Dr. Jordan B. Peterson - We Who Wrestle With God | SRS #108

[Music] Dr Jordan Peterson welcome to the show thank you sir thanks for the invitation it's 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 uh very intriguing I loved it and I want to dig into some of that today and um just our previous conversation right before the show started dig into a little bit about PTSD uh is I have an audience that's very veteran heavy and uh 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 uh so I think that would be very helpful and then on top of that uh my original plan was you have you have all these kind of religious figures philosophers you discuss the Bible a lot and um 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 typer and uh I would like to dig into some of your personal beliefs and uh and maybe if there's time

a little bit about what's going on in the world and uh 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 Dr 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 Ed education category and among all podcasts you've written three books which have sold more than 7 million copies maps of meaning 12 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 in quotes lifechanging in the UFT underground student handbook of course ratings you've released a 17p part seminar on the biblical Book of Exodus as the continuation of publicly acclaimed lecture on Genesis 7.5 million YouTube Subs 150 million podcast downloads 8 million IG followers you've been a 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 uh you're a husband to the to your wife Tammy and a father of two kids and currently on the we who wrestle with God Tour in 2024 am I missing anything I'm sure I am but uh but uh how long have you been married got married in 1989 so I think it's coming up on 35 years congratulations congr 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 the secret to a 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 uh you know that's a vow that has expanding benefits as 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 it means that there's conflict when it's necess Neary 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 MH well of course there's going to be conflict you're going to have conflict around how you discipline your children for example CU it's hard to figure out how to do it you're going have conflict

around your finances CU you have to sort it out there's lots of options and so this 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 cuz 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 it's that's a great point

I asked this question a lot and 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 threat 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 to 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 CU they need to figure it out it's 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 it's like yeah they have a problem they don't 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 you know but it's 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 10 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 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 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 well 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 constantly 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 got to 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 nanders just a week ago and and uh 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 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 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 you're 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 a 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 vitual by that point but they were conscious at each decision step interesting 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 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

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the story you tell yourself if you tell yourself ually it happens very quickly so there are experiments for example showing so imagine I brought students into a classroom and uh I gave them a questionnaire that assessed their political attitudes say with regards to uh abortion and maybe they were pro-choice and so I said okay now you write a 500w 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 you know when if you do that with enough heart let's say you can live in a delusion and then 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 mhm 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 very bad idea it is um I see people do it all the time on social media they build you they they they lie about their backgr around they lie about what they own they lie about past experiences they lie about what happened in war and they build this character M and I see it time and time again with with I would say more more than not the the the 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 and just having to put that false cloak on every day when you wake up they they they go out into the world and they are it's a completely false person and it it follows for years and the resentment that's a very good aspect of that where I'm going with this is one particular

part of the part of your tour that uh that I went to we who struggle with God you were talking about pride and and where I'm going with this is the E 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 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 of or the Israelites are freed from the tyranny of Egypt but that tyranny has two elements

a because the Pharaoh is a tyrant but the Israelites are slaves like Tyrant needs a slave so they're both morally culpable the tyrants culpable because he's a tyrant and the slaves are culpable because they're slaves they're they're it's a dance so Moses comes along he's speaking on behalf of God and he opposes the T 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 you're you're it's all good then it's like no you're lost and and the Israelites they're lost for three generations right 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 you know CU 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 and he doubles down 10 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 it's I'm sad for them that they that they put on that false cloak every day and and and 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 it's you lose track of them all 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 you know I mean without being telling the truth is complicated you 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 cudel 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 you're trying to sort something out even about how things are working on the domestic front who 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 going to 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 it's it's it's

a 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 it love means encouragement too right that's in some ways that's the distinction between the female role and male role in a family you know 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 L lends life interest and Adventure so for somebody that is living a lie how would you how would you advise them to get back to Baseline well I have a program online that's actually designed to to deal with that problem um we put together my colleagues and I Daniel Higgins and Robert Peele Robert Peele was my graduate supervisor at Miguel

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 so 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 you know 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 the the 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 those are very different people 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 right to assume that you should be worshiped 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 um it if a 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 M 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 the

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 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 in 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 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 5 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 you know cuz they know their sins they know the ways they've wandered off the path they carry a lot

of guilt with them and they don't really believe they that it that they deserve anything good that's 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 need within the bounds of Reason in 5 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 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'd 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 back to the problem so is that in is that part of what is happening right now to this country I mean if you get you get the

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 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 the religious Dynamic so imagine the the Tyrant makes

an offer to the slave and the offer is an offer of unbridled he ISM essentially something like that the Tyrant always kills the the source of pleasure in the final analysis mhm so like you'll be offered what will attract the immature part of you but don't be thinking you're going to keep it cuz that isn't how things work and 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 you 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 cuz tyrants become contemptuous of their slaves and unsurprisingly stellin was completely contemptuous of the Russian people he thought they all lied in coud why because they all lied in coud wasn't what 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 II 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 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 2-year-old is ever satisfied if you give the

2-year-old everything he wants all you get is an angry 2-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 isn't 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 a 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's what

are we celebrating first of all how about we don't celebrate Pride Pride's a cardinal sin and you might say well they don't mean Pride they mean you know it's a 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 ident it's like the word pride that's the word that was chosen so I don't care what the lies around that are and it's pride and relationship as far as I can tell to nothing but hedonistic self-gratification

it's like you're going to 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 when the prophet of God disappears the Israelites are left in the hands of Aaron and Aaron's a political leader and in 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 the biblical text you don't have to be much of a genius to understand that you know Rachel LaVine is not exactly striking heart

in the Striking fear in the heart of the Iranians are so damn stupid I'm with you on that you'd also mentioned how lost people are nowadays and and uh I see it everywhere I go why do you think why do you think so many people are lost and and and why are they missing the direction that they need to well I 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 you know governmental tyrants rights rights rights what I want right now that 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

they 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 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 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 2-year-old not in the final analysis all you do is if people just get what they want the time immediately

it's not like that en Nobles 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 and 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 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 Venture 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 were you went down list and I could you please explain how that works and and cuz when you were talking about it up there I had thought about a lot

of the times that I'd felt anger or regret or resentment and a lot of that was when I refused to it was my ego it was my ego question 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 po post-traumatic stress disorder for example so if you 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

is 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 5 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 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 move 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' 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 do 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 is 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 promise like the the the Christian promise is 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 the in 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 uh he was a seal and generally with with the with the Special Operations crowd I do a I do if I have a guest on from that Community it's a life story and there's there's so much truth that comes out of those interviews and and it's almost turned into like a therapy session yeah that's the confession I have somebody

coming on who had to maybe it didn't even have to I didn't I I want 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 it's 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 mhm 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 let's just say it was a a Justified kill but it yet it still haunts him I think it probably haunts a lot of the team members that were a part of that operation and but whether it was justified or not

he still struggling with it yeah he doesn't feel I I don't want to speak for the man but I it obviously bothers him because it got brought up right away and and and he wants to 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 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 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 then well then you 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 to do something terrible to proceed that's a religious question to some degree and 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 cuz 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 disorders I've familiarized themselves with the literature of horror that's very useful so there's a book called Ordinary man 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 Nan King which is about what the Japanese did in China at at the runup 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 that 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 like these are realities in fact they're the deepest realities that's why people break apart part 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 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 well good luck to you because you are completely without resources in 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 um and and people even when they conceptualize themselves when people read the history of Nazi Germany they always think they're Shindler they always think that they're the person who would have saved an Frank in the Netherlands they never read history as a perpetrator that wouldn't 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 godamn masks for the rest of their life

if the payoff would have being they could feel moral morally Superior and inform 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 it's 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 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 the fact that I appreciate the fact on people who who think like that because so many people just justify their their wrongdoings to in their head they justify why they did

it and they they they look for reasons to convince themselves on on why they're why they're sinning why do you think people why is is it so hard for people to just admit wrong instead of justifying well so that 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 to 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 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 right 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 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 know 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 a 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 youve 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 you sacrifice what you want that's what you do when you work you delay gratification you sacrifice what you could be Happ right now for the future it's a sacrifice

that's 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 to and that's your upward aim and that can be the antithesis of that sort of Pride you're Pride do you think that's a good thing sacrificing for the future I 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

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 so what does it mean to aim up that's you might ask

that well in the final analysis is it means to align yourself with the spirit of God but if you want to bring 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 and you could imagine that the sum total of all those incremental improvements is the upward aim you know and that as you make an improvement you get better at seeing the next step upward the the ultimate up name is what would you say the Heavenly City

on the hill it's something like that it's 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 want to 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 what are you trying to do in this discussion you're trying to have an honest discussion MH 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 and is there something meaningful in that abolutely okay so that's a mystery I talked to Joo willing Joo wanted to be a soldier from the time he was like three M and he's a complete bloody monster you know he's 4T 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 cuz 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 uh well 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 you'll 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 this the call of the spirit of Adventure and he makes it Abraham a deal he said if you abide by the spirit of Adventure hold 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 you'll have a reputation

you'll establish something permanent that's good and you'll do 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 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 relig side of things that's associated with what's good and it seems to me it's 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 it would be commensurate with his error know and 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 right 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 uh treatments therapies I've done I've explored all kinds of different ways to overcome postraumatic stress uh TBI but let's just concentrate on postm stress it always seems to go back back to Childhood everybody I've talked to their therapist starts them at childhood I started at childhood then when I got into when I started research in the Psychedelic therapy and I started interviewing people about it a lot of the visual experiences that they relive is not wartime a lot lot of it is I would say more than not our childhood memories

why the psychoanalyst would have called that a complex well imagine that it 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 cuz 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 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' you do wrong this week well I don't want to think about that it's like fair enough but then you carry it attention creators we see you guys ripping our content and putting it all over social media we've seen it on Snapchat Instagram Twitter Facebook YouTube Tik to talk you name it here's the deal we absolutely love it some of the reels you guys are making are getting over 20 million views

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or even if you did maybe it's time for a refresher time and Technology have changed a lot and that's why it's important to learn the fundamentals that's why I'm excited that Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses and the most important and enduring subjects you can learn about the works of CS Lewis the stories of the Book of Genesis the meaning of the US Constitution the rise and fall of the Roman Republic or the history of the ancient Christian Christian church with Hillsdale colleges online courses all available for free that's right free

I personally recommend you sign up for ancient Christianity in this 11 lecture course you'll study the inspiring stories of Christ in the first four centuries of Christianity the course is self-paced so you can start whenever and wherever go right now to hillsdale.edu SRS to enroll there's no cost and it's easy to get started that's Hillsdale edu SRS to register it's it's very difficult to keep and this is the same thing in in marriage this is why you talk for 90 minutes it's like to to keep things from aggregating so this the 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 so it may so when 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 in a rush like how did those connections make themselves manifest with me uh there was not really any connection it was more chronological

order and and I don't understand what the connection is and that's why I'm asking you is because it 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 you know 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 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 are terrifying but that also don't like a monster is something that's an aggregate of the in 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 you know 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 six approximately 65,000 times and you had a great visual which 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 hyperlink 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 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 um then imagine that there are other beliefs that are statistically likely to co occur without belief right 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 for 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 uh um 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 regular 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 um the word c l t that's not a word but it's quite a lot like a word

it's a lot 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 statistic IC 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 this statistical relationship between all between all the ideas that's a reality

that statistical relationship it's a reality it's like does a WI live in a swamp or a highrise well 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 witch 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 walk through 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 for God for Abraham was the spirit of Adventure The Call to Adventure this is a definition this is very much worth knowing cuz 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 whena when chaos looms so imagine that you're a wise man which is how Noah's 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 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 and so what the biblical Corpus is doing is aggregating visions of what's highest and making the presumption that they are 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 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 fin 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 it's I think that's exactly right what was the if you know what was the most referenced verse in the Bible it it if I remember right the graph show yeah I don't I that's a good question I don't know the answer to that actually it was very uh yeah

it was I love see that's that's a very good question because that's actually one way of determining what idea Central right cuz 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 P the length the number of connections the number of cross references it was right smack dab in the middle there was one that would had to be at least double the length of all the other yeah right I was just yeah that would be interesting yeah that's for sure

that's 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 the 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 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 cuz 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 uh enables the Psychopaths fundamentally it's it's very worrisome I mean 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 an innuendo unconstrained so what does that mean it means everybody who tilts in that direction has free

reign 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 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 I I don't I 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 um and you're immersed in this responsibility L landscape of casual speech where all the Psychopaths come out to play It's Made uh 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 it's is the 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 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 and you know kind of where I'm going with this is is people have put so much faith into political parties political candidates they refuse to they refuse to look at or admit wrongdoings of of of anybody that they back and that's that's that's you know you have the right call and the left sheep you have 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've put what why do people why is it so why has it become so polar nobody can can it's like we've lost all critical thinking skills in the world it seems like to me well the 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 base 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 cuz 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 that's not that easy for psychopaths to organize because no one likes them including other Psychopaths but well 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 7 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 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 po po posters these are people who are doing it for the laughs doing it for the lulls just causing trouble hahaa they're Psychopathic so that means they're predatory parasites they're narcissistic which means they want reputation without earning it they're maavalan 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 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 shuttering halt you know it was a very small minority of people who fed the Russian Revolution tiny percentage of the population you let those people out of the out from under their rocks at your apparel 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 talk about this early they don't have imagination for that kind of evil they don't want to look at that even Michael shellenberger I talked to Michael a couple of weeks ago about the W path files Marcy I think Bowers is

his name the surgeon who runs W path the surgeon who operated on Jazz Jennings the surgeon who's surgically converted 12,000 people right and 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 um he didn't want to look at it he he didn't believe he couldn't believe that could be happening that was Michael shellenberger I mean Michael he'll look he looked into the Twitter files I mean Michael's a great journalist you know um

what's his name Bill no uh 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 we've given the mar the marginal the upper hand in the social media networks and that could be fatal like really mean that

we don't we have no idea we have no idea how significant this transformation and communication is we have no idea the long-term consequence let's say of Twitter I mean musk took it over because he hoped he could make it into something good you know on the Free Speech side and I think he's improved 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 consequence quences like zero right cuz 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 it's a major league technological transformation yeah I mean how do we 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 in in all I all I see is just bitching why did you why did you invite me to this podcast because I want to pick your brain about okay but but but obviously part of the reason is because you've observed the effects or the consequences of what I'm doing MH 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 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 L 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 and okay okay so okay so 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 and adventure and meaning people get it right away you know 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 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 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 of itself might be sufficient but it's also it's it's 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 bit bch 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 Lord long run and on the other end are the people who pursue short-term hedonistic one nightst relationships okay now you can ask who are these people well the people who commit to the short-term

responsibility list sexual gratification relationship are Psychopathic narcissistic mellian and sadistic and if they don't start out that way they train themselves to be come that with that lifestyle right so like okay you might ask like the Marquee dead 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's 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 the 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 CU 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 here'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 cuz 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 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

10 women so what are they learning well they're learning how to exploit 10 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 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 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 cuz 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 to 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 the people who let's say the this the pathway that Tate represents he had enough courage to go there 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 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 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 it's it's an interesting conversation because everybody everybody I I think that everybody has the temptation to in in in it's in it's in all being if you don't have the Temptation then you're lying or you're weak yeah it's it's in all beings that that the male wants to plant his seed in 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 re the female romantic fantasy the female myth is beauty

and beast table Beast in 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 geston and she's got Beast now you might think and 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 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 he's a traumatized monster even but she hopes that he's table that she can bring him into relationship and like a good Beast has options but he'll forgo the options for the relationship that's the female sexual fantasy so table 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 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 man to become too you know cuz you can imagine Tate would be a good example of that he's got all the Temptations of success well why

not fall pray 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 pre 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 the these all these you're digging you're dig you're you're talking to religious figures you're

you're discussing the Bible you're all these things yet 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 believe in Christian it's like that's hard there buddy that's the most difficult possible commitment by definition it's the 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 perid 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 CU 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 CHR going to that that you're going to do it h 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 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 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 his burden is light and what does he 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 normal a normal secure life I'm I'm not pillaring 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 we're bounders over the 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 cuz it's a total Comm commitment it's a total commitment to ride out to confront and ride out the worst I'll give you an example so in uh 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 um complaining that the

Heavenly food they have to eat isn't good enough cuz 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 uh they go to Moses they get all about it and um 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 you you don't 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 God go Moses goes and has a chat with God and uh 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 you know 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 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 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

stake snake on the staff is the symbol of a sleepus 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 happened 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 add 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 ever 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 I he maintains his faith in his integral humanity and he refuses to lose faith in God and 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 in the crucifix crucifixion story so with all your studies that you've done in the Bible and I'm asking you because because you have immersed yourself in it in and and and you you've studied it for so long do you believe in it well I believe

in it in the way that I 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 in just that in of itself is is it's freeing that that's for sure that's for sure do I believe

that Christ is the way and 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 c 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' 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 I 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 cuz 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 it why

was it real it was the hardest thing that I've done right that's right yeah was it meaningful absolutely 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 cuz it's better than fun fun is for kids let's say this is that 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 maximum 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 Maximum 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 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 him credit not generous with publication name for example um 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 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 so the part of his brain that was producing those ideas grew cuz things grow if you reward them and so then he had even more ideas it's 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 if you're radically productive and generous people flock to work with you well that's a good deal for you you know could 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 relationship ships like that because people are lining

up and so with each you only get 40% but you got 20 of them or maybe a 100 or maybe a thousand now you know I'm not sure those ratios are correct but you you get my point if you're going to aror 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 gather 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 down play 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 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 mhm those are the guys that get shot in the back know 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 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 that's the religious question what's the right game the right game is certainly sacrificial like that's I think that's obvious just in consequence of definition Community is a sacrificial

Enterprise it's why the 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 sacrific 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 it's father you admire and love are and are grateful for you're you're all of that will be in proportion to his sacrifice on behalf of the family obviously my father did everything for us it's hell of a thing to say about someone it's the it's at the core of what we admire it's obviously at the core of community you know a Monster who a father sacrifices his sexual pracy for his children it's a hell of an offer well Jordan time is up I

don't want to to miss your flight so uh I just want to say thank you for the for the conversation and 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 cheers you bet thanks a lot man yeah thank you y [Music] no matter where you're watching sha Ryan Show from if you get anything out of this please like comment subscribe and most importantly share this everywhere you possibly can and if you're feeling extra generous please leave us review

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