Speaker 1: Jay Richards, thank you for joining me.
Speaker 2: It's great to be with you, Dave.
Speaker 1: We've done this a lot, but you've never actually seen
Speaker 1: my face. I've been involved with podcasts with you for
Speaker 1: over a decade now, but I've always been off to
Speaker 1: the side, and I've always been heavily involved in the
Speaker 1: kind of pre and post and sometimes during sliding a
Speaker 1: little note in like hey ask Jay this, but never uh,
Speaker 1: never face to face. So this is great, This is
Speaker 1: really exciting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: All right, I want to start with a confession. Can
Speaker 1: I tell you something?
Speaker 2: Okay, I used to hate you really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, as a young adult, college aged pushing
Speaker 1: the boundaries of what I grew up with my Christian
Speaker 1: faith and flirting with socialism. And my dad would say,
Speaker 1: You've got to read this guy, Jay Richards, or you've
Speaker 1: got to listen to this guy Jay Richards. So I'd
Speaker 1: look you up. It, uh, this guy with the perfect
Speaker 1: hair and hustle jaw like classic Republican.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, see this guy coming a mile away.
Speaker 1: Dead on arrival. I'm not giving him a chance. And
Speaker 1: so for the longest time he would just recommend you
Speaker 1: you got to read money greeting God as money greeting.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. Yeah, you know, it changed what I to you.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, well, okay, good, I'm glad to hear that.
Speaker 2: So maybe I wasn't the caricature you imagine.
Speaker 1: What you might have been. But you know, it just
Speaker 1: goes to show the benefit of actually hearing arguments out
Speaker 1: as opposed to the projection of what you imagine them
Speaker 1: to be.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, And you know, I mean the reality
Speaker 2: is especially in apologetics. I mean, there you can have
Speaker 2: a perfectly valid argument, but if it's not delivered the
Speaker 2: right way, appropriate to the audience, or you know, it's
Speaker 2: not received, and so both of those things have absolutely matter.
Speaker 2: And I reckon that is that when I'm writing about
Speaker 2: economics and other things that, especially economics, people have lots
Speaker 2: of mental pictures in their imagination that I think blocks
Speaker 2: them from just sort of thinking this passionately about the
Speaker 2: nature of economic reality, you know, And so that's always fraught.
Speaker 2: I can say it's less controversial than the stuff I've
Speaker 2: been working on the last five years. It's just general ideology,
Speaker 2: which is existential and obviously much more controversial. But then
Speaker 2: topics like fasting, which I love, right that's a lot
Speaker 2: less controversial, but still, you know, most people kind of
Speaker 2: have a lot of misconceptions about it, actually, m hm.
Speaker 1: So it just goes to show the benefit of listening
Speaker 1: to people. And even when your name would come up
Speaker 1: for podcast interviews, that guy, and then we continue to
Speaker 1: have you on and every time I just love listening
Speaker 1: to you because you're curious, which is why you're involved
Speaker 1: in so many different things. And that's a question that
Speaker 1: I want to ask you. Yeah, you also aren't afraid
Speaker 1: to change your mind. Yeah, and how do you change
Speaker 1: your mind about something? I changed my mind about something
Speaker 1: usually I hate to say it. I wish I were
Speaker 1: just sort of entirely dispassionate. And I said, Okay, how
Speaker 1: much do I actually know about this? Okay, it's like
Speaker 1: one percent of what I probably should know. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to study all the best representatives on all sides,
Speaker 1: or if I can't find a good representative of position,
Speaker 1: I'll steal man it myself. Try to come up with
Speaker 1: the best argument I can think of for a position
Speaker 1: I disagree with.
Speaker 2: But it's usually not quite that simple. What it is
Speaker 2: is that someone that I recognize is intelligent and articulate,
Speaker 2: says something right, and then it's confirmed by someone else,
Speaker 2: and then I think, you know, maybe I don't know
Speaker 2: this topic as well as I think I do. And
Speaker 2: then you have this moment of introspection where you say, okay,
Speaker 2: am I am I just sort of accepting an intellectual
Speaker 2: orthodoxy or accepting an idea because it's costly to believe otherwise,
Speaker 2: or have I really looked into it? And as you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, if somebody googles me. I've written on a
Speaker 2: lot of different topics, but in most of those cases
Speaker 2: was because I decided to look into something and realize, okay, wait,
Speaker 2: there's a lot more here. And in some cases it
Speaker 2: would be oh wow, I was completely off base and
Speaker 2: you know, need to totally change my mind on this,
Speaker 2: even if it's inconvenient. Other cases, you look into it,
Speaker 2: it's like, wow, the arguments for this are actually much
Speaker 2: better than I realized. And so you never kind of
Speaker 2: know going in if you're going to be serious about
Speaker 2: investigating a topic. And I think to seriously investigate a
Speaker 2: topic is to be willing to put yourself in a
Speaker 2: position to say okay, got to be willing to say
Speaker 2: a position I disagree with is that it's possible that
Speaker 2: it's true. You know, you don't have to assume it's true,
Speaker 2: but it's possible it's true. And what would count in
Speaker 2: its favor, what kind of evidence account its favor? If
Speaker 2: you can't do that, you might be right. It's possible
Speaker 2: that you just landed on all the correct opinions, right,
Speaker 2: That's certainly a possibility, but it's unlikely. And the fact
Speaker 2: that I myself have ended up on different sides of
Speaker 2: issues based upon my own study is a reminder to
Speaker 2: me that, Okay, we're fallible beings, and there's sometimes I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, in God's grace, you might just be born
Speaker 2: into a family that's already thought these things through, you know,
Speaker 2: and you can just sort of take that for granted.
Speaker 2: But in some ways, even your own intellectual confidence usually
Speaker 2: requires that at some point as an adult, you look
Speaker 2: into these things. But you know, especially in an age
Speaker 2: of social media, in which I'm more and more convinced
Speaker 2: at social media, especially you know, social media apps and
Speaker 2: the kind of infinite scroll capacity and then the algorithm
Speaker 2: that sort of gives you more of what you like.
Speaker 2: It's highly addictive. It's just works against careful deliberative thought.
Speaker 2: Because it you know, it stimulates us psychologically and you know,
Speaker 2: I mean literally sort of boosts particular hormones. And so
Speaker 2: I think this has never been more crucial that people
Speaker 2: have some kind of internal method that they follow in
Speaker 2: order to try to come to your views honestly and
Speaker 2: carefully when when needed, and just don't be caught sure
Speaker 2: of things you haven't looked into.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's getting so much harder than ever. I
Speaker 1: haven't read the article last night. I couldn't sleep. In
Speaker 1: the middle of the night I saw I say, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get back to that tomorrow. But it
Speaker 1: had to do intuitively. I understand what it's getting at
Speaker 1: the blue sky versus the X bubble, and how depending
Speaker 1: on which platform you're using, your conception of reality is
Speaker 1: completely altered totally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I constantly remind myself of that. And now
Speaker 2: I find the X feed, my X feed indispensable. But
Speaker 2: it's because I follow particular journalists from different perspectives and
Speaker 2: I can very quickly get at least, okay, a representative
Speaker 2: sample of what people are thinking about something and to
Speaker 2: do it quickly. But it's also extremely dangerous, precisely because
Speaker 2: it's tailored to you, and precisely because not everyone is
Speaker 2: on social media. I mean, I'm sorry. Yeah, I spend
Speaker 2: a number of hours on X, but it's still not
Speaker 2: a large segment of the population, and you know, they'll
Speaker 2: be thinking major controversies that are happening on X, which
Speaker 2: I'm sort of the middle of at different times. But
Speaker 2: then I'll talk to somebody else and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I didn't really hadn't heard about that. In fact, I
Speaker 2: often use my sister, one sibling, my sister who we
Speaker 2: grew up in Texas. She stayed in Texas. She's plugged
Speaker 2: into politics and stuff, but she's not hanging out on AX. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she's got a job to do. And I kind of
Speaker 2: use her to as a test. Okay, how deeply into
Speaker 2: you know, the broader conversation has this gotten? And if
Speaker 2: she's totally aware of it, it's like, okay, it's gotten deeper.
Speaker 2: But if it's some kind of in house sort of
Speaker 2: dispute on X, you know, it's like you got to realize, Okay,
Speaker 2: talk to some people that aren't plugged into that and
Speaker 2: find out, yeah, how how far it is. And then
Speaker 2: as you know, colleagues thatd say, go touch grass and
Speaker 2: look at the blue sky, get outside, right, I mean
Speaker 2: so many of them don't in the blue skuy if
Speaker 2: it exists, right, I've got it right here outside my
Speaker 2: window and I hardly even look out there, right. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean this there's so many I think of our
Speaker 2: sort of maladies these days could certainly for young people,
Speaker 2: could be solved by kids spending three months working on
Speaker 2: a ranch shoveling manure. I mean, honestly, you touch the
Speaker 2: material reality, remind yourself of your embodiedness, right, and not
Speaker 2: the digital thing. And I say that to somebody who
Speaker 2: you know, I see all the kind of benefits from
Speaker 2: this technology, including what we're doing right now. But every
Speaker 2: technology has its ups and its downs, and the more
Speaker 2: powerful it is, the more severe the downs could be.
Speaker 1: Well, and you just touched on the whole premise of
Speaker 1: the name of this podcast, a commitment to reality. It's
Speaker 1: like I just began to sense more and more that
Speaker 1: if we don't literally hold onto the ground, you're floating
Speaker 1: off into the ether. I mean, there's no limit to
Speaker 1: how ridiculous it can get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and yeah, absolutely, I mean this is you know,
Speaker 2: I wrote a book. In fact, your dad interviewed me
Speaker 2: about it, I believe the human advantage back in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: really addressing I wish I had written it in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five because all the stuff I was talking about
Speaker 2: in the book is happening now, right, self driving cars,
Speaker 2: genuine robots that are you know, android in appearance and
Speaker 2: kind of autonomous, not plugged in somewhere. All that stuff's
Speaker 2: happening now. The book was really a defense of the
Speaker 2: human person and not this dystopian vision, not this kind
Speaker 2: of anti technology screed, but like, look, there are lots
Speaker 2: of technologies that are going to be coming online in
Speaker 2: the next few years, are going to change our lives.
Speaker 2: We're going to change the way we work. It is
Speaker 2: not going to replace us as humans. Human beings are
Speaker 2: not machines, so machines can't replace us. It will just
Speaker 2: change the types of work we do. More things get automated.
Speaker 2: But you know, this was you know, kind of realization,
Speaker 2: because what's happened if you were to say, okay, so
Speaker 2: what distinguishes like say, the information economy from the service
Speaker 2: or the industrial economies went before, well one is called digitization.
Speaker 2: This is what the kind of uh information economy economists
Speaker 2: talk about. And so it's moving from the world of
Speaker 2: molecules to the world of bits, in which more and
Speaker 2: more things that before you thought of, okay they need
Speaker 2: to have a physical manifestation can actually be converted into bits.
Speaker 2: That is the kind of the language of software. So
Speaker 2: you know the way we consume music, right Initially it
Speaker 2: was literally had to have a music, you know, the
Speaker 2: musicians in front of you, and then we figured out
Speaker 2: how to record it. At one point in my own
Speaker 2: lifetime as a little kid, I was listening to my
Speaker 2: mom's LPs. Uh the you know, the vital discs, and
Speaker 2: then you're like, what is that? Yeah, exactly these, And
Speaker 2: then we went to a thing called eight track tapes,
Speaker 2: which was a terrible technology. That was a transition to cassettes,
Speaker 2: and then it went to CDs. Where are we now, Well,
Speaker 2: I haven't bought a CD. I can't remember the last
Speaker 2: time I bought a CD because everything is streamed and
Speaker 2: so it's just this it's a fully digital kind of
Speaker 2: manifestation of something that you know initially had to be physical.
Speaker 2: And so that's when we realize that, Okay, that's the
Speaker 2: nature of the information economy. Is that movement. But we
Speaker 2: live in the world of molecules. Right, we have bodies, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, we're you know, we have things in common
Speaker 2: with other organisms in our environment. And so if we
Speaker 2: get too detached from that fundamental human reality that we
Speaker 2: are embodied. God has created us as the these sort
Speaker 2: of unique material spiritual hybrids that are fully fully material
Speaker 2: and fully spiritual, you can put it that way. And
Speaker 2: anything that sort of that alienates us from that, there's
Speaker 2: gonna be some cost to it, and we got to
Speaker 2: become aware of it. Doesn't mean you can't use your
Speaker 2: computer again. It probably means you need to buy intention
Speaker 2: do things to cultivate and remind yourself that your embodied. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A friend of mine from church came up to me
Speaker 1: around Christmas and he gave me a gift. I don't
Speaker 1: need a gift, so actually it's for your fortieth birthday.
Speaker 1: I just getting into a little late. So I went
Speaker 1: and I sat in the car and I started to
Speaker 1: unwrap it and I gasped fun. He didn't read my mind,
Speaker 1: he read my soul.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: He gave me a cassette Blair with two blank cassettes,
Speaker 1: and I thought wow. And my wife got me a
Speaker 1: landline that connects my Bluetooth to your cell phone, so that, oh,
Speaker 1: that works.
Speaker 2: But it's a sort of a regular phone that you
Speaker 2: pick up with.
Speaker 1: It's a regular phone that you pick up and so
Speaker 1: and then what we're intending to do is to set,
Speaker 1: you know, for a period of time, let's say it's
Speaker 1: on Sunday, to set a almost done away message. If
Speaker 1: you remember from the old chat machines, Yes that if
Speaker 1: you get a text that says, hey, I'm not on
Speaker 1: my phone right now, or whatever disclaimer you want to
Speaker 1: put out there, give me a buzz if you really
Speaker 1: need me, here's the number and you can call and
Speaker 1: all of that. It's what you're saying. It's intentionality, it's okay,
Speaker 1: instead of listening to whatever the algorithm thinks that I want,
Speaker 1: and it could be dangerously good. It's unbelievable, and you
Speaker 1: discover and it's so hard because you discover things. There
Speaker 1: are bands that I've discovered via the algorithm that it says,
Speaker 1: you know what Dave based on your listening, I think
Speaker 1: you'd like this, And I say, you're right, that's great.
Speaker 1: I never would have discovered that on my own.
Speaker 2: I know it.
Speaker 1: But there's also music that I haven't listened to because
Speaker 1: it gets buried, that's right. And then I find it
Speaker 1: and I say, wow, I love this album. Why don't
Speaker 1: I listen to this?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And so the cassette player a CD LPs like you
Speaker 1: saying what, and they're all kind of having a renaissance.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my younger daughter actually has an LP for playing
Speaker 2: vinyl records, which have their own sound. It's like a
Speaker 2: kind of a cool sound that you know, you lose
Speaker 2: in a digital medium. But it's funny. But if you
Speaker 2: think about it, even cassettes or even that even right,
Speaker 2: the LPs were a move toward digitization, right, so we
Speaker 2: moved from okay, I need to be in the presence
Speaker 2: of a string quartet to hear it, and it's going
Speaker 2: to go off into the ether and no one can
Speaker 2: ever hear it again. And you record it, you sort
Speaker 2: of freeze that in place, right, so you're able to
Speaker 2: remove the experience of the listening from that kind of
Speaker 2: physical origin point. And so we're already sort of moving
Speaker 2: in that way. But there is something I think profoundly
Speaker 2: different about the kind of radical digitization combined with radical
Speaker 2: connectivity too, that that just you know, these are these
Speaker 2: things are beneficial, but they can also amplify all of
Speaker 2: our sort of worse aspects. I mean, it's just like
Speaker 2: the more connected and the more you can communicate with
Speaker 2: other people, the easierness to communicate the evil plans, right,
Speaker 2: And so that's just that's always true. But I think
Speaker 2: it's especially important now that people have a good anthropology
Speaker 2: and a good metaphysics because so much of the debate
Speaker 2: about artificial intelligence and transhumanism it's a proxy war for
Speaker 2: people's metaphysical differences, and so the materialist has a particular
Speaker 2: take on this. Theists and Christians ought to see it differently,
Speaker 2: but sometimes they themselves don't know how to sort of
Speaker 2: translate their theological views into this kind of complicated technical zone.
Speaker 2: But I think there's never been a time in which
Speaker 2: having good metaphysics is necessary for sort of analyzing technological trends.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so I actually wanted to ask you about
Speaker 1: this later, but I since we're in it. Yeah, how
Speaker 1: do you use AI, because I know you use it?
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, absolutely, I use it quite liberally, I would say. So,
Speaker 2: I mean I think I did I have the benefit
Speaker 2: I'm at gen X, and so I had the experience
Speaker 2: of using actual physical card catalogs as a look. Yet,
Speaker 2: and even in graduate school there was still a card
Speaker 2: catalog and a big library I use. And then we
Speaker 2: went to the cd ROM databases, and then you know,
Speaker 2: of course we've got search engines in which journals are online.
Speaker 2: And the search engines themselves were amazing. I still remember
Speaker 2: my first Google search around I don't know, nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: nine or two thousand and the ais by which these days,
Speaker 2: when people say AAIs they're mainly referring to the chatbots,
Speaker 2: even though search engines are a form of AI. But
Speaker 2: they're so good, and they were good even when they
Speaker 2: were hallucinating a lot right at the beginning, because they
Speaker 2: are so good with natural language that everyone's recognized, Okay,
Speaker 2: the capacity to be able to use natural human language
Speaker 2: like a human. That's a high bar. Because even though
Speaker 2: we have the rules, of course, there's grammatical rules and
Speaker 2: spelling rules, it can be easily delineated, there's just a
Speaker 2: lot more going on when two humans, you know, two
Speaker 2: conscious agents are communicating. And so it's tempting to think, okay,
Speaker 2: now we're reaching a point in which our technology it's
Speaker 2: getting more like us. Right before, Okay, a tractor. That's
Speaker 2: not like us. That's right, Maybe that replaces a job
Speaker 2: for an oxygen. But you know, well the mental stuff
Speaker 2: and the intellectual stuff that seems like it's like us,
Speaker 2: and so it seems sort of scary, but it's easy
Speaker 2: to forget that. Okay, those chatbots, how did they get
Speaker 2: so good? They got so good because they have this
Speaker 2: massive amount of data that it can be trained on,
Speaker 2: and all of that data was produced by human beings,
Speaker 2: intelligent agents, every webpage, every journal article. It's just really
Speaker 2: good at running the statistics and you know, under discovering
Speaker 2: underlying patterns we might not have noticed. And then of
Speaker 2: course the systems themselves are are designed by software engineers.
Speaker 2: They're optimized or tweaked, and so humans are still all
Speaker 2: over this, and so again it's just another tool, but
Speaker 2: it's a very it's a very amazing and sophisticated tool.
Speaker 2: And so I would say at the moment, my main
Speaker 2: use for the for the chatbots is for research. I know,
Speaker 2: that's that's actually kind of a really low level thing.
Speaker 2: I don't use it to write by papers or something
Speaker 2: like that. I will ask it, okay, find the most
Speaker 2: authoritative and most cited reference on this topic and it'll
Speaker 2: find it. I mean, it's just like that can help
Speaker 2: you summarize. It's just really really powerful, and so it's
Speaker 2: it's qualitatively different from the experience of search engines, which
Speaker 2: just kind of give you a list of other sides.
Speaker 2: And so, I mean, the reality is, if everyone else
Speaker 2: is using these chatbots and you're not, you're basically foregoing
Speaker 2: the use of a tool that would make you much
Speaker 2: better at probably what you're doing. At the same time,
Speaker 2: that tool is really good for cheaters, right that want
Speaker 2: to just you know, it's like the days of a
Speaker 2: professor giving an essay exam and then just having it
Speaker 2: turned in are probably over. You've got to have checks
Speaker 2: and balances. That might just mean that, okay, you got
Speaker 2: to go back to blue book exams where they're you know,
Speaker 2: you've written out, or to oral exams or you know,
Speaker 2: and then that's which is actually really a better test
Speaker 2: of knowledge anyway, but it's much more labor intensive. And
Speaker 2: so I mean, it's it's important to remember that we're
Speaker 2: just a couple or three years in to these chatbots
Speaker 2: and they're already amazing. Imagine what they're going to be
Speaker 2: like in ten years.
Speaker 1: Well, that's I guess the fantasy and the fear right exact.
Speaker 1: And we're all kind of in the middle of that
Speaker 1: moment where we're trying to figure out what's in this
Speaker 1: lamp and do we want to keep it in or
Speaker 1: take it out? And and there's this kind of consensus
Speaker 1: everybody who's working on this technology has a fear of it, right,
Speaker 1: and yet we can't stop that's right, Hey, what do
Speaker 1: you make of that?
Speaker 2: Well, it's funny you say that, because I just read
Speaker 2: this book just a few days ago. If anyone builds it,
Speaker 2: we all die, which is absolute, Like the title gives.
Speaker 2: The whole thing is they run these scenarios by which
Speaker 2: it seems almost inevitable that eventually we build a superintelligence
Speaker 2: that won't have a need for us, and we're gonna
Speaker 2: all end up dead. And they created as plausible a
Speaker 2: scenario as you can for that. At the same time,
Speaker 2: the book is a long exercise in equivocation and begging
Speaker 2: the question, because they just presuppose. Like in the whole
Speaker 2: sort of artificial intelligence debate, there's this idea of the
Speaker 2: hard problem of consciousness. How do you account for first
Speaker 2: person perspective or that our thoughts are about things. That's
Speaker 2: not a molecules aren't about things, but our thoughts are
Speaker 2: about things, right, And so anybody that's gonna deal with
Speaker 2: this stuff has to have some way of dealing with that. Well.
Speaker 2: The way the authors of the book deal with it
Speaker 2: is just to comply ignore it and just talk about
Speaker 2: computers choosing things and determining and preferring and having opinions
Speaker 2: and deciding and doing all the things that agents do.
Speaker 2: But they never justify that these things could ever be conscious,
Speaker 2: intelligent agents, which is so they just beg the biggest
Speaker 2: philosophical question of all And I think that's the that's
Speaker 2: the problem with so many people that worked in this area.
Speaker 2: On the one hand, if you ask them, okay, what's
Speaker 2: happening under the hood, it's like, okay, it's actually fairly simple.
Speaker 2: I forget if it was Gary Wolferm or someone that
Speaker 2: wrote a little book about like what's happening with chat GPT,
Speaker 2: And in terms of describing it, it's actually really not
Speaker 2: that complicated. What it does is complicated. But if you
Speaker 2: yourself have a bad metaphysical view of the human person,
Speaker 2: so you think we're ultimately machines, you think that human
Speaker 2: beings ultimately are reducible to physics and chemistry and a
Speaker 2: simple process such as natural selection, right, and we became
Speaker 2: conscious through these kind of processes, and our agents, Well,
Speaker 2: there's no reason that we couldn't design machines that do
Speaker 2: the same thing. That's the kind of that's the sort
Speaker 2: of leap. And if you press them, they'll they'll sometimes
Speaker 2: downgrade us and say, well, who's to say we're conscious?
Speaker 2: Maybe that's an illusion. Right, So you can see how
Speaker 2: again metaphysics, if you don't have the right metaphysics, you're
Speaker 2: going to get freaked out by this, because they really do.
Speaker 2: The guys at Google, they think they're in the process
Speaker 2: of building a general artificial intelligence, which won't even really
Speaker 2: it won't be artificial artificial, it'll be an intelligence. And
Speaker 2: if you think that you're doing that, and you think
Speaker 2: that makes sense it is possible, you would you should
Speaker 2: fear it. That's terrifying. Right. On the other hand, I think, actually,
Speaker 2: if we want to really anticipate the bad stuff that
Speaker 2: can happen, we need to decide what things not to
Speaker 2: worry about. And so the set of things not to
Speaker 2: worry about include things that are impossible. Right, So if
Speaker 2: it's not possible for a machine to be turned into
Speaker 2: a person, right at least, you know, without supernatural powers.
Speaker 2: Then we don't need to worry about that. We don't
Speaker 2: need to worry about Skynett waking up, hating us and
Speaker 2: killing us. It's got the problems are going to be
Speaker 2: someplace else, and that's not waste your time on this.
Speaker 2: A lot of the technologists here, because they have bad metaphysics.
Speaker 2: I think they waste time worrying about these things that
Speaker 2: don't make any sense philosophically. Hmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Somebody was telling me the other day that they
Speaker 1: actually think that AI is demonic and that it's evil spirits.
Speaker 2: That's right, So evil spirits are sort of channeling into it,
Speaker 2: into the technology. I mean you can't, of course, you know,
Speaker 2: if you're Christian beliefs in the unseen realm, you can
Speaker 2: never sort of dismiss that out of hand. But I
Speaker 2: don't think we need anything like that to explain what's
Speaker 2: what's actually happening with the chatbots. We actually, even though
Speaker 2: we don't know the exact answer they're spitting out, we
Speaker 2: know what's happening in terms of backward propagating, and they're
Speaker 2: sort of tweaking. It's a you know, statistical process involving
Speaker 2: massive amounts of computational power trained on data that was
Speaker 2: written by intelligent agents. That's what's happened. And so I
Speaker 2: don't think in this case you don't need to invoke
Speaker 2: something like that. It's not like you know, that hideous
Speaker 2: the end of that hideous strength, right, or it's his
Speaker 2: head is really getting demons are being channeled. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: that's that. Again, that's not something I worry that much about.
Speaker 2: I do think that that demonic forces are involved in,
Speaker 2: you know, all of our activities, But I don't think
Speaker 2: that you need to invoke that if you sort of
Speaker 2: know a little bit about what's actually happening under the
Speaker 2: hood with these technologies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Jay, listen to this. So I'm going through.
Speaker 1: So it was a conversation that I had on this podcast.
Speaker 1: And so I was going through on this editing software
Speaker 1: that I have, and I'd been working all day editing
Speaker 1: it because I'm still learning. And I start to edit
Speaker 1: like a little clip of do you use AI? I
Speaker 1: hate AI. I think it's evil spirits. I try and
Speaker 1: ignore it as much as I can. This is funny.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make a little clip. So I try
Speaker 1: to make a little clip of it, and I couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out exactly how to do it. I had it before,
Speaker 1: but I saw, oh, the program has a co creator,
Speaker 1: an AI co creator. All right, so I said, hey,
Speaker 1: can you make me this little clip? I'm all it
Speaker 1: erased my entire day's work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like my co pilot on all my all
Speaker 2: my Microsoft stuff. It's like wanting wanting to be there
Speaker 2: to help you.
Speaker 1: So IT saw her evil spirits comment and said, okay,
Speaker 1: watch this.
Speaker 2: That's right, though they could just as well be you know,
Speaker 2: they the programmers have shamelessly made it, you know, created
Speaker 2: something that because to resist disparaging comments about AI.
Speaker 1: Well, that's an I've had so many people tell me
Speaker 1: that the way that they interact with these large language models, yeah,
Speaker 1: is always with a veil of kind of politeness. Could
Speaker 1: you please? Would you please? Thank you? Because they're trying
Speaker 1: to train it.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right, you're trying to train it. And also
Speaker 2: you're habituating yourself. Right, So I do the same thing, don't.
Speaker 2: I don't want to accustom myself to speaking bluntly, right,
Speaker 2: Like I could just ask these questions very bluntly but
Speaker 2: I recognize, so I wouldn't want to write colleagues that
Speaker 2: way in an email because it sound bad. And so I,
Speaker 2: you know, you habituate yourself, and so I try to
Speaker 2: write like I would write to a person, although I
Speaker 2: have absolutely no temptation to think that that's really a
Speaker 2: person anymore than I think it's really a person giving
Speaker 2: me my answers to a Google query. And so I
Speaker 2: think that's good. It's just why. It's the reason you
Speaker 2: shouldn't use a bunch of profanity in private, right because
Speaker 2: then when you get mad in public, it's it's going
Speaker 2: to come out where creatures have it. So I think
Speaker 2: it's a good thing. And then you know, the ais
Speaker 2: themselves have been optimized for different things. So I know
Speaker 2: a Claude, which is by the companies called Anthropic, I
Speaker 2: know that Claude. From the beginning, they wanted the AI
Speaker 2: to really be optimized for de escalating. So in other words,
Speaker 2: if you're asking it questions and you're getting very, very agitated,
Speaker 2: it tries to give you more careful, nuanced answers to
Speaker 2: kind of draw you back from the brain. And they
Speaker 2: tell you that that's and so you'll notice that it's
Speaker 2: doing that. That's actually that seems like a noble thing.
Speaker 2: You know, it can maybe misused or something. But they thought, okay,
Speaker 2: we don't want this to amplify anger online, and so
Speaker 2: we're in our in our chatbot, we're just going to
Speaker 2: make it so that it de escalates, you know, and
Speaker 2: and it can tell when you're getting agitated, you know,
Speaker 2: based on I suppose the grammar and the if you
Speaker 2: use all caps or something like that. But you know,
Speaker 2: but then again that is it has these properties because
Speaker 2: of the choices of engineers, and the engineers themselves are
Speaker 2: intelligent persons made in the image of God, who can
Speaker 2: choose things. And the problem is is that because we
Speaker 2: use so much metaphorical language with our technology. Even the
Speaker 2: fact that we call it artificial intelligence, that was a
Speaker 2: marketing plan, right, that was literally people came up with
Speaker 2: that term precisely to get us to imagine it in
Speaker 2: that way. If we had called it, you know, I
Speaker 2: don't know, advanced statistical algorithms or something like that, right,
Speaker 2: would be less tempted intelligence. But they got the name
Speaker 2: artificial intelligences are now you know, we're off to the races.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it sounds like you're not anti AI or
Speaker 1: large language models that you're just approach with discernment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I mean, I would say, here's the spectrum
Speaker 2: on these questions. Techno utopian tech is going to save us.
Speaker 2: It's going to be our salvation. And then like ludditeism,
Speaker 2: which all technology is sort of bad and it displaces
Speaker 2: us and ruins our jobs and alienates us. And then
Speaker 2: there's kind of techno optimism over here or techno pessimism,
Speaker 2: techno optimism over here, and you get to the middle
Speaker 2: something like tech realism. And so I would say I'm like,
Speaker 2: just one click toward the optimist, but in the tech
Speaker 2: realist space, because I do think that we it's generally
Speaker 2: a good thing that we can build tractors, you know,
Speaker 2: or build computers, because it actually these are expressions of
Speaker 2: human creativity. They're part of the mandate, the odds command
Speaker 2: be fruitful and multi apply and fill the earth and
Speaker 2: subd it. So our fecundity, you know, biologically and having
Speaker 2: children and our fecundity and creating those are both in
Speaker 2: themselves expressions of the fact that we're image bearers, but
Speaker 2: we're falling, and so that that's sort of fractured but
Speaker 2: because I think of technology that way, it's a sort
Speaker 2: of intellectual prosthesis of human creativity. I think, Okay, I
Speaker 2: give it kind of a benefit of the doubt, but
Speaker 2: let's look really, really carefully at the ways in which
Speaker 2: human sin can distort these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know if it's unique to him, but
Speaker 1: I've heard Derek Thompson talk about how AI is going
Speaker 1: in these large language models are going to create two superclasses.
Speaker 1: One that's a superclass that uses AI to think with them,
Speaker 1: kind of like what you're explaining, like I say, helping
Speaker 1: with research and to kind of really synthesize. And a superclass,
Speaker 1: if you could use the word of people but lower class, right,
Speaker 1: who use AI to think for them. So with versus four, Yes,
Speaker 1: how do we avoid that? Because I feel like the
Speaker 1: line is.
Speaker 2: It is I mean again, it's the sort of Matthew principle.
Speaker 2: To him who has much more will be given and
Speaker 2: to him who has little, even what he has will
Speaker 2: be taken away. It feels that way because I mean
Speaker 2: someone like me, somebody like my children. You know, they're
Speaker 2: homeschooled and college degrees, graduate degrees and were born just
Speaker 2: early enough that they didn't have their entire lives in
Speaker 2: front of you know, touch screens. We're beneficiaries of this technology.
Speaker 2: I'm using it to amplify what I would do anyway,
Speaker 2: which is research and write those sorts of things. On
Speaker 2: the other hand, if you don't have that it can
Speaker 2: you might use it like it's sort of just live
Speaker 2: your life inside a gaming universe with you know, the
Speaker 2: oculus goggles on, and you use it because you feel
Speaker 2: like your life is not fulfilling, and so you spend
Speaker 2: all of your time in this imaginary digital world. And
Speaker 2: you know, if you're asked to write a letter or
Speaker 2: to write something, you just use the AI to do
Speaker 2: it for you. And so if you have any skill,
Speaker 2: it's figuring out how to query to get the right
Speaker 2: answer right that. I think that's quite possible. I don't
Speaker 2: think it'll be quite as stark as Thompson describes it,
Speaker 2: but it's memorable because it's like these sort of two things.
Speaker 2: Just as people predicted that. You know, they'll always say, well,
Speaker 2: there's this massive hollowing out of the middle class and
Speaker 2: you get like a few super rich and then everybody's poor.
Speaker 2: That's actually not true. I mean, if you just actually
Speaker 2: look at the statistics. It's not true that the middle
Speaker 2: class has disappeared. There's still vast majority of people are
Speaker 2: in the middle class. There are some ultra rich, you know,
Speaker 2: billionaires like Elon Musk with over one hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 2: But I think that in general, these technologies, as long
Speaker 2: as they're deployed properly, will create value. Value is created
Speaker 2: in an economy or wealth that ends up having an
Speaker 2: effect for lots of people. Because it's it's like Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: I can't remember what's not worth is. Maybe it's let's
Speaker 2: just say it's three hundred billion, which you know, or
Speaker 2: something like that. He's staggering. He's not sitting on three
Speaker 2: hundred billion dollars worth of gold, right. All of that
Speaker 2: is assets that are deployed and being created. And so
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any reason to think we won't
Speaker 2: have something like that. I do think there'll be these
Speaker 2: kind of first major, first mover advantages. Musk again a
Speaker 2: perfect example. He and a few guys started PayPal. He
Speaker 2: took that money and he parlated into Tesla. He owns
Speaker 2: the boring company. Right, of course, he has SpaceX, the
Speaker 2: robotics that he's developing. The satellite you know, email and
Speaker 2: internet satellites that he's deployed everywhere, practically in orbit around
Speaker 2: the Earth. Notice what he's done is he's basically taking
Speaker 2: on and developing technologies in these areas that he imagines
Speaker 2: are going to be part of the future, and that
Speaker 2: also serve a role in getting us to Mars. Almost
Speaker 2: every one of these, right has something to do with
Speaker 2: that particular goal. But you know, it's very hard to say, well,
Speaker 2: he's the only beneficiary of that. I mean, having self
Speaker 2: driving Tesla cars. He's not the only beneficiary of that
Speaker 2: in Iran. If you're only access to the INN is
Speaker 2: because he's turned on you know, Skylink. That's beneficial to
Speaker 2: other people as well. So I don't think there's no
Speaker 2: reason to think we'll have this dystopian Healscape with twelve
Speaker 2: super elites enjoying this stuff and everybody just sitting in
Speaker 2: their version of the matrix. It's a really good image, though,
Speaker 2: to help clarify, Okay, let's do what we need to
Speaker 2: do to make sure that nothing like that happens.
Speaker 1: Getting back to why I hated you initially, Yes, so.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's why we were on that topic.
Speaker 1: You know, we're going to talk about, you know, communal
Speaker 1: versus individual Yes, And this quote came up and I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, on on its face, it doesn't sound that bad,
Speaker 1: but I want you to dissect it.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This doesn't have to do with fasting. We are going
Speaker 1: to talk about that, but tell me why together we
Speaker 1: will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth
Speaker 1: of collectivism. Isn't as beautiful as it sounds.
Speaker 2: What isn't as beautiful as it sounds because it trades
Speaker 2: on a couple of Steers types, right, So rugged individualism
Speaker 2: people use that, and it sort of associated with Ronald
Speaker 2: Reagan and things like that, and it's supposed to invoke
Speaker 2: this idea of the wild West, right, which these individuals forged,
Speaker 2: you know, a world for themselves that they didn't depend
Speaker 2: on others. So there's this kind of radical autonomy. Of course,
Speaker 2: as you read Alexi Totolkville's Democracy in America, even in
Speaker 2: the eighteen thirties, it was nothing like that. The thing
Speaker 2: that stood out to him wasn't a bunch of isolated individuals.
Speaker 2: It was these voluntary associations in which these little towns
Speaker 2: and communities would build up. And the first thing and
Speaker 2: do is build a church and a school for everyone,
Speaker 2: and they have community groups. And he noticed how communal,
Speaker 2: like spontaneously communal Americans were, and so that's always been
Speaker 2: I think a stereotype. And then the warmness of collectivism. Okay,
Speaker 2: so what are you talking about? So collectivism is sort
Speaker 2: of vague? Is Soviet communism or maybe like under stalin
Speaker 2: is that what we're talking about? Are you're talking about
Speaker 2: a family? Right, that's a community of persons. It's supposed
Speaker 2: to invoke all those things. It's what it's really designed
Speaker 2: to do is to get you to imagine that what
Speaker 2: ends up looking a lot like Stalinism is more like
Speaker 2: the family. And so it's entirely designed to trade on
Speaker 2: our kind of mental images of what these things are.
Speaker 2: And so if you're, say a right winger and you
Speaker 2: believe the rugged individual myth, you're going to find it insulting.
Speaker 2: And if you're on the left and you like the
Speaker 2: idea of collectivism, you're gonna like it. And also, by
Speaker 2: the way, you hate rugged individualism. Neither of these things
Speaker 2: is actually an accurate description of the American experience or
Speaker 2: American culture, because if you associate, for instance, a market
Speaker 2: economy with rugged individualism. Well, people's well being is much
Speaker 2: greater in market economies, all things being equal, than in
Speaker 2: any kind of command economy. But really, I just think
Speaker 2: we need to think beyond these stereotypes. And we were
Speaker 2: talking about different political economies. You got to talk about
Speaker 2: all the details. Is the rule of law as or
Speaker 2: state that's functional but isn't overly powerful, so that you
Speaker 2: have things that a society that recognizes and respects are
Speaker 2: genuine individualities, creatures made the image of God with intrinsic
Speaker 2: rights as the declaration of independences and responsibilities, but also
Speaker 2: recognizes and respects our communal reality, the family, the church,
Speaker 2: local environments, as opposed to flattening everything out so that
Speaker 2: it's just isolated individuals related to the state. We asked
Speaker 2: the question that way, right. It's more complicated and subtle
Speaker 2: and not good for a politician stereotype, but it clarifies
Speaker 2: what we actually should want and what we don't want.
Speaker 2: One of the things that we don't want is an
Speaker 2: overly centralized decision decision making apparatus in which things are
Speaker 2: decided coercively when they didn't need to. Because in a sense,
Speaker 2: you could think of the role of the state, as
Speaker 2: if the state's doing what it ought to do, that's
Speaker 2: the domain of coercion, right, and the limits actually the
Speaker 2: use of violence. Well, it'd be nice if as much
Speaker 2: as possible could be decided to liberatively or voluntarily rather
Speaker 2: than coercively. Collectivism, at least in its socialist and communist manifestations,
Speaker 2: basically just puts absolutely everything in the hands of the state,
Speaker 2: and so it reduces all social relations to the relation
Speaker 2: of government and subject, in other words, power. And this
Speaker 2: is unfortunately, we don't learn these lessons. Everybody that's you know,
Speaker 2: under forty has no memory of the Cold War, so
Speaker 2: they don't really remember what's at stake, and so the
Speaker 2: same dumb kindness from my youth. Socialist stereotypes keep emerging,
Speaker 2: precisely because like the word socialism, right, it sounds nice.
Speaker 2: It's got the word social and it isn't that good?
Speaker 2: What do you want an Yeah, those are your options
Speaker 2: to see how this goes, right, But okay, yeah, but
Speaker 2: that's just a word and a mental picture. R. Let's
Speaker 2: look at the way this actually works in real in
Speaker 2: real practice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I have to admit I've never read your book
Speaker 1: Money Greeting God, but I picked it up. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I started to go through one. One thing that I
Speaker 1: found fascinating was you went through the same experience that
Speaker 1: I did totally, and so I find that there's a
Speaker 1: greater deal of currency when you can say I used
Speaker 1: to think that. So it's disarming. I mean, as long
Speaker 1: as it's done genuinely.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, Yeah. If it hadn't been true, I mean
Speaker 2: because I was, you know, I had not thought I
Speaker 2: knew nothing about economics, had thought through these things. Got
Speaker 2: to a very liberal undergraduate school. Read the Communist Manifesto
Speaker 2: in one of my first political science classes. Again, you know,
Speaker 2: it just sort of brings you down that sort of
Speaker 2: you know, thought tunnel, so that I just thought socialism
Speaker 2: sounded like the better possibility. Now. I didn't accept the
Speaker 2: Marxist revolutionary violent interpretation. I just thought, you know, something
Speaker 2: like democratic socialism that you have kind of had different.
Speaker 1: Times, not communism.
Speaker 2: It's not socialism democratic socialists democratic socialism. So we're getting
Speaker 2: there by the ballot box, not by the violent revolution.
Speaker 2: That sounded good. I didn't like the idea that you
Speaker 2: had a few rich corporations hoarding all the wealth and
Speaker 2: keeping it from other people, which is this kind of perspective.
Speaker 2: But I also really I had an acute sense that
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of stuff I didn't know, and so
Speaker 2: I had this practice. I don't know who even recommended this.
Speaker 2: Actually two really important things happened early. Somebody had given
Speaker 2: me a little six pack book of C. S. Lewis's
Speaker 2: most popular little books like Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce,
Speaker 2: you know, and miracles in those books, which I ended
Speaker 2: up in my bookshelf and reading. But the other thing
Speaker 2: is I would go to the library every morning. I had, like,
Speaker 2: you know, an eight am class, and then I have
Speaker 2: an eleven am class, and so between that I would
Speaker 2: go to the library and I would read the periodicals
Speaker 2: physical magazines which used to exist, And I read National Review,
Speaker 2: which was known to be the kind of conservative, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of periodical. And then this publication called The New
Speaker 2: Republic that was considered the liberal publication, so not radical
Speaker 2: but liberal, right, So they're perfect kind of mirrored each other.
Speaker 2: And through National Review, I read this guy named Thomas Soule,
Speaker 2: ended up reading a bunch of his books. He's an
Speaker 2: American economist, and just realized, Okay, I really didn't have
Speaker 2: any idea what I was talking about in economics, and
Speaker 2: so I just changed mind on a lot of those things.
Speaker 2: Was it that my intuitions changed or my moral convictions?
Speaker 2: It's just that I thought, Okay, a market economy with
Speaker 2: the rule of law in which prices can range freely
Speaker 2: is just much better for human flourishing than all the
Speaker 2: known alternatives. And that's really what Money Greeting God is about,
Speaker 2: is to try to help others that really to help
Speaker 2: Christians that are kind of confused on these things to
Speaker 2: get clear in their minds, because I think actually most
Speaker 2: of what you need to know about economics it has
Speaker 2: to do with these kind of intuitions. It's not the
Speaker 2: technical stuff you learn in a macroeconomics class. And so
Speaker 2: that's really what the book was about. Two thousand and nine,
Speaker 2: it had a manifestation, and then I tweaked it a
Speaker 2: little for the ten year anniversary edition. But I think,
Speaker 2: you know, arguments are basically the same, though I made
Speaker 2: some tweaks in the newer edition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've got to have you on another time
Speaker 1: to talk about that book.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: You know, as I started to read it, I hated
Speaker 1: you you know, I had a caricature right that I
Speaker 1: hated you for. Then I started to read it and
Speaker 1: I just hated you because you're so good at what
Speaker 1: you do. You're so good at communicating. He's good at podcast.
Speaker 1: But then you're reading that he's fantastic communicator and you
Speaker 1: break down all of those arguments in such a non
Speaker 1: aggressive way. I feel like it just you've got a
Speaker 1: gift for that, my brother.
Speaker 2: Well, I appreciate you saying that that's what I'm trying
Speaker 2: to do, but you never you never know if you're
Speaker 2: you know how well you're accomplishing it. And I can
Speaker 2: say at some point, because you know, I've got an
Speaker 2: academic background, I can remember deciding I started out writing
Speaker 2: academic publications, but I decided, okay, I want to write
Speaker 2: things that just ordinarily educated people read. And so I really,
Speaker 2: in terms of a vocation, I think of myself as
Speaker 2: a translator. So take stuff that's trapped in kind of
Speaker 2: academic jargon and literature and translate it for a general
Speaker 2: educated audience that might be able to do something with it.
Speaker 2: And so that's why I tend to be in that space.
Speaker 2: And it requires you to figure out, Okay, how do
Speaker 2: you write in a way that's non technical. I can
Speaker 2: tell you that. You know, it takes you bet For me,
Speaker 2: it was like twenty years. I go back and I look, okay,
Speaker 2: I've got I got much better at that, you know,
Speaker 2: the last few years than I was twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: It's like read something from twenty years ago. I'm like, man,
Speaker 2: it's a terrible writer. I can't believe that they published
Speaker 2: this thing.
Speaker 1: They let anybody in here. How you know? This is
Speaker 1: something that I am genuinely curious about.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 1: You're involved in so many things, you do so much
Speaker 1: in so many different realms. What is your average day?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: How do you do what you do?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean a lot of it is. I'm actually
Speaker 2: not a great multitasker. I mean I'm not. You know,
Speaker 2: I can do it, but it's because I have to
Speaker 2: do it. I'm much more productive if I can burrow.
Speaker 2: If I can just absolutely focus on one thing, I
Speaker 2: can completely tune out what's around me. And so you
Speaker 2: ask my family if I'm working on something, they can
Speaker 2: literally be talking directly to me and I'll have no
Speaker 2: idea their sound going on. On the other hand, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm I can be easily distracted about things that I'm
Speaker 2: not interested in. But if I'm interested in it, you know,
Speaker 2: I could absolutely burrow. And so writing books, for instance,
Speaker 2: I need time where I can actually do that. If
Speaker 2: I have to do it in fifteen minute increments, it's
Speaker 2: really hard. But I don't exactly have an average day.
Speaker 2: You know, if I'm speaking and I'm traveling, I can
Speaker 2: tell you I make the most of plane rides. I
Speaker 2: do some of the most a lot of my writing
Speaker 2: actually on planes. I won't I won't purchase the Wi Fi.
Speaker 2: I'm just sitting there, and so that ends up not
Speaker 2: being dead time for me. It's the it's the commute
Speaker 2: to the airport and getting on the plane that's actually
Speaker 2: dead time. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I
Speaker 2: do have this practice in which I decide at the
Speaker 2: beginning every year that I'm going to study a particular
Speaker 2: topic that year, a new topic, one kind of just
Speaker 2: topic of interest that I don't know much about. I'm
Speaker 2: going to pick and different years. In fact, my book
Speaker 2: on fasting was kind of the result of me having
Speaker 2: decided that some years ago, and so that you know,
Speaker 2: it kind of keeps you current. I'm hoping it will
Speaker 2: keep my brain working longer than it would otherwise, but
Speaker 2: you do. I mean, you do have to be efficient
Speaker 2: with your time. You have to be sort of deconing
Speaker 2: about the things that you do and don't do. But
Speaker 2: I actually think if you're just genuinely really interested and
Speaker 2: curious about things and have a pretty good research methodology,
Speaker 2: you should get a lot accomplished. But don't. As a writer,
Speaker 2: I always say, ILL never going to write a book
Speaker 2: if it's already been written, And so when you have
Speaker 2: people have book ideas, I always say, okay, make sure
Speaker 2: there isn't already a good book that somebody else wrote,
Speaker 2: because then it's not needed. And so that's you know.
Speaker 2: But I honestly think I've cobbled this together over a
Speaker 2: long period of time and had the good fortune for
Speaker 2: many years of just being in a think tank realm,
Speaker 2: so I didn't, you know, it's like getting to write
Speaker 2: and do research and speak. But I don't have the
Speaker 2: burdens of a college professor position. I was a college
Speaker 2: professor at Catholic University for some years and really loved it.
Speaker 2: But I do think if you have lots of meetings
Speaker 2: and lectures you have to get during the day, it's
Speaker 2: going to be much harder for you to write book
Speaker 2: link things. And so I've got faculty friends who really
Speaker 2: somebody needs to buy them out of teaching in order
Speaker 2: for them to write a book. And so that's sort
Speaker 2: of natural. But what's funny is that I do think
Speaker 2: people that don't write, or that who would like to write,
Speaker 2: they imagine certain things. They imagine that, well, there's you
Speaker 2: get this muse that's going to just carry you and
Speaker 2: you know, and if you're not feeling it, then okay,
Speaker 2: you got to try to do that. They don't want
Speaker 2: to just accept that. No, rite think about writing as carpentry,
Speaker 2: in which you just have to show up and start
Speaker 2: cutting some wood. Right, write something down, don't wait for
Speaker 2: the inspiration. Sometimes you get that and you'll flow. But
Speaker 2: the best way to ever get to that is to
Speaker 2: just force yourself to do it. I think people want
Speaker 2: to think that it's some kind of magical process where
Speaker 2: they have to be inspired. In fact, it's like no,
Speaker 2: lots of writing is just putting in the work. Yeah,
Speaker 2: putting in the work.
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.
Speaker 1: Was your book Eat Fast Feast and you talk about Embodied. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of my favorite books because it really gets
Speaker 1: to the whole holistic human experience mind, body, and soul.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the time people wouldn't think about
Speaker 1: fasting in terms of the benefits for mind and soul,
Speaker 1: right because we've largely stopped fasting, yes, exactly, and Christians
Speaker 1: were at the forefront of this. Why did Christians stop fasting?
Speaker 2: Well, so it's a couple of things that I tell
Speaker 2: in the book, and as people might guess, it's called
Speaker 2: eat fast feast. So my argument is essentially that we
Speaker 2: are designed so that we eat some of the time,
Speaker 2: we don't eat some of the time, and we feast,
Speaker 2: we celebrate, maybe eat more and more richer kinds of
Speaker 2: food every once in a while. That's how we're supposed
Speaker 2: to be. So it's not just like, oh yeah, well,
Speaker 2: that's interesting if you look at the Christian calendar, certainly
Speaker 2: in the liturgical tradition, so a Roman Catholic, Eastern Right
Speaker 2: and Eastern Orthodoxy still very much follow a liturgical calendar,
Speaker 2: and the Anglicans do too. We have feast days and solemnities,
Speaker 2: we have these penitential times like Lent and add but
Speaker 2: were detached historically from the way these things were practiced.
Speaker 2: Let's say, for the first thousand years of Christian history,
Speaker 2: in which fasts were real fasts where people didn't eat
Speaker 2: food part of the time, right, and then feasts through
Speaker 2: real feast, and then the rest of the time you're
Speaker 2: starve eating modestly. So for most of human history, people
Speaker 2: do not have access to any kind of food that
Speaker 2: they wanted twenty four to seven like we do now, right,
Speaker 2: And so by necessity they had to do this. They
Speaker 2: had to. There was simply because of the availability food.
Speaker 2: There would be times during the year when you didn't
Speaker 2: have a lot of access to food and you'd eat
Speaker 2: less other times. If you're going to have a feast day,
Speaker 2: think about this. Imagine you're a farmer and you know
Speaker 2: and have a few animals, and you're just above subsistence
Speaker 2: and you have a major feast coming. Well, subsistence means
Speaker 2: you're just producing just about enough to keep yourself alive.
Speaker 2: How are you ever going to have a feast? You're
Speaker 2: only ever gonna have a feast if you forego some
Speaker 2: of the stuff you'd otherwise have consumed so that you
Speaker 2: could have it for the feast day. Right. So that
Speaker 2: was a that was a kind of just a basic
Speaker 2: economic reality for humans for most of history, and so right,
Speaker 2: that would be true even if you didn't have a
Speaker 2: sort of church calendar on top of it. And so
Speaker 2: in some ways, what the church calendar and the punctuation
Speaker 2: of feasts and fast did is it formalized what was
Speaker 2: before just a kind of basic biological reality in which
Speaker 2: humans had these times where there was plenty and times
Speaker 2: when there was want. Now, what we initially think is okay, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: so God must we must be designed so that we
Speaker 2: can go a while without food. And that's what the
Speaker 2: fat storage is about. That we can eat a bunch
Speaker 2: and we'll store up some fat on our bodies and
Speaker 2: then if we end up in a survival you know,
Speaker 2: starvation situation, we will use those. But that's not good.
Speaker 2: I mean, it would not be good to go two
Speaker 2: days without eating. That's just something that okay, you can
Speaker 2: survive it. Well, I think the evidence strongly suggests, and
Speaker 2: I argue that in fact, we are better off physically
Speaker 2: if we do these things. It's not just a spiritual benefit,
Speaker 2: but in fact God designed us for this kind of
Speaker 2: punctuated way of eating, and by losing both the necessity
Speaker 2: of having to do that and losing the liturgical manifestation
Speaker 2: of it. We're actually worse off. We're worse off spiritually
Speaker 2: because fasting, you know, the New Testament is paired with
Speaker 2: almsgiving and with prayer. That's bad, but we're also worse
Speaker 2: off spiritually. We are more insulin resistant. Our body doesn't
Speaker 2: know what to do with extra calories, so at stores
Speaker 2: of them rather than burning them. Our brains don't actually
Speaker 2: work all that well for certain metamolic reasons. So in
Speaker 2: other words, for complicated reasons having to do with abundance
Speaker 2: of food and the fact that people don't really like
Speaker 2: fasting and it's not anyone's financial interest to promote fasting, right,
Speaker 2: we slowly, I call it the death of by a
Speaker 2: thousand dispensations, just slowly made fasting less and less rigorous
Speaker 2: intell for most Christians. It's at best a kind of
Speaker 2: symbolic things. So for Catholics. Catholics, okay, see you fast
Speaker 2: on you know, on Good Friday, fast on Ash Wednesday,
Speaker 2: but fasting just means basically eating less that day than
Speaker 2: you would otherwise. And then you fast for an hour
Speaker 2: before Mass, which means if you shower before Mass you
Speaker 2: could pass. Right, It's really only the Eastern traditions, honestly
Speaker 2: that still really kind of retain good bits of this.
Speaker 2: I think in the book. I'm trying to remember if
Speaker 2: I use the East, I think it's the East Ethiopian
Speaker 2: Orthodox fasting schedule from the year when I was writing
Speaker 2: the book. It's like half the days have some kind
Speaker 2: of either fast or an abstinence from some kind of food.
Speaker 2: And I just the argument of the book is that
Speaker 2: we will be better off and are better off spiritually, emotionally, mentally,
Speaker 2: and physically if we integrate this into our lives. And
Speaker 2: it is a massive, massive loss not just to our health,
Speaker 2: but to the spiritual power and well being of Christians
Speaker 2: to have mostly abandoned this really really important spiritual practice.
Speaker 2: So that was a longer answer that I meant to give,
Speaker 2: but that was at least the impetus behind the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's an important discipline, the asceticism. Years ago,
Speaker 1: when I joined the Orthodox Church, the guy came up
Speaker 1: to me and just started ranting about how modern Christians
Speaker 1: have lost even in his church, and the Orthodox Church said,
Speaker 1: modern Christians have completely lost our appetite for ascetic disciplines. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and it's not only I have. I had this theory,
Speaker 1: and then I researched and turns out that it's not
Speaker 1: just anecdotally true, it's it's manifestly true that a lot
Speaker 1: of people who go to prison convert to Islam for
Speaker 1: the ascetic practices.
Speaker 2: I believe it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because if you're going to turn around your life,
Speaker 1: you want something that that will hold hold you accountable absolutely.
Speaker 1: And the calendar and the community. Which is something that
Speaker 1: I think is really important as well, is that this
Speaker 1: isn't just an individual practice, right, that's right, it's a
Speaker 1: communal practice, getting back to that that warmth of collectivism
Speaker 1: than the collective fasting practice. You talk so much in
Speaker 1: your book about the individual benefits. But what is lost
Speaker 1: for the church community at large when we've ceased to
Speaker 1: fast together?
Speaker 2: I mean obvious Christian solidarity. I mean this the obvious
Speaker 2: reality of that that if we do things together. I mean,
Speaker 2: remember Jesus said, we're two or three gathered in My name.
Speaker 2: Imagine if you have imagine you just have one parish
Speaker 2: or what congregation, right, all fasting and praying together. There
Speaker 2: is a power in that God has. This is his
Speaker 2: the sort of divine economy of the life of the church.
Speaker 2: When the church does things together, it just has more power.
Speaker 2: So just doing those things together, by definition, is going
Speaker 2: to be greater than doing it individually. It's also, frankly,
Speaker 2: much easier. Or imagine if it's the entire church, or
Speaker 2: imagine if it's an entire country like Crete, in which
Speaker 2: kind of everyone just sort of does these things. Well,
Speaker 2: if everyone is abstaining from meat, or extaining from alcohol,
Speaker 2: or abstaining from eating altogether, that's much easier than if
Speaker 2: you're having to constantly be with people you know, not
Speaker 2: doing it because you have to, you have to constantly
Speaker 2: use your willpower, and we all have very limited amounts
Speaker 2: of willpower, and so the kind of communal aspect of
Speaker 2: that is absolutely crucial. Now I talk a lot about
Speaker 2: the sort of individual benefits and practice of fastening the book,
Speaker 2: mainly because of my diagnosis of the problem is that
Speaker 2: even churches and traditions that have this in their history,
Speaker 2: mostly people don't practice it. And so if we're going
Speaker 2: to recover it, it's going to probably start from the
Speaker 2: bottom up. And so if lots of Christians started practicing
Speaker 2: this voluntarily, you're going to be much more likely to
Speaker 2: have you know, larger Christian communities do it together, and
Speaker 2: so that's certainly my hope. You know, a few there
Speaker 2: have been a few advents where there have been priests
Speaker 2: that have actually bought copies of the book for all
Speaker 2: of their parishioners, which is amazing and done together. But
Speaker 2: that's my goal, is just to help to participate in
Speaker 2: a revival of fasting for everybody, but especially for Christians.
Speaker 2: And so you know, if I wasn't doing the other
Speaker 2: things I was doing, I would just sort of spend
Speaker 2: my full time making the case for this because I
Speaker 2: believe it so strongly. And it's odd though, because it's
Speaker 2: like because we wonder why is the church so weak?
Speaker 2: You know, you know, why is this law making inro
Speaker 2: It's a perfect example. Well, I think part of it
Speaker 2: is precisely this. We abandoned the major spiritual practice that Jesus,
Speaker 2: that Jesus underwent before he started his own earthly ministry,
Speaker 2: and for some reason we think we could just drop
Speaker 2: this and it's not going to have any consequences. It
Speaker 2: does have supernatural consequences, and then also has the consequences.
Speaker 2: You point out that there's something manly and inspiring about
Speaker 2: ascetic practices, and it's Lam. For instance, you can't streak alcohol, right,
Speaker 2: Praying five times a day, it has some of that
Speaker 2: at least if you're going to take it seriously. That's attracted.
Speaker 2: And to me it's like, okay, well, if men in
Speaker 2: prison find that attractive and they're converting to islamra than Christianity,
Speaker 2: and they're doing it for kind of understandable reasons, we
Speaker 2: need to make sure that the Christianity we're presenting is
Speaker 2: it's some kind of weak milk toast thing, that it's
Speaker 2: very serious, more morally and just in terms of sort
Speaker 2: of life practice, which is precisely why it's actually more
Speaker 2: conservative and orthodox. With the small Christian communions that are growing,
Speaker 2: the flaky and sort of the mainline denominations, they're all disappearing,
Speaker 2: and I think it's basically for this why bother right,
Speaker 2: it's all just it's just basically being nice to each
Speaker 2: other and nothing else. So that's not especially inspiring, especially
Speaker 2: if you're trying to turn your life around.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, I've noticed that in our church and
Speaker 1: just across the board, like you said, a lot of
Speaker 1: the more high church that are practicing these things. It's
Speaker 1: attracting people, because when the world says anything goes, I
Speaker 1: think the last rebellion is some form of discipline.
Speaker 2: Amen. Yeah there animal, Yeah, that's right. Being just a
Speaker 2: disciplined person that is trying to live a good life
Speaker 2: and worship God and raise a family. That's like the
Speaker 2: ultimate rebellion right now. It's just a very strange moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I there was something in your book that,
Speaker 1: I mean, you talk about Christ fasting and how Pivolt
Speaker 1: it was in his ministry, and I'd read your book
Speaker 1: and then when I was going through it again, I said,
Speaker 1: I don't remember this. Why did Jesus say that certain
Speaker 1: demons can only be driven out through prayer and fasting.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's something that we should all remember
Speaker 1: immediately exactly.
Speaker 2: It's like, okay, well, so which ones am I dealing with?
Speaker 2: One of those? You know that needs a little war,
Speaker 2: because the implication is that, yeah, we're in a spiritual
Speaker 2: war all the time. Sometimes it's kind of low level
Speaker 2: stuff and maybe we'd say a quick prayer and just
Speaker 2: prevent ourselves from getting in a bad situation, you know,
Speaker 2: Catholic's called avoid the near occasions of sin. Sometimes it's
Speaker 2: major battle with demonic forces and you need to pull
Speaker 2: out the big guns. And Jesus refers to the big guns.
Speaker 2: What is it? It's prayer and fasting. So this, you know,
Speaker 2: if you just kind of take that literally, it's like
Speaker 2: fasting amplifies the effects of prayer. And I have no
Speaker 2: idea exactly how that works. It's bound up in the
Speaker 2: mystery of God. It is providence. But we have the
Speaker 2: Lord himself to us telling us that. And so if
Speaker 2: we have major demons were battling and we're never praying
Speaker 2: and fasting, we're just like, we're literally not using a
Speaker 2: weapon that we have at our disposal to fight the
Speaker 2: forces of darkness. And that's obviously not a good idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you think part of it is because and
Speaker 1: once again this is part and parcel of my whole
Speaker 1: conception of commitment to reality, is that so many Christians
Speaker 1: themselves have ceased believing in the other realm and demons
Speaker 1: and spiritual warfare in general, that everything's just materialistic.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean, and that's always the temptation because of
Speaker 2: course this even though, of course every time you see
Speaker 2: somebody choose something, the fact that you assume someone is
Speaker 2: an agent that has freedom, we're presupposing right that there's
Speaker 2: a lot more to reality than material constituents. Still, the
Speaker 2: stuff that we kind of directly experienced with our senses
Speaker 2: is all the material stuff. And so it's really really
Speaker 2: easy to imagine not only that there's a material world
Speaker 2: that God has created and sustained, but that it's kind
Speaker 2: of the real world. There's maybe this other stuff, but
Speaker 2: it's sort of ethereal and not as real even if
Speaker 2: you kind of officially accept the unseen realm, whereas you know,
Speaker 2: if the biblical picture and the picture that the Christianity
Speaker 2: is taught for its entire history is that, no, it's
Speaker 2: as real in some ways more real than the material things.
Speaker 2: It's the material things that pass away, it's the eternal
Speaker 2: things that do not. And so you again it's like
Speaker 2: we need the right kind of intellectual framework. We need
Speaker 2: to recognize reality as it actually is and then to
Speaker 2: act accordingly. And so it doesn't surprise me that, you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes people that will stumble on too fasting and then
Speaker 2: they'll discover that it allowed them to overcome something that
Speaker 2: they had struggled with for years. We discover that accidentally,
Speaker 2: and I just thought, look, I'm just going to make
Speaker 2: I'm going to first of all, make an apologetic I'm
Speaker 2: going to make the case for why Christians should fast,
Speaker 2: make the case for what, okay, what are its original foundations,
Speaker 2: why does it make sense? What have we lost? And
Speaker 2: then finally how to do it, because the reality is
Speaker 2: this is why most people, most Christians, at some time
Speaker 2: or another try fasting. There was a movement among evangelicals
Speaker 2: in the nineteen nineties led by doctor Bill Bright of
Speaker 2: the Campus Crusade for Christ to get Christians to fast
Speaker 2: for forty days, which is very very hardcore, and so
Speaker 2: that that does happen, but it's not sort of integrated
Speaker 2: in a way that would you know, would have the
Speaker 2: sort of staying power that I think it needs. And
Speaker 2: people find it very hard because if you have not
Speaker 2: been fasting, if you've been eating the standard American diet,
Speaker 2: your metabolism is basically optimized not to be able to fast.
Speaker 2: You need an infusion of carbohydrates every three or four hours,
Speaker 2: or you start feeling famished and weak and hungry and panicky,
Speaker 2: which is what Americans basically all experience if they're not
Speaker 2: doing this. And so in a previous time right where
Speaker 2: you just by necessity, had to not eat part of
Speaker 2: the time. Your metabolism was adapted to that, so it's
Speaker 2: much less hard. I'd look at this and say, okay,
Speaker 2: so what's the average America in the twenty first century,
Speaker 2: what's happening with their metabolism and what needs to happen
Speaker 2: in order to ease into fasting. So that's why I
Speaker 2: have this six week structure in the book that, by
Speaker 2: the way, you could do during Lent. It sort of
Speaker 2: matches lent and which you're like, you're basically adapting yourself
Speaker 2: to be able to fast for longer and longer periods
Speaker 2: of time. By the time Easter comes around, you have
Speaker 2: basically done that, and then you make it a permanent
Speaker 2: part of your lifestyle. But I had to recognize that, gosh,
Speaker 2: there's a reason that even people that get enthusiastic about fasting,
Speaker 2: you might do it once or twice, don't keep it up.
Speaker 2: And it's because their body. Again, we're embodied, right, You
Speaker 2: got to take that into account. If your body's not
Speaker 2: prepared for fasting, you're gonna have a hard time doing it.
Speaker 2: So that's why it's it ends up being kind of
Speaker 2: a both a self help book on how to do
Speaker 2: it and then a case for what we've lost in
Speaker 2: a case for why we need to reinstate this ancient practice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, min em body and soul. I mean I was
Speaker 1: at the doctor maybe a year and a half ago,
Speaker 1: and he wanted me to make some changes to improve
Speaker 1: the numbers. And he is it Jason Fung, Yeah, Jason Fung.
Speaker 1: That the guy who wrote the four Year book.
Speaker 2: Jason Fung. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He recommended his book on fasting, and I said, I've
Speaker 1: got a better one.
Speaker 2: And his book is great. Yeah, it is great.
Speaker 1: No, And so I just thumb back through your book
Speaker 1: and I said, okay, I'm going to pick some stuff
Speaker 1: here to really hone it on the body part. And
Speaker 1: I basically my whole life unintentionally before it was, before
Speaker 1: I gave it a name. I was intermittent fasting. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they didn't eat until late afternoon. I never ate breakfast,
Speaker 1: and I always felt better.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then I got married and started you know, no one
Speaker 1: likes to eat alone, and so you gotta eat breakfast.
Speaker 1: And I started to do that, started to gain a
Speaker 1: little bit of weight. And so I went back through
Speaker 1: your book and I said, you know what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1: I'm going to bring back inter minute fasting. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to pick two fasting days where I think it
Speaker 1: was Sunday night until Monday night I didn't eat and
Speaker 1: I did that, and then let's say another day, Wednesday
Speaker 1: night until Thursday night. Yes, And just by doing that alone,
Speaker 1: when I went back to the doctor, you know, six
Speaker 1: months later, every number was perfect. It was like, think
Speaker 1: the bad numbers. And I think that's kind of debatable,
Speaker 1: it's always changing, but it was like so intensely noticeable
Speaker 1: the difference just through instituting that, and people are coming out,
Speaker 1: you look great. I mean, what have you done? Is
Speaker 1: just and then their their response and this is a
Speaker 1: lot of the people who were asking me are part
Speaker 1: of the Orthodox Church who already fast quite a bit.
Speaker 1: I can't do that. I could never do that. And
Speaker 1: it's such a simple change, and like you said, you
Speaker 1: do it. And then I felt so much better, not
Speaker 1: just physically I was thinking clear, it just I mean
Speaker 1: spiritually speaking, I felt like I'm every part of me
Speaker 1: holistically speaking, was better as a result of fasting. And
Speaker 1: yet we're terrified of it and so many people. I
Speaker 1: hear people say, oh, that's bad for you to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's half the argument in my book. And again
Speaker 2: I was arguing with myself because I was a strength
Speaker 2: trainer in college, so I both with sports teams but
Speaker 2: also students could come in and I would put them
Speaker 2: on a workout program. I'd even give them diet nutritional advice.
Speaker 2: And the wisdom at the time was extremely low fat,
Speaker 2: really high complex carbs, kind of moderate protein was the
Speaker 2: way to go, and would encourage that. And so I
Speaker 2: had this kind of fat phobia that I now know
Speaker 2: was fomented by the US Department of Agriculture, which got
Speaker 2: as scared of fat in general and saturated fats in particular,
Speaker 2: and so I believed that for years. I also believe
Speaker 2: that if you didn't eat lots of small meals throughout
Speaker 2: the day, your body would store fat and would lose muscle.
Speaker 2: So if you want to keep lean masks, you want
Speaker 2: to eat lots of small meals through the day. So
Speaker 2: my poor daughters, when they were young, I would always
Speaker 2: insist to date breakfast right when they got up, even
Speaker 2: them my younger daughter, never wanted to do it. It
Speaker 2: was only later that realized way a lot of this
Speaker 2: stuff just not true. Your body does different things depending
Speaker 2: upon which macro nutrients you consume. And so if you
Speaker 2: have extremely low carbohydrate diet, you eat a high natural
Speaker 2: fat diet and say moderate protein, your metabolism does a
Speaker 2: different thing, even if it's the same number of calories
Speaker 2: as when you're eating that kind of high carboy. And
Speaker 2: so that I had that whole kind of intellectual journey
Speaker 2: of getting over the fat phobia, which was huge, and
Speaker 2: then getting over the idea that it's always a good
Speaker 2: idea to eat lots of small meals, and what you're
Speaker 2: doing when you do that, you're depriving yourself of increasing
Speaker 2: insulin sensitivity. You're never going to get into this metabolic
Speaker 2: state called ketosis, which you only really can get into
Speaker 2: if you either fast for a couple of days or
Speaker 2: you eat high fat, super low carbohydrate diet for a
Speaker 2: few days and your liver starts producing these things called
Speaker 2: ketones that your body uses for fuel. You're never going
Speaker 2: to tap into that if you're constantly eating small meals
Speaker 2: throughout the day. You're also never going to tap into
Speaker 2: the discipline. It's just a little discipline, but if you
Speaker 2: practice this just the esthetic discipline, it spills over into
Speaker 2: other areas. But I'm going to circle back though to
Speaker 2: this one point I talked about the sort of ketones,
Speaker 2: and so my view is that God gave us two
Speaker 2: metabolic systems, sort of like we're like a hybrid or
Speaker 2: like the Toyota Prias that can run just on a battery,
Speaker 2: but it can also draw the fuel from the gas tank.
Speaker 2: We have this kind of glucose sugar glucose carbohydrate system
Speaker 2: where our body takes carbohydrates, it breaks them down into
Speaker 2: glucose either burns it uses it for energy in our
Speaker 2: cells or stores it in our muscles in different places.
Speaker 2: Either's glycogen, and then if you have too much, body
Speaker 2: stores it as fat. Right, So there's that. That's the
Speaker 2: one that most of us use exclusively all the time. Right.
Speaker 2: Our body produces very few keytones, so it almost never
Speaker 2: really uses a lot of the fat it consumes for energy.
Speaker 2: If you deprive yourself of carbohydrates for a few days,
Speaker 2: or you just don't eat for a couple of days,
Speaker 2: your body starts producing ketones, this different kind of fuel
Speaker 2: that your cells use, and it absolutely changes your mental state.
Speaker 2: You notice it. That was the first thing when I
Speaker 2: did this that I noticed is like, wait, my brain
Speaker 2: feels like it's really working today. That's this certainly for
Speaker 2: me and a lot of people. That's what it does
Speaker 2: when you're in ketosis and then all of a sudden
Speaker 2: you realize, Okay, actually the church fathers knew this. They
Speaker 2: knew that fasting had both these spiritual powers and these
Speaker 2: physical effects. And I've got this quote from Saint Basil
Speaker 2: the Great. Here's how you're talking about fasting. Let me,
Speaker 2: I just want to read this. Its fasting gives birth
Speaker 2: to profits and strengthens the powerful. Fasting makes lawgivers wise.
Speaker 2: Fasting is a safeguard for the soul, a steadfast companion
Speaker 2: for the body, a weapon for the valiant, and a
Speaker 2: gymnasium for athletics for athletes. Fasting repels temptations, anoints unto piety.
Speaker 2: It is the comrade of watchfulness and the artificer of chastity.
Speaker 2: In warrant, fights bravely in peace. It teaches stillness. Wow right,
Speaker 2: it's like it's good for your body, it's good for
Speaker 2: your mind. You're thinking, clearly, you're going to be able
Speaker 2: to resist temptation. That's what a major church father said
Speaker 2: about fasting. So we just rediscovering this. The people that
Speaker 2: practice this knew it all along, that the spiritual it's
Speaker 2: not something that's just you know, cordoned off into a
Speaker 2: spiritual realm. Because we're body and soul. This is the
Speaker 2: thing that we do with both of our bodies and souls,
Speaker 2: and it has benefits for both.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's another quote from your book, Schmmin. Christian asceticism
Speaker 1: is a fight not against but for the body. Fasting
Speaker 1: is good for the whole person body, mind, and soul.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: And we're terrified of it.
Speaker 2: We're terrified of it, and we think, oh gosh, you know,
Speaker 2: we think asceticism is masochism, which it's not. And we
Speaker 2: also think it's impossible, which is just precisely the response
Speaker 2: I get is that almost everybody seems to think they
Speaker 2: have a blood sugar problem and so it can't fast
Speaker 2: And say, yea, some people do. A lot of us
Speaker 2: have that problem though, because of the way we've eaten
Speaker 2: our whole lives, and we can actually change it by
Speaker 2: changing the way we eat in the frequency with which
Speaker 2: we eat. But it seems sort of unattainable to people.
Speaker 2: And it is if I say, okay, you should fast
Speaker 2: for three days, well that's like saying to someone who's
Speaker 2: never run a mile, you should run a marathon. That's hard.
Speaker 2: That'd be bad advice. If you want to run a marathon,
Speaker 2: you need to slowly build up the number of miles
Speaker 2: you bank every week until you get there in the
Speaker 2: same way, which we want to do. If you've never fasted,
Speaker 2: get you weaned off the metabolic effects of the standard
Speaker 2: American diet, and then slowly increase the window during the
Speaker 2: day in which you go without food, drink the window
Speaker 2: in which you're eating, and then in a few weeks
Speaker 2: you actually get there. And it really doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: that big a deal. It was something that was impossible
Speaker 2: when you started, but it's just a reasonable discipline by
Speaker 2: the time you get through the process. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, And I think one of the reasons that I
Speaker 1: was recommended the book because my numbers were showing up
Speaker 1: pre diabetic.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: And I remember when we were in Greeceed together, you
Speaker 1: and I, you had this many rant on the food pyramid. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so I don't want to go on too much
Speaker 1: of a dog leg, but yes, you know, there's been
Speaker 1: so many changes. I'm sure you're you're excited about a
Speaker 1: lot of them because you've been skeptical, just like I
Speaker 1: am Guiet advice and what we're getting from the government.
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on the new food pyramid.
Speaker 2: I'm super excited. I mean, it won't surprise you because
Speaker 2: I actually I lead an initiative at the Heritage Foundation
Speaker 2: called Restoring American Wellness, which is basically building out the
Speaker 2: MAHA platform for policy. I mean, I could look right
Speaker 2: in here, so the us capitalist right here, HHS is
Speaker 2: about a mile away right over here. And this has been,
Speaker 2: you know, in the works for months, in fact, ever
Speaker 2: since Robert F. Kennedy Junior became the HHS secretary. There
Speaker 2: are modifications made to the USDA food guidelines every five years,
Speaker 2: and it's a complicated, long term process to really fully
Speaker 2: reform them. But what happened here just a few weeks
Speaker 2: ago in which they visually actually flipped the pyramid, which
Speaker 2: is great, So it's an upside down pyramid. Just remind
Speaker 2: people that maybe never saw the food pyramid was this
Speaker 2: piece of advice from the USDA that basically said, eat
Speaker 2: fats very very sparingly, animal fats even more sparingly, and
Speaker 2: then down at the bottom you get breads and pastas
Speaker 2: and all these carbohydrates, right, So in other words, most
Speaker 2: of your diet should be carbohydrates. I'm absolutely certain that
Speaker 2: that increased the rate of type two diabetes, pre diabetes,
Speaker 2: and obesity in this country because it encouraged people to
Speaker 2: do the very thing that makes them insulin resistant and
Speaker 2: makes their bodies less able to use excess calories and
Speaker 2: fat for storage and for energy and instead stores it.
Speaker 2: And so you've got a massive spike in type two diabetes,
Speaker 2: pre diabetes, and obesity that corresponds to this dumb dietary advice.
Speaker 2: And we've known for a good while now that this
Speaker 2: was really a really bad idea. Nina Taischoltz throught a
Speaker 2: terrific book called The Big Fat Surprise, in which she
Speaker 2: tells the whole story of the shoddy science that led
Speaker 2: us to conclude that fat was the enemy and carbs
Speaker 2: were just totally our friends. And that influence USDA, and
Speaker 2: they're also, needless to say, certain corporate interests that liked
Speaker 2: it this way. On the material line, the cereal lobby
Speaker 2: looks like it turns out as much stronger than the
Speaker 2: beef lobby, apparently in DC, and so Kennedy and then
Speaker 2: the team that was responsible for the revisions realize this.
Speaker 2: They knew this. They also knew, okay, we can't push
Speaker 2: this too far at once, and so they kind of
Speaker 2: kept the cap on saturated fat, which I think they
Speaker 2: need to get rid of. But I understand why you
Speaker 2: didn't want to do it all at once. But it
Speaker 2: now emphasizes the importance of proteins. It emphasizes that natural
Speaker 2: fats are fine, that eating a lot of carbs all
Speaker 2: the time, especially refined and ultra processed carbs, is a
Speaker 2: bad idea. Sugar added sugar is a bad idea. And
Speaker 2: so even if you don't do everything right, if you
Speaker 2: just drop added sugar and you drop industrially refined carbohydrates
Speaker 2: from your diet, so when you get carbs it's from
Speaker 2: sort of whole natural sources, and then quit being scared
Speaker 2: of fats and make sure you get enough protein. Just
Speaker 2: that alone will improve people's health. And then I think
Speaker 2: I'm just hoping that we continue to go in that direction.
Speaker 2: But I mean, honestly, as you said, I'm in greeceting
Speaker 2: about the USD, the food pyramid, the guidelines, you know,
Speaker 2: but we didn't know at the time how radically things
Speaker 2: had changed. So quickly, and so to me, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just terrific. It's not everything, but we're moving the
Speaker 2: right direction. It's nice to have the government officials that
Speaker 2: actually read this stuff and understand it, because this seemed
Speaker 2: like it was just almost unreformable, and yet all of
Speaker 2: a sudden we've got this flipped inverted pyramid. And then
Speaker 2: we even have Marty McCarry, who's the director of the FDA,
Speaker 2: when he's talking actually talking about the bad and shoddy science,
Speaker 2: financial keys and others that led to the original guideline.
Speaker 2: So talk about from a messaging standpoint, it's one hundred
Speaker 2: and eighty degrees and so we're much much much better shape.
Speaker 2: Because remember when I wrote the fast Feast, when it
Speaker 2: first came out, it was like directly in the face
Speaker 2: of official government advised, which is why I say I
Speaker 2: came not a physician. Now it's I think it's such
Speaker 2: much more compatible with what the official federal government is recommending.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe we could do a flip for the church
Speaker 1: as well, because you know, this morning, I was talking
Speaker 1: to my wife about fasting, and I kind of feel
Speaker 1: like fasting is similar to humility. As soon as you
Speaker 1: start talking about how well you're doing at it, you
Speaker 1: lose it totally. And so in practice, I hate talking
Speaker 1: about fasting if we're talking about the actual spiritual benefits
Speaker 1: of it exactly. You know, Hey, Jay, we're in a
Speaker 1: fasting season. That's quite a burkley that you got over there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how much are you doing? You're fasting? How long
Speaker 2: are you going? You know? Exactly? And that's why there's
Speaker 2: Jesus tells us that, right, He says, you know, when
Speaker 2: you fast, when you pray, when you give alms, don't
Speaker 2: be like the showy people that want everyone to see
Speaker 2: how spiritual they are. Right, So, in other words, you
Speaker 2: don't complain and look like, oh yeah, I'm having the
Speaker 2: hardest time. I'm like on day three of this fast. No, sorry,
Speaker 2: you just just lost it. That's not how this is
Speaker 2: supposed to be done. And by the way, you shouldn't
Speaker 2: even probably feel like that if you're really doing it correctly.
Speaker 2: But in any case, you don't want to brag about it.
Speaker 2: So I treat my what I'm doing with my own
Speaker 2: fasting is one thing, and my sort of advocacy about
Speaker 2: it is another thing. And that's what I'm doing here.
Speaker 2: So I'm not going to tell you if I'm in
Speaker 2: the middle of a fast or not well.
Speaker 1: And she and she brought up she really doesn't like
Speaker 1: to talk about fasting with people in the church or
Speaker 1: within our family, but she loves talking about it to
Speaker 1: people who aren't in the church or who aren't members
Speaker 1: of our particular church, yeah, who don't practice fasting, because
Speaker 1: she says, I think it's such a benefit to our family.
Speaker 1: I think it's such a benefit for mind, body and soul.
Speaker 1: I want to advocate for that. And what better way
Speaker 1: than to show them, Hey, look at our calendar. We
Speaker 1: fast on Wednesdays and Fridays and probably half the year
Speaker 1: some form of vegan fast. And it's her way of
Speaker 1: kind of evangelizing for the benefits of fast.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, but and you know, anything can be bad
Speaker 2: if take it to access itself. You like sort of
Speaker 2: fixated on this, just like if someone has, you know,
Speaker 2: a food disorder, or they had a disorder right or
Speaker 2: believe me, anorexia or something like that. Okay, that's you
Speaker 2: know that you need to look at that and make
Speaker 2: sure this isn't another expression of that. I don't think
Speaker 2: that's the common problem. Just to look around on the
Speaker 2: streets that most people have of the opposite problem, but
Speaker 2: you don't. You don't want to sort of forget that.
Speaker 2: The goal I think with the kind of eat fast,
Speaker 2: feast lifestyle ultimately is that you get the physical and
Speaker 2: the spiritual benefits of food, but you also gain control
Speaker 2: over food that it doesn't control you because you have
Speaker 2: a detachment from it. You can actually go one or
Speaker 2: two days without eating with that being miserable. Imagine that.
Speaker 2: It's like, Okay, it's like, let's say you're allergic to
Speaker 2: certain things, right, I have a problem with certain foods, right,
Speaker 2: And so imagine how much easier it is if you're
Speaker 2: always able to skip a meal if you need to
Speaker 2: because maybe they're going to serve the thing you're allergic to.
Speaker 2: You're much better off. What does it mean? It means
Speaker 2: you actually have discipline and control over your relationship with food.
Speaker 2: That's I think the ideal, not that you be obsessed
Speaker 2: with it forever, and you know, focusing on the macro nutrients,
Speaker 2: there's a training to get used to it, but then
Speaker 2: in fact you end up spending less time thinking about it,
Speaker 2: and you really should. That's what should happen long term,
Speaker 2: is that you're not constantly chattering and sort of talking
Speaker 2: about it and obsessing about it. But I do think
Speaker 2: because it's such a new practice for a lot of
Speaker 2: people and so hard because of the way we eat,
Speaker 2: that you do need to have lots of you know,
Speaker 2: sort of conversation about it. But you know, I'm thinking
Speaker 2: about just in my colleagues. I have a colleague, Roger Severino,
Speaker 2: and he and a family or Eastern Rite Catholic, and
Speaker 2: so they have you know, it's been very similar in
Speaker 2: the fasting schedule to Eastern Orthodox, you know. But he
Speaker 2: could totally do it, and he actually looks like somebody
Speaker 2: that knows how to do that, you know, and so
Speaker 2: it's really not surprising to me. But I can remember thinking, Aye,
Speaker 2: he's Eastern, right, so those guys are they're eating like
Speaker 2: a vegan diet a lot of the time, you know,
Speaker 2: so you know, he's getting all these benefits. But you know,
Speaker 2: to me, it's like, honestly, I think this is in
Speaker 2: some ways might be the mission of the Eastern Church
Speaker 2: to the rest of the Christian world is to evangelize
Speaker 2: for this that's where the practice has retained most of it, right, Like,
Speaker 2: you know, it's not I mean early Christians, from what
Speaker 2: I could tell, actually fasted all day on Wednesday and Friday,
Speaker 2: so the day the word trade, right and then crucified.
Speaker 2: That's not really around when you get the inver Day's feast.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of things like that, but it's still
Speaker 2: a much more rigorous thing. And it's so obviously a
Speaker 2: part of the practice that just talking about, you know,
Speaker 2: Orthodox Christians would talk about the benefits physically and spiritually
Speaker 2: to fasting. It may be that, and look, it's actually
Speaker 2: can be a part of the calendar, so it won't
Speaker 2: just be a one time thing the church does on
Speaker 2: New Year's Day and then gives up. It's something that's
Speaker 2: a part of the Christian life, and it supplies a
Speaker 2: kind of an external control to you, right, So it's
Speaker 2: not constantly about you're deciding to do it. It's like,
Speaker 2: oh no, this is the beginning of the you know,
Speaker 2: a fasting season, and so we're all doing it together.
Speaker 2: It's held in somebody's The strength of the Orthodox Christians
Speaker 2: is to send of retain the ancient things, the ancient
Speaker 2: creed saint your practices, and to think of that not
Speaker 2: as a private thing to be hoarded and benefited but
Speaker 2: to tell the rest of the Christian world about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I mean it's not this burden, right, It's
Speaker 1: a blessing. Advent and Lent, in any of the fasting seasons,
Speaker 1: they're kind of forgotten gifts from most of the Christian community.
Speaker 1: And I mean, we're coming up on Lent. We just
Speaker 1: finished the Advent season, and I'm actually I look forward
Speaker 1: at the beginning. When I first started fasting, I was
Speaker 1: very litigious about everything. Oh I'd look at it every
Speaker 1: every uh nutrition label and say, oh, this has you know,
Speaker 1: dried milk, can't.
Speaker 2: You what's the soy lesson? Then? What even that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I felt like that was deflected from the actual practice.
Speaker 1: But once I got into it, and you start being
Speaker 1: less litigious and just more reasonable, and you start to
Speaker 1: understand the actual benefits of fasting for your mind, body,
Speaker 1: and your soul. It's such a gift and it's something
Speaker 1: that we're depriving ourselves of. Paul kings North to This
Speaker 1: has this line that a feast without a fast is
Speaker 1: a strange, half finished thing. Hmm, And I love that
Speaker 1: because we don't we haven't forgotten how to feast, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we've forgotten the prelude, the preparatory aspect of it.
Speaker 2: All.
Speaker 1: That's right, and you talk about that a lot in
Speaker 1: your book as well, about the importance of feasting.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, And by the way, King's North didn't he
Speaker 2: a fairly recent convert to Orthodoxy, If I are correctly so,
Speaker 2: he see he notices it, right, he sees things that
Speaker 2: might be taken for granted. Well, yeah, feast. And so
Speaker 2: people will often say, well, I need to have a
Speaker 2: cheat day when I'm doing a diet or if I'm fasting,
Speaker 2: I need a cheat day, And think, what does that mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2: So who are you cheating exactly? Stealing from someone? Are
Speaker 2: you're cheating yourself? It doesn't really make sense what they mean,
Speaker 2: but they do recognize that it's unnatural always to be
Speaker 2: sort of depriving yourself of a good food is a
Speaker 2: good right. We have sacrament that are involved with our food.
Speaker 2: And so if you actually sort of look at the way,
Speaker 2: certainly Jesus and the apostles practiced it. Read the Old Testament.
Speaker 2: Right before the Church is actually established, there was a
Speaker 2: recognition of this, of the benefits of a feast. Got
Speaker 2: Christ's first miracle in the Book of John is the
Speaker 2: wedding feast to Cana, right that it's not a cheat
Speaker 2: to eat a lot once in a while, it's part
Speaker 2: of the whole package. So sometimes when you really ought
Speaker 2: to rejoice in God's blessings and you know, participate in
Speaker 2: those blessings and enjoy them, that's what a feast is,
Speaker 2: and so you're celebrating it. Of course, it's at least
Speaker 2: in the Christian calendar. It's always a celebration of something
Speaker 2: God has done. And one of the ways you do
Speaker 2: that is by eating and feasting in ways that you
Speaker 2: would not normally do. So, like I just think it's
Speaker 2: generally a bad idea to consume added sugar. We just
Speaker 2: know that it just is not helpful in any obvious
Speaker 2: way for us to do that on a regular basis.
Speaker 2: It doesn't follow that you don't have feasts where you
Speaker 2: enjoy those things, right, But that's what it is. And
Speaker 2: so I always encourage people don't think of a feast
Speaker 2: as a cheat day or it's like, Okay, that's what's
Speaker 2: keeping me on track because they get to indulge or something. No,
Speaker 2: it's a part of the overall pattern that God wants
Speaker 2: for us, and don't just don't just don't think of
Speaker 2: it that way. And moreover, I would argue, you don't
Speaker 2: really know what a feast is supposed is supposed to
Speaker 2: be like how it's supposed to be experienced. If you
Speaker 2: never fast, Yes, you just every three hours you're getting
Speaker 2: a frappuccino and sixty eight whet thens, right, and half
Speaker 2: the thing of peanut butter. You never allow yourself to
Speaker 2: get hungry because you want to lose muscle, and you
Speaker 2: want to sleep well whatever. Right, and then oh goodie,
Speaker 2: it's Easter Sunday, right, and you just go crazy. That's
Speaker 2: just a different thing. You basically just ate more than
Speaker 2: you normally do, which is already too much. If you
Speaker 2: have preceded that feast day by a real a real
Speaker 2: fast and real abstinence, that's just experientially gonna be something
Speaker 2: completely different. I had so many people say I never
Speaker 2: really knew what Easter feast was like. Yes, I had
Speaker 2: really during Holy Week, I had really you know, kind
Speaker 2: of deprived myself in a sense, but fast. That's why
Speaker 2: the Church, in her wisdom, it always has those feasts
Speaker 2: always are preceded by some kind of fast. We've kept
Speaker 2: the feasts and dropped the fast and then wonder why
Speaker 2: we're having problems.
Speaker 1: That's why I love that quote so much. Feast without
Speaker 1: a fast is a strange, half finished thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you take out all of the anticipation and the preparation,
Speaker 1: what are you left.
Speaker 2: With, right? Exactly? Not much. I mean you're just just
Speaker 2: in just indulgence and gluttony, right, Whereas it's very hard
Speaker 2: if you have I mean, what gluttony is is not oh,
Speaker 2: you ate more than your caloric needs today or something
Speaker 2: like that. Gluttony is a disordered affection and sort of
Speaker 2: devotion to food. But if you haven't eat fast feast
Speaker 2: lifestyle that you know is more or less controlled by
Speaker 2: the church calendar, which is given to you. You don't
Speaker 2: decide what the church calendar is, right, it's there, it's external.
Speaker 2: You're going to be much less likely to be gluttonous.
Speaker 2: You can be much less likely to have those those
Speaker 2: weaknesses because it's a type of discipline that it carries
Speaker 2: over into so many other things. It shouldn't surprise anyone.
Speaker 2: Just we're all aware of the fact that different foods
Speaker 2: make our minds and brains feel differently and our bodies
Speaker 2: feel differently. And it's exactly exactly the same thing with fasting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, if anybody's interested in beginning, what's your best
Speaker 1: piece of advice.
Speaker 2: My best piece of advice is to get to go slowly.
Speaker 2: I'm not telling people they have to read my book.
Speaker 2: In fact, I've got a bunch of free articles you
Speaker 2: can find just online on this. But first do some study.
Speaker 2: You know, check out Grock or you know Claude to
Speaker 2: ask give me a summary of what the ancient Christian
Speaker 2: practice of fasting was, right, and then take to heart
Speaker 2: some of the stuff we said about metabolism and the
Speaker 2: need to ease into things. And fasting is a skill,
Speaker 2: just like prayer is a skill. Right, it's a practice.
Speaker 2: We're creatures of habit and so things that initially require
Speaker 2: as individual acts of will to get us to do it,
Speaker 2: let's say, go to the gym or something. Then eventually
Speaker 2: it becomes habituated, so we kind of do it automatically,
Speaker 2: and then it eventually just kind of becomes a part
Speaker 2: of who you are, and you just like it, and
Speaker 2: that's just the thing that you do. Fasting is the
Speaker 2: same way. It starts out with little acts of the will,
Speaker 2: but it shouldn't. It's not three days without eating right
Speaker 2: off the bat. That's just a formula for failure. You know,
Speaker 2: as I say in the book, that fasting is meant
Speaker 2: it's meant to be a sacrifice, it's not meant to
Speaker 2: be torture. So start off slowly. I would encourage kind
Speaker 2: of eating ketogenically for a few days, which just means
Speaker 2: lots of fasts, very few carbs, and a moderate protein
Speaker 2: that already moves your metabolism in the right direction. And
Speaker 2: then slowly expand that eating windows. So maybe you go
Speaker 2: sixteen hours in a twenty four hour day without eating,
Speaker 2: so you just eat out all your meals within an
Speaker 2: eight hour time window. This is the intermittent fasting. Do
Speaker 2: that for a week, and then you can narrow it
Speaker 2: to four hours, right, which sounds hard, but it's actually not.
Speaker 2: You can get all the calories you need to four
Speaker 2: hour period and then your body is not in the
Speaker 2: eating state for twenty hours out of the day. And
Speaker 2: what you're doing is you're actually increasing your insolent sensitivity.
Speaker 2: You're kind of helping your body train in converting either
Speaker 2: dietary or bodily fat fuels, and you're habituating yourself to
Speaker 2: going longer periods without eating. If you do that slowly,
Speaker 2: think of it as kind of an on ramp for
Speaker 2: a few weeks, and you'd otherwise kind of physically healthy.
Speaker 2: You'll be in a position where you really could fast
Speaker 2: for three days without it feeling like torture and just
Speaker 2: be a discipline. And it would have been very to
Speaker 2: most people do fast for three days right at the beginning.
Speaker 2: You just they have to be locked up in a
Speaker 2: cage and ped water, you know, because those people are
Speaker 2: just not going to do that right off the bat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, Jay, I could talk to you all day. I
Speaker 1: have a couple more things that I want to ask
Speaker 1: you more about reality in general. What's one practice that
Speaker 1: anybody I mean, we've been talking a lot about our
Speaker 1: attachment to Christianity and how that helps keep us grounded.
Speaker 1: What's a practice that you have that could keep anybody grounded,
Speaker 1: even if they're not practicing in particular faith.
Speaker 2: I would say things that remind you that you have
Speaker 2: a body right and that and that you are not
Speaker 2: an isolated individual, but are part of a community and
Speaker 2: need it. So we know that even people that aren't religious,
Speaker 2: you know, if you do these kind of longitudinal studies,
Speaker 2: men that live for long periods of time. For instance,
Speaker 2: is that men that have social connection are more likely
Speaker 2: to live a long time as opposed to isolated men.
Speaker 2: Now that correlates with men who are in religious traditions
Speaker 2: because they have communities, but it's also true even for
Speaker 2: non religious if they have genuine, rich communities, they're much
Speaker 2: more likely to to you know, it should be well off,
Speaker 2: at least in a kind of physical sense. And so
Speaker 2: that's actually I think both of those are important just
Speaker 2: because at the moment I say that because ironically, our
Speaker 2: technology kind of leads us into a disembodied state, and
Speaker 2: then it also provides a fake substitute for our sociality
Speaker 2: because we can connect. We're connected on Facebook. If you're
Speaker 2: a guy and you're into gaming, you may really genuinely
Speaker 2: be working with other people that you're playing the games with,
Speaker 2: which you know, in moderation I think is fine. But
Speaker 2: we're getting pushed away from our embodiedness, and we're getting
Speaker 2: pushed away from the genuine sources of community that we
Speaker 2: absolutely need to florish as human beings.
Speaker 1: Amen, where do you think we're most eager to avoid
Speaker 1: or look away from reality?
Speaker 2: Anything that I'd want to spend twenty minutes on this
Speaker 2: to make sure, so I reserve the rights to change
Speaker 2: my mind later. But I would say anything that causes
Speaker 2: us discomfort, honestly, you know. I mean, this is the
Speaker 2: sort of problem and changing our minds is uncomfortable, changing
Speaker 2: our spiritual practices, changing the way we eat, purging ourselves
Speaker 2: of sin. Right. Like, So if you're in a tradition
Speaker 2: in which you go to confession, right, or you just
Speaker 2: think about it. If you're not, and you're just confessing together,
Speaker 2: you know, and just in your prayers, I can say
Speaker 2: it's a Catholic I go to confession. I like to
Speaker 2: go to different priests, actually, because if I keep going
Speaker 2: to the same one, I know I'm going to hear
Speaker 2: you keep listing the same things, right, And so who
Speaker 2: knows though if I just do as a random sample.
Speaker 2: But that's the reality, is that we get stuck in
Speaker 2: rots and we're not supposed to be that way. I mean, remember,
Speaker 2: you know, we're supposed to be purging ourselves of sin
Speaker 2: in this life, right, We're supposed to be detaching ourselves
Speaker 2: from these things that are impediments to us. And so
Speaker 2: why don't we do that? We don't do it because
Speaker 2: it's uncomfortable, and because we're falling and we're still attached
Speaker 2: to things, and so actually deciding. You know, there's a
Speaker 2: book do hard stuff. There is a great book about
Speaker 2: sort of ice baths and things called It's like something
Speaker 2: like that what doesn't kill us? Right, it's an illusion
Speaker 2: to Nietzsche's that which doesn't kill us is stronger, which
Speaker 2: is kind of half truth. But there's something to that
Speaker 2: that like just choosing every day to do a hard
Speaker 2: thing that makes us uncomfortable, or in my case, start
Speaker 2: the day with a boring thing, right, like the thing
Speaker 2: you find totally boring, that's not that time sensitive, but
Speaker 2: you still need to do, like do receipts for reimbursements,
Speaker 2: forcing yourself to do that. Right. For me, that literally
Speaker 2: is a mortification to have to do something that I
Speaker 2: just find this it's so boring. I can't believe they're
Speaker 2: having to do this. But that's actually that's tough for
Speaker 2: me and for other people. It's something else.
Speaker 1: What happens to a culture that can no longer name
Speaker 1: what it sees.
Speaker 2: It gets replaced by radical Islam. That's my answer, right,
Speaker 2: given our particular circumstance we are in our country and
Speaker 2: in fact, there's no advanced developed country on the planet
Speaker 2: right now, with save one state of Israel is even
Speaker 2: replacing itself. So we're having fewer and fewer children, we're
Speaker 2: getting married later, we're waiting later to have children, and
Speaker 2: so by definition, we're having fewer and fewer children. And
Speaker 2: so we're failing in God's commandment to and blessing be
Speaker 2: fruitful and multiply so that happens. I'll give you a
Speaker 2: perfect example. So we are so far into unreality that
Speaker 2: our culture and its commanding heights are medical societies. Literally,
Speaker 2: it's still maintaining that there's not an intrinsic difference between
Speaker 2: males and females, right that what you really are is
Speaker 2: your gender identity, and that's purely a psychological state, and
Speaker 2: it's not related to your body, and maybe your gender
Speaker 2: identity is completely contrary to your actual body. Right now,
Speaker 2: The benefit of that lie is that it's so blatant
Speaker 2: and so obvious that even people that aren't paying attention
Speaker 2: to realize, well, wait, wait, so we're going to sterilize
Speaker 2: kids because they're stressed to their bodies and we're going
Speaker 2: to boys and girls' sports. This is crazy, right, So
Speaker 2: our culture is in the process of waking up from that.
Speaker 2: But it's just one example of kind of a denial
Speaker 2: of reality, in this case the intrinsic complementary nature of
Speaker 2: the difference between male and female. And so I really
Speaker 2: do think that the farther you get away from reality
Speaker 2: and your own thinking and your kind of cultural beliefs,
Speaker 2: you cease to exist in the realm of reality. You
Speaker 2: sterilize your children, you quit having children of your own.
Speaker 2: And where do you think that's going to lead? Run
Speaker 2: that out forty or fifty years and then just you
Speaker 2: apply a little natural selection to the culture, we're going
Speaker 2: to get replaced by a culture that doesn't believe at
Speaker 2: least those things. And it may be way worse in
Speaker 2: every other in every other way, but at least it's
Speaker 2: not that stupid, right, And so I think that's honestly,
Speaker 2: how at least Americans we should think about our situation.
Speaker 2: Either we fix this and we repent as a culture,
Speaker 2: or we get replaced by a culture and a religious
Speaker 2: ideology that we would really really not want to inflict
Speaker 2: upon our grandchildren.
Speaker 1: So you understand what I mean when I say a
Speaker 1: commitment to reality.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, because it's it's a commitment to physical reality,
Speaker 2: it's a commitment to metaphysical reality and moral reality, so
Speaker 2: that the moral structure is built into the universe. It's
Speaker 2: not just a convention, right that we sort of impose
Speaker 2: and agree upon. These are basic realities. And so if
Speaker 2: we if we deny those things, you have a culture
Speaker 2: that denies the intrinsic dignity of the human person, or
Speaker 2: denies the nature of mammalian biology, right, or you know,
Speaker 2: denies the metaphysical truth that the matter is not all
Speaker 2: that matters. That's long term for a culture, that's that's
Speaker 2: how you destroy yourself. So all we need all of
Speaker 2: those things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in a world that feels increasingly unreal, what feels
Speaker 1: most real to you?
Speaker 2: Hmmm? I think the sort of boundary experiences of having
Speaker 2: children born that didn't exist, either your own children or grandchildren,
Speaker 2: right that you think, Okay, this is a person with
Speaker 2: this unique characters and body and personality that did not
Speaker 2: exist before except in the kind of anticipated the mind
Speaker 2: of God. There is something about that, And so I
Speaker 2: think that there are these kind of moments in which
Speaker 2: God is much more likely to be breaking through. And
Speaker 2: I think that's probably one is the experience of a
Speaker 2: new child that's suddenly in your life that you accommodate.
Speaker 2: That's the one that sort of jumps out to me.
Speaker 2: And then I think for a lot of people the
Speaker 2: experience of nature in particular moments. The danger is always,
Speaker 2: of course, that you worship and serve the creature rather
Speaker 2: than the creator. But I do think that it breaks
Speaker 2: in because in some ways these days, people need a
Speaker 2: sense that there is a grander reality than themselves. And
Speaker 2: then also the second sense is that, okay, but I
Speaker 2: don't want to attach ultimate significance to a reality that's
Speaker 2: not ultimately significant. And so I actually think we're in
Speaker 2: better shape now than we were, you know, fifteen years
Speaker 2: ago when new atheism was at its height. I mean,
Speaker 2: atheism is so dead. I don't know how it could
Speaker 2: be deader, right, And I can remember because I was
Speaker 2: in the debates not that long ago, thinking okay, boy,
Speaker 2: this is going to be unpleasant. But it had absolutely
Speaker 2: no staying power. It didn't capture people's got moral sensibilities,
Speaker 2: or their metaphysical sensibilities, or their understanding themselves. So I
Speaker 2: have friends that were new atheists now say gosh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that was that was a mistake. So in some ways,
Speaker 2: I think this sort of chaos and fracturing that we're
Speaker 2: seeing in the culture at the moment, especially between the generations,
Speaker 2: it's at least an opportunity for those of us that
Speaker 2: are believers to make the case for the sort of
Speaker 2: wider aspects of reality that people are missing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you bring up the new atheists,
Speaker 1: and I never thought that there would be a period
Speaker 1: where that wouldn't be the main deal in town. And
Speaker 1: yet there's this thing. I think it's justin Braley calls
Speaker 1: the surprising rebirth and the belief of God absolutely.
Speaker 2: Richard, even Richard Dawkins, he's still a the last I checked, right,
Speaker 2: but he just like, Okay, I'm done with this crazy
Speaker 2: stuff that we can do with that Christianity and our culture,
Speaker 2: because he would much rather live as an atheist in
Speaker 2: England that had some connection to its Christian past than
Speaker 2: in what he sees coming. And he fought against the
Speaker 2: crazy gender stuff. He said, I'm sorry, there's these basic
Speaker 2: biological realities. He's closer to grace for having done that
Speaker 2: than he was before because he's starting to see that, Okay,
Speaker 2: his life trying to destroy people's belief in God had
Speaker 2: these unintended consequences that he had not appreciated enough before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Jay, I used to hate you. I can
Speaker 1: honestly say that I love you.
Speaker 2: Okay, thank you. I hope that was how it was
Speaker 2: going to end. It's good to be good to know
Speaker 2: that we have gone through all those stages.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've gone through all the stages, and and it
Speaker 1: just highlights the importance of actually communicating with people, having
Speaker 1: conversations face to face or you know, for the internet,
Speaker 1: but listening. Yeah, and absolutely I love you. I thank
Speaker 1: God for you, and I thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining
Speaker 2: Us that it's great to be with you Da of anytime.