512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating

Speaker 1 Hey, everybody, some announcements today before my description of the podcast with Dr. Brian Keating.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's a tour associated with it. Some of it in December.
I'm going to be in Texas with my wife, our accompanying musician. And then from January through April, running through the United States.

Speaker 1 If you want more information about that, go to jordanbpeterson.com.

Speaker 1 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, particularly the stories of the Old Testament.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 seminar series for Daily Wire Plus featuring the same players with a few substitutions as part took in the Exodus seminar, which was very popular, this time devoted to explication of the gospels.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 they're actually intellectually complex and somewhat arcane. And the fact that they have this public appeal is really something terrific.
So

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Keating has been a guest on my podcast before, and that was plenty of fun. And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We discussed the utility of

Speaker 1 the opportunity to bring high-quality mass education everywhere at very low cost, very well produced and at low cost.

Speaker 1 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 uh dr kating's offerings are very popular and deservedly so so you can follow us on the scientific side more intensely there we talked about

Speaker 1 the relationship between science and ethics there's 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 To be scientists, you have to put your pursuit of the truth and beauty, which is another topic we touched on.

Speaker 1 You have to put your pursuit of truth and beauty in the service of humanity ahead of all other considerations. And

Speaker 1 that's an ethical decision, not a scientific decision. And it's the ethical decision upon which all science that's genuine in

Speaker 1 its most abstract and glorious formulations and in its most practical elements is predicated. And so

Speaker 1 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 grisp for the mill.

Speaker 1 So join us for that.

Speaker 1 So it's got to be more than a year since we talked.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 you came in January 23 to the house and we had

Speaker 1 almost your rib eyes. Yeah.
Yeah. That's right.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, your tour for the last time in San Diego. Yeah, right.
So that was the last time we were together. And then we did a remote podcast together a couple months after that.
Right, right, right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 cosmology. I have a preposterous question for you today.
I can't wait. That's what I'm here for.
Yeah, we'll get to that. I want to ask you first about the course you did for Peterson Academy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I've done, I've recorded two, ones out currently, which is called Cosmology. Very simple.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 skull.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There are very few things that are literally free, right? I could only think of two, and you'll probably correct me, but freedom of thought is not necessarily a guarantee around the world, right?

Speaker 1 Every human being doesn't have access to freedom of speech, certainly not. Right, definitely not in your home country, especially nowadays.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know this, I'm sure. We breathe in.
Every breath has millions of molecules that Jesus himself breathed breathed in.

Speaker 1 That's the nature of our atmosphere and the mixing of molecules, etc. 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.

Speaker 1 We see in the same cosmos as he did. There haven't been any new planets coming up.
Well, we're also surrounded by Pharisees and scribes and lawyers. And so that's also true.
That's true. They're free.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's free toothaches, I suppose.

Speaker 1 So I find it also quite a respite.

Speaker 1 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 were traumatized.

Speaker 1 That's Play-Doh, not Plato.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 To me, cosmology, uniquely, and science, you know, but less so generally science, certainly not virology, right?

Speaker 1 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 the universe, offers a space for the human mind, the intellect, to relax, to enjoy, to appreciate.

Speaker 1 And there's no secret, you've heard cosmetology. I make this joke in my Peterson Academy course.

Speaker 1 I say, you know, this course is not about hair and makeup, you know, despite my wonderful appearance, but it's actually related cosmology and cosmetology by the prefix cosmos, which in Greek means beautiful or appearance.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a weird fact, really, isn't it? I mean, you wonder about it biologically because

Speaker 1 that exposure to the night sky, day sky too, for that matter, is also an at-hand experience of awe.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 pollution.

Speaker 1 It's not a good way of conceptualizing it because the light interferes with the night sky, right? And it is something I remember growing up in northern Alberta.

Speaker 1 I 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.

Speaker 1 And very frequently we had Aurora Borealis and pretty spectacular displays. And

Speaker 1 when it's 40 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 observing the sky is a primary pleasure that's strange biologically. It's like, what the hell's going on there? That it produces that experience of awe.

Speaker 1 And awe is a weird emotion, too, because it's a very sophisticated emotion, but it's also very primal. One of the

Speaker 1 concomitants of awe is pilo erection, right? That feeling of your hair standing on end.

Speaker 1 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, right? It's trying to make itself more impressive.

Speaker 1 So it's, it's...

Speaker 1 That sense of awe we have is associated biologically with our response to predation.

Speaker 1 But it's also, as you pointed out, see, I've thought about it, it's like when the cat's hair stands on end, it's becoming more than it is, right?

Speaker 1 It's trying to display itself in the most impressive manner possible.

Speaker 1 And there's a call to higher being that's part and parcel of the experience of awe that seems like the psychological equivalent of that, right? You look up at the night sky and

Speaker 1 it fills you with a sense of wonder and a sense of your remoteness and

Speaker 1 finiteness, but at the same time, it also kind of compels you to be more than you are, evokes curiosity. That's right.

Speaker 1 It's very complex, eh? To see that happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the dirty secret, the shameful secret of what I do with my colleagues is that most of us, myself maybe an exception, are completely inured to it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If 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 it causes. It's not mystery.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now the scientists know

Speaker 1 we've extirpated the sort of, you know, mysterious gods and demons and so forth.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, we've also, as I say, inured ourselves to the wonder that a normal person feels when they encounter the mysterious. And I think

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 have it. It's good.

Speaker 1 It calls it, it marks it and makes you note it. That's right.
Well, there are,

Speaker 1 I suspect if your eyes were open as they should be, possibly,

Speaker 1 you'd see that all the time. That's right.
Right. And

Speaker 1 you suggested something that's very interesting. We know neurophysiologically that

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You replace the perception with your presumption. That makes you super efficient because you see what you know, but it distance you, it distances you from the phenomena.

Speaker 1 Phenomena means to shine forth, right? It distances you from that. And so then you gain efficiency at the cost of wonder.
That's part of the reason it's so nice to be around little kids. Yes.

Speaker 1 Because they're not efficient. No, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 And everything is new. But everything's new.
Exactly. That's right.
Are you familiar with the poem by Walt Whitman? Yes. It's called When I Heard the Learned Astronomer.
Oh, no. Yes.

Speaker 1 This is a different one. Oh, okay.
And it's really, they believe it was sort of written around the mid to late 1800s. And he had heard a lecture about the recently discovered planet Neptune.

Speaker 1 So Neptune was discovered in a most remarkable way. It was the first object that we would call dark matter.

Speaker 1 We saw its unseen gravitational pull afflicting and affecting the orbit of an inner planet Uranus, which is closer to the sun.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the poem starts off, it says, when I heard the learned astronomer arranging with facts and tables and figures, et cetera, how quickly I became depressed and despondent by the night sky brought to numbers.

Speaker 1 And then, and then, he says, I walked outside under the silent canopy of stars to be alone and marveled at their great beauty.

Speaker 1 Now, Richard Feynman, another Whitman and Feynman, I always put them opposed, and I do this in the course at Peterson Academy. I contrast them.

Speaker 1 He says, Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of all time, and a very cool and interesting person. Fascinating individual,

Speaker 1 complex, and incredibly brilliant, and often

Speaker 1 talkative. Yes, and often evoking Whitman's other famous phrase, I contain multitudes, right? So, but in Feynman's case, he said,

Speaker 1 what is it about

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 In other words, can you see more? Or can you see less? My wife makes fun of me when I see a circuit. It'd be great to see both.
Yeah. So that's the goal.
And in fact, I say that in the course.

Speaker 1 I say, you don't, at the end, I say, who do you side with?

Speaker 1 And half the students say Whitman and half the students say Feynman. And I say, you're both right in a sense.
You should embody both characteristics.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, I've had the same experience in some ways teaching my students about, let's say, analysis of dreams and

Speaker 1 stories. You know, if you're a naive movie attender, movie core,

Speaker 1 you don't.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You're just in the story. And,

Speaker 1 you know, in a way, that's where the most enjoyable capture takes place.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's actually better. That's the goal.
That's what I, yeah. So often, and this is why I was drawn to Peterson Academy.
I've been a professor for 21 years.

Speaker 1 You know, it's part of my identity as a human being,

Speaker 1 one of many.

Speaker 1 And I think for me, the opportunity to do something completely new, novel, and really interact with the type of intellect, the curiosity that hasn't been beaten out because 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.

Speaker 1 Maybe some of them will. And I've, in fact, been encountered by people that do want to take that course further than when I present in Peterson Academy.

Speaker 1 But the point being, you know, if you can maintain that wonder,

Speaker 1 if you can maintain that curiosity,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's a good thing because

Speaker 1 it's success, exactly. It's deferring gratification.
But the thing about science, Jordan, is you know, you can't win science. You know, science is an infinite game, as Dweck would call it, right?

Speaker 1 There's no such thing as completing, you've come to the end of science.

Speaker 1 No one will ever do that. No one will ever complete science.
You may have the most knowledge.

Speaker 1 You may have a 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's only so many professors that can get it. 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And I think that people cleave towards the, well, if I just do... the hard things, the differential equations and the circuits and the...

Speaker 1 If I master the finite games. Yeah, those finite games, then I will win the infinite game.

Speaker 1 And along the way, they beat out of themselves, unfortunately, sort of the suicide of that curiosity that got them interested in.

Speaker 1 So they subordinate

Speaker 1 their search for beauty and truth to victory in one of the finite games.

Speaker 1 Right. And that's like the equivalent of propaganda in the arts is you're putting the cart before the horse.
And that's a very big mistake. You know, one of the things I learned in graduate school,

Speaker 1 I wouldn't say that I'm particularly mathematically minded. You know, it's not something that comes with with great ease to me.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. And then

Speaker 1 statistics became it became as much fun as gambling, like slot machine gambling, because

Speaker 1 if you were doing a study you were 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.

Speaker 1 And so the thing that's interesting about the infinite game element of that is that

Speaker 1 it's like a bricklayer who's laying one of 50,000 bricks when he's building a cathedral. If you just think of the next brick, that's a pretty damn dismal occupation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if you're pursuing science properly, that is exactly, you have to do it that way.

Speaker 1 So it's interesting, you know, and 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

Speaker 1 sure but but it is a 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 the it's the call of beauty and truth as the fundamental motivation, not only the fundamental motivation of the scientific inquiry, in that it's the pursuit that saturates all the sub-elements with meaning, but it's also the ethical pursuit that makes science possible.

Speaker 1 Because unless you're very strongly aligned

Speaker 1 in your belief

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, another thing you win as a scientist is evidence that you're an idiot and you were wrong, right?

Speaker 1 Because every time you discover anything that's actually a discovery right another Feynman quote science is the belief in the ignorance of experts not their knowledge not their wisdom yeah and look or the ignorance of you well

Speaker 1 exactly and you look at the word look we 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 intermittent you know an inter 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.

Speaker 1 No, that's sapience. That's sapienza.
We are homo sapien. We are a man who is wise.
What are we wise about, Jordan? That we're going to die. That's the only thing that we know.

Speaker 1 Though 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?

Speaker 1 As you've spoken about on

Speaker 1 many occasions. But the word science means knowledge.
And what does the word knowledge in Hebrew connote? Well,

Speaker 1 Adam knew his wife. So it's very different.

Speaker 1 The notion in sort of the Greek, the Roman, the tradition of Esa, et cetera, that is coming down through us and it's very crucial to life.

Speaker 1 I mean, technology, science, and knowledge acquisition in general. That's sort of one tradition.
And the Hebrew tradition is a tradition where knowledge, as I say, means something radically different.

Speaker 1 And the aspiration for wisdom, Torah, wisdom, knowledge,

Speaker 1 truth, Amunah, as you say, all these things have elements of illumination, but it's illumination. Also a relationship.
Yes, a purpose. Purposefulness.
Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So these things, you know, and you should never confuse it. I mean, there's no one as dumb as

Speaker 1 someone who's brilliant.

Speaker 1 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, then an intellectual, then an academic.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 they spoke of, Lenin spoke of useful idiots. Sometimes I think of useless geniuses, you know, that some of my colleagues are useless geniuses.

Speaker 1 They're so bright, and then they'll lead their credibility to the domain of wisdom, of which they have none.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and so you'll find the correlation between there is no correlation between what you might describe as ethical orientation as psychometrically measured and IQ.

Speaker 1 There's no correlation between IQ and learning, for example.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You'd expect just maybe on the basis of something like neurological integrity that people with higher RQs might be able to dedicate themselves to tasks over the long run more assiduously. Nope.
Nope.

Speaker 1 No correlation whatsoever. Yeah.
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

Speaker 1 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 it is the serpent right exactly 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 and the two occasions i've been asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize is that you can't nominate yourself, right?

Speaker 1 That's the one rule that they adhere to that Alfred Nobel stipulated in 1896, but most other things they've

Speaker 1 disavowed, unfortunately, which is a grave sin, by the way, because you know in Judaism,

Speaker 1 the greatest mitzvah, which means commandment, people think it means good deed. It doesn't mean good deed.
It means commandment. You're commanded to do certain things.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so it's the ultimate naltruistic, you know, beneficence in the sense. And when Alfred Nobel wrote his will, he specified exactly what he wanted.

Speaker 1 He wanted to go to one man who did the greatest accomplishments for the greatest benefit of

Speaker 1 mankind

Speaker 1 in the preceding year. So it was one person preceding year, and it had a benefit all of humanity.
So it was what we call in Hebrew a

Speaker 1 an ethical will. So it wasn't just a will, here's my money, because he had no kids, he had no wife, he had no heirs to give the money to.

Speaker 1 So he gave it all in the sense towards the betterment of mankind. Literally, it's what it says.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But one of the few things that they've actually kept is this focus, if you will, that it should benefit. It should provide a benefit to humanity.

Speaker 1 And then you wonder, well, that's also a non-scientific element it's not completely correct you agree with that yeah absolutely 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

Speaker 1 i i science is it can't be at the bottom of of

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And would you say then just based on that that somebody who identifies as a scientist alone is fundamentally unhealthy? Is not maybe psychological? I don't think you can do it because the problem is,

Speaker 1 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 what? Of life more abundant.

Speaker 1 That would be a good way of thinking about it. It's human-centered life more abundant.
Well,

Speaker 1 see,

Speaker 1 I read a book at one point that was written by an ex-KGB officer who claimed that before the Berlin Wall collapse, the Soviets had put together a biolab in Siberia that was working on a hybrid between Ebola and smallpox that could be aerosolized.

Speaker 1 Right. Now, that's science.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 well were the scientific experiments that were done by unit 731 in japan in china by the japanese was that science for that being used the the data is being used yep 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 pee

Speaker 1 who is a very he was a scientist and most scientists aren't right most scientists are journeymen and i'm actually not even criticizing that because we need 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.

Speaker 1 A lot of the publications are going to be the first publication of someone who doesn't know what they're doing. They're incremental.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they're not likely to be correct or useful.

Speaker 1 All PhDs are like that. Right, right, right.
But that doesn't mean you

Speaker 1 have to dispense with. No, no, no, no.
Okay, so

Speaker 1 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, that's your master's thesis, and it doesn't work out.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, then what? Well, that's a year, and it's supposed to take you a year. So that's a big problem.

Speaker 1 And you have to mentor someone in your lab to put the search for truth before

Speaker 1 their short-term career orientation. And you can do that practically because you can say, look,

Speaker 1 if you allow yourself to take liberties with your statistical analysis and you discover and publish something that isn't true, you're going to believe it.

Speaker 1 And maybe you'll pursue it for the next 15 years and you're chasing a chimera. And not only that, so that will happen to your students and everyone that your research influences.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. The problem is scientists don't, we don't get any ethical training.
And I say that, you know, it's all implicit. It's implicit that you're just going to learn it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The university, you know, the university has not, you know, revoked my tenure, but they don't help with it. They don't provide any resources for it.

Speaker 1 There's no antagonism i do that does that's at least they don't no i know your university well that's something

Speaker 1 uh but but um no and i have a great relationship with the chancellor and and my deans and and so forth i'm very blessed to be at 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Imagine if you're the person who installed the countertops in your home

Speaker 1 and they said to you, you said, you know, excuse me, you know, sir, you know, how's it going with the,

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, Jordan. What I do is so specialized.
It's so erudite. You cannot exp, you cannot possibly understand it.
Even with your PhD and your success,

Speaker 1 you cannot, you'd say, go to hell.

Speaker 1 You don't talk to your boss like that. I am your boss.
The public is our boss. The public, we see our.
Well, it's worse than that, isn't it?

Speaker 1 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 behind not only a paywall, but an appallingly expensive and inaccessible paywall

Speaker 1 for 24-hour access to a single article. And a lot of it is p-hacked and

Speaker 1 implicitly hacked to get the results that were desired, whether it's for some drug company's benefit.

Speaker 1 But even beyond that, the workaday scientist, I'm talking to the person in the lab next door to me, not some shill for Pfizer or something like that. I'm talking about just a workaday scientist.

Speaker 1 And 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,

Speaker 1 I don't think I'm not 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 like you're pointing to, though, a lot of that's a consequence of practice. Practice.
Like I stopped lecturing with notes

Speaker 1 30 years ago. That's right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that was incremental improvement over a substantial amount of time. Like

Speaker 1 your videos are online from Harvard, from Toronto, et cetera. 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.

Speaker 1 I forgot, you know, to my friend. I'll say, yeah, you were born knowing quantum electrodynamics.
Yeah. No, no, no.
I work really hard. Oh, oh.
So you work hard at that, which you think is valuable.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I don't think that everybody should be at the lab, you know, tanking 20% of their time, learning how to communicate like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but they should spend some of that time.

Speaker 1 And maybe they should spend 20% of their time. Because the thing is, well, it also forces you to put your thoughts in order.
Yes. You know, I get, I

Speaker 1 develop a lot of my ideas in consequence of lecturing. I would say

Speaker 1 the majority of them, right? But that's also because,

Speaker 1 you see, people also lecture very oddly because

Speaker 1 people generally conceive of a lecture as the reading of a text or something like that. And it's not.

Speaker 1 A lecture is a performance. And I've thought about this for a long time.
It's a lecture theater, after all. So what are you doing in a lecture? Well, you're...

Speaker 1 eliciting enthusiasm by demonstrating your love of the topic. That's partly what you're doing.
And you're embodying that. So you're a model to story.
Like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So it's an issue I've been interested in forever. Before I do a public lecture, I formulate the question that seems...

Speaker 1 from a set of potential questions that seems to be relevant and at hand for that day.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 hypothesis, which is something akin to revelation, by the way. It's like question, potential answer, critical analysis,

Speaker 1 yeah, 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.
In the cave. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And then you think, well, how do we make our way there? And, you know, there's a

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you don't know if it's going to be successful. That's right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, everyone in the audience and me are extremely happy if, as a consequence of this

Speaker 1 quest-like exploration, there's a punchline at the end, right?

Speaker 1 Treasure chest. 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?

Speaker 1 And you're right that it's a travesty that people who will be university lecturers aren't trained to do that. Because you're trained to do diversity, inclusion.
Yeah, yeah, well, that's true.

Speaker 1 You're trained.

Speaker 1 You're trained how to do it. And you're punished for not doing it, at least.
Well, you won't even get in the door now. They won't even have your applications reviewed.

Speaker 1 I'm interested to see what happens

Speaker 1 in the coming administration as we speak. Yeah, so

Speaker 1 let's investigate that a little bit. So,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that's convenient, like super convenient and fun. And so, and then

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I'm extremely, very, very happy about the way the lectures have turned out.

Speaker 1 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 heart.

Speaker 2 I've traveled literally trillions of micrometers and billions of seconds to be here, and we are going to explore this universe together.

Speaker 2 Cosmology is the oldest science known to humanity. Since cavemen and women, people have wondered, where did everything come from?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 How can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos?

Speaker 2 When you look back in space, you look back in time.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 mean?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 You know, Jordan, I always joke, our profession, I call it the second oldest profession, right? I mean, there have been universities since the University of Bologna in Italy was established in 1082.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 After a thousand bloody years, we've done almost nothing different. Okay, so there's PowerPoint, and that's not that much different, let's be honest, right?

Speaker 1 But what if there were the opportunity 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.

Speaker 1 And my third course is, see, what's nice, I'm an experimental physicist. I'm not Brian Green.
You know, I'm not manipulating wormholes like my friend Kip Thorne and so forth, who did

Speaker 1 the science behind the movie Interstellar. I was the advisor to Christopher Nolan.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And that's fine.

Speaker 1 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 by truth in the process of of attempting to achieve truth uh and perfectly as it may be but uh 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 going to go down and you're going to discover dust instead of the big bang which is what happened to me in my i describe my first book um we thought we saw the gravitational wave aftermath of the inflationary universe that we talked about in my first podcast episode with you.

Speaker 1 But instead, that led to the Simons Observatory.

Speaker 1 It's led to a $200 million project that is now going to not only look for the gold, but also look for the dragons, look for the dust, look for the things that are the impediments.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They solve a Rubik's Cube, then another one messes it up, then the other one solves it. And like, I already solved it.
Like, I don't need to rewrite my PhD thesis.

Speaker 1 Like, I already wrote it, you know, but there's a little bit of that thrill that you get when you are surprised. And that's- Well, the surprise, the thing is, is that

Speaker 1 if you lay out a prediction in keeping with your understanding of the world and something else occurs,

Speaker 1 you have no idea what you've discovered. Now, what you've discovered is that your reputation is now shot and your future is looking gloomy, right?

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 right but right 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.

Speaker 1 That's right. If I can just figure out what the hell it is.

Speaker 1 I say this to my students all the time. I say flaws in your experiment, in your theory

Speaker 1 lead to new laws. It's not like we studied.
Do you know, Jordan, that we're made of matter, right? But in the early universe, we think that almost there was almost an exact symmetry.

Speaker 1 It's one of these guiding principles of physics, that there are symmetries. Conservation of energy is a type of symmetry.
Angular momentums conservation is another type of symmetry.

Speaker 1 Displacement symmetry, those are all the things that we say the laws of physics shouldn't change.

Speaker 1 They should not look different in a mirror or upside down or on Pluto or in uh in arizona it should not make a difference who you are where you are it's kind of the great democratic process of of science known as the lorentz uh principle of lorentz invariance that galileo really crystallized and then later uh eventually fundamental things apply everywhere everywhere

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, guess what, Jordan? We wouldn't be here if that were true.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But that's not the case. And it's obvious just from we exist.
You know, I call Guito Ergosum. We know that that's not true.
We can observe it. I refute it thus, you know, kick the rock.

Speaker 1 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? Well, we have to look.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What was left, one particle of matter, and the rest was a bath of photons. Without that.
It's far less than a rounding error. It's not a rounding error.
It's exquisitely balanced.

Speaker 1 Now, we don't know why. Some theists will say, yeah, 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 one percent 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 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,

Speaker 1 then you might start to think this is suggestive. But

Speaker 1 it's not a scientific hypothesis, right? We can't say, we can only say God and we can only say there was no God, but you can't prove it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And one of those hours was just about me, him asking me to prove God scientifically. He said, I'm sorry, Stephen, again and again.
I cannot do that. He's searching.
He's reaching for something.

Speaker 1 Jesus was on his podcast yesterday. Oh, you were? Okay.

Speaker 1 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 theologist. It's a hot topic these days.
It is.

Speaker 1 It's been, yeah, I always say I'd kill for 1% of God's book sales, but, but, you know, and I told him, look,

Speaker 1 what you're searching for, I can't necessarily give you.

Speaker 1 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 and how I understand how I got to be who I am.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't use the strength of quantum electrodynamics and it doesn't use all sorts of things.

Speaker 1 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 a conversation you had with Dennis Prager that I was privileged to be a part of

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's so ridiculous. And I've turned that around and say, I don't believe in gravity.
And he's like, what are you talking about? And Stephen said, you're a physicist.

Speaker 1 You have to believe in gravity. And I said, no, if I take this meteorite and I drop it,

Speaker 1 I don't believe it's going to have evidence for it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 DNA

Speaker 1 leads to the genetic

Speaker 1 inheritance that we have. Those things you don't have to take on faith.
You have evidence for them.

Speaker 1 So science and 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 uh a a screw you you have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed or perhaps best well that's what i've often found that often

Speaker 1 what would you say have come to the conclusion i don't like arguments from design as proofs for the existence of god yeah 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

Speaker 1 obliviate

Speaker 1 its unlikelihood with an evolutionary argument. It's like, well, if life evolved under these conditions,

Speaker 1 it's not surprising that

Speaker 1 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 that form of material reality constituting the substrate.

Speaker 1 And so if something has adapted to something unlikely, the unlikeliness of what it's adapted to doesn't

Speaker 1 presume a designer. I think there are more powerful arguments.
I'm going to give you this book right now.

Speaker 1 So this is the new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle with God.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 I think the

Speaker 1 rapprochement between science and religion is not going to be found in

Speaker 1 use of materialist reductionism to prove the existence of a designer.

Speaker 1 I think it's going to be more a consequence of us coming to understand what it means that science itself is not science without maintaining its embeddedness in an underlying upward striving ethos.

Speaker 1 So, for example, Cardinal Newman, a famous Catholic theologian,

Speaker 1 his

Speaker 1 existence proof for God was an argument from design,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's an identity proclaimed in the story of Elijah and the story of Jonah, Job as well, to some degree, that

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 before you talk about the existence of God, you have to say what the hell it is that you're investigating. That's right.
And that's so resonant. That phrase that you used that is tattooed on my brain.

Speaker 1 Who am I to do that?

Speaker 1 I found it as a call to kind of a clarion call because it made me think: look, Jordan, there's what, a billion Hindus and Buddhists and so forth. It can't only be that Judeo-Christian

Speaker 1 theology is correct.

Speaker 1 It's the only approach, right? It can't be the only approach. And maybe it's not the only truth.
In other words,

Speaker 1 maybe there's, just assume this proposition, and then you can take it apart.

Speaker 1 Assume all religions that have at their base a moral goodness, an aspect of improving human flourishing and the human condition, not some nihilistic witchcraft or whatever that seems to serve no

Speaker 1 teleology whatsoever, but where there is clearly, and we know that Christianity and Judaism have this embedded within them, and Buddhism I'm less familiar with, but as elements of that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Whatever this is, this notion of human flourishing and goodness and treatment and so forth.

Speaker 1 Again, proposition, I'm not saying it's true. Assume it's true.
Just assume that's true.

Speaker 1 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 a specifically a particle.

Speaker 1 We believe the fundamental element is called the photon field, that the field, which exists everywhere at all times, in all places, that that is what's fundamental.

Speaker 1 And then this photon, you know, the human eye is miraculous. We can see a single photon in the right circumstances.
Right. We're dark adaptive.
Yeah, it's a single photon. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 It's incredible.

Speaker 1 And that's part of the loss you spoke about earlier, where we think about the loss of the night sky. I'm curious, we'll talk some other time about how the human psychology will be robbed of this.

Speaker 1 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 happens anyway getting back to my proposition imagine god is a field so that and and then each what we see as a photon or what we see as hinduism or judaism or christianity is an instant is an instantiation is actually the photo the particle version of it if you will of a field that exists throughout all space and all time 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 definition, it's incorporeal, it's a field, and just like you can't feel the photon field, you can detect its manifestations.

Speaker 1 And so, what if the, you know, as the fruits of the tree are sort of proof of what it was made to do, right?

Speaker 1 An apple tree doesn't produce a grapefruit, and each honey bee doesn't produce a spider web. So, the instantiation, how do these things connect to one another? It's a relational system, and that is.

Speaker 1 Well, I think I think the I think the great comparative investigators of religion, Mircea Eliad probably foremost among them, he was part of Jung's broad school

Speaker 1 and maybe played a role equivalent to that of Jung.

Speaker 1 They certainly identified

Speaker 1 the same kind of patterns in profound religious thinking that you can see characterizing literature.

Speaker 1 I mean, literature, stories are identifiable because they are manifestations of an underlying pattern.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 there's a virtually infinite number of ways that you can interact with someone,

Speaker 1 but there's a finite number of ways, extremely restricted and finite number of ways that you can interact with someone in a a manner they and you approve of simultaneously. Like a father, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And Piaget's goal was actually a rapprochement between science and religion. He looked at play as the origin of that in part.
That was very, very smart. Okay, so now...

Speaker 1 There's many ways that we can interact.

Speaker 1 Some of them will

Speaker 1 jointly appreciate. Okay, in consequence of of that appreciation, we'll want to continue them.
That's the establishment of a relationship.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now imagine there's a smaller subset of those games that will maintain their value across time and stay voluntarily desirable or improve.

Speaker 1 Now, that's an even smaller number of potential games. Well, those games are going to have a pattern.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I suspect further that that's universal. Now, out of that,

Speaker 1 a realm of story is going to emerge.

Speaker 1 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. And those sensible games.

Speaker 1 Those are going to have a universality across cultures. Now,

Speaker 1 cultures are going to vary in the sophistication with which they represent those games. But there's a,

Speaker 1 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 structured well, and they're characteristic of human beings.

Speaker 1 But within the family of languages, there's

Speaker 1 commonality still, grammatical structure, there's nouns and verbs, like there's tremendous commonality, but there's also tremendous variability.

Speaker 1 yes 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

Speaker 1 in

Speaker 1 the Judeo-Christian

Speaker 1 endeavor

Speaker 1 proceeded farther along the line of explicit representation than any other religious system. Now,

Speaker 1 we could debate that, but you know, that's not much different than saying that Western cultures are the most literate, which is the,

Speaker 1 that's the case. That's a problem.
So, yeah, definitely. And

Speaker 1 you saw it there early.

Speaker 1 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 the Jews.

Speaker 1 You find there's six different types of words for knowledge and wisdom and intuition and

Speaker 1 you can identify them. They don't have as many words for snow.
And so what were their tools? What was their environment like? It was saturated with religion.

Speaker 1 And with literacy. Yeah, and with literacy and

Speaker 1 the language and being able to communicate that as well, but also expressing something which must be intrinsic. And I find when I hosted Richard Dawkins in Vancouver, he had asked me to come up.

Speaker 1 I had him on my podcast for two episodes for his most recent book.

Speaker 1 And I'm always, you know, kind of, and I've had Sam Harris on in the last year as well. And the thing that's frustrating to me about when I talk to scientists like them is

Speaker 1 how simple their understanding is, quite frankly, of religion, specifically Judeo-Christian. I'm not an expert in anything.

Speaker 1 I mean, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church as a kid, a complicated story, but I'm born Jewish, two Jewish parents, and I'm Jewish to this day. But the point,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I found it so depressing.

Speaker 1 And because of the richness, and by the way, I often call myself a practicing agnostic, meaning, and which I think is in harmony with

Speaker 1 your famous statement that I mentioned before.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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, the Savior, and He died for my sins.

Speaker 1 It's harder for Jews to relate to that.

Speaker 1 But I stipulate that they feel that way.

Speaker 1 But to say that you are an atheist, like that is your identity,

Speaker 1 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. Well,

Speaker 1 the thing that's odd about Sam, too, in that regard, is that

Speaker 1 he's drifted into a kind of a visionary Buddhism.

Speaker 1 And I think I understand why. Like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, the advantage to that is that you can't criticize it intellectually. Falsify it, right? Well, that's exactly right.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 You know, and 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,

Speaker 1 right? Liturgy and ritual that, well, how are you going to criticize like criticizing dance? Like, you're just, or music, you're just not going to get anything.

Speaker 1 The taste is not indisputable, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's so simplistic. And Sam, to some extent, is worse,

Speaker 1 just from the perspective that he's so, 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

Speaker 1 has any verbal crutches whatsoever. And I don't mean to jinx our conversation, but he just speaks in complete, he speaks in prose, as they say, paragraphs.

Speaker 1 And when we talk about things, very simple things, why don't you do, you know, what is your feeling about,

Speaker 1 you know, Judaism that made you reject you know i guess his dad is jewish i forget um and well just take slavery and he just asserts that you know slavery is there's no such thing as he said to me brian brian you and i create a religion are we going to have slavery in it i said sam this is so this is like my my you know seven-year-old learns this you know in her in in school in her talmud class like you you can't be serious like you think that slavery meant like

Speaker 1 black african slave trade you know in the deep south in America. And it's just not that.
And so we go through it and I taught him, you know, what it meant to have a slave.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And there was this concept called indentured servitude, which is actually a kindness.

Speaker 1 If you couldn't pay your debt to me, Jordan, and you were going to steal something, no, no, no, I would give you, basically employ you and I provide food and shelter.

Speaker 1 And by the way, sometimes you wouldn't want to leave.

Speaker 1 After six years, you wouldn't want to 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so, this was meant to show as an outward symbol to the world that I 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.

Speaker 1 But I said, He had no idea about this.

Speaker 1 It's also the case that, like,

Speaker 1 first of all, the entire story of Exodus is about the movement from slavery and tyranny to freedom so and that's like that that's a major part of the biblical library

Speaker 1 and then even more importantly the metaphysical insistence is that

Speaker 1 if you're not a slave to God let's say

Speaker 1 so to speak there's something that you're a slave to you might be a slave to yeah and that's not that's not appropriate or slave to your whims your words and that's what hedonistic self-gratification is It's like, I'm free.

Speaker 1 It's like, no, you're not. You're a slave to your whims.
The most common slavery that scientists practice is workaholism. They work 24-7.
They work six, you know, all days of the week.

Speaker 1 They're so fascinated because it's so intoxicating.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It might be incremental. Maybe it's not.

Speaker 1 You also don't know. But you don't know.
And you don't know what these little seeds are.

Speaker 1 halt on the trail man 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 in other words it's not optional it's a commandment 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 nefesh you know satiating of your soul unless you have that feeling of accomplishment of working the earth or working the 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

Speaker 1 and so yeah when i when i talked to richard and i talked to a i came away you know somewhat depressed because also you know as you know in judaism the word judaism comes from the word gratitude hodo hodea which means to give grace the gratitude towards god you know judah's name for the thanksgiving that uh his mother

Speaker 1 gave to god so it's endemic and our 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 not, if you bless it, you can't be angry and grateful at the same time, right?

Speaker 1 That's right. It seems to be impossible.
So it's, it's, I view it as a. Gratitude is also the opposite of resentment.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Resentment is the most bitter and destructive of emotions. I look at the iPhone 16, you know, so I'm a tech junkie.
I love technology. I guess it doesn't come with a manual.

Speaker 1 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 it, but it's very interesting.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I remember the night we brought our first son home, and we were bleary-eyed. He wasn't nursing.
He's going to die, right? You remember that feeling? He's going to die. Like,

Speaker 1 he's not going to die. He's going to be fine.
He's a six pounder. It's a revelation of a child.
This thing might die. It's sheer terror.
And it's the most responsible.

Speaker 1 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 like, the hell are you talking about? There's no manual.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They justified it as great good, whether it was eliminating Jews or, you know, whatever. They don't even have to take it that far.
So he's trying to justify.

Speaker 1 I think his behavior, because what happens, Jordan, when you believe in God or you have some notion of a muna or faith or just want to approach a creator or something bigger than you?

Speaker 1 Well, then you have obligations and people hate that. I don't think Richard, I mentioned

Speaker 1 Richard Simon. I discovered that

Speaker 1 every audience I've discussed this with goes silent.

Speaker 1 There's no difference between obligation and adventure,

Speaker 1 you know, because you think of an obligation as something that you're involuntarily shouldering, right? That's an obligation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When you go see a movie about a great adventurer, a secret agent, say,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I told you more and more. 20 years ago, Jordan, you eat meat only and salt.
You know, I have prepared meat.

Speaker 1 I think it was pretty darn good, kosher, ribeye, when you came to my house a couple of years ago.

Speaker 1 But if I told you 30, 20 years ago, Jordan, you're just going to eat ribeyes and salt. You would say, that's horrible.
Like, I don't want to do that.

Speaker 1 That's going to be, you know, take away my freedom. You're telling me it's compulsory.
But now you took it upon yourself. I see it in you, the health, the vitality,

Speaker 1 the just, you know, incredible transformation that you've undergone. Who is happier? Jordan, 20 years ago, could eat all the Doritos.

Speaker 1 I don't know what you ate back then, or has this prescribed thing to do

Speaker 1 in the prime of his life? And I feel that way about, so I said that to

Speaker 1 Stephen and also to Sam. 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 why did we not get to, who knows?

Speaker 1 There's no real reason why we think, it's not because they're dirty.

Speaker 1 But, but when you're, when you have an instruction manual,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The question is, you know, if you do believe in God and if you do practice some faith tradition or whatever, will you be happier or not?

Speaker 1 These people that came up to Richard Dawkins with tears in their eyes at the book signing after our event, you changed by.

Speaker 1 One of the things I've learned about the atheist community, so to speak, though, that's a mitigating factor, I would say.

Speaker 1 There's a subset of them that are just Luciferian rationalists, and they're not fun. They're not fun.
They know everything.

Speaker 1 They're bitter, they're resentful, and they're seriously underappreciated for their genius.

Speaker 1 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? So they asked Riz Richard, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1 well, it might even be Richard Dawkins because he's made the odd illusion. Yeah, he's made the odd illusion.
And that's right. I've met lots of people who were very badly hurt by fundamentalist types.

Speaker 1 I don't want to say, you know,

Speaker 1 okay, so now I don't have to listen to him because he was abused.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I don't want to, I don't want to let him off the hooks so easily in that sense. But

Speaker 1 I guess the challenge that I have is when I deal with somebody like that, because I can talk science with either one of them, Lawrence Krauss, again.

Speaker 1 These people people I can talk to and they're so self-conscious, but they would never, and I told this to Lawrence Krauss because I had him on my pod and he's been had me on his podcast.

Speaker 1 We've talked about this and we kind of joke on the religious Jew, he's the atheist, but he knows nothing about the faith. Why does he not know? But why does he know that?

Speaker 1 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 of my kids going through it right now.

Speaker 1 And your voice is cracking and you're in front of everybody and you're embarrassed. You have pimples and your girlfriend, you know, and it's horrible, right?

Speaker 1 But you go go through it, 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.

Speaker 1 It marks sort of a graduation. from religion.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 No one could be a Christian, you know, like you're a Christian because you were born to a Christian family. That doesn't mean that you're you're actively doing anything in Christianity.

Speaker 1 And that's different. So Judaism is more of a behavioral religion where you have to do these myths, supposedly to do certain things.
It's behavior and it's practicing religion.

Speaker 1 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 atheists.

Speaker 1 They didn't take Judaism very seriously. My dad was an active militant atheist, used to say to me, I don't believe in God.
I believe in Satan because he made you believe in God.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 you're denying your children something. And I said, you know, the avatar for me.
What do they have if they don't have a tradition? They have nothing. They have themselves.
They have the media.

Speaker 1 That's exactly the problem.

Speaker 1 Because that's also a very weird definition of self. It's like they have the self.

Speaker 1 That's without tradition. Okay, so that means fundamentally, it means without discipline.
It means without rich moral knowledge. It means without community.

Speaker 1 It means without the necessity of foregoing immediate gratification for a higher purpose. That's a major loss.
Like, you'd only think that

Speaker 1 the child stripped of tradition has himself in the untrammeled sense if you believe that the self, that was the true self, had no relationship whatsoever with the surrounding community. Well,

Speaker 1 that's a lonely person.

Speaker 1 And is it going to be a bitter, unhappy person? 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.

Speaker 1 So one of the things I discovered in this book, and I outlined this in painful detail, might say, is that the postmodern types were correct and the scientists wrong, or the empiricists at least.

Speaker 1 The postmodernists were correct in their proclamation that we see the world through a story. A description of the structure

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you want to know that because it orients you in their direction so you can try that out.

Speaker 1 Once you understand that,

Speaker 1 only question that the question that necessarily arises is what story? And it could be none, nihilism. It could be hedonism, which is whim, possession, essentially.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, the problem with that hypothesis is it's actually wrong, because power...

Speaker 1 power is not an effective unifying motivation. That's why the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings is

Speaker 1 the ring of Satan himself. It's very attractive power.
I can force unity. It's like, yeah, but it doesn't iterate well.
It doesn't unite well. The biblical library is predicated on the idea that

Speaker 1 the foundation of community is voluntary self-sacrifice. And that's right.
And it's actually self-evident because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, so we can think about Piaget, the developmental psychologist, his proposition was that if we wanted to understand ethics scientifically, we'd look at their precursors.

Speaker 1 And he thought we'd find that in the behavior of children as they became socialists. Very smart hypothesis.
That's why he got so interested in games.

Speaker 1 Well, when a child makes the the transition from two-year-old egotist to three-year-old social creature, because that's when that occurs, one of the hallmarks of that development is taking turns.

Speaker 1 Well, taking turns is a sacrifice.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's not my turn now. I sacrifice my turn to you.
Okay, if I do that, then we play.

Speaker 1 If you want to keep playing with me, then we're friends. Well, that's the...
Contract.

Speaker 1 That's the social contract, right? It's not imposed tyrannically from above. Something else, Piaget pointed out, is that the stable social contract is voluntarily created and accepted.

Speaker 1 That's way different than Freud's superego or Foucault's power games. It's way different, way different.
And

Speaker 1 I think there's all the evidence in the world that it's true.

Speaker 1 And so the idea that,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then there's a periphery, which is the town and then the countryside. Center, periphery, or center, surround, periphery.

Speaker 1 The center is the sacred place. And the reason for that is the center is the sacred place.
That's definitional.

Speaker 1 Then in the center of the center, there's an altar where sacrifices are being made, right? And the

Speaker 1 drama that's enacted is

Speaker 1 the community is founded on the principle of sacrifice. It's like, well, yeah, obviously.

Speaker 1 Obviously, obviously, because that's the definition of community in some sense, is that the individual is brought into relationship with others. That's right.

Speaker 1 Well, that's obviously a sacrifice of individual primacy. Now, what's the gain? Well,

Speaker 1 the gain of 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.

Speaker 1 Right. And a relationship is a sacrifice of your whims for the benefit of the relationship.
So it's all sacrifice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And for me, that's why, look, I struggle with God. That's the name of your book, right? Israel.
Israel means wrestle with God. It's not Islam.
Islam means submit to God. When you submit to God,

Speaker 1 it's a very different vision. And we can debate about it.

Speaker 1 But the fact is, when you submit, it's like I've often noted with my children,

Speaker 1 the first word they said was no. It wasn't yes.
That's the magic word. Right.

Speaker 1 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 this. You have no self-identification.

Speaker 1 I mean, you know, this is trivial 101 for you. But that is true.
So you express your

Speaker 1 disagreeable

Speaker 1 battle of no. Yes.
And that is exactly how much is for me, which is what no means, and how much has to be solved by the collective community. Absolutely.
Yeah, no.

Speaker 1 And so it's, it's, it's, so all these things are self-evident.

Speaker 1 And the thing in Judaism, where 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.

Speaker 1 Yuri Gergarin, 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?

Speaker 1 He said, I can't tell you what I saw, but I know what I didn't see. And what? I didn't see a man with a white beard sitting in a chair.

Speaker 1 You know, congratulations, Yuri. That's really, you know, he was a hero of the Soviet Union.
Yeah. That's so baby.
Nobody thinks of that. Where's up? There's no up in space.
There's no heaven.

Speaker 1 There's also none of that in the biblical. None of that.
No, it's not. There is in the artistic representations, but they're images, and everyone understands that.

Speaker 1 And there's also constant warnings in the biblical texts about confusing the image with the ineffable.

Speaker 1 That's right. And there's been huge battles in the Christian church.

Speaker 1 The iconoclasts were people who believed that icons had the danger of concreteness, which is exactly exactly the danger that, say, Dawkins has fallen prey to when he concretizes

Speaker 1 a metaphor. Infantile, right? I said, you know, or, you know, Stephen Bartlett asked me, he said, you know, the Bible says the earth is flat.

Speaker 1 First of all, it doesn't say that, but, but second of all, you know, I said, I think. It's locally flat.
It is locally flat. I said, and I won't say this.

Speaker 1 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 people, ordinary people, will get that right.

Speaker 1 About 50, 60% of scientists will get that right. If I say prove that the Earth orbits around the sun, 90% of scientists will get that wrong.

Speaker 1 I bet most scientists watching this, I'm not going to put anybody on the spot. Don't cannot prove it.
Yeah, I'm not going to say stand on one leg and prove it, Jordan, but we can prove it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
And I think this is so beautiful.

Speaker 1 We put so much emphasis on scientists that they are sort of gods, right? They manipulate. What did Arthur C.
Clarke say? He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Speaker 1 I actually opened my podcast with that

Speaker 1 with his actual voice because I'm at the Arthur C. Clarke Center.
So when you look at that, who wields magic?

Speaker 1 Well, it's gods or it's magicians and fairies and all sorts of wonderful creatures that certainly aren't people.

Speaker 1 But when a scientist can unlock the power of the atom or can unleash you know the the the uh you know humanity's need on electricity with infinite energy or or you know can develop a superconductor or or all the lasers anything that we take for granted in technology all came from basic physics the internet came from basic physics 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 in outer space with the beard uh but but they project that onto humans So they'll say, Richard Feynman was a god.

Speaker 1 I mean, they literally, there's more people, Jordan, that have play in the NBA right now than have won Nobel Prizes in physics, okay?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He went to strip clubs. Einstein married his cousin.
It was a horrible, horrible father. He neglected a child with severe mental illness.

Speaker 1 Never saw him after he moved to America to get fame and fortune. Cavorting with,

Speaker 1 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. I want to be like Einstein.

Speaker 1 Do I want to be like Feynman? Hell no.

Speaker 1 But you look at a man and you analyze him or you analyze a woman.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, and even in that analysis, you're pointing to an 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 certain category.

Speaker 1 And you can't

Speaker 1 so this

Speaker 1 I brought this this to show you. 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.

Speaker 1 And I want to point out just some interesting. That's his signature.
Wow. So this was a book he wrote.
It's called The Military Compass. Now, you and I, I told Stephen Bartlett this.

Speaker 1 I said, do you know what a slide rule is? He said, I have no idea what a slide rule is. Where did you get this? So I have a collector.

Speaker 1 So when I got my advance for my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, I basically bought this book.

Speaker 1 And it's a it's in great shape wonderful look at the pages on it this is from 1646 now as a custom box and and so forth and uh there's an english translation that they made in the 70s you can't get this anymore uh but there's an english translation of it but there's a tag i put there uh hey why don't you open that up and and read me what it says on the post-it note uh page i think it's on this side of the page So these are all things that you could do with this thing called the military compass.

Speaker 1 So I think it says there right what does it say can you read it yes one yes rule for yeah rule for monetary exchange yes so what is 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.

Speaker 1 We shall illustrate this by an example so that everything is clearly understood. And he goes through and what does he mention the currency that he's going to convert?

Speaker 1 Florentine gold scudi into Venetian ducats. Yeah, so there uh so here's what the device looked like.
It was a it was like a slide roll. So we'll maybe later we'll get the cameras to zoom in on it.

Speaker 1 It was a slide roll. 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.

Speaker 1 He wouldn't actually give 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.

Speaker 1 He was also not the greatest of husbands and men and sort of things. He was a deep believer in God.

Speaker 1 But when I look at this and I say, this book, this is a second edition, the first edition was written in 1601.

Speaker 1 And there's only about seven of them left. There's actually more Gutenberg Bibles than first editions of Galilee's Compass.
So this one was cheap, very cheap compared to those.

Speaker 1 You can almost get they're priceless. They're kept under lock and key at the Galileo Museum in Florence.
But the point is,

Speaker 1 if he had taken those Florentines that he's talking about or the ducats, you know, if I give you a ducat right now, it's almost worthless. I mean, it's kind of cool historically.
It might look good.

Speaker 1 It was a paper note. It's basically like a paper dollar.
It got inflated to nothing. They would do things with the money.
Back then, they would shave the corners of the coin.

Speaker 1 That's why coins have ridges on them now, all sorts of interesting historical tidbits.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so you look at these people and you often find that the people who have the greatest scientific knowledge and technical and maybe practical knowledge, sometimes their wisdom is to be lacking.

Speaker 1 But the average person will never look at that and say, wow, this person has been divorced six times or treats his illegitimate stepdaughter horribly or whatever.

Speaker 1 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 students' wives. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 You should just say that there is a value in the people that

Speaker 1 say 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.

Speaker 1 And I think it's very dangerous. And it's very seductive for scientists to want to emulate Galileo.
And, you know, certainly.

Speaker 1 Well, it's very seductive for scientists to want to prioritize the intellectual. Because how else do we get more

Speaker 1 smart? Yeah. Well, so of course you're going to do that because it's in your obvious self-interest to prioritize in importance your most outstanding trait.

Speaker 1 That's also the deadliness of worship of the intellect per se.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I'll be interested in your response to this book. Yes.
I've read the

Speaker 1 couple chapters online, and

Speaker 1 it starts, 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?

Speaker 1 Let me say it to you. Like, what is the most important day on your calendar every year?

Speaker 1 It's probably Christmas.

Speaker 1 So what is Christmas? It's a birth. It's a beginning.
It's a new.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 We go back from now, late 2024. We go back 13.8 billion years.
Let's say we're talking on a Thursday today. We'll come back.
There'll be some Thursday, just counting 24 hours.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean the Earth was here. Doesn't mean the sun was here.
Just counting back in units of 24 hours, back, by, back, by come some Thursday.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And we don't actually know what happened on the Wednesday before that day. That's a concept.
You can think about it, but you can't actually necessarily know what happened.

Speaker 1 And so that is why I feel like cosmology is the ultimate, the most primitive, primordial subject, and why it evokes something in people.

Speaker 1 There's reasons why the caves of Lasko, you know, 40,000 years ago, they weren't depicting like, well, here's how you make a good addle-atl or spear, you know, whatever.

Speaker 1 They were depicting like the stars and the movements of things.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 intermediated because

Speaker 1 the ancient people discovered that there was a relationship between the the events of the heaven and the transformations on earth, right? The movement of the seasons.

Speaker 1 And that was obviously of critical importance. It's going to predict the movement of animals, for example, or when your crops should be planted, but just that concordance of the cosmic with

Speaker 1 the practical.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it's an unbelievable fact of nature to begin with. Visceral, right? By the way, it didn't have to be that way.
Most stars are not like our sun. Our sun is not unique.
I shouldn't say unique, sorry.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that would be very different. That would mean you wouldn't have the ability to see because there'd always be a star out effectively.

Speaker 1 They won't orbit right next to each other like they in Tatooine and Star Wars. Remember, there's a red sun,

Speaker 1 but you don't have constellations. You don't have seasons and tracking.
You don't have agriculture, the human being's first technology.

Speaker 1 And, you know, there are some of my colleagues, and I'd love to talk to you about the psychology of aliens.

Speaker 1 There's a huge murmuration in the zeitgeist right now, both that super advanced technology is visiting the Earth, incomprehensible distances and so forth,

Speaker 1 and simultaneously,

Speaker 1 that there are

Speaker 1 untold worlds yet to be discovered where life is not only abundant, but it's also maybe superior to us.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This is called the simulation hypothesis. And by the way, the greatest adherence to both the alien reality hypothesis and the simulation hypothesis are atheists, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, these are both now supplanting the need for. Well, atheists get all their religion from science fiction.
Right. Right.
I'm dead, seriously. Really?

Speaker 1 No, sure, because the mythological pattern of science fiction stories is crystal clear. I mean, Star Wars was predicated on Joseph Campbell's analysis of heroes.
Hero's journey, right?

Speaker 1 Sure, of course. That is true.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's definitely pretty. 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?

Speaker 1 Then you'd have to, you know, have obligations on you to the community, to your wife, to your parents,

Speaker 1 sacrifices. To sacrifices, to the Sabbath.
You might have obligations, but I don't need those if I believe in an alien who's on Proxima Central. No, I never thought about that particular term.

Speaker 1 You don't have to.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good one. So you get all the advantages of the assumption of advanced intelligence with none of the moral requirements.
Right. And the tuning, you have a fine-tuner, right?

Speaker 1 These same people will reject the arguments of design from fine-tuning, which I'm not saying is I'm comfortable with those sites. We discussed that already.

Speaker 1 I mean, we can put up many counterexamples of things that are extremely exquisitely tuned that didn't have a designer whatsoever.

Speaker 1 And the Earth's distance to the Sun is not exquisitely tuned in a sense that necessitated a designer to do it.

Speaker 1 In other words, we wouldn't, you know, the anthropic principle would suggest we wouldn't be here if things were radically different from the way it is.

Speaker 1 And actually, a lot of the parameters in cosmology and particle physics and asymmetries that we 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.

Speaker 1 But you got to tune it. But actually, you don't have to tune it that exquisitely any better, in fact, than the universe was tuned along the lines of certain parameters.

Speaker 1 But this alien kind of hypothesis has gotten a lot of attention.

Speaker 1 It's political ramifications. It has military ramifications.

Speaker 1 What is it meant to do? But I'm curious from your perspective, putting on my podcaster hat now, is there this compulsion?

Speaker 1 to sort of, you know, feel that there will be, you're familiar with the Drake equation, maybe you've heard of it. I can describe it.
I've got to talk about the UFO artists. Really? Yes, yes.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And he noted, because

Speaker 1 the belief in UFOs historically cycles. Yes.
And it tends to make itself manifest more frequently in times of crisis.

Speaker 1 And he describes, he probably describes in his book on UFOs the answer to the question that you're posing. Really?

Speaker 1 Because what you're really asking about is the metaphysics of materialist atheism, right? The mythological metaphysics of materialist atheism.

Speaker 1 Well, the materialist atheist might say we have no religion. It's like, yeah, yeah, you're wrong.
Right. You have an unrecognized religion.
You don't believe in nothing.

Speaker 1 You believe in anything, right? Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 and you're laying out some of the trappings that tend to come along with that. And so, too, it's because you can't

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
It's partly that.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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. A structure.

Speaker 1 And anxiety itself signals the sudden emergence of entropy.

Speaker 1 So there's a way actually of aligning. This is so cool.
Something we could talk about for a long time.

Speaker 1 There's actually a place where the thermodynamics and emotion can be, what would you say, brought into contours. Yeah, I've thought about that.

Speaker 1 We have to stop on this part of the podcast, and that's too bad for all you people watching on YouTube because we're actually going to continue this on the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 And obviously, we could talk for an endless number of hours and would love to.

Speaker 1 One of the things that means is that the burning question

Speaker 1 that I wanted to ask Dr. Keating has to wait for the Daily Wire side.

Speaker 1 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. And that

Speaker 1 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 Wire

Speaker 1 some support. There we go.
There we go. Thank you for talking about Peterson Academy too today.
We have 40,000 students.

Speaker 1 I've heard from so many, and I'm so impressed by them, Jordan.

Speaker 1 very you and

Speaker 1 we are pretty damn happy with the way things are going your social media interactions on the site are extremely positive they're all idea focused they're upward aiming community trolls yeah yeah i just hope i can get tenure you know that's 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 dailyware side we're we're going to continue this conversation and i'm looking forward to that thanks very much for coming into scholarship today and thank you to all of you for your time and attention on the YouTube side and to the film crew here in Scottsdale today for making this possible.

Speaker 1 Pretty good to see you again. Great.