Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But I'm born Jewish, two Jewish parents, and I'm Jewish to this day. But the point— their understanding of things. Like, I said to Richard, you know, in Vancouver, a thousand people there, it was wonderful, people coming up, tears in their eyes, thank you for making me an atheist. And I found it so depressing.
And because of the richness, and by the way, I often call myself a practicing agnostic, meaning, and which I think is in harmony with your famous statement that I mentioned before, In other words, if you know for sure that God exists, then you're an absolute fool or an imbecile if you don't believe in him or whatever that means, almost to the point of evidence.
And I don't dispute that many, many Christians feel it in a way that Jews don't, you know, this personal relationship with God, Savior, and that he died for my sins. It's harder for Jews to relate to that. But I stipulate that they feel that way. But to say that you are an atheist, like that is your identity—
is a very strange thing to me to believe, especially from these brilliant men like Sam and like Richard, because they have such simplistic ideas and knowledge.
You're just not going to get anywhere with it. The taste is not disputable, right?
I said to Richard, you know, I said, look, Richard, I also don't believe in the God that you also don't believe in. It's so simplistic. And Sam, to some extent, is worse just from the perspective that he's so persuasive. I mean, he's the only person besides you that I've ever known, I've spent four hours with, that never uses the word, you know, has any verbal communication.
crutches whatsoever, and I don't mean to jinx our conversation, but he just speaks in complete—he speaks in prose, as they say, you know, paragraphs. And, you know, when we talk about things, very simple things, why don't you do—you know, what is your feeling about, you know, Judaism that made you reject, you know, I guess his dad is Jewish, I forget— And, well, it just takes slavery.
And he just asserts that, you know, slavery is, there's no such thing as, he said to me, Brian, Brian, you and I create a religion. Are we going to have slavery in it? I said, Sam, this is so, this is like my, you know, seven-year-old learns this, you know, in school, in her Talmud class. Like, you can't be serious.
Like, you think that slavery meant like black African slave trade, you know, in the deep South in America. And it's just not that. And once we go through it, and I taught him, you know, what it meant to have a slave. By the way, Moses is called a slave of God. Did that mean that Moses was whipped by God? No, it means he's a servant.
And 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, 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 that Jewish slaves had to undergo in order to remain with their masters because we're meant to be free. And so this was meant to show as an outward symbol to the world that I chose not to be free.
And we know many people choose to be slaves of a different kind rather than be free men and women. But I said—he—
The most common slavery that scientists practice is workaholism. They work 24-7. They work all days of the week. They're so fascinated because it's so intoxicating. You know, you have that feeling when you discover something and you realize, wow, gee, I am the first— Human, frail human that's ever understood this in the history of the planet. It might be small. It might be incremental.
Maybe it's not. Yeah, but you also don't know. But you don't know. And you don't know what these little seeds— Hard on the trail, man. Yeah, you may blossom into something so wonderful. And that's what's so great about science. But it's addictive. And I tell my students, you have to work. But people forget, Jordan, right?
Before it says, you know, on the seventh day you shall rest, it says six days you must work. In other words, it's not optional. It's a command. It's a mitzvah command form. Hebrew has it. English doesn't.
You must work, Jordan, because you can't appreciate the true sense of soul society, you know, satiating of your soul, unless you have that feeling of accomplishment of working the earth or working 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. Mm-hmm.
And so, when I talked to Richard and I talked to—I came away, you know, somewhat depressed. Because also, you know, as you know, in Judaism, the word Judaism comes from the word gratitude, hodo, hodea, which means to give gratitude towards God. You know, Judah's name for the thanksgiving that his mother gave to God. So, it's endemic in our—and that's why we do say blessings.
Because you can't look at a meteor shower, you can't look at a rainbow, and if you bless it, you can't be angry and grateful at the same time, right? That seems to be impossible.
I look at the iPhone 16. So I'm a tech junkie. I love technology. It doesn't come with a manual. And actually, this is very interesting. I'm going to show it to you in a second. I brought you a very ancient manual. But it's very interesting. We have manuals, but you can get it online. So it doesn't come with a printed manual. You go to Apple, and they'll tell you every single feature.
There's 8,000 YouTube channels that have manuals. Millions of times more subscribers than me. And it will be listed, you know, how to get this shortcut, how to do this app. So there's an instruction manual for a bloody chunk of silicon glass and a little bit of rubber. And there's no instruction manual for people. I remember the night we brought our first son home. And we were bleary-eyed.
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