The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous ｜ Dr. Brian Keating

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody. Some announcements today before my description of the podcast with Dr. Brian

00:00:20.020 Keating. So the first is I just published this book, We Who Wrestle With God, and it hit number

00:00:26.120 one on the New York Times bestseller list. So I'm kind of happy for five different reasons

00:00:30.920 about that. There's a tour associated with it, some of it in December. I'm going to be

00:00:36.000 in Texas with my wife, our accompanying musician. And then from January through April, running

00:00:41.120 through the United States. If you want more information about that, go to jordanbpeterson.com.

00:00:46.560 The content of the tour or the approach of the tour will be similar to my previous tours

00:00:51.200 in that I'm taking abstract concepts, in this case, concepts associated with the realm

00:00:57.100 of story, particularly the stories of the Old Testament. I'm explaining their conceptual

00:01:02.260 significance, but I'm also extracting out the practical implications of that understanding

00:01:07.840 for attention and for behavior. And so it's always my goal to make what I'm discussing

00:01:15.760 applicable immediately in the real world. And that continues in this lecture series.

00:01:20.660 We've released a new seminar series for Daily Wire Plus, featuring the same players with a

00:01:29.660 few substitutions, as partook in the Exodus seminar, which was very popular, this time devoted

00:01:36.980 to explication of the Gospels. And so that released on the first in that series, 10-part series,

00:01:42.260 released on December 1st. So you could go check that out as well. We're pretty excited about it.

00:01:47.920 It seems to be performing a little better than the Exodus seminar did, which is saying quite

00:01:53.000 something because I think that was the most popular offering that the Daily Wire produced,

00:01:57.240 apart from Matt Walsh's movies, which is pretty good given that it's so, you know, they're actually

00:02:02.660 intellectually complex and somewhat arcane. And the fact they have this public appeal is really

00:02:10.220 something terrific. So that's the announcements for the time being. I had the privilege today of

00:02:17.340 speaking with Dr. Brian Keating, one of the world's leading cosmologists. Dr. Keating has been a guest on

00:02:24.060 my podcast before, and that was plenty of fun. And we had an opportunity to continue our ongoing

00:02:32.340 conversations. We talked a fair bit about his lecturing for Peterson Academy. He has a couple of

00:02:37.780 courses on astronomy and cosmology there. We discussed the utility of the opportunity to bring

00:02:46.520 high-quality mass education everywhere at very low cost, very well-produced and at low cost. And so,

00:02:55.140 you know, that was gratifying as far as I was concerned because that project has been quite a

00:03:00.060 stellar success. We have about 40,000 students and Dr. Keating's offerings are very popular and

00:03:06.880 deservedly so. So you can follow us on the scientific side more intensely there. We talked about

00:03:14.760 the relationship between science and ethics. This is a very tricky thing to tease out because the

00:03:22.580 empirical presumption is that we build our representations of the world as a consequence of our

00:03:29.000 experience of the facts of the world. And that doesn't appear to be correct precisely. That

00:03:38.240 doesn't mean there are no facts. It means that the issue of what the relevant facts are is an important

00:03:45.440 issue. And the determination of what facts are relevant and why is actually part of the enterprise

00:03:52.420 that we describe as ethical. That's the definition of the ethical enterprise. And so we tried to bandy

00:04:00.640 back and forth various concepts of the relationship between the ethical and the scientific, or maybe

00:04:06.440 even more particularly, the fact that for science to exist, it has to not only be embedded in an a priori

00:04:15.620 ethical framework, but that the scientists who are practicing science have to be oriented by that

00:04:22.480 ethic. To be scientists, you have to put your pursuit of the truth and beauty, which is another topic we

00:04:30.220 judged on. You have to put your pursuit of truth and beauty in the service of humanity ahead of all other

00:04:38.440 considerations. And that's an ethical decision, not a scientific decision. And it's the ethical decision upon which

00:04:46.660 all science that's genuine in its most abstract and glorious formulations and in its most practical elements

00:04:55.320 is predicated. And so that constituted the bulk of our conversation. And there were many more things that we could

00:05:03.780 have and would have liked to discuss, but, you know, that was plenty of grist for the mill. So join us for that.

00:05:11.700 So it's got to be more than a year since we talked, eh?

00:05:14.440 Yeah. You came in January 23 to the house and we had kosher ribeyes.

00:05:21.000 Right, so almost two years. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Two years, yeah.

00:05:23.560 Yeah, your tour for the last time in San Diego. Yeah, that was the last time we were together. And then we did a remote podcast

00:05:29.800 together a couple months after that. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Well, it's always good to have a chance

00:05:36.280 to talk to somebody from the scientific community. I can plague you with my preposterous questions about

00:05:42.840 cosmology. I have a preposterous question for you today. I can't wait. That's what I'm here for.

00:05:46.840 Yeah, we'll get to that. I want to ask you first about the course you did for Peterson Academy.

00:05:51.260 Yeah. Yeah, I've done, I've recorded two. One's out currently, which is called cosmology.

00:05:56.700 Yeah. Very simple. And then I've recorded a second one, introduction to astronomy,

00:06:00.940 which you might think would come before cosmology, but actually cosmology encompasses most of astronomy

00:06:07.140 anyway. And in some sense, cosmology is one of the oldest sciences, if not the oldest science.

00:06:13.040 It's the science that you can do with the two telescopes that you're born with in your skull.

00:06:18.300 And for that reason, it's accessible to everybody. You know, I was thinking on my way over here,

00:06:23.660 you talk so much about freedom and how important that is. There are very few things that are

00:06:27.260 literally free, right? Right.

00:06:28.780 I could only think of two, and you'll probably correct me, but freedom of thought is not necessarily

00:06:33.660 a guarantee around the world, right? Every human being doesn't have access to freedom of speech,

00:06:37.980 certainly not. Right, definitely not.

00:06:39.500 In your home country, especially nowadays. But air, so far as I know, is free.

00:06:45.100 Yeah.

00:06:45.580 And the only other thing I could think about, Jordan, was the night sky. We all can look at

00:06:50.300 the night sky. We can all enjoy it. And we're in both those ways. You know this, I'm sure.

00:06:56.060 We breathe in every breath has millions of molecules that Jesus himself breathed in.

00:07:01.180 That's the nature of our atmosphere and the mixing of molecules, etc. It's guaranteed that that is the

00:07:06.380 case. But the only other thing that we may share with Jesus is that we see the same night sky.

00:07:11.260 We see in the same cosmos as he did. There haven't been any new planets, you know, coming in.

00:07:15.900 Well, we're also surrounded by Pharisees and scribes and lawyers, and so that's also free.

00:07:20.700 That's true. They're free, yeah. That's free toothaches, I suppose.

00:07:24.220 Yeah.

00:07:24.540 Yeah.

00:07:25.100 So I find it also quite a respite. You know, I'm a pretty tough person, but I do believe the

00:07:30.620 human spirit needs safe spaces, in a sense. Not the kind of places we had on campus on November 6th

00:07:37.340 with, you know, Play-Doh and finger painting kits for the students who were traumatized.

00:07:42.140 That's Play-Doh, not Play-Doh.

00:07:45.180 That's right. But instead, we need safe spaces that the human mind can expand within. You know,

00:07:50.940 if you just go to the gym and work out and you never recover, you can't fully grow to your potential.

00:07:56.300 To me, cosmology, uniquely, and science, you know, but less so generally science, certainly not

00:08:02.140 virology, right? But science in its purest sense, the pure sciences, not political science,

00:08:08.140 but pure science, not applied, like I'd get to do. I have the privilege of doing, which is studying the

00:08:14.060 universe offers a space for the human mind, the intellect, to relax, to enjoy, to appreciate. And

00:08:20.620 there's no secret. You've heard cosmetology. I make this joke in my Peterson Academy course.

00:08:25.660 I say, you know, this course is not about hair and makeup, you know, despite my

00:08:29.580 wonderful appearance, but it's actually related cosmology and cosmetology by the prefix cosmos,

00:08:36.700 which in Greek means beautiful or appearance. So it's literally telling us that the night sky is

00:08:42.380 beautiful and it's something to behold and it's a sensual pleasure. People don't think of that with

00:08:47.180 cosmology. Yeah, it's a weird fact, really, isn't it? I mean, you wonder about it biologically,

00:08:51.740 because that exposure to the night sky, day sky too, for that matter, is also an at-hand experience

00:09:00.540 of awe. And I've wondered often, from the psychological perspective, what it has meant for

00:09:07.340 people and their existential positioning to have less access to the night sky than they once did.

00:09:14.620 Because there's a lot of people who never see the full cosmic landscape because of light pollution.

00:09:20.940 A hundred percent.

00:09:21.580 It's not a good way of conceptualizing it, but because the light interferes with the night sky,

00:09:26.060 right? And it is something I remember growing up in northern Alberta. I mean, we were a long way from

00:09:31.900 any major urban center and the night sky there was very impressive. You could see the Milky Way fully.

00:09:36.700 And very frequently we had aurora borealis and pretty spectacular displays. And when it's 40 below

00:09:44.460 and the air is dry, there's very little humidity. And so the night sky is very stark. And, you know,

00:09:49.820 it was dark by six o'clock at night. So even when I used to do my paper route, my friends, we spent a lot

00:09:56.300 of time looking up at the night sky, watching for falling stars, watching for satellites. But that,

00:10:03.260 it's interesting, eh, that observing the sky is a primary pleasure. That's strange biologically. It's like,

00:10:12.540 what the hell's going on there? That it produces that experience of awe. And awe is a weird emotion,

00:10:18.300 too, because it's a very sophisticated emotion, but it's also very primal. One of the

00:10:25.740 concomitants of awe is piloerection, right? That feeling of your hair standing on end.

00:10:31.180 And that's actually the same reflex that manifests itself when a cat, for example, puffs itself up

00:10:38.940 at the sight of a predator, like a dog, right? It's trying to make itself more impressive.

00:10:43.420 So it's that sense of awe we have is associated biologically with our response to predation.

00:10:51.660 But it's also, as you pointed out, see, I've thought about it. It's like when the cat's hair

00:10:57.500 stands on end, it's becoming more than it is, right? It's trying to display itself in the most

00:11:03.660 impressive manner possible. And there's a call to higher being that's part and parcel of the

00:11:10.940 experience of awe that seems like the psychological equivalent of that, right? You look up at the

00:11:17.900 night sky and it fills you with a sense of wonder and a sense of your remoteness and finiteness, but at

00:11:27.980 the same time, it also kind of compels you to be more than you are. It evokes curiosity.

00:11:32.780 That's right.

00:11:33.420 Very, it's very complex, eh, to see that happen.

00:11:38.540 Yeah. And the dirty secret, the shameful secret of what I do with my colleagues is that most of us,

00:11:44.700 myself, maybe an exception, are completely inured to it. We're so used to seeing, we're so used to

00:11:49.740 thinking of incomprehensible, literally astronomical numbers that we sometimes don't even bother to look

00:11:55.820 up at the sky. If there's an eclipse happening of the moon, oh, so what? I'll see it some other time.

00:12:00.140 Big deal. We know what that is. I know what that is. I know what causes it. It's not mystery.

00:12:03.500 It doesn't portend evil, doom, disaster, catastrophe. Those words have the word star, astro within them,

00:12:10.220 right? Evocative of the power that was once thought to be held within the night sky's domain.

00:12:15.180 Now, the scientists know we've extirpated the sort of, you know, mysterious gods and demons and so

00:12:22.060 forth. But at the same time, we've also, as I say, inert ourselves to the wonder that a normal

00:12:29.580 person feels when they encounter the mysterious. And I think it's quite amazing when you see,

00:12:35.580 you know, in my religion, you know, I'm Jewish and I'm practicing, I take it very seriously.

00:12:39.980 You know, we are commanded, one of the many things we're commanded to do in addition to the Sabbath and

00:12:45.020 honoring our parents and so forth, is when you come upon a miracle, you bless it. So we actually have

00:12:50.940 blessings for seeing a meteorite, for seeing a meteor shower, for seeing a rainbow, for these

00:12:56.380 phenomena, for seeing the ocean when you haven't seen it. That's good. It calls it, it marks it and

00:13:01.020 makes you note it. That's right. Well, there are, I suspect if your eyes were open, as they should be,

00:13:08.940 possibly, you'd see that all the time. That's right. Right. And you suggested something that's very

00:13:16.540 interesting. We know, neurophysiologically, that knowledge and memory inhibit perception.

00:13:24.220 Because what happens when you learn to perceive something, when you're familiar with it, is you

00:13:27.820 replace your presumption with the perception. Right.

00:13:30.860 Right. You replace the perception with your presumption.

00:13:34.780 That makes you super efficient, because you see what you know, but it distance you,

00:13:39.900 it distances you from the phenomena. That's right.

00:13:42.620 Phenomena means to shine forth, right? It distances you from that. And so then you gain efficiency

00:13:48.540 at the cost of wonder. That's part of the reason it's so nice to be around little kids. Yes.

00:13:52.940 Because they're not efficient. No.

00:13:54.860 That's for sure. And everything is new.

00:13:57.980 But everything's new, exactly. That's right. Yeah.

00:14:00.220 Are you familiar with the poem by Walt Whitman? Yes.

00:14:02.300 It's called, When I Heard the Learned Astronomer. Oh, no.

00:14:05.340 Yes, this is a different one. Oh, okay.

00:14:07.180 And it's really, they believe it was sort of written around the mid to late 1800s. And he had

00:14:13.660 heard a lecture about the recently discovered planet Neptune. And so Neptune was discovered

00:14:19.500 in the most remarkable way. It was the first object, what we would call dark matter. We saw

00:14:24.300 its unseen gravitational pull afflicting and affecting the orbit of an inner planet Uranus,

00:14:29.980 which is closer to the sun. We didn't know why the anomalous behavior of the inner planet was

00:14:34.300 being affected. It was predicted to exist. Truly dark matter discovered. And Whitman,

00:14:39.980 you know, was kind of reacting to that. And the poem starts off, it says, When I heard the learned

00:14:43.740 astronomer arranging with facts and tables and figures, et cetera, how quickly I became depressed

00:14:51.340 and despondent by the night sky brought to numbers. And then, and then he says, I walked outside

00:14:57.580 under the silent canopy of stars to be alone and marveled at their great beauty. Now, Richard

00:15:03.260 Feynman, another, you know, Whitman and Feynman, I always put them opposed. And I do this in the

00:15:07.820 course at Peterson Academy. I contrast them. He says, Feynman, the great, one of the greatest physicists

00:15:12.700 of all time. And a very cool and interesting person. Fascinating individual, complex, and incredibly

00:15:19.260 brilliant. And often, you know. Provocative. Yes. And often evoking Whitman's other famous

00:15:25.180 phrase, I contain multitudes, right? So, but in Feynman's case, he said, What is it about scientists

00:15:34.460 that you presume I see less than the poets? Poets will speak of Jupiter as if he is a god. But why do

00:15:41.820 I see less when I speak of him as a ball of methane surrounded by a retinue of planets? In other

00:15:48.220 words, can you see more or can you see less? My wife makes fun of me when I see a shirt. It'd be 1.00

00:15:52.900 great to see both. Yeah. So, that's the goal. And in fact, I say that in the course. I say,

00:15:57.740 you don't, at the end, I say, who do you side with? And half the students say Whitman and half

00:16:02.600 the students say Feynman. And I say, you're both right, in a sense. You should, you should embody

00:16:07.300 both characteristics. Well, you know, I've had the same experience in some ways teaching my students

00:16:12.380 about, let's say, analysis of dreams and stories. You know, if you're a naive movie attender,

00:16:21.140 movie coer, you don't, you don't really think about the movie, right? You certainly don't think

00:16:27.060 about it as an artifact. You don't think about the direction. You don't think about the cinematography.

00:16:30.860 You're just in the story. And

00:16:33.220 Hey, everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and

00:16:39.160 important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those

00:16:44.160 battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can

00:16:49.280 be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:16:53.700 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why

00:16:58.940 you might be feeling this way in his new series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that

00:17:04.000 while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're

00:17:09.300 suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope and there's a path to feeling better. Go to

00:17:15.680 Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety. Let this be the

00:17:21.880 first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:17:27.840 You know, in a way, that's where the most enjoyable capture takes place. And then when you become

00:17:35.860 critically minded, and you start to see the subtexts and to see the technology and to see the skill or

00:17:43.240 lack thereof, then it distances you from that. And that is a gain in that you're a more sophisticated

00:17:49.080 observer and probably less susceptible to manipulation. But it's a loss in that you lose

00:17:54.120 that embeddedness in the story. But my experience has been that with enough concentration on both,

00:18:02.400 then you can unite them and you can have the embeddedness in the experience and the deeper

00:18:07.940 understanding at the same time. And that's actually better.

00:18:11.040 That's the goal. So often, and this is why I was drawn to Peterson Academy. I've been a professor

00:18:17.320 for 21 years. You know, it's part of my identity as a human being, one of many. And I think, for me,

00:18:25.420 the opportunity to do something completely new, novel, and really interact with the type of

00:18:31.020 intellect, the curiosity that hasn't been beaten out because they don't have to learn partial

00:18:36.920 differential equations and they don't have to learn how to solder together a data acquisition system

00:18:41.420 and all sorts of other things that are very important for professional physicists that aspire

00:18:45.480 to do that. And maybe some of them will. And I've, in fact, been encountered by people that do want to

00:18:49.440 take that course further than what I present in Peterson Academy. But the point being, you know,

00:18:55.340 if you can maintain that wonder, if you can maintain that curiosity, and you are undeterred by failure.

00:19:04.080 You know, I always tell my students, when you solve a problem, guess what you win? You win a ticket to an

00:19:09.740 even harder problem. Yeah, right. And that's a good thing because...

00:19:12.660 That's like success in life. That's success. Exactly. It's deferring gratification. But the thing about science,

00:19:18.140 Jordan, as you know, you can't win science. You know, science is an infinite game, as Dweck would call it,

00:19:23.920 right? There's no such thing as completing... You've come to the end of science. You know, no one will ever do

00:19:29.680 that. No one will ever complete science. You may have the most knowledge. You may have a stack of Nobel

00:19:33.740 prizes, etc. But you can't complete science because Mother Nature is undefeatable, because 0.75

00:19:39.220 she's an infinite array of ever-retreating forces, I think Wigner called it. And the point being,

00:19:46.040 it's confusing because there's an ambiguity. The human mind hates ambiguity because we know to get

00:19:52.380 a tenured position is a finite game. There's only so many professors that can get it. To get, you know,

00:19:57.740 the highest score on a test, to get into graduate school, to get a post, all these things. So science is

00:20:02.880 comprised. It's an infinite game comprised of all these finite games. Nobel Prize. It only goes to

00:20:07.220 three people. So how do you navigate in those realms? And I think that people cleave towards the,

00:20:13.100 well, if I just do the hard things, the differential equations and the circuits and the...

00:20:18.160 If I master the finite games.

00:20:19.800 Yeah, those finite games. Then I will win the infinite game. And along the way,

00:20:22.980 they beat out of themselves, unfortunately, sort of the suicide of that curiosity that got them

00:20:29.220 interested in science to begin with. Or worse, you know, they subordinate their search for

00:20:32.980 beauty and truth to victory in one of the finite games. Yeah. Right. And that's like the equivalent

00:20:39.480 of propaganda in the arts is you're putting the cart before the horse. And that's a very big mistake.

00:20:44.560 You know, one of the things I learned in graduate school, I wouldn't say that I'm particularly

00:20:50.820 mathematically minded. You know, it's not something that comes with great ease to me. I had some

00:20:55.800 students who had that proclivity, and I could certainly see how different they were from me

00:21:00.720 in that regard. Although I could learn it if I put my mind to it. I probably had more trouble with

00:21:06.560 statistics in my career as a psychological researcher learning it as a graduate student than anything

00:21:12.180 else until I started doing my own studies. And then statistics became, it became as much fun

00:21:21.060 as gambling, like slot machine gambling. Because if you were doing a study you were interested in,

00:21:27.820 there was a moment in the statistical analysis where you pulled the lever, so to speak, and you could

00:21:32.520 see if you discovered something or not, or if all your work was for naught, if it was going to move you

00:21:37.740 forward. And so the thing that's interesting about the infinite game element of that is that

00:21:43.340 it's like a bricklayer who's laying one of 50,000 bricks when he's building a cathedral. If you just

00:21:52.300 think of the next brick, that's a pretty damn dismal occupation. But if you understand that each of the

00:21:59.040 incremental steps you're taking forward is in relationship to this infinite whole, then the

00:22:05.500 significance of the whole imbues the part. And if you're pursuing science properly, that is exact, you have

00:22:11.180 to do it that way. So it's interesting, you know, in the conception of the divine that's laid forth in

00:22:17.320 the story of Jacob's ladder is an infinite game in the same regard, because Jacob has a vision of a

00:22:23.360 ladder ascending upward with no pinnacle, right? And God is at the top of the spiraling ladder with no

00:22:30.420 pinnacle. Sure. But it is a vision of finite and infinite games, I think, but in relationship to the

00:22:37.820 moral domain rather than the scientific. Those probably overlap, though. And that overlap, I think, is what

00:22:43.900 we're talking about, right? Is that it's the call of beauty and truth as the fundamental motivation, not only the

00:22:50.960 fundamental motivation of the scientific inquiry, in that it's the pursuit that saturates all the sub

00:22:57.800 elements with meaning, but it's also the ethical pursuit that makes science possible. Because unless you're very

00:23:04.360 strongly aligned in your belief with your belief in the truth, you can't be a scientist, because you'll

00:23:11.660 put your career first. That's right. And then the whole bloody thing collapses, because, you know, another

00:23:15.620 thing you win as a scientist is evidence that you're an idiot and you were wrong, right? Because every time

00:23:22.120 you discover anything that's actually a discovery. Right. Another Feynman quote, science is the belief in the

00:23:27.820 ignorance of experts, not their knowledge, not their wisdom. Yeah. And look. Or the ignorance of you.

00:23:32.540 Well, that's right. Exactly. And you look at the word, look, you know more than anybody, you know,

00:23:37.780 what the meaning of words are, you know, and you know in Hebrew, the word for thing is the same as

00:23:42.460 the word for word, suggesting an entanglement that's inextricable. But in the sense, science,

00:23:51.260 let's look at the word science. What does science mean? It doesn't mean wisdom. No, that's sapiens.

00:23:56.380 That's sapiens. We are homo sapien. We are a man who is wise. What are we wise about, Jordan? That we're

00:24:01.040 going to die. That's the only thing that we know. That we know for sure is that we're going to die.

00:24:05.720 And it's interesting that it also comes up in the first chapters of Genesis, right? As you've spoken

00:24:10.220 about on many occasions. But the word science means knowledge. And what does the word knowledge

00:24:17.560 in Hebrew connote? Well, it connote Adam knew his wife. So, it's very different. The notion in sort of

00:24:25.120 the Greek, the Roman, the tradition of Asa, et cetera, that is coming down through us. And it's

00:24:30.500 very crucial to life. I mean, technology, science, and knowledge acquisition in general. That's sort

00:24:36.360 of one tradition. And the Hebrew tradition is a tradition where knowledge, as I say, means

00:24:41.280 something radically different. And the aspiration for wisdom, Torah, wisdom, knowledge, truth,

00:24:47.680 emunah, as you say, all these things have elements of illumination, but it's illumination.

00:24:51.800 Also, a relationship. Yes, a purpose. Purpose. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So, these things, you know,

00:24:57.980 and you should never confuse it. I mean, there's no one as dumb as, you know, someone who's brilliant.

00:25:04.240 You know, there's no one who will believe some of the dumbest things, dumbest propositions that you

00:25:09.080 couldn't convince that bricklayer you spoke about to believe than an intellectual, than an academic.

00:25:13.880 You know, they spoke of, Lenin spoke of useful idiots. Sometimes I think of useless geniuses.

00:25:20.800 You know, that some of my colleagues are useless geniuses. They're so bright. And then they'll

00:25:25.040 lead their credibility to the domain of wisdom, of which they have none.

00:25:29.060 Yeah. Yeah. And so, you'll find people—

00:25:30.460 Well, you know, the correlation between—there is no correlation between what you might describe

00:25:36.260 as ethical orientation, as psychometrically measured, and IQ. There's no correlation between

00:25:41.800 IQ and work ethic, for example. That just shocked me when I first discovered it. It's like,

00:25:46.940 what do you mean there's no correlation? You mean zero? Really? Like zero. You'd expect just maybe

00:25:54.600 on the basis of something like neurological integrity, that people with higher IQs might

00:25:59.320 be able to dedicate themselves to tasks over the long run more assiduously. Nope.

00:26:05.460 Nope.

00:26:05.700 No correlation whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's—and it's also the case, you know, and this has been

00:26:11.420 laid forward in the mythological representations forever, mythological characterizations, that

00:26:17.460 there's nothing—there's no sin greater than the prideful sin of the intellect.

00:26:23.700 Yes.

00:26:24.080 Right? Because it's extremely powerful and very, very inclined to worship itself and its own

00:26:29.740 creations. Right? Very bad.

00:26:31.800 It is the serpent. Right. Exactly. It is within all of us. And the smarter you get—look,

00:26:35.720 I've interviewed 21 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast, and never once—I mean, they've

00:26:40.560 all been brilliant. They've all been incredibly, you know, accomplished in their field, obviously,

00:26:44.800 to get to that level. And I've criticized the Nobel Prize, but not the people that win

00:26:47.960 it. You can't—I mean, the one rule I learned when I was asked to nominate winners on the two

00:26:52.460 occasions I've been asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize is that you can't nominate

00:26:56.000 yourself, right? So, that's the one rule that they adhere to that Alfred Nobel stipulated in

00:27:01.360 1896. But most other things they've disavowed, unfortunately, which is a grave sin, by the

00:27:08.240 way. Because, you know, in Judaism, the greatest mitzvah, which means commandment—people think

00:27:12.700 it means good deed. It doesn't mean good deed. It means commandment. You're commanded to do

00:27:15.960 certain things. And one of the things you're commanded to do that has the greatest utmost

00:27:19.540 importance is to bury the dead and to not leave a dead body unescorted. Why is that? Well,

00:27:25.040 it's the one thing they can't reciprocate, right? They can't—you bury the dead, they're not

00:27:29.100 going to bury you, right? By definition. And so, it's the ultimate altruistic, you know, beneficence

00:27:33.940 in a sense. And when Alfred Nobel wrote his will, he specified exactly what he wanted. He wanted to

00:27:38.420 go to one man who did the greatest accomplishments for the greatest benefit of mankind in the

00:27:47.340 preceding year. So, it was one person, preceding year, and it had to benefit all of humanity. So,

00:27:52.180 it was what we call, in Hebrew, a zava'ah, an ethical will. So, it wasn't just a will,

00:27:56.880 here's my money. He had no kids. He had no wife. He had no heirs to give the money to. So,

00:28:01.140 he gave it all, in the sense, towards the betterment of mankind. Literally, that's what

00:28:05.260 it says. But many of the other things they've disavowed. He can have three people win it.

00:28:10.180 They can win it for stuff done 30 years ago, 50 years ago. But one of the few things that they've

00:28:15.240 actually kept is this focus, if you will, that it should benefit. It should provide a benefit to

00:28:21.780 humanity. And then you wonder, well...

00:28:24.100 That's also a non-scientific element of science, right?

00:28:26.660 It's completely correct.

00:28:27.380 So, you agree with that?

00:28:28.400 Yeah, absolutely.

00:28:29.060 You know, one of the things I've been trying to work out conceptually, and I tried to talk

00:28:33.100 to Richard Dawkins about this, I wouldn't say with a tremendous amount of success,

00:28:39.540 science can't be at the bottom of human endeavor. It can't constitute the fundamental,

00:28:47.860 it can't constitute the foundation of human endeavor, because science itself has to be

00:28:52.500 embedded in an a priori moral framework that is not itself science.

00:28:57.920 And would you say then, just based on that, that somebody who identifies as a scientist

00:29:02.240 alone is fundamentally unhealthy? Is that maybe psychopathic?

00:29:06.380 I don't think you can do it, because the problem is, and you're pointing to this, it's like,

00:29:11.900 is it a defining characteristic of science that it serves the benefit, at least in intent,

00:29:19.340 let's say, it serves the benefit of life more abundant? That would be a good way of thinking

00:29:26.100 about it. It's human-centered, life more abundant. Well, see, I read a book at one point that was

00:29:32.700 written by an ex-KGB officer who claimed that before the Berlin Wall collapse, the Soviets had put

00:29:40.060 together a bio lab in Siberia that was working on a hybrid between Ebola and smallpox that could be

00:29:49.380 aerosolized, right? Now, that's science, right? Because if you accept the proposition that science

00:29:57.020 is value-free, and that all facts are equal, because that's what value-free means, both of those are like

00:30:03.940 very untenable philosophical propositions, but people do accept them. Then, well, were the scientific

00:30:11.360 experiments that were done by Unit 731 in Japan, in China, by the Japanese, was that science?

00:30:17.140 Fritz Haber.

00:30:17.400 They've been used, the data's been used.

00:30:20.160 Yep.

00:30:20.520 And so, if the exploratory endeavor is not motivated by the proper ethical striving,

00:30:28.320 you're not a scientist. And then, I think that actually works out practically, too. Like,

00:30:33.060 I was fortunate in my graduate advisor, who's still alive, I still work with him, Robert Peel,

00:30:40.340 who was a very, he was a scientist. And most scientists aren't, right? Most scientists are

00:30:45.720 journeymen. And I'm actually not even criticizing that, because for there to be any exceptional people

00:30:52.040 or any exceptional things, there has to be a lot of run-of-the-mill things. Like, even scientific

00:30:57.920 research, a lot of the publications are going to be the first publication of someone who doesn't

00:31:02.780 know what they're doing.

00:31:03.500 They're incremental.

00:31:04.260 Yeah. Yeah. And they're not likely to be correct or useful.

00:31:07.760 All PhDs are like that.

00:31:09.060 Right. Right. Right. Right. But that doesn't mean you...

00:31:11.040 No.

00:31:11.520 ...you have to dispense with them.

00:31:12.660 No, no, no.

00:31:13.200 Okay. So, Bob's insistence in the lab was, don't publish things that you know to be wrong,

00:31:21.120 even if you're tempted, because you will be tempted, because maybe you work on an experiment

00:31:25.480 for a year, and that's your master's thesis, and it doesn't work out. It's like, well, then what?

00:31:31.500 Right.

00:31:31.680 Well, that's a year, and it's supposed to take you a year. So, that's a big problem.

00:31:36.880 Yeah.

00:31:36.980 And you have to mentor someone in your lab to put the search for truth before their short-term

00:31:46.300 career orientation. And you can do that practically, because you can say, look, if you allow yourself

00:31:52.820 to take liberties with your statistical analysis, and you discover and publish something that

00:31:59.700 isn't true, you're going to believe it, and maybe you'll pursue it for the next 15 years,

00:32:07.360 and you're chasing a chimera. And not only that, so that will happen to your students and everyone

00:32:13.840 that your research influences. Is that what you want? Like, that's a... Maybe you'll get your postdoc

00:32:20.720 because of the publication, but you've destroyed your credibility and your career and your soul.

00:32:26.760 And your integrity.

00:32:27.980 Absolutely.

00:32:28.340 The problem is scientists don't... We don't get any ethical training. And I say that, you

00:32:33.960 know...

00:32:34.440 It's all implicit.

00:32:35.420 It's implicit that you're just going to learn it. Similarly, we don't get training in public

00:32:39.440 communication. I view my YouTube channel and my podcast, et cetera, as I don't get paid

00:32:43.980 for it. I don't know. The university, you know, the university has not, you know, revoked

00:32:47.600 my tenure, but they don't help with it. They don't provide any resources for it. They're, you

00:32:53.240 know, there's no antagonism. I do it because...

00:32:55.660 Well, that's true. At least they don't get paid for it.

00:32:56.640 No, I know. Your university...

00:32:58.120 Well, that's something.

00:32:59.760 But, no. And I have a great relationship with the chancellor and my deans and so forth. I'm

00:33:05.040 very blessed to be at where I am. And it's one of the best campuses for many other reasons. But

00:33:09.480 all this to say, I don't get, you know, it's not part of my duties as a professor to do this,

00:33:14.100 the explanations that I do and provide interviews with Nobel Prize winners. I do it because I believe in

00:33:19.980 two things. I believe I have, and I believe I have a moral obligation, and maybe you'll agree

00:33:24.980 too, maybe not. I have a moral obligation. I'm taking your money. I'm taking taxpayer money.

00:33:30.320 Imagine if you're the person who installed the countertops in your home, and they said to you,

00:33:36.920 you said, you know, excuse me, you know, sir, you know, how's it going with the... I'm sorry,

00:33:41.240 Jordan. What I do is so specialized. It's so erudite. You cannot possibly understand it. Even

00:33:49.980 with your PhD and your success story, you'd say, go to hell. You don't talk to your boss like that.

00:33:56.720 I am your boss. The public is our boss. The public...

00:34:00.240 Well, it's worse than that, isn't it? Because if the public wants to do their own research online,

00:34:05.240 they'll find that most of it, despite the fact that it's publicly funded, is behind not only a

00:34:10.400 paywall, but an appallingly expensive and inaccessible paywall, like $50 for 24-hour access to a

00:34:17.660 single article. And a lot of it is p-hacked and, you know, implicitly, you know, hacked to get the

00:34:23.700 results that were desired, whether it's for some drug company's benefit. But even beyond that,

00:34:28.160 the work-a-day scientists, I'm talking to the person in the lab next door to me, not some, you

00:34:32.200 know, shill for Pfizer or something like that. I'm talking about just a work-a-day scientist.

00:34:35.920 And, you know, she or he will say to me, I'm not good at that. I'm sorry. You, Brian,

00:34:40.400 you have a gift to it. By the way, I don't think I'm that good. But I do think that I have an

00:34:46.080 innate desire for the 1% gains that can be made by iteration. That every iteration, I try to get

00:34:51.060 1% better. My conversation, the questions I ask, the types of conversations that I have and the

00:34:56.680 depth that I go into. And I think that's my unique skill, if anything. But...

00:35:00.440 It was like you're pointing to, though. A lot of that's a consequence of practice.

00:35:04.300 It's practice. That's what I'm saying.

00:35:05.320 I stopped lecturing with notes 30 years ago. And when I first started, especially when I was

00:35:13.560 lecturing about things that I hadn't thoroughly mastered, which is the case when you first start

00:35:18.160 lecturing, I used PowerPoint and I used fairly detailed notes. But my intent was to dispense

00:35:24.020 with that. And that was incremental improvement over a substantial amount of time.

00:35:28.380 And you can see it. I mean, your videos are online from Harvard, from Toronto, etc.

00:35:31.800 But when I say that to them, they say, well, I'm just not good at that. And I say, oh, yes,

00:35:36.040 I forgot. I forgot. I forgot, you know, to my friend. I'll say, yeah, you were born knowing

00:35:41.460 quantum electrodynamics.

00:35:42.920 Yeah.

00:35:43.240 No, no, no. I work really hard. Oh, oh. So you work hard at that which you think is valuable.

00:35:48.820 So that means you're telling, you're admitting, you're copying to the fact that you don't think

00:35:52.140 communicating to your boss is important. And I find it shameful. And I don't think that everybody

00:35:57.580 should be out of the lab, you know, tanking 20% of their time and learning how to communicate

00:36:01.980 like Neil deGrasse Tyson. But they should spend some of that time.

00:36:05.760 Maybe they should spend 20% of their time because the thing is, well, it also forces you

00:36:10.280 to put your thoughts in order.

00:36:12.260 Yes.

00:36:12.720 You know, I get, I develop a lot of my ideas in consequence of lecturing.

00:36:18.740 I agree.

00:36:18.960 I would say the majority of them, right? But that's also because, you see, people also

00:36:26.340 lecture very oddly because people generally conceive of a lecture as the reading of a text

00:36:34.780 or something like that. And it's not.

00:36:37.240 A lecture is a performance. And I've thought about this for a long time. It's a lecture

00:36:41.240 theater after all.

00:36:42.140 Yeah.

00:36:42.380 So what are you doing in a lecture? Well, you're eliciting enthusiasm by demonstrating

00:36:47.300 your love of the topic. That's partly what you're doing. And you're embodying that. So

00:36:51.080 you're a model.

00:36:51.760 You're telling a story.

00:36:53.120 Like, I've really thought through explicitly what I do in my public lectures. And now I

00:36:58.620 really know what I do.

00:36:59.800 I mean, I have a question in mind that's related to a long-term pursuit. So it's an issue I've

00:37:06.440 been interested in forever. Before I do a public lecture, I formulate the question that

00:37:13.480 seems from a set of potential questions that seems to be relevant and at hand for that day.

00:37:19.800 And then I try to get farther in the answer than I have before. And so what I'm modeling is

00:37:25.660 the process. I'm engaging in the process of intellectual exploration. And so that's thought,

00:37:32.020 question, hypothesis, which is something akin to revelation, by the way. It's like question,

00:37:38.160 potential answer, critical analysis.

00:37:41.420 Iteration.

00:37:41.640 Yep, exactly, exactly. And so I think that has the same structure, by the way, as the

00:37:46.960 mythological quest, right? You specify a treasure of unknown magnitude.

00:37:51.840 In the cave.

00:37:52.520 Yeah, exactly. And then you think, well, how do we make our way there? And, you know, there's

00:37:57.500 a juggling element to that, keeping the plates in the air, or a high wire act. That's another

00:38:04.480 way of thinking about it. Because if it's a real quest, you don't know if it's going to be

00:38:09.860 successful.

00:38:10.300 That's right.

00:38:10.700 So if I go on stage with a question in mind, and I'm trying to push myself farther than I've got

00:38:16.160 before, I don't know if that's going to happen. Now, everyone in the audience and me are extremely

00:38:22.860 happy if, as a consequence of this quest-like exploration, there's a punchline at the end,

00:38:30.160 right?

00:38:30.400 A conclusion.

00:38:30.980 Treasure chest, yeah.

00:38:31.780 And I think I've got better at ensuring that that will happen as I practice this. But

00:38:36.040 it's also a blast, you know?

00:38:37.880 It is.

00:38:38.240 There's no reason you can't practice that, you know?

00:38:40.540 Absolutely.

00:38:40.760 And you're right that it's a travesty that people who will be university lecturers aren't

00:38:46.140 trained to do that.

00:38:47.000 And they're trained to do diversity, inclusion.

00:38:50.180 Yeah, yeah. Well, that's true.

00:38:51.580 You're trained.

00:38:52.100 You're trained how to get-

00:38:53.280 Or they're punished for not doing it, at least.

00:38:55.360 Well, you won't even get in the door now. You won't even have your applications reviewed.

00:38:58.680 I'm interested to see what happens in the coming, you know, administration as we speak.

00:39:03.560 Yeah, so let's investigate that a little bit.

00:39:07.280 So, I mean, part of the reason that we established Peterson Academy, there was a bunch of reasons.

00:39:14.460 One was, I have access to an endless supply of great thinkers.

00:39:19.240 So, that's convenient, like super convenient and fun.

00:39:22.740 And so, and then we could see no reason why the best lecturers in the world couldn't be identified

00:39:30.200 given a public platform and offered the opportunity to lecture about what they love

00:39:37.140 in a manner that's extremely professionally produced.

00:39:40.880 And I'm extremely, very, very happy about the way the lectures have turned out.

00:39:45.400 I mean, my daughter, Michaela, and her husband, Jordan Fuller,

00:39:49.660 have taken the lead in the production side of Peterson Academy.

00:39:54.320 And I think they've just knocked it out of the heart.

00:39:57.980 I've traveled literally trillions of micrometers and billions of seconds to be here.

00:40:03.900 And we are going to explore this universe together.

00:40:06.880 Cosmology is the oldest science known to humanity.

00:40:12.300 Since cavemen and women, people have wondered where did everything come from?

00:40:18.160 We're not going to do any alien autopsies or anything in this class,

00:40:21.500 but we are going to cover a lot of fascinating questions.

00:40:24.560 Where do we come from?

00:40:25.520 Where are we going?

00:40:26.440 What is the universe made of?

00:40:28.260 How can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos?

00:40:32.660 When you look back in space, you look back in time.

00:40:36.880 It's amazing we've been able to do this, to study the properties of the cosmos,

00:40:42.120 timescales of billions of years, size scales billions of times bigger than our own.

00:40:46.740 And now the question is, can we go back to time equals zero?

00:40:49.940 Can we go back to before time equals zero?

00:40:52.880 And what does that even mean?

00:40:55.360 I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions,

00:40:58.840 because without great questions, there can be no great answers.

00:41:02.000 And without great answers, there can be no understanding.

00:41:06.880 You know, Jordan, I always joke, our profession, I call it the second oldest profession, right?

00:41:18.300 I mean, there have been universities since the University of Bologna in Italy was established in 1082.

00:41:24.200 And look how much has changed.

00:41:26.000 There's a guy or a girl taking a piece of rock and scraping on another piece of rock.

00:41:31.900 How innovative.

00:41:33.020 After a thousand bloody years, we've done almost nothing different.

00:41:37.760 Okay, so there's PowerPoint.

00:41:38.860 And that's not that much different, let's be honest, right?

00:41:41.960 But what if there were, you know, the opportunity to bring in literal,

00:41:46.600 the visualizations that they've done on my first course, and I can't wait to see the second course.

00:41:50.240 And my third course is, see, what's nice, I'm an experimental physicist.

00:41:54.280 I'm not Brian Greene, you know, I'm not manipulating wormholes like my friend Kip Thorne and so forth,

00:42:00.440 who did the science behind the movie Interstellar.

00:42:03.620 I was the advisor to Christopher Nolan.

00:42:06.220 I'm not a theoretical physicist.

00:42:07.540 So what do I do?

00:42:08.040 I do experiments.

00:42:08.820 The more experiments, the better.

00:42:10.220 But you only do another experiment because some aspect of the previous experiment failed, right?

00:42:14.620 And that's fine.

00:42:15.360 That's part of the iterative process of science that makes it so, not only so important and so annealed,

00:42:22.640 so hardened by truth in the process of attempting to achieve truth, and perfectly as it may be.

00:42:29.740 But getting things wrong.

00:42:31.660 Look what happens when you get something wrong.

00:42:33.460 Let's be honest.

00:42:34.060 It's a surprise, right?

00:42:35.320 You didn't think you were going to go down and you're going to discover dust instead of the Big Bang,

00:42:39.500 which is what happened to me in my, I described in my first book.

00:42:42.340 We thought we saw the gravitational wave aftermath of the inflationary universe that we talked about in my first podcast episode with you.

00:42:50.000 But instead, that led to the Simons Observatory.

00:42:54.000 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.

00:43:04.460 So the surprise was not a failure.

00:43:07.100 I mean, look, when you solve a puzzle, you get a little bit of thrill.

00:43:09.940 And remember when you were a kid, you had a Rubik's Cube, you had this thing or that.

00:43:13.180 You'd solve the puzzle and you would do something that no adult does.

00:43:16.780 You'd do it again.

00:43:17.600 Like, my kids do this all the time.

00:43:19.180 They solve a Rubik's Cube, then another one messes it up, then the other one solves it.

00:43:22.680 And, like, I already solved it.

00:43:24.140 Like, I don't need to rewrite my PhD thesis.

00:43:25.980 Like, I already wrote it, you know.

00:43:27.380 But there's a little bit of that thrill that you get when you are surprised.

00:43:32.700 Well, the surprise, the thing is, is that if you lay out a prediction in keeping with your understanding of the world and something else occurs, you have no idea what you've discovered.

00:43:48.080 Now, what you might have discovered is that your reputation is now shot and your future is looking gloomy, right?

00:43:53.900 I'm sure that that's not going to happen.

00:43:55.540 But you also have no idea, like, that's a reservoir of unrevealed truth of indeterminate magnitude, right?

00:44:02.820 And so, 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,

00:44:13.620 I probably just stumbled across something that was even more important than what I was investigating.

00:44:17.960 That's right.

00:44:18.240 If I can just figure out what the hell it is.

00:44:20.040 I say this to my students all the time.

00:44:21.540 I say flaws in your experiment, in your theory, lead to new laws.

00:44:27.120 It's not like we studied.

00:44:28.220 Do you know, Jordan, that we're made of matter, right?

00:44:30.020 But in the early universe, we think that almost there was an exact symmetry.

00:44:35.780 It's one of these guiding principles of physics, that there are symmetries.

00:44:39.340 Conservation of energy is a type of symmetry.

00:44:41.840 Angular momentums conservation is another type of symmetry.

00:44:45.320 Displacement, the symmetry, those are all the things that we say the laws of physics shouldn't change.

00:44:50.180 They should not look different in a mirror or upside down or on Pluto or in Arizona.

00:44:55.800 It should not make a difference who you are, where you are.

00:44:58.440 It's kind of the great democratic process of science known as the Lorentz principle of Lorentz invariance that Galileo really crystallized and then later eventually—

00:45:07.360 Fundamental things apply everywhere in all directions.

00:45:10.100 Fundamental truth to the extent that we can perceive it.

00:45:13.660 And so, you know, when you do something and you find out, well, this is not correct, like the fact that the postulate was, and all the greatest scientists thought, there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter.

00:45:24.500 Well, guess what, Jordan?

00:45:25.220 We wouldn't be here if that were true.

00:45:26.520 All the matter particles would annihilate with the antimatter particles, and the universe would be a universe of complete, barren, sterile radiation.

00:45:34.740 Pretty boring unless you happen to be a photon.

00:45:37.400 But that's not the case.

00:45:38.560 And it's obvious just from—we exist.

00:45:40.400 You know, I—Cogito Ergo Sum.

00:45:42.100 We know that that's not true.

00:45:43.520 We can observe it.

00:45:44.480 I refute it thus, you know.

00:45:45.760 Kick the rock.

00:45:46.600 It's made of matter.

00:45:47.520 Where's all the antimatter?

00:45:48.800 Is it segregated some galaxy that we haven't been to yet?

00:45:51.740 No, we don't think that's the case.

00:45:53.060 So where did it go?

00:45:54.000 Well, we have to look how symmetric is the universe, how beautifully, finely balanced, tuned, if you believe in an intelligent designer, how finely tuned did he tune it to be?

00:46:05.260 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.

00:46:14.240 For every billion particles of antimatter, there was a billion and one particle of matter.

00:46:20.740 So the two matching a mirror image, matter and antimatter particles, they destroyed each other.

00:46:27.140 And what was left, one particle of matter, and the rest was a bath of photons.

00:46:31.400 Right.

00:46:31.640 Without that—

00:46:31.980 So far less than a rounding error.

00:46:33.620 It is not a rounding error.

00:46:34.840 It's exquisitely balanced.

00:46:36.560 Now, we don't know why.

00:46:37.620 Some theists will say, it's intelligently designed.

00:46:40.600 And you can ask certain questions.

00:46:41.880 How well designed does the universe have to be?

00:46:44.680 In other words, how finely tuned?

00:46:45.840 You have a good ear for classical music.

00:46:47.640 My wife enjoyed talking to you about it.

00:46:49.760 You know, she plays the violin.

00:46:51.180 I play Spotify.

00:46:52.420 So I have no musical ability whatsoever.

00:46:54.800 But you guys—but you could perceive the note A, 440 hertz, right?

00:46:59.460 Your ear can actually perceive if it's 441 hertz.

00:47:02.760 In other words, one out of 400.

00:47:04.820 So less than 1%.

00:47:06.140 A quarter of a percent mistuning, you can perceive it.

00:47:09.380 How well tuned does the universe have to be in order for us to be having this conversation?

00:47:14.420 And then the supposition is, well, if it's extremely finely tuned across a whole vast panoply of different areas, from the strength of these constants, the number of protons, to the number of antiprotons, then, you know, you might start to think this is suggestive.

00:47:28.820 But it's not a scientific hypothesis, right?

00:47:31.940 We can't say—we can always say God, and we can always say there was no God.

00:47:35.500 But you can't prove it.

00:47:36.620 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.

00:47:42.760 Wonderful podcast.

00:47:44.320 And we spent four hours together, and one of those hours was just about me—him asking me to prove God scientifically.

00:47:51.740 I said, I'm sorry, Stephen, again and again.

00:47:53.380 I cannot do that.

00:47:54.160 He's searching.

00:47:54.780 He's reaching for something.

00:47:56.060 I just was on his podcast yesterday.

00:47:57.960 Oh, you were?

00:47:58.240 Okay.

00:47:58.620 Yeah.

00:47:59.240 Well, he probably talked more about God with me than he did with you.

00:48:01.820 And I was quite surprised that he did because I'm a cosmologist.

00:48:05.020 I'm not a theologian.

00:48:05.460 It's a hot topic these days.

00:48:06.680 It is.

00:48:07.580 And it's been—yeah, I always say I'd kill for 1% of God's, you know, book sales.

00:48:11.740 But, you know, and I told him, look, what you're searching for, I can't necessarily give you.

00:48:17.060 I can give you the approach to me that I find persuasive.

00:48:19.940 But it's not going to be persuasive to you because it's specific to me and my life history and how I understand how I got to be who I am.

00:48:26.620 And it doesn't use the strength of quantum electrodynamics.

00:48:29.580 And it doesn't use all sorts of things.

00:48:31.200 And when you search for that, I think—I told him, I said, Stephen, you know, and I think I got this from you in the conversation you had with Dennis Prager that I was privileged to be a part of in Santa Barbara about five, six years ago.

00:48:42.960 And you said, you know, who am I to say—this is you—who am I to say I believe in God?

00:48:48.080 Like, what is a man to say such a thing?

00:48:50.140 I mean, it's so ridiculous.

00:48:51.280 And I've turned that around.

00:48:52.120 I say, I don't believe in gravity.

00:48:54.500 And he's like, what are you talking about?

00:48:55.660 And Stephen said, you're a physicist.

00:48:57.220 You have to believe in gravity.

00:48:57.860 And I said, no, if I take this meteorite and I drop it, I don't believe it's—I have evidence for it.

00:49:03.580 Yeah.

00:49:04.180 What is the notion of evidence?

00:49:05.840 It means it's something we can't necessarily define, but we can say it's certainly not faith.

00:49:10.500 I don't have faith that it's going to do that.

00:49:12.760 We have empirical evidence.

00:49:14.900 DNA leads to, you know, leads to the genetic, you know, inheritance that we have.

00:49:20.240 Those things you don't have to take on faith.

00:49:22.040 You have evidence for them.

00:49:23.280 So science and religion—science should not be used—it's not one of its tools, its best purposes.

00:49:29.180 You know, you have a hammer.

00:49:30.160 You don't use it to screw in a screw.

00:49:32.960 You have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed or perhaps best.

00:49:36.860 Well, that's what I've often found that often—what would you say?

00:49:41.800 You've come to the conclusion, I don't like arguments from design as proofs for the existence of God.

00:49:47.120 Yeah.

00:49:47.380 And there's a variety of reasons for that.

00:49:49.400 What—I'd like your opinion about one of them.

00:49:51.460 Sure.

00:49:51.560 I mean, the fine-tuning argument I find specious, and maybe I'm wrong about this, because I think that you can obliviate its unlikelihood with an evolutionary argument.

00:50:08.620 It's like, well, if life evolved under these conditions, it's not surprising that there's a tight tuning between what's necessary for life and the conditions of the universe, no matter how improbable they are, because this form of life wouldn't exist without that form of material reality constituting the substrate.

00:50:32.260 And so, if something has adapted to something unlikely, the unlikeliness of what it's adapted to doesn't presume a designer.

00:50:42.280 Right.

00:50:42.580 I think there are more powerful arguments.

00:50:44.740 I'm going to give you this book right now.

00:50:46.560 So, this is the new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle With God.

00:50:49.800 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.

00:50:59.520 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.

00:51:07.540 I think the case, I think the rapprochement between science and religion is not going to be found in use of materialist reductionism to prove the existence of a designer.

00:51:23.040 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.

00:51:38.460 So, for example, Cardinal Newman, a famous Catholic theologian, his existence proof for God was an argument from design, which is an argument that's been around for a long time.

00:51:54.200 It was much more akin to something that's laid out in a sequence of Old Testament stories.

00:51:59.000 There's an identity proclaimed in the story of Elijah and the story of Jonah, Job as well, to some degree, that one of the manifestations of God is the voice of conscience.

00:52:14.560 And I really like that argument, but more it's a definition, you see, not so much an argument.

00:52:20.960 Because before you talk about the existence of God, you have to say what the hell it is that you're investigating.

00:52:28.140 That's right.

00:52:28.800 And so resonant, that phrase that you used that, you know, is tattooed on my brain.

00:52:34.060 You know, who am I to do that?

00:52:35.860 I found it as a call to kind of a clarion call because it made me think, look, Jordan, there's, what, a billion, you know, Hindus and Buddhists and so forth.

00:52:46.760 It can't only be that Judea Christian, you know, theology is correct.

00:52:52.800 It's the only approach, right?

00:52:54.540 It can't be the only approach.

00:52:55.820 And maybe it's not the only truth.

00:52:57.520 In other words, maybe there's, just assume this proposition and then you can take it apart.

00:53:03.740 Assume all religions that have at their base a moral goodness, an aspect of improving human flourishing and the human condition, not some nihilistic, you know, witchcraft or whatever that seems to serve no theology, teleology whatsoever.

00:53:16.980 But where there is clearly, and we know that Christianity and Judaism have this embedded within them and, you know, Buddhism I'm less familiar with, but as elements of that.

00:53:24.600 And take away the theology and just talk about the values.

00:53:29.160 There's an equivalence class in mathematical terms of all religions that practice good values.

00:53:33.800 They have this in common.

00:53:35.200 Whatever this is, this notion of human flourishing and goodness and treatment and so forth.

00:53:40.160 Again, proposition, I'm not saying it's true.

00:53:42.120 Assume it's true.

00:53:43.120 Just assume that's true.

00:53:44.180 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.

00:53:53.660 We believe the fundamental element is called the photon field.

00:53:57.040 That the field, which exists everywhere at all times in all places, that that is what's fundamental.

00:54:02.740 And then this photon, you know, the human eye is miraculous.

00:54:05.300 We can see a single photon.

00:54:06.480 Right.

00:54:06.740 In the right circumstances.

00:54:08.080 Right.

00:54:08.200 If it were dark adapted, one photon, yeah, it's amazing.

00:54:11.780 And that's part of the loss you spoke about earlier, where we think about the loss of the night sky.

00:54:16.340 I'm curious.

00:54:16.820 We'll talk some other time about how the human psychology will be robbed of this.

00:54:20.900 And maybe that will do something like the having phthalates or microplastics. 0.79

00:54:26.100 Those things are tangible.

00:54:27.140 But the intangible loss of the night sky from all places on Earth, perhaps, God forbid.

00:54:31.920 But let's just say it has.

00:54:32.880 Anyway, getting back to my proposition.

00:54:34.020 Imagine God is a field so that – and then each – what we see as a photon or what we see as Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity is an instantiation, is actually the particle version of it, if you will, of a field that exists throughout all space and all time.

00:54:51.960 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.

00:55:05.120 And so what if the – you know, the fruits of the tree are sort of proof of what it was made to do, right?

00:55:11.120 An apple tree doesn't produce a grapefruit, and each – a honeybee doesn't produce a spider web.

00:55:15.720 So the instantiation, how do these things, you know, connect to one another, it's a relational system, and that is –

00:55:23.660 Well, I think the great comparative investigators of religion, Mircea Eliade, probably foremost among them, he was part of Jung's broad school, and maybe played a role equivalent to that of Jung.

00:55:39.900 They certainly identified the same kind of patterns in profound religious thinking that you can see characterizing literature.

00:55:55.100 I mean, literature, stories are identifiable because they are manifestations of an underlying pattern.

00:56:02.340 And I think you can make that case in the religious domain.

00:56:05.240 I would make that case biologically in part by – this is the way I conceptualize it – is that there's a virtually infinite number of ways that you can interact with someone, but there's a finite number of ways, extremely restricted and finite number of ways that you can interact with someone in a manner they and you approve of simultaneously.

00:56:27.500 Like a father, right, like a parent, right.

00:56:29.080 Or two kids playing a game.

00:56:31.080 Now, see, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, he thought of that as the origin of morality.

00:56:35.740 And Piaget's goal was actually a rapprochement between science and religion.

00:56:40.180 He looked at play as the origin of that in part.

00:56:44.100 That was very, very smart.

00:56:45.360 Okay, so now there's many ways that we could interact.

00:56:49.080 Some of them we'll jointly appreciate.

00:56:52.740 Okay, in consequence of that appreciation, we'll want to continue them.

00:56:56.380 That's the establishment of a relationship.

00:56:58.080 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.

00:57:09.180 Now, that's an even smaller number of potential games.

00:57:13.040 Well, those games are going to have a pattern.

00:57:15.960 And it's the pattern of human interaction, sustainable human interaction.

00:57:19.860 My suspicion is that conscience as an instinct indicates a violation of the rules of that game.

00:57:27.340 And I suspect further that that's universal.

00:57:30.680 Now, out of that, a realm of story is going to emerge.

00:57:35.060 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.

00:57:44.180 Or comprehensible games.

00:57:45.400 Those are going to have a universality across cultures.

00:57:48.780 Now, cultures are going to vary in the sophistication with which they represent those games.

00:57:56.220 But it's almost like making the same claim that obviously all languages are the same because they're identifiable as languages and they're characteristic of human beings.

00:58:11.560 But within the family of languages, there's commonality still, grammatical structure, there's nouns and verbs, like there's tremendous commonality.

00:58:21.620 But there's also tremendous variability.

00:58:24.620 So I think that religious domain is analogous to that.

00:58:28.020 But my sense, I've done a fair bit of study of comparative religion is my sense that the Judeo-Christian endeavor proceeded farther along the line of explicit representation than any other religious system.

00:58:48.500 Now, we could debate that, but, you know, that's not much different than saying that Western cultures are the most literate, which is, that's the case.

00:59:01.100 Yeah, that's a fact.

00:59:01.580 So, yeah, definitely.

00:59:03.140 And the Jews thought there early.

00:59:05.240 Mm-hmm, yeah.

00:59:06.020 And I always say, you know, we have the Eskimos and, you know, in northern Canada reputed to have 12 words for snow.

00:59:12.940 And you find that with the Jews. 0.99

00:59:14.680 You find there's six different types of words for knowledge and wisdom and intuition and, you know, you can identify them.

00:59:22.440 They don't have as many words for snow.

00:59:23.820 And so what were their tools, what was their environment like?

00:59:26.560 Was it saturated with religion?

00:59:29.180 And with literacy.

00:59:30.440 Yeah, and with literacy and, you know, the language and being able to communicate that as well, but also expressing something which must be intrinsic.

00:59:37.420 And I find when I, I hosted Richard Dawkins in Vancouver, Ian asked me to come up.

00:59:42.700 I had him on my podcast for two episodes for his most recent book.

00:59:47.220 And I'm always, you know, kind of, and I've had Sam Harris on the last year as well.

00:59:52.400 And the thing that's frustrating to me about when I talk to scientists like them is how simple their understanding is, quite frankly, of religion, specifically Judeo-Christian.

01:00:03.340 I'm not an expert in anything.

01:00:04.920 I mean, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church as a kid, a complicated story.

01:00:08.060 But I'm born Jewish, two Jewish parents, and I'm Jewish to this day.

01:00:11.560 But the point, their understanding of things.

01:00:14.780 Like, I said to Richard, you know, in Vancouver, 1,000 people there, it was wonderful.

01:00:19.220 People coming up, tears in their eyes, thank you for making me an atheist.

01:00:21.660 And I found it so depressing.

01:00:24.400 And because of the richness, and by the way, I often call myself a practicing agnostic, meaning, which I think is in harmony with your famous statement that I mentioned before.

01:00:35.600 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.

01:00:44.460 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.

01:00:50.960 The Savior, and he died for my sins.

01:00:54.200 It's harder for Jews to relate to that.

01:00:56.300 But I stipulate that they feel that way.

01:00:58.860 But to say that you are an atheist, like that is your identity, is a very strange thing to me to believe.

01:01:07.700 Especially from these brilliant men like Sam and like Richard.

01:01:11.680 Because they have such simplistic ideas and knowledge.

01:01:15.140 Well, the thing that's odd about Sam, too, in that regard, is that he's drifted into a kind of a visionary Buddhism.

01:01:23.400 And I think I understand why.

01:01:26.480 Like, one of the characteristics of the meditative tradition that Sam is partaking in is that the God of that meditative tradition is extraordinarily ineffable.

01:01:39.640 Not defined and also not concretized into ritual or story.

01:01:44.580 Now, the advantage to that is that you can't criticize it intellectually.

01:01:48.380 You can't falsify it.

01:01:48.980 Well, that's exactly right.

01:01:50.720 You know, and I see that in the Christian tradition, the Orthodox Church has been the most resistant to woke idiocy. 0.91

01:01:58.500 Partly because it's so embedded in non-propositional tradition.

01:02:03.280 Right.

01:02:03.880 Right?

01:02:04.240 Liturgy and ritual.

01:02:05.620 That, well, how are you going to criticize?

01:02:07.840 It's like criticizing dance.

01:02:09.180 Yeah.

01:02:09.360 Like, you're just, or music.

01:02:11.000 You're just talking to get anywhere with it.

01:02:12.240 The taste is not disputable.

01:02:14.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:15.300 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.

01:02:20.960 Right, right.

01:02:21.460 It's so simplistic, and Sam, to some extent, is worse just from the perspective that he's so, he's so persuasive.

01:02:28.680 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, you know, has any verbal crutches whatsoever.

01:02:38.680 And I don't mean to jinx our conversation.

01:02:40.340 But he just speaks in complete, he speaks in prose, as they say, you know, paragraphs.

01:02:45.180 And, you know, when we talk about things, very simple things, why don't you do, you know, what is your feeling about, you know, Judaism that made you reject, you know, I guess his dad is Jewish, I forget.

01:02:57.920 And, well, it just takes slavery. 1.00

01:02:59.720 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.

01:03:06.860 Are we going to have slavery in it?

01:03:08.080 I said, Sam, this is so, this is like my, you know, seven-year-old learns this, you know, in school, in her Talmud class.

01:03:15.800 Like, you can't be serious.

01:03:17.540 Like, you think that slavery meant, like, black African slave trade, you know, in the deep south in America.

01:03:24.960 And it's just not that.

01:03:26.620 And as we go through it, I taught him, you know, what it meant to have a slave.

01:03:30.660 By the way, Moses is called a slave of God.

01:03:32.760 Did that mean that Moses was whipped by God?

01:03:34.360 No, it means he's a servant.

01:03:35.660 And there was this concept called indentured servitude, which is actually a kindness.

01:03:40.100 If you couldn't pay your debt to me, Jordan, and you were going to steal something, no, no, no.

01:03:43.940 I would give you, basically employ you, and I provide food and shelter.

01:03:47.380 And by the way, sometimes you wouldn't want to leave.

01:03:49.980 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. 0.99

01:03:58.140 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.

01:04:06.040 And so this was meant to show as an outward symbol to the world that I chose not to be free.

01:04:10.380 And we know many people choose to be slaves of a different kind rather than be free men and women.

01:04:15.720 But I said, he had no idea about this.

01:04:18.100 Well, it's also the case that, like, first of all, the entire story of Exodus is about the movement from slavery and tyranny to freedom.

01:04:27.320 So, and that's like, that's a major part of the biblical library.

01:04:31.960 And then, even more importantly, the metaphysical insistence is that if you're not a slave to God, let's say, so to speak, there's something that you're a slave to.

01:04:47.220 You might be a slave to yourself.

01:04:48.240 Yeah, and that's not appropriate.

01:04:49.840 Or a slave to your whims.

01:04:51.200 Your work.

01:04:51.540 And that's what hedonistic self-gratification is.

01:04:54.100 It's like, I'm free.

01:04:55.360 It's like, no, you're not.

01:04:56.660 You're a slave to your whims.

01:04:57.820 The most common slavery that scientists practice is workaholism.

01:05:01.960 They work 24-7.

01:05:03.400 They work six, you know, all days of the week.

01:05:05.780 They're so fascinated because it's so intoxicating.

01:05:08.440 And 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.

01:05:18.380 It might be small.

01:05:18.980 It might be incremental.

01:05:20.100 Maybe it's not, you know.

01:05:20.940 Yeah, but you also don't know.

01:05:22.020 But you don't know.

01:05:22.680 And you don't know what these little seeds.

01:05:24.060 Hot on the trail, man.

01:05:25.200 Yeah, you may blossom into something so wonderful.

01:05:27.460 And that's what's so great about science.

01:05:29.300 But it's addictive.

01:05:29.960 And I tell my students, you have to work.

01:05:32.080 But people forget, Jordan, right?

01:05:33.560 Before it says, you know, on the seventh day you shall rest, it says six days you must work.

01:05:38.400 In other words, it's not optional.

01:05:39.160 It's a command.

01:05:39.700 It's a mitzvah, command form. 0.87

01:05:41.140 Hebrew has English doesn't. 1.00

01:05:42.700 You must work, Jordan, because you can't appreciate the true sense of soul society, you know, satiating on your soul unless you have that feeling of accomplishment, of working the earth, of working the laboratory.

01:05:56.260 But if you only do that, if you only do that, you're a slave.

01:05:59.720 I don't care.

01:06:00.260 You might have a Nobel Prize, but you're a slave.

01:06:03.480 And so, yeah, when I talked to Richard and I talked, I came away, you know, somewhat depressed.

01:06:08.860 Because also, you know, as you know, in Judaism, the word Judaism comes from the word gratitude, hodo, hodea, which means to give grace, to give gratitude towards God.

01:06:17.220 You know, Judah's name for the thanksgiving that his mother gave to God.

01:06:22.200 So, it's endemic, and that's why we do say blessings, because you can't look at a meteorite, a meteor shower.

01:06:27.880 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?

01:06:34.300 That seems to be impossible.

01:06:36.280 So, it's, I view it as more—

01:06:37.420 It's great gratitude is also the opposite of resentment.

01:06:40.380 Exactly.

01:06:40.960 Right, and resentment is the most bitter and destructive of emotions.

01:06:44.380 I look at the iPhone 16, you know, so I'm a tech junkie.

01:06:47.760 I love technology.

01:06:48.880 It doesn't come with a manual.

01:06:50.640 And I—actually, this is very interesting.

01:06:51.980 I'm going to show it to you in a second.

01:06:53.400 I brought you a very ancient manual.

01:06:55.560 But it's very interesting.

01:06:56.800 We have, you know, manuals, but you can get it online.

01:06:59.840 So, it doesn't come with a printed manual.

01:07:01.200 You go to Apple, and they'll tell you every single feature.

01:07:03.540 There's 8,000 YouTube channels that have millions of times more subscribers than me.

01:07:07.340 And it'll be, you know, listed, you know, how to get this shortcut, how to do this app.

01:07:10.880 So, there's an instruction manual for a bloody chunk of silicon glass and a little bit of rubber.

01:07:17.840 And there's no instruction manual for people.

01:07:20.480 I remember the night we brought our first son home.

01:07:23.300 And we were bleary-eyed.

01:07:24.800 He wasn't nursing.

01:07:25.980 He's going to die.

01:07:26.920 Right?

01:07:27.120 You remember that feeling?

01:07:27.800 He's going to die.

01:07:28.840 Like, he's not going to die.

01:07:30.680 He's going to be fine.

01:07:31.540 He's six pounds.

01:07:32.340 That's the revelation of a child.

01:07:33.600 It's terror.

01:07:34.180 This thing might die.

01:07:35.180 It's sheer terror.

01:07:36.460 And it's the most responsible.

01:07:37.220 And they send you home, and there's no instruction manual.

01:07:39.360 And I actually said, let's look at the manual to my wife.

01:07:41.560 And she's, what the hell are you talking about?

01:07:42.860 There's no manual.

01:07:43.720 But humans need some instruction.

01:07:47.420 And it doesn't have to come from somewhere, but it can come from yourself.

01:07:51.300 When I talked to Stephen Bartlett, he said, I'm a good person.

01:07:54.460 I don't kill anybody.

01:07:55.840 I say, Stephen, how many people that committed great sin and great evil thought they were doing evil?

01:08:00.540 None of them.

01:08:01.080 Not a single bloody one of them thought they were doing evil.

01:08:04.180 They justified it as great good, whether it was eliminating Jews or, you know, whatever. 1.00

01:08:08.140 I don't even have to take it that far.

01:08:09.920 So, he's trying to justify, I think, his behavior.

01:08:13.240 Because what happens, Jordan, when you believe in God or you have some notion of a moon or faith or just want to approach a creator or something bigger than you?

01:08:21.740 Well, then you have obligations.

01:08:24.620 And people hate that.

01:08:25.920 I don't think Richard—I mentioned Richard Simon.

01:08:28.520 I discovered that every audience I've discussed this with goes silent.

01:08:35.000 There's no difference between obligation and adventure.

01:08:38.820 You know, because you think of an obligation as something that you're involuntarily shouldering, right?

01:08:44.020 That's an obligation.

01:08:44.940 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.

01:08:53.340 It's like, well, that's an adventure.

01:08:55.160 When you go see a movie about a great adventurer, a secret agent, say, the thing that characterizes his journey that you find so compelling is that he's doing something impossibly difficult voluntarily.

01:09:10.200 It's like, so people don't want an obligation, but that's because they have the wrong attitude towards obligation.

01:09:17.560 It's like, no, you actually want a stellar obligation.

01:09:21.220 If I told you 20 years ago, Jordan, you eat meat only and salt.

01:09:25.900 You know, I have prepared meat.

01:09:26.900 I think it was pretty darn good, kosher, ribeye, when you came to my house a couple of years ago.

01:09:32.080 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.

01:09:38.080 Like, I don't want to do that.

01:09:39.340 That's going to be, you know, take away my freedom.

01:09:41.720 You're telling me it's composed.

01:09:42.860 But now you took it upon yourself.

01:09:44.440 I see it in you, the health, the vitality, the just, you know, incredible transformation that you've undergone.

01:09:51.340 Who is happier?

01:09:52.300 Jordan, 20 years ago, could eat all the Doritos or I don't know what you ate back then or has this prescribed thing to do and is in the prime of his life.

01:10:01.360 And I feel that way about – so I said that to, you know, Stephen and also to Sam.

01:10:05.380 And when you're given, you know, look, as a Jew, I don't eat pork, right?

01:10:09.760 I love to eat pork, you know.

01:10:11.340 And why did we not get – who knows?

01:10:13.340 There's no real reason why we think – it's not because they're dirty.

01:10:16.280 But when you have an instruction manual, the assumption is the writer, the author of the instruction manual knew something that you don't.

01:10:26.620 And maybe there's some benefit from following their instructions.

01:10:29.780 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?

01:10:38.760 These people that came up to Richard Dawkins with tears in their eyes at the book signing after our event, you changed by that?

01:10:44.400 One of the things I've learned about the atheist community, so to speak, though, that's a mitigating factor, I would say. 1.00

01:10:52.060 There's a subset of them that are just Luciferian rationalists, and they're not fun.

01:10:56.760 They're not fun.

01:10:57.600 They know everything.

01:10:58.780 Right.

01:10:59.100 They're bitter.

01:10:59.860 They're resentful.

01:11:00.580 And they're seriously underappreciated for their genius.

01:11:03.400 Yes.

01:11:03.760 Okay.

01:11:04.040 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?

01:11:14.140 So they –

01:11:14.420 That's Richard, right?

01:11:15.300 Yeah.

01:11:15.520 Richard did have a –

01:11:16.340 Well, it might even be Richard Dawkins because he's made the odd illusion.

01:11:19.680 Yeah, he's made the odd illusion.

01:11:21.380 That's right.

01:11:21.720 And I've met lots of people who were very badly hurt by fundamentalist types.

01:11:27.620 I don't want to say, you know, okay, so now I don't have to listen to him because he was abused.

01:11:32.300 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.

01:11:39.720 Yes, of course.

01:11:40.380 Of course.

01:11:40.660 So I don't want to let him off the hooks so easily in that sense.

01:11:43.900 But 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.

01:11:53.240 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:53.680 These people I can talk to and they're so self-conscious.

01:11:56.300 But they would never – and I told this to Lawrence Krauss because I had him on my pad and he's been – had me on his podcast.

01:12:01.260 We've talked about this and we kind of joke I'm the religious Jew.

01:12:03.900 He's the atheist.

01:12:04.400 But he knows nothing about the – why does he know nothing?

01:12:08.520 But why does he know nothing?

01:12:09.280 Because most Jews, boys, have a bar mitzvah at age 13, which is a rite of passage, which sucks. 1.00

01:12:14.780 I mean, I've got one of my kids going through it right now.

01:12:17.220 And your voice is cracking and you're in front of everybody and you're embarrassed.

01:12:20.460 You have pimples and your girlfriend – and it's horrible, right?

01:12:23.420 But you go through it.

01:12:24.420 It's a rite of passage, right?

01:12:25.340 And then what does it mark for most Jews, men, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, if he had one?

01:12:34.700 It marks sort of a graduation from religion.

01:12:38.700 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.

01:12:47.640 I agree with Richard.

01:12:48.860 No one can be a Christian. 1.00

01:12:50.160 You know, like you're a Christian because you were born to a Christian family.

01:12:52.900 That doesn't mean that you're actively doing anything in Christianity, and that's different.

01:12:57.040 So Judaism is more of a behavioral religion where you have to do these mitzvahs and do certain things. 0.92

01:13:01.480 It's behavior.

01:13:02.100 It's practicing religion. 0.92

01:13:03.400 But, you know, at the same token, if you deny somebody that, like, there's almost no chance.

01:13:08.400 I'm sort of miraculously – because both my parents were kind of atheists.

01:13:11.620 They didn't take Judaism very seriously.

01:13:13.280 My dad was an active militant atheist.

01:13:15.320 He used to say to me, I don't believe in God.

01:13:16.860 I believe in Satan because he made you believe in God.

01:13:19.400 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 don't want to say child abuse, but you're denying your children something.

01:13:32.600 And I said, you know, the avatar for me –

01:13:35.560 Well, what do they have if they don't have a tradition?

01:13:37.460 They have nothing.

01:13:38.000 They have themselves.

01:13:38.720 They have the immediate –

01:13:39.460 That's exactly the problem, because that's also a very weird definition of self.

01:13:44.880 It's like they have the self that's without tradition.

01:13:49.560 Okay, so that means – fundamentally, it means without discipline.

01:13:53.900 It means without rich moral knowledge.

01:13:57.760 It means without community.

01:13:59.600 It means without the necessity of foregoing immediate gratification for a higher purpose.

01:14:04.400 That's a major loss.

01:14:05.820 Like, you'd only think that 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.

01:14:21.540 Right.

01:14:21.680 Well, that's a lonely person.

01:14:25.120 It is.

01:14:25.660 And is it going to be a bitter, unhappy –

01:14:27.380 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.

01:14:36.960 That's right.

01:14:37.320 So, one of the things I discovered in this book, and I outlined this in painful detail, you might say, is that the postmodern types were correct and the scientists wrong, or the empiricists at least.

01:14:52.100 The postmodernists were correct in their proclamation that we see the world through a story.

01:14:57.320 A description of the structure through which we perceive the value of the world is a story.

01:15:04.420 When you go see a movie, you're looking at the consequences of the value structure of the protagonist, and you want to know that, because it orients you in their direction so you can try that out.

01:15:15.500 Right.

01:15:15.600 Once you understand that, the only question that – the question that necessarily arises is, what story?

01:15:23.240 And it could be non-nihilism.

01:15:25.620 It could be hedonism, which is whim, possession, essentially.

01:15:32.440 It could be power.

01:15:34.200 And the problem with the postmodernists is that they were all Marxists, virtually, and they turned to power as an explanation immediately.

01:15:41.000 Now, the problem with that hypothesis is it's actually wrong, because power is not an effective unifying motivation.

01:15:51.020 That's why the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings is the ring of Satan himself.

01:15:56.920 It's very attractive power.

01:15:58.760 I can force unity.

01:16:00.400 But it doesn't iterate well.

01:16:03.040 It doesn't unite well.

01:16:04.140 The biblical library is predicated on the idea that the foundation of community is voluntary self-sacrifice, and that's right. 1.00

01:16:15.040 And it's actually self-evident, because when you engage in a social relationship, what you're doing is you're giving up the primacy of your immediate desire for the benefit of the relationship.

01:16:31.060 It's definitional.

01:16:33.640 Like, so we can think about Piaget, that developmental psychologist.

01:16:37.200 His proposition was that if we wanted to understand ethics scientifically, we'd look at their precursors.

01:16:44.700 And he thought we'd find that in the behavior of children as they became socialized.

01:16:48.500 Very smart hypothesis.

01:16:50.220 That's why he got so interested in games.

01:16:51.880 Well, when a child makes 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.

01:17:04.500 Well, taking turns is a sacrifice.

01:17:06.580 It's like, it's not my turn now.

01:17:08.920 I sacrifice my turn to you.

01:17:10.660 Okay, if I do that, then we play.

01:17:13.440 If you want to keep playing with me, then we're friends.

01:17:16.360 Well, that's the contract.

01:17:17.900 That's the social contract, right?

01:17:20.200 It's not imposed tyrannically from above.

01:17:22.460 Something else Piaget pointed out is that the stable social contract is voluntarily created and accepted.

01:17:29.800 That's way different than Freud's superego or Foucault's power games.

01:17:33.680 It's way different.

01:17:34.700 Way different.

01:17:35.800 And I think there's all the evidence in the world that it's true.

01:17:40.240 Oh, I agree, yeah.

01:17:40.860 And so the idea that, see, we're acting out, this is something else I realized, is the typical European town, Christian town, let's say, has a cathedral or church at its center.

01:17:52.320 Yeah.

01:17:52.860 And then there's a periphery, which is the town and then the countryside.

01:17:56.340 Center, periphery, or center, surround, periphery.

01:18:00.420 The center is the sacred place.

01:18:04.520 And the reason for that is the center is the sacred place.

01:18:07.320 That's definitional.

01:18:08.760 Then in the center of the center, there's an altar where sacrifices are being made, right?

01:18:14.300 And the drama that's enacted is the community is founded on the principle of sacrifice.

01:18:21.980 It's like, well, yeah, obviously.

01:18:24.120 Right.

01:18:24.240 Well, obviously, because that's the definition of community in some sense, is that the individual is brought into relationship with others.

01:18:32.980 That's right.

01:18:33.280 Well, that's obviously a sacrifice of individual primacy.

01:18:36.260 Exactly.

01:18:36.420 Well, what's the gain?

01:18:37.800 Well, it's the gain of maturity.

01:18:40.040 Maturity, yes.

01:18:40.680 That's a major gain.

01:18:41.800 Now you're taking care of the future and not just the present.

01:18:44.740 So that's a major gain.

01:18:46.040 Because maturity is the sacrifice of the present for the future, right?

01:18:49.640 And a relationship is sacrifice of your whims for the benefit of the relationship.

01:18:54.600 So it's all sacrifice.

01:18:56.260 Yeah.

01:18:56.640 And perception is sacrificial because you could be attending to a lot of other things.

01:19:01.880 Instead, you're attending to the one thing you're attending to.

01:19:04.560 And to me, that's why, look, I struggle with God.

01:19:07.840 That's the name of your book, right?

01:19:09.060 Israel.

01:19:09.660 Israel means wrestle with God. 0.96

01:19:10.980 It's not Islam. 1.00

01:19:11.960 Islam means submit to God. 0.95

01:19:13.680 When you submit to God—

01:19:14.800 That's a different vision, man.

01:19:15.460 It's a very different vision.

01:19:16.440 And we can debate, you know, about it.

01:19:18.860 But the fact is, when you submit, it's like I've often noted with my children, you know, the first word they said was no.

01:19:26.260 It wasn't yes, right?

01:19:27.100 That's the magic word, man.

01:19:28.420 Because if you say yes, you're just agreeing with somebody else's, you know, whatever they propose to you.

01:19:32.340 You want to eat this?

01:19:32.940 Yes.

01:19:33.180 I want to eat this.

01:19:33.840 You have no self-identification.

01:19:35.680 I mean, you know, this is a trivial one-on-one for you.

01:19:37.980 But that is true.

01:19:39.420 So you express your—

01:19:40.420 At two years old, you're playing the battle of no.

01:19:43.800 Yes.

01:19:44.280 And that is exactly how much is for me, which is what no means, and how much has to be sacrificed to the community.

01:19:50.360 That's right.

01:19:51.140 Yeah, no.

01:19:51.600 And so it's—

01:19:52.420 So all these things are self-evident.

01:19:53.980 And the thing in Judaism, I feel, is sort of denied to people that just refute—

01:19:59.860 Look, I say, as I said, I don't believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in.

01:20:04.460 It's trivial.

01:20:05.600 Yuri Gagarin, when he circled the earth the first time, the communists, you know, Pravda, the truth, right? 0.89

01:20:10.420 They asked him, what did you see up there?

01:20:12.200 He said, I can't tell you what I saw, but I know what I didn't see.

01:20:15.400 And they said, what?

01:20:15.960 I didn't see a man with a white beard sitting in a chair.

01:20:19.620 You know, congratulations, Yuri.

01:20:20.880 That's really—you know, he was a hero of the Soviet Union.

01:20:22.620 Yeah.

01:20:22.980 That's so baby.

01:20:23.860 Nobody thinks of that.

01:20:25.080 Where's up?

01:20:25.740 There's no up in space.

01:20:26.780 There's no heaven.

01:20:27.760 There's also none of that in the biblical focus.

01:20:29.380 None of that.

01:20:29.900 No, it's not.

01:20:30.460 There is in the artistic representations.

01:20:33.900 But there are images, and everyone understands that.

01:20:36.520 And there's also constant warnings in the biblical texts about confusing the image with the ineffable, right?

01:20:44.080 That's right.

01:20:44.740 And there's been huge battles in the Christian church.

01:20:47.760 The iconoclasts were people who believed that icons had the danger of concreteness, which is exactly the danger that, say, Dawkins' fault prayed to when he concretizes a metaphor.

01:20:59.920 Infantile, right.

01:21:00.700 I said, you know, or, you know, Stephen Bartlett asked me, he said, you know, the Bible says the Earth is flat.

01:21:06.300 First of all, it doesn't say that.

01:21:07.340 But second of all, you know, I said—

01:21:08.940 But it is locally flat.

01:21:10.300 It is locally flat.

01:21:11.180 I said—and I won't say this.

01:21:12.640 I said, you know, look, Stephen, I could say this to Sam or Richard Dawkins.

01:21:16.080 You know, I say the Earth is flat.

01:21:18.000 Prove me wrong.

01:21:19.120 One in a thousand people, ordinary people, will get that right.

01:21:23.020 About 50, 60 percent of scientists will get that right.

01:21:25.680 If I say prove that the Earth orbits around the sun, 90 percent of scientists will get that wrong.

01:21:32.140 I bet most scientists watching this, I'm not going to put anybody on the spot.

01:21:35.400 Don't—

01:21:35.840 Including me.

01:21:36.640 Yeah, I'm not going to say stand on one leg and prove it, Jordan.

01:21:39.040 But I could—we can prove it.

01:21:40.460 It's discovered in the 1700s.

01:21:42.240 How you could do it, it's called stellar aberration.

01:21:44.220 And I'll give the answer to the test.

01:21:46.000 But Galileo, one of the greatest minds in human history, he believed, and he was right, that the Earth goes around the sun.

01:21:52.600 And he went to great lengths.

01:21:54.240 And I think this is so beautiful.

01:21:55.680 We put so much emphasis on scientists that they are sort of gods, right?

01:22:00.740 They manipulate—what did Arthur C. Clarke say?

01:22:02.500 He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

01:22:06.580 I actually opened my podcast with that, with his actual voice, because I'm at the Arthur C. Clarke Center.

01:22:12.160 So when you look at that, who wields magic?

01:22:14.840 Well, it's gods or it's magicians and fairies and all sorts of wonderful creatures that certainly aren't people. 0.89

01:22:19.640 But when a scientist can unlock the power of the atom or can unleash, you know, humanity's need on electricity with infinite energy or, you know, can develop a superconductor or all the lasers, anything that we take for granted in technology, all came from basic physics.

01:22:36.320 The internet came from basic physics.

01:22:37.840 And when you look at that, then you expect that they're ineffable, just like they're primitive, childish, infantile notions of what we think God is, right?

01:22:47.160 They think that we think that he's the guy in the chair in outer space with the beard.

01:22:51.220 But they project that onto humans.

01:22:54.500 So they'll say Richard Feynman was a god.

01:22:57.140 I mean, literally, there's more people, Jordan, that play in the NBA right now than have won Nobel Prizes in physics, okay?

01:23:05.460 And so when you look at these great men, including my hero, Galileo, they were greatly flawed individuals, horribly flawed.

01:23:13.160 Feynman cavorted with his graduate students' wives.

01:23:16.700 He had mistresses.

01:23:17.760 He went to strip clubs.

01:23:19.280 Einstein married his cousin.

01:23:20.560 He was a horrible, horrible father.

01:23:22.740 He neglected a child with severe mental illness.

01:23:25.500 Never saw him after he moved to America to get fame and fortune.

01:23:28.820 Cavorting with, what's the guy's name?

01:23:32.360 Charlie Chaplin.

01:23:33.020 He cavorted with Charlie Chaplin.

01:23:34.900 And he loved the fame and attention.

01:23:36.580 He had a huge ego.

01:23:37.920 Not great.

01:23:38.640 I don't want to emulate him.

01:23:40.140 Do I want to be like Einstein?

01:23:41.380 Do I want to be like Feynman?

01:23:42.240 Hell no.

01:23:43.160 But you look at a man and you analyze him or you analyze a woman. 0.62

01:23:47.020 What are they willing to teach me?

01:23:50.920 What can I learn from them?

01:23:52.120 And what you learn from Galileo is that great men can have great flaws and they can be right and they can be wrong.

01:23:58.200 And if you can learn from both of them, both those tendencies that are mixed up within them, they have both within them.

01:24:03.980 You must subdue.

01:24:04.640 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.

01:24:15.300 And all the flaws that are part and parcel of being a human but aren't in the same category.

01:24:20.320 And you can't.

01:24:20.920 Yes.

01:24:21.280 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:21.620 Yeah.

01:24:21.900 So this.

01:24:22.280 You have some.

01:24:22.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:24:23.540 I brought this to show you.

01:24:24.900 I can't give you this because it's signed not by the great Jordan Peterson, but it's signed by Galileo.

01:24:30.280 So I'm going to show you what his signature looked like.

01:24:32.900 And I want to point out just some interesting.

01:24:35.040 That's his signature.

01:24:36.260 Wow.

01:24:36.560 So this was a book he wrote.

01:24:38.020 It's called The Military Compass.

01:24:39.600 Now, you and I, I told Stephen Bartlett this.

01:24:41.760 I said, do you know what a slide rule is?

01:24:43.260 He said, I have no idea what a slide rule is.

01:24:44.380 Where did you get this?

01:24:45.540 So I have a collector.

01:24:47.120 So when I got my advance for my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, I basically bought this book.

01:24:54.060 And it's a.

01:24:54.680 It's in great shape.

01:24:55.380 Wonderful.

01:24:55.780 Look at the pages on it.

01:24:56.780 This is from 1646.

01:24:58.740 And it has a custom box and so forth.

01:25:01.100 And there's an English translation that they made in the 70s.

01:25:04.220 You can't get this anymore.

01:25:05.680 But there's an English translation of it.

01:25:07.460 But there's a tag I put there.

01:25:09.480 Hey, why don't you open that up and read me what it says on the.

01:25:13.020 A post-it note page.

01:25:14.520 I think it's on this side of the page.

01:25:17.120 So these are all things that you could do with this thing called the military compass.

01:25:23.080 So I think it says there, right?

01:25:24.620 What does it say?

01:25:25.380 Can you read it?

01:25:26.000 Yes.

01:25:26.260 This one?

01:25:26.540 Yes.

01:25:26.940 Rule for.

01:25:27.520 Yeah.

01:25:28.080 Rule for monetary exchange.

01:25:29.720 Yes.

01:25:30.020 So what is it?

01:25:30.360 By means of these same arithmetic lines, we can change every kind of currency into any

01:25:35.280 other in a very easy and speedy way.

01:25:38.500 This is done by first setting the instrument, taking lengthwise the price in the money we

01:25:43.460 want to exchange, and fitting this crosswise to the price in the money into which the exchange

01:25:48.540 is to be made.

01:25:49.760 We shall illustrate this by an example so that everything is clearly understood.

01:25:53.700 And it goes through.

01:25:54.260 And what does he mention the currency that he's going to convert?

01:25:57.060 Florentine gold scudai into Venetian ducats.

01:26:00.560 Yeah.

01:26:00.900 So here's what the device looked like.

01:26:03.280 It was like a slide roll.

01:26:05.140 So maybe later we'll get the cameras to zoom in on it.

01:26:07.600 It was a slide roll.

01:26:08.420 It was a computer.

01:26:09.480 It was a device to simplify calculations.

01:26:11.700 And he invented it.

01:26:12.600 And he wouldn't actually produce, as he did with his telescopes, he wouldn't actually

01:26:17.780 give the hardware away.

01:26:19.740 He'd give the software away.

01:26:21.060 He'd give the operating manual away.

01:26:22.860 This is how he made money, because he had illegitimate children.

01:26:25.780 He had mistresses.

01:26:26.900 He was also not the greatest of husbands and men and certain things.

01:26:30.440 He was a deep believer in God.

01:26:31.900 But when I look at this and I say, this book, this is a second edition.

01:26:35.640 The first edition was written in 1601.

01:26:38.220 And there's only about seven of them left.

01:26:40.200 There's actually more Gutenberg Bibles than first editions of Galilee's Compass.

01:26:44.940 So this one was cheap, very cheap compared to those.

01:26:47.280 You can almost get it priceless.

01:26:48.540 They're kept under lock and key at the Galileo Museum in Florence.

01:26:52.980 But the point is, if he had taken those Florentines that he's talking about, or the ducats, you

01:26:59.020 know, if I give you a ducat right now, it's almost worthless.

01:27:02.220 I mean, it's kind of cool.

01:27:03.220 Historically, it might look good.

01:27:04.560 It was a paper note.

01:27:05.400 It's basically like a paper dollar.

01:27:07.040 It got inflated to nothing.

01:27:08.540 They would do things, you know, with the money.

01:27:10.160 Back then, they would shave the corners of the coins.

01:27:12.040 Right, right.

01:27:12.520 That's why coins have ridges on them now.

01:27:14.240 All sorts of interesting historical tidbits.

01:27:16.400 But if he had just kept one of these things, you know, kept the original edition, his heirs

01:27:20.620 would have hundreds of millions of dollars.

01:27:22.680 And so you look at these people, and you often find that the people who have the greatest

01:27:27.100 scientific knowledge and technical and maybe practical knowledge, sometimes their wisdom

01:27:31.660 is to be lacking.

01:27:32.960 But the average person will never look at that and say, wow, this person, you know, has

01:27:37.300 been divorced six times or, you know, treats his illegitimate stepdaughter horribly or

01:27:42.480 whatever.

01:27:43.280 We never look at that.

01:27:44.440 We never say part and parcel.

01:27:46.140 And I think I'm not advocating we should look at Feynman and say, you slept with your

01:27:49.840 graduate students' wives.

01:27:51.200 No, no, no.

01:27:51.540 You should just say that there is a value in the people that, let's say, have those wonderful

01:27:58.280 aspects, those wonderful characteristics that don't have the foibles.

01:28:01.560 Just they may not have Nobel Prizes.

01:28:03.520 In other words, we prioritize the intellect over the ethical.

01:28:07.580 And I think it's very dangerous.

01:28:08.700 And it's very seductive for scientists to want to emulate Galileo.

01:28:12.540 And, you know, certainly I felt victim to that.

01:28:13.980 Well, it's very seductive for scientists to want to prioritize the ethic, the intellectual

01:28:17.980 of the ethical.

01:28:18.040 Because how else do we get more immortality?

01:28:19.160 Well, they're also smart.

01:28:20.580 Yeah.

01:28:20.780 Well, of course you're going to do that, because it's in your obvious self-interest

01:28:25.960 to prioritize in importance your most outstanding trait.

01:28:29.380 That's also the deadliness of worship of the intellect, per se.

01:28:33.580 Mm-hmm.

01:28:34.120 Yeah.

01:28:34.980 Yeah.

01:28:35.380 Well, I'll be interested in your response to this book.

01:28:38.300 Yeah.

01:28:38.620 I've read the first couple chapters online, and it starts, you know, just to think about

01:28:44.280 the connection.

01:28:45.140 As I start my cosmology class at Peterson Academy, you know, I start off by saying, you

01:28:49.820 know, what is the most important day on the calendar?

01:28:52.840 Let me say it to you.

01:28:53.640 Like, what is the most important day on your calendar every year?

01:28:56.740 It's probably Christmas, I'd say.

01:29:00.020 Yeah.

01:29:00.360 So, what is Christmas?

01:29:01.500 It's a birth.

01:29:02.340 It's a beginning.

01:29:03.200 It's a new.

01:29:03.960 But what is the only event for which there might not have been a preceding day, let alone,

01:29:10.240 you know, a repetition of that day, the origin of the universe?

01:29:13.300 In other words, we go back from now, late 2024.

01:29:15.720 We go back 13.8 billion years.

01:29:18.800 Let's say we're talking on a Thursday today.

01:29:20.860 We'll come back.

01:29:21.420 There'll be some Thursday.

01:29:22.400 Just counting 24 hours.

01:29:23.600 Doesn't mean the Earth was here.

01:29:25.000 Doesn't mean the sun was here.

01:29:26.420 Just counting back in units of 24 hours.

01:29:28.740 Back, back, back, back.

01:29:29.500 Comes some Thursday.

01:29:30.960 And, you know, perhaps that was the day the actual Big Bang occurred on, if we could keep

01:29:34.980 track of it.

01:29:35.620 I mean, it's totally practical to do this type of calculation.

01:29:39.240 And we don't actually know what happened on the Wednesday before that day.

01:29:43.560 It's a concept.

01:29:44.280 You can think about it.

01:29:45.140 But you can't actually necessarily know what happened.

01:29:48.240 And so, that is why I feel like cosmology is the ultimate, the most primitive, primordial

01:29:54.860 subject.

01:29:55.740 And why it evokes something in people.

01:29:57.360 There's reasons why the caves of Lascaux, you know, 40,000 years ago, they weren't depicting

01:30:02.340 like, well, here's how you make a good atle-atle or spear, you know, whatever.

01:30:05.920 They were depicting like the stars and the movements of things.

01:30:09.180 Well, and people then, of course, they started to intuit the fact that there was a, this

01:30:13.040 is where, when astrology and astronomy were still rightly intermediated.

01:30:18.280 Because the ancient people discovered that there was a relationship between the events

01:30:24.620 of the heaven and the transformations on Earth, right?

01:30:27.860 The movement of the seasons.

01:30:29.620 And that was obviously of critical importance.

01:30:31.380 It's going to predict the movement of animals, for example, or when your crops should be planted.

01:30:35.580 But just that, that concordance of the cosmic with the, with the, with the practical.

01:30:41.420 Right.

01:30:41.720 That's an, it's, well, it's a, it's an, it's an unbelievable fact of nature to begin with.

01:30:47.360 It's visceral, right.

01:30:48.200 And by the way, it didn't have to be that way.

01:30:49.860 Most stars are not like our sun.

01:30:52.040 Our sun is, is not unique, I shouldn't say unique, sorry.

01:30:54.760 Our sun is unusual in that it's a singular star.

01:30:58.400 The preponderance of stars that you look up and see on a dark night sky are multiples,

01:31:02.920 pairs, binaries, triples, maybe even clusters of stars.

01:31:05.940 And that would be very different.

01:31:07.240 That would mean you wouldn't have the ability to see, because there's, there'd always be

01:31:10.940 a star out, effectively.

01:31:12.100 They won't orbit right next to each other, like they, in, in Tatooine and in Star Wars.

01:31:16.140 Remember, there's a red sun.

01:31:16.980 But you don't have constellations, you don't have seasons and tracking, you don't have

01:31:21.680 agriculture, the human being's first technology.

01:31:24.800 And, you know, there's some of my colleagues, and I'd love to talk to you about the psychology

01:31:28.540 of aliens.

01:31:30.040 There's a huge murmuration in the zeitgeist right now, both that it's super advanced technology

01:31:36.620 is visiting the earth, incomprehensible distances and so forth.

01:31:40.760 Um, and, uh, simultaneously, uh, that there are, you know, untold worlds yet to be discovered

01:31:47.540 where life is not only abundant, but it's also maybe superior to us.

01:31:52.020 And maybe they are so advanced and so in possession of Moore's law for 80 more doubling periods

01:31:58.740 than we've enjoyed it for, that in fact, they've created us in sort of giant silicon apparatus.

01:32:04.460 This is called the simulation hypothesis.

01:32:06.020 And, by the way, the greatest adherence to both the alien reality hypothesis and the

01:32:12.320 simulation hypothesis are atheists, right?

01:32:15.020 I mean, these are both now supplanting the need for...

01:32:17.680 Well, and atheists get all their religion from science fiction, right? 0.99

01:32:21.200 Right, I'm dead serious about that.

01:32:22.540 Really?

01:32:22.920 Oh, sure, because the mythological pattern of science fiction stories is crystal clear.

01:32:27.860 I mean, Star Wars was predicated on Joseph Campbell's analysis of hero psychology.

01:32:32.640 Hero's journey, right, yeah.

01:32:33.520 Sure, of course.

01:32:34.220 That is true, yeah.

01:32:35.000 I haven't thought of that.

01:32:35.800 Yeah, it's definitely the case.

01:32:36.400 But it's natural, right?

01:32:37.260 Yeah, so you're going to subordinate your belief in a God that is Judeo-Christian, say,

01:32:42.600 because then you'd have to do things, right?

01:32:44.540 Then you'd have to, you know, have obligations on you to the community, to your wife, to your parents, perhaps.

01:32:49.980 Those pesky sacrifices.

01:32:51.120 Those sacrifices to the Sabbath.

01:32:53.260 You might have obligations, but I don't need those if I believe in an alien who's on proximus and troll.

01:32:58.060 Oh, I never thought about that particular twist.

01:32:59.780 I don't have that, yeah.

01:33:00.740 Yeah, that's a good one.

01:33:01.520 And so you get all the advantages of the assumption of advanced intelligence with none of the moral requirements.

01:33:07.180 Right, and the tuning.

01:33:08.080 You have a fine tuner, right?

01:33:09.240 These same people will reject the arguments of design from fine tuning, which I'm not saying I'm comfortable with that.

01:33:15.720 We discussed that already.

01:33:17.100 I mean, we can put up many counterexamples of things that are extremely exquisitely tuned that didn't have a designer whatsoever.

01:33:23.780 And the Earth's distance to the sun is not exquisitely tuned in the sense that it necessitated a designer to do it.

01:33:30.580 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.

01:33:36.440 And actually, a lot of the parameters in cosmology and particle physics and symmetries that we talked about earlier are not as finely tuned as a radio dial, if you remember those, as you and I do, but most of the younger folks won't.

01:33:48.780 But you got to tune it.

01:33:49.840 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.

01:33:57.080 But this alien, you know, kind of hypothesis has gotten a lot of attention.

01:34:02.280 You know, it's political ramifications.

01:34:04.220 It has military ramifications.

01:34:06.200 You know, what is it meant to do?

01:34:07.500 But I'm curious from your perspective, you know, putting on my podcast or how it now, is there, you know, this compulsion to sort of, you know, feel that there will be – you're familiar with the Drake equation.

01:34:17.560 Maybe you've heard of it.

01:34:18.460 I can describe it.

01:34:19.120 You wrote about UFOs.

01:34:20.460 Really?

01:34:20.680 Yes, yes.

01:34:21.300 Wow.

01:34:21.520 And he noted – because the belief in UFOs historically cycles, and it tends to make itself manifest more frequently in times of crisis.

01:34:31.220 And he describes – he probably describes in his book on UFOs the answer to the question that you're posing.

01:34:37.520 Really?

01:34:37.840 Because what you're really asking about is the metaphysics of materialist atheism, right?

01:34:42.000 The mythological metaphysics of materialist atheism.

01:34:44.700 Oh, impulse.

01:34:45.140 The urge, yes.

01:34:45.880 Well, the materialist atheist might say, we have no religion.

01:34:48.480 It's like, yeah, you're wrong.

01:34:50.300 Right.

01:34:50.460 You have an unrecognized religion.

01:34:52.560 You don't believe in nothing.

01:34:53.500 You believe in anything, right?

01:34:54.600 Yeah.

01:34:54.680 Well, and you're laying out some of the trappings that tend to come along with that.

01:34:59.520 And so, too.

01:35:00.140 It's because you can't organize your existence in life without imposing a story on the world.

01:35:06.880 There's no way of doing it.

01:35:07.980 Your life is a story in the world.

01:35:10.140 Is that because of the intolerance that we as humans have towards ambiguity, right?

01:35:15.980 In other words, the battle over abortion or the battle over immigration.

01:35:19.800 It's partly that.

01:35:20.900 It's partly because if you fail to specify, you drown in ambiguity.

01:35:25.760 And anxiety technically is a response to ambiguity, right?

01:35:30.800 That's technically, anxiety signals the emergence of entropy, right?

01:35:35.920 And positive emotion, I learned this from Carl Friston, because I didn't know this.

01:35:40.880 Positive emotion signifies a reduction in entropy in relationship to a goal.

01:35:44.840 A structure, yes.

01:35:45.760 And anxiety itself signals the sudden emergence of entropy, right?

01:35:50.060 So there's a way actually of aligning.

01:35:51.580 This is so cool.

01:35:52.320 Something we could talk about for a long time.

01:35:53.800 There's actually a place where the thermodynamics and emotion can be, what would you say, brought into concordance.

01:36:01.100 Yeah, I've thought about that.

01:36:02.220 We have to stop on this part of the podcast.

01:36:05.340 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.

01:36:11.740 And obviously, we could talk for an endless number of hours and would love to.

01:36:16.020 Into the night.

01:36:16.400 One of the things that means is that the burning question that I wanted to ask Dr. Keating has to wait for the Daily Wire side.

01:36:25.560 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.

01:36:33.920 And that sleight of hand, you might say, wasn't done by design.

01:36:39.040 It's just how it worked out.

01:36:40.400 But you might want to think about throwing the Daily Wire some support.

01:36:44.540 There we go.

01:36:45.000 I have a subscription.

01:36:45.320 There we go.

01:36:45.640 So, thank you for talking about Peterson Academy, too, today.

01:36:48.460 We have 40,000 students.

01:36:50.260 Wonderful.

01:36:50.720 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:51.120 I've heard from so many, and I'm so impressed by them.

01:36:53.200 Jordan, you should be very—you and Michaela, Jordan.

01:36:55.320 We are pretty damn happy with the way things are going.

01:36:57.820 And the social media interactions on the site are extremely positive.

01:37:02.660 They're all idea-focused.

01:37:03.960 Yep.

01:37:04.300 They're upward-aiming.

01:37:05.280 Community.

01:37:05.840 There's no trolls.

01:37:06.620 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:07.460 I just hope I can get tenure.

01:37:08.940 You know, that's my—

01:37:09.500 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:37:10.480 Well, we'll work out the details of that as we progress, too.

01:37:13.940 So, for everybody watching on the YouTube side, do join us on the Daily Wire side.

01:37:18.360 We're going to continue this conversation, and I'm looking forward to that.

01:37:21.640 Thanks very much for coming into Scottsdale today.

01:37:23.020 Thank you, Jordan.

01:37:23.420 And thank you to all of you for your time and attention on the YouTube side and to the film

01:37:28.080 crew here in Scottsdale today for making this possible.

01:37:31.400 So, pretty good to see you again.

01:37:32.860 Great.

01:37:33.400 Protected.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 06, 2025

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

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