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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Absolutely. Yeah, no, and so all these things are self-evident. And the thing in Judaism where I feel is sort of denied to people that just refute. Look, I say, as I said, I don't believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in. It's trivial. Yuri Gagarin, when he circled the earth the first time, the communist, you know, Pravda, the truth, right?
They asked him, what did you see up there? He said, I can't tell you what I saw, but I know what I didn't see. And they go, what? I didn't see a man with a white beard sitting on a chair. You know, congratulations, Yuri. That's really, you know, he's a hero of the Soviet Union.
That's so baby. Nobody thinks of that. Where's up? There's no up in space. There's no heaven.
I said, you know, or, you know, Stephen Bartlett asked me, he said, you know, the Bible says the earth is flat. First of all, it doesn't say that, but second of all, you know, I said— But it's locally flat. It is definitely flat. And 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 people, ordinary people, will get that right. About 50, 60 percent 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. Including me. Yeah, I'm not going to say, stand on one leg and prove it, Jordan. But we can prove it.
It's discovered in the 1700s how you could do it. It's called stellar aberration. And I'll give the answer to the test. But Galileo, one of the greatest minds in human history, he believed, and he was right, that the Earth goes around the sun. And he went to great lengths. And I think this is so beautiful. We put so much emphasis on scientists. that they are sort of gods, right? They manipulate.
What did Arthur C. Clarke say? He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I actually opened my podcast with that, with his actual voice, because I'm at the Arthur C. Clarke Center. So when you look at that, who wields magic? Well, it's gods or it's magicians and fairies and all sorts of wonderful creatures that certainly aren't people.
But when a scientist can unlock the power of the atom, or can unleash humanity's need on electricity with infinite energy, or 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 their primitive, childish, infantile notions of what we think God is, right? They think that we think that he's the guy in the chair in outer space with the beard, but they project that onto humans. So they'll say Richard Feynman was a god.
I mean, literally, there's more people, Jordan, that play in the NBA right now than have won Nobel Prizes in physics, okay? And so when you look at these great men, including my hero, Galileo, They were greatly flawed individuals, horribly flawed. Feynman cavorted with his graduate students' wives. He had mistresses. He went to strip clubs.
Einstein married his cousin who was a horrible, horrible father. He neglected a child with severe mental illness. Never saw him after he moved to America to get fame and fortune. Cavorting with... What's the guy's name? Charlie Chaplin. He cavorted with Charlie Chaplin. And he loved the fame and attention. He had a huge ego. Not great. I don't want to emulate him. Do I want to be like Einstein?
Do I want to be like Feynman? Hell no. But you look at a man and you analyze him or you analyze a woman. What... Are they willing to teach me? What can I learn from them? And what you learn from Galileo is that great men can have great flaws, and they can be right and they can be wrong.
And if you can learn from both of them, both those tendencies that are mixed up within them, they have both within them, you must subdue.
Yeah, I brought this to show you. I can't give you this because it's signed not by the great Jordan Peterson, but it's signed by Galileo. So, I'm going to show you what his signature looked like, and I want to point out just something interesting. That's his signature. Wow. So this was a book he wrote. It's called The Military Compass. Now, you and I, I told Stephen Bartlett this.
I said, do you know what a slide rule is? He said, I have no idea what a slide rule is. Where did you get this? So I have a collector. So when I got my advance for my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, I basically bought this book. And it's a— It's in great shape. Wonderful. Look at the pages on it. This is from 1646. It has a custom box and so forth.
And there's an English translation that they made in the 70s. You can't get this anymore anymore. But there's an English translation of it. But there's a tag I put there. Why don't you open that up and read me what it says on a Post-it note page. I think it's on this side of the page. So these are all things that you could do with this thing called the military compass.
So I think it says there, right? What does it say? Can you read it? This one? Yes.
And he goes through, and what does he mention, the currency that he's going to convert?
Yeah, so here's what the device looked like. It was like a slide roll. So maybe later we'll get the cameras to zoom in on it. It was a slide roll. It was a computer. It was a device to simplify calculations. And he invented it. And he wouldn't actually produce, as he did with his telescopes, he wouldn't actually give the hardware away. He'd give the software away.
He'd give the operating manual away. This is how he made money, because he had illegitimate children. He had mistresses. He was also not the greatest of husbands and men and certain things. He was a deep believer in God. But when I look at this and I say, this book, this is the second edition. The first edition was written in 1601, and there's only about seven of them left.
Showing 1241–1260 of 1,291 · page 63 of 65
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