wasn't just a will, here's my money, because he had no

• 29:54Brian Keating?

  kids, he had no wife, he had no heirs to give the money to, so he gave it all, in the sense. Towards the betterment of mankind, literally, is what it says. Uh, but many of the other things they've disavowed. He can have three people win it. They can win it for stuff done 30 years ago, 50 years ago. But, but one of the few things that they've actually kept is this, this focus, if you will, that it should benefit. It should provide a benefit to humanity. And then you wonder, well,

• 30:20Speaker 01

  That's also a non-scientific element of science, right?

• 30:23Brian Keating?

  It's completely correct.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  So you agree with that?

• 30:24Brian Keating?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Well, you know, one of the things I've been trying to work out conceptually, and I tried to talk to Richard Dawkins about this. I wouldn't say with a tremendous amount of success. Um, I, I, science is, can't be at the bottom of, of human endeavor. It can't constitute the fundamental, it can't constitute the foundation of human endeavor, because science itself has to be embedded in an a priori moral framework that is not itself science.

• 30:54Brian Keating?

  And would you say then, just based on that, that somebody who identifies as a scientist alone is fundamentally unhealthy? Is not maybe psychopathic?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  I don't think you can do it, because the problem is, and you're pointing to this, it's like, is it a defining characteristic of science? That it serves the benefit, at least in intent, let's say. It serves the benefit of, of what? Of, of life more abundant? That would be a good way of thinking about it. Human-centered life more abundant. Well, see, I, I read a book at one point that was written by an ex-KGB officer, who claimed that before the Berlin Wall collapsed, the Soviets had put together a bio lab in Siberia that was working on a hybrid between Ebola and smallpox that could be aerosolized.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Right now, that's science.

• 31:49Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Right? Because if you accept the proposition that science is value-free, and that all facts are equal, because that's what value-free means, both of those are like very untenable philosophical propositions, but people do accept them. Then, while were the scientific experiments that were done by Unit 731 in Japan, in China, by the Japanese, was that science?

• 32:13Brian Keating?

  Fritz Haber.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  They've been used, the, the data's been used?

• 32:16Brian Keating?

  Yep.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  And so? If, if the exploratory endeavor is not motivated by the proper ethical striving, you're not a scientist. And then, I think that actually works out practically too. Like, I was fortunate in my graduate advisor, who's still alive, I still work with him, Robert Peel, who was a very, he was a scientist. And most scientists aren't, right? Most scientists are journey men. And I'm actually not even criticizing that.

• 32:45Brian Keating?

  No, no.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Because for there to be any exceptional people, or any exceptional things, there has to be a lot of run-of-the-mill things. Like even scientific research. A lot of the publications are going to be the first publication of someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

• 32:59Brian Keating?

  They're incremental.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And they're not likely to be correct or useful.

• 33:03Brian Keating?

  All PhDs are like that.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. But that doesn't mean you

• 33:07Brian Keating?

  No.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  You have to dispense with them.

• 33:08Brian Keating?

  No, no, no.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Okay, so Bob's insistence in the lab was, don't publish things that you know to be wrong. Even if you're tempted, because you will be tempted, because maybe you work on an experiment for a year, now it's your master's thesis, and it doesn't work out. It's like, well, then what?

• 33:27Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's a year. And it's supposed to take you a year. So that's a big problem. And you have to mentor someone in your lab to put the search for truth before their short-term career orientation. And you can do that practically, because you can say, "Look, if you allow yourself to take liberties with your statistical analysis, and you discover and publish something that isn't true, you're gonna believe it."

• 33:58Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  And maybe you'll pursue it for the next 15 years. And you're chasing a chimeras. And not only that, so that will happen to your students and everyone that your research influences. Is that what you want? Like, that's a, maybe you'll get your postdoc because of the publication, but you've destroyed your credibility and your career and your soul.

• 34:22Brian Keating?

  And your integrity.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yep, absolutely.

• 34:24Brian Keating?

  The problem is scientists don't, we don't get any... Ethical training. And I, and I say that, you know,

• 34:30Speaker 01

  It's all implicit.

• 34:31Brian Keating?

  It's implicit that you're just gonna learn it. Similarly, we don't get training in public communication. I view my YouTube channel, my podcast, et cetera, as I don't get paid for it. I don't know, the university, you know, the university has not, you know, revoked my tenure, but they, they, they don't help with it. They don't provide any resources for it. Um, they're, they're, you know, there's no antagonism. I do it because

• 34:51Speaker 01

  That's at least they don't get

• 34:52Brian Keating?

  No, no, I know, your university

• 34:56Brian Keating?

  But, but, um, no, and I have a great relationship with the chancellor and, and my deans and so forth. Uh, I'm very blessed to be where I am. And it's one of the best campuses for, for many other reasons. But, um, all this to say, I don't get, you know, it's not part of my duties as a professor to do this, the explanations that I do and provide interviews with Nobel Prize winners. I do it because I believe in two things. I believe I have, and I believe I have a moral obligation, and maybe you'll agree too, maybe not. I have a moral obligation. I'm taking your money. I'm taking taxpayer money. Imagine if you're, if you're, uh, the person who installed the countertops in, in your home. Uh, and, and they said to you, you said, uh, you know, uh, excuse me, you know, sir, or, you know, how's it going with the, um, I'm sorry, Jordan.

• 35:37Brian Keating?

  What I do is so specialized, it's so erudite, you cannot, you cannot possibly understand it. Even with your PhD and your success story, you cannot, you'd say, go to hell. You, you don't, you don't talk to your boss like that. I am your boss. The public is our boss. The public, we

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Well, it's worse than that, isn't it? Because if the public wants to do their own research online, they'll find that most of it, despite the fact that it's publicly funded, is beaten behind not only a paywall, but an appallingly expensive and inaccessible paywall.

• 36:10Brian Keating?

  And most, a lot of it

• 36:11Speaker 01

  For 24 hour access to a single article.

• 36:15Brian Keating?

  And a lot of it is P hacked and, and, and, uh, you know, implicitly, you know, hacked to get the results that were desired, whether it's for some drug companies benefit. But even beyond that, the workaday scientists, I'm talking to the person in the lab next door to me, not some, you know, shill for Pfizer or something like that. I'm talking about just a workaday scientist. And, you know, she or he will say to me, I'm not good at that. I'm sorry, you, Brian, you have a gift to it. By the way, I don't think I'm that good, but I do think that I have an innate desire for the 1% gains that can be made by iteration. That every iteration, I try to get 1% better. My conversation, the questions I ask, the types of conversations that I have and the depth that I go into. And I think that's my unique skill, if anything, but I say-

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Like you're pointing to, though, a lot of that's a consequence of practice.

• 37:00Brian Keating?

  Practice, that's what I'm getting at.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I stopped lecturing with notes-

• 37:03Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  30 years ago.

• 37:06Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  When I first started, especially when I was lecturing about things that I hadn't thoroughly mastered, which is the case when you first start lecturing. I used PowerPoint and I used fairly detailed notes, but my intent was to dispense with that. And that was incremental improvement over a substantial amount of time.

• 37:24Brian Keating?

  And you can see it. I mean, your videos are online, from Harvard, from Toronto, etc. But when I say that to them, they say, "Well, I'm just not good at that." And I say, "Oh, yes, I forgot. I forgot. I forgot," you know, to my friend. I'll say, "Yeah, you were born knowing quantum electrodynamics."

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:39Brian Keating?

  "No, no, no. I work really hard at it." "Oh, oh, so you work hard at that which you think is valuable." So that means you're telling, you're admitting, you're copying to the fact that you don't think communicating to your boss is important. And I find it shameful. And I don't think that everybody should be at a lab, you know, tanking 20% of their time, learning how to communicate like Neil deGrasse Tyson. But they should spend some of that time and like-

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Maybe they should spend 20% of their time, because the thing is, well, it also forces you to put your thoughts in order.

• 38:08Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  You know, I get, I develop a lot of my ideas in consequence of lecturing.

• 38:14Brian Keating?

  I agree.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  I would say the majority of them, right? But that's also because, you see, people also lecture very oddly, because people generally conceive of a lecture as the reading of a text or something like that. And it's not. A lecture is a performance. And I've thought about this for a long time. It's a lecture theater after all.

• 38:38Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  So what are you doing in a lecture? Well, you're eliciting enthusiasm by demonstrating your love of the topic. That's partly what you're doing. You're embodying that, so you're a model.

• 38:47Brian Keating?

  You're telling a story.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Like- I've really thought through explicitly what I do in my public lectures and now I really know what I do. I mean, I have a question in mind that's related to a long-term pursuit. So it's an issue I've been interested in forever. Before I do a public lecture, I formulate the question that seems, from a set of potential questions, that seems to be relevant and at hand for that day. And then I try to get farther in the answer than I have before. And so, what I'm modeling is the process, I'm engaging in the process of intellectual exploration, and so that's thought, question, hypothesis, which is something akin to revelation, by

• 39:32Speaker 01

  the way. It's like, question, potential answer, critical analysis.

• 39:37Brian Keating?

  Iteration.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly, exactly. And so, I think that has the same structure, by the way, as the mythological quest, right? You specify a treasure of unknown magnitude.

• 39:47Brian Keating?

  Okay.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And then you think, well, how do we make our way there? And, you know, there's a juggling element to that, keeping the plates in the air, or a high-wire act, that's another way of thinking about it. Because if it's a real quest, you don't know if it's going to be successful. So if I go on stage with a question in mind, and I'm trying to push myself farther than I've got before, I don't know if that's going to happen. Now, everyone in the audience, and me, are extremely happy if, as a consequence of this quest-like exploration, there's a punchline at the end, right?

• 40:26Brian Keating?

  Treasure chest, yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And I think I've got better at ensuring that that will happen as I practice this. But it's also a blast, you know? And there's no reason you can't practice that, you know?

• 40:36Brian Keating?

  Absolutely.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  And you're right, that it's a travesty that people who will be university lecturers aren't trained to do that.

• 40:42Brian Keating?

  And they're trained to do diversity, inclusion.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's true.

• 40:47Brian Keating?

  You're trained, you're trained how to get punished for not doing it, at least. Well, you won't even get in the door now. You won't even have your applications reviewed. I'm interested to see what happens in the, in the, in the coming, you know, administration as we speak.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so, let's, let's investigate that a little bit. So, I mean, part of the reason that... We established Peterson Academy. There was a bunch of reasons. One was, I have access to an endless supply of great thinkers. So that's convenient, like, super convenient and fun. And so, and then, we could see no reason why the best lectures in the world couldn't be identified, given a public platform, and offered the opportunity to lecture about what they love in a manner that's extremely professionally produced. And I'm extremely, very, very happy about the way the lectures have turned out.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  I mean, my daughter Michaela and her husband Jordan Fuller have taken the lead in the production side of Peterson Academy. And I think they've just knocked it out of the park.

• 41:54Brian Keating?

  I've traveled literally trillions of micrometers and billions of seconds to be here. And we are going to explore this universe together.

• 42:05Brian Keating?

  Cosmology is the oldest science known to humanity. Since cavemen and women, people have wondered, where did everything come from?

• 42:14Brian Keating?

  We're not going to do any alien autopsies or anything in this class, but we are going to cover a lot of fascinating questions. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the universe made of? How can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos?

• 42:29Brian Keating?

  When you look back in space, you look back in time.

• 42:34Brian Keating?

  It's amazing we've been able to do this, to study the properties of the cosmos. Time scales of billions of years, size scales billions of times bigger than our own. And now the question is, can we go back to time equals zero? Can we go back to before time equals zero? And what does that even mean? I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions, because without great questions, there can be no great answers. And without great answers, there can be no understanding.

• 43:07Speaker 04

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• 43:40Brian Keating?

  You know, Jordan, I always joke, our profession, I call it the second oldest profession, right? I mean, we, there have been universities since the University of Bologna in Italy was established in 1082. And look how much has changed. There's a guy or a girl taking a piece of rock and scraping on another piece of rock. How innovative. After, after a thousand bloody years, we've done almost nothing different. Okay, so there's PowerPoint, and that's not the, that's not that much different, let's be honest, right? But what if there were, you know, the opportunity to, to bring in literal, the visualizations that they've done on my first course, and I can't wait to see how the second course, and my third course is, see, what's nice, I'm an experimental physicist. I'm not Brian Greene, you know, I'm not manipulating

• 44:23Brian Keating?

  wormholes like my friend Kip Thorne and so forth, who did the, the science behind the movie Interstellar. I was the advisor to Christopher Nolan. I'm not a theoretical physicist. So what do I do? I do experiments. The more experiments, the better. But you only do another experiment because some aspect of the previous experiment failed, right? And that's fine. That's part of the iterative process of science that makes it so, not only so important and so, and so annealed, so hardened by truth in the process of, of attempting to achieve truth, and perfectly as it may be, but, but getting things wrong. Look, what happens, when you get something wrong, let's be honest, it's a surprise, right? You didn't think you were gonna go down and you're gonna discover dust instead of the

• 45:05Brian Keating?

  Big Bang, which is what happened to me in my, describing my first book. We, we thought we saw the gravitational wave aftermath of the inflationary universe that we talked talked about in my first podcast episode with you. But, but instead that led to the Simons Observatory. It's led to a $200 million project that is now going to not only look for the, for the gold, but also look for the dragons, look for the dust, look for the things that are the impediments. So the surprise was not a failure. I mean, look, when you solve a puzzle, you get a little bit of thrill. And remember when you were a kid, you had a Rubik's Cube, you had this thing or that. You'd solve the puzzle and you would do something that no adult does. You'd do it again. Like my kids do this all the time. They solve a Rubik's Cube, then another one messes it up, then the other one solves it.

• 45:48Brian Keating?

  And like, I already solved it. Like, I don't need to rewrite my PhD thesis. Like, I already wrote it, you know? But there's a little bit of that thrill that you get when you are surprised.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Well, the surprise, the thing is, is that if you lay out a prediction in keeping with your understanding of the world and something else occurs, you have no idea what you've discovered. Now, what you might have discovered is that your reputation is now shot and your future is looking gloomy, right?

• 46:20Brian Keating?

  I'm sure that's not.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Right, but you also have no idea, like, that's, that's a reservoir of unrevealed truth of indeterminate magnitude. Right? And so you're, the proper response, and I did learn this in the lab that I trained in, the proper response to your error as an experimental scientist is, I probably just stumbled across something that was even more important than what I was investigating.

• 46:44Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  If I could just figure out what the hell it is.

• 46:46Brian Keating?

  I say, I say this to my students all the time. I say flaws in your experiment and your theory need, lead to new laws. It's not like we study, do you know, Jordan, that we're made of matter, right? But, but there, in the early universe, we think that almost, there was an, almost an exact symmetry. It's one of these guiding principles of physics, that there are symmetries. Conservation of energy is a type of symmetry. Angular momentum's conservation is another type of symmetry. Displacement symmetry, those are all the things that we say, the laws of physics shouldn't change. They should not look different in a mirror or upside down or on Pluto or in, in Arizona. It should not make a difference who you were. Where you are, it's kind of the great democratic process of of science known as the Lorentz

• 47:28Brian Keating?

  Principle of Lorentz Invariance that Galileo really crystallized and then later eventually.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Fundamental things apply everywhere in all directions.

• 47:36Brian Keating?

  Fundamental truth to the extent that we can we can perceive it. And so, you know, when you when you do something and and you find out, well, this is not not correct. Like the fact that the postulate was and every all the greatest scientists thought there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Well, guess what, Jordan? We wouldn't be here if that were true. All the matter particles would annihilate with the antimatter particles and the universe would be a universe of complete barren sterile radiation, pretty boring unless you happen to be a photon. But that's not the case and it's obvious just from we exist, you know, I co get there or go soon. We know that that's not true. We can observe it. I refute it thus, you know, kick the rock. It's made of matter. Where's all the antimatter? Is it segregated some galaxy that we haven't been to yet? No, we don't think that's the case. So where did it go?

• 48:20Brian Keating?

  Well, we have to look. How symmetric is the universe? How beautifully finely balanced tuned, if you believe in an intelligent designer? How finely tuned? Did he tune it to be? Well, it turns out he did a spectacular job. Because for every particle of matter, there was another particle of antimatter. Except for there was one, for every billion particles of antimatter, there was a billion and one particle of matter. So the two matching a mirror image matter and antimatter particles, they destroyed each other. And what was left? One particle of matter and the rest was a bath of photons.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Right. So far less than a rounding error.

• 48:59Brian Keating?

  It is not a rounding error. It's exquisitely balanced. Now, we don't know why. Some theorists will say it's intelligently designed. And you can ask certain questions. How well designed does the universe have to be? In other words, how finely tuned? You have a good ear for classical music. My wife enjoyed talking to you about it. You know, she plays the violin. I play Spotify. So I have no musical ability whatsoever. But you guys, but you could perceive the note A, 440 hertz, right? Your ear can actually perceive if it's 441 hertz. In other words, one out of 400, so less than 1%, a quarter of a percent. Mistuning, you can perceive it. How well tuned does the universe have to be in order for us to be having this conversation?

• 49:41Brian Keating?

  And then the supposition is, well, if it's extremely finely tuned across a whole vast panoply of different areas, from the strength of these constants, the number of protons, to the number of antiprotons, then, you know, you might start to think this is suggestive. But it's not, it's not a scientific hypothesis, right? We can't say, we can always say, "God," and we can always say, "There was no God." But you can't prove it. And I think this is an important fact that people get. I was on with a young man that you've met many times, Stephen Bartlett, on his podcast, wonderful podcast. And we spent four hours together, and one of those hours was just about me, him asking me to prove God scientifically. And I said, "I'm sorry, Stephen, again and again, I cannot do that. He's searching, he's reaching for something."

• 50:22Speaker 01

  I just was on his podcast yesterday.

• 50:24Brian Keating?

  Oh, you were? Okay. Well, he probably talked more about God with me than he did with you. And I was quite surprised that he did, because I'm a cosmologist, I'm not a theologian.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  It's a hot topic these days.

• 50:33Brian Keating?

  It is. And it's been, yeah, I always say I'd kill for 1% of God's, you know, book sales, but, but, you know, and I told him, "Look, what you're searching for, I can't necessarily give you. I can give you the approach to me that I find persuasive, but it's not going to be persuasive to you, because it's specific to me and my life history, and how I understand how I got to be who I am." And it doesn't use the strength of quantum electrodynamics, and it doesn't use all sorts of things. And when you search for that, I think, I told him, I said, "Stephen," you know, and I think I got this from you in the conversation you had with Dennis Prager that I was privileged to be a part of, and that's in Santa Barbara about five, six years ago. And you said, you know, "Who am I to say," this is you, "Who am I to say, 'I believe in God'?" Like, what is a man to say such a thing? I mean, it's so ridiculous.

• 51:17Brian Keating?

  And I've turned that around, I say, "I don't believe in gravity." And he's like, "What are you talking about?" And Stephen said, "You're a physicist, you have to believe in ground." And I said, "No, if I take this meteorite and I drop it, I don't, I don't believe it's going to, I have evidence for it." What is the notion of evidence? It means it's something we can't necessarily define, but we can say, "It's certainly not faith. I don't have faith that it's going to do that. We have empirical evidence. DNA leads to, you know, leads to the genetics." You know, inheritance that we have, those things you don't have to take on faith. You have evidence for them. So, science and religion, science should not be used, it's not one of its tool, its best purposes. You know, you have a hammer, you don't use it to screw in a screw.

• 51:59Brian Keating?

  You have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed, or perhaps best.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I've often found, that often, what would you say, have come to the conclusion, "I don't like arguments from design as proofs for the existence of God."

• 52:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  And there's a variety of reasons for that. What, I'd like your opinion about one of them. I mean, the fine tuning argument, I find specious. And maybe I'm wrong about this, because I think that you can obviate its its unlikelihood with an evolutionary argument. It's like, well, if life evolved under these conditions, it's not surprising that there's a tight tuning between what's necessary for life and the conditions of the universe, no matter how improbable they are. Because this form of life wouldn't exist without those, that form of material reality constituting the substrate.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And so, if something has adapted to something unlikely, the unlikelihood of what it's adapted to doesn't presume a designer.

• 53:08Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  I think there are more powerful arguments. I'm gonna give you this book right now.

• 53:12Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  So, this is the new book I wrote, "We Who Wrestle with God." It's a good time to give this to you, because I've made other arguments about the relationship between science and the divine, let's say, in this book. I tried in this book not to put forward any propositions that I couldn't justify scientifically. But I'm not making a scientific case for God. I think the case... I think the rapprochement between science and religion is not going to be found in use of materialist reductionism to prove the existence of a designer. I think it's going to be more a consequence of us coming to understand

• 53:54Speaker 01

  what it means that science itself is not science without maintaining its embeddedness in an underlying upward striving ethos. It's so, so, for example, Cardinal Newman, famous Catholic theologian, his existence proof for God was an argument from design, which is an argument that's been around for a long time. It was much more akin to something that's laid out in a sequence of Old Testament stories. There's an identity proclaimed in the story of Elijah and the story of Jonah, Job as well, to some degree,

• 54:35Speaker 01

  that one of the manifestations of God is the voice of conscience. And I really like that argument, but more it's a definition, you see, not so much an argument. Because before you talk about the existence of God, you have to say what the hell it is that you're investigating.

• 54:54Brian Keating?

  That's right. And that's so resonant, that phrase that you used, that, you know, is tattooed on my brain. You know, who am I to do that? I, I, I found it as a, as a call to kind of a clarion call. Because it made me think, look, Jordan, there's what, a billion, you know, Hindus and Buddhists and so forth. It can't only be that Judeo-Christian, you know, theology is correct. It's the only, it's the only approach, right? It can't be the only approach, and maybe it's not the only truth. In other words, maybe there's, just assume this proposition and then you can take it apart. Assume all religions that have at their base a moral goodness, an aspect of improving human flourishing and the human condition,

• 55:37Brian Keating?

  not some nihilistic, you know, witchcraft or whatever, that seems to serve no theology, teleology whatsoever. But where there is clearly, and we know that Christianity and Judaism have this embedded within them, and Buddhism I'm most familiar with, but has elements of that. And take away the theology and just talk about the values. There's an equivalence class in mathematical terms of all religions that practice good values. They have this in common. Whatever this is, this notion of human flourishing and goodness and treatment and so forth. What, again, proposition, I'm not saying it's true. Assume it's true. Just assume that's true. Assume that God, in other words, is, you know, there's no such thing as a, we don't believe that there's a thing called a photon, like specifically a particle.

• 56:20Brian Keating?

  We believe the fundamental element is called the photon field. That the field, which exists everywhere at all times and all places, that that is what's fundamental. And then this photon, you know, the human eye is miraculous. We can see a single photon in the right circumstances.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Right, we're dark adapted. One photon, yeah, it's amazing.

• 56:37Brian Keating?

  It's incredible. And that's part of the loss you spoke about earlier, where we think about the nautilus of the night sky. I'm curious, we'll talk some other time, about how the human psychology will be robbed of this, and maybe that will do something like the, having phthalates or microplastics. Those things are tangible, but the intangible loss of the night sky, from all places on Earth, perhaps, God forbid, but let's just say it has. Anyway, getting back to my proposition, imagine God is a field, so that, and then each, what we see as a photon, or what we see as Hinduism, or Judaism, or Christianity, is an instantiation, is actually the photon, the particle version of it, if you will, of a field that exists throughout all space and all time.

• 57:18Brian Keating?

  In other words, what if God is, and we can't, and this is not refutable, because you can't, you know, we're saying by definitions, incorporeal, it's a field, and just like you can't feel the photon field, you can detect its manifestations. And so what if the, you know, as the fruits of the, of the tree are sort of proof of what it was made to do, right? An apple tree doesn't produce a grapefruit, and each, a honeybee doesn't produce a spiderweb. So the instantiation, how do these things, you know, connect to one another? It's a relational system, and that, that is...

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think the, I think the great comparative investigators of religion, Mircea Eliade, probably foremost among them, he was part of Jung's Broad School.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  And maybe played a rule equivalent to that of Jung. They're, I, the, they certainly identified the same kind of patterns in profound religious thinking that you can see characterizing literature. I mean, literature, stories are identifiable because they are manifestations of an underlying pattern. Yeah. And I think you can make that case in the religious domain. I would make that case biologically, in part by, this is the way I conceptualize it, is that there's a virtually infinite number of ways that you can interact with someone. But there's a finite number of ways,

• 58:45Speaker 01

  extremely restricted and finite number of ways that you can interact with someone in a manner they and you approve of simultaneously. Like a father, right, like a parent, right. Yeah, or two kids playing a game. Now, see, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, he thought of that as the origin of morality. And Piaget's goal was actually a reprochment between science and religion. He looked at play as the origin of that in part. That was very, very smart. Okay, so now there's many ways that we could interact. Yeah. Some of them will jointly appreciate, okay? In consequence of that appreciation, we'll want to continue them. That's the establishment of a relationship. Okay, so now imagine there's a smaller subset of those games

• 59:28Speaker 01

  that will maintain their value across time and stay voluntarily desirable, or improve. Now, that's an even smaller number of potential games. Well, those games are going to have a pattern. And it's the pattern of human interaction, sustainable human interaction. My suspicion is that conscience as an instinct indicates a violation of the rules of that game. And I suspect further that that's universal. Now, out of that, a realm of story is going to emerge. There's going to be representations of games that deteriorate, and games that have a tragic end, and games that are sustainable, where everyone lives happily ever after. Or incomprehensible games.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Those are going to have a universality across cultures. Now...

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Cultures are going to vary in the sophistication with which they represent those games. But there's a, it's, it's sort of like, it's almost like making the same claim that obviously, all languages are the same. Because they're identifiable as languages and they're

• 1:00:34Brian Keating?

  Structure.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  They're, well, and they're characteristic of human beings. And, but, within the family of languages, there's commonality still, grammatical structure, there's nouns and verbs, like there's tremendous commonality, but there's also tremendous variability.

• 1:00:50Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  So, I think that religious domain is analogous to that. My sense, I've done a fair bit of study of comparative religion, is my sense that it's, the Judeo-Christian endeavor

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  proceeded farther along the line of explicit representation than any other religious system. Now, we could debate that, but, you know, that's not much different than saying that Western cultures are the most literate, which is, that's the case.

• 1:01:27Brian Keating?

  Yes, that's a fact.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  So, yeah, definitely, and, and the Jews thought they're early.

• 1:01:31Brian Keating?

  Mm-hmm, yeah, and I always say, you know, we have the Eskimos and, you know, in northern Canada reputed to have 12 words for snow, and you find that with, with the Jews, you find there's six different types of words for knowledge and wisdom and intuition and, and, and, you know, you can, you can identify them, they don't have as many words for snow. And so, what were their tool, or was their environment like, it was saturated with, with religion?

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  And with literacy.

• 1:01:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and with literacy, and, and, yeah, the, the language and being able to communicate that as well, but also expressing something which must be intrinsic. And I find when I, I hosted Richard Dawkins in Vancouver, he had asked me to come up, I had him on my podcast for two episodes for his most recent book, and

• 1:02:15Brian Keating?

  And I'm always, you know, kind of, and I've had Sam Harris on the last year as well. And the thing that's frustrating to me about when I talk to scientists like them is how simple their understanding is, quite frankly, of religion, specifically Judeo-Christian. I'm not an expert in anything. I mean, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church as a kid, complicated story, but I'm born Jewish, two Jewish parents, and I'm Jewish to this day. But, but the point, their understanding of things, like I said to Richard, you know, in Vancouver, a thousand people there, it was wonderful, people coming up, tears in their eyes, "Thank you for making me an atheist." And I found it so depressing. And because of the richness, and I, by the way, I often call myself a practicing agnostic, meaning,

• 1:02:57Brian Keating?

  and which I think is in harmony with, with your famous statement that I mentioned before. In other words, if you know for sure that God exists, then you're an absolute fool or an imbecile if you don't believe in Him, or whatever that means, almost to the point of evidence. And I don't dispute that many, many Christians feel it in a way that Jews don't, you know, this personal relationship with God, Savior, and that He died for my sins. It's harder for Jews to relate to that. But, but I stipulate that they feel that way. But to say that you are an atheist, like that is your identity, is, is, is a very strange thing to me to believe, especially from these brilliant men like Sam and like Richard, because they have such simplistic ideas.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Well, the thing, the thing that's odd about Sam too, in that regard, is that, like, he's drifted into a kind of a visionary Buddhism.

• 1:03:49Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And I think I understand why. Like, one of the characteristics of the meditative tradition that Sam is partaking in is that the God of that meditative tradition is extraordinarily ineffable, not defined and also not concretized into ritual or story.

• 1:04:10Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Now, the advantage to that is that you can't criticize it.

• 1:04:14Brian Keating?

  Can't falsify it, right?

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly right. You know, and I see, I see that in the Christian tradition, the Orthodox Church has been the most resistant to woke idiocy, partly because it's so embedded in non-propositional tradition, right, liturgy and ritual, that...

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Well, how are you gonna criticize, like criticizing dance? Like, you're just, or music, you're just not gonna get anywhere with it.

• 1:04:38Brian Keating?

  The taste is not disputable, right? I said to Richard, you know, I said, "Look, Richard, I also don't believe in the God that you also don't believe in." It's so simple, and Sam, to some extent, is worse, just from the perspective that he's so persuasive. I mean, he's the only person besides you that I've ever known, I've spent four hours with, that never uses the word "the," you know, has any verbal crutches whatsoever. And I don't mean to jinx our conversation, but he just speaks in prose, as they say, you know, paragraphs. And, you know, when we talk about things, very simple things, why don't you do, you know, what is your feeling about Judaism that made you reject, you know, I guess it's

• 1:05:22Brian Keating?

  status, I forget? And, well, just take slavery. And he just asserts that, you know, slavery is, there's no such thing. He said to me, "Brian, Brian, you and I create a religion, are we gonna have slavery in it?" I said, "Sam, this is so, this is like, my, you know, seven-year-old learns this, you know, in school, in her Talmud class." Like, you can't be serious. Like, you think that slavery meant like, black African slave trade, you know, in the deep south in America? And, and it's just not that. And as we go through, and I taught him, you know, what it meant to have a slave, by the way, Moses is called a slave of God, did that mean that Moses was whipped by God? No, it means he's a servant. And, and there was this concept called indentured servitude, which is actually a kindness.

• 1:06:06Brian Keating?

  If you couldn't pay your debt to me, Jordan, and you were gonna steal something, no, no, no, I would give you, basically employ you, and I provide food and shelter. And by the way, sometimes you wouldn't wanna leave. After six years, you wouldn't wanna leave because I treated you so well as my slave, that I would have to take your ear and hammer it into the door with a nail. And this was a part of a tradition that Jewish slaves had to undergo in order to remain with their masters, because we're meant to be free. And so, this was meant to show as an outward symbol to the world that I had chose not to be free. And we know many people choose to be slaves of a different kind, rather than be free men and women. I said, he had an idea about this.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Well, it's also the case that like, first of all, the entire story of Exodus is about the movement from slavery and tyranny to freedom.

• 1:06:53Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  So, and that's like, that's a major part of the biblical library. And then even more importantly, the metaphysical insistence is that.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

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• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  If you're not a slave to God, let's say, so to speak, there's something that you're a slave to.

• 1:07:43Brian Keating?

  You might be a slave to yourself.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  And that's not, that's not appropriate, slave to your whims.

• 1:07:47Brian Keating?

  Your work.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  That's what hedonistic self-gratification is. It's like, I'm free. It's like, no, you're not. You're a slave to your whims.

• 1:07:54Brian Keating?

  The most common slavery that scientists practice is workaholism. They work 24/7, they work six, you know, all, all days of the week. They're so fascinated because it's so intoxicating. You know, you have that feeling when you discover something and you realize, wow, gee, I am the first human, frail human, that's ever understood this in the history of the planet. It might be small, it might be incremental, maybe it's not, you know.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  But you also don't know.

• 1:08:18Brian Keating?

  But you don't know, and you don't know what these little seeds.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Hot on the trail, man.

• 1:08:21Brian Keating?

  Yeah, you may blossom into something so wonderful, and that's what's so great about science, but it's addictive. And I tell my students, I, you have to work, but people forget, Jordan, right? Before it says, you know, on the seventh day you shall rest, it says six days, you must work. You know, it's not optional, it's a command, it's a mitzvah, command form, Hebrew has, English doesn't. You must work, Jordan, because you can't appreciate the, the, the true sense of soul society, you know, satiating of your soul, unless you have that feeling of accomplishment, of working the earth, or working in a laboratory. But if you only do that, if you only do that, you're a slave. I don't care, you might have a Nobel Prize, but you're a slave. And so we, when I, when I talked to Richard and I talked, I came away, you know,

• 1:09:04Brian Keating?

  somewhat depressed because also, you know, as you know, Judaism, the word Judaism comes from the gratitude, Hodo, Hodei, which means to give grace, to give gratitude towards God. Judah's name for the thanksgiving that his mother gave to God. So it's endemic and that's why we do say blessings because you can't look at a meteorite, a meteor shower, you can't look at a rainbow and, and not, if you bless it, you can't be angry and grateful at the same time, right? That's, that seems to be impossible. So it's, I view it as more-

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Great gratitude is also the opposite of resentment.

• 1:09:36Brian Keating?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Right. And resentment is the most bitter and destructive of emotions.

• 1:09:41Brian Keating?

  I look at the iPhone 16, you know, so I'm a tech junkie. I love technology because it doesn't come with a manual. And I, actually, this is very interesting. I'm going to show it to you in a second. I brought you a very ancient manual, but, but it's very interesting. We have, you know, manuals, but you can get it online. So it doesn't come with a printed manual. You go to Apple and they'll tell you every single feature. There's 8,000 YouTube channels that have millions of times more subscribers than me and it'll be listed, you know, how to get this shortcut, how to do this app. So there's an instruction manual for a bloody chunk of silicon glass and a little bit of rubber and there's no instruction manual for people. I, I remember the night we brought our first son home and we were bleary eyed. He wasn't nursing. He's gonna die, right? You remember that feeling? He's

• 1:10:24Brian Keating?

  gonna die. Like, he's not gonna die. He's gonna be fine. He's six pounds-

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  It's a revelation of a child. This thing might die.

• 1:10:31Brian Keating?

  It's sheer terror and it's the most responsible. And they send you home and there's no instruction manual. And I actually said, let's look at the manual to my wife and she's, what the hell are you talking about? There's no manual. But humans need some instruction and it doesn't have to come from somewhere, but it can't come from yourself. When I talked to Stephen Bartlett, he said, I'm a good person. I don't kill anybody. I say, Stephen, how many people that committed great sin and great evil thought they were doing evil? None of them. Not a single bloody one of them thought they were doing evil. They justified it as great good, whether it was eliminating Jews or, you know, whatever. I didn't have to take it that far. So he's trying to justify, I think, his behavior because what happens, Jordan, when you believe in God or you have some notion of a Muna or

• 1:11:14Brian Keating?

  faith or just want to approach a creator or something bigger than you? Well, then you have obligations and people hate that. I don't think Richard, I mentioned Richard Simon.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  I discovered that- Every audience I've discussed this with goes silent. There's no difference between obligation and adventure. You know, because you think of an obligation as something that you're involuntarily shouldering, right? That's an obligation. It's like, well, if you get rid of the involuntary part of that, and you make it voluntary, now you're voluntarily shouldering a great weight. It's like, well, that's an adventure. When you go see a movie about a great adventurer, a secret agent, say, the thing that characterizes his journey that you find so compelling is that he's doing something impossibly difficult voluntarily. It's like, so, so,

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  people don't want an obligation, but that's because they have the wrong attitude towards obligation. It's like, no, you actually want a stellar obligation.

• 1:12:17Brian Keating?

  If I told you 20 years ago, Jordan, you eat meat only and salt. You know, I prepared meat. I think it was pretty darn good kosher ribeye when you came to my house a couple of years ago. But if I told you 30, 20 years ago, Jordan, you're just gonna eat ribeyes and salt. You would say, that's horrible. Like, I don't want to do that. That's gonna be, you know, take away my freedom. You're telling me it's composed. But now you took it upon yourself. I see it in you, the health, the vitality, the, the, the, just, you know, incredible transformation that you've undergone. Who is happier? Jordan, 20 years ago, could eat all the Doritos? I don't know what you ate back then? Or has this prescribed thing to do in his, in the prime of his life? And I, I feel that way about, so I said that to, to, you know, Stephen and also to Sam.

• 1:13:01Brian Keating?

  And when you're given, you know, look, as a Jew, I don't eat pork, right? I love to eat pork, you know? And, and why did we not get, who knows? There's, there's no real reason why we think, it's not because they're dirty. But, um, but when you're, when you have an instruction manual, you, you, the assumption is the, the writer, the author of the instruction manual knew something that you don't. And maybe there's some benefit from following their instructions. The question is, you know, if you do believe in God, and if you do practice some faith tradition or whatever, uh, will you be happier or not? These people that came up to Richard Dawkins with tears in their eyes at the book signing after our event. You changed, right?

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  One of the things I've learned about the atheist community, so to speak, though, that's that's a mitigating factor, I would say. There's a subset of them that are just Luciferian rationalists, and they're not fun. They're not fun. They know everything.

• 1:13:55Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  They're bitter, they're resentful, and they're seriously underappreciated for their genius.

• 1:13:59Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Okay, but then there's a very large subset of atheists who are relieved at their atheism because they were brutalized by pharisaic religious pretenders, right?

• 1:14:10Brian Keating?

  That's Richard, right?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Brian Keating?

  Richard did have a...

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Well, it might even be Richard Dawkins, because he's made the odd illusion.

• 1:14:16Brian Keating?

  That's what I mean.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's made the odd illusion.

• 1:14:17Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  And I've met lots of people who were very badly hurt by fundamentalist types.

• 1:14:23Brian Keating?

  I don't want to say, you know, okay, so now I don't have to listen to him because he was abused. You know, it's like if you meet somebody who was physically abused as a child, and then they turn out to... You don't want to make that an excuse, because look at the other people that were.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Yes, of course, of course.

• 1:14:37Brian Keating?

  But so I don't want to, I don't want to let him off the hook so easily in that sense. But, um, but I guess the, the challenge that I have is, is when I deal with somebody like that, because I can talk science with either one of them, Lawrence Krauss, again.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:50Brian Keating?

  These people I could talk to, and they're so self... But they would never, and I told this to Lawrence Krauss, because I had him on my panel, and he's been having me on his podcast, we've talked about this, and we kind of joke, I'm a religious Jew, he's the atheist. But he knows nothing about, about the... Why does he know nothing? But why does he know that? Because most Jews, boys, have a bar mitzvah at age 13, which is a rite of passage, which sucks. I mean, I've got one, one of my kids going through it right now. And your voice is cracking, and you're in front of everybody, and you're embarrassed, you have pimples, and your girlfriend, you know, it's horrible, right? But you go through, it's a rite of passage, right? And then what does it mark for most Jews, men, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, if he had one? It marks sort of a graduation from religion.

• 1:15:35Brian Keating?

  It marks the parole from prison of this obnoxious, not really satisfying or meaningful tradition that was forced upon you by the circumstances of your birth. I agree with Richard. No one could be a Christian, you know, like, you're a Christian because you're born to a Christian family, that doesn't... doesn't mean that you're actively doing anything in Christianity and that's different. So Judaism is more of a behavioral or religion where you have to do these mid supposed to do certain things. It's behavior, it's practicing religion. But, you know, at the same token, if you deny somebody that, like, there's almost no chance. I'm sort of miraculously, because both my parents were kind of atheist growing up. They didn't take Judaism very seriously. My dad was an active militant atheist. He used to say to me, "I don't believe in God, I believe in Satan because he made you believe in God."

• 1:16:16Brian Keating?

  Uh, but, but the point being, you know, if you deny something that could be beneficial, even if you don't believe it yourself, I think it's, I won't say child abuse, but, but you're denying your, you're denying your children something. And, and I said, you know, the, the avatar for me-

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Well, what do they have if they don't have a tradition?

• 1:16:33Brian Keating?

  They have nothing. They have themselves. They have their meetings.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  That's exactly the problem is that, because that's also a very weird definition of self. It's like, they have the self that's without tradition. Okay, so that means fundamentally, it means without discipline. It means without rich moral knowledge. It means without community. It means without the necessity of foregoing immediate gratification for a higher purpose. That's a major loss. Like, you'd only think that the child stripped of tradition has himself in the untrammelled sense, if you believe that the self, that was the true self, had no relationship whatsoever with the surrounding community. Well, that's, that's a, that's a lonely person.

• 1:17:21Brian Keating?

  And is it going to be a bitter, unhappy one?

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Well, and also maybe narcissistic and self-serving. Because if it's all about you, independent of anyone else, then, well, it's all about you.

• 1:17:33Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  So, one of the things I discovered in this book, and I'll line this in painful detail, you might say, is that the post-modern types were correct and the scientists wrong, or the empiricists at least.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  The postmodernists were correct in their proclamation that we see the world through a story. A description of the structure through which we perceive the value of the world is a story. When you go see a movie, you're looking at the consequences of the value structure of the protagonist. And you want to know that because it orients you in their direction, so you can try that out. Once you understand that, the only question that the question that necessarily arises is what story? And it could be non-nihilism. It could be hedonism, which is whim, possession essentially.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  It could be power. And the problem with the postmodernists is that they were all Marxists virtually, and they turned to power as an explanation immediately. Now, the problem with that hypothesis is it's actually wrong. Because power power is not an effective unifying motivation. That's why the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings is the is the ring of Satan himself, right? Very attractive power. I can force unity. It's like, yeah, but it doesn't it doesn't iterate well. It doesn't unite well. The biblical library is predicated on the idea that the the foundation of community is voluntary self-sacrifice. And that's right. And it's actually self-evident.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Because when you engage in a social relationship, what you're doing is you're giving up the primacy of your immediate desire for the benefit of the relationship. It's definitional, like so we can think about Piaget, that developmental psychologist. His proposition was that if we wanted to understand ethics scientifically, we'd look at their precursors. And he thought we'd find that in the behavior of children as they became socialized. Very smart hypothesis. That's why he got so interested in games. Well, when a child makes the transition from two-year-old egotist to three-year-old social creature, because that's when that occurs.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  One of the hallmarks of that development is taking turns. Well, taking turns is a sacrifice. It's like, it's not my turn now. I sacrifice my turn to you. Okay, if I do that, then we play. If you want to keep playing with me, then we're friends. Well, that's the

• 1:20:13Brian Keating?

  Contract, that's

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  That's, that's the social contract, right? It's not imposed tyrannically from above. Something else, Pia Sheik pointed out is that the stable social contract is voluntarily created and accepted. That's way different than Freud's superego or Foucault's power games. It's way different, way different. And I think, I think there's all the evidence in the world that it's true.

• 1:20:36Brian Keating?

  I agree, yeah.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  And so the idea that, see, we're acting out, this is something else I realized is the typical European town, Christian town, let's say, has a cathedral or church at its center.

• 1:20:48Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  And then there's a periphery, which is the town and then the countryside. Center, periphery, or center, surround, periphery.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  The center is the sacred place, and the reason for that is the center is the sacred place. That's definitional. Then in the center of the center, there's an altar where sacrifices are being made, right? And the drama that's enacted is, the community is founded on the principle of sacrifice. It's like, well, yeah, obviously.

• 1:21:20Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Well, obviously, because that's the definition of community in some sense, is that the individual is brought into relationship with others.

• 1:21:29Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Well, that's obviously a sacrifice of individual primacy. Now, what's the gain? Well,

• 1:21:35Brian Keating?

  Maturity, maturity.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Maturity, that's a major gain. Now you're taking care of the future, not just the present. So that's a major gain. Because maturity is the sacrifice of the present for the future.

• 1:21:45Brian Keating?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Right? And a relationship is sacrifice of your whims for the benefit of the relationship. So it's all sacrifice.

• 1:21:52Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  And perception is sacrificial because you could be attending to a lot of other things. Instead, you're attending to the one thing you're attending to.

• 1:22:00Brian Keating?

  And so to me, that's, that's why, look, I struggle with God. That's the name of your book, right? Israel, Israel means wrestle with God.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:07Brian Keating?

  It's not Islam. Islam means submit to God. When you submit to God,

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  That's a different vision, man.

• 1:22:12Brian Keating?

  It's a very different vision. And we can, we can debate, you know, about it, but, but, but the fact is, when you submit, it's like, I've often noted with my children, you know, the first word they said was no. It wasn't yes, right?

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  The magic word, man.

• 1:22:24Brian Keating?

  Right, because if you say yes, you're just agreeing with somebody else's, you know, whatever they propose, you want to eat this, yes, I want to eat the, you have no self-identification. I mean, you know, this is trivial 101 for you, but, but that is true. So you express your

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  Two years old, at two years old, you're playing the battle of no.

• 1:22:40Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  And that is exactly how much is for me, which is what no means, and how much has to be sacrificed

• 1:22:46Brian Keating?

  The collective, that's right. Absolutely. Yeah, no, and so it's, it's, it's so, all these things are self-evident, and the thing in Judaism where, what I feel is sort of denied to people that just refute, look, I say, as I said, I don't believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in, it's trivial. Yuri Gagarin, when he circled the earth the first time, the communist, you know, Pravda, the truth, right? They asked him, what did you see up there? He said, I can't tell you what I saw, but I know what I didn't see, and they're what? I didn't see a man with a white beard sitting on a chair. You know, congratulations, Yuri, that's really, you know, he was a hero of the Soviet Union.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Brian Keating?

  That's so baby, nobody thinks of that. Where's up? There's no up in space, there's no heaven.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  There's also none of that in the biblical.

• 1:23:25Brian Keating?

  None of that, no, it's not.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  There is in the artistic representations, but they're images, and everyone understands that, but, and there's also constant warnings in the biblical texts about confusing the image with the ineffable, right?

• 1:23:40Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  And, and there's been huge battles in the Christian church, the iconoclasts were people who believed that icons had the danger of concreteness, which is exactly the danger that, say, Dawkins has fall prey to when he concretizes a metaphor.

• 1:23:56Brian Keating?

  Trivial, infantile, right. I said, you know, or, you know, Stephen Bartlett asked me, he said, you know, the Bible says the earth is flat. First of all, it doesn't say that, but, but second of all, you know, I said, I think

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  But it is locally flat.

• 1:24:06Brian Keating?

  It is locally flat, I said, and I, I won't say this, I said, you know, look, Stephen, I could say this to Sam or Richard Dawkins, you know, I say the earth is flat, prove me wrong. One in a thousand, the people, ordinary people will get that right. About 50, 60% of scientists will get that right. If I say prove that the earth orbits around the sun. Ninety percent of scientists will get that wrong. I bet most scientists watching this, I'm not going to put anybody on the spot. Including me. Yeah, I'm not going to say, "Stand on one leg and prove it, Jordan." But I could, we can prove it. It's discovered in the 1700s, how you could do it. It's called stellar aberration. And I'll give the answer to the test. But Galileo, one of the greatest minds in human history, he believed, and he was right, that the earth goes around the sun. And he went to great lengths.

• 1:24:50Brian Keating?

  And I think this is so beautiful. We put so much emphasis on scientists that they're sort of gods, right? They manipulate. What did Arthur C. Clarke say? He said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I actually opened my podcast with that, with his actual voice, because I'm at the Arthur C. Clarke Center. So when you look at that, who wields magic? Well, it's gods, or it's magicians and fairies and all sorts of wonderful creatures that certainly aren't people. But when a scientist can unlock the power of the atom, or can unleash, you know, the, you know, humanity's need on electricity with infinite energy, or, you know, can develop a superconductor, or all the lasers, anything that we take for granted in technology, all came from basic physics. The internet came from basic physics.

• 1:25:34Brian Keating?

  And when you look at that, then you expect that they're ineffable, just like their primitive childish infantile notions of what we think God is, right? They think that we think that he's the guy in the chair in outer space with the beard. But, but they project that onto humans. So they'll say, "Richard Feynman was a god." I mean, literally, there's more people, Jordan, that have, play in the NBA right now than have won Nobel Prizes in physics, okay? And, and so when you look at these great men, and including my hero, Galileo, they were greatly flawed individuals, horribly flawed. Feynman cavorted with his graduate students' wives. He had mistresses. He went to strip clubs. Einstein married his cousin. He was a horrible, horrible father.

• 1:26:19Brian Keating?

  He neglected a child with severe mental illness, never saw him after he moved to America to get fame and fortune. He was cavorting with, with, with, what's the guy's name? Charlie Chaplin. He cavorted with Charlie Chaplin. And he loved the fame and attention. He had a huge ego. Not great. I don't want to emulate him. Do I want to be like Einstein? Do I want to be like Feynman? Hell, no. But you look at a man and you analyze him, or you analyze a woman, what? Are they willing to teach me? What can I learn from them? And what you learn from Galileo is that great men can have great flaws. And they can be right and they can be wrong. And if you can learn from both of them, both those tendencies that are mixed up within them, they have both within them, you must subdue.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Well, and even in that analysis, you're pointing to a priori distinction between the things that made them truly great scientists in that necessarily ethical sense, and all the flaws that are part and parcel of being a human, but aren't in the same category.

• 1:27:16Brian Keating?

  That's right. And you can't, yes.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:18Brian Keating?

  So this, this.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  You have some, yeah.

• 1:27:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I brought this to show you. I can't, I can't give you this because it's signed not by the great Jordan Peterson, but it's signed by Galileo. So I'm going to show you what his signature looked like. And I want to point out just some interesting, that's his signature.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:27:33Brian Keating?

  So this, this was a book he wrote. It's called The Military Compass. Now, you and I, I told Stephen Bartlett this. I said, you know what a slide rule is? He said, I have no idea what a slide rule is.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Where did you get this?

• 1:27:41Brian Keating?

  Um, so I have a collector. So when I got my advance for my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, I, I basically bought this book, uh, and it's a.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  It's a great shape, eh?

• 1:27:52Brian Keating?

  Wonderful. Look at the pages on it. This is from 1646. And it has a custom box and so forth. And there's an English translation that they made in the seventies. You can't get this anymore. Uh, but there's an English translation of it. But there's a tag I put there. Uh, why don't you open that up and, and read me what it says on the post-it note page? I think it's on this side of the page. Um, so these are all things that you could do with this, this thing called the Military Compass. So I think it says there, right? What does it say? Can you read it?

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  This one?

• 1:28:22Brian Keating?

  Yes. Rule from, yeah.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Rule for monetary exchange.

• 1:28:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So what is it?

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  By means of these same arithmetic lines, we can change every kind of currency into any other in a very easy and speedy way. This is done by first setting the instrument, taking lengthwise the price in the money we want to exchange, and fitting this crosswise to the price in the money into which the exchange is to be made. We shall illustrate this by an example, so that everything is clearly understood.

• 1:28:50Brian Keating?

  And he goes through, and what, does he mention the currency that he's gonna convert?

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Florentine gold scudie into Venetian ducats.

• 1:28:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so there, uh, so here's what that device looked like. It was a, it was like a slide rule. So, well, maybe later we'll get the cameras to zoom in on it. It was a slide rule, it was a computer. It was a device to simplify calculations. And he invented it. And he wouldn't actually produce, as he did with his telescopes, he wouldn't actually give the, the hardware away. He'd give the software away. He'd give the operating manual away. This is how he made money, because he had illegitimate children. He had mistresses. He was also not the greatest of husbands and men and sort of things. He was a deep believer in God. But when I look at this, and I say, this, this book, this is a second edition. The first edition was written in 1601, um, and there's only about seven of them left. There's actually more Gutenberg Bibles than first editions of Galilei's compass.

• 1:29:41Brian Keating?

  So this one was cheap, very cheap compared to those. You can almost get, they're priceless. They're kept under lock and key at the Galileo Museum in Florence. But, but the point is, if he had taken, if, if he had taken those Florentines that he's talking about, or the ducats, you know, if you, if I give you a ducat right now, it's almost worthless. I mean, yeah, it's kinda cool historically, it might look good. It was a paper note. It's basically like a paper dollar. It got inflated to nothing. They would do things, you know, with the money. Back then, they would shave the corners of the coin.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:30:09Brian Keating?

  That's why coins have ridges on them now. All sorts of interesting historical tidbits. But if he had just kept one of these things, you know, kept the original edition, his heirs would have hundreds of millions of dollars. And so you look at these people, and, and you often find that the people who have the greatest scientific knowledge, and technical, maybe practical knowledge, sometimes their wisdom is to be lacking. But the, the average person will never look at that and say, wow, this person, you know, has been divorced six times, or, you know, treats his illegitimate stepdaughter horribly, or whatever. This, we never look at that. We never say part and parcel. And I think, I'm not advocating we should look at Feynman and say, you slept with your graduate student's wives. No, no, no. You should just say that there is a value in the people that, that say,

• 1:30:53Brian Keating?

  have those wonderful aspects, those wonderful characteristics. That don't have the foibles, just they may not have Nobel prizes. In other words, we prioritize the intellect over the ethical. And I think it's very dangerous and it's very seductive for scientists to want to emulate Galileo. And, you know, certainly I.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Well, it's very seductive for scientists to want to prioritize the ethic, the intellectual.

• 1:31:14Brian Keating?

  Because how else do we get more?

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Well, they're also smart.

• 1:31:16Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Well, of course you're going to do that because it's in your obvious self-interest to prioritize in importance. Your most outstanding trait. That's also the deadliness of of worship of the intellect per se.

• 1:31:29Brian Keating?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll be interested in your response to this book.

• 1:31:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I've read the first couple of chapters online and it's, uh, it starts, uh, you know, just to think about the connection. As I start my cosmology class at Peterson Academy, you know, I start off by saying, you know, what is the most important day on the calendar? Let me say it to you, like, what is the most important day on your calendar every year?

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• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  It's probably Christmas.

• 1:32:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Brian Keating?

  So what is Christmas? It's a birth. It's a beginning. It's a new, but what is the only event for which there might not have been a preceding day? Let alone, you know, a repetition of that day, the origin of the universe. We go back from now, late 2024. We go back 13.8 billion years. Let's say we're talking on a Thursday today. Well, come back, there'll be some Thursday, just counting 24 hours. Doesn't mean the earth was here, doesn't mean the sun was here, just counting back in units of 24 hours back, back, back, back. Comes some Thursday and, you know, perhaps that was the day the actual big bang occurred on. If we could keep track of it, I mean, it's totally practical to do this type of calculation. And we don't actually know what happened on the Wednesday before that day.

• 1:33:10Brian Keating?

  It's a concept, you can think about it, but you can't actually necessarily know what happened. And so that is why I feel like cosmology is the ultimate, the most primitive, primordial subject. And why it evokes something in people, there's reasons why the caves of Lascaux, you know, 40,000 years ago, they weren't depicting like, well, here's how you make a good addle, addle or spear, you know, whatever. They were depicting like the stars and the movements of things.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Well, people then, of course, they started to intuit the fact that there was a, this is where, when astrology and astronomy were still rightly intermediated because the ancient people discovered that there was a relationship between the events of the heaven and the transformations on earth, right? The movement of the seasons and that was obviously of critical importance. This is going to predict the movement of animals, for example, or when your crops should be planted. But just that, that concordance of the cosmic with the, with the, with the practical.

• 1:34:08Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  It's, well, it's, it's, it's, it's unbelievable fact of nature to begin with.

• 1:34:13Brian Keating?

  It's visceral, right? By the way, it didn't have to be that way. Most stars are not like our sun. Our sun is, is not unique, I shouldn't say unique, sorry. Our sun is unusual in that it's a singular star. The preponderance of stars that you look up and see on a dark night sky are multiples, pairs, binaries, triples, maybe even clusters of stars. And that would be very different. That would mean you wouldn't have the ability to see because there's, there'd always be a star out effectively. They won't orbit right next to each other like they, in Tatooine and in Star Wars, remember there's a red sun. But you don't have constellations, you don't have seasons in tracking, you don't have agriculture, the human being's first technology. And you know, there are some of my colleagues and I'd love to talk to you about the psychology of aliens. There's a huge.

• 1:34:58Brian Keating?

  Murmuration in the zeitgeist right now, both that it's super advanced technology is visiting the earth, incomprehensible distances and so forth, and simultaneously that there are, you know, untold worlds yet to be discovered where life is not only abundant, but it's also maybe superior to us. And maybe they are so advanced and so in possession of Moore's Law for 80 more doubling periods than we've enjoyed it for, that in fact, they've created us in sort of giant silicon apparatus. This is called the simulation hypothesis. And by the way, the greatest adherents to both the alien reality hypothesis and the simulation hypothesis are

• 1:35:40Brian Keating?

  atheists, right? I mean, these are both now supplanting the need for-

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  Well, atheists get all their religion from science fiction. Right? Right? I'm dead serious. Oh, sure. Because the mythological pattern of science fiction stories is crystal clear. I mean, Star Wars was predicated on Joseph Campbell's analysis of hero-

• 1:35:59Brian Keating?

  Hero's journey, right?

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Sure, of course.

• 1:36:00Brian Keating?

  That is true.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's definitely-

• 1:36:02Brian Keating?

  But it's natural, right? Yeah. So you're going to subordinate your belief in a god that is Judeo-Christian, say, because then you'd have to do things, right? Then you'd have to, you know, have obligations on you to the community, to your, to your wife, to your parents-

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Those pesky sacrifices.

• 1:36:17Brian Keating?

  Sacrifices to the Sabbath. You might have obligations, but I don't need those if I believe in an alien who's on proximus inter-

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  No, I never thought about that particular-

• 1:36:26Brian Keating?

  You don't have that, yeah.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good one. So you get all the advantages of the assumption of advanced intelligence with none of the moral requirements.

• 1:36:34Brian Keating?

  Right. And the tuning. You have a fine tuner, right? These same people will reject the arguments of, of design from fine tuning, which I'm not saying is, I'm comfortable with that. We discussed that already. I mean, we can put up many counter examples of things that are extremely exquisitely tuned, that didn't have a designer whatsoever. And the earth's distance to the, to the sun is not exquisitely tuned in a sense that necessitated a designer to do it. In other words, we wouldn't, you know, the anthropic principle would suggest we wouldn't be here if the things were radically different from the way it is. And actually, a lot of the parameters in cosmology and particle physics and, and symmetries that we talk- talked about earlier are not as finely tuned as a radio dial if you remember those you and I do but most of the younger folks won't

• 1:37:15Brian Keating?

  but you gotta tune it but actually you don't have to tune it that exquisitely any better in fact than the universe was tuned and along the lines of certain parameters but but this alien you know kind of hypothesis is gotten a lot of attention you know it's political ramifications it has military ramifications you know is it what is it meant to do but I'm curious from your perspective you know putting on my podcast or how now is there you know this compulsion to sort of you know feel that there will be you're familiar with the Drake equation you've maybe you've heard of it I can describe

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  you wrote about UFOs

• 1:37:47Brian Keating?

  really

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  yes yes

• 1:37:47Brian Keating?

  wow

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  and he noted he noted because the belief in UFOs historically cycles

• 1:37:53Brian Keating?

  yes

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  and it tends to make itself manifest more frequently in times of crisis and he describes he probably describes in his book on UFOs the answer to the question that you're posing

• 1:38:04Brian Keating?

  really

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  because what you're really asking about is the metaphysics of materialist atheism right the mythological metaphysics of materialist atheism

• 1:38:11Brian Keating?

  impulse the urge yes

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  well the materialist atheists might say we have no religion it's like yeah you're wrong

• 1:38:16Brian Keating?

  right

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  you have an unrecognized religion

• 1:38:19Brian Keating?

  you don't believe in nothing you believe in anything right

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  yeah well and well then you're laying out some of the trappings that tend to come along with that

• 1:38:26Brian Keating?

  and so too with

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  it's because you can't organize your existence in life without imposing a story on the world there's no way of doing it your life is a story in the world

• 1:38:36Brian Keating?

  is that because of the intolerance that we as humans have towards ambiguity right in other words the battle over abortion or the battle over immigration

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  it's partly that it's partly because if you fail to specify you drown in ambiguity and anxiety technically is a response to ambiguity right that's technically anxiety signals the emergence of entropy

• 1:39:01Brian Keating?

  hmm

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  right and positive emotion I learned this from Carl Friston because I didn't know this positive emotion signifies a reduction in entropy in relationship to a goal

• 1:39:11Brian Keating?

  a structure yes

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  and anxiety itself signals the sudden emergence of entropy right so there's a way actually of aligning this is so cool something we could talk about for a long time

• 1:39:20Brian Keating?

  yeah

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  there's actually a place where the thermodynamics and emotion can be What would you say brought into

• 1:39:27Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I've thought about that.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  We have to stop on this part of the podcast. And that's, that's too bad for all you people watching on YouTube because we're actually going to continue this on the Daily Wire side. And obviously, we could talk for an endless number of hours and would love to. One of the things that means is that the burning question that I wanted to ask Dr. Keating has to wait for the Daily Wire side and what that means for you, poor people on YouTube is that in order to hear that part of the podcast, you actually have to have a subscription to the Daily Wire. That sleight of hand, you might say, wasn't done by design. It's just how it worked out. But you might want to think about throwing the Daily

• 1:40:09Brian Keating?

  I have a subscription.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  Some support. There we go. There we go. Thank you for talking about Peterson Academy too today. We have 40,000 students.

• 1:40:16Brian Keating?

  I wonder.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:18Brian Keating?

  I've heard from so many and I'm so impressed by them. Jordan, you should be very, you and Michaela.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  We are pretty damn happy with the way things are going. And the social media interactions on the site are extremely positive. They're all idea focused. They're upward aiming.

• 1:40:31Brian Keating?

  Community.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Trolls.

• 1:40:33Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah. I just hope I can get tenure, you know?

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll work out that we'll work out the details of that as we progress too. So for anybody, everybody watching on the YouTube side, do join us on the Daily Wire side. We're, we're going to continue this conversation and I'm looking forward to that. Thanks very much for coming into Scottsdale today. And thank you to all of you for your time and attention on the YouTube side and to film crew here in Scottsdale today for making this possible. Pretty good to see you again.

• 1:40:59Brian Keating?

  Great.