Doctor Jordan Peterson, welcome to the show.

Thank you, sir. Thanks for the invitation.

My pleasure. It's an honor to have you sitting here. I went to your event in Nashville, we who wrestle with God event and very intriguing. I loved it and I want to dig into some of that today. And just our previous conversation right before the show started, dig into a little bit about PTSD is I have an audience that's very veteran heavy and veteran family heavy. And so there's a lot of people that are watching this, that struggle with the aftermaths of a lifetime in combat. And so I think that would be very helpful. And then on top of that, my original plan was you have all these kind of religious figures, philosophers, you discuss the Bible a lot and I've seen just some really interesting content, one being I saw a lecture of you where you talk about how the Bible references itself 65,000 times approximately. And I would like to dig into some of your personal beliefs and maybe if there's time, a little bit about what's going on in the world and why you think this is all kind of happening right now. But first, let me give you a quick introduction for anybody that doesn't know who you are, which I don't imagine there will be, but doctor Jordan B.

Peterson, an author, psychologist, online educator and professor at the University of Toronto. The Jordan B. Peterson podcast frequently tops the top charts in the education category. And among all podcasts, you've written three books which have sold more than 7 million copies. Maps of meaning twelve rules for life beyond order. For 20 years, you've taught at some of the most highly regarded courses at Harvard and University of Toronto. You've published more than 100 scientific papers nominated for five consecutive years, is one of Ontario's best university lecturers, was one of only three professors rated as life changing in the U of T's underground student handbook. Of course ratings. You've released a 17 part seminar on the biblical book of Exodus as the continuation of Excuse me and a publicly acclaimed lecture on Genesis. 7.5 million YouTube subs, 150 million podcast downloads, 8 million IG followers. You've been a digital dishwasher, a short order cook, a bookkeeper, a tow truck driver, a gas jockey, bartender, plywood mill laborer and railway line worker. Quite the resume there. Your husband to your wife Tammy, and a father of two kids and currently on the we who wrestle with God tour in 20:24 a.m..

I.

Missing anything? I'm sure I am. But how long have you been married?

Got married in 1989. So I think it's coming up on 35 years.

Congratulations. Congratulations.

35 years in August. Thank you. But I've known my wife for longer than that. I've known her for 52 years. 52 years? Yeah. We met when we were eight.

Wow.

We were childhood friends.

That's incredible. What would you say? What would you say the secret to successful marriages?

Well, being, like, insanely attracted to your partner is helpful. You know, that's helpful. What else? More practically speaking, she's honest. Like, we swore when we decided to get married that we tell each other the truth. And, you know, that's a vow that has expanding benefits. As your life progresses, it's very useful to be able to trust your partner. It makes your life a lot simpler. A lot simpler. Plus, you sort things out. If you tell each other the truth, that means that there's conflict when it's necessary. But there's no difference between conflict when it's necessary and thinking. They're the same thing. And so people who avoid conflict avoid thinking, and that's not a good idea. You know, you have to think when things are difficult. Well, of course there's going to be conflict. You're going to have conflict around how you discipline your children, for example, because it's hard to figure out how to do it. You can have conflict around your finances because you have to sort it out. There's lots of options. And so it's one of the things people don't understand about thought. It's like, should speech be offensive? Well, only if you want to talk about things that are difficult.

Why would you talk about things that are difficult then? Well, because life's difficult. Might as well sort it out instead of running headlong into a wall or off a cliff. So, yeah, so she's very useful, and.

A lot of people avoid conflict. And I think a lot of. That's a great point. I asked this question a lot, and that's the first time I've heard, you know, live by truth. And then you got into how people avoid conflict. So my question would be, how do you approach your wife when there is conflict?

Well, one of the things you have to understand about women is you have to listen to them. So women are more sensitive to negative emotion than men, on average. My wife is actually pretty insensitive to negative emotion for a female. But generally speaking, women are more agreeable. That would be part of the maternal dimension of their personality, and they're more sensitive to negative emotion. So they're threat detection systems. And so a woman will bring you her concerns now because she's sensitive to threatening. She produces a fair number of false positives. Right. So she's concerned about things that maybe aren't. Maybe it's not necessary to be concerned about, but she'll be concerned about them before you are. Women initiate about 75% of divorces, for example. And you might say, well, that means women are primarily troublesome within a relationship. It's like, well, possibly it's also possible that they pick up what's wrong in a relationship before men do, on average. And so, and because women have to care for infants, that's why they're more sensitive to threat. That's not the only reason. They're also more sexually vulnerable. They're more physically vulnerable. Makes perfect sense that they'd be more sensitive to negative emotion.

And that means that in a relationship, they serve the function of threat alert. And so a woman will be concerned about something, and she'll bring her concerns to her husband, and he'll try to solve the problem right away. But that's not helpful because she doesn't know what the problem is necessarily. So she has to wander around and talk about all the things that might be a problem. And if you let her do that, she'll dispense with most of that, and then you can kind of zero in on what the problem might be. And then, if you like, if you let the discussion unfold to that degree, then you can potentially offer a solution. But you can't do that too early. You learn this in therapy, too. Like, when people come to lay out their life to you, you might even know what they should do, but you can't tell them. First of all, they won't listen. Second, they're annoyed if you tell them because they need to figure it out. You can't steal someone's destiny from them. You know, if you solve all your children's problems for them, well, you might think, well, they have no problems.

Like, yeah, they have a problem. They don't know how to solve their own problems. That's a big problem. And so you got to back the hell off. And it's frustrating for men often to participate in that more feminine mode of approaching the world. But if you understand that a woman who's more sensitive to trouble will detect things early and that her discussion of those things that upsets her will clarify problems, maybe even before they arise, then you can understand that it's useful. I mean, I still have to. Even after years of practicing this with Tammy, I still have to stifle my proclivity to leap to the solution. But you want to solve the right problem, man. So you got to listen. And my experience as a therapist indicated to me that in the typical marriage, people need to spend at least 90 minutes a week talking to each other just about their lives, just about the domestic economy, about their kids, about their relationship, just to keep everything up to date. And it's very difficult to have any true intimacy if that isn't allowed for.

Did you. I'm sorry, did you say 90 minutes a day?

No, 90 minutes a week.

Is that rare?

Half marriages end in divorce, so it's rare enough, you know, I mean, you might find that frustrating that you have to spend that much time attending to your domestic landscape, let's say. But it's better to do that on a regular basis than to do it in divorce court while you're paying your lawyers, you know, $500 an hour and having a custody battle for your kids for ten years, which is not a fate that I would recommend for anyone who wants to have a happy life. So it's also the case that it's very difficult to engage in any romantic adventure with your wife. If there's things between you, it's very hard because that's a form of play, that romantic adventure. And play is a very fragile psychophysiological state. If there's anything between you that hasn't been sorted out, you can't play. So.

Very interesting. I did not realize that was a. I mean, 90 minutes a week sounds like nothing.

Hey, man, if it stops you, if it keeps your marriage together, it's a pretty decent investment, you know, I would say that's a minimum. Yeah, but, you know, and that then that would be 90 minutes a week that's specifically devoted to, well, like, your marriage and family. As a business, let's say, you know, practical affairs. Practical affairs may take longer than that. Depends on how much disarray there is in your life. But if you start hoping that it's going to be less than that while you drift apart, too, you have to weave your stories together like a rope across your life. You have to know what your wife is up to and what she's thinking, and vice versa. You have to be on board with your interpretation of the past and the present and also your aims in the future. And that's constant negotiation. See, you know, in our culture, we have this idiot idea that your identity is whatever you say it is. I mean, it's unbelievably immature and narcissistic. In a marriage, your identity is almost never what you say it is. You're negotiating who you are with your wife all the time, and vice versa.

And with your kids, for that matter. Your identity. If you're a civilized human being, your identity is a negotiation. You know, people think, I just gotta be me. It's like I don't want to be around you if that's what you're like. I don't mean that you should be a pushover and that there should be nothing in the situation for you. You know, that you live like a bitter martyr only for the pleasure of other people. That's not helpful. But being mature means negotiating your identity constantly. Constantly, you know, that keeps you alert and alive, too. And I spoke with a very wise man here, tor nortranders, just a week ago. And he said something interesting, you know, he said that he could see all women and his wife. And I thought, how the hell do you figure that out? That's a rare thing to understand. He's a very wise person. A danish author. And if you communicate and you. Then you have all that in your relationship. You can let all that make itself manifest. And if you do that, don't box up your wife. What is it, Peter? Peter. Pumpkin eater. Put his wife in a pumpkin shell.

And there he kept her. Very well. What does that mean? Well, that's what people do to each other. They put each other in a box and they don't let. They don't let their partner or themselves out of that box. And then they get bored. Well, if you communicate with your partner and you facilitate their development, then they continually reveal new parts of themselves. And then your relationship stays dynamic and alive. And that's a good deal.

Do you think people realize they put their partners in a box?

You can get to a very bad place one idiot step at a time. So do you realize it? You realize what you're doing at each micro step? You may be completely ignorant of the total consequence of that. You know, like, if you want to build a pathological personality, you do that one lie at a time. And you might say, well, is someone with a pathological personality conscious of their pathology? And the answer is no. It's spiritual by that point. But they were conscious at each decision step.

Interesting.

But it's terrible. It's terrible. It's a frightening thing. This is why you shouldn't lie. So if you lie, you. Well, you. You automate your deception and that's what you become. Then it's. It's built into you. Then it's not just some attitude you have. You rewire yourself in accordance with the lie. It's a very bad idea. If you knew what that meant, you wouldn't do it. Really? If you. If you could understand what the full consequence of that, you. You'd step very carefully in your life.

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But you believe the story you tell yourself. If you tell yourself habitually, it happens very quickly. So there are experiments, for example, showing. So, imagine I brought students into a classroom, and I gave them a questionnaire that assessed their political attitudes, say, with regards to abortion, and maybe they were pro choice. And so I said, okay, now you write a 500 word essay on the contrary view, and then you have them come back a week later and measure their political attitudes. They tilt way over in the direction of what they wrote. So when you explicate yourself, you build the structure through which you see the world. So if you lie habitually about something, that's the world you come to inhabit. No. And if you do that with enough heart, let's say you can live in a delusion, and then your perception of the world doesn't match the world. That's not a. That's like having a map of the wrong territory.

Mm hmm.

That's a really good way to get lost, like, seriously lost. And then you get lost like that. You get bitter, and then you get resentful, and then, well, then all the real hell starts to break out. So, you know, very bad idea.

It is. I see people do it all the time on social media. They build. They. They lie about their background, they lie about what they own. They lie about past experiences. They lie about what happened in war, and they build this character. And I see it time and time again with, I would say, more than not, the social media phenomenons. Right?

You think social media facilitates that?

I think it maybe. But where I'm going with this is then I see them get trapped. This has happened to friends of mine that build a character around themselves rather than just be themselves, and they get trapped in that character. And exactly what you were talking about. They get resentful and angry at the world and just having to put that false cloak on. Every day when you wake up, they go out into the world, and it's a completely false person, and it follows them for years.

Then the resentment, that's a very good aspect of that.

Where I'm going with this is one particular part of your tour that I want to. We who struggle with God, you were talking about pride. And where I'm going with this is they live this lie, and they think that they're trapped, but they're only trapped because their ego won't allow them to come out and tell the truth. And they just dig themselves in deeper and deeper.

In the story of Exodus, the Egyptians are freed from the tyranny, or the Israelites are freed from the tyranny of Egypt. But that tyranny has two elements, because the pharaoh is a tyrant, but the Israelites are slaves, like tyrant needs a slave. So they're both morally culpable. The tyrant's culpable because he's a tyrant, and the slaves are culpable because they're slaves. It's a dance. So Moses comes along, he's speaking on behalf of God, and he opposes the tyrants. And then he frees the slaves. Frees them. They cross the Red Sea, which is a bit of a catastrophe, but they end up not in the promised land, they end up in the desert. And the reason for that is that when you abandon your tyranny, you end up in the desert. That's why people stick pridefully, one of the reasons people stick pridefully to their erroneous presumptions. It's like once you've built that false character, you let it go. It's not like it's all good. Then it's like, no, you're lost. And the Israelites, they're lost for three generations. So you may be so lost that you just can't get it back together in your lifetime, especially if you stick even more bitterly, let's say, to your pride, because it's a real mystery.

Imagine this, there's a pathway to enlightenment. Just imagine. That might be the case. Of course, sages have said that forever. And you might say, well, why the hell wouldn't people just walk it then? If there's a pathway to enlightenment, that seems like a good deal. It's like, well, there's a lot of desert to wander through when you let go of your stupidity. And so people don't, they double down, which is what the pharaoh does in the exodus story. Right? And he doubles down ten times until he destroys the future and his own people. That's like, that happens all the time. People do that all the time in their lives. States do it, nations do it.

I think it's sad I have friends that do this and I think it's. I'm sad for them that they, that they put on that false cloak every day and it carries on for years and years and years. And I see them. I see how exhausted they are. I mean, and that is, you know, with.

It's very difficult to maintain a structure built on lies.

You lose track of them.

Well, that's for sure. No kidding. No kidding. This is why in a marriage, it's just so much better just to say what you think. And I mean, without being telling the truth is complicated. You can't use the truth as a weapon. Like tell if you're telling the truth. It's a multi dimensional problem. Like, if I'm talking to my wife, I have to talk to her in a way. I can't use the truth as a cudgel. That's a lie. Like, then the truth isn't. It's not the truth. It's truth as weapon. Really, what I'm doing is beating her with the truth. I'm looking for a club, not the truth.

Could you give me an example of that?

Well, maybe you're trying to sort something out, even about how things are working on the domestic front, who does what job, and maybe she's doing something that isn't up to scratch, let's say, with regard to the house. Well, you could try to address that as a problem to be solved, or you could use it as an opportunity to punish and trumpet your moral superiority. And you could. You could say, well, I'm just telling the truth. It's like, yeah, well, you're not doing a very good job of it, you know, because the truth would be. Well, I need to tell you what I think. But I have to be around you tomorrow and next week. So I should try to tell you what I think in a way that isn't gonna turn you against me. You know, I guess there's something in that that's something like minimal necessary force with regard to the truth. The truth has to serve the harmony of the relationship, you know, as well as describing whatever the problem is that has to be solved. So I would say the same with children. If you're disciplining them, you want to do that in the spirit of love.

And what does that mean? Well, the reason you're disciplining them isn't to lord it over them or to indicate your moral superiority, but to put a wall up to protect them, let's say, or to specify a pathway forward that they can walk down. That would be productive. And if you're not doing that, well, then you're not serving the truth in the highest sense. And so that's why there's a religious insistence that truth has to serve love, that the two things are united. And love means. It means care. I suppose people often think that means the provision of security and safety. But love means encouragement too, right? That's. In some ways, that's the distinction between the female role and the male role. In a family or feminine and masculine. The feminine tends to provide security and safety, and the masculine tends to encourage and challenge both. Those are aspects of love. And that's also the case within a relationship. I mean, you want to provide your wife and her to you, a certain degree of security, but you want that allied with an optimal challenge because that facilitates development. And that's, well, that's one of the things that lends life interest and adventure.

So.

For somebody that is living a lie, how would you advise them to get back to baseline?

Well, I have a program online that's actually designed to deal with that problem. We put together, my colleagues and I, Daniel Higgins and Robert Peel. Robert Peel was my graduate supervisor at McGill and Daniel was a student of mine at Harvard. And I've worked with these two for about 40 years now. We put together a series of writing exercises at a site called selfauthoring.com. And the past authoring program helps you write an autobiography, right? Break your life into seven epochs. Identify the events of emotional significance during those times, positive and negative. Tell the story of your life. Write it down as honestly as you possibly can. That's a good way of figuring out where you are. The next program in that series helps you identify your faults and your virtues. In the present, everybody has a temperament, and your temperament is going to provide you with opportunities. Like if you're extroverted, for example, you're going to be someone, you be tilted in a sales direction. So that's a benefit that comes along with that temperament. Extroverts can be narcissists as well. And so that would be the sin that would be associated with that temperament.

And wherever you are in the temperamental landscape, you're going to have some advantages conferred on you by those temperaments and some disadvantages, and it's useful to sort those out. So it's easy for creative people, for example, to be scattered. It's easy for people who are high in intelligence to be prideful, right? So probably the biggest individual difference between people is intelligence. And you might think in some ways that that's unfair. Some people are born with an iq of 130 and some with an iq of, say, 70, and those are very different people. The person with an iq of 70 is going to struggle to become literate regardless of the amount of time they put into it, right? But the temptation that goes along with intelligence is to be prideful, to assume that you should be worship because of your intelligence, or things should go your way just because you're smart, that the world should bow down at your feet, that the fact that you win arguments means that you're right. Well, that's. Anyways, the present authoring program helps people identify their faults and virtues. And then there's a future authoring program. That's the third step.

You can do any of them or all of them that helps you lay out a pathway to the future. And it's very structured. All those are very structured because it's hard to write an autobiography, it's hard to write a plan for the future. The future plan. We've done a lot of research on if a young man does the future authoring program when he goes to college, he's 50% less likely to drop out, 50% is a lot, and grade point average goes up about 35%. The future authoring program helps people develop a vision for their life. And you actually don't have any hope or any freedom from anxiety without a vision for your future. Like a vision for your future is the structure that provides you with hope and that regulates your negative emotion because it specifies a goal. Once a goal is specified, you feel positive emotion in relationship to the goal, and your anxiety is constrained because you have a direction. You're anxious when you have way too many directions. That's why you get anxious if your car breaks down. It's like, what do I do now? Too many pathways. You want the pathways through life collapsed to a single implementable dimension, one that goes uphill.

And then when you walk uphill, so to speak, each step that you see yourself making is indexed by positive emotion, hope, enthusiasm, meaning. So you need a vision. This isn't optional. People are very bad at this, we're very bad in our culture at helping people develop a vision. We don't actually do it with student, with kids in school. It's, it's a blind spot that's so large that it's a kind of miracle. So the way this program works is that, so here's the, here's the game, okay? So you're going to look five years out in your life and you're going to treat yourself for the purpose of this exercise like somebody that you care for. That's a hard thing for people to do. Like most people are reverse narcissists. Most people are harder on themselves than they are on other people. That isn't always the case. There are narcissistic people, but most people are harder on themselves than they are on other people. And they don't really believe that it would be just or good if they were successful and not miserable because they know their sins, they know the ways they've wandered off the path, they carry a lot of guilt with them, they don't really believe that they deserve anything good.

That's a depressive temperament. When it really gets out of control. So you have to put yourself in a position where you treat yourself like someone you care for. Okay? So get in that frame of mind. All right, now here's the deal. You can have what you want and need within the bounds of reason in five years, but you have to specify it. So if you could have what you wanted and needed, that would satisfy you, what would that be? Well, that's a complicated question. People have a hard time answering that, right? But we break it down for them, too. It's like, well, if you had the family you wanted, your siblings, your parents, your wife, your kids, what would that look like in some detail? Dream a bit. Like, if you could have what you wanted, what would it look like with your friends? Same thing. You have the friends you want. People who are happy when good things happen to you and commiserate with you when bad things happen to you and that you can walk side by side with and that are on your side. People don't even understand that they can choose their friends.

You know, that they have a moral obligation to do so. What would your career look like? How would you educate yourself? How would you take care of yourself mentally and physically? What would you do with your time outside of work that would be productive and meaningful? How would you serve the community if you could have what you wanted? Well, this exercise helps people specify all that, and it's ridiculously useful. You need to orient yourself in the world. You need a vision. It's like the development of a map. It's a map of the future. And without that, you're lost. And people are lost, and they blow in the wind, and then their lives are meaningless and they feel like they're powerless. And it's because they haven't developed a vision. The people perish without a vision. It's a very old idea. It's definitely true.

There's so many directions I want to go just off that piece of conversation that we just had. One being. I want to know why so many. Why you think so many people are lost. But before I lose this one, you talked about when your car breaks down. You talked about when there's too many directions to go. That's when people feel anxiety.

Yeah, it's entropy.

Do you think that that is part of what's. Look, the country seems to be in shambles. It's lost right now, I think a lot. It seems like half of the people want to be told exactly what to do.

That's the slave problem.

So is that in. Is that part of what is happening? Right now, to this country, I mean.

If you get it here, you get the slave tyranny. The slave tyrant dynamic always works. Sure, people want, they want whatever they want on the sexual front, on the hedonism front, right now, with no responsibility, and tyrants make that offer, the state will take care of you. There's no reason for you to be mature. There's no reason for you to forego gratification. You can be taken care of from cradle to grave. Fair enough, you know, but the price you pay for that is that you're a slave. And inevitably, and it's worse, the religious dynamic. So imagine the tyrant makes an offer to the slave, and the offer is an offer of unbridled hedonism, essentially, something like that. The tyrant always kills the source of pleasure. In the final analysis, it's like you'll be offered what will attract the immature part of you. But don't be thinking you're going to keep it, because that isn't how things work. Why take responsibility for your life? All the responsibilities you do not shoulder will be taken up by tyrants and used against you. That's the iron law of human existence. And so why mature? Well, because if you turn that responsibility over to someone else, they'll become a tyrant and you'll be a slave.

And that won't work out very well for you because tyrants become contemptuous of their slaves. And unsurprisingly, Stalin was completely contemptuous of the russian people. He thought they all lied in Kauthout. Why? Because they all lied in Kauthaut. It wasn't when he was wrong. I mean, he produced the situation in a dance with his people. But Hitler thought the same thing about the Germans. By the end of world War Two, he thought, contemptible people, they deserve what's coming to them. He didn't think he was wrong as the tyrant. There's always a dance between the slave and the tyrant. And the way you get out of slavery is by taking responsibility for your own destiny. And you do that by developing a vision. It's not optional. None of this is optional. And you might say, well, why bother with maturity? Even if I could just have what I wanted? First of all, you aren't built so that you would be satisfied with just having what you want any more than a two year old is ever satisfied. If you give the two year old everything he wants, all you get is an angry two year old.

If you do that because you don't get what you want by always getting what you want when you want it, that is how life works. You get what you want by molding yourself into something mature and communal and capable of sacrifice. Like, we're built for way higher order journey, way higher order adventure than just infantile, hedonistic gratification. That's a dismal, bloody vision of the world. This is the celebration of pride, the hedonistic celebration of pride. You know, we have pride month. Well, what. What are we celebrating, first of all? How about we don't celebrate pride? Pride is a cardinal sin. And you might say, well, they don't mean pride. They mean, you know, it's a group of oppressed people, and now they're just finding their identity and they're getting some security in that identity. And so what they mean by pride is security in that identity. It's like the words pride. That's the word that was chosen. So I don't care what the lies around that are. And it's pride in relationship, as far as I can tell, to nothing but hedonistic self gratification. It's like your identity is going to be your sexual desire.

That's your identity, your sexual desire. So that's. Sexual desire is at the center of hedonism. So that means you've reduced your identity to the most immature and hedonistic part of you, the part that would exploit someone else for your own gratification, for example. The part that would exploit you for your own gratification. And now that's your identity. And now that's what we celebrate. Yeah. No, that's a very bad idea. That's the worship of the golden calf. And that's what, in the Exodus story, for example, when Moses disappears, so he's the prophet of God. When the prophet of God disappears, the Israelites are left in the hands of Aaron. And Aaron's a political leader, and in no time flat, the political leader offers the slavish Israelites the worship of the golden calf. They're all drunk and dancing naked around the fire in a way that makes them contemptible to their enemies. That's what it says in biblical text. You don't have to be much of a genius to understand that. You know, Rachel Levine is not exactly striking heart in the striking fear in the heart of the Iranians. We're so damn stupid.

I'm with you on that. You'd also mentioned how lost people are nowadays, and I see it everywhere I go. Why do you think? Why do you think so many people are lost? And why are they missing the direction that they need to?

Well, I think I know why. Because I've watched crowds of thousands of people hundreds of times respond to certain things I've said, investigating that problem. For since 1960, we've insisted that the purpose of your life is a kind of hedonistic happiness, that you have rights, which includes the rights to that hedonistic happiness that capitalist marketers certainly capitalize on that just as much as the governmental tyrants. Rights. Rights. What I want right now, that idea of infantile consumption, fundamentally, well, you have rights for a particular reason. And the reason you have rights is so that you can shoulder your responsibilities. And you might say, well, I don't want to shoulder my responsibilities, but that's where all the meaning in your life is. And so when I tell people this, the audiences always go dead silent. It's like the adventure in your life will be found in responsibility. No one ever hears that. We haven't told young people that for like 60 years. You pick up the cross and shoulder it uphill because that's where all the meaning in your life will be derived from. It's in the difficulty, it's in the responsibility. It's not in the hedonistic self gratification that, as I said, won't even satisfy a two year old.

Not in the final analysis. All you do is people just get what they want all the time, immediately. It's not like that ennobles their character. Like, obviously not. Your character is made noble by sacrifice, by the delay of gratification. That's all associated with maturity. And the community itself is a sacrificial. The community itself requires sacrifice on the part of the individual. Obviously. Like, to be in a community is to sacrifice your individuality to the community. It's the definition of community. You know, you don't get everything you want the second you want it in your marriage. You have to take the other people into account. Well, that's a sacrifice of immediate gratification. Now you might say, well, it's a good long term deal. It's like, yeah, that's kind of the point. It's a good long term deal. So you sacrifice the idiot present for a good long term deal, a good communal long term deal. If you do that properly, then you have a stellar reputation, right? Because you're someone who can be counted on, relied upon. And then that also is something that provides your life with meaning. We're lost because we have no direction.

We don't even believe that there is such a thing as direction. And then you might say, well, what's the proper direction? The direction of maximal voluntary self sacrifice. That's the proper direction. Every military person knows that. It's the core of the military enterprise, and there's obviously adventure in that. You know, there can be catastrophe in it as well. But.

I wanted to also elaborate on what you were saying at the event on pride, and how pride can trigger all of the negative emotions, depression, anxiety. You went down the list. And could you please explain how that works? Because when you were talking about it up there, I had thought about a lot of the times that I had felt anger or regret or resentment, and a lot of that was when I refused to. It was my ego. It was my ego.

Okay, so I should return to one thing we discussed. So I discussed that self authoring program you'd asked me about, lies and how people get out of it. Well, one way you get out of your web of lies is to replace it with a truthful story. And that has to cover your whole life, right? Past, present, and future. And so you retool your life if you want to escape from your web of lies, and you try to do that by laying out what happened as clearly as you possibly can. Right. With, no, you lay out the unvarnished truth, and there's going to be real pain in that. This is a treatment for post traumatic stress disorder, for example. So if the terrible thing that happened is in the past because you don't want to do this if it's too soon, you know, you have these psychologists who rush in to schools during a shooting and have the kids talk about it all. That does make it worse. Like, it's a traumatic event. If you dwell on it while it's happening, it makes it worse. Now, if it's something that's five years distant and still a hot memory, it's.

It's something that has to be confronted. Then you go and write it down in painful detail and try to assess exactly what happened and why you acted the way you acted. And that can be curative, but that's painful. It's painful in the short term. And the research on these sorts of programs shows that if you have people write about a traumatic experience, let's say that it worsens their mood in the short term. It's not surprising. That's why they want to avoid thinking about it to begin with. But the long term consequences are positive. So if you've encountered something traumatic, it's like you've. There's an abyss in your life and you had fallen into it. And the reason you're still upset about that is because you don't know why you fell into it, and so your brain, your mind, your soul is warning you. It's like you fell into a pit, buddy, and you don't know why. And so you could fall into it again. And so I'm not going to let you forget it. You have to figure out why you fell into that pit. And if you've done something particularly terrible, then that's a very deep pit, and that's very, very hard on people.

It's very common for soldiers, for example, to develop post traumatic stress disorder. When they watch themselves doing something they can't believe they could do, and it flips their understanding of themselves upside down. They don't know who they are, and they also don't know who other people are, and they don't know what the world's like. It's not what they thought it was, that's for sure. And there's a lot more to them on the dark side, let's say, than they could have ever imagined. It's like that's definitely the case. Well, how do you come to terms with that? You come to terms with that fundamentally, the deeper the trauma, the more a religious approach is necessary. Because if you're traumatized, you're in the landscape of good and evil, right? You're traumatized by an encounter with evil. It's not mere tragedy. It's not just that something bad happened to you. Bad things happen to people all the time without them being traumatized. Usually if someone's traumatized, they've been bit by malevolence. Might be their own, might be someone else's. They've been bit by malevolence. They don't know what to do with that. They don't know what to do with the reality of evil.

One of the things you do with the reality of evil is start to understand the mythological landscape, and that is the landscape of good and evil. And then you have to start to understand what, what good means and what the pathway back there is. You know, part of the religious enterprise, the christian enterprise, deals with this very forthrightly. It's like people can wander very badly off the path and end up in places they can't tolerate being. How do you get back? Confess. Repent. Atone. That's exactly right. What's the confession? Well, what do you do? Everything. What do you do? Okay, repent. Well, could you set yourself up so you wouldn't do that again? How would you have to change yourself? The way you look at the world so that you don't fall into that pit again? Atone. What do you have to do to make it good, to make it right? And if you don't do that, then, well, then you're stuck in hell.

Do you think there's always a way to make it right?

You could pray that that was the case. They promised, like the christian promises, that the answer to that is yes. But the depth of the confession and the difficulty of the repentance and atonement is proportional to the magnitude of the sin. So that's rough, but it makes sense, right? I mean, if you did something terrible, it's not going to be easy to fix it, but that doesn't mean you. The christian insistence is that there's always a pathway back.

I have a friend that's coming on, and he's going to be here towards the end of this year, and he was a seal. And generally with the special operations crowd. If I have a guest on from that community, it's a life story, and there's so much truth that comes out of those interviews, and it's almost turned into like a therapy session.

Yeah, that's the confession.

I have somebody coming on who had to, maybe didn't even have to. I didn't. I told him I didn't want to have the entire conversation on the phone and that if he wanted to have it here, then we could have it here. He says he does, but he killed a child, and it's stuck with him for years. It's haunted him. How do you. How do you make that right? How do you make something like that right?

I would say in a situation like that, the devil's in the details. Right? So if I was working with someone like that, the first thing I would find out is, well, what happened? Because I don't. You need to know the details, you know? Because, for example, in the story that you laid out, I don't know if that was, how much of that outcome could be attributed to the situation.

Well, let's just say it was a justified kill, but yet it still haunts him. I think it probably haunts a lot of the team members that were a part of that operation. But whether it was justified or not, he's still struggling with it.

Yeah.

He doesn't feel, and I don't want to speak for the man, but it obviously bothers him because it got brought up right away and he wants to bring that up here. And so.

Well, what would I investigate then? So imagine he's torturing himself and imagine he's doing that in a way that is counterproductive, and that's also counterproductive in relationship to his family. Is that helping or making it worse? Right. I mean, so that's something to think about. It's. This isn't. I mean, I'm speaking hypothetically because obviously, I don't know this person. I don't know what their situation is. But almost everyone has other people depending on them, you know? And if you overburden yourself with guilt and take yourself out, you're going to hurt people around you. So you have a moral obligation to not do that if you can avoid it. So that's one of the things I would investigate to begin with. I would find out, well, exactly what happened. What were the situational requirements? Conscientious people tend to overestimate their culpability in any given situation and downplay the situational factors. And that's called the fundamental attribution error, and it's particularly true for conscientious people. So I do very careful analysis of the situation and find out, well, was it likely that anyone would have done that in that situation? Okay, well, then. Well, then there's another problem that comes along with that, which is, well, what does it mean about life that you can be in a situation where you have to do something terrible to proceed?

That's a religious question to some degree. And there are ways of addressing that in terms of atonement. Likely. What I would have him do is I would ask him to begin with, at least, is like, well, imagine that you were counseling one of your friends who has this problem, and you wanted to help him calculate a pathway forward that would enable him to get on with his life. What would you require from him? What sacrifice would you require for him? You know? Because people will often burden themselves with an impossible moral task, and it's not helpful. You're not. You're not. It's not right to take yourself out of the game. Right. So I can't be much more specific than that, because the devil's always in the details. It has to be personalized. One of the things that I've done with people who've had post traumatic stress disorder is I've familiarized themselves with the literature of horror. That's very useful. So there's a book called ordinary men that details how a battalion of german police officers were turned into the murderers of naked pregnant women in Poland. One step at a time. There's a book called the rape of Nanking, which is about what the Japanese did in China at the run up to the second World War.

The woman who wrote that, Iris Chang, she committed suicide. It's a rough book. Human beings have a very dark side. And now and then what happens to someone who's traumatized is they run into that dark side. Well, how would that be conceptualized religiously? Well, if you meet Satan at the crossroads, there's no necessity that you're going to recover from that. These are realities. In fact, they're the deepest realities. That's why people break apart in a situation like that. They come across something that's so dark that they just can't function. Well, the first thing to become aware of is that's actually how the world is constituted. It's constituted as a landscape of good and evil. We're very bad at teaching people that. We portray it in our movies, always in action adventure stories, always a landscape of good and evil. A mythological quest, the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, the marvel universe. You know, those are all landscapes of good and evil. What we don't understand is that is the landscape. Now, partly we don't understand it because we're in pumpkin shells, right? It's like, you know, normal middle class existence. There's not much good in it in the extreme sense.

There's not much evil in it in the extreme sense. It's all middle of the road. But that's not life. And if you're in that pumpkin shell and you're naive and then you encounter life, it's like good luck to you, because you are completely without resources in relationship to how to deal with that. People have an immense capacity for darkness. It's bottomless. It's bottomless. No matter how bad you think someone can act, there's something someone did that was worse than that, and no one wants to go there. And people, even when they conceptualize themselves, when people read the history of Nazi Germany, they always think they're Schindler. They always think that they're the person who would have saved Anne Frank in the Netherlands. I never read history as a perpetrator. I wouldn't have done that. It's like, did you watch people during the pandemic in Canada? 30% of my neighbors were thrilled that they had the opportunity to inform on their. On the people around them. Thrilled they would have worn those goddamn masks for the rest of their life if the payoff would have been. They could feel morally superior and in form. And so, you know, people have a very dark side.

And see, once you start to understand that, it also lifts the moral burden off you to some degree. Like, well, you aren't who you think you are. You're way worse and way better. And that's your friend, for example. He discovered that. He discovered he was way worse. It's like, yeah, that's. That's the world. That's reality. Okay, now you know that. Now you know that you're no longer naive. You might say that. What do you do about that? Well, that's the next question. The antidote to evil is good, and good is. Good is deeper than evil. I don't know how good your friend would have to be in order to free himself from his entanglement. You know, maybe he has to become a saint, so to speak. Could be. There's a lot of atonement there.

I think the fact that. I appreciate the fact on people who think like that, because so many people just justify their wrongdoings in their head. They justify why they did it, and they look for reasons to convince themselves on why they're sinning. Why do you think people. Why is it so hard for people to just admit wrong instead of justifying?

Well, so that's related to that question you had about pride. We like to be right. If I'm right and you're wrong, I don't have to change. And so that's pretty convenient for me because change, there's a desert part of change. Like, if I have to change, I have to fall apart, and then I have to put myself back together. It's very annoying to fall apart. You know, if you're arguing with your wife and it turns out you're wrong, then you have to go figure out why you're wrong. God only knows why you're wrong. Like, maybe it's a deep wrong, maybe it's a pattern. And you have to take, maybe 10% of you has to go something like that. And that's a kind of death. It's really hard. And so people will insist that they're right, so they don't have to change. Because change involves sacrifice. Change involves death. When you learn something new, the stupid part of you has to go and it has to die. And that's actually painful. You might have put a lot of work into that stupid part of yourself, you know? And then you have to let it go. And then it's not like you're, like I said, it's not like you're better as soon as you let it go.

It's. No, you're just lost on that front. Then you have to figure out what to do instead. In the religious orientation, what you try to do is you try to replace insisting that you're right. With trying to find out how to be right. And that's the opposite of pride. That's humility. It's like, okay, there's some pathway forward here that I could journey down if I could only specify what it was. My wife has started praying the rosary, and she does that every morning for about an hour. It takes her about an hour to orient herself properly because she's trying to be grateful. Practice it. Practice it to orient herself upward, to commit, to recommit to the truth. That's the attempt to find the right pathway rather than to insist that the one you're on is already right. It's a completely different orientation in the christian landscape. That's something like christ within me and not me, not my will. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means you replace what you want with the attempt to do what's right. Well, what's right? Well, truth. So in our conversation, I weigh my words. I'm trying to find the words that are solid.

That's the pathway forward. Each word is a stone on the water. That specifies the pathway through chaos. Even, you know, if you're in a tight situation, you should be very careful with what you say, especially if you're around dangerous people say. And so you weigh your words, and that's attempt to find the pathway forward instead of to insist that you're right. You know, in your current configuration, it's a form of faith, too, because you might say, well, do you want to put faith in who you are? Do you want to put faith in who you could become? And if, and it's way better to put faith in who you could become, that's a much better deal. Then you can give up who you are. You've put your faith in the right place. You don't have that tyrannical insistence that you're right all the time when I'm dealing with my wife, like we're trying to sort something out, what's my aim? I want to sort this out so we don't have to fight about it anymore. I want to put it right. And if I have to give up something stupid that I'm doing to put this right, that's okay, because what I'm aiming at is peace and tranquility and romantic adventure, and that's the pathway that I want to take forward.

And if I have to give up something idiotic about myself to make that happen, I'd like to find out what it is so I can get rid of it as fast as possible. That's a sacrificial offering, right? There's an insistence in the biblical corpus that sacrifice is the pathway forward. There's no difference between that and maturation. There's no difference between that and work. Those are sacrificial offerings, right? They're delay of gratification. So you sacrifice what you want. That's what you do when you work. You delay gratification. You sacrifice what you could be having right now for the future. It's a sacrifice. That's the communal, that's the communal orientation of human beings, that sacrificial pathway. And if you're smart, you look for what you can sacrifice. Why? To replace it with something better always. And that's your upward aim. And that can be the antithesis of that sort of pride.

Do you think that's a good thing, sacrificing for the future? I personally struggle with this because there's the live in the now, which when I can do it, I feel great. And then there's the sacrifice for the future, which we all do through work.

The sermon on the mount is about that. So the, the central idea in the sermon on the mount is that you should aim up and then you should concentrate on the present. Then you get to have your cake and eat it, too. But the first thing is that you aim up so you want to orient yourself so that everything you do is in keeping with an upward aim. Then you can concentrate on the present. And that's, that's, that's. That's the best possible pathway forward.

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So what does it mean to aim up? You might ask that? Well, in the final analysis, it means to align yourself with the spirit of God, but if you want to bring it down to earth, it's like, well, there's undoubtedly some things you're doing that you know aren't optimal, and you could aim at improving those. Well, that's an upward aim. You could imagine that the sum total of all those incremental improvements is the upward aim, and that as you make an improvement, you get better at seeing the next step upward. The ultimate upward aim is, what would you say, the heavenly city on the hill? It's something like that, its existence, that would be optimal for you and optimal for everyone else. But that's a. That's a receding goal, right? That's a kind of impossible heaven, but it's the thing that sort of stands behind all your proximal aims. When I aim upward, and then you can concentrate on the present, you know, so what I'm trying to do in this discussion, and I'm sure you are, is what are you trying to do in this discussion? You're trying to have an honest discussion.

Okay.

Why? Why?

I want to learn from you.

Why?

I want to improve my life.

Okay. And you're bringing other people along on that trip?

Yes.

Why is it useful to bring other people along?

Because it improves their life.

Okay. And is there something meaningful in that for you?

Absolutely.

Okay. So that's a mystery. I talked to Jocko Willick. Jocko wanted to be a soldier from the time he was, like, three. And he's a complete bloody monster. You know, he's 4ft thick and rampaging. And he said he could have easily been a criminal. He's a disagreeable, militaristic guy. He went off to train and he found that it was. He really liked mentoring young men. That was way better than being a criminal. He found a better pathway, you know, in these discussions that you're having with the people you bring on here, like you said, you're trying to learn, so you're trying to shed your stupidity and move uphill, but at the same time, you're doing that. You're engaged in a communal endeavor, right? Because you're helping other people do that too. And so then you've got this great alignment between what's good for you and what's also good for everyone else. That's a good deal. God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure. So Abraham is rich, and he's 70 years old when the story starts. He spent his whole life in his father's tent, just living a hedonistic and secure life. And there's no reason for him to do anything else because his parents are rich.

But God comes along and says, get the hell out of your zone of security. Leave your parents, leave your tent, leave your community, go out into the world. And Abraham agrees. He commits to it. And he makes the sacrifices along the way that are necessary in expanding. Each sacrifice that marks his pathway forward requires a greater giving up. It culminates in the offering of his son. God tells him to sacrifice his son to God. And so that's the culmination of the sacrificial process. But God makes Abraham a deal. It's such a cool deal. This is such a wonderful thing to understand. So imagine there's an instinct in your child that causes that child to push himself beyond his limits and to develop, to become mature, to become independent. Imagine that you foster that as a father, right? So you'll challenge your child, because you want him to be able to bear the weight of existence by himself, but more than bear it, to bear it in an adventuresome manner. God comes to Abraham as the call of the spirit of adventure, and he makes it, Abraham, a deal. He said, if you abide by the spirit of adventure wholeheartedly, and you make the sacrifices that are necessary, no matter what they are, you'll be a blessing to yourself.

Your name will become renowned, so you'll have a reputation. You'll establish something permanent that's good. And you'll do it in a way that's good for everyone else, and that that's all aligned with that spirit of adventure. Now, that's a good deal. If that's. I think it's true. Like, if it's not true, it would mean that what calls us to develop is not in alignment with communal life, society, or with what's good for other people. It could easily be the case that if you treated yourself properly in the highest sense, that that would align perfectly with the deepest needs of other people, and that's that divine harmony that is offer on offer on the religious side of things, that's associated with what's good. And it seems to me. It seems to me true. You know, I would say for your friend who committed this terrible sin, is that his pathway forward is to swear to do what's good. And I don't know how deeply he has to swear that it would be commensurate with his error. And that could be of great benefit to him to some degree, because it's a very rare person who becomes good without, you know, running into Satan at the crossroads.

You're not serious enough before then. You don't take yourself seriously enough. Think, well, what does it matter? What does it matter what I do? I'm just one dust speck among 8 billion, you know, it's like, no, if you start to see yourself as, what would you say, the author of all Evil? That's a good one. You might just start taking yourself with a certain degree of seriousness, and then you can do a lot of good.

Let's go back to post traumatic stress. I've done three and a half years of therapy twice a week. I've done psychedelics, treatments, therapies. I've explored all kinds of different ways to overcome post traumatic stress. TBI. But let's just concentrate on post traumatic stress. It always seems to go back to childhood. Everybody I've talked to, their therapist starts in my childhood. I started a childhood. Then when I got into. When I started researching the psychedelic therapy, and I started interviewing people about it. A lot of the visual experiences that they relive is not wartime. A lot of it is, I would say, more than not, our childhood memories. Why?

The psychoanalysts would have called that a complex. Well, imagine that. It's the same as a portal into hell. I suppose that's another way of thinking about it. All things you haven't dealt with are the same thing. And why? Well, all things you haven't dealt with are things you don't understand. Well, how can you classify things that you don't understand? Because you don't understand them well, you classify them with negative emotion. That's the class. The class of all things that produce negative emotion. Okay. What's at the core of that? The deepest hell you've managed to fall into. What's associated with that? Everything you haven't dealt with in your life. Right. So that if you encountered something particularly traumatic, it would aggregate everything that was partially traumatic around it. It's something like that because it's the same thing. It's all those places in your life you did not traverse properly. Right. And those all have to be mapped because otherwise they're pitfalls, and that's how your psyche responds to them. There are dragons there. Look out. Do you have to sort that all out? You do if you don't want to carry it with you, you have to sort everything out that you don't want to carry with you.

That's partly why the Catholics insist on confession. It's like, what did you do wrong this week? Well, I don't want to think about that. It's like, fair enough. But then you carry it. It's very difficult to keep. And this is the same thing in marriage. This is why you talk for 90 minutes. It's like to keep things from aggregating. So the small things that you avoid collect in your closet, and in the closet, they turn into a monster. And then one day when you're weak, they come leaping out of the closet and devour you. That's an ancient story. So what do you. So when you were with the psychedelic experiences, you. You said that there was a relationship between childhood experiences and the traumatic experiences that you were describing. Was that something that you experienced in a rush? Like, how did those connections make themselves manifest?

With me, there was not really any connection. It was more chronological order. And I don't understand what the connection is. And that's why I'm asking you is because it just. It's a. It's a trend that I see when I. When I talk to gents about this type of stuff, it's always. It always seems to go back to childhood.

Yeah, well, that's what Freud observed. Well, it's because everything that you don't. Everything you've encountered in your life that you don't understand is traumatic to some degree merely because you don't understand it. It's. It's unmapped. You haven't coped with it properly. You don't know how to deal with it. And so all of those things are tagged pretty much forever with anxiety, with entropy, like, they are entropy itself. They're confusion itself, and you have to make the world out of that. So the great hero, creators of the cosmos in the mythological world, are always those who face the dragon of chaos, who cut it into pieces and make the world out of the pieces. That's the oldest story we know. It's the dragon fight. In its most fundamental sense. A dragon is a monster that's composed of monstrous parts, and monstrous parts are parts that are terrifying, but that also don't. Like. A monster is something that's an aggregate of the. A monster is an aggregate of the incomprehensible. That's a good way of thinking about it. And so everything that's happened to you that's incomprehensible is going to be part of that monster. You have to deal with all of it?

Well, you either deal with it or you don't. And if you don't deal with it, you carry it with you. That's. That's how it goes. That's how it works. It could easily be, too, that people who were primed, let's say, for post traumatic stress disorder had a sequence of traumatic occurrences in their past that have already cracked them in some ways.

I want to switch gears now. I want to get into the lecture that you gave about how the Bible references itself approximately 65,000 times. And you had a great visual, which.

I. Yeah, it's a great visual. Eh, it's.

It's. It was. It was very captivating. And could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Well, the first thing we could say is that the Bible is the world's first hyperlinked text, because many of the verses refer to many other verses. And that means it's a very complicated text because you can find your way through it many, many ways. Like, the more a text is cross referenced, the more pathways through it there are. And you can imagine that that explodes exponentially. So you might say, well, what does a Bible verse mean? And the answer is? Well, it means whatever it means in reference to all of its cross references. And then each of those cross references has cross references. So it's a web. It's a web of meaning. A very complex web of meaning. And so that's what makes it deep, technically speaking. Okay, so what does that mean? This is a good way of understanding a symbol. See if I can explain this properly. Imagine that you have a belief of any sort. Then imagine that there are other beliefs that are statistically likely to co occur with that belief. So if you believe one thing, here's four other things you're likely to believe, and then each of those four has four things, four beliefs that are likely to occur with them.

That's what you'd say if someone was conservative, right? If you know one of their beliefs, you can predict many other beliefs. Or if they're liberal. Every idea, no idea, exists independently. It exists in a web of ideas. That web is something like the statistical probability that another idea will co occur with that idea. That's what the large language models map. They map that mathematically. So here's a way of thinking about it. Imagine a word like hilt. Like the hilt of a sword. H I l t. Well, how do you know that's a word? Well, you know the meaning of the word, but you also know it's a word because a word is identifiable because of the statistical regularities between the letters. You know perfectly well that z qnx is not a word. Why? Well, because there's no word that has that statistical relationship. There's no word that's four consonants, not one. You have to have a vowel in your word. So one of the ways that helps you identify a word is your understanding of the statistical regularity between the letters. So the word c I l t, that's not a word, but it's quite a lot like a word.

It's a lot more like a word than z qnx. So a word has predictable statistical relationships between its letters. Words exist in relationship to each other. Patterns of words exist in relationship to other patterns of words. Paragraphs exist in relationship to paragraphs. All that's a mathematical domain of statistical regularity. That's what a symbol is. A symbol is the complex of ideas that are associated with a particular idea. And so when you're exploring the symbolic landscape, say, of the biblical stories, you're exploring the statistical relationship between all. Between all the ideas. Well, that's a reality. That statistical relationship, it's a reality. It's like, does a witch live in a swamp or a high rise. A witch lives in a swamp. You know that? Well, why? Well, because in, in portrayals of witches, from time immemorial, witches are likely to be in swamps. So when you think, which, that's one of the things, you sort of think along with it. And everything we think is like that. And the part of what the biblical corpus is, is a walkthrough, how would you say it? It's a walk through the patterns of character and order that have been reliably observed to exist, to coexist over thousands of years.

That's a good way of thinking about it. So here's an example. This is very complicated, but here's an example. So I talked about God. God for Abraham was the spirit of adventure, the call to adventure. This is a definition. This is very much worth knowing because people have no idea what to do with the concept of God. It's like God's the call to adventure. That's a definition. Okay? But that's not all. So God for Noah wasn't the call to adventure? Not exactly. For Noah, God was the call to batten down the hatches when chaos looms. So imagine that you're a wise man, which is how Noah is portrayed in the story. So you've actually, you see things straight. You're wise for your time and place, which is how Noah is described. Your eyes are open and you get an intuition that all hell's about to break loose. And so you take the appropriate precautions. Okay? God is defined in that story as the spirit that comes to the wise, to have them prepare in times of trouble. And then the co occurrence of those stories is the insistence that the call to adventure and the call to prepare are the same thing.

That's the monotheism that's underneath it. Right? And so what the biblical corpus is doing is aggregating visions of what's highest and making the presumption that they're all manifestations of a unity. Now, the alternative is that it's a plurality, right? I mean, you're going to cope with this one way or another. Like, either everything that calls to you morally is the manifestation of one thing in some complex manner, or there's a plurality of moralities. Those are the only options. The monotheistic insistence is that what's highest is, in the final analysis, one thing. So what else. So how else is it portrayed in the Old Testament stories? God is the voice of conscience. That's another portrayal. And so you could say God is the voice of conscience. God is the impetus to prepare in times of chaos and God is the call to adventure. And that's all the same. God, it's just manifesting itself. The same spirit is making itself manifest in different conditions. In the christian corpus, God is identical with voluntary. God is the spirit of voluntary self sacrifice. Right, right. And that's the same as the spirit of adventure and that's the same as the voice of conscience and that's the same as the voice of prudence during times of chaos.

It's all the same thing. And that's. I think that's right. I think. I think that's exactly right.

What was the. If, you know, what was the most referenced verse in the Bible? If I remember at the graph show.

That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that actually.

It was very. Yeah, it was a lovely.

See that's, that's a very good question because that's actually one way of determining what idea is central. Right. Because some ideas are going to be more central than others.

At the bottom of the, of the. Of the visual aid there was.

It showed the path, the number of connections, the number of cross references.

Yeah, it was right smack dab in the middle. There was one that would, had to be at least double the length of all the others.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah, that would be interesting.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Did you put that together?

No, no. Someone, I found that online. You can find it online. If you look up biblical graph of biblical cross references it'll pop up right away. Something you can probably find for this podcast and show. Yeah, it's great. It's great, it's great.

I'll find it.

Your brain is organized like that too, by the way. So it's. Every neuron isn't connected to every other neuron. That isn't how it works. That's too much connection. Actually, that's what starts to happen in a psychedelic experience is that the number of connections increases dramatically. That's partly why there's that overwhelming sense of increasing meaning. So. But you don't want everything to be connected to everything else. I mean that's part of the pathology of the modern world. We're connecting everything together. It's like that's a little too much connection. It's. It's insanity making. Right. We may be driving ourselves mad with the interconnectivity online. You know, it's a great way of educating yourself. It's a great way of having access to information. But I'll tell you man, it's a great way of being connected to all sorts of things you don't want to be connected to. And it isn't obvious which of those is going to get the upper hand. You know, like, I'm not. It isn't obvious to me that Twitter could be good, see, because I'm afraid that the social, like, let's take Twitter, for example. Twitter is speech without responsibility. Speech without responsibility might be fatal, you know, and I'm saying that as an advocate of free speech.

But there's a very big difference between free speech on Twitter and the free speech you and I are engaging in right now. Like, you're sitting right there. There's a lot of things that I'm not going to say to you, like, not because I'm hiding, but like, I'm going to be polite.

There would be an immediate consequence.

There would definitely.

There is no immediate consequence on Twitter.

Well, worse, the consequence of being psychopathic might be positive on Twitter. Right. Whenever the psychopaths get the upper hand, society dies. And it could be like, I'm afraid of this. I think it's possible that social media enables the psychopaths fundamentally. It's very worrisome. There are a lot of bad actors on. Well, you know, you read comments, you know, people need a slap.

Yes, they do.

They certainly do. And there's no way of administering said slap. And so one of the consequences of that, for example, many psychological commentators had made this point. Twitter devolves into female aggression. So females, when they're aggressive, they use reputation savaging, gossip and innuendo. It's unbelievably corrosive because they can't engage in physical combat. And so that makes female antisocial behavior unbelievably pernicious and difficult to regulate. Twitter enables gossip, reputation savaging and innuendo unconstrained. So what does that mean? It means everybody who tilts in that direction has free rein. But it also means that even if you don't tilt in that direction, it's going to tilt you in that direction. So we don't know. These are unbelievably powerful communication systems. You know, you can write something casual that a million people will read. Well, maybe you shouldn't ever write something casual that a million people should read. Like, maybe that's a reason for it not to be casual. Maybe if we have a technology that enables people to discuss things casually with a million people, we just all die. Like, that could be. We have no idea what we're doing with these transformations of communication. We have no idea.

It's very difficult to be on Twitter without always feeling like you need to take a shower, you know? And I don't. I wouldn't say that I'm at my best on Twitter. Why do I use it? I use it because that's how I keep track of the doings of 700 people that I know. I do it so that I know what's happening in the moment. And that's often where I find my podcast guests. What's the downside? It's easy to say stupid, casual things, and you're immersed in this responsibility less landscape of casual speech where all the psychopaths come out to play.

It's made, I mean, I don't know if this is what made it, but this is something that I want to get into with you, is the polarization people have become. I don't know if this is the right word, but almost tribal, it seems like. And you know what? Really? I'm always, every day, every single day I wake up, I'm wondering, how did we get here? Why is the country the way it is? It's not just the country. It's the entire world. Why is the world the way it is now? And kind of where I'm going with this is people have put so much faith into political parties, political candidates. They refuse to. They refuse to look at or admit wrongdoings of anybody that they back. And that's, that's, that's, you know, you have the right call and the left sheep. Yeah. And they're doing the same thing. They're doing the same thing. I could show them a million different things of, hey, look at, this is what this person did. And they will dismiss it and they will make excuses for it, and they put, what. Why do people. Why has it become so polar?

Nobody can. It's like we've lost all critical thinking skills in the world, it seems like.

To me, well, the new technologies flattened the information hierarchy so that everybody can communicate with everyone. Everyone's now a journalist. That might be too many journalists. You know, we've radically expanded the degree to which we're connected with people. And. Okay, so you can imagine, if you're a good person, perhaps that's a good thing. If you're a bad person, it's a really bad thing. A lot of the people that aggregate together online, for example, they wouldn't have a single friend in the actual real world. No one would like your basement, you know, your typical basement dwelling, resentful keyboard warrior. It's like if he was left to his own devices without this technological intermediation, he'd have zero impact on anything because no one can stand being around him. But he's magnified madly online and can aggregate with other people. That's what I mean in some ways by the enabling of the psychopaths. So it's not that easy for psychopaths to organize because no one likes them, including other psychopaths. But they can certainly organize. They can certainly organize online. And so we're enabling that. And people are not cognizant of the danger. I've talked to Democrats for seven years, 50 congressmen, senators, people in positions of authority, RFK, Dean Phillips, I always ask them the same question, when does the left go too far?

They never answer. They have no idea. They don't take the fringe seriously. They think, oh, those people don't mean it. It's like you people tend to mean what they say. You know, I know people lie, but often the easiest way to find out what someone's up to is just to listen to what to say. They'll tell you, Hitler told everyone what he was up to. He wrote a whole book about it. Oh, no. And he couldn't be up to that. It's like, yeah, yeah, pretty much he was up to that. These people who come out and say, you know, we should burn everything to the ground and start again, it's like, that's what they mean. Oh, they don't really mean that. They don't mean that with equity. They don't mean equality of outcome. They don't really mean that. They mean it. They have sway online and far more than is good for us. Is that part of the polarization? I think so. I think the polarization is driven to some degree by the fact that social media enables the psychopaths so we know what they're like. So here's the we know this is true, by the way, because these people are much more likely to troll post online.

So there's been psychological investigations into that. What's the psychological makeup of, lol. Troll posters. These are people who are doing it for the laughs, doing it for the lulls, just causing trouble. Ha ha ha. They're psychopathic, so that means they're predatory parasites. They're narcissistic, which means they want reputation without earning it. They're machiavellian, which means that they use their words to do nothing but manipulate for their own short term benefit and to cap it all off, because that's not enough. They're sadistic, which means they take positive delight in the suffering of others. All right, that's not good. None of that's good. And so you let those people take the upper hand. You're in serious trouble, and you don't need that many of them to bring things to a shuddering halt. It was a very small minority of people who fomented the russian revolution. Tiny percentage of the population. You let those people out from under their rocks at your peril. And the marginalized, it's like we should welcome the marginalized. It's like, okay, what are you going to do with the fringe of the margin? Well, they don't exist. It's like, wait till they show up at your door, buddy.

You'll be, you'll be pretty, you'll be thinking twice about the fact that you opened the gate when those people show up. And if the fringe of the fringe isn't enough to terrify you, the margin of the fringe of the fringe, they'll do the trick. And people don't, have, we talked about this earlier. They don't have imagination for that kind of evil. They don't want to look at that. Even Michael Schellenberger. I talked to Michael a couple of weeks ago about the WPATH files. Marcy, I think Bowers is his name, the surgeon who runs WpAth, the surgeon who operated on jazz Jennings, the surgeon who's surgically converted 12,000 people. Right. An absolute bloody monster. It's like you want to look at that. Well, Michael told me when I started talking to Helen Joyce, for example, who wrote a book on the trans phenomena, he didn't want to look at it. He didn't believe, he couldn't believe that could be happening. That was Michael Schellenberger. I mean, Michael, he'll look, he looked into the Twitter files. I mean, Michael's a great journalist, you know, what's his name?

Bill?

No. Mark Cuban came out the other day on Lex Fridman's show, and he said, well, in order to believe that this sort of trans butchery is happening, I'd have to believe that the nurses and the physicians and the psychologists are all in on it. Well, you have, that's ridiculous. It's like, have it your way. You know, I can see why you don't want to believe that people won't. Look, weve given the marginal, the upper hand in the social media networks, and that could be fatal. I really mean that. We have no idea, we have no idea how significant this transformation and communication is. We have no idea the long term consequence, lets say, of Twitter. I mean, Musk took it over because he hoped he could make it into something good on the free speech side, and I think hes improved it a lot. But it could be intrinsically evil. It's highly probable. Well, think about it this way. What's the probability that a radical revolution in connectivity would only have positive consequences? Like, zero, right? Because positive consequences, they're really. If you take any complex system and you radically disturb it, the probability that the radical disturbance will be a net good is infinitesimally low compared to all the ways it could fall apart.

You can't throw a wrench into a military helicopter and improve it. So. And what we've done is we've connected people. That's a major league technological transformation.

Yeah. I mean, how do we get through this? I mean, it's. Nobody holds themselves accountable anymore. Everybody wants to pass the buck. People not only are making excuses only not only for themselves, but they're making excuses for their. Their political figures, parties, candidates, whatever you want to call it. And all I see is just bitching.

Why did you invite me onto this podcast?

Because I want to pick your brain about this.

Okay, okay. But, but, but obviously, part of the reason is because you've observed the effects or the consequences of what I'm doing. Okay, what do you think those consequences or effects are?

I think they're making people think.

Okay, okay, so is. And you think that's a good thing?

Absolutely.

Okay, so what, in the manner in which I'm inviting people to think, do you think. What part of that do you think is good? What element of that is good?

I think that. I think that people have lost the ability to think for themselves, and they are being led around by the nose by political candidates. And I think when somebody like you gets a platform and speaks, it forces them to get out of that hamster wheel.

Okay, okay, so, okay, so you asked what can be done about this. Well, what I've observed is most effective is something like a call to adventure, that. This is why the work I've been doing has resonated with, in particular, with young men, because it's a call to adventure. It's a call to adventure through responsibility, and no one's doing that. We haven't done that with young people for 60 years. And so there's a huge hole there. And if you. I see this wherever I go, if I talk about the relationship between responsibility, adventure and meaning, people get it right away. I mean, you think when you're raking yourself over the coals of your conscience and you're searching in your soul for something, you've done. That's good. So that you don't have to take yourself out on the despair and nihilism front. You're going to be looking for times when you made real sacrifices on behalf of something higher and that was successful. When you were of service to other people, when you were good for the people that you loved, when you went out of your way to accomplish something difficult, you'll be able to satisfy your conscience with those memories.

Well, what if you just lived like that? That's the Christian call. The christian call is to bear maximal responsibility. That's what the cross means. It means to pick up your cross and walk uphill. What's the cross? Death, pain, malevolence. That's what it is. It's unjust death. That's the cross. What does it mean to bear that? Well, it means to bear the weight of life responsibly. Why do that? Because it's deeply. Well, first of all, it's good and just that in and of itself might be sufficient, but it's also in keeping with that. It's deeply meaningful. I tell young men, it's like, find something difficult to do. You need that. You're not built for comfort or pleasure. Like if that comes along good, you know, if you have a day where you're comfortable and there's some things around you that give pleasure, have some sense and enjoy it. But don't be thinking that's what your life is aimed at. That's contemptible. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that. And if they orient themselves in that hedonistic direction, there's nothing in it but shame. No one is proud of themselves for using pornography. They might screech and bitch about their right to do it.

You know, I can live whatever lifestyle I want. It's like, well, first of all, no, you can't. That doesn't work. It won't work for you because you can't sell yourself out and it won't work for other people. We know, for example, who engages in hedonistic short term mating strategies. We know that from the psychological literature. So imagine on the one end of the reproductive strategy distribution are people who commit to the long run and on the other end are the people who pursue short term, hedonistic one night stand relationships. Okay, now you can ask, who are these people? Well, the people who commit to the short term responsibility, less sexual gratification relationship are psychopathic, narcissistic, machiavellian and sadistic. And if they don't start out that way, they train themselves to become that. With that lifestyle, right? So like, okay, you might ask, like the Marquis de sade, you might ask, well, who the hell cares? If I can gratify myself at your expense, why the hell shouldn't I? Who's to say that's wrong? And my answer to that would be, go try it, see what happens. Well, what'll happen, you will degenerate because you're exploiting other people and yourself.

And you can't exploit other people and yourself without degenerating. You will never form a relationship because who the hell is going to hang around with you? If it's all about you and all about you, in the moment, you're the last person anyone wants to be around. So that means that as you age, you'll become increasingly isolated. There's nothing more despicable than a 50 year old hedonist. Oldest guy at the frat party. Oh, that's a hell of a, that's a hell of a name. You know, you know perfectly well at some, maybe if you're 30, at a frat party, even then, like the eyebrows are up, if you're 40, not only their eyebrows up, you're kind of a creep. Or maybe you're really a creep, like a serious creep. And creep can get pretty damn serious. So those lifestyles, they don't work. They don't work for the person because they're not sustainable, not within the context of the relationships that would make for a community. And they don't work communally, obviously, because community is based on sacrifice. That's why societies, civilized societies, are monogamous. Well, why? Well, because if you dispense with monogamy, what happens if you dispense with monogamy?

Well, we already know there's what's happening on the college campuses. So imagine now you have a college campus that's 65% female and 35% male. So you think, well, that's pretty good for the men because they're making out like bandits. It's like, no, a tiny fraction of the men are making out like bandits. Like, you know, maybe 10% of them, let's say it's probably more like 5% high status, high value males. And they sort of have the pick of the women and the women are all after those guys. They don't care about the other guys, they're after those guys. And those guys have like ten women. So what are they learning? Well, they're learning how to exploit ten women. So they're just turning into exploiters. What happens with the women? Well, they don't have a relationship. They're all chasing the same high status guy and he has options so he doesn't have to make any sacrifices to formulate a long term relationship. So the women who any of the decent women are, they're just what the hell's left for them? They can sell themselves out, you know, to be an easy lay for the high status guy, but that women pay a massive price for that.

Women pay way more a price for sexual immorality than men do because the cost for them is obviously much greater. The risk is much higher, so the shame is greater in consequence. You know, I don't think it's any better for a man to do that than for a woman. That's not my point. But a promiscuous woman is selling herself out immediately and in the long run in a way that's more profound than a promiscuous man. They're equally morally reprehensible in some ways, maybe.

Would you say just about any man, any man who was put in the top 5%, would they act the same?

Well, that's complicated, isn't it? There's a reason Andrew Tate's popular. Andrew Tate's popular because it's better to be Andrew Tate than to be an incel, right? And so it's not surprising that a man who has zero sexual value would admire someone who has his pick and choice of hoes, because that's actually an improvement, right? It's the improvement. Someone who's peaceful because they're a coward isn't an improvement over a gang member who will fight. He's worse. He's just pathetic. His goodness is all weakness. The gang member, at least will fight. Now, is the gang member good? Well, he's good compared to the coward. Is he good compared to what's good? No. And Andrew Tate's the same way in some ways. Or the people who, let's say, the pathway that Tate represents, he had enough courage to go out there and get for himself. At least he isn't hiding in his basement, you know, and he's a fighter. And so you can see why people admire that too, because he actually does put himself on the line. But he worked as an electronic pimp. Well, if you have no women working as an electronic pimp, that looks like a pretty damn good deal.

But it's not the right deal. The right deal is to be attractive to women. Radically attractive to women. Radically attractive enough to women so that you have your pick of women and then to find one woman and society falls apart. If that doesn't happen, that's a sacrifice, obviously. I mean, it's a funny sacrifice, because what you get from the sacrifice is your life, you know? I mean, I've been. Like I said, I've been married for 35 years. Okay, so what's the advantage to that? Well, I've been through a lot with my wife. She understands me. She understands in a deep way. She's been with me for decades. Five decades. She knows me in a way that no one else could possibly know me. We were kids together. We've gone through all these transformations together. We've had kids together. We've gone through a lot of adventures and trials. We know each other deeply. There's a huge. There's huge significance in that. There's huge reality in that and challenge to keep it working and dynamic. Otherwise, your life fragments.

I mean, it's an interesting conversation because everybody. I think that everybody has the temptation to. It's in all beings.

If you don't have the temptation, then you're lying or you're weak.

Yeah. It's in all beings that the male wants to plant his seed and as many females as possible.

Yeah, well, that's a proclivity.

And so it's. I 100% agree with what you're saying, but it's just. It's. It's.

Well, that's the real. The female romantic fantasy. The female myth is beauty and beast. Tamable beast. In the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast, the woman who's quite a stellar character, right? She's beautiful, and she's wise and she's intelligent. She has her choice. She's got narcissist like she's got loser, the village men. She's got narcissist. That's Gaston. And she's got beast. Now, you might think. And the stupid women like the narcissist. They don't like the losers. They don't like the dwarfs. They like the narcissist. Now, stupid women like narcissists, naive women like narcissists because they confuse their narcissism with competition, competence, and confidence. That's how narcissists exploit. They look like they're confident. They look like they're competent. Beauty Gaston is after her, wants to charm her. She goes for the beast. Well, the beast is a monster. He's a traumatized monster, even. But she hopes that he's tameable, that she can bring him into relationship. And, like a good beast, has options, but he'll forego the options for the relationship. That's the female sexual fantasy. So, tameable beast. Now, that's rough, right. Because how likely is it that you're going to be able to tame a beast?

Not that likely, but pretty damn useful. If you can do it, then you have someone who can keep the real beasts at bay. Right. And it's a really, like, women have to negotiate a very tight line because they're looking for men who are disagreeable enough to be able to tell the monsters to go to hell, but who are generous and productive enough to share. That's a tight. That's a hard target to hit. It's a hard target for a man to become, too, you know, because you can imagine Tate would be a good example of that. He's got all the temptations of success. Well, why not fall prey to them? Well, compared to not having success or the temptations, it's better to have success in the temptations, but it's actually better to have the success and then not fall prey to the temptations. Right. Then that's a real mastery, high order mastery. That's truly admirable.

100% agreed. I would like to move into. You obviously study a lot about the Bible, and I love a lot of the things that you say about it on your podcast. You have all these. All these. You're digging, you're talking to religious figures, you're discussing the Bible, all these things. And I researched you, and I wanted to figure out what you believe, and I couldn't find it. I found that a question that you despise is, do you believe in God? And so I'd like to dig in and see, the thing about God is.

That God isn't something you believe in. This is the thing. Or people. Or you could say that the way we conceptualize belief in the modern world is shallow. To believe in God is to commit your life. That's what the belief is. It isn't the statement, I believe in God. You could. The statement can get in the way. It does all the time. It says in the gospels, Christ himself says, not everyone who says, lord, lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Just because you say you believe something, it's like people say all the time that they're christians. I'm a believing Christian. It's like, that's hard there, buddy. That's the most difficult possible commitment by definition, because it's the hoisting of the cross, right? Really? You're going to commit to that, are you? So here's what you're committing to. Painful, painful, unjust death accompanied by betrayal, the perfidy of the mob, and the dominion of the tyrant. And you're going to welcome that. And that's not all because Christ harrows hell. That's not all. That's just where it starts. Full confrontation with malevolence. You're going to commit to that, are you? Because that's what you're doing.

What do you mean? You're going to commit to that? You mean you're going to commit to believe that he went, that Christ. No, you're going to do it. That you're going to do it in your own life.

That's what Christ calls upon people to do. That's the imitation of Christ. That's at the core of a genuine christian commitment. Now people will say you can't get to heaven by works alone. And that's true. That's not what I mean. That's not the point here. The point is that the belief is a commitment to a pattern. The pattern is full, voluntary confrontation, full naked, crucified, voluntary confrontation, accepted in good faith with joy and courageously bring it on. Military people understand this, or at least an aspect of it, right? Because they put their lives on the line. And not just their lives, their souls. And so it's a hell of a thing to ask of people. Christianity is not a comfort. Look, Christ says his burden is light. And what does that mean? It means that there's really nothing that's more, that can provide abundance and security like the truth. So that's the lightness part of it. But the cross part of it is you have to decide not to shrink away from anything. You don't get to live in a pumpkin shell anymore. That's the people. Christ comes back at the end of time and he doesn't reserve his wrath for the sinners.

He reserves his wrath for people who sit on the fence and, you know, people who want a normal, secure life. I'm not pillorying that. I'd rather have them than the radicals and the revolutionaries. But there's, that's not what a human being is like. We're bounders over the stormy ocean. You know, we're built for a life of radical harness and adventure. We're built for the maximum sacrifice. That's what it means to believe, to accept that. No holds barred, away the hell we go. And so people say they're believing christians. It's like, really? Really? You dare say that? You have no idea what you're saying. Because it's a total commitment. It's a total commitment to ride out, to confront and ride out the worst. I'll give you an example. So in the story of Exodus, the Israelites are lost in the desert. They're lost for like, 45 years. And they're always whining and bitching and complaining and acting like, you know, privileged slaves and pining for the tyranny and hoping for the golden calf, and complaining that the heavenly food they have to eat isn't good enough because there's not enough variety. It's like they're really quite contemptible.

And near the end of their voyage to the promised land, really on the border, they run out of water again, and they go to Moses. They get all bitchy about it, and they're faithless and complaining, and God gets sick of them again, and he sends a bunch of poisonous serpents in to bite them. And you might think, well, no good God would do that. It's like you're not paying attention to the story. What's the story? If you're lost and faithless and then you get whiny and resentful, it's just going to make it worse. And so you're in the desert, and you don't have enough to drink, and there's all sorts of stupid things you can do that bring the snakes forward. And so that's what happens, is that it's already bad, and they make it worse. So now there's all these poisonous snakes biting them, and they get tired of it eventually. And they go to Moses and they say, well, we know that you can talk to God, and so do you want to see if he'll call off the snakes? And Moses goes and has a chat with God, and God says basically that he's pretty sick and tired of the Israelites, and he thinks that some more snakes might be just thing they need.

But he decides that maybe he'll listen to Moses, because Moses has stored up a certain amount of goodwill. And so God says to Moses, cast a serpent in bronze and put it on a bronze pole and put it in the midst of the Israelites so they can all look on it. And if they look at it, then the poison won't affect them. He doesn't get rid of the snakes. He calls upon the Israelites to face what they're avoiding, to face what's poisoning them. And because of that, they become stronger. That's life, man. And so Christ says later, much later, that he has to be lifted up like the snake in the desert, which is a very strange thing for anyone to say. And the Israelites have to look on what they're terrified of in order to obtain resilience. That's the healing motif, that snake on the staff is the symbol of AscLepius. It's the symbol that physicians still use now to represent their healing enterprise. A little of what poisons you makes you stronger. That's the theory, right? And that's the theory of voluntary confrontation. Well, Christ, the. The crucifix is the same image, except expanded.

It's like all possible snakes. It's all the things that could happen to you if the worst possible things happen to you all at once. And the christian calling is to welcome that right, to become the sort of person who could welcome that. Job. For example, in the story of Job, Job is tortured by Satan himself. JoB's a good man, and God's bragging about him in heaven about how good he is. And Satan comes along and says, I don't think he's that good. And God says, what do you mean? And Satan says, he's just privileged. Things are going well for him, and so he's good. Let me at him for a while, and we'll see if he's good. And God says, I think he's good. Do your worst. And so Job is all his enterprises collapse, his servants all die. His wealth is demolished. He ends up extremely ill with a disfiguring disease. He's sitting in the ashes, demolished. His wife tells him that all that's left for him is to shake his fist at God and die. And then his friends come and tell him that it's all his fault. And so that's Job. And what does job do?

Job says, these terrible things have happened to me, but that's not BECause of some central flaw in me. He maintains his faith in his integral humanity, and he refuses to lose faith in God. And it's kind of perverse in a way, because job has every bloody reason to shake his fist at God and die, which is what his wife tells him to do. And job's insistence is, no. No matter what happens to you, you're called upon to maintain faith and move forward. And that's expanded in the crucifix story. Crucifixion story.

So with all your studies that you've done in the Bible, and I'm asking you, because you have immersed yourself in it, you've studied it for so long, do you believe in it?

Well, I believe in it in the way that we just described. Do I believe that the truth sets you free? Absolutely. It isn't that I believe it. Even I know it's true. I know it's true. And I try to live in that knowledge. It's very difficult to only think or say things that are true, but you can practice it, and it's a great relief. As you pointed out, you don't have to keep track of anything. That's just that in and of itself is.

It's freeing that.

That's for sure.

That's for sure.

Do I believe that Christ is the way in the life and that no one comes to the father but through him? Sure. But I also know what that means. It means that imagine that you want to have the spirit of the almighty dwell within you, say, in this old Testament manner. How do you do that? By taking the burden of life on yourself voluntarily. Why? Because that causes the best within you to make itself manifest. You know that. Look, why did you push yourself on the military front? Why did you go become a Navy Seal? That's a ridiculous thing to do, right? They just torture you to death in the water. Why did you do it?

Because I wanted to serve my country in the highest capacity possible.

Okay, so why did you think that? So you believed that there was a highest capacity?

Yes.

Right. So that was an element of faith. And you. And so personally, you put yourself through this brutal, transformative process. What. How did that change you?

In a lot of ways, it changed me. It. We've been talking about this off and on. There was a lot of pride involved, and when I graduated from that, I never felt more pride. Another reason I did it was I always felt that I had fallen short in childhood, and I wanted my parents to have something to be proud of.

Okay. So let's separate pride from accomplishment.

Okay?

Right. Because you could see pride would be unwarranted pride in your accomplishment, but that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as accomplishment. Okay. So do you feel that you accomplished something real when you went through the Navy SEAL training program?

Absolutely.

Okay. Why was it real?

Because it's the. Why was it real?

Yeah.

It was the hardest thing that I've done.

Right? That's right, yeah. Was it meaningful? Was it transformative?

Yes.

And it was the hardest thing you'd ever done. Okay, well, that's the. That's the pathway. The pathway to what's most real is through the hardest things that you can do. Right. And that's the path, obviously, that's the path of adventure. You know, you go watch a James Bond movie, which everyone loves to do, right? A romantic adventure. Well, what's James Bond doing all the time? Impossible things. And everybody thinks, wow, that's so. Well, so what? It's not fun. Exactly right. Because it's better than fun. Fun is for kids. Let's say this is that pathway of sacrificial adventure. That's way better than just fun, even though, because it's difficult, even the pathway of maximal difficulty. Now I don't mean you should go out and play in traffic just because it's dangerous, you know, but this is something, and this is something that has been, one of the things that's been great about these continued tours is that I can see people's lights go on when I talk about this. It's like, no, no, you're going to put yourself together by shouldering maximal responsibility. No one's ever told me that. It's like, because you see, the conservatives say you should and they finger wag, but that's not the right, it's not the optimal way of presenting it.

It's like, no, you don't understand. Is that the meaning that will sustain you in your life will be found in the shouldering, voluntary shouldering of maximal responsibility. And everyone knows that, you know, if you're, if you go out of your way for your friends, you have better friendships. If you go out of way, go out of your way for your wife, you have a better marriage. If you go out of your way for your kids, you have better kids. I don't mean in this like resentful martyrdom. I don't mean resentful martyrdom, I mean generous sacrificial productivity. If you give yourself away, you get more back, that's for sure. In the universities, I always noticed this with professors, especially when I was a graduate student, there were two kinds of professors you could work with if you were a graduate student, which means you're kind of an apprentice scientist. There was the professor who had the odd idea and was really zero sum about those ideas. Always suspicious of his students because maybe they're taking his ideas and not giving them credit, not generous with publication name, for example, always assuming that everything was in short supply and that his ideas were hyper valuable and that he couldn't trust his students because he needed to get credit for what he was doing.

And then there was the other kind of supervisor. My supervisor was like this, he just gave away all his ideas. He really did what he could to foster the development of the career of his students. What happened? Well, because he gave away all his ideas, he was surrounded by enthusiastic students who were really happy about him and what he was doing, and that was rewarding. And so the part of his brain that was producing those ideas grew because things grow if you reward them. And so then he had even more ideas. It's this inexhaustible well that is replenished by its. In consequence of generosity. That's that radical giving away. That's a form of courage, and that's also part of this sacrificial pathway forward. Why does Christ call upon people to be radically generous? Because that's the best. There isn't a better strategy than that. You know that, man. You know that if you're radically productive and generous, people flock to work with you. Well, that's a good deal for you. You know, can you could imagine a situation where if you're in a relationship with someone, it's 60% for them and 40% for you. Just imagine that.

And you might say, well, that's not fair. It's like, well, how about you have 20 relationships like that? Because people are lining up. And so with each, you only get 40%, but you got 20 of them, or maybe a hundred, or maybe a thousand. Now, you know, I'm not sure those ratios are correct, but you get my point. If you're going to err on the side of generosity, how could that do anything but work to your long term advantage? I don't mean in that selfish and manipulative way. It's the strategy of community, per se. We know among archaic people, hunters, hunter gatherer groups, if you're a good hunter, you still fail most of the time. So if you're going to be a good hunter for your family, you have to deal with the fact that some of the time, even though you're a good hunter, you're not going to produce any food. So how do you deal with that? Well, you go lead all your men on a hunt, and you take down your mammoth, let's say, and you give the best parts to everyone else, and you downplay your role in the hunt. Why?

Because the next time the like fifth guy in the hunting group brings down a mammoth, he's pretty goddamn happy to share with you, right? Absolutely, man. Absolutely. And you know, I'm sure you understand that perfectly well in the military context, right? The leaders that people will follow to their death aren't the tyrants. Those are the guys that get shot in the back, on the front lines when they've pushed their authority a little harder than would be wise.

We only have about 5 minutes left before you get a jump for your flight. And I have one more question. A lot of people think that we are in end times, and as much as you've explored the Bible, are you seeing any, any symbolic, any symbolism that we are in end times, especially today with the eclipse happening?

Well, I would say that the end times in the book of revelation are always with us. Life is characterized by apocalypse. Right. It's built into the structure of life. No matter what you produce, it's going to come to an end. Right. There's cataclysmic. There's cataclysm everywhere, always. Are we in end times? Things are moving very quickly around us. Right quick, in an unparalleled manner. And so the contours of the mythological world are becoming clearer. Are we in end times? There's no difference between end times and times of rapid technological transformation. Could that go terribly wrong? Yes. Could it go extremely well? Yes. How will it go extremely well if we become as wise as we are technologically proficient? That's what I'm attempting to communicate. We've got big toys. We better play the right game with them. What's the right game? Well, that's the religious question. What's the right game? The right game is certainly sacrificial. I think that's obvious. Just in consequence of definition, community is a sacrificial enterprise. That's why the altar is a place of sacrifice. Right. The altar is at the center of the church, and the church is at the center of the community.

Well, why? Because sacrifice is at the center of the community. What do you sacrifice? Well, you sacrifice the present for the future. That's maturity. Literally, that's what maturity is. And you sacrifice the self for the community. And so the most mature sacrifice is the sacrifice of self for community and future. That's. As far as I'm concerned, that's just self. All you have to do is think that through, and it's instantly self evident. You know? If you have a father, a father you admire and love and are grateful for, all of that will be in proportion to his sacrifice on behalf of the family. Obviously, my father did everything for us. It's a hell of a thing to say about someone. It's at the core of what we admire. It's obviously at the core of community. You know, a monster who's a father sacrifices his sexual profligacy for his children. It's a hell of an offer.

Well, Jordan, time is up. I don't want you to miss your flight. So I just want to say thank you for the. For the conversation and thank you for coming on the show, and it was truly an honor to meet you.

Thank you, sir. Feelings. Mutual.

Hope to do it again.

Yeah. Cheers. You bet. Thanks a lot, man.

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