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

Who am I to say I believe in God like what is a man to say such a thing I mean it's so ridiculous and I've turned that around I say I don't believe in gravity and he's like what are you talking about and stevenh said you're a physicist you have to believe in gravity I said no if I take this meteorite and I drop it I don't I don't believe have evidence for it those things you don't have to take on faith you have evidence for them so Science and and religion science should not be

use it's not one of its tool its best purposes you know you have a hammer you don't use it to screw in uh a a screw you you have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed or perhaps [Music] best hey everybody some announcements today before my description of the podcast with Dr Brian keading so the first is I just published this book we Who wrestle with God it hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list so I'm kind of happy for five different reasons about that there's a tour associated

with it some of it in December I'm going to be in Texas with my wife our accompanying musician and then from January through April running through the United States if you want more information about that go to jordanbpeterson.com the content of the tour or the approach of the tour will be Similar to my previous tours in that I'm taking abstract Concepts in this case Concepts associated with the realm of story particularly the stories of the Old Testament I'm explaining their conceptual significance but I'm also extracting out the Practical implications of that understanding for attention and

for behavior and so um it's always my goal to make what I'm discussing applicable immediately in the real world and that continues in this Lecture series we've released a new seminar series for dailywire plus featuring the same players with a few substitutions as partook in The Exodus seminar which was very popular this time devoted to explication of the gospels and so that released on the first in that series 10-part series released on December 1st so you could go check that out as well we're pretty excited about it it seems to be performing a little better

than the Exodus seminar did which Is saying quite something CU I think that was the most popular offering that the daily wire produced apart from Matt Walsh's movies which is pretty good given that it's so you know they're they're actually intellectually complex and somewhat Arcane in the fact they have this public appeal is really something terrific so um that's the announcements for the time being I had the privilege today of speaking with Dr Brian Keaton one of the world's leading Cosmologists Dr keing has been a guest on my podcast before and that was plenty of

fun and we had an opportunity to continue our ongoing conversations we talked a fair bit about his lecturing for Peterson Academy he has a couple of courses on well on astronomy and cosmology there uh we discussed the utility of of of the opportunity to bring high quality Mass education everywhere at very low cost very well produced and at low cost and and so you Know that was gratifying as far as I was concerned because that project has been quite a stellar success we have about 40,000 students and uh Dr King's offerings are very popular and

deservedly so so you can follow us on the scientific side more intensely there we talked about the relationship between science and ethics there's a very tricky thing to tease out because the empirical presumption is that we build our Representations of the world as a consequence of our experience of The Facts of the world and that doesn't appear to be correct precisely that doesn't mean there are no facts it means that the issue of what the relevant facts are is an important issue and the determination of what facts are relevant and why is actually part of

the Enterprise that we describe as ethical that's the definition of the ethical Enterprise and so we tried to Bandy back and forth various concepts of the relationship between the ethical and the scientific or maybe even more particularly the fact that for science to exist it has to not only be embedded in an a prior ethical framework but that the scientists who are practicing science have to be oriented by that ethic to be scientists you have to put your pursuit of the truth and Beauty which is another topic we touched on you have to put your

Pursuit Of Truth and Beauty in the service of humanity ahead of all other considerations and that's an ethical decision not a scientific decision and it's the ethical decision upon which all science that's genuine in in its most abstract and glorious formulations and in its most practical elements is predicated and so that constituted the bulk of our conversation and there were many more things that we could have and would have liked to discuss but you know that was Plenty of uh Grist for the mill so join us for that so it's got to be more than

a year since we talked E I would think yeah you were you came in January 23 to the house and we had theer rib eyes yeah yeah that's right exactly two years yeah yeah your tour for last time in San Diego yeah that that was the last time we were together and then we did um remote podcast together couple months after right right right yeah well it's always It's always uh good to have a chance to talk to somebody from the scientific Community I can plague you with my uh Preposterous questions about cosmology I have

a Preposterous question for you to I can't wait that's what I'm here for we'll get to that I want to ask you first about the course you did for Peterson Academy yeah yeah I've done I've recorded two one's out currently uh which is called cosmology very simple and then I've recorded uh a second one Introduction to astronomy which you might think would come before cosmology but actually cosmology encompasses most of astronomy anyway and in some sense cosmology is one of the oldest Sciences if not the oldest science it's the science that you can do with

the two telescopes that you're born with in your in your skull and for that reason it's accessible to everybody you know I was thinking on my way over here you talk so much about freedom and how important That is there are very few things that are literally free right I could only think of two and you'll probably correct me but uh freedom of thought is not not necessarily a guarantee around the world right every human being doesn't have access to freedom of speech certainly not right definitely your home country especially nowadays uh but um but

air so far as I know is free yeah and the only other thing I could think about Jordan was the night sky we all can look at the Night sky we can all enjoy it and we're in both those ways you know this I'm sure we breathe in every breath has millions of molecules that Jesus himself breathed in um that's the nature of our atmosphere and the mixing of of molecules Etc it's guaranteed that that is the case but the only other thing that we may share with Jesus is that we see the same night

sky we see in the same Cosmos as he did there haven't been any new planets you know coming in well We're also surrounded by Pharisees and scribes and lawyers and so that's also fre that's true they're free yeah that's a free toothaches I suppose but uh so I find it also quite a rest bit you know I'm a pretty tough person but I do believe the human Spirit needs safe spaces in a sense not the kind of places we had on campus on November 6th with you know Play-Doh and and fingerpainting kits for the students

who are traumatized that's Playdoh not Plato that's right uh but instead um we need safe spaces that the human mind can expand within you know if you just go to the gym and work out and you never recover you can't ful grow to your potential to me cosmology uniquely and science you know but less so generally science certainly not virology right but science in its purest sense the pure Sciences not political science uh but pure science not applied like I get to do I have the privilege of doing which Is studying that the the universe

offers a space for the human mind the intellect to relax to enjoy to appreciate and there's no secret you've heard cosmetology I make this joke in my Peterson Academy course I say you know this course is not about hair and makeup You know despite my wonderful appearance but it's actually related cosmology and cosmetology by the prefix Cosmos which in Greek means beautiful or appearance so it's literally telling us that the Night sky is beautiful and it's something to behold and it's a sensual pleasure people don't think of that with cosmology yeah it's a weird fact

really isn't it I mean you wonder about it biologically because they that exposure to the night sky day Sky too for that matter is also an atand experience of awe and I've wondered often from the psychological perspective what it has meant for people and their existential positioning to have less access to the Night sky than they once did because there's a lot of people who never see the full Cosmic Landscape because of light light pollution it's not a good way of conceptualizing it but because the light interfer with the night sky right and it it

is something I remember growing up in Northern Alberta I mean we we were a long way from any major urban center and the night sky there was very impressive you could see the Milky Way fully and and very frequently we had Aurora Borealis and pretty spectacular displays and when it's 40 below and the air is dry there's very little humidity and so the night sky is very Stark and you know it was dark by six o'clock at night so even when I used to do my paper roote my friends we spent a lot of time

looking up at the night sky watching for uh falling stars watching for satellites and but that it's interesting a that observing the sky is a primary pleasure that's strange biologically It's like what the hell's going on there that it produces that experience of awe and awe is a weird emotion too because it's a very sophisticated emotion but it's also very Primal one of the concomitance of awe is pyo erection right that feeling of your hair standing on end and that's actually the same reflex that manifests itself when a cat for example Puffs itself up at

the sight of a predator like a dog but it's trying to make itself more impressive so it's It's that that sense of awe we has have is associated biologically with our response to predation but it's also as you pointed out see I've thought about it it's like when the when the cat's hair stands on end it's becoming more than it is right it's trying to display itself in the most impressive manner possible and there's a call to higher being that's part and parcel of the experience of awe that seems like like the psychological equivalent of

that Right you you look up at the night sky and it it fills you with a sense of wonder and a sense of your remote Ness and and finiteness but at the same time it also kind of compels you to be more than you are evokes curiosity that's right very it's very complex e to see that happen in the beginning was the word Christ is a master at using short mysterious stories they change the listener who takes them Seriously my experience with the biblical text is that they're inexhaustible sources of wisdom if I find something

in them that is an obstacle it's because there's something in me that has yet to be transformed I just don't get it the person that you do not think could ever be virtuous oh let me show you this is the person who is fulfilling the law and the prophets but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and All these things shall be added to you as well I don't believe in that promise I'll just be honest at this point that has not been part of my experience this Parable I've been trying to understand forever while

we were talking and while we were sitting there then it hit me I saw it made me one ideology that has supplanted Christianity that has done good for Humanity this Jew is very frightened of a post-christian society he was the god man the model the example Of what we ought to become and what we can become it's okay it's safe for you in all of your doubts and apprehensions to open up and to let these stories in he is the temple he is the Torah he is the Covenant he is prophecy fulfilled if you're doing

your and it isn't also the love of wisdom it's also an attempt at wisdom without love in both ways you're going radically wrong power of love it sounds shame what you say 60s I don't want to be in a homework C I tell you We've got our work cut out for us gentlemen this is one peculiar time and one peculiar text and I sure hope we're up to the [Music] task yeah and the pretty secret the shameful secret of what I do with my colleagues is that most of us myself may be an exception are

completely inure to it we're so used to seeing we're so used to thinking of incomprehensible literally astronomical numbers that we Sometimes don't even bother to look up at the sky there's an eclipse happening of the Moon oh so what I'll see it some other time big deal we know what that is I know what that is I know what causes it's not mystery it doesn't portend evil Doom disaster catastrophe those words have the word star Astro within them right evocative of the power that was once thought to be held within the night Sky's domain now

the scientists know we we've extrap the the sort of you know Mysterious gods and demons and so forth but and at the same time we've also as I say inert oursel to the wonder that a normal person feels when they encounter the mysterious and I think it's it's quite it's quite amazing when you see you know in in My Religion you know I'm I'm Jewish and I'm practicing I take it very serious iously you know we we are commanded one of the many things we're commanded to do in addition to the Sabbath and honoring our

parents and so Forth is when you come upon a miracle you bless it so we actually have blessings for seeing a meteorite for seeing a meteor shower for seeing a rainbow for these phenomena for seeing the ocean when you haven't that's good it calls it it it marks it and makes you noted well there are I suspect if your eyes were open as they should be possibly You' see that all the time that's right right and it you you you you suggested something That's very interesting we know neurophysiologically that knowledge and memory inhibit perception because

what happens when you learn to perceive something when you're familiar with it is you replace your presumption with the perception right you sorry you replace the perception with your presumption that makes you super efficient because you see what you know but it dis you it distances you from the phenomena phenomena means to shine forth right it Distances you from that and so then you you gain efficiency at the cost of Wonder that's part of the reason it's so nice to be around little kids yes because they're not efficient no that's for sure but and everything

is new but everything's new exactly that's right are you familiar with the poem by Walt Whitman yes it's called when I heard the Learned astronomer oh no yes this is a different one oh okay and it's really um they believe it was sort of written Around the you know mid to late 1800s and he had heard a lecture about the recently discovered planet Neptune so Neptune was discovered in a most remarkable way it was the first object that we would call dark matter we saw it unseen gravitational pole afflicting and affecting the orbit of an

inplanet Uranus which is closer to the sun we didn't know why the anomalous behavior of the inner planet was being affected it was predicted to exist truly Dark Matter discovered and Witman you know was kind of reacting to that and the poem starts off it says when I heard the Learned astronomer arranging the with facts and tables and and figures Etc how quickly I became depressed and despondent by the night sky brought to numbers and then and then he says I walked outside under the silent canopy of stars to be alone and marveled at their

great Beauty now Richard Fineman another you know Witman and Fineman I Always put them a pose and I do this in the course at Peterson Academy me I contrast him he says finean the great one of the greatest physicists of all time and a very cool and interesting person fascinating individual complex and and and Incredibly brilliant uh and often provocative yes and often evoking Whitman's other famous phrase I contain multitudes right so uh but in Fan's case he said what um what is it about about scientists that you presume I see less Than the poets

poets will speak of Jupiter as if he is a God but why do I see less when I speak of him as a ball of methane surrounded by a retinue of planets in other words can you see more or can you see less my wife makes fun of me when I see a cir be great to see both yeah so that's the goal and in fact I say that in the course I say you don't at the end I say who do you side with and and and half the students say Whitman and half the

students say fem Men and I say you're both right in a sense you should you should embody both characteristics well you know I've had the same experience in some ways teaching my students about um let's say analysis of of dreams and and stories you know if you're a naive movie attender movie Corp you don't you don't really think about the movie right you certainly don't think about it as an artifact you don't think about the Direction you don't think about the Cinematography you're just in the story and you know in a in a way that's

where the most enjoyable cap takes place and then when you become critically minded and you start to see the subtexts and to see the technology and to see the skill or lack thereof then it distances you from that and that is a gain in that you're a more sophisticated Observer and probably less susceptible to manipulation but it's a loss in that you lose that embeddedness in the story but My experience has been that with enough concentration on both then you you can unite them and you can have the embeddedness in the experience and the deeper

understanding at the same time and that's actually better that's the goal that's what I so often and and this is why I was drawn to to Peterson Academy I've been a professor for 21 years um you know it's part of my identity as a human being um one of many and and I think for me the opportunity To something completely new novel and and really interact with the type of intellect the Curiosity that hasn't been beaten out because they had they don't have to learn partial differential equations and they don't have to learn how to

solder together data acquisition system and all sorts of other things that are very important for professional physicists that aspire to do that maybe some of them will and I've in fact been encountered by people that do want to Take that course uh further than when I presented in Peterson Academy but the point being you know if if you can maintain that wonder if you can maintain that Curiosity um and you are undeterred by by failure you know I always tell my students when you solve a problem guess what you win you win a ticket to

an even harder problem and that's a good thing because that's like success in life success exactly it's deferring gratification and but the thing about Science Jordan as you know you can't win science you know science is an infinite game as as D would call it right there there's no such thing as as completing you've come to the end of science you know no one will ever do that no one will ever complete science you may have the most knowledge you may have stack of Nobel prizes Etc but you can't complete science because Mother Nature is

undefeatable because she's an infinite array of ever retreating forces I think Wigner called it and and the point being it's confusing because there's an ambiguity the human mind hates ambiguity because we know to get a tenur position is a finite game there's only so many professors that can get it to get you know the highest score on a test to get into graduate school to get a post all these things so science is comprised it's an infinite game comprised of all these finite games Nobel Prize it only goes to three people so how do you

Navigate in those in those Realms and I think that people cleave towards the well if I just do the hard things the the differential equations and the circuits and the and the I master the finite games yeah those finite games then I will win the infinite game and along the way they beat out of themselves unfortunately sort of the suicide of that Curiosity that got them interested you know they subordinate their TR their search for beauty and Truth to victory in it in one of the finite games right and that's that's like the equivalent of

propaganda in the Arts is you're putting the cart before the horse and that's a very big mistake you know one of the things I learned in graduate school um I wouldn't say that I'm particularly mathematically minded you know it's not something that comes with great ease to me I had some students who had that proclivity and I could certainly see how different they Were from me in that regard although I could learn if I put my mind to it um I probably had more trouble with Statistics in my career as a psychological researcher learning it

as a graduate student than anything else until I started doing my own studies and then statistics became it became as much fun as gambling like slot machine gambling because if you were doing a study you were interested in there was a moment in The statistical analysis where you pulled the lever so to speak and you could see if you discovered something or not or if all your work was for not if it was going to move you forward and so the thing that's interesting about the infinite game element of that is that it's like a

brick layer who's laying one of 50,000 bricks when he's building a cathedral if you just think of the next brick that's a pretty damn dismal occupation but if you understand That each of the incremental steps you're taking forward is in relationship to this infinite whole then the significance of the whole imbus the part and if you're pursuing science properly that is exact you have to do it that way right so it's interesting you know and the uh conception of the Divine that's laid forth in the story of Jacob's lad is an infinite game in the

same regard because Jacob has a vision of a ladder ascending upward with no Pinnacle right And God is at the top of the spiraling ladder with no Pinacle sure but but it is a it is a vision of finite and infinite games I think but in relationship to the moral domain rather than the scientific those probably overlap though and that overlap I think is what we're talking about right is that the it's the Call of Beauty and Truth as the fundamental motivation not only the fundamental motivation of the scientific Inquiry in that it's the pursuit

that saturates all the sub elements with meaning but it's also the ethical Pursuit that makes science possible Because unless you're very strongly aligned in your belief with your belief in the truth you can't be a scientist because you'll put your career first and then the whole bloody thing collapses because you know another thing you win as a scientist is evidence that you're an idiot and you Were wrong right because every time you discover anything that's actually a discovery right another fan quote science is the belief in the ignorance of experts not their knowledge not their

wisdom and look or the ignorance of you well that's exactly and you look at the word look we you know more than anybody you know what the meaning of words are you know and you know in Hebrew the word for thing is the same as the word for word suggesting an interm you know inter Entanglement that's inextricable but um but but in the sense science let's look at the word science what does science mean it doesn't mean wisdom no that's sapience that's sapiens we are Homo Sapien we are man who is wise what are we

wise about Jordan that we're going to die that's the only only thing that we know that we know for sure is that we're going to die and it's interesting that also comes up in the first chapters of Genesis right uh as you've spoken about At many at many um many occasions but the word science means knowledge and what is the word knowledge in Hebrew canote well Adam knew his wife so it's very different the the the notion in sort of the Greek the Roman the the tradition of Asa Etc that is coming down through us

and it's very crucial to life I mean technology science and and knowledge acquisition in general that's sort of one tradition and the the Hebrew tradition is a tradition where knowledge As I say means something radically different and the aspiration for wisdom Torah wisdom knowledge um truth amuna as you say all these things have elements of Illumination but it's illumination relationship yes a purpose purposefulness yes exactly yeah so the so these things you know and you should never confuse it I mean there's no one as dumb as you know a someone who's brilliant you know there's

no one who will believe some of the dumbest things Dumbest propositions that you couldn't convince that brick L you spoke about to believe then an intellectual then an academic you know uh they spoke of uh Lin spoke of of useful idiots sometimes I think of of of useless Geniuses you know that some of my colleagues are useless genius they're so bright and then they'll lead their credibility to the domain of wisdom of which they have none yeah and so you know the correlation between there is no Correlation between what you might describe as ethical orientation

as psychometrically measured and IQ there's no correlation between IQ and work e for example that's that just shocked me when I first discovered it's like what do you mean there's no correlation you mean zero really like zero you'd ex you'd expect just maybe on the basis of something like neurological Integrity that people with higher IQs might be able to dedicate themselves to tasks Over the long run more assiduously nope no no correlation whatsoever yeah so that's and it's also the case you know and this has being laid forward in the mythological representations forever mythological characterizations

that there's nothing there's no sin greater than the prideful sin of the intellect yes right because it's extremely powerful and very very inclined to worship itself and its own Creations right very bad idea right exactly is Within all of us and the smarter you get look I've interviewed 21 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast and never once I mean they've all been brilliant they've all been incredibly you know accomplished in their field obviously to get to that level and I've criticize the Nobel Prize but not the people that win it they you can't I mean

the one rule I learned when I was asked to nominate winners on the two occasions I've been asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize is that you can't nominate yourself right so that's the one rule that they adhere to that Alfred Nobel stipulated in 18 uh 96 but most other things they've dis dis disavowed unfortunately um which is a grave sin by the way because you know in Judaism the greatest the greatest Mitzvah which means commandment think people think it means good deed it doesn't mean good deed it means commandment you're commanded to

do certain things and one Of the things you're commanded to do that has greatest utmost importance is to bury the dead and to not leave a dead body on a sced why is that well it's the one thing they can't reciprocate right they can't you bury the dead they're not going to bury you right by definition and so it's the ultimate altruistic you know beneficence in a sense and when Alfred Nobel wrote his will he specified exactly what he wanted he wanted to go to one man who did the greatest Accomplishments for the greatest benefit

of hum of of mankind uh and uh in the preceding year so it's one person preceding year and had a benefit all of human so it's what we call in Hebrew Zava an ethical will um so it wasn't just a will here's my money he had no kids he had no wife uh he had no heirs to give the money to so he gave it all in in the sense towards the betterment of mankind literally that's what it says uh but many of the other things they've Disavowed he can have three people win it they

can win it for stuff done 30 years ago 50 years ago but but one of the few things that they've actually kept is this this Focus if you will that it should benefit it should provide a benefit to humanity and then you wonder well that's also a nonscientific element correct so you agree with that you know one of the things I've been trying to work out conceptually and I tried to talk to Richard Dawkins about this I Wouldn't say with a tremendous amount of success um I I science is can't be at the bottom of

of human endeavor it can't constitute the fundamental it can't constitute the foundation of human endeavor because science itself has to be embedded in an a priori moral framework that is not itself science and would you say then just based on that that somebody who identifies as a scient alone is fundamentally unhealthy is not maybe Psychopathic I don't think you can do it because the problem is in your pointing to this it's like is it a defining characteristic of science that it serves the benefit at least in intent let's say it serves the benefit of of

what of of life more abundant that would be a good way of thinking about it's human- centered life more abundant well see I I read a book at one point point that was written by an X KGB officer who claimed that before the Berlin Wall collapse the Soviets had put together a biolab in Siberia that was working on a hybrid between Ebola and small parks that could be aerosolized right now that's science yeah right because if you accept the proposition that science is value-free and that all facts are equal because that's what value free means

both of those are like very unten philosophical propositions but people do accept them then well were the Scientific experiments that were done by Unit 731 in Japan in China by the Japanese was that science been used the the data is being used Y and so if if the exploratory Endeavor is not motivated by the proper ethical striving you're not a scientist and then I think that actually works out practically too like I was fortunate in my graduate adviser who's still alive I still work with him Robert Peele who was a very he was a scientist

And most scientists aren't right most scientists are Journeymen and I'm actually not even criticizing that because forther to be any exceptional people or any exceptional things there has to be a lot of run-ofthe-mill things like even scientific research a lot of the Publications are going to be the first publication someone who doesn't know what they're doing incal yeah yeah they're not likely to be correct or useful all phds are like that right Right right but that doesn't mean you you have to dispense with them okay so Bob's insistence in the lab was don't publish things

that you know to be wrong even if you're tempted because you will be tempted because maybe you work on an experiment for a year that's your Master's thesis and it doesn't work out it's like well then what well that's a year and it's supposed to take you a year so that's a big problem and you have to Mentor someone in your lab to Put the search for truth before their short-term career orientation and you can do that practically because you can say look if you allow yourself to take liberties with your statistical analysis and you

discover and publish something that isn't true you're going to believe it yeah and maybe you'll pursue it for the next 15 years and you're chasing a chimera and not only that so were you that will happen to your students and everyone that your research influences Is that what you want like that's a maybe you'll get your postto because of the publication but you've destroyed your credibility and your career and your soul and your integrity goes absolutely the problem is scientists don't we don't get any ethical training and I and I say that you know it's

all implicit it's implicit that you're just going to learn it similarly we don't get training in Public Communication I view my YouTube channel my podcast Etc as I Don't get paid for it I the university you know the university has not you know revoked my tenure but they they they don't help with it they don't provide any resources for it um they're they're you know there's no antagonism I do it because that's at least they don't no I know your univers but but um no and I have a great relation relationship with the chancellor and

and my Deans and and so forth I'm very blessed to to be where I Am and it's one of the best campuses for for many other reasons but um all this to say I don't get you know it's not part of my duties as a professor to do this the explanations that I do and provide interviews with Nobel Prize winners I do it because I believe in two things I believe I have an I believe I have a moral obligation and maybe you'll agree too maybe not I have a moral obligation I'm taking your money

I'm taking taxpayer money imagine if you're If you're uh the person who installed the countertops in in your home uh and and they said to you you said uh you know excuse me you know sir you know how's it going with the um I'm sorry Jordan what I do is so specialized it's so aidite you cannot you cannot possibly understand it even with your PhD and your success story you can you'd say go to hell you you don't you don't talk to your boss like that I am your boss the public is our boss the

public we Ser Well it's worse than that isn't it because if the public wants to do their own research online they'll find that most of it despite the fact that it's publicly funded is be behind not only a pay wall but an appallingly expensive and inaccessible pay wall $50 for 24hour access to a single article and a lot of it is packed and and and uh you know implicitly you know hacked to get the results that were desired whether it's for some drug companies benefit but even Beyond that the worker day scientist I'm talking to

the person in the lab next door to me not some you know shill for fiser or something like that I'm talking about just a work a day scientist and you know she or he will say to me I'm not good at that I'm sorry you Brian you have a gift to it by the way I I I don't think I'm that good but but I do think that I have an innate desire for the one% gains that can be made by iteration that every iteration I try to get 1% Better my conversation the questions I

asked the the types of of conversations that I have in the depth that I go into and I think that's my unique skill if anything but yeah but like you like your to though a lot of that's a consequence of practice I stopped lecturing with notes right 30 years ago and when I first started especially when I was lecturing about things that I hadn't thoroughly mastered which is the case when you First start lecturing I used PowerPoint and I used fairly detailed notes but my intent was to dispense with that and that was incremental improvement

over a substantial amount of time like you Lear see I mean your videos are online from Harvard from you Toronto but when I when I say that to them they say well I'm just not good at that and I say oh yes I forgot I forgot I forgot you know uh to my friend I'll say yeah you were born knowing Quantum Electrodynamics yeah no no no I I work really hard at oh oh oh so you work hard at that which you think is valuable so that means you're telling you're admitting you're coping to the

fact that you don't think communicating to the to your boss is important and I find it shameful and I don't think that everybody should be at the lab you know taking 20% of their time learning how to communicate like Neil degrass Tyson but they should spend some of that time and Maybe they should spend 20% of the time because the thing is well it also forces you to put your thoughts in order yes you know I get I I develop a lot of my ideas in consequence of lecturing I would say the majority of them

right but that's also because see people also lecture very oddly because people generally conceive of a as the reading of a text or something Like that and it's not that's a lecture is a performance and I've thought about this for a long time it's a lecture theater after all so what are you doing in a lecture well you're eliciting enthusiasm by demonstrating Your Love of the topic that's partly what you're doing and you're embodying that so you're a model there story like i' I've really thought through explicitly what I do in my public lectures and

now I really know what I do I mean I have a Question in mind that's related to a long-term Pursuit so it's an issue I've been interested in Forever before I do a public lecture I formulate the question that seems from a set of potential questions that seems to be relevant and at hand for that day and then I try to get farther in the answer than I have before and so what I'm modeling is the process I'm engaging in the process of intellectual exploration and so that's thought MH Question hypothesis which is something akin

to Revelation by the way it's like question potential answer critical analysis y exactly exactly and so I think that has the same structure by the way as the mythological Quest right you specify a treasure of unknown magnitude theave yeah exactly and then you think well how do we make our way there and you know there's a juggling element to that keeping the plates in the air or a Highwire act That's another way of thinking about it because if it's a real Quest you don't know if it's going to be successful and so if I go

on stage with a question in mind and I'm trying to push myself farther than I've got before I don't know if that's going to happen now everyone in the audience and me are extremely happy if as a consequence of this Quest likee exploration there's a punchline at the end right a contusion treasure yeah and I think I've got Better at ensuring that that will happen as I practiced this but it's also a blast you know and there's no reason you can't practice that you know and you're right that it's a travesty that people who will

be University lecturers aren't trained to do that because they're trained to do diversity inclusion yeah well that's you're trained you're you're trained how or they punished for not doing it at least well you won't even get in the door now you won't even have Your applications reviewed I'm interested to see what happens in the in the in the coming you know Administration as we speak yeah so so let's let's investigate that a little bit so I mean part of the reason that we established Peterson Academy there was a bunch of reasons one was I have

access to an endless supply of great thinkers so that's convenient like super convenient and fun and so and then we could see no reason why the best Lectures in the world couldn't be identified given a public platform and offered the opportunity to lecture about what they love in a manner that's extremely professionally produced and I'm extremely very very happy about the way the lectures have turned out I mean my daughter Michaela and her husband Jordan Fuller have taken the lead in the production side of Peterson Academy and I think they've just knocked it out of

The par I've traveled literally trillions of micrometers and billions of seconds to be here and we are going to explore this universe together cosmology is the oldest science known to humanity since Cav men and women people have wondered where did everything come from we're not going to do any alien autopsies or anything in this class but we are going to cover a lot of Fascinating questions where do we come from where are we going what is the universe made of how can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the C Cosmos when you look back

in space you look back in time it's amazing we've been able to do this to study the properties of the cosmos time scales of billions of years size scales billions of times bigger than our own and now the question is can we go back to time equals z can we go Back to Before Time equals z and what does that even mean I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions because without great questions there can be no great answer and without great answers it can be no understanding you know Jordan

I always joke our profession I call it the second oldest profession right I mean we there have been universities since the University of bolognia in Italy was Established in 1082 and look how much has changed there's a guy or a girl taking a piece of rock and scraping another piece of rock how Innovative after after a thousand bloody years we've done almost nothing different okay so there's PowerPoint and that's not the that's not that much different let's be honest right but what if there were you know the opportunity to to bring in literal the visualizations

that they've done on my first course and I can't wait To see the second course and my third course um is see what's nice I'm an experimental physicist I'm not Brian Green you know I'm not manipulating wormholes like my friend Kip Thorne and and so forth who did the uh the science behind the movie Interstellar I was the adviser to Christopher Nolan uh I'm I'm not a theoretical so what do I do I do experiments the more experiments the better but you only do another experiment because some aspect of the Previous experiment failed right and

then that's fine that's part of the iterative process of science that makes it so not only so important and so and so annealed so so hardened by truth in the process of of attempting to achieve Truth uh imperfectly as it may be but uh but getting things wrong look what happens when you get something wrong let's be honest it's a surprise right you didn't think you were going to go down and you're going to discover dust Instead of the Big Bang which is what happened to me in my I describ my first book um we

we thought we saw the gravitational wave aftermath of the inflationary universe that we talked about in my first podcast episode with you um but uh but instead that led to the Simon Observatory it's led to $200 million project that is now going to not only look for the for the gold but also look for the drag look for the dust look for the things that are the impediments So the surprise was not a failure I mean look when you solve a puzzle you get a little bit of thrill and remember when you were a kid

you had a Rubik's Cube you had this thing or that you'd solve the puzzle and you would do something that no adult does you do it again like my kids do this all the time they solve a Rubik's Cube then another one messes it up then the other one solves it and like I already solved it like I don't need to rewrite my PhD thesis like you Already wrote it you know but there's a little bit of that thrill that you get when you are surprised and that's well the surprise the thing is is that

if you lay out a prediction in keeping with your understanding of the world and something else occurs you have no idea what you've discovered now what you might discovered is that your reputation is now shot and your future is looking gloomy right I'm sure not right but you also have no IDE like that's that's a Reservoir of unrevealed truth of detent magnitude right and so you're the proper response and I did learn this in the lab that I trained in the proper response to your error as an experimental scientist is I probably just stumbled across

something that was even more important than what I was investigating if I can just figure out what the hell it is I say I say this to my students all the time I say flaws in your experiment in your theory need lead to new laws it's Not like we study do you know Jordan that we're made of matter right but but there in the early Universe we think that almost there was an almost an exact symmetry it's one of these guiding principles of physics that there are symmetries conservation of energy is a type of symmetry

angular momentum's conservation is another type of symmetry displacement the Symmetry those are all the things that we say the laws of physics shouldn't change they should not Look different in a mirror or upside down or on Pluto or in uh in Arizona it should not make a difference who you are where you are it's kind of the great Democratic process of of science known as the Laurence principle of Laurence and variance that Galileo really crystallized and then later uh eventually fundamental things apply everywhere everywhere fundamental truth to the extent that we can we can perceive

it and so you know when you When you do something and and you find out well this is not not correct like the fact that the postulate was and every all the greatest scientists thought there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter well guess what Jordan we wouldn't be here if that were true all the matter particles would annihilate with the antimatter particles and the universe would be a Universe of complete Barren sterile radiation pretty boring unless you happen to be a photon Um but that's not the case and it's obvious just from We

Exist you know I I kosum we know that that's not true we can observe it I refute it thus you know Kick the rock It's Made of matter where's all the antimatter is it segregated some Galaxy that we haven't been to yet no we don't think that's the case so where did it go well we have to look how symmetric is the universe how beautifully finely balanced tuned if you believe in an intelligent designer how Finally tuned did he tune it to be well it turns out he did a spectacular job because for every particle

of matter there was another particle of antimatter except for there was one for every billion particles of antimatter there was a billion and one particle of matter so the two matching a mirror image matter and antimatter particles they destroyed each other and what was left one particle of matter and the rest was a bath of photons Far less than a rounding error it's not a rounding error it's exquisitly balanced now we don't know why some theists will say be it's intelligently designed and you can ask certain questions how well designed does the universe have to

be in other words how finely tuned you have a good ear for classical music my wife enjoyed talking to you about it you know she plays the violin I play Spotify so I have no musical ability whatsoever but you guys But you could perceive the note a 440 Hertz right your ear can actually perceive if it's 441 hers in other words one out of 400 so less than 1% a quarter of a percent Mis tuning you can perceive it how well tuned does the universe have to be in order for us to be having this

conversation and then the supposition is well if it's extremely finely tuned across a a whole vast panoply of different areas from the strength of these constants the number of protons to The number of antiprotons then you know you might start to think this is suggestive but it's not it's not a scientific hypothesis right we can't say we can always say God and we can always say there was no God but you can't prove it and I think this is an important fact that people get I was on with a young man that you've met many

times Steven Bartlett on his podcast wonderful podcast and we spent four hours together and one of those hours was just about me Him asking me to prove God scientifically he said I'm sorry Stephen again and again I cannot do that he's searching he's reaching for something I just was on his podcast yesterday oh you were York well he probably talked more about God with me than he did with you and I was quite surprised that he did because I'm a cosmologist I'm not a the it's a Hot Topic these days it is it's been yeah

I always say I'd kill for 1% of God's you know book sales but but you Know and I told them look what what you're searching for I can't necessarily give you I can give you the approach to me that I find persuasive but it's not going to be persuasive to you because it's it's specific to me in my life history and how I understand how I got to be who I am and it doesn't use the the strength of quantum electrodynamics and it doesn't use all sorts of things and when you search for that I

think I told him I said Stephen you know and I Think I got this from you in a conversation you had with Dennis Prager that I was privileged to be a part of in in um that's in Santa Barbara about five six years ago and you said you know who am I to say this is you who am I to say I believe in God like what is a man to say such a thing I mean it's so ridiculous and I've turned that around I say I don't believe in gravity and he's like what are

you talking about and Stephen said you're a physicist you have To believe in grow I said no if I take this meteorite and I drop it I don't I don't believe it's evidence for it yeah what what what is the notion of evidence it means it's something we can't necessarily Define but we can say it's certainly not faith I don't have faith that it's going to do that we have empirical evidence DNA leads to you know uh leads to the genetic uh uh uh you know inheritance that we have those things you don't have to

take on faith You have evidence for them so science and and religion science should not be used it's not one of its tool its best purposes you know you have a hammer you don't use it to screwing in uh a a screw you you have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed or perhaps best well that's what I've often found that often what would you say have come to the conclusion I don't like arguments from design as proofs for the existence Of God and there's a variety of reasons for that what

I'd like your opinion about one of them I mean the fine-tuning argument I find specious and maybe I'm wrong about this because I think that you can obliviate its its unlikelihood with an evolutionary arguments like well if life evolved under these conditions it's not surprising that There's an there's a tight tuning between what's necessary for life and the conditions of the universe no matter how improbable they are because this form of life wouldn't exist without those that form of material reality cons the substrate and so if something has adapted to something unlikely the unlikeliness of

what it's adapted to doesn't produ presume a designer right I think there are more powerful arguments I'm going to give you this book right Now so this is the new book I wrote We who wrestle with God it's a good time to give this to you because I've made other arguments about the relationship between science and the Divine let's say in this book I tried in this book not to put forward any propositions that I couldn't justify scientifically but I'm not making a scientific case for God I think the case I think the Repro between

science and religion is not going to be found in Use of materialist reductionism to prove the existence of a designer I think it's going to be more a consequence of Us coming to understand what it means that science itself is not science without maintaining its embeddedness in an underlying upward striving ethos it's so so for example Cardinal Newman famous Catholic Theologian his existence proof for God wasn't argument from design um which is an argument that's been around for a Long time it was much more akin to something that's laid out in a sequence of Old

Testament stories there's an identity proclaimed in the story of Elijah and the story of Jonah job as well to some degree that one of the man manifestations of God is the voice of conscience and I really like that argument but more it's a definition you see not so much an argument because before you talk about the existence of God you have to say what the hell it is That you're investigating that's right that's so so resonant that phrase that you used that you know is tattooed on my brain you know who am I to do

that I I found it as a as a call to kind of a Clarion call because it made me think look Jordan there's what a billion you know Hindus and and and Buddhists and so forth it it can't only be that jjic Christian you know uh uh theology is correct it's the only it's the only Approach right it can't be the only approach and maybe it's not the only truth in other words maybe there's just assume this Pro proposition and then you can take it apart assume all religions that have at their base a moral

goodness an aspect of improving human flourishing and The Human Condition not some nihilistic you know witchcraft or whatever that seems to serve no theology theology whatsoever 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 um and take away the Theology and and just talk about the values there's an equivalence class in math itical terms of all religions that practice good values they have this in common whatever this is this notion of human flourishing and good

and treatment and so forth um what a again proposition I'm not saying it's true assume it's True just assume that's true assume that God in other words is you know there's no such thing as a we don't believe that there's a thing called a photon like a specifically a particle we believe the fundamental element is called the photon field that the field which exists everywhere at all times in all places places that that is what's fundamental and then this Photon you know the human eye is miraculous we can see a single Photon in the right

circumstances we're Dark adapted Photon amazing incredible um and that's part of the loss you spoke about earlier where we think about the NS of the night sky I'm curious we'll talk some other time about how the human psychology will be robbed of this and maybe that will do something like like the having phalates or microplastics we we those things are tangible but the intangible loss of the night sky from all places on Earth perhaps God forbid but let's just say it anyway getting Back to my proposition imagine God is a field so that and and

then each what we see is a photon or what we see as Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity is an inst is an instantiation is actually the F the particle version of it if you will of a field that exists throughout all space and all time in other words what if God is and we can't and this is not refutable because you can't you know we're saying by definition it's incorporeal it's it's a field and just Like you can't feel the photon field you can detect its manifestations and so what if the you know as the

the fruits of the of the tree are sort of proof of what it was made to do right an apple tree doesn't produce a grapefruit and each a honeybee doesn't produce a spiderweb so the instantiation how do these things uh you know connect to one another it's a relational system and and that that is well I think I think the I think the great comparative Investigators of religion mer Eliot probably foremost among them he was part of yung's broad school um and maybe played a rule equivalent to that of Yung they I the they certainly

identified the same kind of patterns in profound religious thinking that you can see characterizing literature I mean literature stories are identifiable because they are manifestations of an underlying pattern yes and I think you Can make that case in the religious domain I would make that case biologically in part by this is the way I conceptualize it is that there's a virtually infinite number of ways that you can interact with someone but there's a finite number of ways extremely restricted and finite number of ways that you can interact with someone in a manner they and you

approve of simultaneously like a father right like a parent right or or two kids play A game now see Jean P the developmental psychologist he thought of that as the origin of morality and P's goal was actually a Repro between science and religion he looked at play as the origin of that in part that was very very smart okay so now there's many ways that we can interact some of them will will jointly appreciate okay in consequence of that appreciation will want to continue them that's the establishment of a relationship 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 now that's an even smaller number of potential games well those games are going to have a pattern and it's it's the pattern of human interaction sustainable human interaction my suspicion is that conscience as an instinct indicates a violation of the rules of that game and I suspect further that that's Universal Now out of that a a realm of story is going to emerge there's going to be representations of games that deteriorate in games that have a tragic

end and games that are sustainable where everyone lives happily ever after comprehensible games those are going to have an A universality across cultures now cultures are going to vary in the sophistication with which they represent those games but there's a it's it's sort of like it's almost like making the same Claim that obviously all languages are the same because they're identifiable as languages and they're structure well and they're characteristic of human beings and but within the family of languages there's commonality still grammatical structure there's nouns and verbs like there's tremendous commonality but there's also tremendous

variability yes so I think that religious domain is analogous to that my sense I've done a a fair bit of study of comparative Religion is my sense that in the judeo-christian Endeavor proceeded farther along the line of explicit representation than any other religious system now we could debate that but you know that's not much different than saying that Western cultures are the most literate which is the that's the case that's so yeah definitely and and the Jews got there Early mhm yeah and I always say you know we have uh the eskimos and you know

in in Northern Canada reputed to have 12 words for snow and you find that with with the Jews you find there's six different types of words for knowledge and wisdom and intuition and and and and um you know you can you can identify them they don't have as many words for snow and so what were their tool what was their environment like it was it saturated with with religion and yeah And with literacy and and you the language and being able to communicate that as well uh but also expressing something which must be intrinsic and

I find when I I hosted uh Richard Dawkins in Vancouver he and asked me to come up I had him on my podcast for two episodes for his most recent book and um and I'm always you know kind of and I've had Sam Harris on the last year as well and the thing that's frustrating to me about when I talk to scientists like them is Uh is how simple their understanding understanding is quite frankly of of religion specifically Juda or Chris I'm not an expert in anything I mean I was an alter boy in the

Catholic church as a kid the complicated story but I'm born Jewish two Jewish parents and I'm Jewish to this day but but the point their understanding of things like I I said to Richard you know in our in Vancouver a thousand people there it was wonderful people coming up Tears in their eyes Thank you for making me an atheist and I found it so depressing and and uh because of the richness and I'm by the way I I often call myself a practicing AGN IC meaning and I think is in harmony with with with your

famous statement that I mentioned before in other words if you know for sure that God exists then you're an absolute fool or an imbecile if you don't believe in him or whatever that means almost to the point of evidence and I don't dispute that Many many Christians feel it in a way that Jews don't you know this personal relationship with with God the Savior and and that he died for my sins it's it's harder for Jews to relate to that but but I stipulate that they feel that way um but to say that you are

an atheist like that is your identity is is is a very strange thing to me to to believe especially from these brilliant men like Sam and like Richard because they have such simplistic ideas well Thing that's odd about Sam too in that regard is that like he's drifted into a kind of a Visionary Buddhism yeah and I think I understand why like one of the characteristics of the meditative tradition that Sam is partaking in is that the god of that meditative tradition is extraordinarily ineffable not defined and also not concretized into ritual or story now

the advantage to that is that you can't criticize it intellect well that's exactly right you Know and I see I see that in the Christian tradition the Orthodox church has been the most resistant to woke idiocy partly because it's so embedded in nonpropositional Tradition right liturgy and ritual that well how are you going to criticize like criticizing dance like you're just or music you're just get anywh the The Taste is not disp disputable right I said to Richard you know I said look Richard I also don't believe in the god That you also don't believe

in it's so simpl and and Sam to some extent is worse just just from the perspective that he's so he's so persuasive I mean he's he's the only person besides you that I've ever known I've spent four hours with that never uses the word um uh the the you know has any verbal crutches whatsoever and I don't mean to jinx our conversation but but he just speaks in complete he speaks in Pros as they say you know paragraphs and you Know when we talk about things very simple things why don't you do you know what

is your feeling about uh about you know uh Judaism that made you reject you know I guess it's status J I forget um and well just take slavery and just asserts that you know slavery is there's no such thing if he said to me Brian Brian you and I create a religion are we going to have slavery in it I said Sam this is so this is like my my you know seven-year-old learns this you know in In in school in her talid class like you you can't be serious like you think that slavery meant

like a black African slave trade you know in the Deep South and America and and it's just not that and we go through it and I I I taught him you know what it meant to have slave by the way Moses is called a slave of God do that mean that Moses was whipped by God no it means he's a servant and and there was this concept called indentured servitude which is actually a kindness If you couldn't pay your debt to me Jordan and you were going to steal something no no no I would give

you a basically employ you and I provide food and shelter and by the way sometimes you wouldn't want to leave 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 and this was a part of a tradition uh that that Jewish slaves had to undergo in order to Remain with their masters because we're meant to be free and so this was meant to show as an outward symbol to the to the world

that I chose not to be free and we know many people choose to be slaves of a different kind uh rather than be free men and women but I said he idea about this 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 so and that's like that that's a major part of Of the biblical Library um 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 you might be a slave to yourself and that's not that's not appropriate or slave to your whims and that's what hedonistic self-gratification is it's like I'm free it's like no you're not you're a slave to your whips the most common slavery That scientist practice is workaholism they work 24/7 they work six you know all all days of the week they're so fascinated because it's so intoxicating you know you have that feeling when you discover something and you realize wow gee I am the first human frail human it's ever understood this in

the history of the planet it might be small it might be incremental maybe it's not but you also don't know but you don't know and you don't know what these little seeds h On the trail man yeah you may blossom into something so wonderful and that's what's so great about science but it's a Ive and I tell my students I you have to work but people forget Jordan right before it says you know on the seventh day you shall rest it says six days you must work it's not optional it's a commandment it's a Mitzvah

command form Hebrew has English doesn't you must work Jordan because you can't appreciate the the the true sense of Soul Society NE You know satiating of your soul unless you have that feeling of accomplishment of working the Earth or working the laboratory but if you only do that if you only do that you're a Slave I don't care you might have a Nobel Prize but you're a slave and so yeah when I when I talked to Richard and I talked I came away you know somewhat depressed because also you know as you know in Judaism

the word Judaism comes from the word gratitude Hodo Hoda which means to give Grace the Gratitude towards God you know judah's name for the Thanksgiving that his mother gave to God so it's endemic and our and that's why we do say blessings because you can't look at a meteorite a meteor shower you can't look at a rainbow and and not if you bless it you can't be angry and grateful at the same time right that's seems to be impossible so it's it's I view it gratitude is also the opposite of resentment exactly right And resentment

is the most bitter and destructive of emotions I look at the iPhone 16 you know so I'm a tech junkie I love technology I gu it doesn't come with a manual and I I actually this is very interesting I'm going to show it to you in a second I I brought you a very ancient manual but it but it's very interesting we have you know manuals but you can get online so it doesn't come with a printed menu you go to Apple and it tell you every single feature there's 8,000 YouTube channels that have millions

of times more subscribers than me and it will be yeah listed you know how to get this shortcut how to do this app how to so there's an instruction manual for a bloody chunk of silicon glass and a little bit of rubber and there's no instruction manual for people I I remember the night we brought our first son home and we were blur eyed he wasn't nursing he's going to die right you remember that feeling he's going to Die like he's not going to die he's going to be fine he six pound the revelation of

a child this thing might die it's sheer Terror and it's the most respons and they send you home and there's no instruction manual and I actually said let's look at the manual to my wife and she what the hell are you talking about there's no manual but humans need some instruction and it doesn't have to come from somewhere but it can't come from yourself when I Talked to stepen Bartlett he said I'm a good person I don't kill anybody I say Stephen how many people that committed great sin and great evil thought they were doing

evil none of them not a single bloody one of them thought they were doing evil they Justified it as great good whether it was eliminating Jews or you know whatever I don't even have to take it that far so he's trying to justify I think his behavior because what happens Jordan when you believe in God or you have some notion of auna or faith or just want to approach a Creator or something bigger than you well then you have obligations and people hate that I don't think Richard I I mentioned I men Richard I discovered

that every audience I've discussed this with goes silent there's no difference between obligation and Adventure you know because you think of an obligation as something that you're involuntarily shouldering right that's An obligation it's like well if you get rid of the involuntary part of that and you make it voluntary now you're voluntarily shouldering a great weight it's like well that's an adventure when you go see a movie about a great Adventurer a secret agent say the thing that characterizes his journey that you find so compelling is that he's doing something impossibly difficult voluntarily it's like

so so people don't want an obligation but that's because They have the wrong attitude towards obligation it's like no you actually want a stellar obligation more 20 years ago Jordan you eat meat only and salt you know I prepared meat I think it was pretty darn good kosher ribey when you came to my house a couple years ago uh but if I told you 30 20 years ago Jordan you're just going to eat ribe eyes and salt you would say that's horrible like I I don't want to do that that's going to be you Know

take away my freedom you're telling me it's compul but now you took it upon yourself I see it in you the health the Vitality the the the just just you know incredible transformation that you've under who is happier 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 and I I feel that way about so I said that to to you know Stephen and also to Sam and when you're Given you know look

as a Jew I don't eat pork right I love to eat pork you know and and why did we not get who knows there there's no real reason why we think it's not CU they're dirty but um but when you're when you have an instruction manual um you you the assumption is the the writer the author of the instruction M knew something that you don't and maybe there's some benefit from following their instructions um the question is you know if you do believe In God and if you do practice some Faith tradition or whatever uh

will you be happier or not these people that came up to Richard Dawkins With Tears in their eyes at the book signing after our event you change by one of the things I've learned about the atheist community so to speak though that's that's a mitigating factor I would say there's a subset of them that are just luciferian rationalists and they're not fun they're not fun they know everything they're Bitter they're resentful and they're seriously underappreciated for their genius yes okay but then there's a very large subset of atheists who are relieved at their atheism because

they were brutalized by pharisaic religious Pretenders right so they that's Richard right well it might even be Richard Dawkins cuz he made the odd illusion yeah he's made the odd illusion and I've met lots of people who were very badly hurt by F fundamentalist types I don't Want to say you know okay so now I don't have to listen to him because he was Abus you know it's like if you meet somebody who was physically abused as a child and then that they turn out to you don't want to make that an excuse because look

at the other people that were he's also so I don't want to I don't want to let him off the hook so easily in that sense but um but I guess the the challenge that I have is is when I deal with somebody like that because I Can talk science with either one of them uh Lawrence Krauss again these people I can talk to and they're so self but they would never I told this to Lawrence K cuz I had on my P he's been having me on his podcast we've talked about this and we

kind of joke I'm the religious Jew he's the atheist but he knows nothing about about the why does he know but why does he know because most Jews boys have a bar mitzvah at age 13 which is a right a passage which sucks I mean I've got One one of my kids going through it right now and your voice is cracking and you're in front of everybody and you're embarrassed you pimples and your girlfriend you know and it's horrible right but you go through it's a write a passage right and then what does it Mark

for most Jews men Carl San Steven J ghould Lawrence Krauss uh Sam Harris uh if he had one it m it marks sort of a graduation from religion it marks the parole from prison of this obnoxious not Really satisfying or meaningful tradition that was forced upon you by the circumstances of your birth I agree with Richard no one could be a Christian you know like you're a Christian because you're born to a Christian family that doesn't mean that you're actively doing anything in Christianity and that's different so Judaism is more of a behavioral Rel where

you have to do these mitos and do certain things it's Behavior it's practicing religion but You know at the same token If you deny somebody that like there's almost no chance I'm sort of miraculously because both my parents were kind of atheist they didn't take Judaism very seriously my dad was an active militant atheist used to say to me I don't believe in God I believe in Satan because he made you believe in God but but the point being you know if you deny something that could be beneficial even if you don't believe it yourself

I think it's I don't Want say child abuse but but you're denying your you're denying your children something and and and I said you know the the avatar for me what do they have if they don't have a tradition they have nothing they have themselves they have the med that's that's exactly the problem is that because that's also a very weird definition of self it's like yeah they have the self that's without tradition okay so that means fundamentally it means Without discipline it means without Rich moral knowledge it means without community it means without the

necessity of forgoing immediate gratification for a higher purpose that's a major loss like you'd only think that the child stripped of tradition has himself in the untrammeled sense if you believe that the self that was the true self had no relationship whatsoever with the surrounding Community well that's that's a that's a lonely person and is it going To be a bitter unhappy and also maybe Nar nistic and self- serving because if it's all about you independent of anyone else then well it's all about you that's right 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 the postmodernists were correct in their Proclamation that we see the world through a story a description of the Structure through which we perceive the value of the world is a story when you go see a movie you're looking at the consequences of the value structure of the protagonist and you want to know that because it orients you in their Direction so you can try that out right once you understand

that the only question that the question that necessarily arises is what story and it could be non nihilism it could be Hedonism which is whim possess essentially um it could be power and the problem with the postmodernists is that they were all marxists virtually and they turned to power as an explanation immediately now the problem with that hypothesis is it's actually wrong because power power is not an effective unifying motivation that's why the ring of power in The Lord of the Rings is the is the Ring of Satan himself right very attractive power I can

Force Unity yeah but it doesn't it doesn't iterate well it doesn't unite well the biblical library is predicated on the idea that the F the the the foundation of community is voluntary self-sacrifice and that's right 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 it's definitional like so we could think about P that developmental psychologist his proposition was that if we wanted to understand ethics scientifically we'd look at their precursors and he thought we'd

find that in the behavior of children as they became socialized very smart hypothesis that's why he got so interested in games well when a child makes the transition from 2-year-old Egotist to three-year-old social creature cuz that's when that occurs one of the Hallmarks of that development is taking turns well taking turns is a sacrifice yes it's like it's not my turn now I sacrifice my turn to you okay if I do that then we play if you want to keep playing with me then we're friends well that's the contract that's the that's that's the social

contract right it's not imposed tyrannically from above something else PSA pointed out is that The stable social contract is voluntarily created accepted that's way different than Freud super ego or fuko's power games it's way different way different and I think I think there's all the evidence in the world that it's true oh I agree yeah 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 yeah and then there's a periphery which Is the town

and then the countryside Center periphery or Center surround periphery the center is the sacred place and the reason for that is the center is the sacred place that's definitional then in the center of the center there's an altar where sacrifices are being made right and the drama that's enacted is the community is founded on the principle of sacrifice it's like well yeah obviously obvious well obviously CU that's the definition of community in Some sense is that the individual is brought into relationship with others right well that's obviously a sacrifice of individual pracy well what's the

gain well mat matur maturity that's a major gain now you're taking care of the future and not just the present so that's a major game because maturity is the sacrifice of the present for the future right and a relationship is sacrifice of your whims for the benefit of the relationship so it's all Sacrifice and perception is sacrificial because you could be attending to a lot of other things instead you're attending to the one thing you're attending to and to me that that's why look I struggle with God that's the name of your book right Israel

Israel means wrestle with God it's not Islam Islam means submit to God when you submit to God a different Vision it's a very different vision and we can we can debate you know about it But but the but the fact is when you submit it's like I've often you noted with my children you know the first word they said was no it wasn't yes that's the magic word man no if you say yes you're just agreeing with somebody else's you know whatever they propos do you want to eat this yes I want to eat the

you have no self-identification I me you know this is Trivial 101 for you but but that is true so you express your two years old at two years old Battle of no And that is exactly how much is for me which is what no means and how much has to be sacrificed to the community absolutely yeah no and so it's it's it's so all these things are self-evident and the thing in Judaism where what I feel is sort of denied to people that just refute look I say as I said I don't believe in the

god that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe and it's trivial Yuri gargar when he circled the Earth the first time the the Communist you know Prda truth right they asked him what did you see up there he said I can't tell you what I saw but I know what I didn't see and what I didn't see a man with a white beard sitting on a chair you know congratulation Yuri that's really you know he's a hero of the Soviet Union yeah that's so baby nobody thinks of that where's up there's no up in space there's no Heaven

it in the bibl there is in the artistic representations but there're images and everyone understands That but and there's also constant warnings in the biblical texts about confusing the image with the ineffable right I mean that's right and and there's been huge battles in the Christian church the iconoclasts were people who believed that icons had the danger of concreteness which is exactly the danger that say Dawkins has fall prey to when he concretizes trivial metaphor infantile right I said you know or you know uh Steven Bartlett asked me He said you know the Bible says

the Earth is flat I first of all doesn't say that but but second of all you know I said I think it is locally flat it is locally flat I said and I I won't say this I said you know look Stephen I could say this to Sam or Richard Dawkins you know I say the Earth is flat prove me wrong one in a thousand uh people ordinary people will get that right about 50 60% of scientists will get that right if I say prove that the Earth Orbits around the Sun 90% of scientists will

get that wrong I bet most scientists watching this I'm not going to put anybody on the spot don't cannot Pro yeah I'm not GNA say stand on one leg and prove it Jordan but I can we can prove it it's discovered in the 1700s how you could do it's called Stellar aberration I'll give the answer to the to the test but uh Galileo one of the greatest Minds in human history he believed and he was right that the earth Goes around the Sun and he went to Great Lengths and I think this is so beautiful

we put so much emphasis on scientists that they are sort of gods right they manipul what did Arthur C Clark say he said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic I actually opened my podcast with that um with his actual voice because I'm I'm at the Arthur C Clark Center so when you look at that who wields magic well it's gods or it's magicians and Fairies and and all sorts of wonderful creatures that are certainly aren't people but when a scientist can unlock the power of the atom or can can unleash you know the

the the you know Humanity's need on electricity with infite energy or or you know can develop a superconductor or all the lasers anything that we take for granted in technology all came from basic physics the internet came from basic physics 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 they think that we think that he's the guy in the chair in in outer space with the beard uh but but they project that onto humans so they'll say Richard fman

was a God I mean they literally there's more people Jordan that have uh play in the NBA right now than have won Nobel prizes in physics okay um and and so when you look at these great men and including my hero Galileo they were greatly flawed individuals horribly flawed Fineman cavorted with his graduate students wives he had Mistresses he went to strip clubs Einstein married his cousin and was a horrible horrible father he neglected a child with with severe mental illness never saw him after he moved to America to get Fame and Fortune cting with

with um with um what's the guy's name Charlie Chaplain he convered with Charlie Chaplain and they was love The fame and attention he had a huge ego not great I don't want to emulate him do I want to be like Einstein do I want to be like fan hell no but you look at a man and you analyze him or you analyze a woman what are they willing to teach me what can I learn from them and what you learn from Galileo is that great men can have great flaws and they can be right and

they can be wrong and if you can learn from both of them at the both those tendencies that are mixed up Within them they have both within them you must subdue well and even even in that analysis you're pointing to a a prior distinction between the things that made them truly great scientists in that necessarily ethical sense and all the flaws that are part and parcel of being a human but aren't in the same category right and you can't yes so this this you have some yeah yeah I brought this uh to show you I

can't I can't give you this because it's signed not by the Great Jordan Peters but a signed by Galileo so I'm going to show you what his signature looked like and I want to point out just some interesting that's his signature wow so this this was a book he wrote It's called the military Compass now you and I I told Stephen Bartlett this I said do you know what a slide rule is he said I have no idea what a slide where did you get this um so I have a a collector so when I

got my uh advance for my first book losing the Nobel Prize I I basically bought this book uh and it's a great wonderful look at the pages on it this is from 1646 as a custom box and so forth and there's an English translation that they made in the 70s you can't get this anymore uh but there's an English translation of it but there's a tag I put there uh why don't you open that up and and read me what it says on the a Post-It note uh page I think it's on this side of

the page um so these are all things that you Could do with this this thing called the military compus so I think it says there right what does it say can you read it yeah this one yes rule for yeah rule for monetary exchange by means of these same arithmetic lines we can change every kind of currency into any other in a very easy and Speedy way this is done by first setting the instrument taking lengthwise the price in the money we want to exchange and fitting this crosswise to the price in the money into

Which The Exchange is to be made we shall illustrate this by an example so that everything is clearly understood he goes through and what does he mention the currency that he's going to convert Florentine gold die into Venetian duckets yes so there uh so here's what that device looked like it was a it was like a slide roll so we'll maybe later we'll get the cameras to zoom in on it it was a slider was a it was a computer it was a device to simplify calculations And he invented it and he wouldn't actually produce

as he did with his telescopes he wouldn't actually give the the hardware away he'd give the software away he'd give the operating manual away this is how he made money cuz he had illegitimate children he had Mistresses he was also not the greatest of husbands and men and sort things he was a deep believer in God but when I look at this and I say this this book this is the second edition the first edition was Written in 16001 um and there's only about seven of them left there's actually more uh Gutenberg Bibles than first

editions of gal's Compass so this one was cheap very cheap compared to those you almost they're Priceless they're they're kept under lock and key at the Galileo Museum in Florence but but the point is if he had taken if if he had taken those florentines that he's talking about or the the duckets you know if you if I give you a Ducket right Now it's almost worthless I mean yeah it's kind of cool historically it might look good it was a paper note it's basically like a paper dollar it got inflated to nothing they would

do things you know with the money back then they would shave the corners of the coins that's why coins have ridges on them now all sorts of interesting historical tidbits but if he had just kept one of these things you know kept the original Edition his heirs would have hundreds of Millions of dollars and so you look at these people and and you often find that the people who have the greatest scientific knowledge and Technical maybe practical knowledge sometimes their wisdom is to be lacking but the the the average person will never look at that

and say wow this person you know has been divorced six times or you know treats his his uh illegitimate stepdaughter horribly or whatever this we never look at that we never say part And parcel and I think I'm not advocating we should look at fan and say you slept with your graduate students wives no no no you should just say that there is a value in the people that that say have those wonderful aspects those wonderful characteristics that don't have the foibles just they may not have Nobel prizes in other words we we we prioritize

the intellect over the ethical and I think it's very dangerous and it's very seductive for scientists To want to emulate Galileo and you know certainly I I very seductive for scientists to want to prioritize the ethic the intellectual do we get more well they're also smart yeah well so of course you're going to do that because it's in your obvious self-interest to prioritize in importance your most outstanding trait that's also the deadliness of of worship of the intellect per se yeah yeah well I'll be interested in your response to this book Because I've read the

first couple chapters online and it's uh it starts uh you know just just to think about the connection as I start my cosmology class at at Peterson Academy you know I start off by saying you know what is the most important day on the calendar let me say it to you like what what is the most important day on your calendar every year it's probably Christmas I say yeah so what what is Christmas it's a birth it's A beginning it's a it's a new but what is the only event for which there might not have

been a preceding day let alone you know a repetition of that day the origin of the universe we go back from now late 2024 we go back 13.8 billion years let's say we're talking on a Thursday today we'll come back there'll be some Thursday just just counting 24 hours doesn't mean the Earth was here doesn't mean the sun was here just counting back in units of 2 4 hours back Back comes some Thursday and you know perhaps that was the day the actual Big Bang occurred on if we could keep track of it I me

it's it's totally practical to do this type of calculation uh and we don't actually know what happened on the on the Wednesday before that day it's a concept you can think about it but you can't actually necessarily know what happened and so that is why I I feel like cosmology is the ultimate the most primitive primordial subject and why it Evoke something in people there's reasons why the caves of Las go you know 40,000 years ago they weren't depicting like well here's how you make a good adalle or spear you know whatever they were depicting

like the stars and the movements of things well and people then of course they started to into it the fact that there was a this is where when astrology and astronomy were still rightly intermediated because the ancient people discovered that there was A relationship between the events of the Heaven and the Transformations on earth right the movement of the seasons and that was obviously of critical importance it's going to predict the movement of animals for example or when your crops should be planted but just that that concordance of the cosmic with the with the with

the Practical that's a it's well it's it's a it's an it's an unbelievable fact of nature to begin with visceral right and by the way it Didn't have to be that way most stars are not like our sun our son is is not unique I shouldn't say unique sorry our son is unusual in that it's a singular star the preponderance of stars that you look up and and see on a dark knight sky are multiples pairs binaries triples maybe even clusters of stars and that would be very different that would mean you wouldn't have the

ability to see because there's there'd always be a star out effectively they won't orbit right Next to each other like they uh in and Tatooine and in Star Wars remember there's a red Sun and but you don't have constellations you don't have seasons in tracking you don't have agriculture the human being's First Technology and you know there are some of my colleagues and I'd love to talk to you about the psychology of aliens there's a huge murmuration in the zge right now both that super advanced technology is visiting the Earth uh incomprehensible Distances and so

forth um and simultaneously uh that there are you know Untold worlds yet to be discovered where life is not only abundant but it's also maybe Superior to us and maybe they are so Advanced and so in possession of Moore's law for 80 more doubling periods than we've enjoyed it for that in fact they've created us in sort of giant silicon apparatus this is called the simulation hypothesis and by the way the greatest adherence to both the alien Reality uh hypothesis and the simulation hypothesis are atheists right I mean these are both now supplanting the need

for well atheists get all their religion from science fiction right right I'm dead serious about that well sure because the mythological pattern of science fiction stories is Crystal Clear I mean Star Wars was predicated on Joseph Campbell's analysis of of Hero Journey right sure of course that is true yeah Definitely but it's natural right yeah so so you're going to subordinate your belief in a god that is judeo Christians say because then You' have to do things right then you'd have to you know have obligations on you to the community to your to your wife

to your parents sacrifices the sacrifices to the Sabbath you might have obligations but I don't need those if I believe in an alien who's on proximus no I never thought about that particular have yeah that's a Good one so you get all the advantages of the Assumption of advanced intelligence with none of the moral requirements and the tuning you have a fine tuner right these same people will reject the arguments of of design from fine tuning which I'm not saying is I'm comfortable with that we discussed that already I mean we can put up many

counter examples of things that are extremely exquisitly tuned uh that didn't have a designer whatsoever and The Earth's distance to the to the sun is not exquisitly tuned in a sense that necessitated a designer to do it in other words we wouldn't you know the anthropic principle would suggest we wouldn't be here if the things were radically different from the way it is and actually a lot of the parameters in in cosmology and particle physics and and these imates 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 uh but you got to tune it but actually you don't have to tune it that exquisitely any better in fact than the universe was tuned along the lines of certain parameters but but this alien you know kind of hypothesis is has gotten a lot of attention you know it's political ramifications it has military ramifications you know is it what is it meant to do but I'm curious from your perspective you putting on my podcast or H now is there you know this compulsion

to sort of you know feel that there will be you're familiar with the Drake equation maybe you've heard of it I can describe about UFO really yes yes wow and he noted he noted cuz the belief in UFOs historically Cycles yes and itend tends to make itself manifest more frequently in times of Crisis and he describes he probably describes in his book on UFOs the answer to the question that you're posing because what you're Really asking me about is the metaphysics of materialist atheism right the mythological metaphysics of materialist atheism impulse Ur well the materialist

atheist might say we have no religion it's like yeah you wrong you have an unrecognized religious you don't believe in nothing you believe in anything right and well then you're laying out some of the wrappings that tend to come along with that and so it's because you can't organize your Existence in life without imposing a story on the world there's no way of doing it your life is a story in the world is that is that because of the intolerance that we as humans have towards ambiguity right in other words the battle over abortion or

the battle over immigration it's partly that it's partly because if you fail to specify you drown in ambiguity and anxiety technically is a response to ambiguity right that's technically anxiety signals The emergence of entropy right and positive emotion I learned this from Carl friston because I didn't know this positive emotion signifies a reduction in entropy and relationship to a goal a structure yeah and anxiety itself signals the sudden emergence of entropy right so there's a way actually of aligning this is so cool something we could talk about for a long time there's actually a place

where the thermodynamics and OT can be uh what Would you say brought into con thought about that we have to stop on this part of the podcast and that's that's too bad for all you people watching on YouTube because we're actually going to continue this on the daily wi side and obviously we could talk for an endless number of hours and would love to one one of the things that means is that the burning question uh that I wanted to ask Dr keing has to wait for the daily wire side and what that means for

you poor People on on YouTube is that in order to hear that part of the podcast you actually have to have a subscription to the Daily wire and that um slight of hand you might say wasn't done by Design it's just how it worked out but uh you might want to think about throwing the daily I have subscrip some support there we go we go thank you for talking about Peterson Academy too today we have 40,000 students now wonderful I've heard from so many and I'm so impressed by Them Jordan you should be very you

and Michaela we are pretty damn happy with the way things are going social media interactions on the site are extremely positive they're all idea focused they're upward aiming trolls yeah yeah I just hope I can get tenure you know that's my yeah yeah yeah well we'll work out that we'll work out the details of that as we progress too so for anybody everybody watching on the YouTube side do join us on the dailywire Side we're we're going to continue this conversation and I'm looking forward to that thanks very much for coming into Scot today and

thank you to all of you for your time and attention on the YouTube side and to film crew here in Scottdale today for making this possible really good to see you again great [Music]