The Sophia Lectures With Bret Weinstein - Lecture 4: The Relationship Between Culture and Genes
The Ralston College Podcast
In the fourth and final lecture of the 2025 Sophia Lecture series, Dr Bret Weinstein explores how humanity’s evolutionary inheritance, both genetic and cultural, has enabled us to navigate an extraordinary range of ecological and social niches. They show that while genes provide the foundational architecture of the mind, culture allows for rapid adaptation and the creation of new possibilities, from the construction of monumental cathedrals to the development of shared narratives that transmit knowledge across generations. Weinstein examines consciousness as a tool for novelty, emphasizing...
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The Sophia Lectures With Heather Heying - Lecture 3: The Usual Suspects
The Ralston College Podcast
In this third lecture, Dr Heather Heying turns to the conditions sufficient for the emergence of sentient consciousness, exploring how life evolves the capacity to perceive, learn, and create. Drawing on the examples of primates, corvids, dolphins, elephants, wolves, and others, she reveals how traits such as long lifespans, extended childhoods, sociality, and play recur in the rare instances where sentience has independently evolved. These convergences, she argues, point to universals in the nature of intelligence itself, from cooperative learning to creative problem-solving. Along the way,...
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The Sophia Lectures With Bret Weinstein - Lecture 2: Biological Nature to What End?
The Ralston College Podcast
In his lecture Biological Nature to What End?, Dr Bret Weinstein explores the principles of evolution as a lens for understanding human nature, culture, and the pursuit of well-being. Moving from the biotic and abiotic universes to the subtle dynamics of kin and group selection, he reveals how traits emerge, persist, and change across generations. Weinstein challenges the conflation of data collection with science, advocating for predictive models that embrace paradox, complexity, and long-term explanatory power. Throughout the talk, he considers how evolutionary patterns shape morality,...
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The Sophia Lectures With Heather Heying - Lecture 1: Foundations
The Ralston College Podcast
In this opening lecture, Dr Heather Heying invites listeners on an exploration of the deep structures that underlie both scientific inquiry and the human experience of knowing. Moving fluidly between biology, philosophy, and the history of ideas, she challenges inherited beliefs while seeking reconciliation through a broader epistemic lens. Weaving together Darwin’s early evolutionary sketches, the concept of universals, and the distinction between biotic and abiotic origins, she explores how evolution shapes everything from molecular structures to symbolic expression, and how the universals...
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Making Sense of Complex Systems with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
The Ralston College Podcast
In this informal and wide-ranging conversation with Stephen Blackwood, Drs Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying reflect on the formative influences that shaped their intellectual journeys, the role of teachers in cultivating curiosity and courage, the spirit of play as essential to genuine learning, and the challenges of navigating hyper-novelty in the modern world. Throughout the discussion, they explore the limits of empiricism, the need for humility in the face of complex problems, and the enduring value of beauty, biology, and philosophy in guiding human flourishing. Applications for Ralston...
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Katabasis and Return: A Conversation With Mari Otsu About Her Time at Ralston College
The Ralston College Podcast
Mari Otsu joins Stephen Blackwood for a deeply personal conversation about her journey through the wounds of materialism, ideology, and spiritual forgetting, and her return to the soul through the beauty of the humanities. Reflecting on her years at NYU and the Grand Central Atelier, Mari speaks of a longing that nothing in the modern, politicized worldview could satisfy, and how she found healing in therapy, classical painting, and, most profoundly, the living philosophical community of Ralston College. Engaging with the works of Plotinus, Boethius, and Dante, she discovered a path of...
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Society, Technology and Philology with Dr Jason Pedicone: Thoughts on the Study of the Classical Humanities at the Dawn of the Digital Revolution
The Ralston College Podcast
Ralston College presents a lecture by Dr Jason Pedicone, distinguished scholar and classicist and the co-founder and President of the Paideia Institute. In this rich and compelling address, Dr Pedicone introduces the subject of philology - the study of language in its historical context - before embarking on a historical tour of philological interventions – times when people have decided to pay particularly close attention to language for societal, historical or technological reasons. Our tour takes us from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds of Plato and Pisistratus through Charlemagne,...
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Nature in Augustine’s Confessions
The Ralston College Podcast
Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on St. Augustine’s great autobiographical text The Confessions. This talk offers a detailed walk through of Books VII and VIII of Augustine’s text in light of Augustine’s “abiding preoccupation with the nature of the created order.” Snook explores how Augustine absorbed the insights of Platonist philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry but also moved beyond them as he sought a more embodied account of the nature of the human person. Augustine’s own...
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Douglas Murray: Reconstructing our Culture | Renewal and Renaissance: A Ralston Symposium
The Ralston College Podcast
Douglas Murray, revered cultural critic and author, delivers the highlight of Ralston College’s symposium of “,” a lecture exploring the theme of cultural reconstruction. Delivered from one of the beautiful, stately galleries of Savannah’s Telfair Academy, the audience is treated to an intimate address that is both deeply moving and inspiring of hope. Murray’s talk begins with the sober reflection that civilizations are mortal and share the fragility of life. He recounts how the loss of confidence experienced after the catastrophes of the World Wars led to the development of...
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What does it take to spark a new Renaissance?
The Ralston College Podcast
In February 2025, Ralston College hosted a landmark symposium in Savannah, Georgia, bringing together leading thinkers, artists, educators, and students for a searching conversation about the renewal of our shared culture. Over the course of a wide-ranging roundtable, speakers explored the collapse of higher education, the need for sacred space, the conditions for reawakening beauty and truth, the integral importance of literature, music and architecture, and the crucial role of the young in rebuilding a meaningful culture that can inspire and endure. This conversation is not an academic...
info_outlineA conversation between Dr Jay Parini, a prolific author and the D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, the founding president of Ralston College, recorded on the occasion of the release of a Ralston College short course, “Robert Frost: The American Voice,” taught by Dr Parini. Dr Parini discusses the film adaptation of his most recent book Borges and Me (2020), shares stories of his friendships with literary figures including Jorge Luis Borges, W. H. Auden, and Iris Murdoch, explains why poetry matters, and shares the fruits of a life “lived in literature.”
Applications are now open for next year’s MA program. Full scholarships are available. https://www.ralston.ac/apply
Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
Jay Parini, Borges and Me
Alan Cumming
Jorge Luis Borges
Beowulf
Robert Burns
Isaiah Berlin
Homer
Aeschylus
Dante
Michel de Montaigne
William Wordsworth
W. B. Yeats
Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa
Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Iris Murdoch, The Bell
W.H. Auden
Boethius
Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life
Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”
Jay Parini, Robert Frost: 16 Poems to Learn by Heart
Robert Frost, “The Road Less Traveled”
Robert Frost, “After Apple-Picking”
Robert Frost, “Birches”
Robert Frost, “Directive”
Robert Frost, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets